29
Duncan Faherty
In the middle of his prolific career, Fred Lewis Pattee issued a jeremiad condemning the state of American literary criticism. The opening retort of his 1924 essay, “Call for a Literary Historian,” bemoans the field’s current praxis. “I have nearly a hundred histories of American literature on my shelves, and I am still adding more,” he declared, “a hundred volumes to tell the story of our literary century, and all of them alike, all built upon the same model!” These volumes were so formulaic, Pattee concluded, that he “could dictate one to a stenographer in three days with no reference to authorities save for dates” (134). His dismissal of this rote periodization and thin historicism encapsulates his concerns about the field’s stagnation. In short, Pattee observed, these volumes mapped identical terrains, plotted the usual suspects as canonical, and adopted the same set of constraining rubrics, “Colonial Period, Revolutionary Period, Knickerbocker Period, New England Period, and so on,” to guide their endeavors. This premature commitment to master narratives about the development of American literary history was, in Pattee’s mind, concretizing the field imaginary before its depths and recesses had been fully explored (134).
This reductive praxis emerged out of a pronounced attachment to “stereotyped” renderings of “the same list of biographical facts” and “well‐worn myths” (Pattee 1924: 134). In other words, even as periodization fused around a delimiting set of categories, so too had the ways in which critics curated these subdivisions. Scholars deployed a small coterie of authors to form the backbones of these periods and then regurgitated the same undeviating narratives about them. Sparked by an impulse to mirror the author‐driven canon of English literature, early practitioners of American literary studies had anxiously sought to establish a pantheon to justify their field’s validity. While sympathetic to the need for early scholars to canonize figures and tropes to justify their subjects and objects as worthy of study, Pattee’s trepidations about paralysis outweighed his appreciation of this methodology. To put it another way, the canonical devotion of those books crowding his shelves made them repetitive; their conventional narratives made them predictable. Without a change in ambition, Pattee warned, the field might soon become lost in a critical feedback loop that was leaving too much of American literary history unexamined. While his elegy was far from the last critical monody about the field, Pattee’s discomfort with classificatory systems, which by 1924 had circumscribed scholarship into solidified patterns, suggests the intimate relations between periodization and the possibilities for scholarly innovation.
Despite Pattee’s efforts to dismantle this stagnation nearly a century ago, his outline of operant periods remains hauntingly familiar. While we have moved beyond myths and rely less on biography as the primary inroads into critical analysis, we still habitually deploy these outmoded frames. Let us consider again his list of rubrics: the Colonial period, the Revolutionary period, the Knickerbocker period, and the New England period. While these partitions do not literally comprise how we subdivide antebellum American literature today, they still resonate with considerable power. We can see how Colonial and Revolutionary conjoin to form the basis of what we more commonly call early American literature; similarly, while the term Knickerbocker has left our critical lexicon, we understand Pattee’s representation of the importance of Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper for plotting America’s literary past; and finally, what he describes as the New England period endures as the still largely regional frame of the American Renaissance. To put it another way, the categories that Pattee diagramed as determining the orbits of American literary studies in 1924 continue to impart a gravitational pull on our canonical constellations. More importantly, many of the periods that Pattee’s contemporaries glossed over remain typecast as voids of cultural production.
The oft‐unacknowledged legacy of this inertia, of a 90‐year failure to imagine periodization otherwise, forms the starting point for this essay. More specifically, I want to reconsider textual production from a period routinely effaced by literary critics. While we have generated more complex portraits of the Revolutionary era and what Pattee called the Knickerbocker period, the space in between remains a largely ignored era of cultural production. While the scores of literary histories crowding my shelves do not attempt to chart a literary century, nor fawningly devote themselves to canonical figures, nor adhere to residual borders, they nonetheless still often pivot around this already delimited sense of periodization. On one front, much has changed – changed all for the better – and continues to make visible how much more needs to be done. What has not evolved so significantly is how the period divisions that Pattee demarcated still shape our scholarship and pedagogy. He ends his essay by detailing a new set of coordinates for critical inquiry, a set of prompts which detail how to reclaim the not‐yet‐rediscovered. Sadly, for much of our critical history too few of Pattee’s challenges have been embraced by succeeding generations of critics, and in some ways – with important differences especially concerning the work of women and African American writers – the canon which he identified as already coalescing around Bradford, Winthrop, Jefferson, Irving, Cooper, and Hawthorne still forms the spinal columns of our leading anthologies. Or, more accurately, while the congeries of texts has changed to some degree, the kind of period clustering that Pattee described continues to hold sway over how we define the subfields of American literary studies.
Positioning Fred Lewis Pattee at the threshold of an essay about a period which he marginalized might seem like a perverse opening gambit. Indeed, it might be especially obstinate given how largely forgotten he has become. To his contemporaries, Pattee was a monumental figure: the first claimant to the title “Professor of American Literature,” one of the earliest proponents of the field as far back as the late nineteenth century, and someone who helped form both the Modern Language Association’s American Literature Group and the field’s first flagship journal, American Literature. By any measure, Pattee played a central role in the emergence of the field – which makes his dire reappraisal of its critical genealogies all the more surprising. Still, my ambition is not to cast Pattee as a literary Nostradamus capable of prophesying the failures of future critical turns, nor to advocate that we return to his sense of the field, deeply limited by its privileging of a white male pantheon of writers. Rather, I am interested in considering how his jeremiad provides us with a useful way to take stock of the legacies of periodization and to consider the ways in which we still inhabit structural traces of the frameworks that he struggled to overturn.
All too often literary historiography misrepresents the period between 1800 and 1820 as one of decline, describing it as marked by a plummet both in the numbers of novels published and the number of new authors.1 Accustomed to reading the novels of the 1790s as radical interrogations of social formation, we have embraced a long‐standing myth that this decade was the zenith of early American literary production. In fact, just as many if not more domestically authored novels were published between 1800 and 1810 as during the previous decade. Instead of continuing to assume that on or about 1800 novel production in the United States waned for two decades only to be resuscitated by the emergence of the historical novel, we need to confront how our collective disregard of this interstitial period springs from our misapprehensions over how these texts undertake political and aesthetic work. The majority of texts from this period were first published anonymously or pseudonymously (even as many also first appeared serially), a practice that renders biography impotent as a critical lens. Coterminously, texts from this period are not easily accommodated by Whiggish visions of progressive development; they more frequently explore notions of dissensus rather than promulgate notions of nation formation. In sum, they resist the framing devices Pattee declared all of his colleagues deployed, and as such it is not surprising that they were ignored. That we have continued to do so is more puzzling, but given how anonymity and seriality remain undertheorized aspects of American literary studies, we are perhaps as ill equipped to deal with these methodological challenges as earlier generations.
As an alternative to habitually embracing the myth of the early US novel as a radical form which peaked in the 1790s, we need a more robust accounting of literary culture in the early nineteenth century. I have been focusing on the novel in terms of questions of textual production not because it was the dominant literary form in this period (or, really, any period of American literature), but because it is around the novel that the post‐Revolutionary US canon has always been constructed. Indeed, the first few decades of the nineteenth century witnessed an explosion in serial publication and magazine writing, but given the ways in which the teaching of nineteenth‐century American literature has routinely oriented itself around the novel, recouping the supposedly non‐existent novels from what I call the “canonical interregnum” has a particular urgency. Indeed, our inability to harmonize early nineteenth‐century literary production with earlier and later cultural artifacts has distorted our sense of literary history. Sandra Gustafson has argued that this tendency has created a “disciplinary schism” or, perhaps for my purposes, what I think of as a temporal schism, between “early Americanists” whose work focuses on cultural production to 1800 and what she calls “U.S.‐Americanists” who tend to focus on the post‐1820 nineteenth century (2007: 107). As these subfields have largely developed as autonomous areas, we have perhaps unwittingly created a disjunction between them; the enduring distance of this breach still largely prohibits attention to texts published between 1800 and 1819.
These divisions are largely predicated on attachments to the importance of particular historical flashpoints and still maintain a pervasive influence on our thinking. Pattee observed how this phenomenon hindered his contemporaries when he boasted he could dictate a new volume of criticism without any reference points aside from dates. We continue to follow this practice by habitually moving to discover a cathartic correlation between literary texts and familiarly interpreted historical moments. Indeed, this practice is so widespread, still such a lingering legacy, that it has surreptitiously transmogrified our reading practices. We read literary texts to find evidence of cultural tensions, we examine literary artifacts to decipher political or social arguments, and we do so without collectively confronting our received sense of what is and was culturally, socially, and politically important. While we now read texts to decode moments of imperial ambition, or circumatlantic mobility, or transnational connections, we still by and large mine the same data stream that previous generations of scholars did. I am not trying to diminish or simplify provocative emergent trends, but rather to think about how our evolving critical interests might reanimate our sense of recovery and canonicity.
Pursuing a holistic pattern of rereading to reinterpret continues to systematically guide our endeavors, so much so that novels which fail align with familiar historical contexts remain excommunicated from canonical inclusion. From ongoing paranoia sparked by the Haitian Revolution, or the Burr Conspiracy, or the Louisiana Purchase, or over abiding conflicts with Native Americans, or Gabriel’s Rebellion, or the economic ramifications of the Embargo and Non‐Intercourse Acts, the first decades of the nineteenth century were rife with widespread anxieties about the Republic’s future. The lack of a cultural coherence in the early nineteenth century makes historical contextualization arduous work, another hindrance to recovering texts from this period. My ambition in more fully attending to the canonical interregnum is to suggest that its neglected textual artifacts provide a means of recalibrating the longue durée of US literary criticism by rethinking the canons and periods that we have used to comprise its master tropes and narratives.
