| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Milette Shamir. Inexpressible Privacy: The Interior Life of Antebellum American Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2006. Pp. 282. $55.00.
Milette Shamir's book charts the transformations in the meaning attributed to privacy between 1830 and 1870, decades that witnessed the emerging structures of industrial capitalism in the United States and the formation of the middling classes. Although Shamir's primary readers will be literary critics and theorists, historians, especially those who have made the "cultural turn," will find much that has salience for current debates on the significance of liberal individualism, the gendering of social relations, and the evolving meanings of public and private. They will also participate in ongoing conversations among literary critics about the many ways in which antebellum writers grappled with the issue of privacy. The long-canonized Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne receive close consideration, as do Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass, both of whom have been welcomed into the canon in the last two decades. Defining literature broadly, Shamir also maps configurations of privacy in a series of contextual discourses, including architectural manuals, political speeches, conduct books, and legal opinions.	1
In perhaps the most notable contribution, Shamir dismantles the link that has been forged by cultural historians and literary critics between domesticity and privacy. As she argues persuasively, women, who were identified with domesticity's intimacy, yearned as much as men for privacy. Equally important, Shamir shows that the practice of privacy was integral to the liberal ideal of selfhood. Earlier connotations derived from republican ideology had made privacy an obstacle to a fully realized humanity. Privacy, according to republican theorists, denied both individual solidarity and social engagement on behalf of the newly constituted nation. The challenge mounted by the liberal ideal of private autonomy had enormous implications. Instead of being an obstacle, privacy was defined as crucial to both the individual and society. Privileged as a natural right and a moral good, privacy came to be seen as a constitutive element of selfhood.	. . .

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