Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction by Hannah Lauren Murray (review)

In this review, I follow Murray’s capitalization of White and Whiteness, a practice that she adopts to “focus[] attention on Whiteness as a significant social construct deserving of critique, rather than a default position that today maintains its power through invisibility” (viii). [...]the criteri...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Leviathan (Hempstead, N.Y.) N.Y.), 2023-03, Vol.25 (1), p.35-39
Main Author: Ross, Kelly
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Anxiety
Capitalization
Citizenship
Melville, Herman (1819-1891)
Men
Poe, Edgar Allan (1809-1849)
Power
Storytelling
White people
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Summary:In this review, I follow Murray’s capitalization of White and Whiteness, a practice that she adopts to “focus[] attention on Whiteness as a significant social construct deserving of critique, rather than a default position that today maintains its power through invisibility” (viii). [...]the criteria for naturalization of foreign-born persons from 1798 onward limited eligibility to White people. [...]Whiteness and United States citizenship became indistinguishable, and these civic behaviors were coded as White civic values. [...]his liminal White men yearn for patriarchal citizenship premised on land ownership, a colonial model of citizenship that was vanishing in the early national period. Because Irving’s characters communicate their desire for this fading colonial citizenship through supernatural storytelling, Murray calls it “spectral nostalgia,” noting that nostalgia is not simply an attachment to the past but a critique of the present. According to Murray, the narrator assumes ownership of Bartleby, turning him into property and stripping him of his Whiteness.
ISSN:1525-6995
1750-1849
1750-1849
DOI:10.1353/lvn.2023.0003