/The Spectacle of Reform: Theater and Prison in Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance
/The Spectacle of Reform: Theater and Prison in Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance
Chattel slavery provided a model of lawful violence, against which other forms of exceptional penalty — capital punishment, solitary confinement — operated in the United States in the early decades of the nineteenth century. As the penal system learned from slavery, so reform movements in general began to partake of the rhetoric and practices of penitentiary reform, particularly insofar as sentiment and sympathy produced a kind of lingua franca for reform, shaping debates about technologies of punishment along with those on abolition, temperance, public education, and any number of reformist efforts. The condition staged in The Blithedale Romance is a crisis of empowerment in a society organized as both democratic and sovereign. The mimetic relations instituted at Blithedale involve them in enactments of sovereignty that produce what Tocqueville calls “a stranger among us.”
Keywords: chattel slavery, punishment, violence, penitentiary reform, penal system, Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance, sovereignty
Fordham Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
