TY - JOUR
AU - Millan,, Diego
AB - Abstract This article takes up the representation of voice in Frank J. Webb's 1857 novel The Garies and Their Friends to examine the relationship between Blackness, aurality, and text. Doing so requires an approach tuned to the novel's aural-linguistic dimensions that acknowledges that a character's speaking produces a diegetic sound and that the way characters interact with one another relies, in part, on how each perceives another's voice. It also means looking for how a text conveys a sense of sound both through techniques such as italics and capitalization and through instances of overt narration. Specifically, moments of mistaken identity pivot on the disruption of one character's accumulated presumptions concerning the sound of another character's voice and highlight how sound and listening reinforce processes of racialization, a dynamic Jennifer Lynn Stoever identifies through her work on the sonic color line. Instances of vocalization—moments when characters are depicted speaking and when the text itself performs vocality—defamiliarize social formations along the sonic color line long enough for the novel to scrutinize their underlying premises. Scenes in which characters' voices escape their assumed meaning trouble constructions of racial identity, particularly whiteness and its assumed control over speech. The Garies and Their Friends thus generates an alternative mode through which to critique the safeguarding of whiteness. Ultimately, the novel brings together overlapping meanings of voice, such as physiologically produced acoustic sounds and distinctive literary or authorial decisions, as a meditation on the interplay between voice and writing. It is said that more persons would have attended, had they known that the S. R. Ward, advertised to speak, was a black man. Supposing me to be nothing but a white man, they did not take pains to attend.                —Samuel Ringgold Ward (“Editorial”) Introduction On 16 April 1850, Samuel Ringgold Ward addressed a crowd of abolitionists in Lowell, Massachusetts, as part of a larger speaking tour throughout the North—the occasion to which Ward refers in the above epigraph. Little evidence remains with which to verify Ward’s opinion concerning audience turnout for his speech, and we have no way of knowing whether more people would have attended had his race been advertised. By his own admission, “several other attractions were on hand” that evening to distract the citizens of Lowell (“Editorial”). Despite this uncertainty and the absence of a speech transcript, some reasonable assumptions about the lecture’s subject remain possible, especially given escalating tensions over Senator James Mason’s proposed Fugitive Slave Law. Ward, the formerly enslaved speaker who later turned noted abolitionist, likely made disparaging remarks concerning the “compromises” of Northern politicians, suggesting such decisions would lead to the passing of what he saw as a “monstrous proposition,” an approach he took just weeks earlier during an anti-Webster rally at Faneuil Hall (“Speech” 50). Even though it is impossible to know how publicizing his race would have affected the number of attendees, one might ask why Ward felt compelled to share the comment—which he wrote the following day “from a tavern” in Nashua, New Hampshire—with the readers of his newspaper, The Impartial Citizen. Did Ward simply wish to emphasize the differing ways that white Northern abolitionist sympathizers responded to the growing popularity of black abolitionist orators during the decades preceding the Civil War? Or does Ward’s use of the passive voice leave impressions of a more specific dissatisfaction with the event and its hosts?1 His apprehension concerning audience predilections makes sense, as certain black male orators garnered larger crowds and increased attention through their affiliations with the American Anti-Slavery Society.2 Boston Garrisonian John A. Collins, for instance, referred to the “itching ears” of a public who desired “to hear a coloured man speak, and particularly A SLAVE” in an 18 January 1842 letter to Garrison about Frederick Douglass published in The Liberator (11). The reference to “itching ears” highlights a shift from an interest in speech as a spoken discourse to the supposed acoustic novelty of the speaking/utterance itself also reflected in Ward’s statement. In criticizing a predominately white Northern audience, Ward implies that the heightened interest in black oration—as something to be seen as much as heard—is inextricable from the reproduction of racial difference and the normalization of whiteness; he would be presumed “nothing but a white man” otherwise (“Editorial”). His remark about audience attendance raises questions concerning the phenomenological convergence of race and spoken voice and how both seeing and hearing participate in the racializing process. In this way, Ward’s comment underscores the imbrications of sound, listening, and race as they relate to social formations that are my focus. With these concerns in mind, I take up the representation of voice in Frank J. Webb’s 1857 novel The Garies and Their Friends to examine the relationship between Blackness, aurality, voice, and text. Representations of voice throughout The Garies show the disruption of characters’ accumulated presumptions concerning the sound of another character’s voice—namely, those related to identities sutured by racial ideologies. In doing so, the novel highlights how sound and listening reinforce processes of racialization, a relationship Jennifer Lynn Stoever conceptualizes through what she calls the “sonic color line.”3 The sonic color line decenters vision’s dominance as the only mode deployed in discerning racial difference to better understand “how listening operates as an organ of racial discernment, categorization, and resistance” alongside sight as something “unacknowledged but ever present in the construction of race and the performance of racial oppression” (4). In The Garies, instances of vocalization—moments when characters are depicted speaking and when the text itself performs vocality—interfere with social relations along the sonic color line long enough for the novel to trouble their underlying premises. These sonic disruptions facilitate the novel’s destabilization of race through the interplay of voice and text and text and reader. In this way, the novel brings together overlapping meanings of voice, such as physiologically produced acoustic sounds and distinctive literary or authorial style, as a meditation on the interplay between voice and writing. Examining the ways in which voice operates in The Garies requires a hermeneutic tuned to what could be called the novel’s aural-linguistic dimensions. To “read” for voice in this way, then, acknowledges that a character’s speaking produces a diegetic sound and that the way characters interact with one another relies, in part, on how each perceives another’s voice. It also means looking for how a text conveys a sense of sound both through techniques such as italics and capitalization and through instances of overt narration (that is, moments that call attention to the narration’s overtness relative to the rest of the story). In both senses, to understand voice is to recognize that it exists in relation to space, whether in the soundscape or through textual representation, and often marks who gets to go where. Finally, the novel depicts instances in which characters’ voices escape their assumed meaning in ways that trouble constructions of racial identity, especially whiteness and its assumed control over speech and meaning. The Garies thus generates an alternative mode through which to critique the safeguarding of whiteness and reimagines the act of writing through the relationship between a writer’s voice, print, and even the materiality of ink. Ultimately, The Garies reinforces and expands the need for reading nineteenth-century African American literature through the lens of sound. Sound Reading The mid-nineteenth century witnessed a proliferation of works that highlight the significance of orality. The Garies and Their Friends is just one example of how the popularity and influence of black oral performance and writing of the 1850s extended beyond the predominately male anti-slavery speaking circuit. The growing celebrity of vocal performers, such