Denaturalizing Naturalization

“One of the great misunderstandings of immigration history,” writes Stephanie DeGooyer in her important new book, “is the idea that, before the nineteenth century, America and Europe were lands of open borders and few restrictions, welcoming all who dared to cross rough seas and ragged roads” (33). Redressing a tendency to project nation-based structures of exclusion and belonging back onto earlier periods, Before Borders tracks a different “architecture of immigration,” which “opened up the nation rather than sealed it in hermetic defense” (34). In this context, DeGooyer proposes the term “paranational” to describe the porous and shifting territorial borders of this time when movement was monitored at the parish or city, rather than national, level, and when religion often took priority as the most important form of affiliation. Decoupling the novel from the nation in this way, DeGooyer recovers a complex history of naturalization—including its legal, philosophical, political, and narrative enactments—and contributes to ongoing conversations about law and literature, studies of the novel, the global eighteenth century, and immigration history.This history begins with a series of legal cases on property inheritance shortly after the Union of the Crowns in 1603. As DeGooyer explains, these decisions would form the basis of early immigration law, while raising some of the thorniest questions surrounding allegiance, alien and natural-born status, and subject formation. While Calvin's Case (1606), concerning whether a child born in Scotland after the Union could inherit property in England, was decided in favor of the postnati as subjects of an indivisible English king, it also rested on an unwritten understanding of perpetual allegiance to the sovereign that would later be both clarified and contested. What this ambiguity opens up—in a series of cases (1656 – 70) concerning the estate of antenati Scot John Ramsey—is a much more radical understanding of naturalization, in which Parliament could “create new subjects in the past and the future” and “erase the distinction between the status of aliens and the status of natural-born subjects” (47). In tracking the retrospective and restorative temporality of what many saw as a dangerously heretical understanding of naturalization, DeGooyer introduces a narrative quality to naturalization that comes to inform the book's subsequent readings and promises wider relevance for studies of the novel. In the last section of chapter 1, more liberal versions of naturalization get taken up by late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century economic pamphlets—notably including an unpublished occasional piece, by John Locke, in 1693, written in favor of general naturalization. Seeking to bring more skilled tradesmen to England, writers of political economy and philosophy developed more flexible understandings of allegiance and natural rights. DeGooyer thus makes a case for the long eighteenth century as a crucial and understudied period for theorizing voluntary allegiance, positioned between earlier modes of allegiance and the increasingly rigid allegiances of the nation state in the nineteenth century.Central to critiques of naturalization was a fear about the use of an overtly fictional process—fictio legis, in the sense of making or artifice—to produce subjects and rewrite allegiances. In excavating these complex legal histories, DeGooyer demonstrates how subjects and nations get produced, reinvented, and reimagined through a complex set of legal procedures and technical fabulations. This makes for a very different history of the novel, in which, she writes, “The hallmarks of realism later associated with the development of the novel are notably absent”; DeGooyer recovers instead what she calls “the naturalization imaginary—the slapdash use of various legal fictions and creative metaphors to explain how the law could create new subjects” (34 – 35). In addition to concerns about fiction, there was a set of fears over “naturalization as a nonbiological process” (63). Taking up these issues, DeGooyer distinguishes eighteenth-century naturalization from twentieth-century understandings of citizenship as “a feeling and a future-oriented process” (70). Whereas modern theories of citizenship get entangled with notions of desire and heterosexual reproductive futurity, DeGooyer's history of naturalization recovers “a garishly technical procedure” that figured subject creation as an explicitly artificial process (72).By showing naturalization to be a process that presents itself as anything but natural, DeGooyer invites critics to rethink their methods for reading literary history. To this end, chapter 2 offers a contextual history, in the style of Raymond Williams's Keywords; naturalization, DeGooyer writes, is a word that “has been seen as self-evident to many,” but has been alienated from its early connotations (75). Where dominant critical vocabularies have tended to follow Williams's understanding of naturalization as the hiding of “the multiplicity of things, and of living processes” under the abstract principle of nature and thus the responsibility of the critic to undo, DeGooyer recalls readers to a time when naturalization's “process of making was not hidden from view” but rather “felt by many to be a dangerous affront to a natural order of allegiance and subjecthood” (69).1 Such a historical account of naturalization opens up, rather than forecloses, multiple registers of the word. DeGooyer ends her chapter by looking to Richardson's Pamela to see “how naturalization works as a form of fictional subject-making—not through assimilation or privatization but by openly challenging rules that are designed to seem natural” (77). In this reading, naturalization comes to mean more generally “the introduction of new subjects and a new literary mode into narrative space” (78). Reading the second half of the novel back onto the first, DeGooyer suggests that Pamela is naturalized along class lines through the work of retrospective fabrication. With this example in mind, DeGooyer suggests that Jacques Rancière's theory of the novel as a form that “makes visible subjects who, under older rules, were not thought fit to be subjects” (81) might also be understood as a form of naturalization. Here the reading returns briefly to vocabularies of ideology critique, with Richardson's novel taking on the role of social critic: “The novel exposes . . . the arbitrariness of a system of social hierarchy. It critiques and exposes the arbitrary rules by which Pamela was denied the ability to be seen as a subject of pathos” (80). As this repeated language of exposure suggests, an understanding of the aesthetics of legal naturalization in the period can also work in tandem with opposing critical meanings of denaturalizing history.In her third chapter, DeGooyer builds on an intriguing interpretation from chapter 2, where she reads the first lines of Robinson Crusoe as a naturalization petition, in order to contest understandings of Crusoe as the prototypical English and Protestant subject. Here DeGooyer relates the novel to Defoe's prolific writing on naturalization. Reading Crusoe in connection with the General Naturalization Act of 1709 and the vast migration of Palatine refugees from Germany, which followed the bill, DeGooyer argues that Defoe has Crusoe naturalized in order to purchase a plantation in Brazil as a warning against the detrimental economic consequences of stricter immigration laws: here the effects of less liberal naturalization take the form of profits “siphoned off by the Portuguese king and Catholic Church” (95). Tracing what she describes as Crusoe's “detachable relationship to England”—his understanding of nationality as a set of external signifiers and tokens rather than interiority or felt belonging—DeGooyer casts Englishness as something shifting, tactical, and opportunistic, subordinate to financial return. In DeGooyer's hands, Defoe appears less quintessential English subject than exemplar of “paranational liberty, embodying the right of the private individual to roam and settle beyond the nation of his birth” (88).Read in relation to a history of naturalization, the novel thus relies less on notions of interiority for identity. It also comes to rely less on interior spaces. Turning to the last novels of Smollett, Richardson, Sterne, and Burney in chapter 4, “Open-Door Domestic Fiction,” DeGooyer argues that these writers shift toward more mobile and paranational ideas and toward more migratory selves. Beginning with Smollett's Ferdinand Count Fathom—who “is born in a wagon with his head coming out in Holland and his feet in Flanders” (13) and who appears “to index fears of naturalized identity run amok” (114)—DeGooyer suggests that Smollett engages theories of voluntary nationality and allegiance through the romance genre. In contrast to Smollett, DeGooyer continues, Richardson in Sir Charles Grandison returns to much earlier ideas of indelible allegiance and prior natural law as an answer to public outcries against the 1753 Jewish Naturalization Act: in response to contemporary challenges to naturalization, DeGooyer writes, Richardson would “retreat not inward but more broadly backward to an ahistorical idea of natural relations” (125). In her reading of Sterne's Sentimental Journey, DeGooyer looks to the aesthetics of the passport, which in the period would not have included a physical description of its holder. This opens up a space in which nationality and citizenship come to be defined through language; in Sterne's witty example, Yorick is able to identify himself by turning to fiction and performance, using Hamlet to vouch for his identity. Here DeGooyer makes the case that as citizenship becomes legible through language and aesthetics, one's core person can still remain ambiguous (132). Turning finally to Burney's early nineteenth-century novel The Wanderer, DeGooyer notes how against the backdrop of the 1793 Aliens Act, and during a period when “the nation-state emerged from the policing of borders and the essentialization of national cultures,” Burney writes a novel that “eschews a national perspective” (134). Taking Ellis's insistence on anonymity, which “turns nationality into a buried secret” (137), as a key example, DeGooyer argues that Burney's last novel is committed to an understanding of “naturalization as a voluntarist model of association” rather than as a nineteenth-century national community (139). But while naturalization allows for plasticity, DeGooyer suggests, Burney's work also demonstrates the ways in which “Britain began to overtly racialize naturalization,” foregrounding