The Illiberal Imagination

Class and the Rise of the U.S. Novel

Joe Shapiro

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780813940526
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria nordamericana

The Illiberal Imagination offers a synthetic, historical formalist account of how—and to what end—U.S. novels from the late eighteenth century to the mid-1850s represented economic inequality and radical forms of economic egalitarianism in the new nation. In conversation with intellectual, social, and labor history, this study tracks the representation of class inequality and conflict across five subgenres of the early U.S. novel: the Bildungsroman, the episodic travel narrative, the sentimental novel, the frontier romance, and the anti-slavery novel.

Through close readings of the works of foundational U.S. novelists, including Charles Brockden Brown, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, James Fenimore Cooper, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Joe Shapiro demonstrates that while voices of economic egalitarianism and working-class protest find their ways into a variety of early U.S. novels, these novels are anything but radically dialogic; instead, he argues, they push back against emergent forms of class consciousness by working to naturalize class inequality among whites. The Illiberal Imagination thus enhances our understanding of both the early U.S. novel and the history of the way that class has been imagined in the United States.

1CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN, POVERTY, AND THE BILDUNGSROMAN

Of native novels we have no great stock, and none good; our democratic institutions placing all the people on a dead level of political equality; and the pretty equal diffusion of property throughout the country affords but little room for varieties, and contrasts of character.

—John Bristed, The Resources of the United States of America (1818)

[Bristed] should have excepted from this censure the Wieland, Ormond, and Arthur Mervyn of C. B. Brown, which combine grandeur and simplicity in an extraordinary degree.

—”Bristed’s America and her Resources,” Edinburgh Monthly Review (1819)

I am poor.

— Arthur Mervyn

In Ormond; or, The Secret Witness (1799) and Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 (1799, 1800), Charles Brockden Brown—the late eighteenth-century U.S. novelist most celebrated by early nineteenth-century American writers and most studied by twentieth- and twenty-first-century critics—tells the same story twice. At the outset of both novels, Brown’s protagonists—Constantia Dudley and Arthur Mervyn, respectively—fall into “poverty.” Having become “poor,” these protagonists must sell their labor to others in order to acquire “subsistence.” They become, then, members of late eighteenth-century Philadelphia’s “lower sort.” While Constantia and Arthur eventually—and fortuitously—ascend to property at the close of their respective novels, both Ormond and Arthur Mervyn are predominantly dedicated to narrating what “poverty” entails for their protagonists. To what end, this chapter asks, did Brown—a man who never wanted for money and was “entirely supported by his parents or extended family until he was thirty years old”¹—write novels about young people who must negotiate material deprivation and economic precariousness in late eighteenth-century Philadelphia? And, moreover, to what end do Brown’s Philadelphia novels construe the fall into poverty as a “fortunate” one?

To ask these questions, and thus to focus on Brown’s representation of economic subalternity, is to reveal a facet of his writing that has yet to be fully appreciated. Of course, that Brown’s novels, especially Arthur Mervyn, are “about” early U.S. capitalism is widely acknowledged among scholars of early U.S. literature. As James Justus observes of Arthur Mervyn, in “no other novel before the Civil War are we so assaulted by the immediacy and pervasiveness of a commercial society.”² The typical line of inquiry into Brown’s representation of capitalism in Arthur Mervyn situates Brown within the historical friction between a residual republicanism and an emergent liberalism. According to the republicanism-liberalism paradigm, late eighteenth-century economic transformations and the expansion of the market unleashed a conflict between a new culture of private economic ambition and an older ideal of “civic virtue” that celebrated self-sacrifice on behalf of the polity and for which “commerce” necessarily augured “corruption.” “America in the 1790s,” Teresa Goddu writes, “was both buoyed by a liberal ideology that believed in the benefits of commerce and troubled by the vestiges of a civic republicanism that feared commerce was an infection.”³ Which is to say, late eighteenth-century U.S. writing about “commerce” registers a deep ambivalence, marked at turns both by liberal celebrations of making one’s living by buying and selling goods and by republican critiques of the selfish dispositions that such livelihoods might foster. On the one hand, the market could be seen as a “civilizing” force.⁴ On the other hand, the market could be seen as the dissolvent of civic-mindedness.⁵ Thus the typical question put to Brown’s representation of capitalism is this: do his novels authorize commerce by extolling liberal individualism, or do they critique commerce by depicting liberal individualism as corrupt and corrupting—as incompatible with civic virtue?⁶

Yet, to ask whether Arthur Mervyn endorses liberal individualism or instead critiques it from the vantage of residual republicanism is to read Arthur Mervyn primarily as a meditation on economic activities that were largely the province of the property-owning class in the early United States—rather than as a meditation on the condition of economic subalternity itself. Which is to say, though a number of scholars have explored what Arthur Mervyn might say about greed and financial speculation, we have not yet sufficiently attended to the significance of the fact that the protagonist of Arthur Mervyn must sell his labor and is thus not in fact a capitalist—not a merchant or speculator. Certainly, the world that Arthur inhabits is a capitalist one, but, as I will argue below, Arthur’s story is not a story of speculation or capitalist accumulation or even of an emergent capitalist ethos of acquisitive individualism rendered in biographical form. Rather, it is largely a story about being poor in a massively unequal society, just as Constantia’s is.