as dramatic reader Mary Elizabeth Webb (“The Black Siddons”) and soprano Elizabeth Greenfield (“The Black Swan”), and an increased circulation of “voices” as print personas, such as physician James McCune Smith’s “Communipaw,” mark the 1850s not as a point of origin for black American literature but nevertheless as a generative moment in its history tied to sound’s significance.4 Whether it is Greenfield’s impressive vocal range, Mary Webb’s capacity for voicing multiple characters interchangeably, or even Smith’s fictional persona, these figures each conceive of a sonorous or written voice that is inherently malleable. Mobilizing this malleability, whether vocally by modulating one’s voice or in writing through formal and figurative means, affords a greater flexibility in terms of expression. Such creative deployments of fictional voice in the early black American novels opened up even “greater narrational possibilities” for writers, especially in the face of increased commodification of autobiographical voice occurring more readily through stump-tour oration and written testimony (Peterson 562–63). How these writers represented voice in the ongoing performance of identity expanded the ways sounds could contribute to identity formation, echoing a broader belief that engaging fiction could influence intellectual debates over abolition.5 This growing interest in the representational opportunities available through voice relates implicitly to the interdictions on black life at the time. The idea of having a “voice” as a political right presupposes the kind of stable, self-possessed subjectivity legally and socially denied black people in the United States when the novel was published, a time in which black voice legally signified something other than citizenship. Shifts related to voice were precipitated by the combined consequences of the Fugitive Slave Act (1850) and the Dred Scott decision (1857).6 As the justification for the Court’s decision, Chief Justice Roger Taney’s parade of horribles imagined a series of supposedly negative consequences to granting Scott’s petition, including “the right to enter every other State, … to go where they pleased, … [and] the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak” (United States 15; emphasis added). Syntactically associating the right to move between states with the liberty of speech, the court’s assumed need to regulate black speech extends to spaces both “public and in private.” The ruling also ties mobility to one’s capacity to speak, giving credence to Eric Cheyfitz’s claim that speaking itself is part of the subjection process.7 The mere possibility that black people might discuss, not necessarily execute, rebellious acts in private could not be brooked. An anxiety regarding the physical and metaphoric mobility of black people resulted in a swift, definitive response to Scott’s legal petition at a time in which de facto silencing practices already prevailed.8 One might interpret this assumed need to delimit the capacities of black speech in light of what Fred Moten means—in his interrogation of Marx’s inability to imagine the commodity’s speech beyond the subjunctive—when he imagines the discursive preconditions of a future-oriented value system as constituting the impossibility of a commodity’s capacity to speak: “Speech will have been the cutting augmentation of the already existing chemistry of objects, but the object’s speech, the commodity’s speech, is impossible, that impossibility being the final refutation of whatever the commodity will have said” (10). The Court’s decision attempts to legally silence black speech by securing its discursive impossibility, a commodification affected by the reference to the enslaved as “descendants of Africans who were imported” (United States 7; emphasis added). Casting black speech as exception, which is to say beyond the limits of citizenship, effectively coded the expanding national voice as white in ways that continue to affect the everyday lived experiences of black people in the United States. This exceptional status of (antebellum) black speech must be taken into account when turning to black literature through the lens of sound. Amplifying a text’s sonic dimensions decenters ocularcentric modes of interpretation predicated on sight and empirical evidence, such as phenotype, and thus becomes integral to understanding a text’s potential for meaning-making alongside the visual. Seeking modes through which to disentangle how race and sound emerge as part of the subjection process, scholars examine how phonography—or the inscription of sound—has contributed to the development of black literary and cultural expression in concert with various innovations in sound technologies. Sounds and bodies come together at “corporeal … phonographic … [and] sociocultural” frequencies, insisting on critical engagements with “sound systems” at the intersection of sound production and orders of knowledge (Henriques xxxiii). Artists engage and reorganize questions of being and becoming through conceptual connections between sound technologies and black cultural production, such as the ability to technologically separate voice from embodied human origin, which facilitates new explorations of key facets of modernity such as subjectivity, temporality, and community (Weheliye 5). Following Alexander Weheliye, if understanding and deploying a separation of voice from a bodily/enunciatory origin serves as a starting point for the formation of a modern black subject, we find ample evidence of such a split in Webb’s novel. Put another way, reading The Garies helps us examine how the shaping and reshaping of black identity along the technology-enabled recording of music during the twentieth century finds an analog in mid-nineteenth-century manipulations related to text and voice, specifically how a text might convey that orality. Even Weheliye, who considers the advent of modern recording technologies the occasion for this imaginative subjective (re)formation, holds open the possibility for such analysis when he acknowledges that “orality is always already techne-logical” (19).9 The amount of representation that sits at the intersection of sound and text—not only the use of typographical shifts such as italics and capitalization to indicate tonal shifts but also moments that otherwise draw attention to a voice’s sonic qualities—hinges on the acoustic capacities of voice throughout The Garies and must be read as its own innovation in sound and literature. Rather than provide an unalloyed access to subjectivity, scenes of voices failing to perform as intended highlight how vocalization exists in a dynamic, at times unreliable, relation to identity. By demonstrating how these failures call attention to who stands to gain from the presumptive tethering of voice to subject, the novel disrupts the logic through which racial whiteness operates. Rather than directly address the biological calculus of race, The Garies and Their Friends both performatively undermines epistemological orientations that would concretize race as a wholly knowable object and stages a deconstruction of white supremacy through its representations of vocal indeterminacy. The Garies and Their Friends: Sounding Out a Text The Garies and Their Friends is about black life in Philadelphia during the middle decades of the nineteenth century and tells the story of two families: the Garies and the Ellises. The Garies, comprised of a white plantation owner from Georgia, his pregnant wife Emily, and their two children, move from Georgia to Philadelphia so that Emily, who is legally Clarence Garie’s property, may deliver her child in a free state. They are welcomed by the Ellises, an “industrious” middle-class black family whose head works as a carpenter (Webb 16).10 The novel’s villain, George Stevens, discovers a familial tie to Clarence Garie and disguises his murder within an orchestrated race riot to inherit Clarence’s fortune as his last remaining white relative. Rounding out the cast of main characters are two figures who represent different ends of the novel’s socioeconomic spectrum: the very wealthy real estate mogul Mr. Walters, whom the novel characterizes as “above six feet in height” and “of jet-black complexion,” and the less affluent Kinch, who is best friend to the Ellises’ son Charlie (121). As part of the novel’s manipulation of vocal signifiers, the intersection of many voices—political, literary, figurative, and sonorous—contributes to its examination of racial identity. The novel approximates different social classes and national identities through the use of textually rendered dialect, such as one character’s southern drawl (Mr. Western) and another’s Irish brogue (McCloskey). In addition to dialects, instances in which characters lower their voices to conspiratorial levels highlight how the novel’s representations of voice often take into account the way they sound. Besides intentional misspellings meant to adequately represent national accents and regional dialects, the novel marks diction in a variety of ways. The uses of exclamation points and words written in capitalized letters and italics modify a character’s spoken voice, generating a visible textuality that insists on its audibility.11 For example, the text represents fluctuations in voice when a young Clarence Garie tries to rouse his already-dead mother: “‘She’s asleep,’ said Clarence. ‘Mother—mother,’ but there came no answer. ‘MOTHER,’ said he, still louder, but yet there was no response. . . . ‘Mother, can’t you speak?’” (225). When, later in the novel, George Stevens, Jr. (the son) reveals the race of his former childhood neighbor Clarence Garie, Jr. to the father of Clarence’s white fiancé, the text depicts the announcement in all capital letters to signal shouting: “HE IS A COLOURED MAN” (351). The would-be father-in-law’s stammered incredulity is expressed through dashes and italics, “It–it can’t be” (352). The louder volume and typographic representation of the stammer symbolically coincide with the revelation of Clarence’s race by marking a change in tone. Noting the ways in which such typographical marks can be interpreted as both aural and visual signifiers in her reading of David Walker’s Appeal (1829), Marcy J. Dinius notes, “readers can virtually hear [Walker’s] rising voice and anger in his text’s italics, capitalized words, and multiple exclamation points” (56). Although in no way as “typographically radical” as the Appeal, the many instances of tonal variety achieved in print in The Garies nevertheless situates it as part of this broader tradition of phonographic representation (55). Adding to these more typographically achieved examples of what we might call novelized vocalization, moments when the narrator addresses the audience more directly constitute a notable vocal innovation. Narratologically speaking, there can be no narrative without voice, yet certain instances of rhetorical addresses to the reader take on more identifiably voiced dimensions that go beyond story exposition. Suzanne Keen discusses how degrees of “overtness” and “covertness” of a given narrator “can change during the course of a narrative” and how “[n]oticing where and speculating why moments of overtness occur … can provide opportunities for interpretation” (43). For clarity, the phrase “narrator’s voice” below calls attention to this specific strategy and avoids flattening out generative distinctions between the overt vocality of some moments and the relatively “quieter” backdrop of covert narration. The narrator’s voice in The Garies often interjects in scenes involving racial and social upheaval, inviting readers to reflect on the narrated action in a manner similar to what William L. Andrews has identified as implied readers within the “novelization” of nonfiction enacted by black autobiographers.12 Initially used as a one-to-one tacit agreement that assumed a generous collapse between implied and actual readers, by the 1840s, Andrews argues, black autobiographers’ use of implied readers as a rhetorical strategy reached a point where the reader functioned more as a “negative foil” than immediate co-conspirator: “Instead of flattering his audience with a favorable image of itself in the fictive reader, the autobiographer challenged his audience to liberate itself from the wrongheadedness and moral myopia of this rhetorical straw man” (29). The narrator in The Garies assumes such an ironic stance to urge the audience toward new insights. This is apparent, for instance, during the Garie children’s expulsion from school (chapter 15) and Charlie Ellis’s job search (chapters 28–29), each of which dramatizes a moment of racial subjection as a result of white public outcry. The narrator presents the conflicted sentiments of the teacher Miss Jordan following the expulsion of the Garie children: This was too much for the poor teacher, who clasped the child [Emily Garie] in her arms, and gave way to a burst of uncontrollable sorrow… . [O]pening the door she turned them forth into the street—turned away from her school these two little children, such as God received into his arms and blessed, because they were the children of a “nigger woman.” (160) The em dash removes the narrator’s voice at least one degree, which allows for a shift from a more diegetic descriptive recounting to the register of an extradiegetic appeal to the reader’s sympathies. Such syntactical and rhetorical asides increase the narrator’s overtness, conveying a sense that the narrator speaks directly to the reader and could be said to shuttle between the text’s legible and audible registers. The use of scare quotes signals a performative modulation of the narrator’s voice, one that recalls the very intonation (also in italics) from earlier in the chapter of the racial epithet that haunts Clarence Garie. The younger Clarence had overheard Mrs. Stevens use the epithet in reference to his mother, and the combination of rhetorical address and typographical callback highlights ways in which the narrative manipulates text to affect its aims (131). Yet even as the typography of The Garies stretches the capacity of written text’s ability to convey spoken language, the necessity of including these indications also suggests the inverse—that written text is always already an inadequate vessel for representing the sonic registers of vocal representation, and it is in the purposeful disruption of this supposedly stable relationship that the novel locates its voice.13 Mistaken Identities Some of the central conflicts concerning racialization and voice in The Garies emerge in relation to detection. The first line of dialogue, an interrogative, establishes this tension early: “And so you say, Winston, that they never suspected you were coloured?” (3). In response, George Winston, Emily Garie’s cousin, recounts his time in Philadelphia with a family whose patriarch Mr. Priestly “prides himself on being able to detect evidences of the least drop of African blood in any one” (4). This opening introduces themes of racial passing and white scrutiny. Later moments trouble the capacities of such optic scrutiny through more explicit mobilizations of voice. In one of the novel’s pivotal moments, Emily Garie’s identity is so effectively cloaked that she and Mrs. Stevens, George’s wife, have an entire conversation during which the latter feels emboldened enough to make racist remarks. At this point, Clarence reveals the “truth” of his wife’s race by shining a light on her face. To Mrs. Stevens’s racist remarks, Emily Garie responds: “I presume, madam,” she said, in a hurried and agitated tone, “that you are very ignorant of the people upon whom you have just been heaping such unmerited abuse, and therefore I shall not think so hardly of you as I should, did I deem your language dictated by pure hatred; but be its origin what it may, it is quite evident that our farther acquaintance could be productive of no pleasure to either of us—you will, therefore, permit me … to wish you good evening;” and thus speaking, she left the room. (130; emphasis added) When Mrs. Garie says, “but be its origin what it may,” she indicates that white supremacy need not be limited to expressions of hatred directed at a nonwhite person but that it also facilitates bonding among white people. Neither, however, has a place in her home, and she summarily dismisses the false neighbor. While this early moment in the novel highlights the primacy of the visual with regard to racial identification, it also offers key insights with regard to whether the voice alone can provide definitive proof of racial identity, anticipating a later exchange involving Mrs. Stevens’s husband, which I will discuss in greater detail below. Although the light supposedly reveals Emily’s race to Mrs. Stevens, the latter’s remarks do much to show the truth of her character. In the end, Mrs. Stevens’s faux pas, or false pass, reveals more about her character than Mrs. Garie’s identity and, importantly, about the intimacies of whiteness (130). Instead of asking what work voice intentionally performs, moments such as this encourage us to examine failures in vocal communication and how The Garies puts those failures to productive ends. In The Garies, such instances of “failure” represent the limit of a relationship between sound, voice, and understanding. In scenes of racial passing, for instance, moments of misrecognition during conversations expose assumptions tied to the sounds of one’s voice in a way that ironizes the stability of subjectivity. Adding to the way other stories of passing mobilize phenotypic ambiguity, The Garies uses vocal indeterminacy to dissect racial paradigms. Two scenes involving this latter strategy, which might be called vocal passing, are illustrative.14 Both instances involve characters named George. The first is Emily Garie's cousin George Winston. The second is the novel’s villain, George Stevens, who discovers he is Clarence Garie’s cousin and uses that knowledge to acquire his wealth by arranging Mr. Garie’s death during the orchestrated riot. There is another reason beyond their similar filial connections to the Garies that these two Georges should be read in tandem, which has to do with an editorial error in which George Stevens is referred to as “Mr. Thomas Stevens” at the outset of chapter 12, which leaves open the possibility that the character George Stevens was originally named Thomas and changed after revision.15 These coincidences invite readers to view the characters as twinned or doubled. Each scene features one George crossing the sonic color line in which the disruptions occasioned by their passing highlight the relationship between speech and race. An early chapter in the book describes George Winston passing for white during his travels in Philadelphia, the same trip he describes in the novel’s opening. The irony at play centers how the sound of one’s voice threatens to exceed a speaking character’s intended meaning. Winston’s increased mobility is afforded by this passing as he allows himself to be mistaken for white. At his hotel one evening, Winston is identified as a target to be duped by a waiter named Ben and coworker Mr. Allen, who are secretly collecting funds for the first Philadelphia Vigilance Committee, a group of abolitionists who operated from 1837 to 1852 aiding the enslaved in their escapes.16 The two decide Ben will attempt to trick George, whom he assumes to be a white Southerner, by knowingly feigning a self-deprecating dialect and an anti-abolitionist nostalgia in hopes of securing a large tip: “I was sot free—and I often wish … dat I was back agin on the old place—hain’t got no kind marster to look after me here, and I has to work drefful hard sometimes.” Ben’s plan unsurprisingly fails, and Winston, hardly a proslavery sympathizer, reprimands him: “Any man that prefers slavery to freedom deserves to be a slave—you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Go out of the room, sir, as quick as possible!” (39). This case of mistaken identity cuts both ways, however; Winston does not recognize Ben’s nonstandard grammar and pronunciation as a ruse meant to dupe white supremacists. This misrecognition is due, in part, to what Stoever calls “the listening ear,” which is her concept “for how dominant listening practices accrue—and change—over time.” As characters engage in the cultural politics of listening, the listening ear serves “as a descriptor for how the dominant culture exerts pressure on individual listening practices to conform to the sonic color line’s norms” (7). In short, dominant expectations condition the interaction in subtle ways tied to listening. Both Winston’s and Ben’s errors occur, in part, due to these consolidated practices. This moment thus challenges the notion that there is any innately racialized sound outside of these conditions. Additional information related to sound disrupts these consolidated expectations, as the reader experiences a stark contrast the next time Ben speaks, this time out of Winston’s earshot: “‘Phew!’ said the astonished and chagrined Ben; … ‘that was certainly a great miss,’ continued he, talking as correct English, and with as pure Northern an accent as any one could boast” (40). The irony of this “great miss” leaves much to ponder about the exchange. Ben cannot risk wondering whether he and Winston share similar abolitionist sensibilities, in part, because he strategically ascribes phenotype to race and race to politics in conjunction with regional origins. In other words, the exchange indicates how contingent factors such as appearance and space affect how characters interpret the performativity of sounds/voices in the story. Placed at a disadvantage within a broader social logic, Ben does not have the luxury of presuming otherwise. Winston, too, takes his encounter with Ben at face value, and while neither Ben nor Winston is disabused of his misapprehension—both pass by one another slightly ruffled but mostly unperturbed—the exchange reveals much on the subject of performance and identity in relation to voice. These performances hinge on multiple instances and understandings of passing. George Winston, in a manner often associated with passing for convenience, allows himself to be mistaken for white to access greater social mobility. Once mistaken, Winston’s performance of whiteness provides a set of potential scripts for his interaction with Ben. Ben passes himself off as sympathetic to the anti-abolitionist rhetoric typically associated with a proslavery Southerner. Doing so, Ben’s command over his voice produces its own “strategic infidelity” in relation to the performance of identity (Nyong’o, “Hiawatha’s” 90).17 Ben’s performance of dialect and nostalgia for life on the plantation, and the novel’s choice to represent that performance of dialect textually, introduces the sounds of blackface minstrelsy channeled through a character the reader knows to be pretending, an instance of what Daphne Brooks calls “Afro-alienation acts.” For Brooks, “Afro-alienation acts” refer to moments in which “the condition of alterity converts into cultural expressiveness and a specific strategy of cultural performance” (4). The scene calls attention to the performative expectations of a society organized along the sonic color line through the types of dialogue permitted across it, not to mention what passes for “truth” as a result. Ben’s “great miss” becomes Webb’s representation of a great miss for what the so-called failure manages to convey. Why Ben performs this way remains radically apart from why the white man for whom Ben assumes he is performing would think so. The fact that he puts on this act in the first place suggests its prior success, which the text soon corroborates; so, even as the target might be incorrectly inferred, Webb indirectly criticizes the way white Southerners reward the performance of obsequious proslavery rhetoric, here a commodified fantasy of Blackness with increased capital. Ben’s plan backfires, after all, not because he fails to perform his simulation of an ingratiating former slave but rather because he is successful enough. Rather than present Ben’s failure as a caution against performances of Blackness that risk inadvertently perpetuating stereotypes, the text undermines any such interpretation. A series of similes at the end of the exchange reveals that whatever passes “as correct English, and with as pure Northern an accent as any one could boast” is always already a simulation and as much of a construct (Webb 40; emphasis added). By calling into question the reliability of aural signifiers, the passage directs its ultimate criticism at social structures that demand the kind of self-commodification Ben must undergo. Whereas the scene between Ben and George Winston ends with a tacit acknowledgment of the constructed nature of what passes for properly spoken English, the one involving George Stevens uses the indeterminacy of voice to deconstruct embodiments of racial whiteness. Throughout the passage, multiple instances undermine presumptions concerning appearance, culminating in Stevens beaten, covered