The Columbia History of the American Novel

a pedagogic responsibility that harmonized with the nineteenth-century perception of women as moral guardians. The 'cult of true womanhood' venerated selfless, nurturant beings who found fulfillment in serving others. Confined to the home, spared the compromises and pressures of the public world, women were thought to possess a purity and spirituality that ideally suited them for their tasks as wives and mothers. Fiction writing, like nursing or teaching the very young, was an acceptable activity so long as it conformed to the conventional female role. Woman's charge was to edify and improve her audience, only secondarily to strive for the perfection of art. This didactic strain linked literary domesticity to the republican past. Sentimental novels, though avidly consumed by antebellum readers, were residual in their entanglement with moral purpose and their loyalty to the communitarian emphases of the early Republic.

Although they too oscillated in their adjustments to the marketplace, Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville broke far more decisively than Irving and Cooper with the previous cultural configuration. The three major fiction writers of the antebellum canon raised native letters to a par with foreign models. No one seriously thought of Melville as the American Marryat, and Hawthorne and Poe reversed the transatlantic flow of influence, Hawthorne impressing George Eliot among others, and Poe inspiring a long line of French poets beginning with Charles Baudelaire. Poe considered himself a consummate professional: he devoted all his energies to literature and never held a job other than as a writer, editor, lecturer, or free-lance journalist. -60-

Melville, who came from a patrician family fallen on hard times (as did Poe and Hawthorne), looked to the novel as a way of regaining affluence and social position. He could be extremely calculating in his dealings with the reading public, deleting anticlerical passages from Typee, for example, in order to avoid offending popular taste. At times Melville spoke of the commodity status of his books with a candor and absence of illusion more often found among the domestic and sensational writers. He described Redburn and White-Jacket as 'two jobs, which I have done for money — being forced to it, as other men are to sawing wood.'

Hawthorne, more than any other author of the period, came to personify American literature's maturation. He was a direct beneficiary of the commercializing of publishing: the shrewd Boston editorpublisher, James T. Fields, persuaded him to expand a long manuscript tale of adultery among the Puritans into a full-length novel. Hawthorne had endured years of obscure and ill-paid story writing, and Fields signed up The Scarlet Letter with a promise of an initial printing of 2500 copies and a royalty of 15 percent. The publisher's network of friendly reviewers acclaimed the book, a second edition was needed within days, and Hawthorne had his first (modest) commercial success. Prodded by Fields, who urged him to capitalize on his sudden popularity, Hawthorne embarked on a flurry of activity such as he never again approached. He revised and reissued several collections of tales, wrote two books of mythology for children, and completed two more full-length novels, all in the space of three years. He never quite duplicated his earlier success, but Fields's tireless advocacy of his canonization eventually elevated the novelist to the rank of 'classic' author, the leading exhibit in the newly erected national pantheon.

But sales during one's lifetime matter to a writer too, as much or more than posthumous recognition, and in this area Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville all suffered repeated disappointments. Poe's literary professionalism vied with his aristocratic disdain for the common reader, and his occasional dream of suiting 'at once the popular and the critical taste' fell dismally short of realization. For the metaphysical treatise Eureka (1848), the book he regarded as the culmination of his life's work, he predicted that a first printing of 50,000 would be necessary; an indifferent public slowly purchased 750 copies. A year -61- after this fiasco, Poe died impoverished in a Baltimore hospital, as if driven to actualize the (partial) self-portrait he cultivated — in tales, poems, and poses for daguerreotypes — as haunted, antibourgeois artist. Hawthorne, less histrionic in his patrician reserve, was more illat-ease with the exactions of the market. Having begun his career by publishing anonymously, he remained tormented by the violations of privacy demanded by fame. He simply could not sustain his commercial viability and kept trying to flee dependence on the reading public for the greater security of government patronage. (In this, he resembled Washington Irving.) Though he was dismissed from the Salem Custom House, the strategy ultimately paid off: his appointment as consul at Liverpool — a reward for writing the campaign biography of his friend Franklin Pierce — brought Hawthorne more money than all his works of fiction combined.

