Part Two
5
“Oh, why did Willie do such a thing,” she asked, “when we were such good friends?”
“The names are fictitious,” Mrs. Brown assured her.
“But everyone knows whom he means,” Mrs. Apthorp lamented.
—Purported conversation over the publication of The Power of Sympathy
Selling the First American Novel
In the opening chapter of his unfinished history of the triadic relationships between the reader, the author, and the publisher, William Charvat summarizes the crucial importance of the 1790 Copyright Act:
That the country had got along without a copyright law for over 150 years does not mean that it had not had a literature worth protecting, but rather … that a small and scattered reading public and poor transportation depressed the commercial value of all books. Time would take care of population and transportation, but no literary profession was possible until law had given products of the mind the status of property.1
That italicized last word, property, accords to “products of the mind” a rather different status than that which criticism generally acknowledges and allows. Mind, post-Romantic thinkers like to believe, is free, and its expression even more so. Discounting a few exceptional cases such as Edward Taylor or Emily Dickinson, which by their very rarity prove the larger rule, literature is written to communicate and the means of communications is publication. The goal of writing, then, is not just meaning but, in Robert Escarpit’s telling phrase, “the multiplication of meaning,” the whole process by which meaning is transmitted to a multitude of readers.2 Although the entity of the published book is a necessary part of that grand process, it is by no means its end. Once the product of the author’s mind passes from idea to artifact and takes its form in the printed page, it necessarily becomes somebody’s property and, as such, is subject to the same kinds of market conditions that govern the distribution of hogs or hog shares, patent medicines or blue-chip stocks, or any other commodity.
It is as commodity that I will first consider The Power of Sympathy, and appropriately so, for, thanks to its designation as “the first American novel,” this particular text has long been commodified and institutionalized by the very processes of literary scholarship that presumably celebrate literature as “art.” Moveover, criticism, in this case, merely continues what history began. Written one year previous to the passage of the federal copyright law, the novel from the beginning existed as property at least as much as it existed as art. Its original value was as much in timing as in text. Isaiah Thomas publicized this “first American novel” in a series of advertisements printed to coincide with the preparations for the inauguration of the first American president and in a language designed to invoke any active or even latent nationalistic fervor.
Before addressing The Power of Sympathy’s first claims to firstness, I wish to consider the whole larger debate—lasting now for over a century—as to just which novel was first. This debate suggests that the “origins,” “causes,” and “firsts” we find depend largely on what we are looking for, and thus the whole historiography of early American fiction becomes both circular and story. It is circular in that the first novel is always first by definition—not the definition of “first” but of “novel.” The definition leads us finally to one particular text, and then that text becomes the Ur-novel from which other later texts at least figuratively descend, certified as novels by their genealogy and proudly wearing the family name. It is story in that the circle of limiting definition and validating text has to be filled out, the contained history explained and expounded upon.
When, for example, a few generations ago the “fathers” of the American novel were “officially” Hawthorne and Melville, the clear proof that an older text counted as a novel was its artistic excellence. The unlikely story set forth was a tale of fiction’s full flowering in the New World. We learned (and even more so with New Criticism) to savor these select progenitors, and the descendant sons could take pride in the typically American, self-engendered grand trunk of their family tree. Or James Fenimore Cooper can provide a different beginning for the American novel. As noted earlier, Cooper was the first to earn a living as a novelist. It is a significant “first,” surely, so long as we are clear that we are recounting a business history of the novel (and where do Hawthorne or Melville fit into that history?). But still more recently, the credit for being first has increasingly gone to Charles Brockden Brown, which, as Bernard Rosenthal has noted, is “puzzling” in that Brockden Brown was neither literally first nor the first to support himself by his pen.3 Nor do claims of Brockden Brown’s quality take us any further (except back in time) than similar claims advanced on behalf of Hawthorne or Melville.4 Nevertheless, Brockden Brown has been accorded a de facto status as “first major novelist” by virtue of the amount of criticism devoted to his work, by his institutionalization within the academy (on course syllabi, doctoral reading lists), and by the implicit imprimatur of having his complete works appear under the rubric “Center for Editions of American Authors / An Approved Text / Modern Language Association”—the earliest American novelist to be accorded this distinction. (And who could be more “approved” than that?)
Other less canonical authors have also been put forth—sometimes by “interested” descendants, sometimes by “disinterested” scholars—as the one true source and origin of the American novel. Charlotte Ramsay Lennox’s The Life of Harriot Stuart (1751), Hugh Henry Brackenridge and Philip Freneau’s Father Bombo’s Pilgrimage to Mecca (1770; first published 1975), Francis Hopkinson’s A Pretty Story: Written in the Year of Our Lord 2774 (1774), Thomas At wood Digges’s The Adventures of Alonso: Containing Some Striking Anecdotes of the Present Prime Minister of Portugal (1775), the anonymous The Golden Age; or, Future Glory of North America Discovered by an Angel to Celadon, in Several Entertaining Visions (1785), and Peter Markoe’s The Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania (1787) have all been seriously proposed as the first American novel and have all been deposed on different grounds—too short (A Pretty Story, The Golden Age), too unavailable (Father Bombo), too nonnovelistic (The Algerine Spy), or too British (Life of Harriot Stuart, Adventures of Alonso) either in subject matter or by virtue of the author’s or the book’s place of origin or by any combination of the three.5 However, and as William C. Spengemann has cogently argued, criteria for “Americanness” are most inconsistently applied. As Spengemann points out in “The Earliest American Novel: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko”: “To be sure, Oroonoko was not written in America, but then neither were most of Franklin’s Memoirs, or The Prairie, or The Marble Faun, and The American.”6 And who would exclude any of those last titles from an American literature syllabus? For Spengemann, and as his title avers, Oroonoko is the first American novel simply because it is set in a section of the New World once part of “America” (specifically, Surinam).7
Clearly, different fictions can be put first for different reasons and to different effects. But by a convergence of various criteria—written in America, by an author born in America, published first in America, set in America, concerned with issues that are specifically grounded in the new country and not simply transplanted from England—more and more The Power of Sympathy has been generally accepted as the first American novel. That reading of the history of the novel also has its own revealing history. Joseph Tinker Buckingham was apparently the first person to posit The Power of Sympathy as the “first American novel,” and he did so in 1850 in a book entitled Specimens of Newspaper Literature. As his title suggests, Buckingham was not particularly concerned with definitively claiming precedence for some particular work, nor was he much interested in investigating the provenance of the novel that he casually described as first. Thus he attributes the anonymously published Power of Sympathy to Sarah Wentworth Morton. It was an easy mistake to make given the source of Buckingham’s study. The newspapers of the late 1780s were filled with the accounts of the Apthorp/ Morton scandal; the newspaper advertisements for The Power of Sympathy stressed the connection between the novel and the scandal; and, finally, Sarah Wentworth Morton was vaguely remembered, even in 1850, as one of the most celebrated poets of her generation. Why could she not have been a novelist too? Francis S. Drake, in his The Town of Roxbury (1878), subsequently repeated the attribution, again in passing, and never stopped to wonder if the woman who was the wife of Perez Morton (the prototype for the novel’s infamous seducer) and who was also the sister of Fanny Apthorp (whose seduction and suicide are recounted in the novel) would want to publicize that family scandal.8 And neither did such considerations keep Arthur W. Brayley, the editor of the Bostonian, from suggesting the same attribution when in October 1894 he began serially publishing The Power of Sympathy with considerable fanfare and specifically to celebrate the first American novel. Brayley attributed the work to one Philenia, the name under which Morton wrote much of her poetry.9 A reader of the Bostonian, Rebecca Volentine Thompson, came forward to assert that her uncle, William Hill Brown, and not Morton, had been the work’s author. Her attribution was reported in the December 1894 issue of the Bostonian. Since then, a host of scholars have unearthed letters, presentation copies, and still other evidence all attesting that William Hill Brown was, indeed, the novel’s author.10
The great search for the first American novel flourished, not surprisingly, in the last decades of the nineteenth century. As Herbert Ross Brown has shown, it was a time when nearly every American magazine was calling for the “great American novel,” and surely one cannot have a great one without first having a first one.11 A nation just coming into being as a major power in the Western world required an imperial literature, and an imperial literature required a pedigree. The Power of Sympathy—whether penned by Morton or Brown—was well suited for a high place in that pedigree because of its national purity. And it also served simply by providing a locus for critical endeavor. There have now been two nineteenth-century editions of the book (one ascribed to Brown, one to Morton), a twentieth-century Facsimile Text Society scholarly edition, a scholarly university press edition (with variorum), and also a paperback edition of the novel (bound with the first indigenous best-selling novel, The Coquette) complete with a critical introduction suitable for the college classroom. Leading journals in the field—American Literature, Early American Literature, New England Quarterly— have published articles on the novel and its author, and there is also a published collection of William Hill Brown’s poetry and verse fables.12 Very few early American novelists have sustained so much scholarly attention. All of that concern surely proves something, and, if this seems a circular argument, as of course it is, so, too, is all of literary history. As Foucault insists, “history” becomes tautological the very moment we attempt to establish its limits.13 No Native American would see the landing of the Mayflower as the beginning of anything except, perhaps, the end. The fragmenting of knowledge into periods—firsts—is humanly necessary, but the fragments are by no means intrinsically inevitable or experientially real. Yet once made, these fragments also become commodities—as attested to even by the scholarly institutionalizing of the “first American novel.”
