Eaten alive: slavery and celebrity in Antebellum America.

25 The notion that Foucauldian paradigms and institutional structures of modern, psychological control and punishment were prominent in antebellum culture seems to me true enough, but, at the same time, it also seems to me historically inarguable that slavery and thoughts about slavery pervaded and preoccupied late-antebellum culture and society as did no other subject. Foucault, we might remember, wrote nothing having directly to do with the peculiar cultural history, the continued prominence of corporal rituals of punishment, provided by America's peculiar institution. This might, I think, begin to suggest that we exercise some caution in assuming too broad an application of Foucauldian theories of European development to antebellum America. Again, it seems to me that Dimmesdale's psychology--like the psychology that continues to imagine celebrity in terms of corporal How slow and sure they set their types! How small editions ran! Then fifty thousand never sold-- Before the sale began. For how could they, poor plodding souls, Be either swift or wise, Who never learned the mighty art Of how to advertise.

James T. Fields, the Boston-based publisher, recited this celebration of modern marketing and printing techniques to about six hundred authors and other celebrities--politicians, editors, publishers, ministers, and more--on September 27, 1855 at "The Complimentary Fruit and Flower Festival, Given to Authors, by the New York Publishers' Association." The publishers sponsored and hosted the extravaganza at the Crystal Palace in an attempt to ease, or at least disguise, tensions between publishers, booksellers, and writers. Suspended above the primary banquet table, enclosed in gaslights, read the publishers' tribute to authorship: "HONOR TO GENIUS." In the speeches following dinner, notes of shared economic interest were sounded, and the following day, reporting on the Fruit Festival in a story that made the front page, the New York Times declared that if the antagonism between publishers and writers "ever had any existence, |it~ has now completely passed away."(1)

The Fruit Festival did not, of course, end the economic tensions between authors and publishers. In fact, the staging of it may have helped to reinforce and construct a new kind of conspicuously public space for the celebrity, one which caused some discomfort for many antebellum authors. The event, in other words, was not only, perhaps not even primarily, an attempt to establish unity within the industry. The Festival, in all its gaudy self-consciousness, was a publicity stunt, the presentation by the publishers of authors and other notables before their public. The publishers distributed color-coded tickets weeks before the sold-out event (then advertised the unavailability of and demand for these tickets) with instructions as to which entrances were to be used by the press, spectators, and guests. Three-hundred celebrity-seeking fans, nine-tenths of them women, occupied the gallery overlooking the pavilion where dinner was served to the celebrities below. The art of advertisement was not entirely new in 1855, but, as Fields's poem suggests, it had achieved a sophistication and vastly expanded presence only recently, and the particular advertising strategy acted out in the Fruit Festival, the public appearance by the author as a celebrity in order further to promote that celebrity, may have been systematically used for the first time in America as a mass-marketing tool less than twenty years before, by Charles Dickens.(2)

The Fruit Festival was only one among many events and orchestrations of public appearance that began to construct a newly prominent and celebrated place for those working in the (broadly defined) cultural sphere. It was in the 1840s and 50s that P. T. Barnum, perhaps the first to understand fully the potentialities of an emergent middle-class cultural market, emerged to promote himself and such divergent personages as the tiny Tom Thumb and the sweet-singing Jenny Lind. Religious figures such as Henry Ward Beecher (who attended the Fruit Festival) more and more abandoned the harshness of Calvinist doctrine in their attempts to promote themselves as prominent spokesmen to and for a middle-class public. Andrew Jackson's presidential campaign marked a quantum leap in campaign spending and was the first to rely on a nationwide network of party newspapers and publications to present its candidate as a representative man of the masses. Widely-circulated campaign biographies (such as the one Hawthorne wrote for Franklin Pierce) became standard political practice during the antebellum period.(3)

The literary market and the authorial celebrity emerged within this broader cultural field of the publicized personality. Following the lead of William Charvat, a great deal of recent scholarship has detailed the social and technological developments that made the expansion of the literary market possible.(4) The emergence of a literate middle class, the passage of copyright laws, and improved technologies of reproduction and distribution all combined to bring authors into an unprecedented relation with their audience. Where genteel modes of avocational authorship for a familiar social group had dominated literary work in the eighteenth century, by the second quarter of the nineteenth a professional mode of commercial literary work for an expanded and anonymous audience had clearly emerged. For the first time, successful authors became public figures in a mass market with all of the privileges and demands that accompany such status. They might be idolized and supported as figures of cultural eminence and employment, even as embodiments of crucial political or artistic principles, but, at the same time, the personal and professional activities of antebellum writers were increasingly dictated and disciplined by an anonymous public's demands and intrusions.

I want to suggest in what follows that authorial anxieties about the demands placed by the public on those occupying the increasingly conspicuous cultural stage came to be imagined in the unexpected terms of slave labor and slave economics. The celebrity and slave were united through their shared cultural configuration as corporally consumable workers, laborers whose bodies rather than labor or production were available for consumption. But, as should become increasingly clear, this analogy depended upon selective inclusions and exclusions, complex and ideologically charged constructions of property and labor relations. For celebrity work in the cultural sphere was not, after all, slave labor, and to imagine it as such required not only a particular construction of the celebrity's status but of the slave's as well. Celebrities who ventured into the cultural marketplace generally did so willingly, suffered no literal threats to their bodies, and profited economically by selling books, performances, and so forth. Slaves, on the other hand, went to market whether they willed it or not, were themselves objects of exchange, and had, of course, no chance to profit from this kind of marketability.

This fundamental difference between the celebrity as a famous producer of cultural commodities and the slave's status as intrinsically exchangeable is precisely what figurations of the celebrity as slave imaginatively obscured. They did so by imagining the slave (and celebrity) as particular types of property whose greatest value to a master (or audience) lay not in any conventional or economically rational relation of exchange, but in the act of corporal consumption. The slave in these imaginings was not defined by his marketability but by the irrational non-economy of the South, by the master's pleasure, desire, and need to dismember, rape, or otherwise attack and consume the body of the slave at any cost. The celebrity was defined not by the audience's desire for his cultural productions or by the possibility of economically profitable exchange between the celebrity and audience, but, rather, by the audience's irrational drive to see, touch, hold, possess, and consume the celebrity body itself.