Clockwork nation: Modern time, moral perfectionism and American identity in Catharine Beecher and Henry Thoreau

Journal of American Studies

Volumn 39, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 65-86

  Allen, Thomas ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF RICHMOND   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 18144403185     PISSN: 00218758     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0021875805009254     Document Type: Article

References (53)

1. E. P. Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," Past and Present, 38 (Dec. 1967), 56-57;
2. Georg Simmel, "The Metropolis and Modern Life," in Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London: Sage, 1997);
3. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, 1934).
4. Social and economic historians have produced a vast literature attempting to define the nature of the capitalist market; this paper relies most directly upon Charles Sellers's description of an "intricate network of production for exchange" whose "irresistible commodities drew people into producing the commodities it demanded." Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 4.
5. David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World, revised edn (Cambridge: Harvard-Belknap, 2000);
6. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Orgin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 1991);
7. Mumford, 14.
8. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969), 261;
9. Anderson, 24.
10. Sellers, The Market Revolution, 154.
11. For historical accounts of clock manufacturing in the United States during this early period, see Michael O'Malley, Keeping Watch: A History of American Time (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990), 31-33;
12. Otto Mayr and Carlene Stephens, American Clocks: Highlights from the Collection (Washington, DC: National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, 1990), 4-25;
13. Stephens, On Time: How American Has Learned to Live by the Clock (Boston: Bullfinch, 2002);
14. and Landes, 326-46.
15. Ian Bartky's Selling the True Time: Nineteenth-Century Timekeeping in America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000) documents another way in which time was commodified: the sale of observatory time signals to railroads and local governments via telegraph.
16. William Alcott, The Young Man's Guide (Boston: 1834), 43.
17. On the use of Franklin as a touchstone for modern character formation, see Richard D. Brown, Modernization: The Transformation of American Life, 1600-1865 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976). As Brown notes, Franklin's ways of thinking about many things, including time and money, became more common in the nineteenth century than they had been in his own. Alcott's formulation - asserting that Franklin is no longer needed - suggests that what was once an innovative idea has now become normative.
18. Lydia Maria Child includes a similar injunction in her own popular domestic manual: "The true economy of housekeeping is simply the art of gathering up all the fragments, so that nothing be lost. I mean fragments of time, as well as materials." However, Child's book, which first appeared in 1829, does not emphasize the control of time to the same extent as Beecher's later volume. Lydia Maria Child, The American Frugal Housewife (Mincola: Dover, 1999), 3.
19. Catharine E. Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841; New York: Harper, 1851), 157. Subsequent parenthetical references will be to this edition. Although Beecher made some revisions to her text between the many editions of this book issued throughout the nineteenth century, all of the passages quoted in this essay remained consistent throughout the 1840s and 1850s.
20. Cecelia Tichi, "Domesticity on Walden Pond," in A Historical Guide to Henry David Thoreau, ed. William E. Cain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 99, 101.
21. Henry David Thoreau, Walden; Or, Life in the Woods (New York: Vintage Library of America, 1991), 91. Subsequent parenthetical references will be to this edition.
22. This essay focuses upon time's commodity status within a particular historical context, the development of a capitalist market economy in the nineteenth-century United States. Such an analysis does not disclaim the importance of the many ways in which time has been bought and sold in other historical contexts, but it does depend upon the notion that the commodity acquires a historically unique status within capitalism. Hence, while both clocks and wage labor have been bought and sold throughout human history, the social meaning of these transactions was not the same as that which would emerge with the rise of capitalism. For an analysis of the relationship between colonial and early national American attitudes toward time, see Paul B. Hensley, "Time, Work, and Social Context in New England," New England Quarterly 65, (1992), 531-59.
23. The best comprehensive history of attitudes toward time in Europe from antiquity to the present is Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal orders, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
24. Lori Merish, Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 92.
25. On the rise of consumer culture in America in this period, see Stuart Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1999 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 187-88;
26. Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida Country, New York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981);
27. Katherine C. Grier, Culture and Comfort: Parlor Making and Middle-Class Identity, 1850-1930 (Washington: Smithsonian, 1988);
28. Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982),
29. and Halttunen, "From Parlor to Living Room: Domestic Space, Interior Decoration, and the Culture of Personality," in Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America, 1880-1920, ed. Simon J. Bronner (New York: Norton, 1989), 157-89.
30. Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher. A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973).
31. Robert D. Richardson, Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 168.
32. On the relationship between the ostensibly private domestic sphere and the public world of work and commerce, see, e.g., Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990);
33. and Lora Romero, Home Fronts: Domesticity and its Critics in the Antebellum United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).
34. Patrick Brantlinger, Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694-1994 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 140.
35. In employing die term "personhood," I draw upon Anderson's definition of individual identity as a phenomenon that "must be narrated," in terms that are always particular to a historical moment, and upon Priscilla Wald's analysis of how the "reformulation of personhood" that Anderson describes inevitably "accompanies the constitution of a new community." Anderson, Imagined Communities 204;
36. Priscilla Wald, Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety, and Narrative Form (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 4.
37. Catharine M. Sedgwick, Home (Boston: Munroe, 1835), 9-10. Subsequent parenthetical references will be to this edition.
38. Merish, 120, 121, 126.
39. Mrs. H. C. Gardner, "Labor; Or, Striking for Higher Wages," The Ladies' Repository, 19.2 (Feb. 1859), 85.
40. Catharine Beecher, The Evils Suffered by American Women and American Children: The Causes and the Remedy (New York: Harper, 1846), 7-8.
41. Ibid., 8.
42. Ibid., 9.
43. This interpretation of Beecher's text accords with Nancy Armstrong's more general argument that the normative modern subject is established as female in nineteenth-century literary texts; see her Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
44. This analysis is indebted to Michel de Certeau's insight that capitalism's "points of concentration," such as offices and factories, constitute a "centralized, clamorous and spectacular production" that effectively masks "another production, called 'consumption.'" Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 201, xii.
45. Nicole Tonkovich, Domesticity with a Difference: The Nonfiction of Catharine Beecher, Sarah J. Hale, Fanny Fern, and Margaret Fuller (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), 103.
46. Mary P. Ryan, The Empire of the Mother: American Writing about Domesticity, 1830-1860 (New York: Haworth Press, 1982).
47. Philip Fisher, "Democratic Social Space: Whitman, Melville, and the Promise of American Transparency," Representations, 24 (1988), 65;
48. Michael T. Gilmore, American Romanticism in the Marketplace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
49. Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unbandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), 19.
50. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977).
51. For an extended treatment of the relationship between Thoreau's economic ideas and those of his contemporaries, see Leonard N. Neufeldt, The Economist: Henry Thoreau and Enterprise (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
52. The aphorism "Get your work done up in the forenoon" is quoted in Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman's Home; Or, Principles of Domestic Science (1869; reprint, New York: Arno, 1971), 311.
53. Richardson, Henry Thoreau, 139.