Part One
1
Throughout the first decade of the nineteenth century, Ethan Allen Greenwood, a rather pedantic young diarist, each day recorded both the weather and the title of the book he was reading. He sometimes observed that a particular work was “instructive” or “entertaining” and occasionally noted the library from which the volume was borrowed—the Adelphi Fraternity Library, the Social Friends Library, or the unnamed circulating library he joined in 1806. His meticulous account of his activities and expenses—whether living at home in Worcester County, Massachusetts, or at Dartmouth College or later in Boston, or whether traveling around the countryside as an itinerant painter—provides posterity with an unusually comprehensive portrait of “Ethan Allen Greenwood, His Life and Times.” Looking over the record that he left, we can well imagine that we know this serious and sober, parsimonious and abstemious young man Franklinesquely working his way toward fame and fortune. But then we encounter a curious entry: “Rode out with the ladies. Returned and spent the evening agreeably. What I do not write here will not be forgotten.”1
It is what is not written here that especially seizes our attention. As any semiotician knows, the omissions in a text are often as revealing as what that text explicitly tells. Yet it is difficult to formulate the rules whereby silence is admissible as historical evidence. What did go on between the lines in the diary, between Greenwood and the ladies? That question is pertinent to the historical record precisely because it is not answered in the autobiographical one. Nevertheless, whatever codes and considerations prompted Greenwood’s circumspection are as much a part of his diary and a sign of his times as are the detailed lists of his various daily expenses.
I begin my study of the origins of American fiction with this enigmatic diary entry for two basic reasons. First, the lacuna in Greenwood’s account reminds us that however familiar we are with a particular era or person, what we do not know may be just as telling as what we do. The public record always fictionalizes, at least to a degree, private life, and the interstices between the two allow “the expected fiction” to slide over into and to become “the real life.” Nor can the known absence be simply read. Schooled as we may be in decoding silences (and especially so through recent reassessments of the possibilities of criticism), we have too often also been schooled in dismissing presence. Greenwood left out the details of that not-to-be-forgotten evening in a definite time and place. Before we can plumb his silence, we must sound a larger one—the historical moment in which he both wrote and did not write. Indeed, without a careful appraisal of those moments in which literature is written—or not written—the literary historian perpetuates essentially tautological arguments about the “rise of the novel,” as proven by the observed rise of the novel, or the “origins of the American mind,” as attested to by the chosen texts of that mind’s originating.2
Each of those tautologies is also, it will be noted, a likely trap into which a book about the origins of American fiction well might stumble. But I hope to avoid such stumbling by keeping both traps clearly in mind and by working around them. What this book proposes is a way of reading texts in response to a specific set of circumstances that not only created both texts and ways of reading them but also that those texts, in turn, created. In other words, I am concerned, on one level, with the forces that shape mentalités—not the psychology of individual readers during a particular time (a naive goal and necessarily beyond reach) but the interpretive grid (lost but still largely recoverable) in and around which those readers read—“community assumptions,” in Robert Escarpit’s terminology.3 This focus of my study is particularly indebted to the scholarship of l’histoire du livre, the multidisciplinary approach worked out by a number of historians (primarily Europeans and Americans working with European materials) who have attempted, in Robert Darnton’s formulation, to decipher “the social and cultural history of communication by print” in order better to understand “how ideas were transmitted through print and how exposure to the printed word affected human thought and behavior during the last 500 years.”4 Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin formulated this approach most cogently with their L’Apparition du livre (1958), a monumental work whose impact in America is attested to by the establishment, in 1979, of the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress and, in 1980, the Program in the History of the Book in American Culture at the American Antiquarian Society.5
But for all the insights that I derive from reading, say, Carlo Ginzburg’s remarkable account of Menocchio, a sixteenth-century Italian miller who taught himself to read and whose world was uniquely altered by his participation in print culture, I am concerned, of course, with texts other than those Menocchio happened upon and with other possibilities for meaning besides those that Menocchio might have perceived in the texts he read.6 Ultimately, books are written for readers and not for any one reader, actual or implied or ideal. An individual reading of a work, no matter how detailed or persuasive, does not tell us the whole story of that text. Drawing, therefore, from reader-response critical theory, I suggest strategies by which texts may be deciphered in terms of the complex set of generic, stylistic, thematic, cultural, ideological, and literary expectations that readers bring to texts and that authors (themselves readers of the work that they are writing) play with and around in the creation of texts.7 My focus on mentalités is balanced, then, by a second focus on the codes or rules of fictive discourse. This second focus is not in opposition to the first but is different from it. To summarize in one polyglot formulation, I have attempted to combine l’histoire du livre and Rezeptionsästhetik, using each methodology as a check and a balance to the other.8 Instead of a history-of-the-book approach to early American fiction, I am more interested in what might be termed a history-of-texts approach (with that last term deliberately bearing its semiotic and perhaps even ahistorical connotations).9
