The hallmark of the early American novel is its instability, an uncertainty and confusion in almost every area related to fiction making; in order to highlight the most significant result of this instability, I would like to pretend at the outset of this chapter that I am a critic wedded to contemporary critical fashion. With this guise in place, I begin by declaring that, in fact, there is no such thing as the 'early American novel.' To prove my point, I carefully examine each term in the phrase to show that its intended meaning necessarily evaporates under critical scrutiny. First, take the word 'early,' which in this context is supposed to signify an event or events (the production of novels) occurring in the first part of some division of time, or of some series. In what sense, then, are the works that I intend to discuss — books by William Hill Brown, Hannah Foster, Susanna Rowson, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Charles Brockden Brown, and James Fenimore Cooper — early products of American history or culture?
By consensus the first 'American novel' is William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy, which appeared initially in 1789. But the land mass known as America had been called by that name since 1507, when the German geographer Martin Waldseemüller named it after its founder, Amerigo Vespucci; in that regard, 'America' — its history and surely its culture — had existed for 282 years before Brown published his novel. If we follow the editors of one older anthology of American writing (1978), who declare that by American literature they mean 'literature written in English by people who -6- came to settle in the territory that eventually became the United States of America,' then American writing begins in 1630 with William Bradford's history, Of Plimmouth Plantation; Brown's book, still 159 years away, is hardly an early American production. (Newer anthologies, if they begin with voyages of discovery, assign dates like 1492 to the first American writings; if they commence with Native American 'myths,' the dates are earlier still, though mostly unknown.) Perhaps by 'early' we intend something like the 'beginning' of the American novel, but you do not have to read very far in Brown's book to realize that, as a 'novelist,' he is totally dependent on Samuel Richardson, and in particular Richardson's Pamela (1741-42), where the story, as is Brown's, is told through a series of letters; moreover, Brown's plot centers on the theme of seduction, another Richardsonian gift to the world of fiction. One might plausibly argue that the American novel truly begins with Richardson; without him there would be no Brown. Pamela, in fact, was the first English novel printed in America, in 1844. (Another English antecedent would be Laurence Sterne, whose A Sentimental Journey is actually mentioned in The Power of Sympathy.) Finally, suppose that 'early' means, from our perspective, belonging to a period far back in time. This makes the most sense, relatively speaking, if you consider 200 years ago 'far back in time' — though our country is still proclaiming its newness, still championing its innocence, still denying that it is drenched in time.
'American' is far more problematic. The word is absolutely meaningless as a descriptive term if all it indicates is that a book — Brown's, Rowson's, Cooper's, anyone's — was published in the United States. In the days before international copyright, the works of many English writers were pirated, printed, and sold by American booksellers under their own imprints; they were, in effect, published in America, and most Americans first read the great eighteenth-century novelists in these editions. Moreover, some nineteenth-century American writers — Washington Irving and Herman Melville are good examples — in order to secure both English and American copyrights, published several of their books in England before they appeared in America. Does the writer have to be born in America? Have written his or her novel in America? Susanna Rowson was born in England, and Charlotte Temple, her most interesting novel, was written while -7- she was living in England. Yet literary historians have always proclaimed it an 'American' novel. Anthony Trollope's North America, and some of Frances Trollope's novels, were written wholly while mother and son (independently) were traveling in America. Are they American books? Must America then be the setting of the novel for it to be American? William Hill Brown's book is set in America — the America of the early Republic (New York, Rhode Island, and Boston), but then so is Aphra Behn's Oroonoko if, as William Spengemann has argued, you consider that when she wrote it in 1688 Surinam was considered part of America. In Martin Chuzzlewit, Charles Dickens has his title character travel to America and spend about a fourth of the book there; is the novel then one-fourth American? Perhaps more to the point: only about one-seventh of Moby-Dick takes place on American soil; is Melville's masterpiece not an American novel?
Scholars have spent an inordinate amount of time arguing that 'American' really refers to 'Americanness': national characteristics shape and mirror the form of a literary work. Some idea of America animates the narrative, controls and orders the very pattern of words upon the page. A variant on this idea of 'Americanness' would be that recognizable issues, concerns, preoccupations appear again and again in books that are supposedly representative of American experience. Thus, Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain are the most American of nineteenth- century novelists, and Whitman is our true American poet, since something like an American identity can be discerned from reading their works. Ultimately, Spengemann has said, 'America must make a difference in the way literature is written.'
I have in the past believed this to be so (the force of Spengemann's arguments to the contrary notwithstanding), and to some extent still do, though I am deeply troubled by the implications of extracting some notion of identity, some sense of representativeness, from a canonized literature written almost exclusively by white men. The newest anthologies of our national literature have attempted to correct for this imbalance, and we now have access to the voices and visions of so many previously excluded 'others.' Perhaps, generally speaking, our literature will finally deserve to be called American, but can we say the same in particular for the novel, especially the so-8- called early novel, where the practitioners are exclusively white, though some indeed are female?
To be sure, the America in the term 'the American novel' is a place, with hard outlines and a traceable landscape, but it is also, as it has been from the outset, an idea — often an ideal — imagined first in the minds of enlightened European thinkers, reimagined, and then shaped and configured, in the consciousness of Thomas Jefferson and the other founders of the Republic. That America may indeed never have existed in fact, but it always exists in mythic memory, and it is first and foremost a vision of inclusiveness: it deplores restriction and derogation. Can it not be said that to the extent that the nation embodies this vision it is that much closer to becoming America? How, then, can the 'early American novel' possibly be American when it lacks any kind of minority and ethnic representation? Without there being a free assemblage of different peoples and an open forum for their genuinely differing points of view, there is no America; without a confluence of voices, expressing a myriad range of experience, there is no American novel. The American novel is, in the best sense of the term, multicultural; it may only recently have come into being.
This brings us to the third of our slippery terms: the literary designation 'novel.' If a novel is, in the simplest possible definition, a 'sustained fictional narrative in prose,' as the modern editor of The Power of Sympathy contends, then it appears as if Brown's, as well as every other book to be discussed here, qualifies as a novel. In fact, almost any form of fiction does, for what does 'sustained' mean but that a plan or design has been executed or upheld? Even some autobiographies might fit under this rubric, which is how some contemporary critics view them anyway. A more problematic term, however, is 'fiction,' which had low status in eighteenth-century America and was often shunned by those who wrote it. Often, too, readers believed they were devouring 'true' stories, that is, narratives based on fact — incidents that were historically verifiable (which is the case not only with Brown's Sympathy but also with Foster's Coquette and Rowson's Charlotte). Cathy N. Davidson points out that Rowson promised her readers 'A Tale of Truth,' and that is exactly how her story was read and appreciated. Some writers, like Washington Irving, went to elaborate steps to deny the fictionality of their work; his -9- assuming the mask of Diedrich Knickerbocker is only one of the ways by which he tried to convince the public he was offering it either history or 'true' story.
If today's readers were asked to decide what element of a novel most mattered to them, they would probably emphasize either character or plot development. In other words, for most consumers of fiction, the novel signifies 'realism,' and this is indeed the distinction M. H. Abrams draws between the novel proper and the 'romance': 'The novel,' Abrams writes, 'is characterized as the fictional attempt to give the effect of realism, by representing complex characters with mixed motives who are rooted in a social class, operate in a highly developed social structure, interact with many other characters, and undergo plausible and everyday modes of experience.' The niceties of generic distinction are not the point; rather, the works
