Networked Solitude: American Literature in the Age of Modern Communications, 1831-1898 Open Access
Furui, Yoshiaki (2015)
Abstract
Networked Solitude examines the concept of solitude in nineteenth-century American literature by attending to the developing media environment of the period. Historians have highlighted how developments in communications media radically reshaped concepts of spatiality and temporality in mid-nineteenth century America: they concur that antebellum America witnessed a "communications revolution," which fortified the unity of the nation and served to connect individuals psychologically. In situating solitude in this historical context, I have chosen to examine Henry David Thoreau's Walden, Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener," Emily Dickinson's poetry and letters, telegraphic literature in the 1870s and 1880s, and Henry James's "In the Cage." These works explore the experience of solitude within the newly emergent communications environment in different but mutually illuminating ways. My contention is that, paradoxically speaking, the novel sense of connectedness engendered by the revolution created an equally new sense of disconnectedness. In other words, this dissertation looks at the other side of the communications revolution. While offering a utopian vision of unity both on national and personal levels, the new possibilities of communication also invoked anxiety, ambivalence, and skepticism with regard to connectivity in the literary imagination of the American authors. Thinking about solitude in the nineteenth century helps us reconsider the values of solitude that seem to be eclipsed today by our cultural urge to connect. The authors in this study came to find virtues, not vices, of solitude in their own unique ways. Thoreau viewed solitude as a means of deeply engaging with imaginary others in a higher form of communication; Jacobs shrewdly turned her solitary imprisonment in the garret into empowerment to fight against slavery; Bartleby's solitude signifies his resistance against the economy of circulation and exchange to protect his individual self; and Dickinson maintained her solitary life to extricate herself from the age's cult of speed, embracing what I call "slow solitude." If our culture today regards solitude increasingly as a negative state of being, each of these authors encourages us to reclaim the virtues of solitude.
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER ONE
Walden, or Life in Modern Communications 32
CHAPTER TWO
A Rebel in the Garret: Empowering Solitude in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl 62
CHAPTER THREE
Dead Letters: Bartleby's Solitude in the Postal Age 101
CHAPTER FOUR
"This Is My Letter to the World": Dickinson's Invention of Modern Solitude 148
CHAPTER FIVE
Techno-Mediated Reality: The Promise of Unity in Telegraphic Literature 190
EPILOGUE 238
WORKS CITED 248
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