I am also aware that this histoire du texte may satisfy neither the cultural historian nor the literary theorist. Yet how can we even presume to talk about books and readers without taking into account considerations about how books are made? A book is not simply a text waiting for a cunning reader to come upon it and decode it. A book is also an artifact, a product of the printer’s art as well as the author’s or, for that matter, the reader’s. Conversely, how can we talk about the history of books without taking into account such concepts as genre, audience, implied authors, implied readers, and the strategies by which given texts operate within a given culture?10 To trace out how the American novel originated in purely historical and sociological terms—the economics of early publication and distribution, the sociometrics of Federalist book buying—would be as dubious as to premise a literary interpretation of these same novels on the readers for whom they were first intended without knowing whether, on the simplest and most crucial level, those readers had access to novels, could afford them, or could even read them. It is simply too easy to perpetuate assumptions about the reader that neglect the inescapable fact that readers, as much as texts, operate within historical contexts. Having wisely revalued authors and texts, contemporary criticism still perpetuates its worst tendencies when it attempts to valorize an ostensibly historical reader who turns out to be mostly another apotheosis of the contemporary literary theorist.11 Nor can we conveniently overlook the historicity of the writer. To subject an eighteenth-century American novel to a Derridean deconstruction that does not take into account the codes whereby it was originally constructed demonstrates, again, mostly the transubstantiations of the critic.
The writer has at least left the record of the work; readers, in many cases, left nothing at all. Partly to fill in this gap, a number of literary theorists have addressed themselves to constructing models of the reader. Stanley Fish’s Is There a Text in This Class? emphasizes that all texts exist in the reader and within appropriate “interpretive communities.”12 Fish uses the readings of students as a paradigm of one such interpretive community. Yet the historical application of this contemporary community is necessarily limited, since students come to texts with the current presuppositions of apprentice literary critics, of tyros looking to impress their teacher. Similarly, when Jonathan Culler insists that what we need is a history of reception consisting essentially of a survey of published assessments of a given literary work and then a reconstruction of the codes that occasioned this multiplicity of interpretations, he necessarily (and by design) limits reception to an academic exercise—in both senses of that word.13 What of the implied and actual readers envisioned by writers, the vast majority of whom do not write about what they read? The best model of that reader, to date, has been provided by Janice A. Radway in Reading the Romance: Women, Partiarchy, and Popular Literature. Radway has interviewed the readers of romance novels to reveal the surprisingly diverse functions served in their lives by fictions that critics have typically dismissed as simple, escapist fantasies.14
My problem, of course, is that my readers have been dead for almost two hundred years, so one can hardly interview them to reconstruct an early American interpretive community. Yet in diaries, in letters, and in the fiction itself there are accounts and versions of how the first novels in America were first read. Furthermore, in extant copies of the novels and in other kinds of books as well, readers have often left their marks.15 Inscriptions and marginalia tell us something about how books were valued and how they were read. Wear and tear and the repairs of same—torn pages neatly handsewn back into the volume, dog-eared corners carefully trimmed, thumb papers (little tabs of vellum or wallpaper) secured in the spines of books to protect the print from smudging—constitute further evidence of worth and use. Book morphology also provides clues to at least the intended audience of books (and perhaps the actual audience since early publishers, as much as present ones, had to know their market to survive). American novels were not published as impressive folio or octavo volumes, which itself suggests fiction’s relatively low social status. But we can discriminate beyond that obvious generalization, too. Was the novel published in a calf-bound duodecimo version with illustrative material and marbled endleaves or with paper covers and signatures printed on varying grades or colors of cheap paper? Other questions are also pertinent in reconstructing the interpretive community in which a volume first appeared. What size is the book? How large is the type? Which words are capitalized or italicized in the text? What is the relationship between text and visual material? Or between text and preliminary matter such as a dedication, a preface, or a subscription list bound within the volume? Prefatory material or any other such reading clues also serve as reader clues and indicate something of the gender, age, class, and level of literacy of the first audience to whom the book was addressed.
