Past and Future States: the Cultural Work of the Serial in U.S. Literature, 1786-1815

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Past and Future States: The Cultural Work of the Serial in U.S. Literature, 1786-1815

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of the Ohio State University

Kristina Garvin, M.A.

Graduate Program in English

The Ohio State University

2015

Dissertation Committee:

Professor Elizabeth Hewitt, Director

Professor Molly Farrell

Professor Jared Gardner

Kristina Marie Garvin

2015

Abstract

“Past and Future States: The Cultural Work of the Serial in U.S. Literature, 1786-

1815,” proposes a comprehensive history of seriality in the early republic. Rather than characterize the serial as a subspecies of the early American novel, I argue that “seriality” represented a conceptual practice and a form in its own right, one with distinct features and thematic preoccupations. This project intervenes in the direction of American print studies more broadly. Whereas recent scholarship has focused on geographies—on how print functioned culturally against regional, hemispheric, and transnational distances— my dissertation examines the temporal, urging attention to how writers perceived and managed disruptions between the present, past, and future. Combining close attention to material texts and literary form, “Past and Future States” describes the ways in which serial print culture expressed the economic, historiographical, and social efforts that people made to secure stability.

Focusing on works by Jeremy Belknap, Charles Brockden Brown, Susanna

Rowson, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Joel Barlow, and others, I argue that the serial form enabled authors to revisit events that did not seem to conform to predictive historical philosophies. Each chapter attends to a different site of “temporal governance,” such as economics or social reproduction, demonstrating that authors were deeply invested in literary form’s power to evaluate rapid historical change. By tracing seriality’s continuous engagement with current events, I contend that textual history exposes the

ii lines of thought that informed early American concepts of temporality. My dissertation cuts across genres, emphasizing that multi-volume novels, political allegories, and serialized poetry share formal properties with magazine fiction. Arguing that seriality was the dominant literary mode during the early national period, this dissertation provides a framework for rethinking republican literature’s relationship to intellectual history.

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Acknowledgments

This project would not exist without the support of the Americanist faculty at the

Ohio State University. I owe an immeasurable debt to Beth Hewitt, who guided this dissertation from a one-page program of study to its current form. Beth is a tireless critic and remarkable mentor, and I can think of no better example of scholarly creativity and intellectual generosity. I also thank Jared Gardner, whose class on early American serials was the first class I took at Ohio State, and whose expertise in periodicals was indispensable to this project. In addition, I am grateful to Molly Farrell, who offered feedback and support in all areas of my professional and intellectual development.

Several institutions provided support for this dissertation. The McNeil Center for

Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania furnished me not only a year of funding but also an invigorating atmosphere in which to deepen my knowledge of the field. I thank Dan Richter for an enriching year as a Mellon dissertation fellow; I also thank Amy Baxter-Bellamy and Barbara Natello for their tireless work at the Center. The

Harrison Institute at the University of Virginia provided a fellowship, and I thank Hoke

Perkins for his support. In addition, the Massachusetts Historical Society awarded me a fellowship to work with the Belknap Papers; I am indebted to Conrad Wright for the opportunity, and to Kate Viens for her assistance. And I am especially grateful to the

Library Company of Philadelphia, where Jim Green’s knowledge of the collections is an incredible asset.

I thank the English Department at Ohio State for providing a terrific environment in which to pursue graduate work. The department made available the Margaret Blickle

Award, which enabled me to attend the Dartmouth Institute for the Futures of American

Studies. In particular, I thank Aman Garcha and Debra Moddelmog for their support for graduate students, and Kathleen Griffin for all she does to make sure our program runs smoothly. I also thank Steve Fink, Chad Allen, and Frank Donoghue, and David Brewer for their assistance, and Roxann Wheeler and Pranav Jani, who presided over some of the most rewarding classes I took as a graduate student.

I have been fortunate to make the acquaintance of several teachers and scholars in the past few years; I thank Marcy Dinius for her generous feedback at ‘the McNeil

Center’s Early American Literature and Material Texts Workshop, and I am grateful to

Christopher Looby for his advice and assistance. Andrew Kopec has modeled for me how to transition from a graduate student to a scholar, and I am indebted to him for the feedback and help he has given me.

Colleagues and friends also contributed to the completion of this dissertation, and

I am appreciative of their insights and support: Christine Croxall, Sonia Hazard, Rachel

Trocchio, Jess Linker, Brendan Gillis, Carolyn Roberts, Alan Niles, Jamie Forde, James

Hill, Demitri Debe, Sarah Levine-Gronnigsater, David Silverman, Max Mischler, Max

Dagenais, Lorri Daggar, Rachel Walker, Emily Merrill, Wanlin Li, Leila Ben-Nasr, Beth

Avila, Corrine Martin, and Michelle Wang. I am also indebted to my dissertation writing group, led by Trey Conaster. I thank Elly Williams, who has been my friend and mentor since the beginning.

No set of acknowledgments would be complete without a nod to Joe Finckel, whose trenchant observations about W.A.R. kept me in pursuit of a very singular goal.

My family deserves my deepest gratitude. Preston and Margaret Garvin have been my most tireless advocates. I also thank Karyn and PJ for their unending support.

This dissertation is dedicated to the memory of my grandparents, Leo and

Margaret Burns and Preston and Marian Garvin.

Vita

May 2001………………………………………………………B.A., English Denison University Granville, Ohio

June 2003………………………………………………………M.A., Creative Writing Ohio University Athens, Ohio

May 2009………………………………………………………M.A., English literature University of Connecticut Storrs, Connecticut

Publications

“Corporate Ties: Arthur Mervyn’s Serial Economics.” Early American Literature (50.3): Fall 2015.

Fields of Study

Major Field: English

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Table of Contents

Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………ii

Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………….iv

Vita………………………………………………………………………………………vii

Introduction: Ratification and the Serial...………………………………………………..1

1. Serializing History Jeremy Belknap’s Liberties with Literary Partisanship………………………….27

2. Serializing Economics The Serial Fiction of Charles Brockden Brown…………………………………70

3. Serializing the Self The Politics of Private Morality in the Serial Writings of Susanna Rowson …..104

4. Serializing the Archive Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry…………………………………147

Conclusion: Toward a Greater Understanding of Serial Epistemology……………...... 205

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………214

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Introduction: Ratification and the Serial

On October 26, 1786, a curious piece appeared in The New-Haven Gazette. This narrative fragment, The Anarchiad, was the first installment of a multipart serial co- authored by David Humphreys, Joel Barlow, John Trumbull, and Lemuel Hopkins. Part epic poem, part political commentary, and part fictive history, The Anarchiad offered a particular kind of serialized writing: one that used its fictionality to comment directly on political changes and that took its narrative shape from the events that unfolded in the public arena. Rather than offering pure political commentary, The Anarchiad strove for a kind of narrative coherence. It was a story within a story—one that mixed a fiction of discovery with one of direct political satire, and one that used an American setting to lend immediacy to the project as a whole. Posing as an antiquarian, the work’s fictive narrator belongs to a special society of critics and scholars who unearth the long-forgotten treasures from the banks of the Ohio River. One of these treasures happens to be a set of twelve books of poetry that, though written thousands of years ago, somehow detail the events of Shays’ Rebellion and constitutional ratification. Thus, the serial builds two related story lines, one in which the unnamed editor finds a treasure trove of literature and introduces it to the audience, and the other in which epic characters wage a battle to either antagonize or uphold the forces of polite constitutionality.

The Anarchiad might seem like a strange place to look for the beginnings of

American seriality. It is wholly unlike the more novelistic works by Charles Brockden

Brown and Susanna Rowson, which anticipate more directly the sprawling magazine serials of the mid to late nineteenth century. More political satire than narrative, The

Anarchiad is explicit about its purpose: to facilitate the ratification of the Constitution. Its characters are allegorical figures that stand in for either broad elements of society or very specific political actors. (“Anarch,” for instance, represents all the abstract forces set loose by Daniel Shays, while “Wronghead” more explicitly references the antifederalist instigator General James Wadsworth.1) Instead of coaxing its readers along with the promise of “to be continued,” The Anarchiad exists at the will of its creators. It is concerned with continuing only insofar as political conditions necessitate its reason for being, not the plausible resolution of its plot or the eventual fates of its characters. Unlike

Uncle Tom’s Cabin or The Hidden Hand, The Anarchiad is not beholden to a larger

“story world” that must unfold plausibly and achieve satisfactory conclusion.2 Indeed, it has no presence in the body of scholarly work about seriality, and the few pieces of criticism that address the work talk mainly about its importance as an early political undertaking by poet Joel Barlow.3

But I begin my history of seriality with The Anarchiad to illustrate a few crucial points. First, The Anarchiad demonstrates the ways in which early American serialists

1 Van Dover’s “The Design of The Anarchiad” explores the allegorical dimension of the work and glosses the most prominent characters (242). 2 The concept of “story world” (often written “storyworld”) is a relatively recent model developed by Herman, who writes that storyworlds “are composed of the expressive resources of (written) language, including not just words, phrases, and sentences, but also typographical formats, the disposition of space on the printed page (including spaces used for section breaks, indentations marking new paragraphs, etc.), and (potentially) diagrams, sketches, and illustrations” (vii-viii). But storyworlds also consist of the imaginative processes undertaken by both writers and interlocutors or stories, who “use a variety of cues to construct a timeline for events, a broader temporal and spatial environment in which those events occur, an inventory of the characters involved, and a working model of what it was like for those characters to experience the more or less disruptive non-canonical events that constitute a core feature of narrativity” (viii). 3 For a discussion of Joel Barlow’s political orientation in relationship to his creative work, see Dowling’s “Joel Barlow and The Anarchiad.” 2 oftentimes strove to use familiar literary forms to incorporate current events into narrative structures that were familiar and delimited. The fictional editor of The Anarchiad claims to have found this poem as a completed artifact, but the serial’s sequence of events, of course, depends very much on what is happening in the political arena at any given moment. Second, the narrative deliberately fashions two separate temporalities. It constructs a fictionalized national epic that, despite being a relic from the past, is able to forecast the future, while the work’s larger narrative frame points out “in real time” that social change is possible: the adoption of the constitution could alter the very course of events that the poem ominously forecasts. The Anarchiad plays upon the audience’s awareness of this strange paradox as a way to underscore the need for constitutional ratification and to remind readers of the uncertain nature of the American experiment.

William Dowling writes that the work “portray[s] in urgent terms postrevolutionary

America as it appeared to those who were even now emerging as Federalists, spokesmen for a limited or tempered revolution that would preserve the rights won by Americans while forestalling a dissolution into anarchy and bloodshed” (19). Suggestively, then, The

Anarchiad’s plot and structure imitate the larger intellectual problems of early American historiography. Just as The Anarchiad’s artifactual substance has already decided the outcome of historical events, so too has classical republicanism preordained this revolutionary moment as operating within the framework of cyclical historiography. That

The Anarchiad’s larger narrative frame features an editor who wishes to forestall chaos demonstrates how serialized literature worked to enfold historical developments into preexisting intellectual and narrative systems (cyclical history and epic).

The Anarchiad demonstrates that serial narratives had the capability to expose the limits of historiographical thought.4 Because they were published as they were composed, serials enable us to a more accurate picture of changing intellectual trends. Unlike integrated texts, which have the benefit of undergoing revision before being published as a finished product, the serial is released into the world as perhaps a more unmediated

(and oftentimes a more blatantly unperfected) expression of an author’s process. Authors choose the serial form to relay a narrative; in turn, the serial form influences how they approach their subject matter. In the case of The Anarchiad, its highly public nature forced readers to confront the chaos that would result from the failure of the Constitution.

More than that, it also forced its authors to examine events that deviated from predictive philosophies.

This dissertation sets out to explore the particular uses and features of seriality in the early republic. The story I tell is about a moment when uncertain and non-profitable publishing conditions overlapped with a burgeoning book and periodical marketplace to create a kind of serial culture that was by turns self-conscious, unstable, and ubiquitous.

That seriality can be described as both “unstable” and “ubiquitous” might seem like a contradiction in terms. However, I argue that seriality’s instability made it all the more ubiquitous. Few authors actually profited from their writing or made their living as

4 Dowling’s study of The Anarchiad carefully explicates the apparent political incompatibilities between the latent progressive liberalism of Joel Barlow and the enduring conservative positions of Timothy Dwight and David Humphreys. Whereas other critics have portrayed this fissure as emerging from Barlow’s gradual transition to more progressive ideals, Dowling understands classical republican thought as providing a common vocabulary to support both democratic and conservative lines of thought. Barlow’s “conversion” is not really a conversion at all—it instead emerges naturally from the complex range of civic humanist thought. I would reframe this argument in the context of seriality. Seriality requires authors to consider and incorporate whatever events transpire while they are composing their work. It actually stimulates writers to cultivate a complex and reflexive relationship with the world at large. 4 professional writers.5 Moreover, few periodicals actually turned enough of a profit to stay afloat for more than a year. But these impediments, as I explore in this dissertation, did not stem the tide of literature as much as they promoted flexibility and improvisation on the part of authors. Authors sometimes began their novels in periodicals only to see the periodical fail before their narratives reached completion. Others published the first volume of a novel but had to change publishers before releasing a second. These forced gaps in continuity undoubtedly compelled writers to come to terms with events as they transpired, or to reexamine their motivations as they looked for different opportunities to showcase their work. All told, uncertain publishing conditions actually provoked seriality rather than shutting it down, and these modes of continuing created literary works that were intimately connected to contemporaneous political events.

But seriality wasn’t just born of necessity. In this dissertation, I also detail why and how writers chose to compose and publish their works serially, using the delivery system and its special features because of how the form represented particular values and experiences. The authors of The Anarchiad obviously chose to publish this work in a periodical in order to impact the outcome of the Constitutional Convention. However, other authors were attracted to the serial form for reasons that were less immediately obvious. Susanna Rowson, for instance, might have found the serial format useful for the way it enacted gaps between installments that imitated gaps between correspondence—a way of writing and publishing that demonstrated for readers how missing information could provoke speculation. Hugh Henry Brackenridge, in turn, deliberately published his seven-volume work in distinctly separate installments over an extended period of time,

5 For an extended discussion of early forms of “professional” authorship, see Charvat’s The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800-1870 (5-28). 5 likely resisting the fabricated consistency of the textual artifact. By publishing serially at will, and by refusing to consolidate his many installments into a singular book,

Brackenridge emphasized that temporal distances were, in some ways, unbridgeable.

Authors used seriality for reasons that were as diverse and varied as the populations they were trying to reach.

My dissertation asks that we consider seriality more closely as its own literary form, one with distinct features, preoccupations, and purposes. Rather than conceptualize serials as would-be novels, or as the fragmented texts that authors envisioned as novels in pieces, I argue that we must attend to how texts were composed and published in order to grasp the greater extent of their cultural work. By invoking the term “cultural work,” I enter a decades-long debate about literature’s relationship to the world at large, a debate that considers literature’s aggregate engagement with economic, social, and political tensions. Formalist critics of the mid twentieth century generally viewed literature as both emerging from and critiquing its status quo, operating in uneasy tension with forces that shape reality.6 For New Historicists, these questions of power and ideology were additionally bound up in conceptualizing the literary artifact purely as an object of study.

As Maurice S. Lee wrote in a 2012, New Historicism’s obsession with anecdotal evidence meant that “one could mount sweeping arguments on relatively scant proof and that, given the unbounded flowing of discourse, virtually any homology between context and text could become a key to meaning” (752). My dissertation attempts to mitigate the

6 Most prominently, the Frankfurt School saw aesthetic objects as functioning dialectically, reinforcing the structures of power they were supposedly deployed to critique. Adorno wrote that the “double character of art—something that severs itself from empirical reality and thereby from society’s foundational context and society’s foundational context—is directly apparent in the aesthetic phenomena, which are both aesthetic autonomy and art can be conflated as something strictly social” (252-253). 6 limitations of anecdotal evidence by locating texts within an extended field of context. I argue that studying the serial allows us to assess a fuller and less anecdotally-driven portrait of authors’ continuing encounters with the structures of political knowledge.

Seriality demands that we shift our attention from the literary artifact to the literary process, considering how texts came to be assembled across varying temporal distances.

It provides us with a ready-made avenue of inquiry about authors’ proximity to historical events: What prompted authors to update their works at particular points in time? How did authors attempt to reconcile the impetus of their narrative with the gaps between installments?

As I argue in this dissertation, serial writing did not simply reflect an author’s political position; it also spurred particular kinds of approaches and engagements. The serial, I argue here, possesses a certain agency with which the author must contend. It makes demands—both narrative and political—across periods of time, requiring that authors revisit events from fluctuating perspectives, or make sense of ongoing political change. The author of the serial is not simply a literary craftsman who makes choices; he or she is also beset by various outcomes and beholden to changing possibilities. By studying seriality, we might more convincingly decenter the author from a discussion of early American literature and consider the importance of form. Authors make choices, but literary forms guide the particularities of expression. If historical-formalist arguments rely on a “hermeneutics of suspicion” to underscore the ways aesthetic objects inadvertently reveal cultural underpinnings, then perhaps seriality will allow us to apprehend that these clashing viewpoints are not simply evidence of social contradictions but of temporal disjunctures and competing temporal orientations. For many of the

7 serialists I profile in this dissertation, time unfolds not as linear progression but as continual revision and reevaluation of events. The serial provides a way to access materially the ways authors used texts to access the present and consider the future and the past.

My dissertation concentrates explicitly on fictional narratives for key reasons.

Fiction is simultaneously removed from and attuned to current events; I argue that this refraction makes it a more interesting window into the colliding realms of possibility

(how things could unfold in the future) and certainty (what has already been established).

For the serial, this tension between possibility and certainty is all the more germane, as the serial is invested not only in the future events of its narrative but in the actual, material future in which it will continue to be published. “Narrative”—a term that this dissertation defines to include not only novels but also poetry, allegory, and satire— works constantly to assimilate disparate pieces into a kind of totality. That is not to say that all elements of a given story necessarily move toward a predetermined conclusion— if anything, seriality argues for the opposite, as the narratives I discuss here change directions, pursue certain threads only to abandon them, and sometimes gesture to continuing into perpetuity in what Tzvetan Todorov might call “a pure principle of succession” (39). But even the most loosely designed narratives must address the material they have laid down previously and consider how they will handle what comes next. All authors must balance these ambitions as they write narratives, but for serialists these issues are amplified. Serials are, by their very public nature, irretrievable, available to readers before they can be revised or adjusted to form a more coherent work. Because they are published as they are being drafted, they must strive all the more transparently to

8 reconcile their disparate strands. Margaret Beetham defines the serial form as “not only characteristically self-referring but is by definition open-ended and resistant to closure”

(97). Serials of the early national period, however, are slightly different: they are caught between these two opposing poles of preordained closure and open-endedness, and they attempt constantly to reconcile ongoing narrative impulses and continuation with a larger structure. While these serialists might resist overarching teleology in favor of perpetuity, they are also acutely aware of the attractions of totality, juxtaposing these two yearnings in ways that sustain an ongoing investments in current events.

I make two important qualifications at the outset of this study. First, I define serials as works that were being drafted while they were being published. Because my dissertation argues that the process of writing serially shaped an author’s engagement, I include works only for which there is corroborating evidence that they were composed as they were published, and I exclude works that were serialized after they were already completed (like Charles Brockden Brown’s Weiland). My dissertation is concerned less with how readers received the serial and more with how serial writing constituted an author’s approach. Second, I define “seriality” as encompassing not only works that were published in separate installments—as magazine novels—but also as separate texts, such as multivolume books, sequels, and emended versions. I do not define seriality as beholden to a strict installment schedule. This move at first may seem disorienting, as it risks diluting the definition and special character of seriality, which has typically been understood as unfolding in regular intervals and reaching a community of readers who consume the installments together. But I argue that this risk is worth taking, as it allows us access to authorial processes. If we are to take seriously authors’ engagements with the

9 political world, we must strive to understand what influenced them to return to the same works over and over again.

More importantly, I argue that we need to refocus our understanding of seriality in order to fully contemplate its importance in this time period. In order to do this, we must question accepted definitions of the form. To give a brief synopsis of the scholarly conversation: Critics have previously maintained a very clear distinction between books and serials, arguing, in many ways, that serial and book publication have existed as diametric opposites. Scholars of seriality have been charged with the task of defending the serial form on artistic grounds and to argue against the enduring critical assumption that the serial was an inchoate form that worked in opposition to “the artistic unity of the novel” (Tillotson 40).7 Margaret Beetham distinguishes between periodical fiction and multivolume books, arguing that magazine fiction has often been “rescue[d] into the book form” (97). Other critics have held tightly to the idea that the serial had to unfold along a regular schedule. Roger Hagedorn confines seriality to installment culture, noting that

“[e]pisodicity is the crucial trait which distinguishes the serial (and the series) from the

‘classic’ narrative text—that is, the single-unit realistic narrative, including the novel in book form, the feature film, the radio play, and so on” (28). Likewise, Michael Lund and

Linda Hughes emphasize that the serial takes place “over an extended period of time with enforced interruptions” (1).

7 Much of Belasco Smith’s work on Uncle Tom’s Cabin responds to the critical tendency to treat Stowe’s work as a novel and to therefore disregard how Stowe structured each installment to respond to the challenges of serial publication. Martin makes a similar point in George Eliot’s Serial Fiction, noting that serials were designed differently than novels: “Each part had to be both a whole and part of the design” (29). 10

But our own distinction between the novel—as a “closed narrative”—and the serial—as a collection of piecemeal installments updated with regularity—may be anachronistic for the early national period. According to the Oxford English Dictionary,

“serial,” as it related to literary publication, did not enter common usage until 1835. So though authors of the early national period wrote serially and published their work in installments, they did not necessarily conceptualize their works as either serial or discrete. For that reason, definitions of seriality that rely on episodicity and readers’ habits of consumption are better suited to nineteenth-century seriality, which knew a more organized commercial market. In the early national period, publishing was more chaotic and less certain. Without stable commercial frameworks, authors were forced to improvise, using a wide array of publishing formats to satisfy both their readers and their own artistic curiosity. When we consider the number of works that were begun in periodicals and then continued as multivolume or multi-edition books, we must confront the fact that transmedial seriality was the norm, not the exception.

In the years following the Revolution, authors seemed to conceptualize most of their fictional works as open-ended and fluid, moving toward some uncertain point in the future. They frequently switched between periodical and multivolume formats, sometimes vacillating between them while drafting the same work. To give some ready- made examples: Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn began as a magazine serial and concluded as a three-volume set. His Wieland was published as a book, and then serialized after the fact in the American Magazine, and then followed up with the uncompleted Memoirs of Carwin, which was written and published serially in the

Literary Magazine. Jeremy Belknap began The Foresters in The Columbian Magazine;

11 when he had a falling out with the editors, he decided to publish The Foresters as a book—one he updated twice to add material about the sharp increase in partisan dissent.

It is likely that he would have continued to add to this work had he not died in 1798.

Susanna Rowson wrote her magazine serial Sincerity while editing the Boston Weekly, which she later republished as the bound volume Sarah. Additionally, Rowson wrote

Lucy Temple, the sequel to her iconic Charlotte Temple. Rowson also continued some of her narratives in her periodical’s sketch essays by encouraging her readers to speculate about the conclusion of Sincerity. Brown too used his position as a magazine editor to address the same themes that he explored in his serial fiction, using his novels as inspiration for a variety of essays. In effect, many authors saw their work as bleeding into other pieces as well as the independent imaginings of readers. For authors, the transition from periodical to book publication seemed not much of a transition at all, but way of continuing onward. And while I do not wish to argue that authors saw no distinction between periodical and book publication—clearly, this is not the case—I also think that authors of this period embraced continuation and perpetuity as a condition worth cultivating rather than trying to erase.

Most studies of the American serial focus mainly on how serialized publications shed light on reception and readers’ practices. It has become accepted fact that serialized novels instilled in readers a shared sense of community and a heightened awareness of pressing social issues. Michael Lund’s seminal America’s Continuing Story examines the serial fictions of the second half of the nineteenth century, stressing the ways that authors capitalized on the serial’s ability to generate common interest among readers. Similarly,

Susan Belasco’s “Serialization and the Nature of Uncle Tom’s Cabin” successfully

12 reorients a discussion of Stowe’s novel to its communal and abolitionist periodical contexts, suggesting that seriality was infused with a kind of “intimacy,” and that “no other literary form” allowed literature to become “a part of the day-to-day lives of readers” (71). More recently, Patricia Okker’s Social Stories has provided a comprehensive treatment of the serials of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, taking a closer look at many of the works we’ve forgotten, such as The Foresters and Martin

Delany’s Blake. The American serial, according to Okker, fostered the development of a nation that, just like the serial narrative itself, was characterized by its disparate yet connected parts. The interrelated-yet-disjointed narrative pieces “proved an ideal form for exploring not the individual identity of an American ‘self,’ but rather a collective understanding of the group” (3). Okker’s understanding of the serial narrative—both eighteenth- and nineteenth-century—emphasizes its social, democratic, and reader- centered aspects. The serial brought people together, and it also served as an antidote to the individualism of the novel.

These studies sensitize readers to those novels that were published in parts, but they also limit their scope to serials that were published exclusively in magazines. This dissertation looks to a larger range of serial productions in order to examine the writerly processes that produced evolving narratives. Media theorist Marshall McLuhan has famously argued that the “‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs” (8). But just as the delivery method of a certain text shapes the way the audience perceives its message, so too does this publication practice inform how authors conceptualize and distill their messages.

Publishing serially constitutes for authors both a choice and a larger formal impetus—a

13 foundational apparatus that spurred authors to reconcile new ideas and knowledge with those already set down in their already-begun works. Seriality both guided and expressed authors’ orientation to their subject matter. It was a choice and a necessity for distributing the pieces of a story, and it was a publishing method that actually shaped the narratives it produced. By attending more closely to an author’s purpose in writing and publishing their work in parts, and by considering how seriality constituted a story’s theme, we might better understand how literature constituted an ongoing and contested encounter that took place across varying temporal distances.

Serials were certainly not unique to American literature or to the early national period. Though American serial fiction emerged within the periodical culture of the eighteenth century, the form dates back to much earlier creative expressions. The

Canterbury Tales might qualify as a tentative kind of a serial narrative; so too might

Montaigne’s essays. Certainly people have always told linked stories that had the potential to continue onward; even more unquestionably, they did so without labeling their stories “serials.” As Hagedorn explains, many pre-modern works can be understood as operating serially, with Arabian Nights and Greek and Roman reliefs providing examples of the serial form in ancient contexts. But modern seriality as we know it today, according to Hagedorn, emerged only with a “mass medium that is consumed at regular intervals. Historically, for this to occur, one needs a social context characterized by these three essential elements: a market economy, a communications technology sufficiently developed to be commercially exploited, and [. . .] the recognition of narrative as a commodity” (29). Hagedorn points out that the first books were often distributed in

14 pieces. Though books were largely unavailable to most people, early modern publishers sought to ameliorate this problem by circulating already-written installments of much larger books. For example, Joseph Moxon’s seventeenth-century Mechanik Exercise; or

The Doctrine of Handi-Works is considered by Hagedorn to be an early instance of part- issue circulation (29).

