Truth's Ragged Edge: The Rise of the American Novel - Softcover

Philip F. Gura is the William S. Newman Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he holds appointments in English, American studies, and religious studies. He is the author of American Transcendentalism: A History, which was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction, as well as many other books of American cultural history.

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Historians of the English novel point to John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) as a progenitor of the form. The American version of this tale is Joseph Morgan’s History of the Kingdom of Basaruah (1715), a minister’s allegory of the Calvinist view of man’s fall and redemption.1 Though uninspired, the book is a testament to the centrality of Christian allegories in eighteenth-century British North America.2 But with the circulation in the newly independent United States of popular English novels like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747–48), Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768), and Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771), novelists began to revise and sometimes challenge allegorical narratives of the pious Christian life. Rather than provide road maps through the Delectable Mountains, they heralded the triumph of individual virtue and urged the cultivation of sentiment in contemporary settings readers would recognize. They often based their novels on the kinds of stories heard from neighbors or read in the weekly newspapers—tales, in other words, populated not by pasteboard archetypes but by real people. Appropriate for earlier times, accounts of a pilgrim’s progress lacked the texture and complexity of everyday experience in the late-eighteenth-century United States and particularly its moral ambiguity.
Fictional works that directed an individual through this sinful world emerged first as handmaidens and then as rivals to the sermons, religious allegories, and wonder tales that hitherto had dominated native literature. In his Algerine Captive (1797), one of the earliest American novels, Royall Tyler, Vermont superior court judge, playwright, poet, and novelist, noted this shift. His character Updike Underhill, following six years of captivity in the Barbary States, remarks how on his return from his forced absence from the United States he “found a surprising alteration in public taste,” for now everyone read novels. “The worthy farmer no longer fatigued himself with Bunyan’s Pilgrim up the ‘hill of difficulty,’ or through the ‘slough of despond,’” and “Dolly, the dairy maid, and Jonathan, the hired man, threw aside the ballad of the cruel stepmother, over which they had so often wept.”3 A character in another early American work commented on the same shift in reading habits. “We fly from the laboured precepts of the essayists,” he observed, “to the sprightly narrative of the novelist.”4
This comment appears in what is widely recognized as the first bona fide American novel, William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy.5 Brown (1765–1793) was born in Boston, the son of a prominent clockmaker.6 Educated locally, he displayed a penchant for classical and English literature and by his early twenties was publishing patriotic poetry, thereby contributing to the city’s nascent cultural nationalism. In one poem, “Shays to Shattuck: An Epistle,” Brown imagines a conversation in prison between a despondent Daniel Shays, fomenter of Shays’s Rebellion, and one of his foot soldiers, in which the former tries to justify his rebellion. In another, “Yankee Song,” Brown celebrates the state’s recent ratification of the Federal Constitution. The poem contains the refrain “Yankee Doodle keep it up, Yankee Doodle dandy” and upon republication the following year carried the now-familiar title “Yankee Doodle.” In his early twenties, Brown came to the attention of the prominent printer and publisher Isaiah Thomas, who encouraged regional authors by publishing them in his newspapers and a periodical titled The Massachusetts Magazine (1789–1796), whose contributors eventually included Benjamin Franklin, the New Hampshire essayist Joseph Dennie, the poet Sarah Wentworth Apthorp Morton, and the early women’s rights advocate Judith Sargent Murray. Thomas was not particularly interested in publishing native fiction, however, finding children’s books and almanacs, as well as reprints of popular English titles, more lucrative. But his good nose for profit led him in 1789 to publish Brown’s The Power of Sympathy, no doubt thinking that its thinly veiled references to recent sensational events in Boston guaranteed its success.7
For almost a century this novel was mistakenly attributed—Thomas had issued it anonymously—to another Boston writer, the poet Sarah Wentworth Apthorp Morton, because she was intimately involved in the scandal that had inspired it. This sordid tale unfolded in two of Boston’s most prominent families. Sarah Apthorp married Perez Morton, a prominent state politician who counted the Revolutionary patriot James Otis among his friends. The Mortons graciously allowed Sarah’s unmarried sister Frances (Fanny) to live with them in their Beacon Hill home, but she proved too tempting to Perez; a surreptitious affair led to the birth of their child. Sarah and Fanny’s father, James Apthorp, was outraged and demanded that Morton openly acknowledge the baby girl. Morton refused, and just before a meeting at which Apthorp planned to press his demand even more forcefully, Fanny poisoned herself and died.8