FIGURE 1. Frontispiece, George Fisher, The Instructor; Or, American Young Man’s Best Companion (Worcester, Mass.: Isaiah Thomas, 1785). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
At this point an example can more concretely illustrate how seemingly nonliterary considerations still suggest the scope and nature of a particular work’s use and appeal, the interpretive community to which the work appealed, how its appeal illuminates the sociological context in which it takes place, and how all of these factors together can contribute to a history of texts, an archaeology of reading. More specifically, by comparing a popular nonfiction book with early American novels, we can see the complex place novels inhabited in early American culture and some of the complicating factors in any projection of the novel-reading public. George Fisher’s The Instructor; Or, American Young Mans Best Companion, was first published in London in 1727, was imported to America soon thereafter, and was retitled The American Instructor and reprinted by Benjamin Franklin in 1748. The book was a steady seller in America until the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Designed as an adult self-help book, not a textbook or a children’s book, this relatively sophisticated work instructs the reader on a wide variety of topics, ranging from calligraphy and other fine arts to practical advice on such matters as how to draw up deeds and to more esoteric information such as how to use a Gunter’s-Line or Coggeshall’s Sliding-Rule. Different editions vary the book’s title and subtitle and include different descriptions of the contents, sometimes suggesting a commitment to further educational refinement, sometimes to artisanal application. Clearly, the book was never meant to be a trade manual.16 Its frontispiece portrays a robed scholar in his study, surrounded by telescope, sundial, globes, weighty folios, and five boys—apparently ranging from early to late adolescence—all awaiting the scholar’s wisdom. The legend beneath the engraving reads: “Tis to the Press & Pen we Mortals owe, / All we believe & almost all we know. / All hail ye great Preservers of these Arts, / That raise our thoughts & Cultivate our Parts.” The community (“we Mortals,” “All hail”) here assumed and pictorialized is exclusively masculine. Learning is emblemized as the province of the socially prominent, of those who can afford education and its accoutrements. That ideal is more Old World than New, as is also the frontispiece of the scholar in his High Renaissance study (an illustration taken over from the English editions and published in most American versions of the book).