the social tensions of a moment in which “race will emerge as patently unnaturalizable” (138).In chapter 5, “Unnatural-Born Subjects,” DeGooyer reads the work of Maria Edgeworth and Mary Shelley as forms of what DeGooyer calls “narrative naturalization,” the use of “prose fiction itself to redress failures of legal naturalization to represent and incorporate religious and racial outsiders” (146). Taking up Edgeworth's understanding of Harrington as a form of “atonement and reparation” for earlier stereotyped and anti-Semitic representations of Jewish characters, DeGooyer considers the relationship between fiction and its political effects, specifically in responses to the Jewish Naturalization Act. While Edgeworth seems to reverse that effect by having Harrington feel “inverted sympathy” for Berenice, his Jewish love interest (151), Edgeworth ultimately resorts to what DeGooyer describes as the narrative equivalent of a “cheap trick,” with the discovery of Berenice's Christian origins. For DeGooyer, it is this narrative turn that ultimately comes closest to the procedure of naturalization, which “was considered scandalous by many for appearing to naturalize new subjects in England by the gimmick of a parliamentary act alone” (154). Turning to Frankenstein, DeGooyer points out revisions to the 1831 version that made Frankenstein and Elizabeth both foreign-born, extending the precariousness of natural subjecthood well beyond that of the Creature. Taking up Plutarch's Parallel Lives (rather than Rousseau's Confessions) to make sense of the complex biographical and autobiographical frame narrative, DeGooyer reads Plutarch's use of synkrisis—which sets two political biographies next to each other—as “a structure of correspondence rather than sameness,” one that “holds subjects in common relation, even if they are not entirely of kind” (157). This parallel structure, which recalls the experience of naturalization, is part of what the Creature seeks in his conversation with DeLacey and in his appeal to Victor. Looking closely at the Creature's use of language and legal logic to make this case, DeGooyer argues that the Creature “stages his membership in linguistic and political communities at precisely the same moment that [he] reveals his vulnerability to these groups” (163). The most radical act of narrative naturalization happens, however, by accident, at the very end, when Walton records the Creature's last words to Frankenstein. Conveying the Creature's language without the less-than-human sounds said to accompany it, DeGooyer argues, Walton “equaliz[es] the Creature's voice with Victor's” (166) and “stages the remarkable formal accident of realizing a human subject while trying to create a monster” (167).With these last examples, DeGooyer's account of narrative inclusion concludes by looking to a period when “English law began to codify more exclusionary forms of immigration” (167), and thus, the novel and the law begin to part ways. While DeGooyer introduces narrative naturalization as a form of repair, she is also careful throughout Before Borders to acknowledge the very real limits of such a claim. Her work does not imagine novels to be legally or politically binding, but rather maintains, following Rancière, that the work of inclusion is “wholly aesthetic”: “Novels expose the arbitrariness of classical rules”; as she puts it, “They do not expand voting rights or end corporal punishment” (81). Beyond these formal limitations are the enduring borders of religion and race, which meant that “the elasticity of naturalized national identity occurred across identitarian lines” (60). As DeGooyer puts it in the introduction, “Before Borders does not propose that the eighteenth century was a more progressive period for immigrants than our current era or that its literature did not manifest racist and colonial ideologies about subject formation” (23).Even at its most generative and radical, naturalization comes with a very specific set of harms. Returning in her coda to the example with which her book began, Hannah Arendt's image of “an explosion” to describe the dramatic shift at the beginning of the First World War in which “people could be legally stateless on a mass scale” (1), DeGooyer reflects on how the early history of detachable allegiance made possible these later examples of mass denaturalization. Through its recurrent language of native soil, and blood, and natural-born subjects—including its revision or expansion of that language—the legal history of naturalization also carries across the Atlantic another violent set of fictions: what Jodi Byrd describes as a set of internal contradictions, “where human rights, equal rights, and recognitions are predicated on the very systems that propagate and maintain the dispossession of indigenous peoples for the common good of the world.”2 A painful irony of this history is that answers to the violence of hardening borders often rely on legal vocabularies that find flexible subject-formation in the language of settler colonialism. In response to DeGooyer's final call to “think anew the conditions from which subjects are born and made” (174), perhaps readers might also begin to think against that irony as well—or to think differently about the fictions in which such subjects are made and included

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