“THIS TYRANT CUSTOM”
Brown used the scandal to explore the vagaries of human passion in a young republic that extolled free will. The Power of Sympathy, an epistolary novel, alternates between scenes of overt moralizing and outright melodrama. It begins in a way familiar to contemporary readers, with Thomas Harrington writing to his friend Jack Worthy about his attraction to Harriot Fawcet, whom he plans to seduce. But she successfully resists his intentions, whereupon Brown includes his first surprise: Harrington, now admiring her virtue as well as her beauty, eventually falls in love with her, and she with him. However, some in their circle disapprove of their marriage plans. In particular, Mrs. Holmes, a family friend, urges another of Harrington’s friends to dissuade him. Before long, the secret comes out: the couple cannot marry because they are siblings. Harriot is the result of Harrington’s father’s illicit affair sixteen years earlier with a young woman, Maria. When Harrington’s father learned that his mistress was pregnant, his interest cooled, and he abandoned Maria to her fate. The Reverend and Mrs. Holmes took her in, and the family soon included Maria’s young daughter, Harriot; Maria revealed the identity of the girl’s father to her benefactors. After Maria becomes gravely ill and dies, the Holmeses, to protect their friend Harrington’s reputation, place young Harriot out to service. The news of her early years shocks and dismays both Harrington and her, and before long she dies of sorrow and despair. Learning of her death, Harrington shoots himself, an end that borrows from Goethe’s book The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774).
Much of the novel consists of secondary characters moralizing on this tragic course of events. Worthy’s epistles, for example, and those of Mr. and Mrs. Holmes read like didactic essays or sermons on character formation in young women, the dangers of reading fiction, and proper republican marriage. But the characters also punctuate their moral lessons by alluding to other events at least as troubling as the dilemma in which the Harringtons and Harriot find themselves. One subplot concerns a young man, Henry, who after his lover, Fidelia, is kidnapped just before their marriage, takes his own life. Her abductors release her; but on hearing of Henry’s fate, she despairs and becomes deranged. Another tangential tale, again centering on the vagaries of passion, details the affair of the senior Mr. Harrington and the young Maria. And in a brief textual reference and lengthy footnote, Brown alludes to yet another contemporary story making the rounds in New England. Elizabeth Whitman, a Connecticut clergyman’s unmarried daughter, had died alone in childbirth at a tavern near Boston, the baby’s father unknown, a scandal that later became the basis of another early American novel, Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette (1798).
As these stories indicate, in The Power of Sympathy Brown was chiefly interested in the wages of excessive passion, both socially approved and illicit. Henry’s love for Fidelia is so great that once she is abducted, he kills himself because he cannot imagine life without her. Ophelia and Maria are unable to resist the advances of men who they believe are willing to marry them but in fact are rakes. Harrington and Harriot’s affection is so deep that the impossibility of their marrying leads to one’s suicide and the other’s premature death. Brown implies that love, hatred, and fear cannot be easily controlled and often push one to irrationality. Recounting Ophelia’s story, Brown writes that when Martin turned on her, “she awoke from her dream of insensibility, she was like one … deluded by an ignis fatuus to the brink of a precipice,… abandoned … to contemplate the horrours of the sea beneath him, into which he was about to plunge.”9
That terrifying moment, standing at the edge of an abyss and peering over, fascinated Brown, as it did other early American writers. Famously, it became the subject of Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Imp of the Perverse,” his name for the impulse to look over the edge, fascinated by the thought of one’s extinction. In The Power of Sympathy, Harrington and Harriot continue to feel more than familial love even after they realize that their love is illicit. He wonders why “this transport” is a crime, for his affection for Harriot is “most pure, the most holy … Here,” Harrington exclaims upon learning his dilemma, “was all the horrour of conflicting passions.”10 What precisely does one do about such a love? The rational Mrs. Holmes cannot help them. “GREAT God!” she cries to Harrington’s sister, Myra. “Of what materials has thou compounded the hearts of thy creatures! Admire, o my friend, the operation of NATURE—and the power of SYMPATHY!”11 Even the elder Harrington is at a loss to comprehend his son’s and Harriot’s plight. He asks the Reverend Holmes, “How shall we pretend to investigate the great springs by which we are actuated, or account for the operation of SYMPATHY?” His son, he continues, had “accidentally seen [Harriot], and to complete THE TRIUMPH OF NATURE—has loved her.”12