Considering the title and the frontispiece, it should not be surprising that nearly all of the fifty-three names I have found inscribed in different copies of this book are male (on a few occasions only first initals are given, but this form of book signing was seldom used by eighteenth-century women unless preceded by Mrs. or Miss). Even this highly informal survey suggests that, in the case of Fisher’s book, a preponderantly masculine readership was not only implied by the text itself but may, in fact, have existed. But when we come to novels generalizations about the gender of the audience require further qualification and examination; one is also struck by how easily sociological factors elide into literary issues. In over one thousand extant copies of early American novels I have surveyed, women’s signatures outnumber men’s roughly two to one. Male names, however, actually outnumber female in the few subscription lists published with early American novels.17 While these figures are both preliminary and impressionistic (I have by no means seen every extant copy of every novel nor is there anything statistically controlled about the sample of copies that happens to survive), they do seem to suggest a disparity between private book ownership (evidenced by signatures) and public endorsement of a book (as in a subscription list). Were women ashamed to subscribe to novels, which were often considered a licentious form of literature? Or is economics at issue here? Who could afford to buy books? What books were considered necessities and what extravagances? Were books considered more of a luxury for one sex than for the other? Who paid—at least publicly—for literature? “Gentlemen holding subscription papers for Emily Hamilton, a New Novel, are requested to return them immediately to this office,” Isaiah Thomas, Jr., announced in the Massachusetts Spy, or Worcester Gazette on March 2, 1803, assuming that the subscribers to this novel—about women, implicitly for women, and written “By a Young Lady of Worcester County”—would be gentlemen.18
We know, from surviving eighteenth-century account books as well as from entries in numerous diaries of the time, that men did (or were credited with doing) most of the purchasing in the early national period. Seven transactions with the notoriously irresponsible William Rowson are recorded in Mathew Carey’s account books, to cite one particularly graphic example, but none with Rowson’s wife, Susanna, the first bestselling novelist in America and one of Carey’s most profitable authors.19 In short, the sociology of wage earning and spending is important here since in a social and economic context that privileged male buying and reading, any evidence of a female readership becomes a significant literary and sociological phenomenon. It should also be noted that women, in particular, flocked to the new lending libraries where they could rent novels far more cheaply than they could buy them. The clearer gender differentiation in the case of Fisher’s self-help book highlights the complex case of fiction—and the ambiguous status of women as implied readers of early American fiction.
The gender of Fisher’s interpretive community seems to be fairly clear-cut, but I hasten to emphasize that gender is not the only important factor in discovering readers. Fisher’s book also illustrates the ways in which interpretive communities can be composed of readers with vastly different educational levels and, by extension, different class affiliations. The frontispiece of The Instructor suggests a book addressed to the young upwardly mobile professional of two hundred years ago. But inscriptions and marginalia suggest that Fisher’s appeal may have extended far beyond wealthy or upper-middle-class American men (the majority of whom could read and write fluently by the middle of the eighteenth century). One E. J. Patterson, for example, in an 1800 edition, practiced printing a very crude series of numbers from one to nine on the inside flyleaf; while in a 1753 edition, Adam Orth neatly and clearly wrote his name (twice) on the endpapers, yet also practiced the most elementary addition problems taught in the book (such as how to carry the ten) and practiced writing his numbers. What, one wonders, was the relationship between elementary literacy and numeracy in early America and what class or regional factors may have influenced the acquisition of these different skills? Similar questions are raised by Joseph Langdon’s signatures in a 1748 edition. Langdon wrote his name several times and on the inside front flyleaf, directly beneath his name, practiced “abcd.” Were signatures learned first, before other elementary writing skills (a sequence that could have implications for the study of sign literacy, an issue discussed in chapter 4)? Or by George Duncan, who signed his name six times in the flyleaves of the book over a five-year period beginning in 1815, the successive signatures indicating increasing skill in the art of penmanship; or by an anonymous reader in an 1802 edition who used the endpapers to practice the geometric designs that constituted the preliminary exercises in the study of penmanship. What was the class, the educational level, and the age of Fisher’s readers? These matters seem clear in the text itself but highly ambiguous when we assess the way actual readers made use of that text.
