Casting the eternal original : classicism, class, and the antebellum dread of modernity

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Dept. of English, 2012.Through a consideration of the architecture, statuary, and fiction of the antebellum period, this project examines the ways in which classicism was used by both the lingering aristocracy and the ascending middle class to assert cultural dominance during the decline of the former and the ascension of the latter. I argue that the remnants of the aristocracy attempted either to trump middle-class engagement of the classical ideal through more fashionable aesthetic modes, like the Gothic, or to out-classicize the bourgeoisie in order to control the current of national taste and thus to justify their class superiority. I suggest that the middle class, in turn, seized the classical aesthetic for its well-established signification of refinement and privilege to rebut the aristocracy's critique and legitimate its own coalescing hegemony. At stake for both groups was proof of a necessary virtue demanded by an enduring civic humanism, which undergirded the politics of the middle class and aristocracy alike and which understood the fate of the republic as thoroughly dependent on the moral temper of its ruling class. Classicism, I suggest, demonstrated this virtue in the form of a putative aesthetic purity that was thought to mirror the characterological taintlessness of classicism's patrons. Both groups, in different ways and at different times, reached for what classicist Cornelius Conrad Felton called the "eternal original" of the antique ideal as an antidote to an enduring "dread" of the modern world, a feeling born, J.G.A. Pocock has observed, with the founding of the U.S. as an independent nation and sustained, I maintain, at least to the onset of the Civil War. Classicism uniquely enabled both the lingering aristocracy and the ascending middle class to represent their claims to an eternal social order even as it gestured toward the very conclusion they feared: the fall of the republic, a legacy of antiquity alternately invoked and suppressed during this unstable transition in the structure of class identity