As a serialized poem, The Anarchiad was not unique either. Samuel Butler’s

Hudibras provides an interesting precedent. Composed and published during the English

Civil War, Butler’s deeply satirical poem takes aim at the various factions that emerged during this politically fraught time. Butler published his work in multiple volumes in

1663, 1664, and 1678, using each volume to comment directly on events of the war as they developed. Hudibras also spawned many imitations. The most notable was Hudibras

Redivivus: Or, a Burlesque Poem on the Times by Edward Ward, which was published between 1705 and 1707. Ward was an inveterate serialist, one with deeply-held Tory sympathies that set him at odds with many of his literary contemporaries. Before and while he serialized this poem, for which he was pilloried, Ward serialized the nonfiction

London Spy (1698) and London Terrae-Filius (1707-1708). Published in eighteen installments, The London Spy, which Ward described as detailing “the Vanities and Vices of the Town,” proved a particularly popular account of London’s seedy inner-city.

Indeed, it was in eighteenth-century England that the serial form developed many of the features that we still recognize today. In the hands of authors who were more

Whiggish than Edward Ward, the serial became a principally effective tool for transmitting rational, middle-class ideals. Indeed, theorists such as Jürgen Habermas and

Benedict Anderson have associated the rise of print and newspaper publication with the

15 rise of nationalism. Traditionally, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s The Spectator is considered the first serial to lay claim to a short installment format. Printed daily as a small sheet, The Spectator follows the musings of the main character, Mr. Spectator, who inserts himself into the goings-on and daily foibles of his local community. Offering commentary on everything from social mores to literature, The Spectator would inspire generations of sketch essayists, including Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith. On the other side of the Atlantic as well, the serialized sketch essay became a staple of the periodical. An early famous example is Benjamin Franklin’s Silence Dogood essays, which were published in the New-England Courant in 1722. Presented as a series of letters, the Dogood essays made observations on fashion, widowhood, vices, and religion.

The periodical essay would rise to even greater popularity in the late eighteenth century, inspiring authors such as Charles Brockden Brown, Judith Sargent Murray, Susanna

Rowson, Joseph Dennie, and Washington Irving to contribute their own experimental wit to magazines.

Although these linked Addisonian essays might qualify as early examples of serialized literary production, they do not necessarily manifest the qualities of a serial narrative in the way that I define it for this dissertation. These essays often featured a fictional narrator who pretended to circulate in an urban center, collecting anecdotes for the edification and entertainment of readers, and often interacting with a consistent cast of characters. However, most sketch essay series were not governed by a larger plot- driven impetus. While some sketch essays contained larger interpolated narratives, such as Murray’s The Gleaner, most concerned themselves with topical issues that drove everyday debate. Unlike The Anarchiad, which addressed topical issues by putting them

16 in a larger narrative frame, sketch essays often did not work toward a larger project of resolution. They mainly collected observations and imparted humorous anecdotes.

Serials that were more recognizably fiction did not surface until after the

Revolution. Before this time, most of the serial narratives that appeared in American magazines were taken from British sources. An early example is The Fortune Hunter, which appeared in in 1774 in Isaiah Thomas’s The Royal American Magazine. The serial’s first installment was prefaced by an editorial note by “Altamont”: “Sir, As the scandalous practice of Fortune-Hunting, is prevalent in this as well as other countries, I beg you would insert in your useful monthly Magazine the following story, which I doubt not will be entertaining to many of your readers” (Feb 1774, 57). Though The Fortune

Hunter’s source is unclear, it probably was drawn from a British periodical or novel, as were many of the pieces in the Royal American Magazine. According to Lyon N.

Richardson, Thomas was “unable to gather for the forty pages of each number over ten pages of original work, and the nature of the submitted material was mostly too imitative, too general, or too pompous to be in any sense distinctive” (168). Of greater interest to scholars have been the two plates that accompanied The Fortune Hunter, which were completed by Joseph Callender. Richardson calls Thomas the “first Colonial editor to offer many confessional and love stories heavily laden with sex, sorrow, and sentimentality. These he borrowed from English magazines, which were sensitive to the public taste” (169). Richardson also points out that Thomas readily distinguished between borrowed and original material by prefacing his selections with either “to” or “for” the magazine.

In the 1780s and 1790s, the first original serial narratives would grace the pages of American magazines, beginning with The Anarchiad and continuing with the anonymously authored Amelia: Or the Faithless Briton and Jeremy Belknap’s The

Foresters. Like The Anarchiad, Amelia and The Foresters were both published around the time of the Constitutional Convention. But these narratives could not have been, on the surface, more different. Amelia is a seduction novel and quite short. The “original novel, founded upon recent facts” was published in two separate installments in late

1787. Detailing the Revolution-era seduction and subsequent ruin of an American girl by a British soldier, Amelia follows many of the seduction tropes of the time while also deviating from them in key ways. In the first installment, published in October, the heroine Amelia is led away from her family by an aristocratic seducer, Doliscus, who fools her into believing that he has married her. She subsequently finds herself pregnant and abandoned. Rather than acquiesce to her ruin, Amelia travels to London to confront her seducer and to reclaim her honor. After she is cruelly spurned by the soldier, she gives birth to a baby who dies; subsequently, Amelia contemplates suicide. In the second half of the narrative, published in December, Amelia’s father and brother appear in

England to try to rescue her. Her brother then challenges Doliscus to a duel and kills him.

Amelia then dies and her brother is later killed in the Revolution. At the end of the tale, readers are told that Amelia’s legacy is commemorated in a monument, much like the one that would mark the legacy of Elizabeth Whitman, Hannah Foster’s inspiration for The

Coquette.

Though a seemingly straightforward seduction tale, Amelia is a not-so-thinly- veiled political allegory that meant to provoke self-examination during and after the

Convention. Its serial publication, much like Anarchiad’s, drew readers into the greater political events as they unfolded. Both Amelia and The Anarchiad used recognizable narrative forms through which to explore these debates—albeit much different ones. The

Anarchiad was a satire and a mock epic while Amelia is a seduction novel; however, both narratives work within the parameters of genre to address timely and urgent concerns, using genre, in fact, to both satisfy and destabilize readers’ expectations. Tara Fitzpatrick observes that the “political nature of this ‘original novel’ […] was suggested by its placement in the magazine alongside domestic and foreign political commentary. Lest anyone be surprised at the inclusion of a serial tale of seduction, betrayal and revenge in a national magazine that had, a month earlier, published the first draft of the Constitution, it should be noted that the Constitution itself faced an anecdote entitled ‘Love and

Constancy’—a parable insisting that ‘conjugal fidelity’ was necessary for preserving liberty” (44). Amelia begins with a lengthy headnote to explain to readers the hardships of family life during the Revolution. The editor explains that “the author’s object is merely to glean those circumstances in the progress of the revolution, which the historian has neither leisure nor disposition to commemorate, and to produce, from the annals of private life, something to entertain, and something to improve his readers” (677). Within the greater context of needing to promote “love and constancy,” Amelia performs a function during Consolidation: to remind readers that the realms of politics and family are so interconnected as to be inseparable.

More importantly, Amelia and The Anarchiad use the serial form to make recurring contact with readers during a politically turbulent time. Both are anchored to a sense of doom, emphasizing that ruin is somehow inevitable, even as their didactic or

19 strident approach suggests that people can alter the course of events. Crucially, this constant negotiation between inevitability and possibility is ubiquitous in serial narratives of the early national period. The Anarchiad is more blatantly concerned with the cyclical course of history and the sense that the nation will need to check its mob-like impulses in order to overcome the ravages of time. But Amelia is also concerned with a kind of disorder that worsens as time passes—the disintegration of family life and personal- political virtue. Because serials evolved over extended periods of time, they often addressed more transparently the changes and shifts in attitudes and events. They also often registered anxieties about the future while examining how the course of events has already unfolded.

The Foresters also makes manifest the temporal challenges to nation building.

And like Amelia and The Anarchiad, it emerges within a specific genre (satirical allegory) that negotiates the fine line between certainties and interventions. As I explore in Chapter 1, “Serializing History,” Jeremy Belknap’s serialized allegory revisits politically fraught moments that occur over the course of the 1780s and 1790s. These destabilizing events—the French Revolution, the rise of Democratic societies, and the

Whiskey Rebellion—foreshadowed for Belknap the potential for the republican to devolve into chaos. But Belknap’s tactic was not to rail against these threats, as other satirists did, but to portray them as minor incidents in an ongoing narrative that asserted that the American colonial legacy could correct sharp partisan dissent. Much like other allegories of its time, The Foresters uses characters to stand in for nations, famous leaders, and social problems. “Walter Pipeweed” represents Sir Walter Raleigh and then eventually the entire state of Virginia from the colonial era to the early national period.

“Roger Carrier” represents Roger Williams and eventually all of Rhode Island.

Suggestively, Belknap’s allegory collapses vast temporal distances to erase the distinction between the present and the past and to therefore strategically assert that

American character is stable and unchangeable over time. Belknap’s actual text also performs the same kind of work. Belknap serialized the first chapters of The Foresters in the Columbian, but he updated his narrative periodically in book form. And rather than calling attention to the inevitable fissures between pieces, Belknap attempted to assimilate the updates of his narrative into a seamless material text. Just as the characters of The Foresters purport to remain constant and to represent entire bodies and states even as they change over time, so too does Belknap’s narrative yearn for the physical permanence of the integrated codex.

I argue in this dissertation that seriality is prone to try to mediate the passage of time—to embrace or erase its passage or to evaluate the challenges that time posed to social and national cohesion. Seriality might not be unique to the early national period or to American literature, but the writers and thinkers of the period believed they lived in extraordinary times, and many tried to reconcile differing concepts of time with the strains of revolutionary and stadialist thought. For many thinkers and writers, time was fraught with issues of inevitability, governed by continual revolutionary impulses and constant cycles of death and renewal. As Rousseau famously remarked, “You trust in the present order of society without thinking that this order is itself subject to inevitable revolutions, and it is impossible for you to foresee or prevent the one which may affect

21 your children” (qtd. in Kelly 28).8 But Raul Coronado has recently pointed out that eighteenth-century revolutions “all [erupted] with their own particular ideological configurations with distinct intellectual genealogies that, while on the surface all ostensibly yearned for liberty and equality, often resulted in incommensurable understandings of those very terms, liberty and equality” (9). Thus, cultural differences often governed how particular people conceptualized revolution, and categories such as

“the Enlightenment, revolution, independence” are “susceptible to multiple temporalities that may lead to familiar forms but with contents that have distinct geneaologies” (9).

Calling for a better understanding of these “genealogies,” Coronado argues that we must approach different national histories on their own terms to “move beyond obstinate analytical categories that obfuscate alternative histories, categories that line up neatly such as the Enlightenment, revolution, independence, and the modern nation-state” (11).

Though Coronado is discussing the critical tendency to view the Hispanic world as lagging behind Protestant northwestern Europe, I argue that we might apply his concepts to the various temporalities that seriality makes transparent. Early national literature is often discussed as having a firm foothold in the cultural trends of the era, either refusing or affirming the status quo. But conceptualizing early national literature as

“serial” enables us to see more clearly how authors tested differing concepts of time and post-colonial ideology, working through theories of time as cyclical, stadialist, or progressive. For Charles Brockden Brown, these questions of time are economic—an alternative framework to cyclical or stadialist theories. As Harry Harootunian argues,

8 But even as revolutions were thought to be inevitable, they were also considered, as Yves Citton and Myriam Revault d’Allonnes have recently pointed, to be “‘predictable,’ for the future’s course is precisely not governed by the idea of infinite progress.” 22

“the time of capitalism […] presents a smooth, unbroken surface that resembles national time, yet it also works to unify immense temporal irregularities—uneven time—in the sphere of production, circulation, and distribution—thus totalizing the various temporal processing resulting from the division of labor” (473n). Chapter 2, “Serializing

Economics,” explores how Brown’s Arthur Mervyn (1798-99; 1800) considers the long- term ties of economic relationships. It also explores Brown’s economic ideas about authorship. Because Arthur Mervyn as a novel examines economic instability, and because it emerged from a notoriously unstable literary marketplace, it actually demonstrates the way Brown capitalizes on perpetual deferral as a stabilizing force.

Brown takes the serial’s riskiest aspect—that it is premised on deferral—and harnesses it to describe an incumbent economic reality wherein everything relies on extended credit.

He also imagines Mervyn himself as a serialist—a character who delivers stories in pieces and never fulfills his promises in an effort to permanently forestall his auditors’ conclusions. In this case study, I emphasize that the novel’s prolonged structure posits that linearly “serialized” contracts undergird modern financial dealings, and that these contracts are animated by the emergence of corporate systems of finance. By likening

Mervyn to a serialist whose stories have no discrete ending, Brown imagines Mervyn as a fictive “corporate person” whose contractual relationships with his auditors evade pay- off. Ultimately, Brown uses the serial form to explore the complex financial afterlives that extend beyond the constraints of the temporal and the human.

Susanna Rowson provides another perspective on the serial’s penchant for fostering speculation, but she uses this focus on speculation for vastly different ends. In

Chapter 3, “Serializing the Self,” I argue that Rowson capitalizes on the temporal gaps

23 between installments to demonstrate for readers how rumor and misinformation take hold in the minds of readers. Rather than using the serial to govern the passage of time,

Rowson effects time as a definitely ungovernable distance—one that unleashes the uncontrollable forces of suggestion and speculation. For Rowson, these ideas have an explicit real-world counterpart: the continued pamphlet attacks by political instigators

William Cobbett and James T. Callender. Having suffered an attack from Cobbett herself,

Rowson found special urgency in the serial’s ability to approximate for readers the communicative impasses and information delivery systems that inflamed imagination.

Rowson’s Sincerity, then, is not simply a novel about a woman accused of adultery.

Rather, it stimulates critical attention to the broader surveillance culture that seeks to regulate women’s probity. If Rowson’s concerns seem less “public” or “political” than those of Belknap and Brown, I would submit they encompass an extraordinarily public issue—that of press freedom. As the federal government retreated from the project of regulating the press in the early nineteenth century, Rowson argued for personal measures that would both protect women and obviate the problem of suspicion: people needed to examine their reasons for engaging in baseless speculation and reading gossip pamphlets, and women needed to anticipate that they could at any moment become the subject of a slanderous attack. Thus, Rowson’s serial and periodical work both undermined and reasserted the culture of surveillance—but in a way that evinced

Rowson’s own pessimism about systemic inequality rather than her willful acceptance of female piety.

In my final chapter, “Serializing Archives,” I turn to Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s

Modern Chivalry, which spans seven separate volumes and unfolded over the course of

24 twenty-three years (1791-1815). In many ways, Modern Chivalry is a counter-anecdote to

Belknap’s The Foresters—it refuses coherence both textually and thematically as a way to demonstrate the failure of institutions and text to provide long-term stability. This chapter examines the publication of Modern Chivalry as well as Brackenridge’s sustained examination of the challenges to consistent republican governance. By examining how

Brackenridge negotiates the tension between the singular isolated installment and the larger narrative, I argue that Modern Chivalry underscores the difficulty of developing a national legal apparatus that transcends its particular moment and stands to stabilize society in the long term. Over the course of his multivolume work, Brackenridge tests various efforts to connect citizens across vast temporal distances, turning the narrative’s installments into textual artifacts, antiquarian collections, legal treatises, and other “found documents.” Suggestively, Brackenridge links an obsession with the past’s artifacts— literary, legal, and cultural—with incoherence and illiteracy, ultimately collapsing the distinction between literate republican society and the various indigenous and immigrant groups that populate the frontier. For Brackenridge, the long-term success of republican society hinges not upon erudite efforts to preserve culture but upon attempts to creatively reimagine governance for each particular time period. This “reframing,” which

Brackenridge portrays as both a literary and political endeavor, provides an important justification for disregarding previous agreements and treaties regarding frontier territory.

By promoting a literary solution to problems of governance, Brackenridge outlines a complex connection between early national textual production and efforts to manage and master indigenous territories.

In my conclusion, I look forward to the nineteenth century, considering the ways in which antebellum serials expanded upon and departed from the groundwork laid by authors of the early republic. I discuss works by antebellum serialists, and I examine nineteenth-century works by African-American serialists, who labored under shaky political and market conditions that were similar to those in the early national period. In particular, Martin Delany’s unfinished 1859 serial Blake; or, the Huts of America demonstrates the ways in which serials could materially convey the chaos of sectional crisis. In the final part of the conclusion, I consider the broader ways the serial form remains the centerpiece of contemporary popular culture. Rather than describing seriality as a practice that is merely incidental to the publication of longer works, I propose that we think about the form on its own terms. By examining the circumstances that surround the evolution of the serial, my dissertation secures a framework by which to trace the shifting political flashpoints of early national literature’s multiple commitments.

Chapter 1

Serializing History: Jeremy Belknap’s Liberties with Literary Partisanship

In May of 1787, famed American historian Jeremy Belknap wrote to Ebenezer

Hazard about the publication of his most recent literary project, a small satirical narrative that would eventually be known as The Foresters. “The piece (unfinished) to which I allude is my John Bull; and they [the editors of the Columbian] have offered me a guinea for three pages in the Magazine,” Belknap wrote. “But I must not be known as the author; for I shall take great liberty, and tell some sad truths, in pretty coarse language” (Belknap

Papers I 474). The Foresters was indeed a distinct departure from Belknap’s previous historical and religious writings, but the question remains for us to puzzle over: What

“liberty” did Belknap see himself taking with the story of American history? The

Foresters, after all, is a transparently Federalist rendering of the nation’s colonial origins.

Published during the Washington Administration, it seems a paean to strong central government. At its harshest, it politely satirizes general human follies rather than exposing “sad truths” about the current state of governance.

To our own modern understanding, Belknap’s allegorical retelling of U.S. history seems little more than an underwhelming footnote in American literary history.

Conservative and didactic in tone and subject-matter, the work’s significance rests solely on the celebrity of its historian author. The scanty amount of Foresters criticism confirms that this novel was of little consequence for reasons both political and literary: Peter

McCarter called The Foresters “typical of the political wit of the time” (169); George

Kirsch, who wrote a detailed biography of Belknap in 1982, denounced it as a work that had “only a minor impact on the progress of the American novel” and that “did not closely examine the life of colonial and Revolutionary America” (“Jeremy Belknap” 49); and even Lewis Turlish, who in 1969 edited the only surviving published edition of The

Foresters, expressed doubts about the novel’s merits, stating that it “is in no way a masterpiece of the Early National Period” and “suffers from a lack of a captivating persona within the narrative” (xii). In addition to its reported stylistic defects, The

Foresters also exemplifies generic indecisiveness. Part history, part allegory, and part satire, it seems an outlier among the more popular novels of the 1790s—a throwback to the era of Swift, Pope and Goldsmith. Even though its magazine publication predates

William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy by two years, it has rarely been considered a contender for the title of “first American novel.”9

But to dismiss The Foresters as obscure and Federalist is to deny the staying- power this narrative had for Belknap and its contemporary audience. The novel sold well and inspired coffeehouse debates and conversations about its authorship.10 More crucially, it was for Belknap an ongoing project that grew into a full narrative over the

9See Okker’s Social Stories: The Magazine Novel in Nineteenth-Century America. Okker writes that The Foresters’ allegorical nature “can best be understood not as a trait that disqualifies it as a ‘novel,’ many of which transgress more recent conventions” (32). Moreover, says Okker, The Foresters’ generic indecisiveness “raises some provocative questions not just about the beginnings of the American magazine novel, but also about the novel itself. If one considers The Foresters the first American magazine novel, it can also be considered the first American novel, for its serialization began two years before the publication of The Power of Sympathy in 1790” (32-33). In addition, the “novel” is of course a highly contested term. As Michael McKeon points out, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers often made no distinction between histories, romances, and novels (25).

10 See Kirsch, who writes that the “first edition earned [Belknap] about thirty pounds, and he was satisfied to learn that people were speculating about the author’s identity” (“Jeremy Belknap” 50). 28 course of a decade. He published the novel not once but three times, first as a magazine serial in 1787 and 1788, and then as two separate book editions in 1792 and 1796. In fact, even as he published other works at the time—namely The History of New Hampshire and American Biography—he returned to The Foresters again and again as if sensing that rehearsing his version of colonial history had the capacity to contain the ever-present twin threats of factionalism and dissent. Intriguingly, after it became a book it remained a serial project: Belknap updated it and extended it, adding new chapters that detailed the recent developments of American history. As the narrative found its footing in the

“Federalist decade,” it blurred the lines between current events and colonial history so much as to imagine them as contemporaneous—or as happening to the same characters within the same span of time.11 Even as Belknap’s serial narrative unfolded over a long period, it attempted to collapse these temporal distances, arguing that all American history can be characterized by a preternatural stability of American character and the fixed solidity of opinion.

In this chapter, I do not argue that The Foresters is a secretly subversive text. I do not look to The Foresters to unravel the tight hold that classical republicanism had on the early American imagination. Instead, I focus my inquiry more particularly on a few key points that underline the relationship between literary form, publication format, political ideology, and book history. I trace the peculiar publication history of The Foresters as a way to reorient our understanding of how early American authors appreciated, theorized, and used the serial form and its publishing format order to communicate the anxiety and

11 We might think of The Foresters’s very peculiar temporality as functioning as what Bakhtin calls a chronotope, or as the “intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (84). 29 promise surrounding consolidation. The Foresters is not simply a book about the nation’s beginnings; it is also a book about developing a story across time, space, and multiple publication venues. It asks us to imagine what it means in this particular time period to conceptualize history as always open-ended and amendable, and it demands that we consider how this creative process both influenced and expressed Belknap’s ideas about the political and ideological landscape of the early national period. A dedicated writer of serial literature, Belknap struggled to reconcile his serialistic vision with his staunch

Federalist ideals of a carefully structured society and a predictive historical philosophy.

As I will explore in this chapter, the serial form engendered for Belknap particular narrative demands and opportunities. Because seriality functions as a narrative form that unfolds over a long period of time, it enabled Belknap to continually amend and add to his allegory to reflect the current happenings of the republic. However, Belknap also struggled against the forward-moving serialistic imperative, striving to create a story that collapsed temporal distances rather than emphasizing their inevitably destabilizing nature. Belknap’s serial writing opens up our definition of seriality, requiring that we understand the practice not simply as writing for magazines but also as a writing process.

In many ways, Belknap attempted to work against this open-endedness, consolidating his story into a book—or an object capable of codifying and fixing historical events.

The Foresters offers us a peculiar case study in early national seriality. As

Belknap’s initial critics mentioned, The Foresters appears at first glance a superficial

Federalist treatment of the nation’s founding, unimaginative in its execution and uncomplicated in its ideological underpinnings.12 It certainly does not try to undermine

12 As Ed White has remarked, most of the fiction of the early national period was written by authors who were affiliated with Federalism in some way. Enumerating the many tensions inherent in Federalist social 30 the Federalist project in any way; it might not even inadvertently reveal Belknap’s reservations about Federalism’s shortcomings. By casting the history of the United States as a light Menippean satire, Belknap gently satirizes the follies of the nation’s founders while simultaneously enshrining their efforts at consensus-making and republican governance. But when we examine each version of the text, we understand that The

Foresters juggles the logic of Federalism with the precariousness of the American experiment—an act of maneuvering, I argue, that exposes not only Federalism’s shortcomings but also the real-life fissures of which other thinkers were undoubtedly forced to confront. Thus, The Foresters does not function simply as a text that reveals what it tries to conceal—although it does engage some suggestive techniques of erasure.

Rather, it displays the unresolvable and contradictory problems of nationhood itself, problems that became increasingly evident even to the most strident Federalists.

Over the course of a decade, Belknap would unveil the unresolvable and contradictory problems of U.S. nationhood itself: that it is an exceptional endeavor founded by equally perspicacious individuals; that it is also an unstable enterprise that must be guarded against the unchecked passions of its citizens; that its history is both exemplary and deserving of satire; that it faces the inevitable ravages of history—like all other nations—while setting course for a progressive and enlightened future; and that its people need to be subjected to a strong federalist government, even as this government emerges naturally from their intrinsic character. Philip Gould observes that Belknap’s

and political policy, White states: “Indeed many of the critiques of Federalist policy noted by readers of early U.S. fiction might be better read as clashes under and within the hegemony of the Federalist intelligentsia. [. . .] What becomes clear, I think, is our limited understanding of the variegated conservative intellectual front of the time: this was a movement that included anticapitalism with the most aggressive formulations of capitalism; that accommodated strong antislavery feminist positions alongside strict hierarchism; that included an acute anticlerical strain alongside theocratic tendencies; and eventually articulated Anglophilic secessionism alongside nationalist centralism” (6). 31 work exemplified the “transitional nature of the era itself, specifically the cultural currency of both republicanism and liberalism” (85). But I argue that the textual history of The Foresters reveals that the move from republicanism to liberalism was not so much a “transition” (at least for Belknap) as it was a contested encounter that unfolded in material texts. Seriality, then, both provides Belknap with a forum for exploring these issues and also exposes Belknap’s contradictory take on the nation. Belknap does not so much shift from one point of view to the next as he moves back and forth, revealing the ways in which political philosophy inadequately accounted for the new historical developments that seemed to defy both the pessimistic range of Augustan theory and the optimistic principles of liberal thought. By serializing and updating The Foresters,

Belknap attempted to make historical fiction and the text itself into a mutable and transformational ideological apparatus.

Interestingly, though, this same mechanism that allowed Belknap to consolidate the grand narrative of American history also alerted readers to the very need for intervention. By reissuing and amending his historical fiction in moments of national crisis, Belknap portrayed the opposite of what he tried to assert: that American character precluded the possibility of factionalism and decay. Especially after the 1794 Whiskey

Rebellion, The Foresters operates like a jeremiad, reminding its readers of the past while urging self-examination and wide-scale revitalization. In its last installment especially,

The Foresters resembles Augustan satire—or the body of literature that, according to

William Dowling, announced “an actual belief in the power of language to remake the world” (Poetry and Ideology ix). Typically wedded to classical republican thought,

American-Augustan literature warned that the fledgling nation might fall victim to the

32 ravages of history. For Augustans like Connecticut Wits Timothy Dwight, David

Humphreys, and Lemuel Hopkins, partisan activities and other populist developments foretold the decline of civilization itself—they were a sign that democracy would unravel into mobocracy and then usher in another period of despotic rule.13

Additionally, Belknap’s attempts to revise history continually renew his commitment to a republican sense of mediation and control: by refashioning an account that conceals the existence of factions, he creates a history that can readily authorize

Federalist politics. Belknap does not simply look to the past to affirm a sense of

American identity; instead, he invents the past and the present. Much like the classical republican’s ideal type of government, with its belief in mediation and control, The

Foresters is a carefully managed project that promotes a hierarchical and deferential society. Belknap’s treatment of slaves, Native Americans, and democrats demonstrates the Federalist need to simultaneously integrate and expunge such groups from the pages of history.