Other evidence also indicates that the readers of The Instructor were drawn from a range of social situations, possessed varying literary sophistication, and used the same text to very different ends. Thus one anonymous inscriber set down in haphazard fashion on one of the endpapers a crude and sloppy partial index (“Will 294,” “Receipt for Black Ink 49”) to presumably just those sections pertinent to this reader. In contrast, when John Blakey, an accomplished calligrapher, presented his friend John Sharpies with a copy of the book on April 4, 1772, he included with the volume an elaborate, finely penned, and beautifully organized index to its entire contents. From such evidence, one can postulate a disparate community of male readers, some of whom used the book at a very elementary level, apparently to improve basic literacy and numeracy skills; some of whom used it as a convenient reference book (especially when hand-indexed to serve more efficiently an artisan or tradesman or busy gentleman); and some of whom presented it as a gift book—more a proper token of social esteem (and status) than a utilitarian reference guide. As different inscriptions indicate, the book could be given by one well-educated friend to another, but it could also be passed among a community of marginal writers and readers to be preserved and shared—as the different names and dates of an 1812 edition show—over the course of a quarter of a century and in a setting (frontier Michigan) seemingly worlds removed from the genteel world of Renaissance learning depicted by the volume’s frontispiece but, no doubt, still inspired by this vision of tradition and status.20 In view of the varied responses to the text, the frontispiece, too, is a text to be read and interpreted. It seems less a sign of the book’s contents than a symbol of the reader’s aspirations and an implicit promise (like a before-and-after ad) of the benefits to be gained by studying the volume. (You, too, can have youth eagerly attend to your words of wisdom!)
Such assessments of an interpretive community, although necessarily inconclusive, give us glimpses of how books were read in the new Republic. The issues, as already noted, are considerably more complex when it is a novel, not a textbook, that is the focus of investigation. None of Fisher’s readers need look for a hidden political allegory behind his discussion of calculation. Furthermore, and as even The Instructor demonstrates, the same book can serve different demands of different readers possessed of different needs, skills, and experiences. These differences should be even greater with novels than with self-improvement books since novels necessarily leave so much more to the individual imagination. Nevertheless, by surveying inscriptions and marginalia (sometimes merely a partial signature, sometimes a miniature book review), by assessing book use, by considering book morphology as well as visuals of reading situations, by attending to clues offered up by the texts themselves, and by taking into account diaries and letters about the novel and the extensive recorded testimony denouncing the genre, one can construct an ethnography of the early American novel reader (and writer) that provides a “thick description” of the role of the novel in early American culture. This phrase (borrowed from Clifford Geertz) emphasizes the need not just to describe the “meaning particular social actions have for the actors whose actions they are” but for “stating, as explicitly as we can manage, what the knowledge thus attained demonstrates about the society in which it is found and, beyond that, about social life as such.”21
The novel, I argue throughout this study, became the chapbook of the nineteenth century—that is, a cheap book accessible to those who were not educated at the prestige men’s colleges, who were outside the established literary tradition, and who (as both Charles Brockden Brown and Helena Wells noted) for the most part read few books besides novels. Given both the literary insularity of many novel readers and the increasing popularity of the novel, the new genre necessarily became a form of education, especially for women. Novels allowed for a means of entry into a larger literary and intellectual world and a means of access to social and political events from which many readers (particularly women) would have been otherwise largely excluded. The first novels, I would also argue, provided the citizens of the time not only with native versions of the single most popular form of literary entertainment in America, but also with literary versions of emerging definitions of America—versions that were, from the first, tinged with ambivalence and duplicity.
