3
I thank God, there are no free schools nor printing [in Virginia], and I hope we shall not have these [for a] hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best government. God keep us from both!
—William Berkeley, governor of Virginia (1671)
The opinion of the world in regard to works of fancy has of late years undergone a wonderful change. It is no longer considered an offense against either religion, morality, or prudence to peruse a book bearing the name of a novel.… To us it appears as if it were but yesterday, that the grave, the serious, the religious, and the prudent, considered novel reading as an employment utterly beneath the dignity of the human mind.… In those days, it was almost as disreputable to be detected reading a novel, as to be found betting at a cockfight, or a gaming table. Those who had sons would have supposed them forever incapacitated for any useful pursuit in life, if they exhibited an inclination for novel reading; and those who had daughters who exhibited such an inclination, would have considered them as totally unfitted for ever becoming good wives or mothers.
—James McHenry (1824)
Back in his native land “after an absence of seven years,” Updike Underhill, the protagonist in Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive (1797), observes a revolution in the reading habits of America:
When he left New England, books of biography, travels, novels, and modern romances were confined to our seaports; or, if known in the country, were read only in the families of clergymen, physicians, and lawyers: while certain funeral discourses, the last words and dying speeches of Bryan Shaheen, and Levi Ames, and some dreary somebody’s Day of Doom, formed the most diverting part of the farmer’s library. On his return from captivity, he found a surprising alteration in the public taste. In our inland towns of consequence, social libraries had been instituted, composed of books designed to amuse rather than to instruct; and country booksellers, fostering the new-born taste of the people, had filled the whole land with modern travels and novels almost as incredible.
This wandering son of the new Republic come home again is especially struck by the “extreme avidity with which books of mere amusement [are] purchased and perused by all ranks.”1 And Tyler’s fictional comments are by no means the only observations on this remarkable new interest in fiction. As the editor of New York Magazine decisively proclaimed in 1797, “This is a novel-reading age.”2
In chapter 2, I focused on the manufacture of fiction at the dawning of the Industrial Revolution and, correspondingly, on the economic origins of the American novel. I traced how the form first appeared in a transitional society, preindustrial in its modes of production yet protocapitalistic in its modes of consumption, and I surveyed how the new genre along with its early producers—individual authors and enterprising printers—survived financially in a post-colonial world that merely presaged mass book production and mass consumption. In this chapter, my focus is on the politics of genre and, more specifically, on the ideological position that the novel as a genre was perceived to take in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War—a vital and volatile time when the ideals of the nation had to be formulated and promulgated. I ask how the new form survived in a society that, on the highest levels, was intensely hostile to its appearance. What were the causes of that pervasive cultural censure? What were the consequences? How much were the arbiters of taste motivated by fears that they operated within a society that was becoming too diffuse, too individualistic, and too democratic?
According to former president John Adams, by 1805 America had entered an “Age of Folly, Vice, Frenzy, Brutality, Daemons, Buonaparte, Tom Paine, or the Age of the burning Brand from the bottomless Pit: or anything but the Age of Reason.”3 For other men of power and prestige, too, it was a chaotic new world, and the novel, more than any other literary genre, was seen as the sign of a time when their authority was being called into question.
MONUMENTAL SOCIAL changes seldom occur overnight, which means, as many historians have noted, that there is often little immediate correspondence between events—everything from civil wars to technological breakthroughs—and the mentalités of the people most influenced by events. The historian may supply a correlation (e.g., “The Revolutionary War caused a new individualism in America”), but it is not by any means clear that life changed drastically for the Connecticut farmer who before, during, and after the war still had to worry about tilling unyielding soil, milking cows, feeding a growing family—facts of life that remained, for most Americans, more present and more pressing than the political considerations and compromises whereby the Constitution was being forged somewhere in Philadelphia behind locked doors. As Rip Van Winkle discovered, the sign above the tavern may have metamorphosed from King George to President George, but the life of the village stayed largely the same.
When change does occur and the king elides into the president, those who would continue to hold power and position within a society must contrive documents or proclamations that articulate a carefully limited and defined concept of progress that does not contravene their status: a new deal, a great society, a light at the end of the tunnel. In a word, ideology persists and is both less and more than history. It is an attempt to sell history, to sell an interpretation of the time and place in which men and women live their lives to those same men and women. As Anthony Giddens has observed, ideology represents “the capability of dominant groups or classes to make their own sectional interests appear to others as universal.”4 Ideology, by this definition, succeeds when those to whom it is directed assume that it is normal, natural, definitive, and thus destined to endure.
Giddens’s formulation is a useful refinement of Marx’s well-known aphorism “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas,” in that it differentiates between “ruling ideas” and the perception (perhaps erroneous) that certain ideas are dominant, ruling.5 This is a crucial distinction for this discussion. As noted earlier, the continuing censure of the early novel rivaled the novel’s growing popularity, and that incongruity took a variety of unusual forms. Thus, before approximately 1790, many books sold in America that we would now unquestionably define as novels (e.g., Tristram Shandy) were advertised otherwise (“a sentimental history”). But, by the turn of the century, a whole range of nonfictional reading materials, including sketches, captivity narratives, and travel pieces, were advertised as novels. Publishers, booksellers, and lending libraries could all promote their business by indiscriminately applying the label novel to the commodity they dispensed. Yet the censure of the form, emanating from the pulpit and the press, remained potent enough so that, until well into the nineteenth century, virtually every American novel somewhere in its preface or its plot defended itself against the charge that it was a novel, either by defining itself differently (“Founded In Truth”) or by redefining the genre tautologically as all those things it was presumed not to be—moral, truthful, educational, and so forth. Or newspapers and magazines would serialize works of fiction under a headnote defensively proclaiming the genre’s moral advantages even as they also published, sometimes within the same issue, denunciations of the genre as a whole (denunciations that presumably applied to all works of fiction other than the particular specimen included in their publication).6 The question, then, is how much potency did “ruling ideas” about the necessarily deleterious effects of the novel have?
Jürgen Habermas has argued that ideology is always implicitly or explicitly reactionary, a counter stance to some other force within a culture. An “ideology is always coeval with the critique of ideology.”7 The light at the end of the tunnel is proclaimed in response to a suspicion that one is stumbling through an unrelieved darkness. The pervasive censure of fiction eloquently attests to the force that fiction itself was perceived to have as an ideology (or as an agent of ideology). Had the novel not been deemed a potent proponent of certain threatening changes, there would have been little reason to attack it. Had the novel not been seen as a covert or even overt critique of the existing social order, there would have been no need to defend so rigorously what had not been called into question or to strive to persuade potential novel readers of the harm that they would do themselves should they foolishly indulge their appetite for fiction.
To the modern reader, the whole contretemps over fiction well may seem a tempest in a teapot, but it is important to remember that the early reviewers, by attacking fiction, were defending a vision of society that they viewed (the essential purpose of ideology—to assume, to presume, to subsume) as well ordered and manifestly worthy of defense. Their stand in striving to perpetuate this order reified the position from which they believed they spoke, the stance of a superior dismayed by another’s reading habits but willing to warn the other of the grave consequences of his or her unfortunate literary tastes—novel reading today, licentious riot and senseless revolution tomorrow. Unwary readers might still be saved from that undesired end through the generous intermediation of the critic. Thus the need for the very social authority that the novels themselves presumed to question.
This need for the critic was the critics’ need and it pervaded the higher reaches of the society. Timothy Dwight took time out from presiding over Yale, Jonathan Edwards from fomenting a religious revival, Benjamin Rush from attending to his medical and philosophical investigations, Noah Webster from writing dictionaries, and Thomas Jefferson and John Adams from presiding over a nation—all to condemn the novel.8 But even that formulation devalues the seriousness of such attacks by differentiating the censure of fiction from the more public duties of these Founding Fathers. Denouncing the novel, they would have insisted, was ancillary to or coextensive with or even integral to the civic, religious, or educational duties of right-minded men. Culture, Raymond Williams has persuasively argued, was not defined as separate from the larger fabric of Anglo-American society until the middle of the nineteenth century. For the social spokespersons of the new Republic, an aberrant form of literary culture equaled an aberration in the very design of America.9
As Royall Tyler (in the passage quoted at the beginning of this chapter) humorously asserted, many people believed in a Gresham’s law of texts or reading. Bad new works would supposedly drive out good old ones, so that a print world dominated by the Bible, The Day of Doom, sermons, tracts, and sundry other religious works well might be superseded by a new world of predominantly secular reading, of texts designed merely to amuse, not to instruct. This is not to say there were no amusing books before the novel. As noted in chapter 2, special laws were passed in Colonial America to eliminate chapmen with their chapbooks. This street literature (crime confessions, captivity narratives, picaresque tales, etc.) anticipated the early novel in form and even more in function. It was a literature about average people, even rogues—characters who often survived within or against the prevailing structures of authority—and it appealed to the authorities no more than the early American novel later did.
But the novel threatened not just to coexist with elite literature but to replace it, and its critics knew full well that changes in the primary reading of an increasingly greater number of people presaged far more than a faddish redeployment of leisure time (leisure being itself, as Williams reminds us, another nineteenth-century construct).10 The crucial matter was not so much a question of how common citizens invested that time allowed for reading but the question of where the society vested the voice (or voices) of authority. While the novel was widely censured in Europe, the criticism in America may well have reached its particular level of vehemence because the novel was established here in the wake of the Revolution, at a time when disturbing questions (witness the Constitutional debates) about the limits of liberty and the role of authority in a republic were very much at issue. Might not the American novel by addressing those unprivileged in the emerging society persuade them that they had a voice in that society and thus serve as the literary equivalent of a Daniel Shays by leading its followers to riot and ruin? Many of America’s best educated and most illustrious citizens thought so, and the genre provided a locus for their apprehensions about mobocracy on both the cultural and political level.
What I find most intriguing about this whole flyting with fiction is not its hysterical tone but its essential percipience.11 The critics predicted the rise of the novel well in advance of its actual economic ascendancy and understood (for all their seeming paranoia) the cultural, social, and political implications of that ascendancy. With the historian’s hindsight, we can appreciate just how validly their early warnings anticipated changes that, economically and technologically speaking, would not fully transpire until the mid-nineteenth century. If it now seems rather silly or overstated to blame one literary form for massive social ills, perhaps it is because the transition to a mass-market form of publication for a mass audience has been accomplished so thoroughly that the present world of print seems to us as fundamentally natural as their previous world seemed to them. No wonder the novel’s early critics strove, through the power of the word, to stop a cultural revolution in the uses (in their view, abuses) of the word. That task was further complicated by their suspicion that in the new world of letters presaged by the novel they would have little to say. On a very elemental level, theirs was a fight for survival.
Sustained misgivings as to the social and moral effects of fiction represent, then, an attempt by an elite minority to retain a self-proclaimed role as the primary interpreters of American culture. It may well be that this group (and I define them only as they defined themselves through their critiques of fiction) never truly exerted an unquestioned moral authority in the local communities of the time. But they certainly sounded as if they did and regularly assumed a tone of inherited privilege, of moral and social rectitude. This ostensibly had its roots in the traditional Puritan religious paradigm (again, a model or ideal, not necessarily a fact) of the minister as the officially authorized translator of the text and as the literary critic of last resort interposing himself between the finally unfathomable authority of God and the all-too-human limitations of his audience. One of the most intriguing formulations of this model, for my purposes, and one which idealizes the role of the Protestant divine occurs in The Power of Sympathy: “[The Reverend Mr. Holmes] is assiduous in the duties of his profession, and in the love and admiration of his flock. He prescribes for the health of the body, as well as that of the soul, and settles all the little disputes of his parish. They are contented with his judgment, and he is at once their parson, their lawyer, and their physician.”12 In a theocracy, the minister’s word is never limited to preaching the Word.
Just how much American communities really honored the pronouncements of men such as the Reverend Holmes is open to debate. But until well into the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the local minister not only served as God’s annointed spokesperson, he was typically the only citizen in a small town or village who had received a classical education at one of the prestige colleges. Wills and estate inventories regularly reveal that his library was the largest in his community. As expert witness to the world and the Word, the minister interpreted science, philosophy, and other forms of learning as well as religion for his congregation/audience. Although select members of that audience may have been versed on the particular subject of the preacher’s discourse, for many the sermon would be the first word on the topic at hand and for most it was the final word.13 As novels became increasingly available, increasingly affordable (either purchased or rented), and increasingly accessible to the public (both because of their own linguistic simplicity and their readers’ improved literacy), they were increasingly perceived to be eroding the pulpit model of erudition and authority. Nor did the novels overlook that shift. It seems no coincidence, for example, that immediately after the description of the Reverend Mr. Holmes in The Power of Sympathy, the minister delivers a lengthy diatribe that is against novel reading and seduction and in favor of sermons, satire, and didactic essays. The only problem with his “metaphysical nicety” is that it is quite ignored. While he drones on, one of the members of his intended audience diverts herself “with the cuts in Gay’s Fables” while another reads a copy of Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey.14
Fiction was a particular threat to ministerial authority because the novel, by its nature, necessarily ruled out the very intermediation that the preacher was professionally prepared to provide. In the terminology of the linguist Dell Hymes, fiction entails a “dyadic sender-receiver form” of communication, a form in which there is a direct line of communication between the sender and the receiver. With this form, the meaning of the text is embedded in the experience of decoding the message and thus cannot be separated from the act of reading itself.15 Although a scientific treatise may be paraphrased without any significant loss of validity or substance, a novel cannot, and to summarize the argument of the plot is not to convey the essence of the fiction. In a sense, the novel is its reading, and that reading must finally be private and personal.
For the critics of the novel, the power of fiction to preoccupy the reader was a double danger. On the public level, would not novels keep the poor from being good workers and women from being good wives? On the private level, was not the engrossed reading of the wrong text itself a kind of seduction or even a state of possession? “I have heard it said in favour of novels,” a commentator wrote in the Weekly Magazine in 1798, “that there are many good sentiments dispersed in them. I maintain, that good sentiments being found scattered in loose novels, render them the more dangerous, since, when they are mixed with seducing arguments, it requires more discernment than is to be found in youth to separate the evil from the good … and when a young lady finds principles of religion and virtue inculcated in a book, she is naturally thrown off her guard by taking it for granted that such a work can contain no harm: and of course the evil steals imperceptibly into her heart.”16 Some exorcism consequently seemed called for, and the clergy (backed by educators and political leaders) strove to dispossess readers of the novel in order to repossess themselves of their “elect” status and role.
Writing in 1853, one anonymous reviewer for the Unitarian magazine The Christian Examiner assumed that the minister had already become a figure mostly of nostalgia, not a potent leader of his culture and the chief articulator of its ideals. Commenting specifically about the vogue for quaint historical novels about ministers, this reviewer noted that “as we read these records of ministerial life … the mind naturally reverts to olden times.… We see at a glance into what entirely new conditions society has fallen. Then the minister made himself felt; he was a man of power; he was far more erudite than those around him; the means of acquiring knowledge was far less than now.… The printing press had not achieved its present miracles of art, and public libraries were unknown.”17 Just as Governor William Berkeley of Virginia had predicted in 1671, there was, for this anonymous reviewer in 1853, an inextricable interrelationship between the rise of the popular press and the decline in public respect for religious and civil authority.
The change from a small and essentially elite readership of a few selected nonfictional (and often devotional) titles to a proto-mass audience for books, and primarily novels that did not require official exegesis, marked other changes, too. Fredric Jameson has argued in this context that the revolution in readership signaled a larger revolution in the whole social contract of the culture. “The older pre-capitalist genres were signs of something like an aesthetic ‘contract’ between a cultural producer and a certain homogeneous class or group public; they drew their vitality from the social and collective status… of the situation of aesthetic production and consumption, that is to say, from the fact that the relationship between artist and public was still in one way or another a social institution and a concrete social and interpersonal relationship with its own validation and specificity.”18 With the advent of the market-model of literary production, exemplified by the rise of the novel, we have not just a new form, new authors, and a new audience, we also have a new contract between the producers and consumers of print. With this redefinition of both author and audience, the established canon of literary forms and genres collapses and the whole structure of literary relationships is rearranged. With the advent of the novel, the indirect and secondary audience of much previous literary discourse became the direct, primary audience for much present literary discourse and the mediating middlemen, such as the expounding clergyman, were removed from the transaction.
Although my comments thus far have been directed to the American scene, a pervasive censure of fiction was by no means a purely American phenomenon. On the contrary, and as Mikhail Bakhtin has pointed out, the novel was officially opposed in virtually every European country into which it was introduced. Much of the censure of fiction in American periodicals was, in fact, based on European sources and was often directly appropriated from British publications, for fiction had already challenged British social institutions (an entrenched class system) in much the same manner that it would subsequently challenge different American social institutions (a residual puritanism and an emerging industrial-capitalism). As Bakhtin notes, the whole process of reading fiction empowers individual readers in ways innately inimical to social authority. “In a novel,” this critic argues, “the individual acquires the ideological and linguistic initiative necessary to change the nature of his own image (there is a new and higher type of individualization of the image).” Within the novel, “there always remains an unrealized surplus of humanness”—a surplus that creates new needs, different desires, and that thus controverts the status quo. Moreover, the very temporality of the novel—its emphasis on the here and now rather than on a classical tradition of timeless forms, right readings, and proper responses—similarly aggravates desire in a way that extends far beyond the novel to compromise even the good work of those other forms: “The novelization of literature does not imply attaching to already completed genres a generic canon that is alien to them, not theirs. The novel, after all, has no canon of its own. It is, by its nature, not canonic. It is plasticity itself. It is a genre that is ever questing, ever examining itself and subjecting its established forms to review.”19 And it similarly subjects the forms of the society in which it is written and read (and the writings that support those forms) to review. No wonder the novel was derided by those who profited from the status quo and strove to perpetuate it.
It is not the purpose of this study to document the whole nexus of changing social ideology in postrevolutionary America, but I would observe that the rise of the novel (as well as the negative reaction to the novel) occurred simultaneously with other transformations within American society. By no means an isolated phenomenon, the emergence of the novel was part of a movement in the late eighteenth century toward a reassessment of the role of the “average” American and a concomitant questioning of political, ministerial, legal, and even medical authorities on the part of the citizens of the new nation who, having already accepted the egalitarian rhetoric of the Revolution, increasingly believed that the Republic belonged as much to them as to the gentry. As Nathan O. Hatch notes:
From the debate over the Constitution to the election of Jefferson, a second and explicitly democratic revolution united many who suspicioned power and many who were powerless in a common effort to pull down the cultural hegemony of a gentlemanly few. In a complex cultural process that historians have just begun to unravel, people on a number of fronts began to speak, write, and organize against the authority of mediating elites, of social distinctions, and of any human tie that did not spring from volitional allegiance.20
This process—in Gordon S. Wood’s phrasing, the “democratization of mind”—was happening across the nation.21 Writing specifically of Virginia, for example, Rhys Isaacs posits a remarkable transition in the aftermath of the Revolution from a gentrified society—where authoritarian figures served as interpreters of both a religious and legal tradition for a marginally educated but increasingly literate populace—to a society that put less confidence in its gentlemen as infallible sources of information and opinion. Isaacs notes that one mark of the change in social attitude was the increase in the number of newspapers, religious tracts, and novels, all seemingly intended for a less educated audience, but an audience increasingly sceptical about the authority vested in minister or magistrate. As Isaacs summarizes:
The Great Awakenings, and the popular dissent they promoted, effectively wrested the Bible and its interpretation from the custody of the learned; the republican principle of popular sovereignty subverted the conception of higher authority embodied in the wisdom of learned justices; newspapers and pamphlets (increasingly promulgating divisive ideologies, and more and more frequently involving the vulgar in affairs formerly the preserve of the learned) combined with the newly invented book product of the 1750s, the sentimental novel, to turn the flow of print into a flood.22
In the North, too, the flood of print was perceived as threatening to an established social order. Readers were increasingly eager to participate in the creation of meaning, of public opinion, of culture—not just to serve as the consumers of meanings articulated by others. And the novel, as Bakhtin insists, is par excellence a genre that “authorizes” the reader as an interpreter and a participant in a culture’s fictions.
THE CENSURE OF THE novel in the late eighteenth century has been amply documented and there is no need to review the range of complaints. However, I do want to look in some depth at a few representative comments in order to examine the ideological assumptions underlying the critique and, conversely, the countering ideological position occupied by the novels themselves. Obviously, the main object of censure is the woman reader, who, not coinciden tally, is also the implied reader of most of the fiction of the era. The primary issue, on several levels, is legitimacy—who is and who is not the legitimate audience of literature and, less theoretically, who are to be the legitimate heirs of the Republic.