THE INSTITUTIONALIZING of the first American novel goes, however, a long way back. Isaiah Thomas early recognized the cultural cachet of publishing just such a volume. Thomas, as noted earlier, was one of the most prosperous printers in eighteenth-century America, an exception to the rule that publishing was not generally a lucrative profession. Running seven presses, a bindery, and a paper mill, he employed as many as 150 people and operated on a scale that allowed him the relative luxury of publishing an occasional unprofitable American product.14 He had been particularly active as a patriotic printer during the Revolution, was determined after the Revolution to promote an emerging American culture, and, happily, could afford to do so. Ironically, his success as a pirater and reprinter of British titles underwrote his different success as a collector and publisher of American titles. His large legacy to America, besides a number of early American imprints, is the American Antiquarian Society (AAS), which he founded and which he endowed with his collection of books and manuscripts as well as the land and a building for the library. His legacy also includes The History of Printing in America, a detailed compendium of early American publishing practices and the definitive book on the subject until well into the twentieth century. Although other histories have now superseded it, Thomas’s volume is still a valuable source of information about the early American book trade.15
That Thomas was the publisher of the first American novel is appropriate for still another reason. As suggested earlier, the novel as a genre was curiously self-made in America and struggled to succeed in the face of considerable social opposition. Thomas, too, overcame substantial obstacles to become an important publisher. His story is reminiscent of that of Benjamin Franklin, another self-made printer and one of Thomas’s friends. A descendant of Evan Thomas who came to Boston from Wales in 1640, Isaiah Thomas endured poverty as a child. His education was minimal and probably amounted to only a few weeks of official schooling. At the age of six he was sent off to work in a printing office and was in his seventh year apprenticed to a rather harsh master, Zechariah Fowle, a printer in Boston. When he was fourteen, Thomas was in charge of Fowle’s entire printing shop. He was already more capable at the craft than was his master, yet he still received the minimal wages and endured the miserable conditions that were typically the apprentice’s lot in the eighteenth century. At seventeen Thomas ran away, intending to book passage to London where he could further improve his skills as a printer. That venture failed, but Thomas did secure a release from his apprenticeship to Fowle. Despite their differences in the past, Thomas at twenty-one became Fowle’s partner in the publication of the Massachusetts Spy and then bought out Fowle to be the full owner of the newspaper that became one of the most vociferous proponents of the American Revolution as well as a successful newspaper that continued to be published into the twentieth century.16
We know that Thomas was an ardent patriot, and there is even a persistent story that he rode with Paul Revere warning the countryside that the British were coming. With the occupation of Boston, he moved his press to Worcester and continued to print patriotic (or, from the British point of view, seditious) broadsides and pamphlets throughout the war. After the war, he remained in Worcester and continued his printing business. Perceiving that distribution would be a key factor in his success, he soon set up different branches of his bookshop—principally in Massachusetts, but also in Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, New York, and Vermont—and also devised an elaborate sales itinerary for the agents who traveled between these shops and the main shop in Boston. The branches were co-owned by Thomas and various partners who had often begun as printers in Thomas’s shop. As early versions of limited partnerships, these arrangements protected Thomas from complete loss should any branch fail. As early versions of franchise branches, they encouraged the local partners to work diligently for their own profit and for Thomas’s too. Thomas also established less formal connections with booksellers in at least a dozen other cities and towns in New England, the Middle States, and the South. But primarily because of the haphazard way in which business agreements were recorded, preserved, and abided by, no one has yet been able to compile a comprehensive history of Thomas’s diverse, far-flung, and generally successful business dealings.17
Those dealings can occupy us briefly but appropriately in a chapter on The Power of Sympathy because the novel results perhaps as much from the publisher’s intentions as from the author’s, and it is finally Thomas’s enterprise, not William Hill Brown’s, that gives the book its official status as book, as a fact and artifact in the history of the book in America. To start with, Thomas himself was an innovative publisher. New and different projects appealed to him. Most notable in this regard is his famous “Standing Bible.” Thomas purchased enough extra type to set an entire Bible. He had the pages set in England (because of a lack of skilled compositors in New England) and then shipped to his shop. He would print a small edition as needed and, once that edition sold out, simply print another from the ever-ready plates. This was a case of perfectly and profitably adjusting supply to demand, but a case made possible by the fact that Thomas could afford the investment of the stored type and did not have to break down the standing type for the next publishing venture at hand.
We know that Thomas applauded the republican commitment to self-improvement. Perhaps his own humble origins and remarkable self-education emphasized for him the ways in which the written word could help others to rise in both the world and their own estimation. He intended that his newspaper, the Massachusetts Spy (“common sense in common language”) be open to readers of the lower classes, not just the higher, and that it have a special appeal to mechanics. He published in 1785 his New American Spelling Book, designed to compete with Noah Webster’s best-selling lexicon; he also brought out in the same year an improved speller by a professor at the University of Edinburgh, William Perry, in some editions cleverly retitled The Only Sure Guide to the American Tongue (1785). Perry’s speller went through fourteen editions and had a total sale of some three hundred thousand copies. Perhaps mindful of Thomas’s success with this competing text, and deciding it was better to join him than to try to beat him, Webster even allowed Thomas to publish an edition of The American Spelling Book in 1789. Thomas issued, too, several of the informational almanacs popular during his time, and we might also note that his Massachusetts Magazine, or Monthly Museum, was editorially intended to “improve the taste, the language and the manners of the age.”18
As the singular success of Perry’s speller indicates, Thomas could aptly gauge the demands of his audience. He also cultivated the demand that he was ready to meet. One amusing example of such self-promotion can be seen in Thomas’s cheap ($.04), brief (thirty-one pages), toy-book version of Robinson Crusoe, which included a specific address to the child reader: “If you learn this Book well, and are good, you can buy a larger and more complete History of Mr. Crusoe, at your friend the Bookseller’s, in Worcester, near the Court House.” On the title page, beneath the publisher’s imprint, Thomas also added, “Where May be had a Variety of Little Books for Children.”19
A variety of books for adults could also be had at the same shop. Thomas’s edition of George Minot’s The History of the Insurrections in Massachusetts in 1786 (1788) was, during the period of Shays’s Rebellion, a local best-seller. Although he himself was a moderate Federalist, Thomas published socially conservative writers such as Webster and Jedidiah Morse and also published Paine’s The Age of Reason, the most revolutionary tract of its day, as well as the feminist writings of Judith Sargent Murray and Mary Wollstonecraft. He also printed other works that the social authorities of the time would have found, but for different reasons, as offensive as Paine or Wollstonecraft. Examples are crude crime narratives such as The Lives and Dying Confessions of Richard Barrick and John Sullivan, High-Way Robbers, Together with the Last Words of Alexander White, Murderer and Pirate (1786) and, even more salacious, such European volumes as Amours and Adventures of Two English Gentlemen in Italy (1795) or Aristotle’s Complete Master Piece, in Three Parts; Displaying the Secrets of Nature in the Generation of Man (1795), a work that was, as one of the printer’s biographers notes, “the standard hayloft reading for curious boys in that generation.”20
There is even some evidence to suggest that Thomas was the first American publisher of John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, or the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749). But more interesting than the possibility itself is the way in which the very tenuousness of the evidence suggests something of the nature of eighteenth-century publishing. We do know that Thomas wrote to his English bookseller, Thomas Evans, for a copy of the novel and received in answer a short, shocked reply: “The Memoirs of a W. of P. which if you must have, must beg you will apply to some of the Captains coming here, as it is an article I do not send to my Customers if I can possibly avoid it.” We do not know whether or not Thomas found an obliging captain, but more than a century after the printer’s death, when some marbling wore off a newspaper that had been bound in Thomas’s shop, it was observed that the stock Thomas had marbled over included two title-page sheets from an edition of Fanny Hill that bore a fictitious London publisher’s imprint. We also know that in 1819 Peter Holmes was fined $300 in the Worcester Court of Common Pleas for selling a copy of the novel, and, the following year, Stillman Howe was sentenced to six months hard labor for the same offense. Residents of Worcester did not have ready access to sea captains with contraband to sell. Were these men passing on copies of the novel reprinted and purchased clandestinely in Thomas’s Worcester shop? The evidence is hardly conclusive, but the two sentences do suggest that if Thomas had published Fanny Hill, he would have gone to considerable lengths to hide that fact.21
The Power of Sympathy presented no such problems and would have appealed to Thomas as a prospective publishing project for several reasons. The book would be the “first” American novel and thus had a definite nationalistic potential; its particular attention to female virtue and female education argued its social morality; its effective exploitation of a current and rather lurid scandal gave it the potential for turning a profit. But it should also be noted that at least one consideration probably weighed heavily against it. The available evidence indicates that Thomas himself was suspicious of fiction. We know, for example, that he published relatively few novels, either American or imported, during his prolific career. Furthermore and more explicitly, in his personal copy of Emily Hamilton (a novel published by his son), he recorded his misgivings about fiction in general. In his own unmistakable, unfinished hand (he had very little formal education), Thomas maintains that “the perusal of Novels generally tend[s] to enlighten than to distract the mind.” Nevertheless, he continues, “if in the opinion of Some, there is a Novel in which there is [even] a line to excuse a vice, then it behooves those (I mean the heads of families, Such as Father, Mother, or Guardian) to expel Such Books from their Homes.”22 This from the publisher of Aristotle’s Complete Master Piece! That Thomas’s practices as a printer were not fully consistent with his apprehensions as a concerned parent and a proponent of public morality should occasion no great surprise. A certain disjunction between one’s actual policy and one’s affirmed ideals is often simply part of the cost of doing business. And The Power of Sympathy, of course, is hardly Aristotle’s Complete Master Piece.
