In her book Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America, Gillian Brown constructs a complicated, sometimes convoluted argument about the relationship between nineteenth-century domestic ideology and possessive individualism. Brown's work focuses on the ways the nineteenth-century individual manufactures the self by redefining and adjusting the domestic boundaries that relate directly to the increasingly important and dominating American market society. She uses as case studies the texts of three authors who published in the 1850s -- Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville -- though other works, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, are included in her study. Brown also incorporates such cultural practices as interior decorating, abolitionism, architecture, mesmerism, and communitarian reform as evidence for her argument, which, at some points, enlivens the otherwise repetitive methods of delineating her argument. Though scrupulous in detail and careful in analysis of the supporting texts, she ends the book with an interesting but unnecessary and almost irrelevant analysis of Henry James's The Bostonians. By not finally situating her book in the greater schema of literary criticism, Brown never fully demonstrates the importance of her argument to nineteenth-century studies; and in the end, her book seems to be more an exercise in creative scholarship than a provocation for a deeper engagement into the concept of domestic individualism.

Brown devotes two chapters to each of the three authors mentioned previously, and uses as her primary texts Uncle Tom's Cabin, The House of Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, Pierre, and Bartleby the Scrivener. Using each text in conjunction with a cultural practice, Brown argues that the nineteenth-century definitions of self "locate the individual in his or her interiority, in his or her removal from the marketplace." Her definition of domestic interiority aligns the term almost synonymously with domesticity: "[i]n the midst of change the domestic sphere provided an always identifiable place and refuge for the individual: it signified the private domain of individuality apart from the marketplace" (3). The chapters on Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom's Cabin demonstrate the incompatibility of slavery with the domestic sphere, in that the presence of slavery brought the tumult of the marketplace into the home. Brown argues that Stowe uses domesticity to promote the abolitionist movement: "homemakers and housekeepers evolve into activists when their sustaining convention, the integrity of women and their homes, is threatened" (37), which it is by having slaves -- objects of the marketplace -- within the domestic sphere. Brown's second chapter, "Sentimental Possession," is a convincing account of how Stowe can be an abolitionist and still racist, in that she protests against the treatment of slaves as commodities, rather than slaves as things. Brown's treatment of Nathaniel Hawthorne, however, is far less compelling than her analysis of Stowe. In a single chapter she jumps from architecture to mesmerism in relation to The House of Seven Gables to describe the use of domesticity to allow the individual to transcend the economic world of social disorders and chaotic change. Even less compelling is the chapter on The Blithedale Romance, in which Brown seems to equate voyeurism with a type of consumption that in turn threatens the individuality of the gazer. The treatment in the last two chapters of Herman Melville's Pierre and Bartleby the Scrivener allows the book to regain some of the momentum felt at its beginning; and Brown's use of cultural practices in alignment with primary texts is at its most clever here. In her last chapter, "The Empire of Agoraphobia," Brown relates agoraphobia and anorexia to Bartleby; and by demonstrating how Bartleby disassociates himself from society and the marketplace, she argues that he triumphs over the desire to consume in the economic world, just as the anorectic wishes to overcome the desire to consume food. Yet the end of the sixth chapter, along with the unsatisfying afterword, do not provide a sense of finality or closure about the ideas presented in the book. Domestic Individualism would have been strengthened, as a whole, by the inclusion of a conclusion as substantial and thought-provoking as the introduction.

The majority of the primary texts used in Domestic Individualism precede those on the reading list of ENAM 712, with the exception of The Yellow Wallpaper; and therefore Brown's analysis of this story is of especial relevance to us. Brown argues that The Yellow Wallpaper appropriates the mutability of the marketplace and places it in the home: "[t]he nervousness manifest in moving walls and in the dislocation of self replicates the conditions of commerce from which those walls ideally barricade the individual" (176). This story, written much later than the 1850s texts previously used as case studies, demonstrates how the marketplace is eventually integrated into the domestic sphere.

In Domestic Individualism Gillian Brown presents an intriguing argument about the relationship between individuality, domesticity, and the marketplace; but somehow she is never entirely convincing in her argument, even though she documents her conclusions meticulously with quotations and almost fifty pages of endnotes. Her chapters could stand alone as separate essays (or journal articles, as two of them indeed were), as strongly as they now cohere as a single text. Yet in general her argument is compelling, her conclusions clever, and her prose for the most part digestible. As an innovative investigation into the relationship emerging between concepts of the individual, the role of domesticity, and effects of the marketplace on nineteenth-century American society, Domestic Individualism is worthwhile background reading for scholars of American literature and culture.