A Fresh Start with a New Purpose

It’s time for me to get a fresh start, and so I am here, back to blogging. I know that the interweb circuitry that connects my blog address to your RSS feed probably rusted out a long time ago, but I hope that you will dust it off and come with me on a new journey.

For the past three years, I’ve been teaching the U.S. History survey at a state college (which I will call State College). It’s a job that is rewarding (at times) and frustrating (at times), and while I enjoy interacting with students, I miss a certain type of intellectual engagement—the type that involved talking about cool books on esoteric historical subjects, geeking out on interesting movies, and swapping tips on how to get other people interested in the things I am interested in. In some ways, I think that this was the heart of the grad school experience. But, I also want to keep this more grounded than the hours-long dissections of Foucault, or detailed analysis of Benedict Anderson (no offense to either of them). So, I’m going to focus on things that I’ve found useful or helpful in teaching—the monographs that I turned into interesting lectures, the lectures that worked, the essay prompts and subjects that got students thinking, and the free resources that are available on the web. I will be here, on a periodic basis, writing brief summaries of books, films, current events, etc. and then saying why I think whatever-it-is is cool. I will be focusing on the positive—it’s damn hard to write a book, make a movie, or make a difference—and I would like to celebrate those efforts. This doesn’t mean, though, that I will never offer criticism. But I think that taking a work and lauding it for what it does well is underrated. 

With all that being said, let me get started with one of my favorite time periods. When I first started teaching at State College, I didn’t much like the early nineteenth century. I hadn’t spent much time with it, and preferred the colonial period or Gilded Age and Progressive Era. But as I’ve taught, I’ve really come to appreciate it. Particularly the 1820’s-1840’s. It was a time of great economic, social, and geographic expansion for the United States. Not unlike our own time, it was a period when the world seemed to shrink as it speed up—new forms of transportation closed distances, cities grew and became more anonymous, technology caused great leaps in manufacturing. And people worried about all of it. What did the future hold? How would young people stay morally pure without the eyes of the community upon them? How did they know that people were who they said they were and not frauds? How did the expanding middle class differentiate itself from those above and below? The center of this was world was New York City. Recently connected to the Midwest river system by the Erie Canal, and a node in the web of the Atlantic world, New York City in the 1830’s was in the midst of a building and population boom. 

Karen Haltunnen explains in her book Confidence Men and Painted Women that in New York City, middle class people expressed these concerns by setting up two “straw men”: confidence men, and painted women. Confidence men were those who lured the recent male migrants into sin and, inevitably, moral and physical ruin. Think Lord Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray. The young, naïve man arrives in the city and meets someone who he thinks is reputable (because the guy has the appearance of being of good character). The Confidence Man shows the younger man around town, to the places where young people congregate. This journey may start of respectably, but it will soon lead to dens of sin—brothels, gambling houses, saloons, and the like. And once the young man has set foot off of the path of morality, the depravity will spread like a cancer, until it has consumed every part of him and he is found robbed and murdered, floating in the Hudson (as this illustration from the 1860's shows:

 These types of warnings are very melodramatic, and were also used heavily in the Temperance Movement).

For women, the Painted Woman was one who was artificial—her outside appearance did not match her inner reality. The emphasis for women was therefore sensibility and sincerity. In the case of sensibility, women were supposed to be like one raw, exposed nerve; reacting to everything around them and showing that reaction. If you think of Marianne, the younger sister in Jane Austin’s Sense and Sensibility, you will begin to get the picture. The girl reacts to everything, and seems to have no filters. One part of the way that women showed that they were sensible was through fashion. Gone were the elaborate dresses and bonnets, and in their place were simpler dress and accessories. The dress, which emphasized restraint (literally in the sense that you couldn’t lift your arms very far), and a bonnet which would frame the sincere face instead of distracting from it. But the problem with this was that it could be faked. For women, then it was all about the unbelievably long list of social protocol rules. If you were part of that world, you would know how to behave, and if you weren’t, it would expose you as a fraud. 

It was into this world that a river of migrants rushed into New York City. One drop in the river in this flow was a (soon to be infamous) prostitute, named Helen Jewett.

Helen was likely murdered by her lover, Richard P. Robinson. Her murder has all of the juicy elements of a romantic novel—a young woman in love but tied to a life where she couldn’t be monogamous, hiding from a past, murdered, her corpse snatched from its resting place and dissected, and then her name and story exposed by the press, from which thousands across the United States would come to know her. (Here I am drawing very loosely from Patricia Cline Cohen’s excellent book The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York) But it’s also more than that. Jewett is a good way to talk about the dynamics that I mentioned above. She and Robinson were recent migrants to the city. She was originally from Maine, he was from Connecticut. She was from a poor family, and had been basically indentured into a wealthy and prominent Maine household. He was the son of a wealthy and prominent Connecticut landowner. She had left the house where she was a servant, slipping her low-class past, changing her name (which was originally Dorcas Doyen) as she made her way down the coast from Augusta to New York City. Here, she was a high-class prostitute, and came into contact with many civic leaders of the day. He was a clerk, which was an emerging white-collar business trade. Before the 1830’s he would have been living with his employer’s family, but with the urban expansion, wealthy businessmen had begun to move out of the downtown, leaving their clerks to stay in boardinghouses.

Here, then, is one of the main elements of middle-class anxieties: the lower class woman masquerading as a middle or upper-class woman, seducing the upright young clerk. Led into descent, he will eventually murder her. And although the newspapers generally thought that he did it, Robinson had a strong following from among the young clerks in the city. They blamed Jewett for being a “disgrace to her sex” (as one letter writer put it) and for seducing Robinson away from a wholesome life.

Because I don’t have much time in the current class, I focus on these issues. But there are several connections that I think would be excellent to make here. One would be to bring in Christine Stansell’s City of Women, and put Jewett more into the context of wage-earning women. Another would be to focus on the role of Confidence Men and speculation in business, and talk about the changing urban economy, and the financial panics of the period (here Jane Kamensky’s The Exchange Artist would be helpful).

For student projects, I see two main directions. One is to examine Godey’s Ladies Book, and the fashion and expectations for women. The other would be to look at newspapers, and particularly those in New York City, to get an idea of this rapidly changing urban world. Both of these would give students a sense of what life was like during that time period, and the ways that it was changing.