White-collar Gothic: Tabloid masculinity and urban sensationalism in antebellum America.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the representation of an emerging white-collar masculinity within the urban Gothic literature produced in America from 1836-1861. Looking at a variety of canonical and non-canonical materials--the penny press coverage of murder trials in the 1830s and 1840s; urban Gothic dime novels such as George Lippard's The Quaker City (1845); canonical fiction such as Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables (1851) and Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener (1853)--I argue that urban Gothic sensationalism was the representational space in which a new cultural category I term tabloid masculinity was taking shape. Tabloid masculinity represents the intersection of two key cultural factors: the perceived threat posed by the sexual and economic expenditures of the young Jacksonian male entering the lower ranks of the professional classes in the urban northeast, and the rise of mass print culture, especially as represented by tabloid newspapers and urban Gothic novels. I argue that on the one hand tabloid masculinity embodies an anti-aristocratic masculine class politics that challenges the ideal of the traditional public sphere. In the narratives I examine, the male homosocial spectrum of the white-collar clerking classes is almost inevitably negotiated on the basis of violent interactions in which binary distinctions between interiority/exteriority, private/public, self/Other are broken down, and male subjectivity is rendered inextricable from the vicissitudes of the financial market, and the technologies of mass culture. Paradoxically, I argue that the Gothic threats to self-possession posed by tabloid masculinity end up finding their solutions in a recuperative set of narrative events and affective gestures. Specifically, I contend that the often hysterical white-collar male of the urban Gothic almost inevitably inhabits a subject position that resembles the deeply feeling, interiorized self of middle-class domesticity, in particular by assuming masculine postures of submission, humiliation, and bodily violation. I thus argue that the various masculine crises posed within the urban Gothic are themselves the representational space in which a more stable form of middle-class subjectivity is being formulated.