Brown, too, stands at the verge of such an abyss but refuses the plunge. He does not pretend to know why such things as Harrington’s and Harriot’s love occur and ends his novel the “easy” way, with the death of one of the lovers. Harriot’s demise drives Harrington to despair, even as his suicide serves a higher purpose: soon he will join her in heaven, where their love “will not be a crime,” although the reader never learns why not.13 In their earthly lives, the problem resides in society’s arbitrary rules, in particular an insistence on the supremacy of reason over passion. “Why did I love [this] Harriot?” Harrington ruefully asks. “Curse on this tyrant custom that dooms such helpless children to oblivion and infamy!”14
Brown’s characters’ failings indicated his allegiance to the ideals of republican virtue, selfishness at odds with their privileged position in society. The elder Harrington’s dalliance with Maria, his inferior in social class, betrays a social hierarchy that exists even in a supposedly democratic nation. “I am not so much a republican,” the younger Harrington tells Worthy early in the novel, “as formally to wed any person of this class. How laughable,” he thinks, openly to acknowledge as his wife a “daughter of the democratick empire of virtue.”15 To his surprise, “the power of sympathy” prevails, for he does fall in love. But once the couple’s true relationship is known, to formalize it would only fray, if not sever, the still-fragile bonds of republican virtue. Brown thus postpones their happiness until heaven.
SUSANNA ROWSON’S EMERGENCE
The revolutionary nature of the U.S. government was not explicit in The Power of Sympathy but in various degrees was the focus of other early American novels, particularly Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry (1792–1815), set in western Pennsylvania after the disruption of the Whiskey Rebellion, and Tyler’s Algerine Captive, which drew on the United States’ conflict with the Barbary States. These are loose and baggy picaresque novels that through satire probe the country’s new social order, in particular the still-uncomfortable notion that the most plebeian citizen should be afforded the same respect as a person of wealth and influence. Thomas Jefferson voiced this ideal when he famously wrote John Adams in 1813 that there is a natural aristocracy among men based in virtue and talent that should trump any inherited or honorary rank.
But these picaresque novels were never as popular as other contemporary novels, such as The Power of Sympathy, that center on the vagaries of human passion, typified by seemingly omnipresent tales of seduction. One historian attributes this genre’s popularity in part to the “dramatic slackening” of laws against moral offenses like prostitution and adultery. In this climate women “began to experience unprecedented social and sexual freedom,” even as didactic novels and other moralistic literature warned of the dangers of female sexuality.16 Perennially the most popular novel of passion was Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte: A Tale of Truth, first published to an indifferent reception in England in 1791 by William Lane at his Minerva Press and issued in Philadelphia three years later. In the United States, however, Charlotte Temple, as it was retitled in 1797, became one of the bestselling novels before Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), appearing in scores of editions, most commonly as Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth. What was its appeal to an American readership?
One answer lies in the way Rowson’s biography gave the book an air of undeniable veracity, for just as William Hill Brown’s life was brief and relatively uneventful, Rowson’s was the stuff of contemporary fiction.17 She was born Susanna Musgrove Haswell in 1762 in Portsmouth, England, the daughter of William Haswell, a career naval officer, and Susanna Musgrove Haswell, who died when her daughter was only ten days old. When Rowson was a year old, the English navy sent Haswell on assignment to New England as a customs official, and relatives in England cared for her until he brought her over in 1767. Having landed in Boston Harbor on a frigid and stormy midwinter day (a scene she later re-created in her novel Rebecca; or, The Fille de Chambre [1792]), Rowson found a new home at nearby Nantasket, a peninsula just south of the city. There she faced many adjustments, for she had to live not only with a parent she hardly knew but also with a stepmother, whom Haswell had married two years earlier. Although Susanna never warmed to Rachel Woodward Haswell, she later looked back fondly on these years, filled as they were with seaside and country walks and fine literature from her father’s library, not to mention spirited conversation with the future patriot James Otis, who gave her, according to one early biographer’s account, “particular notice and favor.”18
But the 1760s and 1770s were increasingly difficult times for the Crown’s officers. As the imperial crisis escalated, Haswell attempted to stay neutral, but his situation grew tenuous. Finally, in 1775, he and his family were placed under house arrest and relocated, first to nearby Hingham and then inland to Abington, this second move occurring because none other than Perez Morton had accused Haswell of “frequently making such false representations among the inhabitants, as tend t...