The Columbia History of the American Novel

review and didn't sell enough copies to keep its author from the almshouse.

Such works make abundantly clear how stifling the antebellum marketplace could be to unwelcome ideas and unpopular voices. White buyers needed to be conciliated before they would agree to patronize African American artists. In Our Nig Wilson thematizes the prohibition against African American self- advocacy: the efforts of her protagonist Frado to make herself heard are repeatedly frustrated by whites, who find her words too discomforting to listen to and try to muzzle her. Frado has her mouth stuffed with a towel and a block of wood; her mistress, Mrs. Bellmont, threatens to cut out her tongue to prevent her from 'tale-bearing.' Written from the perspective of a mulatto servant, Our Nig paints a relentlessly bleak picture of race and class relations in the North. The book flaunts its unsalability by debunking the middle-class domestic scene that Stowe and other female abolitionists mobilized against slavery. The family for Wilson is not a stronghold of emancipatory affect; it is a plantation or factory where Nig suffers brutal mistreatment from other women. No other antebellum novel by a woman, white or African American, places itself so far outside the expectations of the feminine reading public.

Although white authors had a much easier time of it, not all of them, even in the North, fared well now that literature was a trade. In general, one can divide the novelists of the 1840s and 1850s into three groupings: the small circle of men who over the course of the next hundred years came to constitute the canon of national literature; the domestic or sentimental women; and the quasi journalists -56- like Lippard, most of them male, whose narratives of urban violence and sexual titillation shaped a sensationalized popular culture. These three groupings constituted the first generation of Americans able to view storytelling realistically as a career, a vocation that promised a decent livelihood and held out the prospect, for the lucky few, of real wealth. Least is known about the purveyors of sensationalism. Their paper-covered pamphlet novels, hawked on street corners or sold through the mails (until the U.S. Post Office withdrew their permits to ship at inexpensive newspaper rates), proved both popular and highly ephemeral.

Our concern here lies with the canonical and domestic writers, the major artists of the period and figures who often seemed to occupy antipodal cultural spheres. Rivals for the respectable, middle-class audience, they differed in subject matter, popular appeal, and understanding of the literary calling. Yet a series of paradoxes and inversions joined them and pointed to a broader area of agreement. In varying degrees, each school internalized but also set itself against the social and economic universe identified with Adam Smith. Although the women enjoyed immense commercial success and frankly viewed their writing as a lucrative form of employment, American culture — and they themselves — defined womanhood as the antithesis of acquisitiveness. They retained traditional ideas of the novel as committed to service; for most of them, the self-expressive dimension of art was subsidiary to the doing of good. The men, on the other hand, sold modestly or poorly in their lifetimes and felt estranged from the market, yet they forged an individualized conception of literature as 'high' art, as a separate realm analogous to the newly theorized category of the economic.

Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, fiction writers who came of age in the 1820s, prefigured the allegiances and contradictions of their canonical successors. Of the important male artists active in the mid- nineteenth century, only these two were born in the previous century and attained adulthood before the War of 1812. Performing a complex dance of equivocation, they advanced into the commercialized future while preserving essential characteristics from the preprofessional, foreign-dominated past. The two men were regarded in their own time as imitators of British models: Cooper as the American Scott, Irving as the American Lamb. Irving's international -57- hit, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-20), is suffused with Anglophilia and announces its superiority to the market in its title. Throughout his career, Irving maintained a public image of himself as a gentleman of letters, not a professional; he was forever seeking sinecures in government and cultivating the patronage of great men. Cooper's more abrasive personality ruled out supplication, but he too had an air of being above commercial considerations. His maiden foray into literature, Precaution (1820), apes English courtship novels and exudes a reverence for the aristocracy that persists throughout his American works, eventually to reach a pinnacle of shrillness in his last fiction, The Ways of the Hour (1850). Cooper's quarrels with publishers and reviewers, and his growing disdain for American democracy, hurt his sales and amounted to a declaration of independence from the reading public.

