By Bridget T. Heneghan
Even sooner than mass advertising, American shoppers acquired items that gentrified their families and broadcast their experience of "the good stuff in life." Bridging literary scholarship, archaeology, heritage, and artwork heritage, Whitewashing the USA: fabric tradition and Race within the Antebellum mind's eye explores how fabric items formed antebellum notions of race, classification, gender, and purity. From the progressive struggle until eventually the Civil warfare, American shoppers more and more sought white-colored items. Whites most popular heavily produced and really expert items, heading off the previous darkish, coarse, low-quality items issued to slaves. White shoppers knit round themselves subtle household goods, visible reminders of who they have been, equating wealth, self-discipline, and purity with the racially "white." garments, paint, dinnerware, gravestones, and structures staked a visible distinction, a conveyable, obvious identify and deed segregating upper-class whites from their lower-class buddies and family servants. This publication explores what it intended to be "white" by way of delving into the whiteness of dishes, headstone paintings, and structure, in addition to women's garments and corsets, cleanliness and dental care, and complexion. Early nineteenth-century authors participated during this fabric financial system besides, construction their literary landscapes within the similar approach their readers provided their families and manipulating the understood meanings of items into political statements. Such writers as James Fenimore Cooper and John Pendleton Kennedy use environment descriptions to insist on segregation and hierarchy. Such authors as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville, struggled to barter messages of domesticity, physique politics, and privilege based on complicated agendas in their personal. demanding the preferred notions, slave narrators akin to Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs wielded white gadgets to opposite the point of view in their white readers and, from time to time, to mock their white middle-class pretensions. Bridget T. Heneghan, a lecturer in English at Vanderbilt collage, has been released in Nineteenth-Century reviews.
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Extra resources for Whitewashing America: Material Culture and Race in the Antebellum Imagination
Sample text
11 Use of white dishes and the manners needed to handle their specialized forks and plates indicated a degree of mastery usually withheld from slaves. In fact, the color of dishes illustrated the evolutionary difference between masters and slaves, as ritualized dining guarded against “a recognition that the process of eating might reduce all involved to an animal level of appetite and competition” (Kasson 139). Frederick Douglass acknowledges table manners to be part of white mastery, declaring that a slave child “is never chided for handling his little knife and fork improperly or awkwardly, for he uses none.
The coincidental timing of these white goods points to a near obsession with whiteness in these decades: combined with an interest in impossibly white heroines among novelists with diverse political agendas, and with the mounting abolitionist movement, women’s movements, and class riots, these white things represent an ideological army, expected to fight its battles on multiple fronts. 12 WHITE GOODS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF RACE DIXIE CUPS Color was the most overt indicator of ceramic vessels’ functions and their users’ status.
For this reason, Olmsted, as an upper-class Northern traveler, expresses exasperation when he receives directions from slaves or common folk. He quotes at length the directions received from a farmer, which include fallen-in cabins, fences, unidentifiable schoolhouses and hidden big houses. But of these Olmsted sees “hardly anything” except “a continuation of pine trees, big, little, and medium in size, and hogs, and a black, crooked, burnt sapling” (52). From a slave he repeatedly asks the distance to a certain house, but the slave can only estimate how long the journey will take (54).