7
But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department, the necessary constitutional means, and personal motives, to resist encroachment of the others.… Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man, must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.… If men were angels, no government would be necessary.… In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.
—James Madison, The Federalist, No. 51 (1788)
He that is not for us, is against us.
—Motto of the Federalist Gazette of the United States (1798)
The Rhetoric of Republican Dissensus
A number of novelists of the early national period turned the essentially conservative subgenre of the sentimental novel (with its fetishization of female virginity) to a subversive purpose by valorizing precisely those women whom the society had either overtly condemned (the fallen woman) or implicitly rendered invisible (woman as feme covert). Yet even the most progressive sentimental novels still focused primarily on women’s restricted familial role. Within the confines of the novel and the society, women only sporadically and peripherally entered into the political discourse of the era, either as objects of the debate or participants in it. Certainly a number of sentimental novels (such as The Coquette and The Power of Sympathy) include scenes in which female characters discuss political issues, but given the Constitutional silencing of women, this fictive act is just that—a fiction. Lacking any legal standing, women’s political opinions could be dismissed as easily as John Adams dismissed his wife’s plea. “Every man, by the Constitution, is born with an equal right to be elected to the highest office,” the Reverend John Cosens Ogden of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, declaimed in 1793. “And every woman, is born with an equal right to be the wife of the most eminent man.”1 No wonder sentimental fiction remained closeted, circumscribed by home and hearth. No fictive young woman could ask, existentially, “To be or, not to be?” for all versions of that question were preempted by the patriarchy’s more controlling consideration, “Is she or isn’t she?”
In the picaresque novels with which I am concerned in this chapter, politics is the central issue, and, not surprisingly, women mostly enter the picaresque world in passing. Except for one subgroup of novels that I term the female picaresque (discussed in detail later in this chapter), the picaresque virtually excludes women precisely because women mere excluded from the politics of the new Republic and also from the more perfect, imagined polis formulated by most of early America’s political visionaries. In custom, law, theory, and literature, the political world of the new Republic was predominately a world of men.
But what was that world of men? If it was ostensibly centered in the Founding Fathers and the revolutionary emergence of a new political order, it, nevertheless, necessarily took shape tangentially to that center—not in Independence Hall but in the city itself, in the shanties that dotted its margins; in the shacks around its malodorous, fever-infested swamps; and in the surrounding countryside where cash was scarce and where a revolution had not brought the prosperity for which so many had hoped. Political discourse centered, too, not in the promised equality of all men but in a different practice that allowed some men to be more equal than others (slaves, the poor, not to mention the women). How, a number of writers asked, could the novel portray the nation’s complex and contradictory political realities? The picaresque seemed to many to be the perfect form to address the divisive political discourse of the era. The loosest of narrative forms, the picaresque conveniently allows a central character (or characters) to wander the margins of an emerging American landscape, to survey it in all its incipient diversity, to sound out its different constituents from the most lowly, uneducated yeoman to those of high birth and great learning (or at least with pretensions to same, as in Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s send-up of the American Philosophical Society).
Just as The Coquette and Charlotte Temple provided the reader with strategies for valorizing women degraded and demeaned according to the social mores of the time, so, too, did the picaresque, by its very insistence upon diversity and indeterminacy, emphasize the complexity of the political world of the postrevolutionary era, the many variations on the definition of what constituted an American, and the myriad applications of that often repeated term republicanism. A narrative strategy of circumlocution worked for picaresque novelists for two different but related reasons. First, the increasing displacement of the gentry as the foremost representatives of America’s government after the Revolution diffused language, made the official language of government not just balanced Enlightenment prose but also the direct, colloquial, impassioned panegyric of the kind heard (too often, many averred) in the state houses as well as in the town square. To men thoroughly versed in a tradition of classical rhetoric, much of the fractious political debate of the early national period sounded like glossolalia. To many novelists, however, the cacophonous discourse sounded like the stuff of fiction, and picaresque novels often replicated those discordant sounds through dialect, deliberate violations of standard English prose, and other linguistic idiosyncracies, including slang and arcane professional jargon. Second, the decade of the 1790s saw an increasingly repressive political agenda designed to stem the tide of republicanism and Republicanism. A movement to enact measures that would curb the most radical elements in the society (and, for many, the Constitution seemed part of this restrictive movement) and protect the privilege of an educated elite culminated in the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798. As I will show, the picaresque, with its tireless circumambulations around the locus of debate, countered this official attempt to homogenize the polis with a rambunctious heterogeneity. It did so with impunity because the very form of the fiction made it impossible to pin down the political agenda of the author. Just as the sentimental novel hid its message for hidden women, so, too, did the picaresque novel use the smoke screen of its own irrepressible rhetoric to evade the era’s repressions.
Later in this chapter, I will assess both the picaresque’s projection of its own fictive America and the cosmology created in that image. I will also look at the lives of a number of picaresque novelists who did not fall any more clearly or neatly into the narrow classifications of the party politics of the time than did their exuberantly ambiguous novels. But before entering the picaresque world of the novels or of the authors, I would like to focus, briefly, on the discourse of the time and place in which picaresque fiction was written and read. The picaresque novel is indubitably part of the “wordy battles” and “paper wars” (in Washington Irving’s phrase) of the era, but while the official rhetoric of dissent and “dissensus” seems, at first glance, absolute (either/or, us/them), the picaresque continually blurs oppositions into ambiguities. It is even tempting to argue that the confusing (and often confused) cosmology of the picaresque more nearly represented the mentality of many late-eighteenth-century Americans than did the eloquent delineations of republican ideology argued by the Founding Fathers and their most vociferous opponents.
IN 1783, WHEN Thomas Paine learned that the treaty of peace had been signed with Britain, he immediately ceased publication of The Crisis, for, in his words, “the times that tried men’s souls are over.”2 Would that he had been right. For many, from Founding Fathers to impoverished farmers, they were just beginning, and the next two decades would prove far more trying than the previous one. “The pressure of an external enemy hooped us together,” Thomas Jefferson wrote of the War of Independence, fully aware that, without the immediate and overt crisis of a war fought on their own soil, Americans had to confront an equally pervasive but more nebulous war within the Republic—between the haves and have-nots, between competing visions of what America was and was to be.3
The rational Enlightenment document of the Constitution—with its rhetoric of fairness and freedom and its cautious regulating of the former and restricting of the latter—disguises the acrimonious debate that preceded its passage and obscures the carnivalization of republican principles enacted in the numerous public displays of the postrevolutionary era—everything from rallies and parades to strikes and insurrections.4 As the whole process of confederation emphasized, Americans had fought and died for very different revolutions, some for a relatively simple bid for American autonomy from England, others for an entire restructuring of America’s political and social system. While many members of an educated class or gentry conceived of a republic governed by and for gentlemen, many middle-and lower-class Americans stood ready to elect legislators like themselves who pledged to serve their interests as opposed to what they saw as the narrow and special interests of the nation’s aristocrats (with that last term itself becoming increasingly pejorative in the new republic).5 Split by factions and by subfactions within these factions, the nation seemed, to many Americans, on the verge of another revolution.
The dichotomizing of postrevolutionary politics is reflected even in the names of two of its major parties—the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists. The antipathy embodied in those names underscores a perception of difference, at least among each party’s most outspoken proponents. For example, Anti-Federalist rhetoric was often grounded in class awareness and class resentment. Whereas most of the Colonial-appointed counselors of prerevolutionary America had been wealthy citizens, often from prominent old families, in postrevolutionary America, many Anti-Federalists insisted that “men of family, wealth and of eminence and grandeur” were also the most likely to be “men of ambition and to form parties to promote their views.” America had not fought tyranny abroad to replace it with tyranny at home, they argued. “Precisely,” men like Alexander Hamilton agreed, pointing a finger in the opposite direction, to what they saw as the growing tyranny of mobocracy. Advocating rule by “the wise and good and rich,” Hamilton predicted that the union would collapse because of “the influence of many inconsiderable men in possession of considerable offices.” Inconsiderable men, Hamilton believed, would, as state legislators, combine forces to block the Federal Constitution that, among other things, was designed at least partly to curtail the power of local government. And many Anti-Federalists viewed Hamilton’s polemics in favor of central control as King George come again. Each party denounced the other as the enemy, the threat, the negation of every truth each held to be self-evident and sanctified by the sacrifices they had made during the war. As Ronald P. Formisano has noted, although actual party organization and even voter participation remained weak during the 1790s, the acrimony of partisan rhetoric spread throughout American society. Both sides “tried to stig matize their opponents as illegitimate. Federalists denounced Jacobins, the French party, anti-federalists, conspirators, demagogues, democrats, antis, disorganizers, a faction, and the evil-minded. Republicans cried out against monarchists, the junto, the Essex Junto, a faction, aristocrats, the order, dictators, high partisans, the arrogant, conspirators, and the tyrannical.” Each rhetoric, if taken seriously, simply canceled the other out.6
Hugh Henry Brackenridge perfectly captures the contradictions of republican discourse—both Federalist and Republican—in an early scene in Modern Chivalry. Captain Farrago enters a town on an election day and observes a “man of education” running for the legislature against an illiterate weaver. The gentleman convincingly expounds, for the benefit of his unlearned opponent and any other interested parties, that “when you go to the senate house, the application to you will not be to warp a web; but to make laws for the commonwealth.” Knowing some low trade does not prepare one to run a government; knowing Thucydides does. Brackenridge’s satire, capturing the tone of this learned and certain man, runs both ways. It mocks an illiterate running for public office, and it equally mocks another’s assumption that an aristocratic and dilettante education in and of itself qualifies one to rule. Note, for example, Captain Farrago’s assent to this position, which Brackenridge (a Republican) renders in tones replete with Federalist preferences: “A free government is a noble possession of the people; and this freedom consists in an equal right to have the benefit of the laws when made. Though doubtless, in such a government, the lowest citizen may become chief magistrate; yet it is sufficient to possess the right; not absolutely necessary to exercise it.”7 This is Federalist theory in a nutshell: All (white) men are created equal, and so long as we all acknowledge that equality, we need not practice it. Naturally, after the voters have listened attentively to the learned man, they proceed to elect the weaver.
Many common people found it easy to resent a gentry who proclaimed liberty and submission in the same breath. As a Rhode Island Republican noted in a bit of doggerel during the Confederation period:
These men I hate ‘cause they despised me
With deep contempt—and ‘cause they advis’d me,
To hold my tongue when th’was debate
And not betray my want of wit.8
That resentment alarmed its recipients, who read therein something of their own declining authority within the Republic. Men such as Hamilton, John Adams, and even George Washington were dismayed by what they saw happening in the nation they thought they had created. They anticipated a violent outcome of the American experiment and questioned the foresight of their former idealism. In 1786, Washington, for example, could “predict… the worst consequences from a half-starved, limping government, always moving upon crutches and tottering at every step.” Or, referring specifically to Shays’s Rebellion in Massachusetts, he wrote: “But for God’s sake who will tell me what is the cause of all these commotions?… I am mortified beyond expression that in the moment of our acknowledged independence we should by our conduct verify the predictions of our transatlantic foe, and render ourselves ridiculous and contemptible in the eyes of all Europe.”9 He was worried about more than what the neighbors might think. “We are fast verging to anarchy and confusion!” Washington insisted, by which he meant that illiterate weavers, so to speak, seemed to be winning elections everywhere.10 And Hamilton spoke more directly for many of America’s Founding Fathers when he noted, sadly, “This American world was not made for me.”11
The alarm of the privileged is eloquently recorded in history. Because they had the most to lose from any redistribution of power, they wrote persuasively of what horrors might await any (and especially the middle class) who caved into the forces of anarchy abroad in the land. But their story was only one-half of the story of the early national period, and, as is suggested by even the brief passage I have quoted from Modern Chivalry, many early American novels told the other half as well. In the Anti-Federalist or the Republican fable of new injustices for old, the nation in the Confederation years endured not only one of the worst recessions in the memory of its citizens but a recession disproportionately suffered by the poorer and middling classes. In New York City, for example, in the first years of the Republic, some 4 percent of the population owned over half of the city’s noncorporate wealth.12 Ballooning unemployment meant that even many in the artisan class owned no taxable property, and destitution often also meant disenfranchisement. Could not the virtuous poor also be good citizens? Debtors’ prisons overflowed with honest workingmen who had no means to pay their bills or support their families, and many predicted that the urban poor would be permanently locked into their poverty by a political system that rewarded the rich at the expense of the poor.13
For rural Americans the situation, if anything, was worse. Farm prices were so low that farmers could barely recoup the relatively low costs of preindustrial cultivation. Did the new government even care about the nation’s farmers, the agrarian Anti-Federalists asked? In their view, the men who formulated the nation’s first laws had callously ignored the welfare of its most industrious and essential citizens.14 For most farmers, subsistence living was a norm, and the government seemed content to leave it at that. One consequence was a collapsed market. For the most part, there was no cash for those commodities that could not be produced among the local population, anything from sugar to Charlotte Temple. Nor was there money to pay off mortgages. Farm foreclosures and imprisonments of yeomen for debts reached an all-time high, as did also executions, crime being one occupation ever open to the desperate. In such conditions, it is no surprise that thousands of farmers, inspired by Daniel Shays’s exhortations, should march upon the Massachusetts legislature to protest the excess tax burden placed upon the property of the farmer (who had no taxable income but did have taxable land) and to urge the printing of more paper money with which farmers might pay their debts and mortgages and have access to some of the commodities that streamed into the port cities but not into the cash-deprived countryside.15
The debate over the ratification of the Constitution typified the fragmentation of the early American public, with Republicans or Anti-Federalists fearful of a powerful central government controlled, in the words of Mercy Otis Warren, by “aristocrats” who practiced “chicanery, intrigue, and false coloring” and who “plume themselves, more on their education and abilities, than their political, patriotic, or private virtues.” In contrast, Adams, in his Defense of the Constitutions of the United States of America, insisted that “democracy never has been and never can be so desirable as aristocracy, or monarchy,” but he also fully realized that, short of oligarchy or enlightened monarchy, America’s future depended on the ratification of the Constitution, which through its Madisonian system of checks and balances, and the separation of powers, could cushion some of the force of the elected legislatures and even create a de facto oligarchy, particularly in the executive and legislative branches. A tripartite government, with each branch partly checked by the other two, minimized the spreading mood of populism that men like Adams feared in the new nation.16
The procedures by which the Constitution was finally framed have been recounted many times and do not need to be recapitulated here except to emphasize that the document that has been the keystone of American government for two hundred years was designed by fifty-five uncommon men from twelve colonies (Rhode Island was at no time represented). When the Constitutional Convention was originally convened in Philadelphia on May 14, 1787, so few delegates attended that the Convention had to be postponed for over a week until more delegates could be rounded up. Fear of protests and insurrections by the populace mandated that the Constitutional deliberations be conducted in secret (the full proceedings were not published until 1840), and the Constitution was presented to the nation as a completed document, a product not a process, and one that could only be ratified in toto or rejected, amended but not itself changed. It was signed by only thirty-nine of the delegates, twenty-nine of whom were graduates of the colleges and more than half of whom were lawyers. Yet even this similarity of background did not assure consensus for, as Robert Ferguson has pointed out, throughout the Convention, the delegates were in such radical disagreement over what a Constitution should do and say that a final text was achieved only when the points of contention were linguistically—not necessarily ideologically—resolved through calculatingly ambiguous wording of the Constitution itself. Motivated largely by their shared fears of a factious nation, the delegates agreed on the final day of the Convention that they should disguise their differences and present a pretense of “apparent unanimity” to the world at large: for, of course, if a handful of elite men could not agree over the text that would provide the foundation of new nation, then how could the society at large be brought to consensus?17
The fact is that the society could not be brought to total agreement, and the issues that were glossed over by a mystifying ambiguity at the Convention remained—and remain—pressing issues once the Constitution was ratified. As many commentators have noted, the same problems that persisted before ratification persisted after, even if the effects of political fragmentation were more limited by its institution. Alfred F. Young has shown, for example, that the Constitution may have more clearly pointed up the class divisions in American society and especially those within the Federalist party. Before ratification, many artisans favored a Constitution that, through protective tariffs as well as domestic measures, purported to facilitate American commerce and seemed to promise better economic conditions, particularly for the urban worker. With time, however, and no appreciable improvement of living conditions, workingmen grew increasingly disaffected from the Federalist party with its ruling conviction that wealthy merchants or landed gentry were innately suited to be the leaders of men and that sensible artisans and mechanics would happily acquiesce to a subordinate rank within the party and the Republic.18
They did not. The Democratic-Republicans in New York, for example, soon gained the support of the city’s mechanics (and not just those at the lowest end of the wage scales). A significant proportion of professionals—lawyers, teachers, doctors, ministers—also joined the Anti-Federalist ranks, which still included many farmers who had long and vociferously opposed Federalist politics. Citizenship remained the clarion call of this new and potentially disruptive coalition: “After thy creator, love thy country above all things,” proclaimed one Republican slogan. But perhaps most striking, this patriotism did not, for its proponents, contradict their keen interest in the revolutionary happenings in France. Interpreting in radical terms the inherent indeterminancy of the Constitution, many citizens invoked that document as the justification for their political zeal. Former opponents of a Constitution now supported it to the letter—or, more accurately, to their radical reading of its letter. And here we see political history subsumed into literary criticism, as just what that “letter” meant became a subject of endless dispute and contradictory interpretation even within the earliest years of the text’s existence. According to the new reading of many Republicans, the Constitution guaranteed libertarian rights, the kind of rights that made America “an asylum to the oppressed” of the rest of the world. It was a revolutionary document as they saw it, not the moderating or even reactionary document conceived by men such as Adams.
The same text, as an appropriate stand-in for the ambiguous and multivalent nation, thus engendered different contradictory and self-consuming readings of itself. The Constitution could be upheld by those, like Adams, who defended a curtailment of civil liberties in the face of the frightful possibilities of Jacobinism but could also justify, for others, that same Jacobinism. George Clinton, the governor of New York, for example, could hail New York state’s “free and happy Constitution” in 1777, could ten years later still praise “our excellent constitution,” and could, with no sense of contradiction, in 1797 address his infant grandson as “Citizen George Clinton Genêt” and assure him that “your drum… is at Granny’s braced for you to beat to arms against Tories and aristocrats if necessary.” In short, the existence of the Constitution proved as little in 1795 as it did in 1855 or 1985; its interpretation meant everything. Constitutional fundamentalists could argue about its meaning and application then as now, and Federalists interpreted the Constitution to defend moderation and even reaction with the same degree of certitude that Jacobins felt when they invoked it in a call to reform or even further revolution.19
What I am suggesting is that “America” has existed as a self-contradictory and self-perpetuating symbolic construct right from its formative years, and American novelists, like other citizens of the new Republic, early debated, but did not resolve, the meaning of the “legacy America” (to borrow Thomas Pynchon’s phrase)—what it was, what it meant.20 No matter that recent quantitative studies have documented the wide range of class and economic affiliations of the Republicans. Most Federalists, then, would have simply agreed with William Cobbett (in his reactionary Philadelphia phase) that the Republicans were “butchers, tinkers, broken hucksters, and trans-Atlantic traitors”—and complicated charts and tables would not have altered the picture.21 For men like Cobbett, the Republicans were not simply members of a different party to be analyzed and politically outmaneuvered, they were devilish, dangerous, selfish, unruly, treacherous—in a word, un-American. They were, differently put, as un-American as men like Cobbett seemed when viewed through Republican eyes.
TO DECIDE HOW MUCH the rhetoric of, on the one hand, a Washington or a Cobbett and, on the other, a Mercy Otis Warren or a George Clinton reflected “actual” social conditions is as dubious now as it was then. Suffice to say that differing versions of America informed much early American fiction, and many novels pitted one version against another in a continuing dialogue (if not, more formalistically, a dialectic) on the shape of republicanism and its potentialities and pitfalls. Rarely did these opposing versions of America correspond to the specific political dogma of one party or another, but, more often, they suggested the ramifications of power politics in a nation yet establishing its own political structures and the rules whereby it would operate. Sometimes, in fact, the novels fantasize power without politics—a wish-fulfillment version of entitlement as enticing as Cinderella but fraught with the same contradictions and affirmations of the status quo that pervade all cultural fairy tales. No pain, no gain. But what is particularly intriguing about the political discourse of the early national period is that, in many ways, it is every bit as fantastic, contradictory, and self-conflicted as any discourse in the most rambling and ambivalent picaresque novel—Modern Chivalry, Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive, Tabitha Tenney’s Female Quixotism, or a host of other picaresque novels to be discussed later in this chapter. With amazing grace, picaresque novelists could leap from one construction of reality to its inverse, yet the rhetorical alacrity of the creative writers never exceeded the verbal gymnastics of America’s most respected (and often stodgiest) public citizens.
Writing to the Chevalier de la Luzerne, George Washington enthused over the same America he, more privately and locally, decried: “In short… the foundation of a great empire is laid, and I please myself with a persuasion, that Providence will not leave its work imperfect.” And Franklin, writing also in 1786, to M. Le Veillard, noted that “America never was in higher prosperity,” although he well knew that commodity prices had plummeted (a full 30 percent during the 1780s) and that farm wages had fallen to practically nothing. Similarly, while even Jefferson doubted the stability of the Constitution, he assured his friends in France that, far from approaching bankruptcy, America flourished and “the Confederation is a wonderfully perfect instrument.”22 The raison d’être for these extravagantly optimistic statements was the general audience to which they were addressed. The Founding Fathers spoke in quite a different voice among themselves, castigating the American mob and fearing that they ruled, tenuously at best, a nation on the verge of financial ruin or political chaos. But America was all affluence, egalitarianism, and rising glory when these same men sought to justify to Europeans the Revolution they had recently supported. They also employed a similar optimism and similar clichés of progress when they attempted to ingratiate themselves with the lower electorate, with the “mob,” that some of them, such as Washington, despised, and that even the most magnanimous, such as Jefferson, distrusted.