As I discuss in this chapter, Belknap believed that history could stabilize the changes wrought by the 1790s, but only once it had been ordered, revised, and reissued as

13 Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment expounds upon the ideas of the Augustan age, explaining that classical republicanism subscribed to the notion that a carefully ordered constitution might guard against the human passions that would inevitably lead to the devolution of society (458). Both Federalists and Republicans believed that history operated cyclically, but, as Appleby points out in Capitalism and a New Social Order, Federalists of the 1790s (such as Hamilton) were far more pessimistic about the nation’s economic expansion and westward push, seeing these developments as harbingers of rapid decay (94). William Dowling further explains the significance of cyclical history to classical republicans, noting that the famously Federalist Connecticut Wits subscribed to Augustan strains of thought. As many scholars have acknowledged, the period leading up to and succeeding the Revolution saw a synthesis of classical republicanism, civic humanism, and fervent evangelicalism. Dowling has pointed out that in during Consolidation the ideological underpinnings of both Federalists and antifederalists overlapped, so much so that the grim literary Augustanism of Timothy Dwight and David Humphreys converged with the “progressive” attitudes of Joel Barlow and Thomas Paine. This “moment of ideological convergence” emerged, Dowling says, from the “paradigm of civic humanism of which [cyclical theory] was a central element,” and which was “one of the ideological wellsprings of the revolution in the American colonies” (“Joel Barlow and The Anarchiad” 25). 33 a discrete text at critical moments. His need to efface history in order to make it a proper model for behavior and piety demonstrates his devotion to a staunchly republican worldview while also revealing that this worldview is both somewhat at odds with and wholly dependent upon the technology of seriality. As much as The Foresters’ serial impetus sometimes gestures toward the uncharted future and the cautious optimism of liberal politics, it unravels its own progressivism with a heavy-handed urge to amend history. The Foresters’ complex publication history urges special attention to the ways authors use the serial form to express political ideology—and, in turn, how the form’s particular features and impulses shape and prefigure an author’s approach to subject matter. Belknap strives to constantly incorporate new developments into his text while also attempting to erase the reality of time—the fissures and disruptions that seriality makes so apparent. By hiding its own creative process, The Foresters equates temporal and textual cohesion with consensus.

The Three Versions of The Foresters

Like many fictional pieces of the early national period, The Foresters initially emerged from the pages of a periodical. First published in the Philadelphia-based

Columbian Magazine in 1787 and 1788, it appeared alongside the usual fare of the

American magazine: political tracts, histories, biographies, and poetry. According to

William Free, Belknap was the most prolific of the Columbian’s contributors: he regularly wrote several sketches for each issue, and ten of the twelve issues of 1787 contained sketches and articles that he had written.14 But Belknap had a difficult time maintaining a multipart fictional serial—in part because of the magazine’s financial

14 See William Free’s The Columbian Magazine and American Literary Nationalism, 37.

34 difficulties. Like so many periodicals of the late eighteenth century, the Columbian struggled to stay afloat. When he had a falling out with the magazine’s editors, he discontinued The Foresters as a serial and concentrated on publishing it as a book.

As a serialized allegory about the founding and settling of the North American colonies and their subsequent break from England, Belknap’s 1787 version of The

Foresters seemed particularly well-suited for publication during Constitutional ratification: it fashioned a narrative of American history that both lauded the founding colonists for their fortitude while gently poking fun at them for their occasional weaknesses and petty self-interested moments. Patricia Okker argues that The Foresters operates as a Ratification-era text precisely because it shows the colonies as working together “as a family” to rise above the limits of their self-interest in a way that “suggests an interest in communal, if not yet national, identity. [. . .] Just as Belknap suggests that the colonies needed to overcome their historical and religious differences in order to survive, supporters of the Constitution sought to overcome differences among states

(based, for example, on size and religion) so as to establish a strong federal government”

(41-2). But Belknap did not simply imagine his narrative as wading into Ratification-era debates. By calling The Foresters “my John Bull,” and by advertising it as “a sequel to the History of John Bull, Clothier,” he argued that American literature was inseparable from its colonial antecedents. When Okker emphasizes The Foresters’ investment in issues of American nationalism, she only partly encapsulates Belknap’s project. As a text that references and builds upon John Arbuthnot’s The History of John Bull, The Foresters argues that American history may be the sequel of British history—not just as a dramatic departure from its most damaging aspects. The Foresters is predicated not so much on the

United States’ exceptionalism or uniqueness as it is its reliance on its temporal precedents.

The History of John Bull, published in 1712, was a predecessor of The Foresters in its form as well as its purpose. As a serial publication that spanned five pamphlets,

Arbuthnot’s satire addressed contemporary issues of Parliamentary politics and international conflicts as they actually unfolded, exposing the folly of England’s involvement in the War of the Spanish Succession and advocating for more rational foreign policy. Arbuthnot’s stories enjoyed a healthy afterlife throughout much of the eighteenth century, so much so that the term “John Bull” was very quickly absorbed into popular culture, circulating without any attribution to Arbuthnot or acknowledgement of his stories. Therefore, when Belknap explicitly describes his story as a sequel to

Arbuthnot’s, he emphasizes that the story is continuing the tradition of British satire. He even quotes Arbuthnot in his first paragraph: “Every one who has read the history of

John Bull, the clothier, must have observed, that though ‘he was in the main an honest, plain-dealing fellow, yet he was choleric and inconstant, and very apt to quarrel with his best friends’” (Columbian Magazine, June 1787, 453). Belknap continues, emphasizing the connection between Bull and his apprentices: “as the opinions and manners of superiors have a very great influence in forming the character of inferiors, we need not be surprised if we find a family likeness prevailing among the persons whose history we are about to recite, most of whom were residents in Mr. Bull’s house, or apprentices in his shop.”

Belknap’s reference to Arbuthnot’s work is additionally significant. By transparently invoking Arbuthnot’s work, Belknap positions his narrative to embrace

36 seriality and intertextuality. The Foresters evinces a sequential, cause-and-effect relationship between British and American history—a relationship that suggests interdependence as much as independence—and that declares an awareness of the past as well as a belief in the foresters’ ability to progress to a better future by detaching themselves from John Bull. Belknap’s narrative is not only the story of the founding of the nation but also the story of John Bull, the sympathetic but misguided patriarch of a large extended family, beset by his troubled relationships with his neighbors and his fanatical mother. By setting up his narrative as a character study, Belknap catalogues the numerous flaws that caused John Bull to fail at his endeavors, and by noting the similarities between Bull and his descendants, Belknap suggests that these flaws existed within the foresters as well. But crucially, Belknap uses this connection between the colonies and Great Britain to establish the ways in which the foresters are able to achieve an outcome different from John Bull’s. John Bull is led astray by his wife (Parliament) and his mother (the Church of England), and he is eventually undone because of his foreign entanglements with Lord Strut (Spain) and Lewis (France). In short, he becomes a tyrant—and a cautionary tale about the corrupting nature of power and foreign influence. When not restrained by his apprentices, he makes poor, financially irresponsible decisions that cause him to eventually cede control of his forest. The foresters themselves, then, are an exemplar of Federalism’s curative powers: they succeed because they are so many. Individually they harbor the same flaws and shortcomings that John Bull does; as a collective, they embody disinterested restraint.

The Foresters, then, seems on the surface an overwhelmingly optimistic story—a light satire of people’s follies and faults—and perhaps it would have ended as one had

Belknap concluded it as he does in 1792, with the foresters putting aside their differences to create a perfect state. But The Foresters, as William Eitner has rightly observed, was a

“thrice-told tale”15 and its last major revision came in 1796. It is this final version that complicates Belknap’s vision most problematically. But before turning to the 1796 text and its own political anxieties, I will first discuss the earlier versions of the narrative in order to provide a fuller picture of the long arc of Belknap’s project. Indeed, The

Foresters’ political project can be understood only as a serial—as a text that negotiates its open-endedness against an idea of American history that forecloses upon political chance.

Eitner remarks that Belknap’s allegory “gives us a satirical slant on historical events that were then still within memory” (161), but particularly provocative is how Belknap saw recent history as indistinguishable from the distant past. In Belknap’s allegory, the same characters who settle the forest later participate in its Revolution; these characters remain metonymically stable despite how much time goes by. For example, the same Walter

Pipeweed (Sir Walter Raleigh, later all of Virginia) who settles his section of the forest remains Walter Pipeweed through the Revolution and the ratification of the Constitution, concerned with preserving Walter Pipeweed’s interests (mostly regarding tobacco and farming). For Belknap, the colonial character persists into the present age, and the same concerns and interests that characterized settlement are reflected in more recent

15 Further, Eitner notes that scholars have largely ignored the changes that Belknap made from one edition to the next—some of them minor and some notable. For example, unlike the magazine version, the 1792 and 1796 versions are written in the epistolary mode, and Belknap’s letter-writer, a visitor among the foresters, addresses a specific recipient who wishes to know about the foresters’ customs and way of life. Belknap uses footnotes in each version of The Foresters to explain the targets of his satire, but in 1796 he adds a clavis allegorica after the table of contents.

38 developments. The partisan crises of the 1790s happen to the same people who settled the forest in the first place.

The first nine installments published in The Columbian Magazine in 1787 and

1788 are a relatively simple and straightforward allegory of colonial history: they detail many of the interpersonal and colonialist conflicts that arise when the foresters to journey to an uncultivated country. John Bull, who has inherited a “pretty large tract of land,” leases sections of his unsettled forest to a collection of apprentices and family members.

These apprentices represent the American colonies and prominent colonial figures—

Frederick Peterson is Maryland, Roger Carrier is Rhode Island, and John Codline is

Massachusetts. When Bull’s mother (the Church of England) is “seized with hysteric fits” and “all sorts of whims,” she alienates other members of the family (such as Peregrine

Pickle, or the Plymouth Adventurers), who also journey to the forest to live a more autonomous life (Columbian Magazine, July 1787, 514). But peace, if it ever materializes, is short lived. The settlers face a number of challenges to their stability and prosperity: their settlement is continually threatened by encroachments by the forest’s wild animals (Native Americans), and their clashing values make it difficult for them to operate as a cohesive unit. Belknap’s version of the Anabaptist conflict, for instance, is rendered as a petty dispute over meaningless ritual and hygiene. Roger Carrier and John

Codline fight about face washing: Roger “had taken a fancy to dip his head into water, as the most effectual way of washing his face, and thought it could not be made so clean in any other way. [. . .] John was out of patience with this addition, and plumply told him, that if he did not reform his principles and practice, he would fine him, or flog him, or kick him out of doors” (Columbian Magazine, Aug. 1787, 565).

Throughout the first nine installments of The Foresters, several key issues emerge that typify the early challenges to settlement and independence: religious intolerance (and the irrationality that it causes) and threats to autonomy (brought about by John Bull’s financial problems and presence of the forest’s “animals”). Though the foresters are initially driven away from John Bull because of his fanatical mother, they also must contend with their own conflicting belief systems and religious differences. The foresters succeed because they adhere to a classical republican belief system that encourages them to subordinate their individual passions to the greater communal good. No more rational than John Bull himself, they are saved by their sheer numbers and their willingness to accommodate one another’s differences. The most significant challenge to the foresters’ autonomy comes not from their own idiosyncrasies but from John Bull himself, whose foolishness leads him into ill-advised economic policies and gambling debts. Embroiled in lawsuits with neighbors Mr. Lewis (France) and Lord Strut (Spain), Bull demands that the foresters help him cover his debts. When the foresters refuse, they enter into a lawsuit with Bull. The result, of course, is the Revolution, which Belknap portrays as won legitimately and politely within the confines of a courtroom.16 Thus, Belknap revises history to promote the idea that nations can solve problems legally and rationally and without resorting to violence. The foresters, when working together, manage to solve their problems without causing significant harm to each other or to their patriarch.

16 Belknap’s (typically Federalist) urge to legitimize the Revolution as a polite and legal act has been discussed extensively by other critics. Turlish notes that in Belknap’s story “the foresters do not rebel against legal authority, since John Bull has no legal title to the forest. The foresters are thus perfectly justified in appropriating the land for themselves” (ix). Kirsch calls Belknap’s version of events “a patriot’s interpretation of the Revolution” and says that the “key images in The Foresters reveal his concept of the Revolution” as a “family argument”: “The satisfaction of a well-argued legal case replaces the glory of war; logic and truth, not guns and swords, are the weapons. The final cause is brought to a favorable verdict at York Court” (“Jeremy Belknap” 48-9). 40

Belknap’s second version of The Foresters was published in 1792. This volume collected the early nine installments and completes the story of the Revolutionary War.

But Belknap’s narrative does not end with the foresters’ courtroom triumph. Instead it keeps going to incorporate the tumult of the late 1780s—conflicts between Federalists and Anti-Federalists, Constitutional Consolidation, and the need to settle overwhelming debts. Thematically, then, the 1792 version endeavors to delineate the politics of self- determination and the probationary success of the foresters’ governmental program. The

“plan,” as it is called by the narrator, is a complicated and delicate undertaking: “if the plan was compared to a house,” the narrator states, “then the objection would be made against building it too high, lest the wind should blow it down.” But if the plan is

“likened to a ship, then it would be asked, how shall we guard it against leaking?” (1792,

190). Influenced by Hobbesian attitudes, the foresters adopt a plan of which the

“fundamental principle” is “not to suppose men as good as they ought to be, but to take them as they are” and to initiate a strong federal government to keep such men from committing harm (1792, 184). When this government prevails in the end, Belknap’s narrator seems satisfied that all is well in the forest. He recommends that his audience—a correspondent who is never named—“journey hither . . . to convince you how much human industry and ingenuity can perform in a short time, when nature has already done her part toward making a good country and a happy people” (1792, 211). Belknap’s optimism is tempered by his conviction that a strong federal government must correct the defects of human nature. Significantly, the foresters are able to transform their particular historical moment by relying on a carefully ordered government. Like other Augustans,

Belknap here asserts that government is necessary for delaying the unraveling of society.

But unlike the Augustans, Belknap seems cautiously optimistic about the foresters’ ability to sustain themselves as a long-term collective—and mostly because their model of federalism-as-character provides a strong foundation for postponing the ravages of history.

Belknap’s 1792 version also treats the beginnings of the French Revolution. Mr.

Lewis, Belknap’s stand-in for France, has long kept a series of mistresses “who minded on their own pleasures and the enriching of their own relations and dependents.” As a result, Lewis’ tenants—or France’s citizens—“were abused, the mansion house was dirty and out of repair, and the rents were paid into the hands of the steward, yet much oppression and embezzlement, and little economy, were the constant topics of complaint”

(1792, 208). Inspired by the foresters’ rebellion, Mr. Lewis’s lawyers find that the same arguments they used to help the foresters might apply “with equal propriety” to the oppressive conditions of Mr. Lewis’s family. Provocatively, Belknap seems more comfortable writing about human rights as they pertain to the situation in France.

Whereas the foresters had rebelled against Mr. Bull because of his unlawful debts, Mr.

Lewis’s tenants are driven to rebellion by inadequate living conditions and violations of basic human rights.17 The rebellion of Lewis’s family is one of the rare narrative moments where Belknap intimates that revolutions—or lawsuits—do indeed represent a break from past traditions and a gesture toward an uncharted future. Still, the outcome of the French “lawsuit” is, however, another instance of polite compromise rather than

17 George Kirsch notes that Belknap “emphasized the commercial character of the foresters’ community and the importance of securing their property but neglected the question of human rights” (“Jeremy Belknap” 49). This observation is, of course, in keeping with the idea that Belknap is writing a markedly Federalist version of the Revolution—one that emphasizes the politics of commercial and legal self- determination. 42 wholesale revolution: Mr. Lewis is persuaded “to marry a reputable woman, who would be agreeable to the family” (1792, 208). The woman, France’s National Constitution, is portrayed as a “lady of good sense and polite manners” who remodels Lewis’s mansion and demolishes his “dirty dog kennel,” or the Bastille (209).18

Predictably, then, Belknap’s 1796 version begins by revoking his previous attitudes toward the French Revolution. If Belknap was willing to overlook the violence of the French Revolution in 1792, he is quick to revise his previous sentiments in 1796:

“I have told you,” the narrator writes, “that there was a suspicious hankering which Lewis indulged toward his cast off mistress, and that the neighboring gentlemen savored the intrigue. This suspicion has been sadly verified, and a long and bitter controversy has ensued between Lewis and the new wife who had been imposed on him” (1796, 207-8).

More importantly, Belknap’s tone shifts as he takes on the matter of violence. Lewis’s family has been cruelly “turned out of doors” while his supporters were “so roughly handled by the majority, that such of them as could, were glad to escape, leaving the rest maimed and wounded on the floors; which were [. . .] stained with blood.” (1796, 208).

This moment of violence and pure disavowal is rare in The Foresters, but it underlines the complex nature of Belknap’s serial project: by reissuing The Foresters at this precise

18 Despite The Foresters’ initially optimistic attitude toward the French Revolution, Belknap viewed the Revolution as an eruption of men’s unchecked and violent passions. In September of 1789, he wrote to Hazard that he was “sorry they massacred the officers of the Bastile [sic]. Had they confined them, and let them have opportunity to make their defence, it would have been more congenial to the spirit of liberty; but it was the effect of furor brevis, to which all men are subject” (Belknap Papers II 166). Belknap’s opinions on the French Revolution align him with the other Augustan thinkers during what J. G. A. Pocock calls the palpable moment “in which the republic was seen as confronting its own temporal finitude, as attempting to remain morally and politically stable in a stream of irrational events conceived as essentially destructive of all systems of secular stability” (vii). The Foresters attempts to present a moral and political version of history in two related ways: it seeks to reorder history so that it confirmed the virtues of a strong federal government, and it attempts to reconcile presents threats to stability with a fabled and constructed past.

43 moment, Belknap understands that his narrative has the power to intervene in the present political situation—to repudiate, to warn, and to instruct readers how to feel about such violent revolutionary activities. At the same time, Belknap attempts to maintain the levity of his previous installments, referring to Lewis’s “cast off mistress”—demonstrating, perhaps, the need for consistency. If Belknap envisions history as a serial text, then he must reconcile—however unsuccessfully—its various strands, subordinating incongruences to the narrative that has come before. It is this devotion to seriality that emblematizes and animates Belknap’s ideological brand of historical fiction: the narrative must move forward, incorporating new events even as it tries to represent a version of history that is relatively stable.

Belknap’s most pressing challenge, however, comes when he must fictionalize the nation’s most recent domestic crises: the Jay Treaty and the Whiskey Rebellion. If the previous versions of The Foresters were concerned mainly with the domestic politics of self-governance, then the 1796 edition considers how matters of international intrigue threaten to destabilize the society that the foresters have built for themselves. Bull’s choler and jealousy of the foresters prompt him to prohibit them from trading at his sugar warehouse, but the “Franks” pose an even greater problem: they desire to aggressively export their violent version of democracy to their neighbors—or to “bring on revolutions among them, or as they metaphorically expressed it, ‘to plant the tree of liberty in their gardens’” (1796, 215). When the foresters fail to be coerced or tempted by the temptations of Jacobinism, the Franks resort to behavior that is even more extreme: they send Teneg (Citizen Genet) to the forest to in a basket of birds’ eggs. These eggs hatch into a new species, “Mother Carey’s Chickens”—a symbol for the insurrectionists who

44 caused the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion.19 Thus, in the fictional world of Belknap’s creation, the Whiskey Rebellion is not a prolonged domestic dispute over taxes and the Federal imposition of power but evidence of foreign tampering. Belknap’s highly satirical and mediated model allows him to recast the Rebellion as farcical barnyard disaster.

The “Mother Carey’s Chickens” episode is the text’s most ideologically fraught moment, one that betrays Belknap’s discomfort with the representative government that

James Madison espoused in the tenth Federalist. Though Belknap disavows the Rebellion as little more than foreign interference, he still devotes to it several pages. Set loose in

William Broadbrim’s field, Mother Carey’s Chickens chant phrases like “whisky” and

“war” and “jaco,” but they pose no material threat to the foresters’ stability. After they are chased away by a group of archers, they resurface only occasionally to make noise and to drown out the “contemplations” (1796, 235) of George Pipeweed. They are seen afterwards “mixing with the common poultry” (231), but they are in the end symbolic of

Jacobins’ failure to export their brand of revolutionary politics. By portraying this domestic struggle as an act of foreign aggression, Belknap revises current events to include them in the grander narrative of American consensus and cooperation.

The Foresters final version ends on this strange note: Mother Carey’s Chickens are under control (though perhaps not for long), and the Forest is a mostly peaceful place.

But Belknap’s narrator issues several warnings. First, he states that the foresters have the potential to be “as happy a set of people as any on the globe”—but only “if they should

19 Belknap probably did not invent this term. According to Peter Kyle McCarter, John Fenno’s Gazette of the United States printed a political fable in 1793 that featured Mother Carey’s Chickens as a “Federalist caricature of Jeffersonian Republicans” (165). Belknap had been in communication with Fenno around this time (see Belknap Papers II 274, 278, and 295), but McCarter thinks it improbable that Belknap actually authored the piece. More likely, he probably lifted the idea from Fenno’s newspaper just as he borrowed many of his characters from Arbuthnot’s History of John Bull (170). 45 continue at peace among themselves, uninfluenced by the quarrels, and untainted by the dissipation and folly of their neighbors” (1796, 240). Second, he delivers a postscript cautioning against the proliferation of “rats” (speculators) in the forest, who “not only remain, but are very numerous and mischievous” and are “so sly and evasive, that they elude all the arts of common rat-catchers; and at the same time are so bold and impudent as to make their appearance in open day-light, in the houses, roads and fields” (240).

Alluding to the Yahoo land speculation scandal, the narrator notes that these rats have taken up residence in the dining room of George Trusty (Georgia). If the narrative feels unfinished, then perhaps it was meant to be: Belknap died in 1798, and it is feasible that he might have continued the narrative when he saw fit, incorporating new events into the schema he had developed. The Foresters is a meditation on what it means to write an ongoing, open-ended allegorical history—a narrative that seems to work toward some kind of resolution, but as a serial remains speculative about the future.

The Foresters’ desire to be both an open-ended serial underscores its conflicted thematic. The narrative both warns against the inevitable disintegration and decay posed by the destabilizing forces of history—forces set loose by rapid commercialization and unchecked human passions—and it also argues that the nation is truly an exceptional project that does not need intervention. Through The Foresters endorses the foresters’ society as a rejection of John Bull’s past and therefore as an exception to European precedents, it also advocates Augustan attitudes toward identity, trade, and political organization. Belknap’s allegory paints the foresters as a collection of aristocratic yeomen whose rights have been secured by a polite, legal revolution and whose agricultural riches keep them from relying too much on foreign powers. He also

46 emphasizes that the society is a hierarchically structured republic, with several families identified by their ancestral affiliations and headed by George Pipeweed. Most importantly, Belknap stresses that the foresters have fashioned a seamless society. In

Belknap’s political imaginary, only foresters exist to make up the composite parts of the settlement, and they are united by a common lineage (extending from John Bull) and a commitment to the same ideals. Though conflicts occasionally arise among the foresters

(like those between “fiddlers” and “anti-fiddlers”), they are always resolved and the bond between the families is constantly reaffirmed. Even as the foresters encounter Jacobin threats this bond is strengthened; the fact that Jacobin threats never fully materialize reinforces the notion that federalism is a matter of character rather than choice. In other words, Belknap argues that to be a forester is to be a Federalist—to be utterly unmoved by the temptations of Democratic-Republican rhetoric.

Belknap’s satire still attempts to warn its readers against the attractions of partisanship—even as it asserts that the U.S. colonial legacy prevents the existence of factions. This feature makes The Foresters different from other more strident Federalist satires of the same period. Belknap’s contemporaries often emphasized the threats to the unity of the republic and blamed partisanship for the hastening of society’s decline, even as they themselves adopted recognizably partisan stances. By explicitly taking aim at

Democratic-Republican organizations, these satires positioned dissent as an act of domestic treason. Belknap, on the other hand, portrays Democratic-Republican societies ineffective in matters of political subversion. In The Foresters, Jacobin infiltration poses no greater threat than a flock of noisy chickens, and speculators are rats who pilfer crumbs from dinner plates. Unlike his contemporaries, Belknap’s tactic is not to expose

47 the opposition’s treachery; it is to invent a world where opposition is so ineffectual—so incompatible with a forester’s character—that it is doomed to fail as surely as did John

Bull.

However, Belknap’s “liberties” with current events—his desire to revise the

Whiskey Rebellion to fit his schematic, for instance—actually underscore the presence of dissent. These “liberties” reflect what Eric Slauter calls the “veneer of consensus” so evident in the days of the early republic, or the ideological project that framers undertook to repress the persistence of factionalism and dissent (6). In working so hard to cover up or ignore the threats to federal unity, Belknap inadvertently exposes his anxieties about the staying-power of the Constitution and the new federal government. Moreover, by deliberately dismissing the existence of partisan divisions and homegrown dissenters,

Belknap attempts to create in historical fiction what was so elusive in reality: the kind of federal pluralism that incorporated all views while subordinating them to a central authority. The difficulty of representing the nation in all its constituent parts becomes a problem that Belknap cannot completely solve. Instead of highlighting, in Madisonian fashion, the opposing points of view that representative government supposedly celebrates, Belknap makes the Democratic-Republican societies a distinct group that needs to be expelled rather than assimilated into the nation. Unlike Madison’s tenth

Federalist, which argues that the representation entailed by republican government will actually obviate the prospect that representative democracy would ultimately lead to wide-scale corruption of the people, Belknap’s story disavows the potential of representative government. Whereas Madison argues that representative government will control the effects of factions, Belknap desires to expel anyone from the republic who

48 does not embody the Federalist character passed down from the nation’s (highly fictive and constructed) founders. And by rendering the Whiskey Rebellion such a barnyard farce, Belknap makes clear that the factions of which Madison speaks are in no way a natural outgrowth of a republican system. Instead, they are foreign infiltrators.

Belknap uses seriality for two related purposes: to reiterate the crucial moments of the nation’s past, reminding readers of the stability of American character—a stability that confidently assures the success of the national project—and to issue warnings against factionalism—an approach that undermines the belief in American exceptionalism. The first use of seriality is evident in Belknap’s attempt to collapse the distinction between the present and the past: William Broadbrim remains the stand-in for Pennsylvania long after

William Penn has passed away; the French and Indian War and the Glorious Revolution occur out of order, evincing a model of history that is thematically-structured and recursive rather than chronological and linear. The second use of seriality undermines the first—after all, if the U.S. is a stable venture, then it is not in danger of disintegrating into chaos. Though Belknap works hard to diminish the threats to stability, he still acknowledges that they exist. As much as he attempts to enshrine U.S. history as a model for policy, he also argues that history must be carefully revised to accommodate current events.

The Foresters as Poetic Warfare

Belknap first began The Foresters in 1787. Originally intending it only as a private gift to editor Robert Aiken, Belknap sent it to Hazard first for his approval: “If you think it worth his acceptance, I will proceed in it; and it will serve for a by business, when I feel right for it, which is not often” (Belknap Papers I, 424-5). Throughout the

49 next decade, Belknap would keep in close touch with Hazard about the narrative, asking for his input and requesting, above everything else, that Hazard not reveal his identity.

Periodical and book publications were often anonymous, but Belknap’s obsession with his anonymity was particularly pronounced. While searching for a book publisher in

1789, he wrote to Hazard, “Do you know of anybody equal to the business I could trust with the secret, for a secret it must be that I am the author, if it can be?” (Belknap Papers

II, 136). In 1792, immediately before his book went to press, he again emphasized to

Hazard that he wished to remain “concealed, if possible” (II, 278). Belknap and Hazard would occasionally refer to Belknap’s authorship as the “secret,” and Hazard seemed to relish the privilege of knowing. Belknap also asked Hazard if he had heard anything said about The Foresters (Belknap Papers I, 489). Belknap anticipated that his work would become a point of controversy.

Although Belknap authored a “mild” satire, as Kirsch points out (46), he seemed to understand that his work flirted with some of most vexed partisan controversies of the era. Indeed, Belknap grasped that The Foresters was another addition to a form of literary warfare that Federalists and Republican-Democrats waged throughout the 1790s, and it was received as such by its audience. After The Foresters began appearing in the

Columbian in 1787, Hazard met a “gentleman” to whom he mentioned the “very good

History of the settlements (as far as it went) in the Columbian Magazine, though the story was ludicrously told” (Belknap Papers I, 496). The gentleman replied that he was “much pleased with it” and asked Hazard if he knew the author’s identity:

I told him I did, but I was not at liberty to tell who it was. He said, as I was not at liberty, he did not wish to ask me, but had supposed it to be Mr. Hopkinson. I said he was not the writer. Then he should guess Dr.

