The Columbia History of the American Novel

versus the marginalized, the sanctioned versus the disenfranchised, and women will inevitably suffer victimization until the social structure is reformed.

Rowson counsels resistance: men are 'vile betrayer[s],' 'monsters of seduction,' and if they know the meaning of the word 'honour' are undoubtedly too swayed by modern fashion and 'refinement' to practice it. Forget 'romance,' she tells her readers (almost as if they were her charges), 'no woman can be run away with contrary to her own inclination.' But even though she expresses these feminist sen-18- timents and aligns herself with her audience, as if to say we must nurture each other rather than look toward a man for support, Rowson still cannot produce a text that itself resists the pieties and homilies of the culture it has been vilifying (the book actually concludes with the utterly banal biblical platitude that vice eventually leads to 'misery and shame'). In the end it winds up promoting the values that cloak forms of (male) oppression; it authorizes the very authorities it has previously sought to displace. The 'precepts of religion and virtue' vanish from the novel (if they were present in the first place) as quickly as Montraville when he has the opportunity to make an advantageous match, yet these become the tired ideals to which young women should aspire. If, after everything Montraville has done to disgrace and humiliate Charlotte, she can still declare her love for him, what kind of model has Rowson provided those readers whom she had previously roused to anger and indignation? Moreover, what kind of stability does the sentimental novel offer, when it itself is marked by such prevarication?

If the sentimental novel often failed because it could not sustain a coherent critique of American society, the picaresque often succeeded for the very same reason. This loose, baggy, disjointed narrative form, usually containing several different kinds of discourse, including philosophical reflection, travel essay, and political disquisition, was also perfectly suited for commentary on the politics of republicanism, which in the years following the Revolution, and especially in the time of Constitutional debates, could be highly factious. Cathy N. Davidson has convincingly argued this point, showing how the various and divergent voices of the American polis were sounded out by characters who traveled through cities, towns, and villages, engaging those whom they encountered in argument and debate. What often emerged was a tension — sometimes outright hostility — between Federalist and Anti-Federalist, privileged and common, those who supported the entrenched power and those who demanded its redistribution. The vociferous, highly charged (but implicit) arguments centered, above all, on the meaning of America and who were its rightful inheritors.

But the picaresque also had inherent weaknesses, the most glaring being an inconsistency in its point of view. It was often difficult, sometimes impossible, to tell where its author stood on the vital po-19- litical issues he (and it almost always was 'he') was discussing. It was not until Mark Twain transformed the picaresque with the publication of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1884-85 that any kind of stability in tone and vision entered the form. If the journey down the Mississippi seemed random and unplotted, Twain's purposes were nevertheless highly focused. Moreover, with the dual portrait of Huck and Jim, Twain achieved a clarity and depth in character that no other picaresque novel had previously managed. Earlier versions of the genre may also have highlighted socially marginal figures, pitting them against representatives of mainstream society, yet none could maintain the satiric perspective while at the same time realizing the emotional depths of, and eliciting compassion for, their wandering protagonists. The potential for greatness had always been there; it took a great writer, of course, to realize it.

The most successful of the early picaresque novels, Hugh Henry Brackenridge's Modern Chivalry (published in irregular installments from 1792 to 1815) combines the best and the worst aspects of the genre. Concerning the latter, the narrative rambles incessantly, digresses willfully, pontificates frequently; moreover, the author interrupts, directly or in postscripts, to discuss both his career and his book (the very one we are reading), even quoting critical reviews of the first two volumes at the outset of the third (the advantage, perhaps, of publishing parts of a work at widely separate intervals). While these practices may seem like contemporary self-reflexiveness by our postmodern standards, they are merely distracting, since they apparently partake of no larger metafictional strategy; nothing, that is, holds the book together as a coherent whole. Concerning the best, however, Brackenridge creates two characters with charged comic energy, the educated and sophisticated Captain Farrago and his ignorant and coarse servant Teague O'Regan. The two have been compared to the classic fictional travelers Don Quixote and Sancho Panza (the novel itself suggests the likeness), but a more illuminating analogy would be the stage and television performers Abbott and Costello; like Abbott, Farrago relies on his superior reasoning ability, constantly offers advice and guidance, and is invariably ignored or, worse, foiled in his attempts to impose order on a chaotic scene. Like Costello, O'Regan depends on Farrago for assistance in difficult situations, always disregards his plea for moderation, and, though he is -20- the butt of the humor, winds up triumphing over the man of reason by becoming the choice of the common people. Had Brackenridge been a greater novelist (had he been Twain), he could have written a comic masterpiece.