Nevertheless, the very enterprise of publishing The Power of Sympathy occasioned much the same ambivalence that pervades the text itself, as is obvious even in the advertisements in the Herald of Freedom announcing that the novel is forthcoming:
An American Novel
We learn that there is now in the Press in this town a Novel, dedicated to the young ladies, which is intended to enforce attention to female education, and to represent the fatal consequences of Seduction. We are informed that one of the incidents upon which the Novel is founded, is drawn from a late unhappy suicide. We shall probably soon be enabled to lay before our readers some account of so truly Novel a work, upon such interesting subjects.
Subsequent advertisements running simultaneously in the Massachusetts Spy, or Worcester Gazette and the Massachusetts Centinel similarly announced the immediate publication of the “FIRST AMERICAN NOVEL” and similarly play off one type of interest (patriotic and moral) against another (a covert promise of at last hearing the whole scandalous story).23 Thus in the “An American Novel” ad, the “late unhappy suicide” as the signifier and the “fatal consequences of Seduction” as the signified are conjoined only in “Novel” discourse and even there admit the possibility of other “interesting” subjects to be found in the coming book.
The same dichotomy in the advertisements carries over to the book itself and particularly to the prefatory material, which was typically provided by the printer. To explore more fully the partly pietistic, partly prurient split in the book, let us imagine an early reader holding the recently published novel in her hands, ready to read it, and opening the cover to look first at the title page and the frontispiece. The former bears a guarantee, “FOUNDED IN TRUTH,” as well as a pietistic poem:
Fain would he strew Life’s thorny Way with Flowers,
And open in your View Elysian Bowers;
Catch the warm Passions of the tender Youth,
And win the Mind to Sentiment and Truth.24
As a reading directive for a new and as yet unsophisticated audience, all this represents a complex and comprehensive authorial program indeed. We have, in the promise, the text as truth and, in the poem, the text as flower, as vision, as vicarious pleasure, and as, at best, a way to truth. The deconstructionist will notice that we end up led to Truth but also ostensibly began with truth, so these two truths are hardly synonymous, and each well might serve to call the other into question.
Matters become still more complicated, however, when the reader’s eye falls on the left-hand page, the frontispiece, for here we have a clear sign of the truth in which the novel originates. Thomas hired Samuel Hill, one of America’s foremost engravers, to provide the frontispiece, entitled “The STORY of OPHELIA” This exceptionally realistic and detailed engraving is clearly another story, a portrayal of the tragic resolution of a recent and well-known scandal. We view a vial of poison on the table, a goblet tipped on the floor. A young woman lies dying, her head thrown back and her mouth open. An older woman, in maternal dress and bonnet, holds the younger one’s hand while an elderly man stands in the half-open doorway, his mouth agape and his own hands clasped in alarm. The contemporary reference is unmistakable. Fanny Apthorp had fatally poisoned herself, partly to escape further exposure that would necessarily have followed from her father’s determination to make a public accusation against Morton, her sister’s husband. It is a story that will be retold (Letters 21 to 23) in the novel with only minor changes in details: Morton, for example, becomes Martin. This frontispiece attests that the prefatory promise intended to placate literal-minded critics (“FOUNDED IN TRUTH”) is, indeed, true. But it was, no doubt, true in quite the wrong way, for airing the whole scandal was not the kind of truth that those social authorities generally critical of fiction had in mind, especially since Perez Morton came from their own social level. In short, the first American novel eschews “lying” for exposé; it promises to provide the truth and it does so with a vengeance.
The title page and frontispiece are themselves followed by a dedication, which when set in modern typeface seems innocuous enough. It is appropriate for both the young female reader for whom the book is ostensibly intended and the moralistic critic who would weigh the book’s intentions:
To the young ladies, of United Columbia, these volumes 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, are inscribed, with esteem and sincerity, by their friend and humble servant, the author.
But even a casual glance at Thomas’s typography (see figure 9) registers the prominent placement of the word “SEDUCTION.” This key word is centered in the middle of the page; occupies an entire line; and is written in the darkest, clearest, boldest type on the page. Even the spacing between each letter gives further prominence to the word. What we have here is another graphic illustration (literally and figuratively) of the role of the printer in the creation of the American novel and in the “seduction” of the American reading public. Such matters as punctuation, spelling, capitalization, and layout were typically the province of the printer, not the author. So the author’s dedication (stressing the seemliness of the book’s intention) is the printer’s advertisement (stressing the steamy subject matter). In such duplicity begins America’s first novel and American fiction. The frontmatter of the first American novel almost paradigmatically sets forth tensions implicit in the form itself. As I have shown, those tensions themselves derive largely from the different and even contradictory demands placed on fiction by the professional readers and critics who, on the one hand, thought they knew what the public needed, and, on the other, by the printers, the booksellers, and the nonprofessional readers who gradually and sporadically worked out what the public actually wanted.
Reader Reception of the First American Novel
The public of the time did not particularly want The Power of Sympathy. Despite Thomas’s best efforts to promote his product, the book quickly sank into an oblivion from which it did not emerge until antiquarians, in the middle of the next century, resurrected it as a “first” in American culture. Puzzled by the early obscurity of such an important novel, a few of these nineteenth-century scholars accounted for the virtual disappearance of The Power of Sympathy by claiming that the book had been “banned in Boston,” which would definitely be another first in American fiction. This claim continued to be advanced until recent times, and there is some contemporaneous evidence that Perez Morton wanted to suppress The Power of Sympathy, for the scandal on which it was based had started to die down at the time of the novel’s first publication. Apparently, however, Morton was persuaded to drop his scheme, or, equally plausible, Thomas would not permit his author to be censored and Morton decided it was not worth it to buy up the extant copies of the books himself. In any case, as Richard Walser has demonstrated, any scheme to suppress the novel failed almost as dismally as the work itself failed in its own right.25 The novel, we know, was still available, listed in John West’s 1797 catalogue at a price of $.83⅓ a decade after its publication.26
We also know that Thomas tried to generate interest in the book after its publication by reprinting eleven excerpts in the first volume of his Massachusetts Magazine, or Monthly Museum (1789). These samples were ostensibly submitted by one Calista, who wished to share portions of the “first American novel” with the new magazine’s readers. Printed under the headline “Beauties of ‘The Power of Sympathy,’ ” they had titles such as “Seduction,” “Suicide,” or “Female Study.” This ploy elicited little more attention than did the novel itself. Except for a few brief reviews, the book’s publication had not been celebrated in the other magazines and newspapers of the time. For whatever reason, it simply failed to establish an audience. In this case at least, Isaiah Thomas had rather misjudged the public. Or perhaps he had merely misjudged the virtues of novelty, of being the first with an American novel. If so, it was not a substantial miscalculation. Soon another seduction novel set in America, Charlotte Temple, written by a woman only marginally American and published first in England, would capture the attention of the American reading public and prove conclusively that American fiction was a marketable commodity.
FIGURE 7. Frontispiece, The Power of Sympathy. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
FIGURE 8. Title page, The Power of Sympathy, Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
FIGURE 9. Dedication, The Power of Sympathy. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
There is no way to resurrect any of those late-eighteenth-century readers and to interview them in detail as to how and why they liked (or disliked) The Power of Sympathy. Some few signs of their reactions, however, still remain in the surviving books themselves. For example, Isaiah Thomas’s own copy of the novel has been preserved in the AAS. Specially bound in a deep tan, richly grained calf, a red leather label on the spine embossed with gilt lettering and with endpapers beautifully marbled in the Old Dutch style, the book suggests that Thomas took pride in The Power of Sympathy once he decided to publish it. But one other surviving copy of the novel bears more obvious signs of readers’ reactions and from a more unbiased source. This copy (now in the Library of Congress) bears two signatures, Rebecca Thomas and Geo. H. Child, and is underlined throughout. Consistently, the passages marked center on loss, and certain phrasings (such as “Adieu my friend—Little Happiness is left for me in this World”) are underlined two and three times and are even accompanied by marginal comments like “How pathetick.” Or one of Harrington’s last letters to Worthy (Letter 53) is underlined, but Harrington’s observation on “how unfortunate is the man who trusts his happiness to the precarious friendship of the world” is marginally denied with the protest “It is not true.” One reader, at least, was moved enough to respond to the book and also knew enough of the novel’s source to pencil “Morton” beside Brown’s barely circumspect alteration of the name to “Martin.”27
A much more explicit, extended, and intriguing record of how and how differently the novel could be read survives in opposing reviews published in the Massachusetts Centinel and the Herald of Freedom and printed in February 1789, a few weeks after the novel itself first appeared. Written pseudonymously (as was typical of the time), the interchange between Civil Spy and Antonia also reveals something of the social context in which reading took place and hints at the ways in which gender expectations, then as now, underlie literary theory.
The contretemps began when, in his review, Civil Spy expressed “disappointment” that the novel failed to fulfill its prefatory promise to expose the Apthorp/ Morton scandal. This reviewer indignantly observes that “the frontispiece, designated from the Story of Ophelia, naturally leadeth to a conclusion, that the author considered the circumstances in that story, as greatly contributory to the promotion of the design of his undertaking.” But promotion and design, design and performance, do not fully accord: “It is not until we arrive near the end of the work, that we find any thing to authorize the title.”28 Obviously, for this reader at least, the frontmatter of the book and particularly the engraving constituted a kind of covenant between the reader and the text, but one that the text only minimally honored—a breach of the spirit of the contract if not the letter.
Civil Spy’s insistence on a literally adhered to reading contract is even more obvious in his strictures on the novel’s disarming claim of being “founded in truth”: “The story of Ophelia, however recent and local the particulars related in it, referreth to Rhode Island for its origin. Perhaps the Rhode Islanders may be so far acquainted with it, as to be profitably entertained by reading it in the author’s dress; but I am strongly inclined to believe that the story would be less familiar in Rhode Island, than in Boston.” Boston is not Rhode Island; Martin is not Morton; truth is not fiction. But still worse is the story of Harriot, Harrington, and the elder Harrington that was, in the novel at least, set in Boston. For this reviewer, that story simply has no fictional standing because it has no factual grounding. Civil Spy “had never heard of any thing similar to it in this part of the world,” and, “in a country so lately inhabited by civilized people, as Massachusetts—in so young a town as Boston, and so small, as that the most trivial circumstances, and terminating with such dire events, as related, could not have been completely kept from public cognizance, until printed by Isaiah Thomas and Company.” The confidence with which this last claim is advanced attests that in the little world of late-eighteenth-century Boston, any scandal must be known by all. But the force of the whole argument gives us a figurative circle of censure and apology in which the new form was caught precisely because of the different demands of fiction and of fact. When the novel’s primary sin, for critics such as Civil Spy, is its novelty, the emerging form can be expected to protect itself by promising truth in fiction, and, when it makes that promise, it can expect to be taken literally and to be condemned if the promise is not fulfilled.
Fortunately for the novel’s future, not all readers of the time were so insistent on getting the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, nor were they all so certain that they already knew just what the whole truth was. In response to Civil Spy, Antonia (possibly Catherine Byles, Brown’s confidante and relative) offered a quite different response to the novel:
Having paid my tribute to tears to this chaste and moral performance and having experienced pride in that the first American Essay (in this stile) might vie with the most sentimental and unexceptionable British, or Hibernian Story, I cannot omit expressing my suprize, that the only “observations” on this ingenious work, which have yet appeared, should be those published in the last Centinel. Whether they were “made” by an old snarling misanthrope or a young cynical Fop, is to me indifferent, but I venture to determine, they never arose in the mind of a friend to either women or virtue!
The book is now praised for its patriotic import and its moral message: Truth again, but now writ large. In response to Civil Spy’s complaint that Brown altered the names and the setting of the Morton/Apthorp scandal and omitted some of the details, Antonia insists that the author circumspectly protected the principals in the “truly tragical catastrophes.” But most of all, for Antonia, the “Author merits the most grateful acknowledgments from our sex,” because of the “respect and tenderness” he has shown to “youthful females.” He is a “champion of feminine innocence, a promoter of religion and chastity, and a pleasing monitor of inexperienced minds.” This, she insists, is far more important than gossip-mongering, and Civil Spy (whom she subsequently dismisses as a “pupil of Chesterfield”) dubiously prefers the whole salacious story that is not in the text to Moral Truth, which is.
Antonia’s charge, naturally, elicited Civil Spy’s countercharge, a countercharge couched in a pervasive sarcasm that speaks this critic’s certainty of his privileged position in the discourse simply by virtue of his being a man as much as his first comments admit no quibbling as to what is truth. A sample of his response will suffice to give the tone of the whole piece: “Mr. Civil Spy finds himself much affected by having brought on himself the resentment and contempt of the Lady Antonia. He was altogether insensible of the stupidity and pitifulness of his observations upon a late novel, until Madam Antonia so graciously undertook for his good—and the good of the publick—to exhibit the unjustness and futility of his remarks in a proper light—which she performed in a manner so modest—so learned—and so mistressly as could not have been expected—even from ‘a masterly pen.’ ” The origin of the “truth” herein expressed is obvious. Since the mistress lacks the master’s pen, it is beneath the dignity of the master to debate seriously any comments made by such a wanting person. It is beneath his dignity to be offended, too, by the charges that have been leveled against him, so the offense is translated into jest: “Thrice blessed, reputed author of The Power of Sympathy!—admired—pathetick—delicate—elegant work! Alpha and Omega of Novelty—’in this style’—in lieu of being a ‘misanthrope’—a cynic—’an enemy to women and virtue’—why might not Civil Spy have been, an ‘amiable youth’—a ‘reputed author’—a ‘pleasing monitor’—or an anything, worthy of the honour and esteem of Madam Antonia.” Here again, it requires no Freud to translate his humor back to its source. Poison in jest? No offense in the world.
We can hardly call this critical disagreement a debate or a dialogue because no real discussion takes place. Civil Spy’s strategy is simply to label Antonia’s position feminine and thus, by extension, inconsequential, an occasion for veiled contempt and not reasoned response, a contempt that also extends to the novel Lady Antonia champions. The very fact of her defense of the book is his best proof that his original strictures were justified, which, perhaps, is the real point to be garnered from this nonexchange. All the difficulties that early fiction faced were doubly faced by novels such as The Power of Sympathy or subsequent fuller versions of the sentimental or seduction novel that especially addressed women’s situation in the society and women as readers. The adjudicators of what constituted art or suitable subjects for art were not women and simply could not take seriously writers or readers who were.
We might also briefly notice how much this nonexchange anticipates issues recently and more explicitly examined by feminist criticism. For example, Mary Jacobus, in “Is There a Woman in This Text?” has suggested that the main question of women’s literature is not the “sexuality of the text” (whether a text is written by, for, or about women) but the “textuality of sex” (an assumed a priori or normative standard that insists that any text that is defined as “feminine” is intrinsically lacking).29 Civil Spy is already a past master of that latter ploy. Thus his satirical aspersions on Brown’s style in his second response to Antonia implicitly posit an absolute and universal “masculine” standard of taste that must necessarily overrule Antonia’s biased and idiosyncratic “feminine” standard.
At this point we might do well to ask if Civil Spy and Antonia really addressed the same novel. I would suggest that they did not, that one read a promised story of an ostensibly true scandal involving seduction, incest, and suicide and was somehow disappointed when the scandal in part (the Martin subplot) fell short of the known facts and in part (the Harrington/Harriot subplot) outrageously exceeded them. The other read a didactic novel that promised to edify the female reader and was delighted when it did so. Differently reading the duplicitous prefatory material, these two could not read the same novel.
