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This is the submitted version of a paper published in Orbis Litterarum.
Citation for the original published paper (version of record):
Cananau, I. (2019)
On the Path to Citizenship: A Conceptual Historicist Reading of Antebellum Women's
Protest Literature
Orbis Litterarum
https://doi.org/10.1111/oli.12244
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The article was accepted in the form in which it was submitted to the journal (i.e. prior to
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A Conceptual Historicist Reading of Antebellum Women’s Protest Literature”, which has
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NOTE: This is the accepted version of the following article: “On the Path to Citizenship. A
Conceptual Historicist Reading of Antebellum Women’s Protest Literature”, which has been
published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/oli.12244. This article may be used for non-
commercial purposes in accordance with the Wiley Self-Archiving Policy.
ON THE PATH TO CITIZENSHIP. A CONCEPTUAL HISTORICIST READING
OF ANTEBELLUM WOMEN’S PROTEST LITERATURE
Iulian Cananau, University of Gävle, Sweden
This essay
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introduces a new approach to the history of protest literature, and to literary
history writing in general. My case studies investigate antebellum American works by women
that express discontent with women’s condition. A text like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle
Tom’s Cabin, which is a classic of antebellum protest literature but does not protest women’s
condition, is therefore outside the scope of this analysis. The three texts are the “Declaration of
Sentiments” of the Seneca Falls Convention (1848), Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth
Century (1845), and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (published in 1861,
but written probably between 1852 and 1857). Although they raise consciousness about
women’s social and political oppression, these non-fictional texts belong to different literary
genres and combine aesthetics with ideology and social protest in different ways. They are,
however, fortuitously connected by a common thread, with the Seneca Falls Declaration
occupying the central position: its main author, Elisabeth Cady Stanton, had attended Fuller’s
“Conversationals” which inspired her to initiate her own conversation series in upstate New
York (Kolodny 1994, 377); sometime between 1849 and 1852, Amy Post, an anti-slavery
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I am grateful to Marshall Brown for his generous advice on an earlier version of this essay.
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feminist who had attended the Seneca Falls Convention and signed the Declaration of
Sentiments, urged her friend Harriet Jacobs to contribute to the abolitionist cause by writing the
story of her life in slavery and her arduous but ultimately victorious struggle against her
oppressors (Yellin 2002, xix). Drawing on Reinhart Koselleck’s theory and practice of
conceptual history, this essay will analyze the semantic field of citizenship in these works with
an aim to explore the textual politics of their protest within the conceptual and ideological
context of antebellum America.
To give an account of literary texts and their contexts attuned both to the alterity of the
past and to the historian’s situation, the literary historian must acknowledge the incongruity
between history and the language employed to represent historical events and structures, then
and subsequently. Furthermore, to avoid the disappearance of the text from her account, the
literary historian needs to attend to the language of the literary sources (or some linguistic
aspect thereof) and account for their aesthetic dimension. Begriffsgeschichte, the method of
conceptual history developed by Koselleck for German and European historiography, promises
to help achieve this aim through its reliance on lexical and semantic analysis. By eliminating
confusion between historically different understandings of the same concept, it also counteracts
the tendency to read the present into a past text. It is then up to the literary historian to decide
which concepts can become stable topical criteria alongside or above other criteria such as
genre, period, thematic content, authorial intent, or cultural politics.
While all concepts are words, according to Koselleck, “a word becomes a concept only
when the entirety of meaning and experience within a sociopolitical context within which and
for which a word is used can be condensed into one word” (2004, 85). Concepts are ambiguous
and have multiple meanings that are not as readily disambiguated as polysemous words can be.
The meaning of citizenship has long been contested in law courts, political assemblies, civil
society, and political philosophy, and the struggle to define it continues in debates on
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nationality, immigration, and the return of ISIS terrorists and their families to their countries of
origin. Citizenship is a fundamental historical concept, that is, one of those concepts derived
from Greek or Latin that are still unavoidable and necessary to make sense of the social and
political reality at a certain time. In its oldest sense, it designates the status of a citizen, typically
conferring rights and privileges such as the right to vote and be elected, enabling individuals to
participate in the political life of their self-governing community. In a more modern sense, it
denotes membership in a sovereign nation state and largely overlaps with “nationality”. And
thirdly, citizenship can denote a standard of civic conduct, a sense identified by OED as
“engagement in the duties and responsibilities of a member of society” (“citizenship, n.”); true
or good citizenship is thus virtually synonymous with active or participatory citizenship. For
the conceptual historian this last meaning is especially interesting because it signals a semantic
shift toward normativity and universality that most likely started with the establishment of a
republican model of citizenship in parts of Europe and North America at the end of the
eighteenth century, an assumption that the chronology of OED’s illustrating quotations seems
to confirm.
Concepts need to be analyzed both synchronically, in terms of the semantic fields and
their interactions with related concepts at a given moment, and diachronically, as new meanings
emerge in relation to persisting, overlapping, or extinct usages. Complementary to the three
major senses above, the semantic field of citizenship in antebellum America included elements
of meaning directly assigned by various contemporary discourses (legal, political, economic,
technological, historical, artistic, and so on), and others derived from adjacent concepts and
relevant ideologies. For example, the heavily racialized conception of US citizenship articulated
in the Naturalization Acts of 1790 and 1795, which granted citizenship through naturalization
only to “free white persons”, survived well into the nineteenth century, as demonstrated by the
Supreme Court rulings in Cherokee Nations v. Georgia (1831) and especially Dred Scott v.
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Sandford (1857). At the same time, the influence of the concept of class on the semantic field
of citizenship declined because of the systematic removal of property qualifications for voting
from state laws and constitutions throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. The
republican view of voting as a privilege, rather than a right, similarly faded, allowing voting
rights to assume a central role in the meaning of citizenship. However, other aspects of the
republican ethos, such as virtue and the obligation to defend the state and pay taxes in return
for protection and full enjoyment of citizenship rights and privileges, continued to inform the
antebellum concept (Isenberg 1998, 7; Carroll 2015, 427).
The most divisive, yet semantically very productive, characteristic of antebellum
citizenship was its restrictiveness. In conceptual-historicist terms, citizenship formed
asymmetrical pairs with counter-concepts that collectively designated non-citizen groups, such
as women (womanhood), African Americans (blackness), and Native Americans (Indianness).
To identify and analyze the semantic constituents of citizenship that the three texts of
antebellum women’s protest literature recognized, challenged, or proposed, I pay special
attention to the citizenship-womanhood conceptual pair. Because the documents I have chosen
belong to the species of protest literature, the aesthetic dimension of the text, which is rarely a
problem for conceptual historians, is attended to in addition to semantics and social history. In
his foreword to American Protest Literature, alongside empathy and shock value, John Stauffer
identifies “symbolic action” as one of the three rhetorical strategies that protest literature writers
employ to persuade and mobilize readers. The concept, borrowed from Kenneth Burke’s
aesthetic theory, stands for “indeterminacy of meaning, rich ambiguity and open-endedness in
the text, which goes beyond the author’s intent” (Stauffer 2006, xiii). Although these New
Critical categories are certainly not the only aesthetic criteria to measure and demonstrate the