What he has produced, however, is a book as contradictory and as confusing in its pronouncements and outlook as the early American Republic itself. Brackenridge cannot seem to decide between the aristocratic assumptions of Farrago and the populist impulses of O'Regan; while he shares Farrago's fear of the mob, for example, he apparently admires O'Regan's determination to rise in American society, even if he is unqualified for every position or office he seeks. If he seems dubious about the leveling tendencies of democracy, he also tends to reject the reactionary declarations and prejudiced views of an (often self-proclaimed) elite citizenry. Not surprisingly, Brackenridge shifts political allegiances in his book just as he did in his life, championing Federalism during the time of the Constitutional debates, then subsequently becoming an Anti-Federalist when government policies began to privilege land speculation at the expense of impoverished farmers. But, finally, the novelist seems unsure as to which version of the democratic system he supports, either total participatory democracy, or some limited form of democratic government where an enlightened leadership rules on behalf of a populace not quite intelligent and therefore trustworthy enough to govern itself. The equivocation may very well mirror the endless uncertainties of political life in the new nation, but it also weakens the already shaky foundations of the fledgling novel.

Perhaps Americans had the most success adapting the form of the novel that would seem to be the least suited to the open, expansive American landscape, the gothic, which depended for its effects on such feudal artifacts as intricately constructed castles and ruined abbeys, and such Old World types as evil barons and mad monks. But the gothic also specialized in such human foibles as superstition and delusion, as well as human anxieties over hidden corruption and uncertain, if not outrightly malign, motivation. The claustrophobic structures and mazelike pathways that tend to recur in these stories become metaphors for the distorted, haunted minds of the protagonists of these novels, characters whose respectable, seemingly normal outer lives mask savage, abnormal inner ones. The gothic thus be-21- came the perfect form for expressing the fears that American society, with its concomitant ideologies of liberalism and individualism, not only had continued the abuses of a hierarchical social structure but also had actually opened the way to even greater treacheries: selfmade, self-improved, self- confident, and self-determined men abusing power, subverting authority, undermining order.

No practitioner of the gothic was more attuned to these potential problems in American society than Charles Brockden Brown, and no American novelist exploited them more successfully than he did in several books from the late 1790s, including Wieland (1798), Ormond (1799), Arthur Mervyn (Part I, 1799; Part II, 1800), and Edgar Huntly (1799). In these experimental and daring, though flawed novels, Brown tested the limits of reason in a country willing to believe in its limitlessness, examined the darker and perhaps evil impulses of unchecked imagination, and explored the consequences of personality unloosed from its moorings in some form of stable, traditional community. Not surprisingly, given his interests, all four novels become fixated on violent disruption of a previously harmonious group of people, sometimes caused by an outside agent (Carwin in Wieland), sometimes by an internal one (Edgar Huntly himself). In each case, there is no refuge from the turbulence and confusion that results, no return to the fixed relations of things as they used to be. Drawing on the radical creeds, speculative philosophy, and psychological experimentation of his own time for the plots and metaphors of his novels, Brown introduced such ideas as ventriloquism, somnambulism, and spontaneous combustion into American fiction, suggesting the end of the once stable relationship between appearance and reality, and between the individual and society. Moreover, long before it became a fashionable critical notion, Brown posited the belief that the self was basically unknowable, indeterminate; the more we look for an inviolate order within, the more we discover the basic rule of fragmentation.

These ideas are most prevalent — especially the discovery of disorder within and the consequent inability to reconstruct an ordered self — in Brown's best novel, Wieland, which dramatizes, as Jay