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Abstract
Some stories are written by the dead. The inheritance plot names the narrative form by which literature provides a voice for a past that entails a future. From Thomas Jefferson onward, the United States espoused ideals of democratic egalitarianism and individual self-determinism, premised on a departure from the past: this would be the land of the living, not the dead. But narratives of inheritance provided a counterweight to these leveling forces. Writers and thinkers repeatedly turned to inheritance plots—narratives that turn on the receipt or loss of belongings, beliefs, or ideas from the past—to understand the persistent power of a past that so much of the nation thought they had left behind. Through inheritance’s narrative dimension, these writers, thinkers, and politicians treated past generations, and their property, as active characters within the ongoing story of the nation’s future.
“Inheriting the Future” shows the political and cultural uses of inheritance plots across the nineteenth century. Whether as a legal mechanism, a biological process of passing traits across generations, or a common plot device in fiction, inheritance shaped cultural understandings of gender, sexuality, race, and class in this period. Working across genres of historical fiction, romance, sentimental writing, slave narratives, and realist fiction, authors thought through logics of inheritance to demonstrate and debate the possible futures that can result from a shared past, as the inheritance plot reshapes an open and fungible history into a narrative with beginning, middle, and predetermined end.
This project unfolds over two parts. The first half includes accounts of writers struggling with the inheritance of both gifts and debts from the past; the second part provides an overview of those who attempted to bequeath property, ideas, and cultures to the future. Chapter One, “The Redecoration of Houses,” details how inherited homes offer novelists such as Hawthorne and Chesnutt an image to describe the structures of the past and reveal their characters’ fraught attempts to claim mastery over the present. Chapter Two, “Refusing the Inheritance,” analyzes work by Louisa May Alcott and Harriet Jacobs, each of whom depicted gestures of refused inheritances to register an ambivalence toward how commercial and economic realities restricted their literary production. Turning to how inheritance plots shaped attempts to shape the future, Chapter Three, “Proslavery’s Late Style,” studies how proslavery writers and thinkers in the antebellum South adapted the form of the last will and testament to convey a slave-holding society into the future just as abolition became increasingly imminent. The final chapter, “Immortal Influences,” studies the life and career of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son, Julian, and the role of inherited copyrights and manuscripts in shaping his fraught career as an author.