Identity Fashioning Analysis

Sorry this is late: I thought it was due before class. My bad!



All three of this week's readings: David Waldstreicher's “Reading the Runaways: Self-Fashioning, Print Culture, and Confidence in Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic,” Karen Halttunen's “Confidence Men and Painted Ladies: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America,” and George Chauncey's “Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940” engage the issues of identity and identity transformation as a means of interpreting the societies in which the papers' respective identities engaged with.
Waldstreicher's article seeks to reflect a more nuanced construction of mid 18th century mid-Atlantic society by analyzing the way in which runaway slave advertisements' attitudes engaged with the emerging role of runaways as “confidence men.” The introduction is well formed and states the purpose of the article quite clearly” to “[use runaway advertisements to analyze the acts of cultural hybridization black and racially mixed people committed...and to evaluate the owners' use of print to counter the mobility of the unfree...” Unfortunately, this structure fails to carry throughout the bulk of the article, which further complicates the argumentation of the main body. Making matters more difficult for the reader, the body simultaneously argues two strains of thought: how these “confidence men” operated, and how print responded. More explicit structure could have really helped this article get its point across more clearly. That having been said, the sources used are very effective at bolstering the argument. The heavy reliance and citation of primary sources lends the argument a sense of authenticity, and though other historical arguments are not explicitly engaged with any degree of frequency, the secondary sources used do reinforce the argumentation. I feel like the most important lesson one can take out of this paper is how to center a unique, creative argument around primary sources.
The section from Halttunen's book reads more like a narrative than an argument at times, which works to the book's advantage by maintaining the reader's interest. Like Waldstreicher, Halttunen does a phenomenal job engaging primary sources, explicitly breaking down the rhetoric and frequency of common themes in passages from early 19th century guides for young men. I found the core of her argument – the connection between fear of the “confidence man” and the necessity of “republican virtue” to maintain the republic – to be both bold and fascinating. The structure of the work is very sound – the first part of the paper gives us all we need to know about attitudes towards confidence men, and then the more solid argumentative section in the latter part of the paper looks for explanations for the previously described attitudes. My only issue with this work is that the argument could have been outlined or framed better at the beginning of the chapter. However, we must keep in mind that this is an excerpt from a book, not an article, and without reading the entire book it is impossible to completely understand the function of the first chapter in relation to the work as a whole.
We run into the same type of issue with the section Chauncey's book, Gay New York, but, like the Halttunen excerpt, the selected section succeeds on its own merits. The two sections have two different arguments: the first, that Gay culture thrived, though in a different way than it does today, in pre-WWII New York, the second, that “fairies” provide a mechanism with which to understand the Gay culture of the time. I think that the strongest part of Chauncey's writing is his engagement with other historical theories and “myths” about pre-WWII Gay culture. He does not discount the merits of the arguments, but systematically debunks their logic or command of the facts. There isn't as much hard evidence from primary sources in this selection as the previous two, but the primary source citations that are used are used masterfully. Like Halttunen's work, Chauncey's work combines argumentation with narrative, but in a way that is structured more soundly and makes more sense to the reader. From the introduction onward, we as readers know exactly what direction the work is going to go in, making the argumentation much more easy and enjoyable to process.
Ultimately, there are things to take from from each of these works. Depending on the style of the paper one is trying to write, any of these three could serve as a sufficient primary model with which to take structural insights from.