Between nation and empire: Representations of the Haitian Revolution in antebellum literary culture
Description
This dissertation considers the role that Haiti and the Haitian Revolution played in the construction of the expanding U.S. in the early years of Manifest Destiny. It does so by examining various representations of Haiti published predominantly between 1820 and 1860, right at the beginning of the development of a specific Manifest Destiny ideology, its early applications and its subsequent critiques. During this era, U.S. 'expansion' was not limited to the Western frontier alone, but instead moved in all directions, both internally across the continent and externally across the seas. And as the U.S. continued to develop into the early to mid-nineteenth century, Haiti was increasingly used by various politicians, writers and social critics to talk about specific crises and conflicts within the U.S. itself. I consider the narratives of Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, Leonora Sansay, Harriet Martineau and Herman Melville in light of contested issues of American exceptionalism, national expansion, New World imperialism, and slavery, and my analysis reveals that by writing Haiti's own history, these writers are additionally constructing and coming to terms with the bounded nation as it grows into an expanding empire If each of the writers considered are trying to manage broader issues of national expansion, they are also variously dealing with the U.S.'s own crisis over slavery and subsequent ways American 'identity' changes as a result of internal debate and external growth. The narratives studied in this dissertation use Haiti to point to the problems that plagued older forms of empire expansion while at the same time imagining how the U.S. can grow differently, and thus more successfully. I conclude that these narratives unconsciously expose the artifice inherent in the very notions of American exceptionalism that they are struggling to construct. This study, then, ultimately explores the various origins and spread of U.S. liberalism and finds that such an ideology is not as monolithic and unitary as many may believe. In fact, U.S. liberalism is necessarily heterogeneous, as ambivalence, uncertainty, anxiety and hysteria were built into its very fabric