The Novels of the Canonical Interregnum
Despite my claims about the neglect of the first two decades of the nineteenth century, or as further proof of them, there is one novel from this period whose canonical ascendency seems unalterable. First recovered by Michael Drexler in 2007, Leonora Sansay’s the Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo (1808) has garnered a wealth of critical attention because it vibrantly indexes US anxieties about the Haitian Revolution and circumatlantic networks of association. A remarkable epistolary novel, the text is largely composed of 32 letters written by an American woman, Mary, and addressed to Colonel Aaron Burr. The bulk of Mary’s epistles describe her voyage to Cape François in 1802 in the company of her sister Clara and her husband St. Louis. A refugee creole planter who had fled revolutionary violence in St. Domingo, St. Louis was now returning as part of a French campaign to retake the island. Mary’s letters largely focus on six topics: the decadence of colonial planters and their treatment of diasporic Africans in pre‐Revolutionary Haiti; how such treatment caused enslaved people to violently rebel against their exploitation; the tensions between creole elites who have returned to reclaim their lost estates and the French military forces who exhibit deep‐seated prejudices against both diasporic Africans and white Creoles; the varying sexual and moral codes held by French, Creole, and later Spanish elites as compared to those held by Americans; general descriptions of the inhabitants and people of Cape François; and, finally, representations of Clara’s unraveling marriage and portraits of the presumptive suitors who attempt to seduce her into extramarital entanglements. The failure of the French to reclaim the island overlaps with St. Louis’s increasingly jealous and abusive treatment of Clara, driven in part by how Clara’s beauty has attracted the advances of several Frenchmen, including their ardent commander, General Rochambeau. In an effort to escape destruction, figured as both the French collapse and her own husband’s physical abuse, Clara and Mary flee Cape François first for Barracoa, then Cuba, and then Kingston, Jamaica, before deciding to return to Philadelphia and to Aaron Burr’s supposed protection.
Across the length of the novel, issues of sexual desire and exploitation are contrasted with the ravages of colonial violence and possession, as Sansay deploys this juxtaposition to meditate on the state of circumatlantic social and political reproduction. Or to put it another way, as Elizabeth Maddock Dillon (2006) has suggested, from its opening sentence onward the novel “frames an opposition between the life of the physical body and that of the social body” (77). Without question, Sansay’s novel grants scholars direct access to subjects and subjectivities sorely marginalized by intra‐nationalist figurations of US literary history. The initial burst of scholarship privileged the text’s treatment of the Haitian Revolution, as it became a vehicle by which to bring attention to this long‐neglected event and to consider its impact on the early republic. Increasingly, scholars have focused on how the novel meditates on the larger Caribbean world in the early nineteenth century, and have seen Sansay’s reflections on the Haitian Revolution within the context of her descriptions of sociality in Jamaica and Cuba. Sansay’s own biographical attachment to Burr (she was likely his mistress) has also served as a means for critics to unpack Burr’s still largely muted presence in US history. Michael Drexler and Ed White’s provocative book The Traumatic Colonel (2014) provides an important corrective to this neglect, and demonstrates how the early nineteenth‐century US novel recursively reimagined Burr as a kind of haunting specter of alternative possibilities. Still, more remains to be said about Sansay’s figuration of the larger Caribbean world, and how in particular it links to the kinds of territorial expansion that Burr was likely to have been involved with.
Another interregnum novel which (like the Secret History) links questions of sexual consent, citizenship, and social reproduction to Haiti is Martha Meredith Read’s Margaretta; or, The Intricacies of the Heart (1807/2012). Like Sansay, Read employs the epistolary form in crafting her novel, although she explodes the conventions of that genre by featuring no less than eight different correspondents. While Margaretta’s letters to her silent friend (Elce Thornton) comprise the bulk of the text, the other epistles reveal the interiority of the various figures she interacts with. On the surface Margaretta appears as a familiar version of a Federalist seduction narrative, one in which its titular heroine functions as an allegorical representation of the uncertainties facing the emerging nation. Yet, the sheer volume and repetition of presumptive seducers, kidnappers, and rapists that the novel catalogues suggests the limits of such a classification; indeed, the text might best be understood as a meta‐exploration of the function of the seduction genre.
In contradistinction to the claustrophobia of the canonical 1790s seduction narratives, Read’s novel maps the interconnectivity of the Atlantic world – by virtue of Margaretta’s staggering mobility – and the threats that such movements pose to social stability. Unfolding within an expansive circumatlantic ring of forces, Margaretta charts a multi‐nodal geography that recognizes the interconnectedness of the United States, Europe, and the Caribbean. As Margaretta roams away from her natal village in Maryland, she begins to understand the need to divest herself of economic and social connections to anyone who profits from slavery. Margaretta’s movements underscore that she can only discover the meaning of her national identity after she has passed through divergent forms of cultural organization allegorized in the novel as different regions replete with different social codes. In so doing, she resettles planter degeneracy outside the United States and imagines a northern mid‐Atlantic region free from the horrors of slavery. This narrative strategy allows Read to forecast a geographic delineation between foreign and domestic behaviors and to redefine American citizenship as a by‐product of a reformulated Federalism. The novel’s conclusion frames this relocation as enabling the reconfigured family to, as Joseph Fichtelberg argues, “practice virtue in a restricted sphere, shielded from both passion and interest” (2003: 92). While such a space may be untenable in the real world, Read asserts its importance for promoting cultural stabilization in the wake of the Jeffersonian ascendency in 1800.
