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“Dens of Iniquity and Holes of Wickedness”: George Lippard and the Queer City

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 July 2009

MARY UNGER
MARY UNGER
Affiliation:
Department of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article examines George Lippard's portrayal of “queer space” in his 1845 novel The Quaker City. Despite William Penn's meticulous urban grid rooted in the democratic ideals of national space, Lippard presents Philadelphia's landscape as unruly, illogical, and transgressive. The novel's manor of vice, Monk Hall, is as twisted as the city streets, facilitating behaviors and experiences unregulated by hegemonic forces. I argue that by perverting the places of his novel, Lippard creates ruptures in the ideological underpinnings of a national geography. In so doing, he attempts to enact a radical social critique to reconstitute the Philadelphia of Penn's egalitarian plan. Yet while Lippard's exposé reveals Philadelphia's illicit elite, his sensational narrative undercuts any social transformation he may have imagined.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 43 , Issue 2 , August 2009 , pp. 319 - 339
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

1 George Lippard, The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall, ed. David S. Reynolds (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995; first published 1845), 5. Subsequent references to The Quaker City are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the essay by page number and the abbreviation QC.

2 By using the term “queer,” I intend not only its connotation of “peculiar” or “strange,” but also its qualities of marginalization, non-normativity, and counterhegemony that suggest a degree of antagonism with dominant power structures invested in heteronormativity.

3 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 165. On Jefferson's distrust of urban space and manufacturing, see Query XIX.

4 Compounding its elusiveness, Lippard never identifies Monk Hall's precise location within the Philadelphia grid. The narrator notes that it is vaguely “located on the out-skirts of the southern part of the city” (QC 46), and makes several references to Chesnut Street and Walnut Street, as well as to the State House clock whose chimes act as a metronome, marking the rhythm of the plot along with the hours. According to these descriptions, we could infer that the mansion would be somewhere (theoretically) just west of References 10 (Girard's Bank), 11 (Old Jail Walnut St.), 12 (Arch Street Jail), 13 (House of Refuge), and 14 (State Hall and Independence Square) on Tanner's map (see Figure 3). Interestingly, such references characterize this area of Philadelphia as a municipal intersection of commerce, vice, charity, and governmental authority – a precarious locale for the murderous manor.

5 Jefferson, 165.

6 William Penn, quoted in Richard M. Sommer, “Philadelphia – The Urban Design of Philadelphia: Taking the Towne for the City,” in Edward Robbins and Rodolphe El-Khoury, eds., Shaping the City: Studies in History, Theory and Urban Design (New York: Routledge, 2004), 135–76, 138.

7 Ibid., 144.

8 An “emptiness,” of course, only possible by the removal and extermination of American Indians – an oversight Penn, Jefferson, and even Lippard easily make.

9 Fisher, Philip, “Democratic Social Space: Whitman, Melville, and the Promise of American Transparency,” Representations, 24 (Fall 1988), 60–101, 64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Ibid.

11 Henry S. Tanner, The American Traveller; or Guide through the United States, 4th edn (Philadelphia: Henry S. Tanner, 1839), iii.

12 Ibid., iv.

13 Such two-dimensional representations of space are particularly misleading for places such as Monk Hall that depend upon movement between multiple floors, trapdoors, and other secluded subterranean spaces.

14 On the relationship between newspapers and public associations, see Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve, revised edn, ed. Francis Bowen and Phillips Bradley, abridged and with an introduction by Thomas Bender (New York: Modern Library, 1981), especially chapter 6, “Of the Relations between Public Associations and the Newspapers.” See also Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn (New York: Verso, 1991).

15 Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 1.

16 In the case of Philadelphia, this spatial tension may have been exacerbated by the geography of the city itself. Despite its attempt at uniformity, Sommer has noted that Philadelphia in particular was built with a predisposition to spatial irregularity. See Sommer, “Philadelphia,” 141–42.

17 In Jefferson's vision, American soil is primed for the reproductive labor of preserving heteronormativity. As Philip Fisher notes, Jefferson inextricably links national space to families, or, more specifically, to “independent family farms,” that provide “for both self-sufficiency and for reproduction” of themselves and of the nation. See Fisher, 65.

18 William Penn, quoted in Edwin B. Bronner, William Penn's “Holy Experiment”: The Founding of Pennsylvania, 1681–1701 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1962), 69, Penn's italics.

19 Berlant, Lauren and Warner, Michael, “Sex in Public,” Critical Inquiry, 24 (Winter 1998), 547–66, 558.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 1.

21 Michel Foucault, “Space, Knowledge, and Power,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rainbow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 239–56, 252.

22 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1991), 26.

23 Ibid.

24 Massey, 4.

25 Ibid. See David Harvey on the development of space and the dissemination of power, specifically pertaining to the role of capitalism in the unfolding of uneven space. In his analysis, Harvey concludes, “Spatial and temporal practices are never neutral in social affairs. They always express some kind of class or other social content, and are more often than not the focus of intense social struggle.” See David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989), 239. See also idem, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (New York: Routledge, 2001); and Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London and New York: Verso, 1989). “The spatial” has often also been deployed as a tool for subversion both inside and outside the academy by a multitude of political and social causes. Feminism in particular has embraced “space” as a locus of subversion since the early 1980s when Adrienne Rich first spoke of a “politics of location.” See Adrienne Rich, “Notes toward a Politics of Location,” in Women, Feminist Identity and Society in the 1980s: Selected Papers, ed. Myriam Díaz-Diocaretz and Iris Zavala (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1985). For responses to Rich see Caren Kaplan, “The Politics of Location as Transnational Feminist Critical Practice,” in Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, ed. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 137–52; Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, “Feminist Encounters: Locating the Politics of Experience,” Copyright 1 (Fall 1987), 39–44Google Scholar; and Wallace, Michelle, “The Politics of Location: Cinema/Theory/Literature/Ethnicity/Sexuality/Me,” Framework 36 (1989), 42–55.Google Scholar

26 Steve Pile, “Introduction: Opposition, Political Identities and Spaces of Resistance,” in Steve Pile and Michael Keith, eds., Geographies of Resistance (London: Routledge, 1997), 1–32, 23.

27 Foucault, Michel, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics, 16 (Spring 1986), 22–27, 24CrossRefGoogle Scholar. We might also draw comparisons between Monk Hall and Nancy Fraser's “subaltern counterpublics,” a term she uses to describe spatio-ideological spheres that remain antagonistic, yet “porous” to one another. See Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 109–39. See also Michael Warner's discussion of counterpublics in Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002). Both Fraser and Warner echo Pile's assertion that authoritative and resistive geographies can never be wholly disentangled from one another.

28 “According to some historians,” David Reynolds reports, “during this period the share of Philadelphia's wealth controlled by the richest 10% of the city's population nearly doubled, increasing from 50% to 90%. Even more remarkably, the share controlled by the wealthiest 1% ballooned from less than a quarter to a half, while that owned by the poorest 75% sank from 30% to less than 3%.” See David S. Reynolds, “Introduction: George Lippard in His Times,” in George Lippard, George Lippard, Prophet of Protest: Writings of an American Radical, 1822–1854, ed. David S. Reynolds (New York: Peter Lang, 1986) 1–42, 12.

29 Anthony, David, “Banking on Emotion: Financial Panic and the Logic of Male Submission in the Jacksonian Gothic,” American Literature, 76, 4 (Dec. 2004), 719–47, 730CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for an in-depth discussion on economic turmoil and gender panic in Quaker City, see especially 730–42.

30 Ibid., 720.

31 Indeed, “Lippard's notion of a huge Monk Hall where the wealthy gathered to revel was by no means a complete fabrication.” See Reynolds, 13. Rather than a wild fantasy, Lippard's mysterious den of vice – as well as its exploitative gentry – would have been a dangerous reality for his contemporary readers.

32 Analogies to Monk Hall continue later in the narrative. Upon entering the estate, Dora exclaims, “Certainly the place looks like the den of some old monk” (QC 491).

33 Here again, Monk Hall harbors a disconnect between material place and ideological space: the Rose Chamber, where Lorrimer and Mary are to be married is described as “heavy and gloomy, as though the place was a vault of death, instead of a cheerful Wedding Room” (QC 92).

34 See Lippard's prefatory note to The Quaker City entitled, “The Origin and Object of this Book” (QC 3–4), in which he recalls a wild story concerning a dying friend who entrusts him with secret documents so that he may “lay bare vice in high places” (QC 4).

35 Apparently not everyone did. As Reynolds recounts, “Prudish reviewers, shocked by Lippard's descriptions of women being seduced by wealthy Philadelphians, branded the novel as ‘the most immoral work of the age.’ His satire on the social elite was considered so offensive that Lippard felt he had to arm himself against assassins. Meanwhile, the laboring poor took Lippard's side, venerating him as the people's champion come to lash modern moneychangers out of the temple of urban America.” See Reynolds, 5. Lippard even hyperbolically states, “The results of my labors was [sic] this book, which has been more attacked, and more read, than any work of American fiction ever published” (QC 2).

36 Anthony, 739.

37 See Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); and David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Knopf, 1988).

38 On Lippard's middle-class resentment see Streeby, Shelley, “Haunted Houses: George Lippard, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Middle-Class America,” Criticism, 38, 3 (Summer 1996), 443–72.Google Scholar

39 For Lippard's more successful attempts at social reform see the writer's body of political writings, especially “The Gospel of the New World,” in George Lippard: Prophet of Protest, 107–11.