in tar and mistaken for black, unable to self-identify using his voice. Ultimately, the scene troubles known physiognomic tropes and other such pseudoscientific logic, in which the legibility of an object remains tautologically predetermined, by undermining an assumed mastery over voice and showing it to be a supposed mark of racial whiteness. In the depictions of George Stevens in disguise, which he puts on as part of his bigger scheme to murder Clarence Garie, the narrator emphasizes the effects of the disguise on George Stevens’s appearance, noting how the disguise brings out “the most disagreeable points of his physique … [it] being quite in harmony with his villanous [sic] countenance” (184). The description highlights what we already know of Stevens’s disreputable character by turning a recognizably physiognomic trope—in which the face is read as an external manifestation of internal essential qualities—on a white person, ironizing a practice that was historically and intimately connected to the racial stereotyping of nonwhite features. The passage makes use of physiognomic tropes as part of its tacit commentary on concealment in relation to the properties of Stevens’s everyday clothes in which his gentlemanly attire is revealed to be more of a disguise. The description of his facial features after he is beaten up and covered in tar further blurs distinctions between pseudoscientific and caricaturist fictions. In his new outfit, Stevens gets mistaken for a member from a rival gang and beaten as a result. Whereas the narrative previously bound Stevens’s personality to his “villanous [sic] countenance” (184), the description post-beating uses physical markers typically associated with caricatured depictions of black faces: “His lips were swelled to a size that would have been regarded as large even on the face of a Congo negro, and one eye was puffed out to an alarming extent; whilst the coating of tar he had received rendered him such an object as the reader can but faintly picture to himself.” The hyperbolic quality of the account emphasizes similarities between caricaturist minstrelsy and pseudoscience, as if, from the narrator’s perspective, each shares the same ideological impulse. These similarities emerge from the use of a conditional perfect address to the reader, which emphasizes the narrator’s distance from both the scene’s diegetic action and the interpretations of those who “would have … regarded” (189) Mr. Stevens uncritically through a stricter adherence to such racist pseudoscientific indicators of race. The conditional perfect captures the tautology undergirding both blackface minstrelsy and pseudoscience; for both, the complete impression of an image predetermines its legibility. In other words, the narrative aligns pseudoscience’s underlying rationale with that of minstrelsy in that both cling to false reproductions of authenticity. Even as the descriptions and case of mistaken identity would seem to reinforce the primacy of the visual, the narrator’s voice destabilizes the situation and compels further consideration. Goading readers to examine the ubiquity and familiarity of such images, the narrator calls attention to their potential complicity with the tropes used in describing George Stevens as an “object” they might still “faintly picture.” The free indirect speech deployed by the narrator’s voice in such addresses to the reader opens an “enunciatory gap” that temporarily separates the narrator from the story’s diegesis (Peterson 563). This narratorial distance performatively objectifies the narrated action as the constructed perspective invites a greater amount of cross-examination of what is going on. Soon after, a group of affluent, intoxicated white men mistakes a swollen and tar-covered Stevens for black. Of course, registering tar for “black” skin renders their oversight absurd, and the ironic distance generated by the mediating screen of narration separates the reader from both Stevens and the group of white men in a way that emphasizes the absurdity of their perception. In making light of their mistake with a rhetorical nudge and wink to the reader, the narrator’s voice generates enough distance with which to ridicule the astounding ignorance of these white men who work themselves into unreasonable, illogical contortions in an effort to preserve a particular racial hierarchy and class status. Yet narrative voice is not the only kind of voice brought forward in the passage. There is also the matter and sound of Stevens’s own voice and its relation to his body. Having thoroughly debunked the fantasy of an accurate visible (external) signifier for race, the narrative shifts to address the possibility of an audible (internal) signifier—the voice—as an indicator of racial difference. As the intoxicated men surround Mr. Stevens, they begin demanding that he speak: “‘Spirit of—hic—hic—night, whence co-co-comest thou?’ stammered one; ‘sp-p-peak—art thou a creature of the mag-mag-na-tion-goblin-damned, or only a nigger?—speak!’”18 Stevens, familiar with some of the men who have identified him as “a darkey,” refrains from speaking, afraid “his voice might discover him” (Webb 190). Within the larger logic of the story, “discover” here means the discovery of not only his individual identity but also his nefarious orchestration of the race riots and murder plot. We might also understand “discover” in relation to more scientific practices predicated on detection, which is to say to an episteme founded on one’s fidelity to discoverable empirical evidence. In this instance, Stevens’s reluctance indicates his belief in the immutability of his racial identity. As no one is able to visually confirm his status as white, Stevens’s anxiety about speaking demonstrates his belief that the primacy of voice trumps that of the visual. Put another way, despite the absence of a recognizable face, Stevens has faith his voice holds the capacity to betray his identity, so that even if viewing him might not uncover who he is, he rests assured in a socially sanctioned command over language that secures his ability as a white man to announce it. It is this relationship between voice and subject that Mladen Dolar considers in A Voice and Nothing More (2006), which examines the possibility of what he calls an “object voice” as the bit of voice that remains unintelligible to phonologic explanation. Considering philosophical paradigms that stress the voice as the basic element of language and written language as its supplement, Dolar traces the history of the voice in Western critical discourse: “The voice offered the illusion that one could get immediate access to an unalloyed presence, an origin not tarnished by externality, a firm rock against the elusive interplay of signs which are anyway surrogates by their very nature, and always point to an absence” (37). George Stevens’s reluctance to speak hinges on his belief in this illusion, as if there were some unassailable quality in his voice that was undeniably him or at the very least undeniably white. Yet, when the voice, like the gaze, appears as the pivotal point of self-apprehension, it introduces a rupture that must be reconciled by constructing self-presence around an empty center from which the subject emerges “in an impossible relation to that bit that cannot be present” (42). The voice engenders a remainder for which no amount of phonological schematization can ever account. It is this bit, this “object voice,” that soon bites back when Stevens finally decides to speak. Further ironizing this decisive moment in The Garies, Stevens’s belief in an inherently racialized voice is ultimately refuted by the scene’s end. Whereas a presumed “visual” confirmation of “race” leads to the miscommunication between George Winston and Ben, the misrecognition involving George Stevens focuses more on notions of voice and sound. Although Stevens will not speak in front of the larger party of men, he reveals his voice to a more intimate acquaintance, Mr. Morton, who happens to be among them. Pulling Morton out of earshot of the others, Stevens finally speaks: As soon as they were out of hearing of the others, Mr. Stevens exclaimed, “Don’t you know me, Morton?” Mr. Morton started back with surprise, and looked at his companion in a bewildered manner, then explained, “No, I’ll be hanged if I do. Who the devil are you?” “I’m Stevens; you