Ostensibly, the plot of Isaac Mitchell’s The Asylum; or, Alonzo and Melissa (1804/1811) unfolds against the backdrop of the US Revolutionary War, yet its economic subplots and concerns evince its deep engagement with the fluctuations in global capital stemming from the Haitian Revolution. Thus, Mitchell’s novel folds seemingly discrete historical periods into one another to demonstrate the inadequacies of isolationist imaginaries and discrete national histories. In many ways, Mitchell’s novel is a messy affair, one that hemorrhages an array of meanings by virtue of its temporal amalgamations of revolutions, inequalities, labors, exploitations, and dependencies. Mitchell first serialized the novel across 1804 in the Political Barometer, a newspaper he edited in Poughkeepsie, New York, before crafting an expanded edition published separately in 1811. In perhaps the most notorious case of authorial fraud in US literary history, Mitchell’s novel was plagiarized by Daniel Jackson, Jr. who produced several popular editions under this false attribution across the nineteenth century.
While Cathy Davidson (2004) identifies The Asylum as “the single most popular Gothic novel in early America,” Mitchell’s text remains inexplicably marginalized (322). Part of this neglect stems from its publication in this overlooked interstitial period, but, arguably, our collective inattention to the text more accurately emerges from the difficultly of aligning Mitchell’s sense of a non‐national historical accumulation with our operant master narratives for US literary development. The novel begins in pre‐Revolutionary Connecticut, initially focusing on Melissa Bloomfield, the daughter of a wealthy landowner. Early on, Melissa encounters the Bergher family, whose account of their own history effectively anticipates Melissa’s future troubles by depicting the difficulties of marriage without parental consent. Melissa is then courted by two men and after some indecision finally (with her father’s approval) decides on Alonzo. As volume one draws to a close, Alonzo and Melissa fervently anticipate their union, even as they worry over the outbreak of war between England and her rebellious North American colonies.
The second half of the novel opens with disastrous news. Alonzo’s father, a commercial speculator with global interests, is bankrupted when British authorities seize his cargo in both the Atlantic and the Caribbean. With Alonzo now destitute, Mr. Bloomfield forbids the proposed marriage. Despite his daughter’s efforts at persuasion, Bloomfield remains intractable. Heartbroken Alonzo enlists, serves at Bunker Hill, suffers capture in a naval battle and eventual imprisonment in England; meanwhile Melissa fakes her own death, absconds southward, and disguises herself as her recently deceased cousin. A gothic castle, a crucial encounter with Benjamin Franklin, a shipwreck, and a counterfeiting plot later, the two are reunited in South Carolina and return to Connecticut to marry. The Revolutionary War comes to a close; all losses are restored; and the novel ends by optimistically restoring Anglo‐American social, if not political, relations. Across the length of the novel, the sea functions as a destabilizing force, as Mitchell meticulously details the instability of oceanic ventures. The site of ruinous naval battles, of imperiled cargoes, of shipwrecks, and of smugglers, Mitchell deploys the Atlantic to create a sharp divide between domestic landscapes and the lawless antagonisms of international waterways. This juxtaposition between oceanic instability and the possibilities for domestic accumulation as a wellspring for independence resonate throughout the novel. The novel’s political ambitions, as it were, merge around this notion of isolationist self‐sufficiency as a counter to the otherwise unstable connections between foreign commodity production, settlement practices, economic circulation, and the import of destabilizing revolutions.
While Rebecca Rush’s Kelroy (1812) seemingly has little to do with the disruptions in circumatlantic trade caused by West Indian rebellions, it does subtly reflect these events by having its titular protagonist venture to China to procure a fortune and become a viable suitor for his love interest, Emily Hammond. As Lisa Lowe convincingly demonstrates in The Intimacies of Four Continents (2015), the Anglo‐American embrace of the China trade (as well as the idea of coolie labor) in the early nineteenth century was a direct response to fears about the insurrection of enslaved peoples in the Caribbean. While the earliest fictive rendition of the turn toward Asia and away from the Caribbean as the space for economic possibility occurs in Charles Brockden Brown’s Jane Talbot (1801), Rush’s novel much more centrally exhibits this turn as necessary for the economic mobility of its characters. The plot of Kelroy revolves around the relationship between economic status and social mobility, and it reproduces tropes about women’s agency and status networks more familiarly associated with the sentimental tradition. Yet in contradistinction to the conventions of that genre, Rush’s text, as Betsy Klimasmith (2014) asserts, offers “something radically different: an experiential re‐creation of urban life in the early Republic” (467). In so doing, Rush highlights the realities of how women have to navigate the complexities of the marriage market from a position of economic precarity; in other words, while sentimental heroines might abstractly fret over debts, Rush has her characters confronted by tradesmen who demand payment for their services.
Kelroy opens by describing how the recently widowed Mrs. Hammond retreats from Philadelphia with her two young daughters to preserve the scant fortune that her spendthrift husband bequeathed her. Under the guise of grief, Mrs. Hammond retires to a rural location until her daughters achieve marriageable age. At this point, she returns to Philadelphia to secure her own future by marrying her daughters to wealthy suitors. The elder daughter, Lucy, resembles her cunning mother and soon marries a visiting British aristocrat (Lord Walsingham). The younger daughter, Emily, is less guided by her mother’s ambitions and falls in love with the virtuous but penniless Kelroy, a good friend of Walsingham’s. Mrs. Hammond does all she can to prevent this match and promotes the devious Marney instead. After he discovers Mrs. Hammond’s financial shell game, Walsingham forces her into allowing Emily and Kelroy to become engaged, which prompts Kelroy to venture to China to procure a fortune. Just as her finances evaporate, but before her schemes become publicly exposed, Mrs. Hammond’s house burns to the ground. In a quirky turn of events, she had fortuitously purchased a winning lottery ticket with her last dollar and miraculously it survives the blaze. With her future now secure, Mrs. Hammond attempts to break Emily’s engagement and conspires with Marney to forge correspondence aimed at convincing each of the lovers to believe that the other one has forsaken their promises. Emily soon marries a new admirer, Dunlevy, and after the wedding Mrs. Hammond dies; among her papers are found drafts of the forged letters, a discovery that exposes the vicious charade. Consumed with sorrow, Emily soon follows her mother to the grave. After Kelroy returns to Philadelphia, he learns of the deception and likewise becomes unhinged. He sets sail for Italy and perishes in a shipwreck in the middle of the Atlantic. In sum, the novel places the dangers of financial speculation alongside the marriage plot to mark how economic fluctuations disrupt the domestic sphere.
Tabitha Gilman Tenney’s Female Quixotism (1801) shares a similar concern with the problems of circulation, although the novel focuses on the flow of texts and the question of women’s education. Tenney’s protagonist, Dorcasina Sheldon, is raised by her widowed father who indulges her taste for fiction and allows her to read nothing but novels as she matures. The novel then traces how this attachment to romantic and sentimental plots has distorted her behavior. Indeed, Dorcasina remains incapable of entering into a social situation without over‐reading it into a contorted version of some narrative trope that she has encountered in a novel. Dorcasina rebuffs her first suitor, the sensible Lysander, because he fails to compare with the romantic heroes of her beloved novels, and her outlandish behavior scares away all other potential suitors. She soon becomes a curiosity and the source of bemused comedy for the surrounding community, remaining sequestered in her father’s house with all her romantic novels. Around her thirtieth birthday, an Irish fortune seeker (O’Conner) casts himself as the romantic hero of one of her treasured plots in order to bluff his way into her father’s fortune. O’Conner is soon revealed to be a thief and a gambler, while at the same time, as a cruel practical joke, the local schoolmaster convinces the village barber to court Dorcasina and provides him with flowery letters signed by the imagined “Philander.” This misguided ruse allows Dorcasina to briefly embody one of the plots she so admires, but only adds to her pain when the veil of this cruel joke is lifted.
The second volume of the novel opens with Dorcasina falling for a young officer, Captain Barry, who has been quartered in her father’s house. Despite being old enough to be his mother, Dorcasina embraces the idea of a military suitor and Barry humors her devotions out of a twisted kindness. Barry’s servant, unbeknownst to his master, concocts a falsified secret elopement plan, which ends in another humiliation for Dorcasina who still fails to realize that her pretended suitors are really gold diggers. The aging Sheldon tries to marry his daughter to a respectable widower, but his efforts are rebuffed and he soon dies. After her father’s passing, Dorcasina fantasizes that her servant John Brown is actually a gentleman in disguise and constructs an elaborate narrative about his supposed devotion to orchestrate yet one more romantic plot to inhabit. Another mysterious suitor appears, Captain Montague, to deflate this imagined romantic plot and court Dorcasina himself. Montague proves to be cross‐dressing Harriet Stanly, a friend of Dorcasina’s who understands her problems as related to her reading habits. Stanly attempts to cure Dorcasina by reeducating her through an elaborate performance; this staged courtship only partially affects Dorcasina. A final suitor, an overt fortune hunter, appears and claims that Dorcasina reminds him of his deceased wife. When Dorcasina rejects him, he viciously tells her that no man would actually want to marry her because of her age, and his barbs finally shatter her remaining illusions about her appearance and age. At the novel’s end, Dorcasina becomes a dispenser of charity, and Barry and Harriet marry, although their future is full of regrets over how they exploited Dorcasina’s naivety for their own amusement. Drexler and White (2014) have suggested that the novel has a significant political dimension by decoding how Tenney’s two volumes “present two books, the first corresponding to a colonial or imperial framework and the second to the illusory period of Federalist hegemony in a national context” (76). In their reading, the novel’s presentation of various suitors reveals the racial and class antagonisms of the period.
The question of marriage and its relationship to social reproduction is also the subject of a short novella, Moreland Vale; or the Fair Fugitive (1801), by the pseudonymous writer “A Lady of the State of New‐York.” Moreland Vale revolves around the tumultuous courtship of Eliza Vernon and Henry Walgrove, but much of the action springs from how Eliza’s stepmother defrauds her after her father’s death. Like many early nineteenth‐century novels, the issue of a lost patriarchal authority defines the narrative concerns of Moreland Vale, but the novel’s vivid depiction of a sexually aggressive stepmother who threatens Walgrove after he refuses her bold advances is far from conventional. A forged will, which wrongfully disinherits Eliza, allows the stepmother to assume a great deal of authority, and as the plot unfolds the issue of hereditary transmission of property and the legalities of inheritance take center stage. Cast from her natal home and separated from Walgrove (who is tricked into undertaking a voyage to the East Indies), Eliza finds solace in a community of working‐class farmers who devote themselves to restoring her lost birthrights. Meanwhile, after a series of circuitous misadventures Walgrove discovers a fortune in Canton which liberates him from any external dependencies. A barely averted rape, a kidnapping, the physical abuse of an elderly woman, and an attempted murder later, Eliza legally establishes her rights when several figures who have been missing return to New York and testify to her father’s real intentions. Once her stepmother’s fraud is exposed, Eliza returns to Moreland Vale to the delight of her father’s former servants and the neighboring farmers. Reunited with Walgrove, the pair quickly marry and become a beacon of comfort to all of those around them. The novella closes by reasserting a faith in legitimate and ancestral rights to property ownership. As I have argued elsewhere, the novel fundamentally moves to “galvanize support for traditional forms of hereditary transmission” which had been “rent by the disruptions of the revolution” (Faherty 2015: 153).
Questions around inheritance and social formation similarly serve as the subject of two novels by George Watterston, The Lawyer; or, Man As He Ought Not to Be (1808) and Glencarn; or The Disappointments of Youth (1810). The plot of the first of these novels features another motherless protagonist, Morcell, and examines how this absence undermines his moral education. Apprenticed to a corrupt lawyer, Morcell rapidly becomes a seducer, coward, gambler, and profligate. His addiction to gambling supersedes his income, and he soon finds himself insolvent. At the novel’s conclusion, Morcell discovers that he has had an illegitimate child who has died of neglect and that his own sister has perished in a brothel after being seduced and abandoned by another rake. He reforms his behavior and attempts to make amends for his wickedness by becoming a dispenser of charity. In his innovative preface to Glencarn (which meditates on the development of US literary history and the form of the novel), Waterson surveys the development of American literature, and concludes that Charles Brockden Brown is the nation’s first great writer. Glencarn’s plot is truly convoluted, featuring among other improbable events a protagonist who out‐wrestles a wild bear. Another narrative about an orphaned protagonist, the text traces how this lack of familial connection places Glencarn in a precarious position. In one of the many scenes indebted to Brockden Brown, Glencarn displays a pronounced skill at ventriloquism to evade physical harm. The novel concludes with revelations about a murder by poisoning, a suicide, and the truth about Glencarn’s patrimony. Richard Bell (2011) notes that the suicide of the novel’s chief antagonist reproduces an operant period trope which often had “the villain’s suicide” serve “as a prelude to divine judgment and retribution” (109). Such is the case in Glencarn, for after the suicide Glencarn is able to purchase the languishing estate of his adoptive father and marry his childhood sweetheart who, despite being endlessly slandered, has predictably remained virtuous.
As Karen Weyler (1996) deftly summarizes, the vast majority of texts from this period depict “a landscape largely free of manufacturing, populated instead by farmers, artisans, professionals such as doctors, lawyers, ministers, and soldiers, and, most interestingly, merchants” (209). Depictions of these occupations routinely served in interregnum texts as a means of thinking about the relationship between the individual subject and the rapid changes brought about by increases in global trade and a turn toward industrialization. Perhaps the one counter to this anti‐speculative spirit in the period is Sara Savage’s 1814 novel The Factory Girl, which is likely the earliest piece of US fiction to consider the social effects of factory work on the nation’s burgeoning young workforce. But considerations of speculation were not limited to questions of industrialization or the concept of circumatlantic trade, as this theme was also explored in relation to questions of territorial expansion and more inwardly focused in explorations of the social effects of gambling. Sally S.B.K. Wood’s Dorval, or, The Speculator (1801) explores the problems of economic ambition as a potential social destabilizer by having a virtuous hero fall victim to a scheme involving land speculators (modeled on the actual Yazoo land fraud in 1795 in Georgia and Mississippi) that ruins him. The dangers of gambling and how this vice endangers social cohesion forms the subject of a range of novels from this period, including St. Hubert (1800), a retrospective tale of repentance on the part of a broken gambler; Caroline Matilda Warren Thayer’s The Gamesters (1805), which depicts the wreck of a family when the husband is seduced into gambling; and The Gambler, or The Memoirs of a British Officer (1802), which revolves around two jailhouse confession narratives decrying the evils of games of chance. In each of these texts, games of chance (be they card games or larger‐scale land speculation) are framed as destabilizing forces having the capacity to upend the social order. As such, these texts highlight the shifts in the market economy and how this alteration impacts social formation.
Although most famous for her earlier fiction, Susanna Rowson was enormously productive across the first two decades of the nineteenth century. She published a number of pedagogic texts in this era, beginning with An Abridgement of Universal Geography (1805) and including A Spelling Dictionary (1807), A Present for Young Ladies (1811), and a Youth’s First Step in Geography (1811). In 1811, she also published her final play, Hearts of Oak, and a collection of verse entitled Miscellaneous Poems. Her only fictional publication during this period was Sincerity, which appeared serially in the Boston Weekly Magazine in 1803–1804 and was later repackaged as a stand‐alone volume, Sara; or, the Exemplary Wife, in 1813. Sincerity opens with Sarah’s abandonment by her father and her consequent, unhappy marriage. In many ways, the plot reverses normal sentimental tropes by opening with a marriage and tracing its dissolution, rather than charting a protagonist’s navigation of obstacles in order to marry. As if to underscore this reversal of narrative conventions, Rowson has her heroine suffer from an overwhelming nose bleed shortly after she takes her vows. This psychosomatic illness forces her to leave her husband at the alter until she can regain her composure. Sara’s marriage to Darnley, a licentious spendthrift, is loveless from the start, and shortly after their union Darnley moves his former mistress, Jessey, into their house to rekindle their affair. At first, Sara believes Jessey to simply be in need of assistance, but she soon discovers evidence of her husband’s adultery and demands Jessey’s removal from their home.
Shortly after the Jessey’s departure, Darnley is sentenced to debtor’s prison and, rather than risk further humiliation, Sara moves to Ireland to work as a governess. Unfortunately, Sara soon discovers her employers are unscrupulous, and she flees when they attempt to convince her to take a lover to sustain herself. After some destitute wandering around Dublin, which vividly demonstrates the dangers women without secure social connections face in strange places, Sara is reunited with her husband, who claims to have reformed his behavior. They settle on a small Warwickshire farm and attempt to restart their life together. Darnley’s reclamation proves short‐lived, and he soon he returns to his immoral ways. After Sara’s death, the epistolary narrative continues and unfolds a series of reports suggesting that poetic justice has been dealt to everyone who has tormented her. While largely an epistolary novel, it is a rather innovative instance of the genre. From the outset of the narrative, the text alternates between Sarah’s letters to her friend Anne and Anne’s more distant letters to another friend, Elenor (which sometimes include Sara’s original letters within them). Late in the novel, Anne suddenly dies, changing the epistolary circuits still further. Through these different perspectives, the novel ventures a complex reflection on marriage as well as one of the most straightforward depictions of adultery in an early American text. While Sincerity has some continuities with Rowson’s much more famous Charlotte Temple, the contrasts in plot, character, and narrative technique creatively complicate the understanding of sentimentality associated with Rowson’s earlier works and with misplaced assumptions about her limitations as a writer. Indeed, as Jared Gardner (2012) has noted, “Sincerity stands as something of a willful refusal of the conventions of the novel,” and as it “eschews the didacticism of Charlotte Temple” it denies readers the “alternately comforting and chastising” narrative voice which marks Rowson’s most famous text (142).
Rip’s Slumber and Questions of Canon Formation
In many ways, the 1819 publication of Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon has long been heralded as marking the birth of nineteenth‐century US literary production. According to this critical doxa, Irving’s work matured after his residency in England as this setting afforded him the experiences necessary to evolve from author of juvenile satires to more complex meditations on how European cultural legacies shaped US social development. Such an accounting of Irving’s trajectory understates the complexity of his earliest writings, neglects his work as an editor of the Analectic Magazine (1813–1814), and mutes the impact of his popular biographical portraits of US military heroes during the War of 1812. Indeed, Irving was rather prolific before the appearance of The Sketch Book, and this early work has been dismissed for far too long. Ending with Washington Irving, my survey of American literature from 1800 to 1820 culminates by considering the sole writer from this period who has received attention even as far back as the time of Pattee’s contemporaries. While Irving previously served as a signpost for the reawakening of American literary production after its supposed dormancy for Pattee’s generation of critics (and many succeeding ones), I situate him within a larger frame of textual production from this interregnum period to generate a different sense of his importance. In so doing, I draw attention to how Rip Van Winkle’s 20‐year slumber has been imagined by critics as a metaphor for the lack of cultural production in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Critics often fail to accurately note that within the text, Rip falls asleep before the Revolutionary War and thus awakens circa 1800; he reenters the social order, in other words, in the early stages of the canonical interregnum. Our habitual misreading of the temporality of Rip’s slumber has effectively served as a self‐fulfilling prophecy about the lack of noteworthy cultural production in the early nineteenth century.