Having suggested in the barest terms what the book intends, I will now as briefly indicate what it does not. Most obviously, I do not examine the early American novel in comparison with British models. Everyone knows that the first American fiction imitated earlier British originals, but we are not so sure just what that means. Did “the American novel” imitate “the British novel” (phrases that assume each national product was monolithic and the influence equally so)? Or did Charles Brockden Brown imitate William Godwin (implying a subservience of the apprentice author to the master writer)? Yet Godwin in his 1817 preface to Mandeville acknowledged his debt to Brown, and Brown was also credited with influencing Godwin’s daughter, Mary, and her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, even though few studies of the Shelleys posit their debt to Brown. What should be clear from these preliminary observations is that there are unquestioned assumptions of cultural hegemony implicit in the conventional concept of imitation. Those assumptions may be correct, but they are as yet undemonstrated, and a full investigation of the whole matter would depend on a detailed study of precisely what British books were read in America, in what numbers, by whom, and how New World writers responded individually and collectively to Old World texts, individually and collectively.22 It should also be remembered that the most popular writers in Britain at the time the American novel began were not Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne but Godwin, Robert Bage, Ann Radcliffe, and “Monk” Lewis and that the English novel most often listed in late eighteenth-century American booksellers’ catalogues was Henry Brooke’s The Fool of Quality (1766–1770).23 No one, however, seems to wish to investigate in detail these particular authors.24 Finally, and most important, any adequate study of the influence of English fiction on the emerging American novel would be at least as extensive as the present work. It is a different study from my own, and, I would suggest, until it is done, there is little to be gained either by reiterating or rejecting the conventional assumptions of influence and imitation.
Yet I must also emphasize that most books Americans read, even after the Revolution, still came from abroad, either imported directly or pirated by American printers from European originals. David D. Hall, John Seelye, and William Spengemann have each cogently argued, in different contexts, that it is both insular and a historical to develop a model of the “American mind” or an “American tradition” based solely on books written in America, and they are completely correct in doing so.25 As every aspiring American novelist knew full well, he or she competed in a precarious market already flooded with European products. For example, Hocquet Caritat, with the 1804 catalogue for his New York library of fiction, could include only some forty American titles in a list of almost fifteen hundred works—despite what seems to have been his concerted effort to gather as many native novels as possible.26 One cannot deny the omnipresence of European fiction. As will be clear throughout this study, early American novels contain numerous allusions to (and condemnations of) British novelists. But I must reiterate that I am leaving the European connections of American fiction to other scholars specifically interested in that topic.27 My concern is with the ways in which a small body of Americans used the novel as a political and cultural forum, a means to express their own vision of a developing new nation.28 Like writers in any country that has achieved independence through revolution, early American novelists faced the special task of creating literature against the overwhelming impact of their nation’s residual Colonial mentality. How did they make an American fiction? What local issues were fictionalized, were considered significant enough to warrant the attention of novelist and reader? More theoretically, how does one make art in an inchoate land whose boundaries are all the more difficult to perceive because of a persistent imperial presence? These insistently political questions pervade early American novels and can be seen in myriad comments within the novels on the need for an indigenous art or the correlative need for an indigenous audience (the repeated argument that Americans should read and buy American books).
I do not assess how British fiction shaped American fiction and neither do I assess in any detail how the first novels might have shaped those that came after—Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the clear beginning of a “tradition” of American fiction. Whatever affinities these subsequent writers have with the early authors will be, for the most part, implicit in my discussion of the earlier writers and need not be validated by further discussion of the later ones.29 At the same time, it would be naive to pretend that the present study has not been influenced by my own education in and to a tradition of nineteenth-century American fiction. As diverse commentators such as Michel Foucault, Clifford Geertz, and Edward Said have argued, any study of origins is necessarily compromised from the beginning by the fact that the historian already knows what it is that is to be explained.30 A cultural given is given only on the terms whereby it is already possessed. It is that possession that proves old patents, not vice versa. Artifacts are always labeled by virtue of a whole history of past labeling; they carry their archaeology in their name. On some level, then, to trace origins is to repeat the name, and any foray into the ostensibly revelatory past is hopelessly grounded in the very present to be thereby explained. Indeed, hindsight, as much as foresight, is vision affronting time.