know me.” “Indeed I don’t. Who’s Stevens?” “You don’t know me! Why, I’m George Stevens, the lawyer.” Mr. Morton thought that he now recognized the voice, and as they were passing under the lamp at the time, Mr. Stevens said to him, “Put your finger on my face, and you will soon see it is only tar.” (Webb 191) Despite their established familiarity, Mr. Morton fails to discern any new information from the voice he hears; his listening ear assumes that Stevens both looks and sounds “black.” In short, Stevens’s voice does not discover him at all. Not even saying his own name proves sufficient enough in overcoming the cognitive inertia of racial signification. Stevens tries three times to speak and have his voice carry the significance of his identity, if not in particular as George Stevens, then at the very least as white. His repetition of “know me” tries to assert his individual identity by distancing himself from the image of Blackness he presents through his voice’s presumed whiteness as he pleads for recognition along epistemological lines. Instead, the phrase aurally foregrounds the exact opposite, as no “me” can be discerned from voice alone. The novel successfully disrupts the assumed stability of whiteness by reintroducing this break. Furthermore, if we consider the plea “know me” along with the use of the word “companion” to describe Stevens, we see how admitting too close an intimacy and familiarity with Blackness produces Morton’s most fervent repudiation. This gives further meaning to Morton’s colloquial response that he would be “hanged” for such intimate knowledge, connoting a convergence of epistemic and disciplinary violence in the formation and policing of whiteness. Frustrating Stevens’s attempts to announce who he is, Morton insists he does not recognize any incongruity between the voice he hears and the body he sees in front of him. With the invitation to put a finger on his face, Stevens introduces the haptic as another potential vector for making meaning, although he immediately muddles it through his colloquial use of “see” as a substitute for one’s understanding, once again yielding to the primacy of the visual in the white imaginary as the epistemological terrain on which white supremacist racial discrimination occurs. The real-life Dr. Samuel Morton of Philadelphia was one of the most prominent voices in the propagation of visual regimes in the service of producing so-called racial knowledge through works such as Crania Americana: Or a Comparative View of the Skulls of Various Aboriginal Nations of North and South America (1839), which relies heavily on supposed links between observation and truth. Thus, we might interpret Mr. Morton in The Garies as a play on a pseudoscientist trying to decipher the apparent mystery before him. Throughout the exchange with Stevens, neither voice nor vision occupies a primary space for knowledge production and instead work together to reinforce a constructed, subjective image of a black body as the product of white anxieties concerning a social, intimate proximity to Blackness. Through moments that prove more illustrative and symbolic than strictly realistic, the text exposes white attempts to determine Blackness by mocking the senseless behaviors of white people bent on preserving racial difference as a means of preserving their access to the privileges of whiteness. Much like the intoxicated white partygoers, Morton’s impossibly absurd perception of tar as black skin redirects the object of ridicule back onto the impulses of the white gaze. That the tar was put on emphasizes more blatantly the constructedness of a version of “Blackness” as a racial category. Even materially, this “Blackness” is exposed here as constructed out of white actions and perspectives—in which white people put on the tar and then decide how it is read. Thus, the text shows a body not “black” so much as “blackened.” At the level of the voice, The Garies locates a white racial anxiety at the ruptures where body and voice do not line up neatly, in which meaning becomes indeterminate as these ruptures threaten the fantasy of a sustainable, authentic whiteness. In response to this uncertainty, Stevens and Morton become active coconspirators in the parsing of racial difference, which, in the context of the chapter, means generating the externality of a false “black” object (of study) in order to preserve their faith in the subject of whiteness. If we stay with the interaction between George Stevens and Mr. Morton, we find that the printed text—black ink on white pages—proves insufficient in capturing the resonant meanings at play. Mr. Morton’s response, “Who’s Stevens?,” produces an aural slippage between “who’s” as contraction for “who is” and “whose” as possessive, the latter indicating the kind of language used in slave states when trying to ascertain the identity of slaves vis-à-vis their relationships to masters as property. The linguistic slip pivoting on this word in particular crystallizes a tension central to the novel between property and self-possession, between the objects whose possession grounds the ontological stability of a subject “who is.” Importantly, the answer to the question “Who's Stevens?” remains contingent on both characters’ ability to conceive of a Blackness stable enough to be abjected. Their apprehension, we might reason, lies in the fear of failing to provide a passable answer to this question.19 A passable answer, in this case, would be able to absorb and thus obfuscate the formation of whiteness. Instead, the novel troubles notions of identity by illustrating the mechanism through which white supremacy operates: radical commodification. The scene thus refutes constructions of race by addressing their shoddy logical foundations and, importantly, not by presenting the social accomplishments of its black characters. Rather than subjecting the aspirations and achievements of its middle-class black protagonists to white measurements of respectability, The Garies both promotes economic upward mobility as a means to achieve a propertied self-possession and deconstructs the racist, speculative ideologies on which whiteness asserts itself.20 Vocal indeterminacy circulates in the novel and frustrates observational practices seeking to pinpoint voice as immanently discernible, as an undeniable aspect of a body. Noting such disruptions encourages a reading practice that attends to the indefiniteness opened up by sounds against the definite words written on a page. It is telling that the anxiety that emerges from destabilizing whiteness manifests as an anxiety over the uncertainty of language. As Morton attempts to decipher the enigmatic presence before him, the aural slippage of “who’s” unconsciously speaks to an uncertainty in language that a white supremacist gaze necessarily renders coincident with an idea of Blackness. Occupying a liminal neither/nor space, voice short-circuits attempts at relegating what is spoken to a presupposed position and signals a sonic dimension that frustrates schematic explanation. Of course, written text here helps anchor meaning and makes such a misinterpretation less plausible for the reader, but screening for any potential misinterpretation is the point; the act of reading affects, in a sense, the epistemological motivation behind pseudoscience: to fix meaning by producing a legible black type. Conclusion The Garies and Their Friends thus connects a desire to stabilize voice’s potentially indeterminate meanings via print with a desire to propagate a white supremacist construction of the social body. How does this connection play out in terms of the novel’s treatment of writing and its own status as a printed artifact? The scenes involving the two Georges represent attempts to imagine the fugitive capacities of sound and voice in text. The Garies further extends its depiction of these capacities to imagine how manipulating print technologies can perhaps disrupt the reciprocal development of “the links between technologies of print and technologies of racialization” in the nineteenth century (Senchyne 141). The novel examines this relationship between print materiality and racialization through the various letters characters exchange, as the letters represent moments of transcribing voices for circulation. After the riot in which Mr. Ellis is severely injured, the novel devotes two chapters to