Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America provides a platform for Kerry Larsen's discussion of equality in nineteenth-century thinking, and a wide platform it is, since, as Larsen notes, Tocqueville came down on both sides of almost every question he asked in attempting to define what Americans were doing, or thought they were doing, in the name of equality. Larsen's method is to replace the negative and responsive term “inequality” with a positive definition of “equality,” much harder to frame than its negative counterpart. That variance by itself helps explain the egalitarian position of Americans who claimed equality before the Civil War not only in free states, but in slave states as well. Larsen concludes that a true understanding of equality was more elusive than many authors and commentators of the period thought and that their quest for a definition led to mental gymnastics bordering on the grotesque, or at least on self-parody. Larsen sees this quest as finally forcing writers to abstract individualism to make individuals independent and equal, thus making uniqueness and difference the cornerstone of equality imposed on everyone, at least in theory. There are enough contradictions right there to provide him with a wealth of cases.

Tocqueville, throughout the study, and the anti-Stowe novels, especially at the beginning, are touchstones. Later the transcendentalism of Emerson and Whitman, among others, completes the picture. Larsen's focus is really on a brief span of about twenty years, covering the antebellum period between the American renaissance and the Civil War, although sources are offered from as early as 1815. Slavery, on the one hand, and mass culture, on the other, seem to have spawned a rich variety of fiction and apologetic essays building on the basic American claim to equality. In most of the authors studied, Larsen dissects plots, fictional characters, or expressed ideologies to show how issues worked in self-contradictory ways, making the idea of equality itself a paradox. Larsen's targets are serious writers with polemical objectives in mind, which is too bad because humorists and P. T. Barnum would have added dimensions to the study that might have been especially rich. Larsen's own sense of irony, however, has plenty to work on. As it is, varied case studies take Larsen through the three divisions of the problem that he stakes out: first, he examines ideas of equality as a natural state, or at least one to be sought by all; second, the requirements of what he calls “the social whole,” the mass culture imposing uniformity in rather inequitable ways; and third, self-differentiating individualism in Emerson, especially, and Hawthorne and Channing, among others.

Race provides the book's first focal point. Notably, Harriet Beecher Stowe, David Walker in “Appeal … to the Coloured Citizens of the World,” and Frederick Douglass in My Bondage and My Freedom are representative of the anti-slavery position that freedom was a “natural” right. Inequality, and particularly slavery, thus become a convention of power imposed politically. Larsen notices that political equality and natural equality are “disarticulated,” as in the example of Douglass, who was popular as an exposer of southern denial of equality, a sort of literate representation of Uncle Tom, but was a little intimidating to audiences when he insisted that he was their equal. Benevolent despotism, proposed by southern ideologues like George Fitzhugh in Cannibals All! to defend slavery, defies the North by claiming that paternalism is ultimately a pure equality of responsibility by master and slave; northern economics dissociates individuals into groups that are unequal in wealth and survival. Thus Caroline Lee Hentz's The Planter's Northern Bride claims that whites treating blacks as if they were physically and mentally equal is actually condescension which makes them unequal. No matter how the argument is twisted, believers in slavery as a social necessity seem to be trapped into also assuming that equality is a natural state that must be politically controlled. Worse, white women's equality as seen in plantation wives does reflect male tyranny. The outcome is that the dissociation between ideology and reality in the South left southern writers with dysfunctional rhetoric, rendering a national solution impossible. Complex though the argument is, as it traces contradictory plot lines crossing each other within single texts, it would seem to have been born out, historically at least, in southern chauvinism and secession.

Larsen's second major topic is how individuals relate to society taken as a whole. Once again, he finds arresting contradictions more or less openly exposed. The popularity of Lydia H. Sigourney's sentimental poetry makes sense in Larsen's analysis. Poetry could be popular in presenting what now seem to us rather abstract and stilted sentimental conventions because the feelings are “not felt,” or what we would call “genuine.” Instead, as the North American Review proposed in 1816, “the merely personal is sifted out” in externalizing inward feelings in standard forms of speech. William Cullen Bryant, likewise, could see and describe for his audience the universal identity representing each individual taken in association with all others. Early literary nationalism can thus be expressed in natural images and abstract language which seem far from the gritty reality. Democratic taste calls forth the abstract child elegy, universally popular in nineteenth-century America across class lines. Although Larsen does not extend beyond the 1850s, his analysis does much to explain how the literary bohemians of New York could find this sort of poetry so easy to parody at the same time that they recognized its wide appeal to the middle-class readership. Given these parameters, Twain's lack of sympathy with Cooper's heroes and heroines seems inevitable. Poetizing the mortality of infants, the “Sweet Singer of Hartford,” Sigourney, abstracts images and designs to such an extent that any moral position seems to be laid on superficially. Literary nationalism, if Sigourney represents such, or William Cullen Bryant, as Larsen posits, refuses to let one individual character stand out from the type. Readers may differ with Larsen on the “artistic achievement” of Sigourney's work, but his case for abstractionism is heavily documented with Sigourney's own verse, and argues determinedly for the consistency of her aesthetic practice as seen in the otherwise annoying abstractions of her sentimental portraits of grieving mothers and dying infants. Aligning such writing with literary nationalism and the push toward uniformity in equality helpfully fills the need for understanding the wide sales of her many books of verse. Aligning Whitman with Sigourney, as Larsen attempts, however, may disregard a substantially different texture and imagery, despite the claim that Whitman's drive to equality by averaging all Americans or leveling the “you” and “me” is derived from the same sources. Finding the transcendental in literary “associationism” is appropriate, but some readers may still feel that a recognition of the specific naming in the gazettes of Leaves of Grass is profoundly different and more concrete. Taken by itself, Larsen offers an engaging discussion of how Whitman diffuses authority through the particular in the leaves of grass, breaking down boundaries, leveling, and making an aesthetic whole. Discussing Leaves of Grass as literary egalitarianism insistently expressing a desire to contain the whole allows the reader to account for line after line of Whitman's urgency to express the values of a multitude of things, people, and even the role of the reader in joining with the poet to create meaning.

Caroline Kirkland's A New Home, Who'll Follow?, as treated in the chapter following Whitman, takes on much larger standing as an expression of a unique American predicament: how does the individual overcome the tyranny of the majority, with its implacable envy of qualities that rise above the norm? Larsen notes (115) that Kirkland and Tocqueville are aligned in suggesting an antidote in good manners and silent examples. This may be something of a reach from Kirkland's satire of the masses as represented in the Mid-west, but the documentation is convincingly derived from more or less explicit statements on the part of both. The kinds of passages that Larsen's position brings out, as well, seem to express very clearly the direction the novel takes, highlighted by Kirkland's own strength of expression. Expanding on this premise, Larsen finds Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables perverse in its treatment of Judge Pyncheon, a suggestion that leads easily into Harriet Wilson's Our Nig and the truly perverse Mrs. Bellmont.

The third segment of Larsen's argument, somewhat briefer than the two preceding, brings out the necessity for transcendentalism to isolate individuals further rather than unify them in one complex mix. “Self” in this construct, Larsen argues, requires Emerson and others to require that the ultimate equality lies in an individual who becomes transcendent by virtue of being totally independent of anyone else's influence. As Larsen notes, Emerson is even exhausted by his own argument on that one. For such a seemingly simple term as “equality,” it is interesting to see the paradoxes pile up one over another. Yet the outcome – that equality finally becomes a solitary event – seems to be where the book has been tending from the beginning.

Larsen's treatment is heavily documented with direct citations, giving concreteness to a very abstract argument. One or two authors are notable by their absence, Melville particularly, but also Poe. The book is highly directed without them; with them it would perhaps have become more diffused, but would also have covered all the available major authors of the period. The framework provided is enough for most readers to generalize for themselves. In sum, extracting ideas of equality from important works of the period as Larsen does is a valuable undertaking; Tocqueville is a good starting point, and the outcomes are highly worthwhile.