What is significant for my present purposes, however, is not the schisms in the society, the inequalities in earnings and property, the divisiveness of party politics, and the reevaluation of the role to be played by the gentry within American society but the way in which both Federalist and Anti-Federalist could call upon the same republican rhetoric to justify contradictory actions, assumptions, and visions of the Republic. The invoked mythic “America” had little to do with depressions, inflations, poverty, greed, insurrections, disenchantment, and political disaffection—the whole range of disturbances in the new Republic—but had everything to do with postrevolutionary ideals and an attempt, through language, at least, to realize those right ideals and to hold in check the misguided if not malicious programs of others lest the nation perish. Even in the bitter election of 1800, both Adams and Jefferson could each invoke the same words (common-wealth, virtue, independence, citizenship, equality) to argue opposing visions of a nation.23 By the same divided logic, Americans could hear identical language and understand different intentions. And even more to the point, this awareness of the multivalence of rhetoric, when both emitted and received, strikes me as crucial to our understanding of how early Americans read texts and could, to use but one example, make a best-seller of The History of Constantius and Pulchera, a work so diffuse, episodic, and self-contradictory as to be virtually unreadable today.
Gordon S. Wood, partly attempting to explain the myriad contradictory statements on the new Republic issued in different contexts (private versus public, local versus international) by its leading citizens, has argued that the quintessential feature of late-eighteenth-century discourse was its contextuality. Schooled in classical rhetoric at the colleges, the gentry understood rhetoric not as the communication of definitive truth but as situational discourse aimed at persuading a clearly defined implied reader or auditor of the present worth of a present proposition for that particular audience (not to mention the speaker). Washington’s contradictory verdicts on the Republic, depending upon whether he addressed an American friend in a personal letter or a Continental statesman in some quasi-official capacity, may strike the modern reader as duplicitous at best or even downright hypocritical. But Washington might have said, simply, that he was a gentleman, and he wrote as one. Amateur politicians and writers, the Founding Fathers prized elegance, erudition, and classical balance (note the differences in implied audience, for example, suggested by even the title of Paine’s common Common Sense as opposed to Adams’s pedantic Defense of the Constitutions). As a matter of course, these gentlemen weighed the worth of an audience and tailored their address accordingly.
Consider in this context the first and second parts of Franklin’s autobiography. In one, written for an illegitimate son, all the “errata” stand out and Franklin is revealed as a self-made and self-serving man. In the other, solicited by an admirer for the express purpose of edifying America, Franklin emerges as a pious moralist, almost a prig. The discrepancy between the two “Franklins” has generated sundry literary assessments of the author’s duplicity. But if we ask for the real Ben Franklin in these differing portraits, the figure that emerges is a late-eighteenth-century man in full possession of the rhetorical strategies characteristic of the class into which he was not born but to which he aspired. As Wood notes, “the art of persuasion … was regarded as a necessary mark of a gentleman and an indispensable skill for a statesman, especially for a statesman in a republic. Language, whether spoken or written, was to be deliberately and adroitly used for effect, and since that effect depended on the intellectual leader’s conception of his audience, any perceived change in that audience could alter drastically the style and content of what was said or written.”24 No wonder James Madison observed among his peers at the Convention that “no Constitution would ever have been adopted by the convention if the debates had been public.” Nor did Madison see any contradiction between defending the extraordinary measures the Convention used to ensure the absolute secrecy of its proceedings on the one hand and proclaiming in the newspapers his preference for open government on the other. As Madison argued in an article in the National Gazette in 1791, liberty and republican virtues could only be promoted where there was a “general intercourse of sentiments” facilitated by public and frequent elections, free trade and open commerce, more and better roads, and “particularly a circulation of newspapers through the entire body of the people.”25
Madison’s occasional advocacy of a free press is especially interesting because newspapers, like novels, were perceived by many social authorities to be agents of social dissension. They gave voice to the wrong elements, and then they compounded the crime by speaking badly, by abandoning the proper art of rhetoric in favor of a rougher, more direct, and, the gentry would argue, more incendiary brand of persuasion. Anybody could read a newspaper, so, by the best genteel rules of discourse, one had to be especially careful about what one said there. The newspapers, moreover, stridently advocated their political positions, often in the most alarmist and revolutionary terms, and, equally sinister, more and more people were reading this particularly ungenteel form of discourse. By 1810, in fact, some 22 million readers were being served by 376 newspapers that covered the full political spectrum.26 Neither did American newspapers properly censor the contents of their pages. As the extensive coverage of both the Apthorp/ Morton scandal and the Elizabeth Whitman story should indicate, early American newspapers delighted in the sensational, especially in scandals among the high born. Furthermore, most newspapers opened their columns to any citizen, and, within this new public forum, the private citizen often spoke with a directness and forthrightness rarely seen before in print in America.
Expanding upon Wood’s argument, I would suggest that the passage of the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts during the Adams administration may well have arisen partly because those in power did not know how to interpret the rhetoric they read in the newspapers and did not understand the new rules of the inflammatory vernacular discourse that suddenly seemed ubiquitous in the nation. If Adams, for example, was conscious of the distance between his own public words and his private sentiments, he may well have deemed other writers to be speaking in the same manner. That possibility would be appalling if beneath the virulent rhetoric of the Republican newspapers a far worse brew of barely restrained anarchic impulses seethed. After all, the one previous time when such native rhetoric had flourished there had been a revolution against Britain—a revolution Adams had advocated. What was to prevent it from happening again?
The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, in answering that last question, refined and legalized the profound misgivings of those in authority regarding the unruly discourse of those who had not been educated into a hierarchical system of values and the values of a hierarchical system. Again interpretation (not simply discourse) is at issue, for the Alien and Sedition Acts were vague enough to be effective against the rhetoric of those who challenged the status quo yet need not apply to the equally virulent rhetoric of those who challenged the challengers. Thus one “Burleigh” could write in the New York Commercial Advertiser in 1800 a not untypical bit of anti-Jefferson propoganda: “Do you believe in the strangest of all paradoxes—that a spendthrift, a libertine, or an atheist is qualified to make your laws and govern you and your prosperity?” Because it was directed at Jefferson, this was not considered seditious. The Acts were designed to suppress only disturbing or dangerous rhetoric, and thus blatant censorship was justified for the proponents of the Alien and Sedition Acts by their conviction (a convenient conviction) that the disturbing was dangerous.27
Inspired partly by the virulence of party politics in the 1790s, partly by fear of what was happening in France, and partly by the apparent connection between France’s revolutionary government and the American Republican party (dramatized by the XYZ Affair), the Alien and Sedition Acts mandated the prosecution of anyone suspected of opposing “any measure or measures of the government of the United States.” The law against seditious libel states:
If any person or persons, … shall counsel, advise, or attempt to procure any insurrection, riot, unlawful assembly, or combination, whether such conspiracy, threatening, counsel, advice, or attempt shall have the proposed effect or not, he or they shall be deemed guilty of a high misdemeanor, and on conviction, before any court of the United States having jurisdiction thereof, shall be punished by a fine not exceeding five thousand dollars, and by imprisonment during a term not less than six months nor exceeding five years.… And be it further enacted, That if any person shall write, print, utter or publish, or shall cause or procure to be written, printed, uttered or published, or shall knowingly and willingly assist or aid in writing, printing, uttering or publishing any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or either house of the Congress of the United States, or the President of the United States, with intent to defame the said government, or either house of the said Congress, or the said President, or to bring them, or either of them, into contempt or disrepute; or to excite against them, or either or any of them, the hatred of the good people of the United States … then such person, being thereof convicted before any court of the United States having jurisdiction thereof, shall be punished by a fine not exceeding two thousand dollars, and by imprisonment not exceeding two years.28
The full effect of these statutes (as well as the persecutions which both preceded and followed their actual passage) upon the whole range of discourse—from newspaper columns to novels—is incalculable, but no wonder that many early American novels (especially those novels that criticized aspects of American society) chose to transpose their criticism to a foreign setting.
The Federalists in power employed the gentlemanly art of persuasion to maintain, against the laws’ detractors, that the Alien and Sedition Acts need have no effect whatsoever on the shape of American discourse. These laws, their proponents asserted, did not enforce censorship or even self-censorship, for that, of course, would violate the new Constitution—the very Constitution the Acts were designed to protect. The Acts merely forbad libel, incendiarism, and other evils. They were designed to promote “Truth,” to protect the very foundation of the new nation. And who, the Federalists wondered, would want to speak in favor of lies?
Thomas Jefferson, for one, did. He argued before Congress that even “false, scandalous, and malicious” opinions ought to be allowed to “stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which errors of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”29 Jefferson opposed the Alien and Sedition Acts precisely because they inhibited the free expression of public opinion that, for him, allowed the consensus upon which the new nation had been and had to be based.
Jefferson’s worst fears about the effect of the Alien and Sedition Acts were borne out immediately after their passage, and the end of the century brought a crisis in political discourse. The Federalist Gazette of the United States (Philadelphia), in 1798, coined its revealing (and symptomatic) motto: “He that is not for us, is against us.” And as the Acts attested, he who is against us probably should be prosecuted. In 1798, the leading Republican newspaper in New England, the Independent Chronicle, was symbolically burned at a Fourth of July Federalist rally in Newburyport, Massachusetts, in a ceremony accompanied by appropriately incendiary rhetoric. Federalist editors all over New England decried the treason of their Republican competitors and called for censorship and suitable punishment. The Boston Centinel stated “whatever American is a friend of the present administration of the American government is undoubtedly a true republican, a true Patriot.… Whatever American opposes the Administration is an Anarchist, a Jacobin and a Traitor”—accusations rendered serious by a law that required the imprisonment of anarchists, Jacobins, and traitors.
As is common during times of cultural confusion and repressive political legislation, the denouncing of others’ treachery became increasingly a matter of rhetorical demagoguery. Even silence, the Connecticut Courant argued, could be a sign of the traitor, for when Jacobins were silent, it was “ominous of evil. The murderer listens to see if all is quiet, then he begins. So it is with the Jacobins.” The Courant was also quite willing to point out which newspapers were silently Jacobin, potentially murderous. At much the same level of hysteria, the New York Gazette invited vigilante groups to scour the countryside, looking for writers of seditious libel, for Republican editors, and other similarly suspect citizens, for “your country was never more in jeopardy than at the present moment.” France and Satan had equally conspired, this paper maintained, to get at least a few traitors elected to Congress.30
A deeply polarized society in which the political issues of the time are passionately debated is one thing. A ruling party that enacts laws to punish anyone who advocates policies other than its own is quite another. The secretary of state, Timothy Pickering, regularly read the Republican newspapers, searching for sedition. He recruited like-minded volunteers to carry out this same good work in the far places of the Republic and had them report their findings back to him so that the culprits might be punished. Even the private correspondence of noted Republicans, such as the congressman John Clopton, was scrutinized. Adams, apparently, never initiated any of these legal proceedings, but he personally approved of the trials against his more outspoken political opponents and countenanced the suppression of any political discussion or debate that did not fully accord with his particular vision of the Republic. “Most High God,” President Adams intoned on March 6, 1799, in his National Proclamation of Day of Fasting, “withhold us from unreasonable discontent, from disunion, faction, sedition, and insurrection.” The pompous prose and pose of the prayer are emphasized by the political foresight that prompted it. Soon, during the course of the 1799 presidential campaign, in which Jefferson ran against the incumbent Adams, many editors and writers of the opposing press were imprisoned for their seditious opinions, and others were silenced by the threat of that same punishment. As James Morton Smith has shown, of the major newspapers prosecuted for sedition, only the Bennington, Vermont Gazette continued to publish its pro-Jeffersonian views, undeterred by the fact that its editor languished in a federal prison.
Smith’s Freedom’s Fetters, published in 1956, remains the definitive study of the Alien and Sedition Acts. Its persuasive eloquence is no doubt grounded in the politics of its own time, and even though no overt mention of Senator Joe McCarthy or the Cold War concern for un-American activities intrudes into the text of this meticulous study, nevertheless, the story of America’s first attempt to suppress dissent certainly sets forth a pertinent allegory for those who, in the twentieth century, would labor at the same task. John Adams, Smith reminds the reader, was soundly defeated by Jefferson, who referred to the election of 1800 as a “contest of opinion” decided by the “voice of the nation.” Jefferson affirmed the right of the people “to think freely and to speak and to write what they think.” In a polemical conclusion written very much for the reader of 1956 (and by no means irrelevant to the reader of subsequent times) Smith insisted:
The American experiment in self-government, which was conceived in liberty, was dedicated to the proposition that public discussion is a political duty; that men may disagree on public issues; that the opportunity to speak their minds on supposed grievances affords the best means of deciding on proper remedies; that in the marketplace, or on the battleground, of opinions, the people will be able to distinguish truth from error; and that the sounder principles and measures will prevail. Without free speech and a free press, representative government is not truly representative. Without them, popular government cannot function.31
Smith’s conclusion repeats Jefferson’s and reminds us that the debate on what margins of freedom should be allowed in political discourse has been a central issue in America for some two hundred years. How appropriate, then, that the first attempt to force a resolution of this debate, the Alien and Sedition Acts, became not the envisioned solution to the problem but the single most potent example of what Leon Howard has called America’s “age of contradictions,” a postrevolutionary time when the rhetoric of freedom and republicanism vied with an equally persistent rhetoric of fear and repression.32
Rhetorical and Narrative Strategies in the Picaresque
Because of its loose structure and formalistic latitude, the picaresque could readily address a range of social issues within the new Republic and, more important, could effectively exploit the diverging rhetorics of the early national period, sometimes for a serious purpose but often for comic effect. Even when ostensibly founded on such seemingly apolitical topics as the nature of Providence or of female virtue, the picaresque still explored the diffuseness of the era, often by comically undercutting or otherwise challenging the very basis for any practical or philosophical debate. At other times, and as I briefly noted in regard to Modern Chivalry, early American picaresque novels directly confronted political controversy, sometimes supporting one side, sometimes another, and sometimes undermining or parodying both.
By its very structure—or, more accurately, by its structurelessness—the picaresque allowed the early American novelist numerous fictive possibilities. To begin with, the writer could explore a full range of contradictory impulses within the new nation as well as a whole spectrum of different philosophical premises on topics as diverse as religion or legislative procedures. The picaresque also appealed because it did not require an author to take a “position” on any of the various issues adumbrated within the text. Animadversions, not pronouncements from on high, are basic to the picaresque modus operandi. Furthermore, the picaresque can always disguise any social stand it does take by hiding behind its own comic business. In effect, it can evade both censure and censorship through its indeterminacy, for just what or who is the butt of the joke or the actual object of serious discussion is not fully certain. Another advantage is the very way in which the form necessarily conjoins issues or ideas with the different people who embody them—rich and poor, rural and urban, Northern and Southern, Eastern and Western, male and female, gentleman and pauper, black and white. The novel as tract necessarily verges into the novel as travelogue and vice versa. Finally, the picaresque form in America borrowed from its Spanish antecedents a preoccupation with marginality, with extremes, with the most contradictory aspects of the society. Typically, the picaresque hero (much less frequently, heroine) is an outsider by virtue of special social circumstances (which themselves partly serve to define the society) or because of personal predilections (such as succumbing to the very curiosity and wanderlust that spin the picaresque plot).
The picaresque’s marginality, central to the form since its inception, is crucial to its development in early America. Specifically, the picaresque, like a margin, delimits what is included as well as what is excluded, who is in and who is out. Opposition, moreover, always defines, simultaneously, both the self and the other—the grounds of agreement and contention. But I would also argue that the picaresque novel in early America is also marginal in the sense that it overflows its own ostensible boundaries, brimming with unreconciled contradictions, with simultaneous pictures of different Americas imposed one upon the other, and even with different constructs of the cosmos all concurrently entertained. Its whole is both more and less than the sum of its parts. Indeed, the picaresque always contains a surplus of its own measure, and that excess is its margin of safety.
The picaresque constructs its own politics or polis, a crazy quilt of American attitudes and practices. The loosest subgenre of all, it hovers ever on the edge of a formalistic collapse under the burden of its own inclusiveness. Its tendency is to get as much into the discourse as possible, often concatenating character upon character, scene upon scene, adventure upon adventure, and all in a manner often bewildering to the modern reader. What kind of novel is this anyway? What kind of America is this anyway? What fictive principles unite the various competing versions of the new Republic in the picaresque plot? What stitches it all together is usually no more than a certain satirical thread or tone, a comic energy or movement—but not an Ariadne’s thread that, if carefully followed, can lead the reader out of the picaresque’s fictive labyrinth. On the contrary, it leads the reader in. And the reader who would try too hard to unravel the loose ends will probably end up with only some random scraps and pieces (rather like a new nation without a Constitution, as James Madison might say).
The Madisonian model of rhetorical checks and balances presumes countervailing forces and interests that ultimately lead to a prevailing (if sometimes precarious) stability. The picaresque novel also mobilizes disharmonious ideologies, sometimes by treading some fine line between them, sometimes by carefully weighing each against the other, but most often by careening wildly between extremes, exploring the inherent danger of one polarity only to be propelled into the pitfalls of the other. The end product of this rhetorical and narrative seesaw is not some fictional utopia—the ideal America—but a raw (if energetic) republic, a diverse and divided society in which the inherent contradictions of republican discourse have not been totalized. Again, the picaresque novel is engaged in exploring the margins of society and not in trodding some middle way.
Narrative irresolution, furthermore, is another characteristic traceable to the Spanish origins of the form. As Walter L. Reed has observed in his illuminating study of the evolution of picaresque fiction, the structure of these novels typically entails a series of self-refutations. In Cervantes, for example, one character often unequivocally condemns empty moralizing immediately before launching into a “long moralizing digression of his own.”33 Thus the picaresque continually repeats and repeals itself, so that replication and refutation ultimately become not thesis and antithesis but merely two sides of the same picaresque coin, the tossing of which constitutes the plot. The result is that the picaresque plot typically has no center—rhetorically, logistically, or morally. The action proceeds sequentially with each episode bearing little relation to contiguous episodes except perhaps as comic negation. Even at the novel’s end, the picaro’s ritual homecoming, like Odysseus’s, is not necessarily final, as if the hero’s wanderlust has only temporarily abated. Sooner or later, we suspect, he will be heading out again for the territories with musket, spear, or winnowing fan.
The form’s morality, like its end, is often provisional. When a lesson comes at all, it comes typically at the end, almost tacked on, but since an appended apothegm has usually been compromised or refuted in earlier sequences, there is no good reason to assume that its having last place has any final significance. After all, the book had to conclude somewhere, but its action can usually be extended beyond its end. In the moral universe of the picaresque, the process of exploration continues indefinitely, and morality is usually left just where we found it, sliding along the outreaches of the outrageous.
Examining a specific early American picaresque novel might help to clarify the ways in which self-contradictions are central to the form. James Butler’s Fortune’s Foot-ball; or, The Adventures of Mer cutio (1797), one of the simplest, if not silliest, specimens of the subgenre, vacillates between mutually exclusive possibilities, beginning with the pun in the title. Is Mercurio the sport of fate or finances? Ambiguous fortune motivates many picaresque episodes as an initial quest for cash is obscured by a series of bizarre adventures and subplots that complicate the meaning of a capitalistic allegory of success against odds. Mercurio, for example, begins rich, is deprived of both property and privilege, and then, finally, after being suitably successful at his plebeian adventures, is returned to his original estate. The implication is that one needs capital to be able to exert control over one’s own destiny. Yet only through misfortune (and missed fortune) does Mercurio see the world and star in the plot.
Even more contradictory than the different social visions of Fortune’s Foot-ball are the two theological universes that it inhabits. One is a pietistic, Christocentric cosmos (“Miracles! Miracles all!… all bounteous Providence!” a character proclaims near the tale’s conclusion); the other is a world ruled by chance, by contingency (“But alas! Fortune, that fickle Goddess, had raised her foot with a design to give him another kick”). There is, admittedly, a certain order to that dichotomy. God gets the credit for anything good, while Fortune is blamed for all unhappy events. But since the division is about equal, it becomes virtually impossible to say just who or what really rules in the world of the text or in the text of the world. Butler’s preface, incidentally, differently raises much the same question. “In penning the following memoirs, I had no other object in view than my own amusement,” the author stridently proclaims at the outset. But then he stages a strategic withdrawal to conventional moralism and assures the “critics” that his novel will “propagate sentiments of virtue” and “stimulate youth to a humble resignation to the dispensations of providence.”34 Do we here have amoral hedonism enlisted in the cause of pious instruction or deferring to it?
It is difficult to answer that last question, just as it is difficult finally to determine what force drives Mercutio (a.k.a. Fortune’s Foot-ball) from London to Venice to Marseilles to San Marino to Constantinople to Moscow and finally back to London again. Nor is there any logic to the manifold misfortunes that befall Mercutio during the course of his wanderings. He either witnesses or endures war, murder, slavery, pirate attacks, storms on both land and sea, and numerous other mishaps natural or man-made. But what is the underlying logic of the more or less senseless sequence of crimes, follies, and disasters that constitute the novel? Is it a commentary on European decadence? Or possibly a critique of American foibles safely translated to a European setting? Or perhaps Butler simply intended an escapist fantasy? But why then the ubiquitous digressions on fortune and Providence? Neither can the novel be read as a kind of bildungsroman. Mercutio apparently learns nothing from his trials, and we as readers learn little about him. Nor is the ending any clearer than the beginning (or the middle either, for that matter). A few characters are married off in the final paragraphs. But these unions seem pro forma and the quickest way to terminate the action, for the weddings neither arise from the intrinsic logic of the plot (it has not any) nor resolve the chaos at the heart of the novel. The narrative simply exhausts itself—and the reader—without ever answering any of the central issues (about humans, about Providence) that it asks.
The connection between the rhetorical structure of even a simple picaresque novel such as Fortune’s Foot-ball and the language of republicanism should be obvious at this point. In each case, the discourse offers a surfeit of signs but a dearth of signification. We are left wondering what all the rhetoric—and all the action—might mean. What is permitted or even encouraged by the counterbalancing but self-negating structures of fictive or nationalistic rhetorics that might be disallowed by a more direct, explicit, or univocal rhetorical strategy? In The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt, with what seems to me an essential insight, connects rhetorical indefiniteness, cosmological dislocation, and picaresque wanderlust to the heated debates over the respective role of individuals and the State in eighteenth-century England and, concomitantly, the beginnings of commodity capitalism (which, of course, paralleled similar economic and ideological developments in the new Republic and undergirded much of the rhetoric of republicanism). Noting the uses to which religion is put in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Watt observes that Crusoe is an “occasional conformist with a vengeance” who assumes or discards his religious professions as “it is economically expedient to do so.” Religion in Robinson Crusoe thereby becomes a social form that fulfills an economic function—for it is economics, after all, that serves as the prime mover of Defoe’s plot and motivates all the activities of the novel’s hero. As Watt notes, “leaving home, improving on the lot one was born to, is a vital feature of the individualist pattern of life” and part of the “dynamic tendency of capitalism itself, whose aim is never merely to maintain the status quo but to transform it incessantly.”35
Change, difference, possibility, mobility, and restlessness or flux are crucial in that the status quo, of course, cannot in and of itself generate commodity consumption. Republican virtues such as commonwealth and citizenship may make for a harmonious society, but they also make for a sluggish economy and a dull plot. The picaresque form, like the Republic’s joint attention to individual profit and social order, spurs the desire for new experiences, new objects, new symbols of status and success. More than any other form, the picaresque embodies this driving yearning for something more endemic to the capitalist spirit. The frenetic attention to fashion (as opposed to culture) means that the market continually renders its own products obsolete, or, to quote Georg Lukács, “every organic development vanishes and in its place steps a directionless hither-thither, an empty but loud dilettantism.”36
And Fortune’s Foot-ball does bounce merrily along with a “directionless hither-thither” perfectly predicted by its title. Thus the novel can switch from ersatz feminism (Leonora lamenting that “arbitrary custom” restricts her freedom even as she invites Mercutio to join her for the night) to deferred sex in the Sternean typographical mode (“She requested that he would accompany her into the house—he complied—what man could have refused?—Their love became reciprocal—mutual caresses succeeded the most unequivocal protestations of eternal fidelity, and*****************************”) to postcoital Puritan musings (“Like all the descendants of Adam, [Mercutio] had a spark of that frailty, which, in those recesses of reason when the soul is left unguarded, and open to the hostile attacks of misfortune, expels both religion and philosophy”) and all in the same passage.37
At the end of his lust (the breaks in the text) and wanderlust (the substance of it), Mercutio returns to England to settle into virtuous married life with one Isabella. The third object of his amorous desires (and the only one to survive the various catastrophes that constitute the plot), Isabella is not really distinguishable from her predecessors, Lucinda, whom Mercutio wooed against the opposition of her aristocratic parents, or Leonora, who wooed Mercutio without the consent of her aristocratic parents. But then again, as Watt also notes (and borrowing here from Max Weber), romance (whether lust or love) poses a serious threat “to an individual’s rational pursuit of economic ends, and it has therefore … been placed under particularly strong controls in the ideology of industrial capitalism.”38 Mercutio’s three equivalent ladies reduce love to an exchange value, to a consumable picaresque commodity, whereas only one burning passion might have elevated love to the end and driving purpose of the novel. Mercutio’s reinstatement into a life of married “ease and affluence” marks, then, not the triumph of passion or even the claims of propriety but only the cessation (and perhaps only temporarily) of his picaresque adventures. It is not even clear whether the ending can better be read as Paradise Regained or Paradise Lost.
Yet it should now be clearer why Providence (like sexuality) has only a sporadic role to play in this picaresque plot and why Mercutio’s travels can never be a Pilgrim’s Progress, The Christian ideal implicit in that last title too overtly challenges a different paradigm of progress: Young man makes good. Material good, it must be emphasized. In terms of republican iconography, the picaresque gives us Benjamin Franklin turning his two loaves of bread into a small fortune and then turning that success into narrative, into a celebrated and celebrating autobiography. It is a parable of personal and capital gain within a new republic. Like Franklin, Butler brings in Providence only when the adventures threaten to become too unseemly, while the credit for all that is seemly can be (directly) the protagonist’s and (indirectly) God’s.
The picaro’s journey is quintessentially an earthly journey, and, in the American form, one firmly rooted in earthly values. Yet those stark values are disguised by the discursive form of the novel just as they were modified in the society by its jingoistic rhetorics. Gaining a fortune is rarely the explicit goal of the picaresque novel, any more than the telling phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of property” could be left in the final version of the Declaration of Independence. In both the novel and the society, the ultimate conflicts of class and wealth are translated into self-enhancing searches for independence, adventure, opportunity, and individualism. Commodity capitalism is hidden beneath a rhetoric of national expansion and prosperity for all. Just as the sentimental novel’s obsession with virtue (for which read virginity) cloaks deeper corollaries such as the legal and economic subjugation of women, so too does the picaresque disguise its material imperatives behind tempering tales of no-account and highly idiosyncratic adventurers.
Watt and Lukács tend to view the picaresque as mostly a literary analogue to the pathological condition of capitalistic alienation. In both the literary and the social form, they suggest, a dominant acquisitiveness perverts natural relationships and subordinates possible happiness to necessarily unsatisfiable desire. Yet that critique (a twentieth-century retrospective diagnosis of the high cost of rampant capitalism) curiously mirrors the rhetoric of the aristocratic Federalists, who—at the other end of the nineteenth century’s plunge into industrial capitalism and from the point of view of the socially reactionary, not the socially radical—scorned the bourgeois preoccupation with property and denounced the novel as the source and symbol for the disruptive materialistic desires of the lower orders. As suggested earlier, there was something dubiously self-serving in a privileged class denouncing the acquisitive aspirations of the unprivileged. The self-interest inherent in an eighteenth-century elite’s protests against commodity consumption makes more contemporary denunciations of the bourgeoisie vaguely unsettling too. In any case, the picaresque novel, whether it sensed this dilemma or not, still managed to have things, characteristically, both ways: The objective of rising in the world ambivalently presented as capitalistic restlessness becomes both the pattern of the protagonist’s success and the point of the novel’s cultural critique.
Even the Adventures of Jonathan Corncob, Loyal American Refugee, one of the few early American picaresque novels to follow the earlier Spanish model and present the picaro as a rogue, remains calculatingly uncommitted to the justice of what Jonathan wants or of what he gets. Published anonymously in London in 1787, the novel was purportedly written by a Loyalist American who, after the Revolution, set up permanent residence in England. The novelist, however, well may have been an enterprising Englishman attempting to capitalize on interest in the New World by pretending to be both a refugee and a Loyalist. But the larger point, as one critic has noted, is not the nationality of Jonathan’s creator but the locus of Jonathan’s own allegiance. His loyalty “is to himself rather than to any country or institution.”39 After bundling with a nice Presbyterian girl improbably named Desire Slawbunk, Jonathan presently embarks on a life of picaresque adventures to avoid acknowledging paternity and entering marriage. Like Mercutio, this character then endures a series of trials ranging from encounters with pirates to bouts with venereal disease (the aftermath of what he thought was the seduction of another “innocent” young woman). In general and as the disease attests, Jonathan is mostly the victim of his own dubious and unexamined desires, so while he comments cynically on the folly of Americans, the reader is left to wonder if the folly in the novel is not mostly the narrator’s own:
Obliged to fly my country for the first little mistake I ever made in bundling; flogged by the first captain of the Navy I ever saw; and p-xed by the first woman I ever intended to make my wife: surely, said I, no man was ever so ill-treated by his evil genius as I am. I have been beat at Barbados; almost choked with the reed end of a clarinet; blown naked out of bed in a hurricane; p-ssed upon by the guard of a prisonship; and to crown all, here I am with my legs and wings pinned down like a trussed pullet’s.40
Trussed—and yet writing still! Can this narrator be trusted at all? The matter is as much in doubt at the novel’s end as it was at its beginning.
Jonathan’s misadventures evince another aspect of the early American picaresque, its global episodism. Not content to wander New England, the republican picaros regularly take themselves and their text “elsewhere”—as if America were too homely and too new to accommodate adventure. S.S.B.K. Wood’s Ferdinand and Elmira: A Russian Story (1804) moves from Russia to Poland to Siberia to England with various side journeys in between. Adventures of Alonso (1775), by Thomas Atwood Digges, traverses the Western world, from Lisbon to Algeria to Rio to the Isthmus of Panama. Even those few picaresque novels set in America usually manage to work in an ocean voyage or two. The best-selling The History of Constantius and Pulchera, while ostensibly occurring during the Revolutionary War, incorporates numerous transatlantic crossings, during one of which Pulchera (disguised as Lieutenant Valorus) is shipwrecked on a deserted island and is saved from becoming dinner for her fellow survivors only by the timely arrival of a bear. Or in The Algerine Captive, Royall Tyler far more dexterously interweaves Updike Underhil’s picaresque adventures in America with his captivity in northern Africa to have each setting provide a mirror for the other. And although Modern Chivalry remains mostly homebound, Teague O’Regan still makes a brief excursion to France.
Situating the fiction on foreign ground was, as noted, safer for the author than keeping it rigorously at home. But that displacement could have artistic advantages as well. Umberto Eco has argued that a judicious blending of the foreign and the familiar may well be a necessary feature of any highly exotic fiction. Referring specifically to Ian Fleming and the James Bond stories, Eco notes that one reason for the reader’s engagement with all the preposterous, sensationalized, and melodramatic events of such highly stylized and implausible plots is that something in the novel is always portrayed as very real. Using “the technique of the aimless glance,” Fleming will occasionally describe in detail not some wild or grotesque event but an utterly commonplace character or object.41 And this note of borrowed realism then casts its aura over the rest of the text. In just that same fashion, the author (the painter William Williams) of Mr. Penrose: The Journal of Penrose, Seaman (published in 1815) takes pains to describe in minute detail the flora and fauna of Nicaragua, where Llewellyn Penrose is shipwrecked, before setting forth the standard picaresque sequence of life-threatening adventures such as one character hunting killer whales in a bark canoe and with only a small harpoon for a weapon.42
Like the sentimental novel, which allowed a woman to vicariously survey her marital options within the “comfort of her own home” (as the advertisements used to say), the picaresque did provide a glimpse into a world inaccessible to the typical early American reader. A good citizen of Hatboro, Pennsylvania, for example, who borrowed The History of Constantius and Pulchera from the local lending library in 1799, not only read one of the best-sellers of the generation, not only read about the Revolutionary War now almost a generation in the past, not only read of the brave Pulchera disguised as a still braver young soldier to fight in the war, but also gained all sorts of esoteric information about life in Europe, about life aboard ship, about life at every level of American society. Sometimes given only cursory attention but sometimes described in lavish and loving detail, exotic events were “realized” for the early American reader. No wonder that many picaresque novels were popular in the new Republic. They represented a unique chance for average Americans, citizens in a country still marginal to the world of Western civilization, to encounter, at least imaginatively, that larger world.
The episodic structure of the picaresque particularly facilitated instruction, for it encouraged a novel to be encyclopedic, to provide a virtual catalogue of strange costumes and customs that the reader would not be likely to encounter firsthand. As Janice A. Radway has noted, a middle-class or lower-middle-class woman today, whose life (outside of the books she reads) may be largely regulated by repetitive routines of house and child care, well might appreciate being taken, imaginatively, into a larger would.43 But what Emily Dickinson called the “frigate” possibilities of imaginative literature would have been far greater for earlier readers simply because there was, in 1790, no mass media that could shrink the vast world to the small dimensions of a television screen and render it all one global village. As ludicrous and implausible as picaresque plots seem to modern readers, these plots still performed an important educative function for their first readers while providing a certain psychological release. Escapism is not necessarily evil when one’s life is confined, by economics or gender, to some provincial hamlet or to the even more restrictive world of home and hearth—worlds from which most elite readers who deride escapist literature have already escaped.
In this respect, the picaresque novel was closely related to the nonfictional travel narrative, one of the most popular literary forms in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Typically written by Americans exploring the nation’s backcountry or, more often, by Europeans surveying an exotic new land, these travels-through-America books were widely read in both America and Europe. But the early American picaresque novel turned the tables in a sense and often showed Americans surviving against innumerable difficulties posed by strange European customs such as a rigorous class system (villains in American picaresque novels are often European noblemen) or pirates or other nonindigenous varieties of treachery. Whether nationalistic allegories of the pitfalls of Europe’s “higher” civilization or simply encyclopedic accounts of life in distant places (places from which many American families had recently emigrated), the picaresque was a kind of travel book that allowed the reader to experience, at least vicariously, places far away. The publishers, incidentally, saw it in that light, too. In two separate editions of The History of Constantius and Pulchera (one published in 1796 and one in 1797) bookseller’s advertisements (printed at the back of each book) included titles such as Saunder’s Journal, Travels, and Sufferings and Jedidiah Morse’s textbook Elements of Geography,44 In short, travel writing extended from the picaresque and the “travel liars” (Percy G. Adams’s term for the most fantastic of the travel books) to geography textbooks, and those two poles are, appropriately, both in opposition to one another and conjoined by that opposition.45
There is another important connection between the picaresque and ostensibly nonfictional forms of travel writing. The former borrows from the latter a crucial structuring device—the one device that gives some unity or cohesion to the otherwise diffuse picaresque form. Constraining the fictive anarchy of the picaresque is the picaresque hero, who is both the object of the various vicissitudes that make up the plot and the subject through whom that plot is recorded. In that second role, the protagonist necessarily imposes his own unique language, his own interpretive design, upon all he sees and sets down. Even when the events are filtered through an omniscient and aloof narrator, the locus of the events remains the central character, whose point of view still shapes those events. For example, in Charles Sargent’s The Life of Alexander Smith (1819), the story of the mutiny on the Bounty is told by one of the mutineers, who assumes the role of “captain” on the Island of Pitcairn. Clearly, we would have a different story had the narrative centered on Captain Bligh. Or in a novel as diffuse as Ferdinand and Elmira, all that supplies any sense at all to the bewildering plot is the much simpler tale of thwarted love embodied in and acted out by the eponymous lovers, and around that one misadventure all the others are (however loosely) clustered.
Yet some picaresque novels exploit an inherent contradiction in travel narratives by emphasizing how the traveler/hero must be both part of and apart from what he surveys. He is both witness and judge, and each role compromises the other. The judge necessarily reveals his own personal and social prejudices, which, grounded in his own culture, usually make him an unsatisfactory interpreter of strange and foreign ways. We often sense that he would have done better by them and by himself had he remained safely at home. The witness, in contrast, seems mostly a compiler of exotica, a victim of his own motiveless curiosity and driven to no particular end. When these two roles are effectively combined—as in The Algerine Captive, Modern Chivalry, Mr. Penrose, and, to a lesser extent, Elkanah Watson’s A Tour of Holland (1790), or Adventures of Jonathan Corncob, the result can be a narrative duality that gives depth (and ambivalence) to the novel’s vision.46
Politically, narrative dualism also prevents these picaresque novels from being hopelessly provincial. Thus Mr. Penrose is far less the bourgeois burger adrift in the wilderness than is his counterpart, Robinson Crusoe, mostly because Penrose comes to appreciate and even emulate the Indians and the blacks he encounters. For all his lamentations about wishing to see his native country before he dies, Penrose regularly betrays his English imperialistic propensities by siding with the Native Americans. He marries an Indian who dies bearing his child; then he remarries another Native American. The dynamic in these relationships is very different from Crusoe’s managing his native manservant, Friday, as is also suggested by the name Penrose gives his daughter. “America,” a mixture of New World and Old, Native American and Englishman, is a different symbol of the polis from the maternal Columbia with her classical toga and impeccably Caucasian ancestry. In other ways, too, Penrose increasingly overcomes the distance between observer and observed, as is evident in an exchange he has, late in the novel, with Quammino, a brutalized slave who has escaped to the Moskito Coast where he finds safety with Penrose and his friends. In one of their frequent conversations, Penrose asks the old man if he has been converted to Christianity:
“What good would that have done to me?” said he. “Would it have made White men love me better? No! No! Dont they Curse and Dam each other, fight, cheat and kill one the other? Black men cannot do any thing Worse than what White men do.… How can they expect Blacks to be good and No Christians when they who say they are Christians Are worse than we who know not the books of God as they do?”
The “savage’s” discomfiting weighing of the best that civilization has to offer is not disputed in the book. “All this time I sat silently puffing,” Penrose responds, “for I had Little to answer in behalf of my own colour, but told him that I believed him a much better man than many Thousands who call’d themselves Christians.”47
As Mr. Penrose illustrates, in the best picaresque novels, the hero undergoes some change from the experiences he recounts. Yet even that formulation asserts too much of an opposition between the perceiver and the perceived, the teller and the tale. For ultimately these picaresque novels are about interpretation—about how experience is transformed into narrative. Nor can that experience be judged by standards exterior to it. We have no other world than the one the picaro (or the narrator of the picaresque tale) traverses and relates. There is no other America, for example, to juxtapose against the America of Captain Farrago and his manservant, Teague O’Regan. The “facts” of the picaresque world, contradictory as they usually are, still constitute that world, and the picaro ultimately is the picaresque world he describes. In this way, the protagonist of the early American picaresque becomes both a representative man and a commentator on the most diverse, contradictory, obscure, and idiosyncratic elements in the Republic.
In reading the text of different marginal lives, the picaresque hero also reads himself. That process is then carried one step further by the reader, who is encouraged, paradoxically, to judge and identify with the picaro and the various characters and events the picaro encounters and describes. Both readings, moreover, can ran both ways. While some early American picaresque novels perpetuate—sometimes in an extreme form—the restlessness and alienation of commodity capitalism, or, more locally, the aspirations of a new Republic based on free enterprise, others seem to offer a critique of the very aimlessness they describe. It is as if the text both sanctions the society in which it is grounded and opposes it. As I will show, in The Algerine Captive, Underhill’s captivity in Algeria makes him realize that, despite America’s manifest faults (and these have been fully explored in volume ι of the novel), “there’s no place like home.” But the novel does not end with a finally realized affirmation of the status quo, and the patriot, in several senses, come home again. On the contrary, the political and social problems encountered in the first half of the novel remain for the returning captive. Even more to the point, the very condition of his captivity has made Underhill understand far more trenchantly the appalling nature of slavery, the manner in which it threatens to destroy America, and the determination with which it must be opposed. For Underhill, a Constitution that condones slavery constitutes the nation against itself; owner against enslaved; slaveholder against abolitionist; the institution of slavery opposed to the cherished principles of liberty in what should be “the freest country in the universe.”48 The Constitutional compromise on slavery was itself un-American and must be undone. “By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall,” and unless the impossible contradiction of slaves in a free society can be resolved peacefully, the war out of which the nation was forged remains to be fought again. The novel that seemed to promise escapist adventures in foreign climes has itself escaped from those limitations and even more than its protagonist has come home again, and it comes home with a vengeance, largely through the double perspective with which the alien/traveler/expatriot/patriot reflects back upon America itself.
Lucien Goldman, in Towards a Sociology of the Novel, disputes the idea that the novel is predominantly a socially conservative literary genre. Although bestsellers (indeed, the novel itself) are basically a product of bourgeois culture, certain writers have still used the form to oppose the dominant culture. As Goldman argues: “A number of individuals who are essentially problematic in so far as their thinking and behavior remain dominated by qualitative values” have survived in society, “even though they are unable to extract themselves entirely from the existence of the degrading mediation whose action permeates the whole of the social structure. These individuals include, above all, the creators, writers, artists, philosophers, theologians, men of action, etc., whose thought and behavior are governed by the quality of their work even though they cannot escape entirely from the action of the market and from the welcome extended them by the reified society.”49 As noted in chapter 2, none of the market conditions of advanced capitalism had been fully worked out in the new Republic, but, as also noted, after the Revolution, Americans increasingly concerned themselves with materialistic considerations (partly, it must be added, because a promised prosperity eluded so many). And if the duplicitous picaresque form was particularly fitted to that divided social context in that it could both condemn the materialistic propensities of the bourgeoisie while deriding the older aristocratic version of that same material compulsion, it also allowed its practitioners to play precisely Goldman’s “problematic” role and to trouble the mainstreams (either Federalist or Republican) with different, discordant, marginal thought. Although admittedly no novelist before 1820 wrote with Thomas Paine’s vehemence, the rights of man—particularly the solitary wandering man—were not foreign to their consideration.