Charlie Ellis searching for a job, a task that includes submitting letters of intent. Charlie’s search initially proves fruitless because of the way whiteness circulates as the presumed standard against which Charlie’s successful emulation of bourgeois writing styles must stand. As Robert Reid-Pharr argues, “The fact of standardized communication removes the impress of the author’s hand from his text. It separates the fact of the black’s body from the necessity of his representation” (81). In other words, Charlie’s letter, and by extension Charlie himself, sounds good on paper and thus “good enough” to be incorrectly presumed white. This standardization performs a sort of temporary disembodiment that only intensifies the violence of Charlie’s forced reembodiment the moment he arrives for an interview, illustrating the contextual limits to print’s supposed democratizing (and often idealized) capabilities. Juxtaposing Charlie’s letter with a letter written to him by his friend Kinch offers potential insights into the literary practices that the novel envisions.21 Kinch’s letter successfully navigates the disembodying standardization of the post in part because it is a letter between friends, arriving safely bundled within a letter by Charlie’s older sister Esther. This latter point is an implicit nod, perhaps, to clandestine modes of circulation and communication imagined by the text as necessary for survival. The letter bears all the markings of a child’s letter: improper use of grammar, non sequitur logic, misspelled words, and a motley assortment of colorful inks. This instance of overt narration draws attention, in particular, to the inks used and the variegated representational practice they represent. Besides patriotic red and blue inks, the narrator refers to Kinch’s use of a “pale muddy black which is the peculiar colour of ink after passing through the various experiments of school-boys, who generally entertain the belief that all foreign substances, from molasses-candy to bread-crumbs, necessarily improve the colour and quality of that important liquid” (Webb 265). This attention to ink fits within a broader conceit of making a metaphor out of the relation between ink and paper in order to explore racial dynamics.22 “Print legibility does indeed require contrast,” Jonathan Senchyne writes, “but the adoption of whiteness as a central metaphor makes paper inextricable from the processes by which blackness becomes difference and whiteness the unmarked center” (145). In addition to the nonstandard appearance of the letter, the narrator lauds the “chirography” of Kinch’s script, underscoring both the singular style and character of his handwriting as part of the letter’s capacity to convey meaning. Together, the varied inks and chirography disrupt the homogenizing imperative of standardized print, which would remove the imprint of the author’s hand, by intensifying a requisite contrast between paper and ink. This chirography, and its ability to successfully convey not only the author’s voice but also his sentiments, contradicts the supremacy of standardization, or a belief that the clarity of a message depends on determining everything about its mode of transmission. Kinch’s writerly voice thus emerges within the logic of the passage in tandem with the sincerity of his sentiment and the qualities of the inks he has had a hand in making. The composition of this third, capacious “pale muddy black” ink emerges out of infinitely variable “experiments.” Indeterminate qualities that underwrite its message exist in relation to both an ability to manipulate the text’s production and an inventive style. The printed text of The Garies adds to the singular creativity of this “curious epistle,” with a momentary change in font to more gothic lettering and a postscript skull and cross-bones, which the printed text also reproduces (265). Attending to the interplay of text and sound offers important insights for evaluating The Garies and Their Friends and other written texts that do not overtly take music or sound as their subject matter. Doing so opens up new interpretive possibilities with which to consider how sound affects literary representation. Expanding our understanding of the sonic dimension expressed in antebellum black American writing has the potential to confirm, challenge, or reshape how we interpret this moment in black literature and its relationship to the decades that follow. Caught in its own double bind of using text to illustrate that which exceeds and complicates written language, The Garies appeals to a proto-phonographic imaginary for its reorganization of the “vexed codependency” between “sound and source” (Weheliye 7). In crafting scenes that hinge on the significance of voice, The Garies and Their Friends amplifies this relationship between sound and text, capturing how vocal indeterminacy traverses the sonic color line in ways that frustrate the schematizing imperatives of racialization. The novel compels us to consider the ways early black American literary works realign the relation between black letters and black people through the subtle sonic performances of both. Footnotes " 1. Such dissatisfaction with Northern abolitionists was not uncommon at the time. Scholars document, for example, Frederick Douglass’s initial turn away from William Lloyd Garrison in 1847 and his announcement of an opposing political stance concerning the Constitution in 1851; see, for example, Benjamin Quarles. William H. and Jane H. Pease locate the origin of Douglass’s strife with the Garrisonians earlier, in 1841. " 2. The history of black oration in the United States reaches as far back as the nation’s history itself. Poet and essayist Jupiter Hammon’s 1787 “An Address to the Negroes in the State of New-York” is believed to be the first published speech by a black American. Maria W. Stewart was the first woman to deliver a public speech (1832). During the 1800s, notable figures such as Stewart, David Walker, William Whipper, James McCune Smith, and Douglass made significant speeches on topics central to the lives of America’s black population. " 3. Jennifer Lynn Stoever writes that " The sonic color line describes the process of racializing sound—how and why certain bodies are expected to produce, desire, and live amongst particular sounds—and its product, the hierarchical division sounded between “whiteness” and “blackness.” The listening ear drives the sonic color line; it is a figure for how dominant listening practices accrue—and change—over time, as well as a descriptor for how the dominant culture exerts pressure on individual listening practices to conform to the sonic color line’s norms. (7) " 4. For an example of the way Smith joins ideas of voice and print, see his letter to Douglass dated 8 October 1851 in Frederick Douglass’ Paper. In it, Smith calls for an “organ through which to strike, and around which to rally,” playing on the multiple meanings of organ as newspaper and sound instrument (491). " 5. The rise of the American novel during the mid-nineteenth century is so widely accepted as to barely warrant mention. We know, for instance, that the success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly (1852) garnered as much attention for its extraordinary sales as for its timely subject matter. Carla L. Peterson notes that an increase in fictional experimenting on the part of black writers mirrors the general upward swing in fiction sales during the 1850s (562). " 6. The spatial limitation on black speech is a legal category that the Dred Scott decision enacted. The decision, in concert with the Fugitive Slave Act’s de jure protection of slave-catching in northern and newly emerging territories, effectively denied or reversed black people’s access to basic rights. It prevented future legal petitions by the enslaved for freedom through the courts, safeguarding the expansion of slavery into western territories. If citizenship in a democracy is thought of as having a vocal presence, grounded in the legal definition of “standing,” the Supreme Court’s decision in the Dred Scott case effectively stripped black subjects of a viable political voice and legal standing. " 7. Eric Cheyfitz discusses “the mechanics of slavery in [Douglass’s] Narrative … as a differential in the power of language possessed by master and slave,” in which the slave’s curses remain confined to