The possibility of such deep gender division in reading the text and responding to it has large implications for the early novel. Essentially (and admittedly simplifying a complex matter), I would suggest that women of the time read against a tradition that derided “learned women” (to use the common and almost always derogatory eighteenth-century term that Civil Spy employs in his response). But they also read in a new, republican tradition that rewarded feminine virtue. Thus women often justified their reading by claims to “self-improvement” (moral or otherwise), and prefaces could promote books on those same grounds but not overtly champion increased women’s rights and thus threaten to destabilize the status quo. Nevertheless, and as is implicit in Civil Spy’s attack, reading for feminine edification was often condemned as a waste of time and a source of irresponsible ideas. Even modest, moral fiction intended for women was still suspect. The woman reader was thus caught in the middle, with no socially sanctioned rationale for her novel reading, while the male novel-reader must have felt somewhat defensive about enjoying a form often implicitly and explicitly feminine. Furthermore, and to emphasize again a point I have made before, all the material evidence available—extant lending-library rosters, subscription lists published in novels, and inscriptions found in extant copies of novels—attests that men as well as women read even the most sentimental novels such as Charlotte Temple. What kinds of refractions occurred within the man who was reading a form identified with women, about women, in a society where men were not supposed to be concerned with the intellect or lives of women? And how did this genderization of a genre affect the would-be male—or female—author? These are rhetorical questions, obviously, but they are posed by Civil Spy’s reactionary response—as if he had forgotten that he wasn’t supposed to comment on novels, to take them seriously, until Antonia reminded him that women read them.
A Novel Divided against Itself
Even on the level of plot summary, there are obvious incongruities and disjunctions in The Power of Sympathy. Essentially, the book begins as a seduction novel. Harrington, the main male character, initially writes to his friend Worthy about his plan to conquer Harriot. Worthy counsels virtue, not seduction, and Harriot further convinces Harrington that matrimony, not sex, is the proper resolution for his passion. At this point the novel is all that it moralistically claims to be, a didactic story denouncing vice and particularly the “vicious” sin of seduction. But that project lapses when Harriot and Harrington, virtually on the eve of their planned marriage, learn that they are brother and sister. Subplots and digressions embedded within the main Harriot/Harrington plot further demonstrate how the novel departs from the simple statement of purpose contained in the prefatory promise that “the dangerous consequences of seduction [will be] exposed and the advantages of female education set forth and recommended” (p. 5). Far from adhering to this worthy program, the subplots center on subjects ranging from rape to slavery and become progressively more morally complicated or morally obscure. Furthermore, the original didactic intentions of the book are both regularly reasserted and regularly undermined as the novel progresses. Worthy, for example, increasingly becomes the spokesperson for the text’s morality within the text, and he also increasingly becomes a sententious prig whose very limitations serve the plot and resolution of the fiction.
This division in the novel runs so deep that at times it almost seems as if we have two distinct and even contradictory discourses, a didactic essay and a novel, shuffled together and bound as one book. The moral essay is embodied in the long letters of Worthy, Mrs. Holmes, and the reported speeches of the Reverend Mr. Holmes. Little in this material is novelistic. The letters especially are, to modify one of Bakhtin’s terms, nonsituational. Neither replies to other letters nor responses to the unfolding action of the plot, they are little set pieces, didactic lessons that could be addressed to virtually anyone and delivered upon virtually any occasion. The real model for this portion of the novel is not the already established epistolary novel but the even more established format of the collected sermons of some respected divine. These letters read as if they were delivered from a pulpit to a suspect audience requiring moral edification. Consequently, the reader does not identify with Mrs. Holmes or Worthy, but is cast as a subordinate in need of the counsel these morally privileged personages dispense. The young female reader especially is told to listen attentively, to sit a little straighter in her chair. I would also here note that the comments in the novel against novel reading are delivered in the epistolary sermons.
Side by side with the didactic epistles, however, are quite different letters that, taken together, give us a salacious, sexually charged novel. Harrington feels real lust, then real love, then real anguish as he progresses from prospective seducer to fiancé to brother and, finally, to suicide, while Harriot’s distress at not being able to sublimate her love for Harrington into a safe sibling affection is great enough to cause her death too. Now that’s a novel! Nor is its novelty explained away by the characters expostulating on the moral significance and meaning of all that befalls them. Worthy and Mrs. Holmes can do that, thank you. And these moral spokespersons regularly interpose themselves between the action and the audience to offer their interpretations of the text. Yet their surplus of concern is called into question by its very excess as well as by its ineffectuality. Thus Mrs. Holmes’s letters finally speak mostly of their own long-winded emptiness in contrast to the force of Harrington’s missives and Harriot’s, which derive substantially from the fact that, try as they might, they cannot put into adequate words all that prompts them to write. Furthermore, when the moral advice that overflows in the novel serves so little the protagonists to whom it was ostensibly directed, how can the reader hope to be aided by it? Such considerations lead to a large question. Just as Civil Spy and Antonia read two different books, did not Isaiah Thomas publish and William Hill Brown write two different books that only masqueraded as one?
The early reviews, the frontmatter, the disjunctive format of the novel itself all suggest that William Hill Brown had neither a precise authorial program nor a clearly conceived audience in mind. To borrow Ross Chambers’s recent paradigm for interpreting fiction, this novel is not only about a seduction, in narrative method it enacts one, too.30 The reader is calculatingly led from one moral lesson to the next by the interspersing episodes of a more enticing story. At the end of the text the reader has perused all the lessons but possesses the story and perhaps has even been possessed by it. Perhaps the first partner and victim in any such seduction by the text is the author himself. It is suggestive that the unfolding novel is substantially shaped by the authorial equivalent of what a psychologist could well term displacement and denial.
First and most obvious, we can consider the odd distribution of novel time. Far more of the text is given over to the didactic than to the dramatic, especially in the first sections. The moralists have the preponderance of the letters and seemingly the largest claim on the reader’s time and attention, while the lovers have the story. Differently put, the text’s primary residence is with one discourse while its primary concern is with the other. This disjunction rather resembles the conjunction of a tired marriage and a fresh affair. The straying partner’s various gestures of affirming “my real union is here”—fresh flowers for the deceived wife, special meals for the cuckolded husband—seldom settle things for either party, and, similarly, Brown’s regular protestations of his moral intentions are finally too much to be taken at face value.
Admittedly, the book does have, with its emphasis on education, a certain unity. The catalogue of female misfortunes can be refracted through the lectures on morality that dominate the text to emphasize effectively the primary need for real female education in a society that generally denied that need and, consequently, the attendant need for reshaping society into forms more suitable for men and women. But here, too, we encounter problems. The program just sketched out is premised on a young female reader, ill educated and hardly prepared to cope with questions of seduction (or of much else, for that matter), learning from the novel. The novel, however, assumes the very education this reader lacks. Unlike novels such as Charlotte or The Coquette, The Power of Sympathy is rampant with erudition. Syntax and vocabulary are both often inordinately complex. There is, throughout, an almost desperate display of the author’s learning as seen in the frequent and frequently obscure literary allusions to dozens of writers ranging from Cicero to Goethe to La Rochefoucauld to Chesterfield to Barlow, Dwight, and Webster. This parade of references would not reassure the average young woman of the time that she was welcome into the novel and that the novel spoke particularly to her but serves rather to emphasize the educational accomplishments of the writer, his competence, his intelligence, his expertise. And also his ambivalence; fiction is not all fluff and fancy, the author seems to proclaim, but is learned, respectable, didactic—hardly even a novel at all.
William Hill Brown seems to be painfully aware of the implications and isolations of being the first American novelist and tries to compensate by writing virtually a nonnovel, which partly explains the eclectic format of the novel itself. The epistolary method, borrowed from Richardson, also imitates the popular journal and letter mode of writers such as John Dickinson or British writers such as Dr. John Gregory and Lord Chesterfield. The numerous discourses on topics ranging from metaphysics to educational philosophy approximate the ubiquitous moral tracts of the time, and moral spokespersons such as Mrs. Holmes or the Reverend Holmes give advice in a popular advice-tract format. There are also political asides that resemble broadsides, irrelevant encyclopedic details in the almanac mode, descriptions of physical settings reminiscent of travel narratives, and—as already noted—various sermons, which do come close to constituting a standard collection of same.
I began this section by considering the text as divided between moral discourse and novel discourse. I end with a whole host of other types or models of discourse sounding in the background. Along the way the opening disharmonious duet has picked up a whole cacophonous chorus. No wonder no one clear note or melodic line sounds in the novel. Yet the odd mixture of duplicity, diversity, excess, and inconsistency that we encounter in this first novel does have a Characteristically American tone that will be deployed to better advantage in nineteenth-century works like Moby Dick or Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In short, even with the first American novel we already have, firmly established, the author as bricoleur, and soon she/ he will be better at that trade.
