Reading the American Novel 1780 - 1865

Shirley Samuels

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781118779910, 9780631232872
• eBook ISBN: 9781118786314
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Reading the American Novel 1780-1865 provides valuable insights into the evolution and diversity of fictional genres produced in the United States from the late 18th century until the Civil War, and helps introductory students to interpret and understand the fiction from this popular period.

• Offers an overview of early fictional genres and introduces ways to interpret them today
• Features in depth examinations of specific novels
• Explores the social and historical contexts of the time to help the readers' understanding of  the stories
• Explores questions of identity - about the novel, its 19th-century readers, and the emerging structure of the United States - as an important backdrop to understanding American fiction
• Profiles the major authors, including Louisa May Alcott, Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, alongside less familiar writers such as Fanny Fern, Caroline Kirkland, George Lippard, Catharine Sedgwick, and E. D. E. N. Southworth
• Selected by Choice as a 2013 Outstanding Academic Title

Chapter 1

Introduction to the American Novel

From Charles Brockden Brown’s Gothic Novels to Caroline Kirkland’s Wilderness

The practice of writing fiction in the United States developed along with the nation.¹ Like the nation, the form of the novel adjusted its boundaries and expanded to make sometimes audacious claims on neighboring territories. Like the nation, the novel encompassed practices that, in hindsight, sometimes seem heroic – such as the struggle against slavery in the fiction of Harriet Beecher Stowe – and sometimes seem embarrassing. Stowe’s fiction (notably Uncle Tom’s Cabin [1852], perhaps the bestselling novel of the nineteenth-century United States) can engage the reader with what then might have appeared as picturesque dialect and now can look like racist caricatures. The very popular frontier fiction of James Fenimore Cooper now appears as an uneasy justification for the atrocities of border warfare. The ambivalence with which a twenty-first-century reader must regard the many political decisions affecting the history of the nineteenth-century United States frequently makes for difficulties in reading the nineteenth-century novel. Fictional practices often engaged readers (and citizens) in supporting the separation of gendered spheres of action as well as defending decisions such as the extension of slavery into new territories and the removal of sovereignty from the Cherokee nation.

As well as encountering such a changed political climate, the expectations of a twenty-first-century reader might meet many practical interpretive obstacles. Often the attention to details that a reader brought to bear in the nineteenth century included assumptions about shared references – including Shakespeare plays, biblical citations, and sentimental poetry – that are rarely as easily available for readers in the twenty-first century. That set of assumptions tends to permeate narrative address for much of the first half of the century, but throughout the century authors felt it necessary to address their readers and to inform them about the designs that they had on readers’ politics, sympathies, and morals. Such moral and emotional claims may now appear to belong to a premodern era, one difficult for readers to re-inhabit. A primary goal of this book is to suggest a way to read such fiction as a richly textured enterprise, one replete with satisfactions both literary and cultural.

Later in the century, the burgeoning questions posed by industrial capitalism and by increased urbanization would receive few answers in fiction, yet inevitably fiction tried to make these questions as visible as possible. In the short novel Life in the Iron Mills (1861), set among the hard-working immigrant laborers of what is now West Virginia, Rebecca Harding Davis plaintively posed the question this way: “Is this the end? Is life as fragile, as frail?”² Davis asked this question by way of making the crises of laboring classes part of an aesthetic enterprise, one bound up with their strivings as well as her own, as a disenfranchised “western” woman writer. The goal of the novel in the nineteenth century was to ask that question over and over while demonstrating a resilience and strength that suggested forms of life in every location.

In writing about the nineteenth-century novel in the United States, the critic Richard Chase once drew a firm distinction between the novel and the romance. Unlike the romance, he declared, the “novel renders reality closely and in comprehensive detail.”³ As evidence, he cited the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, who explained in his preface to The House of the Seven Gables (1851): “When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume, had he professed to be writing a Novel.”⁴ For all the influence Hawthorne came to have on the form of the novel, such a discrimination between a category of fiction tied to “reality” and one freed by the writer’s imagination to engage with the “moonlight” Hawthorne found best to illuminate his fiction has not persisted in critical analysis of nineteenth-century fiction. Overall, the position of what we call the novel, especially what has been called the “great American novel,” has won out over the romance. The concept of the romance, that is, has become subsumed into that of the novel and Hawthorne’s plea for latitude sometimes seems an affectation designed to free him from too close contemplation of the busy commerce and industrialization that surrounded his production of fiction.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose novel The Scarlet Letter (1850) had a limited readership at publication, has become required reading for students of United States literary culture, a detail that would have surprised professors in the New England colleges of his day. Hawthorne’s readership was small compared to that of his contemporary, Susan B. Warner, widely renowned in her lifetime for the intensely private universe of The Wide, Wide World (1850); yet Warner’s novel disappeared from view by the mid-twentieth century, something that would also have surprised nineteenth-century readers. The religious virtues Warner celebrated had become separated from a concept of great literature based on esthetic values. And the extent to which Hawthorne’s fiction sets out to provide a moral compass has become submerged in the concept of his literary production as something to be read outside of the time and space of its production in the politicized world of nineteenth-century New England.

The Role of the Novel

To adapt the architectural metaphor later proposed by the novelist Henry James in his collection of prefaces The Art of Fiction, the house of the novel was built – and then rebuilt – on American soil.⁵ According to James’s famous image as he described his own process of composition, the “house of fiction” has “a million windows.”⁶ James asserts that the viewer from one window views a different landscape from the viewer at another. As readers who engage a variety of territories, while still enjoying the relation between home, spectatorship, and landscape presented here, we must challenge James’s assumption that only one house appears with such a plethora of windows.

The popularity of domestic fiction in the nineteenth century forces us to ask whether the viewer, certainly as a woman reader, might not want to turn to look inside the house. A viewer who stands looking out of the window both overlooks the role of the writer as a domestic laborer and paradoxically must be called to notice the invisibility of domestic labor in fictions that emphasize gender and race. The problematic concept that the viewer remains forever within the house ignores the mobility of novel reading. Further, let us challenge the assumption that neither landscape house changes could change through the act of description, that describing is a neutral act. To mount such a challenge contaminates the process that for James remains more immaculately contained. Novels in the United States repeatedly stage the messiness of interactions between viewer and viewed, between writer and reader, between the novel and the world. Above all, readers in the nineteenth-century United States assumed that the novel must act in the world.

The nineteenth-century United States found writers busy responding at once to political changes in national boundaries and volatile market changes. Witnessing such dramatic historical shifts as the Civil War and the end of slavery, their fiction created a shift in the related concepts of the nation and the novel. Indeed, the formal construction that came to be known as the American novel emerged from early attempts to document historical change in the new nation. To consider how the novel evolved during the nineteenth century, we must look at the formatting of genre within, for example, choices made by writers who produced the epistolary, gothic, sensation, sentimental, and historical novel.

To tip my hand immediately, let me note that these genres can never appear in isolation. The letter-writing activity associated with epistolary fiction appears well suited to the appearance of supernatural elements in gothic fiction. The dramatic and often unbelievable events, crises, and catastrophes in gothic fiction function nicely to produce the emotional ruptures of sensation fiction. The cliff-hanger elements of both gothic and sensation fiction operate well to spice up the plotting of historical fiction. And the attention to national identification in historical fiction can complement the desire to establish a home in domestic fiction. The epistolary and gothic novel forms associated with the late eighteenth-century novels produced after the American Revolution were fading by the early nineteenth century. Novels of sensation and sentiment that succeeded them held sway until mid-century when the Civil War produced a gloomier reading public whose appetite for realist and naturalist fiction was honed through the rise of urbanization and industrial capitalism. Historical fiction, however, and the domestic fiction that both supported and supplanted it, remained popular throughout the nineteenth century.

Within the historical novel, reliable narrators are coded for us through the author’s prefaces. In the popular novel Hope Leslie (1827), for example, Catharine Sedgwick’s remarks at once declare her reliance on original records and call attention to the domestic nature of her concerns. Sedgwick’s narrator allows the historical record to speak tellingly; she cites the seventeenth-century Massachusetts governor John Winthrop who called it a “sweet sacrifice” when his troops burned Pequod women and children.⁷ But she also disrupts his authority with a narrator’s interjection that the story of Magawisca, who describes living through the same event as a terrible tragedy, has more “truth.”

The novels most often associated with the nineteenth-century United States by later readers are novels such as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), or Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1886). One must notice, of course, that all these authors are male. The bestselling authors of the nineteenth century tended to be female and literary critics once asserted that popularity in and of itself argued against literary value. Yet each of these novels, once considered “timeless classics,” can be read as a historical novel, presenting episodes from United States history through the lens of the author’s nostalgic retelling of past trauma. Moby-Dick analyzes the whaling industry as it went into decline; The Scarlet Letter revisits Puritan judgments about sin two centuries later; Huckleberry Finn re-enacts the crisis of slavery decades after the Civil War had ended the practice.

The Place of Polemic

That nineteenth-century writers used fiction to compel action emerged from a history of significant public uses of narrative. In New England, for example, the earlier practices within a state-sanctioned church to declare religious conversion publicly in effect produced identity as the proper business of narrative. To tell a public story about private identity, within a community that presents the narrative formation of a self as fundamentally important, once appeared as a condition for joining a religious community. The community of readers that emerged in the nineteenth-century United States still read published sermons and captivity narratives as they also read novels that emphasized interiority. In relating private reading and public action, such novels related reading and political mobilizing, transforming at once public spaces and interior spaces, the space of the mind and the heart, through narrative declaration.

Conversion narratives were popular well into the nineteenth century, yet they were eclipsed by captivity narratives, typically depicting escape from an Indian raid. These accounts of compelled errands into the wilderness became transformed into origin stories for other forms of American identity.⁸ Stories about escape from captivity were joined by escapes from slavery, emancipation narratives that fused racial differentiation with the progressive enlightenment associated with Christianity. Learning to read in these accounts provides access to freedom. In the nineteenth century, such non-fiction accounts overlap with the historical romance to forge national narratives into courtship dramas. These fictional travels through time supplied through the dramatic plots of historical fiction can be seen to supplement travel narratives that produce vicarious existence at the same time as the twists and turns in their courtship dramas produce and reinforce a concept of “home.” Novelists like James Fenimore Cooper, in Home as Found, paradoxically suggest that the home found in the wilderness is at once appropriate and appropriated by sojourners who might need to return to Europe.

Violence and the Novel

Fiction written in the United States before and after the conflict now referred to as the Civil War presents different accounts of violence. In particular, early nineteenth-century fiction often refers in laudatory terms to wars such as the American Revolution, the Mexican–American War, Indian warfare, and clashes at the borderlands. Seldom does it reveal the terror and randomness of such violence, though the depiction of “border ruffians” in such novels as Cooper’s The Spy (1821) suggests an anxiety about its purposelessness. Later in the century, realist and naturalist fiction describes the failure of reconstruction and the tactics associated with lynching (in novels such as Pauline Hopkins’ Contending Forces [1900]). The very foregrounding of the color red in novels such as The Scarlet Letter and Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895) emphasizes the color of blood as the color of shame and belonging at once. These novels, long taken as markers of adolescent passages within the United States, as well as staples of the literature classroom, produce an uncertain value through allusions to blood. Novels frequently use killing to motivate movement of characters and plot and mobilize identities through staving off interracial sex and indeed any chance of reproduction. Such tactics appear in almost all of James Fenimore Cooper’s novels.

Although the Civil War continues to serve as a momentous dividing line between the understood antebellum and postbellum novels, it scarcely ever appears as a subject in the postbellum world of fiction. Before the war, troops declared themselves to be inspired by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s bestselling Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). During the war, northern troops sang “John Brown’s Body” and “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory” to the same tune. Southern troops read Augusta Evans’s Macaria (1863), which was dedicated to the “Glorious Cause” (and secretly read in the north). A postwar exception to the great silence in fiction about the war experience is John De Forest’s Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867). This novel seems to have been intended as a conversion narrative for the politics of the United States at large and contains disturbingly vivid battleground scenes from an author who had, in fact, experienced the southern front. In developing his own historical fiction as well as writing about its purpose, De Forest was said to have issued the call for the great American novel and is credited as the first to use the term. The major novel associated with the Civil War had to wait a generation. Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895), by a young author who listened to tales of veterans rather than fighting himself, formulated for the warriors who survived an account of fear and cowardice as well as heroism that has seldom been equaled.

Novels in the Early United States

Many novels written in the early United States republic emphasized the training for citizenship that reading might confer. Novels that empowered forms of thinking were favored, whereas those that encouraged bodily sensations were devoured privately while publicly viewed with suspicion. Like other guilty pleasures, however, they were nonetheless pursued, although sometimes associated with the deteriorating moral capacities of women readers, a condition parodied in Tabitha Tenney’s satirical Female Quixotism (1801). When he began to write, the most famous creator of fictional men in the wilderness, James Fenimore Cooper, first tried to write domestic fiction. His early prefaces reveal that he still understood his audience to be women readers.

Cooper was charged with imitating the famous historical novelist across the Atlantic, Sir Walter Scott. Such an anxiety of influence makes it even more difficult to see early historical novelists such as the prolific southern author William Gilmore Simms or the Maine author John Neal or the Border States’ John Pendleton Kennedy, all of whom wrote popular historical novels in the early nineteenth century, as other than imitators of Cooper. Gestures of dominance and subordination recur in descriptions of women authors as well. Although ranked as a peer by their contemporaries, Catharine Sedgwick wrote historical fiction whose reputation gradually dimmed in relation to that written by Cooper.

Significant authors like Tabitha Tenney presented a burlesque of the novel-reading heroine Dorcasina Sheldon as a “true hi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Introduction to the American Novel
• Chapter 2: Historical Codes in Literary Analysis
• Chapter 3: Women, Blood, and Contract
• Chapter 4: Black Rivers, Red Letters, and White Whales
• Chapter 5: Promoting the Nation in James Fenimore Cooper and Harriet Beecher Stowe
• Chapter 6: Women’s Worlds in the Nineteenth-Century Novel
• Afterword
• Further Reading
• Index