figuration while the master holds exclusive power over literalization. Imperial force expresses itself via the repression of the dialogic, and “confronted with this monopoly of the literal, the slaves are left in the possession of the figurative,” which, although it can further dispossess the slave, also offers an “ironic, or potential, power” that facilitates covert expressions able to skirt the overseer’s surveillance (39). " 8. Shane White and Graham White note the proliferation of “Africans and African Americans talking” in the years prior to the Civil War. In this context, White and White describe the use of devices designed to gag a slave perceived to be troublesome. For more on the historical context of the “plantation soundscape,” see White and White (xii–xiv). Elaborate networks of communication emerge among the enslaved in response to these silencing tactics and other surveillance modes. For instance, James Redpath uses the phrase “Underground Telegraph” to denote the “rapid modes of communication among the slave population of the South” as a partial reason for the successes of the Underground Railroad (284). " 9. Mike Chasar’s analysis of “the organic or bodily acoustics of African American laughter” in Harlem Renaissance poetry is one precedent for extending sound studies’ insights derived from what he identifies as a “focus on technological innovation (telephone, gramophone, radio, film, and other broadcast or recording devices)” to literary representations of the body’s acoustic capacities (58). " 10. Focusing on the capacities of sound and representation through voice in The Garies and Their Friends complements much of the current scholarship on the novel, which privileges domesticity in terms of familial affiliation and the importance of the black home as an antecedent for the emergence of a stable black subjectivity. The presence of elements such as domestic tropes, familial connections, and marriage contracts that dominated more conventional bourgeois novels of the nineteenth century led Bernard Bell to call The Garies and Their Friends the “most novelistic” of the four published black American antebellum novels—a distinction with which critics have more or less agreed (55). Securing the home in The Garies and Their Friends, as Robert Reid-Pharr has convincingly argued, correlates with the protection and reproduction of a particular form of black subjectivity grounded in a familial, future-oriented, racially decontaminated domestic space. Extending Reid-Pharr’s analysis, Anna Mae Duane notes how “the black women who populate the novel” remain “inextricably bound” to the (re)production of a secure black subjectivity (202). Maria G. Fabi suggests that the “familial standpoint of [Webb’s] novel,” in contrast to the whiteness one encounters in the public sphere, “provides a background against which his African American characters stand out in their full individuality” (29). Acknowledging this tendency, Elizabeth Stockton moves her analysis beyond “Webb’s interest in African American domesticity,” yet she nevertheless couches the bulk of her article concerning property on private discussions among characters held indoors, bringing her argument fully home when she positions the male revolutionary and the female domestic as “twin guards of the home space” (479). Consequently, this almost exclusive attention to subjectivity in the terms of the home has resulted in an implicit scholarly wariness of the novel’s public spaces. Yet The Garies and Their Friends constantly wrestles with the question of whether or not black people have a voice outside the home. From whispered gossip among white mothers seeking to remove the white-passing Garie children from school to vociferous objections from white male workers that fill a printer’s workshop in response to Charlie Ellis’s potential apprenticeship, white characters’ dominance over the public soundscape spans a broad spectrum. " 11. The tonal range achieved by such typographic markings in The Garies and Their Friends generates audibly varied tones similar to those heard during Webb’s first wife Mary Elizabeth Webb’s vocal performances. Recognized widely for her strengths in elocution and known by her stage name, “The Black Siddons,” Mary Webb toured broadly and was the better known of the pair after her debut in 1855. Although beyond the scope of this article, I would argue that the novel’s imaginative treatment of text parallels Mary Webb’s calculated disruptions of body; through voice, both Webbs strategically construct dynamic, fluid bodies, and subjectivities. For more on Mary Webb and the subject of vocal performance, see Tavia Nyong’o (“Hiawatha’s” and Amalgamation). Alex W. Black also discusses Mary Webb alongside vocalist Elizabeth Greenfield. " 12. As William L. Andrews writes, “Black autobiographers of the antebellum era were profoundly concerned with being successfully read. Like many writers, they introduced into their works implicit or explicit models by which their readers might be guided or measure themselves” (29). " 13. Fred Moten encourages a similar conclusion: “The written mark—the convergence of meaning and visuality—is the site of both excess and lack; the word supplement—only theorizable in the occlusion of its sound—endlessly overshoots its destination” (59). " 14. This is similar to Melissa Dennihy’s concept of “linguistic passing,” which refers to “situationally altering one’s way of speaking, in addition to or instead of altering appearance, to pass as a member of or gain insider status within a particular racial group” (157). Although we each acknowledge the capacity for voice to move in relation to the sonic color line, my attention to passing and voice differs from Dennihy’s insofar as the misrecognition represented in the novel sometimes exceeds a characters’ control and sometimes a character does nothing to alter their voice, calling attention to the more contingent factors at play. " 15. Werner Sollors’s edited collection of Webb’s writing has corrected this as one of the novel’s few “errata” (537). " 16. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out that there were two vigilance committees in Philadelphia. Following the dissolution of the first in 1852, a second formed that operated until the beginning of the Civil War. Given the setting and time of the scene, the character Ben would have been collecting for the first of these two groups, but the second would have been in operation in 1857 when the novel was published. " 17. Nyong’o uses the phrase “strategic infidelity” to describe how Mary Webb’s uses of personae in her vocal performances trouble oversimplified presumptions concerning racial authenticity (“Hiawatha’s” 90). " 18. The drunks stammer through a perversion of lines 43–46 of act I, scene 4 of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, spoken by Hamlet himself on seeing the ghost of his father for the first time: “Angels and ministers of grace, defend us! / Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned, / Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from / hell.” " 19. Eric Lott informs my interpretation here and the above discussion of “blackening up.” In particular, Lott rightly observes how a “white male solidarity” consolidates over “black(faced) men” and “how insistently blackface performance concerned itself with matters of the body[,] … which mediated, and regulated, the formation of white working-class masculinity” (86). " 20. For a fuller sense of the triangulation I am drawing here, see Elizabeth Stockton’s discussion of property (475–77). " 21. The exchange of letters appears fairly close to one another, a fact that further encourages reading them in relation. In fact, both Kinch’s and Esther’s letters alert Charlie to the riot’s tragic outcome, which motivates Charlie’s return home and job search. " 22. 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Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - “Voice Might Discover Him”: Representations and Failures of Voice in Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends
JF - MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States
DO - 10.1093/melus/mlaa017
DA - 2020-06-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/voice-might-discover-him-representations-and-failures-of-voice-in-0gmunbYyIN
SP - 46
VL - 45
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -