The Columbia History of the American Novel

Introduction

Critics, preachers, and other self-appointed moralists hated it; young men and women loved it. The novel was the subject of heated popular debate in the late eighteenth century and, in many ways, was to the early national period what television was to the 1950s or MTV and video games to the 1980s. It was condemned as escapist, anti-intellectual, violent, pornographic; since it was a "fiction" it was a lie and therefore evil. Since it often portrayed characters of low social station and even lower morals — foreigners, orphans, fallen women, beggar girls, women cross-dressing as soldiers, soldiers acting as seducers — it fomented social unrest by making the lower classes dissatisfied with their lot. The novel ostensibly contributed to the demise of community values, the rise in licentiousness and illegitimacy, the failure of education, the disintegration of the family; in short, the ubiquity of the novel — augmented in the early nineteenth century by new printing, papermaking, and transportation technologies — most assuredly meant the decline of Western civilization as it had previously been known.

Predictably, running side by side with the sermons and newspaper editorials condemning the genre was a countering polemic in its favor. Other social commentators on the early novel claimed it was educational, nationalistic, populist, precisely what was required to bring together a nation recently fragmented by a Revolutionary War and further divided by the influx of immigrants in the postRevolutionary period, European immigrants who did not speak the same language, practice the same religion, or share the same values -3- as those earlier arrived on these native shores. By its linguistic simplicity, the novel was uniquely accessible to working-class readers and would introduce them to middle-class (and, presumably, WASP) values and manners. By its typical focus on women characters and its frequent addresses to women readers, it would help to erase the gender inequities built into the early American educational system. By its preoccupation with seduction as a theme, it would warn women that they had to be smart to survive. And even the early genre's suspect attachment to local scandal as a major source for its materials served a worthy end, for it warned men that their infamies could be broadcast to the community at large and that they could thus be held accountable for private sin in the court of public opinion.

What was the real function of the novel in early America? Again one might make the analogy to modern cultural forms such as television: the verdict is still out. But what is obvious is that, in a market sense, the new form triumphed decisively over its detractors. On the most basic, mercantile level, this is evident from late eighteenthcentury publishers' catalogs and book advertisements. Prior to around 1790, books that we would now call novels (for example, Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews) were frequently hawked as "narratives," or "personal histories," or simply left unlabeled. After around 1790, virtually any text that could conceivably be connected to the term "novel" (as noun or adjective) wore that designation, and autobiographical and biographical accounts, crime reports, conversion stories, captivity narratives, religious tracts, collections of sermons, even poetic sequences were all peddled as novels. As an established and valued commodity, novels sold.

The early contentious history of the novel in America anticipated in subtle and profound ways the debates, anxieties, and controversies about the genre during the nineteenth century, issues taken up in the chapters in the first section of this volume. Where, for example, is the boundary between the autobiography and the novel? The blurring of one into the other has a long history. That blurring also raises crucial theoretical and even political issues. As-told-to narratives, for example, contest the interrelated notions of "authenticity," "authority," and "authorship." An autobiography must be shaped and controlled and plotted in ways that resemble fiction, but the very concept of fictionality jeopardizes an authoritative "I." Which has more status, -4- novel or autobiography? Which has more cultural power? Questions of genre — especially when we address slave or Native American narratives — turn (as did discussions of the early novel) on questions of social truth and social power.

Authority and authorship also turn on questions of economic power. By the mid-nineteenth century, the "novel" did not exist as any single entity. Popularity produces diversity, and soon there were many kinds of novels designed for a vaguely differentiated and overlapping audience — sensation novels, pulp romances, adventure stories, newspaper serials, reform novels. Some writers, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, even wanted to distinguish their "romances" from the more prevalent but still partly suspect varieties of the novel.

Hawthorne's trepidation lest he be called a "novelist" seems rooted in virtually all of the early American anxieties about the morality, factitiousness, accountability, moral purpose, and political function of the novel in society, anxieties arising (like Hawthorne's own) from a Puritan preoccupation with the practical social value of products of the imagination. Even Hawthorne's well-known uneasiness about fiction and gender, articulated throughout his life and his fiction in a variety of ways, seems to be a vestigial manifestation of the very first anxieties about the novel in America. The first two American best-sellers, Charlotte Temple and The Coquette, were both penned, after all, by "scribbling women."

Did the novel forever alter America? Can a literary work really reform/re-form society? Can any cultural form effect social change? Or do cultural forms reflect those changes in progress? Agency, at one theoretical level or another, remains an issue in all discussions of the novel to date, just as it was in the first debates on the morality of fiction. So what else is new? Our fears and our hopes about the social potentialities of any new cultural phenomenon continue to inspire much the same debate (with the attendant tropes of apocalypse or redemption) that surrounded the emergence of the novel in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America.

Cathy N. Davidson

-5-

The Early American Novel

The hallmark of the early American novel is its instability, an uncertainty and confusion in almost every area related to fiction making; in order to highlight the most significant result of this instability, I would like to pretend at the outset of this chapter that I am a critic wedded to contemporary critical fashion. With this guise in place, I begin by declaring that, in fact, there is no such thing as the "early American novel." To prove my point, I carefully examine each term in the phrase to show that its intended meaning necessarily evaporates under critical scrutiny. First, take the word "early," which in this context is supposed to signify an event or events (the production of novels) occurring in the first part of some division of time, or of some series. In what sense, then, are the works that I intend to discuss — books by William Hill Brown, Hannah Foster, Susanna Rowson, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Charles Brockden Brown, and James Fenimore Cooper — early products of American history or culture?

By consensus the first "American novel" is William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy, which appeared initially in 1789. But the land mass known as America had been called by that name since 1507, when the German geographer Martin Waldseemüller named it after its founder, Amerigo Vespucci; in that regard, "America" — its history and surely its culture — had existed for 282 years before Brown published his novel. If we follow the editors of one older anthology of American writing (1978), who declare that by American literature they mean "literature written in English by people who -6- came to settle in the territory that eventually became the United States of America," then American writing begins in 1630 with William Bradford's history, Of Plimmouth Plantation; Brown's book, still 159 years away, is hardly an early American production. (Newer anthologies, if they begin with voyages of discovery, assign dates like 1492 to the first American writings; if they commence with Native American "myths," the dates are earlier still, though mostly unknown.) Perhaps by "early" we intend something like the "beginning" of the American novel, but you do not have to read very far in Brown's book to realize that, as a "novelist," he is totally dependent on Samuel Richardson, and in particular Richardson's Pamela (1741-42), where the story, as is Brown's, is told through a series of letters; moreover, Brown's plot centers on the theme of seduction, another Richardsonian gift to the world of fiction. One might plausibly argue that the American novel truly begins with Richardson; without him there would be no Brown. Pamela, in fact, was the first English novel printed in America, in 1844. (Another English antecedent would be Laurence Sterne, whose A Sentimental Journey is actually mentioned in The Power of Sympathy.) Finally, suppose that "early" means, from our perspective, belonging to a period far back in time. This makes the most sense, relatively speaking, if you consider 200 years ago "far back in time" — though our country is still proclaiming its newness, still championing its innocence, still denying that it is drenched in time.

"American" is far more problematic. The word is absolutely meaningless as a descriptive term if all it indicates is that a book — Brown's, Rowson's, Cooper's, anyone's — was published in the United States. In the days before international copyright, the works of many English writers were pirated, printed, and sold by American booksellers under their own imprints; they were, in effect, published in America, and most Americans first read the great eighteenth-century novelists in these editions. Moreover, some nineteenth-century American writers — Washington Irving and Herman Melville are good examples — in order to secure both English and American copyrights, published several of their books in England before they appeared in America. Does the writer have to be born in America? Have written his or her novel in America? Susanna Rowson was born in England, and Charlotte Temple, her most interesting novel, was written while -7- she was living in England. Yet literary historians have always proclaimed it an "American" novel. Anthony Trollope's North America, and some of Frances Trollope's novels, were written wholly while mother and son (independently) were traveling in America. Are they American books? Must America then be the setting of the novel for it to be American? William Hill Brown's book is set in America — the America of the early Republic (New York, Rhode Island, and Boston), but then so is Aphra Behn's Oroonoko if, as William Spengemann has argued, you consider that when she wrote it in 1688 Surinam was considered part of America. In Martin Chuzzlewit, Charles Dickens has his title character travel to America and spend about a fourth of the book there; is the novel then one-fourth American? Perhaps more to the point: only about one-seventh of Moby-Dick takes place on American soil; is Melville's masterpiece not an American novel?

Scholars have spent an inordinate amount of time arguing that "American" really refers to "Americanness": national characteristics shape and mirror the form of a literary work. Some idea of America animates the narrative, controls and orders the very pattern of words upon the page. A variant on this idea of "Americanness" would be that recognizable issues, concerns, preoccupations appear again and again in books that are supposedly representative of American experience. Thus, Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain are the most American of nineteenth-century novelists, and Whitman is our true American poet, since something like an American identity can be discerned from reading their works. Ultimately, Spengemann has said, "America must make a difference in the way literature is written."

I have in the past believed this to be so (the force of Spengemann's arguments to the contrary notwithstanding), and to some extent still do, though I am deeply troubled by the implications of extracting some notion of identity, some sense of representativeness, from a canonized literature written almost exclusively by white men. The newest anthologies of our national literature have attempted to correct for this imbalance, and we now have access to the voices and visions of so many previously excluded "others." Perhaps, generally speaking, our literature will finally deserve to be called American, but can we say the same in particular for the novel, especially the so-8- called early novel, where the practitioners are exclusively white, though some indeed are female?

To be sure, the America in the term "the American novel" is a place, with hard outlines and a traceable landscape, but it is also, as it has been from the outset, an idea — often an ideal — imagined first in the minds of enlightened European thinkers, reimagined, and then shaped and configured, in the consciousness of Thomas Jefferson and the other founders of the Republic. That America may indeed never have existed in fact, but it always exists in mythic memory, and it is first and foremost a vision of inclusiveness: it deplores restriction and derogation. Can it not be said that to the extent that the nation embodies this vision it is that much closer to becoming America? How, then, can the "early American novel" possibly be American when it lacks any kind of minority and ethnic representation? Without there being a free assemblage of different peoples and an open forum for their genuinely differing points of view, there is no America; without a confluence of voices, expressing a myriad range of experience, there is no American novel. The American novel is, in the best sense of the term, multicultural; it may only recently have come into being.

This brings us to the third of our slippery terms: the literary designation "novel." If a novel is, in the simplest possible definition, a "sustained fictional narrative in prose," as the modern editor of The Power of Sympathy contends, then it appears as if Brown's, as well as every other book to be discussed here, qualifies as a novel. In fact, almost any form of fiction does, for what does "sustained" mean but that a plan or design has been executed or upheld? Even some autobiographies might fit under this rubric, which is how some contemporary critics view them anyway. A more problematic term, however, is "fiction," which had low status in eighteenth-century America and was often shunned by those who wrote it. Often, too, readers believed they were devouring "true" stories, that is, narratives based on fact — incidents that were historically verifiable (which is the case not only with Brown's Sympathy but also with Foster's Coquette and Rowson's Charlotte). Cathy N. Davidson points out that Rowson promised her readers "A Tale of Truth," and that is exactly how her story was read and appreciated. Some writers, like Washington Irving, went to elaborate steps to deny the fictionality of their work; his -9- assuming the mask of Diedrich Knickerbocker is only one of the ways by which he tried to convince the public he was offering it either history or "true" story.

If today's readers were asked to decide what element of a novel most mattered to them, they would probably emphasize either character or plot development. In other words, for most consumers of fiction, the novel signifies "realism," and this is indeed the distinction M. H. Abrams draws between the novel proper and the "romance": "The novel," Abrams writes, "is characterized as the fictional attempt to give the effect of realism, by representing complex characters with mixed motives who are rooted in a social class, operate in a highly developed social structure, interact with many other characters, and undergo plausible and everyday modes of experience." The niceties of generic distinction are not the point; rather, the works usually labeled as early American novels do not look anything like the conception most people have of the novel. Their characters are abstractions, hardly ever realized in any complex psychological way; their plots are mechanical, often clumsy and ill contrived; their "modes of experience" are anything but "everyday." In the modern sense of the term, the one we live with experientially, none of these books are novels at all but perhaps more like sermons or fables.

I must add a note here about what I personally look for in American novels, that is, what makes novel reading a vital experience for me. In each new book I am interested in discovering what I call "cultural voice," the process or the means by which an author with a social conscience and a rich and liberating language, though usually speaking through a persona, presents us with a unified moral vision of American society. "Voice" in this sense is the sound that results when fear is overcome so that truth can be asserted. It is the refusal to internalize, and thus be tamed by, the forces and agents of cultural repression. It is the cry of unsuppressed rage, the explosion of unchecked anxiety, the release of unmitigated anger, the expression of (as much as possible) unmediated passion or desire. A genuine voice can never be truly imitated, duplicated, or reproduced.

The primary function of the "cultural voice" I am describing is to demythologize, to unravel the web of false pieties that would masquerade as virtue, thus exposing sham, duplicity, and pretension cloaked under the guise of authenticity, honesty, and integrity. Di-10- rected at those who have assumed positions of authority, power, and privilege, it often reveals claims of superior citizenship to be little more than hypocrisy, a cover for selfish, rapacious deeds. (A prototypical example of my ideal American novel would be E. L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel [1971].) This quality of voice is fundamentally moral: in the novels that really matter, those fictions that change the way readers see or experience their world, expressive language and visionary commitment are aligned so that characters reach moral awareness through acts of speech; that is, the utterance of personal truths, values, and beliefs culminates in the long and often painful process of discovery. The "voice" with which a character or a narrator speaks, the language he or she chooses for that expression, are themselves agents of revelation of inner being and moral selfhood.

There are no cultural voices in the "early American novel," and there are four primary reasons for this absence. First, no authentic American language was available for literary purposes. The writers who constitute the canon here, from Foster and Rowson through Irving and Cooper, were thoroughly dependent on the modes, styles, rhythms, and structures of the English language that they found in the books of their favorite seventeenth- and eighteenth-century authors. While America may have proclaimed its political independence from Britain, it nevertheless remained culturally subservient well into the nineteenth century. One reason Irving was hailed as America's first significant author by the British literary establishment, for example, was that his elegant prose sounded as if it had been written by an Englishman. Twenty-five years ago, in The Colloquial Style in America, Richard Bridgman showed that not until the nineteenth century did American prose first incorporate a colloquial or spoken speech into its style; American writers, as Bridgman put it, began to "evolve a new means of expression out of the casual discourse of the nation," which included, among other things, an emphasis on "greater concreteness of diction" and "simplicity in syntax." The importance of this development must be underscored: if language creates consciousness, then "means of expression" creates literary forms of resistance; without an originality in either area there could be no genuine American voices.

Second, while the formality, propriety, and correctness of the written English language constrained early American authors, what may -11- have been equally limiting was the lack of cultural support of their creative efforts. America was simply too new and too raw a society to be overly concerned about the development of arts and letters; labor and resources were better expended on building towns and cities, roads and transportation systems, than on constructing an authentic American literature. Why should any healthy, able-bodied American citizen devote time and energy to products of the imagination, which were, after all, only of secondary or tertiary importance? Furthermore, when there was leisure available for literary pursuits, the lack of an international copyright made cheap reprints of British authors readily available. Why pay more for a book written by an American, which in any case was likely to be inferior? No aspiring American author could therefore afford to write full time — there was no profession of authorship in America as there was in England; the American Dr. Johnson did not exist — and without concentrated attention a bold indigenous literature was unlikely to appear. It is worth remembering that when Washington Irving became the nation's first successful professional author, he did so by going to England and winning recognition among the mother country's literati; having been approved abroad he could be sanctioned at home, which meant not only recognition but also, and perhaps even more important, dollars. But it did not mean the beginning of an American writer.

Third, where American culture did exist it tended to be parochial, thus generally distrustful of any form of written expression that was not expressly didactic. Literature, above all, was supposed to be edifying; its purpose was clearly that of moral improvement. Richardson's significant American following was a good illustration of this belief; as a Christian moralist (though Henry Fielding may have thought otherwise) he satisfied the public's overt need to see virtue rewarded, vice punished, and, whenever possible, raffishness reformed. But the novelist who sought to move beyond these boundaries, to, say, entertain through a tale of terror or adventure (seduction was too charged a subject to be considered entertaining), became highly suspect; such a book, being neither moral, educational, nor "truthful" (then as now, the vaguest of terms), served no socially redeeming purpose, and was condemned by clerical and secular leaders alike. Although the church may have been slowly losing its heg-12- emonic sway in American society, it still held enough authority to have its point of view taken seriously, and time and again the clergy (including such a luminary as Jonathan Edwards) warned that novel reading was an indulgence likely to lead to moral and spiritual decline. In the public sphere, prominent leaders (numbering among them figures no less revered than John Adams and Thomas Jefferson) decried the loss of a civic-minded feeling among the populace, a development they blamed in part on the withdrawal into a private and personal realm of being, emblematized perfectly by the isolated and self-absorbing experience of reading fiction. Such criticism encouraged neither experimentation nor forthrightness among American writers.

Attitudes eventually changed, of course, though the censure of the novel did not fully abate until well into the nineteenth century; what is truly noteworthy, however, was the continued, and in fact widespread, reading of novels in the eighteenth century, in spite of — and here one almost wants to say in opposition to — the criticism emanating from "high" places. By the turn of the century libraries were stocking, in addition to the standard sermons and funeral orations, novels and romances, travel narratives and adventure stories. And these were being consumed, as observers of the social scene noted, not only among middle-class families in seaport towns and cities along the East Coast but also by farmers and other dwellers in what was then the heartland of the country. It is difficult to know exactly what to make of this shift in reading habits, though as a form of popular resistance to the tedious sermonizing against fiction it may very well be part of a more general questioning of authority that occurred in the decades following the Revolution.

Fourth, if you have an unsettled society, there is no stable "American" genre of the novel — or, for that matter, anything else. The challenge to an established hierarchy of political leadership (composed, in the eighteenth century, of men who had wealth, talent, and social status), which is supported by such historical evidence as the worry over increased factionalism (addressed so cogently in The Federalist), the fear that the rise of the popular press would lead to a decline in religious and civil authority, and the passing of repressive laws like the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798) — all these point toward the unsettled nature of society in the years during which the novel -13- was (supposedly) rising in America. In a society that was still being formed, and at a time when debates about the nature and shape of the government, and about such vital issues as the inclusivity or exclusivity of the voting populace, were taking place, the novel might very well have played a significant role in redirecting or restructuring power relations. Indeed, Cathy N. Davidson and others have argued that some novels tried to assume an ideological position — as, in Davidson's phrase from Revolution and the Word (1986), a "covert or even overt critique of the existing social order" — and that the more popular the genre became the more those vested with cultural authority worried over their loss of dominance. This was true because, unlike sermons, the novel required no intermediaries for interpretation or guidance; addressed to all readers, it presumed no special erudition on their part. In effect, it eliminated the need for mediation; the individual himself or herself assumed the role of authority. Novelists were then in an excellent position to shape public opinion, to become agents of the liberation of the democratic mind.

I contend, however, that such a glorious scenario never really took place: while this may have been an era in which the unprivileged were beginning to demand a place in the political culture of the nation, and while the novel may have validated the legitimacy of the individual reader's responses, the novelists themselves were too conservative in their relation to the state, too ambivalent about the location of legitimate authority, and too uncertain about where their loyalties ultimately lay to have become genuine "cultural voices" and to have written powerful social critiques. Although they located the inequalities and incongruences in an American society that claimed to be egalitarian, and although they occasionally undermined cherished beliefs about reason and liberty as the girders of that society, these writers remained wedded to the rhetoric of the Revolution, and thus were still intent upon educating an American readership to be good citizens of the Republic. An unsettled and turbulent nation did not lead to bold products of the imagination, but rather to didactic textbooklike texts that tried to freeze values that were even then in flux. Unlike our own era, which has witnessed a revolution in Latin American and Eastern European fiction, corresponding to an upheaval in the political life in these parts of the world, late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America produced no new forms and configura-14- tions of the novel. Rather, we get not the novel as reflection of its society (one standard definition of the term) but a sham sermon to hold change at bay, mere imitations of older British forms. Indeed, the contradictions in the very term "early American novel" that I previously categorized mirror the contradictions in the works of the imagination to which that term applies.

If we examine some of the canonized novels of this period, drawing examples from four subgenres — the sentimental, the picaresque, the gothic, and what might be called the novel of nostalgia or reclamation — we can see the dislocations in the very form, shape, and language of these works. Beginning with the sentimental, and taking the "first" American novel first, we notice immediately that, like Foster's Coquette and Rowson's Charlotte Temple, Brown's The Power of Sympathy defends itself as a novel by claiming "to represent the specious Causes, and to Expose the fatal Consequences of Seduction"; further, it will "set forth and recommend" the "Advantages of Female Education"; but the truth is, as its publisher well knew, and highlighted as part of his advertising campaign, that the book was based on — was in fact an exposé of — the story of Perez Morton's seduction of his wife's sister, Fanny Apthorp, an act at once both adulterous and incestuous according to eighteenth-century law. Politician, statesman, patriot, and Harvard-educated, Morton was a member of the privileged class, a friend to John Adams and other New England elites, who actually defended his honor and reputation after his sister-in-law committed suicide. Clearly, it was this underlying scandal that fueled public interest in Brown's novel, especially since many of his readers believed he would provide them with previously unknown details. Clumsily written, with little attention to the nuances of character, and told through a series of letters that do not even bother to respond to each other, America's first "novel" lacks any memorable novelistic features; furthermore, it owes its enthusiastic reception and recognition not to any realized imaginative conception but rather to the historically verifiable events it purports to illuminate.

Brown certainly leaves no doubt that Morton (changed to Martin in the novel) deserves punishment as well as censure for violating both private vows and civic duty, and in this respect he indirectly challenges men like Adams who blamed the entire episode on Fanny's -15- (called Ophelia in the novel) supposed insanity. Moreover, as it promised, the novel does insist on the importance of education for women; its moralizing, didactic letters are just as often (if not more so) directed toward the audience as to the wayward characters. But as much as Brown may have wanted to defend the victimized, helpless woman, virtually powerless in a society where she was viewed as another form of property, he leaves too many unanswered questions about her possible complicity in the unsavory event of seduction. Ophelia may be innocent, even virtuous, yet she is seduced by her sister's husband and in her sister's house. There are no psychological clues to this puzzle. Furthermore, as for the other pair of male and female protagonists, Harrington and Harriot (who turn out to be brother and sister), they are unable to break free of their desire for each other. Their story is an enticing, sexually charged one, and cannot be canceled out by the author's moral intentions, no matter how often these are sounded. Seduction may well be a subject that points toward the gross abuse of social power by men of privilege and position, but it is also a titillating one, and Brown has not found a way to negotiate this dangerous issue satisfactorily.

Hannah Foster is more successful in The Coquette (1797), though once again we have a work of fiction based on factual incident, one familiar to every reader of the novel since it was a scandal widely publicized in the newspapers of the day. In 1788 Elizabeth Whitman (thinly disguised as Eliza Wharton in the novel), thirty-seven years old, pregnant, and nearly penniless, though from a respected family and well educated for the time, arrived at an inn in Massachusetts and, while supposedly waiting for her husband to arrive, gave birth to a stillborn child and then died shortly after of infection. As it turned out, there was no husband: Whitman was an abandoned woman, a victim of seduction, and in the popular lore of the day she became an example not only of compromised virtue but even more so of unjustified arrogance, since she had rejected what appeared to be two excellent opportunities for marriage in the hope of finding a husband with whom she could share both an intellectual and an emotional life. In other words, she desired compatibility, not merely protection, and for this she was vilified in the press. Foster attempts to retell her story from the victim's point of view, showing how limited were her choices and as a consequence how narrowly cir-16- cumscribed was her life, a life that, given her talents and abilities, should have been fruitful. It is Foster's point, however, that "should have" itself is an impossibility in a society that accords a woman status only as a male appendage.

Like Brown, Foster relies on the epistolary technique, and while she handles it more fluidly than he — the letters are more individuated, the style of each somewhat more appropriate to the particular correspondent — the narrative still remains leaden, often tedious. Looking forward some years to 1813, when Pride and Prejudice was first published, we can see how a master like Jane Austen handles similar material: the wooing of a bright, interesting woman by a dull, self-important cleric, her recognition that such a marriage would be spiritual death, and yet the consequences of refusing what looks like, socially speaking, the best offer the woman is likely to receive. Where Eliza Wharton's story drags, Elizabeth Bennett's sparkles, but then the Reverend J. Boyer, surely as pompous as Mr. Collins, is far less amusing and far more self-serving in his vanity and righteousness; moreover, Mr. Wharton can provide no ironic observations on his daughter's situation as does Mr. Bennett on his. And of course, there's no rescuer like Mr. Darcy to save the heroine and her family from ruin, only a destroyer like Peter Sanford to cause it. While the differences are, to a large extent, generically necessary (the comic as opposed to the sentimental), they are also motivated by the radically distinct social visions of Foster and Austen; for all its proclamations of openness and opportunity, American society is far more limiting and restrictive for women. It strips them of choice, just as it denies them a meaningful voice in their country's affairs, and even in their own.

Indeed, no difference here is finally more instructive than the major one between Elizabeth and Eliza: Austen's heroine combats her situation through brilliant and witty language, a play of sensibility that enables her to triumph over unfortunate, occasionally menacing circumstance, whereas all that Foste r can imagine for her protagonist is silence. Her letters ironically demonstrate a lack of creative choice. Eliza Wharton loses her voice or, perhaps more to the point, relinquishes it, but in either case circumstance and event triumph over her. Silence, as critics of the novel have argued, is an appropriate metaphor for a woman's lack of independent legal status in American -17- society; since she has no agency, why pretend that her words mean anything? But to yield the struggle, to accept powerlessness, is to permit the dominant culture not only to go unchallenged but also to take refuge once again in its supercilious moral standards. Eliza passively giving herself to her seducer, falling into sin and, inevitably, death, only reinforces the codes that Foster has in other ways tried to subvert. The novel itself sacrifices the cultural ground it might otherwise have claimed.

If Susanna Rowson was more successful in her social commentary — a point of some debate — it may very well have been because in Charlotte Temple (published in America in 1794) she abandoned the Richardsonian form (mercifully, only a few letters appear in the text) in favor of a third-person narrative, though one that she occasionally interrupts to speak in her own voice. It is that voice, however constrained it may be by her culture's suspicion of novel writing (she indicates in the preface her awareness of the novel's suspect nature), and bound though it still is to conventional morality (she advises her young readers to implore "heaven" to "keep [them] free from temptation"), that gives the novel its real interest, for we can hear, underneath the rather formal and even stilted language, her desire to break the bonds of women's cultural subservience, an inherited sphere of expectation that makes Charlotte Temple a prey to male predators like her seducer Montraville and his adviser Belcour. Addressing young women explicitly (perhaps the first time an American novel does so), Rowson warns against listening to the "voice of love" — the very voice women were culturally conditioned to await eagerly — since men, too, are products of their culture. Occasionally tempered by sympathy during the act, perhaps mitigated by remorse afterward, seduction is nevertheless a scenario of the empowered versus the marginalized, the sanctioned versus the disenfranchised, and women will inevitably suffer victimization until the social structure is reformed.

Rowson counsels resistance: men are "vile betrayer[s]," "monsters of seduction," and if they know the meaning of the word "honour" are undoubtedly too swayed by modern fashion and "refinement" to practice it. Forget "romance," she tells her readers (almost as if they were her charges), "no woman can be run away with contrary to her own inclination." But even though she expresses these feminist sen-18- timents and aligns herself with her audience, as if to say we must nurture each other rather than look toward a man for support, Rowson still cannot produce a text that itself resists the pieties and homilies of the culture it has been vilifying (the book actually concludes with the utterly banal biblical platitude that vice eventually leads to "misery and shame"). In the end it winds up promoting the values that cloak forms of (male) oppression; it authorizes the very authorities it has previously sought to displace. The "precepts of religion and virtue" vanish from the novel (if they were present in the first place) as quickly as Montraville when he has the opportunity to make an advantageous match, yet these become the tired ideals to which young women should aspire. If, after everything Montraville has done to disgrace and humiliate Charlotte, she can still declare her love for him, what kind of model has Rowson provided those readers whom she had previously roused to anger and indignation? Moreover, what kind of stability does the sentimental novel offer, when it itself is marked by such prevarication?

If the sentimental novel often failed because it could not sustain a coherent critique of American society, the picaresque often succeeded for the very same reason. This loose, baggy, disjointed narrative form, usually containing several different kinds of discourse, including philosophical reflection, travel essay, and political disquisition, was also perfectly suited for commentary on the politics of republicanism, which in the years following the Revolution, and especially in the time of Constitutional debates, could be highly factious. Cathy N. Davidson has convincingly argued this point, showing how the various and divergent voices of the American polis were sounded out by characters who traveled through cities, towns, and villages, engaging those whom they encountered in argument and debate. What often emerged was a tension — sometimes outright hostility — between Federalist and Anti-Federalist, privileged and common, those who supported the entrenched power and those who demanded its redistribution. The vociferous, highly charged (but implicit) arguments centered, above all, on the meaning of America and who were its rightful inheritors.

But the picaresque also had inherent weaknesses, the most glaring being an inconsistency in its point of view. It was often difficult, sometimes impossible, to tell where its author stood on the vital po-19- litical issues he (and it almost always was "he") was discussing. It was not until Mark Twain transformed the picaresque with the publication of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1884-85 that any kind of stability in tone and vision entered the form. If the journey down the Mississippi seemed random and unplotted, Twain's purposes were nevertheless highly focused. Moreover, with the dual portrait of Huck and Jim, Twain achieved a clarity and depth in character that no other picaresque novel had previously managed. Earlier versions of the genre may also have highlighted socially marginal figures, pitting them against representatives of mainstream society, yet none could maintain the satiric perspective while at the same time realizing the emotional depths of, and eliciting compassion for, their wandering protagonists. The potential for greatness had always been there; it took a great writer, of course, to realize it.

The most successful of the early picaresque novels, Hugh Henry Brackenridge's Modern Chivalry (published in irregular installments from 1792 to 1815) combines the best and the worst aspects of the genre. Concerning the latter, the narrative rambles incessantly, digresses willfully, pontificates frequently; moreover, the author interrupts, directly or in postscripts, to discuss both his career and his book (the very one we are reading), even quoting critical reviews of the first two volumes at the outset of the third (the advantage, perhaps, of publishing parts of a work at widely separate intervals). While these practices may seem like contemporary self-reflexiveness by our postmodern standards, they are merely distracting, since they apparently partake of no larger metafictional strategy; nothing, that is, holds the book together as a coherent whole. Concerning the best, however, Brackenridge creates two characters with charged comic energy, the educated and sophisticated Captain Farrago and his ignorant and coarse servant Teague O'Regan. The two have been compared to the classic fictional travelers Don Quixote and Sancho Panza (the novel itself suggests the likeness), but a more illuminating analogy would be the stage and television performers Abbott and Costello; like Abbott, Farrago relies on his superior reasoning ability, constantly offers advice and guidance, and is invariably ignored or, worse, foiled in his attempts to impose order on a chaotic scene. Like Costello, O'Regan depends on Farrago for assistance in difficult situations, always disregards his plea for moderation, and, though he is -20- the butt of the humor, winds up triumphing over the man of reason by becoming the choice of the common people. Had Brackenridge been a greater novelist (had he been Twain), he could have written a comic masterpiece.

What he has produced, however, is a book as contradictory and as confusing in its pronouncements and outlook as the early American Republic itself. Brackenridge cannot seem to decide between the aristocratic assumptions of Farrago and the populist impulses of O'Regan; while he shares Farrago's fear of the mob, for example, he apparently admires O'Regan's determination to rise in American society, even if he is unqualified for every position or office he seeks. If he seems dubious about the leveling tendencies of democracy, he also tends to reject the reactionary declarations and prejudiced views of an (often self-proclaimed) elite citizenry. Not surprisingly, Brackenridge shifts political allegiances in his book just as he did in his life, championing Federalism during the time of the Constitutional debates, then subsequently becoming an Anti-Federalist when government policies began to privilege land speculation at the expense of impoverished farmers. But, finally, the novelist seems unsure as to which version of the democratic system he supports, either total participatory democracy, or some limited form of democratic government where an enlightened leadership rules on behalf of a populace not quite intelligent and therefore trustworthy enough to govern itself. The equivocation may very well mirror the endless uncertainties of political life in the new nation, but it also weakens the already shaky foundations of the fledgling novel.

Perhaps Americans had the most success adapting the form of the novel that would seem to be the least suited to the open, expansive American landscape, the gothic, which depended for its effects on such feudal artifacts as intricately constructed castles and ruined abbeys, and such Old World types as evil barons and mad monks. But the gothic also specialized in such human foibles as superstition and delusion, as well as human anxieties over hidden corruption and uncertain, if not outrightly malign, motivation. The claustrophobic structures and mazelike pathways that tend to recur in these stories become metaphors for the distorted, haunted minds of the protagonists of these novels, characters whose respectable, seemingly normal outer lives mask savage, abnormal inner ones. The gothic thus be-21- came the perfect form for expressing the fears that American society, with its concomitant ideologies of liberalism and individualism, not only had continued the abuses of a hierarchical social structure but also had actually opened the way to even greater treacheries: selfmade, self-improved, self-confident, and self-determined men abusing power, subverting authority, undermining order.

No practitioner of the gothic was more attuned to these potential problems in American society than Charles Brockden Brown, and no American novelist exploited them more successfully than he did in several books from the late 1790s, including Wieland (1798), Ormond (1799), Arthur Mervyn (Part I, 1799; Part II, 1800), and Edgar Huntly (1799). In these experimental and daring, though flawed novels, Brown tested the limits of reason in a country willing to believe in its limitlessness, examined the darker and perhaps evil impulses of unchecked imagination, and explored the consequences of personality unloosed from its moorings in some form of stable, traditional community. Not surprisingly, given his interests, all four novels become fixated on violent disruption of a previously harmonious group of people, sometimes caused by an outside agent (Carwin in Wieland), sometimes by an internal one (Edgar Huntly himself). In each case, there is no refuge from the turbulence and confusion that results, no return to the fixed relations of things as they used to be. Drawing on the radical creeds, speculative philosophy, and psychological experimentation of his own time for the plots and metaphors of his novels, Brown introduced such ideas as ventriloquism, somnambulism, and spontaneous combustion into American fiction, suggesting the end of the once stable relationship between appearance and reality, and between the individual and society. Moreover, long before it became a fashionable critical notion, Brown posited the belief that the self was basically unknowable, indeterminate; the more we look for an inviolate order within, the more we discover the basic rule of fragmentation.

These ideas are most prevalent — especially the discovery of disorder within and the consequent inability to reconstruct an ordered self — in Brown's best novel, Wieland, which dramatizes, as Jay Fliegelman has argued, one of the most perplexing issues in the early republican period, the "conflicting claims of authority and liberty." The tension within Brown's narrator, Clara Wieland, is precisely be-22- tween these two mutually exclusive demands, represented by Henry Pleyel, the rationalist who eschews all other forms of knowledge, and Carwin, the man of passionate will who tests and manipulates Clara in order to destroy her faith in the rational side of her being, and by implication in Pleyel as well. (He also manages to ruin her reputation, by inference rather than act, in the mind of Pleyel, who essentially abandons her.) Thus, the authority of supreme reason wars with the license of unchecked liberty, the one constrained and controlled, the other raw and raging. Clara's crazed brother, Theodore, who in his pursuit of religious certainty kills his entire family (and would have added Clara to the list of victims were he not prevented by Carwin), illustrates not only the dangers of enthusiasm but also those of submitting too readily, too pleasurably, to the demands of a higher, more potent will. In other words, Theodore combines the excesses of both authority and liberty, and he must be eliminated. But his death brings no resolution to the essential conflict, and Clara, though she regains health at the end, never achieves self-knowledge. Brown's novel, compelling and powerful in its psychological undercurrents and social implications, ends irresolutely, thus weakly. Novelistically, Brown could not resolve the tensions; culturally, he could not solve the contradictions.

At the close of this period of the "early American novel," James Fenimore Cooper, in all probability America's first significant novelist, if not quite a genuine "cultural voice," produced a novel that indeed sought to reunify the spirit of a discordant nation. In The Spy (1821), Cooper concentrates on the issue of virtuous behavior in the Republic, and though his story is set in the Revolutionary era, he means the lesson to pertain to his own, which he saw threatened by the powerful forces of discord, emanating for the most part from a populace that had turned toward the pursuit of material satisfaction at the expense of national loyalty. Cooper illustrates his meaning through the symbolic structure of the novel, which centers on the Wharton family and the patriarch's attempt to preserve the sanctuary of his home in a time of crisis. The attempt is a futile one, for the elder Wharton, like Cooper's America, has conceived the task purely in material terms. As with the businessmen whom Cooper despised, money is Wharton's bottom line, dictating relationships as well as physical movement. The complicated plot turns on the fact that -23- Wharton has placed his family in a dangerous situation because he has refused to accept the moral responsibilities of citizenship.

Dispossessed as he thought he was from America, Cooper nevertheless writes from within a comfortable position in the cultural hierarchy, and his novel is, not surprisingly, a conservative one about preserving a sense of original virtue, located in the social structure as Cooper perceives it. That structure is in tatters, an idea suggested both by the "divided house" motif and the "neutral ground," the territory that, as it becomes the novel's dominant setting, represents post-Revolutionary America, with its bifurcated loyalties and shifting values. In its essence, it is a wilderness; it is fraught with conflicting passions and points of view, violence and disorder. "The law," Cooper writes, "was momentarily extinct in that particular district, and justice was administered subject to the bias of personal interests and the passions of the strongest." In addition to lawlessness, moral indifference defines the terrain. Thus, the land can only be set in order through the restoration of moral authority.

The problem with the novel — perhaps a mirror of the problem in American society as Cooper saw it — was to find a locus of that authority, and the best that Cooper can do is to invoke the archetypal father — the father of Founding Fathers — George Washington. Possessing both virtue and authority, Washington accomplishes the greater task of setting his lands in order by healing the divisions that have threatened their internal security. As the only legitimate paternal figure in the novel, he projects a sense of control that the other characters find reassuring. And when he is unable to act owing to military circumstance, he does not retreat from his sense of public duty but entrusts the task to his spy, Harvey Birch, who, by his disinterested deeds, extends the Father's virtue to the neutral ground. If Washington is Virtue incarnate, Birch is Selfless Action come to life, since his motives are clear: patriotism, not profit, has led him to sacrifice comfort, reputation, and future prospects of happiness for his country. In short, he is a saint, and when Washington smiles upon him he is beatified.

For Cooper, in a time of growing materialism, which would soon run rampant with the coming of industrialization, Harvey's selfless devotion was the single most important virtue Americans needed to practice if the Republic was to survive. But of course that was an -24- impossibility, since it had already vanished into myth and legend, signaled, though Cooper hardly means it that way, by Washington's very presence in the book. Cooper tells a great story, but unfortunately it is an irrelevant one. Whether America had ever enjoyed the golden moment of Revolutionary self-sacrifice and transcendent devotion to the ideals of the Fathers has been long debated by historians, and there will probably never be a definitive view on the subject. But again, it matters little in terms of Cooper's nostalgic vision, since in any case it would never come again. Ironically, Cooper moves the American novel forward by looking backward, for if he had one thing that all the others lacked, it was a consistent, fully realized, forcefully articulated vision of a reconstituted American society. If only all its citizens could be gods like George Washington, or even just angels like Harvey Birch.

To conclude, then, by returning to the beginning: as it turns out, an argument can be made for the existence of an "early American novel," though unless it accounts for the contradictions, inconsistencies, and instabilities in the genre as American writers adapted it, it is falsifying the achievement. Originality of design and form would only arrive with great romantic writers of the nineteenth century; an authentic American idiom and a genuine "cultural voice" would have to await Mark Twain's arrival on the novelistic scene. And the American novel would not truly become "American" until the politically disenfranchised and culturally dispossessed of American society were finally heard in the pages of our literature.

Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky

-25-

Autobiography and the Early Novel

Concepts of social value in autobiography existed for many centuries before the word was coined. In the Western tradition, the earliest known text in this genre, The Confessions of St. Augustine, written at the turn of the fourth to the fifth century, is only one of many that were accommodated under a variety of other names. These include Plato's seventh epistle in the fourth century B.C., the Essays of Michel de Montaigne in the latter half of the sixteenth century, and the Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 1760s. As legend has it, credit for the initial appearance of "autobiography" in the English language goes to Robert Southey, under whose name it made its debut in The Quarterly Review in 1809. In America, The Autobiography of Thomas Sheperd, the Celebrated Minister of Cambridge, New England (1830) was the first book to use the term in its title.

In contemporary studies of characterizations of autobiographical narrative, scholars like G. Thomas Couser (Altered Egos: Authority in American Autobiography [1989]) have noted the singular aspects of the word used to describe the self: its number, capitalization, and position as the only single-letter pronoun in the language. Moreover, there is its typographical likeness to the Roman numeral I, its phonemic identity with "eye," and its punning on the idea of a single point of view. Although its implied dominance, usually claimed by privileged racial and cultural groups, is now widely challenged by people outside of those groups, these singular qualities of the "I" -26- suggest its elevated status — an acknowledgment of the uniqueness and independent social standing of the first person.

In addition, many Americanists have observed a particular relationship between the nature of autobiographical discourse and texts like The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin that traditionally define the dominant American identity. Almost all such critics (including voices from the margins) agree that while autobiography is not unique to this country, the form embodies peculiar American characteristics. This idea finds reinforcement in the fact that, subsuming boundaries of race and sex, the genre has become the country's preeminent form of writing. Nor is this a recent phenomenon. As early as the October 1909 issue of Harper's Monthly Magazine, William Dean Howells, an autobiographer himself, and one of America's foremost novelists and literary critics of that age, spoke of autobiography as a "new form of literature," calling it the most "democratic province in the republic of letters." Of course, literary theories of democratic equality do not mitigate the disadvantages and sufferings of the daily lives of large numbers of Americans, but judging from the quantity of documents identified as autobiographies, it is not difficult to conclude that Howells's judgment was correct. For autobiography, in its valorization of individualism and its focus on the success story, has always been eminently suited to the dominant American temperament.

One of the attractions of autobiography for readers of popular literature is that, generally, Americans presume the absolute truthvalue of these texts and an authentic and direct contact with the authors through the written word. Such beliefs grant the form what Elizabeth Bruss described as "empirical first-person" authority, and set the genre of autobiography hierarchically apart from other forms of narrative discourse.

Perhaps for this reason as well as for our innate curiosity about the lives of the famous and the successful, from its beginnings narrative autobiography flourished in America. Euro-Americans began recording their experiences in the new land in the early seventeenth century, and in the closing years of the twentieth century they continue to do so in unprecedented numbers, as ethnic and other minority groups, formerly excluded from recognition in letters, make their voices heard through this medium. But even excluding these aggressive newcom-27- ers, by 1961, Louis Kaplan's A Bibliography of American Autobiographies listed more than 6000 titles recorded prior to 1945, and Mary Briscoe's American Autobiography, 1945–1980, adds 5000 titles to that list. In addition to the sheer numbers of individual selfwritten lives, these bibliographies demonstrate that the American autobiographical narrative accommodates itself to wide varieties of selfrepresentations — the conversion, captivity, criminal, slave, and travel narratives, ethnic, immigrant, colonial, and transcendental autobiographies, to name a small number of easily recognizable categories.

Interestingly, while writing-the-self began early in the country's history, the study of American narrative autobiography was slow in developing. In 1948, a book almost unnoticed by the literary establishment, Witnesses for Freedom: Negro Americans in Autobiography, by Rebecca Chalmers Barton, became the first full-length study of the genre. Barton's text, consisting of twenty-three textual portraits, with a foreword by Harlem Renaissance philosopher Alain Locke, included such figures as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Mary Church Terrell, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright. Sixteen years later, in 1964, The Examined Self: Benjamin Franklin, Henry Adams, Henry James, by Robert F. Sayre, appeared, and set the stage for what was soon to become a new and almost instantaneously flourishing field of intellectual inquiry. Today, a multiplicity of critical texts, as wide-ranging in methodologies and interpretive intent as the varying content of the narratives they explore, makes up this burgeoning body of knowledge. These studies constitute a revolutionary reassessment of the relationship between self-representation and other branches of narrative literature.

This revolution has been immensely aided during the second half of the twentieth century by the explosions in literary theory and cultural criticism that, among other things, have led academic critics of American autobiography to define the "I" and to call indiscriminate presumptions of truth-value in the genre into question. Even before this, scholars had discussed the position of autobiography as a hybrid of history and literature, and had come to interesting conclusions about the art of its narrative techniques. But in the new wave of criticism, scholars like Albert E. Stone, in Autobiographical Occasions and Original Acts (1982), advanced the idea of the autobio-28- graphical act as occupying "the frontiers of 'fact' and 'fiction,'" a viewpoint that helped to open up new avenues for destabilizing the once dominant "I." As Stone describes it, in straddling this frontier autobiography comprises a "literary as well as a historical activity which recreates psychic as well as social experience," simultaneously resisting complete appropriation by the disciplines to which it is connected. The richness of the autobiographical enterprise, he points out, rests in its blending of, and the tensions between, memory, reflection, and imagination. More recent studies in the genre have gone even further, as such works as Couser's Altered Egos, Paul John Eakin's Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention (1985), and Herbert Liebowitz's Fabricating Lives: Explorations in American Autobiography (1989) take advantage of poststructuralist discourse to further problematize the boundaries of the "I."

In his disputation of a fixed truth-value in autobiography, Couser takes issue with notions that the "I" is first (prior), personal (private), or singular (unique), a position earlier and more conventional critics (primarily white males on white male autobiography) claimed. Couser's view, buttressed by the scholarship of social psychologists, is that the self is not constructed in isolation but continually engages in complicity, negotiation, and collusion in its relationships with others. This point of view inscribes difference in identity and acknowledges a contextually variable self that, although integrated, need not embody harmonic unity. Furthermore, memory, which is unstable, plays such an important role in the construction of autobiography that it unsettles the ground on which the truth of a narrative rests. Assuming the validity of this theory, how do we assess the relationship between American autobiography and the American novel in their development? A brief survey of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American autobiography through the end of the Revolutionary War, followed by a look at the slave narrative and Native American autobiography in the nineteenth century, provides an outline of early patterns in the development of fictional elements in autobiography in this country.

The earliest Euro-Americans to face themselves in writing were explorers in search of New World adventure. Psychologically, these men were attuned to the idea of psychic transformations as a result -29- of their contacts with the Americas. The literature of the period, partly intended to attract additional settlers to the new exotic country, while descriptive of the physical characteristics of the new land and giving accounts of its inhabitants, speaks also to the effects that the environment had on these men. Among these early impulses to create an American self distinct from the one that came out of the old country are the accounts left us by Captain John Smith, which include A True Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents of Noate as Hath Hapned in Virginia (1608), A Description of New England (1616), The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles (1624), and The True Travels, Adventures, and Observations of Captaine John Smith (1630). One of the most well known events in this last-named text recounts Smith's capture by the Indians and his escape from death through the intervention of the princess Pocahontas. The singular importance of the story, in the context of the new "self," is the metaphorical rebirth of Smith who becomes, through Pocahontas's willingness to sacrifice her life to save him from the barbarousness of her people, the son of the Indian chief.

There is little doubt that John Smith met Pocahontas and her chieftain-father Powhatan. Among English settlers, however, the story of Smith's escape from death at the hands of the Indians was built on assumptions that as a white man he was superior to the natives, a superiority that Pocahontas and her father recognized. This belief was further reinforced by Pocahontas's subsequent marriage to another English settler. On the contrary, besides the fact that whites were killed by Indians previously — as well as subsequently — to Smith, therefore negating the idea that Indians believed in a theory of white superiority, recent anthropological evidence indicates that when Powhatan permitted Smith, through a ritual ceremony, to become a young "white" chief, he used him to help him (Powhatan) in his trade for European goods and to strengthen his power base. Smith's was clearly a romanticized version of the events intended to capture the imagination of others with interests similar to his own, to lure them to the American colonies. The intent might have accomplished its goal, but this fictionalized appropriation of the Pocahontas story, the first legend of Euro-American colonialization, set the stage for the subsequent denigration of Native American intelligence and humanity. -30-

The secular stories of explorers like Smith find counterparts in the conversion narratives and Puritan histories, such as those of William Bradford (History of Plimmoth Plantation [1650]) and Edward Johnson (Wonder-Working Providence of Sions Saviour in New England [1654]). Although accorded the status of autobiographies, these texts more accurately represent collective community biographies that give all credit for the European settlement of the country to Divine guidance and providence, and set the ground rules for individual participation in the community. The best-known Puritan autobiographies are the Diary of Samuel Sewall (1673–1729) and the Diary of Cotton Mather (1681–1724). Mather also authored Paterna (1688–1727), an instructional document intended for his son, and Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), a history of the Puritan New England experiment. Other well-known spiritual autobiographies of the eighteenth century include Jonathan Edwards's Personal Narrative (ca. 1739), the Quaker writings of Elizabeth Ashbridge and John Wolman, and A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682), the text that launched America's first unique autobiographical account: the Indian captivity narrative.

As documents that defined the boundaries of life and behavior in the Puritan community, American seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury spiritual narratives were mechanical in pattern and restricted in subject matter, and promoted the idea that their writers had the presence of grace in their experiences. Since conversion was not an issue, it was never questioned. Each text was a testimony to the effect that the experiences of its subject conformed to the patterns of feelings and conduct permitted within the confines of the Puritan ethic. It bears mentioning that Puritan spiritual autobiography was not exclusively confined to prose narrative. Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor, who also wrote short first-person prose statements, are among those who wrote poetry that falls within the boundaries of this genre.

In their historical and cultural contexts, from the late seventeenth through the middle of the eighteenth century, Indian captivity narratives occupied religious, propagandistic, and sentimental spaces in early American autobiography. The first ones tended to focus on the religious dimensions of captive experience, while later ones became a vehicle for promulgating white hatred of Native Americans and made -31- an argument for Indian removal. The Puritans, believing themselves God's chosen people on a mission to establish the New Zion on this continent, equated Native Americans with the devil, creatures for them to exterminate from the land in a righteous cause. Infusions of melodrama into captivity narratives in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries made them factually exaggerated sensational horror fictions. In The Indian Captivity Narrative: An American Genre (1984), Richard VanDerBeets notes that the compelling pattern in the Indian captivity narrative, regardless of emphasis, is of the Archetypal Hero on an initiation journey from Death to Rebirth. The narratives follow a pattern of the subject's Separation from his/her culture (symbolic death), Transformation (through ordeals that ensure the movement from ignorance to knowledge and maturity), and Return (symbolic rebirth). The focus in Mrs. Mary Rowlandson's narrative is on the religious dimensions of the genre, but the pattern held for all captivity narratives.

On February 10, 1676, Narragansett Indians raided the English settlement of Lancaster, Massachusetts, destroying the town, killing seventeen of her family members and friends, and taking Mary Rowlandson, wife of Lancaster's minister, Joseph Rowlandson (away in Boston at the time), and her three children captives. She was immediately separated from her two older children, ages ten and fourteen, while the youngest, six years old, having been wounded in the raid, died a week after the capture. For eleven weeks Mary Rowlandson lived and traveled with her captors, before she and her two children were released in exchange for Ł20.

In 1677 the Rowlandsons moved to Wethersfield, Connecticut. A year later Joseph Rowlandson died, and in another year Mary, having remarried, dropped out of public view. A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson appears to have been written in 1677, but was not published until 1682. Under the title The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, the narrative was an instant success. A True History established the pattern for the early texts in this tradition: a confirmation of the election of God's people, the piety of the captives, and the justification for Indian removal. Mary Rowlandson's narrative went through four editions in its first year, and twenty-three by 1828. To date, at least forty editions have appeared. -32-

A True History, a story intended to instruct rather than exploit the stereotype of the savage Indian, focuses on Christian affliction. On the superficial level, Rowlandson tells the story of her 150-mile journey with the Narragansetts, but it is the interior journey that holds our attention; the symbolic landscape more than the literal one; and the darkness of the forest that represents that of the soul when God turns his face away. For Rowlandson, her capture was a rupture in the pattern of the daily life of the Puritan mother and marked the loss of everything that gave meaning to her life. Although her Indians are "murtherous" captors, "merciless Heathen," and "a company of hellhounds," because she is a faithful Puritan she transcends that symbolic death by finding meaning in her afflictions. In this way she recreates herself, and in the process of transformation seeks to discover what failings led to her punishment. Her duty in captivity is to concentrate on submitting to God's will. Among other things she learns how to provide for herself. During this period, her voice in the text is that of a Christian in the wilderness crying out to God. Her release from captivity assures her of having gained redemption and the promise of salvation. The return is fully accomplished in the writing of her story.

Although admirable for the dignity that its author displays in the face of a terrible ordeal, this text does not inform readers of the author's personal reactions to her trials. Like all spiritual autobiography of its time, A True Story reveals more about the strength of Puritan culture than about the true characteristics of Mary Rowlandson. In a time when women led socially restricted lives, she told her story publicly because it was the end of a process, and those who were able to draw the prescribed lessons from such ordeals were obliged to pass them on to others for their moral instruction. In her words, "one principall ground of my setting forth these lines is to declare the Works of the Lord, and his wonderful power in carrying us along, preserving us in the Wilderness, while under the Enemies hand, and in returning us in safety again." Clearly, the narrative was not her story. Her place in the flow of events in eighteenth-century Puritanism was to stand still and wait on her Lord.

Another interesting autobiography of that time was The Journal of Madam Knight, by Sarah Kemble Knight, the only text of its kind in the American genre. Although written in 1704-5, it was not pub-

— 33-

lished until 1825. Acting in her own business interests, Knight describes with humor and bravado her arduous and even dangerous journey from Boston to New Haven at a time when women seldom traveled alone. Her story is one of self-confidence and nonconformity to conventions of her day. At the end of each day she made entries in her diary. These reveal inner resources that enabled her to cope with the obstacles she encountered. The trip took her exactly five months, including a winter spent with relatives in Connecticut. Knight was not the typical woman of her time, but she was also not alone in her independence from conventions that restricted women's lives.

Knight's journal is especially important because of how openly she expresses her fears, misgivings, and loneliness on the road. She was not always alone, however, for she hired guides and met other travelers in the places where she stayed. Although little is known about her outside of her journal, some critics believe that she wrote, not for publication, but for the amusement of close friends. Not unaware of the religious beliefs of her day, she appears to have had little concern about them, and her journal did not follow the pattern of the spiritual quest found in most diaries of her time. Only at the end of the journal, in her expression of gladness over returning home safely and finding warm welcomes from friends and loved ones, does she express gratitude to the "Great Benefactor" for giving his "unworthy handmaid" safe passage during her months abroad.

But if Knight was more secular than religious, she also took class distinctions seriously. A small-businesswoman, she was mindful of treating those of higher social standing than herself with deference while she was condescending in her treatment of country people, African Americans, Native Americans, and others of lower status. Her journal reveals a robustness of taste and a love of good stories. She records several of these. She was also a satirist who wrote in many voices, using the language of colloquial modes of expression, neoclassical diction, and contrasting genres, mixing poetry, dialogue, and fiction into her personal prose. Because of this journal, Knight has a prominent place in travel literature, and it establishes her as a satirist representing significant themes and character types in the tradition of American humor.

The single most well known and often-written-about eighteenth-34- eighteenth- American autobiography (frequently characterized as the bridge text between the eighteenth and the nineteenth century) is that of Benjamin Franklin (written between 1771 and 1790). For Franklin the man is the model American hero and patriot. Born in Boston in 1706 of humble Puritan parentage, he lived a life that was the stuff of national legend. In his teens, Franklin rejected the religion of his parents for Deism, then popular among eighteenth-century intellectuals. At age seventeen he ran away from Boston to Philadelphia, and soon went off to England. Back in Philadelphia in 1726, he did well as a printer, bought and reformed a newspapers, The Pennsylvania Gazette, opened his own stationer's shop, and became the public printer for the colony. Financial prosperity led him to involvement in local politics. He established a fire company, a lending library, the American Philosophical Society, and proposed an academy that later became the University of Pennsylvania. In 1748 he retired from business to spend his time in politics and science. In the latter field, his discoveries in electricity brought him international fame.

In the world of politics, Benjamin Franklin became a leading member of the Pennsylvania Assembly, and in 1757 he went to England to represent the Assembly in its complaints against the British. He returned to America in 1775 when the country was at war. His greatest fame came to him as a member of the Second Continental Congress and as America's minister to France. He was involved in working out the peace this country made with England after the war, and he signed the Treaty of Paris in 1782. Returning to America in 1785, as an elder statesman, he was a representative to the Constitutional Convention. By the time of his death in 1790, having transcended poverty, low birth, and limited education, he had become to many the embodiment of the dream that in America hard work, virtue, and respect for conventions were the keys to prosperity, independence, and happiness.

The Autobiography is Benjamin Franklin's most important written work. Notably, it was the first major text in American autobiography to break with the (Puritan) tradition of the spiritual narrative, and many claim it as the first truly American self-in-writing. Franklin wrote the first part (which, in his treatment of his Boston, early Philadelphia, and London life, resembles a picaresque novel) while in England in 1771; the second part (accounts of his library project and -35- his efforts at moral perfection) in France in 1784, after the Revolution; the third (a record of the 1730s through the 1750s) in America in 1788. The brief and incomplete fourth section (a memoir of London) was also written in America shortly before his death in 1790. This text was Franklin's interpretation of his life as the self-made man, the Franklin he constructed for the world to see. The writing of it was the making of that self in which the "I" took full control of its own destiny. Primarily, Franklin uses his autobiography to promote the classic tale of the poor but talented boy who, through hard work, ability, and learning from his mistakes, makes a success of his life. Addressing his son in the first section, in a voice wise, humorous, and tolerant, the older man juxtaposes age and youth, and provides advice for the younger.

But Franklin's autobiography, the exemplary American text, is not the true life story of Benjamin Franklin. As G. Thomas Couser notes, from the beginning Franklin describes his text as the second corrected "edition" of his life, suggesting that the "life" itself was the first edition, and a text at that. Under these circumstances, his writing of his life was equivalent to editing a book, and the "relation between narative and life, or history, is not between 'language' and the 'reality' to which it refers, but between one text and another that it revises." As such, Couser points out that it is impossible to look through the autobiography for the life and the self behind the text. All the reader has for certain is the character with which he begins the narrative: a literal man of letters invented by the autobiographer. For, as Robert F. Sayre concludes, Franklin was writing to and about himself, developing a correspondence between his past and his present. Through his rich imagination he was able to create roles for himself (such as the waif who arrives in Philadelphia) that turned the narrative into an adventure permitting him to live out a variety of identities.

Ironically, within the decade following his death, several inaccurate partial versions of The Autobiography appeared. The first full edition, edited by his grandson Temple Franklin, was published in 1818, but critics remain divided on its accuracy of representation. As some experts conclude, even now Franklin's narrative resists publication in a "truly authoritative text." Still, few would deny its -36- achievement: the art of its autobiographical impulse and Franklin's historical place as a master craftsman in the writing of public prose.

While seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European settlers in America created autobiographical narratives by way of the explorer, Indian captivity, travel, and spiritual narratives, and finally through Benjamin Franklin's secular model American life, little or nothing was made of the presence and conditions of Africans or African slaves in their roles in the nation's beginnings. Slave status was equivalent to nonpersonhood and placed its victims outside the boundaries of the rights and privileges expected and enjoyed by the white population. By 1760, however, black autobiography was born, launching the slave narrative as America's second unique form of self-writing. White collaborations with Native Americans in the as-told-to life stories were preempted by more than seventy years when, in 1762, the first black document in this genre appeared, the product of a white amanuensis and a black subject. Between 1760 and 1798, the Revolutionary era, the partial experiences of fifteen African Americans appeared in print, five of them (of which four were self-written) by former slaves seeking to establish identities separate from their earlier slave status, while the remainder were criminal confessions written down by interested whites shortly before the execution of these men. In many cases, editions of the stories of those attempting to create "other" than slave selves appeared in Ireland, England, and on the European continent, sometimes before their American publications. In To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (1986), William L. Andrews establishes the relationship between early slave narratives and American autobiography of that time.

In surveying this relationship, scholarship shows that at the beginning of the nineteenth century the former American colonies were settling into new nationhood as the Republic of the United States. The democratic state was grounded on the Declaration of Independence, which reinforced a national sense of individual rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Here was the ideal impetus toward autobiography. Few, if any, among those who found themselves leading the destiny of the new nation, or those enabled by its -37- new Constitution to participate in its progress, questioned the legitimacy of who automatically shared those rights and privileges, and who were excluded from that largesse and why. But if the country ignored the human dimensions of African American life, individually and collectively, African Americans, including slaves, did not internalize concepts of inferior human status to whites. From its eighteenth-century beginnings, the first one hundred years of African American autobiography is the story of women and men struggling to claim, in writing, for white readers, that they were human beings capable of telling the "truth" of their experiences. In this context, the black "I" and the white reader, with separate racial identities within the same culture, were forced toward a common reading of experience.

Slave narratives, the predominant genre in early African American writing, were the personal accounts of former slaves telling their own stories, first, in search of the psychological freedom that the bonds of physical slavery denied them prior to their escape from its shackles; and second, as propaganda weapons in the struggle for the abolition of that slavery. Information and reformation were the root motives driving their production. African Americans felt that moral and just whites, especially those in the North, needed to know, firsthand, the conditions of slavery, and to rise up to purge the country of its scourge. What the nation needed most, they would have said, was a mighty contingent of John Browns — white men and women willing to give their all for the honor of the democratic promises of the Constitution. While the most complex and personally interesting narratives in this tradition were written by their subjects, dozens of narratives were as-told-to life stories, generally mediated through the offices of white male amanuenses. Much scholarly debate on slave narratives focuses on the authenticity or lack of it of these latter, primarily on the editorial authority of the transcriber to compose, shape, and interpret the textual lives of the former slaves.

In addition to the slave narratives, spiritual autobiographies emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While escaped slaves condemned the "peculiar" institution by indicting its atrocities, spiritual narrators claimed selfhood by way of equal access to the love and forgiveness of a black-appropriated Christian God, which therefore negated any notions that they were nonpersons as -38- whites would have them believe. Like the slave narratives, the spiritual narratives compelled a revisionary reading of the collective American experience. Thus, the slave and spiritual narratives, secular and religious self-stories intended largely for white audiences, offered profound second readings of the American and African American experiences against prevailing white American racial perspectives. These personal accounts, dozens in number, recount, expose, appeal, and remember the ordeals of blackness in white America.

The most well known slave stories are Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845), and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself (1861), by Harriet Jacobs, and published originally under the name of Linda Brent. Both Douglass and Jacobs determined at an early age that the most important goal of their lives was to gain their freedom. To this end, both, overt rebels against the system, devoted their best efforts and eventually succeeded in liberating themselves from their much hated shackles.

Born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey on a Maryland plantation in 1818, as a slave, Douglass experienced both the harshness of the system and its most benevolent face. However, under all circumstances he refused to compromise his belief that the only acceptable condition of life was in securing his right as an autonomous human being. In 1838, while living in Baltimore, he escaped the South and changed his name. A few days later, in New York City, Douglass married Anna Murray, the free African American woman who had helped him to engineer his escape. The Douglasses lived together for almost four decades. They had two sons and two daughters. Anna was vital to his career but remained in his shadow for all their years together. She died in Washington, D.C., in 1882.

Although as an abolitionist speaker Douglass traveled extensively in the northern United States and Europe for more than twenty years, New Bedford, Massachusetts, was home to him for most of the time until the abolition of slavery. With the encouragement of William Lloyd Garrison, a leading white abolitionist whom he impressed with his articulateness on slavery, Douglass took to the abolitionist stump in 1841. In the years following, he dazzled audiences with his oratorical expertise. In 1845, Douglass, who learned to read and write surreptitiously while in slavery, published his first-person account of -39- slavery, Narrative, and in 1855 he brought out a second, My Bondage and My Freedom. He published a third autobiography, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, in 1881. Douglass held several government appointments after the abolition of slavery, including that of Assistant Secretary of the Commission of Inquiry to Santo Domingo (1871) and United States Marshal for the District of Columbia (1877). He died of a heart attack in Washington in 1895.

Narrative was an instant success. More than 30,000 copies were sold in Europe and the United States in the first year after its publication (4500 in the first five months). The story delineates Douglass's firsthand knowledge of his parentage and early life, his struggles toward selfhood within the slave system, the consequences of his overt rebelliousness, one failed attempt at escape, and, finally, his success in achieving his life's goal. While the book is now a classic of African American literature, Andrews observes that, among its other qualities, readers and critics laud this narrative for its declaration of independence in the author's interpretation of his life, Douglass's claims to freedom through his text, and his literary and rhetorical sophistication. Although the second narrative is longer and more detailed, and is written by a more accomplished man of letters — a successful journalist and orator — in this text, as Andrews notes, Douglass turned to exploring his complex relationship with his environment in his search for a new group identity. Douglass biographer Dickson J. Preston (Young Frederick Douglass: The Maryland Years [1986]) estimates that for every person who has read either My Bondage and My Freedom or Life and Times, 300 have read Narrative. Both Andrews and Preston subscribe to Douglass's manipulation of the "facts" of his story to achieve greater advantage in audience interest. To this end, Andrews emphasizes Douglass's use of artifice — especially he credits the inventiveness of Douglass's rhetorical style. So successful are these strategies, Andrews concludes, that the imagined, fabricated, or deliberately exaggerated events in Douglass's story are of little significance in comparison to the literary and political effectiveness of the text, even if they remain matters for historians to continue to probe.

Harriet Ann Jacobs was a contemporary of Frederick Douglass's, and like Douglass's narrative, her Incidents challenged the institution of slavery. Born in Edenton, North Carolina, in 1813, she enjoyed a -40- reasonably carefree early childhood, unlike Douglass, living with both of her parents and her brother, and having a loving grandmother nearby. This tranquillity was irreparably ruptured at age six when her mother died. But even then the conditions of her life changed only minimally. When she was twelve, however, the mistress who had treated her with kindness also died, and left her as a human legacy to her five-year-old niece. At that point Jacobs learned, to her great distress, that the bane of all slave women was their vulnerability to the sexual abuse of their masters. Soon after she moved into his household, her young mistress's father, a local doctor, began his sexual pursuit of her. The struggle between the two, what Jacobs describes as the "war of her life" — his determination to win her submission and her resolve never to become his victim — went on for many years, even after she escaped from the South in 1842.

In addition to depicting events in her childhood and the unwanted sexual attentions of her master, Jacobs's narrative details events of slave life in Edenton and surrounding communities; strategies she adopted to thwart the master's desire to conquer her; her deliberate decision to become the mother of two children by another white plantation owner and her escape from her master by hiding for seven years in a crawl space under the roof of her grandmother's house; her struggle to free her children; the existence of an antipatriarchal interracial community of women; her flight to freedom; and the events of her life in the North. While the whole narrative is an interesting and moving document, its most memorable passages focus on the sexual victimization of the slave woman and Jacobs's culminating analysis of the meaning of freedom.

Unlike Douglass, in her time Jacobs gained no fame for her story, perhaps because of the combination of its publication during the Civil War and the lesser attention women's narratives enjoyed than men's. Incidents rose to prominence in the late 1970s, in the wake of the rise of white and black feminism, and is now universally recognized as a text that is as important as Douglass's Narrative.

Straddling the slave narrative and nineteenth-century sentimental novel traditions, and mindful of the power of the "cult of True Womanhood," especially since the implied readers of her story were Northern white middle-class women, Jacobs scores a major achievement in her textual handling of the incidents surrounding her vul-41- nerability to the sexual tyranny of her former master and her willing participation in a miscegenational relationship. A black woman slave and a fallen woman, she presumes to speak to the white women of the North, the upholders of "piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity," through a rhetoric that invites them to join her in the struggle against the patriarchal domination of all women. Incidents was the first book by an African American woman in which the victim made her own plea against the sexual tyranny of her slave master, and as woman and slave Jacobs ably addresses the parallels between race and sex. Finally, in the culmination of her story, when, against her will, a white female friend purchases her freedom, Jacobs does an elegant feminist analysis of the meaning of freedom for women of color. She had insisted that, as a human being, she could not be bought or sold. Although she recognized the impulse of her friend to free her from further harassment by her then dead master's kin, she was offended and disappointed by the act of money changing hands for her.

Unlike Douglass's Narrative, the authenticity of Incidents was a subject of critical debate for a number of years. At least one historian initially claimed that while the central character may have been a fugitive from slavery, the narrative was probably false because the work was not credible. Much of the debate centered on the extent of the editorial role of white feminist Lydia Maria Child in its production (was this a fiction by Child?), the narrative's use of novelistic conventions like dialogue, and its literary sophistication. Years of research have now gone into locating the "facts" that prove that Harriet Jacobs was indeed a former slave from Edenton, that she was owned by a well-known physician of that town, and that she authored her own narrative.

However, two aspects of the narrative persist to make this a problematic text. One is Jacobs's use of the conventions of sentimental fiction, and the other, her pseudonym. While it is arguable that she used the first to create bridges with her white female readers-bridges that, for cultural reasons, it would have been impossible to build with traditional slave narrative conventions, the pseudonym, a purely literary device, is more difficult to explain. Even more confusing, I suggest, are the contradictions in the narrative's opening statement: -42- "Reader, be assured this narrative is no fiction…my adventures… are…strictly true…. [But] my descriptions fall short of the truth." Yet, like the pseudonym that protects the identity of the author by raising doubts regarding her authenticity, the statement is a camouflage that permits her more control over her narrative. With its novelistic techniques, its pseudonym, and the ambiguity in its declaration of contingent truth, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, as effective a text as Douglass's Narrative, sits squarely on the frontier of fact and fiction.

The first Native American to publish anything in America was Samson Occom, a Methodist missionary to the Indians, whose Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul (1772) was also the first Indian best-seller. Before that, Occom went to England to raise money for the Indian Charity School in Hanover, New Hampshire, which later became Dartmouth College. Native American authors in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries wrote sermons, protest literature, and tribal histories based on oral traditions for similar reasons that former African slaves wrote their autobiographies.

Egocentric individualism was not an aspect of Native American cultures before Europeans arrived on these shores, and autobiography took a long time to develop among the native peoples. Although Native Americans valued personal freedom, self-worth, and personal responsibility, personal autonomy was secondary to the welfare of the group. Even in autobiography, Indian first-person narratives do not probe the nature of the self in the text. Also, since no Indian culture, prior to the European coming, developed a phonetic alphabet, writing did not exist for them as we know it in Western culture. Experts like Arnold Krupat note that tribal writings took the form of "patterns worked in wampum belts, tatoos, [and] pictographs painted on animal skins." Within their cultures, Native Americans constructed their identities not as individuals but as persons in relationship to collective social units of which each person was only a part.

The early Indian forms with the closest resemblances to Western autobiographical narratives were stories and accounts of dreams or mystic experiences. Communicated orally, these included the exploits of war and stories of family events told to assembled audiences of the -43- tribes, among whom were some individuals other than the tellers likely to have been present during the events actually being told. Honors were won, not for the individual, but for the tribe.

In the Western tradition, written Native American autobiography was a nineteenth-century phenomenon and exists in two separate forms: Indian autobiographies that are collaborative efforts produced like the as-told-to slave narratives, with the Indian as the subject; and autobiographies by Indians, texts composed without the mediation of an editor or transcriber. The latter, of course, depended on the Indian's mastery of literacy. However, critics see both groups as bicultural texts that developed as a result of contact with a culture outside of the native one. Krupat tells us that each represents the subject's having sufficiently distanced her/himself from the native culture to be influenced by the "other," and in the case of autobiography written by Indians, to have gained the "other's" expertise to compose one's own story in a normative form.

Thus, written Indian autobiography comes out of the oral tradition in contact with Europeans. In Indian autobiography, oral narratives are committed to writing through separate processes: the ethnographic and the as-told-to stories. Both share oral origins and presume a non-Indian mediator, but the ethnographer, usually an anthropologist, collects materials for a different purpose than the editor of the as-told-to story. The first collects for the record — for information on customs, mores, practices, and rituals of special groups of people. The as-told-to editor, on the other hand, not only takes information for the record but also works with the subject to produce a full autobiographical narrative. The product of the collaboration is determined by the narrative skill of the subject and the editorial skills of the editor, especially those of literary techniques. Unlike the ethnographic record, in the as-told-to story it is expected that incidents are reordered especially for their telling and do not represent a mirror image of actual experience. Since imagination plays a vastly important role in the final story, the outcome resembles Western autobiography.

Within the constraints of the transformation of oral narratives to written autobiography, governing patterns within Indian narratives fall into three main categories: the captivity narrative of the early white settlers, the memoirs of Franklin, and the African American -44- slave narrative. Indians converted to Christianity were strongly influenced by the captivity narratives with their penchant for a public declaration of faith, spiritual development, and endurance. The memoirs of Franklin, with their emphasis on historic content and public event, were attractive to Indian males but almost unobservable in female narratives. Women tend to turn to day-to-day activities in their life stories, recording family and personal life along with their roles in preserving the traditions of their people. From the slave narrative tradition, another branch of the Indian personal narrative focuses on those experiences in which the subject develops from within a group identity and tells stories otherwise unknown to white readers, but to whom they are directed. From such stories this audience gains insight into the individual as well as into the society of that individual. Indian autobiography, the product of direct bicultural interaction, and autobiographies by Indians, the product of socialization and influence by several streams of American cultures outside of the Indian experience, may very well represent the most profound example of the complexity of narrative at the junction of history and literature, fiction and autobiography.

Clearly, autobiographers of all groups — seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British settlers in the new colonies, black slaves in the nineteenth-century South, Native Americans forced to give up their cultures and to adopt the ways of white men, as well as the twentieth-century American heterogeneous migrants from across the globe — use techniques of fiction to place discernible patterns on their lives in writing. In autobiography, there is always a necessary relationship between the life of the subject and the life in the text, but the separations between fact and fiction are not always clear. Literature is less chaotic and infinitely more manageable than life and so imagination more than absolute historical truth grounds the autobiographical text. Undeniably, autobiography is a fictional form — a realization that need not diminish its social, historical, or literary value. For autobiography and fiction together provide complementary strategies for the art of writing the self.

-45-

The Book Marketplace I

Between 1815 and 1860, Americans lived through a market revolution and saw the novel establish itself as the lucrative art form of middle-class civilization. Lines of force bound these two occurrences together, but the rates of change on both sides were uneven, and writers often had unstable and conflicting relations to the new social universe. Literary patterns, in works and in careers, did not materialize simply as an homologous reinscription of the cultural dominant, in this case the solidifying of market capitalism. Such resemblances certainly existed, and they illuminate the common contours of literature and society. But the novel's flowering represented a multivalent negotiation, involving dissent as well as agreement, with an ideological ascendancy that was itself far from monolithic. Gender complicated integration into historical change and set male and female authors on dissimilar trajectories of development. Women novelists, culturally identified with domesticity, produced functional narratives that evoked an older understanding of the literary, but they far outsold their more experimental male rivals and were paradoxically freed by their prescribed gender roles to accept commercial popularity. The men conceived of themselves as professionals and bequeathed a definition of the aesthetic as the antithesis both of exchange value and of the best-selling women. Male novelists ultimately found acceptance in a space that was neither the market nor the not-market, in the regulated economy of the academy.

A famous quotation and an obscure location: two coordinates -46- from which to map an economics of the antebellum novel. The quotation comes from Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, a book published in the same year as the Declaration of Independence, and occurs in the midst of remarks about the legal and medical professions. Lawyers and physicians, says Smith, enjoy a respectability and decency of recompense altogether foreign to "that unprosperous race of men commonly called men of letters."

The site, an imaginary one, appears in George Lippard's The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall, a Gothic thriller issued in ten pamphletlike installments in 1845, almost exactly seventy years after Smith's bible of free-market capitalism. Lippard is describing the setting of Monk Hall, a mansion originally erected on the outskirts of Philadelphia by "a wealthy foreigner, sometime previous to the Revolution," and long since overtaken in its isolation by the expanding metropolis. The ancient building now stands on a narrow street, "with a printing shop on one side and a stereotype foundry on the other," while rows of stores, offices, factories, and tenements stretch brokenly into the distance.

A cultural upheaval separates Smith's "unprosperous race of men" from Lippard's paperbound best-seller, with its image of a sensationalized house of fiction surrounded by the indices of technological and social change. Smith's phrasing accurately defines the state of authorship and literature in the early Republic. Indeed, his inclusion of writers in the same passage with lawyers and doctors indicates the extent to which the literary culture of Great Britain, however unremunerative, was in advance of that of the United States. The American novelist may have followed a profession, but it wasn't composing fiction: earning a livelihood from literature was an impossibility in this country until the 1820s. Only two novelists in the half-century before Irving and Cooper even aspired to professional status. The rest were men and women for whom novel writing remained, by choice and by necessity, a diversion, an amateur activity carried out in moments stolen from regular duties as jurists, clergymen, or educators. The two exceptions, Susanna Rowson and Charles Brockden Brown, labored valiantly to make letters self-supporting but could not overcome the economic and cultural obstacles. Brown, who was eventually forced by poverty to join his family's import business, found -47- novels so unprofitable that he not only stopped writing them but sought to repudiate his efforts in the genre, while Rowson had to turn to schoolteaching and textbooks to supplement the meager rewards of fiction.

Numerous reasons can be and have been adduced to account for these failures. Lippard, who dedicated The Quaker City to Brown as his great forerunner in fiction of the metropolis, identifies one impediment when he suggests that culture was the property of "wealthy foreigners." Inhabitants of the new nation, accustomed to associate art with Europe and with aristocratic patronage, looked abroad for their reading matter: over three-quarters of the books published in the United States before the 1820s were of English origin. The copyright law adopted by Congress in 1790 denied protection to these works in an ill-conceived attempt to aid native letters. The paradoxical result of the law was that American printers naturally preferred to pirate foreign novels than to gamble on American ones, whose authors would have to be compensated. The few American works of fiction that made it into print — barely ninety between 1789 and 1820, or an average of just three a year — stood little chance of posting a profit. Books were costly to produce and often priced beyond the means of ordinary readers. Publishing was localized and distribution hampered by the lack of adequate transportation. And Americans, according to contemporaries, faced too many pressing tasks to turn their attention to literature. Building a nation, settling the wilderness, and acquiring a competence all took priority over cultivating the arts. Nor was republican ideology, the dominant creed of the Revolutionary era, nurturant of fiction. Its subordination of personal interest to the community placed it at odds with the novel's focus on the appetitive subject. Brown's titles point to the dissonance: his six novels are named for individuals. He summed up the plight of the early fiction writer: "Book-making…is the dullest of all trades, and the utmost that any American can look for, in his native country, is to be re-imbursed for his unavoidable expenses."

Brown's words were prophetic in one respect: he spoke of literature not as a pastime but as a trade. Over the next fifty years, as the United States transformed itself into a market society, writing and publishing assumed the character of a business. The parallel development was anything but fortuitous: Adam Smith's economics har-48- bored the corrective to his own, and Brown's, negative assessment of the writer's plight. An agricultural people lacking a cultivated class of aristocrats could not have a thriving literary culture, nor the prospect of professional authorship, without an exponential increase in the "wealth of the nation." The War of 1812 set in motion an economic "takeoff" that shifted into high gear in the 1840s and 1850s, the decades not just of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville but of Lippard, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Susan Warner. Some changes — for example, the modernizing of production and distribution — were primarily material, but deeper structural affinities tied together the growth of commerce and industry and the maturation of the literary calling. Not only did the marketplace create the requisite conditions for art, it shaped the capacity for reception and determined, or rather produced, the novel's dominance of American literature. But the commercial order's power, though immense, was never total. The narrative of how the American novel became a commodity, of how we get from Brown's Wieland (1797) to The Quaker City, is a story both of the artist's implication in the marketplace and of his or her resistance to its values.

Technological advances and unprecedented population growth laid the foundations for a national market for printed material. The mechanization of printing and improvements in papermaking and binding meant that books could be manufactured in greater volume and more cheaply than ever before. (Lippard, in his description of Monk Hall, singles out the recent technology of the stereotype, an inexpensive duplicate plate, introduced in 1813, that permitted multiple copies of a work to be printed simultaneously.) Canals, turnpikes, and railroads facilitated interchange between distant geographic regions and diminished the obstacles to distribution. The flood of immigrants and the high native birthrate combined to double population every twenty-five years and to ensure a huge potential audience for books. Thanks to the common school system, the United States at mid-century claimed the largest literate public in history, with about 90 percent of the adult whites able to read and write (the figure was slightly higher for males than for females).

Economic arrangements had an instrumental role in turning these once abstemious men and women into devourers of fiction. As the subsistence orientation of the past yielded to commercial and then -49- industrial production, Americans as a people grew more affluent and had more disposable income to spend on entertainment. The divorce between home and work brought about by the rise of offices and factories particularly favored the consumption of light literature (that is, novels as opposed to history, politics, or theology). Middle-class women, who had traditionally gravitated to fiction because of its attention to female concerns (as in the seduction and courtship novels of the eighteenth century), were no longer involved in household manufacture and enjoyed more free time in which to read. The domestic sphere became identified with relaxation and culture; libraries entered middle-class residences; and men of all classes began to bring home newspapers and periodicals, which regularly serialized works of fiction or published entire novels as low-priced supplements.

Changes in ideology and the organization of social life further contributed to the triumph of the novel. The entrenchment of market capitalism was accompanied by an altered perception of the relationship between the self and the community. Republicanism, with its privileging of the common good, yielded to liberalism, which elevates the particular person and maintains, in the version developed by Adam Smith, that the general welfare is enhanced by the pursuit of private interest. This inversion of priorities meshes with the novel's historic emphasis on the individual. The clarifying of boundaries between residence and outer world also lessened the sway of communalism. The public realm — magistrates, clergy, and the like — had once exercised authority over family matters. (Hawthorne fictionalizes this older habit of public supervision in The Scarlet Letter [1850], where the Puritan magistrates regard it as their duty to oversee Hester's upbringing of Pearl.) As the family and the larger social order drew apart, the home emerged as the enclave of privacy and interiority. The public sphere appeared increasingly remote from personal life and hence from the concerns of art. The American novel largely ceased to take interest in public affairs, or rather took interest in them, as in the case of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), by personalizing political issues and seeking to read them under the sign of the home. There is no antebellum Modern Chivalry (1792–1815), Hugh Henry Brackenridge's multivolume satire of civic foibles. Nor is there anything comparable to A History of New York (1809), Washington Irving's comic masterpiece that deflates the public realm in laughter. -50-

There are, however, many fictions that replicate the split between household and labor — or, to phrase it somewhat differently, that sort themselves along the gender lines beginning to prevail in the society as a whole. Antebellum literary culture bifurcates into the novel of female domesticity and the novel of masculine adventure and camaraderie. As long ago as 1923, in his Studies in Classic American Literature, D. H. Lawrence noticed the pattern of male bonding on the margins that has since been taken as constitutive of the romance genre. The convention should be seen not so much as a flight from social existence as the refraction of an experience that growing numbers of American men were undergoing by mid-century, as they left their families on a daily basis to work alongside other men in banks, commercial enterprises, and factories. The male novel is noteworthy not merely for its distancing from the domestic zone but also for its immersion in the details and lexicon of work. Melville's fictions are among the most memorable on this score, from the early Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850), through Moby-Dick (1851), to the ironic reversal of Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853), where the eponymous protagonist's singularity consists precisely in his refusal to do his job.

Masculine novels help to create the work patterns of modern society. As James Fenimore Cooper among others understood, printed literature erodes traditional economic structures (such as the apprenticeship system) by preserving and circulating information that was once hoarded by craftsmen and passed on selectively from older men, often fathers, to younger ones. In The Last of the Mohicans (1826), the legendary woodsman Natty Bumppo harangues against the "black marks" on the page for their power to undermine respect for the wisdom of age. Like mechanized production, male fictions render the father/master obsolete in that they teem with technological information and can double as how-to manuals. They construct the unconnected individuals they depict. Popular books of the era offer instruction in the secret of surviving the wilderness (Cooper, William Gilmore Simms, Robert Montgomery Bird's Nick of the Woods [1837]); the mysterious metropolis (Lippard, Poe's detective stories featuring C. Auguste Dupin, George Thompson's New-York Life [1849]); or at sea (Melville, Cooper's nautical novels, Poe's Narrative of A. Gordon Pym [1837-38]). -51-

Nineteenth-century sentimental novels eschew the depiction of male labor but expatiate lovingly on the work carried out in the home. This emphasis divides sentimental fiction from the seduction tales popular a generation earlier, before the separation of spheres gave domestic life its feminized coloring. Neither Rowson's Charlotte Temple (1794), the early Republic's best-selling novel, nor Hannah Foster's The Coquette (1797), which did nearly as well, shows the heroine doing chores around the house. These were not activities eighteenth-century women saw as defining their nature. The bestsellers of the pre-Civil War era tell a different story, and the chapters in Uncle Tom's Cabin that memorialize Rachel Halliday's homemaking skills are exemplary of the change. In Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1850), the heroine Ellen Montgomery has to master her aversion to housework to prove her mastery over herself. But mostly what Ellen does is to read books and write. The activity of authorship is one commercial enterprise that, being performed in the middle-class home, turns up time and again in novels both by women and by men. Melville's Pierre Glendinning and Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall meet on this terrain if nowhere else.

Of course the gendering of fictional subgenres always admitted of exceptions, just as the barrier between the home and the economic arena was never impermeable. Domestic fictions were composed by men and adventure narratives by women. Ann Stephens wrote the first volume published in the Beadle series of "dime novels," lurid tales of bloodshed that actually sold for as little as a nickel. And Hawthorne's books incorporate elements from both genres. The pages in The House of the Seven Gables (1851) describing Phoebe's facility at cooking, cleaning, and gardening rival anything in women's literature for sentimental effusion.

Rationalization of the book trade was fundamental to the novel's discursive preeminence. Publishers moved swiftly to take advantage of the changed environment — or rather, the category of the "publisher" in the modern sense came into existence as venturesome persons seized the opportunity for profits. In the eighteenth century, the writer had arranged the manufacturing of his or her works and paid the printer or bookseller a commission to distribute them. Over half the country's fiction had originated in relatively small communities like Poughkeepsie, New York, or Windsor, Vermont, and had come -52- from local printers who published notices and newspapers as well as books. By the 1850s, the proportion of local imprints had declined to under 10 percent. Centralization replaced dispersal as large and wellcapitalized firms arose in the rapidly growing northeastern cities of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. Harper Bros., Putnam's, and other publisher-entrepreneurs specializing in books now monopolized the production of fiction. These concerns relieved authors of the risks of publication (while also reducing the author's share of the possible profits) and asserted total control over the business end of literature. They took charge of all commercial responsibilities, from buying paper and overseeing printing to merchandizing the finished product.

The new houses, backed by the financial resources to promote and disseminate their wares, inaugurated the mass marketing of written culture. They made literary works generally available and affordable and dispelled the aristocratic aura of books by turning out inexpensive series under the title of "libraries." Two classics of the American Renaissance appeared in Wiley and Putnam's Library of American Books: Poe's Tales (1845), which sold for 50 cents, and a twovolume, paper-covered edition of Hawthorne's Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), priced at $1.00 the set. Fifty years earlier, when wages were far lower, American novels had sold for about twice as much. Advertising emerged as an integral part of the literary scene, an essential tool for informing far-flung consumers about the latest publication and stimulating interest in buying. Promotional campaigns included announcements in newspapers, excerpts and blurbs in magazines, posters in bookstores, lecture tours, and inflated reports of sales figures (on the reasonable assumption that people will want to read a book liked by other people). Brown had tried to generate publicity by sending a copy of Wieland to Thomas Jefferson with a covering letter asking the third President for a plug. (Jefferson ignored him.) Antebellum publishers eliminated the element of chance and routinized the practice of "puffing," or planting favorable reviews and notices by writers who were often in the publisher's employ.

Under the market regime, works by Americans shed their reputation as money losers. Publishers welcomed home-grown manuscripts because they knew that a successful book could sell more than enough copies to recoup the cost of royalties. The output of native -53- novels surged accordingly, as writers, publishers, and booksellers scrambled to keep pace with demand. One hundred twenty-eight fictions by Americans appeared in the 1820s, or forty more than in the first three decades of the nation's existence. The number tripled in the 1830s, and then jumped again in the 1840s to eight hundred — almost thirty times the yearly average of the early Republic. Buyers snapped up the most popular of these works in quantities that kept rising until the figures peaked in the forties and fifties. The Last of the Mohicans qualified as a best-seller in 1826 with 5750 copies in circulation. The Quaker City, in contrast, sold 60,000 copies in 1845 and 30,000 in each of the next five years; the total of over 200,000 made Lippard's exposé the best-selling American novel before Uncle Tom's Cabin. Stowe's antislavery saga outdid that aggregate in the single year of 1852, and thereafter sales escalated; estimates of total copies purchased before the Civil War range as high as five million. While Stowe's figures were exceptional, other domestic novelists conquered the reading public too, with Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall (1855) logging sales of 55,000 and Maria Cummins's The Lamplighter (1854) exceeding 40,000 within eight weeks.

The South did not participate in these statistical marvels. The fate of literature below the Mason-Dixon line inverted the experience of the North, as if to underline the close connection between freemarket capitalism and the flourishing of native fiction. Thomas Jefferson, the country's leading eighteenth-century man of letters, was a Virginian who practiced authorship as a gentlemanly avocation. In the nineteenth century, as the rest of the nation modernized, an anachronistic understanding of the arts as nonprofessional persisted in the South to the detriment of the area's culture. The South lost its literary luster and didn't regain comparable distinction until the novels of William Faulkner. The problem, of course, was slavery: its expansion committed the region to an agrarian economy, retarded the growth of industry and cities, and had the inevitable consequence of devaluing all forms of labor. The South failed to nourish literature, said the North Carolinian abolitionist Hinton Helper, because it lacked a modern system of production. Its authors "have their books printed on Northern paper, with Northern types, by Northern artizans, stitched, bound, and made ready for the market by Northern -54- industry" — and, added Helper, the books found the vast majority of their readers in the North.

Literary supremacy decamped for the bustling commercial centers the South never had. The area's major fiction writer, Edgar Allan Poe, served a stint in Richmond as a magazine editor before fleeing for the more congenial cultural climes of Philadelphia and New York. The most prolific novelist, William Gilmore Simms, was clubbed the "Southern Cooper" but never attracted a large enough Southern readership to approach Cooper's financial independence. Although he chronicled regional history and mores, Simms remained dependent on Northern royalties and lecture tours. The principal outlet for the Southwestern humorists was a periodical edited and published in New York by William T. Porter, The Spirit of the Times. And the major Southern novel written before the Civil War, Uncle Tom's Cabin, was the work of a Northern woman and bore the imprint of a Boston publisher.

The African American novelist struggled under far greater disadvantages than the Southerner. Nearly all African Americans were in bondage, and those who gained or were born into freedom had little access to education. A minute pool of possible authors faced an audience problem unknown to whites. Free African Americans numbered barely a quarter million, or about 2 percent of the North's population in 1860, and few among these despised and impoverished people had sufficient leisure time or money to expend on novels. A readership of sympathetic whites failed to materialize. So formidable were the hindrances that just four novels by African Americans reached print before the Civil War. Only Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859) was published in book form in the antebellum United States. Martin Delany's Blake; or, The Huts of America (1859-62) appeared serially in two African American periodicals but had to wait until the 1960s to achieve publication on its own. The other novels, William Wells Brown's Clotel; or, The President's Daughter (1853) and Frank J. Webb's The Garies and Their Friends (1857), were issued in London with British imprints.

Unlike the typical slave narrative, which appeared under white (abolitionist) sponsorship and was introduced by white testimony to -55- its authenticity, these novels make few concessions to the sensibilities of white readers. The Garies and Their Friends details the racial hypocrisy of Northerners; Blake advocates African American separatism and refers to whites as "devils"; and Clotel broaches the scandal of Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and rumored father of two mulatto daughters who are sold into slavery during the narrative. Our Nig, easily the strongest of the novels, refuses to honor the conventions of African American publication. Wilson consigns white testimonials to the back of the book and excoriates abolitionists "who didn't want slaves at the South, nor niggers in their own houses, North." Her novel received not a single American review and didn't sell enough copies to keep its author from the almshouse.

Such works make abundantly clear how stifling the antebellum marketplace could be to unwelcome ideas and unpopular voices. White buyers needed to be conciliated before they would agree to patronize African American artists. In Our Nig Wilson thematizes the prohibition against African American self-advocacy: the efforts of her protagonist Frado to make herself heard are repeatedly frustrated by whites, who find her words too discomforting to listen to and try to muzzle her. Frado has her mouth stuffed with a towel and a block of wood; her mistress, Mrs. Bellmont, threatens to cut out her tongue to prevent her from "tale-bearing." Written from the perspective of a mulatto servant, Our Nig paints a relentlessly bleak picture of race and class relations in the North. The book flaunts its unsalability by debunking the middle-class domestic scene that Stowe and other female abolitionists mobilized against slavery. The family for Wilson is not a stronghold of emancipatory affect; it is a plantation or factory where Nig suffers brutal mistreatment from other women. No other antebellum novel by a woman, white or African American, places itself so far outside the expectations of the feminine reading public.

Although white authors had a much easier time of it, not all of them, even in the North, fared well now that literature was a trade. In general, one can divide the novelists of the 1840s and 1850s into three groupings: the small circle of men who over the course of the next hundred years came to constitute the canon of national literature; the domestic or sentimental women; and the quasi journalists -56- like Lippard, most of them male, whose narratives of urban violence and sexual titillation shaped a sensationalized popular culture. These three groupings constituted the first generation of Americans able to view storytelling realistically as a career, a vocation that promised a decent livelihood and held out the prospect, for the lucky few, of real wealth. Least is known about the purveyors of sensationalism. Their paper-covered pamphlet novels, hawked on street corners or sold through the mails (until the U.S. Post Office withdrew their permits to ship at inexpensive newspaper rates), proved both popular and highly ephemeral.

Our concern here lies with the canonical and domestic writers, the major artists of the period and figures who often seemed to occupy antipodal cultural spheres. Rivals for the respectable, middle-class audience, they differed in subject matter, popular appeal, and understanding of the literary calling. Yet a series of paradoxes and inversions joined them and pointed to a broader area of agreement. In varying degrees, each school internalized but also set itself against the social and economic universe identified with Adam Smith. Although the women enjoyed immense commercial success and frankly viewed their writing as a lucrative form of employment, American culture — and they themselves — defined womanhood as the antithesis of acquisitiveness. They retained traditional ideas of the novel as committed to service; for most of them, the self-expressive dimension of art was subsidiary to the doing of good. The men, on the other hand, sold modestly or poorly in their lifetimes and felt estranged from the market, yet they forged an individualized conception of literature as "high" art, as a separate realm analogous to the newly theorized category of the economic.

Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, fiction writers who came of age in the 1820s, prefigured the allegiances and contradictions of their canonical successors. Of the important male artists active in the mid-nineteenth century, only these two were born in the previous century and attained adulthood before the War of 1812. Performing a complex dance of equivocation, they advanced into the commercialized future while preserving essential characteristics from the preprofessional, foreign-dominated past. The two men were regarded in their own time as imitators of British models: Cooper as the American Scott, Irving as the American Lamb. Irving's international -57- hit, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-20), is suffused with Anglophilia and announces its superiority to the market in its title. Throughout his career, Irving maintained a public image of himself as a gentleman of letters, not a professional; he was forever seeking sinecures in government and cultivating the patronage of great men. Cooper's more abrasive personality ruled out supplication, but he too had an air of being above commercial considerations. His maiden foray into literature, Precaution (1820), apes English courtship novels and exudes a reverence for the aristocracy that persists throughout his American works, eventually to reach a pinnacle of shrillness in his last fiction, The Ways of the Hour (1850). Cooper's quarrels with publishers and reviewers, and his growing disdain for American democracy, hurt his sales and amounted to a declaration of independence from the reading public.

In spite of their reluctance, these two pioneers gave American fiction respectability and put it on a profitable footing. Irving and Cooper exemplified the man of letters as a man of business, their very aloofness from materialism endowing their works with an aura of highly marketable exclusivity. Gentlemanly aversion to exchange underwrote their appeal to a readership eager to acquire literary culture. Both men turned to writing careers after their families suffered financial embarrassment in the Depression of 1819. Both capitalized on the improved conditions of the 1820s to convert literature into an instrument of economic mobility. Cooper's Americanization of the historical romance in The Spy (1821) and The Pioneers (1822) took the country by storm, and his keen grasp of his audience's desires made him the Republic's first true professional author, popular enough, at least for a time, to live comfortably on his literary earnings. Irving excelled at recycling his successes: Bracebridge Hall (1822) was clubbed his "English Sketch Book," The Alhambra (1832) his "Spanish Sketch Book." But it was the retailing of the original Sketch Book that first demonstrated his formidable commercial sense. The collection was issued serially in seven pamphlets and sold for the astronomical figure of $5.37 1/2 the set. Five thousand Americans, according to William Charvat, paid the price, and Irving netted close to $10,000 before the sketches appeared as a separate book.

Irving and Cooper made vital if fitful contributions to the reconfiguring of literature as "a world elsewhere." Irving's History of New -58- York struck a blow against the cultural prestige of history writing, a genre esteemed by Americans for its pedagogic authority. In The Sketch Book, he portrays the artist as a dreamy idler, someone whose power to entertain has nothing to do with usefulness. Cooper, after making obeisances to patriotism in The Spy, claimed to have written The Pioneers "exclusively to please myself." The book's exquisite descriptions of natural scenery suggest an ambition to craft a selfsufficient "art" novel, although this aspiration has to contend against Cooper's usual wish to lecture his readers. Neither author proved consistent in absolving his work from "some definite moral purpose" (a phrase Hawthorne uses ironically in the preface to The House of the Seven Gables). Irving reverted to writing the kinds of histories he once mocked, while Cooper's didactic impulses, except in the Leatherstocking tales (and sometimes there too), almost invariably got the better of his artistic judgment.

The sporadic suspension of extrinsic purpose in Irving and Cooper not only marked them off from contemporaneous women novelists like Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Lydia Maria Child; it also declared their difference from an earlier cultural formation. In the eighteenth century, American novels had marched under the banner of social utility. They had not fully differentiated themselves from functional discourses such as sermons and patriotic histories. Something like a "moral economy," in which the corporate welfare took precedence over personal interests, had prevailed in cultural life much as it had in material affairs. The nineteenth century saw the gradual eclipsing of this definition of the aesthetic. Relative indifference to the moral or instructional obligation of fiction, an attitude appearing in embryo in the post-Revolutionary period, became a hallmark — perhaps even the distinguishing quality — of the imaginative writing that was subsequently judged canonical.

Literature's ostensible autonomy — its relatively recent status, that is, as a discrete discourse, governed by its own rules and values and emancipated from extraliterary functions — may appear to distance the artwork from a money-oriented social order; and, as I shall argue later, such an ideal did express genuine disaffection from the commercial spirit. But the disembedding of the literary was also part of a larger social trend toward specialization and individuation. The adherents of free-market thought interpreted the economic as a zone -59- apart from morality, theology, and government. Although autonomous art was in advance of mid-century economic practice, fiction's casting free from didacticism reproduced as cultural agenda the same structural imperative that informed liberal individualism. Art now presented itself as a circumscribed terrain analogous to the scene of commerce and no less secure from intrusions by church and state (or piety and politics). The new aesthetic ideology's privileging of disinterestedness bespoke not transhistorical "purity" but rather rootedness in a modernizing capitalist society and affiliation with Adam Smith's increasingly influential defense of the market as a selfregulating sphere that should be "let alone."

Domestic fiction, on the other hand, affirmed connectedness over autonomy. Sentimental discourse retained a pedagogic responsibility that harmonized with the nineteenth-century perception of women as moral guardians. The "cult of true womanhood" venerated selfless, nurturant beings who found fulfillment in serving others. Confined to the home, spared the compromises and pressures of the public world, women were thought to possess a purity and spirituality that ideally suited them for their tasks as wives and mothers. Fiction writing, like nursing or teaching the very young, was an acceptable activity so long as it conformed to the conventional female role. Woman's charge was to edify and improve her audience, only secondarily to strive for the perfection of art. This didactic strain linked literary domesticity to the republican past. Sentimental novels, though avidly consumed by antebellum readers, were residual in their entanglement with moral purpose and their loyalty to the communitarian emphases of the early Republic.

Although they too oscillated in their adjustments to the marketplace, Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville broke far more decisively than Irving and Cooper with the previous cultural configuration. The three major fiction writers of the antebellum canon raised native letters to a par with foreign models. No one seriously thought of Melville as the American Marryat, and Hawthorne and Poe reversed the transatlantic flow of influence, Hawthorne impressing George Eliot among others, and Poe inspiring a long line of French poets beginning with Charles Baudelaire. Poe considered himself a consummate professional: he devoted all his energies to literature and never held a job other than as a writer, editor, lecturer, or free-lance journalist. -60-

Melville, who came from a patrician family fallen on hard times (as did Poe and Hawthorne), looked to the novel as a way of regaining affluence and social position. He could be extremely calculating in his dealings with the reading public, deleting anticlerical passages from Typee, for example, in order to avoid offending popular taste. At times Melville spoke of the commodity status of his books with a candor and absence of illusion more often found among the domestic and sensational writers. He described Redburn and White-Jacket as "two jobs, which I have done for money — being forced to it, as other men are to sawing wood."

