Walking, Working, Reading: the Workingman as Body and Text

David M. Stewart

This essay explains the bodily style of antebellum workingmen, their lounging, swaggering, and general public comportment that would become a primary marker of class identity. I do this not by way of broad generalizations we associate with subcultures and performative transgression. Nor do I have access to empirical resources that account for the curve of Mose’s back in James Brown’s 1848 lithograph, or how the quintessential New York B’hoy must have looked when he turned and walked away, shoulders square, hips swinging. I account for working male bodies through their reading, specifically the emotionally coercive disciplinary reading that increasingly dominated the period’s pervasive culture of reform. This reading openly targeted bodies, and succeeded to a large degree in having its affects linger in the somatic structures that determined how they behaved. Doing so played a significant role in transforming a rural, artisanal workforce into one that met the needs of an evolving urban industrial market economy. Insofar as it was highly specific in the feelings it sought to leverage, the rhetoric that achieved this provides a basis for understanding the conduct of those who read it. The particular affect I treat is shame, which has attracted attention from both theorists and cultural historians. Using A. L. Stimson’s popular temperance novel, Easy Nat; Or, Boston Bars and Boston Boys: A Tale of Home Trials, together with comments gleaned from manuscript archives on the book and on affective life more generally, I argue that the bodily style of antebellum workingmen can best be accounted for in terms of what Sedgwick calls “shame performativity,” exuberance generated in the matrix of shame experienced as a specifically material crisis of a reformed self.