Rituals of Diagnosis argues that nineteenth-century America’s literary representations of madness and its diagnosis respond to interdisciplinary efforts at cultivating a national psychology. Uniting theological and philosophical traditions with medical speculation, mental health reformers from Benjamin Rush to Dorothea Dix linked the expansion of democracy with new vulnerabilities for madness. Theories about insanity thus hypothesized relationships between freedom and responsibility. I examine how America’s first psychological fictions contributed to this rich field of discussion. Taking up novels by Charles Brockden Brown, Robert Montgomery Bird, and Oliver Wendell Holmes that pivot around the investigation of madness, I examine how literary works from the Revolutionary Era to the Civil War dramatize interpretive processes that classify transgressive behavior. I argue that the grotesque subjects at the center of these investigations—Anglo-Americans who are likened to demons, animals, and “savage” racial others—indicate the provisionality of the period’s theories of mental illness and register anxieties about affiliation and responsibility that accompanied their development. This inquiry contributes to contemporary conversations about authority, desire, and the role of violence in the American imaginary, and argues that scientific speculation and literary experimentation collaborated in constructing this imaginary. While many have acknowledged that discourses of mental health participated in codifying social and political norms, I draw explicit attention to literary form as a site for examining the motivations that fuel these discourses by showing how their narrative trajectories put medical knowledge into conversation with sentimental ideologies. Examining how these novels conjoin problems of interpretive confusion with affective confusion, I explore how these mysteries destabilize the disembodied rationality central to the perch of objectivity that sustained white supremacist interrogations of racial and gendered others. The struggle to situate the locus of social unrest into psychological and ethnic others betrays an archive of fears and fantasies contained by diagnostic procedures. / text

In my dissertation, I argue that both white and black authors of the late-1850s and early-1860s used scenes of race-centered hospitality in their narratives to combat the pervasive stereotypes of black inferiority that flourished under the influence of chattel slavery. The wide-spread scenes of hospitality in antebellum literature—including shared meals, entertaining overnight guests, and business meetings in personal homes—are too inextricably bound to contemporary discussions of blackness and whiteness to be ignored. In arguing for the humanizing effects of playing host or guest as a black person, my project joins the work of literary scholars from William L. Andrews to Keith Michael Green who argue for broader and more complex approaches to writers’ strategies for recognizing the full personhood of African Americans in the mid-nineteenth century. In the last fifteen to twenty years, hospitality theory has reshaped social science research, particularly around issues of race, immigration, and citizenship. In literary studies, scholars are only now beginning to mine the ways that theorists from diverse backgrounds—including continental philosophers such as Derrida and Levinas, womanist philosopher and theologian N. Lynne Westerfield, and post-colonial writers and scholars such as Tahar Ben Jelloun—can expand the reading of nineteenth century literature by examining the discourse and practice of hospitality. When host and guest meet at the threshold they must acknowledge the full personhood of the other; the relationship of hospitality is dependent on beginning in a state of equilibrium grounded in mutual respect. In this project I argue that because of the acknowledgement of mutual humanness required in acts of hospitality, hospitality functions as a humanizing narrative across the spectrum of antebellum black experience: slave and free, male and female, uneducated and highly educated. In chapter one, “Unmasking Southern Hospitality: Discursive Passing in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred,” I examine Stowe’s use of a black fugitive slave host who behaves like a southern gentleman to undermine the ethos of southern honor culture and to disrupt the ideology that supports chattel slavery. In chapter two, “Transformative Hospitality and Interracial Education in Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends,” I examine how the race-centered scenes of hospitality in Frank J. Webb’s 1857 novel The Garies and Their Friends creates educational opportunities where northern racist ideology can be uncovered and rejected by white men and women living close to, but still outside, the free black community of Philadelphia. In the final chapter, “Slavery’s Subversion of Hospitality in Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” I examine how Linda Brent’s engagement in acts of hospitality (both as guest and host) bring to light the warping influence of chattel slavery on hospitality in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. In conclusion, my project reframes the practices of antebellum hospitality as yet another form of nonviolent everyday resistance to racist ideology rampant in both the North and the South. This project furthers the ways that American literature scholars understand active resistance to racial oppression in the nineteenth century, putting hospitality on an equal footing with other subversive practices, such as learning to read or racial passing.