Hawthorne, more than any other author of the period, came to personify American literature's maturation. He was a direct beneficiary of the commercializing of publishing: the shrewd Boston editorpublisher, James T. Fields, persuaded him to expand a long manuscript tale of adultery among the Puritans into a full-length novel. Hawthorne had endured years of obscure and ill-paid story writing, and Fields signed up The Scarlet Letter with a promise of an initial printing of 2500 copies and a royalty of 15 percent. The publisher's network of friendly reviewers acclaimed the book, a second edition was needed within days, and Hawthorne had his first (modest) commercial success. Prodded by Fields, who urged him to capitalize on his sudden popularity, Hawthorne embarked on a flurry of activity such as he never again approached. He revised and reissued several collections of tales, wrote two books of mythology for children, and completed two more full-length novels, all in the space of three years. He never quite duplicated his earlier success, but Fields's tireless advocacy of his canonization eventually elevated the novelist to the rank of "classic" author, the leading exhibit in the newly erected national pantheon.

But sales during one's lifetime matter to a writer too, as much or more than posthumous recognition, and in this area Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville all suffered repeated disappointments. Poe's literary professionalism vied with his aristocratic disdain for the common reader, and his occasional dream of suiting "at once the popular and the critical taste" fell dismally short of realization. For the metaphysical treatise Eureka (1848), the book he regarded as the culmination of his life's work, he predicted that a first printing of 50,000 would be necessary; an indifferent public slowly purchased 750 copies. A year -61- after this fiasco, Poe died impoverished in a Baltimore hospital, as if driven to actualize the (partial) self-portrait he cultivated — in tales, poems, and poses for daguerreotypes — as haunted, antibourgeois artist. Hawthorne, less histrionic in his patrician reserve, was more illat-ease with the exactions of the market. Having begun his career by publishing anonymously, he remained tormented by the violations of privacy demanded by fame. He simply could not sustain his commercial viability and kept trying to flee dependence on the reading public for the greater security of government patronage. (In this, he resembled Washington Irving.) Though he was dismissed from the Salem Custom House, the strategy ultimately paid off: his appointment as consul at Liverpool — a reward for writing the campaign biography of his friend Franklin Pierce — brought Hawthorne more money than all his works of fiction combined.

Melville engaged in a lengthy quarrel with the marketplace that he finally resolved, much like Hawthorne, only by removing himself from its domain. In 1866, while still in his forties, he took a position in the New York Custom House (ironic refuge from trade!) and never again wrote fiction for a living. This was a fate Melville provoked as well as had thrust upon him. In a famous series of letters to Hawthorne, he declared his unwillingness to accommodate his talent to the popular taste. "What I feel most moved to write," he told the older novelist, "that is banned — it will not sell. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot." Melville's books, early and late, bristle with mistrust of, not to say belligerence toward, the middle-class reader; resentment breaks out into rage in the semiautobiographical Pierre (1852), where the narrator rails against the public, and the protagonist, a writer, commits murder and incest. In his disaffection, Melville echoed his frustrated predecessor, Charles Brockden Brown. He complained in 1851:

Other male novelists blamed their misfortunes on their female competitors. In a now notorious outburst, Hawthorne vented his spleen at the "scribbling women" whose books sold by the hundred -62- thousand and drove more deserving literature (he meant his own) from the market. Canonical writers regularly depict intellectual women as unnatural and textualize the wish to vanquish them, either by silencing or verbal usurpation. A conspicuous case of fantasy fulfillment occurs at the outset of The Scarlet Letter, when Hester Prynne, plainly a type of the female artist, stands in the Boston marketplace and vows never to speak in public. In The Blithedale Romance (1852) Hawthorne stills Zenobia's voice more ruthlessly by drowning her; Priscilla's utterances require no such violence because her public performances are orchestrated by a man. Poe's Ligeia, a woman so erudite that the male narrator abases himself before her "infinite supremacy," expires mysteriously and then returns from the dead with a bandage wound about her mouth. One woman who repaid these hostile gestures with disparagements of male narcissism was Fanny Fern, sister of the critic N. P. Willis and an author whose pugnacious spirit won over even Hawthorne. In her roman à clef, Ruth Hall, Fern caricatures her brother as a self-regarding poseur whose own works are ghostwritten. Willis is said to resent his sister's success because he "wants to be the only genius in the family."

Fern's novel tells the story of a woman writer who unabashedly regards literature as a trade and sets out, with single-minded determination, to win its financial prizes. The contrast to Melville's portrayal of the artist in Pierre could not be more pronounced. Melville's hero, who has been dispossessed of his inheritance, embarks on a literary career ostensibly to support his "family," but, more important, he writes in order to express profound truths about society and man. He loathes commercialism, composes a work far too radical for his publishers, and, thoroughly alienated from his dreams of literary greatness, ends up as a suicide. Fern's text reorders Melville's priorities. After Ruth Hall's husband dies, leaving her penniless, and she has to send a daughter to live with relatives, she decides to try her hand at authorship. She writes to make money so that she can restore her family, and she exults in the "market-value" of her sketches because the demand for them enables her to enter the "port of Independence." Ruth wants her pieces to affect and inspire others, but she thinks of herself above all as "a regular business woman" whose writings secure the wherewithal to cover "shoeless feet" and buy "a little medicine, or a warmer shawl." -63-

Pierre of course was atypical in his extremism, but Fern's version of the female author was representative: most sentimental novelists turned to literature for quite practical reasons and adopted a businesslike attitude toward writing. As Nina Baym puts it in her study of the women, they "conceptualized authorship as a profession rather than a calling, as work and not art." This overstates the case in that it elides the ambivalence many literary domestics felt about appearing in public or even signing their names to their books. Fern's heroine hides behind the androgynous pseudonym of "Floy," and she says that no woman can publicly defend herself from unfair reviews without doing "violence to her womanly nature." But the women seem to have experienced little of the alienation from their audience that beset the men. They saw their role as satisfying their readers' expectations and were largely untroubled by the contradiction, so bitter to Melville, between artistic urges and popular acceptance. Need to provide for one's family justified commercialism. "I am compelled to turn my brains to gold and to sell them to the highest bidder," said Caroline Lee Hentz, author of several best-sellers including Linda (1850). Hentz had no hesitation about carrying out such alchemy after her husband was incapacitated by illness. Stowe and Warner became entrepreneurs of the pen because of similar circumstances: the real or imaginary invalidism of Stowe's husband, and the worsening economic situation of Warner's father, who had a history of bad investments. Authorship, it should be remembered, was one of the few professions open to middle-class women in the antebellum period. Little wonder that so many embraced the literary marketplace: it offered prestige, good money, and unmatched range of influence, rewards far beyond those afforded by needlework and schoolteaching.

But aiming for, and achieving, material success did not produce liberal individualists. Commercial groundbreakers, the women remained troubled by conflicts over commercialism peculiar to their gender. Women were supposed to preserve their purity by refraining from the struggles of the marketplace, and Ruth Hall, for all her business acumen, turns over the management of her affairs to the editor John Walter, a gentleman-protector who addresses her fraternally as "Sister Ruth." What Hall did in fiction, Catharine Maria Sedgwick did in fact: she let her brothers handle all negotiations with -64- her publishers. "Our men are sufficiently moneymaking," asserted Sarah Hale, novelist and influential editor of Godey's Lady's Book. "Let us keep our women and children from the contagion as long as possible." Legal statute seconded popular thought in quarantining women, especially married women, from financial matters. Harriet Beecher Stowe's husband Calvin signed the royalty agreement for Uncle Tom's Cabin because married women couldn't sign contracts and didn't possess control over their earnings. Stowe was one of several female novelists who felt uneasy about the time and energy demanded by authorship. That composing fiction took place in the home merely exacerbated the distress such activity could cause. Wasn't the home the place where one cared for one's husband and children, and didn't the work in progress steal time from more urgent duties?

Carrying the requirement to be useful into the novel, women writers rejected the commercial age's tendency toward categorical differentiation and affirmation of the self. Stowe, who had no peer in either sales or profits, disavowed the authorship of Uncle Tom's Cabin, protesting on numerous occasions, "I did not write that book," and "the story made itself." Other women took more credit for their accomplishments, but the instinct to repress personal goals and deny unique capabilities was widely shared. All appealed to higher purposes, whether responsibility to humanity or service to God. The pleasure of exercising one's talent and basking in applause had to be coupled with the duty of instruction; the novel shared this trust with nonliterary utterances. Even Fern voiced the wish, in a didactic note to the reader, that her book would "fan into a flame, in some tired heart, the fading embers of hope." Sedgwick, like Irving and Cooper born in the eighteenth century, voiced traditional fastidiousness about the self-exposure of print. What emboldened her to write, she told a correspondent, was "the consciousness of a moral purpose." In Warner's case, the religious motive was so strong that she alternated works of fiction with homiletic tales and glosses on the Scriptures.

The background to Stowe's great book dramatizes some of the paradoxes common to domestic fiction. Her motives were at once familial, economic, and selfless. The financially straitened Stowes badly needed income from literature, and the royalties from Uncle Tom's Cabin exceeded $10,000 in the first nine months of sales -65- alone. But the catalyst for writing was moral outrage at the Fugitive Slave Act; Stowe conceived of her novel as a pulpit from which to rouse readers and convert them to antislavery. She deplored the evil of trafficking in human beings, but about the benefits of selling a book "favorable to the development…of Christian brotherhood" she had no qualms. The goal of succeeding for monetary reasons intersected with the desire to better the lives of others: the more books in circulation, the more people influenced for good.

Against this notion of literature as socially constructive, Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville turned the novel into a proto-modernist art form, self-contained and increasingly self-referential. Undoubtedly pushed in this direction by lack of sales, the men were already moving toward aesthetic disentanglement, encoding in their narratives and theoretical pronouncements the impulse to specialize ascendant elsewhere in market culture. Hawthorne, perhaps the best-known spokesman for the canonical viewpoint, termed his fictions "romances" and defined them, in contradistinction to the novel, as taking place in "a Neutral Territory" removed from the actual world. His preface to The House of the Seven Gables problematizes the injunction that the work of literature should inculcate a moral. Questioning whether romances teach anything, Hawthorne says that the truth of fiction "is never any truer, and seldom any more evident, at the last page than at the first." Renunciation of advocacy pervades The Blithedale Romance. Published in the same year as Uncle Tom's Cabin, the book, in its prefatory disclaimer, underscores the divergence between the canon and a sentimental literature resolved to better society. The utopian community at Brook Farm, Hawthorne insists, is "altogether incidental" — a mere backdrop — to the action, and the story has not "the slightest pretensions to…elicit a conclusion, favorable or otherwise, in respect to socialism."

Poe and Melville were evolving toward the same position of disinterestedness. In The Fall of the House of Usher (1839), Poe imagines the artist as a hypersensitive being isolated from everyday reality, a creator of imageless pictures and self-reflexive songs. Poe's critical ruminations champion autonomous literature, and his appeal to Baudelaire was as a precocious proponent of art pour l'art. His essay on "The Poetic Principle" inveighs against "the heresy of The Didactic" and extols the "poem written solely for the poem's sake." -66-

Melville's work engages more directly with the issues of his time — among other topics, he wrote on slavery, class, imperialism, and the destruction of the Native American — but the ever-present ironies and ambiguities dissipate external purpose. Melville's fictions awaken awareness of social injustice but leave the reader with no thought of changing things. (In this regard, he is Stowe's opposite, more so even than Hawthorne.) For Melville, the writer was a teller of Truth (invariably capitalized) who had privileged access to perceptions too terrible for common consumption; he had to smuggle his meaning to the select few while concealing it from the multitude.

If the movement toward literary autonomy shared a structure of thought with free-market economics, that movement also generated values opposed to the regimen of capitalism. The canonical writers' modernist orientation espoused a version of professionalism that located itself outside the commercial world. Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville developed occupational ideals different in significant ways from the practical vocational outlook of the domestic novelists, for whom the confirmation of the common reader in sales was a relatively unambiguous gauge of success. The canonical ethic took the form it did as a deliberate act of self-definition against the contrary example of the women. The three male writers simultaneously wanted to demarcate themselves from their female rivals and to associate their practice of authorship with other professions that were emerging or undergoing rationalization during this era. Medicine, law, and teaching, occupations from which women were usually barred (except at the lower levels of teaching), were establishing more stringent requirements to enter the field and stricter standards of practice within it.

These changing fields, as they proceeded to specialize over the course of the century, stressed their dissimilarity from entrepreneurial pursuits governed by profit and loss. The new professionals came to place special emphasis on expertise in one's endeavor. They were comparatively insulated from the market — many collected a fee set by custom or the profession rather than a salary — and skillfulness assumed a value for them distinguishable from the income they received. Of course they wanted to be well paid, but what made them professionals was their sense of integrity and ability in performing a technical service, and what confirmed their professional identity was -67- the recognition of their merit by others in the field. In the egalitarian Jacksonian years, licensing laws and other attempts to restrict entry encountered popular resistance; nevertheless, the trend toward disciplinary rigor was irreversible. The professional ideal may have derived some of its prestige from the older, slowly disappearing tradition of artisanal handicrafts, which mandated a long period of apprenticeship before mastering a trade. The ideal can also be seen as a prefigurement of Thorstein Veblen's principle of workmanship, the devotion to excellence that Veblen attributed to the twentieth-century engineer and that he hoped would topple a system of production in which quality was sacrificed to profit.

But whatever its provenance and filiations — and Veblen clearly overestimated its potential to subvert — there is no doubt that for the canonical authors the professional ethic represented an alternative to the reign of commerce. An element of mystification entered into this, since the novelist, unlike the physician or lawyer, depended directly on sales for his income. But professionalism valorized extramonetary goals and conferred some of the aristocratic prestige, though little of the immediate market appeal, that "gentleman" supplied for Irving and Cooper. Melville was explicit on the disjunction between popularity and professional standards. "Try to get a living by the Truth — and go to the Soup Societies," he exclaimed, and he interpreted audience acceptance as a sign of artistic ineptitude. "Hawthorne and His Mosses," the impassioned essay Melville wrote to celebrate his fellow craftsman, spurns the public's plaudits as "strong presumptive evidence of mediocrity." For the meritorious writer, Melville argues, what counts is not the market but the appreciation of other literary professionals, including trained readers, who can grasp the complex messages encrypted within the multilayered text. A call for "close reading" informs this tribute, one hundred years before the New Criticism revolutionized the study of literature in university English departments. Melville's correspondence with Hawthorne is similarly dominated by his sense of their being practitioners of an exacting discipline, bound together by dedication to the highest standards of art. In this spirit of appreciative collegiality, he inscribed Moby-Dick to his brother novelist "In Token of My Admiration for His Genius."

Hawthorne was made uncomfortable by the degree of Melville's -68- adulation, but he too thought of himself as a professional in an esoteric specialty demanding training and skill. For a dozen years after his graduation from college, he lived in his mother's house in Salem and applied himself to mastering the art of fiction. Reclusiveness was at work here, but so was a commitment to the kind of rigorous apprenticeship becoming less common in manual crafts and more frequent in mental occupations. Few writers from the antebellum period brooded so obsessively on the character and mechanics of their calling. Like the masculine tales of his contemporaries, Hawthorne's works abound in detailed information about an arduous task. They are primers imparting instruction on the materials, "laws," and composition of the romance. While Ruth Hall is also a how-to manual for aspiring women authors, in Fern's case the advice deals not with the process of composition but rather with the best strategies for placing one's manuscript and coping with editors and publishers.

Poe shared Hawthorne's preoccupation with technique and agreed that the making of literature was a profession as distinct as medicine or law. Finding favor with the mass public, he stated in a review of Sedgwick, "has nothing to do with literature proper." And by "literature proper," Poe meant a self-conscious art pruned of everything that was not literature, an art obedient to its own regulations and explainable on its own terms. Like Hawthorne, he invited readers into his laboratory and allowed them to glimpse the creative process. "The Philosophy of Composition" describes how he selected the topic, determined the length, and achieved the effect of his poem "The Raven" — a palpably fraudulent account that says more about the pressure to professionalize than about the text's actual preparation.

For Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, the writer's vocation crystallized as a counterpoise to the articulation of literary domesticity. The three men defined their callings as artists in opposition to the sentimental novelists. Hawthorne endlessly denominated the romance as a species of storytelling liberated from the close notation of domestic manners, thereby proclaiming the form's distance from the fictions of his female compatriots. In his censure of the scribbling women, he grumbled that he had no prospect of success while "their trash" monopolized the public taste, and added that he "should be ashamed of [himself] if [he] did succeed." Melville's Pierre, resolved to astound -69- the world with a tale of truth, shows his seriousness by repudiating the feminized sentimentality of his juvenilia. And Poe, in his account of "How to Write a Blackwood Article," ridicules as mindless the female authors whose contributions fill the journals of the day. To the canonical figures, the domestic novelists may have stood for the unaesthetic past, a time when native culture had not yet found its voice, or they may have symbolized the materialistic, utilitarian present; but the fact remains that the men could not have formulated their professional identity without the alternative model represented by the women. Literary professionalism as a distancing from the market, as an elevation of calling and competence over profitability, was the creation of white male fiction writers reacting against the commercial triumphs of the feminine novel.

Adam Smith had believed that men of letters were less well compensated than physicians and lawyers because the field of literature was overstocked: the more restrictive a profession, the more highly rewarded its members. Despite their efforts to distinguish themselves from their contemporaries, Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville failed to attain financial parity with elite practitioners of medicine and law; in fact, their forbidding standards of professionalism impaired their marketability. But in the long run, membership in a select club did reap economic benefits. Canonization transformed Hawthorne into a belated best-seller, available to the nineteenth-century reader in inexpensive school texts and imposing, clothbound editions of his collected works. Poe and Melville had a longer wait, but they too gained the ultimate in literary exclusivity: the status, and commercial longevity, of national classics.

A series of concluding ironies arises from this peculiarity of cultural history, final complications in the three men's shifting relation to the economics of authorship. Outsold by the more popular women while they were alive, the canonical novelists turned out to have greater staying power in the marketplace after their deaths. They owed their posthumous success not to the triumph of laissez faire but rather to the support of the emergent literary establishment. Whether or not their works possess greater artistic value, what raised Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville above their compatriots was the intervention on their behalf of fellow male professionals — the publishers, critics, and teachers who overruled the market by reprinting their books, -70- promoting their reputations, and assigning them in courses. The novelists who created the aesthetic as a discrete entity, a literary realm parallel to Smith's self-righting economy, achieved immortality through a form of cultural subvention or "welfare." The visible hand of professional authority was needed to rescue the self-sufficient novel from popular disfavor and to convert antebellum remainders into the enduring best-sellers of American literature.

Michael T. Gilmore

-71-

The Romance

Perhaps no literary term has been more descried, analyzed, and debated during recent decades than the term "Romance." Such eminent critics of American literature as Lionel Trilling and Richard Chase have identified its characteristics, contrasted them with those of the novel, and offered a beguiling paradigm focusing our attention on the achievement of Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and (especially) Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville. But consensus has not rested easy: although such studies as those of Joel Porte and Richard Brodhead refined our sense of romance elements in specific texts, David H. Hirsch and Nicolaus Mills — among others — have balked at the idea of an autonomous genre called the romance and at what seemed to them fuzzy distinctions between narrative forms. Aware of the confusion wrought by evolving perspectives and critical fashions, Michael Davitt Bell has surveyed "the development of American Romance" with perceptive authority as a way of coming to see what happens in narrative when the romance sacrifices (as it does) relation to the quotidian world. And such recent assessments of American fiction as those of Edgar A. Dryden, Robert Levine, and Steven C. Sheer have inquired into the provenance and function of the romance with a fresh sense of purpose. On one thing most parties would agree: the persistent dialogue over the nature of the romance suggests its vital, albeit elusive and ambiguous, importance.

By common consent, the crucial text for discussing the nature of -72- the romance in American fiction comes from the preface to Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables (1851). "When a writer calls his work a Romance," Hawthorne writes, "it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume, had he professed to be writing a Novel." The novel, he goes on to say, "is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course" of human experience; the romance, while it must adhere to the truth of the human heart, offers a greater freedom of presentation: the writer may manage the "atmospherical medium" so as to "bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture." The writer of romance, that is, has the latitude to adjust or refract reality, to fashion what we might call a subjunctive world of fiction different in kind from the socially structured world in which we live but implicated, I would add, in its desires and fears.

Hawthorne was not alone in making such a distinction between the romance and the novel. Nor was the distinction invented by American writers. Both William Congreve and the gothic storyteller Clara Reeve characterized the romance as dealing with the wondrous and unusual and the novel as depicting events of a familiar nature, Congreve in the preface to his otherwise-forgotten Incognita (1692), Reeve in The Progress of Romance (1795). In a preface to the revised edition of The Yemassee (1853), Hawthorne's Southern contemporary William Gilmore Simms made an elaborate case for the romance as the modern substitute for the epic. Important for Simms, as for Hawthorne, is the fact that the romance allows an extravagance of presentation: rather than subjecting "itself to what is known, or even what is probable, it grasps at the possible."

Despite the tendency of some nineteenth-century reviewers to use the terms romance and novel interchangeably (as Nina Baym demonstrates in her study of reviews and readers), Hawthorne could and did assume an established distinction between the two kinds of fiction in his preface to Seven Gables. Later descriptions of the romance as an identifiable kind of narrative support the idea of breaking away from the commonplace as a fundamental characteristic. Having already declared his affinity for the romance in Mardi (1849), Melville came to think of fiction itself as expansive, replete with wonder: "It -73- is with fiction as with religion," he wrote in The Confidence-Man (1857); "it should present another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie." The metaphor of a "tie" brings to mind Henry James's well-known analogy of "the balloon of experience" in his preface to the New York edition of The American (1909). The balloon, according to James, carries us into a world of imagination; but it is tethered to the earth by "a rope of remarkable length" that locates us and assures us where we are. If the rope is cut, "we are at large and unrelated." Ever concerned with technique, James concludes that "the art of the romancer" is to cut the cable undetected, with "insidious" craft. James's balloon analogy has long been a favorite among students of the romance. But his preface to The American offers an equally provocative and even more precise description of the form. James explicitly disavows the popular idea of the strange and the far as crucial aspects of the romance; they simply represent the unknown, which the increasing range of our experience may convert to the known. Nor is a romantic temperament in a character basic to this kind of narrative (while Emma Bovary is a romantic, "nothing less resembles a romance" than Flaubert's Madame Bovary). The romance, he goes on to say, explores a reality that "we never can directly know," no matter our resolve. It "deals" with a special kind of experience — and here we come to the essence of James's definition — "experience liberated, so to speak; experience disengaged, disembroiled, disencumbered, exempt from the conditions that we usually know to attach to it" by way of social context.

What emerges from this assemblage of definitions is a sense of the romance as an enabling theory of narrative equipped with memorable and facilitating metaphors. What comes from the theory is a mode of fiction that presents extravagance and courts the "disengaged" (in James's term), a fiction of intensity that feeds on caricature and seeks to confront the absolute. The consequence is a diverse set of narratives, gothic, magical, and psychological (frequently tending toward the allegorical and symbolic), unparalleled as expressive vehicles of revenge. In the work of Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville, one finds achievement of high and diverse order but none more eloquent than in studies of revenge empowered by the narrative energies of romance. -74-

Throughout his twenty years of writing tales before the publication of The Scarlet Letter (1850), Hawthorne worked tentatively and at times clumsily to release the imagination for the purposes of his art. He spent a career finding ways to enter what he once called "the kingdom of possibilities." In the context of a society suspicious of imaginative indulgence, his commitment to the imagination was cautious, even intermittent: what he called "the hot, hard practical life of America" never ceased to threaten his creative efforts. Out of his difficulties he wrote a number of tales dramatizing the plight of the imagination in a hostile environment — among them, "The Artist of the Beautiful" (1844), and "The Snow-Image" (1850) — and developed strategies of shaping and presentation that did much to define the nature of the romance as he saw it. (It may be well to note that although the tale is not simply a short form of the romance, any more than the short story is an abbreviated form of the novel, it does deal with the kind of expansive reality typically found in the romance. In his tales as in his romances, Hawthorne worked to set the reader apart from what he continually called the "actual" world.)

Each of Hawthorne's major romances contains a preface explaining that his kind of fiction requires a domain of its own if it is to flourish. In "The Custom-House" sketch, which serves as an introduction to The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne formulates the metaphor of "a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairyland, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other." In the preface to The House of the Seven Gables, as we have seen, he explains that the latitude of fashion and material afforded by the romance is congenial to his imagination. His concern in The Blithedale Romance (1852) is "to establish a theatre, a little removed from the highway of ordinary travel," where his characters will not be exposed to direct comparison "with the actual events of real lives." The difficulty of creating fiction without access to a "Faery Land," he admits, "has always pressed heavily" upon him. The same perspective evokes his statement concerning the romance and America in the preface to The Marble Faun (1860). Italy, he explains, afforded him "a sort of poetic or fairy precinct, where actualities would not be so terribly insisted upon, as they are, and must needs be, in America." -75-

As much as any of his prefatory statements, Hawthorne's sketch "The Haunted Mind" (1835) suggests the nature of the "neutral ground" and its relation to disencumbered experience. In this sketch Hawthorne writes of an hour of the night when one wakes suddenly into a world of scattered dreams. It is a time out of time when yesterday has vanished and tomorrow has not yet emerged, "an intermediate space where the business of life does not intrude." The sketch epitomizes such familiar features of Hawthorne's fiction as inner guilt and the comforting associations of the hearth. Its larger significance, however, lies in its brooding dramatization of the conditions of his fiction. Hawthorne's subject is the haunted mind, but the setting of the sketch is a kind of neutral ground — out of time, between yesterday and tomorrow. Somewhere behind or below is the haunted mind (Hawthorne's metaphor for the free-floating imagination), which yields up vivid and uncontrolled images never yet encumbered or engaged by social institutions. As they emerge onto the neutral ground (here, the "intermediate space"), they confront actually existing things (furniture in the room, embers on the hearth) that swim into cognition: and the meeting of the two provides the potential for art.

To juxtapose the mental drama of "The Haunted Mind" with a different set of instructions for confronting the terrors of the night gives us a surer view of the context in which Hawthorne lived and wrote. James Beattie was a Scottish moral philosopher, one of the Common Sense school that had widespread significance on American educators, clerics, and writers during the first half of the nineteenth century. In his Dissertations Moral and Critical (1783), Beattie describes what he considers the most preferable way of dealing with "imaginary terrors" of the night. "By the glimmering of the moon," he writes, "I have once and again beheld at midnight, the exact form of a man or woman, sitting silent and motionless by my bedside. Had I hid my head, without daring to look the apparition in the face, I should have passed the night in horror, and risen in the morning with the persuasion of having seen a ghost." But determined to discover "the truth, I discovered that it was nothing more than the accidental disposition of my clothes upon a chair." On another occasion Beattie was alarmed to see "by the faint light of the dawn, a coffin laid out between my bed and the window…. I set myself to examine it, and -76- found it was only a stream of yellowish light, falling in a particular manner upon the floor, from between the window-curtains."

Here we have two ways of treating the imagination at its most exacerbated. James Beattie has no place for the haunted mind: he moves rationally to discover the facts of perception so that the actual world — what he would call the world of truth — is reestablished around him. In "The Haunted Mind," however, Hawthorne's narrator sustains a series of images within the mind. Retreating (head under the covers) from the wintry world outside, he speculates on the luxury of living forever like an oyster in a shell, then envisions the dead lying in their "narrow coffins." After entertaining such "hideous" fantasies, the narrator finally welcomes the sight of embers on the hearth because it balances the terrors of the haunted mind. What Beattie would banish as a matter of course (in the name of common sense), Hawthorne nourishes "on the borders of sleep and wakefulness" (in the name of imaginative life).

In the terms established by Hawthorne in "The Haunted Mind," failure to achieve the necessary balance of the imaginary and the actual may come about in one of two ways. In an overpowering wakefulness, in the midst of the insistence on empirical fact that James Beattie espouses, the products of the haunted mind are subjected to skeptical attack, rationalized, as it were, out of existence, rendered powerless. Conversely, blocked away from actually existing things and left to itself, the haunted mind could only contemplate its own nightmare visions in an empty and narcissistic exercise. The lurking danger — in this sketch, in Hawthorne's tales and romances, and in his meditations on art and life — is that the imaginative and the actual worlds might somehow be cut off from each other, leaving each in an impoverished and untenable position. When, in the final year of his life, he lamented that "The Present, the Immediate, the Actual, has proved too potent for me," Hawthorne signaled in the coded language he had long employed his awareness of the death of his imagination.

Poe's attitude toward the imagination and thus toward his fiction contrasts sharply with that of Hawthorne. Whereas Hawthorne labors toward the latitude he sees necessary for the romance, Poe leaps boldly into what the narrator of "Berenice" (1835) calls "palace[s] of -77- imagination" and thumbs his nose at the hot, hard practical life of America. Whereas Hawthorne focuses on the consequences of human action with painstaking emphasis, Poe (as we shall see) ignores consequences, at times with sportive insistence. He champions the imagination, proclaims its range as unlimited, and sets it free to play in a realm of its own where it is lord of all it surveys. In his "Marginalia" (1846) Poe describes certain fancies that come to one on the "borderground" between sleep and wakefulness. His version of a middle ground, unlike Hawthorne's, is not a place where the actual and the imaginary may meet in productive combination; the fancies of which he speaks inspire ecstasy beyond the range of human experience; they reveal "a glimpse of the spirit's outer world." Poe's "border-ground," in other words, is a point from which the imagination, unbounded and free from constraint, may journey into the "supernal."

Poe's fiction enacts the system of priorities suggested by this passage from the "Marginalia." His tales present the spectacle of the imagination playing games of its own according to rules of its own making. And where the imagination is at its purest and most triumphant, we may expect to find it transcending consequences. The narrator of "Loss of Breath" (1832), for example, undergoes startling mutilations that have no "real" effect on him. After cutting off his ears, a surgeon cuts him open and removes part of his viscera. Later, one ear is somehow back on his head. And, although the cats that eat on his nose do cause pain, no more is heard of wounds or their effects. He tells his story in the manner of someone having a bad day.

The most thoroughgoing example of a situation without consequences comes in "A Predicament" (1845), the companion-piece to "How to Write a Blackwood Article." Both "How to Write" and "A Predicament" abound with parody: Poe satirizes the formulas of contemporary magazine fiction, mocks his own style, and presents in burlesque his most fundamental ideas about the imagination. In a context of verbal frolic, the Signora Psyche Zenobia receives her instructions about how to write a story from the editor of Blackwood's Magazine. One point predominates: the writer, says Mr. Blackwood, must get into a situation no one was ever in before and then record his (or in this case, her) sensations. Sensations, he says, are the great thing: "Should you ever be drowned or hung, be sure and make a -78- note of your sensations. If you wish to write forcibly, Miss Zenobia, pay minute attention to your sensations."

Readers of "A Predicament" will recall the bizarre manner in which Zenobia chances to follow Mr. Blackwood's advice. As she gazes out the clock-face of a church tower, the minute hand comes around and, to her horror, pins her head in the opening. Then, as the minute hand slowly cuts into her neck, she proceeds to give "minute attention" to her sensations. "It had already buried its sharp edge a full inch in my flesh, and my sensations grew indistinct and confused." "The bar had buried itself two inches in my neck. I was aroused to a sense of exquisite pain." "The bar was now four inches and a half deep in my neck, and there was only a little bit of skin to cut through. My sensations were those of entire happiness." One eye pops out and stares insolently up at her from a gutter. Finally her head comes off and tumbles down into the street. Zenobia concludes the story of her predicament by recalling her singular feelings on the occasion.

"A Predicament" takes us past the ideas of destruction and death. From the moment it becomes clear that Zenobia will continue narrating after her head comes off, we are set apart, fully and finally, from reality as we know it. Though exaggeration and banter have sustained the uneasy tension of the tale up to this point, the decapitation of the narrator is the masterstroke. Poe has liberated his imagination from our assumptions and given us Zenobia, his only woman narrator and in a way the most Poesque of all, not the unreliable narrator we have come to know and mistrust but the indestructible narrator, whose disencumbered voice transcends all, whose narrative has no relation to the conditions of human existence. She is Ligeia in burlesque, a caricature of a caricature; her name Psyche means "the soul," she tells us. Then she adds: "that's me, I'm all soul."

In "The Power of Words" (1845), one of Poe's fables featuring a dialogue between angels after the destruction of the earth, Agathos recalls speaking a star into existence "with a few passionate sentences," something possible because of "the physical power of words" to create. Again, in the "Marginalia" entry cited above, Poe writes of his complete "faith in the power of words." Such a faith underlies Poe's commitment to the imagination and his empower-79- ment of narrators who speak "supernal" worlds into being. Equally bold but radically different is the position of Melville's philosopher Babbalanja in Mardi, who holds that "Truth is in things, and not in words," that "truth is voiceless," that fictions are as real as shovels and trenches — and equally liable to deceive. Melville would never agree with Poe about the power of words (though he used them effulgently); his primary metaphor for romance is a chartless voyage such as he undertook imaginatively in Mardi, sustained by the conviction that "those who boldly launch, cast off all cables; and turning from the common breeze, that's fair for all, with their own breath, fill their own sails." If the mention of casting off cables recalls James's balloon-of-experience analogy, the idea of a self-directed quest over "untracked" seas promises (even more severely) discoveries at once disencumbered and disconcerting — the story in brief of Melville's career as a writer of romance.

As Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847) demonstrate, Melville levied on personal experience for the substance of his early narratives. Both of these narratives deal with his adventure in the South Pacific, where he lived and loitered after deserting an Australian whaling vessel in the early 1840s. By the time he began Mardi in 1848, however, Melville was beginning to feel the constraints of writing picaresque travel narratives; because some critics had doubted the factual basis of Typee and Omoo, he proposed to write "a romance of Polynesian adventure." He would, as he announced, "out with the Romance." Despite these intentions, Mardi opens as a straightforward narrative, picking up literally where Omoo left off; but it quickly moves to uncharted dimensions. At work on his "narrative of facts," as Melville announced to his publisher John Murray, he "began to feel an incurable distaste for the same; & a longing to plume my pinions for a flight, & felt irked, cramped & fettered by plodding with dull common places." So, "suddenly," he began "to work heart & soul at a romance," something new and original. "It opens like a true narrative — like Omoo for example, on ship board — & the romance & poetry of the thing thence grow continually, till it becomes a story wild enough I assure you & with a meaning too." Replete with elements of allegory, satire, and philosophical speculation, Mardi reflects Melville's readings in Dante, Rabelais, Edmund Spenser, and -80- Thomas Browne, as well as his developing concern for what he called the great art of telling the truth."

Melville thus came to the romance by way of personal odyssey. Energized by a desire to "plume his pinions" for flight, he felt exhilaration as he cast aside the fetters of convention and moved toward the expansive world of "romance & poetry." The tone of his letter to Murray is typically his own. But his sense of imaginative release is something that all practitioners of the romance envision. To Hawthorne it appeared as a "Faery Land" shielded from actuality; to Poe it was a glimpse of the "supernal"; to Melville it arrived as a "story wild" and unpredicted.

In the work of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville revenge thrives on an atmosphere of intensity that brings the self to stand apart from communal and institutional concerns, to confront what is perceived as a target with the full force of mind and volition. Various strategies of caricature serve each writer well; for by means of caricature the portrayal of self is perforce distorted, at once limited and magnified, invested with incipient violence.

Virtually all of Poe's tales display the human form in distorted and extravagant postures, versions of what Poe called the grotesque. In "King Pest" (1835), for example, the method is that of portrait caricature, which E. H. Gombrich (almost as if he had been reading Poe) defines as "the playful distortion of a victim's face." Poe characterizes each of his strange company by describing one highly exaggerated facial feature — a "terrific chasm" of a mouth, "a pair of prodigious ears," "huge goggle eyes" amazed at "their own enormity." In The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar (1845), caricature accelerates to metamorphosis when the long-dead Valdemar suddenly rots away on his bed — "a nearly liquid mass of loathsome — of detestable putridity."

The distorting violence of Poe's imagination can take caricature an additional step to cruelty and revenge. Hop-Frog, court jester to a brutal king, is both a dwarf and a cripple, who can move along the floor "only with great pain and difficulty." The extreme anguish and abasement of his life (synopsized, as it were, by his deformities) bring him to hoist the king and seven counselors on a chandelier during a -81- masquerade party and burn them alive. And thus a narrative that begins, "I never knew anyone so keenly alive to a joke as the king was. He seemed to live only for joking," ends with "The eight corpses swung in their chains, a fetid, blackened, hideous, and indistinguishable mass." An ominous idea of joking encompasses "Hop-Frog" (1849): Poe twists it through stages of cruelty, uses a masquerade party to reverse its direction, and finally has it consummated by an act of revenge — for which Hop-Frog, incidentally, pays no penalty.

Edward Davidson has suggested that the camouflaged crudeness in Poe's early work — his coarse pun on the name Abel-Shittim in the first version of A Tale of Jerusalem (1832), the Shandean play on noses in Lionizing (1835) — may have come from an almost compulsive tendency to get even with his society, to ridicule an audience that could be at once amused and fooled. A compulsive aggression against his audience seems indeed to pervade Poe's work, both early and late. And one of its manifestations is the prevailing invitation of Poe's narrators to witness an act of vengeance. In a society that prized the domestic and valued the didactic for its moral utility, Poe became militantly antididactic, mischievously antidomestic. The narrator of The Black Cat (1843) presents the garish revenge of his tale as "a series of mere household events." The narrator of The Cask of Amontillado (1846) exults in the memory of revenge taken fifty years before — although some readers, uneasy at the amoral calisthenics of this tale and unwilling to accept Poe in undiluted form, see the narrative as confessional rather than celebratory.

In some of his best-known work Poe explores the intricate and baffling nature of the perverse. Characteristically, he uses narrators who seek to destroy the "I" — the self driven by an "unfathomable longing" to offer violence to "its own nature" (as we read in "The Black Cat"). Obsessed by the "eye" of his victim, the narrator of The Tell-Tale Heart (1843) decides "to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever." Given Poe's fondness for puns (and his disdain for the transcendentalists' emphasis on self), it is tempting to substitute an "I" for an "eye" in this context.

Poe's longest fiction, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), is sustained by the spirit of self-destruction and recurrent strategies of revenge on the reader. We are at the mercy of Poe's imagination in Pym — the power of his words is paramount: hot and -82- cold, black and white, are what Poe says they are. Against all odds, Pym battles through to the final dream vision; as it progresses, his narrative casts off and subverts experience. And Poe is not above playing a trick to speed the voyage. He stages his scene of cannibalism brilliantly, in a way that maximizes its horror. The proof of Poe's power as a writer is that he makes us believe him in this scene; he engages us as members of a civilization that regards cannibalism as fearful and regressive, the ultimate sickening gesture to sustain life. And then he sandbags us. After the sailor Parker has been murdered, eaten, and his blood drunk, Poe has Pym remember the whereabouts of an ax with which he can chop through the deck and obtain food. After leading us to credit the terrible extremity of the situation, Poe subverts our reactions by quickly setting things back to "normal." But after this scene we are a good deal less sure where we are. In retrospect, we can see that we are taking a journey into a vengeful imagination.

Hawthorne's use of caricature differs from that of Poe when it depends for its validity on the perceptions of characters. What Giovanni sees in Rappaccini's garden (evidence of Beatrice's poisonous nature) may be the product of his skepticism and inability to love. What Young Goodman Brown sees in the forest (evidence of evil in those he reveres) may be the result of specter evidence. What various people see, and don't see, on Arthur Dimmesdale's breast at the end of The Scarlet Letter tells us something about the spectators, something about ourselves, and a lot about Hawthorne — inventor of the first multiple-choice test in the romance.

But Hawthorne, like Poe, can use caricature for his own purposes. And since the distorting effects of monomania produce psychological and spiritual caricature, Hawthorne's work contains what may be a peerless array of figures such as Richard Digby in The Man of Adamant (1837), Aylmer in The Birth-mark (1843), Ethan Brand in Ethan Brand: A Chapter from an Abortive Romance (1850), and of course Roger Chillingworth in The Scarlet Letter. Out of a belief that only he can be saved, Richard Digby forswears society, disdains the young woman who (for some reason) loves him, and lives his self-intent life in a cave. Obsessed with his desire for perfection, Aylmer kills his loving wife (who for some reason married him) in the course of a great experiment and thus rejects the best the earth can -83- offer. Ethan Brand confronts the absolute even more starkly than these two destructive protagonists. The sole issue in this tale is whether a human being can commit an unpardonable sin, a sin so grievous that it exceeds God's capacity for mercy. Can Ethan Brand triumph over God? On such an absolute question does Hawthorne construct his "Chapter from an Abortive Romance," a story bleak, intense, formed out of the protagonist's monomania, his presumption, and his final despair and suicide.

Whereas Melville came to Moby-Dick (1851) after a burst of activity that included Mardi, Redburn (1849), and White-Jacket (1850), Hawthorne turned to The Scarlet Letter after being fired from the Salem Custom House. Whereas Melville would later present such sportive caricatures as Turkey and Nippers in Bartleby, the Scrivener (1856), one temperamentally unable to work in the morning, the other in the afternoon, Hawthorne had long before examined the hallucinatory and even cruel aspect of revolutionary fervor in My Kinsman, Major Molineux (1832) and presented as "A Parable" the resolute mystification of the Reverend Mr. Hooper in The Minister's Black Veil (1836). But the two writers saw their consummate stories of revenge published only a year apart. The Scarlet Letter, of course, came first; and so impressed was Melville with that romance and Hawthorne's earlier work that he inscribed Moby-Dick to Hawthorne "in Token of my admiration for his genius."

Vengeance in The Scarlet Letter reaches out to affect the entire fabric of the fictive world. The Puritan community, as we know, metes out public punishment to Hester Prynne the sinner. But Chillingworth undertakes a private search for Hester's partner in adultery, and Hawthorne handles the development of his obsession by giving us a virtual anatomy of revenge. Chillingworth begins his search with a sense of objectivity, as if the matter were a problem in geometry rather than one "of human passions, and wrongs inflicted on himself." Gradually, however, what Hawthorne calls "a terrible fascination, a kind of fierce, though still calm, necessity" comes over him. Ultimately, his revenge becomes more intense, more involved, more personal, an obsession that feeds upon itself. When Hester asks if he has not tortured Dimmesdale enough, Chillingworth replies, "No! — no! - He has but increased the debt." Part of Hawthorne's achievement in The Scarlet Letter lies in his ability to demonstrate the re-84- flexive nature of revenge, to show convincingly that Chillingworth has caught himself on a vicious blade of vengeance that cuts two ways. Though there can be no getting even, the avenger must intensify his torture; yet the more he does so, the more he destroys himself.

Dimmesdale and Chillingworth, of course, make each other possible in The Scarlet Letter. Just as Chillingworth lives to torture, Dimmesdale lives to be tortured. Yet the fundamental falseness of the minister's position yields an idiom of anguish that stands him very well in his professional life. His sermons, for example, are models of efficacy: the more he reviles himself as a sinner (in general terms, from the security of the pulpit), the more his congregation elevates him to new heights of spirituality (as he knows it will) and thinks comparatively of its own unworthiness. His anguish is convincing, compelling, and genuine, although it springs from and compounds his hypocrisy — even because of his awareness that it springs from and compounds his hypocrisy.

Dimmesdale clearly suffers from an excess of self. His weakness and suffering throughout most of the romance have tended to blur for some readers the fact of his pride, which, like his scarlet letter, lies beneath and gives special form to his mask of saintliness. Selfcondemnation, self-abnegation, and self-loathing are the stimulants of his psychic life; they constitute as well the price he must pay if he would not strip away the self reverenced by the public. And that self — formed out of a communal wish to admire a young, pious, and learned minister — he cannot bring himself to renounce. That his private suffering contributes to the public mask of spirituality is a kind of masochistic dividend for him.

It is Hester Prynne who breaks the cycle of vengeance and selfloathing in The Scarlet Letter. For Hester, who stands in haughty agony on the scaffold at the outset of the romance, neither seeks vengeance nor loathes herself. Proud, unable to hate her sin, she ornaments the letter and thereby (as Nina Baym points out) subverts "the intention of the magistrates who condemn her to wear it." The iron grace of her life for seven years, a discipline bred on suppressed emotion, leads directly to the forest interview with Dimmesdale and the unraveling of the story Hawthorne has set in circular motion. Without Hester, there is nothing in the logic of The Scarlet Letter to make it end, so tightly has Hawthorne woven his narrative of revenge -85- and self-absorption. The ending, as it must be, is grim. But the survival of Hester Prynne shows that there is life after the distortions of caricature and obsession.

Chillingworth's revenge is personal, Ahab's cosmic. And while Chillingworth masks his motives during the course of The Scarlet Letter, Ahab announces the vengeful purpose of the Pequod's voyage when he first faces his crew from the quarterdeck. Yet Ahab on the quarterdeck does not divulge the full dimensions of his rage. That responsibility falls to Ishmael, Melville's narrator, who is at pains to account for the growth of Ahab's monomania; Ishmael's language registers the intensity, the pitch, of the Captain's burning idea. Since his first and near-fatal encounter with Moby Dick, Ishmael tells us,

Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malignant agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning…; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil; — Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.

Strong language, this, an absolute rhetoric with its repetitive all, all, all. It posits the existence of an "intangible malignity…from the beginning"; it invokes the "rage and hate" of the human race, "from Adam down." Ishmael notes that Ahab bears a scar, "a slender rodlike mark, lividly whitish," as if he were a tree struck by lightning. According to the Manxman, should Ahab ever be "tranquilly laid out" and made ready for the grave — an unlikely supposition — it would turn out to be "a birth-mark from crown to sole." Maddened, desperate, and scarred (perhaps by birth), Ahab seeks to confront not experience but evil. There are voices of reason in Moby-Dick, voices that speak of whaling as a business and of ties to families in Nan-86- tucket. Chief among them is Starbuck, who says he has come to hunt whales and not his commander's vengeance. But Ahab, who would confront the absolute, is absolute aboard the Pequod. The crew, he says, are his arms and legs; to him, the three symbols on the doubloon are all Ahab. Tied to him alone, the crew share the destructive fate of a captain questing for absolute revenge.

After the publication of The Scarlet Letter and Moby-Dick, Hawthorne and Melville continued to use the latitude of the romance to fashion narratives of revenge. Both Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables and The Marble Faun extend the revenge story to include gothic elements, the first a family curse that shapes the issues of the narrative, the second an oppressive and haunting figure of malevolence who is murdered by the faunlike Donatello — precipitating a new fall from innocence. Likewise gothic in atmosphere is Melville's provocative Benito Cereno (1856), in which revenge comes from slaves who revolt on board a ship carrying them to South America. Finally, in the posthumously published Billy Budd (1925), Melville converts the romance to fable with a story of "natural depravity," as seen in Claggart, causing the fall of the preAdamic Billy Budd.

Perhaps to demonstrate that the myth of the American Adam was indeed a myth, American writers have shown a fascination for revenge as a motif for the romance. Motives for vengeance cut across race and gender, involving such characters as Magua in Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826), Nathan Slaughter in Robert Montgomery Bird's Nick of the Woods (1837), Ruth Hall at the end of Fanny Fern's novel of that name (1855) — as well as the plots of powerful twentieth-century texts such as Richard Wright's Native Son (1940), Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), and Stephen King's garish Misery (1987), in which a reader turns vengefully on a writer. Native Son, of course, has never been called a romance; it is a hard-driving novel, unrelenting in its realism. Yet Bigger Thomas takes revenge for his life, for the fact of living, in that novel; and when he says, "What I killed for, I am," in the final chapter, realism falls away before an existential moment akin to the free-floating ventures of the romance. The urge to get even with someone or something or everything may be an essential part of the American sense of story, something artic-87- ulated out of a deep sense of loss or disappointment. If so, it continues to seek new forms of expression. As Melville said at the end of the broken promises and surfaces of The Confidence-Man (1857), "Something further may follow of this Masquerade."

Terence Martin

-88-

Romance and Race

Henry Whistler, writing during the English expedition of 1654-55 against Spanish Jamaica, described Barbados as "the dunghill whereon England doth cast forth its rubbish." In this hub of excrement he lamented how a rogue could so easily become a gentleman, a whore a lady. Both Edward Long, in his History of Jamaica (1774), and Lady Maria Nugent, in her Jamaica journal, observing the behavior and appearance of white ladies on their plantations, complained about these surprising hybrids of the New World. Long writes: "We see…a very fine young woman awkwardly dangling her arms with the air of a Negroe-servant." Lady Nugent focuses on the shock of hearing the English language corroded by the drawling, dissonant gibberish of negro domestics: "Many of the ladies, who have not been educated in England, speak a sort of broken English, with an indolent drawling out of their words, that is very tiresome if not disgusting." Nugent and Long speak from the position of a dominant culture: threatened by the fact of creolization, a contamination, as they see it, of the pure civilities of Mother England. A latter-clay Rochester in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) looks at his white creole wife Antoinette and momentarily confounds her with the negro servant. "She raised her eyebrows and the corners of her mouth turned down in a questioning, mocking way. For a moment she looked very much like Amélie. Perhaps they are related, I thought. It's possible, it's even probable in this damned place."

What happens to romance when we turn to those places where -89- everything was allowed because thousands were enslaved, where the fact of slavery — the conversion of person into thing for the ends of capital — turned all previous orders upside down? If "masters" claimed civilization on the backs of those they called polluted or bestial — claims ever threatened by evidences of a terrible brutality and abandon — they had to clarify their identity against a background of hybridization, forced intimacies, and pollution. Perhaps we can no longer understand what we mean by romance in the Americas without turning to the issue of slavery. The forced intimacy of what Pierre de Vassière, writing about creole life in Saint-Domingue from 1629 to 1789, called "a very strange familiarity" between those who called themselves masters and those who found themselves slaves made the old practices of idealization unworkable. In plantation isolation, the extremes of differences were blurred in an odd promiscuity, where those who were supposedly inferior became absolutely necessary to those who imagined themselves superior.

If being master or mistress was so addictive a pleasure that the slave as ultimate possession (what Edgar Allan Poe in his review of James Kirke Paulding's 1836 Slavery in the United States praised as dependent upon, indeed goaded by, the use of the word "my," that "language of affectionate appropriation") became a necessary part of the master's or mistress's identity, then we are up against a situation where the terms of exclusivity or control, proclaimed and repeated, are somehow confounded by the facts of slavery. What happens to such words as "power," "purity," "love," or "filth" when, as an anonymous planter from Saint-Domingue put it, you have "tasted the pleasures of a nearly absolute domination"?

The development of romance in the United States was linked in unsettling ways to the business of race. Out of the ground of bondage, the curse of slavery, and the fear of "servile war" came a twisted sentimentality, a cruel analytic of "love" in the New World: a conceit of counterfeit of intimacy. So Herman Melville in Moby-Dick (1851) presented Ishmael and the cannibal Queequeg locked in a marital embrace. In Pierre (1852) the dark, mysterious Isabel and Pierre perform the spectacle of husband and wife, finally to be reciprocally neutered in a stony apocalypse. In Benito Cereno (1856) Don Benito and Babo act out a masquerade of servitude and attachment that -90- Melville will take to its most alarming extreme in the negative romance Bartleby, the Scrivener (1856). Poe's Eureka (1848) ends with an apocalypse startling in its eroticism: "a novel Universe swelling into existence and then subsiding into nothingness, at every throb of the Heart divine." The atoms in the intensity of their "spiritual passion," in their "appetite for oneness," will at last "flash…into a common embrace." This essay on the "Material and Spiritual Universe" Poe called a "Romance."

Speaking about the epic adventures of fugitive slaves in his lecture The American Scholar (delivered 1849), Theodore Parker declared that "all the original romance of Americans is in them, not in the white man's novel." The facts of slave life, once turned into heroic and sentimental romances, turned negroes into matter for idealization. Critics as diverse as Winthrop Jordan, William Andrews, Eric Sundquist, and Gillian Brown have noted how the cult of sentiment with its emphasis on self-denial, piety, and pathos signaled a turn away from the ethical problems of slavery. Further, like the idealization of women, which narrowed their realm to the domestic haven of home — a pristine place of comfort and compensation — the conversion of the negro into a figure for romance or a call to formal lament turned the oppressed, whether slave or ex-slave, man or woman, into an object in someone else's story, deprived of the possibility of significant action. The very question of love, as Ann Douglas argued in The Feminization of American Culture (1977), had to be de-natured when both ministers and ladies found themselves marginalized and awash in a language of spirit that allowed another reality to perpetuate itself. While Sarah Hale of Godey's Lady's Book celebrated the powers of feminizing and angelic "influence" on the brute, money-making men, the divide between those who wielded the terms of mastery and power and those who were busy sanctifying, serving, and suffering increased.

"What then is the American, this new man?" To answer St. John de Crèvecoeur's question in Letters from an American Farmer (1782) demands that we recognize that the Declaration of Independence always meant independence for white men only: an exclusion implied in the title of Lydia Maria Child's essay, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833). A Calvinist fear of pol-91- lution and dread of the flesh would find ready objects and necessary victims in those marginalized by the curse of color: the blackness that marked for the racist imagination depravity and corruption.

In the first half of the nineteenth century more Africans than Europeans arrived in the Americas. William Bird wrote to Lord Eymons as early as 1732: "They import so many Negros hither, that I fear this Colony will some time or other be confirmed by the Name of New Guinea." It is therefore not surprising when reading Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Custom-House (the preface to The Scarlet Letter [1850]) to note that he describes the street running through the old town of Salem as having "Gallows Hill and New Guinea at one end, and a view of the almshouse at the other." In "Free and Coerced Transatlantic Migration: Some Comparisons," The American Historical Review (April 1983), David Eltis writes: "In every year from about the mid- sixteenth century to 1831, more Africans than Europeans quite likely came to the Americas, and not until the second wave of mass migration began in the 1880s did the sum of that European immigration start to match and then exceed the cumulative influx from Africa…. In terms of immigration alone, then, America was an extension of Africa rather than Europe until late in the nineteenth century."

The revolution in Saint-Domingue (1791–1804) — the only successful slave revolt in the New World — forced the call for "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" to crash hard upon the facts of Property, Labor, and Race. For Edmund Burke in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), as for other apologists of Empire, the emancipating year of 1789 turned the French into "a nation of low-born servile wretches." The colonists of Saint-Domingue had been proved right. That one could speak freedom for all humans, no matter the color of the skin, did mean "the end of Saint-Domingue." What might have remained vague ("The rights of men," Burke claimed, "are in a sort of middle"), once on the soil of Saint-Domingue became quite clear. When mulatto and black began to compete for pieces of "republican" entitlement, race, what Aimé Césaire has called "the terrifying negro problem," would explode what might have remained abstract, safe, or static.

In the United States the first successful slave revolution in the New -92- World qualified the "democracy" of the "Founding Fathers" and gave substance to the specter of the racial Armageddon prophesied by Thomas Jefferson in his 1781 Notes on the State of Virginia. "Deeprooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will…produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extinction of one or the other race." Thomas Carlyle's "African Haiti" — "black without remedy…. a monition to the world" — and reported scenes of vengeance would haunt those proslavery writers who sought to prove the deep bonds of affection between masters and their slaves: a compelling empathy and disciplined love that no "crude" or "fanatic" abolitionist could understand.

The duplicity in such spectacles of feeling, the hitch in the business of sentiment would be enacted in the writings of Edgar Allan Poe. Critics, myself included, have ignored the way the romance of the South and the realities of race were fundamental to his literary production. Poe was not an exotic, a writer displaced "out of Space, out of Time." He knew the South, and for the most part remained ambiguous and cautious about the practice of chattel slavery. Yet the terrors of barbarism, and his own alternating unease with and attraction to the language of the heart, mark his tales of revelation and revenge. In the course of his life, something strange happened to what might have remained mere regionalist sentiment. But that gradual transformation should not blind us to the way Poe perpetually returns to his sense of the South, while attempting to screen his increasingly subversive concerns: the perils of mastery and nightmares about the decay of all fictions of status, the rot at the heart of the Great House.

Nowhere does Poe reveal his comprehension of the power extended over another in love, the terrible knot of complicity, as in his treatment of bondage: that unerring reciprocity between one who calls him or herself master and one who responds as slave. It is quite possible that Poe's most parodic exaggerations, his most sentimental posturings, have their source in what remained for Poe the ground of "civilized" society: human bondage. For Poe, as for Burke, Carlyle, or Jefferson, also severe (and enlightened) constructors of English -93- prose, the fact of the negro made possible the empirical elevation of something they call "human," with its finest image in tow, the Marie Antoinettes of this world. And yet, in Poe's writings how slippery, how easily reversed is the divide between human and brute, lady and slave.

Let us try to give a history to the dark side of Poe's romance. On June 22, 1815, according to The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe (1987): "John Allan writes Charles Ellis to sell Scipio, a slave, for $600 and to hire out others at $50 a year." On December 10, 1829, two years after Poe left the Allan household, Poe acted as agent for Maria Clemm of Baltimore in the sale of a slave named Edwin to Henry Ridgway for a term of nine years. In the Baltimore Sun (April 6, 1940), May Garrettson Evans begins her article by explaining that "a Baltimore man who wishes his name withheld quite by chance came across an old document relating to Edgar Allan Poe, which seems thus far to have entirely escaped the poet's biographers." It is easy to understand why a Baltimore gentleman might want to remain unnamed as he provides information that those who prefer to monumentalize a rarefied Poe would prefer to ignore.

Edgar A. Poe agent for Maria Clemm of Baltimore City and County and State of Maryland, for and in consideration of the sum of forty dollars in hand paid by Henry Ridgway of Baltimore City at or before the sealing and delivery of these presents the receipt whereof is hereby acknowledged have granted, bargained and sold by these presents do grant bargain and sell unto the said Henry Ridgway his executors administrators and assigns a negro man named Edwin age twenty one years on the first day of March next to serve until he shall arrive to the age of thirty years no longer.

Poe was then awaiting the time for his entrance to West Point and had already written his early "romantic" poems, including "Al Aaraaf," "Tamerlane," "To the River — ," "A Dream," and "Fairyland."

What happens if we add the despotism of slavery to the cult of sentiment: to Poe's "fair sex" and the "romance" she appears to demand? Race remains crucial to Poe's treatment of women and "womanliness." For Poe understood the matter of idealization better than most of his contemporaries. He knew how praise, or the sanc-94- tifying of women, can become easy handmaid to a deadly, conservative ideology. For mystification is always a matter of power: a decreeing subject ordains the terms for a silenced object to attain the status, or stasis, of myth. The master makes the myth through which the other must seek his or her identity.

If to sentimentalize is to colonize the image, then Poe will ironize fantasies of love and domesticity. More important, as becomes evident in Poe's letters recycled to his various beloveds, there is nothing more compelling than possession: you love most what you own. And yet that love, as Virginia Woolf realized when she reviewed Caroline Ticknor's Poe's Helen in the Times Literary Supplement in 1916, can be "tedious" and "discreditable," languishing in an "atmosphere…of withered roses and moonshine." Poe understood the terrible burden of feeling, the tyranny of the "law of the heart," as the late "love poems" — "To Marie Louise Shew," "To Helen," and "For Annie" — demonstrate.

Poe knew that the language of romanticism allowed the covert continuation of inequality. What does man love in woman? Her transformation into superlatives, or as Poe repeats and overdoes it, her reduction into generality. Recall the exaggerations of his landscape sketch Landor's Cottage (1849), when the narrator introduces "Annie," the angel of the house: "So intense an expression of romance…had never sunk into my heart of hearts before…. 'Romance,' provided my readers fully comprehend what I would hear implied by the word — 'romance' and 'womanliness' seem to me convertible terms: and, after all, what man truly loves in woman, is simply her womanhood."

If Poe's women become shadowy, losing substance in attributes repeated and recycled no matter for whom or when he wrote, the writer himself seems to be most "heartfelt" when most vague. If Poe's narrators in the tales about women, in "Ligeia" (1838), "Berenice" (1835), or "Morella" (1835), for example, become as vain, abstract, and diseased as the objects of their desire (the women the madmen had idolized), Poe's letters and his love poems also trade on a sexual exchange. If women in nineteenth-century America must bear the trappings of style, must inhabit most fully the external as essence, Poe shows how such a spectacle both exploits and consumes its participants, both men and women. -95-

What happened to the tough, sometimes delirious skepticism of the critic of a society "sunk in feeling," when he turned to an institution that sustained itself by the most incredible mystifications? What were the effects of Poe's characterization of Jupiter in "The Gold Bug" (1843) or the fiendish "brute" whose shrill "jabberings" are unidentifiable — the terribly marked deeds of the "OurangOutang" driven wild by "the dreaded whip" in The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) — on readers for and against human ownership?

When Poe was an editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, Virginia (1835-38), he corresponded with Thomas R. Dew, professor of history at William and Mary College, author of the Vindication of Perpetual Slavery (1836), and he published an introductory note to Thomas R. Dew's "Address" delivered at the College on October 10, 1836. In the April 1836 issue of the magazine a review of two books on slavery appeared, known as the "PauldingDrayton Review." As Bernard Rosenthal writes in "Poe, Slavery, and the Southern Literary Messenger: A Reexamination," in Poe Studies (December 1974), his excellent argument for Poe's authorship of this contested document, the review was traditionally assumed to have been written by Poe. The essay was included in J ames Harrison's Virginia edition, but in 1941 and subsequently, some scholars claimed that the review had been "misattributed" to Poe and identified Nathaniel Beverley Tucker as author. The review is excluded from Essays and Reviews in the Library of America edition of Poe's work.

If we place Poe in his historical and social context, reread his comments on Longfellow's Poems on Slavery (with his jibe that the collection is especially suited for "the use of those negrophilic old ladies of the north"), reconsider his scattered attacks on the fanatic coterie of abolitionists and transcendentalists, and recall his deep faith in human imperfection, we can see how much Poe's politics concerning slavery, social status, and property rights owed to the conservative tradition of the Virginia planter aristocracy.

Though Poe tried to subvert his society's idealizing rhetoric about women, he could not apply the same irony and skepticism to the institution of slavery. I now turn to what could be called Poe's most disturbing, because most authentic, "love poem," his review of James Kirke Paulding's Slavery in the United States and an anonymous -96- work, The South Vindicated from the Treason and Fanaticism of the Northern Abolitionists. The review appeared the same year as Lydia Maria Child's Anti-Slavery Catechism (1836). What I have argued about Poe's defiance of masculine disempowering of women is confounded by the question of slavery. Here, Poe produces straight the language of affection and subservience he seems to hyperbolize and mock when imaging women. The bond between master and slave that Poe portrays reads like a case of pietism gone wild.

Poe begins his review with a discussion of the French Revolution. Like Edmund Burke before him, he argues that since "property" is what everyone most wants, it is the secret law of any upheaval: "the many who want, band themselves together against the few that possess; and the lawless appetite of the multitude for the property of others calls itself the spirit of liberty." After condemning the Revolution, which he calls "this eccentric comet," he uncovers its real object. And he is far more honest than many historians of revolutionary France: "the first object of attack was property in slaves; that in that war on behalf of the alleged right of man to be discharged from all control of law, the first triumph achieved was in the emancipation of slaves." Poe, ever rigorous in his analysis, suggests how deeply dependent was the progress of the French Revolution on slave revolts in the Caribbean. For Poe, private property and the possession of slaves remained at the center of events in France and put such abstractions as "the rights of Man" to the test. Before turning to "Domestic Slavery," however, Poe turns to what he refers to as "recent events in the West Indies," treating them as foreboding what he deems "the parallel movement here."

Writing in 1836, Poe no doubt refers to the slave revolt of 1831-32 in Jamaica, also known as the Christmas Rebellion of 1831-32, the Baptist "War," or the Sam Sharpe Insurrection, involving between 18,000 and 50,000 slaves and their sympathizers over five parishes in North and North-Central Jamaica. The revolt lasted only ten days — December 28, 1831, to January 5, 1832. At the end, fourteen whites were dead and 312 slaves executed, with over 1000 shot in battle or while fleeing. What Poe leaves unsaid is significant. He says nothing about the Nat Turner rebellion of 1831, too unspeakable to mention, perhaps because it took place too close to home in Southampton, Virginia. -97-

Poe wants his readers to recognize that abolitionists who "come to us in the name of our common Redeemer and common country" seek "our destruction under the mask of Christian Charity and Brotherly Love." Ever alert to the way totalizing rhetoric screens more devious concerns, Poe now substitutes a few unalienable facts for what he sees as the dangerous masquerade of liberation. What follows are five of the most disturbing pages Poe ever wrote. Here, all the language of sentiment — the cunning use of the claims of the heart to remove or deny real human claims — what Poe recognized in his writings about women, is used, with no irony intended, as he turns to blacks.

What he introduces as "a few words of [his] own" is far more vehement than Paulding's discussion of slave devotion and the master's "kindly feeling and condescending familiarity." Here, Poe takes his own romantic postures, the supine poet dead or dying in "For Annie," or the varying deathbed scenes in his tales about women, and gives what was literary parody or philosophical crux a ground in reality. And the reality is ugly, and perhaps made more so by Poe's moralizing idealism, his attempt to turn a thing into a man, to paraphrase Philip Fisher's words in Hard Facts (1985). "We speak of the moral influences flowing from the relation of master and slave, and the moral feelings engendered and cultivated by it." Poe depends for his lesson about this relation on what he calls the "patriarchal character." This character is both sustained and necessitated by what he calls "the peculiar character (I may say the peculiar nature) of the negro." No less a suggestion than that the enslaved want to be mastered, for they love — and this is the crucial word for Poe — to serve, to be subservient. What follows is an excess of devotion that becomes the focus, as Poe sees it, of the master-slave relationship. In "The Black Cat" (1843) Poe will reveal the consequences of such an inextricable bond through the horrific reversals possible in a formally benevolent attachment: "the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute" and the "docility and humanity" of the master.

But before Poe gets to his theory of servitude, cast as devotional sermon, he presents the essential negro. Poe never has problems with invention, and yet his inventiveness, his masterly design, is confounded in his attempt to "develop the causes which might and should have blackened the negro's skin and crisped his hair into -98- wool." Since Poe admits it might be a while before anyone can answer the why of the curse of pigment and frizz, he gives us his theory of the institution of slavery. This theory is based on the reciprocity between what he describes as "loyal devotion on the part of the slave" and "the master's reciprocal feeling of parental attachment to his humble dependent." These "sentiments in the breast of the negro and his master," Poe explains, "are stronger than they would be under like circumstances between individuals of the white race." So, slavery becomes something akin to divine devotion, a lock of love that no mere mortal white man can sunder. As Melville reiterates in "Benito Cereno" when Captain Delano thinks about the "negro":

If there is any doubt that Poe is raising the "childlike" devotion of the slave and the "fatherly" concern of the master to the status of something akin to courtly love (where, however, the heart is made noble by not possessing), note what follows.