The objectivity of any retrospective vision is also compromised by the subjectivity of the “I” seeing. If we focus back through Edith Wharton and Nathaniel Hawthorne to more distant fictional foremothers and forefathers such as Hannah Webster Foster and Charles Brockden Brown, the perspective virtually predicts one of two only seemingly contradictory ends. The already valorized nineteenth-century authors can serve to valorize their eighteenth-century predecessors (“Here we see the seeds of…”). Or the still devalued eighteenth-century writers can serve to valorize further their nineteenth-century successors (“Not from this did Melville spring …”). In either case the governing impulse is the same. We search for roots not out of dispassionate curiosity about the past but because we know that the family tree ultimately produced “me.”
The subjectivity (one might even say egotism) at the heart of all genealogical endeavors is, inevitably, part and parcel of the present volume.31 My discussion, for example, owes a large debt to poststructuralist criticism, even though I have tried, as much as possible, to avoid what has already become the formulaic roll call of prominent theorists, the invocation of the Continental Muses that ensures their presence in the text. It will also be obvious that I am indebted to recent feminist critiques of gender and ideology; of, in Mary Jacobus’s phrase, the “textuality of sexuality,” and vice versa.32 As a feminist and a sociological critic, my pulse naturally quickens when I discover an 1814 novel by Sarah Savage entitled The Factory Girl in which the heroine of the novel organizes her fellow workers into a study group. My biases are also, no doubt, evident in my disappointment with the as similationism that is the end of such a beginning, although, given the time and place within which the book was written, published, and read, Christian forbearance and subservience of one’s personal will to the demands of and for domestic tranquility are more likely conclusions for a heroine than the one I would have preferred. The point is, simply, that all etiologic studies assume a development that has already taken place, and the investigator inevitably posits origins congruent with the development that can be documented as following from those origins—the tautology of history, which is as inescapable as the historian’s place in history. For any version of history is a version; implicit in that version are often complex hegemonic forces that have little to do with the subject under study and much to do with the historian. In sociological terms: “To understand the state of the socially constructed universe at a given time, or its change over time, one must understand the social organization that permits the definers to do their defining.”33
All history is choice, discourse that begins with the very questions the historian chooses to ask (or not ask) of his or her own version of the past. Fiction cannot be simply “fit into its historical context,” as if context were some Platonic pigeonhole and all that is dark or obscure in the fiction is illuminated when the text is finally slipped into the right slot. If we argue that history provides the context, then who or what, we must also ask, provides the history? Organizing a multiplicity of disparate data into a coherent structure, any history is itself necessarily a narrative. Historians tell their stories as much as do novelists, and through much the same means—by what they bring in and what they leave out, by how they structure their material and to what end.34 One story (history) seeking to explain another (fiction) can only extend or circumambulate it. Nor can we really ever think of history or context as something that contains fiction. The early American novel, for example, did not sit around waiting for a favorable context in which it could flourish but instead immediately embarked on a program of cultivating the very social context that it required. The relationship runs two ways, which is to say that the connections between the history of story and the story of history are multiple and complex.
To make sense of those connections is to make more story, to advance this story instead of that story. Yet I hope that I have avoided, in the following chapters, what E. P. Thompson has described as the “condescension of posterity.”35 In as much detail as I thought my forbearing reader would endure, I attempt to explore early American novels as agents and products of social change. Throughout this volume I make many historiographic assumptions (one always does). For example, I see in the early national period a unique instance of cultural formation and transformation. Not only was America attempting to define itself in the aftermath of its Revolution, it was also attempting to constitute itself (literally, in the 1780s, with the framing of the Constitution) against revolution abroad and dissent at home. Just as important, at least for early American book production and print culture, were the substantial changes in the modes of production and the commercialization of culture then beginning throughout the Western world.