Clarkson. No, nor he: however, don’t guess any more, least you should embarrass me, so he left off. (496)

Three years later, in 1790, Hazard relayed a similar anecdote to Belknap. While in New

York Hazard met a “sensible Connecticut man” who mentioned “Nic Frog” in conversation:

This led to a conversation about something relating to Nic Frog, which we had both seen in a magazine. My neighbour said it was written by F. Hopkinson, of Philadelphia. I doubted it. He said we had no writer in America who could do it but him, and he was so sure of being the author that he would not be afraid to lay his life on it. I replied that I would not be afraid to take up the bet in this case, for I could not see F. H. in the piece, and I thought I knew his style. He asked immediately, “Do you know the writer?” This was a home-stroke; but I parried it by saying I had my suspicions about him, and was rather inclined to think the piece came from New England. From my reply and the manner of it, I believe he thought I suspected him; and he said there were no writers in New England who could be the author. The most likely were Trumbull, Dr. Hopkins, and one or two more; but it was neither of them. I singled out Trumbull as a man well calculated for the author, but he said, “It was not he; it was Francis Hopkinson,” and we dropped the subject of conversation, as disputants generally do, each enjoying his own opinion. (II, 227-8)

Indeed, The Foresters was something of a conversation piece. More interestingly, it was plausibly associated with Francis Hopkinson, John Trumbull, and Lemuel Hopkins— three Augustan satirists who rose to prominence during the Revolution and the early national period. Hopkinson was perhaps the most natural suspect; right before the

Revolution, he had published A Pretty Story, an allegory about the strained relationship between the colonies and Great Britain. Like The Foresters, A Pretty Story imagines the colonies as a group of rural farmers who are oppressed by their patriarch. But unlike The

Foresters, Hopkinson’s work is obviously a piece of anti-English propaganda meant to accomplish a transparent political purpose. Published in 1774, A Pretty Story was more

51 overt about its ideological underpinnings: it wanted to highlight the injustices wrought by

England and its Parliament.

The anonymous man’s speculation that The Foresters could be written by

Trumbull and Hopkins demonstrates further that Belknap’s work was associated with

Augustan satire. Trumbull and Hopkins were also Federalist writers and Augustan poets.

Both “Connecticut Wits” contributed to the The Anarchiad. Hopkins especially continued to produce the type of poetry that, as William Dowling puts it, waged “warfare against corruption and social decline” (Poetry and Ideology ix). Constituting “a transmutation of the classical republican tradition” (14), this poetry both warned against the specters of luxury and mercantilism and lauded classical republicanism as a solution to these problems” (Poetry and Ideology 17). Colin Wells has called this era one of “satiric warfare” (555). Published in partisan newspapers, these satires ruthlessly and unrelentingly accused their opposition of conspiring to co-opt government for self- interested ends.20 Crucially, the satiric warfare of the 1790s further validated the existence of political parties—the development of which was somewhat worrying to those who held classically republican attitudes. Pocock points out that for Aristotelian

Augustans of the eighteenth century, political parties were seen as heralding the downfall of a society as they demonstrated the power jockeying that would lead to factionalism and greed. For Augustans, “it was far from clear how any group intent upon its private

20 The belief that the world was controlled by the machinations of powerful men was not at all unusual in this time period; Gordon Wood has famously argued that much early American thought was governed by “the paranoid style,” or “the mode of causal attribution based on particular assumptions about the nature of social reality and the necessity of moral responsibility in human affairs” (409). Typical of the Augustan age, the paranoid style “flowed from the expansion and increasing complexity of the political world” and “became a major means by which educated men in the early modern period gave meaning to their political world” (410-11). The thought that political parties and secret societies were working to undo the work of the Constitution was not at all an irrational assumption—it was considered sound political theory. 52 interest could have any sense of the common good at all [. . .] which only individuals, not groups, could possess” (483). Federalists believed that democratic elections in themselves obviated the need for further political organizing, while Democratic-Republicans condemned this attitude as elitist.

For Democratic-Republicans, the Federalist monopoly on government was reason enough for a different political party to represent non-elite interests.21 Condemning the

Federalists for their perceived allegiance to aristocracy, Democratic-Republican satirists argued that the real threat to the republic was the Federalists’ plot to restore monarchical government. “Probationary Odes of Jonathan Pindar,” published in Freneau’s National

Gazette, condemns Federalists as the “well-born” who “now presume so high to hold their heads:/ Wretches, whose pride by far outweighs their wits” (31 Aug. 1793, 351).

The poet also singled out Washington, urging him to live up to the promise he had displayed during the Revolution. Particularly disappointing is Washington’s potential to be corrupted by his advisors (probably Adams and Hamilton) who spout “impious falsehoods” and would welcome the chance to “wound” whatever stability Washington has managed to achieve. As “Probationary Odes” demonstrates, both Democratic-

Republican and Federalist satirists operated under the same Augustan belief system that cast the other party as scheming to bring about the downfall of the republic:

O WASHINGTON! For whom my willing lyre Unbidden vibrates loudest notes of praise, When shall thy yet unrivall’d worth inspire Some emulation of thy glorious days! Still, as FATHER to thy country dear. Regard not those who seek to wound thy peace, Nor to their impious falsehoods lend an ear, Who would persuade THEE her regards can cease.

21 For more information about Federalist positions on party politics, see Joyce Appleby’s Capitalism and a New Social Order, 66. 53

Federalists, on the other hand, denounced Democratic-Republican clubs and organizations as evidence that Jacobins had infiltrated the nation’s largest cities.22 In the wake of the Whiskey Rebellion, Washington castigated the Democratic Societies in his annual message to Congress, and Ebenezer Hazard wrote to Jedediah Morse: “they must be carefully watched, and their Machinations guarded against, or we shall yet see such

Scenes as have been acted in France” (qtd. in Koschnik 36). Lemuel Hopkins’s 1795 mock epic The Democratiad characterizes the sentiments and tone of much Federalist satire on this subject. The speaker of the poem, a member of the Philadelphia Jockey

Club—a Democrat who, like all Democrats, “despise[s] the Senate and their rules” (7)— delights in the inevitable chaos and bloodshed that will result from the proliferation of

Democratic-Republican societies:

I say, that we’re determined, one, and all, That Jay’s vile Treaty to the ground shall fall. The subject we expect will raise a heat. In every town were Clubs and Traitors meet. From thence extend itself from shore to shore, ‘Till Peace and Government exist no more. For well the truths of sage Experience show, That Faction’s plants in towns and cities grow; For there collect the refuse of mankind, Prepared for treasons, and for plots design’d, There every traitor hides his forfeit head, There finds protectors, and there looks for aid, There noisy demagogues their standards raise, Sedition’s sparks there kindle to a blaze. (8)

Hopkins’ Democrat speaker relishes the possibilities of sedition, laying out a plan to subvert the Jay Treaty and to sew dissent among public figures. “Clubs and Traitors” is

22 According to Albrecht Koschnik, Federalists took note of the fact that Jacobin clubs had become popular in France preceding the revolution—that they had “created alternative centers of power, usurped local governmental functions, and intimidated the National Convention into enacting their demands” (35). 54 juxtaposed with “Peace and Government,” and Faction (almost always a central character in Federalist satire) will make possible the seduction and manipulation of the “refuse of mankind,” whose isolation and poverty make them particularly well suited to treasonous activity. The Democratiad is particularly transparent about its specific allusions to

Democratic policy—in footnotes below this passage, Hopkins explains that the

Democrats’ desire to revoke the Jay Treaty, despite their obvious lack of a majority in

Congress, emblematizes their brand of factionalism and subversion: “Still, these patriotic

Democrats would persuade us that we ought to obey one third, let two thirds say what they may. It is this kind of majority that the Democrats in the United States compose.

However what they want in numbers they say they have in merit” (8). Hopkins’ poem vilifies the Democrats for seeking to undermine the Constitution and dispose political moderation for their own gain.

Hopkins’ work falls under the category of the “poetry of conspiracy”—what

Colin Wells has described as a “form of satire that, beyond simply unmasking some unflattering or unacknowledged truth about a public figure or group or institution, detailed a specific, deliberate conspiracy against America by a narrow ring of enemies”

(559). Often written as mock epic, the “poetry of conspiracy” echoed the classical strains of thought that informed much of the age. As the Connecticut Wits had done with The

Anarchiad during Ratification, the authors of these poems often pretended to be critics or editors who had stumbled upon these great relics while searching for America’s antiquities. John Sylvester John Gardiner’s “Remarks on the Jacobiniad,” originally published in the Federal Orrery in 1794 and 1795, pretends to be a piece of literary criticism of an epic that aspires to be like the Iliad and the Aeneid. The poem, according

55 to its editor, “relates the rise of jacobinism; its progress; its present situation in Europe and America; and describes the principal supporters of it in both countries” (7-8). The poem’s central villain, Faction, who has spent time among the Jacobin societies in

Europe, has now come to the United States. She “visits the various jacobin clubs, or, as they, with admirable modesty, style themselves, constitutional societies. After a close conference with citizen Genet [. . .] she bends her course to Boston, where she is received with every mark of joy and reverence by her worshippers” (8). The editor intersperses pieces of the poem in his article, but mainly he summarizes its main plot points, charting

Faction’s progress throughout the United States and her endeavors to infiltrate every aspect of public life. Similarly, “Aquiline Nimble-Chops, Democrat,” author of the 1795

“Democracy: An Epic Poem,” begins his mock epic by invoking a muse that originated where, as he puts it quite succinctly, “Chaos rules” (5).

By co-opting the literary and philosophical sensibilities of Dryden, Pope, and

Swift, these Early National poets pretended to construct a fictional narrative about the nation’s past that predicted an ominous future. Federalist poets and writers argued that the devolution of American society was as inevitable as it had been for ancient Rome— evidence of a systemic problem produced by egalitarianism and economic liberalism.

These satires invented a fictional that pretended that America’s ancient past held clues to interpreting its present. As Dowling observes, that the great attraction of the cyclical theory was its “explanatory power”; it allowed people to “acknowledge that the meaning of history must lie somewhere outside history, governed as it visibly was by processes as inexorable as those governing seasonal change in the world of nature” (11). Mock epic, then, enabled the Federalist satirist to stand outside of history, remarking on the

56 inevitability of the nation’s decline, and bemoaning the fate of the country as a foregone conclusion.

Though Belknap’s satire exposes similar attitudes towards partisanship and

Democratic-Republican societies, it differs in its tone and its approach to its subject matter—a difference, I argue, that evolves from its use of seriality. Though The Foresters is written in a different mode from the mock epic—it is clearly a Menippean satire, which

Northrop Frye describes as “stylized rather than naturalistic, and presents people as mouthpieces of the ideas they represent” (309)23—the narrative’s hyperawareness of its own seriality strains its Augustan view of history. Unlike the “found epics” of Hopkins and Gardiner, which allege that the downfall of American society has already taken place, The Foresters functions a collection of letters that can always be updated.

Belknap’s narrator does not stand outside history but within it; he chronicles the events of the forest as they happen and reports them to his correspondent. This approach requires that Belknap espouse a more complex method of reading and understanding history—one that tries to bring the permanence of American character sharply into conversation with the acceptance of cyclical theory. For Belknap federalism is not about the choice to govern properly; it is instead a legacy bestowed by the colonial forbears to their descendants, evidence of a genealogical connection between past and present peoples that must be continually affirmed and then reaffirmed, even as this very act of reaffirmation unravels the preternatural belief system that the foresters simply intuit the right way to govern.

23 Unlike more polemical forms of satire, Menippean satire is usually quite mild. It aims to be amusing rather than overtly controversial; Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and The Tale of a Tub are prime examples. 57

These differences in mode enable Belknap to make a less polemical intervention in the republic’s problems, therefore diffusing the threat of partisanship. Of course,

Belknap’s model of federalist-as-identity precludes the reality of political organizing: In being Federalist, Federalists are not “Federalists” but only expressing the true and proper nature, while Republicans are left to represent the partisan alone. Rather than directly confront the existence of Democratic clubs and the internal divisions they cause, Belknap emphasizes that the “Franks” are solely responsible for any kind of factionalism and disorder that plagues the forest. The narrator gives a lengthy discourse detailing how the

Franks have attempted to use a covert form of subversion on the foresters:

Having introduced the word fraternization, I must tell you that this is one specimen, and there are many others, of that liberty which the Franks have assumed, of coining words. [. . .] When words have a real and definite meaning, it is of no consequence who is the original coiner of them, nor by whom they are brought into use; but every one is fond of the productions of his own brain, and every one has a right to claim and enjoy the honour (if there is any) belonging to such productions. Never was a word better adapted to any particular purpose than this. To fraternize, in the sense of the Franks, is to make brethren; to coax, or bribe, or compel, or use means of any kind whatever with other people to make them brethren. (1796, 214-5)

Not only do the Franks introduce the concept of casual and unsanctioned political organization to the foresters, but they also manufacture the discourse that surrounds such organizing. Belknap’s narrator finds this kind of rhetorical manipulation especially disconcerting, and most disconcerting of all is the Franks’ suggestion that they will “plant the tree of liberty in their gardens,” a metaphor that means “to bring on revolutions among them” (215). However, for Belknap the Franks’ rhetorical manipulation serves another purpose: it absolves the foresters of their responsibility for the proliferation of

Democratic clubs, or “fraternization.” Rather than acknowledging that “fraternization”

58 has emerged organically, and that the members of these clubs feel unrepresented by

Federalist structures of power, Belknap argues that “fraternization” is evidence of foreign intrigue.

But Belknap is also unable to reconcile the tension between Augustan satire’s urge to intervene and his own project’s desire to assuage anxieties by portraying federalism as a trademark of American character. Though he insists that the foresters are a unique and unified group of people, he occasionally undermines his own belief that they will be able to reconcile their own specific interests with those of the body politic.

At the beginning of Chapter 17, the narrator writes that he monitors the actions of Mr.

Bull and Mr. Lewis because

those two eternal rivals have had some influence, and I fear will always have too much on the sentiments and transactions of my favourite foresters. For, notwithstanding all that dignity and independence of character which really exist among them, and which ought to prevail over every inferior principle, yet there are persons in all these families who, from natural and political connexions, are strongly inclined to imitate the manners and adopt the principles of one or the other of those ancient rivals. (1796, 207)

This instance is one in which Belknap’s narrator highlights an ideological “break” among the foresters. Though the foresters are a people of “dignity and independence of character,” they are still vulnerable to foreign influence, especially if this foreign influence concerns the “commercial attachments” endemic to complex systems of international politics. Indeed, Belknap often seems stymied about issues of economics;

George Trusty’s speculator-rats are another problem he cannot solve, or perhaps chooses not to solve. In essence, Belknap gestures toward certain vulnerabilities that may threaten the federal mythology that the narrative initially promotes. This moment of palpable anxiety destabilizes the myth of American uniformity.

For Belknap, there is a tension between the demands of Augustan satire—with its emphasis on cyclical history and its belief in the power of language to transform reality— and the serial project of The Foresters, which envisions history as an ongoing and open- ended collection of entertaining anecdotes. While maintaining (and propagating) the belief that the foresters are immune to French treachery, Belknap also reveals uncertainties about federalism’s ability to construct a myth of perfect ideological uniformity. In these moments of uncertainty, Belknap either states these doubts outright or self-consciously refashions current events to fit with his overarching thesis of a federal unity that extends from colonial times. When writing about the Whiskey Insurrection,

Belknap works hard to conceal the regional, economic, and ideological divisions that provoked the rebellion. By sidestepping many of the contemporary debates about the demonstration of federal power, and by using additionally creative ways of diminishing his opposition, Belknap betrays an awareness of federalism’s inability to assimilate all perspectives. Moreover, he reveals some of the challenges of writing serially—the problem of remaining consistent while incorporating new events into the narrative—that make The Foresters a contradictory text. And by using the same literary techniques he had used previously to handle Native Americans and slaves, Belknap tries to resolve these contradictions by portraying the Whiskey Insurrection not as evidence of the republic’s unraveling but as confirmation that its enduring historical character would ultimately prevail. Belknap reimagines the Rebellion, which had the power to undermine the American experiment, as actually fortifying a fictive and stable sense of American identity. That he expands his paratextual apparatus in the last version of The Foresters underscores his commitment to the technology of the book. By including a clavis

60 allegorica and a more extensive table of contents, Belknap further codifies the

“permanent characters” of American history as a fixed part of the text itself.

Belknap’s Reinvention of the Whiskey Rebellion

Belknap continued to write to Hazard about The Foresters throughout the 1790s, and he harbored ambitions about updating it right away after the 1792 edition had been published. In 1793, he wrote to his publisher, Thomas Andrews, protesting the high cost of printing that Andrews had laid upon him. He then revealed that he had two additional chapters already written: “Feeling my interests in pleasing the reader and in a prospect of an increased sale of the work in a second edition I have added two chapters, which perhaps paternal fondness had me to conceive will be an additional recommendation and to ask whether this addition may not be […] an equivalent to the better quality of the paper on which you propose to print it.”24 It is unclear what these two chapters contained because they were not published in 1793. Instead, Belknap updated the book again in

1796; the two additional chapters reflect a preoccupation with the French Revolution and the Whiskey Rebellion.

During 1794, Belknap and Hazard often discussed the Rebellion and the development of Democratic-Republican societies. In September of 1794, Hazard wrote to

Belknap: “I should not be surprised if it should be found that some members of democratic societies have, by letter or otherwise, stimulated opposition to the laws”

(Belknap Papers II, 350). Belknap replied: “I hope ‘our Pittsburgh brethren’ will be brought to submission” (351). But when Belknap integrated the Whiskey Insurrection into the 1796 version of The Foresters, he omitted the acknowledgment that he gave in

24 See Papers of Jeremy Belknap, Folder 161. J. Massachusetts Historical Society.

61 his letter—that the insurrectionists were from Western Pennsylvania and therefore far removed (if connected at all) to events in France.

Belknap’s portrayal of the Whiskey Rebellion echoes Federalist propaganda on the subject. By denouncing the insurrectionists as foreigners, Belknap, as Kyle McCarter observes, is “following the regular Federalist line of identifying the Societies with the

Jacobin Clubs of France, of charging Genet with being the ‘father’ of the Societies, and accusing the Societies of openly placing loyalty to the French Republic above their loyalty to the American Republic” (169). Belknap’s version of the Whiskey Rebellion remains consistent with his portrayal of fraternization: he both acknowledges and defuses the Jacobin threat. He emphasizes that the insurrectionists who cause the Whiskey

Rebellion—Mother Carey’s Chickens—are not indigenous to the forest, or, in other words, not evidence of a widespread, grassroots desire for better representation, but evidence of the spread of French subversion. And as he did with “fraternization,”

Belknap constructs a scenario that explains how such an incongruous event was made to happen: Teneg (Genet), wishing to provoke the foresters, smuggles eggs into the forest where they are hatched by “old hens” who “would readily perform the office of incubation” (1796, 225). When Mother Carey’s Chickens are released into the forest, they are more a curiosity than a reason for concern:

These birds have some peculiarities, which must be considered as characteristic of the species. One is, that they vary their note according to the instruction of their keepers; in this respect they resemble the magpye and the mock-bird. Their usual sound, when not under any particular direction, is a dull monotony, an eternal repetition of jaco, jaco, jaco: but they have been taught to found other words which terminate with a vowel, or a liquid consonant: such as, war, war, war;--whisky, whisky, whisky,-- ja, ja, ja, &c. (223)

Wholly irrational and incapable of original thought (or even words that end in consonants), Mother Carey’s Chickens can only be taught to chant the catchphrases of insurrectionists—“war,” “whisky,” “jaco,” and “ja” (for Jay). They cannot make decisions without the guidance and prompting of Teneg and his associates, and they ultimately prove to be a useless device. Though they are evidence of a conspiracy to corrupt the United States, they are, more tellingly, evidence of the futility of this conspiracy in the face of the foresters’ ingenuity and perspicacity.

Though Belknap’s writing echoes Federalist propaganda on this subject, it differs in ways that are crucial. Belknap spends a great deal of time discussing a threat that he maintains is ultimately not very threatening. He traces the source of political dissent to the French—as do other Federalist satirists—but he makes clear that the republic was never in any real danger. The author of “Democracy: An Epic Poem” writes that

“Faction” has impregnated the hawk “Democracy” with his “brood” to disastrous ends

(13), but Belknap instead emphasizes the stupidity of Mother Carey’s Chickens and the idea that they are doomed to fail. In doing so, Belknap revisits the overall project of The

Foresters: to assert that the foresters are the inheritors of an exceptional tradition that has been passed down since its colonial inception. Belknap’s task is not to show that the development of political parties is destructive to the republic; it is to show that the historical character of the republic has made the development of political parties impossible—even as he acknowledges the strange terror that these parties have wrought.

Because the story of America is still the forward-moving, continuous, serialized story of its first colonists, who continue, throughout The Foresters, to define the ideological and cultural concerns of its citizens, then the nation must remain as it was initially: a family.

By distancing political dissenters from the “genuine” members of republic,

Belknap is able to justify the use of executive power to put down the rebellion.

Throughout each version of The Foresters, Belknap uses animals to symbolize the people that the republic cannot fully assimilate. In earlier chapters, the foresters were constantly threatened by the presence of wild animals—or Native Americans—and they had to maintain control over their cattle, or slaves. As Patricia Okker has observed, Belknap’s portrayal of Native Americans is contradictory. At times Belknap emphasizes that the

“animals” are incapable of being civilized. At other times, as Okker argues, Belknap uses the terms “wild beasts” and “wolves and bears” “to point, satirically, to the racist ideas of the colonists” (46). But Okker’s explanation overlooks that Belknap uses animal symbolism to describe Democratic-Republicans, thus co-opting the machinery of racial difference to diminish the opposition.25 And indeed Belknap’s representation of

Democratic-Republicans is even less ambivalent than his portrayal of Native Americans: whereas the animals of the forest sometimes garner Belknap’s sympathy and provoke his fascination, Mother Carey’s Chickens are “unworthy of a philosophic mind” (225).

Democratic-Republicans, in other words, have no redeeming qualities.

Intriguingly, Belknap proposes to solve the problem posed by the Whiskey

Rebellion by relying on tactic he developed while serializing The Foresters: the device of iteration. As reimagined in the narrative, the Whiskey Rebellion is a problem that is

25 Jared Gardner’s Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature, 1787-1845 provides a detailed discussion of the ways that political parties racialized their opponents: “The logic of a Republican argument looks something like this: the Federalists, by reifying hierarchy, consolidating federal power, and working to reestablish the nation’s former servitude to Britain, are creating a nation of political slaves [. . .]. For the Federalists, the Republicans, by leveling social structures, turning power over to the people, and embracing a corrupted revolutionary ideal imported from France, are working to create a nation of political savages, a nation that comes to be articulated in terms of the nations of ‘savages’ Americans know firsthand: Indians” (12-13). 64 relatively straightforward to solve: it requires that “George Pipeweed” send a group of archers to simply drown out the noise made by Mother Carey’s Chickens. But by obscuring the actual debates surrounding and leading up to the Rebellion, Belknap inadvertently exposes his own propagandistic means of suppressing dissent. Historical records demonstrate that leaders were far more ambivalent about how to put down the rebellion.26 As Richard Kohn points out, the major question for Washington and his advisers was “whether it was possible to use force, and if it was feasible to do so, whether a military expedition would restore order and respect for the law or provoke civil war and deeper disrespect for the whiskey excise and the federal government’s authority generally” (568). Even the mere possibility of the use of force, as demonstrated by the mobilization of troops to Western Pennsylvania, was interpreted as an offense to the ideals of republican government—a flagrant display of federal power as an intimidation tactic. For Republicans like Thomas Jefferson, the entire affair rightly inspired “a detestation of the government” (“Letter to James Madison”). Of Washington’s address to

Congress, Jefferson wrote, “I expected to have seen some justification of arming one part of the society against another; of declaring a civil war the moment before the meeting of that body which has the sole right of declaring war.”

But neither were Federalists united on the subject of subduing the rebellion.

Though Alexander Hamilton may have explicitly tied the federal government’s

26 I take much of my understanding of the Whiskey Rebellion from Slaughter’s The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution. According to Slaughter, the rebellion intensified debates over “the relation between representation and just taxation in a republic, the tensions between eastern mercantile and western agricultural regions, debates over the rights and duties of citizens, the place of protest in a republican society, international competition for North America, the problem of western lands, policies on westward expansion, Indian warfare, the relationship between federal and state governments, and the navigation of the Mississippi River” (4).

65 legitimacy to a demonstration of its power,27 George Washington was more ambivalent about the use of such coercion. In his 1794 address to Congress, he discussed his reluctance to dispatch troops to dispel the rebellion. Noting that “without submission, coercion must be the resort,” he instructed the commissioners to “invite [the rebels], at the same time, to return to the demeanor of faithful citizens, by such accommodations as lay within the sphere of Executive power” (Washington Papers 287). Washington remarked that “[w]hile there is cause to lament that occurrences of this nature should have disgraced the name or interrupted the tranquility of any part of our community [. . .], there are not wanting real and substantial consolations for the misfortunate” (289). The

Whiskey Rebellion forced Federalists to articulate a highly precarious position: that governmental intervention was undesirable but necessary, distasteful but fully justified.

Belknap’s fictional version of the suppression lacks this ambivalence. Though he describes the foresters as deploying a number of archers to brandish their arrows, he also emphasizes that a different kind of intimidation is ultimately responsible for diffusing the

Rebellion: the foresters disperse the chickens by making enough noise to drown out their chants. The narrator states that the company of archers “crept along, making several kinds of noise, to no purpose, till they had got very near, when they set up a loud cry of

Wash, Wash, Wash, which entirely drowned the noise of whisky, and was so formidable to the chickens, that they flew away with precipitation, and became remarkably silent”

(1796, 231). The archers succeed not by a show of force but by an act of repetitive

27 According to a letter from Randolph to George Washington, Hamilton stated, “Government can never said to be established until some signal display has manifested its power of military coercion” (qtd. in Kohn 585n). This quote is commonly attributed to Hamilton as evidence of his desire to increase the government’s military power. Kohn states: “For Hamilton force made the government a grander machine, more impressive and more permanent. It spoke a language of its own, imparting confidence to friends and threatening punishment to enemies, endowing its wielders with prestige and respect” (582-3). 66 vocalization. By shouting out Washington’s name over and over again, they drown out the bywords of Jacobin rebels (whisky and war and jaco), and their own cries are bolstered by the legitimacy of the ultimate figurehead of executive power. But more explicitly, this repetition calls upon the power of The Foresters’ seriality itself: it performs a hagiography of Washington’s name and evokes the historical lineage that ties

Washington to Virginia’s earliest founders. By linking Washington to a colonial figure and a geographic region, Belknap stresses that political legitimacy is inherited and stable across time. The key, or course, is to remember one’s origins and to call upon this legitimacy when enduring the squawks of a Jacobin chicken.