“Of all the artillery” that can “soften hearts” and thus circumvent virtue, one “Leander” warned in 1791, “the most effectual is the modern novel.”23 Or, wrote another commentator, “novels… are the powerful engines with which the seducer attacks the female heart, and if we judge from every day experience, his plots are seldom laid in vain.”24 Still more explicit in its charges and histrionic in its tone is an 1802 jeremiad portentously titled “Novel Reading, a Cause of Female Depravity”:
Without the poison instilled [by novels] into the blood, females in ordinary life would never have been so much the slaves of vice.… It is no uncommon thing for a young lady who has attended her dearest friend to the altar, a few months after a marriage which, perhaps, but for her, had been a happy one, to fix her affections on her friend’s husband, and by artful blandishments allure him to herself. Be not staggered, moral reader, at the recital! Such serpents are really in existence.… I have seen two poor disconsolate parents drop into premature graves, miserable victims to their daughter’s dishonour, and the peace of several relative families wounded never to be healed again in this world.25
All this from reading novels! But hyperbolic as such charges might seem to the modern reader, they were taken seriously at the time—seriously enough that virtually every early American novel answered such criticism either prefatorially or in the plot: “These volumes,” even the first American novel insists in its dedication, are intended “to represent the specious Causes, and to Expose the fatal Consequences of Seduction; to inspire the Female Mind With a Principle of Self Complacency, and to Promote the Economy of Human Life.” In plain English, The Power of Sympathy promises to discourage licentiousness and to do what it can to prevent the Republic from being overrun with illegitimate children.26
That translation is not at all facetious. In the various critiques of the novel, female sexuality was regularly defined and the possible offenses of same were just as regularly considered not as a private matter but in the most public of terms. Note that the exemplum just quoted from “Novel Reading, a Cause of Female Depravity,” is not limited to one particular young lady seduced by reading romances into seducing the husband of her “dearest friend” but also brings in the premature grave of “disconsolate parents” and the permanent grief of “several relative families.” In short, female sexuality was not only fetishized but nationalized.27 It became (at least for those who denounced novels from the privileged position of their elevated social class) a national resource. In both cases—engaging in sex or engaging in reading—what could be regarded as an ultimately private, personal experience has been publicized and politicized and is therefore (the main point) subject to censorship, restriction, and control. As the sociologist Patricia Murphy Robinson argues in a different context: “Woman’s strength as a sexual being is a constant threat. We have to face the biological fact that she is the sex that harbors and brings forth the very human beings the ruling class must have to create wealth. She is still the main sustaining force who cares for what she births.… Our sexuality in all its facets.… is interpenetrated by the reproduction of the species and through this the reproduction of the world. The control of our minds, as a sex, is an economic necessity.”28 To control female minds and feminine sexuality, the novel—its early critics would unanimously agree—had to be kept out of the wrong hands.
Whether or not one accepts this class analysis of sexism, it cannot be disputed that sexuality is always a historical construct that finds its expression—and its repression—within a specific social setting.29 In regard to the critique of fiction, illicit sexuality was certainly at issue (as it was in most early American novels). But critical censure translated desire into a threat against the institutions of patriarchal marriage and the state upon which that system of marriage was based. “Novels not only pollute the imaginations of young women,” wrote a commentator in the Weekly Magazine in 1798; novels also give women “false ideas of life, which too often make them act improperly.”30 The critic wishes to protect the susceptible young reader but, more important, wants to protect society from the unprivileged who are suddenly inspired with “unrealistic” ambitions.
The critic, telling the woman reader of her place, also tells the reader of his. The pronouncements against fiction assert (or reassert) a claim to social authority, as is made particularly clear in the extended commentary on novel reading by the Reverend Samuel Miller, a Presbyterian minister and a teacher at Princeton. With questionable concision, the Reverend Miller equates public and private lapses of virtue by moving from a Lockean argument based upon social good into, finally, a Benthamite argument on behalf of personal pleasure:
Every opportunity is taken [in novels] to attack some principle of morality under the title of a “prejudice;” to ridicule the duties of domestic life, as flowing from “contracted” and “slavish” views; to deny the sober pursuits of upright industry as “dull” and “spiritless;” and, in a word, to frame an apology for suicide, adultery, prostitution, and the indulgence of every propensity for which a corrupt heart can plead an inclination.… The author has no hesitation in saying, that, if it were possible, he would wholly prohibit the reading of novels.… For it may, with confidence, be pronounced that no one was ever an extensive and especially an habitual reader of novels, even supposing them to be all well selected, without suffering both intellectual and moral injury, and of course incurring a diminution of happiness.31
The elision of the novel’s critique of accepted morality, gender roles, and class expectations (the role of workers) with suicide, adultery, and the indulgence of other such propensities is an effective (if underhanded) rhetorical maneuver. Even more so is the final assertion that happiness and novel reading are antithetical states. By this logic, it is in the individual’s interest to give up such self-abuse.
The argument that novels unfitted one for one’s position in life (always, of course, a subservient position) could even be advanced in novels themselves and thus—even if unintentionally—co-opted. I refer here to Memoirs of the Bloomsgrove Family (1790) by the Reverend Enos Hitchcock (Yale graduate; Federalist; pastor of the Benevolent Congregational Church in Providence, Rhode Island; author; educator; and a novelist), whose novel sets forth, among other matters, a sustained critique of novels:
The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth; and prevented others from improving their minds in useful knowledge.… Parents take care to feed their children with wholesome diet; and yet how unconcerned about the provision for the mind, whether they are furnished with salutary food, or with trash, chaff, or poison? How many thousands have, by a free use of such books, corrupted their principles, inflamed their imagination, and vitiated their taste, without balancing the account by any solid advantage?
