| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Inexpressible Privacy: The Interior Life of Antebellum American Literature. By Milette Shamir. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. 282 pp. $55.00, ISBN 0-8122-3906-7.)

Although Inexpressible Privacy is conceived foremost as literary criticism focusing on the writers of the American Renaissance, it is equally valid to call it a history of ideas, specifically the idea of privacy as it was developed by the emerging middle class in America's early industrial era. It has long been argued that the modern concept of personal privacy developed as economic production moved out of the home and into separate work places, creating a contrast between the public self of the marketplace and the private self of the domestic sphere. Milette Shamir complicates that formulation by successfully arguing that there were two conflicting, and highly gendered, definitions of the private self of home and hearth: the "feminine" or "sentimental" ideal of sociable intimacy associated with "the cult of domesticity"—epitomized by the conviviality of the parlor—and the "masculine" or "romantic" ideal of autonomous self- ownership associated with "the rise of liberal individualism"—epitomized in the silent seclusion of the study. Because recent historians have tended to equate the private sphere with womanhood, they have overlooked the personal and cultural tensions generated by these intertwined yet irreconcilable values, as well as the strategic ways in which those values were deployed in the pursuit of power, status, and comfort.

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