Later in the narrative, George Pipeweed also demonstrates an incredible ability to silence his opposition. During a debate about the Jay Treaty, a flock of Mother Carey’s chickens invade the hall and attempt to derail negotiations. These chickens, “who had been trained for the purpose, flew into the hall, perched on the tables and chairs, and began to cackle with a new note in addition to their former vociferations. Papers, papers, papers” (235). George ignores the harassment for as long as he can until two chickens— presumably Jefferson and Madison, though they remain unnamed in the narrative’s paratext—“had the impudence to alight on [his] shoulders [. . .] putting their bills into his ears to squally this harsh note” (235). His patience exhausted, George finally silences the chickens by uttering “the monosyllable No, so forcibly, that the cackling ceased, and the chickens returned to the managers, for further instruction” (235). George Pipeweed’s ability to nonviolently put down his opposition testifies not only to the efficacy of centralized leadership, but also to Belknap’s urge to establish a version of history that dispenses with debate and dissent. In Belknap’s Federalist imaginary, the best way to

67 suppress opposition is to perform a kind of univocal silencing: to drown out the opposition not with disorganized cries but with an utterance that, like The Foresters itself, does not allow for the existence of political organization.

Additionally, Jefferson and Madison are the episodes chief antagonists, but they remain unnamed and unfootnoted, indistinguishable from the mass of Jacobin chickens.

Their absence from the paratext might indeed speak to the timeliness of the episode—it would have been fresh in the minds of the nation’s citizens, after all, so perhaps there would have been no need to footnote it—but it also highlights Belknap’s project of systematic effacement and silencing. By erasing the particulars of the Jay Treaty debate,

Belknap constructs a text that ridicules the opposition while attempting to expunge it from its pages. In this sense, Belknap uses the technology and format of the book—its footnotes and its paratext—in order to make this transformation textual and complete.

Belknap’s rendition of the Whiskey Rebellion is willfully and deliberately reductive, a moment of transparent historical refashioning. But to return to my original question, I would argue that these “liberties” with history are more than evidence of his

Federalist political leanings. Rather, they speak to the difficulty of reconciling two strains of eighteenth-century historiography—as well as his desire to his desire to reconcile difference with a totalizing narrative of a new American history, a narrative that ties

America’s present to its past in an effort to be cautiously optimistic and pragmatic about its future. For Belknap, eighteenth-century models of satire could not adequately account for the widespread changes he witnessed in political culture and could not convey the urgency with which he felt American history needed to be creatively reimagined.

Ultimately, he is invested in a particular version of national politics that emerges from a

68 carefully authorized historical vision—rather than a version of national politics that emerges from any combination of policy decisions. The problem for Belknap is that history cannot be used to promote this national vision without serious and sustained rewriting. Seriality, then, represents more than a publication practice: it enables Belknap to counteract threats to the republic by recasting them as evidence of America’s historical impetus.

Chapter 2

Serializing Economics: The Serial Fiction of Charles Brockden Brown

1798 was not a good year for Charles Brockden Brown. He successfully published Alcuin and “The Man at Home” but lost his friend Elihu Hubbard Smith to yellow fever. Then Brown contracted the disease himself, though he recovered after a short time. Professionally, he struggled to serialize his most ambitious novel, Arthur

Mervyn. An editorial note in the July issue of Philadelphia’s Weekly Magazine of

Original Essays, Fugitive Pieces, and Interesting Intelligence brings these problems sharply into focus. Announcing that the serial publication of Arthur Mervyn had to be suspended, the editor took great pains to explain the delay: “The distance at which some of our Correspondents reside, or their indisposition, necessarily subjects us to the hazard of a pause in publication. This is the only excuse we have to offer for a temporary suspension of Arthur Mervyn” (“To Correspondents”). Weeks later, the Weekly Magazine and Arthur Mervyn suffered an even greater setback: yellow fever took the editor’s life, thereby causing the magazine to be suspended indefinitely. The serialization of Arthur

Mervyn was never again resumed in magazine form, though Charles Brockden Brown continued his vision of the novel as a serialized work by issuing the book in two separate volumes in 1799 and 1800.

These events illuminate a crucial aspect of serial publication: it was a risky venture for writers and readers alike. In early national magazines, there were no

70 guarantees that serially published stories or novels would ever see completion. When the

Weekly Magazine’s editor speaks of the “hazard” of disrupting readers’ expectations, he refers to the precarious nature of magazine writing, which could be disrupted by financial problems, shifting politics, geographical distances, or even natural disaster. Like Arthur

Mervyn, many serialized fictional narratives were delayed or abandoned. Oftentimes magazines folded for financial reasons. Sometimes, as was the case with The Foresters, conflicts between editors and the author prompted the author to discontinue publication of his magazine novel. Other times, authors lost interest or moved to other projects.

Sometimes readers received a reason for the serial’s suspension.28 But more frequently, serials disappeared from the pages of a magazine without any explanation at all. All told, authors and editors were acutely aware that if they failed to generate interest in their work—or if they experienced the kind of setback suffered by the Weekly Magazine—they might not procure enough subscription money to continue publishing. For readers too, serials must have also seemed risky. If reading a novel was like “investing in a speculative venture” (Ingrassia 2), then reading a serialized novel was even more literally speculative, as readers must have wondered not only about the narrative’s events but also the material terms of its delivery. Serials, more than integrated and completed texts, made transparent a relationship between writers and readers that was both contractual and speculative in ways that were both metaphorical and concrete. They required that writers continually satisfy readers’ desires by delivering textual wares across a period of time,

28 When deciding to resume publication of Memoirs of Carwin in the Literary Magazine after a hiatus, for instance, Brown published an editorial note claiming that the writer “was influenced to discontinue the publication of that work from a persuasion that the narrative was of too grave and argumentative a cast to be generally amusing. He has, however, received so many and such urgent intreaties to resume the story that he should not be justified in suppressing it any longer. Hereafter it will be continued with regularity” (Literary Magazine, and American Register, Feb. 1805, 160). Brown published one more installment of Memoirs of Carwin before abandoning the work altogether. 71 and they demanded that readers make repeated emotional and financial investments by purchasing pieces of stories.

This chapter explains how Brown used the serial form to offer an economic model that could harness risk, capitalizing on the “hazards” of publication rather than shrinking from their potentially devastating consequences. Though serial publication was risky, its riskiest aspect—the deferral of its conclusion—paradoxically offered Brown a solution: by delaying the answers to the questions that his readers sought, he could secure their long term investment. Seriality, I argue here, signified for Brown a new type of author- reader relations—one that understood the contract between readers and writers as unfolding over a period of time and without a pre-ordained ending. We might appropriately describe this type of relationship as “corporate.” To understand what I mean by this term, we must recall that the “corporation” is a fairly modern invention—an

“artificial being” as Supreme Court Justice John Marshall would later write—that functioned as a “person” under the law, enabling individuals to form financial relationships that transcended the limits of the human lifespan.29 Crucially, the corporation allowed businesses to extend credit and pool risk, insulating individuals from the consequences of market fluctuations. After the Revolution, corporations became a tool for safeguarding economic development, and the unprecedented 317 new corporations that sprang up in the 1780s and 1790s evinced the need to establish financial

29 For a fuller discussion of Marshall’s 1819 decision, see Brook Thomas’s American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract (234). Although many early corporations were chartered with specific rules detailing their longevity, they were formed to ensure continuity despite changes in shareholders. As early as 1612, Sir Edward Coke articulated the corporation as “invisible, immortal, and rest[ing] only in intendment and consideration of the law” (qtd. in Williston 115). 72 mastery of the future.30 Corporatism heralded the advent of a marketplace that would be managed not by embodied individuals but by impersonal conglomerates. Arthur Mervyn intervenes in this emerging reality, offering a model of capital relations that displaces immediate fulfillment in favor of continued deferral. As a self-consciously serialized novel that calls attention to itself as open-ended, it is also a meta-serial: Mervyn himself acts as a serialist, trading stories for a kind of metaphoric credit, enticing his auditors with the prospect of an ending that never arrives, and striving to supersede the limits of the one-time contract. In doing so, he underscores key features of the modern marketplace—namely, that capital resides in estimates of a commodity’s future value, and that sustaining such future-oriented partnerships requires the collective act of envisioning an artificial being that might exceed mortal limitations. Serialists are beholden to readers not only for their financial support but also for the credit they place on an author’s efforts, thereby helping to imagine creative works into existence.

Arthur Mervyn might seem a strange place to look for the corporate person.

Brown’s eponymous hero is usually discussed as an individual—a Franklinian youth set loose in an urban matrix of commercial intrigue during the human and financial disaster of the yellow fever. But critics have also acknowledged that Brown’s mystifying novel never clearly takes a position about capitalism’s corrosive effects on the individual.31 By

30 See James Willard Hurst (14) and Pauline Maier. Though many Revolution-era corporations were public projects meant to aid in building infrastructure, critics felt that they flaunted the republican tenet of disinterest (Maier 55). 31 Many critics read Arthur Mervyn as the key to unraveling Brown’s attitude toward commercial capitalism. Teresa Goddu argues that despite Arthur’s “good intentions,” which contrast with Welbeck’s “evil plots,” his “actions are deeply rooted in the commercial economy” and “signa[l] the corruption of the agrarian man by commerce” (38). Steven Watts’s The Republic Reborn argues that the novel explores “the rocky terrain of individual choice in an expanding liberal society” (179). Michael Warner emphasizes the sharp contrast between Mervyn and Welbeck’s attitudes toward credit, writing that “Brown leaves no doubt that Welbeck’s evil stems from the personality structures of civility and credit economies. [. . .] The two personality structures, one defined by managed esteem, the other by civic action, orient the ethical-political 73 seeking to categorize Mervyn as either an agrarian hero or a duplicitous con man, critics have attempted to assign him—and Brown as well—a position in debates over republican virtue and Lockean liberalism.32 But these questions have failed to yield a satisfying analysis of Brown’s novel and Mervyn’s character—indeed, I argue, because these questions overlook the ways in which Brown engages the serial form to produce a narrative and a character that rely on strategies of permanent deferral. Just as Brown’s serial form gestures toward an unwritten future where its promises might someday be fulfilled, so too does Mervyn confound his auditors precisely because he springs from a world where financial arrangements are prolonged and futural rather than limited and discrete. If Arthur Mervyn fails to answer important questions about Mervyn’s character, it is perhaps because Brown recognizes that liberal-republican formulations of virtue do not apply to the corporate, aggregate person that exists as a concept rather than a clearly defined economic individual. Many critics and thinkers stressed that corporations, though a product of economic liberalism, antagonized both natural market outcomes and the liberal individual’s right to own property. They thus existed both within a liberal marketplace and in defiance of its key principles. Adam Smith, for instance, stressed that corporations possessed “exclusive privileges” (164) that inhibited the “natural” outcomes of economic activity (165).33

order of the novel” (157). More recently, Jennifer Baker’s Securing the Commonwealth argues that Arthur Mervyn promotes a vision of economic interdependence sanctioned by a complex credit economy (120). 32 Stephen Shapiro trenchantly questions previous assumptions about the American novel’s dependence upon the ideological confluence of nationalism and republicanism. Shapiro argues that the inception of a new bourgeois class explains the explosion of novels in the 1790s (32-40). By recalibrating the economic contexts that shaped the 1790s, Shapiro locates Brown’s novels in a complex matrix of cultural materialism and bourgeois achievements. I argue, however, that Arthur Mervyn engages republican liberalism precisely to demonstrate its inapplicability to corporate developments. 33 See also Jeffrey Lustig (49-52). 74

Arthur Mervyn often rehearses republican rhetoric surrounding incorporation and debt, summoning the anxieties about perpetual national debt and the risks presented by the First Bank of the U.S.34 An early corporation that consolidated the war debt, the national bank married government to business in ways that troubled republican tenets of disinterest. Described as a peculiar and noncompliant being, the bank inspired a “torrent of opposition” (Maier 52) and was labeled by critics a “defiance of every principle of our creed” and “mortifying to us its real republican friends” (“To Mr. Fenno” 42). Brown invokes these anti-corporate sentiments, but he dismisses them as betraying an antiquated understanding of a complex economic system.

In Arthur Mervyn Brown also animates the relationship between authorship and commerce. Mervyn represents the “ideal author”—he uses the risks of seriality to ensure his survival in a marketplace of bankruptcies and defaults. For Brown, the content of the story matters less than the deferral of its delivery. Mervyn represents an authorial fantasy—the ability to thrive by extending the audience’s credit—but one that paradoxically reveals an incumbent reality: the market was driven increasingly by speculation, and it would need to be managed by artificial beings in order to protect long- term investments. Brown’s novel is, of course, encumbered by actual dead bodies; suggestively, these deaths disrupt the financial health of the Republic far more than the behavior of those who subsist on credit. And Mervyn, the corporation masquerading as a person, demonstrates how an author might cultivate tactics of perpetual deferral in order to thrive.

34 For a discussion of how Congress’s decision to issue securities with no specific date of maturity fueled anti-Federalist anxieties, see Max M. Edling, “Alexander Hamilton and the Restoration of Public Credit” (288). 75

This chapter argues that Brown uses the serial form to offer a particular economic model, one that merges authorship with the conceptual development of corporations. By focusing on the deferral of exchange—as expressed both in the material publication of

Arthur Mervyn and its thematic emphasis—Brown suggests that economic and literary activity demands that people imagine a transactional state that exists beyond the discrete boundaries of texts and bodies. Brown’s use of the serial form extends the emotional credit of readers, similar to the ways that corporate relationships allow businesses to enjoy uninhibited economic dealings. Within the narrative, Mervyn promotes extended relationships and seeks a kind of intangible credit that resembles dematerialized forms of capital. I first discuss the parallels between Brown’s serialized writing and the economic relations of early American periodical publishing. I then describe the ways in which

Brown intended Arthur Mervyn to be read as a serial text that describes a web of interrelationships unique to emergent capitalism. Finally, I turn to the ways in which

Mervyn functions as a corporate person within Arthur Mervyn, enabling Brown to explore conventional arguments against this particular economic development. The story

Arthur Mervyn tells is not one of an individual in a turbulent marketplace; rather, it describes the ways that modern capitalism demanded imaginative and abstract solutions to the problems of human finitude.

Serial Economics: The Work of Brown, Murray, and Dennie

Seriality is often understood as a minor publishing practice, as a convenient means by which many novels entered the world.35 But serial narratives differ from

35 Matthew Pethers has argued that the serial is different from the novel in that it “requires the intentional cultivation of narrative ambiguity” and “grows from simplicity to complexity, deliberately accumulating characters and subplots as the story progresses into a potentially endless future” (69). 76 discrete novels with regard to the ways that they make transparent the economic aspects of the relationship between writers and readers. Serials rely on continued support from readers, and thus they require authors to fulfill and sustain readers’ demands over a period of time. Whereas discrete texts entail a one-time exchange of goods and capital, serial texts ask readers to make repeated financial and emotional investments in publications that are evolving and amorphous commodities. In the early national period, serialists described their efforts as complexly economic—bound up in notions of credit and debt. Indeed, serialists and editors faced the challenges of writing in a system where pay was often scarce and subscription money was not forthcoming. But they also spoke of the intangible rewards of writing serially—of procuring readers’ emotional investments.

American serial fiction emerged within the periodical culture of the eighteenth century, but it was in eighteenth-century England that the serial form developed many of the features that we still recognize today. Addisonian sketch essays and other forms of

“periodical seriality” would imbue serialized installments with market value, fixing price value not only to the installment itself but also to the anticipation it could generate.

Traditionally, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s The Spectator is considered the first serial to lay claim to a short installment format. Printed daily as a small sheet, The

Spectator inspired the sketch essays that would become a staple of the periodical. As I have argued before, though, Addisonian essays do not necessarily manifest the qualities of a serial “novel” in our own modern sense of the word. They contain a consistent cast of characters, but they do not often pursue a unified narrative that worked toward a recognizable conclusion. Still, they modeled seriality in a way that would come to inform

77 the magazine novels that emerged in the late eighteenth century, and more importantly, they modeled a literary system predicated on credit, debt, and perpetual obligation. In particular, Judith Sargent Murray’s The Gleaner would blend the Addisonian essay format with “The Story of Margaretta,” interspersing interpolated essays with a longer and more consistent fictional narrative. Arthur Mervyn, though not Addisonian and more identifiably novelistic, emerged within the periodical’s framework of negotiation and deferral. As I will detail in this section, Brown understood the credit economy of the magazine as functioning similarly to the increasingly complex financial sector.

Previous scholars have located the periodical in a discussion of early American politics. As David Nord has argued, the periodical exemplified a “republican literature with a republican purpose” by promoting “participation, not social revolution” in the years following independence (58). Michael Cody also emphasizes that the periodical stressed “the improvement of the individual and the concomitant improvement of the nation” (17) through “social, cultural, and political participation in republican life” (16).

But in our desire to link literature to republican politics, we have overlooked that serial publication aestheticized commercial capitalism in ways that exceeded popular republican and Federalist models of political-economic thought. Authors located seriality within literal and metaphoric discussions of risk, reward, and speculation. Though some seemed uneasy with the “credit economy” of the magazine, railing against readers who failed to pay their subscription dues, others espoused the open-ended contract, declaring that they would subsist forever on readers’ credit if they could. These authors collapsed the distinction between debtors and creditors, with readers and writers occupying both positions at varying times in the contract. Sometimes authors spoke of the real risks of

78 serial publication—the unpaid dues and the damage to the editor’s financial well-being.

At other times, however, authors referenced the intangible currencies of reputation, prestige, and reader interest. And sometimes they combined both literal and metaphorical discussions of credit and debt, negotiating the abstract nature of risks and benefits with the realities of bankruptcy and default.

Early national magazines were particularly vulnerable to financial collapse. They occupied a peculiar position in the literary economy: they were goods that readers purchased on credit. Readers did not have to pay their subscription fees up front, and magazines folded for the simple reason that they could not force their readers to pay dues.36 Editors were particularly susceptible to a periodical’s instability, as they often shouldered the brunt of the financial fallout. Whereas the disappearance of magazines doubtless frustrated readers who had invested their metaphoric currencies of interest and esteem, they devastated the magazinists who had invested actual capital. The dunning notices published by magazines were polite, but they also took to task those unfaithful subscribers who were violating tenets of civic virtue. Matthew Carey, for example, stressed the basic need for financial support, emphasizing that magazines could not subsist on public confidence forever. “After a careful examination of the various shoals on which periodical publications have been wrecked,” he wrote in the Massachusetts

Magazine, “I am in dread of only one—which I am afraid to intimate. This shoal is a want of due punctuality in paying the subscriptions” (qtd. in Mott 19-20). In less polite fashion, Joseph Dennie scolded subscribers who, “from culpable negligence, postpone

36 According to Frank Luther Mott’s detailed study of American magazines, periodicals lasted 18 months on average (21). 79 their payments” for the Port-Folio. And when Brown began his Monthly Magazine, he also cited lack of subscriber support a reason for why magazines failed. Writing as

“Candidus,” he published an essay “On Periodical Publication” in the Monthly

Magazine’s first issue:

You have undertaken, it seems, to amuse the world with a monthly publication. I hope you have well considered the difficulties that lie in your way, and have not forgotten the old fable of the farmer and his ass. In his eagerness to please all, he displeased every body, and most of all, himself, since his adventure terminated in the drowning of his poor beast. I am far from thinking that your publication will deserve the fate of the ass; but I am much afraid that such a fate will befall it. (1)

Brown might have understood that his magazine posed a financial risk, but he did not reveal predictably republican anxieties surrounding credit and debt. Instead, Brown described the ways in which intangible forms of wealth were inseparable from actual earnings. In his inaugural 1803 issue of the Literary Magazine, he wrote that he “must rely for credit on the good nature of my readers” to promote a magazine that was not yet established. “The project,” Brown wrote, “is not a mercenary one. Nobody relies for subsistence in its success, nor does the editor put any thing but his reputation at stake. At the same time, he cannot but be desirous of an ample subscription [. . .] because this is the best proof which he can receive that his endeavors to amuse and instruct have not been unsuccessful” (“Editor’s Address” 5). Though Brown admits that money is not his chief motivation, he also acknowledges that “pecuniary profit” is evidence of the project’s reputation. He thus promotes a view of the literary market according to which tangible capital serves to advertise those more important and intangible effects of a writer’s work such as reputation and credit. These notions of “credit” epitomize what Leon Jackson has called the “symbolic and social capital” of antebellum literature—the “more important

80 currencies that were exchanged for works of literature during this period” (2).While I do not wish to elide the differences between symbolic and tangible capital altogether, or to argue that symbolic capital served as a substitute for actual remuneration, I would argue that Brown’s insistence on their coexistence contextualizes a broader cultural shift toward the dematerialization of wealth. Though the symbolic capital of one’s reputation is not equivalent to the investment capital that drives speculative economies, it does involve the subject’s ability to credit that which is not verifiable or has not yet come to pass. In linking pecuniary profit with reputation, Brown sketched a perspective according to which metaphorical capital was inseparable from the tangible benefits it might ultimately produce. Instead of understanding symbolic wealth as creating an alternative, purer economy apart from the avarice and greed of commercial capitalism, Brown acknowledged that currencies of reputation and esteem—currencies that could be procured by reliably producing material regardless of its intrinsic value—might hold the key to self-sustaining authorship.

Brown was not alone in his convictions. Other authors spoke of serials in economic terms. While serializing her Gleaner essays, for instance, Judith Sargent

Murray strayed from “The Story of Margaretta” to deliver essays about varied topics.37

Writing that she was “borrowing” from her readers’ good will, Murray beseeched her

“good natured Reader” to be patient while she pursued a topic other than what her readers were anxiously awaiting (152). Murray’s narrator, Mr. Vigilius, registers the risks of such

37 In “Profligate Gleaning and the Textual Economies of Judith Sargent Murray,” Elizabeth Hewitt argues that “even more than [other essayists such as Royall Tyler and Joseph Dennie], Murray depicts her Gleaner as engaged in complex economic negotiations with an audience, and her ‘Miscellaneous Production’ necessarily engages its readers and author in a credit economy, one that requires postponement of interest for some and repayment for others. And she contrasts this with the fantasy of economic autonomy that asserts individual property ownership as the essence of republican virtue” (312-313). 81 digressions. While veering away from Margaretta to discuss classical mythology, he remarks: “[W]ere I to pursue so fruitful a subject, I should assuredly multiply words beyond the indulgence of my readers” (154). By using such economic language—of surplus, indulgence, and borrowing—Murray stressed the ways in which seriality represented a prolonged renegotiation of the terms of the writer-reader contract.

Likewise, when writing his “Eugenio” series for The New-York Magazine, Richard

Bingham Davis similarly suggested that he might easily substitute one kind of essay for another and “bribe my fair reader’s attention” away from the usual fare of his serial to discuss a topic “less gay than useful” (The New York Magazine, Oct. 1792, 611).

We might better contextualize these attitudes alongside contemporary notions of economic contract. As Morton Horwitz reminds us, prior to this historical moment

“contract” had governed the “immediate sale and delivery of specific property” (161).

But in a world of vast and competing commercial networks, the value of specific property was determined more by the perceived market value of the thing exchanged rather than any notion of intrinsic worth. Published in 1790, Powell’s famous Essay upon the Law of

Contracts and Agreements argued that contracts were always “arbitrary and uncertain”

(x) because “it is the consent of parties alone, that fixes the just price of any thing, without reference to the nature of things themselves, or to their intrinsic value” (229).

This shift from a “title theory” to a “will theory” of contract underscores the ways serialists may have understood the fungible nature of imaginative work and the risks of manipulating the fine line between readerly desires and writerly license. After all, if literature is a commodity, and if serials represent a speculative endeavor in which readers invest, then the serial’s value is a matter of public confidence. Moreover, the writer may

82 depart from the terms of the original “contract” by supplying pieces of stories that do not deliver what the writer promised, as long as those offerings continue to entertain the reader. When Murray asks her readers to be patient while she digresses from “Story of

Margaretta,” she implies that writers might extend their readers’ “credit” to deliver a product that may be different from—and perhaps superior to—that which was originally promised.

Other serialists, however, used similar language of speculation, deferral, substitution, and digression, but with more anxiety about the risks that they were taking and the potential for unfulfilled debts to undermine republican virtue. Dennie’s concerns about delinquent Port-Folio subscribers point to uneasy attitudes about the idea that a

“will theory” of contract threatened to undermine the efforts of many writers. After all, if a serialist could veer from his contract with the reader by delivering something other than an agreed-upon commodity, then so could the reader refuse to pay for “the imperfections” of the writer’s “literary toil.” Still, Dennie’s “The Farrago” series exemplified many of the traits of serial economics. Calling his essays “speculations,” Dennie both embraces and resists the connections between writing and commercial capitalism. Anxious about the possibility of “meandering” with the reader’s credit, he compares his inspiration to a quantifiable agrarian product that, unlike credit or prestige or other symbolic currencies, will eventually run out: “Thus an essayist, conscious of the scantiness of his stores, handles a topic as a farmer’s wife manages her annual pound of bohea, in such a manner to make last” (372). Notably, however, bohea tea is from China, and the very presence of this foreign import demonstrates that the “farmer’s wife” has already entered the arena of

83 national trade. When Dennie continues to describe his writing process, he uses language that underscores the relationship of writing to a capitalistic system:

When I began my second speculation with some general remarks on the utility of an alliance between application and genius, I little thought that I should quit my sober talk and commence character painter. When Fancy handed me a pencil, and bade me to sketch the likeness of Meander, I had no design to ransack his room, or transcribe his diary; and lastly [. . .] I tremblingly thought I had said too much, and dreaded lest my readers should complain that they were surfeited by the Farrago. But they who are even tinged with the metaphysical doctrine of ideas flowing in a train, will not be confounded, though they see another speculation rising from the last, when I narrate the following incident. (372)

Not only does Dennie use economic language, but he also argues that a serial publication is spurred on by a corporate author. This corporate author is made up of manifold impulses and fictive personas—“Fancy,” “Meander,” and “Farrago” himself.

Together these separate characters create a publication that may not necessarily fit neatly into the “utility of an alliance between application and genius” but instead will multiply words by ransacking and speculating. Whereas Murray and Davis represent their desire to digress as a calculated choice, Dennie recognizes that this marketplace of ideas is one of chaotic impulses and competing yet overlapping interests. Farrago, after all, is beholden to a train of “speculations.” He “ransacks” Meander’s room, taking words from one source to transfer them to his readers, “surfeiting” them with more words than they expected but perhaps not the ones they hoped for. Moreover, Dennie implies that an aggregate author is particularly well-suited to prolong a reader-writer relationship and thus secures the link between seriality and corporatism. The speculative risks of seriality are best commandeered by fabricated being—an aggregate persona—that exceeds our comprehension. In addition, this fictional corporate author undertakes various operations

84 separately and obviates the possibility of criticism or fault. Dennie knows that his readers could “complain”—and blame the Farrago for the “surfeit”—but he also deflects criticism by making clear that Farrago is beholden to a much larger system wherein speculations beget speculations. In other words, Dennie argues that the world of transactions is governed by unknowable, uncontrollable forces that elude the comprehension of the individual person. Rather than portraying the marketplace as made up of competing and self-interested individuals, Dennie writes that it is rife with unknowable and conflicting identities.

Before publishing Arthur Mervyn, a novel that executes this fantasy of perpetual contract, Brown serialized “The Man at Home” (1798), which explores the way open- ended texts communicate a commercial aesthetic. “The Man at Home” follows the musings of a narrator who contracts a debt after endorsing a friend’s credit note.

Thematically, the serial offers a treatise on the fate of debtors, but the most fascinating thing about “The Man at Home” is its ending—or its lack thereof. The last installment ends with the narrator awaiting jail, as he has refused to liquidate his assets in order to cover his debts. Despite knowing the means by which his financial burden might be readily relieved, the narrator prefers to remain in a state of conjecture. The series ends abruptly when the narrator breaks off, saying: “I feel myself disposed to enter more particularly into this topic, but my dinner has just been placed before me: When I have passed some time in prison, I shall be more qualified to judge respecting this subject”

(98).

Interestingly, the narrative’s structure emulates the narrator’s financial situation: it is deliberately kept open, suspended in the reader’s imagination even as the narrator’s

85 fate seems certain. Though “The Man at Home” could easily be read as a failed literary venture—a bankruptcy of sorts—Brown’s tactic of suddenly discontinuing the work deserves a closer look. The narrative does not simply end; rather, it gestures toward an unwritten future. For Brown, this tactic of permanent deferral provides an antidote to the perils of bankruptcy, even if it does not furnish the tangible capital necessary to rescue the contractor from unpleasant economic consequences. It involves readers in imaginative activity, implying that the solution to financial distress may very well reside in the audience’s capacity to envision alternative ways of continuing. Seriality, of course, promotes and activates this kind of imaginative activity. As readers and writers of periodicals occupy the roles of both creditors and debtors, so too do they participate in the sustained work of imagining and anticipating a world that exists beyond each bordered installment.38 Similarly, in the financial world, people had to imagine the existence of fictive aggregate beings—composed of humans but not human themselves— in order to carry out dealings in the modern marketplace.

Arthur Mervyn picks up where “The Man At Home” leaves off. Like the narrator of “The Man at Home,” the Weekly Magazine fell victim to economic distress, but Arthur

Mervyn managed to move beyond the borders of the periodical to continue in another form. Likewise, Mervyn evades bankruptcy precisely by using the serialist’s tactic of permanent deferral: he digresses, providing particulars that may not be relevant; he pauses at crucial intervals; he substitutes certain stories for others, thereby giving his auditors a commodity that partially imparts the answers that they seek while urging them

38 Benedict Anderson, of course, has made the case that the structure of the novel itself fostered the invention of the nation space (26). But Brown’s serialistic efforts require readers to imagine not the nation they already believe to be in existence but an economic system that exceeds recognizable limits. 86 to keep listening; and he changes the subject entirely to introduce a romantic subplot. In sum, he understands that to survive is to keep going, and that to flourish involves avoiding contracts that have an expiration date. More importantly, he amplifies the sense of temporal disorientation that dismantles traditional understandings of personhood.

Arthur Mervyn’s Perpetual Obligation

Seriality is perhaps the most salient economic feature of Arthur Mervyn—and one that has gone overlooked. Though Arthur Mervyn is not the only of Brown’s works to thematize and allegorize aspects of the market economy, it suggestively combines seriality with an execution of economic principles in a way that demonstrates how economy and literary form evolved side by side in the early republic. As I will detail in this section, Arthur Mervyn’s form, structure, and publication history work in connection to one another to produce both a novel and a text artifact that is self-consciously open- ended and unfinished.

Indeed, Arthur Mervyn has much in common with Brown’s other novels in terms of its structure and thematic. Wieland, Ormond, and Edgar Huntly feature embedded stories, and oftentimes with more than one narrator. Many of these narrators find themselves struggling with issues of credibility, especially as it involves social and economic relations. Neither is Arthur Mervyn the only novel Brown published serially; the unfinished Memoirs of Stephen Calvert was featured in the Monthly Magazine, and the unfinished Memoirs of Carwin was published in the Literary Magazine. Arthur

Mervyn is unusual, however, because Brown sought to continue it despite the Weekly

Magazine’s failure; subsequently, even after publishing it as a book, he sought to continue it again, taking the book in a very different direction. Many critics have noted

87 that the second volume seems to bear little relation to the first; I argue that this division points to Brown’s conviction that serials must necessarily continue regardless of textual medium. We see this impulse emerging in Brown’s later work: Memoirs of Carwin is, in fact, linked to Wieland. Though a separate text, and though a much different story, it carries forward the previous strands of a novel, insisting upon the perpetual lives of characters.

When critics mention the serial publication of Arthur Mervyn, they do so usually to explain the novel’s haphazard plot structure. Donald Ringe’s 1991 study blamed the novel’s composition history for its many imperfections, noting that the book “suffers more than do Brown’s other novels from his practice of improvising as he wrote” (49).

Likewise, Norman Grabo listed Brown’s “inveterate sloppiness, and his haste” as reasons for Arthur Mervyn’s imperfections (90-91). Even William Dunlap, Brown’s earliest biographer, attributed the novel’s defects to Brown’s “haste” in “composing and publishing” (29). Though more recent critics have argued that the novel’s chaotic structure reflects its themes of modern subjectivity,39 the fact remains: Arthur Mervyn faced the challenges of real-life intrusions and an uncertain publishing schedule. In all probability, Brown would have continued to serialize the novel in the Weekly Magazine had the yellow fever not claimed the editor.

But critics’ seemingly contradictory observations about Arthur Mervyn—that its flaws stem from having been composed both hastily and over a period of time— emblematize the unique nature of seriality. The form capitalizes on deferral, using

39 Jane Tompkins argues that the “problem, then, for anyone who wishes to understand the original intent of Arthur Mervyn as a whole, is to explain how its apparently mindless reiterations and stark implausibilities can be seen as an extension of the author’s benevolent aims” (65). Similarly, Daniel A. Cohen argues that the novel’s “intricate formal structure …gives thematic design to much of Brown’s narrative” (364). 88 temporal gaps to sustain reader interest and working to bridge such gaps to achieve consistency with what has come before. Brown “rushed” his novel even as he took a long time to complete it, writing each portion hastily and publishing sections before subsequent parts had been drafted, allowing real-life events to impinge on its composition.40 Nevertheless, the details of Arthur Mervyn’s publishing history do not simply explain away the inconsistency of the novel’s plot, even as they illuminate connections between Brown’s life and the yellow fever. Rather, they signify the narrative’s function for Brown as an evolving commodity. Even after Arthur Mervyn became a book, he still called attention to its open-endedness, declaring at the beginning of the first volume that it might be amended in the future: “In the following tale, a particular series of adventures is brought to a close [. . .]. These events are not less memorable than those which form the subject of the present volume, and may hereafter be published either separately or in addition to this” (231). Brown highlights that his novel represents a “series of adventures,” and he situates it within multiple accounts of the yellow fever, describing his work as “an humble narrative” and a “brief but faithful sketch” among many tomes (231).

Within this self-consciously open-ended novel, Mervyn himself performs a kind of meta-seriality. He does not narrate his story from one secure temporal position. Rather, he tells it in pieces, putting it on hold as he pursues adventures, and hoping that his auditors will grant him “credit” in the wake of his damaging association with Welbeck.

More importantly, he describes his relationship with Stevens in terms of intangible benefit. Acknowledging that Stevens helped him not out of a desire for “pecuniary

40 Grabo offers many hypotheses about when and where Brown drafted his chapters, but Ringe (48) contests these claims on the basis that we have no hard evidence for any of Brown’s writing processes. 89 recompense,” Mervyn says that he must “heighten the gratification which must flow from the reflection on your conduct—by shewing that the being whose life you have prolonged

[. . .] is not profligate and worthless” (426). In sum, he emphasizes that his story is a type of payment in exchange for Stevens’s help. Significantly, though, he describes the relationship as involving a kind of “heightening”—a rhetorical gesture that underscores that the story is an evolving commodity, risky for what it may or may not deliver.

At first glance, the transactional relationship between Mervyn and Stevens seems to highlight the economic connections buttressed by the sentimental ties of credit.

Jennifer Baker argues that the invisible hand of economic self-interest draws Brown’s characters closer together and that readers and auditors “ultimately come to sympathize with others only once they care about—or are invested in—another’s narrative by virtue of their own economic concerns” (120). Brown’s novel, then, demonstrates that republican values could be directly reconciled with economic self-interest in ways that were both politically productive and economically viable for eighteenth-century

Americans. However, although the novel does indeed emphasize sentimental ties, it also describes promises that are never fulfilled within the narrative. Mervyn asks his auditors to make an investment in his story, but by delaying its ending, he obscures the immediacy that governs traditional transactions. What Baker sees as emphasizing the mutual interdependence that constitutes capital relations, I see as offering a model of the economic that extends beyond a particular temporality. Mervyn continually portrays his relationships with auditors as protracted—Stevens’ “good opinion” is an “indulgence,” he says, that he must “hold” onto as long as possible (243). And by describing his story as

“worthy of attention,” Mervyn highlights that its value lies not in any objective truth but

90 in its ability to generate more interest (243). Rather than committing to delivering specific answers about his motivation, he elongates his story, introducing new characters that never again appear in the narrative.

The moments in the narrative that seem most extraneous highlight Mervyn’s tactics of deferral. Consider, for example, the night Mervyn spends in the closet, where he discovers the existence of a secret love child.41 Because nothing ever comes of this subplot, it seems part of a strand that Brown failed to develop. But the serialistic Mervyn never promises to return to this subplot. Instead, he uses it to illuminate the dizzying credit-based linkages—or the “complexity of incidents”—that connect strangers and the seemingly random events that unite even the most disparate subjects. “I never saw the face of either of those persons,” Mervyn says, “and yet I am acquainted with the most secret transaction of their lives” (265). Though he does not know what happens to this couple, he embraces conjecture rather than attempting a conclusion. More importantly, he commoditizes this incident, imparting it to his auditors as another way to draw out his tale, capitalizing upon its open-endedness. The very presence of this couple signifies the ways in which a “serialized” narrative juxtaposes multiple experiences that need not amount to anything cohesive. It is perhaps no wonder that Mervyn dislikes books for the very ways that they are finalized and closed, posing few risks. Books, he says, “are vexatious in their sparingness of information” and frustrating because “all they chuse to give, they give at once; they allow no questions, no further explanations, and bend not to the caprices of our curiosity” (619). By contrast, Arthur Mervyn, as one critic described it, has “neither beginning nor end” (Clark 181).

41 Pethers remarks that this event is “is in keeping with the serialistic demand for indefiniteness and open- endedness” and “that such peculiarities are a fairly conventional part of serial fiction” (69). 91

Mervyn’s storytelling indeed generates a high level of interest. Rather than simply frustrating his auditors, his techniques of deferral inspire in them “an ardent curiosity as to those particulars which his unfinished story had left to obscurity” (432). Indeed,

Mervyn’s two auditors form unresolvable “different conclusions” about his sincerity—in a way, their disagreement prefigures the scholarly debate that has shaped criticism of the work. For some critics, Mervyn is a youth victimized by a commercializing society. For others, he is a confidence man who uses his benevolent appearance to fleece everyone around him; for yet another set of critics he emblematizes the disorienting effects of commercial capitalism, with its steady erosion of virtue. Indeed, critics have moved from trying to determine what Arthur is to thinking about the character’s ambiguity as the chief signifier of the novel’s value system. Steven Watts argues that “[s]omewhere between these two polar images—Arthur as virtuous hero, Arthur as villainous confidence man— the protagonist’s character assumed a complex, malleable, and elusive shape” (Romance of Real Life 103). And perhaps Cathy Davidson best encapsulates this line of thinking when she calls the search for the “real Arthur Mervyn” not just a critical preoccupation but rather the central question of the novel itself, one that “supplies the structuring narrative device of the book and serves as both its modus operandi and raison d’être”

(340). But Mervyn causes confusion precisely because he engages tactics of permanent deferral, not giving answers to questions and capitalizing upon this lack of fulfillment to generate more curiosity. At the end of his last chapter, he tells his pen to “[l]ie there, snug in thy leathern case, till I call for thee, and that will not be very soon” (637). Mervyn promises to return to the narrative, but he does not provide a specific timeline for his return. Like the narrator from “The Man at Home,” he embraces futurity.

Because Mervyn embraces this kind of temporal indeterminacy, multiplying open accounts rather than seeking to settle them, he remains ambiguous, unknown, and removed from the temporal limitations that force closure and definitive valuation. As critics have observed, he encompasses seemingly irreconcilable positions: he is at once a rustic youth and a cunning confidence man; a victim of Welbeck and his willing accomplice.42 But he encompasses these positions, I argue, because he transcends the boundaries of the discrete account—in both its economic and narrative implications— opening up possibilities rather than enclosing himself within a single narrative arc. In his landmark history of the corporation’s beginnings, nineteenth-century legal scholar

Samuel Williston noted that the “necessity for persons to compose the corporation results from the nature of things rather than from any rule of law. Perhaps the same may be said of the importance of a name. As an actual person could hardly transact business or sue and be sued in the courts without a name, so the fictitious person of a corporation rests under a similar necessity” (114-15). Arthur Mervyn seems driven by this same necessity.

Brown assigns a name to Mervyn—perhaps only because a corporate, aggregate character must be embodied somehow within the novel—but he also resists clarifying Mervyn’s character as if to underscore that the serial contractor can never really be understood.

The Politics of Perpetuity

Corporations and postmortem debt loomed rather large in the early American imagination, and for similar reasons. Both extracorporeal debt and incorporation underlined the confluence of modern finance and perpetuity. Even as corporations became increasingly necessary, they also became more controversial. Corporatism

42 Tompkins explains that by the end of the novel Mervyn “becomes both less and more than a character— an impulse of energy rippling through society itself” (68). 93 troubled the epistemological boundaries between the individual and the aggregate, the knowable and the unknowable, and the present and the future. Brown was not oblivious to these biases, and Mervyn is described in ways that echo allegations about corporations.

But Brown more often portrays the act of abandoning debt as more destructive to the financial health of the republic. Regardless of their ambiguities, corporate bodies allowed a body of individuals to protect their interests against the changes wrought by time.

For Thomas Jefferson, one of the most strident anti-corporate critics, the problem of postmortem financial obligation was deeply personal: he was forced to take on John

Wayles’s postmortem debt—an injunction, says Herbert Sloan, which he regarded as “not only economically burdensome but also as morally oppressive, [an example] of the way the past controlled the present” (55). Jefferson viewed perpetual debt as a manifestation of “the dead hand of the past” that would deform the new republic’s opportunity to uphold natural law (Sloan 72). For Jefferson, the solution to postmortem debt was to either discharge all debts or force them to expire. In his 1789 letter to James Madison, he argued, quite famously, that natural law and perpetual obligation were antithetical to one another: “no man can, by natural right, oblige the land he occupied, or the persons who succeed him in that occupation, to the paiment of debts contracted by him. For if he could, he might, during his life, eat up the lands for several generations to come” (264).

Jefferson went on to broaden his invective, boldly contending that the only way to limit the influence of the “dead hand of the past” was to cut ties with it. He proposed limiting the duration of all laws and financial obligations to nineteen years, a span of time he calculated as most closely encapsulating a generation. Jefferson reasons that a society in which 23,994 people are born each year and live to the age which Buffon’s table dictates

“will consist constantly of 617,703 persons of all ages.” Half these people, Jefferson reasons, will be dead in approximately 25 years. About 11,000 of them will turn 21, and half of those over 21 will be dead within 19 years (265).

Though Jefferson began his letter by talking about postmortem debt, he ended by addressing the ways in which both governments and financial organizations infringed on personal liberty. For Jefferson, debts and corporations sprang from the same obsession with guarding the financial activities of the past. If nations were “extinguished then in their natural course with those who gave them being” (266), says Jefferson, then entire societies would be forced to uncouple themselves from the manmade structures that had enabled tyranny and corruption. Jefferson speculated about the possibilities:

It enters into the resolution of the questions Whether the nation may change the descent of lands holden in tail? Whether they may change the appropriation of lands given antiently to the church, to hospitals, to colleges, orders of chivalry, and otherwise in perpetuity? Whether they may abolish the charges and privileges attached on lands, including the whole catalogue ecclesiastical and feudal? It goes to hereditary offices, authorities and jurisdictions; to hereditary orders, distinctions and appellations; to perpetual monopolies in commerce; the arts and sciences; with a long train of et ceteras: and it renders the question of reimbursement a question of generosity and not of right. (266)

These organizations—churches, colleges, hereditary orders, and corporations

(“monopolies in commerce”)—were understood by Jefferson as exercising the same unnatural authority as perpetual debt. Like his contemporaries, Jefferson associated Old-

World feudal systems with modern systems of finance, denouncing the corporation as aristocratic. Indeed, democratic critics repeatedly invoked the word “unnatural” when describing the corporation, linking its unnaturalness to its unconstitutionality (or, in another sense, to its lack of corporeality). Often this accusation carried anti-mercantile

95 sentiments. “An unnatural alliance exists between certificate and stockholders,” wrote

John Taylor (25). “Which is most to be dreaded; titles without wealth, or exorbitant wealth without titles?” (29).

In many ways, Jefferson and his contemporaries advocate for a world quite different from Brown’s serialistic vision. Whereas seriality demands the accumulation of the past and provides an impetus to keep going, Jefferson argues for the death of all institutions. What Brown renders as an inescapable feature of modernity, Jefferson portrays as a preoccupation with an aristocratic past. Famously, Jefferson favored an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to limit the lifespans of corporations because he feared that they would foster a new moneyed class that would control most commercial endeavors. Jefferson wrote to Alexander Donald that a “declaration of rights” should include “freedom of commerce against monopolies” (Thomas Jefferson: A Chronology of

His Thoughts 96). These attitudes about perpetual debts and laws carried over into

Jefferson’s antipathy toward the First Bank of the United States, a venture that he described as lying “beyond the boundaries thus specifically drawn around to powers of

Congress” and as exemplifying a “boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition” (“Opinion” 51). As bodies that knew no limits, corporations not only displaced and overrode individual rights but also enabled a kind of commercial activity that supplanted the natural and the human.

Within Arthur Mervyn, characters describe Mervyn as springing, paradoxically, from both the fulfillment of unrestrained economic liberalism and a return to an aristocratic world order.43 Not only does Mervyn exist at the crux of a series of

43 As Pauline Maier points out, early corporations were intended as public projects. The Revolution spurred contradictory attitudes toward incorporation: corporations were necessary to recover from the war, but even 96 unresolved speculative financial schemes, but he also disrupts traditional understandings of class structure. Other characters express wonderment at Arthur’s mixture of youth and experience. Upon meeting Arthur, Stevens observes that he “was no more than eighteen years old, but the depth of his remarks indicated a much greater advance” (237). Arthur is conspicuously youthful and yet his actual age is difficult to determine; more notably, he is described as the kind of economic experiment well-suited to the new nation’s expansionist impulse. Stevens even believes that Mervyn would be a viable investment, a youthful being who might be put to some good use in a nation that is portrayed as blank and uncharted. But Mervyn also displays an affinity for both aristocratic and bourgeois expressions of wealth, preoccupied by both the paper money and credit of the modern world and the tangible displays of old-world opulence. When he meets Welbeck and discovers his standard of living, Mervyn notes that Welbeck’s ideas “seemed to open a new world to my view” (280). Alongside these sentiments, he also executes a kind of upwardly mobile pragmatism not grounded in material assets but activated by symbolic currency and built on the idea that one can generate wealth through the practice of deferral. Interestingly, it is Mervyn’s tactic of deferral that provokes the wealthy and powerful Wortley, who expresses frustration at the fact that Mervyn “knows that he may safely defy my power” (241). Mervyn’s tactics remind us that corporations had the potential to dismantle recognizable power structures by enabling a new merchant class to amass considerable wealth. Even as critics decried corporations for their uncanny

municipal corporations chafed against republican ideals of disinterestedness. In the 1780s and 1790s especially, debates about incorporation centered on matters of class, aristocracy, and personal autonomy, and critics charged that corporations represented antidemocratic systems that overrode individual rights. (61).

97 resemblance to feudal forms of power, they also distrusted them for their ability to empower a new middle class to commandeer the exclusive privileges that were once associated with the landed elite. Mervyn should, of course, be compelled to comply with

Wortley, but instead he “put[s] on an air of perplexity” and acts out of “noncompliance”

(241). Perhaps, then, Mervyn is most threatening not because he seems poised to reinvigorate aristocratic forms of power, but because he encourages speculation and controls the timeline for imparting answers and resolutions. Mervyn’s practice of deferral does not simply provide him with a means to survive; it allows him to defy the people whom recognizable structures most typically empower.

Wortley is not the only character whose demands Mervyn evades; he also frustrates others who cannot extract even the most basic facts about his motivations.

When Stevens attempts to uncover the veracity of Mervyn’s stories by questioning his neighbors, he is frustrated by accounts that only obscure, rather than illuminate, the vagaries of Mervyn’s character. When Stevens attempts to uncover the veracity of

Mervyn’s stories by seeking out his neighbors, he is frustrated by additional tales that further obscure any particular way of apprehending Mervyn’s character. One woman puzzles over Mervyn’s inscrutable nature, remarking:

I could give you many instances of behaviour equally singular, and which betrayed a mixture of shrewdness and folly, of kindness and impudence, which justified, perhaps, the common notion that his intellects were unsound. Nothing was more remarkable than his impenetrability to ridicule and censure. You might revile him for hours, and he would listen to you with invincible composure. To awaken anger or shame in him was impossible. (442)

Mervyn’s neighbor emphasizes this “mixture” of several opposing and conflicting attributes—shrewdness and folly, and kindness and impudence. Mervyn is also

98 impenetrable and invincible, unwilling or unable to express the emotions that most would expect of him. He continually thwarts his neighbors’ attempts to understand him or unpuzzle his motivations, all while they repeatedly condemn him for his activities.

Interestingly, Mervyn also seems to conceive of himself as a corporate being.

When responding to the criticisms leveled against him by his neighbors, he notes that

“[i]t was not me whom they hated and despised. It was the phantom that passed under my name, which existed only in their imagination” (538). This “phantom” identity represents

Mervyn’s articulation of the extracorporeal substance of his own personhood. An entity that exists beyond embodiment, it is not recognizably human. This “phantom” identity also best captures the epistemological difficulties of corporations: they require a collective act of imagination in order to be acknowledged as persons, and yet at the same time they confound us because they exist outside knowable definitions of personhood.

We recognize them as having agency even as their contours surpass our normal understanding of humanness.

Critics maintain that Arthur Mervyn uses the gothic mode to explore the mysterious aspects of modern finance. As Theresa Goddu puts it, the novel’s “gothic counternarrative of disease, degeneracy, and decay warns of commerce’s corrupting effects” (32) and posits the “commercial man” as “ghost” (34). Undoubtedly Mervyn’s

“phantom” identity draws from a gothic imaginary. But Arthur Mervyn’s most gothic moments occur when flesh-and-blood contractors pass away, leaving both their debts and their physical bodies in the streets of Philadelphia. The concept of corporate persons may elude comprehension, but corporations preserve the health of the republic. Whereas

Mervyn’s continuing story keeps his phantom-like presence similarly circulating,

Welbeck and other characters languish and die in debtors’ prisons, severing the connections that bind people together across time. Brown’s descriptions of debtors’ prisons rival in vividness the novel’s most gruesome passages about the yellow fever, as the prisons are replete with “pale faces and withered forms” (458). More directly, his portrayal of Philadelphia’s abandoned commercial spaces emphasizes the damage wrought by unmet financial obligations. While wandering around Philadelphia’s deserted streets, Mervyn “met not more than a dozen figures; and these were ghost-like” (356).

Unlike Mervyn’s serial fantasy, in which an author or contractor can subsist solely on credit, much of the novel details the opposite—namely, the failure of the financial subject to continue. In this sense, the corporation may be a necessary instrument—a public project immune to human mortality. And Mervyn’s symbolic capital provides him with more financial mobility than any tangible return on the kind of speculative, deceitful scheme that Welbeck attempts to authorize.

Brown’s portrayal of Welbeck highlights the ways in which a dissolute contractor can wreak havoc on an already vulnerable financial system. Welbeck attempts to abandon his debts by either committing suicide or faking his own death. Seeking to make money by borrowing to finance a fraudulent maritime venture, he pursues immediate gratification in the form of tangible wealth and opulence. When he is no longer able to sustain his grandiose lifestyle, he plunges himself into the Delaware River. Welbeck finally escapes his debts entirely when he dies in prison—a final exploit that will

“consummate my fate and defeat the rage of my creditors” (547). By couching Welbeck’s attempted escape from debt as a series of “deaths,” Brown undermines the proposal that financial obligations should be laid to rest with the death of the physical person.

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Welbeck’s death is not so much a “consummation” as a financial disruption, and debts rarely are fully resolved in an interdependent, credit-based society. Modern financial entanglements involve multiple markets that coexist indefinitely; they move through cycles of debt and credit, leaving us with little choice other than to keep extending our debt into an unforeseen future or to end up defaulting. Mervyn criticizes Welbeck for his

“thoughtlessness of futurity” (412), an observation that may very well distinguish

Welbeck’s stealing from Mervyn’s deferral. Mervyn’s delayed gratification promises at least a “heightening”—a partial return on a reader’s investment and the promise of more in the future.

Brown’s novel argues that the economic system of credit and paper money is inescapable and that the best course of action is to embrace the economics of futurity. We might extend these ideas to Brown’s turn to magazine writing later in his career. Many critics have characterized Brown’s later magazine work as a “retreat” from writing novels,44 and others have framed it as reflecting a desire to temper individualism with republican collaboration.45 I would suggest that Brown returns frequently to the serial form to explore the possibilities of credit-based authorship. While Brown’s inaugural

44 See especially Grabo and Clark, who describe Brown’s later work as a repudiation of his earlier devotion to fiction. Grabo writes that Brown “turned his back” on the novel (142), and Clark states that “Brown was forsaking creative literature for the more mundane yet equally important fields of history, politics, and science” (242). Watts’s The Romance of Real Life also characterizes Brown’s later career as a withdrawal from political novels (132). 45 See Jared Gardner, who reads Brown’s later magazine work as a critique of the “tyranny of the central consciousness” (23). Brown “defin[ed] the periodical as the space in which unstable texts, fragments, and anonymous diatribes can be made stable, ordered, and organized without the totalizing narratives and central consciousness of the conventional novel” (22).

101 editor’s address in The Literary Magazine champions the “promotion of public and private virtue,” it also invites ruthless and mercenary tactics. The editor “will not scruple to collect materials from all quarters. He will ransack the newest foreign publications, and extract from them whatever can serve his purpose” (5). In other words, the serialist must keep going. Publications fail, Brown says, not because of any dearth of readerly credit but because editors “either changed their principles, remitted their zeal, or voluntarily relinquished their trade, or, last of all, and like other members, have died” (4).

Brown bemoans not that magazines sometimes fail to secure subscriptions but that they are grounded in finitude and human limitations. His fantasy “corporate author” might stave off the challenges of politics, economics, or mortality.

Although early American authors wrote before the advent of self-sustaining authorship, we might see in Brown’s literary economy many of the sentiments that led later American authors to incorporate themselves. We might also see the stirrings of the

“commercial collaborative author”—that twentieth-century invention that would produce popular book series under the mantle of a singular identity, multiplying long narrative arcs in which the characters hardly change and are frozen in some realm that eclipses the passage of time. What these corporate developments would give writers in terms of financial success they would take away in individuality and intellectual ownership. But the popularity of such financial arrangements represents a way to frame the eventual triumph of literary corporatism, with its alliance between art and commerce and its exchange of individual personality for literary celebrity. In our own time especially, we recognize that serials are valued most when they keep going; the promise of longevity, in many respects, is the key to securing corporate sponsorship. By reconceptualizing the

102 serial-periodical form as an economic endeavor, we may broaden our understanding of professional authorship in the eighteenth century. Brown was, above all else, a serialist; even as his subject matter and approach changed, he returned to the form time and time again as if to demonstrate that successful literary projects must insist on perpetuity.