Reading The Power of Sympathy
We are happy to be able to announce to the public, that the accusations brought against a fellow Citizen, in consequence of a late unhappy event, and which has been the cause of so much domestic calamity, and public speculation, have, at the mutual desire of the parties, been submitted to and fully inquired into, by their Excellencies JAMES BOWDOIN and JOHN ADAMS, Esq., and that the result of their inquiry is, that the said accusations “have not been in any degree supported, and that therefore there is just ground for the restoration of peace and harmony between them.”—And in consequence thereof they have recommended to the parties, with the spirit of candor, and mutual condescension, again to embrace in friendship and affection.
We would add, that were it not for the verdict of the Jury of Inquest to the contrary (for Verdicts must always be respected) it would have been the wish of many, that the extraordinary conduct of the deceased, had been early attributed to the only accountable cause, an insane state of mind.31
Appearing in the Herald of Freedom on October 9, 1788, some four months prior to the publication of The Power of Sympathy, this announcement demonstrates how easily history can be fictionalized without the intermediation of novelists. Only the names of the uninvolved authority figures—a former governor of Massachusetts, a future president of the United States—are given. To protect the innocent? To protect the guilty? The name most missing, of course, is that of Perez Morton, a wealthy Harvard-educated patriot who would go on to become Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives and the state’s attorney general, and who was also, not coincidentally, a personal friend of both Adams and Bowdoin. Nor need the scandal be named. All who lived in Boston in 1788 would know the fate of Fanny Apthorp, who had just killed herself. Many would also know more; would know that she killed herself rather than accuse and publicly confront the brother-in-law who had fathered her child, as was being demanded by her father. Against such knowledge, validated by a jury’s deliberations and a coroner’s verdict, John Adams and James Bowdoin set their discreet defense of Morton and their more explicit insinuation that everything (seduction? suicide? story?) could best be charged to the disordered mind of the now deceased woman. Against that calculated accounting the twenty-three-year-old William Hill Brown, a close neighbor of the Mortons and only a year older than the beautiful Fanny, set his novel.
On this level, then, the first American novel serves not to fictionalize a local scandal but to “factualize” (and “factionalize”) it. More specifically, Brown refuses to allow the voice of public authority to consign all the blame to the woman while the man remained, at least in Adam’s and Bowdoin’s rendering, unnamed and innocent. Given his material—most of which was published in the local newspapers—Brown could have chosen to support either story, the official one (that few common citizens, judging by the newspaper reports, really believed) or its alternative. He chose the alternative. He made few changes in the details, disguising only the setting, the names of the characters, and the sex of Fanny’s child (changed from a daughter to a son, probably to provide some variation from the main plot, which must, because of the power politics of seduction, focus on an illegitimate daughter). But in every essential, Brown’s story is an indictment of Morton and an exoneration of Fanny Apthorp—and by extension a verdict against the judgment of Adams and Bowdoin.
Consider, for example, how Brown’s pseudonyms operate on quite different metonymie levels. James Apthorp is both thickly disguised as Shepherd and also given the function designated by the name. In this character we see the father as a shepherd who comes to the defense of his lamb too late and too vehemently and who thereby inadvertently occasions its slaughter. Fanny becomes the highly allegorical Ophelia, a young woman perfectly sane, if weak willed, until the verdicts and public accusations go against her. Perez Morton, however, as Martin, is a different matter. Such a minor change in name leaves him exposed, identified, condemned by and in the novel: “By a series of the most artful attentions, suggested by a diabolical appetite, he insinuated himself into her affection—he prevailed upon the heart of the unsuspicious Ophelia and triumphed over her innocence and virtue” (p. 60).
We might notice also how Brown begins with this verdict on the affair and not with the affair itself or the preliminaries to it. Even before he presents the seduction, he has cast Ophelia as, essentially, the villain’s innocent victim. But can an innocent young woman be involved with her own sister’s husband and in her own sister’s home? The author encourages us not to ask that question by excluding as much as possible all sisterly considerations from the plot. Thanks to Mrs. Martin/Sarah Wentworth Morton, the husband and the sister can inhabit the same house, and that useful service rendered, the wife largely disappears from the text. Harriot and Mrs. Francis, explicitly the guests of Mrs. Martin, do early note that their hostess puts on a “face of vivacity” seemingly at odds with “the feelings of her heart,” but once the story of Ophelia begins to unfold, any story of Sarah is not even hinted at until after Ophelia’s suicide.32 Only then does the sister have a place—a place that, ironically, partly redeems the very suicide that belatedly acknowledges the sister’s place. Ophelia, in the note that she leaves, apologizes more for betraying her married sister than for bearing an illegitimate child. She acknowledges that she “had been doing an injury to her sister who was all kindness to her; she prayed for her sister’s forgiveness … she was always sensible to her obligation to that sister.… She intreated [sic] her sisters to think of her with pity” (p. 67). Who could condemn further a woman who has so thoroughly condemned herself? Certainly not the injured sister, nor the collective “sisters” who are the implied readers of her story.
For Martin, however, there are, in Brown’s rendering, no extenuating circumstances. This wealthy and esteemed gentleman betrays his wedding vows, Ophelia’s virtue, and also his implicit obligations to his community. After Ophelia returns from Europe to visit her sister, Martin is soon offering to set her up in “an elegant apartment at his house in town” (p. 60). As the affair begins, he is promising to divorce his wife in order to marry her. But once Ophelia has borne his child, “the affection of Martin now changed to the vilest hatred,” and, hypocritical in the extreme, he is the “first to brand her with the disgraceful epithets, of undutiful and unchaste” (p. 61). Ophelia retires to the country and anonymity to bear and raise her child, but her father chafes at the injustice of seeing his daughter suffer while Martin still occupies an eminent social position, seemingly untouched by his deeds. When Ophelia kills herself to avoid the public exposure her father intends to make, Martin is quick to shift all of the blame for the girl’s death onto the father: “He reminded Shepherd of his obstinacy in persisting in an explanatory meeting, and refusing to grant Ophelia’s request in suffering the affair to subside.” Martin says imperiously to Shepherd, “You cannot accuse me as the immediate cause of Ophelia’s death; the facts are as I have stated them—and thus was a straying, but penitent child, driven to despair and suicide by a severe use of paternal power” (pp. 69–70).33 Martin/Morton’s lawyerly training obviously serves him well; but Brown, just as capably, builds a more convincing case by juxtaposing this seducer’s shallow, self-serving words with his even shabbier deeds.
Although Martin is not explicitly punished in The Power of Sympathy, another story in the novel, that of the elder Harrington, shows how one’s sins can come back to haunt one. When the young Harrington gives up his first program to seduce the “orphaned” Harriot and decides, instead, to marry her, the stage is set for the traumatic revelation that “HARRIOT IS YOUR SISTER!” (p. 106). And so was Fanny, by eighteenth-century law and custom, Morton’s sister. The numerous parallels between the two stories (sister, secret sin, seducing lawyer, public exposure) suggest that we conjoin them to read the end of Martin’s story, which is not given in the text, through the end of the Harrington/Harriot story, which is. The Honorable Mr. Harrington, sixteen years after his interlude with Maria, is revealed publicly as a seducer. He must watch in anguish as both his legitimate and his illegitimate children die tortured deaths. He himself endures a Dantesque nightmare, a vision of hell in which men like himself and Martin occupy the innermost circle. Within eighteenth-century Boston, Perez Morton may seem to have escaped the consequences of his actions. Within the moral universe of the novel, Martin’s punishment—in this life and in the life to come—waits in time and is not to be denied.
In the present social universe of the novel, however, Martin’s apparent immunity as opposed to Ophelia’s suicide tokens the partiality and imperfections of human institutions and the moral bankruptcy of those who argue the justice of the very status quo that privileges them as its spokespersons. In short, a careful reading of the novel is also a critical reading of the society in which it is set. Adams and Bowdoin hardly refute that subversive reading. If anything, they inadvertently affirm it. Better men than Perez Morton, they are still willing to equivocate, perhaps even to prevaricate (were those charges against Morton really not “in any degree supported”?), and to set aside justice (“the verdict of the Jury of Inquest”) in the name of justice by blaming all the “extraordinary conduct of the deceased” on the deceased woman’s “insane state of mind,” as if the pregnancy and delivery too had been mere figments of her imagination. That rough paraphrase of what the two proclaim should serve to indicate how tenuously they argue to protect one of their own and, by extension, to preserve the myth of a gentleman’s moral primacy.