That they [these sentiments] belong to the class of feelings "by which the heart is made better," we know. How come they? They have their rise in the relation between the infant and the nurse. They are cultivated between him and his foster brother. They are cherished by the parents of both. They are fostered by the habit of affording protection and favors to the younger offspring of the same nurse. They grow by the habitual use of the word "my," used in the language of affectionate appropriation, long before any idea of value mixes with it. It is a term of endearment. That is an easy transition by which he who is taught to call the little negro "his," in this sense and because he loves him, shall love him because he is his. The idea is not new, that our habits and affections are reciprocally cause and effect of each other.

Applying the same analytic skill to this nearly incomprehensible (and incommensurate) relation as he will apply to the cosmic attractions of Eureka, Poe bases the cause of reciprocity in what is cultivated, cherished, and fostered. In this diagnosis, he goes far beyond the discourse of James Kirke Paulding in Slavery in the United States. Paul-99- Paul- argues that "the domestic relations of the master and slave are of a more familiar, confidential, and even respectful character, than those of the employer and hireling elsewhere." He praises the reciprocal and natural attachment, "this state of feeling, which a Southern life and education can only give," and concludes: "It is often the case, that the children of the domestic servants become pets in the house, and the playmates of the white children of the family." But Poe is less interested in what Southerners claimed as a type of familial proprietorship — feelings that could elevate or mask what was merely the best use of valuable property — than in elucidating a gothic tale of excessive obedience, reminiscent of Caleb Williams's confession to Falkland: "Sir, I could die to serve you!"

No cause for attachment is more powerful than a linguistic practice, the use of "the possessive 'my'…the language of affectionate appropriation." This recognition that you love what is your own, or "propre" in French ("ce que quel qu'un, quelque chose a, possède a l'exclusion de tout autre"), returns us to Poe's romance. For the remainder of the review gets its force from two proofs for "this school of feeling": in the sickroom and on the deathbed. As Poe says, "In this school we have witnessed scenes at which even the hard heart of a thorough bred philanthropist would melt."

Love and piety flow from both sides, from both the proprietor and the property. "But it is not by the bedside of the sick negro that the feeling we speak of is chiefly engendered. They who would view it in its causes and effects must see him by the sick bed of his master — must see her by the sick bed of her mistress. We have seen these things." Poe takes what he calls "t he study of human nature" out of the closet, as he reports intimate scenes of a black nanny shedding tears over her white "foster babe," of a black servant, "advanced in pregnancy, and in bad health," who kept returning at night to the door of her "good lady" mistress. Poe repeats the words of the faithful, "crouched down at the door, listening for the groans of the sufferer." Ordered home, she cries, "Master it ain't no use for me to go to bed, Sir. It don't do me no good, I cannot sleep, Sir."

In this world of noble sentiments, nothing less than love "prompts" the master, not "interest" or "value." Since the black was for Poe savage, childlike, and brute, a near mystical reliance on a cult of feeling becomes most fit for any discussion of race relations. Ap-100- propriative language is appropriate for a piece of property. For Poe, biological traits would accomplish the full metaphysical right of exclusion. Except for this one review, and a brief discussion of Longfellow's Poems on Slavery (1845), Poe omits the discussion of race from his critical reviews and essays.

For Poe the analogy between women and slaves was unthinkable. Poe could never, in spite of his awareness of women's subordination, entertain the conjunction of race and gender. For example, his review of Elizabeth Barrett's The Drama of Exile, and Other Poems in the Broadway Journal in 1845 expresses his concern about how women writers are treated when "the race of critics," as he put it, "are masculine — men." The greatest evil resulting from the absence of women critics, he explained, is that "the critical man" finds it "an unpleasant task. . 'to speak ill of a woman.'" Yet though here Poe refused to condescend to women, taking both their persons and their writings seriously, he blots out the activism of women writers who also happen to be abolitionists.

"Gracious heaven! What a prostitution!" James Kirke Paulding ends his Slavery in the United States with a warning to those women members of the abolition societies: "with all that respectful deference to the sex," he reminds them "that the appropriate sphere of women is their home, and their appropriate duties at the cradle or the fireside." For women must never forget that they are "the guardian angel of the happiness of man; his protector and mentor in childhood; his divinity in youth; his companion and solace in manhood; his benign and gentle nurse in old age."

In spite of Poe's subversion of the romantic idea of woman — his interrogation of women's coercion into image — he could never make the connection between slavery and the condition of white women in his society. No woman will ever be named by Poe as part of "the small coterie of abolitionists, transcendentalists and fanatics in general," who are a "knot of rogues and madmen." Recall Margaret Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), which Poe will review in The Literati of New York City in 1846: "There exists in the minds of men a tone of feeling toward women as toward slaves, such as is expressed in the common phrase, 'Tell that to women and children.'" When Poe reviews Woman in the Nineteenth Century, he ignores Fuller's conjunction of woman and slave but praises the essay -101- as "nervous, forcible, thoughtful, suggestive, brilliant. . for all that Miss Fuller produces is entitled to those epithets — but I must say that the conclusions reached are only in part my own. Not that they are too bold, by any means — too novel, too startling, or too dangerous in their consequences." That Poe did not, or would not, make overtly the connection between women and slaves is also evident in his review of Lydia Maria Child, also in "The Literati of New York City." Throughout his praise of her poetry, there is never a reference to her well-known Anti-Slavery Catechism (1836), The Evils of Slavery and the Cure of Slavery (1836), or An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833), even though he begins by noting — without naming — those compositions by which she has "acquired a just celebrity." He concludes by merely saying: I need scarcely add that she has always been distinguished for her energetic and active philanthropy."

Poe remained haunted, as did Jefferson, by the terrible disjunction between the ideology of slavery (the abstract and rather benign parental ideology grounded in the equally abstract assumption of negro inferiority) and the concrete realities of mutilation, torture, and violation. Jefferson's inability to deal with the issue of slavery leads directly to the apocalyptic terminology at the end of Query XVIII in Notes on the State of Virginia: "Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever; that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become possible by supernatural interference!" The gospel of apocalypse, the blood, fire, and overturning of Poe's tales of terror, gain their force from Poe's problematic relation to notions of mastery and subordination. More important, he understood how the idealization of women in his society depended for its force on the dehumanization of blacks. When he writes Eureka at the end of his life, his version of "the realm of Ends," he demonstrates the "convertibility" of matter and spirit, destroying the divisions that were at the heart of racialist discourse.

In the South's official mythology, the negro was forever nonAdamic: he/she had no task of naming and no gift of language. In -102- "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," Poe uses Dupin's acuteness in detection to reveal his own fantasy of barbarism. Poe had no doubt read that most severe of colonial historians, Edward Long, who in his History of Jamaica wrote: "That the oran-outang and some races of black men are very nearly allied, is, I think, more than probable." As Long admitted with Buffon: "the oran-outang's brain is a senseless icon of the human;. . it is meer matter, unanimated with a thinking principle, in any, or at least in a very minute and imperfect degree. . an oran-outang. . is a human being. . but of an inferior species. . he has in form a much nearer resemblance to the Negroe race, than the latter bear to white men."

The most difficult problem in knowing what manner of brute is the murderer in the Rue Morgue is the "very strange voice," the unrecognizable language of the criminal. Dupin explains: "How strangely unusual must that voice have really been. . - in whose tones, even, denizens of the five great divisions of Europe could recognize nothing familiar! You will say that it might have been the voice of an Asiatic — of an African." Poe concludes the story by describing a scene of wrath and revenge that suddenly, whether intentionally or not, moves us from Paris to the South, from Madame L'Espanaye to the brute's master:

What Poe calls the "catastrophe of the drama" in the supposedly "humorous" story The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether (1844), we should now recall: "But I shall never forget the emotions of wonder and horror with which I gazed, when, leaping through these windows, and down among us pele-mele, fighting, stamping, scratching, and howling, there rushed a perfect army of what I took to be Chimpanzees, Ourang-Outangs, or big black baboons of the Cape of Good Hope."

Poe's Hop-Frog; or, The Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs (1849), one of his last tales, written some seven months before his -103- death, after the end of his engagement to Sarah Helen Whitman, while he fought illness and despair, remains Poe's most horrible tale of retribution. What Thomas O. Mabbott regards as merely "a terrible exposition of the darkness of a human soul" is Poe's final revelation of the national sin of slavery. Did Poe know Hegel's analysis of convertibility? The master, dependent on the labor of the slave, would end by depending on the slave, and the terms of domination would be reversed. As Hegel wrote in his Phenomenology of Mind: "Just as lordship showed its essential nature to be the reverse of what it wants to be, so, too, bondage will, when completed, pass into the opposite of what it immediately is." In any case, Poe would have been familiar with Jefferson's description of the effect of slavery "as a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism," which turned the master into brute.

The eight masters of "Hop-Frog" get turned into orang-outangs, tarred and flaxed (not feathered), by an enslaved dwarf "from some barbarous province that no person ever heard of." Then, chained in a circle, facing each other in a stupor of coincidence, they are burned to "a fetid, blackened, hideous, and indistinguishable mass." The shocking blind spot of most critics to the practice of slavery as fundamental to the horrors of "Hop-Frog" is exemplified by Mabbot's reflection in introducing the story in his Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe: "The manner of chaining apes described is not mentioned by any authorities consulted, and since it is integral to the plot, may well be invented on the basis of the captive wild men described by Froissart." In the final incendiary climax of "Hop-Frog" Poe gives "the power of blackness" its obvious, though repressed cause. Poe recalls, in a bloodcurdling way, his own earlier preoccupation in the "Paulding-Drayton Review" with what, in God's name, might "have blackened the negro's skin and crisped his hair into wool." But the tables have turned. The epidermic curse — the fatality of being black, or blackened — has been visited on the master race.

Writing his 1855 "Preface" to Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman declared: "Great genius and the people of these states must never be demeaned to romances. As soon as histories are properly told there is no more need of romances." By the 1850s the apparent division between fact and fiction was breaking down. The "romance" of the -104- fugitive slave depended for its force on being a "true history." These "verifiable" romances were janus-faced, pointing to both truth and fable. Hawthorne precedes The House of the Seven Gables (1851) with a discourse on "Romance" that grants the writer the use of the "Marvelous" in writing a tale that attempts "to connect a bygone time with the very present that is flitting away from us." And as Poe had argued against Hawthorne's heavy-handed use of allegory in his 1847 review of Twice-Told Tales, now Hawthorne emphasizes the importance of keeping any moral "undercurrent" to the tale unobtrusive. Unsubtle didacticism can kill the effect proper to revealing "the truth of the human heart."

Whereas Hawthorne can choose to err on the side of fiction, no African American writer who had recovered his freedom only to work for the abolitionist cause could afford such flights of fancy. On the one hand, the conversion of brute to man depended on a language so extraordinary that it could make the horrible facts of slavery into romance. On the other hand, these titillating narratives had to be based on true experiences. Harriet A. Jacobs, writing her "Preface" to Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861, begins: "Reader, be assured this narrative is no fiction. I am aware that some of my adventures may seem incredible; but they are, nevertheless, strictly true." And her editor, Lydia Maria Child, authenticated the document in the introduction to Jacobs's drama of what happens when romance — or more precisely, sexuality — is locked into race. She assures readers that she knows the writer and adds: "I believe those who know her will not be disposed to doubt her veracity, though some incidents in her story are more romantic than fiction."

Toni Morrison writes in Beloved (1987): "Definitions belong to the definers — not the defined." The black fugitive turned hero or heroine found not only that there had to be limits to invention — imagination had to be accountable to a reality often invented by someone else — but also that these facts could then be embellished or made to serve the often demeaning romantic fantasies about the "African character." So, terms like romance and history (like liberty and bondage) underwent some strange but instructive metamorphoses. In the history of the United States, where a slave, a piece of property, could become an object of "love," linguistic distinctions were undone, humanitarian definitions derailed and dismantled. -105-

The oft-repeated "power of blackness" thus could be argued to be absolutely necessary to the continued construction of whiteness. As Frantz Fanon argued in Black Skin, White Masks (1952, tr. 1967): "The black soul is a white man's artifact." Who holds the claims on the business of racial identity? Melville knew that the claims of color are nothing more than a sometime masquerade, depending on who wields power when. The Confidence-Man (1857) remains the most astonishing narrative of convertibility. But as early as Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852), Melville attempted to "gospelize the world anew" by reveling in a wild blurring of opposites, what Poe had called "Infernal Twoness." Reviewers were quick to condemn Pierre when it appeared, recognizing how dangerous were the excesses of his language (not only his subject) to morals and to the very myths of purity and domestic love on which Americans of "good taste and good sense" depended.

Like Poe in Eureka, Melville dealt with impossible inversions, unspeakable mergings. But Melville humanized or gave flesh to Poe's Newtonian mechanics and cosmic attractions. He attempted nothing less than to give a moral to what might have remained an abstract story. "This history goes forward and goes backward, as occasion calls." The convertibility between matter and spirit that Poe cast as atoms moving to and fro in the throes of attraction and repulsion, Melville articulated as the inevitable reciprocity between "Lucy or God," "Virtue or Vice," light and dark, "wife or sister, saint or fiend!" In Pierre's remarkable dream of Enceladus, the burden of whiteness — parasitical, destructive, and sterile — is embodied in the white amaranthine flower. These flowers multiply, contribute nothing to the agricultural value of the hillside pastures, and force the tenants to beg their "lady" to abate their rent: "The small white flower it is our bane!. . The aspiring amaranth, every year it climbs and adds new terraces to its sway! The immortal amaranth, it will not die, but last year's flowers survive to this!"

The dark world, the trope of aggression and excess, Melville reassigns to an overpowering whiteness. After all, if natural philosophers had argued about the cause of human blackness, the pollution of color, the barbaric stain, Melville put inscrutable whiteness, the "colorless, all-color," the "shrouded phantom of the whitened waters" at the heart of the terror and the fascination of Moby-Dick, his -106- other quest romance. In 1837-38 Poe wrote a story that no doubt influenced Melville. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket was his own "narrative" of whiteness, a romantic voyage to the "white curtain of the South." If the Southern slave made his perilous journey from bondage to the North — a place that, as Frederick Douglass and other African American autobiographers would find, was no salvation from degradation — Poe takes his reader from the North to a terribly iterated South. Ostensibly a trip to the South Seas, the narrative at times seems to mime and invert the narratives of American slavery. The title page reads as a burlesque of captivity, catastrophe, and incredibility: ". . the massacre of her crew among/ A group of islands in the / EIGHTY-FOURTH PARALLEL OF SOUTHERN LATITUDE; / Together with the incredible adventures and discoveries / STILL FURTHER SOUTH / To which that distressing calamity gave rise."

In the "Preface" to his narrative, "A. G. Pym" places a "Mr. Poe, lately editor of the Southern Literary Messenger," quite firmly in the role of Southern gentleman, one of those "several gentlemen in Richmond, Va., who felt deep interest in all matters relating to the regions I had visited." Although Pym fears his story will lack "the appearance of that truth it would really possess," that only family and friends would "put faith in [his] veracity," and that the public would judge his writing "an impudent and ingenious fiction," he agrees to a "ruse" suggested by Mr. Poe. The adventures will be published in the Southern Literary Messenger "under the garb of fiction." Yet the public refuses to receive the "pretended fiction" as a "fable," and Pym decides "to undertake a regular compilation and publication of the adventures in question."

Poe will later claim Eureka to be his "Book of Truths" as well as a "Romance." Convertibility is essential to both his style and his metaphysics. Fact becomes fancy and fancy fact in the mutual adaptation that remains for his earthbound readers the sure sign of God's perfection. But what is being made convertible in Pym's strange narrative? Pym's narrative is based on other chronicles of polar exploration and travel, most notably Benjamin Morrell's Narrative of Four Voyages (1832). This story, however, is less a romance of voyages to distant seas than a spectacular and violent staging of "civilization" defining itself through the conquest of savagery. Yet there is -107- no possibility of definition or conquest in this world of shifting appearances. Before Pym and Peters reach the black island of Tsalal (meaning "to be shaded, dark" in Hebrew and "to be shade" in its ancient Ethiopian root), the reader has already endured scenes of butchery, drunkenness, treachery, and cannibalism. So, although Pym's story leads us to the islands of the South Seas where we encounter "barbarians" and "savages," when the explorers finally visit the island village, the common racist divisions between "civilization" and "barbarism," good and evil, black and white, are no longer operative.

The "savages" are described with their "complexion a jet black, with thick and woolly hair." The natives dread the complexion of "the white race" and, most of all, the strange white thing "lying on the ground," earlier described by Pym as "a singular-looking landanimal," with a "body. . covered with a straight silky hair, perfectly white." The complex working out of the narrative depends upon a duplicity or doubling of color. As the explorers journey farther into the interior to that "country differing essentially from any hitherto visited by civilized men," any simple splitting of color into black and white — with the metaphysical truths normally attached to such biological facts — becomes more vexed and shifting than any racialist polarity allows.

Color becomes Poe's subject, as in the celebrated description of the water of Tsalal: not black, not white, but "not colourless: nor was it of any one uniform colour — presenting to the eye, as it flowed, every possible shade of purple, like the hues of a changeable silk." If the justification of slavery depended on the curse of color as sign of inferiority — what Jefferson stressed as the "real distinction which nature has made" — this story depends upon a crisis of color. Even though the waters manifest an uncommon variability of color, upon closer examination Pym discovers that "the whole mass of liquid was made up of a number of distinct veins, each of a distinct hue. . these veins did not commingle."

Without pushing too far the problematic symbolic construction of a totalizing category called race in this romance, I turn to the final entries in Pym's narrative, before his fall into the vacancy of whiteness. Moving quickly southward, Pym, Peters, and the black-teethed Nu-Nu are absorbed by an inexplicable whitening: the warm water -108- has a "milky hue"; a "fine white powder, resembling ashes" falls over the canoe; another white animal floats by. In the apocalyptic end, they are in between a "sullen darkness" and "milky depths." Then the darkness spreads except for the "veil" or "curtain" of whiteness. Pym's final vision — the mysterious "shrouded human figure" with a complexion "of the perfect whiteness of snow" — has been described as God, Lord of Death, or the "Deity of Eureka," ushering all things into the final Unity. However we choose to interpret the figure, the ultimate revelation of light becomes deadly, absorbing the previous nuances of shadow or darkness.

In the "Note" that follows Pym's death and the abrupt end of his story, the unnamed writer refers to "the most faintly-detailed incidents of the narrative." Attempting an interpretation of the figures of the chasms on the island of Tsalal, he moves his reader toward "The region of the south." The arm of the '"most northwardly' of the figures" is "outstretched towards the south," and the displaced Virginian Poe concludes with a litany on white: "the carcass of the i animal picked up at se. . the shuddering exclamation of the captive Tsalalian upon encountering the white materials in possession of Mr. Pym. . the shriek of the swift-flying, white, and gigantic birds which had issued from the vapoury white curtain of the South. Nothing white was to be found at Tsalal." And in the region beyond, Poe suggests we can know nothing. Yet, perhaps his Southern readers, especially those Virginians who had followed closely the debates about slavery in the Virginia Legislature in 1831-32, would not be immune to the final effect of this strange commentary on the vicissitudes of white power. The unaccountable and prophetic final sentence of the "Note" reads: "I have graven it within the hills, and my vengeance upon the dust within the rock." What G. R. Thompson in Poe's Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (1973) calls a divine and "perverse vengeance for some unknown offense," no doubt recalled for some readers the known offense of slavery, and the fears of some Southerners, like Jefferson and Poe, that God's judgment would not be stayed, that the inevitable catastrophe is at hand.

Joan Dayan

-109-

Domesticity and Fiction

Literary histories have employed a variety of terms to describe the novels written by women in the United States during the middle decades of the nineteenth century: the sentimental novel, the female Bildungsroman, the domestic novel. This proliferation of terms is useful, if for no other reason, because it suggests that women novelists of the period were hardly the undifferentiated mass that Nathaniel Hawthorne represented them as being when (rankled by the success of the women novelists with whom he competed for the public's attention) he complained to his publisher that "America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women."

Although rakish characters like Charles Morgeson in Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons (1862) and St. Elmo in Augusta Evans Wilson's St. Elmo (1867) owe more than a little to Samuel Richardson, the seduction plot so prominent in the early sentimental fiction intrudes only occasionally in women's novels published after 1820. Female Bildungsroman more adequately describes much of this fiction. Yet, while Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1850) and Martha Finley's Elsie Dinsmore (1867) are exemplary instances of the novel of female development, Caroline Lee Hentz's Linda (1850) and E. D. E. N. Southworrh's The Hidden Hand (1859) flaunt the realist conventions of the Bildungsroman and might be more accurately classified as female picaresque or sensation fiction. Finally, to call women's popular fiction "domestic novels" is also somewhat misleading. Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Home (1835) is little more than a fictionalized treatise on housekeeping and child-rearing, but -110- Fanny Fern's semiautobiographical Ruth Hall (1855) records the adventures of a woman whose domestic ties have been severed and Caroline Chesebro's Isa: A Pilgrimage (1852) tells the story of a radical feminist who lives with a man to whom she is not married.

"Women's novels" might be the only rubric elastic enough to encompass the diversity within this literature. But since historically the gender distinction has worked at the expense of women writers (as Hawthorne's comment suggests), we now must wield it very carefully. Arguably, the only way to avoid inadvertent replication of the invidious nineteenth-century gender distinction would be to dispense with the category of "women writers" altogether. And yet, entirely abandoning this category of analysis seems unwise at this particular historic juncture. Literary historians, accepting Hawthorne's comments about scribbling women at face value, have assumed that women novelists of the period do not merit serious study, and hence these writers languish in undeserved obscurity. Given that women novelists have been excluded as a class, feminist literary histories must include them as a class — albeit with the understanding that the category of "women novelists" intervenes rather than describes, which is to say that it is used provisionally to redress strategic omissions in the scholarship rather than used to suggest either that women's novels are all the same or that they are necessarily different from men's novels.

One could argue that the ill-repute of mid-century novels by women owes less to their individual literary infelicities than to the rhetorical uses toward which scholars attempting to define the classic tradition of the novel have deployed them. Acts of definition are necessarily acts of differentiation. The highly contingent process of defining a classic tradition in part involved distinguishing it from what is not the classic tradition. By aligning the distinction they produced between canonical and noncanonical with gender difference, scholars could give that distinction the look of a difference found in nature (as it were) rather than in the opinions of mere human beings. Literary historians evolved a complex history of nineteenth-century culture in which they associated femininity with the passive reproduction of the status quo and masculinity with the willful transgression of norms. In defining the classic tradition they excluded not just -111- women but also male novelists whom they perceived as capitulating to the conventional, and they exalted those male novelists who most visibly thematized their own defiance of cultural expectations.

The crucial role of gender difference in defining the classic tradition of the novel helps explain some counterintuitive representations of the male classics that have been taken as truisms — for example, that James Fenimore Cooper's historical romances and what are called his "Indian novels" are a reaction against the feminization of the vocation of novel writing and an attempt to articulate a "masculine" novelistic countertradition. This claim is made despite the fact that Lydia Maria Child's "Indian novel" Hobomok (1824) exercised a profound influence on The Last of the Mohicans (which appeared two years after Child's book) and despite the fact that the historical romance was a preferred mode amongst women writers. Further evidence of the role played by the rhetoric of gender in the construction of the American Renaissance is the fact that, rather than describing The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851) with the "feminine" term of "domestic novels," literary historians generally refer to them as "romances," and they do this despite the fact that Hawthorne's relentless and gendered opposition of public and private spheres, his hostility toward the Puritan patriarch, and his representation of imperiled womanhood are precisely the materials of the domestic novel. Similarly, the need to manufacture the difference that would separate canonical from noncanonical, one could argue, dictates that Herman Melville's Pierre (1852) be generally regarded as a parody of the domestic novel rather than an instance of it.

Traditional concepts of the American Renaissance do not ignore women novelists so much as use them as the demonic double of the classic novelists of the period. Taking their cue from Melville's Hawthorne and His Mosses (a review of a collection of Hawthorne's tales that Melville published anonymously in 1850), literary historians have argued that classic writers used the conventions of best-sellers in order to communicate their own original and profound meanings. Popular women novelists, they have claimed, merely reproduced a standardized product that appealed to a mass audience composed primarily of undereducated and underemployed middleclass women desperate for something to fill their empty days. >-112-

Yet, even if women writers (like male writers) had to fulfill certain conventions in order to sell their novels, what prevented them from manipulating those conventions toward their own ends, as Melville describes Hawthorne doing or as he himself perhaps does in Pierre? In Little Women (1869) Louisa May Alcott's satiric transposition of E. D. E. N. Southworth into S. L. A. N. G. Northbury, her humorous treatment of Jo March's conflicting commitments to economic success and truth-telling when she launches her career as a writer, and Jo's disparaging references to notions she finds too "sentimental" — these suggest that the classic male novelists were not the only ones who felt that writing for the literary marketplace imposed some limits on what they could say. Only if one assumes that women writers were incapable of manipulating popular conventions can one read Little Women (as it so often is read) as an uncomplicated and unselfconscious capitulation to the demands of the marketplace.

Revisionary feminist scholarship has suggested that women like Alcott encoded "subversive" feminist messages in texts that merely appear conventional. Women novelists may also have been in the business of "hoodwinking" a public composed primarily of "superficial skimmers" (to borrow Melville's language). A more radical feminist critique, however, would note that the images of passivity and addiction characteristic of descriptions of the rise of mass culture are themselves gendered. The belief that by mid-century the reading audience was increasingly (if not overwhelmingly) female may itself account for scholarly consensus that antebellum Americans were hostile to any novel that manifestly challenged the literary, moral, or political conventions that permitted the masses to proceed through their lives with as little reflection as possible.

Literary historians' use of a rhetoric of gender in the construction of the American Renaissance has antecedents in the work of the canonical male writers of the period. For example, in The Spy (1821) Cooper (who published his first novel, Precaution, under a female pseudonym) satirizes the literary predilections of "our countrywomen, by whose opinions it is that we expect to stand or fall." Taking statements by male writers at face value, scholars have gone so far as to claim that the antebellum United States was "a society controlled by women." One dubbed the middle decade of the nine-113- nine- "the feminine fifties" and exclaimed: "And to think of the masculine Melville and Hawthorne and Thoreau condemned to work through their literary lives in an atmosphere like that."

Increasingly, the "feminization of American culture" (that is to say, the alleged determining influence exercised by women over midcentury culture at the level both of consumption and of production) appears to be largely a fiction created by the nineteenth century and perpetuated by literary historians in the twentieth. No direct evidence corroborates Cooper's assertion that the success or failure of a novel depended on women's tastes; contemporary historians of reading have little firsthand data on the gender composition of the early nineteenth-century reading audience. The belief in the femininity of the audience for novels rests primarily upon indirect evidence like The Spy's introduction and upon the patently chauvinist assumption that because most middle-class women were "only housewives" they had enormous quantities of free time on their hands that they squandered reading trash. (Harriet Beecher Stowe's letters suggest that some middle-class women were in fact driven to states of nervous exhaustion by the amount of work required to run a household prior to our age of "modern conveniences." Her descriptions of trying to dry sheets in the humid summer air while a cholera epidemic that would eventually take the life of one of her children raged through Cincinnati seems particularly to the point.)

Nor is it clear that women dominated culture at the level of production. To the contrary, there is evidence that at mid-century men produced more than twice the number of novels as women. Midcentury women writers like Warner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Maria Cummins (who wrote the first "best-sellers" in the modern sense of the term) far outsold the "classic" male novelists with whom they are usually compared. But Hawthorne, Melville, and Cooper were not the only male novelists of the period. William Ware, T. S. Arthur, and Donald Mitchell are just a few of the male novelists whose popularity rivaled that of their female competitors. Finally, even if (as it indeed appears) the best-selling novels of the period written by women outsold the best-sellers written by men, the bookpublishing industry was entirely in the hands of men, a fact that greatly complicates the issue of who "controlled" the literary marketplace. In the face of such facts about production — and in the ab-114- sence of direct evidence about consumption — perhaps the time has come to ask not whether the "feminization of American culture" was a bad thing (the traditional view) or whether it was a good thing (the feminist revisionary view) but whether it even happened in the first place.

How is it, we might ask, that writers in this period came to believe that America (to paraphrase Hawthorne) had been wholly given over to women?

The belief that society had been feminized grows out of exaggerated claims for the influence of women generated by the rise of domestic ideology. By 1830 the nature of woman's contribution to society had become a regional obsession amongst intellectuals of the Northeastern United States, and by virtue of the dominance this region exercised over cultural production it necessarily became a national obsession as well.

The Revolutionary-era idea of republican motherhood is in some sense the precursor of domestic ideology. The Enlightenment concept that youth was particularly susceptible to both good and bad influences led late eighteenth-century American educators like Judith Sargent Murray and Benjamin Rush to argue that in their capacity as mothers women exercised a tremendous power over the fate of the Republic in the values they taught boys who would grow up to lead the nation. It was therefore necessary, argued these writers, to pay more attention to women's education than had previously been given, lest mothers communicate undemocratic tendencies to their male offspring.

Whereas Murray and Rush attempted to incorporate women into the ongoing Revolutionary project by representing men and women as equally capable of contributing to the moral well-being of the Republic, early nineteenth-century writers increasingly represented women as the sole repository of virtue in society. At the same time that they began characterizing men as naturally aggressive, sensual, and godless, authors of countless sermons, newspaper articles, and treatises began to argue that if through their relations with fathers, husbands, and sons in the home women did not exercise a civilizing influence on men, society would collapse into complete anarchy. In one of the scores of sermons bearing the title "Female Influence"-115- written in the period, the Reverend J. F. Stearns proclaimed to his women parishioners in 1837: "Yours it is to decide. . whether we shall be a nation of refined and high minded Christians, or whether. . we shall become a fierce race of semi-barbarians."

While such theories of female influence claimed that women ultimately controlled society, they also stressed that women exercised that power through indirect influence rather than through direct force. If a woman attempted to influence society directly — through, for example, winning the right to vote — she would lose her control over men, since brute force rather than moral suasion governed the political realm. Woman's physical delicacy would prevent her from battling with men on their own terrain, it was argued, and hence it was in her own best interest to remain within her "proper sphere."

For some writers, however, even moral suasion within her proper sphere was too direct a manifestation of woman's power. Child's 1831 treatise The Mother's Book(a somewhat more philosophical statement than The American Frugal Housewife, which Child published one year earlier) asserts that it is better for mothers to instruct through the example of their own virtuous behavior rather than through precept. Its dialogic form made narrative a particularly appropriate vehicle for what the age defined as women's proper exercise of power. Child (herself a novelist) recommended the reading of uplifting fiction, but she took care to distinguish uplifting fiction from fiction with a "good moral": "The morality should be in the book," she wrote, "not tacked upon the end of it." No doubt Cummins was thinking of the educational uses to which her own work might be put when, in The Lamplighter (1854), she describes Emily Graham judiciously selecting uplifting narratives of the "triumph of truth, obedience and patience" for Gerty Flint to read. This method of inculcating moral principles in her willful ward conforms with Emily's more general commitment to exerting her authority only covertly — a method contrasted with her father's disastrously manifest exertions of his authority. Emily, writes Cummins, "preached no sermons, nor did she weary [Gerty] with exhortations and precepts. Indeed, it did not occur to Gerty that she [was being] taught anything; but simply and gradually [Emily] imparted light to the child's dark soul." Because narrative was not considered rhetorical (rhetoric being associated with the "masculine" political sphere), novel writing was seen as -116- a particularly appropriate way for women to exert their indirect influence for the good of society.

The cult of domesticity and its appropriation of the genre of the novel provide a cultural context in which to understand Hawthorne's comment that America had been taken over by a mob of scribbling women (a comment that, by the way, was prompted specifically by the success of The Lamplighter). Hawthorne's overstatement of the case was informed as much by his culture's belief in the feminization of American society as it was by his own professional jealousy. In fact, in The Scarlet Letter, five years before writing the letter to his publisher, Hawthorne suggested that in American society the masculine-identified characteristics of Puritan times (the physical vigor and moral callousness of the Puritan elders) had given way to feminine-identified qualities of antebellum times (the exquisite delicacy and sensitivity of the narrator of "The Custom-House," which is presaged by the nervous behavior of the Puritan male hysteric Arthur Dimmesdale).

The theory that society had grown more feminine was by no means limited to male novelists of the period. One could argue that male writers manifested more hostility toward the changes they perceived than did most women writers, a hostility that they evidenced in their fondness for narrating the flight of male characters into the wilderness or out to sea (and thus away from the rule of women); however, a novel like Harriet Beecher Stowe's Pearl of Orr's Island (1862) suggests that it is more complicated than this. Like The Scarlet Letter, Stowe's local color tale is set in Puritan times (its titular "pearl" Mara Lincoln in fact recalls Hawthorne's character Pearl). Stowe's narrator, coyly prophesying the situation that nineteenthcentury Americans felt increasingly characteristic of their own century, associates seventeenth-century New England with the haughty masculinity of the young Moses Pennel and suggests: "There may, perhaps, come a time when the saucy boy, who steps so superbly, and predominates so proudly in virtue of his physical strength and daring, will learn to tremble at the golden measuring-rod, held in the hand of a woman." As an adolescent, Moses begins to chafe at the virtuous Mara's "apron strings" and goes to sea to sow his wild oats — an act of rebellion that anticipates Huck Finn's decision at the end of Mark -117- Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) "to light out for the Territory" in order to evade Aunt Sally's "sivilizing" designs on him. One might argue that women's novels already contain the narratives of male rebellion against the rule of women that are generally associated with male writers. In other words, far from challenging the principles of domestic ideology, male narratives of rebellion against women's rule merely reinforce domesticity's association of men with "semi-barbarism" and women with "high minded" Christianity. Similarly, one could argue that theories of the American Renaissance that represent the classic male novelists as rebels against the acceptable conventions of a literary marketplace controlled by women merely perpetuate the belief in the moral inequality of the sexes fundamental to domestic ideology.