Melville engaged in a lengthy quarrel with the marketplace that he finally resolved, much like Hawthorne, only by removing himself from its domain. In 1866, while still in his forties, he took a position in the New York Custom House (ironic refuge from trade!) and never again wrote fiction for a living. This was a fate Melville provoked as well as had thrust upon him. In a famous series of letters to Hawthorne, he declared his unwillingness to accommodate his talent to the popular taste. 'What I feel most moved to write,' he told the older novelist, 'that is banned — it will not sell. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot.' Melville's books, early and late, bristle with mistrust of, not to say belligerence toward, the middle-class reader; resentment breaks out into rage in the semiautobiographical Pierre (1852), where the narrator rails against the public, and the protagonist, a writer, commits murder and incest. In his disaffection, Melville echoed his frustrated predecessor, Charles Brockden Brown. He complained in 1851:

This country…[is] governed by sturdy backswoodsmen — noble fellows enough, but not at all literary, and who care not a fig for any authors except those who write those most saleable of all books nowadays — i.e. - the newspapers, and magazines.

Other male novelists blamed their misfortunes on their female competitors. In a now notorious outburst, Hawthorne vented his spleen at the 'scribbling women' whose books sold by the hundred -62- thousand and drove more deserving literature (he meant his own) from the market. Canonical writers regularly depict intellectual women as unnatural and textualize the wish to vanquish them, either by silencing or verbal usurpation. A conspicuous case of fantasy fulfillment occurs at the outset of The Scarlet Letter, when Hester Prynne, plainly a type of the female artist, stands in the Boston marketplace and vows never to speak in public. In The Blithedale Romance (1852) Hawthorne stills Zenobia's voice more ruthlessly by drowning her; Priscilla's utterances require no such violence because her public performances are orchestrated by a man. Poe's Ligeia, a woman so erudite that the male narrator abases himself before her 'infinite supremacy,' expires mysteriously and then returns from the dead with a bandage wound about her mouth. One woman who repaid these hostile gestures with disparagements of male narcissism was Fanny Fern, sister of the critic N. P. Willis and an author whose pugnacious spirit won over even Hawthorne. In her roman à clef, Ruth Hall, Fern caricatures her brother as a self-regarding poseur whose own works are ghostwritten. Willis is said to resent his sister's success because he 'wants to be the only genius in the family.'

Fern's novel tells the story of a woman writer who unabashedly regards literature as a trade and sets out, with single-minded determination, to win its financial prizes. The contrast to Melville's portrayal of the artist in Pierre could not be more pronounced. Melville's hero, who has been dispossessed of his inheritance, embarks on a literary career ostensibly to support his 'family,' but, more important, he writes in order to express profound truths about society and man. He loathes commercialism, composes a work far too radical for his publishers, and, thoroughly alienated from his dreams of literary greatness, ends up as a suicide. Fern's text reorders Melville's priorities. After Ruth Hall's husband dies, leaving her penniless, and she has to send a daughter to live with relatives, she decides to try her hand at authorship. She writes to make money so that she can restore her family, and she exults in the 'market-value' of her sketches because the demand for them enables her to enter the 'port of Independence.' Ruth wants her pieces to affect and inspire others, but she thinks of herself above all as 'a regular business woman' whose writings secure the wherewithal to cover 'shoeless feet' and buy 'a little medicine, or a warmer shawl.' -63-

Pierre of course was atypical in his extremism, but Fern's version of the female author was representative: most sentimental novelists turned to literature for quite practical reasons and adopted a businesslike attitude toward writing. As Nina Baym puts it in her study of the women, they 'conceptualized authorship as a profession rather than a calling, as work and not art.' This overstates the case in that it elides the ambivalence many literary domestics felt about appearing in public or even signing their names to their books. Fern's heroine hides behind the androgynous pseudonym of 'Floy,' and she says that no woman can publicly defend herself from unfair reviews without doing 'violence to her womanly nature.' But the women seem to have experienced little of the alienation from their audience that beset the men. They saw their role as satisfying their readers' expectations and were largely untroubled by the contradiction, so bitter to Melville, between artistic urges and popular acceptance. Need to