Prompted by their own recent political revolution and the changing economics of an unfolding Industrial Revolution, Americans of the early national period continued to realign their attitudes toward established social authorities, a process, as Perry Miller noted, that began almost as soon as the Pilgrims set foot upon American soil, but one greatly accelerated by the end of the eighteenth century.36 The church more and more lost its traditional powers. Although religion remained a potent force in many individual lives, the structure of religious authority changed demonstrably with revivalism; with the emergence of new denominations, sects, and even religious cults; and with the locus of religious education and religious authority within the home being transferred from the father to the mother. Newspapers, increasingly virulent in their partisan affiliations in the early national period, also attest to a crisis of authority, a crisis most strikingly emblemized by the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts in John Adams’s administration. Pedagogy, too, had become, for the first of many times in American history, a focus of social and political crisis. Nearly every American leader saw the nation at risk unless the majority could be educated to the “right” principles, but how was that worthy end to be accomplished, given the rudimentary system of schooling of the time? In short, the fears of those in authority—expressed in the Alien and Sedition Acts, the attention to mass education, and the censure of fiction—serve as eloquent tribute to the turbulence of the era in which the first American novelists plied their trade and produced their art.37
In many ways, the novel was the perfect form for this imperfect time. As Mikhail M. Bakhtin argues, prose fiction has been perceived as a subversive literary form in every Western society into which it was introduced: subversive of certain class notions of who should and should not be literate; subversive of notions of what is or is not a suitable literary subject matter and form and style; subversive of the term literature itself.38 The novel did not rhyme or scan. It required no knowledge of Latin or Greek, no intermediation or interpretation by cleric or academic. It required, in fact—from reader and writer—virtually no traditional education or classical erudition since, by definition, the novel was new, novel. Furthermore, the novel was, formalistically, voracious. It fed upon and devoured more familiar literary forms such as travel, captivity, and military narratives; political and religious tracts; advice books, chapbooks, penny histories, and almanacs. It appropriated drama (in its dialogic moments) and even (in its epigraphs and endings) poetry. It also appropriated nonliterary forms such as letters (almost one third of the novels written in America before 1820 were epistolary) or diaries as well as traditionally oral forms of culture such as local gossip, rumor, hearsay, folktales. It was a dangerously inchoate form appropriate for and correlative to a country first attempting to formulate itself.
Psychologically, the early novel embraced a new relationship between art and audience, writer and reader, a relationship that replaced the authority of the sermon or Bible with the enthusiasms of sentiment, horror, or adventure, all of which relocate authority in the individual response of the reading self. Speaking directly to that self, the early American novel ideologically represented and encouraged the aspirations of its new readers—aspirations in conflict, at many points, with ideas preached from the pulpit or taught in the common schools. Yet the early novel was not anti-intellectual. On the contrary, in novel after novel we see learning encouraged and find that reading and writing well were valued aspects of heroes and heroines. I argue in the chapters to follow that the novel inspired education by stressing the sentimental and social value of literacy—as seen in group discussions of reading depicted within the plots of novels and in the formation of similar reading groups in every section of America.
In these pages, I will discuss novels on two quite different, yet interrelated, levels. As Lewis Hyde has shown in his remarkable book The Gift (subtitled Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property), every work of art operates both within a market economy and a gift economy. When the New England Primer (ca. 1687) instructs its young readers, “My book and heart shall never part,” it speaks to the gift nature of literature.39 As Hyde notes, “that art that matters to us—which moves the soul, or delights the senses, or offers courage for living, however we choose to describe the experience—that work is received by us as a gift is received.”40 In what ways, then, were the first American fictions gifts to their first readers? Whether a given work is “good” or “bad” literature (especially by contemporary standards) seems to me a less significant matter than the question of what kind of response it engendered and how subtle or persuasive its message and meaning might have been for the reader.41 At the same time, however, art always has to find some way to exist within a specific economy, and the persistent economic failure of every early American novelist who attempted to support herself or himself by writing fiction attests to the inescapably harsh facts of the market economy of the time. Considering the economics of the early American book trade, how did the novel commence and how did it survive? Why did a small number of American writers continue to produce novels with such little hope of financial remuneration? What was the cash value of the new art and how best could it be sold? These are elemental but crucial questions, and it is to such questions that this study of American fiction now turns.