Suspended in uncertainty: Drowning in antebellum America.

摘要

This dissertation examines the cultural work of drowning in American life between 1780 and 1850. Intimately aligned with social and economic conditions of panic, the dying, restoration, and saving of drowned and nearly-drowned bodies threatens to overwhelm early Americans' confidence in new forms of knowledge, emerging enterprises, and changing social relationships. The dissertation opens with an examination of the aesthetic stakes in grieving drowned bodies in funeral sermons and broadside elegies. I show how the tenacity of the elegiac genre to express overwhelming loss, especially for bodies that are not found and properly interred, is gradually replaced by the bureaucratizing impulse of the humane societies that advocate resuscitating drowning victims as the ideal synthesis of policy and philanthropy. Through analysis of the production and circulation of the humane society's literary texts in chapter three, I distinguish saving the drowned from the civic work of other charitable associations surging in the early nineteenth century. The fourth chapter analyzes the narrative transformations of bodies on the verge of death. I argue that the transfer of breath between men's and women's bodies in fiction by Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Montgomery Bird composes a subtext of resuscitation in which saving life converges with the century's cyclical occurrences of accumulation of wealth, debt, and insolvency. Poe's and Bird's stories published in the 1830s circumvent the limits of physiology and turn the state of resuscitation inside out for examination. The fifth chapter traces the resonances of slave suicide by drowning and the slave trade's practice of drowning slaves during the trans-Atlantic crossing to minimize financial losses in Herman Melville's mid-century sea novels. Melville's account of the near-drownings of Pip, I argue, mediates reconciliation in the face of this profound and inexplicable loss.