Home Fronts: Domesticity and its Critics in the Antebellum United States

LORA ROMERO, Home Fronts: Domesticity and its Critics in the Antebellum United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 113, cloth, $49.95, paper $15.95.

As a reconsideration of the place domesticity holds in antebellum literary production, Lora Romero's Home Fronts : Domesticity and its Critics in the Antebellum United States is one among a host of important titles published in the 1990s. Each of these studies seeks to revise how tropes of domesticity in nineteenth-century American culture were used and understood, and each seeks to rethink the politics of both the domestic realm and sentimentality. As such, Romero's work is situated within a vital, on-going critical debate, as evidenced by a burst of work from a number of scholars. This wealth of inquiry betokens something like a collective intellectual project. Indeed, it is already abundantly clear that critics such as Shirley Samuels, Lynn Wardley, Priscilla Wald, and Dana Nelson have, as Home Fronts insists, already taken note of "the impact of the antebellum grammar of gender on twentiethcentury constructions of the literary as a category."

As Romero reminds us, however, the "sentimental" and the "domestic" are troubled categories, despite a decade of reconsideration. The gendered, aesthetic legacy of the nineteenth century remains part of a contemporary critical terrain, a legacy made evident in the fact that book reviews of the present moment can still use the term "sentimental" to damage a reputation or trash a work. Rectitude, tacitly understood still as both masculinist and modernist, holds aesthetic sway in the so-called postmodernist era.

Home Fronts, then, offers a provocative blueprint for examining the historical reasons for this persistence of vision. A self-reflexive Foucaultian, Romero critiques not only those who regard antebellum American literature as that which either eschews or mis-reads the domestic-a tendency that has held lingering sway since the 1940s publication of F.O. Mathiessen's American Renaissance-but she also takes on a host of contemporary critics and cultural historians who have, as she puts it, failed to "exercise sufficient skepticism towards the antebellum period's narrative of itself" and so have "reproduced its tropes of female power and masculine resistance, and these tropes motivate their search for an illusory position of powerlessness from which a purely oppositional literature could arise." Re-reading four writers of the antebellum period: James Fenimore Cooper, Maria W. Stewart, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Romero contests what she sees as a prevailing critical narrative about antebellum literature in which that literature is shown to play out "a monumental and centralized struggle between mind-numbing popular doctrine and demystifying marginal critique"-the struggle in which the domestic, famously scribbling woman writer is so often pitted against the marginal, misunderstood genius hero-- author. Arguing that this critical narrative merely recapitulates and thus sustains the gendered aesthetics and political inequities of the nineteenth century, Romero seeks to "demonstrate that the politics of culture reside in local formulations" and to describe "different horizons of representation on which struggles for authority played themselves out in the antebellum period: the middle-class home, the frontier, African American activism, social reform movements and homosocial high culture."

Each chapter examines one of these five horizons, and each opens up intriguing vistas from which to survey the whole field. Within these vistas, Home Fronts leaves the reader with some startling insights, such as how Maria Stewart's writing and her public speaking was both militant and maternal, a coupling that challenges the prevailing idea that "motherhood" must mean nuturing, not threatening. Or the image of Cooper's "precipitating" Indian, that is, the link Romero forges between the repeated scene of a Native American "prodigy" who plunges headlong off a precipice in Cooper's oeuvre and those ethnographic, pedagogic writings that saw mental precocity as a symptom of disease. As she points out, "[e]ducational treatises published in the United States in the antebellum period slide easily from the individual to the race," so that "the figure of the prodigy ... organizes into a single discursive economy two distinct cultural arenas expressed through binarisms of feminine and masculine, private and public, suburbia and frontier, sentiment and adventure."

However, in order to offer a serious intellectual engagement rather than to merely sing praises, I should note that this book's stated goal "is to inquire into the theoretical assumptions about power and resistance underlying contemporary debates about dominant and oppositional cultures." In pursuance of this goal, Home Fronts offers Foucault-inspired readings of nineteenth-century texts while making larger claims about how power and resistance are treated within critical debates, particularly those of "first wave" or "revisionary" feminist scholarship, African-American scholarship, and New Historicism. But this reader sometimes finds it difficult to be persuaded of those claims. For example, it is hard to understand precisely how Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality de-corporealizes power, when one could plausibly argue the opposite: that Foucault's work in toto has made the corporeal, as a site where power manifests itself, almost too insistent. And although wherever Home Fronts responds to a particular critic whose work engages antebellum domesticity-Ann Douglas, Jane Tompkins, Nancy Armstrong, David Leverenz, to name a few-that engagement is acute. When such engagements are extended to a general level, often the argument seems to overreach itself, and appears to disregard or misrepresent those critics who have reconceived, rather than merely repeated or reified, a nineteenth-century narrative about the reign of those damned scribbling women-a narrative that, as Romero suggests, has been tediously repeated in order "to guarantee the countercultural status of 'classic' male writers." Having stated this, however, I feel I must reiterate: Home Fronts leaves scholars in the field with a challenge to pursue its provocative insights and to remain determined to argue that sentimentality and domesticity do register what Lora Romero names the never-ending work of resistance.

STEPHANIE A. SMITH, University of Florida

Copyright Novel, Inc. Spring 1999
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