Inexpressible Privacy

The Interior Life of Antebellum American Literature

Milette Shamir

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780812204247
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic TitleFew concepts are more widely discussed or more passionately invoked in American public culture than that of privacy. What these discussions have lacked, however, is a historically informed sense of privacy's genealogy in U.S. culture. Now, Milette Shamir traces this peculiarly American obsession back to the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when our modern understanding of privacy took hold.Shamir explores how various discourses, as well as changes in the built environment, worked in tandem to seal, regulate, and sanctify private spaces, both domestic and subjective. She offers revelatory readings of texts by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, and other, less familiar antebellum writers and looks to a wide array of sources, including architectural blueprints for private homes, legal cases in which a "right to privacy" supplements and exceeds property rights, examples of political rhetoric vaunting the sacred inviolability of personal privacy, and conduct manuals prescribing new codes of behavior to protect against intrusion.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Divided Plots: Gender Symmetry and the Architecture of Domestic Space
• 2. Dream Houses: Divided Interiority in Three Antebellum Short Stories
• 3. The Master’s House Divided: Exposure and Concealment in Narratives of Slavery
• 4. Hawthorne’s Romance and the Right to Privacy
• 5. Thoreau in Suburbia: Walden and the Liberal Myth of Private Manhoo
• 6. “The Manliest Relations to Men”: Thoreau on Privacy, Intimacy, and Writing
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments