Whaling Wives, Life Writing, and Sentimental Extraction in the 19th Century Pacific

Abstract

In this article, Katharina Fackler examines the affective economies of US extractivism in the Pacific via the journals of Mary Brewster, who accompanied her captain husband on whaling voyages in the mid-nineteenth century. The journal emerges as a form of maritime life writing that allows its author to constitute a distinct sense of interiority. Adapting Amy Kaplan's notion of manifest domesticity, the chapter argues that Brewster's journals produce notions of interiority and figurations of (un-)feeling that throw into relief the deep links between White feminine consumption, domestic sentimentality, and the extractivist and imperialist logics of the whaling business.