The myth of moral primacy as voiced by the socially prominent is regularly exposed in the novel.34 The Honorable Mr. Harrington, for example, first seduces the indigent Maria and then further profits from her now lowered state. Pregnant and penniless, who is she to accuse him? The Reverend Holmes, although given to long-winded pedanticism on such subjects as how “we are blinded by pride and self love, and will not observe our own imperfections” (p. 40), at first seems a somewhat admirable (if self-satisfied) man. He did, after all, shelter the abandoned Maria. But when Maria dies the Reverend denies the daughter her birthright by sending her away to be raised, anonymously, by the peevish Mrs. Francis, and he deceives the world as to the continuing virtue of his friend, Judge Harrington. That deception proves devastating when the legitimate son of this “good” man meets his illegitimate daughter, a meeting that explodes the Honorable Mr. Harrington’s pretentions to honor and the Reverend Mr. Holmes’s pretensions to ministerial wisdom.
But Worthy, both the moral spokesperson of the novel and the main recipient of its satire, especially illustrates how effectively Brown can conjoin those two functions in one character. Worthy first priggishly patronizes just about everyone in the novel. “I have seen many juvenile heroes during my pilgrimage of two and twenty years,” he can intone in an admonitory letter to Harrington, certain that the experience of those years renders him an expert observer of the human scene. He goes on to advise his friend not to be “easily inflamed with new objects—agitated and hurried away by the impetuosity of new desires” (p. 10). Worthy will never be so hurried, not even when the happiness of his fiancée or the life of his friend hang in the balance. Thus, when Myra, Harriot’s friend and Worthy’s fiancée, requires his comfort and his counsel, Worthy remains distant, uncommunicative, physically and emotionally removed. Residing peaceably in the rational little world of Belleview, the rural retreat he then shared with the Reverend Holmes and his widowed daughter-in-law, Mrs. Eliza Holmes, he apparently prefers not to be disturbed by his fiancée’s sorrow over her suffering friend, and he is moved only slightly more when his friend hints of impending suicide. One imagines the three of them, Worthy and the Holmeses, ensconced within their bogus “Temple of Apollo,” discoursing on incest, seduction, scandal, suicide, and novel reading, while first Harriot languishes, then Myra mourns, and finally Harrington dies.
“My dear friend,” Harrington writes Worthy, typically, to no avail, “I have a great desire to see you—I wish you could come home speedily.… When life becomes insupportable and we find no blessing in it—have we not a right to resign it?” (Letter 48, p. 142). Harrington, receiving no answer, writes again soon after: “Why must I wait the lingering hand of the grisly messenger to summon me to the world above?” (Letter 54, p. 161). The first intimation of suicide Worthy receives is in Letter 48; he does not even bother to respond to this and other disturbed missives until Letter 58, which begins, “Let your mind be employed, and time will wear out these gloomy ideas” (p. 165). Or even worse, after Harrington’s suicide threats become even more overt, Worthy writes: “I thank you for your letters, but I wish you had something better for the subject of them” (Letter 61, p. 168). He does make one late promise to “be with you soon,” but, before he can see his friend, Harrington has blown out his brains with a pistol in imitation of another epistolary novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther. This book, with him at his death, is as much a guide and a friend as was the most misnamed Worthy.
Only too late do these moral characters see the error of their ways, and then they are as ineffectual in their reformation as they were in their original course. The litany of apology of Worthy, the Honorable Mr. Harrington, or Mr. Shepherd is countered by a roster of the personal tragedies their carelessness occasions and stands in muddling contrast to the grim and realistic determination of Fanny Apthorp whose diary/suicide note was published in most of the Boston newspapers after her death: “I have felt from the first that this matter would go against me, but I have resolved never to live after it has,” or to the poignant last letter written by Elizabeth Whitman to the unnamed father of her child (and quoted in The Power of Sympathy), “I know that you will come, but you will come too late” (p. 35).35
The self-dramatized apologia of men like the Honorable Mr. Harrington who grieve over past failures is juxtaposed with the melodrama of young men and women deranged by grief. We have the whole paraphernalia of sentimental fiction—women who die in childbirth, stillborn infants, abandoned orphans raised in anonymity and penury, broken health, self-inflicted or merely self-willed death, insanity. This is the focus of the fiction, and it is also precisely what was happening around the corner at one of the best addresses in Boston. That countergrounding in “truth” makes all the difference. It should make any reader—especially the modern one conditioned by the so-called sexual revolution—question the usual condescending tone with which critics typically deal with seduction novels. The Power of Sympathy is not a tale of seduction telling the women that they should have been more careful. It is more a condemnation of men like Martin/Morton and the Honorable Mr. Harrington and also of those such as Mrs. Holmes or the Reverend Holmes who supported the authority of a Martin or a Mr. Harrington and defended their acts—the low-level Adamses and Bowdoins of the novel.
Brown persistently questions claims to special position or preeminence. He has Harrington, for example, describe in Letter 17 how a “party was overthrown by a strange piece of folly.” A beautiful, intelligent, accomplished young woman, Miss P——, attending the “little” gathering, overhears a derisive comment between a “lady and gentleman” who “scornfully” dismiss her as “a mechanick’s daughter.”36 Upset, the young woman flees the festivities, whereupon “disorder and confusion immediately took place, and the amusement was put an end to for the evening” (pp. 52–53). Nor is that the end of the matter. Harrington delivers a diatribe against elitism, insisting that class considerations can never be just grounds for judging character. “Inequality among mankind is a foe to our happiness,” he proclaims, and is out of place in a “democratical” government. “Were I a Lycurgus no distinction of rank should be found in my commonwealth.” The “nature of the constitution” should triumph; all men should be “free and equal.” Yet the incident with Miss P——(as well as an earlier incident in which Mrs.
Holmes savagely satirizes the ill manners of the noveau riche Mrs. Bourne and her gawky fourteen-year-old daughter) suggests that Harrington’s friends do not all share his egalitarianism. Nor does Harrington always abide by his best principles. Upon first being attracted to Harriot, an orphan of dubious birth and no social prospects, he decides that she might suitably serve only as a kept mistress. “I am not so much of a republican,” he early confides to Worthy, “as formally to wed any person of this class. How laughable would my conduct appear were I… to be heard openly acknowledging for my bosom companion, any daughter of the democratick empire of virtue” (Letter 3, p. 12).
Love presently prompts a different estimation of the lady’s worth. But even though Harrington’s love—which occasions the end of his misogyny and elitism—is applauded in the novel, that love still leads to disaster for the young couple. The children’s disaster, however, is really grounded in their father, who was not swayed by love from his original design to seduce the hapless Maria nor prevented by love from abandoning her when it proved convenient to do so. In both cases, law and custom are at odds with love, and in both cases law and custom carry the day. Yet the two cases are hardly parallel. To consort with one’s social inferior is not the same as to consort with one’s sister. More accurately, three “sins” are dubiously conjoined—offenses against established (though ostensibly questioned) social mores (misalliances), offenses against established and ostensibly unquestioned sexual mores (seductions), and offenses against the incest taboo. That odd conjoining serves to force the reader to gauge the real weight of each offense.
For many conservative social authorities of the time, any such weighing no doubt constituted the seduction of the reader, too. Indeed, the sustained subtext of the sentimental novel was a covert questioning of the very rules textually affirmed by the tragic fall of some too-weak woman who does not properly resist the seducer’s blandishments. Although seduction is ever the focal point of these novels, their illumination did not always fall precisely where the conventional moralists would have cast it.
What we might term the socioeconomics of seduction, central to The Power of Sympathy and to almost all other early American sentimental novels, can here be briefly reviewed. Essentially, what the modern reader must almost of necessity view as a melodramatic plot device would be, for the late eighteenth-century reader, no such thing. Seduction spun so many of these sentimental plots precisely because seduction set forth and summed up crucial aspects of the society—the author’s, the characters’, the contemporary readers’ (especially if they were women)—that did not have to be delineated beyond the bare facts of the seduction itself. Seduction thereby becomes a metonymie reduction of the whole world in which women operated and were operated upon.