Perhaps no novel better exemplifies the double perspective of the picaresque and its reliance on contradictory rhetorical strategies than does Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry. Published sporadically over nearly a quarter of a century, from 1792 to 1815, the book is a sprawling, disconnected, and almost endless work. The narrative, too, is disjunctive, divided, split so evenly between Captain Farrago and his not-so-trusty servant Teague O’Regan that much critical debate has centered precisely on the question of just who is the real protagonist. Farrago embodies the ostensible moral center of the book or is at least most given to making moral pronouncements, but O’Regan provides most of the adventures which keep the novel going. Between the two of them they just about constitute one duplicitous picaresque character conjoining high life and low, the ego and the id, the different agendas abroad in the land through which they jointly wander. This joint venture in divided interests and conjoined duplicity has its ancestry partly in another elemental pair, and that debt is both acknowledged and compounded in the novel itself:
You may have my bog-trotter.… I am pretty well tired of bothering myself with him.… I have had as much trouble on my hands with him as Don Quixotte [sic] had with Sancho Panza; and I cannot but acknowledge as some say, that I have resembled Don Quixotte myself, at least in having such a bog-trotter after me.… But I hope I shall not be considered as resembling that Spaniard in taking a windmill for a giant; a common stone for a magnet that can attract, or transmute metals. It is you that are the Don Quixottes in this respect, madcaps, and some of you from the madcap settlement … tossing up your caps at every turn, for a new constitution; not considering that when a thing gets in the way of changing, it will never stop until it gets to the end of liberty, and reaches despotism, which is the bourne from whence no traveller returns. (p. 783)
Characteristically, the Captain slides from one form of address to another, and a self-reflexive observation on his own literary analogues and ancestry soon gives way to his chief political program of opposing all change. Thus, he fancies, is the role of Don Quixote transformed from his own noble endeavor, and transmuted to his madcap auditors, a fancy worthy of the Don at his maddest. They are no more prepared than Teague, no more than he, to mend their ways.
The pairing of two slippery polarized protagonists is also grounded in the very nature and history of the picaresque. In the earliest forms, the picaro is poor, frequently a servant, often a foundling, always a sharper. He swindles and connives in order to survive in a society that is itself corrupt and corrupting. The reader is encouraged to sympathize with the prankster protagonist. We admire him and his amoral ingenuity as opposed to his privileged antagonists and the immoral legalities whereby they hope to keep him in his place. In short, the picaresque is radically populist by design. It was suited to a nation that at least preached democratic principles and, in theory, sympathized with the aspirations of its Teague O’Regans. But while the picaresque formalistically favors the underprivileged, it also attests that the uneducated can be gulled and the unwary abused. It demonstrates that the underdog is often underhanded. What is condemned in one manner of speaking is required in another. As the previous quotation amply illustrates, the novel, in the guise of Captain Farrago, is ever ready to warn the unruly and unreasoning mob of the danger into which it is about to rush. Modern Chivalry, thus viewed, is a sustained critique of some of the most anarchic propensities in American democracy.
The novel is also a sustained critique of the persistent critiquer. In the passage just quoted, the Captain goes on to predict for at least a few of his listeners “the guillotine, before a fortnight.… This happened in the French revolution, and it will happen with you if you give way to your reveries” (p. 784). His reference to the French Revolution, the bugaboo that immediately silenced most early American political reformers, is his real argument. Opposing reform, the captain regularly proffers a different solution to the political questions of the day. His advice is always simple: accept, be quiet, let those wiser wisely rule. Again and again, he denounces what he perceives he has encountered—backwoods ignorance, pretentious American pseudointellectualism, the hypocrisy of religion, the pitfalls of sentimentality—and again and again his words label him as no better than (indeed, as hardly distinguishable from) the subjects of his discourse.
His most common subject and auditor is his servant, O’Regan, who, to run the equation backward, is himself no better than the Captain. O’Regan is a reductio ad absurdum of the American dream and of the democratic ideal that any man—even an illiterate immigrant—can succeed in the New World. O’Regan is unscrupulous but ambitious, uneducated but convinced that his lack of education does not handicap him in the pursuit of success. More to the point, those whom Farrago and O’Regan meet during the course of their wanderings almost always share the servant’s point of view and are ready to help him rise in the world. O’Regan is nearly elected to the legislature, is almost inaugurated into the American Philosophical Society, is just about ordained a Presbyterian minister, and even comes close to being named chief of the Kickapoo. He is prevented from achieving these distinctions only by the timely intervention of Farrago, who, as a proponent of order and rationality, regards the sundry honors showered on his servant as so many gross miscarriages of justice that a man of honor must set right. But Brackenridge also hints that Farrago may be motivated by unacknowledged jealousy as well as by the pragmatic desire to retain the services of O’Regan. The Captain’s aristocratic convictions conveniently serve his mundane needs.
With such unresolved ambiguities Brackenridge’s plot thickens and his meaning expands. O’Regan fails too frequently to be the traditional picaro who calls into question the structure of his society. Mostly, the program of Captain Farrago prevails, and the book has often been read as authenticating the elitist standards to which he and his class adhere. That reading, however, simplifies all that is subtle in Modern Chivalry. Briefly, although Captain Farrago is often partly right, he is also frequently sententious, generally priggish, and invariably dull. At fifty-three, a bachelor with little experience in life, he has set out to discover the world. But his new education merely confirms his old prejudices. In fact, for eight hundred pages, he views his fellow citizens with a mechanical misanthropy and never considers the possibility that an illiterate man might be wise or a poor man prudent. His attitude toward others is unremittingly patronizing. Lawmakers in Philadelphia, he would insist, have only the best interests of the populace at heart, even though that populace consists mostly of “uppity” provincials who do not even merit their betters’ concern. His views are too simplistic, too “reactionary” to be taken seriously.
Furthermore, as Robert Hemenway and Emory Elliott have each differently demonstrated, Farrago’s practice continually compromises his theory.50 The reason and justice whereby he thinks he lives should, he claims, rule all men. Yet his reason and justice never carry the day, never even carry him to triumph in his minor disputes with O’Regan. Again and again we see Farrago expounding to citizens and servant, who remain unswayed by his rational pronouncements. Then, to achieve his ends, the Captain must play the confidence man himself in order to prevent his man from conning the public. We see him resorting to ad hominem arguments, hysterical rhetoric, appeals to fear, vanity, and small-mindedness. Or, as when O’Regan is about to be sent to Congress, Farrago takes him aside to twist the real issues through an exercise in dubious logic that perfectly exemplifies the Captain’s self-serving agenda:
When a man becomes a member of a public body, he is like a raccoon, or other beast that climbs up the fork of a tree; the boys pushing at him with pitch-forks, or throwing stones, or shooting at him with an arrow, the dogs barking in the mean time.… They will have you in the newspapers, and ridicule you as a perfect beast. There is what they call the caricature; that is, representing you with a dog’s head, or a cat’s claw.… I would not for a thousand guineas, though I have not the half of it to spare, that the breed of O’Regans should come to this; bringing on them a worse stain than stealing sheep; to which they are addicted. You have nothing but your character, Teague, in a new country to depend upon. Let it never be said, that you quitted an honest livelihood, the taking care of my horse, to follow the new fangled whims of the time, and to be a statesman. (P. 17)
It works. The servant will keep his place, so the master can also retain his. But the master achieves his ends through the traditional means of the picaro, of the powerless, by using his wits. Here, as elsewhere, a specious argument does the trick; irrationality prevails, even in the name of reason.
As Claude M. Newlin demonstrated in his pioneering 1932 critical biography of Brackenridge (still the best discussion of that author’s political vision), the novelist’s own sentiments were deeply divided, and his novel, not surprisingly, dramatized the divisions in his political thinking as well as the political divisions in western Pennsylvania during the 1790s that culminated in the infamous 1794 Whiskey Rebellion.51 I would somewhat extend that observation and argue that the relationship between the political life, the nonfiction political histories, and the political fiction of Hugh Henry Brackenridge effectively capsulizes the various tensions I have discussed in this chapter and gives us a more complicated version of history as a contradictory discourse than does even the novel.
Brackenridge himself, a curious combination of elitist and plebeian, of Princeton-educated classicist and backwoods lawyer, cut quite an unlikely figure in the new Republic. While he was writing a detailed study of Blackstone’s commentaries applicable to American jurisprudence, he frequently appeared in court rumpled and dirty, his hair unkempt, without socks, and, more than once, without shoes. On one occasion, fearing to get his only suit wet in a rainstorm, he rode naked through the countryside, for “the storm, you know, would spoil the clothes, but it couldn’t spoil me.”52 His political positions evolved along the fissiparous pattern of divisive party politics described in the first part of this chapter. More specifically, as a young legislator in Pennsylvania, he championed Federalism or at least the adoption of the new Constitution. Yet he later vehemently broke away from the Federalists and opposed many of the economic measures undertaken by Alexander Hamilton as Washington’s head of the Treasury, particularly Hamilton’s land taxes, his excise tax on whiskey, and his willingness to have the government exchange bonds on land at their face value—a practice that encouraged speculators to purchase land at rock-bottom prices from poverty-stricken farmers on the frontier and then to sell it back to the government for its original value. Some of the most cutting satirical denunciations in Modern Chivalry are reserved for rich land speculators who, Brackenridge believed, exploited the penury of others and profited at the expense of the whole nation.
A Federalist during the Confederation period, a Jeffersonian and Anti-Federalist in the subsequent time, a sympathizer with the French, and then, after 1797 (and what he saw as the failure of republicanism in France), an enemy of the ongoing French Revolution, Brackenridge never felt bound by any party loyalty to maintain one position. More important, he understood politics not as principle or belief in action but as rhetoric in action, and in action mostly as speech. Throughout his career he was known—to his admirers and his enemies—as a great orator and, like both Farrago and O’Regan, delighted in the power of verbal persuasion, in his ability to talk himself into and out of almost any situation.
That power was fully tested during the Whiskey Rebellion, in which Brackenridge played a major role not as insurgent or counterinsurgent but merely as available spokesperson. His voice was at the service of both sides, and consequently both sides had considerable suspicions about where that voice came from. To explain his role in the rebellion and to exonerate himself, Brackenridge published, in 1795, Incidents of the Insurrection in the Western Parts of Pennsylvania, in the Year 1794. It is a work of some 350 pages in which Brackenridge both recounts his own role at the center of the rebellion but also disclaims any real role in that same rebellion. This curious book raises at least as many questions as it answers. To whom does Brackenridge wish to exonerate himself, the populace or the government? That matter remains as unresolved at the end as at the beginning. But what does emerge is a wily and slippery narrator, an author whose history of the Whiskey Rebellion is as much a fiction as his fictionalized version of the same rebellion in volume 4 of Modern Chivalry. Like Farrago in the novel, Brackenridge in the history attempts to counsel moderation to each side primarily by trying to persuade each camp that he is their friend and spokesperson while also convincing them that a pitched battle against the other side would result in unacceptable loss and bloodshed. An example from his account reveals the retrospective historian as participant-narrator and masterful rhetorician. In this scene (and Brackenridge’s method in the history as in Modern Chivalry is always scenic, dramatic), the insurgents are determined to attack Pittsburgh, and Brackenridge’s design is to dissuade them from their plan:
INSURGENT: “Are we to take the garrison?”
BRACKENRIDGE: “We are.”
INSURGENT: “Can we take it?”
BRACKENRIDGE: “ No doubt of it.”
INSURGENT: “At a great loss?”
BRACKENRIDGE: “Not at all; not above a thousand killed and five hundred mortally wounded.”
As he intended, the insurgents decided to march through Pittsburgh as an orderly army instead of attempting to sack the city.53
Or on another occasion Brackenridge attempted to quell threatened revolutionary violence by enacting a little satire at the expense of Washington and Hamilton and the federal government. His impromptu dialogue between General Knox and Cornplanter, however, did not amuse the crowd, so Brackenridge returned to the federal representatives to attempt to persuade them not to attack the rebels as he had, immediately before, attempted to dissuade the rebels from attacking the government officials. It was a slippery business and one that almost ended in Brackenridge’s conviction for treason. Hamilton became convinced that Brackenridge had been the chief fomenter of the Whiskey Rebellion, and his dramatization of Cornplanter as well as President Washington was taken as proof of his revolutionary propensities. Whereupon Brackenridge persuaded Hamilton that the satire had had an entirely different purpose and that Cornplanter, not the Father of the Nation, had been the butt of all the jokes. “Mr. Brackenridge,” Hamilton apologized, “your conduct has been horribly misrepresented.” That exoneration prompted General Neville, one of the author’s political enemies, to proclaim Brackenridge “the most artfull fellow that ever was on God Almighty’s earth; he has put his finger in Bradford’s eye, in Yates’ eye, and now he has put his finger in Hamilton’s eye too.”54
Even after the failure of the rebellion and despite concerted Federalist opposition, Brackenridge continued his Republicanism, still attempting to organize the farmers and mechanics against the Federalist leadership. But his aristocratic education, his ambiguous role in the earlier insurrection, and the people’s general reading of the man himself rendered his motives suspect. The unprivileged distrusted the Princeton graduate’s advocacy of their cause, and in a letter to the Pittsburgh Gazette on October 5, 1799, one who signed himself “A Real Farmer” even suggested that “old Hugh himself” had been up to his old tricks again, pretending to be different yeomen or mechanics and writing letters to local newspapers in support of himself under various plebeian pseudonyms, actively putting himself forward as a candidate for the Assembly while neglecting, in these specious pronouncements on his own behalf, to inform the public that, during his earlier term as a legislator, he had voted against precisely the egalitarian legislation that he had “promised… to effect.”55
The position of the man is hard to pin down in his account of the Incidents of the Insurrection—a purportedly nonfictional account and ostensibly aimed at his own exoneration—and is equally ambiguous in his political career, but the author of Modern Chivalry vanishes almost entirely behind a smoke screen of various contradictory asserted intentions and shifting narrative perspectives. By James Kelleher’s count, “the author-narrator’s descriptions of the reasons for writing the book recur like a motif fifty-three times. On twenty-two of these occasions he confesses a serious moral intention. Significantly less often he denies in a mock-serious tone that the book is a satire (five times); calls it an exercise in style only (seven times), a burlesque (once), an adventure narrative (four times), pure nonsense (five times), playful satire (once) and history-memoir-biography (eight times).”56 In effect, the narrative, like the hero, is a farrago, a hodgepodge, an adventure in discourse on a whole range of political opinions regarding the operations of democracy and the failures and the triumphs of the new Republic, and all bound up in one continuous, shape-shifting saga.57
Yet the shifting shapes of the fiction and the narrative slipperiness that facilitates those slides do, finally, have a certain political logic:
Why should I undervalue democracy; or be thought to cast a slur upon it; I that am a democrat myself.… Nor is it democracy, that I have meant to expose; or reprehend, in any thing that I have said; but the errors of it: those excesses which lead to its overthrow. These excesses have shown themselves in all democratic governments; whence it is that a simple democracy has never been able to exist long. An experiment is now made in a new world, and upon better principles; that of representation and a more perfect separation, and near equipoise of the legislative, judicial, and executive powers. But the balance of the powers, is not easily preserved. The natural tendency is to one scale. The demagogue is the first great destroyer of the constitution by deceiving the people. He is no democrat that deceives the people. He is an aristocrat. (P. 507; italics in the original)
If these words of Captain Farrago sound remarkably like Madison, it is by no means purely coincidental. Brackenridge and Madison were schoolmates at Princeton, were close friends, and were two of the leaders of Princeton’s Whig Club. What this passage from Modern Chivalry points up is the contradictory views of human nature implicit in both the picaresque novel and in the republican paradigm. Humans are innately good and therefore deserve to govern themselves; humans are innately stupid, petty, corruptible, and thus require a system of checks and balances lest democracy run toward anarchy at the one extreme or tyranny at the other. Checking the balances and straddling the oppositions, the picaresque, and Modern Chivalry in particular, charts out the margins of political discourse in the new nation.58
The Female Picaresque
A woman on horseback, presents her form to advantage; but much more at the spinning wheel.
—Modern Chivalry
As I have shown, the circumscription of the female character within the domestic sphere constitutes a defining feature of sentimental fiction. In contrast, the picaresque novel defines itself by its own mobilities—formalistic and on the level of plot and characters, too. The picaresque hero can comment upon slavery, class disturbances, party politics, and different immigrant groups precisely because his travels carry him into encounters with diverse segments of the population and across those dividing lines that mark out the contours of the society. His journey is also the reader’s journey and his freedom the reader’s freedom. Whenever a particular episode might become too constraining and threatens to fix the action in, say, prison or matrimony, the logic of the plot still requires that the novel move on, and freedom (the protagonist’s and the reader’s) is regularly retained through evasive action. Furthermore, such exercises in independence, unlike comparable ventures on the part of female characters in the sentimental novel, are sanctioned in the plot. So if the picaresque explicitly celebrates an essentially male freedom, then just where do women come in—as characters, authors, and readers? Can Modern Chivalry, for example, prefatorially addressed explicitly to the male reader (“If you are about to chuse a wife, and expect beauty, you must give up family and fortune; or if you attain these, you must at least want good temper, health, or some other advantage” [p. 31]), even be read by women, and, if not, then what kind of chivalry is it? One might claim that just as the sentimental novel examines women’s issues, why could not the picaresque form fairly be written only for men? But I would argue that, in a patriarchical society in which resources (income, books, status, freedom, and the rest) are inequably divided, what is sauce for the gander rarely serves the goose as well.
As the quotation from Modern Chivalry with which this section began illustrates, merely reversing the terms of an argument by no means reverses its underlying assumptions. The woman on horseback is still subordinated to her more typical position behind a spinning wheel. Both postures, moreover, are appropriated as service to a proper master. Why ride a horse? To get from hither to yon or to show one’s form to advantage? In short, Brackenridge’s surveyed woman is precisely the antithesis of his surveying hero. When she is not invisible in the text or entirely omitted from the narration, she exists adjunctive to his good, his ends. Therefore, to create a female picaresque novel in which a woman on horseback traverses, assesses, and describes town and countryside almost necessarily, given the culture in which it is read, devolves into self-parody. The female simply does not have the same freedoms—to journey, to judge, to have her judgments heeded—as does the male, and that is a fact of picaresque fiction almost as much as it is a fact of sentimental fiction.
Not surprisingly, in those novels in which a woman comes closest to enacting the role of the standard male picaro, she does so only in male dress. Both the Martinette-goes-to-war sequence in Ormond and the whole of Herman Mann’s The Female Review allow a woman male freedom: first, because all of her companions think of her as him; second, because that deception itself serves a larger redeeming cause, patriotism, the good of her country. A feminized picaresque fiction, consequently, requires both justification and narrative deception. While the reader is in on the ruse, the characters the picara meets are not, and most of the interest of the book derives from a continual but covert textual dialectic of knowledge and ignorance, of male and female, of power and powerlessness. For once the picara’s true (i.e., female) identity is revealed, her power no longer exists. In short, her very role in the fiction is specious and surreptitious, is conditional upon its being asserted in ways that challenge neither the status quo nor the double standard. Personal power without political power can provide a momentary fantasy but is no solution to the larger dilemma of female disenfranchisement within the polis.
FIGURE 13. This frontispiece of The Female Review (1797) emphasizes both Deborah Sampson’s patriotism and her femininity, in marked contrast to her masculine exploits in the novel itself. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
Since the cross-dressed picara retains her power only as long as its inauthentic basis is not revealed either literally or figuratively, the novels often flirt, almost pornographically, with the threat of exposure.59 For example, in The Female Review (and, remember, most of the subscribers to the novel were men of substance) Deborah Sampson at one point suffers not only a head wound but also a wound to her right thigh, just (we are specifically told) below her groin. To reveal the second injury would reveal her sex, so much so that the wound can be seen as an obvious stand-in for the hidden sex. She allows a doctor to remove the one bullet, but she herself secretly extracts the other one with a penknife (and, it might also be added, with obvious Freudian implications). Her sex, however, does not go entirely undiscovered. Later, as she lies unconscious with yellow fever, a doctor feels for her heartbeat to find if she is still alive and finds also something else. Breasts prove the woman, but a woman’s wiles soon bring the doctor to promise silence, and Deborah is off again, this time westward, to travels on the frontier, encounters with Indians, and to still more narrow escapes from women who find this “blooming soldier” irresistible. A curious amalgam of stereotypically masculine and feminine attributes, the young soldier, as a kind of Revolutionary Michael Jackson, enchants most of the females s/he meets. What do women want? Deborah Sampson knows. But it is not so clear that Herman Mann, the author, does. Although the novel recounts several incidents of her exemplary courage (and courage in the exploitative masculine model: She must kill an Indian in self-defense before she is truly “manly”), Sampson’s chief occupation is to keep men from uncovering her hidden femininity while simultaneously preventing women from falling in love with her covering masculinity. The title page, too, hints equally of patriotism (“she performed the duties of every department, into which she was called, with punctual exactness, fidelity and honor”) and prurience (she “preserved her chastity inviolate, by the most artful concealment of her sex”).
Yet the doctors, colonels, merchants, majors, and captains (as well as Miss Hannah Wright, Miss Alice Leavens, Miss Hannah Orne, and the other misses whose names were included in the volume) apparently saw themselves as supporting through their subscriptions a purely pious tale. In contrast to the lists bound with all other early American novels, the one found in The Female Review is unusual in that it contains no pseudonyms such as “A Friend to the Publication” or “A Young Lady of Massachusetts,” phrasings obviously intended to hide the patron’s true identity.60 But consistent with its tranvestite plot, The Female Review cross-dresses generically too. Nowhere announcing itself as a novel, this fiction masks its own fictionality by passing itself off as a proper history of the Revolution.
Another novel of cross-dressing, also set during the Revolution, further underscores the inherent contradictions between female, on the one hand, and picaresque, on the other. The History of Constantius and Pulchera; or, Constancy Rewarded: An American Novel was one of the best-selling novels of the early national period. Originally published in brief installments from June 1789 to January 1790 in the American monthly periodical Gentleman and Ladies Town and Country Magazine, the novel also went through eight editions in English between 1794 (its original date of book publication) and 1802, was translated into German for the Pennsylvania market, was reprinted again in 1821 and 1831, and was then published in a plagiarized edition, under the title History of Lorenzo and Virginia; or, Virtue Rewarded, by one T. H. Cauldwell, D.D., in 1834. It was available in a pirated paperbound edition that sold for a quarter and in a handsome, calfbound duodecimo that sold for over a dollar. Despite its popularity, however (or perhaps because of it), the book has baffled contemporary critics. It is surprisingly brief (some copies are only twenty-five or so pages long) and extremely episodic (as if with each installment, the author had mostly forgotten what he or she had written last month). A number of critics have even insisted that the book is so discontinuous, its plot so ludicrous, its rhetoric so preposterous, and its moral so muddled that it must surely have been originally intended as a parody of the sentimental or picaresque forms, for “it is impossible to take [it] … seriously.”61
Yet apparently the original readers of The History of Constantius and Pulchera did just that. Nothing in the twenty-one copies of the novel that I have inspected suggests that they were read any differently from, say, romantic novels such as The Coquette or Charlotte. Most are signed in the usual fashion and using the usual formula, “Elizabeth Smith, her Book.” Others, however, are signed several times, sometimes by members of the same family, sometimes (judging by the dates and inscriptions) by different generations of the same family, sometimes shared among friends or relatives with different family names. Most striking for my purposes, however, in one copy of the cheap, poorly printed edition pirated by Edward Gray in 1801, there is clear evidence of a reader who not only saw nothing funny in the work but who obviously valued it and drew connections between it and her own view of the world. As noted in chapter 4, she embellished the book itself with fine handmade covers and a delicate drawing of flower buds and, at crucial points in the text, supplied her own poetic and philosophical gloss on the events of the nebulous plot.
Why, we must ask, is the book virtually unreadable today or readable only as a parody of itself? Robert Darnton addresses essentially the same question when he sorts through Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s mailbag and finds dozens of fan letters addressed to “l’Ami Jean-Jacques” from readers enraptured by Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse—“six volumes of sentiment unrelieved by any episodes of violence, explicit sex, or anything much in the way of plot”; in short, by today’s standards, an unreadable book. Yet this unreadable book, with its overinflated prose and its overheated didacticism, went through a minimum of seventy editions before 1800, as many editions as any other novel in any country by that date.62 Perhaps we read differently today from the way we did in 1800.
In 1800, many Americans—and there is no way of knowing just how many—read The History of Constantius and Pulchera, and what they read, starting with the frontispiece with its evocation of Romeo and Juliet, was a sentimental story of star-crossed lovers conjoined with a female picaresque adventure tale. At first the sentimental predominates. The first appearance of the heroine is standard romance: “In the suburbs of the city of Philadelphia, in the soft season of the year, about one o’clock, on a moon shining morning, on the terrace of a high building, forty feet from the ground, appeared a most beautiful lady of the age of sixteen—she was clad in a long white vest, her hair of a beautiful chestnut colour, hanging carelessly over her shoulders, every mark of greatness was visible in her countenance, which was overcast with a solemn gloom, and now and then, the unwilling tear unnoticed, rolled down her cheek.”63 Yet in the novel’s preface, explicitly addressed to the “Daughters of Columbia,” prospective readers are promised “novelty” that will be “like a new Planet in the solar System” of “the Ladies’ Libraries.” They are also assured that the novel will not arouse “party spirit” and the “many emotions” of the divided “political world” but, rather, will focus on women’s concerns and is designed for the “Amusement of the Fair Sex.” That statement, in itself, is, of course, a political statement, one that recognizes women’s exclusion from or indifference to official party politics. The book opposes the world of men’s politics to the world of the lady’s library—different planets in the same (or, perhaps, not the same at all) universe.
Although, to say the least, much shorter than La Nouvelle Héloïse, The History of Constantius and Pulchera mimics the strained language of feeling that Rousseau deploys throughout his six-volume novel: “O transcendently propitious heaven! thrice bountiful, inexhaustible, magnificent Providence! inexpressible, benevolent, and superlatively beneficent fates! The most exalted language is more than infinitely too inexpressive to give an idea of the grateful sensations which occupy my breast” (p. 94). Just as recent authors run up against the limitations of language in one way, early novelists did so in another way. Pulchera, still disguised as Lieutenant Valor us, has just tested her lover’s constancy, and his exclamations follow upon her revealing her true identity. No words—not even these words—can capture his joy. But notice that his effusive language would normally be her language. Pulchera is in control. She contrives the meeting, the test, the revelation. Constantius’s role is essentially passive, responsive, in a word, “feminine.” The novel focuses on Pulchera’s prowess and adventures, and Constantius, consistent with the passive connotations of his name, is finally reduced, rhetorically, to the role traditionally occupied by a woman, that of the grateful heroine over-whelmed by good fortune and the capable attentions of another. One almost expects the fellow to swoon.
FIGURE 14. The frontispiece of this edition of The History of Constantius and Pulchera (New York: John Tiebout, 1801) gives little indication that Pulchera—here passively receiving the attentions of Constantius—is actually the main character in the novel and the novel’s chief adventurer. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
The narrative transvestism or emotional role reversal, however, does not overtly challenge the status quo, and that consideration may well explain the “secret” to the novel’s success. The heroine rushes from harrowing adventure to even more harrowing adventure, but she does so “innocently” because, ostensibly, she proceeds in opposition to her own more proper desires. The novel essentially grafts the typical picaresque adventure story (such as Fortune’s Foot-bait) onto a sentimental novel through the ingenious device of captivity (a device to be explored at greater length in a subsequent section on the female Gothic novel). Because Pulchera is repeatedly abducted and thus, by definition, deprived of volition in the matter, she cannot really be held responsible for breaking virtually every imaginable restriction placed upon the eighteenth-century American woman. She is, happily, forced into her different unlikely roles as picara, world traveler, cross-dressing soldier, prize master on a brigantine captured by pirates, and sole woman stranded with a group of men on a remote desert island. In her assumed role as Valorus, she is constantly thrown into the company of disreputable men, and, just as constantly, she overpowers or outwits or otherwise triumphs over them all. She is transformed, onomastically and metaphorically, from Pulchera—suggesting a typically feminine beauty, pulchritude—to Valorus, a hero. As Lillie Deming Loshe has noted, there is a certain “cheerfulness” in the way the narration lurches from one unlikely and outlandish adventure to another, with Pulchera/Valorus thoroughly enjoying her successes in situations no eighteenth-century woman had any business even fantasizing.64 And then her exhilarating trials all end in the domesticity she would have entered on page ι except for the intervention of her parents (who, of course, had wanted to marry her to a designing French aristocrat). She has her adventures and her Constantius, too. He is, indeed, a final triumph and also an appropriate reward (playing the role of the traditional heroine again) for all of her other earlier triumphs.
It is, in short, a wonderful fantasy. Pulchera/Valorus violates all of the restrictions placed upon eighteenth-century women but still ends up, thanks to her unflagging ingenuity and overall capability, safe at home again and at last in possession of her constant American lover. No wonder the novel was a best-seller! This American heroine saw the world, proved her mastery of it by triumphing over a whole host of designing men, and then returned home to an America that had won its independence (her own story of independence, like Deborah Sampson’s, is set during the Revolutionary War) to enter into a marriage that, mercifully, is left undescribed at the novel’s end. Like all good escapist literature, The History of Constantius and Pulchera allows the reader a temporary reprieve from her own situation but never requires her to question its governing assumptions. Catharsis arises precisely from the novel’s lack of realism—signaled by its exuberant rhetoric—which allows the reader freely to imagine freedom without in any way having to pay the personal or public price that any effort to realize that freedom necessarily entails.
Another factor probably contributed to the popularity of this curious little tale. It is among the shortest, sparest, and simplest of early American novels. Even when the vocabulary is at its most florid (“transcendently … propitious … bountiful… inexhaustible … benevolent… superlatively”), the “words of three, four, and five syllables” are those that are found in Dilworth’s, Perry’s, and Webster’s spelling books. In effect, rote vocabulary lessons have become enlivened into plot, and words have gained significance by being incorporated into story. What to us seems like a highly erratic, episodic, and undeveloped plot may, therefore, have seemed almost like magic to an inexperienced reader making her way from her speller to a novel in which those long lists of words memorized in the schoolroom suddenly transported a girl very much like herself about the globe and through a whole series of adventures while Constantius waited mostly at home. The novel is simple in its disjunctive vocabulary, and it is simple, too, in its disjunctive story, calling upon the reader’s ready imagination to fill in the lacunae in the notably undelineated plot. In what is almost a child’s ordering (“this happened and then this happened and then this happened …”), impetus and excitement derive not from the narrative skills of the author but from the reader being able to re-create a tale of utter implausibility and to participate thereby in the global derring-do of a sixteen-year-old girl from the suburbs of Philadelphia.
Only in cross-dressing or captivity do a few women characters find something of the same full freedom that the picaresque regularly grants to its male protagonists. Moreover, that freedom, it must be emphasized, is conditional and temporary, and definitely not for domestic consumption. Clearly, “Mrs. Constantius” (née Pulchera), back in “the suburbs of Philadelphia,” may wistfully recall her life as Valor us, ship’s mate and soldier, but she will not swashbuckle through the marketplace. As Arabella, the satirized heroine in British novelist Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752), aptly observes, when a woman “at last condescends to reward [a man] with her Hand… all her Adventures are at an End for the Future.”65 Returned to female dress and mien again, Deborah and Pulchera presumably live happily ever after. But such an ending does not elicit the imagination of the author, and both the “happiness” and the “after” can be appropriately left to the readers, who will all have their own experiences on that same score.
Tabitha Gilman Tenney, in Female Quixotism: Exhibited in the Romantic Opinions and Extravagant Adventures of Dore asina Sheldon (1801), portrays a protagonist whose adventures are hardly as extravagant as those of Pulchera or Deborah Sampson. Perhaps Dorcasina’s wildest act is to dress up her previous name, which was the more mundane Dorcas. In this novel the picara never strays more than thirty miles from her place of nativity. Her adventures are mostly in reading and are all emphatically and stereotypically female. A devotee of romances, she reads to imagine herself the object of male adoration. Theoretically, she need imagine no further than that essentially passive state. Love should conquer all, which means she need conquer nothing—not enemy soldiers, not pirates, not even the more difficult nonfictional books in her father’s library. Tenney’s genius is to tie the form that most emphasizes freedom from society back to limitation (read: female limitation) and society (read: patriarchal society). The protagonist’s “romantic opinions” and “extravagant [albeit mental] adventures” only circumscribe the fixity of her place.
An intelligent woman, an heiress of a thousand pounds a year (rightly designated in the novel as “a great fortune”), Dorcasina renders herself pathetic not just by her novel reading but by her willingness to believe in the whole fantasy of love perpetuated in the novels she reads. She takes “happy ever after” at face value and sets out to discover the man who will render her so. She is consequently victimized by both her own delusions and by men who calculatingly exploit those delusions and see in her only a windfall profit to be easily won by passionately declaiming a few romantic phrases plagiarized from those same novels in which her delusions are grounded. She reads too trustingly, both the books and the men she meets. Just as The History of Constantius and Pulchera was a kind of elementary how-to-read-a-novel novel, Female Quixotism is a more subtle how-not-to-read-a-novel novel. Tenney allegorizes the reading process and turns it upon itself; one must be a resisting reader, a critical reader, a reader able to read other readings of the fiction, able to read the context in which the text is read.
Dorcasina emblemizes the passive consumer who presents no critical opposition to the texts she reads. She reads her life the same way—postulating a gentleman behind an uncouth, illiterate servant (she has just finished Roderick Random), seeing true love in the faces of false men whose dissembling is motivated by the materialistic consideration of her fortune. She is saved from the most calculating of these men only by his fortuitous arrest for outstanding debts. Mr. Seymore, a dubious schoolmaster of uncertain past, intends to rise in the world through a fortunate match despite the fact that he is already married. His plan was to wed Dorcasina and then to have the middle-aged woman incarcerated in an insane asylum so that he could enjoy her cash unencumbered by her company. Bilked of the real prize at the last moment, his revenge is to tell his ostensible prize just where she stands in his regard: “Ridiculous vanity, at your age, with those grey locks, to set out to make conquests! I … assure you that any man would be distracted to think of marrying you except for your money.”66 The veil is lifted, and Dorcasina sadly recognizes the delusions under which she has long labored. Even sadder, she realizes that it did not have to end that way: “Had my education been properly directed… I believe I might have made acquirements, which would have enabled me to bear a part, perhaps to shine, when thrown among people of general information” (2:212).
An emphasis on female education begins even with the novel’s epigraph: “Felix Quem Faciunt Aliena Pericula Cautum. In plain English—Learn to be wise by others harm, / and you shall do full well.” As in many early works, the Latin quotation is translated into “plain English” for those who do not have the benefit of a classical education—for, more specifically, the “Columbian Young Ladies, who Read Novels and Romances” and to whom the volume is dedicated. This epigraph, along with the novel’s preface, reiterates the eighteenth-century assumption that narrative directly addresses questions on the conduct of life. By reading of Dorcasina’s delusions and consequent suffering, the reader should “learn to be wise” and “do full well” in her own personal existence. The key, then, is not for women to stop reading—but for women to read the right kinds of books, the right kinds of novels even, not the novels Dorcasina reads but the novel in which she reads them. It is all a matter of choice, and Tenney, moreover, makes clear the grounds of her protagonist’s unfortunate propensity to mislead her fancy with bad fiction. Had Dorcasina’s mother lived, we are told, the daughter’s education would have been well regulated, sensible. Instead, her father has indulged his own appetite for bad novels and nourished his daughter’s. In the process, the widower has also ensured that his only child will remain at his side, a devoted daughter who is also his housekeeper and companion.
The importance of female reading, Tenney insists, is all the greater given the intellectual climate of the time in which any female reading was seen as suspect. After Dorcasina rejects her first suitor because he does not, in his speech or letters, sound like Werther or Harrington, no more male attention disturbs her novelistic retreat for many years. “Notwithstanding the temptation of her money, and her agreeable person,” most men who knew of Dorcasina’s love of novels avoided her, “wisely forseeing the inconveniences which would result from having a wife whose mind was fraught with ideas of life and manners so widely different from what they appear on trial.” The author seems to endorse such prudent reservations but not the baser doubts of men put off simply by Dorcasina’s love of books: “Others there were, who understood only that she spent much time in books, without any knowledge of the kind which pleased her. It was sufficient to keep them at a distance, to know that she read at all. Those enemies to female improvement, thought a woman had no business with any book but the bible, or perhaps the art of cookery; believing that everything beyond these served only to disqualify her for the duties of domestic life” (1:17). This double-edged focus makes Female Quixotism more than a satire of one silly woman who reads too many equally silly books. The novel is also a larger different satire on a whole society in which a deficient educational system and dubious sexual politics render women devoid of judgment by deeming judgment, in a woman, a superfluous quality.
One early incident in the novel effectively epitomizes the dual focus of its pervasive satire. When the father attempts to marry his daughter to the only son of his best friend, Dorcasina anticipates “a sensible pain at quitting my dear and affectionate father, and this delightful spot where I have passed all my life, and to which I feel the strongest attachment. But what gives me the greatest pain,” she continues, “is that I shall be obliged to live in Virginia, be served by slaves, and be supported by the sweat, toil and blood of that unfortunate and miserable part of mankind” (1:9–10). Her condemnation of slavery continues for another page and a half. She is articulate, moral, intelligent; she denounces slavery in all of its forms and goes considerably beyond her father’s reservations on the matter, for while he believes slavery is evil, he also insists it is an “inherited” evil now so entrenched as to be, perhaps, beyond cure. That prognosis is not good enough for Dorcasina. She refuses to accept “inheritance” as any adequate justification for perpetuating an immoral system, and the author obviously concurs with her judgment. But note the impossibly romantic solution Dorcasina devises for what she rightly sees as America’s most serious problem. She will marry the Virginian (whom she styles Lysander) with the express purpose of convincing him, through his ardent love for her, that he has no choice—no wish—but to free his slaves. Love, she fondly imagines, should conquer all, even social injustice, and even on the largest social level: “Wrapt in the glow of enthusiasm,” she envisions “his neighbors imitating his example, and others imitating them, till the spirit of justice and humanity should extend to the utmost limits of the United States, and all the blacks be emancipated from bondage, from New-Hampshire even to Georgia” (1:11). With such effusions from her protagonist, Tenney brilliantly captures the excesses of sentimental rhetoric. Yet the excess of romantic posturing that renders this solution ridiculous is surely no less suspect than the excess of social hypocrisy and injustice that requires it. Dorcasina, however, is not so naive as not to know that the first decisive action toward her envisioned emancipation of the slaves must be taken by her husband. She might be his prime mover, but his will still be the prime move. In short, Dorcasina grotesquely mirrors the status quo even as she questions it. But by subjugating all of her opinions to a notion of romanticism and domestic love, she would be, at one and the same time, both a secret revolutionary and a standard feme covert. Yet, one well might ask, what other alternatives has she? The only political solution Dorcasina can envision is a hopelessly romantic one—perhaps because hopeless romanticism decently obscures the fact that the very position from which she plans to act, the subservient domestic helpmeet, is itself a form of slavery.
The picaro adventures on the margins of social possibility; the picara either ends up ensconced in domesticity or, like Dorcasina, never really leaves it, which makes the female picaresque a fictional form fundamentally divided against itself. We have, on the one hand, extravagant escapist fantasies typically dependent upon a woman’s cross-dressing (the male picaresque in drag) and, on the other, a woman’s picaresque adventures as a mostly imagined escape that both counterbalances and weighs the public and private constraints under which her fantasy labors. Dorcasina is no Don Quixote, for the simple reason that even if he challenges only windmills, he still traverses the landscape he misreads and validates that misreading by his various misadventures. The carnivalesque elements in Don Quixote, borrowed largely from Rabelais, thus serve to question the official cultural and political hierarchies, in some ways to reverse them completely—which is precisely what also happens in Modern Chivalry or Mr. Penrose, Seaman when convention is turned topsy-turvy.67 But in Female Quixotism, Dorcasina’s excursions in her quixotic mental world do not trouble the status quo. Only after she awakens to see the “real” world does she begin to question such fundamental matters as the nature of matrimony or the nature of men. “I begin to think all men are alike,” Dorcasina confides to her faithful womanservant, Betty, after she has been released from her romantic notions of life, “false, perfidious, and deceitful; and there is no confidence to be put in any of them” (2:201).
When Dorcasina finally sees how the rest of the world views her and how, using that view, Seymore intended also to use her and her money, she seeks refuge with her friend Harriot Stanly, now married to the same Captain Barry who earlier pretended to woo Dorcasina out of some twisted desire to show her what the “real” world was like. Coming to this domestic refuge, however, Dorcasina is surprised to encounter not the wedded bliss she had expected (and that she feared might contrast too painfully to her own lonely state) but sadness and disharmony. Dreams and delusions still. As the protagonist confesses to her now married friend, she had formerly thought that “in a happy union, all was transport, joy, and felicity; but in you I find a demonstration that the most agreeable connection is not unattended with cares and anxieties.” The new Mrs. Barry must concur in that evaluation: “I have been married a twelvemonth, to the man whom of all the world I should have chosen. He is everything I wish him to be; and in the connection I have enjoyed great felicity. Yet, strange to tell, I have suffered more than I ever did before, in the whole course of my life” (2:207). As Dorcasina notes, the once “sprightly Harriot Stanly” has been “metamorphosed, by one year’s matrimony, into a serious moralizer” (2:207) and a diminished version of her former self. This second realization parallels the first as a liberation from fantasy. “The spell is now broken,” Dorcasina can proclaim, referring equally to the fictions of her novels and the fictions of her society, which were not, after all, that different from one another.
Almost triumphantly, Dorcasina takes control of her life and of the final words of the text. Only the end of the novel is in the first person. Her concluding letter to Harriot announces that she will spend the rest of her days in assisting others less fortunate than herself, in sewing, and in reading novels. She also informs Harriot, who has never read even one novel, that “I [still] read them with the same relish, the same enthusiasm as ever; but, instead of expecting to realize scenes and situations so charmingly portrayed, I only regret that such unallayed felicity is, in this life, unattainable” (2:212). Her life has allegorized her reading, just as the lives of those who do not read novels allegorizes the bleakness of a life without any imaginative escape (i.e., romantic fantasy or picaresque adventures). Given those alternatives, Dorcasina chooses fiction.
In a perceptive analysis of the romance as a genre and, more specifically, of Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, Laurie Langbauer has recently argued that Lennox’s book “associates the dangers of romance with sins of women, and through this association clinches its derision of the form. Romance’s faults—lack of restraint, irrationality, and silliness—are also women’s faults.” As Langbauer also notes, this same connection was early drawn by Henry Fielding, who, in a review of Lennox’s novel, observed that he preferred The Female Quixote to Don Quixote precisely because it was more plausible that a woman, not a man, would be ruled by romances:
As we are to grant in both Performances, that the Head of a very sensible Person is entirely subverted by reading Romances, this Concession seems to me more easy to be granted in the Case of a young Lady than of an old Gentleman.… To say Truth, I make no Doubt but that most young Women… in the same Situation, and with the same Studies, would be able to make a large progress in the same Follies.68
Fielding’s logic is as circular as it is androcentric. Women read silly books because women are silly or vice versa (it really does not matter). Cervantes missed the point in his classic; no man, surely, would really succumb to fiction’s influence as “most young Women” are wont to do. In contrast, Tenney denies Dorcasina Everywoman status. Every woman who reads Female Quixotism is encouraged to see herself as different from what Dorcasina was, and, indeed, Dorcasina becomes different too. Furthermore, Tenney refuses to hang both the satire and the blame, as Fielding conveniently does, on the ostensible folly of women. Why, she wants to know, are women so susceptible to the fantasies of romance they encounter in novels? Maybe it is because the world outside of novels holds so little else for a capable, intelligent woman.
Female Quixotism runs counter to the male picaresque, to the sentimental romances affirming a patriarchal status quo, and also to another trend already under way in 1801 and one that became increasingly popular throughout the first half of the nineteenth century despite (or, perhaps, concomitant with) the highly restrictive legal and social conditions of women. I refer to the fad for female adventures starring women in their plots and almost always in their titles—The Female Fishers, The Female Marine, The Female Robinson Crusoe, The Female Spy. A Domestic Tale, The Female Wanderer, The Female Spy; or, The Child of the Brigade—even The Female Land Pirate. In contrast to these female picaresque fantasies, Tabitha Tenney’s book provides a hard core of realism—and it does not paint a very pretty picture of women’s lives. Dorcasina retreats to fiction at the end of her life because, first, her education has been so elementary that she simply cannot read anything more challenging than popular fiction and, second, because fiction itself is finally far more satisfactory than anything she has found in the world at large. She prefers, not unreasonably, a happy fantasy life to an unhappy actual one.
I WOULD HERE ADD a brief epilogue—an appropriately marginal allegory on the marginality of women’s lives—to this discussion of the politics of the female picaresque. Although a best-selling novelist (and one of the best early American novelists), Tabitha Tenney remains virtually unknown as an individual. In the History of Exeter, her husband, Dr. Samuel Tenney, is accorded almost two pages of fulsome comment: “He was a man of fine presence, and of much dignity. His domestic and social relations were of the happiest character. He was universally esteemed and respected, and in his death, his townsmen felt that they had met with no ordinary loss.” The novelist, in contrast, receives four lines: “Dr. Tenney’s wife was Tabitha, daughter of Samuel Gilman, a highly accomplished lady. She was the author of two or more published works, the chief of which was Female Quixotism which had much popularity in its time, and went through several editions.” The Tenney family history contains the same prescription—“wife of,” “daughter of,” “a highly accomplished lady”—and, ironically, so, too, does the history of the Gilman family. There are letters reproduced in the Gilman volume from Dr. Samuel Tenney to Tabitha’s father, but they do not mention the daughter. In contrast, I know of only one letter by Tabitha, but it, too, is about Samuel Tenney. On October 25, 1823, she wrote the Honorable William Plumer, who was seeking information for his proposed biography of Dr. Tenney. “It would certainly be most gratifying,” the wife observes, “to see some account of my late husband appear in the way which you propose.” The letter reveals virtually nothing of Tabitha’s own life or thoughts, but, then again, Mr. Plumer was not interested in those. The historical record here affirms the vision of women that Tenney criticized. Woman’s place is as daughter or wife or mother; she passes unnoticed in the written record, except, of course, in novels.69
In only two sources have I found any record of Tabitha Gilman Tenney that goes beyond the usual and formulaic “highly accomplished lady” encountered in practically all dictionary entries on the author. One account is an amusingly idiosyncratic personal memoir, A Few Reminiscences of My Exeter Life, by Elizabeth Dow Leonard. Writing in 1878, Leonard particularly remembers the earlier “authoress” because novelists then “did not grow as now, plenty [sic] as blackberries, but were as hard to find as a real phoenix or one-horned unicorn.” Novelty, however, did not assure esteem or even notice. As Leonard confesses: “I blush to say, with all my pride in the rich achievements of my native village, I never read [Female Quixotism].… Those who did read it pronounced it superlatively silly, and [Tabitha Tenney] tried in after years to recall it without success.” I have not uncovered elsewhere any evidence to corroborate this report of authorial regret, but, valid or not, Leonard’s account constitutes a sad postscript to the long neglect of one of America’s first best-selling novelists.70
The only other information on Tenney appears in the private record, not the public. I refer to a diary by Patty Rogers, which has never been published, a marvelously detailed account of the reading and romances of an eighteenth-century American young woman. The diarist, an expansive young woman who was apparently well known in the town of Exeter for both her volubility and her love of fiction, was one of Tabitha Gilman’s contemporaries. The two, however, apparently, did not much care for one another. Patty found Tabby too reserved, but then, as Patty directly and indirectly records, others, including her beau (the preceptor William Woodbridge), found Patty too excitable. This opinion may also have been shared by Patty’s second suitor (or would-be seducer: the issue is unclear), a former doctor in the Revolutionary army, the thirty-seven-year-old Samuel Tenney, who had apparently returned to Exeter with the dual intentions of marrying and entering politics.
The diary records in intimate detail Patty Roger’s love for novels, how her various suitors “seduce” her with fiction, the way Woodbridge (she styles him Portius in her diary) eventually forsakes her for a girl of more sense and less “sensibility” (“He said some persons had too much sensibility!”). She also describes how Dr. Tenney, her father’s friend, begins to ply her with billets, poetry, and, above all, novels. On one occasion, he gallants both her and Tabby Gilman home. At another time (she has now renamed him Philamon) he takes “liberties” with her in a carriage, and later he takes “liberties” (the same ones? different?) on her doorstep (“You treated me ill,” she reprimands him, “as if you thot me a bad girl—Nobody else treats me so ill”). And all the while he also publicly courts Tabitha Gilman, a sober, serious, quiet young woman, a year younger than Patty, and, the latter records, “a person peculiarly disagreeable to me—not from any injury she ever did me, but there is a Certain something, in her manner, with which I am ever difficulted.” The older doctor, a former soldier in the Revolutionary War, denies that he favors Tabby and regularly flirts with Patty, who just as regularly sets down their exchanges in her diary, interweaving the sentimental plot of her small life with the plots of the various novels she reads (History of the Human Heart, Ganganelli, A Sentimental Journey, etc.). Of course, the ambitious doctor presently marries the more sensible Tabby, and, since Patty’s diary ends here, we learn no more from her of her rival.71
With the arrival of the husband on the scene, the official record takes over. He was elected to Congress for three terms, and the couple lived, during his term of office, in Washington, D.C. They had no children. In 1801, a year after moving to Washington, Tabitha wrote Female Quixotism, a novel in which there is little mention of the world of masculine politics but that does feature Dorcasina Sheldon, a young woman who in personality, in voice and style, and in her passion for novels remarkably resembles Patty Rogers. In 1816, after Samuel’s death, Mrs. Tenney returned to Exeter, where Patty Rogers, yet unwed and now renowned for her sewing, her piety, and her charitable works, still resided. In her later years, Tabitha Tenney stopped writing, took up sewing, and was esteemed as well for the originality and intricacy of her needlework. There is no more to tell, and even this inconclusive account exists only in fragments, suggesting other stories that operate equally on levels of history and fiction: Is Female Quixotism a satire against the writer’s old rival? Or did the author, married, thirty-nine years old, and childless when she published her novel, recognize a bond between herself and Patty that she may not have been willing to acknowledge in 1785, when Dr. Tenney played each woman’s virtues off against the other’s shortcomings? For even though Patty does seem to provide the inspiration for Dorcasina in Female Quixotism, we should also remember that the biblical name Dorcas is simply the Greek version of the Aramaic Tabitha (as we are specifically told in Acts 9:36), and, moreover, that biblical reference to the good, charitable Dorcas/Tabitha of Joppa whom Peter raised from the dead applies equally to the older character and the older author.72
The politics implicit in this possible conjoining of writer and rival transcends the fractious and almost exclusively masculine debate on what shape the new nation should take. It is the same politics that can be observed in the life, letters, and literary legacy of Tabitha and Patty. One imagines the two old women—Tabitha died in 1837 at the age of seventy-five and Patty in 1840 at seventy-nine—living on in Exeter, both esteemed by the community, each engaged in charitable works and spinning tales of her youth in the early years of the Republic while she also plied her needle. It is a world of women’s lives as far removed from the world of Modern Chivalry or The Algerine Captive as from The Female Review or The Female Land Pirate but not that different from the final days of one Dorcasina Sheldon, who emerges, when viewed from the end of both her original and her author, as a most representative female picaresque hero.
Reading The Algerine Captive
The contrast between the scholarly attention devoted to Royall Tyler, as opposed to the pervasive neglect of Tabitha Gilman Tenney, could hardly be more marked. In an exemplary critical biography, G. Thomas Tanselle has meticulously examined Tyler’s life and literary career. Tanselle has also resurrected and published in the Harvard Library Bulletin correspondence between Tyler and his publisher, Joseph Nancrede. There is also a more general assessment of Tyler in the widely available Twayne series. Moreover, primary materials for further study are available in the extensive Royall Tyler Collection at the Vermont Historical Society. The enterprising scholar can peruse correspondence between Tyler and other writers as well as publishers, relatives, and friends; can study typescripts (and some manuscripts) of Tyler’s poems, plays, essays, and fiction. The diary and autobiography of the author’s wife, Mary Palmer Tyler (which include invaluable insights into Tyler’s working methods, his schedules, his opinions, and his literary and personal habits), can be studied, as can another memoir by Tyler’s son. The social historian can trace Tyler’s role in Shays’s Rebellion as well as his various legal decisions as a Vermont Supreme Court judge in extant court records and state archives. In addition, Marius B. Péladeau has collected and edited, in one thick volume, The Prose of Royall Tyler (1972) and, in a somewhat smaller volume, The Verse of Royall Tyler (1968). The unfinished autobiographical novel The Bay Boy has recently been published; The Contrast, reprinted or excerpted in various anthologies of American literature of the early national period and in numerous general surveys of American literature, is widely available; and four of his lesser plays are currently in print. Finally, although Female Quixotism is available only on microfilm as part of the Early American Imprints (Evans) series, The Algerine Captive; or, The Life and Adventures of Doctor Updike Underhill, Six Years a Prisoner Among the Algerines (1797) can be read in both a facsimile reprint of the London edition of 1802 and also in a paperback “edited for the modern reader.”73
Because the archive is so extensive, intentionality in Tyler’s work can be assessed more easily than in most early American texts. Tyler’s own reports on his life, juxtaposed with the reports of those who knew him, allow us to envision what he envisioned as the shape and purpose of his life—his own story of himself. To move from these different but not inconsistent portraits of the author to the fiction requires, obviously, a critical leap, but it is a leap that provides valuable glimpses into an early American writer’s assumptions about the powers of narrative, about the role of fiction in the polis, and, finally, about the interrelationships between picaresque and political structures.
Even without this kind of background, however, one can make a number of judgments about Tyler’s work. The Algerine Captive, for example, employs a different set of fictive rules and structuring principles from those of such picaresque fantasy tales as Fortune’s Foot-ball or The History of Constantius and Publchera. Nor does it satirize such fantasies in the manner of Female Quixotism, nor is it a shape-shifting and ultimately unfinished political allegory like Modern Chivalry. On the contrary, Tyler’s novel is, by the standards of the early American picaresque, remarkably cohesive. Even its narrative indefiniteness and inherent contradictions are largely resolved through the way in which the whole tale is rendered in the first person and by a narrator fumbling his way through America and stumbling toward his own meaning of America. Whereas Modern Chivalry embodies an inconsistent narrative voice double-talking its competing modes toward a nonconclusion in which plot and perspective remain determinedly indeterminate, The Algerine Captive ends by resolving the narrator’s irresolution, which has all along been the main subject of the text. For Updike Underhil’s fitful voyage in search of the “real” America is also, like all classical quests, a voyage of self-discovery.
As even his name suggests, Updike Underhill is a seriocomic figure in a comically serious work. The comedy in volume ι results largely from the high seriousness with which the protagonist views himself. It is a view unsustained by any attendant action. Yet Updike grows in the course of the novel precisely because he flees from virtually every challenge he encounters. Instead of heroically facing adversaries or resolving crises, his characteristic modus operandi is first to try to talk his way out of any immediate impasse and then to beat a rapid retreat to safer ground—a different locale, a different occupation, a different persona—to whatever seems safely distant from the former threat. Like the ruling Federalists, he assumes that one can resolve conflict by evading it or suppressing its public articulation. But such solutions—on the psychological, the sociological, and the political level—necessarily portend further and fuller disasters.
For Underhill, that deferred disaster finally comes when he naively accepts a position as a doctor on a slave ship (as if he can maintain his abolitionist sentiments while serving slavery’s masters). Serving slavery soon leads to his own six-year enslavement among the Algerines. Yet his captivity, paradoxically but in keeping with the ironic reversals of the book, sets him free. He is at last freed from his own earlier elitist assumptions about the “barbaric” Americans; from his own inability to change either his life or his society (escape, after all, is not social action); and, ultimately, from his picaresque restlessness. The burden of this freedom is that he must now devote himself to improving the American society that he earlier saw as meriting only condemnation, derision, and evasion. While volume ι of the novel provides a consistent critique of the excesses of American society—and especially the masses, the mob—volume 2 shows that even the charlatanism, gullibility, avarice, cupidity, and stupidity that Underhill encounters in volume 1 are preferable to the despotism of Algiers and the hateful institution of slavery upon which that too-well-ordered society is based. Democracy has its drawbacks, certainly. But the alternatives—oligarchy, suppression of dissent, and slavery—are far worse evils than (on the most specific level) unruly schoolchildren, than (on the most general level) a populace willing to be duped by quacks and hypocrites or too prone to criticize the president.
BEFORE EXAMINING THE novel in any detail, however, I will first briefly assess Tyler’s political and literary career. The former is particularly interesting, for, like another early picaresque novelist, Tyler was not only a lawyer and a judge but also played a key role in one of America’s postrevolutionary insurrections. Like Hugh Henry Brackenridge during the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania, Tyler served as a mediator during Shay’s Rebellion in rural Massachusetts. Also, as even a few of the stories that Tyler himself endlessly repeated to all auditors throughout his long life should make clear, for both men the divisively polarized party factions of the 1790s did not always accord with their particular viewpoints on what political program might best serve the emerging polis or what form that polis should assume. Confronting armed revolutionaries, both writers, one a Federalist and one a Republican, argued for a discourse less desperate than rebellion. Each also attempted to resolve apparently irreconcilable dissent by resorting to obviously novelistic devices. Both assumed duplicitous personae, acknowledged the appeal of antagonistic and seemingly antithetical political positions, and played out safer versions of the inimical conflict that they sought to forestall. Both, in brief, sought to alter the history of their time by calculatingly fictionalizing both history and the time.
Tyler’s retrospective version of the role he played in putting down Shays’s Rebellion—calming a band of rebels with the wit and wisdom of his own oratory—left out (as all narratives leave out) some of the more interesting aspects of his story. More specifically, Tyler himself was in flight when he became involved in Shay’s Rebellion. All of Boston, it seemed, was talking about “Nabby” Adams (daughter of John and Abigail) turning down, largely at her father’s instigation, a rather wild, young, Harvard-educated lawyer and accepting instead a proposal from her father’s private secretary, Colonel William Stephens Smith. Writing many years later, Mary Tyler noted that this romantic disappointment, coupled with the debts Royall had incurred while trying to build up his farm, sent him into a deep depression, during which time he also let his legal practice slide and neglected his other business ventures (a pattern that continued, intermittently, to the end of his life).74 But as if wars were made to solve the problems of the young, in January 1787 Daniel Shays gathered forces to attack the federal arsenal at Springfield, Massachusetts; General Benjamin Lincoln put out a call for men willing to defend the arsenal; and the twenty-nine-year-old Tyler, eager to leave Boston and try adventure, joined Lincoln’s forces as a major and an aidede-camp.75
Tyler, as an old man increasingly suffering the effects of illness and poverty, especially enjoyed recounting how he had helped put down Shays’s Rebellion. “You all remember with what zest he used to relate his adventures during that expedition when he took a meetinghouse full of Shays’s men,” Mary Tyler recalled in the autobiography she addressed to her children and grandchildren. She also tells how he took particular pride not in his martial but in his verbal prowess:
He found their arms stacked outside the door, while they were within, probably listening to some Yankee Cromwell, who excited them to resist oppression and unjust rulers. Your father walked in followed by a file of soldiers, and ascending the pulpit steps with his wonted elegance spoke so forcibly on the other side that they finally agreed to lay down their arms and return home, soon after which Shays was apprehended and the rebellion quelled. How much good his speech did I know not, but I do know that, whatever his theme, he very seldom spoke in vain, sometimes perhaps “making the worse appear the better reason”; but few were the audience who could resist his eloquence.76
“Grandmother Tyler” here elides several events to imply a causal relationship between her late husband’s power of positive speaking and the cessation of political dissent in Massachusetts. But according to the son’s redaction of his father’s legend, Tyler’s eloquence did not end with the men in the meetinghouse persuaded to surrender their arms and to pay obeisance to federal law and order. In this longer version, Shays himself managed to slip across the border into Vermont, a territory not yet part of the Union, and adverse to any dictates of authority, especially those emanating from the notoriously autocratic Governor Bowdoin of Massachusetts. There, surely, the rebellious Daniel Shays could find sanctuary. It was a crisis that again called for Royall Tyler, who, armed only with his notable verbal skills, finely honed at Harvard, called upon Governor Chittenden of Vermont, dined with him, discoursed, and, by daybreak, had convinced him that official political asylum should not be granted to the rebels or their leader.77 Shays, however, still escaped, probably abetted by Chittenden’s own men. Nevertheless, General Lincoln wrote Tyler praising him for his role in the affair: “You have done a great deal; we cannot command success; to deserve it has the same merit.” But perhaps equally important for the career of a future novelist, Tyler’s travels took him to new places, encounters with new people, and he seemed unusually sensitive to both, as is clear even in the official report (with its barely concealed admonition) delivered before the Massachusetts legislature. “Proclamations,” he insisted, “can never Coerce the General Sentiment of the People,” especially since “the Bulk of the People in Vermont are for affording protection to the Rebels.”78 One cannot stifle the passions of dissent and discontent by proclamations or official decrees.
“My good Friends,” Tyler wrote the Palmers (Mary’s parents, with whom he had previously boarded) on February 17, 1787, at the height of the rebellion, “how I wish you could look in upon me, and see your old friend the center, the mainspring of movements, that he once thought would have crazed his brain—this minute, haranguing the governor and Council, and House of Representatives; the next, driving 40 miles into the State of New York, at the head of a party to apprehend Shays: back again in 20 hours: now, closing the passes to Canada: next, writing order to the frontiers.”79 Tyler was also soon writing more than orders to the frontier. In April 1787, The Contrast, which he claimed he had completed in only three weeks, was produced professionally at the John Street Theatre in New York City. Tyler’s escapades in America’s backwoods were transformed into comedy. The various New England yeomen he encountered were conjoined into a fictional Yankee, Jonathan, one of the most popular figures to come out of early American literature and the prototype for hundreds of subsequent stage and fictional Yankees. The play was immensely successful. When it was published in 1790, George Washington’s name headed the list of its subscribers. On a more homely level, Mary Tyler wrote of her uncle who “had not taste for reading; his heart was all in his business.” Although he had read nothing except the newspapers until the appearance of The Contrast, “he found the Yankee character, Jonathan, [the play’s] great charm,” and thereafter, “in the evenings… he seldom sat down with us, without bringing out The Contrast, of which he had a printed copy, reading it aloud, till his wife would almost scold, saying she should know it all by heart.”80
Much of the work’s popularity may also have derived from the way in which it disposed of insurrections, and especially Shays’s Rebellion. Jonathan early vows, “I did think the sturgeons [insurgents] were right,” but is persuaded by his master, the Colonel Manly, to embrace a more moderate position:
Colonel said that it was a burning shame for the true blue Bunker Hill sons of liberty who had fought Governor Hutchinson, Lord North, and the Devil, to have any hand in kicking up a cursed dust against a government which we had, every mother’s son of us, a hand in making.
Again the word is mightier than the weapon or is at least given that potency in the world of words that comprises Tyler’s drama. Manly’s patriotic argument can convert Jonathan to safe, sane political opinions and presumably might serve just as well for any radicals who happened to take in the play (although, it must be admitted, there were probably few Shaysites among the well-to-do New Yorkers who could afford $.75 or $1 for a night at the theater).81 Politics is here again conceived as discourse and discourse as power. As Tyler would demonstrate again and even more conclusively in The Algerine Captive, a political agenda can entail considerably more than a speaker’s election and can include matters that weigh heavily on the individual lives of those who do not pay enough attention to the words with which they have been wooed.
It is important to emphasize that Tyler’s Federalism was temperate and that he did not, in doctrinaire fashion, attribute major human faults and foibles only to members of the other political party. For example, Tyler, along with Joseph Dennie, contributed for ten years the popular Colon and Spondee columns to various New England newspapers, and these popular columns were certainly known for their Federalism. In a letter to Tyler, Dennie observed that he was welcomed on his travels for his pro-Federalist sentiments: “The Aristocracy were pleased that the satire of Colon & Spondee was levelled against the foes of Federalism. Such is the state of parties here that this apparently [sic] trivial circumstance has procured me a host of friends, not lip service friends but such as will render me pecuniary.”82 Yet the Colon and Spondee columns (Tyler, apparently, wrote as Spondee) could be surprisingly apolitical, as the first advertisement for the series, in the Eagle of July 1794, makes abundantly clear:
Salutatory and Valedictory Orations, Syllogistic and Forensic Disputations and Dialogues among the living and the dead—Theses and Masters’ Questions, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic and the ancient Coptic, neatly modified into Dialogues, Orations & c. on the shortest notice … Dead Languages for Living Drones … Anagrams, Acrostics, Anacreontics; Chronograms, Epigrams, Hudibrastics, & Panegyrics; Rebuses, Charades, Puns and Conundrums, by the gross, or single dozen.… Adventures, Paragraphs, Letters from Correspondents, Country Seats for Rural Members of Congress, provided for Editors of newspapers—with Accidental Deaths, Battles, Bloody Murders, Premature News, Tempests, Thunder and Lightning, and Hail-Stones, of all dimensions, adapted to the Season.… Serious Cautions against Whoredom, Drunkenness, & c. and other coarse Wrapping-Paper, gratis, to those who buy the smallest article.83
The columns, among the most popular in early America, were beloved as much for their wit as for their Federalism.
Tyler himself had few of the aristocratic aspirations that often characterized what we might term the “high Federalists.” The son of a wealthy politician and businessman, he had managed to spend his own inheritance at an early age. He had to support himself, knew the meaning of a day’s work, and knew, too, at various times in his life, penury. Although far better educated than most of his associates in Vermont, he prided himself on his lack of pretension. “Those around us,” Royall purportedly told Mary, “will like you all the better for not appearing in any way above them, and I need not tell you that it is love and not mere outward circumstances that will constitute happiness.”84 It was advice not really needed; Mary Palmer Tyler also suffered little from aristocratic pretensions. She, too, was born into a wealthy family, but her father had lost virtually all of the family money while she was still a young girl. As the daughter of one of Boston’s first families, all “cultured and gentle,” she had, in a matter of weeks, become subject to a “thousand mortifications.” The women of the family had to “wean themselves of the idea that they must be ladies.” Mary’s schooling ceased immediately; an older brother, at age fourteen, left a private academy for the harsher education of the sea (to slightly alter Melville, a merchant ship became his Yale and his Harvard); her parents sought to take in boarders and to find teaching jobs, which was all that their genteel upbringing had prepared them to do.85
Tyler and his wife apparently lived quite happily in Guilford, Vermont (even though it was well known as a bastion of Republican, even insurrectionist sentiment), and then, later, in Brattleboro, Vermont, both of which were isolated in those early days when not even a stagecoach penetrated the Green Mountains. By all reports, even when a state supreme court justice, Tyler lived modestly, no differently from his neighbors. It was, early and late, a married life far removed from his own youth as the son of a wealthy Boston merchant or as a somewhat wild (he used the word “dissipated”) scholar at Harvard in 1772, when students were still ranked according to the social status and wealth of their families rather than (as would subsequently be the case) by a more egalitarian alphabetical order.86
It is also clear that despite the declamations against aristocrats filling the Republican press during the 1790s, the Tylers were highly regarded, even loved, by their Republican neighbors. They were particularly appreciated for the education and culture (Mary, too, was an author) they brought to a far corner of New England. As the editor for the Brattleboro Chronicler fulsomely wrote about their arrival: “Their first coming to the high hill overlooking the whole town seems to us as the morning dawn of intellectual life in this region or the beginning of an Elizabethan age in Brattleboro.”87 Even though he was a Federalist at the time of the bitter 1800 and 1801 national and state elections, during which opposing party affiliations sometimes severed friendships and divided families, Tyler was still appointed to the state supreme court by a Republican legislature. On the court, he became close friends with the Republican chief justice, Jonathan Robinson, a friendship that would last a lifetime. Tyler himself was subsequently appointed chief justice after the 1807 elections in which the Republicans totally dominated the state. Ironically, in 1813, when the Federalists gained control of the legislature, they removed all the justices, including Tyler, replacing them with Federalists more committed to the party’s hard-line political vision. But then Tyler had always boasted that he made “just” decisions, not necessarily “politically correct” ones.
Both as a lawyer and, later, a judge, Tyler traveled all over the Vermont backcountry, especially when he served on the state supreme court, which was required by law to sit for one term every year in each of the state’s fourteen counties.88 Traveling extensively and regularly, staying in local homes and inns, Tyler increasingly came to appreciate the virtues of the yeomen he had satirized (albeit affectionately) in his early play. That appreciation was itself more than repaid. After his removal from the state supreme court, with his own law practice defunct, his finances in total disarray, himself in the depths of one of his severe depressions and suffering from a debilitating and disfiguring face cancer that was also slowly rendering him blind and that required him to be heavily drugged with laudanum, the judge and his wife were kept from starvation mainly through the aid of the common citizens of Vermont. (The only other family income derived from what Mrs. Tyler could eke out by her needle.) The townspeople still appreciated the coming of the Tylers to such a remote region and expressed that appreciation with sustaining gifts, which Mary Tyler movingly recorded in her diary: “Madam Boot sent us a fine goose & turkey—more providential supplies”; or “Mrs. Fessenden by her kind and sympathetic conduct drew tears from my full heart—May God bless her here & hereafter—this evening she sent me coffee—sugar & butter & rice.”89
Near the end of his life, in pain and poverty, Tyler returned to The Algerine Captive, revising it ostensibly for re-publication but also to divert his mind from his suffering. In those same final years, he also began an autobiographical novel, The Bay Boy, which repeats large portions of The Algerine Captive. His wife would often read to him from the earlier novel, and he would work on revising it or would rework portions of it into his evolving autobiographical piece, writing slowly on a slate because he could no longer hold a pen or see his marks upon a page. Then, while her husband slept, often in the daze of opium that mercifully relieved his pain, his wife would transcribe what he had written. Perhaps he hoped that the revised novel might reap the financial reward never produced by the original edition, the kind of remuneration other American fiction writers were beginning to enjoy by the 1820s. As Mary Tyler wrote to her daughter, Amelia, a year and a half before her husband’s death: “This writing occupies my time so intensely that it cuts off the little resource I had in my needle—but I have strong hope if we can rub along and get something finished for the press it may be of greater advantage than anything I could earn in any other way.” But Mary Tyler did not imagine that publication would bring an end to all their poverty, as is indicated by her realistic appraisal of a publisher’s plan to issue most profitably the revised edition of The Algerine Captive. She writes to her daughter:
[He] said there was now such a rage especially in [Europe?] for American literature, that his intention was when the first volume was finished to send it to his correspondents in London—and have an Edition printed there at the Same time it was printing in New York—and to secure the Copy right in both countrys and he had no doubt of a rapid sale—as for terms—he says there were three ways of proceeding—one was for the author to print at his own expense—another to let some responsible bookseller print at certain Shares of profit.… and the other, for the author to sell the copy right for fourteen years for Such Sum as he could get—this last is the only way we could do—as you know the Destruction of the poor is their poverty—but it is most probable even this way it will command a few hundred dollars—which will be a blessing.90
Tyler died the following year, leaving unpublished three new plays as well as the unfinished revisions on The Algerine Captive and the unfinished The Bay Boy. His epitaph noted only his career as a Vermont judge and said nothing at all of the literary works that had provided early fame but no relief from final poverty.
Ironically, even as Tyler lay dying, James Fenimore Cooper, the author who most capitalized on the “rage for American literature,” could, in 1822, praise his predecessor’s fiction. Yet the terms of Cooper’s praise virtually prophesied that anything Tyler might finally produce would be no Cooperesque best-seller. Much had changed between 1797, when Tyler wrote his novel, and 1822, when Cooper sought to retrieve it from obscurity with precisely those props of praise (“a forgotten masterpiece,” “a strangely neglected work”) required by texts that can no longer stand quite on their own. Cooper praises “Mr. Tyler’s forgotten, and we fear, lost narrative of the Algerine Captive … which relate[s] to times long past. Any future collector of our national tales, would do well to snatch [it] from oblivion, and to give [it] that place among the memorials of other days, which is due to the early and authentic historians of a country.”91 As Cooper’s tribute implies, Tyler had become a relic, a cultural monument to literature past (and passed), without ever having been a professional writer. As noted in an earlier chapter, even at his most vigorous and famous, Tyler could not support himself by his pen; in his final days, he could only pathetically pretend to be a professional author. His life and death starkly image the plight of the novelist in the early Republic.
Tyler outlived his books, but he also lived long enough to see that many of the crucial ideological disputes of the 1790s were simply rendered irrelevant by another generation’s different concerns or at best remembered almost with nostalgia as that new generation faced its own problems—modernization, industrialization, sectionalism, and even the dawnings of American imperialism. The author died in the summer of 1826, a summer that saw hundreds of celebrations all over America to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It was also a summer during which two of America’s most respected Founding Fathers passed away, mourned by the populace. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, two old friends, turned bitter rivals, turned friends again in old age. “You and I,” Adams had written to Jefferson in 1813, “ought not to die, before we have explained ourselves to each other.” And they died, many letters later, each on the same portentous day: July 4, 1826.92
Writing at a time of divisive national politics, when political tempers boiled, the novelist somehow remained remarkably aloof from partisan bickering. It would be difficult, reading The Algerine Captive, to discern its author’s Federalist affiliation from the text itself—as difficult, perhaps, as it is to perceive Brackenridge’s Republicanism in Modern Chivalry. Each novel eschews narrow party politics to address larger and more general political issues. Slavery, for example, the principal political target of The Algerine Captive, had champions, or at least apologists, on both sides of the official party line. Furthermore, personal pettiness, avarice, prejudice, and ignorance infected the ranks of Republican and Federalist alike, rich man and poor, Northerner and Southerner. Or Updike Underhill, the narrator of The Algerine Captive, often sounds, as he berates American provincialism, very much like Washington or Hamilton or Adams at their most vituperative and most elitist. Yet Underhill, too, with all his aristocratic pretensions and plebeian origins, is also a subject of the novel’s satire. Finally, the real brunt of Tyler’s satire is not the wrong party but tyranny itself. The novel fictionally opposes the tyranny of history, the tyranny of religion, the tyranny of law, the tyranny of ignorance and cupidity and affectation; and, most of all and as becomes increasingly clear in volume 2, the tyranny of slavery, upon which the economies of Algeria and the United States both were based.
IN PRAISING TYLER, JAMES Fenimore Cooper not only defined him as a historian but defined the term as well:
We say the historians—we do not mean to rank the writers of [fictional] tales, among the recorders of statutes, and battles, and party chronicles; but among those true historians which Dr. Moore says, are wanting, to give us just notions of what manner of men the ancient Greeks were, in their domestic affections, and retired deportment; and with whom Fielding classes himself, nearly in these words: “Those dignified authors who produce what are called true histories, are indeed writers of fictions, while I am a true historian, a describer of society as it exists, and of men as they are.”93
Cooper, following Fielding, reverses the usual prescriptions for fiction and history. History is a fiction and the novelist is the true historian. In The Algerine Captive, Tyler confuses the issues further by claiming his fiction is factual and by pretending that he writes, valiantly, against the mass popularity of fiction. Fiction masquerading as fact and railing against fiction: it is a complicated narrative game Tyler here plays but one that he sustains throughout the first portion of his novel and that, I would suggest, is a key to the large political purpose of his picaresque tale.94
The novel begins with a genealogy that, by the very act of placing the narrator in history, effectively displaces much of the history that the tale occupies. As Don L. Cook observes, Updike’s account of his origins conveniently disregards likely detail or careful chronology—and all for the sake of a good story.95 The “honored ancestor,” Captain Underhill, acting as a go-between whereby Queen Elizabeth and the earl of Leicester seek to advance different affairs of the heart and of the state, gives us a version of history as Harlequin romance. The text, moreover, admits as much. The crucial scene, the private interview between the Captain and the Queen that conduces to the premature “decease of the Earl of Leicester,” has “never yet received the sober sanction of the historian,” and only a “traditional family anecdote” vouches for the truth of the account. On the American side, too, the commonly accepted historical record is undermined when Updike Underhill tells the story of how his Puritan forebear was accused of “adultery of the heart” and banished from Boston. The ostensible sin of the pharmakos victim compromises the ostensible sanctity of those who find him guilty.
The descendant Underhill amasses impressive documentation to clear the name of his impuned ancestor. But disputing one suspicion highlights another, which is to say that the enterprise of the character mirrors a larger enterprise of the author. The novelist and the narrator both suspect that the historical record, the archive, lies—or, rather, serves mostly its own view of itself. Note, for example, how the narrator’s account calls the very sequences of history into question by calculated anachronistic juxtapositions:
The writers of those times differ as to the particular offense for which he was punished. Some say that it was for holding the antinomian tenets of the celebrated Ann [sic] Hutchinson; others say that the charge against him was for saying, That the government at Boston were as zealous as the scribes and pharisees, and as Paul before his conversion. The best account I have been able to collect is that at the time when the zeal of our worthy forefathers burned hottest against heretics and sectaries, when good Roger Williams, who settled Providence, the pious Wheelwright, and others were banished, he, with about sixty other imprudent persons who did not believe in the then popular arguments of fines, imprisonment, disfranchisement, confiscation, banishments, and halters for the conversion of infidels, supposed that the Christian faith, which had spread so wonderfully in its infancy when the sword of civil power was drawn against it, in that age, surrounded by numerous proselites, needed not the same sword unsheathed in its favor. These mistaken people signed a remonstrance against the violent proceedings which were the order of that day.… Some of the remonstrants recanted, some were fined, some were disfranchised, and others, among whom was Captain Underhill, were banished. (P. 34)
It is hard to miss the parallels between the repressive politics of the times in which Captain Underhill lived and the equally constrained contemporary world of 1797, in which Tyler’s readers first perused The Algerine Captive. Congress was already framing the Alien and Sedition Acts, the newspapers were filled, pro and con, with talk of new ways to require “fines, imprisonment, disfranchisement, confiscation, banishments” and other punishments for those who protested too vociferously against authority. But if the magistrates could be wrong in Captain Underhill’s case, Tyler implicitly suggests, then cannot magistrates be wrong again? What is the morality of legislating extreme morality? Notice, in this context, the supreme silliness, from the point of view of the reader of 1797, of the offense for which the captain was banished from his community:
At a certain lecture in Boston, instead of noting the referred texts in his Bible, according to the profitable custom of the times, this gallant soldier had fixed his eyes steadfastly, and perhaps inordinately, upon one Mistress Miriam Wilbore; who it seems was, at that very time, herself in the breach of the spirit of an existing law which forbade women to appear in public with uncovered arms and necks, by appearing at the same lecture with a pair of wanton open-worked gloves, slit at the thumbs and fingers for the conveniency of taking snuff. (P. 36)
The incident—its causes, its persecution, its history—becomes a reductio ad absurdum of the whole process of enforcing proper behavior so much at issue in 1797.
The ancestral account of the injustices Captain John Updike endured goes on (with a continuing relevance for the “now” of 1797) to undermine the authority not just of Underbill’s accusers but of those who have kept the official record. “It is said by some authors that he was charged with the heinous crime of adultery,” the narrator observes. John Winthrop, Cotton Mather, and Jeremy Belknap are all implicated in perpetrating the “error.” Deliberately? Does historiography compound the abuses and offenses of history? The “unwary reader” is warned that official history, like official dictates, is mostly an expression of the scotomas and stigmatisms of the official vision of the time. “The rigid discipline of our fathers of that era often construed actions, expressions, and sometimes thoughts into crimes” (p. 35). In compensation, the text proliferates with competing versions of the text—public and signed accusations, testimonies, and “Brother Underhill’s” own account, “indorsed” and fortuitously preserved, “pasted on the back of an old Indian deed.” The narrator, “according to the beneficial mode of modern historians,” decides to “transcribe literally” this document for the reader, and thus the fiction itself enacts the process whereby any account, however fictional, can be incorporated into the official record. Equally to the point, Captain Underhill concludes his epistle: “I came from England because I did not like the lords bishops, but I have yet to praye to be delivered from the lords bretherenne” (pp. 39–40). From lords bishops to lords bretherenne to lord president?
The descendant Underhill, after quoting his ancestor’s justifying epistle, coyly observes: “It is with great reluctance I am induced to publish this letter which appears to reflect upon the justice of the proceedings of our forefathers. I would rather, like the sons of Noah, go backwards and cast a garment over our fathers’ nakedness; but the impartiality of a historian, and the natural solicitude to wipe the stains from the memory of my honored ancestor, will excuse me to the candid” (p. 40). So, which will it be, disinterested history or apologetic genealogy? Or is there, finally, any discernable difference between the two? The fictionalizing of history in this novel postulates the fictionality of history and suggests that ostensibly definitive judgments—“adultery of the heart” or “Jacobinism”—are simply the strained conventions of certain readings that valorize only those readings. The conventions of history are, moreover, the conventions of morality. History, in the novel, gives us the devolution of moral edict to ridiculous charge and harsh sentence (banishment for being taken in by the fenestrations of a glove). Tyler thus early establishes the picaresque’s characteristic self-refuting moral vision and also something more. All moral vision, the text seems to suggest, can be self-serving and self-refuting; perspective constantly changes; prejudice is next to humanness. The danger lies in attempting to elevate prejudice into law, desired morality into enduring edict, and history into a self-confirming typology of only the revealed truths that the proponents of that history would themselves ask all others to contemplate.96
Clearly, the same novel could not be narrated by the fictional grandson of, say, Cotton Mather, as opposed to the putative descendant of a Puritan miscreant (miscreant, of course, only according to the official history). The picaresque as a form requires a protagonist whose place, whose genealogy, is marginal and at least partly in question. Updike Underhill is just such a character. Like his ancestor, he is no paragon of virtue. Something of a ne’er-do-well, something of an overeducated bumpkin, and something of a snob with little basis for his defensive pretensions to superiority, Underhill serves as a kind of low-status Everyman, an Everyman particularly recognizable in late-eighteenth-century America. His story—the ambiguous background, the fitful beginnings, the small hypocrisies of his convictions, the moral blind spots but also his essential good will and energy—allegorizes his country’s unofficial present, just as Captain Underhill’s story allegorizes certain aspects of its unofficial past.
Yet very little of Tyler’s tale is clear, and that, I would suggest, is part and parcel of his allegory. Where is truth in the story of Captain Underhill? Where is truth in the story of Updike? If there is truth at all, it is “truth” with a small t—contextual, multivalent, never fixed and final, and not at all prepared to support a superstructure of received history or manifest destiny. Consider, for example, the odd auguries that attend the protagonist’s birth on the otherwise insignificant day of July 16, 1762. His mother dreams that her son will be “beset by Indians,” who will play football with his head. The dream is interpreted to mean that the youngster is “born to be the sport of fortune and that he would one day suffer among savages” (p. 43). Both premonitions, of course, come true, which serves to raise certain ontological questions. “The learned reader will smile contemptuously, perhaps, upon my mentioning dreams in this enlightened age” (p. 44). The smiling “learned reader” is here quite wrong and might do well to question the questioning prompted by learning. Updike, too, will find that a little learning is a dangerous thing. As the narrator suggests, “It was the error of the times of monkish ignorance, to believe everything. It may possibly be the error of the present day, to credit nothing” (p. 44). An earlier scepticism about history does not preclude a different scepticism about scepticism.
The status of truth—revealed truth, dreams, history, learning—becomes a major preoccupation of The Algerine Captive and supplies one connecting thread in a novel otherwise rambling, episodic, and, in a word, picaresque. Underhill, as the retrospective narrator of his life and his six years’ captivity in Algiers, must somehow wrestle with the whole notion of what truths he has to tell. More specifically, just what is his story, and how can he best present it? Yet the whole first section of the novel, from the preface through to chapter 5, is mostly about how not to make story. The fiction examines such questions as what should be discounted in any story and what might be included despite its seeming irrationality. The result is, to use a term coined by Linda Hutcheon, “historiographie metafiction,” fiction that self-consciously explores the whole process of making any historical fiction.97 Not until chapter 5 do we encounter the kind of narrative beginning normally expected in the first pages of an autobiographical account: “In my childhood I was sent, as is customary, to a woman’s school in the summer and to a man’s in the winter season, and made great progress in such learning as my preceptors dealt in” (p. 45). The fact that the novel, for some five chapters, has been questioning history, truth, and learning adds further weight to the satirical implications of the phrase “such learning as my preceptors dealt in.”
We soon learn that his preceptors dealt very little in learning at all. Reading, as did virtually all schoolchildren of the early Republic, from Dilworth’s spelling book, young Updike learned mostly to recite “as loud as I could speak, without regard to emphasis or stops” (p. 45). But Tyler’s satire is not limited to the pedagogical shortcomings of early American education. The local minister, a Harvard graduate who “prided himself on the strength of his own lungs,” makes an annual inspection visit to the district school and is impressed by the boy’s bellowing forth his lessons, impressed enough to convince Updike’s father to “put Updike to learning.” By waiting at table or otherwise serving the more well-to-do students, Updike might be able to earn his way through Harvard, just as his minister did before him: “I rubbed through and am now what I am,” the minister avers, while the reader wonders precisely what he is.
The first minister is countered but not canceled out by a second one. A Boston clergyman who happens to be traveling through New Hampshire encounters Updike’s father and informs him that all a boy learns at college is Greek, a subject “entirely useless.” This minister insists that “learning … has its fashions, and, like other fashions of this world, they pass away” (p. 48), an assessment with which the narrator will later agree: “The little advantage this deceased language has since been to me has often caused me sorely to regret the misspense of time in acquiring it” (p. 50). Neither does Updike’s classical learning profit his family. At one point the young scholar decides to imitate a passage from the Georgics and kills “a fat heifer of my father’s, upon which the family depended for their winter’s beef, covered it with green boughs, and laid it in the shade to putrify, in order to raise a swarm of bees, after the manner of Virgil” (p. 50). Seeing in this failed attempt at beekeeping that learning has unfitted his son for a farmer’s life, the father accedes to the mother’s request that the boy continue his “career of learning”—anything, one imagines, to get rid of him.
A classical education, the distinguishing mark of America’s gentry, hardly distinguishes young Mr. Underhill, who, for that matter, was not much distinguished before he obtained his education either. As in the incident with the heifer, regularly Tyler’s satire runs both ways, condemning, evenhandedly, both the affectations of the high and the limitations of the low.98 Having parodied, for example, a pedantic minister and his deleterious influence on an untutored common man, Tyler immediately turns his satirical gaze upon other such “average Americans” to show their shortcomings as well. But especially in the protagonist the flaws of both the high and the low conjoin. Consider here how Updike, unsuited for farming by learning, contracts to serve as a preceptor in a neighboring village. He naively envisions himself as a godlike guardian of the minds of youth, a living monument to education with “my scholars seated in awful silence around me, my arm chair, and my birchen sceptre of authority” (p. 51). It hardly works out that way. When the young master first enters his new school, he is met with some sixty students, ranging from small toddlers to hulking lads of eighteen, each at a different level of learning, and all clamoring at once for “master’s” attention. His training for Harvard hardly trained him for that chaotic scene.
The protagonist’s misadventures as a schoolteacher soon bring his career to an end but do so in a fashion that validates the premises about the fictionality of history with which the novel began. One day an overgrown and surly student seats himself in the master’s chair before the fire and refuses to move when Underhill arrives on the scene. “Father finds wood, and not you,” the churlish boy observes, whereupon Underhill immediately revises his previously asserted philosophical opposition to corporal punishment and smacks the youth with a ruler. Soon after the student’s father appears at the schoolhouse bearing a whip and threatening to thrash the teacher should he ever lay hands on his poor innocent boy again. “The next day, it was reported all over town what a cruel man the master was. ‘Poor Jotham came into school half frozen and near fainting; master had been sitting a whole hour by the warm fire; when he begged him to let him warm himself a little, the master rose in a rage and cut open his head with the tongs, and his life was despaired of’ ” (p. 53). When a short time later the boys burn down the schoolhouse, Updike again is blamed, but this time for “want of proper government.” Now he is much too lax as a disciplinarian. “The beating of Jotham was forgotten and a thousand stories of my want of proper spirit circulated” (pp. 54–55). The now missing building constitutes the best proof of those stories. Underhill is judged officially, albeit unfairly, a failure and must seek his fortune in other endeavors. But his immediate change in prospects does not, to say the least, perturb him: “I am sometimes led to believe that my emancipation from real slavery in Algiers did not afford me sincerer joy than I experienced at that moment” (p. 55).
This early episode (along with the protagonist’s final reaction) is paradigmatic. The plot progresses by escape as Underhill regularly retreats from one scene of failure to another and just as regularly learns little along the way. Admittedly, the school was impossible, but so was the ludicrous master. Although we are never shown Underhill in the act of teaching (perhaps because none ever took place), his method of pedagogical address is amply indicated by his discourse in such unlikely establishments as the local tavern. There he enters into a conversation about racehorses by offering up his own “descant upon Xanthus, the immortal courser of Achilles” (p. 53), to the befuddlement of his audience. Or at a quilting bee with the ladies, he discovers “a happy opportunity to introduce Andromache, the wife of the great Hector, at her loom, and Penelope, the faithful wife of Ulysses, weaving her seven years web” (p. 53). His classical allusions elicit only “a stupid stare until I mentioned the long time the queen of Ulysses was weaving.” Then “a smart young woman observed that she supposed Miss Penelope’s yarn was rotted in whitening, that made her so long; and then she told a tedious story of a piece of cotton and linen she had herself woven under the same circumstances” (p. 53). But the prize for tediousness is immediately claimed by the smart young man, who caps the woman’s story by declaiming “forty lines of Greek, from the Odessey,” and then passing on, with no stop or mercy, to “a dissertation on the caesura” (p. 53).
Tyler’s pattern here—satirizing with the same incident the learned ignorance of his protagonist and the untutored ignorance of the populace—continues throughout volume 1. Updike and the people he encounters are not so different after all, but only the older retrospective narrator, not the young untested man, recognizes that fact. For just as the yeomen he encounters brandish their willful ignorance as if it were some badge of honor, so, too, does Underhill brandish his spurious learning, and he also is unwilling to change. Throughout volume 1, he seems singularly incapable of learning the lessons his own experience teaches and so retreats from failure to failure. For example, after abandoning his career as a pedagogue, at least partly because of his own inability to speak the same language as those whom he ostensibly serves, Updike turns to medicine and apprentices himself to one of the most celebrated physicians in early America. From the wise and “celebrated Dr. Moyes,” he learns something of the doctor’s science but nothing of his humanity and “could not help being astonished that a man of [Dr. Moyes’s] acknowledged learning should not sometimes quote Greek” (p. 65). When subsequently he goes to study with the esteemed Dr. Kittredge, he is equally surprised to find that “excepting when he was with his pupils or men of science, I never heard him use a technical term.” He possessed “all the essence, without the parade of learning” (p. 76), and what fun was that? Incidentally, Underhill himself fails when he attempts to put into practice the method for which these famed doctors are esteemed, for his patients judge him precisely as he first judged Dr. Moyes. Only after he spatters his practice with snippets of Tully, Virgil, and Lily (the one occasion on which his classical learning serves him) is he deemed “the most learned because the most unintelligible” (p. 85). Patients now come in greater number, but all Underhill amasses is promises of payments (empty recompense for empty words), so he decides to go south to warmer climes and, surely, fuller purses. That last expectation soon proves to be merely another of the delusions that can promote his wandering but not his rise.
Penniless in the South, as unsuccessful at doctoring there as he had been in New England, Underhill contemplates teaching again but soon decides that he would prefer “laboring with the slaves on their plantation [to] sustaining the slavery and contempt of a school” (p. 97). His overblown rhetoric marks more his opposition to schoolmastering than to slavery, and he resolves his present impasse by hiring on as a surgeon on a slave ship. The irony of his administering to slaves (so that they can be sold profitably back in America) despite his professed hatred of the institution and the further irony of slavery being practiced in a country ostensibly founded on a declaration of all men’s equality are both underlined by the names of the ships on which Underhill and his countrymen practice their trade. In a real sense, aboard, first, the incongruously named Freedom and then on the equally misnamed Sympathy, Underhill leaves America to come home to it, and what at first promised to be an excursion into the wider world of Europe and Africa, crossing seas and encountering other peoples and other ways, soon proves to be anything but that liberating experience.
Just as The Algerine Captive seems about ready to take off in the direction of such picaresque fantasy novels as Fortune’s Foot-ball or The History of Constantius and Pulchera, it switches to a second form that is structurally and ideologically inimical to the picaresque. As Tanselle has aptly noted, Tyler produces an oddly hybrid novel when he grafts a captivity tale onto a picaresque trunk.99 But it is a captivity tale with a powerful political message, not simply a sensationalized account of a white adventurer living among exotic captors. Instead of adventure on the high seas, we have a gruesomely detailed rendering of the barbarities of a slave ship, the details borrowed largely from slave narratives and most obviously from the account by Olaudah Equiano, first published in London in 1789 and reprinted in New York in 1791.100 Aboard the Sympathy, Underhill witnesses from the perspective of one of the captors the deprivations that Equiano documented from the perspective of one of the captured. “I execrated myself for even the involuntary part [Involuntary? Who has enslaved him?] I bore in this execrable traffic. I thought of my native land and blushed” (p. 109). Underbill’s previous and persistent metaphorising of his own service as slavery now rings false indeed. The horrors of the voyage seem finally to penetrate the erstwhile invulnerable obtuseness of this picaro, and, for the first time, he can empathize with someone totally unlike himself. He imagines “the peaceful husbandman dragged from his native farm; the fond husband torn from the embraces of his beloved wife; the mother, from her babes; the tender child, from the arms of its parent; and all the tender, endearing ties of natural and social affection rended by the hand of avaricious violence” (pp. 108–9). When the captain inquires how many slaves Underhill would like to purchase, he “rejected [his] privilege with horror, and declared [he] would sooner suffer servitude than purchase a slave” (p. 109).
This is the second time in the novel he has made such an offer, and this time the fates take him at his word. His ship is attacked by an Algerian ship, the Rover, that in name mocks the previous pattern of Underbill’s life and, in effect, ends it. Seized himself “by the hand of avaricious violence,” the innocent picaro ends his wanderings to experience firsthand just what slavery is all about. Furthermore, his forced servitude follows appropriately from his own involvement in the slave trade. Recognizing the poetic justice of his punishment, he finally begins to take some responsibility for his past actions and to realize that, in a republic, one’s tolerance of injustice in its most extreme form, slavery, is synonymous with one’s complicity. Both expiation and reform (private and public) are in order:
I have deplored my conduct with tears of anguish; and I pray to a merciful God, the common parent of the great family of the universe, who hath made of one flesh and one blood all nations of the earth, that the miseries, the insults, and cruel woundings I afterwards received when a slave myself may expiate for the inhumanity I was necessitated to exercise towards these, MY BRETHREN OF THE HUMAN RACE. (P. no)
At the end of volume i, Tyler foregrounds the political import of this picaresque tale. As the volume concludes, Underhill, captured by Algerians, makes a promise which he will later keep by writing his own story:
Grant me … once more to taste the freedom of my native country, and every moment of my life shall be dedicated to preaching against this detestable commerce. I will fly to our fellow citizens in the southern states; I will, on my knees, conjure them, in the name of humanity, to abolish a traffic which causes it to bleed in every pore. If they are deaf to the pleadings of nature, I will conjure them, for the sake of consistency, to cease to deprive their fellow creatures of that freedom which their writers, their orators, representatives, senators, and even their constitutions of government have declared to be the unalienable birthright of man. (P. 118)
Again, The Algerine Captive seems broken-backed in its odd conjoining of apparently inconsistent parts. The picaresque novel that verges into a captivity tale does so to register the full horror of slavery. To that end the travelogue of the protagonist’s disconnected life can gradually carry him to a confluence with a different traveling, the forced voyage of the captured Africans being conducted to the slave markets in the land of the free. And then a different ship can carry him back to, literally, where they came from, and, figuratively, where they were going to. With that captivity accomplished, however, the novel proceeds to lapse into a travelogue again, a travelogue that seems far more conventional than was the account of Underhill’s early excursions through America, perhaps because Tyler himself had never seen Algiers and had, in effect, plagiarized his captivity tale from several popular Algerine captivity narratives of the day. Obviously, he hoped to exploit the then-current national preoccupation with the outrages perpetrated on Americans by Barbary pirates to expose worse outrages perpetrated by Americans on Africans. It is a worthy objective but, as almost every contemporaneous reviewer and contemporary critic has noted, volume 2 is “much inferior” to volume 1.101 volume 2 mostly reprises, without much plot or perspective, the strange ways and religion of the Algerines.102
Yet one cannot simply dismiss the rambling and often repetitious second half of the narrative, for it is here that the political implications of the whole novel coalesce, and, more to the point, Tyler here shows how much one’s perception of any country—America or Algiers—depends mostly upon the perspective from which one views. In volume 1, the callow Underhill had no problem distinguishing his own superiority from the patent and manifest inferiority of the mob. But once he joins the ranks of the unprivileged, he radically revaluates the hierarchies that he earlier upheld:
The higher his rank in society, the further is man removed from nature. Grandeur draws a circle round the great and often excludes from them the finer feelings of the heart. The wretched are all of one family and ever regard each other as brethren. Among the slaves of my new master, I was received with pity and treated with a tenderness bordering upon fraternal affection. They could not indeed speak my language, and I was ignorant of theirs; but, by dividing the scanty meal, composing my couch of straw, and alleviating my more rugged labors, they spoke that universal language of benevolence which needs no linguist to interpret. (P. 126)
The same man who despised his fellow Americans because they did not speak Greek can now comprehend the “universal language of benevolence.” Among his fellow captives he finds not a single “man of any rank, family, or fortune” (p. 127)—none of the noble enslaved who populate typical narratives of romantic captivity—yet he finds men and women of dignity and merit, of honesty and integrity, of courage and charity. Under the harshest of conditions, he meets the oppressed of different races, nations, and religions, and, a captive himself, he discovers, for the first time in his life, a sense of community and finally learns the one language he really needs to know.
Underhill’s transformation initially occurs on an emotional level, one that has nothing to do with learning or status. But his captivity also forces him to reexamine his intellectual assumptions as well. Certainly the most interesting (and controversial) of Underhill’s revelations in volume 2 occurs when the captive engages in a philosophical and theological argument with his captor. Attempting to convert Underhill, the Mollah challenges him to a debate on the relative worth of Christianity and Islam. “A wise man,” the Mollah insists, sounding more like Locke than a Mahometan priest, “adheres not to his religion merely because it was that of his ancestors. He will examine the creeds of other nations, compare them with his own, and hold fast that which is right” (p. 139). When Underhill consents to subject his own Christianity to this rationalist comparative test, the Mollah’s arguments are not easily answered:
My friend, you surely have … read the writings of your own historians. The history of the Christian church is a detail of bloody massacre: from the institution of the Christian thundering legion, under Constantine the Great, to the expulsion of the Moors out of Spain by the ferocious inquisition, or the dragooning of the Huguenots from France, under Louis the Great. The Mussulmen never yet forced a man to adopt their faith.… We read in the book of Zuni that the souls of true believers are bound up in one fragrant bundle of eternal love. We leave it to the Christians of the West Indies, and Christians of your southern plantations, to baptize the unfortunate African into your faith, and then use your brother Christians as brutes of the desert. (P. 142)
Once more Underhill is “abashed” for his country. He cannot at all answer the Mollah, and, after five days of such failure, he “resumed [his] slave’s attire and sought safety in [his] former servitude” (p. 143).
The diction here—safety in servitude—is potent. In the manner of other early American picaresque novels, The Algerine Captive seems singularly ambivalent about its own Christian principles, and Tyler’s contemporaries were quick to note this wavering. “Read ‘Algerine Captive,’ ” the painter and critic William Dunlap noted in his diary. “The authors zeal has made him scurrilous in respect to Thos Paine, and yet in the statement he makes of Mahometanism, he appears rather to favour the Musselman.” More publicly, a writer for London’s Monthly Review noted that “in the dialogue with the Mollah, the author too feebly defends that religion which he professes to revere,” and the reviewer for the Monthly Anthology and Boston Review similarly expressed “apprehension” over the “conversation between Updike and the Mollah,” since “the author has so decidedly given the Mollah the best of the argument, that the adherence of Updike to Christianity seems the effect rather of obstinancy than of conviction. We enter our solemn protest against this cowardly mode of attacking revelation.”103 Ironically, Tyler was criticized for showing an open-minded attitude toward religion in a novel that begins by condemning those who criticized Captain John Underhill’s openminded attitudes.
Although Tyler retrospectively defended himself and his novel against those charges by insisting that his novel advocated neither “infidelity or even scepticism” but aimed, simply, at dispelling the “vulgar prejudices against Islamism,” I would suggest that his first reviewers correctly surmised the subversiveness of his plot.104 There are more similarities between Tyler’s Algiers and America than most Americans in the 1790s would have cared to admit. The class, religious, political, and racial hierarchies in Algiers simply extend and exaggerate the same hierarchies dividing the American political and social scene. In each country, Underhill finds greed, deceit, quackery, and superstition. And most obviously, Algerians abducting Americans and forcing them to serve as slaves merely reverses the usual direction of the trade. The institution is the same, the heinousness of the activity is the same, only the peoples and the continents are switched. But with one proviso: The “barbarians” of the Barbary Coast are more civilized in their practice. As the Mollah points out, the Algerines do not convert their captives and then keep them enslaved, as is regularly done in the “land of the free.” Algiers thus becomes a distorted mirror version of America. Or, more accurately, it becomes the mirror version that especially shows up American distortions.
For Underhill, to travel is to see different things, but, more important, to sojourn for six years in Algiers is to see things differently. The protagonist learns much from his captivity, and what he finally knows juxtaposed against what he previously did not know serves to produce the singularly complex and surprisingly humane satiric vision through which the novel is narrated. One angle of that vision can note and denounce the various frauds and failures whom Updike early encounters, such as the hard-swearing, slave-beating Southern clergyman or the Northern minister who opposes all “human learning as carnal and devilish” (p. 54). But another angle sees that a failed, pompous young pedant is hardly the measure of all that he thinks he perceives. The example of others such as “the celebrated Doctor Moyes, who, though blind, delivered a lecture upon optics and delineated the properties of light and shade to the Bostonians” (p. 63), contrasts unfavorably to young Updike’s abilities as both propounder and perceiver.
Happily, the Updike Underhill who returns home is not the same man who earlier sailed away. He is older, wiser, more able to accept pluralism in society and even in religion. He is ready to be more settled, as indicated by his promise to become a “useful physician” (as opposed to his previous doctoring both on the slave ship and before it), and to become also a “good father, and a worthy FEDERAL citizen.”
The “federalism” here recommended is open-minded, pluralistic, democratic, and utterly opposed to oligarchy or autocracy, to one people’s dominating over another. The young protagonist revels in his picaresque adventures, even though they mostly proceed from or to failure. The somewhat more mature protagonist, while captive in Algiers, tends to romanticize the America in which he can then no longer live. The older narrator’s vision—expanded by his captivity and oppression—infuses the entire novel with a classic eighteenth-century form of humanitarianism; in Raymond Williams’s phrase, a “passionate insistence on care and sympathy, based on an implied standard of plain, virtuous and responsible living.”105
Tyler’s final solution to the problems of American democracy, which he satirized in volume 1 and then unequivocally condemned in volume 2, is ultimately not political in any systemic sense but returns us—individual readers—back to the republican values of individual responsibility, individual conscience, and individual action within and for the good of the commonwealth. Like the sentimental novel, which provided the nation’s single most telling critique of patriarchy without offering specific agendas for eliminating institutionalized sexual discrimination, the picaresque novel pointed out what was rotten in the American polis but stopped short of outlining a project of political change. The early American novel carved out its literary territory in the here-and-now of the contemporary American social and political scene and commented upon and criticized that scene, but left the solution of these problems up to the individual reader—the indeterminacy of the solution as basic to the form as the incisiveness of its critique. In this respect, The Algerine Captive is thoroughly representative. The text, written essentially to keep an earlier promise—“every moment of my life shall be dedicated to preaching against this detestable commerce” of slavery—is both product and proof of Underbill’s awakened consciousness and conscience and is intended to effect the same process in the reader. But it is up to the reader to implement the political message implicit in that development and made explicit by the end of volume 2: “For to no nation besides the United States can that ancient saying be more emphatically applied; BY UNITING WE STAND, BY DIVIDING WE FALL” (p. 224). The pedant and the untutored; the Northerner and the Southerner; the Federalist and the Republican; the urbanite and the country yeoman; the rich and the poor; most specifically, the master and the slave, black and white; even, perhaps, men and women—all must be included, for, without unity, without equality, then the Mollah, after all, was right.
ALTHOUGH ι HAVE EXAMINED seven copies of the first (1797) edition of The Algerine Captive (a substantial portion of the surviving volumes from the original edition of one thousand copies), none offers up any significant evidence as to how the book was actually read by early American readers or just who its readers were. But one anecdote, related to her children by Mary Palmer Tyler, provides a fitting epilogue to this chapter and gives us a delightful account of a real writer and reader corroborating on the production of an early American novel. This anecdote is all the more appealing in that it is the only one I know that intimates, in telling detail, the various assumptions in the new Republic about the appropriate audience of fiction, the role of the reader, and the status value of fictional “truth”:
Your father finished “The Algerine Captive” and, by way of trying, like Moliere, the worth of the work, he was in the habit of reading it, as he finished the chapters, to an old woman who lived with us as maid of all work; she was a woman who had seen better days and was quite intelligent. She had imbibed the common prejudices against the “horrid Algerines” and felt greatly interested about Dr. Updike Underhill; had heard of people of that name in Rhode Island, and wondered if he ever got home, and understanding from your father’s answer that he had, “And he has got your honor to write his life and adventures?” Upon receiving what she took to be an affirmative, “Well! I do hope he will come here while I stay; do you think he will?” “It is quite doubtful,” said your father. “Oh, I do hope he will; but you will let me hear you read what you write, I know.” “Certainly.” And, of course, every evening after her work was done, she would put on a clean white apron and her best cap, and come to see if he had any ready to read to her, and was greatly disappointed if he had not. She evidently believed it all true, and years afterwards I saw her … [and] she asked us seriously if Dr. Underhill ever came to visit us.106
There is a curious relationship here of master and maid, author and reader. Who, it might well be asked, is serving whom? Dressed in her clean apron and best cap, the maid is the ideal reader—ever ready, once her work is done, to enter into the fiction. The author refuses to clarify the status of the text, its fictionality, while, all the time, measuring the success of his fiction by his maid/reader’s honest reaction to the false truth of what he reads to her. Mrs. Tyler, writing retrospectively to preserve the anecdote for posterity, further confuses the differences between fact and fiction, story and the story of that story. We have here more than just a metaphor of authority—the author beguiling the reader through the medium of text. For Tyler’s role as employer whose household is managed in part by the labor of the maid who is also his first, primary, and most immediate audience and, as well, the consumer and ultimately the purchaser/employer of his artistic labors emphasizes the interdependence of author and reader, writing and reading, text and performance. The maid might well be a stand-in for Tyler’s ideal, implied reader—just as the author himself is a stand-in for Updike Underhill, the guest who never comes to dinner.