Novels, this novelist notes, are “written in order to catch the imagination of the reader and beguile it into vice and error unawares.”32 But beginning with its dedication to Martha Washington (and a polite acknowledgment of the “high rank which [she] hold[s] in this rising Empire”), the Memoirs of the Bloomsgrove Family strives to beguile in a different direction and to inspire its readers toward self-improvement while carefully defining the direction of the desired improvement. For example, the book sharply criticizes any aspirations the reader might have toward a genteel education. The education that the Reverend Hitchcock advocates is in industry and good citizenship for men and in “economy and domestic employments” for women. Hitchcock especially insists that women’s education and women’s reading must be carefully prescribed so that women do not take into marriage “expectations” that are “above the drudgery of learning the necessary parts of domestic duties.” Domestic drudgery, discouraged by novels, is necessary to the economic prosperity of the family and is equally necessary to the survival of the nation: “In a free country, under a republican form of government, industry is the only sure road to wealth; and economy the only sure means of preserving it.… [Thus] we see the necessity of educating females in a manner suited to the genius of the government.”33
FIGURE 2. “The Farmer’s Cottage,” from Herman Mann, The Columbian Primer (1802). Although the text indicates that “the mother is seen spinning or sewing at the door,” she is here pictured as reading while her child plays and her husband (“the honest and industrious laborer”) tills his field. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
A Yale degree is fine for the gentry, but the populace needs more elemental stuff: no classics for the farmer, no art or musical training or other “female accomplishments” for the farmer’s wife (or the merchant’s wife, for that matter), and no novels, it might be added, for either. Yet Hitchcock writes a novel in order to read the novel out of the republic of letters. The best case one might make for such inconsistencies is that he was fighting fire with fire and addressed in the pages of his book those not likely to be found in the pews of his church. About his right to do so, he had no doubt, even though he deconstructs, in his own idiosyncratic fashion, both the message he imparts and the platform from which he delivers it.
IT HAS BEEN ARGUED, often enough, that early America was not a class society. Obviously, a hereditary ruling class was less entrenched in the former colony than it was in late eighteenth-century Britain.34 Yet, in the critique of fiction, one sees how readily aspects of the British class system were transported to the New World and translated into terms consistent with the looser social structures of the young Republic. As has been well documented, the principal source of much of the critique of fiction was the Scottish Common Sense philosophers (men such as Henry Home, Lord Kames; Thomas Reid; James Beattie; and Vicissimus Knox), who, primarily in the 1740s and 1750s, criticized the novel immediately after its inception in England. Typically conservative in their social attitudes and especially so with regard to women, these men fulminated against the new genre in tracts and advice books that were imported to and reprinted in the New World. Even after this opposition to fiction had largely subsided in the Old World, it continued to flourish in the New. As Terence Martin and Emory Elliott have both noted, the writings of the Scottish Common Sense philosophers greatly influenced important teachers in American colleges, men such as William Smith at the College of Philadelphia, John Witherspoon at Princeton, and Thomas Clapp and Ezra Stiles at Yale.35 These teachers passed on to their students an implicit suspicion of the undisciplined imagination, a conviction that literature must serve clear social needs, and a pervasive assumption that social need and social order were one and the same. Through these students—many of whom served as ministers—such ideas were readily disseminated throughout the populace.
I am not suggesting that all critics of the novel were progeny of the best families and products of the prestige colleges, whereas all readers and writers of the novel were not. Social/literary divisions are never so exactly drawn and do not give us perfect paradigms. Nevertheless, it is significant that most of the critics of fiction, who were often well born and well educated, voiced a particular concern for a different class of readers whom they perceived as being barely capable of reading fiction but eager to do so and, no doubt, highly susceptible to its dubious charms. Might not the unsophisticated reader, these critics worried, readily emulate unsavory portrayals of illicit sex, of dishonest dealings, of revolution and anarchy? Would not the farm boy and the servant girl become discontent with the station in life to which providence had consigned them and fulfill the duties of that station grudgingly or not at all? To use Timothy Dwight’s term, all fiction was deemed potentially likely to destabilize “useful life”—a life “useful” to those who wished it to go on exactly as before.36 Even though a few writers such as Hugh Henry Brackenridge and Royall Tyler graduated from men’s colleges—the College of New Jersey (later known as Princeton) in the former case, Harvard in the latter—most did not. William Hill Brown, Charles Brockden Brown, and, of course, Susanna Rowson, Hannah Webster Foster, Tabitha Tenney, and the other women novelists immediately come to mind.37 All of these writers operated in a rather different world from their critics—if only by virtue of the fiction they wrote—and in that world (and in their novels) they found some justification for what they were engaged in doing.
The novelists, in a number of different ways, responded to charges leveled against them. Most common was the method, already referred to in another context, employed in The Power of Sympathy, a novel explicitly dedicated “To The Young Ladies of United Columbia” and prefatorially committed to their moral instruction:
Novels have ever met with a ready reception into the Libraries of the Ladies, but this species of writing hath not been received with universal approbation.… Of the Letters before us, it is necessary to remark, that… the dangerous Consequences of SEDUCTION are exposed, and the Advantages of FEMALE EDUCATION set forth and recommended.38
As a novelist, William Hill Brown is well aware of the pervasive censure of fiction and basically accepts the standards by which novels have been generally judged but deflects those standards from his particular fiction through truth, teaching, and typography.
