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Bret E. Carroll, Exploring Other Worlds: Margaret Fox, Elisha Kent Kane, and the Antebellum Culture of Curiosity, Journal of American History, Volume 93, Issue 2, September 2006, Pages 523–524, https://doi.org/10.2307/4486281
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Since Neil Harris's Humbug appeared in 1973, scholars have explored in increasing depth the dynamics of a democratic antebellum popular culture and an emerging mass-entertainment industry driven, Harris argued, by an “operational aesthetic” grounded in appeals to public curiosity and individual judgment (Humbug, 1973, p. 57). Independent scholar David Chapin built on and extended that body of work by examining the antebellum “culture of curiosity” through the intertwined lives and careers of the Arctic explorer Elisha Kent Kane and the spirit rapper Margaret Fox. Chapin seeks, as do many other historians, to combine cultural analysis with good storytelling, appealing to our own curiosity by illuminating the often rumor-shrouded romance between two antebellum celebrities.
The culture of curiosity, Chapin argued, both brought Kane and Fox together—each used techniques of performance and mass marketing to reveal unknown worlds to a curious public—and drove a wedge between them. Because the culture of curiosity offered both the promise of moral and intellectual uplift and the threat of devolving into mere amusement, Kane—situated between an Enlightenment culture of genteel science and the baser commercial culture of the nineteenth century—worried that his participation in the latter culture threatened to undermine his public reputation for heroism, learning, and virtue. He saw that threat embodied in his relationship with Fox, whom he (and much of the public) felt had demeaned herself by violating middle-class gender taboos against women in public careers and by participating in a movement widely associated with moral danger. Thus he sought privately to finance Fox's education into genteel womanhood while publicly denying that he had anything more than humanitarian and paternalistic interest in a woman that he, his family, and his friends arrogantly deemed his social inferior. Fox, meanwhile, hoped that rapping might lead her to middle-class respectability by bringing her into contact with the urban middle class but, despite her and her sister's performance of female innocence and passivity, Fox had to contend with the disapproval of the public, Kane, and Kane's family. In the Kane-Fox relationship, as in the wider culture of curiosity, “high” and “low” culture coexisted uneasily.