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Chapter 3

Serializing the Self: The Politics of Private Morality in the Serial Writings of Susanna Rowson

In May of 1795, Susanna Haswell Rowson wrote to her cousin Anthony about the recent publication of her novel Trials of the Human Heart. After promising to send him a copy, she then turned to the issue that undoubtedly served as the real occasion for her letter. “You no doubt have seen by the newspapers that the scribblers have made my works a subject to exercise their wits upon, some for, some against, and all truly because

I am an English woman and yet have an unaccountable affection for America and all that appertains thereunto,” she wrote.46 Rowson was, of course, referring to the scathing pamphlet attack she had very recently suffered at the hands of William Cobbett—a political instigator whose gossip pamphlets had earned the disdain of politicians and public figures alike. Caught in the crossfire of a skirmish between Cobbett and the editors of the American Monthly Review, Rowson found herself accused of political maneuvering. Denouncing her “sudden conversion to republicanism” as insincere,

Cobbett further condemned her as a writer of immodest, immoral novels. “Our American

Sappho,” he said, inspired young people to continue “the work of generation” whether they were “married or not” (24); “The Inquisitor is my opium,” he wrote, “and I have ever found the Slaves in Algiers a most excellent emetic. As to Mentoria and Charlotte, it

46 See Papers of Susanna Rowson, Box 1, MSS 7379; Folder 39; 21 May 1795. University of Virginia Special Collections. 104 is hardly necessary to say what use they are put to in the chamber of a valetudinarian”

(27). For Cobbett, the way to most effectively silence Rowson’s political voice was to accuse her of peddling pornography.

Cobbett’s accusations did not go unanswered. When Rowson published Trials of the Human Heart just months later, she referenced in her preface the “loathsome reptile” and “creature” that “splits out its malignant poison.” After defending her patriotism from

Cobbett’s charges, she delivered a novel that addressed thematically the problem of slander. As Joseph Fichtelberg has convincingly argued, Trials of the Human Heart intervenes directly in the personal and institutional implications of defamation, drawing upon the performative nature of melodrama to imagine “an array of scenarios [. . .] through which one’s own stories are appropriated by others” (437). For Fichtelberg,

Rowson’s work answers many of the pamphlet scandals of the 1790s, namely James T.

Callender’s revelation of Alexander Hamilton’s affair with Maria Reynolds. In Trials of the Human Heart, Rowson used “an exchange of letters mimicking the distortions of slander” to “demonstrate[e] how an attack by a Federalist satirist could be transformed into public redemption” (437). Trials of the Human Heart spoke particularly well to the

1790s—a decade that saw the introduction of the Alien and Sedition Acts and numerous libel lawsuits against journalists and pamphleteers. As a novel that examined the public- private paradigm, it remains for us a particularly fruitful locus point for any study of print politics, fiction, and personal morality.

But this chapter doesn’t tell this more familiar story. Instead, it pushes beyond the immediate impact that Cobbett might have had on Rowson’s writing in order to evaluate how gossip, slander, and publicity continued to figure into her nineteenth-century work.

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By the early nineteenth century, the Alien and Sedition Acts had been repealed; the high- profile prosecutions of James T. Callender and Anthony Haswell (Rowson’s cousin) were nearly a thing of the past. However, these issues continued to matter for Rowson, and her later work took a slightly different turn. Rather than railing against the “loathsome reptiles” who printed inflammatory writing, Rowson looked more closely at the readerly appetites and mental habits that made possible the flourishing of a “gossip culture” in the first place. The federal government retreated from the project of regulating the print sphere; in turn, Rowson seemed to realize that print alone had never been the problem.

Instead, the problem was even more systemic and longstanding: it emerged from the human imagination—that uncontrollable frontier, powerful and inexorable, that drew conclusions from suggestive correspondence, isolated incidents, and even the lack of information. While printed material surely provoked imagination, it was only one piece of the overall problem. Gossip culture was a systemic issue: it emerged from the flow of communication itself.

As editor of the Boston Weekly, Rowson returned again and again to the subjects of marital infidelity and public censure, authoring two serial texts that addressed the role that written texts played in provoking the spread of injurious gossip. These works complemented each other, each arguing that texts and their authors were neither the cause of nor the solution to the problem of slander. For Rowson, communication was a volatile process—one that would inevitably give way to conjecture and misreading. In the end,

Rowson did not simply disown the pamphleteers and professed gossips; she also took aim at her readers for indulging a larger culture of suspicion and conjecture.

Introduction: Sincerity, Publicity, and the Problems of the Communal Public Sphere

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Sincerity is the only novel Susanna Rowson wrote entirely as a long-running serial. Published in small one- or half-page weekly installments in Rowson’s own Boston

Weekly, it was presented as a collection of “found documents”—letters, diary excerpts, and various enclosures—that chronicle the twenty-year span of a difficult marriage and a tragic life. Though Rowson would eventually publish the novel as a complete entity in

1813 as Sarah, or the Exemplary Wife, Sincerity existed for nearly a decade solely in the pages of a periodical. An ephemeral “novel in fragments,” it was available only alongside the Boston Weekly’s other pieces, essays, and stories. In Sarah’s preface, Rowson writes that the novel’s original serial form delivery posed difficulties for the narrative as a whole: it was “written in snatches of time, and under the pressure of much care and business incident to my profession; consequently it was a degree incorrect” (i). Though

Rowson does not specify in what ways her novel was a “degree incorrect,” she attributes many of the narrative’s flaws on its hasty composition and her own multiple professional commitments as author, editor, and educator. By reissuing the novel as a discrete codex, then, Rowson acknowledges that her publication process produced a disordered and imperfect text.

Rowson’s decision to reissue Sincerity evinces a general dissatisfaction with the serial form, but this same dissatisfaction also underscores her awareness of the form’s special advantages. In other words, Rowson used the form for precisely the same reasons she found it challenging: it modeled for readers the staggered communicative activity that characterized most methods of exchange in the early republic. As letters move slowly between the main character Sarah and her correspondents, so too do the installments of the serial itself travel between Rowson and her readers. Rowson’s use of the serial form

107 allows her to render dramatically and mimetically for readers the gaps between readers and writers, correspondents and subjects, and interlocutors and bystanders. A narrative as much about imparting information across periods of time as it is about a doomed marriage, Sincerity is concerned not as much with the content of texts—with the subject- matter of the missives and letters and documents that allege wrongdoing—but with the temporal gaps between communications that provoke speculation.

In Sincerity, Rowson engages the serial form in order to explore the epistemological peculiarities of irregular and sporadic communication. In so doing, she describes the conditions that gave rise to the “gossip culture” of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—the same culture that ignited debates about the federal government’s role in regulating the print sphere. Rowson uses the serial form to highlight the ways fragmented and incomplete material relied on readers to supply their own conjectures, sometimes conferring with friends and acquaintances to discuss the text or missive at hand. And by capitalizing on readers’ imaginative processes, serialized texts gestured to the potent world beyond the page—the world of more seemingly authentic acts of communication. Sincerity’s Sarah is often characterized badly by her detractors; worse, however, is the fact that her friends and correspondents entertain misinformation because they read only partial details in letters, or because they possess a lack of information. In essence, their own imaginations and interpersonal conjecturing do as much damage to Sarah than the most overt accusations. By using seriality to replicate for readers the way that Sarah’s correspondents receive information, Rowson uncovers the interplay between texts and the reader’s imagination. For Rowson, the serial text

108 represents both a vehicle by which slander is transmitted and a means by which to depict the way gossip and conjecture operate in close, interpersonal settings.

My chapter intervenes in a conversation about the role of the serial in promoting the communal bonds that seemingly proved so integral to national consolidation.

Previously, scholars of seriality have painted a somewhat sanguine picture of communal reading practices as they sprang up in antebellum America, activities anchored in part by periodical literature. Susan Belasco and Kenneth Price call the serial “a social text, involving complex relationships among writers, readers, editors, publishers, printers and distributors” (3).47 Patricia Okker writes that readers of serials “viewed their reading as a pleasurable communal experience” (11). “Unlike novels in general,” writes Okker,

“which have often been associated with promoting private and individualistic responses, magazine novels inspire not just private experiences, but also the same kind of communal bonds scholars have long associated with periodicals” (15-16).48 Rowson certainly understood the serial form as operating in a communal setting, prompting citizens to confer with one another about what they read. But Rowson also portrays these communities as indulging a culture of suspicion. More troubling, these spaces do not necessarily operate as part of the rational public sphere but as a hybrid space of semi- private conjectures that could not be tracked or regulated. As Elizabeth Dillon reminds

47 About Uncle Tom’s Cabin in particular, Belasco has famously argued that the narrative’s seriality “offered readers the opportunity to participate closely in the narrative [. . .] by writing letters to the editor of the periodical, as many of Stowe’s readers did” and that “these and other letters suggest the intimacy of serialized publication; as in no other literary form, literature became a part of the day-to-day lives of readers” (71). 48Okker writes that magazine novels “participated in the process of forming and sustaining a communal identity. [. . .] the American magazine novel proved an ideal form for exploring not the individual identity of an American ‘self,’ but rather a collective understanding of the group. Just as the novels emerge as a single entity through the publication of individual installments, magazine novelists seemed to revel in deciphering the relationship of parts to whole. [. . .] [These] novels tell stories about how—and whether— individuals can come together to form a society” (3). 109 us, print exists neither exclusively in the public or private sphere but “as an intermediary location that helps to generate the meaning of both private and public domains” (Gender of Freedom 6). In Rowson’s work, seriality demonstrates how conjecture and speculation move from the minds of individual readers to the shared suspicions of the community.

And rather than seeking to “check” the validity of their information against those of their peers, people instead were inclined to entertain the most conjectural aspects of what they read or heard.

Rowson contributed to the Boston Weekly’s “The Gossip” column as she serialized Sincerity. Despite its title, “The Gossip,” was anything but salacious. Instead, it sought to educate its readers about the importance of monitoring their behavior, talk, and habits of speculation. Not simply critical of the practice of publishing inflammatory material, “The Gossip” took aim at the readers who financially supported a culture that capitalized on the misfortunes of the innocent and misunderstood. No stranger to slander herself, Rowson likely drew upon her own intimate experiences with bad publicity.

Though William Cobbett had assailed her conversion to republicanism and denigrated her writing, he had hinted more insidiously that her political views were the subject of public rumor. For Rowson, this insinuation was equally damning, least of all for what it implied about the weight of personal conjecture. Cobbett gestured not to what Rowson had said publicly but to the world of rumors—of readers’ unregulated and unruly thoughts. This is the world of Sincerity, where private musings and half-substantiated conclusions hold sway. “The Gossip” tries to provide something of a solution to this problem. Whereas

Sincerity makes a subtle argument against spreading rumors, “The Gossip” offers a framework for evaluating more skeptically the information that frequently circulated

110 about public and private citizens. Gossip and slander, according to Rowson, should be curbed by readers’ careful attention to their own appetites. Just as human habits were reason for the spread of rumors, they were also the cure: People needed to regulate their own curiosity while others—women in particular—needed to imagine ways to avoid becoming a subject of gossip.

Previously, critics have characterized Rowson’s late-career work as either a retreat from the proto-feminist novel she helped to promote or a recommitment to the measured, communitarian ideals of republican print culture. I argue instead that Rowson grapples with individualism and feminism in ways that illuminate the complex and somewhat confounding machinery of print culture, liberalism, and republicanism at the turn of the nineteenth century. By placing so much emphasis on the individual’s imagination, and by instructing individuals to regulate their own private thoughts in order to preserve the integrity of other people (especially women), Rowson recognized that imagination was constitutive of privacy itself. Elizabeth Dillon reminds us that U.S. liberalism did not exclude women so much as it “create[d] and reserve[d] a discrete place for women within its structure” (Gender of Freedom 3). Indeed, Rowson’s attitude toward privacy underscores how privacy could be coopted to reaffirm traditional gender expectations. But for Rowson, the formulation was more complex: imagination was a private faculty, true, but it was also incredibly unruly and ungovernable and maybe even entirely unpredictable. It existed beyond the purview of authors, editors, and statesmen and exemplified the unassailable nature of a truly private space.49 It was also incredibly

49 For many critics of American literature, the novel has always fostered a sense of privacy that was often viewed as detrimental to republican polity. For Rowson, though, as I argue in this chapter, the private space allows respite from a sphere that purported to continually evaluate women’s virtue. 111 unstable—it could be cultivated, manipulated, or influenced by both printed and spoken word. For Rowson, this recognition simultaneously liberated imagination from the constraints of the rational public sphere and made its self-regulation all the more necessary. Even as Rowson recognized that imagination might be intrinsically ungovernable—a truly “free” creative faculty that was not necessarily tied to any corresponding real-life referent—she also understood that its uncontrollability made it additionally threatening. If people could not control what they imagined, then they could not stop from speculating about things they saw, heard, or read. More importantly,

Rowson’s work does not assign this “uncontrollability” to the realm of emotion. By making this argument, I depart from the critical conversation that associates emotion with faulty judgments. Most notably, Julia Stern draws upon Adam Smith’s ideas of moral sentiment to argue that “the novels of the 1790s link problems of sympathy with obstacles to perception, characteristically dramatizing crises of fellow feeling in the language of sensory failure” (7). In Sincerity, though, characters are not taken by runaway passions and flights of fancy. Instead, they engage their imaginative faculties in seemingly reasonable fashion, making judgments based on the pieces of evidence they have managed to glean from letters and other testimonies. That they accord them so much weight—and that they often follow them to damaging conclusions—troubles Rowson the most.

In Sincerity we see a nascent Romantic artistic sensibility colliding with the late eighteenth century’s penchant for censure and surveillance. In this chapter, I argue that

Rowson’s dual commitments to private liberalism and a private imaginary make her a much more complex figure than we have previously been willing to take seriously. She

112 negotiates the sentimental novel with a Romantic approach to imagination and finally undercuts both with a fatalistic recommendation that shores up the operation of traditional gender roles. In other words, Rowson’s progressive underpinnings eventually work to justify a traditional program of personal piety: Women must expect to be talked about. The only way to avoid such a predicament is to be a “closed book”—or, in other words, a text that precludes speculation.

Sincerity as Anti-Novel

Because Sincerity is such a complex and obscure novel, some plot summary is necessary to understand both its structure and its critical engagements. Like Charles

Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, Sincerity is a meta-serial that comments on the practice and process of seriality itself. But whereas Brown organizes his novel around the testimony of an important eye-witness, Rowson uses the epistolary form. Each chapter of

Sincerity presents a letter, a part of a letter, or a diary entry contained within a letter. But despite the conventionality of epistolary writing, Sincerity is, by all accounts, a rather unusual epistolary novel. Most of the letters are not written by Sarah; rather, Sarah’s friend Anne is writing to Elenor, whose own correspondence is omitted from the novel, and who has no apparent relationship to Sarah. Even more confounding is the fact that

Anne dies before the novel’s end and an anonymous (and previously unintroduced) editor must piece together the remaining correspondence between Sarah and her brother.

Frequently, the narrative emphasizes the breaks and pauses inherent in a serial publication. Just as readers must wait to receive the story’s installments, so too must

Sarah’s friends and correspondents wait for letters and news. At times, these correspondents prematurely break off their letters because their lives have intruded—“I

113 am interrupted,” Sarah tells Anne in one letter (Boston Weekly, 23 July 1804, 160). In another letter, Anne writes to Elenor, “I know you are interested in this narrative, but I must drop my pen for the present” (Boston Weekly, 13 Aug. 1804, 172).

By opening where many domestic novels end—with marriage—Sincerity begins as a kind of sequel. In her first letter to Anne, Sarah proclaims, “Yes! Anne, the die is cast—I am a wife. But a less cheerful bride” (“Letter I,” Boston Weekly, 4 Jun 1803,

132). Anne provides her friend Elenor with the background. Sarah was the daughter of a gentleman who “was not a man of strict morals” and who contracted a considerable amount of debt. Out of desperation she turned to George Darnley, who is from a “family of rank,” and whose offer of marriage seems an easy solution to Sarah’s financial and personal woes (“Letter VII,” Boston Weekly, 16 July 1803, 156). But all is not as it seems. Soon after their marriage, Sarah discovers that Darnley is engaged in a series of adulterous affairs with women. As he becomes increasingly bold about his infidelity,

Sarah grows progressively withdrawn from society and afraid of the shame that public exposure might bring. Indeed, Sarah’s aunt soon confirms that “the world says he prefers other women to you,” to which Sarah responds, “The world is officiously meddling”

(“Letter XVIII,” Boston Weekly, 22 Oct. 1803, 212). Sarah’s conviction that the world is meddling in her affairs governs much of the novel.

When Darnley’s financial irresponsibility results in eviction and repossession of all his and Sarah’s possessions, Sarah must work as a governess to Mrs. Bellamy, a wealthy Irish woman she soon discovers is morally corrupt and a professed slanderer.

Vexed by Sarah’s devotion to her disloyal husband and her professed morality, Mrs.

Bellamy forces Sarah to leave her lodgings and resolves to ruin her reputation with

114 accusations of adultery. From this point, the narrative grows increasingly complex with many different accounts and various enclosures. Anne relays the story to Elenor in a series of letters, but many of these letters contain enclosures of Sarah’s letters.

Additionally, Sarah’s letters contain enclosures from other characters—the Marquis,

Sarah’s brother, Mrs. Bellamy’s daughter. We might thus understand the novel as operating through many competing authorial voices and temporal orientations. Anne, for instance, juggles different authorial commitments: she writes about Sarah’s trials as she hears of them, and she also visits Sarah as well. But Anne also provides a larger overview for Elenor by wondering about Sarah’s wellbeing. In a way, Anne bridges two temporalities: she reads about Sarah’s hardships as they happen, but she also reflects on them as she writes to Elenor. Additionally, she transcribes letters from other people in order to give Elenor a fuller sense of the events as they unfolded for her. At one point,

Anne tells Elenor that she wants to replicate the story as she experienced it herself: “I have wonders to recount,” she writes to Elenor, “but you must take all in the order as they occurred to me.” Anne’s statement underlines Rowson’s greater belief that the serial form depicts the way information is experienced and processed.

Sarah is less fortunate than Anne or Elenor in the sense that her story is her lived experience, not simply a letter or an anecdote of “interest.” In order to separate herself from Mrs. Bellamy’s calumny, she goes into hiding, but her disappearance raises many more questions than her actual presence. When she disappears, Anne commissions a lawyer to look for her and then relays this information to Elenor, transcribing the lawyer’s letters and conversation. One lawyer concludes that Sarah is indeed a woman of ill-repute who has deliberately disappeared in order to evade suspicion. He also believes

115 that Sarah has gone to live with another man. When Anne receives these accounts, she is stunned and disbelieving—but she also begins to entertain the idea that Sarah might indeed have committed adultery. It is not in Sarah’s nature, says Anne, “to become a voluntary slave to vice. Indeed, it is plain to me, throughout every part of this letter, that she has been persecuted and ill used; perhaps driven to extreme distress; want of bread or clothing, would not tempt her into the paths of shame; but when in distress, should a man of sense, delicacy, of polished manners, and insinuating address, relieve her, and then sue for her favor—I cannot answer for her heart” (“Letter XXVI,” Boston Weekly, 7 Jan.

1804, 44). Indeed, Anne begins to believe that Sarah has transgressed moral boundaries and she rationalizes for Elenor how this indiscretion may have come to pass. When the

“heart is enthusiastically impressed with grateful sensations,” Anne writes, “how soon will assiduous tenderness, from an engaging object, make it vibrate with a warmer sensation, and then, what are our best resolutions? I speak not as a woman only but as a child of frailty; for such are all the sons and daughters of Adam.” In this one letter, Anne vacillates between a conviction that Sarah has been falsely represented—with a complete denial of Sarah’s culpability—and a suspicion that the lawyers may be correct. “In such situation,” she writes to Elenor, “I would not answer for the steadiness even of my virtuous Sarah” (“Letter XXVI” 44). She believes that Sarah has fled to escape the “dread of ignominy,” but she also acknowledges that Sarah might indeed have given in to temptation. In other words, she can only speculate about what Sarah has done. And even though these speculations are purely conjectural, they eventually crystalize into a willingness to entertain the worst possibilities. Her intimate knowledge of Sarah’s

116 character cannot dampen her own imagination—an imagination that she commits to print with striking rationality.

But still unwilling to give up on Sarah, Anne enlists Sarah’s brother, Frederick, to help search for his sister. However, he also begins to credit the rumors he has heard, vowing that “I would rather hear she was dead, than find her what every thing I hear and see what leads me to fear she is” (“Letter XXVII,” Boston Weekly, 28 Jan. 1804, 56).

Like Anne, Frederick draws conclusions about Sarah’s morality not from what he has heard or read but from his sister’s silence, and though “his heart’s anguish overflowed at his eyes,” he prizes Sarah’s morality above her life. Reluctant to abandon the search for

Sarah completely, he places an article in the newspaper to persuade her to return. But he must take great care in crafting this advertisement so as not to arouse public suspicion.

He “couched” the advertisement “in such terms, as if it fell into her hands, and she wished to return to her friends, she could not but understand it; yet so delicate as not to wound her feelings by making her situation a topic for public animadversion” (60).

Interestingly, Frederick’s acute anxiety about “public animadversion” indicates the ways that public opinion develops around the lack of information and the persistence of curiosity. By putting an advertisement in the paper, Frederick runs the risk of making

Sarah the subject of public talk. The advertisement itself is not the problem; rather, the problem is that the advertisement, no matter how innocuous, will inspire more curiosity and speculation among its readers.

Fortunately, Sarah is soon reunited with her brother and Anne. Though she is relieved to live apart from Darnley, she acknowledges that the very state of separation from her husband threatens her reputation; she fears that she “shall never again appear

117 respectable in the eyes of the world until I am again under my husband’s protection”

(“Letter XXVIII,” Boston Weekly, 11 Feb. 1804). She gives Anne the journal she kept while she was confined from society, and the fragments of this journal become yet another enclosure for Elenor. Sarah originally intended the journal for Anne so that

“should any event have put a period to her existence, it might have been transmitted to me, and have justified her to her father should he ever return.” But Anne delivers the journal to Elenor to “explain many circumstances which at present appear problematical” and to “greatly interest your feelings.” Significantly, Anne’s enclosure underscores the notion that Sarah can only be exonerated by textual evidence—her own, in this situation—and by a complete documentation of all her missing time. By accounting for her own whereabouts and by releasing her own personal diary, Sarah can limit the extent to which the unknown can populate her readers’ minds. Further, Anne’s statement calls attention to problems created by serialized publication: Sarah’s missing time appears

“problematical” to Elenor, after all, because of the way Anne initially represented these events in her own staggered correspondence. Sarah’s diary counteracts the problems of conjecture by providing Elenor with a complete text, one that will hopefully produce a reading experience that supplies answers and obviates the kind of curiosity that seriality promotes. Though it will “interest” Elenor’s feelings much like the suspenseful, serialized rendering of Sarah’s trials, it will, more importantly, temper and control that interest with a cohesive and total explanation for Sarah’s strange behavior.

Rowson’s readers, however, do not receive Sarah’s diary as a complete text. For us the diary is still broken up and delivered in parts. Rowson uses seriality to force the reader to revisit the events they have read about and to experience this particular time

118 from Sarah’s perspective. Since readers are already aware that Sarah is innocent of all charges against her, they can read the diary for a more detailed and sympathetic sense of how these events unfolded for Sarah. Though Rowson could just as easily make Sarah’s account of her travails a retroactive explanation, she instead staggers the delivery of

Sarah’s diary, sometimes dividing one entry among several installments. Obviously, the format of the magazine itself determines the size of the installments, but the decision to present Sarah’s diary unveils the starkness of Sarah’s situation. As if to underline Sarah’s own precarious position, the diary’s installments often come to abrupt ends in cliff- hanger moments—when Sarah faints at the sight of the marquis, for instance, or when she is reunited with her brother.

Sarah’s diary emphasizes the poor treatment she received from people who assumed that the rumors about her were true. A grim chronicle of her withdrawal from society, the diary details the ways in which Sarah was the constant subject of scrutiny and analysis. While living in a boarding house and sleeping in a closet, she had an encounter with a landlady who discovered her identity and immediately revealed that she had already heard “the whole story” about Sarah’s background and encounters with Mrs.

Bellamy (“Letter XXVIII,” Boston Weekly, 3 March 1804, 76). Sarah writes to Ann “you will hardly believe what bad hearts there are in this world. I have subjected myself to an insult, which has given my sensibility so keen a wound, that were I to live an hundred years, if memory retained a trace of any past transaction, the remembrance of it will ever give me an indescribable pang” (76). While trying to procure the money that Mrs.

Bellamy owes her, Sarah discovers that Mrs. Bellamy has written to Darnley “such an infamous falsehood” (“Letter XXVIII,” Boston Weekly, 10 March 1804, 80). Sarah

119 knows that Anne must have heard the rumors as well: “You too, my dear Ann, will hear the shocking tale, I have no doubt; but you will not believe it—I know you will not” (80).

Managing to find employment and sanctuary in a large mansion in a remote estate, Sarah begins to earn money to pay her debts. She resolves to “return to England with respectability” once she has paid what she owes (“Letter XXXVIII,” Boston Weekly,

17 March 1804, 84). However, when the marquis eventually locates her and finds her at the mansion—“the man who had presumed openly to make overtures derogatory to my honour”—with Darnley’s former mistress, Mrs. Romaine—Sarah soon discovers that she has been living, unknown to her, in Mrs. Romaine’s house. When she discovers that she is “seeing the woman who had been the bane of my domestic peace,” she faints (“Letter

XXXVIII,” Boston Weekly, 24 March 1804, 88). When she recovers, Sarah manages to escape from the house on foot, setting out in the night even though she is twelve miles from Dublin. This section of the diary corresponds to her disappearance, which was reported to Anne by the marquis.

Before Sarah can be restored to her society, she must make amends with Darnley.

This undertaking proves difficult, as Darnley has already received letters from Mrs.

Bellamy that undermine Sarah’s integrity. But again, Anne uses incomplete knowledge of the situation to speculate about the exact nature of Sarah and Darnley’s relationship.

Anne tells Elenor:

I informed you in my last, that Sarah had written to her husband, to announce to him her arrival in England; he returned no answer, and I began to think all connection between them was forever at an end; indeed, I did not much regret it, only as it respected her own ideas of propriety, which led her to wish to see him, that she might clear up all misconceptions, which, aspersed as her character had been, was absolutely necessary to be done; though, until she saw him, and knew exactly what had been said by that arch fiend Bellamy, or whether she had really

120

written at all or not, to attempt an explanation before she was accused, was to acknowledge a consciousness of error. (Boston Weekly, 14 Apr. 1804, 100).

Anne’s insistence highlights the gaps between items of correspondence and the epistemological gaps posed by serialized communication. Sarah’s husband makes damaging assumptions about Sarah’s behavior because of the written correspondence he has received from “arch fiend” Bellamy. In order to clear up these misconceptions, Sarah must attend to her husband in real time to overcome the limitations imposed by the slow movement of letters. Additionally, Anne’s belief that “all connection” between Sarah and

Darnley is “at an end” also hinges upon the uncertainties posed by staggered communicative activity. Because Sarah has not heard from Darnley by post, Anne constructs a plausible explanation: that he has no desire to reconcile his own marriage.

Though Anne may be correct, her assumptions are founded in a lack of information. By sharing these unsubstantiated conclusions with Elenor, she promotes a culture of communal speculation.

Surprisingly, Darnley is willing to reconcile with Sarah—but only after he receives enough information to be convinced that she is not guilty of adultery. He and

Sarah resume their life together, though Anne doubts Sarah will find lasting contentment.