Other novels found other ways, sometimes even more strained and circuitous, to defuse or deny the ideological assumptions against which they had to contend. One of the more interesting of these defenses is found in the preface to Monima, or the Beggar Girl: A Novel, in One Volume, Founded on Fact. By an American Lady (1802). The author, Martha Meredith Read, dedicated her novel to Dr. Hugh Meredith—perhaps her father, perhaps her brother, perhaps an uncle. However close to the author the dedicatee might have been, her preface assumes the good doctor’s opposition to fiction and then works around it by recourse to a new kind of argument in the novel’s favor:
To the man of deep erudition, [my novel] will, probably, appear insignificant, as it is impossible to connect other characters than low and illiteral ones with beggars; but to write merely for those who are already informed, argues much vanity and a defective judgment in the writer. To exhibit mankind in their true colours, to display characters as they are, to unfold the pernicious tendency of ignorance, prejudices and immorality, is the indisputed privilege of the Novel-writer; this, however, cannot be done but by a strict adherence to truth and nature; to deviate from this, the mind must become enveloped in mystery and darkness… To me, one tear of compunction shed by a disobedient child; one little emotion of remorse in the breast of the avaricious and contracted sons of fortune, would be far more dear, far more grateful than all the empty plaudits that can be bestowed upon well rounded periods or elegantly constructed sentences.39
Read first trivializes the “man of deep erudition” who seeks to trivialize her audience. She is not writing merely for the educated—which would be sheer vanity and arrogance. Rather, she is writing for those, like poor Monima, who occupy another world, unsophisticated, uncelebrated, and often downright unsavory. Given that world, only realism (not aphorism, not dogma) might inculcate moral lessons in those impervious to “well rounded periods or elegantly constructed sentences.” In effect, the author subverts the criterion by which novels like hers are commonly condemned by inverting them and her novel, too. She will aim at moralism in an ostensibly immoral world but a world in which the penniless Monima is again and again shown to be the most admirable character in the novel, while the gentry (including hypocritical philanthropists) are portrayed as petty prigs—avaricious, lustful, dishonest, and deceitful: the world of Hitchcock, Miller, and Dwight turned topsy-turvy.
The terms of Charles Brockden Brown’s defense of fiction are also grounded in both a calculated assessment of who the majority of his readers really are and in a pragmatic appraisal of how to write for those particular readers:
They who prate about the influence of novels to unfit us for solid and useful reading, are guilty of a double error: for in the first place, a just and powerful picture of human life in which the connection between vice and misery, and between facility and virtue is vividly portrayed, is the most solid and useful reading that a moral and social being (exclusive of particular cases and professional engagements) can read; and in the second place, the most trivial and trite of these performances are, to readers of certain ages and intellects, the only books which they will read. If they were not thus employed, they would be employed in a way still more trivial or pernicious.40
Brockden Brown parenthetically valorizes certain kinds of thoroughly pragmatic reading in pursuit of professional improvement (i.e., class mobility) and then asserts at length that his own fiction is the next best thing. He is also well aware that many novel readers, many of those who read his novels, might not read anything besides fiction and that reading is considerably preferable to what they might be doing in its place—a possible declension downward that never occurred to the critics of the novel. Or, in a somewhat different vein, Helena Wells similarly observes that the “studies” of most of her readers “go not beyond the page of the novelist” but rather than berate these readers for their ignorance, she insists that “it was a view [of] benefitting this class … which induced the writer to commit this trifle… to the tribunal” of criticism.41
Implicit in all of these defenses of fiction is a definition of realism at odds with the corresponding definition whereby they were condemned. Timothy Dwight’s hypothetical novel reader, for example (and in his own terms), “must one day act in the real world. What can she expect, after having resided so long in novels, but that fortunes, and villas and Edens, will spring up every where in her progress through life, to promote her enjoyment. She has read herself into a heroine, and is fairly entitled to all the appendages of this character.”42 For Dwight, what is unrealistic is the teleology by which a poor girl might become, if only vicariously, a princess. To the novelists, however, it is quite unrealistic that no “low and illiteral” characters inhabit the pages of history, of biography, of classical literature, of all the works that comprise the education of men such as Timothy Dwight. And it is even more unrealistic for Dwight to expect average readers to prefer Milton, Locke, or Euclid (all writers alluded to in Dwight’s discourse on novel reading) over Monima, or the Beggar Girl. Moreover, to read Locke or Milton or Euclid presupposes a familiarity with philosophical or poetic or mathematical discourse. One does not enter into these worlds without a suitable foundation. And where, one might ask, would Monima, the beggar girl, obtain that education? Certainly not at Yale. For Dwight, not Charlotte Temple but the Bible should be the reading of the “illiteral” masses. But in the changing world of the turn of the eighteenth century, many new readers wanted to read about characters like themselves, characters with whom they could identify and about whom they could fantasize. The Bible offered little opportunity for fantasies of earthly rewards or social empowerment, and Dwight on the Bible offered even less.
Although early novels advanced their own definition of realism, a number still ended as wish-fulfillment fantasies. Monima wins a fortune at the end of her novel; she does not die, derelict, in some Philadelphia back street. But not all of these fictions concluded so fortunately. Charlotte Temple and Eliza Wharton (the heroine of The Coquette) both die at the end of their best-selling stories. Even Monima focuses not just on fantasy’s fulfillment but also on the injustices of poverty, on the crime of poverty. As E. P. Thompson has noted of the sanctity of property in late eighteenth-century law: “The greatest offense against property was to have none.”43 Monima’s social status, as much as her sex, graphically attests to how far short of Jefferson’s ringing dictum that “all men are created equal” a professed American democracy can actually fall.
Beyond and behind the fantasies intrinsic to individual novels (and this is a topic to be explored case by case when I consider specific early American novels) there is also a hard core of formal realism in the novel that was not acknowledged by the critics of the time. As Ian Watt has shown of earlier British novels, the realism operates on numerous levels: linguistic (characters sound as if they are talking to one another), situational (in Bakhtin’s term, “chronotropic,” or within the time/space of fiction), and personal (characters are viewed as individuals—not types—by the reader).44 Benjamin Franklin (an avid novel reader and the publisher of the first American edition of a novel, Pamela) more simply defines the essential reality of early fiction: “Honest John [Bunyan] was the first that I know of who mixes narration and dialogue, a method of writing very engaging to the reader, who in the most interesting parts finds himself, as it were, admitted into the company and present at the conversation. Defoe has imitated him successfully in his Robinson Crusoe, in his Moll Flanders, and other pieces; and Richardson has done the same in his Pamela.”45 Franklin’s formulation draws a crucial distinction between the novel and the other print forms such as biography and history typically recommended over fiction. While biography and history might be “true,” they posit a wide gulf between the subject and the reader (“the great man” or the “great event” versus the ordinary reader and his or her uneventful life) and also between the author and the reader (the author proclaiming, the reader receiving wisdom and moral edification). The novel, in contrast, creates its own truth by involving the reader in the process of that creation. The distance between text and reader, author and reader is effaced: The reader is “present at the conversation” and becomes imaginatively part of the company. Whether an esteemed political leader or a lowly printer’s apprentice, the reader is privileged in relationship to the text, is welcomed into the text, and, in a sense, becomes the text.