What I seek to theorize, then, is how Brown’s Philadelphia novels, in narrating stories about the “poor,” are weighing in on economic inequality and asymmetric labor relations in the early United States.⁷ Indeed, to examine how Brown’s Philadelphia novels— Arthur Mervyn, but also Ormond—represent poverty in the early United States is, I would submit, to better understand precisely how an approval of economic inequality manifests itself in the novels of this unquestionably foundational early U.S. novelist. So, while a number of critics have argued that Arthur Mervyn links the commercial ethos of liberalism to fraud and deception and thereby tenders “a bitter, somber critique of late-eighteenth-century capitalism,”⁸ I want to argue nearly the opposite: that Arthur Mervyn, but also Ormond, represent poverty as potentially beneficial to individuals subjected to it and, by extension, work to ratify the inequality of which this poverty is a symptom.⁹

A focus on Brown’s representation of poverty, in addition to shedding new light on his literary practice in particular, also revises literary historical common sense about the kinds of narratives Americans told themselves in the early republic. While it is a commonplace that the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century discourse of American exceptionalism insisted that the United States had already escaped—or was destined imminently to escape—the poverty endemic to Europe, novels such as Ormond and Arthur Mervyn counter this exceptionalism with a deliberate celebration of class inequality in the United States. In Ormond and Arthur Mervyn, poverty exists in the United States—and it is good that it does.¹⁰

Brown was familiar, through his reading of William Godwin, with a strain of philosophy for which poverty was, to use Gavin Jones’s apt words, “an ethical dilemma” that “provokes questions of distributive justice.”¹¹ Yet, while characters in Ormond and Arthur Mervyn at times broach questions of distributive justice, these novels do not finally lament economic inequality or demand its end. An indicator of the class politics of Brown’s Philadelphia novels is to be found in the fates of those characters that refuse to learn to submit to their own economic subalternity: these characters are villains—and are punished, usually with death. In contrast to those characters that refuse to submit to economic subalternity, poor characters in Brown’s novels who do signal their consent to the unequal distribution of wealth in the United States are rewarded—and not just with wealth—in their respective stories.

These poor characters become protagonists in versions of the bildungsroman. Brown is usually understood as a writer of gothic fiction, but in Constantia and Arthur “one finds a dynamic unity in the hero’s image,” as Bakhtin writes of the protagonist of the bildungsroman; here, “changes in the hero . . . acquire plot significance.”¹² Yet, the bildungsroman is more than a novel in which “changes in the hero . . . acquire plot significance”; rather, it is a form that works to reconcile “the conflict between the ideal of self-determination and the equally imperious demands of socialization” through a narrative of a young person’s “maturation.”¹³ In Ormond and Arthur Mervyn, Brown reconciles an ideal of self-determination with socialization by inviting his readers to imagine subjection to poverty and free-subjectivity as, paradoxically enough, one and the same.¹⁴ For the narrators and the plots of these novels, poverty need not spell exploitation and oppression, but instead entails freedom and individual intellectual expansion. In Ormond and Arthur Mervyn, poverty itself provides the occasion for Constantia Dudley’s and Arthur Mervyn’s “intellectual improvement” (since it increases their knowledge of the world and themselves); it allows these characters to practice “benevolence” and heroism; and, it allows them to encounter extraordinary personages and expand their circles of friends.

By rewriting “poverty” as “freedom,” Brown’s Philadelphia novels revise their moment’s governing discursive formations. Early Americans thought of poverty and freedom as fundamentally antithetical.¹⁵ Both republicanism and emergent liberalism equated personal autonomy with property ownership.¹⁶ “It was an axiom of Enlightenment political thought,” writes Amy Dru Stanley, “that persons who sold their labor—however voluntarily—were dependent, and therefore not fully autonomous or capable of exercising the virtue required of citizens.”¹⁷

Because Constantia and Arthur do “rise” out of poverty, we might read Ormond and Arthur Mervyn as early instantiations of a nationalist ideology of class mobility. As Karen Sánchez-Eppler contends, “National ideologies of class promise that in the United States poverty, like childhood, is merely a stage to be outgrown.”¹⁸ Yet, because Brown’s Philadelphia novels invest in poverty as an essential stage of their protagonists’ developments, they do not insist that the United States should one day outgrow poverty as a feature of its economic life. Alternatively, because of whom they permit to “rise” out of poverty, we might read Brown’s novels as primarily working to imagine a wealthy class that deserves to be wealthy. This is the argument that Matthew Pethers has put forward about Ormond. For Pethers, Ormond is exemplary of what he names the “parabolic social mobility narrative.” In Ormond and a host of other novels published in the first decade of the nineteenth century, Pethers discovers a narrative form in which the ascent from poverty to wealth is, first, limited to characters who were initially wealthy, and, second, a matter not of a character accumulating wealth via work but instead a matter of Providence’s recognition that this character has responded “virtuously” to poverty.¹⁹ Like Pethers, I also observe that the ascent from poverty to wealth in Ormond—but also Arthur Mervyn—is not about accumulating wealth via work so much as it is about an individual being bequeathed wealth: Brown does not tell stories of economic “bootstrapping.” Additionally, I also investigate the extent to which Brown’s fiction works to portray members of the propertied class as “moral.” Yet, in contrast to Pethers’s account of the “parabolic social mobility narrative,” I am arguing that Brown’s Philadelphia novels primarily work not to link wealth with virtue but instead to legitimate the very existence of poverty by, again, aligning poverty with freedom and intellectual expansion.

Moreover, I want to suggest that Brown’s Philadelphia novels turn the representation of poverty into a source of pleasure for those who have not experienced poverty but instead read about it in the pages of his novels. Insofar as Ormond and Arthur Mervyn construct poverty as the precondition of positive, noneconomic transformation for their protagonists, poverty itself becomes the price of admission for narrative pleasure—for captivating stories.

To exploit poverty on behalf of narrative pleasure in this fashion is a quintessentially anti-utopian gesture. Indeed, in the utopian world of Reynolds’s Equality, A Political Romance (1802), the kind of stories that Brown offers in Ormond and Arthur Mervyn are ruled out from the start. The first half of Equality, as I explained in the introduction, paints a portrait of Lithconia, a society in which class inequality has been overcome. Yet, equality in Lithconia functions as an impediment to the production of stories. As Louis Marin has pointed out, “utopia knows nothing of time. . . . Utopia knows nothing of change.”²⁰ In Lithconia, equality means an absence of conflict, and the absence of change is expressed as absolute social integration and normality. “The period of the life of one man is employed nearly in the same manner as any other,” the narrator explains: “To give the history, then, of one Lithconian, is to describe the manners of the nation” (23). There are no adventures—no trials and tribulations—in Lithconia. The only “plot” deserving of the name in Lithconia is the arrival of an outsider, the text’s narrator. For Charles Brockden Brown the novelist, this political dream—where not even the young can drop into poverty—would make two of his novels essentially impossible. There has to be poverty for Brown’s young protagonists to fall into; there must be economic inequality to tell the stories that he does.

“THE ABSURD AND UNEQUAL DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH AND POWER”

According to the exceptionalist imagination, the European who comes to America leaves behind an exquisitely detailed variety of rank, along with the extreme divergence of wealth and poverty. This exceptionalism finds its most cogent expression in Letter 3 of Crèvecoeur’s 1782 Letters from an American Farmer, the salient moment for my purposes here which I want to quote once more. “Here are no aristocratical families,” the invented Farmer James writes, “no courts, no kings, no bishops, no ecclesiastical dominion, no invisible power giving to a few a very visible one, no great manufactures employing thousands, no great refinements of luxury. The rich and the poor are not so far removed from each other as they are in Europe” (67). In contrast to Europe, Farmer James explains, the United States is defined by a “pleasing uniformity of decent competence” (67). In the absence of Europe’s political structures and the presence of America’s natural abundance, the American becomes a “new man” that has escaped from “voluntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labor” and has been “rewarded by ample subsistence” (70).

But by the end of the eighteenth century, this promise of “competence” and “ample subsistence” for individuals of European ancestry was already being undercut by the paradoxes of capitalist accumulation, especially in mid-Atlantic cities like Philadelphia. As Billy G. Smith has documented, “One group of Philadelphians became rich as their neighbors grew poor during much of the second half of the century.”²¹

“The vast majority of laboring people were without property,” Smith explains, and their “positions at the bottom” of the economic ladder “more permanent” than just-so stories of mobility suggest (133, 149). Wealth did not “trickle down” to workers, who led precarious and anxiety-wracked lives (149). “Competence” and “ample subsistence” were anything but guaranteed in Philadelphia at the end of the eighteenth century.

For some late eighteenth-century political economists and philosophers, moreover, economic inequality was at odds with Enlightenment—or with what Immanuel Kant called the ability “to use one’s understanding without gui...