deleterious influence of lower-class immigrants and recently emancipated slaves (who during Reconstruction were allowed to vote). The same millennial -126- zeal that gives domesticity its custodial mission, then, also makes it both classist and ethnocentric.
A reading of Harriet E. Wilson's novel Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859) suggests that some African American women were acutely aware of domesticity's normative contents; however, because most of the other important mid-century African American women intellectuals (including Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, and Elizabeth Keckley) expressed their suspicions about domestic ideology in nontraditional literary forms, any history devoted to a genre like the novel will necessarily underrepresent the contributions of African American women to the discourse on domesticity. Wilson's autobiographical tale (believed to be the first novel published by an African American in the United States) is yet another story of an orphaned girl in search of what Wilson calls 'selfdependence.' This orphan, however, is an African American woman living in the North who is taken in as a servant by a white family when her mother abandons her.
The willfulness of the orphan Frado recalls that of Cummins's character Gerty in The Lamplighter, but unlike Gerty's guardian Emily Graham, Frado's mistress Mrs. Bellmont is hardly a domestic woman. Intent upon 'breaking' Frado's will, she rules over not just Frado but the entire Bellmont household with an iron hand. Wilson opposes Mrs. Bellmont's method of governing to Aunt Abby's more gentle methods. Befriending the abused child, the Bellmont family's maiden aunt manifests their concern for her spiritual welfare by attempting to convert her. But Wilson establishes this opposition between Mrs. Bellmont and the domestic woman Aunt Abby only to render visible what they have in common. The author orchestrates the death of Frado's defender James Bellmont in such a way as to provide an opportunity for Frado to provide evidence of her conversion to Aunt Abby's god. As the opening of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps the younger's novel The Gates Ajar (1869) suggests, in the nineteenth century the death of a loved one was often seen as an occasion for manifesting one's submission to a divine wisdom that passes human understanding. But just when she appears on the verge of submitting to the higher authority that Aunt Abby attempts to impose on her, Frado suddenly rebels against Mrs. Bellmont, threatening henceforth -127- to return any blows that her mistress inflicts on her. At the same time the narrator abruptly drops the question of Frado's conversion. Because race gave Wilson a marginal status within the dominant culture, perhaps she was in a better position to see the way in which the advocates of what Bushnell called a new 'domestic' religion had not entirely erased 'conquest' from Christianity.
Introducing the women's novel into the canon of the American Renaissance, some object, will involve discarding aesthetic criteria and instituting political considerations as the determinants of literary merit. We must not forget that even the acknowledged male 'classics' of the American Renaissance were themselves at one point noncanonical and that their cultural ascendency in fact owes a good deal to politics in the form of American nationalism. Few critics have found even the handful of acknowledged male classics (including Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter, The Last of the Mohicans) entirely satisfying from a strictly aesthetic standpoint, particularly in comparison to the British and European 'masterpieces' of the same period. Indeed, a comment by Melville in Hawthorne and His Mosses suggests that if nineteenth-century critics had applied aesthetic rather than political standards to literature, most of the classic male novelists we now read might languish in the same literary obscurity to which their female contemporaries have been relegated. Concerned over the ill-repute of American writers and wondering where the American Shakespeare was, Melville enjoins, '[L]et America first praise mediocrity even, in her own children, before she praises. . the best excellence in the children of any other land. Let her own authors, I say, have the priority of appreciation.'
Neither were strictly aesthetic criteria F. O. Matthiessen's principle for selection when he introduced the concept of the American Renaissance in 1941 — the same year in which the United States entered World War II and democracy both at home and abroad seemed so imperiled. In his American Renaissance (which for almost half a century helped determine which mid-nineteenth-century writers were read), Matthiessen asserts that the best authors 'all wrote literature for democracy,' and he notes excluding Edgar Allan Poe from his study because Poe 'was bitterly hostile to democracy.'
Both Melville's and Matthiesen's comments suggest that political -128- considerations have for a long time and quite explicitly informed our sense of literary value. Introducing novels by women into the canon may not entail a drastic change in our concept of literary merit, after all. Instead it may require something far more radical — a change in our politics.
Lora Romero
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'In the history of the world,' Emerson proclaimed in Man the Reformer (1841), 'the doctrine of Reform had never such scope as at the present hour.' Indeed, as he surveyed the cultural scene, he sensed a 'new spirit' and 'new ideas' pervading Northeast reform activity. But whereas many of his acquaintances became involved in group efforts at social reformation, such as the communitarian experiment at Brook Farm, or abolitionism, Emerson insisted on the primacy of individual reformation. All desires for reform, he argued, emerged from 'the conviction that there is an infinite worthiness in man' and an 'impediment' standing between individuals and their essentially divine nature. As he insisted even more strenuously in New England Reformers (1844): 'society gains nothing whilst a man, not himself renovated, attempts to renovate things around him.' That same year, however, Emerson began to read widely in the history of slavery, and in a pivotal lecture, Emancipation in the British West Indies (1844), he called on the 'great masses of men' to take a larger role in changing laws and affecting social policy. Seven years later, in a lecture on the Fugitive Slave Law, he advised his auditors that civil disobedience would be an appropriate response to the government's efforts to enforce 'the most detestable law that was ever enacted by a civilized state.' Abolitionism, the most pressing social reform movement of his time, had taken hold of Emerson, and during the 1850s the champion of selfculture addressed numerous abolitionist meetings and even campaigned for Gorham Palfrey on the Free Soil Ticket. Slavery was by -130- no means the only reform movement to capture his attention; in addition to offering occasional remarks on temperance, in 1855 he spoke to a women's rights convention in favor of women's suffrage, arguing that 'if in your city [Boston] the uneducated emigrant vote numbers thousands, representing a brutal ignorance and mere animal wants, it is to be corrected by an educated and religious vote, representing the wants and desires of honest and refined persons.' Nevertheless, despite his various reform commitments of the 1840s and 1850s, in his journals of the period he continued to muse skeptically on the value of group efforts at social renovation.
Emerson's ambivalent but increasingly engaged response to social reform suggests that he wrestled with some of the large questions his more individualistic philosophy of the 1830s and early 1840s tended to avoid: Can self-reformation proceed in a social vacuum somehow apart from the debates, institutions, and laws of antebellum culture? To what extent is group reformation dependent on individual reformation, and vice versa? Fearing that the 'civilized state' was falling into barbarism, he also began to address different sorts of questions, as his unattractive remarks on the 'brutal ignorance' of the emigrants suggest, about the state of the union: Who should lead the nation, and to what end? What constitutes legitimate authority? How achieve civilized harmony and progress during a time of heightening sectional, ethnic, and class conflict?
As the literary genre most responsive to social debates and discourses, and, at least traditionally, the genre most attentive to situating the individual in society, the novel is naturally suited to address all of these large (and representative) questions from a variety of perspectives. Given the enormous social impact of reform movements during the 1825-60 period, both in England and in America, and given not only the increasingly dominant place of the slavery debate in antebellum culture but also the increasingly tense ethnic, class, and gender relations of the period, it should not be surprising, then, that a conflict between individual and social action, a questioning of authority, a fear of social breakdown, and a utopian desire for social regeneration are some of the key issues and concerns informing and energizing the antebellum novel.
Of course the starting point of American reform is problematic. Historians have argued for the primacy of
