http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/19433159

A question of taste : class, restraint, and the body in nineteenth-century U.S. literature

My dissertation, "A Question of Taste: Class, Restraint, and the Body in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature," highlights the operations of class in and through U.S. literature and culture from the antebellum period through the turn of the century. While Americanists frequently call for an examination of class issues, race and gender have displaced class in investigations of nineteenth-century middle-class culture. Even critics interested in class, such as those collected by Wai Chee Dimock and Michael T. Gilmore in Rethinking Class, argue that class is "staged through" or "displaced by" race and gender, or alternatively, that middle-class culture is "hegemonic," both approaches that reproduce the myth of the U.S. as a society without significant class conflict. My project rereads in class terms the familiar binaries--private and public, home and market, spirit and body, civilized and primitive--that we have viewed primarily in gendered and raced terms. In order to make class visible in the U.S. context, where conflict does not line up neatly in terms of the opposition between capital and labor, I turn to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, who is interested in the "specific contributions that representations of legitimacy make to the exercise and perpetuation of power." Not only is self-interest not reducible to economic interest, according to Bourdieu, but indeed blatant economic power must be hidden or inhibited, converted into symbolic power, to be legitimated and exercised. Defining class as "habitus," the "system of dispositions" or deeply ingrained tastes, values, and lifestyles shared by a social group, Bourdieu argues that a "habitus of order, restraint, and propriety" characterizes not only the bourgeois relationship to the body and its needs, but also an entire social and aesthetic practice. The emphasis on restraint also shapes an attitude toward the lower classes, whom the bourgeoisie regards as lacking good form and indulging appetites without restraint. Focusing on four novels in which class issues have been largely overlooked--Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1850), Herman Melville's Pierre; or the Ambiguities (1852), Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900), and Charles W. Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1901)--I locate class conflict in the tension between characters represented as refined and self-disciplined and those depicted as vulgar and lacking restraint. In highlighting the role of "symbolic" or "cultural capital" in the assertion of class superiority, this approach is especially appropriate to literary study as it makes clear how questions of literary taste are relevant to class.

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