The cult of domesticity may have become culturally dominant by the mid-nineteenth century, but it is important to bear in mind that, at least in its origins, it was an oppositional ideology. Domesticity's origins are explicitly antipatriarchal, and while to argue this is not the same thing as arguing that domesticity was feminist, it does explain why so many women took up the pen in behalf of a philosophy that seems, from a contemporary perspective, so at odds with women's political, economic, and personal independence.

Domesticity proceeds from a critique of the commodification of womanhood in the aristocratic patriarchal family. Jean-Jacques Rousseau captures the spirit of the patriarchal view of womanhood when he, in his cursory treatment of female education in Emile (1762), explains the difference between male education and female education as the difference between "the development of strength" and "the development of attractiveness." Responding in part to Rousseau in her Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799), British educator Hannah More (who is generally credited with the founding of domestic ideology) criticized her contemporaries for educating their daughters "for the world, and not for themselves." Patriarchal interests dictated the shape of the system of female education More wanted to reform. Consisting almost exclusively in ornamental graces requisite for obtaining an advantageous familial alliance through the marriage contract, this education, More felt, treated women as little more than commodities bought and sold -118- on the marriage market. Rousseau expressed the degree to which women were raised "for the world" rather than for themselves when he argued that a woman's knowledge and powers of reasoning should be developed only enough so as to prevent her from being tedious in conversation with her husband. Using the home as a metaphor for interiority (in the sense of "selfhood"), More was attempting to redefine woman's value in terms of internal qualities: sound judgment, knowledge of how to run a household, moral tendencies — qualifications that suited a woman to be a good wife and mother rather than merely making her satisfying to the male gaze.

Historical romances written by women clearly express domesticity's antipatriarchal content. We see this in Child's romance of ancient Greece, Philothea (1836). Aspasia, who herself relentlessly cultivates the gaze of the crowd, holds entertainments at her home in which women dance and sing before a male audience. Child's retiring heroine Philothea, seemingly voicing the author's view, explains to Aspasia that the renown women gain from performing before men is a sign of their thralldom rather than a measure of their freedom. The presence in the narrative of a woman who is literally enslaved (Philothea's friend Eudora) only strengthens the force of an analogy that later antislavery novels like Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and Child's A Romance of the Republic (1867) would pursue in a native and more contemporary setting.

Like Philothea, Eliza Buckminster Lee's Parthenia (1858) constructs the domestic woman in order to criticize patriarchy. Set in the fourth century, the novel describes the youth of Emperor Julian, who dedicated himself to reviving the worship of the pagan gods just as Christianity seemed on the verge of establishing its ascendancy. Lee transforms the struggle between paganism and Christianity into a struggle between men and women. The warrior Julian (reputed to be a woman-hater) believes that Christianity is a religion suited only to women. In its story of the crucifixion he sees none of the male heroism he so admires in Homeric literature. In meeting the beautiful and wise pagan priestess Parthenia, however, Julian learns firsthand that there are forms of power other than physical force. He proposes that she become his empress and use her feminine charms to promote the cause of paganism. But because in her gradual conversion to Christianity she learns that the only way to make woman a "puri-119- fying and refining influence infused through society" is to "elevate [her] to her true place in the family," Parthenia declines the honor. Lee, it seems, detects in Julian's offer the patriarchal tendency to reduce women to mere objects for public display.

More was concerned that the patriarchal display of woman robbed her of any authentic identity. Hence she associated the fashionable life with a lack of authenticity. The life of the young lady, More had lamented, "too much resembles that of an actress: the morning is all rehearsal and the evening is all performance." The association of wealth and fashion with the loss of female authenticity is particularly apparent in some of the more didactic novels of the period, including Sedgwick's Clarence (1830) and The Poor Rich Man and the Rich Poor Man (1836), Elizabeth Oakes Smith's Riches Without Wings (1838), and Ann Stephens's Fashion and Famine (1854). The association, however, also seems to inform Alcott's compelling and not in the least bit didactic novella Behind a Mask (1866). Subtitled "A Woman's Power," Alcott's gothic romance is set in an aristocratic English household. The young and lovely governess Jean Muir ingratiates herself with the members of the Coventry household — particularly its male members — until she has all of them at her beck and call. At the end of the first chapter the reader sees what the Coventry family does not. Alone in her room after a first impressive day on the job, Jean declares aloud, "[T]he curtain is down, so I may be myself for a few hours, if actresses ever are themselves." She then proceeds to remove her makeup, wig, and several false teeth. The narrator remarks that the "metamorphosis was wonderful, but the disguise was more in the expression she assumed than in any art of costume or false adornment." The setting of the tale suggests that Alcott, like More, saw loss of authenticity as the inevitable fate of women in the patriarchal household. Like Lee and Child, Alcott selects a foreign setting for her novel in order to suggest that such a household has no place in the modern United States.

More's American protégé Catharine Beecher used images of physical confinement to express patriarchal culture's violence against the integrity of female selfhood. Beecher authored what is probably the single most influential statement of American domesticity, A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841), which she later (with the aid of her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe) revised and published under the title -120- The American Woman's Home (1869). Throughout her work, Beecher expresses concern that young girls spend too much time indoors in overheated rooms and that when they are permitted outdoors are instructed not to run around and "romp" like boys. Women are further restrained by corsets and other "monstrous female fashions," which, by impeding the natural growth and development of the body, "bring distortion and disease" — literally to the female body, but metaphorically to the female self. The tomboy Jo March in Little Women expresses the domestic critique of monstrous patriarchal fashions when she complains, "I hate to think I've got to grow up and be Miss March, and wear long gowns, and look as prim as a China-aster." In Little Women Alcott uses the backdrop of the Civil War to create a value system that gives priority not just to women but to women as the representatives of the interior life.

The figure of domestic woman then cannot be separated from the modern reconstruction not just of the female self but of selfhood in general. In Little Women the March sisters remain at home, while the Northern men have gone off to fight. Jo rails against the destiny of her sex: "I'm dying to go and fight with papa, and I can only stay at home and knit like a poky old woman." Through her representation of the March sisters' attempts to overcome their "bosom enemies," Alcott relocates within the home the heroism traditionally identified with the battlefield. Alcott suggests that, in part because heroics attract the attention of the world, it is far easier to be a hero than it is to purify one's own heart; temporary hardship and even death in the name of a virtuous cause are more easily endured than a quiet, lifetime struggle for virtue. The same logic that led Alcott to valorize the (feminine) quotidian over the (masculine) heroic led minister Horace Bushnell to propose a new "domestic" form of worship. Referring in part to the histrionic conversion experiences that accompanied the religious revivals that punctuated the entire antebellum period, Bushnell complained in Christian Nurture (1860): "We hold a piety of conquest rather than of love, a kind of public piety, that is strenuous and fiery on great occasions, but wants. . constancy." In Bushnell's opinion all Christians, not just women, should cultivate domesticity of character.

During the Civil War years the influential women's magazine Godey's Lady's Book never once alluded to the conflict that so en-121- grossed the attention of the nation. Along with the novels Northwood (1827) and The Lecturess (1839), Godey's was an important vehicle for its editor Sarah Hale's rather conservative domestic philosophy, and Hale's critics have taken the magazine's failure even to acknowledge the major conflict of the day as evidence that women intellectuals retreated to the home to escape harsh realities. "Reality," however, was not something these women were attempting to escape so much as something the particular form of their antipatriarchal critique encouraged them to redefine. According to Child's The Mother's Book, "Nothing can be real that does not have its home within us." If under the editorship of Hale Godey's manifested little interest in the war, this is in part because domestic ideologues were skeptical about the importance of the merely external. Hence in addressing the question of discipline, The Mother's Book stresses that behavior matters far less than the motives that impel it. The modern concept of the self and the modern experience of the self would be inconceivable without the transvaluation that domesticity helped effect.

Domesticity's valorization of character over conduct gave novelists license to produce some of the era's more reverent representations of non-Western cultures. In Hobomok (1824) the prolific Child (whose 1868 An Appeal for the Indians refers to the belief in white superiority as a "curse") protests the undue harshness of Calvinist doctrine that would damn the unconverted but noble savage to everlasting punishment in the afterlife. Like Stephens's later Malaeska (1860), Hobomok is a tale of interracial marriage. At one point Mary Corbitant, who marries Hobomok and bears his child, has a vision of the Christian God smiling "on distant mosques and temples" and "shedding the same light on the sacrifice heap of the Indian, and the rude dwellings of the Calvinist." The narrator lays the groundwork for an early theory of cultural relativism when she asserts that "spiritual light" shines equally on all people but is refracted in many different ways.

Women novelists' willingness to entertain notions of cultural relativism was not entirely disinterested, of course. Like her earlier A New-England Tale (1822), Sedgwick's Hope Leslie (1827) employs -122- relativism to buttress its own antipatriarchal critique as much as to ennoble aboriginals. Through the generous actions of her native heroine Magawisca, Sedgwick legitimates the alien culture rejected by Puritan "fanatics" because it does not conform to their ethnocentric standards. At the same time, and through a similar logic, Sedgwick legitimates the acts of defiance against the Puritan elders committed by her white heroine Hope Leslie. In an age of what Sedgwick calls "undisputed masculine supremacy," Hope fails to demonstrate the "passiveness" that the Puritans define as woman's chief virtue. Sedgwick describes Hope as someone whom the Puritans perceive as, like the natives, in need of "civilizing" restraints. But Hope's conduct only appears immoral; steadfast principles in fact guide her actions throughout the novel.

The domestic emphasis on cultivating principle in order to preserve the authenticity of the self may also account for the frequency with which orphans appear in women's novels. In three of the most popular novels of the time, Warner's The Wide, Wide World, Cummins's The Lamplighter, and Finley's Elsie Dinsmore, the death of one or both parents or the abandonment of children is a compelling donnée for women novelists because it provides an opportunity for distinguishing between character and conduct. Only with the parent absent can the child's internalization of principle be gauged. In women's novels, as in Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay on the subject, "selfreliance" is not freedom from duty but rather subjection to an internalized standard of duty. This is not to say that by internalizing duty domesticity merely introjected patriarchal rule but rather to suggest that even oppositional ideologies can have normalizing as well as liberating aspects.

While one could read assertions of women's moral superiority to men as empowering to women, historical romances written by women suggest that because theirs is the power of influence rather than of force, domesticity is always on the verge of reproducing patriarchal culture's male gaze. Harriet Vaughan Cheney's historical romance A Peep at the Pilgrims (1850) suggests that even in her private relations the domestic woman is necessarily a spectacle (as suggested by the titular "peep"). Even more so than Lee, Cheney -123- makes clear the erotic nature of the influence that domesticity assigned to women. Mr. Grey, voicing the wisdom of the Puritan patriarch, warns his daughter Miriam that she must accept male authority without question because women are more prone to err than men. "Women are born to submit," he claims, "and as the weaker vessel, it is meet they should be guided by those who have rule over them." Miriam argues in response that to the contrary women appear better suited to dispense the gospel rather than to receive it — since their erotic power makes their "influence" over men well-nigh irresistible: "If the entreaties of Delilah could subdue Samson, how much more powerful must be the arguments of religion from the lips of a virtuous woman," she asserts. Even though Miriam works toward Christian ends, Cheney cannot rid her "virtuous woman" of all the erotic power represented by the biblical Delilah.

Similarly, Stowe's representation of the virtuous Tina Percival in Oldtown Folks (1869) participates in the logic of the male gaze. Like Cheney, Stowe suggests that women's power over men depends upon their ability to please them. Tina's spectacular beauty, far from being a source of temptation for Stowe's male characters, is instead presented as, potentially, an agent of their regeneration. The narrator speaks of romantic "LOVE" as "greatest and holiest of all the natural sacraments and means of grace." Stowe contrasts this perspective with that of the Calvinist minister Dr. Stern, who believes that "the minister who does not excite the opposition of the natural heart fails to do his work." Significantly, the minister's sermons excite only "revulsion" among the townsfolk. Stowe had previously relocated gospel authority from the clergy to the eroticized domestic woman in The Minister's Wooing (another local color tale set in Puritan New England that Stowe published in 1859). There her character James Marvyn asserts that he does not understand a word of the minister Dr. Hopkins's tedious sermons but that the lovely Mary Scudder is his "living gospel" — the same phrase that the skeptic George Harris uses to describe his pious wife Eliza in Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Although thinking of women as the living gospel for men gives women a certain authority, it also defines them strictly in terms of men's needs. Because domestic ideology posits a moral difference between men and women, it always threatens to reduce women to little more than vessels for male salvation. One could argue that Stowe's -124- representation of the virtuous heroine not long for this world (the archetypal expression of which is, of course, Eva St. Clare in Uncle Tom's Cabin) results from the moral difference between the sexes posited by domestic ideology. Referring to Mara Lincoln's little Evalike demise at the end of Pearl of Orr's Island, the narrator notes that some people die young in order to aid in the spiritual development of those whom they leave behind. Mara's death has this effect on her skeptical fiancé Moses Pennel, whose salvation seems much more assured after her death than before it. In fact, on her deathbed Mara asserts that her Christian influence on him will be greater when she is dead than it would have been had she lived to marry him. For Stowe, then, a woman's dying gospel is perhaps even more potent than her living one.

Yet Mara Lincoln's martyrdom for the sake of her fiancé's spiritual well-being is just one logical extreme to which domestic ideology's claims for the moral superiority of women could lead. It is important to stress that domesticity was not an ideology in the impoverished sense of the term. Domesticity did not become a dominant discourse because it provided people with a finite and orderly set of beliefs relieving them from the burden of thinking; to the contrary, domesticity was compelling precisely because it gave people an expansive logic and a series of rich cultural symbols through which to think about their world. As a result, domestic ideology, while it certainly manipulated antebellum intellectuals, could also be manipulated by them. Hence Alcott could take it to what is perhaps its feminist extreme in her novel Work (1873). Work opens with the orphan Christie Devon (invoking the "Declaration of Sentiments" revealed by women's rights supporters at their convention in Seneca Falls in 1848) announcing to her guardians that "there's going to be a new Declaration of Independence," namely, her declaration of economic independence from them. Alcott uses domestic ideology in order to identify not just work but meaningful work for women. Christie ultimately becomes a mediator in an organization composed of both middle- and working-class women. There she helps to heal the class conflicts that arise. Alcott's fictional character Christie, one could argue, anticipates historical figures like Jane Addams, who at the turn of the century established social work as a legitimate profession for women. Because domesticity placed the welfare of society -125- in women's able hands, women could claim that certain social professions outside of the home were the logical extension of their work inside the home.

Alcott perceived that the particular skills and knowledge women developed in managing households had extra-domestic applications, and this perception no doubt influenced her own decision to become a nurse during the Civil War. After the war other women intellectuals like Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell (who in 1849 received the first medical degree granted to a woman in the United States) also tried to expand the terrain of women's civilizing mission to include all of society and not just her own household. Declarations of women's moral superiority and civilizing influence, as well as claims for the managerial and practical skills they acquired through labor in the home, buttressed women's entrance into careers in medicine, education, and social welfare. Ironically, in the second half of the century domesticity itself enabled women's forays out of what the antebellum period identified as women's proper sphere. To add to the irony, postwar suffragists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton even used the logic of domestic ideology in their fight for women's political empowerment. Amongst these suffragists, antipatriarchal domesticity seems at last to have developed a recognizably feminist character.

The influence of domestic ideology on the suffragists, however, guaranteed that early feminism would not be without its political ambiguities. As early as 1838 in her Letters to Mothers Lydia Sigourney attempted to expand the terrain of domesticity into the world at large. Appalled that "the influx of untutored foreigners" had made the United States "a repository for the waste and refuse of other nations," Sigourney maintained that it was the responsibility of women "to neutralize this mass" through an internal missionary movement that would spread the good word of the Anglo-American middle-class home. Unfortunately, postwar suffragists, retaining domesticity's vision of the custodial role of women, used an argument reminiscent of Sigourney's to press for the vote. If white women were enfranchised, they argued, it would help offset the deleterious influence of lower-class immigrants and recently emancipated slaves (who during Reconstruction were allowed to vote). The same millennial -126- zeal that gives domesticity its custodial mission, then, also makes it both classist and ethnocentric.

A reading of Harriet E. Wilson's novel Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859) suggests that some African American women were acutely aware of domesticity's normative contents; however, because most of the other important mid-century African American women intellectuals (including Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, and Elizabeth Keckley) expressed their suspicions about domestic ideology in nontraditional literary forms, any history devoted to a genre like the novel will necessarily underrepresent the contributions of African American women to the discourse on domesticity. Wilson's autobiographical tale (believed to be the first novel published by an African American in the United States) is yet another story of an orphaned girl in search of what Wilson calls "selfdependence." This orphan, however, is an African American woman living in the North who is taken in as a servant by a white family when her mother abandons her.

The willfulness of the orphan Frado recalls that of Cummins's character Gerty in The Lamplighter, but unlike Gerty's guardian Emily Graham, Frado's mistress Mrs. Bellmont is hardly a domestic woman. Intent upon "breaking" Frado's will, she rules over not just Frado but the entire Bellmont household with an iron hand. Wilson opposes Mrs. Bellmont's method of governing to Aunt Abby's more gentle methods. Befriending the abused child, the Bellmont family's maiden aunt manifests their concern for her spiritual welfare by attempting to convert her. But Wilson establishes this opposition between Mrs. Bellmont and the domestic woman Aunt Abby only to render visible what they have in common. The author orchestrates the death of Frado's defender James Bellmont in such a way as to provide an opportunity for Frado to provide evidence of her conversion to Aunt Abby's god. As the opening of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps the younger's novel The Gates Ajar (1869) suggests, in the nineteenth century the death of a loved one was often seen as an occasion for manifesting one's submission to a divine wisdom that passes human understanding. But just when she appears on the verge of submitting to the higher authority that Aunt Abby attempts to impose on her, Frado suddenly rebels against Mrs. Bellmont, threatening henceforth -127- to return any blows that her mistress inflicts on her. At the same time the narrator abruptly drops the question of Frado's conversion. Because race gave Wilson a marginal status within the dominant culture, perhaps she was in a better position to see the way in which the advocates of what Bushnell called a new "domestic" religion had not entirely erased "conquest" from Christianity.

Introducing the women's novel into the canon of the American Renaissance, some object, will involve discarding aesthetic criteria and instituting political considerations as the determinants of literary merit. We must not forget that even the acknowledged male "classics" of the American Renaissance were themselves at one point noncanonical and that their cultural ascendency in fact owes a good deal to politics in the form of American nationalism. Few critics have found even the handful of acknowledged male classics (including Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter, The Last of the Mohicans) entirely satisfying from a strictly aesthetic standpoint, particularly in comparison to the British and European "masterpieces" of the same period. Indeed, a comment by Melville in Hawthorne and His Mosses suggests that if nineteenth-century critics had applied aesthetic rather than political standards to literature, most of the classic male novelists we now read might languish in the same literary obscurity to which their female contemporaries have been relegated. Concerned over the ill-repute of American writers and wondering where the American Shakespeare was, Melville enjoins, "[L]et America first praise mediocrity even, in her own children, before she praises. . the best excellence in the children of any other land. Let her own authors, I say, have the priority of appreciation."

Neither were strictly aesthetic criteria F. O. Matthiessen's principle for selection when he introduced the concept of the American Renaissance in 1941 — the same year in which the United States entered World War II and democracy both at home and abroad seemed so imperiled. In his American Renaissance (which for almost half a century helped determine which mid-nineteenth-century writers were read), Matthiessen asserts that the best authors "all wrote literature for democracy," and he notes excluding Edgar Allan Poe from his study because Poe "was bitterly hostile to democracy."

Both Melville's and Matthiesen's comments suggest that political -128- considerations have for a long time and quite explicitly informed our sense of literary value. Introducing novels by women into the canon may not entail a drastic change in our concept of literary merit, after all. Instead it may require something far more radical — a change in our politics.

Lora Romero

-129-

Fiction and Reform I

"In the history of the world," Emerson proclaimed in Man the Reformer (1841), "the doctrine of Reform had never such scope as at the present hour." Indeed, as he surveyed the cultural scene, he sensed a "new spirit" and "new ideas" pervading Northeast reform activity. But whereas many of his acquaintances became involved in group efforts at social reformation, such as the communitarian experiment at Brook Farm, or abolitionism, Emerson insisted on the primacy of individual reformation. All desires for reform, he argued, emerged from "the conviction that there is an infinite worthiness in man" and an "impediment" standing between individuals and their essentially divine nature. As he insisted even more strenuously in New England Reformers (1844): "society gains nothing whilst a man, not himself renovated, attempts to renovate things around him." That same year, however, Emerson began to read widely in the history of slavery, and in a pivotal lecture, Emancipation in the British West Indies (1844), he called on the "great masses of men" to take a larger role in changing laws and affecting social policy. Seven years later, in a lecture on the Fugitive Slave Law, he advised his auditors that civil disobedience would be an appropriate response to the government's efforts to enforce "the most detestable law that was ever enacted by a civilized state." Abolitionism, the most pressing social reform movement of his time, had taken hold of Emerson, and during the 1850s the champion of selfculture addressed numerous abolitionist meetings and even campaigned for Gorham Palfrey on the Free Soil Ticket. Slavery was by -130- no means the only reform movement to capture his attention; in addition to offering occasional remarks on temperance, in 1855 he spoke to a women's rights convention in favor of women's suffrage, arguing that "if in your city [Boston] the uneducated emigrant vote numbers thousands, representing a brutal ignorance and mere animal wants, it is to be corrected by an educated and religious vote, representing the wants and desires of honest and refined persons." Nevertheless, despite his various reform commitments of the 1840s and 1850s, in his journals of the period he continued to muse skeptically on the value of group efforts at social renovation.

Emerson's ambivalent but increasingly engaged response to social reform suggests that he wrestled with some of the large questions his more individualistic philosophy of the 1830s and early 1840s tended to avoid: Can self-reformation proceed in a social vacuum somehow apart from the debates, institutions, and laws of antebellum culture? To what extent is group reformation dependent on individual reformation, and vice versa? Fearing that the "civilized state" was falling into barbarism, he also began to address different sorts of questions, as his unattractive remarks on the "brutal ignorance" of the emigrants suggest, about the state of the union: Who should lead the nation, and to what end? What constitutes legitimate authority? How achieve civilized harmony and progress during a time of heightening sectional, ethnic, and class conflict?

As the literary genre most responsive to social debates and discourses, and, at least traditionally, the genre most attentive to situating the individual in society, the novel is naturally suited to address all of these large (and representative) questions from a variety of perspectives. Given the enormous social impact of reform movements during the 1825-60 period, both in England and in America, and given not only the increasingly dominant place of the slavery debate in antebellum culture but also the increasingly tense ethnic, class, and gender relations of the period, it should not be surprising, then, that a conflict between individual and social action, a questioning of authority, a fear of social breakdown, and a utopian desire for social regeneration are some of the key issues and concerns informing and energizing the antebellum novel.

Of course the starting point of American reform is problematic. Historians have argued for the primacy of evangelicalism to the rise -131- of reform, pointing to the mid- 1790s — the beginnings of the "Second Great Awakening" — as the point of origin for subsequent reforms. However, because of the centrality of secular Enlightenment thought to some of the great reformist crusaders, we might argue for the primacy of Jefferson's authoring of the Declaration of Independence. Or, taking an even longer view, the Protestant Reformation itself — with its affirming of the individual over the traditional and institutional — could be viewed as the beginning of "American" reform. For the reform movements of the antebellum period, however, which drew on all of these sources, the revivals and religious debates of the 1820s and 1830s had the greatest immediate impact, channeling energies toward antislavery, feminism, temperance, hydropathy, penology, spiritualism, phrenology, peace crusades, and numerous other related causes. Dubbed "the Sisterhood of Reforms" by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, these various movements sometimes contradicted or were at odds with one another, but they shared in a set of fundamental beliefs: a rejection of Calvinist determinism; an insistence on the individual's ability to shape his or her own fate (even though, paradoxically, many reformers would endorse the use of institutions to achieve this end); a millennialist conviction of the nation's potentially glorious destiny.

The social and religious dimensions of these beliefs were developed in the perfectionist theology of the itinerant minister Charles Grandison Finney, who began his career in the West but had a major impact on the Protestant revivals of upstate New York's "burnedover district" during the late 1820s and early 1830s. Preaching that "God has made man a moral free agent," Finney insisted that, in tandem with God's love and grace, individuals could achieve an immediate and saving conversion. The regeneration and perfection of individuals, he argued, would ultimately serve to regenerate and perfect the nation. In more complex ways, Emerson, influenced by his former teacher William Ellery Channing and various Continental Romantics, argued for the importance of intuition and self-culture, rather than Unitarian institutional and historical authority, in encouraging individuals to discover their own miraculous divinity. A wave of such self-discoveries of the "Divine Soul" within, the utopian conclusion of The American Scholar (1837) implied, would ensure the renovation and reformation of American society. -132-

Despite the providential calm and ease of such large-scale transformations, as envisioned in the optimistic writings of both Finney and Emerson, many of the reform movements of the period were actively directed by Protestant elites concerned with maintaining their social hegemony during a time of increasing class and ethnic diversity. For many other reformers, however, the impulse toward reform emerged from a more genuine desire to bring about change in a nation whose idealistic values were believed to be compromised by rampant materialism, class and gender inequities, various abuses of authority, and the intransigent presence of slavery. To be sure, even these reformers sometimes betrayed a meanspirited hostility toward those perceived as marginal or different, but overall the religious revivals, along with the romantic theorizing of Emerson and his circle, played an enormously productive role in the emergence of a number of progressive reforms, such as the temperance, communitarian, antislavery, and women's rights movements. Although Finney and Emerson were themselves somewhat suspicious of group efforts at social reform, many of their auditors and readers, newly convinced of the regenerative potential of the individual and the nation, thought concerted social action the best possible approach to purging America of its accumulated evils and renewing consensual ideals.

Convinced that American society was in need of complete renovation, communitarian reformers, for example, established familial subcommunities based on noncompetitive principles of group association that were intended to serve as models for national reform. Over one hundred such groups, mostly short-lived, came into existence between the Revolution and the Civil War. Notable early groups, whose religious beliefs provided their chief inspiration and modus operandi, included Ann Lee's Shakers, the German pietistic Harmony Society, and the Mormons. Other groups, such as Robert Owen's New Harmony Society in Indiana and Frances Wright's group at Nashoba, Tennessee, were more secularly inclined. Both the socialist ideals of Charles Fourier, as popularized by Albert Brisbane's Social Destiny of Man (1840), and the millennialist ideals of the revivalists and the transcendentalists informed the 1840s communitarian experiment at Brook Farm. During the same period Adam Ballou established the nearby Hopedale Community, with the evangelical aim of promoting world peace. Many of these reform associ-133- ations attempted to implement nonsexist modes of social organization, though none was more committed to this end than John Humphrey Noyes's upstate New York Oneida community. During its relatively long life from 1848 to 1880, the community practiced "complex marriage" — shared marriage partners — and male continence, an arrangement intended both to protect women from the bonds of repeated pregnancies and to protect men from what was believed to be the debilitating expenditure of semen.

Surprisingly, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who in an 1835 notebook entry compared the "modern reformer" to an escaped lunatic, joined the Brook Farm community for seven months of 1841. His retrospective The Blithedale Romance (1852), set at a reform association similar to Brook Farm, reveals his conflicted attitudes toward the reform impulses that he himself briefly embraced. Conceiving of themselves as disinterested reformers in the spirit of the Pilgrims, the participants at Blithedale appear to be self-important and just plain selfish: Hollingsworth secretly pursues his prison-reform project; Coverdale apparently seeks a private refuge and literary material; the feminist reformer Zenobia, modeled partly on Margaret Fuller, seems in search of the limelight and a man. Though the community embraces gender reforms, women continue to do the cooking and men the physical labor, and there is a strong suggestion that Zenobia commits suicide out of her frustrated love for Hollingsworth (whereas Fuller in Woman in the Nineteenth Century [1845] had mocked the idea that women exist only for the love of a man).

Hawthorne's treatment of spiritualism further contributes to his apparently skeptical portrayal of the group's character and intentions. Whereas the Fox sisters' 1848 "spirit-rapping" communications with the dead helped to give rise to spiritualism as a reform movement of sorts, promising to provide access to the invisible and divine, in Blithedale Hawthorne analogizes Westervelt's decadent spiritualistic practices, which link mediums in "one great, mutually conscious brotherhood," to the associative practices at Blithedale, which link reformers in a "general brain" — with the large intention of underscoring both groups' propensities toward revolutionism. This is never so clear as when the novel shifts from Westervelt's lyceum display to the festive masquerade at Blithedale, where the associationists, as Coverdale describes them from his hiding place in the -134- hermitage, whirled "round so swiftly, so madly, and so merrily, in time and tune with the Satanic music, that their separate incongruities were blended all together." In his imaging of associationism and spiritualism as forms of demonic revolutionism, Hawthorne would seem to be in the same reactionary camp as the Roman Catholic convert Orestes Brownson, whose novel The Spirit-Rapper (1854) portrayed spiritualism as Satan's invisible tool for bringing forth the French Revolution, the European revolutions of the 1840s, and the emerging women's rights movement.

Yet Blithedale is more complicated than that, in large part because of Hawthorne's use of the first-person narrator Coverdale to enact both the suspicion of and the desire for reform. As presented in the novel, Coverdale is simultaneously an insider and outsider, a character who, leading an aimlessly drifting life in the anomic city, deeply desires the structure and community offered by Blithedale. He is a character, too, whose sexual anxieties and insecurities, and chronic cynicism, make him an unreliable critic of reform. The novel, to a large extent, is a study in power, desire, and impotence, as the voyeuristic Coverdale, simultaneously attracted to and frightened by Zenobia's sexuality, Hollingsworth's "masculine" fixedness of purpose, and, indeed, the carnivalesque energies of the festive Blithedalers, weaves melodramatic tales of flight and entrapment suggestive of his own wavering desires. Though the satirical elements of the novel would appear to suggest, in the manner of early Emerson, that individuals must first achieve their own private reforms in order for communitarian reforms to succeed, the larger thematic thrust of Hawthorne's skillful creation of the ironic and at times loathsome Coverdale is to suggest the importance of the self having some sort of ground, some sort of context, against which that self-reformation can be initiated. Unwilling to make any social commitment, whether at Blithedale or in the city, and fearful of losing control over his self-regulated imagination and body, Coverdale simply drifts on, unattached, unengaged, unhappy. In this sense he is quite different from the erstwhile reformer Holgrave (Maule) of The House of the Seven Gables (1851), whose ability both to locate himself in history and to honor the integrity of individuals — most dramatically when he resists taking mesmeric control over Phoebe's body — allows him to forge redemptive and potentially transformative bonds with others. -135-

In his use of mesmerism, in House and Blithedale, Hawthorne dramatically brings to focus a large impulse of social reform: the desire to take control of the body — individual and social. Whereas some Americans of the 1840s and 1850s regarded mesmerism — a species of hypnotism — as a reformatory science potentially bringing individuals and nature into perfect harmony, Hawthorne presents it, in his accounts of Matthew Maule's cruel domination of Alice Pyncheon, and of Westervelt's and Hollingsworth's manipulations of Priscilla and Zenobia, as merely the selfish enactment of hyperintrusive patriarchal power. Despite the demonizations of mesmeric control, however, an underlying anxiety of both books is a fear of losing control, an anxiety that in Blithedale finds its most haunting expression in the figure of the decaying inebriate Moodie. Devastated by the ravages of the marketplace, Moodie, like the sherry-loving Coverdale and the Blithedale masqueraders "with portentously red noses," remains in search of "a boozy kind of pleasure in the customary life" even as he wastes away. Coverdale, who does everything he can to deny his likeness to Moodie, remains haunted by a fear that their characters, fates, and resting places — the tavern — might not be so very different after all.

Coverdale's fears of decline, dissipation, and loss of control parallel the fears giving life and urgency to the temperance movement, the largest reform movement of the antebellum period. In part, the popularity of temperance reform can be attributed to the fact that Americans had a real drinking problem: the national per capita consumption of distilled spirits jumped from under two gallons in 1800 to just over five gallons in 1830. But temperance also melded well with a variety of ideological orientations. In the tradition of Protestant admonitions, ranging from Increase Mather's Wo to Drunkards (1673) to Lyman Beecher's Six Sermons on Intemperance (1826), Finney warned that temperance was of crucial importance because alcohol wreaked havoc on the spiritual and rational resources necessary for conversion. Emerson similarly believed that "unnatural" intoxication crippled the individual's spiritual resources and, like the Enlightenment temperance reformer Benjamin Rush, he also remained concerned about the effects of drinking on bodily health. The institutional sources of temperance activity in America were set in place by Federalist and Protestant directed societies — such as the -136- Massachusetts Society for the Suppression of Intemperance, founded in 1813, and the American Temperance Society, founded in 1826 — which concerned themselves with reforming the drinking habits of the working classes. Proclaiming the virtues of self-denial and thrift, temperance tracts from these organizations promulgated a capitalist ethic conducive to the demands of the newly expanding factories. Many of the male workers who took the temperance pledge, however, were influenced less by these elitist groups than by the working-class Washingtonian Societies of the 1840s, which championed temperance in the Ben Franklin tradition of self-help and upward mobility.

Women, too, participated in great numbers in the temperance movement, as they saw drinking as a male activity threatening to violate the purity and harmony of the home. During the 1820s and 1830s, middle-class women organized female moral reform societies, which regularly conducted home visits of urban working-class tenements in an effort to purge those dwellings of the alcoholic beverages believed to transform honest laborers into shiftless, wife-beating beasts. (Concerns about violation and purity contributed as well to the rise of Magdalene Societies — groups of evangelical women offering refuge and the possibility of reformative conversions to urban prostitutes.) Women were also particularly responsive to a variety of health reforms championed by writers who took temperance as their starting point. Sylvester Graham's high-fiber cracker, William Alcott's vegetarianism, Orson Fowler's nondeterministic phrenology (according to Fowler, the defects of character detected in the skull could be remedied through diet and exercise), Amelia Bloomer's dress reforms, and the spiritualist Mary Gove Nichols's hydropathic water cure — all of these reforms were embraced by a number of women as ways of regaining control of their bodies from an increasingly professionalized male medicine and, more generally, the impinging male body.

