The Persistence of Property-owning Personhood in Nineteenth-century U.S. Literature (1845-1913)

This dissertation examines representations of property-owning personhood in crisis in nineteenth-century U.S. literature (1845–1913). I argue that, in response to what historian Charles Sellers calls “the market revolution,” nineteenth-century U.S. writers constructed a transcendental conception of property that elevated property ownership above history, politics, and the market. To preserve the property-owning individual as an ethical and political ideal, nineteenth-century writers separated property from capitalism. Yet alongside this (supposedly) clear-cut opposition is a lingering uncertainty, one that held that property is both the cure for capitalism’s ills and the root cause of the market’s violence. Drawing on political writings by John Locke and Karl Marx, I show how separating property from capitalism proves just as impossible as preventing the instrumentalization of categories such as class, gender and race for capitalist gain. I begin with a discussion of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s opposition between “living property” and “accidental property” in “Self-Reliance.” Here, Emerson describes a form of property that is purified of history and relationality. He laments that property diminishes individual autonomy and increases reliance on the external world. Each subsequent chapter identifies a conceptual challenge to the stability of property-owning personhood: excess and debt, circulation, and racialized ideas of the human. In Chapter One, I argue that both Henry David Thoreau and Harriet Jacobs identify an unfair distribution of surplus and debt as inherent to the logic of property under capitalism. In my second chapter, I show how Edith Wharton’s novels use circulation and gender as the conceptual fields to understand the destruction of property-owning personhood. Chapter Three considers how the “tragic mulatto” genre depicts the limitations of self-ownership and property-owning personhood in two novellas by William Dean Howells and Charles Chesnutt. Both texts chart a dream property’s fabrication out of the ruins of capitalist property. My dissertation closes by extending my arguments about property to the contemporary moment through a close reading of Ramin Bahrani’s 2015 film, 99 Homes. Nineteenth-century U.S. writers’ fantasies about property are fraught with a generative ambivalence particular to property in crisis; their indecision can either threaten or reinforce property’s stronghold on political life.

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