As earlier observed, the effacing of the distance between the events narrated in fiction and the reader’s emotional response to the events alarmed many critics. The very act of reading fiction asserted the primacy of the individual as reader and the legitimacy of that reader’s perceptions and responses. In an age increasingly concerned with the individual—whether from the philosophical perspective of thinkers such as Locke, who saw every mind as a blank page upon which experience wrote a “self,” or from the political perspective of a new democracy that depended for its success, in some measure, upon the success of its individual citizens—the novel form validated individual identities and championed equality. In theory at least, it was bound to succeed and, happily, for its readers and authors, by the second quarter of the nineteenth century it had clearly done so.
Writing in 1824 for the American Monthly Magazine, James McHenry examined in some detail the connection I have suggested between the openly pervasive censure of fiction on the one hand and the covert importance of class difference (especially during the 1790s) on the other. Even though the contemporary reader may well suspect that McHenry overstates the case for the egalitarianism of his own time, his perspective on the previous era is persuasive:
The liberal feelings, which seem to be, at present, more prevalent in society than at any previous period of the history of men with which we are acquainted, are undoubtedly the cause why many of the pursuits and entertainments of life that were formerly esteemed reproachful and humiliating are now viewed with complaisance, and followed without any sense of degradation. A taylor, a shoe-maker, or a weaver, who has thriven by his profession, is respected by the world, and admitted into society, if he can only pay his way, as freely as if he had never handled a single instrument of industry; nay, he is, nine times out of ten, received with more internal respect, than if he had been all his lifetime an idler. Yet many of us, who are not very old, may recollect the time when these industrious members of the community would have been kept at a distance from genteel company, with as much care as if their presence carried contamination with it.
McHenry also observes that now “the politician, the lawyer, the philosopher, and all who wish to see human affairs depicted on an extensive scale” praise novels, whereas these “were the kind of men that, in the days when novels were held in degradation, treated them with most contempt.”46
In the course of a few generations, there was a revolution in the reading habits of Americans. In synergistic fashion, at the same time that more and more people became readers of novels, more novels became available as distribution improved and, even more, as the capital-intensive nature of publishing technology, achieved by the mid-nineteenth century, required that a system of mass production and mass consumption replace the older system of book production for essentially a small group of readers. In practical terms, the common American reader effectively replaced the socially prominent critic as the primary arbiter of nineteenth-century taste. This does not mean, of course, that common citizens had control over the means of production—for they did not—but it does mean that those who controlled the production of culture had to be attuned to the tastes and opinions of common citizens, the ways to cater to those tastes as well as the ways to manipulate them for greater profit.
The realignment of the economic base of American culture also necessitated a shift in the role and function of the critic. As Nina Baym has shown in her exhaustive study of the reception of the novel from 1840 to 1860, social authorities had to establish a new relationship to the novel and to the novel-reading public.47 Instead of serving as the form’s opponents and—much later and more hopelessly than the first critics—attempting to stem the tide, they chose, for the most part, to assent to the new cultural order. Ministers, as both Rhys Isaacs and David Reynolds have shown, increasingly borrowed from the novel genre that their predecessors had castigated. Many ministers even restructured the classic Puritan sermon into a quasi-novelistic story that presumed an audience familiar with fictional plots, characters, and technical devices.48 Similarly, critics found themselves in the role of the handmaiden, not the harrier, of the novel. A certain critic might, on occasion, criticize the failings of a specific novel, but gone almost entirely was the dismissive rhetoric of the earlier reviewers who would have preferred—if they could have arranged it—that they (and all readers) never again darken their imagination or their morals with a novel.
The portentous changes in culture and authority that the early critics feared and predicted had already, in the wake of the novel, come to pass by the middle of the nineteenth century, and for the first time in history a mass audience was conceived of as the primary consumers of literature. In Baym’s formulation, “not only was [the novel] a new form, it was a popular one; and it was an unprecedented cultural event for the masses to be determining the shape of culture. To follow the public instead of leading it, to surrender critical judgment to the extent of permitting a low literary mode to assume cultural significance, involved critics in new and difficult professional decisions.”49 Perhaps the issue is best described by another nineteenth-century reviewer, Allan Cunningham, who wrote retrospectively in 1833 about the advent, over a decade before, of Sir Walter Scott. When Waverley first appeared, “men beheld it with as much perplexity, as the out-break of a revolution; the more prudent held their peace, and waited to see what might come of it; the critics were in sad straits, having nothing wherewithal to measure it; … but the public, without asking their opinion, gave decisive judgment in its favor.”50
Theirs was a judgment not just on Waverley but on the novel as a genre. As the first critics intuited, readers could claim the power to pass judgment for themselves on cultural forms “without asking the opinion” of those who, from the landing of the Mayflower onward, had been schooled in asserting judgment without waiting to be asked.