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Whitewashing America: Material Culture and Race in the Antebellum Imagination
Even before mass marketing, American consumers bought products that gentrified their households and broadcast their sense of "the good things in life."
Bridging literary scholarship, archaeology, history, and art history, Whitewashing Material Culture and Race in the Antebellum Imagination explores how material goods shaped antebellum notions of race, class, gender, and purity.
From the Revolutionary War until the Civil War, American consumers increasingly sought white-colored goods. Whites preferred mass-produced and specialized products, avoiding the former dark, coarse, low-quality products issued to slaves. White consumers knit around themselves refined domestic items, visual reminders of who they were, equating wealth, discipline, and purity with the racially "white."
Clothing, paint, dinnerware, gravestones, and buildings staked a visual contrast, a portable, visible title and deed segregating upper-class whites from their lower-class neighbors and household servants.
This book explores what it meant to be "white" by delving into the whiteness of dishes, gravestone art, and architecture, as well as women's clothing and corsets, cleanliness and dental care, and complexion.
Early nineteenth-century authors participated in this material economy as well, building their literary landscapes in the same way their readers furnished their households and manipulating the understood meanings of things into political statements.
Such writers as James Fenimore Cooper and John Pendleton Kennedy use setting descriptions to insist on segregation and hierarchy. Such authors as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville, struggled to negotiate messages of domesticity, body politics, and privilege according to complex agendas of their own. Challenging the popular notions, slave narrators such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs wielded white objects to reverse the perspective of their white readers and, at times, to mock their white middle-class pretensions.
Bridging literary scholarship, archaeology, history, and art history, Whitewashing Material Culture and Race in the Antebellum Imagination explores how material goods shaped antebellum notions of race, class, gender, and purity.
From the Revolutionary War until the Civil War, American consumers increasingly sought white-colored goods. Whites preferred mass-produced and specialized products, avoiding the former dark, coarse, low-quality products issued to slaves. White consumers knit around themselves refined domestic items, visual reminders of who they were, equating wealth, discipline, and purity with the racially "white."
Clothing, paint, dinnerware, gravestones, and buildings staked a visual contrast, a portable, visible title and deed segregating upper-class whites from their lower-class neighbors and household servants.
This book explores what it meant to be "white" by delving into the whiteness of dishes, gravestone art, and architecture, as well as women's clothing and corsets, cleanliness and dental care, and complexion.
Early nineteenth-century authors participated in this material economy as well, building their literary landscapes in the same way their readers furnished their households and manipulating the understood meanings of things into political statements.
Such writers as James Fenimore Cooper and John Pendleton Kennedy use setting descriptions to insist on segregation and hierarchy. Such authors as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville, struggled to negotiate messages of domesticity, body politics, and privilege according to complex agendas of their own. Challenging the popular notions, slave narrators such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs wielded white objects to reverse the perspective of their white readers and, at times, to mock their white middle-class pretensions.
224 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2003
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
September 11, 2012
Heneghan chose an interesting topic, and seems aware of the leaders in the field of material history, her primary genre. She appeals to James Deetz, particularly his analysis of pottery in an Early American context, to underpin her own work. However, she uses the lens of Anglo-American racial tension and identity to read the objects she uses. Her assertion is that white Americans in the antebellum years used increasingly elaborate white dishes, houses, and clothing to signify the civility and gentility of white people, and their correct usage and deployment as a boundary marker of whiteness. To own elaborate white tea sets, largely produced only for the American market in England, and to conduct tea in the proper way signified belonging to the right class of people – middle class and higher, with no taint of African-American blood or behavior. Cleanliness, refinement, and the possession of manufactured goods all became markers of class and whiteness, and African-Americans, struck with the condition of savage blackness, had no access to the gentrifying possessions and behaviors. White women, having the most to gain or lose as status markers themselves, internalized the need for increasing whiteness and complexity in domestic and social rituals in order to prove their belonging to the appropriate group, and made the home, the center of these goods and their rituals, a shrine to civilization, whiteness, and the refinement that marked the good white woman apart from her inferior, lower-class, savage black counterpart.
While Heneghan’s concept is fascinating, her analysis of things falls apart because she comes to the material goods and the culture they represent with a “common sense” construct of how they ought to be. This means that her selection and lens on the antebellum world focuses only on the parts of the Anglo-American world where the “one drop” rule of blackness held – that is to say, even the slightest bit of African heritage marked a person as African-American and therefore, “naturally” inferior – thereby disregarding the way race and whiteness functioned in the parts of antebellum America that had a Caribbean approach to race, such as Louisiana. She assumes “black” and “white” are absolute categories all over America, with no variance, and universal agreement as to the occupants of said categories (11). She also ignores slave-holders who have less rigid boundaries between slaves and their masters, focusing on large plantations as if they were the dominant norm in the antebellum South. Heneghan writes as if there were no small slave-holders, ignoring essential works in Southern studies dealing with small slave-holders like Stephanie McCurry’s Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country. For Heneghan, the only slaves visible in America were those kept in slave cabins on large plantations (12).
Equally problematic are Heneghan’s choices of primary sources. While many are period, she insists on using Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 epic, "Gone With the Wind" to illustrate antebellum ideas about femininity and whiteness (86-7). (This choice remains baffling, considering Mitchell’s many anachronisms in the book!) These methodological problems leave her analysis feeling incomplete and her conclusions seeming broad and far-reaching. Where historians like Laruel Thatcher Ulrich demonstrates some of the best of material history with an additional lens of gender – focusing on a small regional sample, with clear boundaries about what goods apply to her study – Heneghan over-reaches to make sweeping statements about America as a unified whole, presuming even that one could say such a thing existed in the antebellum years. Her refusal to start from the objects and move to an interpretation, rather than imposing her vision on her objects, makes her conclusions questionable; her insistence on making broad, wide-sweeping statements about all of America from smaller samplings is problematic. Thus one sees the limits of material history – it is only as good as its interpretation, and only as broad as its sampling. Heneghan’s work stands as a reminder of how to focus one’s work and keep the lens narrow and appropriate.
While Heneghan’s concept is fascinating, her analysis of things falls apart because she comes to the material goods and the culture they represent with a “common sense” construct of how they ought to be. This means that her selection and lens on the antebellum world focuses only on the parts of the Anglo-American world where the “one drop” rule of blackness held – that is to say, even the slightest bit of African heritage marked a person as African-American and therefore, “naturally” inferior – thereby disregarding the way race and whiteness functioned in the parts of antebellum America that had a Caribbean approach to race, such as Louisiana. She assumes “black” and “white” are absolute categories all over America, with no variance, and universal agreement as to the occupants of said categories (11). She also ignores slave-holders who have less rigid boundaries between slaves and their masters, focusing on large plantations as if they were the dominant norm in the antebellum South. Heneghan writes as if there were no small slave-holders, ignoring essential works in Southern studies dealing with small slave-holders like Stephanie McCurry’s Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country. For Heneghan, the only slaves visible in America were those kept in slave cabins on large plantations (12).
Equally problematic are Heneghan’s choices of primary sources. While many are period, she insists on using Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 epic, "Gone With the Wind" to illustrate antebellum ideas about femininity and whiteness (86-7). (This choice remains baffling, considering Mitchell’s many anachronisms in the book!) These methodological problems leave her analysis feeling incomplete and her conclusions seeming broad and far-reaching. Where historians like Laruel Thatcher Ulrich demonstrates some of the best of material history with an additional lens of gender – focusing on a small regional sample, with clear boundaries about what goods apply to her study – Heneghan over-reaches to make sweeping statements about America as a unified whole, presuming even that one could say such a thing existed in the antebellum years. Her refusal to start from the objects and move to an interpretation, rather than imposing her vision on her objects, makes her conclusions questionable; her insistence on making broad, wide-sweeping statements about all of America from smaller samplings is problematic. Thus one sees the limits of material history – it is only as good as its interpretation, and only as broad as its sampling. Heneghan’s work stands as a reminder of how to focus one’s work and keep the lens narrow and appropriate.
February 20, 2015
I read this for class and the Introduction and Epilogue were mind-blowing, but after that it was totally repetitive, like the author just wanted to cram every bit of evidence possible into the argument to prove how much she knew, even though most of it was totally unnecessary.
August 11, 2012
Great topic; poorly executed
March 1, 2013
The topic was interesting but the book was VERY repetitive.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews