Table Of ContentReading the American Novel 1780–1865
READING THE NOVEL
General Editor: Daniel R. Schwarz
Theaimofthisseriesistoprovidepracticalintroductionstoreading
thenovelinboththeBritishandIrish,andtheAmericantraditions.
Published
Reading the Nineteenth-Century Novel Harry E. Shaw and
Alison Case
Reading the Modern British and Irish
Novel 1890–1930 Daniel R. Schwarz
Reading the Novel in English 1950–2000 Brian W. Shaffer
Reading the American Novel 1780–1865 Shirley Samuels
Reading the American Novel 1865–1914 G. R. Thompson
Forthcoming
Reading the Twentieth-Century American Novel James Phelan
Reading the American
Novel 1780–1865
Shirley Samuels
Thiseditionfirstpublished2012
(cid:2)2012ShirleySamuels
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1. UnitedStates–Inliterature.2. Americanfiction–19thcentury–Historyandcriticism.
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1 2012
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xv
1 Introduction tothe American Novel: From CharlesBrockden
Brown’s Gothic Novels to Caroline Kirkland’s Wilderness 1
2 HistoricalCodes inLiterary Analysis: The Writing Projects
of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Elizabeth Stoddard, and
Hannah Crafts 23
3 Women, Blood, andContract: Land Claims in Lydia Maria
Child, Catharine Sedgwick, and James Fenimore Cooper 45
4 Black Rivers, Red Letters, andWhite Whales: Mobility
and Desire inCatharine Williams,Nathaniel Hawthorne,
and Herman Melville 67
5 Promotingthe Nation in James Fenimore Cooper and
Harriet BeecherStowe 91
6 Women’sWorldsinthe Nineteenth-Century Novel:
Susan B. Warner, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps,FannyFern,
E. D.E. N. Southworth,Harriet Wilson, and
LouisaMay Alcott 119
Afterword 151
Further Reading 165
Index 171
v
Preface
..........................................................................................................
“Did you ever hit anything human or intelligible?”
JamesFenimore Cooper,The Deerslayer(1841)
“Is this theend?Is life asfragile, as frail?”
......................R..e..b.e..c.c..a...H..a..r.d..in..g...D..a..v.i.s.,..L..i.f.e..i.n..t.h..e..I.r.o.n...M..i.l.l.s..(.1..8..6.1..).
Thisbookpaysattentiontohowfictionworksasahistoricalpractice.
Inparticular,itintroduceswaystothinkaboutnovelswritteninthe
United States during its early development as a national enterprise
and before the historical break we know as the Civil War.The early
chapters present an overview of such novels as well as introducing
fictional genres; they include possible ways for readers to interpret
thesegenres.Thelaterchapterscarryoutmorespecificexaminations
ofparticularnovels,askinghowtheyestablishanddevelopgroundsof
inquiry.Suchinquiriesincludestoriesaboutmurder,seduction,and
seavoyages,aswellashousekeeping,lamplighting,anderrandsinto
thewilderness.Throughoutthebook,criticalattentionispaidtohow
to interpret a relation between the volatile (and sometimes quiet)
eventsthattakeplaceindifferentlocationsandatdifferenttimes,and
thestoriesthatpeopleintheUnitedStatesmadeuptoexplainthose
events and themselves.
TotellstoriesabouttheongoingenterprisewenowcalltheUnited
Statesengagesreadersinarelationbetweenhistoryandthenarrative
eventsthatthisbookwillsometimestakeforgranted,yettheposition
ofnarrativewill,ofnecessityinabookaboutmakingfiction,always
vii
Preface
take priority. A literary history of the United States assumes both
historyandliterariness,howeverinterconnectedandinterpenetrating
theseterms.Theutilityofsuchapositionwillemergeinthepagesthat
follow. The major authors who appear in these pages – Louisa May
Alcott,CharlesBrockdenBrown,JamesFenimoreCooper,Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe – keep com-
panywithauthorswhomightnotbeasfamiliarastheyoncewereto
readers–FannyFern,CarolineKirkland,GeorgeLippard,Catharine
Sedgwick,andE.D.E.N.Southworth.Theycertainlyreadeachother
andthisbookreadstheminconversationaswellasexploringwriters
whoseworksarestillbeingdiscovered,writerssuchasHannahCrafts
and Julia Ward Howe.
Inthemeantime,theepigraphswithwhichIopenmyinvestigation
aremeanttorefertotheimportantrelationbetweenhumanlifeand
intelligibilityinthenovelsthatappearhere.Forthehistoricalnovelist
JamesFenimoreCooper,thequestionofhowamanonthefrontier
decides his manhood in the early American republic often revolves
aroundkilling.TheenigmaticinquiryposedinTheDeerslayerdefines
theboundarybetweenhumanandanimalspeciesastheplacewherea
hunter decides if he kills for food or for some more difficult cause,
suchasrevengeorthebountyofscalps.ForRebeccaHardingDavis,
writing of the coal mines of West Virginia not long after Cooper’s
frontierhaspushedfurtherwest,thefragilityoflifeunderindustrial
capitalism makes an emphatic argument about immigrants and the
laboringclassesintermsoftheiraccesstoanothercategoryofhuman
life, the ability to understand art.
Formulatingtheconnectionsamongreading,affectivebeliefs,and
familial ideology in the context of the rise of democratic political
identifications has been the project of critical works since F. O.
Mathiessen’s American Renaissance appeared to produce a field of
study aligned with his title.1 In many ways a study of how national
identifications with democracy are enacted in the literature of the
1850s, Mathiessen’s influential treatise has been followed by several
excellent studies on the rise of the novel as an explanatory force for
social order. These works include Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel
(1960),CathyDavidson’sRevolutionandtheWord(1986),andNancy
Armstrong’sDesireandDomesticFiction(1990).2Morerecentwork
bycriticssuchasElizabethBarnesandLaurenBerlanthasencouraged
viii
Preface
inquiry into the relations of democratic traditions and the work of
fiction.3 Critics like Karen Sanchez Eppler and Caroline Levander
have engaged in new attention to childhood as a literal nursery for
education and belief.4 What happens to childhood, they ask, in the
context of democracy and the novel?
Fiction that repeats a narrative progression toward familial for-
mation, often expressed through a culminating marriage, provides
reassurance. That reassurance might emerge through a narrative
progression that enables and endorses family formation as well as
endorsingafamilyformationthatproducessatisfactoryanticipations
and resolutions in the narrative form of the novel. Not simply
chiasmatic,sucharelationdeclaresmutuallydependentandmutually
constitutivethearrangementsofnovelsandfamiliesthatproduceand
endorse an especially satisfying relation to a social order that can
maintain both marriage and the novel.
Questionsremainaboutqueeridentificationsthatcouldcrossand
perhaps, by their very tensions, reinforce the dominance of hetero-
sexual marriage plots.5 So, for instance, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
TheBlithedaleRomance,theuncertainty ofthenarrator,evocatively
named Miles Coverdale, and his several attachments might seem
betrayedratherthanelucidatedbyhisfinalconfession.Aftertortuous
scenes in which the seemingly reluctant narrator spies on lovers
throughbackparlorwindowsorfromtangledvine-producedbowers
in trees, Coverdale asks the reader to guess his amative longing. Or
ratherheannouncesthatthesecretmusthavebeenvisiblelongbefore.
Thenondescriptdeclarationatthenovel’sclose–“I–I,myself–was
inlovewithPriscilla!”–leavesreadersinaplaceofregretandlonging.
One reason for such regret is that the purported object of his
affectionhaslongbeenmarriedtoarivalandafellowinhabitantof
their utopian alternative to familial order, Hollingsworth. Yet the
reader’s longing might more plausibly be situated in relation to the
desirability of Hollingsworth, the brawny blacksmith about whom
Coverdalehasalreadyexpressedhisstronglove.Thebrawnandheft
of Hollingsworth operate in odd relation to the perpetually evanes-
cent Priscilla, whose early life as a seamstress has operated in close
proximitytothesuggestionthatherbodyaswellasherlittlewoven
pursesmightbeavailableforpurchasefromherpanderingfather.The
secondaryeffectofsuchchoices,aneffectusuallyinvisibleorrelegated
ix
Preface
to the afterlife of an epilogue, might also be understood to be a
primary desire. Once a romantic choice has been consummated, at
leastinthepredominantlyheterosexualworldofsuchfiction,theplot
might close down possibilities and the novel can end.
