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Stensrud, Craig Paul

University of British Columbia

Scorching Irony: Anti-Hypocrisy in U.S. Antebellum fiction argues that hypocrisy served as a key heuristic for those on all sides of the U.S. slavery debates as they navigated and negotiated their positions in antebellum society’s racial capitalist economy and liberal political order. Accusations of hypocrisy flooded the U.S. public sphere during the 1840s and 50s, but previous scholars have generally ignored these exchanges, which can seem nothing more than distracting noise. I demonstrate, however, that anti-hypocritical discourse enabled important negotiations of political solidarity, agency, and responsibility. The period under study witnessed rapid capitalist development, accelerated by slavery, which disrupted the traditional ways that white Americans conceived social relations. The national economy’s increasing dependence on slavery challenged faith in the liberal subject’s autonomy and agency. At the same time, racialization enabled relationships of domination necessary for economic exploitation, creating subject positions that overdetermined established class distinctions. Hypocrisy discourse registers responses to these rapid changes. I look to this discourse’s refraction in the period’s literary productions, where authors both participated in the cultural exchange of accusation and reflected upon it through experiments with ironic modes of address that explored hypocrisy within the microcosmic relationship between text and reader. In chapter one, I read the work of Henry David Thoreau alongside white liberal abolitionists to explore their various attempts to extricate themselves from hypocritical complicity in slavery by aspiring to a personal purity through boycott and withdrawal—without, however, mounting a challenge to the racial capitalist system. In chapter two, I read the ironic innovations of William Wells Brown’s novel Clotel in the context of a Black rhetorical tradition that used hypocrisy accusations to expose and critique slavery and other modes of economic exploitation, treating hypocrisy as an index of material relations rather than an issue of individual morality. In chapter three, I argue that Herman Melville’s novel The Confidence-Man reflects a cultural exhaustion with the exposure of hypocrisy, as suspicion gives way to cynicism as the dominant attitude toward hypocritical inconsistency. Finally, in the conclusion, I briefly explore the afterlife of antebellum anti-hypocritical discourse through the Civil War and into the present.

Text

2024-01-31

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/83536

English

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/