Jeff Miller

Cultivating Citizens

"Cultivating Citizens: American Literature and Civic Education in the Gilded Age" is a book-length manuscript that explores the relationship between education, literature, and citizenship in the late nineteenth-century United States. This was an era marked by a cultural obsession with defining what it meant to be "American," an era when many groups clamored for citizenship rights. Former slaves became new citizens, immigrants looked to move to the land of opportunity, laborers desired a stronger role in shaping capitalism, and women began to agitate for a larger measure of control within the political process. Additionally, American society was moving rapidly from a rural, agrarian economy to an urban, industrial marketplace, creating new unrest between the individual and society. Historian Michael Ignatieff claims that these changes wrought a modern society that never resolved the conflict he describes as a "tension between the republican discourse on citizenship and liberal political theory of market man."¹ It is precisely this kind of tension—between the collective drive of inclusion as citizens and the singular drive of freedom as individuals—that propels the fiction of the writers I study in this project: William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Edward Bellamy, Pauline Hopkins, and Charles Chesnutt.

In Chapter One, I consider three novels written by Howells between 1886 and 1894 through the lens of John Stuart Mill’s conception of liberalism, and I claim that Howells defines his version of liberal citizenship in three ways: through liberty of thought and speech, through democratic reform, and through the conservative liberal “containment” of characters and ideas not conducive to liberal citizenship. All three were seen explicitly as parts of an educational process—as mechanisms of Americanization, and thus as avenues towards an ideal American citizenship.

In Chapter Two, I argue that Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is influenced by Immanuel Kant’s theory of the kingdom of ends and its application to educating citizens. The protagonist Hank Morgan attempts to institute nineteenth-century American progress into sixth-century England, focusing on the Kantian idea of the public will—in effect, justifying monarchy through the civic education of the populace. Morgan’s ideas and actions are consistent with the Kantian moral politician in three ways: he sees the public will as the source of rightful political power, he judges political figures by their understanding of the public will, and he refuses to advocate open rebellion.

In Chapter Three, I analyze how the utopian novelist Edward Bellamy acts as a missionary of inclusive citizenship, adapting the ideals of socialist citizenship to the dramatic conventions of utopian writing in order to educate the leisure class about radical ideas, which they may have found unpalatable in other forms. I argue that his utopian novel, Looking Backward, co-opts three elements of late-nineteenth century culture that the professional and leisure classes found irresistible: first, the novel prescribes elite, domestic reform (i.e., paternal citizenship, rather than reform from below or, worse yet, foreign reform); second, it taps into the idea of technocratic progressive citizenship through natural, historical evolution, rather than through active and dangerous agitation; and third, even as it proposes a holistic and organic model of citizenship, it respects and upholds traditional patriarchal familial roles.

In Chapter Four, I examine the trope of Africa as home and its implications for black political identity. I claim that Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood posits Africa as the cradle of Western civilization and thus functions as an element of her uplift program, which focuses on building an ethos of civic virtue for African Americans. Three elements of this uplift program are evident in the novel: first, to claim that Western civilization has its origins in Africa; second, to present, then reverse, the standard Western conception of Africa as the “dark continent”; and third, to put the rebirth of ancient Ethiopia, and thus the metaphoric rebirth of African American civic virtue, into an explicitly Christian theological framework. These elements work together to contextualize the Aristotelian notion that an educated populace makes good government within the complicated milieu of post-Reconstruction American politics.