SinceTheBlithedaleRomanceissetinHawthorne’simmediatepast
ratherthanintheearliercenturiesofanovellikeTheScarletLetter,it
mightseempeculiartotreatthisnovelinthecontextofnationalism
andhistoricalfiction.Bypresentingthenovelinsuchacontext,Iwant
tocalltomindHawthorne’sfameasahistoricalromancer,and,via
The Scarlet Letter, as author of the founding text of American
identification based on extramarital desire and illegitimate birth.
Theveryuneaseofthenarrativevoiceinbothnovels–aswellasthe
hesitations and concealments carried out by the narrators of The
House of the Seven Gables and The Marble Faun – suggests that the
productionofasteadyrelationtothenationmadeavailablethrough
fiction has deteriorated by the 1850s.
Such attention to the difference in novels and other forms of
writing produced in the United States during the 1850s has a long
criticalhistory.EversinceTheAmericanRenaissance,thequestionof
howAmericandemocracywasatoncereformulatedandre-described
has challenged prior norms of narrative production. The potential
distortionsthatthepresenceofnon-normativedesiremightencour-
ageintheplottingoffictionappearnotonlyinHawthorne’shistorical
fictionbutalsointheovertlynationalplottingsofnovelssuchasthe
redemptive Civil War narratives by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (in The
Gates Ajar [1868]), Augusta Evans (Macaria [1863]), and John
William De Forest (Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to
Loyalty [1867]). All three show the at once riveting and rivening
effects of war on national identifications and all refuse to find
satisfactorymaritalresolutions,arefusalthatoperatesasacommen-
taryonwhatpossibleidentificationsmightremaintocharacterswho
have suffered from death and disintegration during wartime.
Thesemodificationsofhowtoreadfictionsometimesflyintheface
ofthechallengethathistoricalmoments–notablythelonghistorical
momentof theAmerican Civil War– provideinfiction. Modifying
theideaofthenationtoconformatoncetothepracticesofthestate,
the place where the apparatus of government resides, and to draw
ontheplaceofbelonging,novelspresenttheappealofagrouplarger
x
Preface
thanthefamilythatyetinvokestheemotionalresonanceofthefamily.
Toyokethispracticalaspectofstategovernancetothesymbolicorder
ofnationidentificationhasbeentheworkofapositedfamilyorder.
Whatmostpowerfullyconveysthesymbolicorderoffamilystructure
especiallyinthestagesofformationmightbethefictionproducedat
once to be consumed in the private space of the family and to be
(evocativelyinrelationtoitself)partofaserialtellingoftherelationof
such order to the state.6
What makes it possible to articulate a new understanding of the
productionandconsumptionofliteratureinthenineteenth-century
United States? Further, what has happened to the relation between
suchnewliteraturesandwhatwasformuchofthetwentiethcentury
identifiedasclassicAmericanliterature?Therecentincreaseincritical
andtheoreticalenergybeingbroughttobearonbothcanonicaland
non-canonicalwritershasrevitalizedboththetextureanddetailofthe
literatureweread.Readingsuchliteraturehasbecomeanewactivity
throughexploringitsconnectiontothepopularculturethatappears,
for instance, in the proliferating propaganda of the American Tract
Society, the snippets of poetry in newspaper columns bordered by
lithographed announcements of new patent medicines, the stories
bound so beautifully into gift books next to engravings of sleeping
children, and the fashion plates of Godey’s Lady’s Book. Critics can
nowaskwhatconversationsmighttakeplaceamongthesedisparate
formsofwriting.Theycanexaminethecorrelationsbetweenvarying
scenesofproduction,fromcrowdedparlorswithcryingbabiestoattic
rooms.Criticscanquestionwhoreadtheseworks,andhowtheyread,
includingpresidentsoftheUnitedStateswhonotonlywrotepoetry
butsubmittedpubliclytosuchextraordinaryactsasproducingtheir
heads for phrenological examinations.
Evenastheyengagethesenewunderstandingsofhistoricalcontext,
criticsstillwanttoknowwhatmakesthefictionalworkcompelling.
Eachnewgenerationasksabouttherelationbetweentheoriginalityof
their claims and the careful attention to prior modes of critical
comprehension.Thecategoriesproposedinthefirstchapterascrucial
for readings of the nineteenth-century novel in the United States –
categoriessuchasviolence,nationalism,andwater–willbeexplicated
andfleshedoutinthechaptersthatfollow.Thefirstchapterprovides
an overview of authors and genres in American fiction, noting
xi
