(the) American (Novel of)

210 Robin Truth Goodman
capital,” or habits of the body, is instrumental in maintaining socialized
class differences and power domination. 5 According to Nikolas Rose,
during World War II the field of professional psychology discovered that
disciplining attitudes through group behaviorism would lift morale, and
this finding was translated into factory management, where the “subjective
commitments of the worker were to be incorporated within
the objectives of the firm.” 6 “At work,” explains Rose, “unconscious
conflicts, unsuccessful repression of thwarted instincts, and unexpressed
emotions could be found at the root of many industrial problems. . . . The
question of industrial efficiency was, at root, one of mental hygiene—
the diagnosis and treatment of the minor mental troubles of the manager
of the worker before they produced major and disabling problems;
the promotion of correct habits in light of a knowledge of the nature
of mental life; the organization of the factory itself so as to minimize
the production of symptoms of emotional and mental instability and
enhance adjustment.” 7 Etiquette was one of the ways which management
used to get labor to identify with the needs of management
during industrialization. Richard Sennett has explored the public performance
of class replacing sumptuary laws of dress and comportment
as critical masses congregated with strangers in the growing urban
centers of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century western Europe. As
a man was no longer recognized familiarly and his reputation no longer
built out of his family name, vestments, and ancestry, gestures served to
codify strength of character and trustworthiness.
Nancy Armstrong has discussed how, with the rise of the popular
press and leading toward the advent of the novel, eighteenth-century
conduct books for women “enabled a coherent idea of the middle class
to take shape,” 8 producing a sense of female domestic propriety, taste,
virtue, leisure, and privacy as separated from the economic and the
public. Ann Laura Stoler has shown how eighteenth-century manuals of
conduct and child rearing were seen to preserve a proper white culture
as the culture of governance and superiority in colonial Malaysia.
I use the Indies to illustrate . . . how a cultivation of the European
self (and specifically a Dutch bourgeois identity) was affirmed
in the proliferating discourses around pedagogy, parenting,
children’s sexuality, servants, and tropical hygiene: micro-sites
where designations of racial membership were subject to gendered