Irving’s first major publication, the Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle (1802), initially appeared in the pages of the New York Morning Chronicle in mid‐November of 1802 and irregularly continued until April of 1803. Framed as observational letters from the pen of Jonathan Oldstyle, a blustering social critic who lampooned the culture of the early republic by focusing on such issues as marriage, manners, fashion, dueling, and entertainment, the nine Oldstyle letters brought Irving’s capacities as a satirist to the public’s attention. In a move that he would replicate to greater success in The Sketch Book, Irving began to experiment with the idea of multiple authorial personas within a single narrative frame by surrounding Oldstyle with a number of friends who would inject their own observations into his letters. These letters were collected and reprinted as a single volume, seemingly at first without Irving’s permission, after the international success of The Sketch Book. In 1807–1808, Irving collaborated with his older brother William and James Kirke Paulding to produce their own satirical periodical Salmagundi; or The Whim‐whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq. & Others. The overall efforts of the three have long been dismissed as a motley collection of parodies skewering the cultural sphere of early New York, but such a classification misses the point of the collaboration. Deeply political in focus, the 20 issues display a range of narrative voices interrogating the centrality of New York in the emerging republic even as they consider how the early United States was immersed in a larger circumatlantic network of associations. In particular, Irving’s Mustapha Rub‐a‐Dub Keli Khan persona evinces the deep interest, in the early republic, in North Africa as a result of the Barbary Wars. In deploying a North African Muslim persona to critique the state of US social development, Irving returned to a trope previously used by a range of late eighteenth‐century writers, including Benjamin Franklin who used the figure of Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim to criticize the slave trade, Peter Markoe’s The Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania (1787) which uses an Islamic spy to lampoon the Constitutional Convention, and Royal Tyler’s The Algerine Captive (1797), which more directly examines the ramifications of barbary captivity.
Finally, Irving’s A History of New York (1809) continues the evolution of Irving’s abilities as a satirist and remains the strongest of his earliest publications. The text began as a kind of burlesque of historiography, but soon morphed into a pointed Federalist critique of Thomas Jefferson’s presidency. Within the text, Irving reimagines the settlement of New York as a means of complicating operant histories about national development. The production was an elaborate hoax, as Irving sought to authenticate his pseudo‐history with voluminous footnotes and references to real historical figures. One of the few modern critics to take the text seriously, Jerome McGann (2012), suggests the volume “gives a good account of [Irving’s] skeptical Enlightenment mind” because of the ways in which it interrogates both “antiquarian follies” and “progressivist illusions” (349–350). In short, the text exemplifies Irving’s sense of the rhetorical possibilities of authorial personas as a means of exploring both the history of the early republic and his concerns about its future prospects. The text further cemented Irving’s persona of Diedrich Knickerbocker as an authorial device who could be deployed to rethink the lingering effects of the Republic’s complex pre‐Revolutionary heritages.
Critics have often considered how Irving’s The Sketch Book romanticizes rural spaces and the possibilities of a kind of antiquarian disconnection from a market economy, and as the above summaries have detailed these were much more widespread concerns of the period than critics have typically suggested. Irving’s interest in the tensions between region and nation or the need for charity in the face of a society governed by an increasing market logic did not simply arise out of a vacuum. Indeed, by moving to understand the tales of The Sketch Book as taking up the threads of a wider literary culture we can better understand Irving as an innovative inheritor rather than as a lonely originator of important tropes and traditions. Moreover, Irving’s interest in how Revolutionary legacies had been abandoned or muted in the early nineteenth century were also in dialogue with a number of texts which previously addressed these questions. Considered in this light, Irving’s work extends larger cultural debates rather than evincing proof of a 20‐year‐long literary slumber. It is high time that we – like Irving’s most famous protagonist, Rip Van Winkle – wake up and read the early nineteenth century landscape for evidence of cultural changes that we have ignored at our own peril. Irving’s careful mapping of Rip’s slumber through the 1780s and 1790s, if anything, is a further indication that the cultural changes that occurred within the early nineteenth century are ones that he thought were of intense importance.
Far from a void of cultural production, the canonical interregnum of 1800 to 1820 is rife with texts that alter any sense of the progressive development of American literary history. In bridging the gap between the well‐mapped canons of the 1790s and the 1820s, these texts can fruitfully bring these two semi‐autonomous fields into conversation. Moreover, if a sustained attention to the texts from this interstitial period entered into our critical histories, the prominent embrace of non‐national geographies as a means of thinking about cultural formation in the early nineteenth century would come into a sharper focus, and we would more fully understand the intense period interest in the Caribbean and North Africa. Recovering textual production from this period would likewise increase our understanding of the importance of region for early American writers, even as it would challenge us to find more sophisticated ways of thinking about seriality and anonymity. And, perhaps most importantly, since the majority of texts from this period were authored by women, attending to these texts as a crucial pivot between the 1790s and the 1820s would fruitfully unsettle the lingering master narratives about canonicity which have routinely glossed over the importance of female authorship in the early development of American literary history. Turing our attention to this period would, in other words, force us to move beyond the residual frame of thinking that the canon of American literature concretized in the early twentieth century accurately captures the complexities of our literary history. Finally, resurrecting this period might productively unsettle the stagnant nature of periodization which Pattee lamented was derailing scholarship even in the formative moments of the discipline. A hundred volumes about 1800 to 1820 remain to be written, all of them unlike, and all of them mapping this largely undiscovered country.
References
Further Reading
See also: chapter 16 (captivity recast); chapter 17 (gender, sex, and seduction in early american literature); chapter 18 (letters in early american manuscript and print cultures); chapter 25 (from the wharf to the woods); chapter 26 (performance, theatricality, and early american drama); chapter 27 (charles brockden brown and the novel in the 1790s); chapter 28 (medicine, disability, and early american literature); chapter 30 (commerce, class, and cash); chapter 31 (haiti and the early american imagination).
Note