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Frank Webb’s Still Life: Rethinking Literature and Politics through The Garies and Their Friends (1857)
Sam Otter, Associate Professor of English, UC Berkeley
October 25, 2007

From a project analyzing an unacknowledged literary tradition of peculiar forms and intensities concerned with Philadelphia between the U.S. Constitution and the Civil War, I have excerpted an essay focusing on Frank J. Webb’s historical novel of urgent manners, The Garies and Their Friends. Webb incorporates and transforms much of the debate about Philadelphia: its status as case study for the problems and possibilities of race in the United States, the volatile history of its social experiment in freedom, the force of Northern prejudice, the strenuous labors of its African American middle and higher classes, the demands on its black and white residents, the gauging of prospects, the sense of advance and retreat. The Garies and Their Friends may clarify our thinking about literature, politics, and aesthetics at a time when the profession of literary studies is reflecting on the conjunction and on its methods. Webb’s novel raises issues about history and form, the constitution of space, the articulation of character, the struggle for authority at the level of the word, and the burdens and pleasures of excess.