An issue that spoke to a wide range of constituencies, temperance became a central motif of the writings of the period. Between 1829 and 1834 the New York State Temperance Society circulated over four million copies of its publications, while the American Tract Society distributed over five million of its temperance pamphlets by 1851. Significantly, in 1836 the American Temperance Union, challenging Finney's assertion that novel reading was a corrupting waste -137- of time, endorsed temperance fiction as an efficacious method of gaining converts to the cause. For temperance crusaders, the novel itself was of special importance, as book-length fiction, in the narrative tradition of William Hogarth's print cycle The Rake's Progress (1734), could trace the degeneration over time of the individual tempted to drink, and could trace as well the impact of drinking on the individual's family. An important forerunner of antebellum temperance fiction was Mason Weems's The Drunkard's Looking Glass (1813). During the 1830s, Mary Fox's The Ruined Deacon (1834) and George B. Cheeve r's Deacon Giles' Distillery (1835) achieved a considerable readership. In 1842 Walt Whitman wrote a temperance novel, Franklin Evans, for the Washingtonians, and three years later George Lippard published his enormously popular and sensationalistic The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall, which presented numerous scenes of depraved group drinking among Philadelphia's degenerate aristocrats.

Temperance themes had an important, though often satirical, place in Herman Melville's sea fiction (recall Aunt Charity's failed temperance work in Moby-Dick), as he tended to romanticize the fraternal bonds forged among his drinking sailors. Redburn's short-lived allegiance to the Juvenile Abstinence Association, White-Jacket's perception of the Neversink as "the asylum for all the drunkards," and Ishmael's initial shock at the unrestrained drinking at the Spouter Inn are meant to signify the greenhorn status of characters soon to become fraternal salts. That said, Melville's extended account in Redburn (1849) of dissipation in Liverpool's sailor bars, his portrait of despotic, hard-drinking Captain Claret in White-Jacket (1850), his demystifying picture of fraternal drinking in The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids (1855) as dependent on the exploitation of women and the working class, and his wonderfully perverse rendering of the cunning con games masked as fraternal drinking between Charlie Noble and the Cosmopolitan in The Confidence-Man (1857) — all suggest that he, like the conventional temperance writers of the day, viewed alcohol as a considerable social problem.

Temperance themes and images also found their way into many of the popular women's novels of the period. Concerned with addressing the problem of patriarchal power, women writers tended to image -138- the drunken husband or father as a brute who, under the influence of ardent spirits, gave unconstrained sway to his predatory passions. In Caroline Chesebro's Isa: A Pilgrimage (1852), for example, the heroine's adoptive father is an abusive drunkard who, fortunately, dies early on in the novel. Devoting her novelistic energies principally to the temperance cause, Metta Victoria Victor wrote two temperance novels, The Senator's Son; or, The Maine Law: A Last Refuge (1853) and Fashionable Dissipation (1854). In The Senator's Son in particular, Victor underscores the ravages wrought over time by paternal drinking. Opening with the protagonist accepting a glass of wine from his father at the age of four, the novel shows how this seemingly innocent act leads to the death of the boy's mother and, eventually, assorted ills to his sister, wife, and daughter before he kills himself while suffering delirium tremens. A more complex account of the ravages of drinking appeared in Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons (1862), which, in the larger service of exploring the themes of free will and companionate marriage, counterpoints an alcoholic, who fathers a retarded child and dies of the d.t.'s, to a reformed drinker who participates in the shaping of a potentially happier marriage.

By far the most influential temperance novelist of the antebellum period, and the most successful in linking themes of individual and social dissipation, was Timothy Shay Arthur, who produced nearly zoo books, edited several popular journals, and published numerous sketches and tales. His best-selling collection of temperance sketches, Six Nights with the Washingtonians (1842), sold 175,000 copies by 1850; even more popular was his novel Ten Nights in a Bar-Room, and What I Saw There (1854), which, like Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, achieved enormous sales and spawned numerous stage productions. An advocate of socialism, Swedenborgianism, women's suffrage and right to divorce, and various other reforms, Arthur in Ten Nights devoted his considerable narrative talents (and penchant for melodrama and sensationalism) to demonstrating the need for legislation prohibiting the sale of alcoholic beverages at a time when the nation was beginning to react against just such legislation — the Maine law of 1851. Set at the Sickle and Sheaf, Cedarville's new tavern run by the former miller Simon Slade, the novel traces from the point of view of an unnamed traveler the downward course of town and tavern during a ten-year period. As the tavern becomes -139- increasingly degenerate — the inevitable result, Arthur suggests, the miller's abandoning the life of productive labor for the speculative hope of quick and easy profit — so too, in a suggestively organic relationship, does everything else in Cedarville. Slade's son Frank, twelve years old at the novel's outset, succumbs to the temptation to drink while serving customers, and by the end of the novel is an impoverished patricide. The town's fathers and sons suffer similarly dire fates, while the town's women, acutely aware of what the narrator calls "moral consequences," can only watch helplessly as the town falls apart: one mother dies grief-stricken over the body of her murdered son, and Mrs. Slade herself ends up in an asylum. Among the female characters, only Mary Morgan, the eleven-year-old daughter of Slade's former mill worker Joe Morgan, possesses the power to influence events. Mortally wounded by an empty glass Slade had thrown at the drunken Morgan, Mary on her deathbed, in the manner of little Eva, extracts a promise from her father to free himself from the enslaving clutches of alcoholic beverages. By the end of the novel the still-abstinent Morgan has the one neat and clean house in the neighborhood.

Concerns about social decay, the ill effects of materialism, the tyranny of the patriarch, and, especially, apocalyptic violence — central to much temperance activity — were also central to the antislavery movement. For abolitionists, as for other reformers of the period, America had betrayed its founding ideals and millennial promise, and was drifting toward barbarism. Like the temperance and communitarian movements, antislavery grew in large measure out of the "ultraist" perfectionism of the 1820s and 1830s revivals, while owing a considerable debt to Enlightenment ideals of selfcontrol and natural rights. As a reform movement, antislavery had important eighteenth-century sources in the work and writings of the Quaker humanitarian Anthony Benezet, who enlisted Benjamin Franklin to the cause, though antislavery took a somewhat conservative turn in 1816 with the formation of the American Colonization Society. Galvanized by the evangelical movements of the 1820s and 1830s, however, William Lloyd Garrison and many others came to view slavery as a national sin that, as long as it persisted, compromised the nation's hopes of achieving its millennial potential. Unlike Finney, who counseled his parishioners to avoid "angry controversy -140- on the subject," Garrison adopted a bold and confrontational rhetoric intended to develop in his readers a conviction of slavery's evil and an immediate need to abolish it. Writing in the inaugural issue of The Liberator (January 1, 1831), which appeared less than a year before Nat Turner's bloody slave rebellion in Southampton, Virginia, Garrison drew on the injunctions of the Bible and the Declaration of Independence to assert the moral imperatives of antislavery, warning that "till every chain be broken, and every bondman set free. . let all the enemies of the persecuted blacks tremble." Garrison's mobilization of antislavery forces contributed to an upsurge in antislavery publications, most notably Richard Hildreth's The Slave; or, Memoirs of Archy Moore (1836) — one of approximately twelve antislavery novels published before Uncle Tom's Cabin — and Theodore Weld's Slavery As It Is (1839), an important documentary source for Stowe's antislavery fiction.

Although most antebellum Northerners opposed to slavery were far more moderate than Garrison in their opposition, by the mid1840s there was shared common ground among a range of groups and individuals opposed to slavery. It was viewed as an affront to republican ideals of free labor, as an act of great hypocrisy on the part of a supposedly Christian and democratic nation, and as an indication of an apparent quest by a small group of states, or plantation owners, for national power — hence the currency of a "slave power" conspiratorial fear during the late 1840s and 1850s, especially after Congress passed the Compromise of 1850. Perhaps the dominant rhetorical concern of antislavery texts, however, was with the unchecked mastery of the slaveowner over the slave. Endowed with godlike power, but hardly gods, enslavers, according to antislavery writers, found it nearly impossible to keep their passion for mastery under control. "Intoxicated" by their power, "enslaved" by slavery, they brutally inflicted cruelties on their slaves, who, for good reason, became increasingly vengeful. Inevitably, then, slavery undermined civilized restraint and promised to bring forth the most catastrophic breakdown of all: an apocalyptic war of extermination between the races.

Given the centrality of concerns among abolitionists about the ways in which slavery undermined self-control, it is not surprising that many of the leading antislavery writers were also involved in -141- temperance reform — Garrison, Theodore Weld, Gerrit Smith, and the African American writers Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, William Wells Brown, and Frances Harper, among numerous others, saw the temperance movement and antislavery as intimately related. And given that slavery was viewed as a manifestation of unchecked, brute patriarchal power, it is not surprising that antislavery, like temperance, drew heavily on women participants.

Women's involvement in antislavery activity became a significant phenomenon in the early 1830s, as 1832 saw the formation of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society and 1833 the publication of Lydia Maria Child's seminal An Appeal on Behalf of That Class of Americans Called Africans. Angelina and Sarah Grimké, South Carolina Quaker sisters of a slaveholding family, presented their antislavery views during an 1837 public speaking tour of New England, thereby prompting the critical condemnation of the Congregationalist churches and of Catharine Beecher, who argued that women should exercise their moral influence within the privacy of the domestic sphere. As the hostile response to the Grimké sisters might suggest, women in antislavery remained in subordinate roles within the institutional structures of the movement. The refusal by the 1840 World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London to seat or give voice to women delegates from America intensified feminist thinking among Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and others (as the refusal by an 1851 New York temperance convention to allow Susan B. Anthony the right to speak would help to raise her feminist consciousness). Abolitionism, as an ideology and social practice, therefore taught many of the "feminist-abolitionists" about their own subordinate status, and, arguably, together with temperance, helped to fuel the emerging women's movement of the period.

Because marriage and property laws, along with the lack of suffrage, denied women rights thought to accompany republican citizenship, in feminist writings the analogy of woman to slave was seen as particularly apt, despite the fact that it was, after all, metaphorical. As Angelina Grimké remarked in Letters to Catharine E. Beecher (1838), "The investigation of the rights of the slave has led me to a better understanding of my own." Margaret Fuller, in her impassioned and poetical celebration of woman's potential, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), published the same year as -142- Frederick's Narrative, likened woman to a slave and man to a slave trader. In Letters on the Equality of the Sexes (1838), Sarah Grimké pictured the situation of the typical wife in this way: "man has exercised the most unlimited and brutal power over woman, in the peculiar character of husband, — a word in most countries synonymous with tyrant." At the epochal Seneca Falls women's rights convention of 1848, the early culmination of organized feminist activity, Stanton, in her resounding "Declaration of Sentiments," therefore revised Jefferson's Declaration, substituting male for British tyrannical authority, in order to call attention to the ways in which the nation's social institutions and legal codes mainly served the interests of America's white male citizenry. That same year, the New York State Legislature, in response to thoughtful women critics like Stanton, passed the nation's most liberalized married women's property act, which made it legal for women to maintain control over property they brought to their marriages.

The Married Women's Property Act of 1848 followed in the wake of the land reforms modifying the near feudal control New York's upstate landholding families held over their tenants. The antirent agitation leading up to these reforms prompted James Fenimore Cooper's Littlepage trilogy — Satanstoe (1845), The Chainbearer (1845), and The Redskins (1846) — which forecast a reign of demagoguery should the landed gentry lose its leaseholds — and the land reforms, along with the married women's property act, lay behind his The Ways of the Hour (1850). - In portraying in this late novel a woman who deserts her husband, is falsely accused by a mob of murder, and is eventually revealed to be insane, Cooper suggests that allowing women too much liberty could lead to the breakdown of civilization itself. (A similar argument informed the pseudonymous Fred Folio's Lucy Boston; or, Women's Rights and Spiritualism [1851].) During the 1850s, divorce was addressed from a very different perspective by women writers, who remained convinced of the need for liberalized divorce laws. Fanny Fern (Sarah Payson Willis Parton), whose first novel, Ruth Hall (1855), touched on the wretched marriage and eventual death in a mental hospital of Ruth's friend Mrs. Leon, focused in Rose Clark (1856) on a divorced woman who, hardly debilitated by her condition, develops her self-possession and self-reliant virtue to the point where she remarries her former husband on egalitarian -143- terms. More boldly, Mary Sargeant Nichols, in her autobiographical novel Mary Lyndon (1855), presented the eponymous protagonist divorcing her tyrannous and cloddish husband, and eventually attaining a happier second marriage with a man who shares her ideals of the primacy to marriage of free, unconstrained love.

Of all the novels published before the Civil War, Harriet Beecher Stowe's million-copy best-seller, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), the novel Lincoln credited with making "this big war," most compellingly interwove the major strands of antebellum reform: feminism, temperance, and antislavery. Temperance, for example, is central to the novel's representation of power relationships — between masters and slaves and, analogously, between men and women. The novel begins with Shelby signing over the slaves Tom and Harry to the obnoxious slave trader Haley, as the men sit together drinking wine and brandy. By the end of the novel we descend from this relatively restrained scene of intemperance to the unrestrained hell of the harddrinking brute Simon Legree's plantation. Along the way Stowe depicts a typical Kentucky tavern, wherein a crowd of slave hunters, "free-and-easy dogs," spit gobs of tobacco juice, drink tumblers "half full of raw spirits," and, significantly, wear hats, what Stowe terms "the characteristic emblem of man's sovereignty." White male sovereignty, rather than a prohibitionary politics, is the central issue here, with temperance blending into feminism, as Stowe presents male enslavers rendered intoxicated (and dangerous) less by alcoholic beverages than by their seemingly unlimited power over slaves and women. Representing "home-loving and affectionate" slaves, male and female, as admirably domestic and womanly, Stowe not only places the slaves at the center of her culturally revisionary idealization of matriarchy but also, in the tradition of the Grimkés, Fuller, and Stanton, points to the "enslaved" status of women in patriarchal society. The tragic destiny of the slave Prue, therefore, who was raised as a "breeder," speaks in part, Stowe implies, to the situation of all women in America. In this respect, the slave warehouse, where "stubbed-looking, commonplace men" physically examine the slaves Susan and Emmeline, provides a metonymic picture of race and gender relationships in America, with the suggestion that Simon Legree should be taken as the representative American man in extremis (just as the antipatriarchal Simeon Halliday of the Quaker settlement rep-144- resents the bright reverse image that Stowe hoped would accompany America's regenerative transformation). Violating women and slaves alike in the secluded space of his unregulated plantation, insisting in blasphemous ways on his mastery — "I'm your church now," he proclaims to Tom — Legree, having rejected the spiritual guidance of his mother (and thus of God), revels in his mastery until Cassy resourcefully debilitates the enfeebled, guilt-ridden drunkard.

As suggested by Cassy's rage, and also by Stowe's analogizing of George Harris's armed battle against fugitive slave hunters to the American and Hungarian Revolutions, natural rights theory figures prominently in the feminist politics of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Moreover, in addressing the evils of the Fugitive Slave Law, the novel offers critiques of Northern capitalism's implication in slavery, and of the implication of Northern and Southern organized religion as well. Reform must be national and wide-ranging, according to Stowe, or dreadful consequences will follow. For one, as St. Clare prophesies, America under slavery risks falling into a bloody, apocalyptic race war. For another, as Stowe's sermonic final pages portend, America under slavery, as a nation of sinners, risks God's apocalyptic wrath. In this sense evangelical reform — as embodied by Eva and Tom — is of special urgency. As Stowe explains, if readers can "feel right," as Eva makes Miss Ophelia and St. Clare (and the reader) feel right, or as Tom makes the slave overseers Quimbo and Sambo (and the reader) feel right, conversion of self and society would proceed naturally, thereby fending off the various cataclysms — racial and eschatological — informing the dark imagination of the novel. In important ways, then, the emphasis on evangelicalism, with its millennial promise, serves to contain the novel's more troubling insurrectionary dimension, particularly as embodied by the rebels George Harris and Cassy. The novel concludes with a series of Christian conversions on the part of the rebels, and with Stowe, through Harris, endorsing African colonization as a possible solution to America's racial problems — as a safety outlet, as it were, provided less by moderate racialists, such as her father Lyman Beecher, with whose politics Harriet disagreed, than by God, who has a larger design.

A fear of uncontained racial violence informed a number of the novelistic "responses" to Uncle Tom's Cabin, such as Caroline Lee Hentz's The Planter's Northern Bride (1854) and -145- William Gilmore's Woodcraft (1854), though, unlike Stowe, slavery apologists insisted that the well-ordered plantation could control such violence. In her subsequent novel, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), Stowe countered this notion, and in doing so revealed even more clearly than in Uncle Tom's Cabin the social fears and desires underlying her antislavery position, and the underlying elitism as well. In A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853), Stowe worried over the debilitating effects of slavery on Southern whites, and remarked on the pervasiveness in the South of what she termed "Poor White Trash": "This miserable class of whites form, in all the Southern States, a material for the most horrible and ferocious of mobs. Utterly ignorant, and inconceivably brutal, they are like some blind, savage monster, which, when aroused, tramples heedlessly over everything in its way." In Dred, while sympathetically addressing the revolutionary perspective of the escaped slave Dred — presented as the son of the historical slave conspirator Denmark Vesey and modeled, as millennialist revenger, on Nat Turner — Stowe's principal focus is on the increasingly intemperate mobs of "poor white trash" under the control of demagogues. For, after the death of the newly converted plantation mistress Nina Gordon, who, under the guidance of her beloved Edward Clayton, had begun to adopt antislavery beliefs, her plantation and slaves fall into the hands of her brother Tom Gordon, a Legree-like enslaver intoxicated by alcohol and power. The novel concludes with the picture of an utterly degenerate mob under the control of Gordon, and a despairing sense of the nation falling apart under the pressure of the insurrectionary energies of the proslavery rabble. Clayton, who had wanted to reform slavery from within by educating and freeing his slaves, flees to Canada where he sets up a model township; Dred is shot and killed when he attempts to rescue an escaped slave from the drunken Tom's drunken mob.

Anxieties similar to Stowe's about the poor and working classes arguably lie behind much of the middle-class reforms of the period. In this respect, reform could sometimes serve the interests both of change and of the status quo — that is, preserving the hegemony of white Protestant elites. Desires to preserve and control can be viewed at an unattractive extreme in the period's pervasive nativism, itself a kind of Protestant reformism. For it was the opinion of a considerable number of Protestants that the increasing Catholic immigration -146- of the period was the greatest cause for alarm about social decay, signaling America's need for a "Protestant reformation": 54,00 °Catholics arrived in the 1820s, 200,000 in the 1830s, 700,000 in the 1840s, and 200,000 in the year 1850 alone. To meet the challenge posed by these immigrants, the evangelical community developed the vast publishing network of the American Tract Society (founded in 1825) and related organizations to disseminate and perpetuate Protestant-republican values. Lyman Beecher, in his widely read nativist tract Plea for the West (1835), emphasized the role of the word in this "reformatory" campaign: "Whatever European nations do, our nation must read and think from length and breadth, from top to bottom." And read Americans did, as they made best-sellers of numerous convent captivity novels dramatizing putative Catholic plots to undermine the values and institutions of the Republic. In their popular first-person narrative accounts, Rebecca Theresa Reed's Six Months in a Convent (1835) and Maria Monk's notorious Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery (1836) presented sadistic nuns and priests, violations in the confessional, evidence of Roman Catholic conspiracies, and, ultimately, a summons to Protestant reform (and to spend money on this kind of fiction) by remaining vigilant to Catholic subversives. Monk's sensational book of horrors sold upwards of three hundred thousand copies through 1860, spawned numerous other convent captivity novels, such as Charles Frothingham's The Convent's Doom (1854) and Josephine Bunkley's Miss Bunkley's Book: The Testimony of an Escaped Novice from the Sisterhood of Charity (1855), and helped to legitimize nativist discourse, which played an important role in the founding of the Republican Party, as a discourse of social reform.

Nativism and fears of insurrectionary disorder from the poor and working classes also played an important role in the urban reform movement of the period. Like Southerners concerned about the possibility of slave revolts and abolitionist conspiracies, Northerners remained concerned about the dangers lurking beneath the surface of what came to be regarded as the mysterious and wicked city — a trope central to a number of antebellum urban novels, such as Ned Buntline's Mysteries and Miseries of New York (1848) and Ann Stephens's Fashion and Famine (1854). Especially worrying to cultural elites was the marked upsurge in riots in Northeast cities between 1830 and -147- 1860, and the upsurge during the same period of labor organizing and discontent — or, we might say, urban reform from below. Frances Wright and leaders of the New York Workingman's Party, for example, spoke out against "wage slavery," and writers as diverse as Orestes Brownson, in The Laboring Classes (1840), Theodore Parker, in A Sermon on Merchants (1846), and George Lippard, in such urban reform novels as The Quaker City and New York: Its Upper Ten and Lower Million (1853), excoriated the rich for exploiting the working poor. In "The Laboring Classes" Brownson went so far as to predict a violent uprising from the workers similar to a slave revolt, "the like of which the world as yet has never witnessed, and from which. . the heart of Humanity recoils with horror"; and in The Quaker City Lippard presented a dream vision of God wreaking vengeance on "the factory Prince" for his crimes against "the slaves of the city."

Fearful of confronting rebellious "slaves" in their own region, urban reformers of the middle and upper classes invoked the putative republican ideals of hierarchy and order and sought to perpetuate these ideals through the creation of reformatory institutions — prisons, mental asylums, almshouses, juvenile delinquent homes, and, relatedly, schools and factories. These new institutions of social reform, so argued their promoters, for the most part Whigs convinced of the malleability of human nature (and concerned about the Democrats' mobilization of Catholics and other "undesirables"), would make model republicans of the dangerous working classes. At the very least, these institutions would keep in check, as reformer Horace Mann put it, the "mutinous" tendencies of those down below.

Indeed, with their emphases on discipline, hierarchy, and custodial isolation, the new asylums, prisons, and other self-contained reform institutions resembled not only the slave plantation but also the institution afloat of the period's popular nautical romances — the wellordered ship at sea. A tension between the claims of the "organic" state and the claims of the aggrieved and exploited individual — the tension, as it were, between urban reform from above and urban reform from below — is therefore central to much of the "escapist" sea fiction of the period. In many of these nautical narratives the hierarchical ship, like the idealized Northern reform institution, endows impoverished young men with a sense of place and purpose. In -148- Charles Briggs's popular The Adventures of Harry Franco: A Tale of the Great Panic (1839), Franco recuperatively takes to sea to escape bankruptcy. Similar financial situations motivate Melville's narrators in Redburn and White-Jacket, who bear some resemblance to the greenhorn of Richard Henry Dana's best-selling Two Years Before the Mast (1840). Like the ship in Dana's Two Years and the reform institutions of America's urban centers, the ship in White-Jacket, compared to "a city afloat," "a sort of state prison afloat," and an "asylum," adopts the order of the factory and the prison, not only because it houses sailors in search of purposive order, but also because it houses the disorderly poor — a rough lot of sailors — that urban reformers wanted isolated and enclosed.

Central to this institutional order, however, was the disciplinary prerogative of flogging, and for naval reformers William McNally and John Lockwood, whose Evils and Abuses in the Naval Merchant Service (1839) and An Essay on Flogging (1849), respectively, galvanized support among Northerners for the eventual abolition of flogging in 1850, ships commanded by authoritarian "lords of the lash" resembled slave plantations. For others, however, flogging, whether at ship or social institution, remained a necessity; even prison reformer Dorothea Dix believed it "sometimes the only mode. . by which an insurrectionary spirit can be conquered." Dana, though highly critical of flogging, as he sympathetically imaged the flogged seaman as a type of slave, nonetheless argued for the right of captains to flog or even execute sailors in extreme situations. Increasingly suspicious of unchecked democratic energies among the masses, Fenimore Cooper, in his nautical romances of the 1840s, most notably Afloat and Ashore (1844), idealized captains as benevolent republican gentlemen for whom flogging or execution at sea were regrettable but ultimately necessary last resorts.

Melville's early sea fiction typically demystified the institutional ideals of the well-ordered ship — and, by implication, the well-ordered urban reform institution — by developing the analogy of the ship not only to the reform institution but also to the slave plantation. In White-Jacket, for example, Captain Claret, like the captain of Dana's Two Years, sadistically flogs an apparently innocent sailor while blasphemously asserting his shipboard supremacy: "I would not forgive God almighty!" Whereas the greenhorn of Two Years somewhat gen-149- teelly resists mutiny when faced with a similar situation, WhiteJacket's emergent belief that the captain's authority rests on "arbitrary law" leads him to develop a rationale for resistance that appeals, as many abolitionists appealed, to the higher law of God and Nature. Thus, when the captain subsequently orders him flogged following an unfair charge of not being in his proper place, WhiteJacket, on "plantation" Neversink, where "you see a human being, stripped like a slave," in effect entertains the possibility of a slave revolt. Through Melville's presentation of White-Jacket's "wild thoughts" — his meditation on resistance — the reader is taken inside to experience what it means to be subjected to the institutional authority of ship, reform institution, and plantation. Yet White-Jacket, thanks to the intervention of corroborating sailors, does not have to risk becoming a "murderer and suicide," a rebellious slave. Perhaps because Melville shares with elites some of the anxieties about the consequences of unleashed insurrectionary energies, he keeps WhiteJacket's anger under constraints. Though other abuses of authority are represented in the novel, an informing fear of revolutionary social disorder, nowhere more apparent than in the account of the riotous "head-beaking" of the skylark, suggests that even in this reformist text Melville adopts a politics of "nautical" order not so radically different from the more aggressively institutionalist politics of a Dana or a Cooper.

That said, Melville's abhorrence for chattel slavery is evident in all of his novels, and it is precisely his ability to provide an "inside" perspective on what it means to be victimized by arbitrary authority — a perspective lacking in much antislavery and reform writing — that makes his antislavery thematics so powerful and challenging. Yet in his novella Benito Cereno (1855), his greatest treatment of slavery, Melville denies readers the inside perspective of the rebellious slave Babo while tempting them inside the perspective of the racist Delano. Melville, it would appear, had come to see reform as a balm for the middle class, and thus, in situating the reader in "Benito Cereno" outside the slave revolt — thereby making the reader a victim of the plot — he implicates even self-proclaimed "good" whites in the perpetuation of slavery. In a novella published two years before Benito Cereno, Frederick Douglass, in The Heroic Slave (1853), similarly keeps the white reader at a distance from a -150- rebellious slave. Although a sympathizing white aids Madison Washington in his early prison escape, by the end of the novella, which culminates in Washington's successful engineering of an uprising on the slave ship Creole (the novella is based on the actual 1841 rebellion), the slave acts on his own. As in "Benito Cereno," the mutinous events are conveyed from the outside: the rebellion is narrated after the fact by an eyewitness, the Creole's mate, who remains impressed yet terrified by the slaves' intelligence and heroic rebellious energies. Like Melville, then, Douglass points to the limits of reform by situating blacks in a world marked by pervasive racism and slavery's institutional hegemony.

In such a world, "The Heroic Slave" and "Benito Cereno" both suggest, revolutionary action on the part of the slaves is perhaps the only sensible course of action. The African American activist Martin Robison Delany came to a similar conclusion. In his novel, Blake; or, The Huts of America (1859-62), serialized in the Anglo-African Magazine and The Weekly Anglo-African, he depicted white racism in America culminating in a proslavery plot to set up Cuba as a locale for reestablishing the African slave trade in the Americas. Rather than leaving matters for white antislavery reformers to address, Delany has his hero Blake — "a black — a pure Negro — handsome, manly and intelligent " — organize violent countersubversive actions: a black rebellion in Cuba, an attack on an African king who continues to sell his people to slave traders, and slave revolts in the American South. Slave revolt also has an important place in William Wells Brown's Clotel; or, The President's Daughter, first published in London in 1853, as Brown, in his account of the New Orleans cholera epidemic of 1831, metaphorically links the fever to the feverish insurrectionism of the rebel Picquilo lurking in the swamps. Modeled after Nat Turner and a possible prototype of Stowe's Dred, he "was a bold, turbulent spirit; and from revenge imbued his hands in the blood of all the whites he could meet." Yet Brown, who worked as a temperance reformer among Buffalo's free African Americans, can seem more moderate than Delany, as he presents the noble reformer Georgiana advising her newly freed slaves thus: "If you are temperate, industrious, peaceable, and pious, you will show to the world that slaves can be emancipated without danger." But while the freedmen pose no danger to the whites, whites continue to pose danger to them. -151-

In a conclusion that both ratifies and undercuts Georgiana's counsels, Brown portrays a happy marriage between Clotel's daughter Mary (a granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson and his slave mistress) and the former slave George, who, after escaping from slavery, educates himself and becomes a partner in a merchant house. Significantly, however, this success story occurs abroad: Mary and George are reunited and married in France and they choose to remain in London.

Similar pessimism about racial and class oppression informs Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859), the first African American novel published in America, which, like Clotel, takes on the related issue of gender oppression as well. The poor white and African American women of Wilson's novel find it next to impossible to find decent work; though not actually enslaved, they suffer from the ravages of "wage slavery." In this respect, Wilson addresses the exploitation of women in ways that parallel and develop the treatment of the same issue in the fiction of white women writers — Fern's Ruth Hall and Ann Sophia Stephens's The Old Homestead (1855) depicted the desperate plight of New York's working women, and Rebecca Harding Davis, in her short novel Life in the Iron Mills (1860) and her first novel, Margret Howth (1862), explored the spiritual impoverishment and exploitation of women working in Northern factories. Frado, the "Nig" of Our Nig, is the daughter of a poor white working woman who, as she falls deeper into poverty, marries "a kind-hearted African," by whom she has two children. Unable to support them, she abandons one, Frado, with the rich and respected Bellmonts. Emphasizing the intersecting issues of class and race, Wilson presents as the most brutal character of the novel the "haughty, undisciplined, arbitrary, and severe" Mrs. Bellmont, whose privilege and cruelty link her to Stowe's Marie St. Clare of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Intent on exploiting and humiliating Frado, whom she raises as a servant, Mrs. Bellmont beats, chokes, and otherwise degrades and brutalizes her. When she leaves the Bellmonts at age eighteen, Frado, impoverished and the mother of a sickly son in Massachusetts, eventually has no one to turn to for help. The narrator refers scornfully to "professed abolitionists, who didn't want slaves at the South, nor niggers in their own houses, North," and, as fictional and real worlds collapse — Wilson herself was the mother of a sick child who eventually died —152- the author offers the novel to "my colored brethren" with the hope that their willingness to purchase it would provide her with funds to help her ailing son.

Harriet A. Jacobs casts an equally jaundiced eye on the problems of race, class, and gender in antebellum America in her novelized autobiographical narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). An account of Linda Brent's amazingly resourceful escape from slavery by hiding for seven years in her grandmother's attic space, the book exposes from an African American woman's point of view the sexual brutality inherent in slavery. As Jacobs remarks about the situation of the typical slave woman: "Women are considered of no value, unless they continually increase their owner's stock. They are put on a par with animals." The most "animalistic" character of the narrative, however, is Brent's slave master Dr. Flint, consumed by his desire to possess Linda sexually: "No animal ever watched its prey more narrowly than he watched me." As in Stowe and other antislavery and feminist writers, in Jacobs the patriarchal will to sexual mastery is presented as a form of intoxication. And like the scourge of alcohol in T. S. Arthur's fiction, slavery, in Jacobs's narrative, "makes the white fathers cruel and sensual; the sons violent and licentious; it contaminates the daughters, and makes the wives wretched." Indeed, because the plantation mistress and the slave mistress are portrayed as victims of the male enslaver's lust for power, sexual and otherwise, there are intimations that Jacobs, like Stowe in Uncle Tom's Cabin, is invoking a sisterhood of white and African American women, especially mothers, as the best possible reformatory solution to the problem of slavery. Yet Jacobs is clear-sighted about the gulf between the races and the classes, as Dr. Flint's wife, Brent's fellow "victim," absolutely fails to see any analogy in their respective situations. Though the privileged New Yorker Mrs. Bruce, following Brent's escape to the North, helps Linda to escape from her pursuers and eventually purchases her freedom, she stands as a rare exception to the racism rampant in the North, where segregated boats, trains, and hotels, and wandering fugitive slave hunters, remain the order of the day. As is true for George and Mary in Clotel, or the African American sailor in Melville's Redburn unselfconsciously walking the streets of Liverpool, Linda experiences her greatest sense of freedom when she visits England. -153-

By emphasizing the intractability of racism in America, particularly as it "invisibly" undergirded the nation's social, religious, and economic institutions, African American writers made clear what Emerson only occasionally faced up to: just how difficult it would have been for any American to achieve "transcendental" individual reform within a social system countenancing slavery. In this respect, African American writers presented a fundamental challenge to white reformers who, in advocating various specific programs, could lose sight of the need for larger structural and ideological reorientations. Reading African American novelists therefore presses us to reread white middle-class novels of social reform with a skeptical eye, alert to the ways in which, despite their authors' reformist intentions, they participated in the reproduction of dominant ideologies. Yet to engage in a thoroughgoing demonization (or deconstruction) of these novels as complicitous in, rather than subversive of, the reigning order — the interpretive thrust of recent New Historicist approaches to the Anglo-American novel of reform — may be anachronistic. Such a critical perspective, in affiliating white reform novelists in particular with the disciplinary and institutional practices of the state, and thus with the persistence of racial, gender, and class inequities in America, may even be self-righteous. More productively, we could regard novelists of reform, African American and white, as dialogical writers, alternately pragmatic and visionary, who, even as they were inevitably inscribed by their culture, found much in it to critique as they sought to imagine and hopefully thus to create a better America.

Robert S. Levine

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