30
Elizabeth Hewitt
The inextricability of economics from any study of early American culture is efficiently conveyed in a New Yorker cartoon by Donald Reilly, which depicts two Pilgrims in conversation aboard a Mayflower‐like ship with the caption, “Religious freedom is my immediate goal, but my long‐range plan is to go into real estate.” Crucial to the joke is that even as the canonical texts of early American literature acknowledge the economic rationales for English colonization of North America, economic topics have been a bit like Poe’s purloined letter: so much in plain sight as to be almost undetectable. One is hard pressed to identify a single text in the early volumes of the Norton Anthology of American Literature that is not fundamentally informed by economic concerns. The earliest work of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries includes the numerous texts that explicitly justified English colonization in economic terms. The theological writing of Calvinist New England, for all its concern with spiritual futures, is imbued with the literal and metaphoric language of material economies, as that American ur‐text of American Protestantism and capitalism, John Winthrop’s “A Modell of Christian Charity,” demonstrates so ably. And as we move later into the eighteenth century, early American writing is dominated by the subject that is at the heart of the colonies’ very existence: the mercantilist system that defines their economic exchange with England. This system, and the American critique of British economic policy, continued to dominate American writing across all genres well into the early national period. And yet, despite the inevitable centrality of trade, commerce, finance, value, and labor to early American literature, the earliest American literary scholarship offered a relatively infrequent discussion of explicitly economic subjects.
This dearth was brought into sharp relief by the “surge of interest in economic topics” in early American scholarship at the end of the twentieth century (Baker and Wertheimer 2006: 397). Indeed, at the turn of the twenty‐first century, there was sufficient scholarly production at the intersection of literature and economics to coin a critical subfield, New Economic Criticism. The term came into being in 1991 when Mark Osteen and Martha Woodmansee organized a Midwest Modern Language Association (MMLA) panel entitled “The New Economic Criticism” in order to give expression to their “perception of an emerging body of literary and cultural criticism founded upon economic paradigms, models and tropes” (Woodmansee and Osteen 1999: 3). The published collection of the same name in 1999 secured the term’s currency. This economic criticism was designated as “new” in part to recognize its links to New Historicism, but also to register a novel attempt to join what had been two very isolated approaches to the literary study of economics: the contextualization of literary texts in economic history (a focus on commerce) and the analysis of both language and economy as abstract symbolic systems (a focus on cash).
The New Economic Criticism also defined itself by what it did not do, as it explicitly distinguished its own methodological projects and thematic interests from those of earlier Marxist literary criticism. In many ways, then, the third term in my essay’s title, “class,” has been largely absent from New Economic Criticism. But the general movement away from Marxism, I would suggest, was largely nominal – less a rejection of Marx than a positive call for literary scholars to acquire knowledge of economic history and theory that went beyond Capital. Deirdre McCloskey, the economist whose work has been so crucial to the New Economic Criticism, for example, chided literary scholars for having a “knowledge of economics [that] begins and ends with Karl Marx,” even as she also lambasted her own discipline’s methodological shortfalls (Woodmansee and Osteen 1999: 12). Matt Seybold (2014) made the argument even more forcefully: “what little economic analysis emerges from English departments remains entrenched in Marx and not‐Marx, a reduction ad absurdum derivation of partisan polemics as old as Madonna and equally subtle” (12). It is also the case that the methodological proclivities of new economic critics have likewise been criticized on a number of different fronts – namely, as replicating “the preoccupations of mainstream economic theory” (Sweet 2002: 181) and as having a “recurrent tendency to evade or euphemize Marxist categories of analysis” (Sebek 2008: 3).
I would suggest that more recent scholarship in early American literature focused on economic analysis is evidence less of a shift away from Marx – or even Marxism – than of a reignited engagement with the twentieth‐century progressivist historian, Charles Beard. Although Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913) was neither especially well read when first published nor frequently cited a century later, the book’s explanation of American political origins as essentially framed through class conflict – as a dispute between a democratic (Republican) emphasis on realty and an elitist (Federalist) attachment to personality – has been foundational to criticism in early American letters (Slauter 2010: 325). Indeed, Beard’s work influenced some of the earliest examples of early American scholarship: we know, for example, that Beard was important to Vernon L. Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought (1927). And when Beard reviewed Main Currents he commended Parrington explicitly for emphasizing an economic interpretation of American literary history: “It appears that Mr. Parrington is about to start an upheaval in American literary criticism. He has yanked Miss Beautiful Letters out of the sphere of the higher verbal hokum and fairly set her in the way that leads to contact with pulsating reality – that source of inspiration of all magnificent literature” (quoted in Hall 1994: 226–227).
American historians long ago vivisected the work of Beard and Parrington: as early as 1968, one scholar remarked that the “evaluation of [their] the present relevance and validity […] [has] something of the melancholy flavor of a post‐mortem” (Strout 1970: 230). And yet Beard’s work also has had remarkable staying power in American literary scholarship, even as it is rarely cited. As Eric Slauter argues, “New accounts of class conflict and democratization return to terrain first plowed by progressives like […] Charles Beard a century ago” (Slauter 2010: 325). Americanist practitioners of the New Economic Criticism, in particular, have been significantly animated by Beard, and the story they tell of early national literature largely follows his plot of American founding: a class conflict that pitted merchants, manufacturers, and financiers against farmers and laborers. The one notable exception would be Timothy Sweet’s American Georgic (2002), which offers a more complicated rendering of economic interests, as he explains how the discourses of “rural virtue” were absolutely coextensive with arguments on behalf of American agricultural capitalism (120–121). But even while Sweet challenges the conventional wisdom about the configurations of the young nation’s economic players, his account is somewhat similar insofar as he locates in early American literature a final capitulation to economic liberalism, commercial capitalism, and, in Sweet’s case, to anti‐environmentalism.
Beard’s legacy is also seen in the fundamental assumption of contemporary scholarship that “Miss Beautiful Letters” can only be studied when she is in contact with the “pulsating reality” of early American economic practices. In their editorial introduction to a special issue focused on the intersection between early American literary studies and economics, Jennifer J. Baker and Eric Wertheimer (2006) celebrate New Economic Criticism in terms strikingly similar to those with which Beard praised Parrington: “recent scholars have trained their attention on the specific conditions that have shaped points of contact between literary and economic culture” (398). This “points of contact” model has been an especially fruitful one for early American studies, for reasons both literary and economic. A literary period comprising a vast array of textual genres, many of which precede the disciplinary bifurcation of “imaginary” from “economic” or “political” writing, the period also encompasses the enormous economic transformations that developed from the earliest moments of European imperialism, to mercantile colonialism, to the emergent commercial capitalism of the early national era.
The key books in the field reveal the heterogeneous scope of the literary and economic topoi available. Sweet’s (2002) archive includes some of the oldest texts in the American literary canon, the sixteenth‐ and seventeenth‐century promotional tracts that established North America as the source from which British imperial wealth might be drawn. Michelle Burnham (2007) likewise emphasizes the early colonial period, parsing the significance of the economic language that fills New England religious and aesthetic texts. Jennifer J. Baker’s (2005) study of debt includes analysis of both seventeenth‐century Puritan and eighteenth‐century Virginian monetary policy. David Shields (1990) argues that eighteenth‐century neoclassical poetry offered a “coherent economic ideology” on behalf of mercantilism (15). Philip Gould’s (2003) analysis of eighteenth‐century antislavery writing demonstrates how the condemnation of trafficking in human beings allowed for the sanctification of other kinds of global commercial exchange. David Anthony (2009) reads Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book in relation to the global panic of 1819. Eric Wertheimer (2006) argues that the work of several canonical early American authors, including Benjamin Franklin, Phillis Wheatley, and Noah Webster, is informed by underwriting, the concept at the heart of the insurance industry. Joseph Fichtelberg (2003) explains how John Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer and Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative establish a new cultural appreciation for appropriation, accumulation, and consumption in a rising capital economy. These eight titles examine over 200 years of American writing, and they study the many genres that constitute the American canon: promotional tracts, travel narratives, captivity narratives, autobiography, sketches, political and religious essays, and poetry.
The primary scholarly focus, however, has been on the genre that has dominated early American scholarship for the last several decades, the novel. And it is not surprising that critics invested in economic subjects would find the novel a prominent object of inquiry, given the theorization of the genre as the discursive space in which readers were habituated to the ethos, customs, and sentiments of the early capital marketplace. Both Baker (2005) and Fichtelberg (2003), for example, study the early novel as showcasing the sentimental bonds that, they argue, were equally important to modern commercial and financial markets. Scholars also set out to explain how the domestic novel became an emblematic literary space through which to observe the dialectic between an expanding global market and the private household economy that was increasingly oriented toward consumption. In other words, while economists have historically been inattentive to the details of household economies and non‐monetary transactions, literary critics are deeply interested in them and have seen the novel as a crucial space in which to observe the market’s penetration into the everyday lives of men and women, rich and poor. Karen Weyler (2004), for example, argues that the early American novel describes a model of economic virtue that navigates the uneasy contradictions of American capitalism – somewhere between avarice and apathy, between grotesque accumulation and poverty. As she explains, “The agenda of much early American fiction is precisely this regulation of masculine economic desire in a republic anxious about the dangerous effects of luxury on both the individual and national psyche” (107).
Predictably, the novelist who has engendered the most interest is Charles Brockden Brown, the author, editor, and businessman, whose work has been central to early American literary scholarship in the last quarter century. Critics have been particularly drawn to Arthur Mervyn (1799), Brown’s picaresque novel that details its eponymous hero’s economic vicissitudes during the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, but also within the larger Atlantic trade systems into which Mervyn and the United States are necessarily embedded. Brown himself stresses his novel’s especial interest in economics, as he proposes in the “Preface” that the context of the yellow fever epidemic “supplied copious materials for reflection to the physician and the political economist” (Brown 2008: 3). And the novel’s detailed attention to the financial instruments by which value was exchanged across the Atlantic world – bills of trade, promissory notes, wills, bonds, insurance policies, and mortgages – was noted by Brown’s earliest critics in the twentieth century. “In no other novel before the Civil War,” one scholar wrote in 1970, “are we so assaulted by the sheer immediacy and pervasiveness of a commercial society” (Justus 1970: 315).
Yet, despite the novel’s almost relentless attention to economic transactions, it would be another 30 years before they would receive sustained attention. At the turn of the twenty‐first century, a flurry of work was published on Arthur Mervyn that tried to account for the novel’s nightmarish vision of commercial traffic. The individual arguments of the scholars are intricate and nuanced, but in some ways we can schematize them into a fairly simple binary. On one side are those who read Brown’s novel as working to legitimize, or at least accommodate, their audiences to the emerging financial and commercial markets of the United States (Baker 2005; Garvin 2015; Hinds 1997; Ostrowski 2004). On the other are those critics who see the novel as articulating an explicit critique of the new capital economy. For these readers, the abundant gothic horrors of Arthur Mervyn – disease, poverty, imprisonment, seduction, slavery – are all side effects of the novel’s real monsters, commercial capitalism and economic liberalism (Goddu 1997; Goudie 2004; Weyler 2004). Stephen Shapiro (2008) makes the most emphatic case, suggesting that Brown’s explicit ambition was “to craft a new relation between literary production and social transformation and suggest how progressives might intervene within a world that is rapidly altering toward conservative and capitalist predicates” (259–260). But whether we see Brown’s work as legitimizing capitalism or directly challenging it makes very little difference to the basic methodology which, in either case, is fundamentally concerned with establishing a point of contact between a discursive form (in this case, the novel) and specific economic contexts – financial debt, corporations, the Atlantic slave trade, and so on.
Even more crucially, almost all these economic readings of Arthur Mervyn – regardless of the assessment they offer of Brown’s own politico‐economic position – see the novel as a moment of capitulation or defeat in the face of the transformation to a more developed form of capitalism. Although not directly interested in economic context, Michael Warner’s The Letters of the Republic (1990) inaugurated this reading as he argued that Arthur Mervyn exemplified the condition of the early American novel more generally, which marked the transformation of “a civic ideology of publication into the kind of private imaginary appropriate to nationalism” (172). Baker (2005) makes a similar assessment with a more explicit focus on economic context: “Like other novels in early America which dramatized in various ways the tension between classical republican values and economic liberalism, Arthur Mervyn depicts a privatized reading process that parallels economic privation” (136). Weyler (2004) sounds a similar note, arguing that the novel voices “misgivings about the impact of changing economic conditions […] and the inadequacy of traditional American institutions to contend” with the consequences (181). Even Shapiro (2008), who sees Brown’s novel as formally innovative – as “putting pressure on familiar modes of narrative perspective” so as to challenge the “dominance of commercial political economy” (259) – nevertheless reads Arthur Mervyn as a last gasp. Brown’s work, he argues, proves the ultimate futility of the novelistic form for “ideological contestation” (45). Each of the above critics contextualizes the early American novel in economic history so as to reveal the form’s capacity to evaluate material change but also to succumb to its pressures.
This broad interest in seeing how literary forms could pave the uneven path into the dominant economic structures of the nineteenth century has led the field to new archives that are only just beginning to be explored. Scholars have exhumed many early novels that, like Arthur Mervyn, provide incredibly detailed descriptions of economic life at the turn to the nineteenth century, including Enos Hitchcock’s The Farmer’s Friend (1793), James Butler’s Fortune’s Football (1797), Susanna Rowson’s Reuben and Rachel (1798), the anonymously published Moreland Vale (1801), Isaac Mitchell’s The Asylum (1811), Rebecca Rush’s Kelroy (1812), and Sally Sayward Barrell Keating Wood’s Dorval; or the Speculator (1801). The last is a particularly illustrative case since, as its title indicates, it so clearly hews to economic themes.
Wood’s didactic novel (one of four that she published) offers a fairly standard critique of the familiar bêtes noires of the eighteenth‐century novel: speculative bubbles and luxurious excess. It is also typical of early American novels in the inconsistency of its critique, simultaneously condemning speculation as a social vice while praising an economic system that necessarily depends on representative currency and calculated risk. One of the only critics to seriously attend to the novel, Karen Weyler (2004) explains how Wood negotiates this careful position, arguing that the novel distinguishes a dangerous speculation associated with gambling and deception from a virtuous commerce associated with some form of intrinsic value. Weyler argues that, like many early American novels, Dorval provides the solution to “this masculine dilemma of amassing capital” by depicting its male characters as securing wealth through East Indian or Asian trade and then converting this portable property back into real estate in the United States (126). For Weyler, Dorval emblematizes a fundamental strategy of American novels “[to] find ways to accommodate modern capitalist behavior without sacrificing the virtuous ethos of republicanism” (182).
In what follows I would like to attend to another kind of accommodation that Dorval performs, one that requires us to shift our perspective away from the novel’s depiction of a capitalist ethos and toward a more basic project: how does Wood use the novel to demonstrate the movement of wealth within the emerging commercial and financial markets of the early United States? How does the novel narrate the exchanges of illusory wealth that motivates its plot? This descriptive project manifests itself in what has forever been most striking about early American novels, which is their seemingly meandering and digressive plots. Dorval offers a particularly interesting case, I want to suggest, because it represents a conflicted strategy for narrating economic exchange. On one hand, it telescopes a complex series of commercial and financial exchanges into a singular encounter between individuals; on the other, it strives to explain how any single exchange can only be understood as embedded into a sequence of other exchanges across space and time.
The novel begins by introducing us to a male protagonist, Colonel Morley, who emblematizes the novel’s ambiguous representation of commerce and speculation. Although Morley will ultimately be bankrupted by his failed speculative ambitions, we also learn that he has successfully steered between the shoals of an economic dispute that was primarily responsible for partisan conflict in the early nation: the refinancing of public debt. Like many speculators after the Revolutionary War, Morley has purchased large quantities of debt securities and continental notes from American soldiers who, desperate for liquidity, sold them at a loss. Such speculators were demonized in the American press throughout the 1790s, but the novel depicts Morley’s actions as virtuous because, we are told, he did not purchase the debt certificates at a discount, but rather above their market price, at par. The novel thus opens by describing Morley as a participant in an institutionally mediated financial marketplace that includes state and federal debtors, creditors, and debt purchasers. The dense network of these myriad transactions provides the context for Morley’s own purchases. Yet the novel also depicts the colonel as a participant who ignores a basic premise of the market, which is that the value of its objects of exchange necessarily fluctuate, being dependent on the behavior of individual buyers and sellers. Thus, although we are clearly supposed to read Morley’s debt purchases as a sign of his benevolence, they also indicate a fantastical misrepresentation of the marketplace. To purchase the certificates at par is to assume a market in which financial instruments are atemporal stores of value, and it assumes that a market consists of a single encounter between debtor and creditor.
Such a misrepresentation is not unusual and, indeed, the ideological work of the novel has largely been to render the anonymous and mediated transactions of modern capitalism as exchanges between free individuals. Immanuel Wallerstein (1983) even points to this representational inadequacy as one explanation for a failure to understand the logic of historical capitalism: “We must rid ourselves of the simplistic image that the ‘market’ is a place where initial producer and ultimate consumer meet” (29). What is unusual about Wood’s novel is that even as it offers this “simplistic image” of the market, it also tries to give some expression to the temporal expanse of any single exchange. For example, it labors to narrate the antecedent events that bring individuals to economic transactions and it tries to give at least partial expression to the myriad consequences of these encounters.
The novel, for example, explains how Colonel Morley secured the capital sufficient for him to purchase these debt certificates. Like many a fictional hero, he has inherited a fortune, but his bequest was no simple gift. Instead, in a detailed backstory, we learn that Morley’s aunt promises to leave her nephew the legacy only if he agrees to change the name he was given at birth (“Stephen Wilson”) to “William Morley,” the name of her dead lover from whom she herself has inherited the fortune. The cost of receiving the “property of her deceased lover” is to exchange his own titular value. As Wilson, he is worth almost nothing: indeed, we are told that the salary he received from the army was “inadequate to [his] wants and wishes.” And therefore, like the veterans from whom he will later purchase debt certificates, Morley exchanges one symbolic instrument for a new and more valuable one. And as with the later purchase of debt securities, in this transaction too Morley refuses to recognize fluctuating value. When he inherits the money, he determines to “appreciate[] the blessings of competence at its full value, and no more” (Wood 1801: 9).
These descriptions of Morley’s financial actions are partially designed to distinguish “virtuous” commerce from avaricious speculation and later the novel explicitly spells out the terms of the distinction: “The man who aims at immoderate riches, without intending to give equivalent […] must be considered as a speculator” (284). The line that separates the capitalist from the speculator is located both in intention and action. The speculator has an immoderate desire for profit and also violates contract by not providing an equivalent exchange. Virtuous commerce thus must involve moderation and equivalence. But while this homily is simple enough, it again depends on a necessarily condensed representation of the marketplace: a non‐compound encounter between a single buyer and single seller in which we could identify one person’s desires as immoderate and in which equivalence would be determined solely by whether each complies with the terms of that individual transaction. Again, what is so remarkable about Wood’s novel is that it tries to tell its story of modern commerce as an atemporal encounter between individual agents (thereby providing the rationale for its explicit moral argument) and as a narrative of long economic chains in which any single encounter is a fractional part.
This latter project is epitomized by the specific historical setting of the novel, the Yazoo land fraud case. The novel identifies Morley’s ultimate financial ruin as a consequence of his participation in this early American economic debacle involving the sale of 35 million acres of land in what is now Alabama and Mississippi. In January 1795, the Georgia governor signed the Yazoo Act, which authorized the sale of the territory (called the Yazoo because of its proximity to the river of the same name) to four land companies for $500 000. These companies proceeded to sell parcels of the acreage to numerous investors, most of whom planned to resell, confident they would profit on the expectation of rising prices on western property. One of the largest of these purchasers was the New England Mississippi Land Company, which itself sold shares to many individual New England investors. The transaction, however, generated controversy when it was discovered that all but one of the Georgia legislators who had voted for the Act had received compensatory shares in the land companies in exchange for their votes. And so, only a year after the original sale, in February of 1796, in response to the outcry against this legislative corruption, the Georgia State House officially rescinded the sale.
The so‐called Rescinding Act not only nullified the original sale to the four land companies, but also all subsequent sales from the companies to individual purchasers (Elsmere 1967: 425–427). In so doing, the Act not only invalidated the purchased titles to the property but also obliterated the value of any shares in the companies. The Rescinding Act even set out to erase the record of these purchases: “kindred papers were to be removed literally from the official records and burned in public view. The document of the Act of 1795 was to be burned in an elaborate ceremony on the State House steps […] as evidence of Georgia’s disavowal of the land sale” (Elsmere 1967: 427). This symbolic conflagration follows the same basic logic as Morley’s debt purchases: it strove to rewind time. It suggested that by destroying the paper metonymy of the original Act of 1795, the state could also obliterate the various economic conveyances that the Act had set in motion. Of course, this is not the way markets work and since numerous financial instruments (e.g. specie, promissory notes, other securities) had already exchanged hands, neither the fire nor the Act offered any clear resolution. The New England Mississippi Land Company immediately began to lobby the United States Congress in protest at the Rescinding Act, hoping the federal Congress would overrule the Georgia legislature and legitimate the original purchases. Indeed, there was no resolution to the issue until 1810 (long after Wood published Dorval) when the Supreme Court case Fletcher v. Peck struck down the Rescinding Act of 1796, arguing that a grant to a private company was covered under the Contract Clause of the United States Constitution.
I rehearse these details in part because the land fraud, which the novel compares to the “south sea bubble” (52), is a crucial moment in early American economic history. Indeed, Wood so assumes her readers’ familiarity with the particulars that she dispenses with detail: “It is not necessary to tell any American by what unprecedented conduct” the sales of millions of acres were nullified by legislative act. And Wood was not the only American author to fictionalize the scandal, since we know that Royall Tyler penned a three‐act comedy, now lost, called The Georgia SPEC; Or, Land in the Moon, in 1797 about the affair (Péladeau 1967: 56). But I also offer these details precisely because Wood chooses not to do so, and this decision to abbreviate the details of the scandal is characteristic of the novel’s ambivalence about narrating economic exchanges. The decision to set her story in the context of a financial scandal that implicated hundreds of buyers and sellers, and which took over 15 years to resolve, would seem to indicate a desire to emphasize the complex machinery of the emerging American economy. And yet the novel’s depiction of the affair also reveals a very different desire, which is to condense its myriad exchanges across time and space into a simple encounter between individuals.
We might see a similarity, then, between the narrative strategy of the Rescinding Act and Wood’s own novel. Just as the law imagined a resolution to the fraud by a symbolic fire, Wood sometimes strives to translate the intricacy of the Yazoo land fraud into simple melodrama that identifies and embodies the agent of malice as the hyperbolically nefarious Dorval. As Weyler (2004) notes, Dorval “unites in one person multiple evils” (134). As with Morley, the novel describes his financial origins in detail. The bastard son of a sailor and a country girl, Dorval is abandoned by his mother and raised on a ship until he travels to the West Indies where he becomes an overseer of a large plantation. Described as both a deist and a utilitarian, Dorval also is aligned with the economics of slavery as his practices engender greater profits for his employer by “increasing [slave] labor, [and] […] lessening their expense to their owner” (Wood 1801: 55). And long before Dorval convinces Morley to purchase millions of Yazoo acres, he has also committed several murders and secretly married a young heiress in the hope of securing her fortune. In short, then, the novel depicts its eponymous antagonist as a veritable caricature of eighteenth‐century moral villainy.
Given the novel’s manifest purpose to vilify speculation, this characterization of Dorval is not unexpected. According to the explicit argument of the novel, Colonel Morley’s cupidity leads him to interact with the seductive Dorval, thereby illustrating the dangers of both immoderate desire and speculation. And the novel describes Dorval’s sale of the Georgia territory to Morley as fraudulent: “The boundaries were specified, the lines mentioned, as marked upon the maps, and every appearance of honest and just dealings exhibited to sanctify the fraud and conceal deceit” (68). The language here suggests not only that the land companies were selling illusory property, but that Dorval was an active participant in this misrepresentation. Morley’s virtuous daughter, Aurelia, likewise assumes something illicit in the transaction, writing to a friend,
I don’t know anything of the value of land; but it appears to me, there must be some deception when it is sold for a cent an acre. Only think, my dear, of purchasing a hundred acres of land for one dollar. Perhaps it is the observations, I have heard my aunt make upon the evils of speculation, and the impositions, that are often practiced, that give me this disgust to the most distant appearance of speculation.
(36–37)
But while the novel implies that Dorval is deliberately party to fraud and deception, the historical context of the Yazoo land fraud would suggest otherwise. Crucially, Dorval is not depicted as owning either land or shares in any of the land companies; he is only a sales agent, a mere link in the chain that conveys Georgia real estate titles to New England investors. And Wood carefully dates the events in the novel so as to make clear that the fatal transaction between Dorval and Morley occurs before there was any widespread knowledge of legislative corruption – and long before the Rescinding Act. While there was protest as early as March 1795 from those Georgians who saw the transfer of property as an alienation, as one memorial petition put it, “[of] the retained sovereignty and jurisdiction of the soil,” the magnitude of the racketeering was not revealed until the autumn of 1795, several months after the imaginary sale in the summer of 1795 in the novel (“To the Honorable President” 1795: 1). Dorval is therefore selling what would have then been legitimate leases for acreage that had been authorized by the Georgia State House. The ostensibly illicit sale identified as the primary cause of Morley’s ruin was a legitimate financial transaction of equivalence.
In fact, even as the novel locates Dorval as the agent of all misery, it offers a very precise account of the financial contract by which Colonel Morley purchases the Yazoo property. And, if anything, the terms by which the colonel secures the leases favor him and not Dorval. The transaction is made through a schedule of promissory notes that stipulated payment of 25% in the first three months, 25% within six months, and the final 50% within the year. The deferred payment, the narrator explains, was not a consequence of illiquidity, since Morley had “sufficient” funds to make the first payment. Rather Morley defers the payment “purely [on] motives of economy.” He assumes that he will be able to resell enough of the land in the first three months to provide sufficient capital to make his initial payment to Dorval and that he will continue to use the capital from his resale to pay his own debts to Dorval. In this exchange, Morley is both the speculator and the debtor – the one who has exchanged the mere promise of future payment for real property. Indeed, Dorval even recognizes the vulnerability of his economic predicament, noting that he “was loath to depart without money for his employers” (69). The novel perhaps discloses these details to implicate Colonel Morley in his own ruin. This reading would certainly be corroborated by the homily he offers just before he dies in debtor’s prison. He opines that he hopes his story will deter others from “engaging in any species of speculation,” describing his desire for easy profit as a “phantom, that enchanted me until it has stripped me of my property, of my happiness, of the peace of my mind” (151).
However, this assignation of guilt and misery to Colonel Morley seems just as unsatisfactory as the identification of Dorval as cause of all evil. The primary cause of Morley’s financial ruin is the legislative act that repudiated a sale that precedes Morley’s own involvement. Thus, although the novel depicts both Morley and Dorval as cautionary examples against land speculation, it also chooses a historical event that emphasizes an economic scenario in which both men are the tiniest of cogs. And far from offering a wholesale critique of land speculation, the novel actually begins by castigating those who have not accepted payment in “those vast tracts of land, which are now a source of unfailing riches to America” (13). Thus we might ask: why does a novel whose manifest purpose is to censure speculation choose a contextual event in which legislative corruption – and not risk or avarice – was the fundamental cause of ruin? And why does Wood choose to make the tertiary agent, Dorval, the apotheosis of dangerous and corrupt finance?
The answer to these questions, I think, can be located in the novel’s contradictory narrative purposes, which are to represent the countless transactions that characterize and define the global economy at the beginning of the nineteenth century and also to render this highly mediated marketplace metonymically as a single melodramatic encounter between buyer and seller. Another way to put this is that Dorval, like many other early American novels, is torn by its ambition to represent both the experience of economic life and the truth of socioeconomic social relations under an expanding capital marketplace. My use of the terms “experience” and “truth” gestures explicitly toward Fredric Jameson’s (1991) rumination on the difficulties of representing imperial capitalism. Jameson describes this particular stage in historical capitalism as exemplifying a “growing contradiction between lived experience and a more structural model of the conditions of existence of that experience,” an experience that he contrasts with an earlier moment in which “the lived and limited experience of individuals is still able to encompass and coincide with the true economic and social form that governs that experience.” But as capital markets develop, Jameson argues,
the phenomenological experience of the individual subject – traditionally, the supreme raw material of the work of art – becomes limited to a tiny corner of the social world, a fixed‐camera view of a certain section of London or the countryside or whatever. But the truth of that experience no longer coincides with the place in which it takes place. The truth of that limited daily experience of London lies, rather, in India or Jamaica or Hong Kong. (411)
Jameson’s formulation helps us make sense, I think, of several features of Wood’s novel. It explains, for example, the novel’s contradictory desire to give expression to the experience of the individual in the market while simultaneously revealing the inadequacy of this isolated perspective to describe the truth of the economic ruin that forms the larger context for the novel’s plot.
Dorval, like most nineteenth‐century novels, is orchestrated around the “phenomenological experience of the individual subject.” Although it does not offer an especially sophisticated inquiry into individual consciousness or moral action, its plot is framed as the experience of individual characters: it tells stories of Morley’s economic career, his daughter’s romance, her lover’s vocations, and Dorval’s seductions. Yet the novel also self‐consciously draws attention to its own perspectival limitations. This ambivalent explanatory project is evidenced, for example, in the novel’s inconsistent narrative mode. While much of the novel is told through a third‐person narrator, several chapters are epistolary: we read the letters of Colonel Morley’s daughter, Aurelia who, like Julia Granby in The Coquette, is both un‐seducible and economically sensible. In these letters, our apprehension of a monetary crisis is bounded by the limited phenomenological experience of one young woman. Yet this young woman recognizes her ancillary connections to the larger economy, and, unlike her father, Aurelia also understands the complexity of the marketplace. As “the only daughter of a very rich man, and presumptive heiress to his fortune,” she reckons herself as a valuable commodity, but one whose worth – whose “powerful attractions” – will necessarily fluctuate in relation to her father’s wealth. Indeed, she doubts the sincerity of her possible admirers precisely because, as she puts it, “Divested […] of these powerful attractions, I shall have but few left, that will entitle me to expect this adulation” (50). Aurelia likewise recognizes that her father’s liquidity will have substantial consequences on others: she knows, for example, “that [Morley] had been forced to press the payment of sums comparatively small, which he had lent to young tradesmen, to assist them upon their first commencing business for themselves” (84).
The novel is punctuated with similar moments that acknowledge the myriad consequences that descend from Morley’s purchase. Friends, for example, advise a solution to the financial predicament in which Morley finds himself. They argue that the promissory notes that Morley first gave in exchange for the Yazoo land are not legally binding – that “[n]otwithstanding it was expressed on the face of the notes that they were for value received, it was notorious that no valuable consideration had ever been made.” Notably, this advice largely echoes the logic of the Rescinding Act in that it repudiates the contract on the grounds that the conditions under which it was entered were fraudulent. But the narrator suggests with a very different emphasis that even if this specific transaction did not involve a legitimate exchange of value, it initiated a sequence of transmissions that could not simply be halted: notes “had been taken up,” “money […] had been paid,” and “what still remained due had been bought up at a tenth part of the specified value.” There were, the narrator contends, “industrious and worthy citizens, whose lives had been spent in honest endeavors to procure a decent competency, and who, without it, must be reduced to abject poverty” (121).
We see a similar argument in the concluding paragraph of the chapter in which the colonel first purchases the Yazoo land: “Many others were equally imposed upon; but as these do not come within the limits of our observation, the narrative will be confined to these two families.” Here then, the narrative specifically admits to its narrow explanatory scope. Perhaps vexed by the admission, the narrator appends a footnote to this sentence, which insists that however “romantic and melancholy” the events in the novel “may appear,” they are also “strictly agreeable to truth” (62). This gesture toward “truth” is a convention of the early novel – a disclaimer against the dangers of imaginary speculation. But linked, as it is here, to the specific recognition of the novel’s “limit[ed] […] observation,” it also confesses that the “truth” of the economic world is vaster than the individual experience that its pages will relay.
That the novel does not tell the story of the many people whose lives were affected by one particular financial transaction is inevitable: how could it rehearse the stories of all those “imposed upon”? What is remarkable, however, is that the novel calls such deliberate attention to its narrative limitations. We see something similar in a letter from Aurelia in which she unfolds a seemingly superfluous tale, which she has herself heard secondhand, about an orphaned girl rescued from poverty and neglect. In her letter, Aurelia fantasizes a conclusion to this story: “For my own part, I shall have finished the romance, by marrying Mr. Wharton to his lovely ward [the orphaned girl], when his example and the education he is giving her, have rendered her amiable and accomplished.” This prospective romance is quickly aborted, however, by an authorial footnote: “It is with real regret the author is obliged to say, the benevolent Mr. Warton has fallen a sacrifice to the yellow fever. He has amply provided, in his will, for his orphan ward” (39). We might read this editorial interjection as an appeal to realism – as if Wood insists on replacing Aurelia’s speculative fantasy with a truer and more prosaic history of inherited property. And yet, I would argue, this is not the effect of this strange moment, which instead emphasizes historical contingency: that the story of the orphaned girl might have gone any number of different ways. And by insisting on the author’s “oblig[ation]” to tell the story in one particular way, the novel also cannot help but reveal the inevitable distortions that are a consequence of narrative choices.
Wood’s novel at least partially wishes to represent the complexity of the speculative marketplace that implicated so many participants in the Yazoo land fraud. Indeed, we might even theorize that the stylistic feature of so many early American novels, including Dorval, that is said to mark its primitivism – their meandering and digressive plots and the cacophony of minor characters – is a strategy by which to narrate the long exchange chains that constitute a capitalist economy. It is for this reason that so many early American novels migrate characters, commodities, and monetary instruments across the globe. In Arthur Mervyn, for example, Santo Domingo real estate is converted into Portuguese gold and bills of credit from London banks. In Dorval, Morley purchases shares in a shipping venture between Philadelphia and Batavia; other characters make their fortunes in India and Jamaica. The early American novelist thus attempts to acknowledge that the realities of any one person’s “limited daily experience” necessarily exist in a contingent network of worldwide economic dependencies (Jameson 1991: 411). What early American novels thus teach us is that while cultural texts may ultimately have failed to explain the movement of capital, this failure was not inevitable. Perhaps the recovery of the diverse canon of early American writing that has shaped the field over the last decade can become a productive source by which scholars might begin to trace the equally heterogeneous and even contradictory accounts of early American commerce, class, and cash.
References
Further Reading
See also: chapter 17 (gender, sex, and seduction in early american literature); chapter 27 (charles brockden brown and the novel in the 1790s); chapter 29 (remapping the canonical interregnum).