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Philip Barnard, Mark L. Kamrath, and Stephen Shapiro
Since his lifetime, Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810) has been the best‐known novelist of the US early national period. This remains the case even after the great expansion of scholarly interest in early national literary history and the “early American novel” that began in the 1980s with studies such as Cathy Davidson’s landmark Revolution and the Word (1986). While scholars now discuss a wider variety of early national writers and texts than were considered before the 1980s, Brown’s seven published novels – particularly the four “gothic” narratives that appeared between 1798 and 1800 – nonetheless remain the most frequently discussed and assigned novels of the period. In spite of this wealth of contemporary attention, and indeed in spite of the relative sophistication of contemporary models of literary history and of the history and theory of the novel, however, it remains the case that the shape of Brown’s career and corpus of writings, as well as his particular approach to novel writing and relation to contemporary novelistic production, often remains weakly or inadequately understood and contextualized. If discussing Brown, for most it becomes a question of “Brown and the novel.” How have the parameters and implications of this discussion changed in recent scholarly generations?
This chapter addresses this question by providing an overview of Brown’s reception history and corpus of writings and a discussion of Brown’s relation to the novel‐form that will, we hope, support our contention that the commonplace understanding of Brown’s novels, and of his relation to the genre’s contemporary form, require revision. A forward‐looking understanding of Brown as a novelist, we contend, is somewhat paradoxical in that it requires us to acknowledge the truth of two assertions that are contradictory only at first sight: (i) Brown should not be understood primarily as a novelist, at least in the traditional sense that appears in most of his reception history, since the greater part of his literary output consists of writings and editorial work in other genres; and (ii) the novel may well continue as a central focus for current and future considerations of Brown’s literary career, but only insofar as we acknowledge his particular understanding of the novel‐form as conjectural history and thus as an engagement with socially focused writing that extends well beyond the limits of the novel as conventionally understood.
Reception History and the Shape of Brown’s Corpus of Writings
In a basic sense, Brown’s reception history involves the gradual unfolding of the full parameters of his corpus and career as a Revolutionary‐era participant in the period’s “republic of letters” as well as a writer who published prolifically in a variety of genres. A review of the four stages of this reception history helps explain why it is no longer adequate to understand Brown primarily as a novelist.
In a first phase, from Brown’s lifetime until roughly the 1860s, a period during which Brown’s late‐Enlightenment formal and thematic repertoire are still widely legible, he was received and praised as a major novelist by many US and European writers and particularly by the Godwin–Wollstonecraft and later Shelley circles in England, who responded to the resonance or commonality between their writings and Brown’s, to which we will turn shortly. Without reviewing praise and commentary from notable writers of this era, from Godwin and Walter Scott to Margaret Fuller (see, for example, Rosenthal 1981), one can note that the period sees the foundation of a basic reception pattern that still persists residually today, according to which Brown is primarily notable as the author of four novels grasped in varying ways as examples of the period’s “gothic” subgenres, on the one hand, and as related to the writings of the Godwin–Wollstonecraft circle, on the other. These are, of course, the now‐canonical Wieland; or The Transformation (September 1798); Ormond; or The Secret Witness (January, 1800); Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep‐Walker (late summer 1800); and Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 (First Part, spring 1799; Second Part, fall 1800). Brown’s final published novels, Clara Howard; In a Series of Letters (June 1801) and Jane Talbot; A Novel (December 1801), and the serialized Memoirs of Stephen Calvert (June 1799–June 1800), received little attention during this period, and the voluminous periodical writings (essays, reviews, anecdotes, dialogues, poetry, etc.), historiography, historical fiction, short fiction, political pamphlets, and miscellaneous writings remained virtually unknown. The posthumous biographical collection of lesser‐known writings and letters published by Brown’s associate William Dunlap in 1815 provided an initial hint of the wider contours of Brown’s corpus but remained unknown outside a tiny circle of enthusiasts. Brown’s reputation throughout the period was sustained primarily via numerous US, British, and continental reprintings and translations of the four canonical novels, for example in editions that symptomatically present Brown’s Edgar Huntly bound together with Shelley’s Frankenstein (London and Edinburgh, 1831), Schiller’s Ghost‐Seer (London, 1832), or Southey’s The Curse of Kehama (London, 1853).
A second phase of reception, from the 1860s through the 1910s, constitutes the low ebb of the author’s renown. Knowledge of Brown’s writing faded among general readers in the United States and Europe during these decades, and the basic reception pattern established in the earlier nineteenth century, involving recognition of the major novels and little else of Brown’s career, became cemented via the periodic republication of the novels in scattered editions. This period’s reputational decline seems related to general changes in the assumed norms of literary culture. In a period that witnesses the rising aesthetics of realism and naturalism, and during which a Henry Jamesian “unity of tone” becomes widely valued, the eighteenth‐century narrative conventions, disjunctive plotting, and abrupt affective‐tonal shifts of Brown’s novels appear increasingly illegible in relation to dominant and normative forms, especially when paired with Brown’s webs of late‐Enlightenment intellectual thematics now generally foreign to Victorian and early modernist readers.
It is only in a third phase of reception, from the 1920s to the 1960s–1970s, that scholarly commentary in the professional and institutional sense emerged and that the wider contours of Brown’s corpus outside the 1798–1801 novels began to come into view. This period of course coincides with, and cannot be understood apart from, the emergence of American studies and the rapid growth and institutionalization of “American literature” as a progressive and nationalistic narrative and concept, all of whose premises shape a new and often anachronistic image of Brown. Influential New Critical and early Cold War era scholars from Fred Lewis Pattee (1926) to Warner Berthoff (1954), Richard Chase (1957), and Leslie Fiedler (1960), along with scholarly biographers Harry Warfel (1949) and David Lee Clark (1952), reestablished Brown as a major voice, albeit always within the period’s nationalistic, aestheticized, and historically teleological conceptual framing. Brown now appeared in the evolving discourse of US literary studies as a major but aesthetically imperfect or “flawed” novelist, the quality of whose achievements is debatable, but whose novels present essential “American” characteristics and point forward to the progressive flowering of US literary culture in the American Renaissance. Brown was deemed canonical, but the specificity of his achievement remained muted as it was subordinated to the larger (aesthetic, teleological, nationalist) master tropes of American literature.
In addition to the recovery work that began with biographers Warfel and Clark, although little noted at the time, other scholars began to establish the larger extent of Brown’s corpus. From the 1920s to about 1948, antiquarian Daniel Edwards Kennedy (1948) wrote an enormous, never‐published biography and survey of Brown’s career that subsequently led scholars to large numbers of printed and manuscript writings previously ignored or unknown (Hemenway 1966). In more orthodox fashion, Charles E. Bennett (1974) and others made the first efforts to establish comprehensive bibliographies of Brown’s writings in all genres. While Berthoff’s 1954 dissertation on Brown is the first persuasive effort to grasp the totality of Brown’s corpus – that is, to characterize the intellectual coherence and significance of all the writings, of which the novels are but one element – the labor of the abovementioned scholars had enormous implications for the fourth, contemporary phase of Brown’s reception.
The fourth, current phase of reception extends from the 1980s to the present and falls into two moments that correspond to the publication and impact of the two scholarly editions of Brown’s writings. The appearance of the 1977–1987 “Bicentennial Edition,” The Novels and Related Works of Charles Brockden Brown (seven volumes managed by Sydney Krause and S.W. Reid), simultaneous with the 1980s revival of early American literary studies as a specialized subfield, marked a watershed in the reception history. The period produced an outpouring of scholarly discussions, new editions, and ever more sophisticated responses to the novelistic writings. Monographs by Norman Grabo (1981), Fritz Fleischmann (1983), and Elizabeth Hinds (1997), notable discussions by Jane Tompkins (1985), Davidson (1986), Michael Warner (1990), Shirley Samuels (1996), and Christopher Looby (1996), among many others, capitalized on this period’s recovery of commonwealth republicanism and new emphasis on interdisciplinary models of historical contextualization (gender and sexuality studies, poststructuralist critiques of foundationalism, postcolonial and cultural studies, etc.) to produce substantially new accounts of Brown. Certain studies, such as those by Alan Axelrod (1983) and Steven Watts (1994), began to insist on the necessity of coordinating the novels with Brown’s many other writings. Collectively, scholars working in this phase replaced the image of Brown as a canonical but “flawed” precursor of later literary greatness with more nuanced awareness of Brown’s fiction and other writings as formally and intellectually complex responses to the crisis atmosphere of the late 1790s in eighteenth‐century British North America and the wider Atlantic world. Behind all of this activity, however, the critical tradition’s inherited tendency to place the four “gothic” novels squarely at the center of commentary still weighs heavily (a classic example of institutional path dependence), despite growing awareness that this novel‐centric focus and its nationalist framing are becoming inadequate given new states of knowledge.
From the late 1990s to the present, the institutionalization of Brown studies has been accelerated by the founding of a Brown society and by the related and ongoing Charles Brockden Brown Electronic Archive and Scholarly Edition project (www.brockdenbrown.cah.ucf.edu), which provides both a digital archive of all Brown’s known writings (approximately 1000 texts at present) and a print edition of the non‐novelistic writings, Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown (seven volumes beginning in 2013, managed by Mark L. Kamrath and Philip Barnard). The project’s digital and print editions make available, often for the first time, the entirety of the writings in multiple genres and across the entire 1789–1810 span of Brown’s literary career. Ever more rigorous historical contextualization during this current phase has and continues to produce substantially revised accounts of Brown in at least two interrelated ways. On the one hand, discussions such as Peter Kafer (2004), Karen Weyler (2004), Stephen Shapiro (2008), and Robert Levine (2008) propose advancing modes of historical contextualization, examining Brown in relation to current discourses concerning ethno‐racial, gender, postcolonial, transatlantic, and world‐systems studies. On the other, notable discussions have begun to shape new critical traditions concerning Brown’s work in non‐novelistic genres, especially the studies of Brown’s periodicals and editing work by Michael Cody (2004) and Jared Gardner (2012), and of the historical and political writings by Mark Kamrath (2010) and Wil Verhoeven (2011), among others.
The relatively straightforward consequence of this reception history is that it is no longer adequate to approach Brown on the basis of his novels alone, especially if these are not understood and approached with an understanding of the author’s theorization of the genre, to which we will now turn. Brown’s novels, from a contemporary perspective that was not entirely available even in the late twentieth century, are now counterbalanced by a larger volume of major and minor writings in a multitude of genres. Their reception for the present and future will be inflected by the author’s own career‐long insistence, which has come increasingly to the fore in recent considerations of the novels, on presenting his narratives as forms of socially engaged conjectural history. These developments imply the need to grasp the continuity and coherence of Brown’s engagement with historico‐fictional forms throughout his corpus, as these appear in varied forms from the early fictional and other generic experiments of the 1789–1796 period, to the 1798–1801 canonical narratives, the political pamphlets of 1803/1809, the historical fictions of 1805–1806, or the historiographical “Annals of Europe and America” of 1807–1809. With access to the full range of Brown’s texts, the canonical novels no longer appear as an inevitable center of gravity for future Brown scholarship.
Reconceptualizing the Novel‐form
From the present juncture, proposing a more adequate framework for the discussion of Brown and the novel requires us to consider two basic challenges or questions. The first involves the status of the category and concept of the “novel” generally, while the second leads us to Brown’s theorization of his own narrative project as “romance.”
The “novel” as a category of analysis – as a subcategory of literary studies and the literary marketplace, and as we understand it in specialized discourses such as “history of the novel” or “theory of the novel” – is largely a product of the nineteenth‐century’s tendency to create and organize academies and universities, and the knowledge they produce, on the basis of containers (such as disciplines and departments) that separate human interaction, perception, and communication into artificial and isolated categories. Even the briefest archaeology of “the novel” suggests several ways in which the category should be considered anachronistic when applied to Brown and the 1790s. We are generally familiar, for example, with the process whereby “art” and all of the “cultural” phenomena studied by the “human sciences” were categorically separated from the “natural sciences” in ways that make C.P. Snow’s (1959) description of the “two cultures” seem self‐evident in ways that would have been incomprehensible in the early modern and eighteenth‐century worlds. Disciplinary divisions and subspecialties were fabricated along similar lines. As Immanuel Wallerstein (2004) has noted, modern, post‐revolutionary knowledge production builds a system of disciplines in which “political science” defines and describes matters of the state, “economics” covers the marketplace, “anthropology” is applied to peoples outside the Euro‐American core, while “sociology” applies to those within the core, “geography” describes territory, “history” accounts for temporal changes, and so on. While “philosophy” was granted property rights to the realm of abstract thought, “literature” was deemed to cover the domain of aesthetic and fictional constructions along with language’s effects, as opposed to its syntax or derivation, which belonged to “philology” (2–9).
Today, these divisions – from disciplines such as “literary studies” to their subcategories such as “the novel” – are recognized as deeply enmeshed with the development of modern nation‐states, their bureaucratic institutions, and the rise of political and economic liberalism as a dominant ideology or worldview. Consider the simple distinction, crucial to Brown and to narrative production in the eighteenth century, between “history” and the novel‐form. Leopold Ranke (1795–1886), a founding figure of modern historiography, famously insisted that professional history should avoid the more narrative storifying of the past in favor of claims based on ostensibly empirically verifiable documents, in order to write history with objectivity, “as it really was,” rather than as a form that relies on authorial interpretation (Ranke 2011). Ranke’s influential claim cemented historiography as knowledge grounded in archival sources that were being constructed or enlarged by groups committed to establishing the new sovereignty of the modern nation‐state. Consequently, history credentialized itself on the basis of an allegiance to archives that, in the most foundational sense, accepted and reproduced new divisions that determined what would be included within a library determined by nationalist parameters and their state bureaucrats and office holders. Hence what may have seemed, at first glance, to be a commitment to scientific objectivity and analysis free from idiosyncratic value judgments was still bound to these effects, although the resulting effects of selection and confirmation bias that shape the archive were masked by the imprimatur of the state.
Therefore, in the first instance, any discussion of “the novel” in the 1790s and prior to the construction of modern scholarly disciplines must rebalance itself against the initial separations that divide literature and politics from history, environmental studies, and so on. Although the post‐1980s methodological shift toward historical contextualization does move toward a consideration of this problem, and thus recognizes the anachronistic character, for early modern texts, of basic categories such as nationalism and aspects of aesthetic ideology, categories such as the novel as it is commonly understood (as a unified aesthetic whole that deploys fictionality in the service of new models of subjectivity) exert powerful residual force. Overcoming such separations is no easy project, for the contemporary university, with its departmental structure, remains a dutiful child to its parents, the modern nation‐state, and its attendant separation of the social whole into subordinate constructed categories. When considering cultural productions like Brown’s, that were created in a time before the nation‐state, liberalism, and the university had become as dominant as they would soon become, terms like “the novel” must be used with caution and understood to be less stable than might easily be assumed by readers who are themselves inheritors of nineteenth‐century propositions and institutions.
As Raymond Williams (1991) memorably noted, the category “English literature” conflates language, land, and people. Does “English” refer to texts written in a language, standardized by state‐backed bodies; to texts written within a geography demarcated externally by the military and internally by the police; or to the expression of a quasi‐racialized people, born within certain arbitrary and changing boundaries or descended from those who had been so in the past, even if these terms obscure internal status hierarchies? Thus the “English” – as opposed, for example, to “British” – novel subsumes and erases the particularity and history of subordination of Wales, Ireland, and Scotland (194). To reprise an unresolvable conundrum that haunts the subfield of “early American literature,” at what point do texts produced in British North American colonies become “American” as opposed to “English”?
Benedict Anderson (1983) has influentially argued, conversely, that the idea of a national literature is not simply a creation of the modern nation‐state, since literature itself (however we define this) played a key role in constructing the emergent nation‐state’s legitimacy. Anderson contends that the magnetism of a national identity was the effect of the construction of an “imagined community.” This now‐celebrated phrase is Anderson’s formulation for what Marx called “Die scheinbare Gemeinschaft” in The German Ideology (written1846, published 1942), which might also be rendered as a “pretended community” in the sense of an invented unity intended to conceal the reality of competing social groups. One field that bore the burden of creating this pretense was long‐form fiction – the novel – especially as the novel‐form has commonsensically been understood to differ from other expressive forms in its ability to bring disparate characters together in a workable whole or lifeworld, even if this dialogic fusion is not always entirely coherent. The (nationalizing) novel’s conglomeration of different actors and social levels provided a model for how vastly different (rural/urban; sectarian; racial/gender/class) groups could be agglomerated into a whole.
This project of fusion was likewise linked to the construction and enshrinement of the liberal subject, roughly understood as an individualized economic and political agent, free to trade and own commodities, including their own labor. The particular burdens of economic and political publicness were compensated for by the construction of a “private” sphere in the domestic household and interiorized psychologism, the creative “imagination” or “fancy” of the early nineteenth century or the “subconscious” of the early twentieth century, seen as a space of freedom from the rules or constraints of the marketplace and political arena. Inflected in this manner, as a commentator like Nancy Armstrong (2006) has put it, the novel’s technology of selfhood provided a template for emerging norms of bourgeois personhood and tropes such as the self‐made individual.
Yet such public/private divisions are never easily delineated or enacted by governmental decree; consider the vast state regulation of relationships, such as the long‐standing rights and privileges of heterosexual marriage. Consequently, cultural manifestations must be developed to help smooth the public–private separation even while they become sinks or vortices that house and centralize the tensions of contested difficulties within them. Thus, we can say that the novel’s imbrication in the rise of liberal nationalism means that it stands as a primary receptacle or transistor for all of these tensions. If the imagined reader of the novel has purchased this cultural commodity through an intervening marketplace, which both links and separates author‐producer and reader‐consumer, it depends on and reproduces the separations of public and private. Therefore the novel always addresses, even as it simultaneously extends and questions, the question of who is a subject, allowed to trade and vote with determination, and who is not. It traces out shifting boundaries that separate metropolitan readers from the excluded; from those consigned to categories of social death, such as chattel slaves, to groups like aboriginal or colonized peoples who are perceived as unable to make the developmental transition from tribal to national identity. It distinguishes ideal readers from those unable to move easily between the public and private, such as women who are often limited to private‐sphere roles of sexuality, domesticity, and nurturing, and, in this period, deemed legally unqualified to have property ownership and inheritance rights, let alone political suffrage. The novel‐form captures the tensions of an object that is simultaneously used to confirm a public identity of nationalized taste and social expression, while also legitimating consumption “in private,” in feminized ways (outside the public marketplace or political realms) and in the sanctuary of the isolated mind‐space, enacted in intimate spaces of the private home such as the study or bedroom. This tension was amplified in the mid‐twentieth century and particularly during the post‐World War II period that was powerfully shaped by the Cold War. This is the period in which American studies came of age as an academic specialty and when an emerging discipline began to search for and celebrate local cultural productions that could exemplify an exceptional American identity. As newly canonized works were marshaled to consolidate a special group identity, the period’s anti‐left tendencies also downplayed texts that were considered too socially oriented as suspiciously sympathetic to communist ideals, so that the “American novel” appeared to be a category that focused on isolated individuals wandering in a malleable environment, or, to use the title of an influential early study of American literature by R.W.B. Lewis (1955), the well‐known figure of an “American Adam.”
In a basic sense, then, the conventional category of the novel as an aesthetic form, particularly as it has developed in the mainstream tradition of studies of American literature, is only awkwardly applicable to Brown, who wrote in a period before the liberal nation‐state and public–private distinctions became fully dominant. Applied to the early modern world through the 1790s, the aesthetico‐national history of the American novel, which remains residually powerful in early American cultural studies even today, can only be anachronistic. Historian Reinhart Koselleck (1967) has proposed the periodizing term Sattelzeit (saddle or bridge era) for the time surrounding the hinge‐point of the French Revolution, roughly 1750–1850. While this unit may still be too broad, the concept is useful as a way to consider how Brown’s work is distinct from both the cultural ecology of earlier Enlightenment‐era consolidations in the first half of the eighteenth century and the emerging dominance of the later Romantic‐industrial era, beginning in the post‐Napoleonic 1820s. For Brown’s primary cultural orientation or location is one that was recognized as soon as his work was published and one that remains crucial today: that is, his participation in and engagement with the milieu of Anglophone radicalism exemplified by a cluster of writers, chief of whom were William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. These writers and activists were known as Anglo‐Jacobins during their lifetime, but the then‐pejorative “Jacobin” was not a term that they either used or accepted. Today, we prefer the term Woldwinites (Shapiro 2008: 148), which may emphasize the central importance of Mary Wollstonecraft in the group’s development and legacy.
Romance as Socially Engaged Narrative
Considered from the perspective of the Woldwinite intellectual ecology which Brown embraced and extended, the second and more particular difficulty with considering Brown and the novel is that novel is, precisely, the term that Brown chose not to use in relation to his writings. Instead, he considered his narratives as romances. Brown develops the keyword “romance,” however, in a sense that is quite distinct from either the early modern or later, nineteenth‐century uses of the term. The earlier meanings of the term involved tales that focus on interpersonal tensions between a subordinate knight and his queen, or other individuals whose relationships are prohibited by institutional limits. These tales primarily functioned to convey, and deny, the erosion and historical erasure of the feudal system before the advent of the early modern state. The later usage of the term begins with the early nineteenth‐century historical romance most closely associated with Walter Scott in Britain or James Fenimore Cooper in the United States. Unlike early modern romance, which is the form of a disintegrating social order before the onset of mercantile capitalism, the Romantic‐era historical romance was the cultural device of a post‐Revolutionary bourgeoisie confident enough in its newly achieved power that it could rewrite history. It did so through tales that claimed either that the onset of industrial bourgeois society was a natural and forgone conclusion – as in Cooper’s reinscription of the myth of the Vanishing American Indian passing the species baton to the more entrepreneurial Natty Bumppo – or that bourgeois manners already existed from time immemorial and thus that the embarrassing necessity of revolution could be forgotten. Ivanhoe’s feudal court, in Walter Scott, therefore, experiences erotic compulsion in the vein of bourgeois companionate marriage rather than the aristocratic forging of family alliances (Moretti 2000).
Brown deploys the term “romance” in ways that are congruent with neither the early modern nor later nineteenth‐century meanings. His understanding of romance is developed most explicitly in two key essays, “Walstein’s School of History” (August–September 1799) and “The Difference Between History and Romance” (April 1800). Together, formulating a conception of narrative that Brown outlined as early as 1792–1793, these essays stake a claim for Brown as the first American literary critic, in the sense of one who theorizes the effects of narrative and the means by which they can be critically evaluated (Shapiro 2008: 216–229; Brown 2013: 833–834, 841).
Brown’s version of romance emerges from a Revolutionary‐era context that took preexisting Enlightenment ideas not merely as visionary or utopian possibilities, but also as enactable claims. Because nonconformist figures like the British Woldwinites, who did not profess Anglican doctrine, were denied entry into Oxford and Cambridge universities as well as access to government posts, these writers sought a different platform for their egalitarian claims. The developing public sphere of print communications, in which authors published under their own names rather than pseudonyms, provided one means of advancing their ideas. While many Woldwinites (Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Bage, and Holcroft were especially important for Brown and his circle) produced long‐form fictional narratives, later called Jacobin novels, these writers did not differentiate their work into the categories of political commentary on the one hand and fanciful fiction on the other. Instead, they saw all forms of their expression as driven by the same motivation and progressive perspective.
The approach developed by the Woldwinites can be called rational or associative sentiment. Throughout the eighteenth century, notions of sentiment and its cognate sensibility were put forward as one among a group of related concepts that reinforced the argument that a spectrum of groups associated with the emerging, mercantile middle class should supplant the aristocracy. The central idea of associative sentiment proposes, most basically, that emotions or affective behavior, experienced directly or embedded in cultural productions (whether philosophical, fictional, historical, etc.), can be circulated from one person to another. Thus, secular virtuous behaviors (or, symmetrically and dangerously, vicious or corrupting behaviors) produce a magnetic emulation that can be replicated and amplified, thereby transforming society peacefully and providing a progressive alternative to the violence and threats of the military–priestly coalition on which the feudal and early modern worlds rested. The idea that the bourgeoisie was “civil” was neatly exemplified by “literature” understood as a mode of communication distinct from frequently scurrilous, distempered, and pornographic political partisan pamphlets or the doctrinally driven warnings of sectarian ecclesiastics. Florid emotion was prevented from being transformed into vicious manifestations of selfish desire, because it could be fused with the predicates of reason’s universality and tested out in social discourse.
Rational sentiment articulated a critique of the old regime, presenting it as illegitimate due to its cruelty and exceptionality, and grounded in the hierarchical separation of persons due to birth status or belief. Such divisions were rejected as irrational and degenerate, as their aberrant lack of feeling broke the chain on which sentimentally driven civilizational ascent depended. Similarly, on this view, old regime hierarchies of caste and faith maintained their power through an obscurantist mythology of territorialized race, priestly tricks, and a politics of secret plots, conspiracies, and lies. Hence a new and more just social order required the development of more rational, constructive, and transparent institutions and practices. Finally, due to the Woldwinites’ profound distrust of preexisting institutions, new instruments of cooperative sociality and rational exchange were to be developed, be they conversational groups or mediums like the novel, whose social purpose draws its energies and effects from secular readers’ responses.
Writers like Godwin and Wollstonecraft forged their contribution by arguing that, if environment shapes individuals, environment is in turn socially conditioned and neither fixed in Nature nor inherent to the human condition. No one is born in sin or to essentialized identities destined for domination or subordination. Instead, people are made vicious through dysfunctional institutions, practices, and ideas that lead to damaging behavior, often linked to inequalities and unacknowledged forms of exploitative privilege, or to forms of corruption that flow from them. Consequently, these writers tend to reject embedded and embodied identities of race, gender, or nationality. For Revolutionary‐era Woldwinites developing literary forms intended to dramatize the logic of rational sentiment for wider emulation, long‐form fiction can have a pedagogical function beyond the rote didacticism of earlier texts such as Voltaire’s Candide.
Brown stands as both an inheritor and peer of the Woldwinites. Although the particular conditions of state exclusions and political repression that nonconformists and progressives experienced in 1790s Britain were more rigorous than those that took effect in the United States (especially during the crisis years 1798–1801, when Brown’s canonical novels appeared), the Philadelphia Quaker Brown shares some of the conditions of social marginalization experienced by the dissenting Woldwinites. In ways still important to recall, Quakers in the American colonies and nascent United States were outsiders to the period’s (New England) Congregationalist and Presbyterian dominance. While more integrated into dominant strata than some other groups, such as early Methodists, Quakers still had an aura of the weird about them. Brown, after all, was the son of one of a group of Quaker men who were consigned to a Virginia internment camp during the War of Independence. Since Quakers were prohibited from swearing oaths as part of their faith, they refused the patriots’ demands for a formal declaration of allegiance. To secure Pennsylvanian compliance, a group of elite Philadelphia Quakers were incarcerated in what is best understood as a mechanism of hostage taking (Kafer 2004: 38–46).
Brown’s fiction writing, then, further develops a theory of social communications initially established by the period’s Anglophone radical democrats. The theory of romance as socially engaged conjectural history that he articulates most fully in his 1799–1800 “Walstein” and “Difference between History and Romance” essays goes beyond Godwin and Wollstonecraft, however, by considering the nature and implications of fictional production more explicitly and in more nuanced ways than did the English writers. In “The Difference Between History and Romance,” Brown argues that history and fiction should be understood as two sides of the same coin. The crucial distinction is not between fiction and non‐fiction, but rather between narratives that attest that events occurred but cannot establish ultimately unknowable causes (history), and narratives that conjecturally explore possible motives and circumstances that cause or motivate events, thereby leading their audiences to consider how forces and institutions shape and limit behaviors (romance). History and romance differ not in their relative truthfulness, Brown argues, but in terms of the perspectives they provide on human actions and their causes. History is primarily archival, exhuming documents and merely describing human and social actions, while fiction interprets actions, investigating the social environment that shapes motives and results with an eye to making predictive assumptions for the future (Brown 1800: 251‐52).
The role of fiction, according to this model, is to function as a narrative laboratory, staging and testing hypothetical situations in order to speculate on the causes of historical events. Thus, in a memorable line in chapter 7 of Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, the novel’s protagonist takes stock of his new situation as an urban émigré and remarks: “The rest of the day I spent chiefly in my chamber, reflecting on my new condition […] and conjecturing the causes of appearances” (Brown 2008: 49). The social purpose of this conjectural history – discerning the “causes of appearances” for readerly consideration – may explain why Brown considers his fictions as romances, rather than novels. A romance no longer looks to fabulate or obscure the tensions within society as a distracting alibi for a declining order, as was true for early modern romance. Nor does it dissimulate the violence inherent in the establishment of a new (bourgeois) order, as was soon to be the case for the historical romance of the early nineteenth century. Instead, Brown’s notion of romance situates the generic mode as an inquiry or speculative assay into the conditions through which historical transformation occurs. Thus, rather than the earlier or later versions of romance, which deploy mythological tales to direct attention away from large‐scale social change, Brown’s version of romance foregrounds the dynamics of change, or the project of encouraging awareness of those dynamics, as the very purpose of romance. In its relation to the reader, the romance for Brown provides an encouragement for critical thinking and problem solving, insofar as the reader is encouraged to consider the causes and enabling contexts of the narrative’s problems for themselves.
Brown offers very few explicit evaluations of contemporary fiction, and the somewhat surprising lack of allusions to contemporary novelists (as opposed to generic models such as, above all, Rousseau and Godwin) throughout his voluminous periodical and other writings arguably suggests that he saw most novelistic fiction of his moment as lacking analytic and investigative drive. The few references to contemporary novelists that appear in his correspondence, for example, suggest that Brown viewed most novels as geared toward ephemeral amusement (Brown 2013: 548, 553). Nevertheless, Brown does not indulge in the period’s moralizing anti‐novelism (Davidson 1986: 101–120). He never condemns novels as a form of social contamination or mental degeneration and, obviously, promotes his own version of the form in his literary practice.
In a sense then, Brown’s implicit contrast between novel and romance may be more significant than his titular distinction between romance and history. History and romance contrast explicitly as the mechanical and the analytic: historians hew and haul facts from the subterranean archive, in order to hand over their unprocessed material to romancers for cognitive shaping. The implicit contrast between novel and romance, on the other hand, is akin to the later German dramatist Bertolt Brecht’s (1964) claims for an epic theater that refuses the Aristotelian dramaturgy of mimesis as transmission of affect, for example in the production of catharsis. Brecht believed that he could deploy formal techniques of estrangement or alienation in order to divorce audiences from their tendency to become immersed in the emotional charge of the performance. Once distanced from affect, the Brechtian viewer would be free to engage in (class) critical analysis.
In “Walstein’s School of History,” Brown complicates this contrast between mimesis and estrangement by arguing for their necessary linkage before a subsequent separation. The Walstein essay, which is itself a fiction, presents Walstein as a Schiller‐like historian who combines history and romance in order to advance “moral and political” engagement while emphasizing, not universalist truths, but the historically and socially specific conditions of events. Walstein’s great achievement is his narrative concerning the classical figure Cicero; but in contrast to Brown’s political contemporaries, such as the second US President John Adams, who invoked Cicero as a model of emulation, Walstein presents Cicero as a problematic case study from whom usable elements can be appropriated, but not as an exemplum of unquestionable wisdom or rules (Brown 1799: 337–338). In describing Walstein, Brown suggests that history and romance are mutually constitutive, so that, to paraphrase Roland Barthes, a little romance may initially draw one away from history, but a more thorough immersion in romance brings one back to history. Reading him strongly, once again, Brown’s choice of terminology implies that novels, unlike romances as he understands them, lack this contrapuntal dynamic or dialectic.
After describing the historian Walstein and his model of embellished or romanticized history, the essay‐fiction extends its discussion of narrative method to argue for the merits of the romance form. From Walstein’s practice, the discussion turns to his foremost student, Engel, who transforms the historian’s imaginative method into a more powerful instrument for social change by using romance to appeal to and influence a wider, more democratic readership. Engel understands that sociopolitical discussion is often unappealing and alienates common readers, or, in this case, common readers who may lack classical education and be unable to appreciate nuanced arguments concerning notables such as Cicero. Therefore, rather than inventive historiography that illustrates virtue based on classical and elite exempla – the historical Cicero – Engel writes more useful fictions that develop social observation based on modern and plebeian exempla. He writes a long narrative about the adventures of a fictional commoner, Olivo Ronsica, who struggles with the social damage of the Thirty Years War in seventeenth‐century Weimar. Instead of focusing on elite figures like Cicero, an effective tale thus presents figures that ordinary readers can imagine and emulate. In a certain sense, it does not matter what one might think about Cicero, since ordinary readers will never face the challenges of being an empowered, elite statesman. Cicero’s experiences are beside the point for modern readers because, unlike the fictional protagonist Olivo Ronsica, they do not lead to any consideration of links between everyday social contexts and their effects, or to any contemplation of potential social transformation in the familiar world.
Aiming for maximum social impact in the manner of rational sentiment, Engel additionally reasons that romance must “be so arranged as to inspire, at once curiosity and belief, to fasten the attention, and thrill the heart” (Brown 1800: 409). Since audiences must be motivated to contemplate problems that they face in everyday life, Engel’s tales focus on frequently experienced conflicts concerning “property” (or more simply, money) and “sex” (or, for the Wollstonecraftian Brown, the constellation of sex/gender norms, marriage, and other modes of female subordination). Thus Engel – and here we can see the structure of Brown’s long fictions, as Olivo Ronsica’s story duplicates the plot of Brown’s own Arthur Mervyn – suggests that romance should depict ordinary personages in crisis situations involving money and sex, even if these situations are extreme, and should do so in a thrilling manner in order to encourage readerly engagement. These tales are designed encourage the reader to contemplate the social circumstances that place pressures and limits on decision making and to consider social action widely (Brown 1800: 409–410).
Romances, then, are tales that prompt reflection about the social conditions informing sensational events occurring in the mundane, rather than the supernatural. For Brown, this formula produces tales of religious delusion and patriarchal family murders (Wieland); murderous sleepwalking in the postcolonial environment of settler colonialism (Edgar Huntly); the far‐reaching corruptions of an economic system founded on slavery (Arthur Mervyn); or sex/gender subordination and partisan struggles during the Revolutionary era (Ormond). While Brown has been and continues to be read as a “gothic” writer, he differs from many others in his use of the subgenre, not because he supplants feudal European scenery with American landscapes, as some read the preface to Edgar Huntly, but because he distinguishes tales whose main purpose is to generate heightened sensation in order to reinforce narrative’s public purpose of training citizens in the contemplation of decision making.
Understanding Brown as a romancer in this way has two main implications. First, such a perspective alters the ways in which we approach all of Brown’s writing. Because a pedagogical desire motivates all of the writings, the walls separating different generic categories dissolve quickly. It makes increasingly less sense, at present, to separate Brown’s fiction from his history, periodical, or political writings, and editorial work or poetry, since all of these forms were mobilized to “romantic” ends. Not only is the fiction umbilically linked to the historical writings and political pamphlets, but arguably the seven canonical long‐form narratives should be embedded or interlaced within all of the writing across all of the author’s genre forms.
The second implication is that it makes far less sense, at present, to consider this work primarily in terms of the category of “American” literature, if this means an autonomous, self‐developing cultural ensemble. Rather than viewing Brown’s long‐form fiction as a national development, two consequential frameworks may be more useful. The first is to approach his work as belonging to circumatlantic flows, wherein questions of readership, intellectual production, and popular movements form a tenable constellation. In this light, the exploration of commodity chains, from books to chattel slaves and monoculture products such as the sugar produced by slaves, are included in the sociality, ideas, and narrative forms and plots of the period. Brown’s long‐fictions, like those of the British‐born Susannah Rowson, belong to interrelated flows of culture and capital that extend throughout the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Mediterranean worlds. A second and wider ensuing approach pursues the arguments of the Warwick Research Collective (2015) and their claims that world literature needs to be considered as the literature of the capitalist world‐system. The transformations of the early American novel in the Revolutionary era make the most sense from our perspective today, perhaps, when considered as the registration of tensions within the move from a stage of imperial conflict between England and France to one of a more British‐dominated world‐system, or from the age of handicrafts to that of large‐scale industry, as these frameworks capture the global horizon and motivations of Brown’s long‐form plots.
References
Further Reading
See also: chapter 19 (early american evangelical print culture); chapter 25 (from the wharf to the woods); chapter 29 (remapping the canonical interregnum); chapter 30 (commerce, class, and cash).