Between the Novel and the News

The Emergence of American Women's Writing

Sari Edelstein

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780813935911
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

While American literary history has long acknowledged the profound influence of journalism on canonical male writers, Sari Edelstein argues that American women writers were also influenced by a dynamic relationship with the mainstream press. From the early republic through the turn of the twentieth century, she offers a comprehensive reassessment of writers such as Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Harriet Jacobs, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Drawing on slave narratives, sentimental novels, and realist fiction, Edelstein examines how advances in journalism—including the emergence of the penny press, the rise of the story-paper, and the birth of eyewitness reportage—shaped not only a female literary tradition but also gender conventions themselves.

Excluded from formal politics and lacking the vote, women writers were deft analysts of the prevalent tropes and aesthetic gestures of journalism, which they alternately relied upon and resisted in their efforts to influence public opinion and to intervene in political debates. Ultimately, Between the Novel and the News is a project of recovery that transforms our understanding of the genesis and the development of American women's writing.

1. Seditious Newspapers and Seduction Novels

In 1788, Benjamin Rush, physician, essayist, and signer of the Declaration of Independence, wrote a letter to the editor of the Federal Gazette titled “Directions for Conducting a Newspaper,” in which he urges the editor to avoid printing anything that might offend “female honour” and cautions, “Never suffer your paper to be a vehicle of private scandal, or of personal disputes.”¹ With these instructions, Rush articulated an idealized vision of newspapers as public forums for the circulation of rational ideas. The very fact that Rush felt compelled to articulate these “directions” indicates that in spite of newspapers’ ostensible function as spaces for critical debate, they posed hazards to the political stability of the new nation and to “female honour.” For Rush, women as well as private matters were inappropriate subjects for the press, and he saw newspaper editors straying from a republican ideology of print, which espoused impartiality and impersonality.

Rush’s concerns about the condition of journalism were part of a decades-long dialogue on the role of newspapers in early America. Colonial Americans vigorously debated whether the colonies—and eventually the republic—would support a free press and, if so, how it would be defined.² By the time of the Revolution, the press was no longer simply imitating and reprinting material from British counterparts but had become decidedly political and partisan.³ Improvements in printing technology and a rise in literacy led to a dramatic increase in the number of newspapers printed, and Americans wrestled with whether libel, sedition, and slander would carry the same penalties as in Britain or whether the republic would establish more lenient laws regarding indecent language.⁴ By the 1790s, newspapers erupted in a brand of partisan journalism that one historian labels “the most vicious and vituperative in the nation’s history” and another refers to as the “dark ages of partisan journalism.”⁵

Surely it is not merely coincidence that the seduction novel—the primary fictional genre of the era—emerged alongside these newspaper wars. A genre structured around the dangers of persuasive language and corruption, the seduction novel broadcasts its anxieties about the consequences of unregulated free speech. While scholars have done much to complicate Cathy Davidson’s pioneering claim that the early American novel is fundamentally a subversive form, the seduction novel has not been sufficiently placed in the context of contemporaneous newspaper culture.⁶ I view these novels as exemplars of what Marion Rust calls the “widespread practice of Federalist-affiliated female participation in national politics,” but I am less interested in proving that they belong on one particular side of the partisan battle than in excavating their critical engagement with the heated, passionate journalistic warfare of the era.⁷ Early American women writers exploit the novel form not simply to intervene in the partisan battle but to warn against the newspaper itself, which they represent as a seducer that threatens to disrupt the peace of the nation and corrupt an ingenuous citizenry.⁸

Citizens of the republic were encouraged, even expected, to read the news and to take an active part in civic affairs, and newspapers often reprinted the proceedings of the First Congress and published editorials on finance, foreign relations, and domestic issues.⁹ Classical republicanism held that informed, vigilant citizens were crucial to peace and order and that rebellions were often the outcome of misinformation and ignorance about government affairs. Noah Webster expressed this view in the first issue of his newspaper, the American Minerva, in 1793: “It is an important fact in the United States that the best informed people are the least subject to faction, intrigue and a corrupt administration.”¹⁰ The First Congress acknowledged and endorsed the integral role of the newspaper in the republic with the passage of the Post Office Act in 1792, which made the free exchange of newspapers a government policy and kept the cost of circulating newspapers very low.

Where the two major political parties diverged was in their sense of who and what should be able to appear in print without regulation or intervention. Perhaps the most ardent advocate for a completely free press was Thomas Jefferson, who famously wrote in 1787, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government . . . I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”¹¹ As this passage indicates, Jefferson was a believer (at least early in his political career) in an utterly free, unchecked brand of journalism, which he saw as essential to republicanism. Jefferson and his supporters, in an attempt to solidify their identification with republican ideology, called themselves Republicans, a hint at the role semantics were to play in the partisan battles of the following decade.

In opposition to the Republican commitment to a free press, the newly instated Federalist government viewed the proliferation of unregulated newspapers as a serious threat to political stability.¹² Appropriating the name of those who fought for the Constitution, the Federalists sought to solidify their own legitimacy as the national authority and feared an excess of popular sovereignty. For them, unrestricted freedom of speech, especially freedom of the press, signaled the inevitable antecedent of anarchy and factionalism. They saw the emergence of newspapers as unnecessarily democratizing the public sphere and compromising the culture of eloquence that had characterized the previous decades. Federalist newspapers described seditious speakers insinuating their way into the nation, cultivating faction, and inspiring anarchy.¹³ According to historian David Waldstreicher, “Federalists claimed to be the people’s government; any popular intervention between elections, they contended, could only be the carping of disgruntled, self-interested losers or the machinations of ‘foreigners’ who were not really of the people.”¹⁴ By labeling their political opponents “Jacobins” and “foreigners,” Federalists aligned their adversaries with French revolutionaries, insinuating that Republicans were antinational and traitorous.¹⁵

In spite of Federalists’s disdain for public opinion and for the masses in general, they could not disregard the political promise of journalism. The surge in pamphlets, magazines, and newspapers made it necessary for Federalists to enter the fray in order to disseminate the official views of the administration and to monitor the content of the news. In 1789, John Fenno began publishing the Gazette of the United States, a Federalist newspaper, often considered the first American party newspaper, and shortly thereafter, the Republicans established the National Gazette, edited by the poet Philip Freneau, as a vehicle for their criticisms of the administration. The emergence of these competing newspapers reflected and reinforced the ideological differences between the two parties and established the primacy of newspapers to partisan political culture.¹⁶

What worried Federalists most about the virulent opposition press was the potential for Republican newspapers to breed faction by seducing loyal citizens into rebellion against George Washington and, later, John Adams.¹⁷ In order to secure the primacy of the Federalist ideology, the Adams administration passed the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798. The first three components of the acts stiffened the requirements for naturalization and authorized the government to deport any alien deemed “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States.” The Sedition Act, the fourth component of these acts, made it a federal crime to “knowingly assist or aid in writing, printing, uttering, or publishing false, scandalous, and malicious writing or writings against the government.” While these unconstitutional laws were eventually repealed, they represent the extent to which Federalists viewed the wrong kind of discourse as hazardous to the stability of the new nation.

A brief glance at the two most representative seduction novels reminds one of the extent to which this literary genre is animated by anxieties about “scandalous” and “malicious” utterance. When we meet Eliza Wharton, the protagonist of Hannah Webster Foster’s 1797 novel The Coquette, she is torn between two men: Reverend Boyer, who her mother has deemed an appropriate match, and Peter Sanford, who has “successfully practiced the arts of seduction; by triumphing in the destruction of innocence and the peace of families.”¹⁸ Thus, from the first pages of the novel, the “arts of seduction” are characterized as destructive not only to ingenuous women but also to families and potentially to society at large.

The novel is populated with characters that view Sanford’s language as unreliable and dangerous. Julia Granby, Eliza’s confidante, warns, “Trust him not then, my dear Eliza! If you do, depend upon it, you will find his professions of friendship to be mere hypocrisy and deceit.”¹⁹ Similarly, another friend, Lucy, cautions Eliza, “Beware of his wiles! Your friends are anxious for you.”²⁰ These suspicions about Sanford’s sincerity echo the Federalists, who feared that false, seductive rhetoric would sway popular opinion and cultivate dissent. In a disembodied, democratized print public sphere, people, like print, needed to be read with reason and skepticism, and “professions of friendship” had to be tried and tested lest a deceiver jeopardize the virtues of the new nation.²¹

With Sanford’s ability to influence Eliza through impassioned rhetoric, he personifies the threat of partisanship, and his desire to “disconnect” Eliza from other attachments aligns him with the seductive, divisive opposition press. A 1796 editorial in the Federalist newspaper the Columbian Centinel warned readers, “An awful crisis awaits you.—The Demon of Antifederalism, which has long labored by secret devices to subvert your Constitution.”²² Like this hidden anti-Federalist demon, the seducer in Foster’s novel lies in wait, threatening a crisis in the new nation through deceptive speech. By situating The Coquette within this emergent and influential culture of print, we might read the seductive Sanford as a seditious document himself.

Like the voice of another faction, Reverend Boyer warns Eliza to stay away from Sanford: “Banish him from your society, if you wish to preserve your virtue unsullied, your character unsuspicious. . . . Snatch it from the envenomed tongue of slander.”²³ Boyer’s use of the word “slander” echoes the contests taking place in print, in which opposing newspapers called one another’s credibility into question. By the novel’s end, Eliza has taken one liberty too many; she dies pregnant and alone, a victim of Sanford’s self-serving scheme.

Critics tend to read Eliza’s downfall either as a didactic morality tale for impressionable female readers or as a subversive critique of the limited options for women in the early republic.²⁴ But The Coquette and its contemporaries might also be understood in terms of their fixation with language and its seductive powers in both speech and print.²⁵ As Jay Fliegelman puts it, “One reason novels of seduction on the model of Richardson’s Clarissa had such popularity in Revolutionary America was that they spoke to the larger preoccupation not only with deception, but more specifically with the seductive power of the potent word to convince others to surrender themselves freely to one’s will.”²⁶ Indeed, The Coquette’s denigration of rhetorical seduction and its anxiety about Sanford’s language register the widespread cultural unease about the perils of the newly granted freedoms of speech and the press. Significantly, The Coquette was written in response to newspaper accounts of the actual story of Elizabeth Whitman, whose seduction and subsequent illegitimate pregnancy and death were attributed to her addiction to novels. According to the Massachusetts Centinel, “She was a great reader of romances, and having formed her notion of happiness from that corrupt source, became vain and coquettish.”²⁷ By novelizing a story that first circulated in the pages of newspapers, Foster redeems not only Elizabeth Whitman, whom she grants interiority and subjectivity, but also fiction itself. Rather than a corrupting agent, fiction is protective and educative, and Foster urges readers to encounter language through a critical lens in contrast to newspapers, which are mediums for deception and illicit rhetoric.

Although first published in Britain in 1791, Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple was a bestseller upon arriving in the United States three years later, suggesting that its portrayal of corruption and persuasion tapped into the American preoccupation with unchecked free speech. That young Charlotte finds herself seduced by her teacher, Mademoiselle LaRue, and two men, Belcour and Montraville, reveals the novel’s investment in depicting foreigners and outsiders as manipulative rhetoricians. Over the course of the novel, they influence the young Charlotte with false promises and seductive arguments, using her as a pawn for their own self-interested purposes. For Federalists, French-inspired rhetoric signaled popular uprising and radicalism, and they characterized pro-French publications and speakers as seductive and treacherous.²⁸ Taken together, The Coquette and Charlotte Temple warn against the possibility for seductive language to deceive individuals and lure them away from their rational attachments, and thus, they are cautionary tales not only for women but for a nation besieged by factionalizing newspapers.

The popularity of these American reconfigurations of the popular British genre suggests that the seduction narrative had particular resonance in the post-Revolutionary cultural imagination. In 1804, John Adams wrote, “The time would fail me to enumer...