In spite of their reluctance, these two pioneers gave American fiction respectability and put it on a profitable footing. Irving and Cooper exemplified the man of letters as a man of business, their very aloofness from materialism endowing their works with an aura of highly marketable exclusivity. Gentlemanly aversion to exchange underwrote their appeal to a readership eager to acquire literary culture. Both men turned to writing careers after their families suffered financial embarrassment in the Depression of 1819. Both capitalized on the improved conditions of the 1820s to convert literature into an instrument of economic mobility. Cooper's Americanization of the historical romance in The Spy (1821) and The Pioneers (1822) took the country by storm, and his keen grasp of his audience's desires made him the Republic's first true professional author, popular enough, at least for a time, to live comfortably on his literary earnings. Irving excelled at recycling his successes: Bracebridge Hall (1822) was clubbed his 'English Sketch Book,' The Alhambra (1832) his 'Spanish Sketch Book.' But it was the retailing of the original Sketch Book that first demonstrated his formidable commercial sense. The collection was issued serially in seven pamphlets and sold for the astronomical figure of $5.37 1/2 the set. Five thousand Americans, according to William Charvat, paid the price, and Irving netted close to $10,000 before the sketches appeared as a separate book.

Irving and Cooper made vital if fitful contributions to the reconfiguring of literature as 'a world elsewhere.' Irving's History of New -58- York struck a blow against the cultural prestige of history writing, a genre esteemed by Americans for its pedagogic authority. In The Sketch Book, he portrays the artist as a dreamy idler, someone whose power to entertain has nothing to do with usefulness. Cooper, after making obeisances to patriotism in The Spy, claimed to have written The Pioneers 'exclusively to please myself.' The book's exquisite descriptions of natural scenery suggest an ambition to craft a selfsufficient 'art' novel, although this aspiration has to contend against Cooper's usual wish to lecture his readers. Neither author proved consistent in absolving his work from 'some definite moral purpose' (a phrase Hawthorne uses ironically in the preface to The House of the Seven Gables). Irving reverted to writing the kinds of histories he once mocked, while Cooper's didactic impulses, except in the Leatherstocking tales (and sometimes there too), almost invariably got the better of his artistic judgment.

The sporadic suspension of extrinsic purpose in Irving and Cooper not only marked them off from contemporaneous women novelists like Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Lydia Maria Child; it also declared their difference from an earlier cultural formation. In the eighteenth century, American novels had marched under the banner of social utility. They had not fully differentiated themselves from functional discourses such as sermons and patriotic histories. Something like a 'moral economy,' in which the corporate welfare took precedence over personal interests, had prevailed in cultural life much as it had in material affairs. The nineteenth century saw the gradual eclipsing of this definition of the aesthetic. Relative indifference to the moral or instructional obligation of fiction, an attitude appearing in embryo in the post-Revolutionary period, became a hallmark — perhaps even the distinguishing quality — of the imaginative writing that was subsequently judged canonical.

Literature's ostensible autonomy — its relatively recent status, that is, as a discrete discourse, governed by its own rules and values and emancipated from extraliterary functions — may appear to distance the artwork from a money-oriented social order; and, as I shall argue later, such an ideal did express genuine disaffection from the commercial spirit. But the disembedding of the literary was also part of a larger social trend toward specialization and individuation. The adherents of free-market thought interpreted the economic as a zone -59- apart from morality, theology, and government. Although autonomous art was in advance of mid-century economic practice, fiction's casting free from didacticism reproduced as cultural agenda the same structural imperative that informed liberal individualism. Art now presented itself as a circumscribed terrain analogous to the scene of commerce and no less secure from intrusions by church and state (or piety and politics). The new aesthetic ideology's privileging of disinterestedness bespoke not transhistorical 'purity' but rather rootedness in a modernizing capitalist society and affiliation with Adam Smith's increasingly influential defense of the market as a selfregulating sphere that should be 'let alone.'

Domestic fiction, on the other hand, affirmed connectedness over autonomy. Sentimental discourse retained