Society in America, Volume 1 (of 2)
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~130,000 words · 624 passages
Cite this work
- APAHarriet Martineau. (n.d.). Society in America, Volume 1 (of 2). SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/harriet-martineau/society-in-america-volume-1-of-2
- MLAHarriet Martineau. "Society in America, Volume 1 (of 2)." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/harriet-martineau/society-in-america-volume-1-of-2.
- ChicagoHarriet Martineau. Society in America, Volume 1 (of 2). SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/harriet-martineau/society-in-america-volume-1-of-2.
What it is about
The first volume of Harriet Martineau's 1837 study of the United States, setting what the country said of itself against what she found there.
Context and history
Martineau travelled through the United States between 1834 and 1836 and published this in 1837. What makes it remarkable is not the travel narrative but the method: she went with a criterion declared in advance — to compare what the country said of itself in its founding documents with what she found there — and with rules for how to observe, which she published separately. That is why she is counted among the founders of sociology, and often is not listed as one. Her conclusion is hard: the republic that proclaims itself founded on equality holds slaves and keeps women without rights, and the two facts are of one kind. She wrote it when doing so could cost her her safety in the southern states, and it did. She had been deaf since youth and earned her living by writing throughout her adult life.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
"To seize a character, even that of one man, in its life and secret mechanism, requires a philosopher; to delineate it with truth and impressiveness is work for a poet. How then shall one or two sleek clerical tutors, with here and there a tedium-stricken esquire, or speculative half-pay captain, give us views on such a subject? How shall a man, to whom all characters of individual men are like sealed books, of which he sees only the title and the covers, decipher from his four-wheeled vehicle, and depict to us, the character of a nation? He courageously depicts his own optical delusions; notes this to be incomprehensible, that other to be insignificant; much to be good, much to be bad, and most of all indifferent; and so, with a few flowing strokes, completes a picture, which, though it may not resemble any possible object, his countrymen are to take for a national portrait. Nor is the fraud so readily detected: for the character of a people has such a complexity of aspect, that even the honest observer knows not always, not perhaps after long inspection, what to determine regarding it. From his, only accidental, point of view, the figure stands before him like the tracings on veined marble,--a mass of mere random lines, and tints, and entangled strokes, out of which a lively fancy may shape almost _any_ image. But the image he brings with him is always the readiest; this is tried; it answers as well as another; and a second voucher now testifies its correctness. Thus each, in confident tones, though it be with a secret misgiving, repeats his precursor; the hundred-times-repeated comes in the end to be believed; the foreign nation is now once for all understood, decided on, and registered accordingly; and dunce the thousand