King Coal and the Comforts of Catastrophe in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

This dissertation explores American literature’s role in teaching its readers to look away from the human and environmental violence of natural-resource extraction, and to understand coal specifically as necessary to domestic well-being and even to the production of literature itself.
Chapter One locates the project’s ideological beginnings in a range of writings about coal’s fuel-predecessor: iron. While early modern texts about iron negatively associate the metal with labor, by the late-seventeenth century, John Locke’s political philosophy cast iron mining as a self-possessed labor, enabling in turn the eighteenth-century poet Joel Barlow to champion iron mining in his nationalistic verse. I call the culmination of this shift the “iron legend”: a fantasy that the brutality taking place in Spanish-controlled gold, silver, and other ore-mines was different from the mining that happened in colonial North America. In this fantasy, Anglo-American mining—and the elision of slavery—emblematized liberalism.
This dynamic grew more complex in the nineteenth century as iron was replaced by coal. My second chapter argues that the fossil fuel helped Nathaniel Hawthorne formulate his conception of romance writing, which he saw as a vehicle for transmuting the dirty, racialized realities embodied in his fiction as coal. I focus particularly on Hawthorne’s overlooked short-story “Feathertop”—a fable featuring a witch who uses her coal-powered magic to bring a scarecrow to life—as a key to the larger Hawthorne corpus with its meditation on his anxieties about literature’s new (and newly gendered) dependence on the extractive, material, fuel-driven realities of American life.
While Hawthorne’s work marked coal’s negative valences, my third chapter traces the ways that Frederick Douglass and William Still nevertheless championed coal and coal work. In each iteration of his autobiography, Douglass provides increasingly detailed descriptions of his early job shoveling coal outside of New Bedford homes to help mark his transition from ex-slave to putatively free and self-possessed individual. After working as an agent along the Underground Railroad, Still opened a profitable coal yard and used its proceeds to fund his publication of The Underground Railroad Records—a text that is, in turn, full of stories suggesting that the use, sale, and transportation of coal were vital tools for freedom seekers. Douglass and Still differently but powerfully leverage coal to critique the iron legend: liberalism’s grounding in extraction and the elision of enslavement.
These approaches to coal converge in Rebecca Harding Davis’s “Life in the Iron-Mills,” the subject of my fourth chapter. Amidst its realist commitments to demystifying the cruel modernity of iron-mill workers, Davis’s story nonetheless elides the issue of enslavement that Douglass and Still used it to discursively combat; in life in the iron mills, she suggests, the iron legend lives on. Yet, in a departure from each of the authors discussed before her, Davis uses coal to perform that elision self-consciously and with what is an ultimately literary aim: illuminating the limitations of realist fiction and the unique role of the woman writer.
Throughout the project, I mark out literature’s role as a constituent element in the rise and consolidation of fossil-fuel consumption—how literature helped teach us to feel comfortable with coal—as well as its power to instill ways of reading and apprehending that offer alternative paths for reading, writing, and living the future.