The same story of seduction was told over and over again, within the fictions and without them. For example, Sarah Connell Ayer noted in her diary entry of March 13, 1810, the sad case of an unnamed “young Woman who lives with us” who was seduced by a “gay young man.” Since Connecticut law demanded that the father of illegitimate children pay $200 per child for their support, the gentleman married the woman but then, the very next day, left the state. “There is a certain class of Men,” Ayer continues, “well skill’d in the arts of seduction, who when they find a young girl in such state, consider her as directly in their power, and how many have fallen victims to the baseness of those who call themselves the lords of creation.”37 Both the information and the import of Ayer’s narration would be right at home in The Power of Sympathy as another entry in the novel’s catalogue of seduction. Or note a similar collapsing of custom and misogyny in the events that make up the historical basis of Mrs. P. D. Manvill’s Lucinda; or, the Mountain Mourner. Being Recent Facts, in a Series of Letters (1807), a novel that went through six editions in the first part of the nineteenth century. Lucinda, after being raped by the devious Mr. Brown, returns to live with her father and stepmother who, although poor (he is an impoverished schoolteacher, she a seamstress), are loving and forgiving and happy to care for their daughter. But the magistrates of the community, upon learning that Lucinda is pregnant, try to incarcerate her or force her to leave their community, a vestige of the old Puritan custom of “warning out” (exiling pregnant woman from the community and thereby sparing it the expense of supporting an illegitimate child). Lucinda’s health fails soon thereafter, and the magistrates, ashamed of their verdict, rescind it. In subsequent editions of the novel, the magistrates (real or fictitious) even append to the novel their own defense of their actions—actions that by the early nineteenth century were beginning to require some defense.38
As these narrations by Ayer and Manvill indicate, law in the new Republic did not protect the seduced (or raped) woman and, in some cases, worked against her. In Connecticut in 1810, a law that tacitly acknowledged a man’s superior earning power and his prime role as provider by requiring that he contribute to the support of an illegitimate child could be circumvented with the two-step procedure of first rendering the birth legitimate by marrying the mother and then abandoning both wife and baby. As the episode behind Lucinda suggests, the legal and economic procedures whereby the community could imprison or expel an unwed mother contrasts sharply to the sentimental novel’s verdict that the community, not the young woman, was most in error.
Equally relevant to The Power of Sympathy and to the development of the early American sentimental novel is the fact that, all over America, laws concerning fornication were being reevaluated in the 1790s. The Connecticut law, for example, seems progressive, indeed, when compared with the procedures in Massachusetts a generation earlier. In some two hundred cases of fornication tried before the Middlesex County, Massachusetts, Superior and General Sessions Courts between 1760 and 1774, always the offending woman—never the guilty man—was subject to punishment and public humiliation. Even in cases where fornication was proved by the arrival of a baby too soon after a hasty marriage, the sin was only the woman’s, and that same sin was regularly prosecuted. But in 1786, three years prior to the publication of The Power of Sympathy, the Massachusetts Fornication Act somewhat liberalized matters by “permitting a woman guilty of the crime to confess her guilt before a justice of the peace, pay an appropriate fine, and thereby avoid [public] prosecution.” After 1791, women in Middlesex County stopped confessing their guilt at all, apparently aware that “though they did not confess, they would not be indicted.” With this change in law and custom, as the legal historian William E. Nelson notes, a woman for the first time could attempt to sue the putative father of the child for paternity without herself incurring a criminal charge. A woman did precisely this in Middlesex in 1790, eliciting considerable public discussion in the local newspapers. In other states, too, matters of sexual morality were being debated, particular laws were changing, and the more basic question of the role of the law in society was being examined. Was it the function of law to prosecute “sin” (however sin was defined) as it had been in Puritan times? Or was it the function of law in an enlightened republic to protect property (however property was defined—daughters? wives?), to protect rights (even of the illegitimate), and to keep order?
Increasingly, the consensus of society leaned toward the latter alternative but not without the strenuous objections of social spokespersons such as Timothy Dwight or Chief Justice William Cushing, who saw this tendency as suspiciously “French” and as further evidence of the breakdown of social authority and the “declension in morals.”39 The decriminalization of civil sin, they feared, would lead to libertinism and atheism. Civil sin, in sexual matters, had also, of course, been female sexual sin. So the “declension in morals” that these men feared may have had some relationship to the fact that the old ostensibly higher morality also gave men a freer hand.
The Power of Sympathy especially speaks to that last artful dodging and does so not just by exposing a comparable dodging in Martin and the elder Harrington and intimating something of its consequences. The novel is also a surprisingly subtle anatomy of seduction and insists upon the relevance of seduction to the whole moral fiber of the new American nation. More particularly, The Power of Sympathy attests that the very mechanism of seduction signifies a grossly inequal distribution of social power and social worth, imbalances that should be corrected in a country purporting to be a republic. One main implication is that seduction is a social disease that will not be fully cured until men such as the elder Harrington and Martin are forced to surrender much of their inauthentic status or are shamed into exercising it more responsibly. Another is that women can learn to take preventative measures, be taught to appreciate the high price that must be paid for seduction given the time and place within which they live.40 As Mrs. Holmes at one point observes, a well-educated woman who understands the “real charms of economy and simplicity” cannot be victimized (“enslaved”) by even the smoothest of deceivers (Letter 40). Better to promote awareness than to perpetuate ignorance, especially when ignorance foredooms one to the status of victim in both the private and the public realm. Like almost all early American novels, The Power of Sympathy advocates improved female education and condemns any who would condemn women for aspiring above their place. Improved education should allow a woman self-confidence (so she need no longer depend upon a man for her knowledge of the world); social status and mobility (thus obviating the need to trade her body for a higher position in the world); moral values (discovered for herself and not provided by another for that other’s advantage); and, above all, a realistic (so says William Hill Brown) suspicion of men.41
THE SOCIOLOGICAL dimensions of seduction and the communal responsibility of and for individual vice preoccupy the early American sentimental novel and are intrinsic to the social assumptions underlying the first American novel. In my discussion of The Power of Sympathy I have focused on seduction—how it was socialized, legalized, and fictionalized and how it might be forestalled by severer punishment of the seducer and by superior education for women. Certainly, this is a major, if not the major, concern of the book as well as the connecting link between its sensational story and its moral lesson plan. But it must also be emphasized that seduction in this novel is a metaphor not just of women’s status in the Republic but of a range of problems, all of which might be reduced to the same structure or seduction plot—that is, a range of problems that arise when moral value and social responsibility are outweighed by the particular desires, no matter how basely self-serving, of privileged individuals or classes. The door is thereby thrown open to any sins that choose to walk in—lust, avarice, oppression—and the open door, the worst of a society’s sins, is the instituted inequality of the society itself. In the main and subsidiary seduction stories in The Power of Sympathy, seduction depends upon the superior social status, education, and economic prospects of the man as well as upon a legal substructure that, essentially, makes the seduction a female not a male crime. The novel underscores the double jeopardy into which women are placed by misogyny in both its individual and its cultural manifestations.
In passing or at some length, William Hill Brown addresses numerous other social issues by noting the disjunctions between sanctioned behavior and professed ideals. These issues range from such relatively innocuous considerations as the continuing and antirepublican popularity of British tastes (especially in books) or manners to far more heinous matters such as slavery. Three times Brown halts his seduction tale to comment pointedly on the evil paradox of a nation founded on the premise of human equality still practicing slavery. He promotes a social judgment of this sin by stressing that those who own slaves are “haughtier, more tenacious of honour, and indeed possess more of an aristocratick temper” (p. 53); are, in short, un-American and threaten the peace and unity of America (pp. 53–54). He promotes a sentimental judgment by the eloquent and sustained digression telling of a slave woman who courageously accepts the “mark of the whip” (p. 103) that otherwise would have fallen upon her child who accidentally broke a glass tumbler, a slip any child could have committed. Harrington conjoins this narration with the main plot of the novel and his own misfortunes by invoking Laurence Sterne and the “power of sympathy” that necessarily binds one human being to another—regardless of gender, class, or race—within the human community and that, in a republic, makes no person free until all are free. Like seduction, slavery cannot be tolerated in a society where “all men are declared free and equal, and their tempers are open, generous and communicative” (p. 54).
But while Brown takes pains to connect private and public vice, the individual and the larger society, and all through the agency of sympathy, it would be grossly misleading to suggest that the novel finally and fully coheres in that one program. For the same power of sympathy that holds together the fabric of Brown’s fictionalized republic also has a menacing underside that is nowhere reasoned or moralized away in the novel. That sinister sympathy, of course, centers in incest, the irresistible and ultimately tragic attraction between Harriot and Harrington that does not cease even with these characters’ demise.42 Harrington seizes upon Harriot’s death as a chance to take his own life. He might then join her in some afterlife in which the deity will forgive their love, their death, and in which the now necessarily spiritual passion of brother and sister will not be tainted by social censure.
The final words of the novel (presented, as was conventional, in an epitaph) constitute an admonition: “May we never love as these have lov’d.” These words, like Harrington’s hopes, anticipate a better future, but they also assert the darker powers of sympathy that nothing in the novel can dispel. The concluding epitaph, like the opening epigraph, duplicitously signals a moralistic novel that ultimately affirms an amoral universe—a novel that both believes and rests content in its disbelief.