And though this occasion seems a good one for the novel’s end, Anne describes the urge to keep going. She tells Elenor: “Don’t you know when a heroine is married, the Novel always ends—there is nothing worth relating in the every day incidents of the family circle” (“Letter XXX,” Boston Weekly, 28 Apr. 1804, 108). Anne’s statement underlines one of the ways that serial novels differ from discrete texts: they deal with events in diurnal fashion, relating the happenings of the “family circle.” Anne’s insistence also

121 places emphasis on the distinct properties of the serial narrative more generally.

Concerned primarily with conveying the passage of time, Sincerity details the way a woman’s public persona is complicated and constructed by others’ accounts and perceptions. These “snatches of time” are Rowson’s chief concern; by publishing

Sincerity serially, Rowson accentuates the highly unstable nature of the public personhood in a world of shared discourses. In a subsequent letter Sarah describes her own unhappiness as directly related to living in a “state of perpetual obligation” (“Letter

XXXI,” Boston Weekly, 5 May 1804, 112)—a sentiment that echoes the ways that her own person is always in debt to others’ imaginings.

As Sincerity posits that a person’s reputation is constructed by a community’s perceptions, it also highlights that these perceptions shift with the passage of time. If we think about Sarah’s personhood as existing as a serial text, we might acknowledge that

Rowson’s novel merges with David Hume’s contemporary writings about reality, perception, and time. Hume, after all, posited the notion of a serialized self, emphasizing that perception and imagination were responsible for constructing reality. Stressing that

“successive perceptions only” “constitute the mind,” Hume argued that the self was

“nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and moment” (A Treatise of

Human Nature, Book I Part IV Section 6). He also describes the passage of time as challenging any notion of discrete, stable identity: “Who can tell me,” he writes, “what were his thoughts and actions on the 1st of January 1715? Or will he affirm, because he has entirely forgot the incidents of these days, that the present self is not the person with the self of that time, and by that means overturn all the most established notions of

122 personal identity?” Rowson’s serial text, then, enacts for her readers a model of perception that more mimetically depicts the reader’s own apprehension of his or her surroundings, as well as the imaginative processes that construct a stable sense of identity. If an “action of imagination” invents “the uninterrupted and invariable object,” as Hume states, then the serialized text uncovers and lays bare this act of creative invention.

Furthermore, Rowson’s deployment of seriality demonstrates how text and personhood collapse so that one comes to stand in for the other. A person receiving a serial text, whether a series of letters or fictional installments, changes between receiving each segment, just as the text itself shifts to reflect its temporal location. Just as the person must use imagination to secure his own identity and reality across the passage of time, so too must the reader of a serialized text do imaginative work to stabilize the text’s disparate pieces as a whole. Sincerity actually calls attention to this process, fixing specific dates to its letters and staggering its delivery. Indeed, the text’s sporadic publication more accurately renders for readers the separate temporalities of narrative time and real time. By acknowledging that readers help to invent the story, Rowson stresses the centrality of readers’ perceptions to the serialist’s project of developing narrative in the realm of the imagination.

Whereas Hume focuses on an individual’s perception of his own reality, Rowson applies this act of invention to more communal efforts, demonstrating that identities are forged not only by individual perceptions but also collective perceptions fostered by periodical literature. For Rowson, reputation—a kind of invented reality in and of itself— requires a shared effort of imagination. In this sense, Rowson’s own theories of the

123 imagination build upon and then deviate from Hume’s. While she, like Hume, prizes the imagination for its ability to construct a stable reality, she also recognizes that this imagination can easily be influenced and coopted by others, and that members of reading communities often conferred with one another to assign meaning to incidents and people.

Sarah’s own self is an unstable creation; more problematically, it is located and imagined into being by a larger system of communication and perception. By approximating the processes of anticipation and conjecture that surround epistolary correspondence,

Rowson’s text amplifies the idea that mental impressions constitute reality.

More clearly, Rowson underscores the distinct relationship of the serial text to the minds of readers: as a form that very deliberately provokes the imagination and encourages readerly involvement, seriality involves readers in a process of fashioning reality. Even as Sarah withdraws physically from spaces and locations of her detractors and calumniators, she is unable to extricate herself from a tide of misinformation. In fact, her physical absence demonstrates the overwhelming ways in which personhood is encumbered by others’ conceptions rather physical (or textual) presence itself. Most significant, then, is multifaceted attitude toward the role of the individual in controlling the propagation of misinformation. Though Rowson cedes the process of creating reality to the hidden landscape of the mind, she finds both solace and anxiety in the idea that an individual has an incredible role in the construction of public opinion—solace because allegedly one could be taught to adopt a sense of skepticism, and anxiety because the very power to which she ascribed the imagination rendered it uncontrollable. Ultimately, according to Rowson, the burden rests with vulnerable individuals—women in

124 particular—to avoid acting in ways that could be misinterpreted and to prevent the leaps of others’ imaginations.

The last letters of Sincerity reaffirm the idea that identity is constructed by the thoughts and impressions of perceptive subjects. Even as characters begin to die, their legacies echo throughout the periodical’s subject-matter. First Anne dies; in her place an unnamed (and previously unintroduced) editor pieces together the remaining correspondence. Sarah endures her loveless marriage to Darnley, resolving to remain married despite her sufferings. Describing her life as “a vast blank on which my history may be written in one expressive word, disappointment,” Sarah calls attention to her own inability to self-author (“Letter XXXII,” Boston Weekly, 16 June 1804, 136). By referring to this “blankness,” she describes her own misgivings about modern personality—that it is forged, somewhat extensively, by others’ vivid mental impressions rather than by the subject’s own desires, convictions, and actions. Again, we see in Rowson’s novel a somewhat complicated stance on the interplay between private imaginings and public consensus—that the personality might be a product of individualism, but its value in society is determined by others’ assessments of character and reputation.

Moreover, Sincerity’s insistence upon continuing after its main characters have died demonstrates that reputation, personality, and identity are invented and sustained by a somewhat communal act of perceiving and creating. Sarah’s last letter breaks off in the middle of a word, but the last installment comprises an editor’s note. As Gardner has observed, “the ‘novel’ ends by dissolving itself back into the magazine, the larger periodical form with its own enveloping collection of letters, anecdotes, and everyday

125 observations” (110).50 Even when Sarah is no longer alive, she continues to exist in the minds of characters within the story as well as the larger periodical’s editor and, most importantly, the readers themselves.

Like Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, Sincerity gestures to its own perpetuity: by continuing after its main interlocutors have passed away, it embraces the spirit of perpetual obligation that extends beyond mortal limitations. Both Mervyn and Sincerity suggest that seriality depicts the modern conditions that usurp traditional notions of finite human activity. But whereas Mervyn details the economic relationships that extend beyond the temporal and the human, Sincerity limns the persistence of an individual’s reputation in the memories of community members. Sarah’s story continues to exist after her death because readers animate her legacy and reputation. Just as the practice of serialization reminds readers that the crucial work of imagination constitutes the creation of a person’s public identity, so too does Sincerity’s story of a person’s prolonged afterlife demonstrate the somewhat enduring potential of communal investments. Rowson finds the development of shared interest a double-edged sword, both affirming for the protection it offers and threatening for its potential for misuse and exploitation.51 Though characters become invested in Sarah’s plight—Anne stresses over and over again that

50 Gardner argues that Rowson embraced the periodical form much more fully than she did the novel. Indeed, the subject-matter of Sincerity echoes throughout the periodical, extending the conversation begun by Sarah’s trials. In “The Gossip,” writes Gardner, “we can also see that for Rowson the story of ‘matrimonial unhappiness’ was in many ways borne of hearing from other adult readers stories of what happened after ‘the Novel . . . ends.’ These were stories that resonated with Rowson’s own and which, in sharing with her readers, provided at least the promise that they were not alone” (110). 51 Adam Smith famously argued that human imagination allowed for great empathy, and that “it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are [a person’s] sensations. […] It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy. By the imagination, we place ourselves in his situation” (11-12). Rowson contributes an additional dimension to Smith’s writings here, insisting that a shared sense of concern might function to place women at the center of a monitorial culture. Additionally, Jay Fliegelman’s concept of “affective consent” is particularly constructive when considering Sarah’s situation (40). 126

Sarah’s story is “interesting” and “of interest” to Elenor, even though Elenor has never met Sarah—their interest also encourages a culture of surveillance.

Previous critics have characterized Sincerity as a kind of “anti-novel” for the ways it departs from the novel genre in both form (as a long-running serial) and subject matter

(for the ways it champions what Anne calls “common life.”) Against the tendency to dismiss Rowson’s later periodical writing as a didactic and conservative departure from her proto-feminist novels,52 Gardner argues that Rowson’s late-career turn to the periodical form represents not a “retreat” but a “culmination of a career meditating about the limitations of the novel” (111) and of the novel’s potential for “authorial tyranny”

(103).53 Likewise, Okker sees in Sincerity a striking similarity to another staple of the periodical—the “didactic essay that served as a key feature of eighteenth-century novels”

(33). Arguing that the periodical served as an antidote to the addictive and individualistic danger of novel-reading, Okker contends that serializing novels provided editors a way to control how people read fiction.54 By forcing readers to take structured and imposed

52 See Eve Kornfeld, who describes Sincerity as “providing lessons” in “domestic martyrdom”: “Passive domestic virtue overshadows active choices in Rowson’s new ideal woman” (59). According to Kornfeld, Rowson “retreated from republican political demands” at the end of her career and “acknowledged indirect means of strengthening political virtue to be more suitable for young ladies” (61). 53 Gardner writes that part of the problem with early American literary studies is that “we are inclined to see the repeated turn of the first generation of American novelists to the magazine as apostasies, martyrdoms, or personal tragedies. [. . .] That Rowson might have chosen to devote herself to non- novelistic writing is almost unimaginable to her contemporary biographers, who often read her turn away from the novel form after Reuben and Rachel as a sign of the financial pressures she struggled with due to her constitutionally insolvent husband” (110-111). 54 Further, Okker states, the “simultaneous appearance of denouncements of and publication of novels is not without irony. Indeed, serialized fiction in this early period may be best understood as an attempt to shift the nature of addiction and seduction. Though editors may well have been reluctant to be associated with the unchecked reading of the circulating libraries and the addiction of novels, they certainly hoped readers would become addicted to the magazine” (39-40). Like book reviews of novels, which give an editor power to guide novel readers,” Okker also points out that “magazine novels are introduced to readers through an intermediary—the editor—who selects appropriate novels. The interrupted reading process of the magazine novel allowed for even more editorial guidance and control” (36). 127 breaks between chapters, editors could exercise a degree of control over readers’ minds and imaginative processes.55

According to these critics, then, Rowson’s decision to serialize Sincerity seems to coincide with familiar (and republican) efforts to regulate citizens by guiding their reading practices. By serializing her novel, Rowson engineers Sincerity to focus on the quotidian and realistic rather than the passionate, fanciful, and individualistic. And by situating the narrative within the paratextual substance of the periodical, Rowson

“checks” the addictive aspects of fictionality against the edifying extra-textual stuff of the republican print sphere. However, these arguments overlook a crucial aspect of Sincerity and sidestep Rowson’s actual depiction of the pitfalls of serialized communication: As much as Rowson uses seriality to lend verisimilitude to her work, she also critiques the community’s propensity to form conclusions based on incomplete evidence. Therefore, rather than trying to control how or when people read, Rowson’s seriality revealed the larger assumptive leaps that exceeded any effort to rein in the imaginative processes of individual readers. Okker writes that periodical editors hoped to “shif[t] the focus” of readers’ addictions “to magazine novels” (40) but the very awareness of this addiction belies any attempt to channel its potential. After all, if readers could become addicted to novels, then why would periodicals be any different? And what of the dangers of empowering people to read communally, sharing contagious judgments and making ill- thought inferences? Rowson seems less concerned with checking the disruptive potential

55 Gardner reaffirms this argument in his study of Rowson’s periodical work: “The critique of the novel especially found favor in the pages of early American magazines, a fact that initially seems confusing considering that many of these magazines published fiction, including serialized novels, and regularly reviewed novels. However, periodicals had good reason to foment suspicion of the novel, precisely because the critique favored the mental properties of the magazine. If the novel was prone to authorial tyranny over the imagination of the reader, the periodical offered multiple texts and authors, overseen by a judicious editor” (103). 128 of the novel than with raising awareness of the text’s ability to provoke public

“animadversion.”

Communitarian sentiment undergirded the foundation of republican society, but it also contributed to larger attempts to control the behaviors of private citizens—women especially. Though Sarah’s problems arise when marries Darnley (“do not marry a fool,”

Rowson tells readers in her 1813 preface to Sarah), they also are exacerbated by a hierarchical society that places undue emphasis on women’s virtue as crucial to the moral health of the nation. Under the rubric of “republican motherhood,” women were expected to be virtuous exemplars for their husbands and children.56 But such a position was of larger consequence to the political world at large. As Michelle Burnham has argued, such ideas of womanhood, with their “passive articulation of female power,” were not as opposed to the participatory Federalist program of governance as critics have originally thought. Republican motherhood shared “theoretical compatibility” with the “power relations imagined under a representative government” (83). The domestic sphere was one that indirectly regulated public life as “an indirect and mediated form of power”—but it was one that was also controlled as other branches of governments were inhibited and restrained by one another.57 When Sarah describes her condition as being subjected to intense levels of scrutiny, she demonstrates an awareness of herself as an integral yet powerless part of the Federalist collective—a collective that must be engineered and

56 As Linda Kerber has argued, republican motherhood performed a “political function” in the years after the Revolution: it “altered the female domain in which most women had always lived out their lives; it justified an extension of women’s absorption and participation in the civic culture” (60). Additionally, Burnham states: “One might even go so far as to say that the political invisibility most women suffered from under the condition of coverture—which among other things assumed them to be publicly represented by their husbands—resembles the state of passive dependence in which the republic left its constituents” (83) 57Kerber actually describes motherhood as “fourth branch of government” as it underscore its capability of intervening in public life at large (Women 200). 129 maintained, as Hamilton describes in the sixth Federalist, for the purpose controlling the passions of individuals. Just as the central government must rein in its citizens, so too must women watch and be watched.

By emphasizing the uncontrollable aspects of community chatter and incredible weight of public opinion, Rowson alerts her readers to the importance of maintaining a healthy distance from gossip. Rowson’s late-career periodical work espouses a sense of privacy that supersedes and revises that which the bourgeois middle-class ideology had originally established. While middle-class culture in the eighteenth-century had proclaimed the importance of individualism, it also exalted private morality, making it the subject of constant scrutiny and a central component of civic virtue. Rather than consigning what was “private” and “domestic” to an invisible and unimportant place, republican ideology promoted an obsession with private conduct and internal convictions.

Without subverting larger moral stipulations that govern womanhood in the new republic,

Rowson models for readers a healthy skepticism about publicity and gossip. While critics have been quick to read in Rowson’s late-career work—especially Sarah—a codification of traditional gender roles,58 I would argue instead that Rowson urges greater critical attention to the surveillance culture that seeks to regulate women’s probity, even as she

58 In one of the few studies to treat Sarah; or, The Exemplary Wife, Klaus P. Hansen argues that Rowson’s novel “remains entirely within the traditional framework of victimization” (48) and that Rowson “had not been trying to come up with a completed, mature plan for a revolution. She does not want women to be completely independent and find self-fulfillment without men; she wants them recognized as equal partners who out of love submit voluntarily. By making Darnley die so that Sarah could marry Hayley, Rowson could have concluded her novel with the realization of this concept. But that would have infringed on the concepts of duty and the inviolability of marriage” (53). Hansen’s analysis affirms Kornfeld’s argument that Rowson’s late career represented a retreat from the liberal potential of her early novels. Kornfeld writes that Rowson “helped to define a more limited sphere for American women—but one with great civic importance, and much potential for growth. Still distrustful of men and their ability to achieve political virtue without the help of women, Rowson was willing by the end of her life to reject the political sphere as too filthy for female delicacy to endure” (61). 130 encourages the self-policing that would replace the state-sponsored acts of regulating slander. It is not accurate to say that Rowson advocates a transformation of morality or private sphere politics, but it is equally inaccurate to argue, as Marion Rust does, that

Sincerity or Sarah retreats “from the political to the scriptural” and “extends this uncharacteristic invitation to passive endurance to the female sex in general” (155).

Sarah, of course, as our editor reminds us, remains a valiant example of piety and self- sacrifice until the end of her life—but the serial structure of Sincerity illustrates that the acts of imagination that make these restrictive social practices somewhat necessary. By placing Sincerity in dialogue with her contiguous essay series “The Gossip,” Rowson manages to criticize the temptation to give into the tyranny of collective imagination.

As much as Rowson presses her readers to evaluate more carefully the gossip they hear or receive, she still advocates a strict personal program of piety. In other words, though Rowson registers as unjust the public’s penchant for gossip mongering, she more realistically affirms the kind of faultless behavior that might preclude the potential for public criticism. In its 1813 edition especially, Sarah emphasizes Sarah’s virtue and piety. Whereas the Gossip’s central message is that one should avoid becoming the person “addicted to perpetual prating,” Sarah advocates that its readers “remember patience, forbearance, and in many cases perfect silence” as “the only way to secure domestic peace” (iv). Rowson’s own life and teaching practices also affirm her interest in shoring up these more traditional values in the everyday lives of young girls. While teaching at her Young Ladies’ Academy, she subjected many of her young pupils to scrutiny, reading their correspondence and monitoring their daily habits. While these students were under her care, she often forced them to show her the letters they wrote to

131 their parents. As one woman recalled decades later, “What was considered generally as hardships by the misses, were, that we were obliged to write letters to parents and friends on Slates which were submitted to Mrs. R. at night.” Rowson not only read her pupils’ letters but also restricted them from going “beyond the precincts of the enclosed […] garden without permission from Mrs. R., or the company of a teacher.” Recollecting that the pupils “stood much in awe of her piercing eye,” the woman wrote that Rowson’s

“frown was positively dreadful, therefore you may suppose we could not unlock the secrets and wishes of our hearts to such a presence.” Years later, the woman concluded that Rowson’s strict “regulation was necessary.”59 While Rowson advocated for healthy skepticism regarding gossip, she also took careful measures to prevent her own students from becoming or providing fodder for public scandal. These practices demonstrate

Rowson’s complex attitude toward social mores: one must try to avoid perpetuating gossip while accepting the fact that one might at any moment become the subject of public censure and scrutiny.

Seriality and the Gossip

Published alongside Sincerity in The Boston Weekly, “The Gossip” seemed the sort of essay sketch series that had graced the pages of periodicals for almost a century.

Like these previous sketch essays, “The Gossip” presents himself as a man who insinuates himself into the daily lives of citizens and ordinary people, drawing upon their problems to generate material for his musings. However, “The Gossip” also demonstrates an acute awareness of the dangers of this practice and seeks to critique such a mission even as he capitalizes on its most titillating aspects. As I will detail in this section, “The

59 Mary Batchelder to Elias Nason; Papers of Susanna Rowson Box 1; MS 7370; Folder 71.

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Gossip” actually undermines his readers’ expectations by not delivering the salacious material they expect.

Rowson served as an editor of The Boston Weekly as “The Gossip” grew in popularity. Although the specific details of Rowson’s involvement in this column remain unclear, most of her nineteenth-century contemporaries and biographers credited her with contributing to the series quite substantially.60 While I don’t wish to elide completely the question of Rowson’s authorship, I would argue that her involvement with The Boston

Weekly—an involvement she spells out in her introduction to Sarah—suggests that she played a crucial role in the magazine’s overall project. Her editorship alone is tangible evidence of her compliance with the values and themes that “The Gossip” communicates.

And in light of the attacks Rowson suffered at the hands of noted slanderer and gossip

William Cobbett years earlier, “The Gossip” seems poised to analyze the conditions that made such an attack possible in the first place. Composed and published alongside

Sincerity, “The Gossip” allows Rowson to satirize the public’s appetite for damaging information. At the beginning of the series, the Gossip says that his role will be to reveal the concerns of the community and to give advice. Previous sketch essayists had tried to distance themselves from the practice of gossip, but “The Gossip” makes explicit a connection between the circulating coffee-house essayist and the purveyor of provocative information.61 As Sincerity often depicts the familiar and informal relations between

60 An 1824 obituary in the Boston Gazette credits Rowson with writing “The Gossip,” and Elias Nason’s 1870 A Memoir of Susanna Rowson names her as a major contributor to the series (117). 61 See “The Spectator,” which called the “inquisitive” the “Funnels of Conversation; they do not take in any thing for their own Use, but merely to pass it to another. They are the Channels through which all Good and Evil that is spoken in Town are conveyed.” The Spectator denounced the conversations of “the inquisitive” as evidence of “a vacancy of their own imaginations” (Number 228; 21 Nov. 1711). 133 people that take place in letters and conversations, so too does “The Gossip” try to forge a relationship with the reader that is more casual than prescribed.

But Rowson does not simply use “The Gossip” to spotlight the interpersonal and conversational practices that promote hearsay; she also asserts a connection between printed material and public chatter. By aligning the coffee-house essayist and the neighborhood gossip, Rowson refutes commonly held assumptions about the sharp divisions between print and speech. In her study on the literary practice of gossip, Patricia

Meyer Spacks writes that gossip was often considered feminine and spoken and thus existing outside the polite sphere of letters.62 While the male essayist “circulates in coffee houses to relate the foibles of public men,” women “share secrets, hiding from scrutiny”

(155). By calling an essay series “The Gossip,” then, Rowson collapses the hierarchical distinction between print and speech, arguing that print is not necessarily any more enlightened or judicious than talk. More importantly, Rowson’s “The Gossip,” seeks to demonstrate the means by which print carries gossip into the world of print.

For Rowson print is not as much to blame for gossip as the “action of imagination” that both informs and is informed by printed and circulating material, and it is this “action of imagination” that is subject of Rowson’s critique. In both Sincerity and

“The Gossip,” Rowson demonstrates that print and gossip involve a somewhat symbiotic

62 In the eighteenth century, Spacks writes, “[p]ublic writing on the whole enjoyed a higher status than did public talk,” and “talk” was consigned to the realm of the subjective and decidedly female. However, as Joseph Fichtelberg reminds us, the actual and textual practices of the “public sphere” stood in sharp contrast to its abstract and theoretical purposes. As an “ideal type,” the public sphere’s “model of polite society” was often disrupted by the reality of the “tide of slanderous literature that washed over the Enlightenment” in the form of French “libelles,” or American politics, which “could resemble a form of assault enhanced, rather than restrained” (427-428). Such attacks were, ironically enough, seen as wedded to the preservation of virtue and honor in a somewhat unstable social system: in a newly forming republican world order, one had to be able to denounce threats to one’s reputation, even if it meant publicly reproving or penalizing others for their supposed misdeeds. 134 and circular relationship: Printed material often inflames the imagination of community members and intensifies the specter of surveillance, and serialized print encourages readers to discuss and speculate about what they have read. While Sincerity attempts to lay bare for readers the consequences of crediting the spare threads of information, “The

Gossip” calls attention to the ease with which rumors can be spread.

Tellingly, the Gossip’s proposed mission offends certain readers. The third installment contains a letter from the “Vaticinator,” who complained that the Gossip had the power to do far more damage than good. The “thousand incidents which take place every day” can “do a world of mischief were they given publicity”: “For instance, suppose a wife, a learned, or a reverend gentleman, be seen at any time kissing a pretty girl, [. . .] or should they at any time (accidentally) be thrown off their equilibrium, by the volatile spirit of champagne [. . .] how shocking it would be to have it Gossiped forth to half the world”(9). The Vaticinator’s accusation world echoes Sarah’s awareness that the

“world” wants to meddle in her affairs. If the idea of gossiping to half the world seems hyperbolic, then perhaps print culture makes it less so. In response to the Vaticinator, the

Gossip writes that the best way to avoid being gossiped about is to carefully manage one’s public image. Just as Rowson monitored her pupils’ letters to prevent them from becoming the subjects of scandal, so too does the Gossip remind people that they live on the public stage.

But then Rowson’s Gossip does something unexpected: he fails to deliver the scandalous anecdotes he originally promised. As if to advertise this incongruity, he publishes a letter from a young correspondent that complains that he has “not told us about one strange marriage, unexpected birth, or disappointment in love” (“To the

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Gossip,” Boston Weekly 19 Feb. 1803, 69). Indeed, the Gossip condemns the reader’s secret yearning for inappropriate material, spotlighting the ways in which printed texts feed unflattering characteristics of collective imagination. More provocatively, the

Gossip denounces the practice of slander as a criminal act. Gossips “use the most mean and despicable arts to obtain a knowledge of the private transactions, or individuals: and in retelling anecdotes they thus fraudulently pick up, they make additions of their own or may perhaps omit circumstances which would give the transaction quite a different appearance” (54). Emphasizing that such unlikable people specialize in the “retelling” of anecdotes, the Gossip lays the groundwork for a crucial argument: that slanderers glean information from observing or listening to others and then make their own deletions or additions before presenting the information for public consideration. They willfully isolate the incident from a greater overall context and distort extenuating circumstances.

The Gossip also strives to correct the assumption that gossip is an inherently female activity, stressing that those “addicted to perpetual prating” are both men and women.

Though women gossip by “seating themselves in some remote corner,” so too do men

“often descend to the same puerile frivolity” (45). But unlike the juvenile or frivolous desires of the young correspondent, this type of slanderer can become a “viper” among peers and “involve society in broils and disputes [. . .] and rob those of reputations, whose good name was perhaps their all” (45). Here the Gossip declares that slander has the capacity to destroy lives and livelihoods: “The thief, the murderer, are punished with death, and yet what are the injuries they can do, compared with what may be done by a calumniator?” (45).

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It is impossible to read these selections of “The Gossip” without recalling

Rowson’s own experience with slander. William Cobbett might have been one of the decade’s chief “calumniators” who reveled in gossip and willfully despoiled reputations, but his literary criticisms or Rowson’s work simply laid the groundwork for his most incendiary claims: that Rowson was not a true republican. Cobbett fixed these accusations to rumors he had heard: “Notwithstanding all this, there are (and I am sorry to say it), some people, who doubt of her sincerity, and who pretend that her sudden conversion to republicanism, ought to make us look upon all her praises as ironical” (27-

28). As Cobbett’s true realm of attack lay in the political, he understood that the public’s collective opinion held particular sway. By gesturing to the world beyond his own page, he suggested that he merely transcribed the gossip he had already heard. This move gave both gossip and printed material more significance: Gossip, when affixed to the page, had the power to circulate more broadly; more importantly, the printed attack carried more weight because it was upheld by what “other people” already knew to be true. Just as

Sincerity gestures to the world beyond the page, so too does Cobbett echo the claim that the true attacks have already taken place in a larger and more complex context; he has deigned simply to write them down. By transcribing this chatter, Cobbett defers to the authority of the world beyond the page, and he demonstrates that the print sphere merely imitates (and also widely replicates) the authority of the local community.63

63 Interestingly, Rowson did not answer Cobbett’s accusations directly; rather, John Swanwick published A Rub from a Snub in response to Cobbett’s missive. Swanwick’s piece contained “A Word of Comfort to Mrs. Rowson” in which he rebutted many of Cobbett’s allegations. “By adopting your rules,” he writes to Cobbett, “I can prove Mrs. Rowson to be an advocate for slavery and murder; I can prove Shakespeare and Otway to have been the greatest villains that ever existed [. . .]” (412). In other words, Swanwick argues that anyone can slander someone’s character by taking their work out of context. He adds also that Rowson should not feel compelled to answer Cobbett’s accusations: “It will redound to her credit if she connives at the insult; because were she to condescend to expostulate with you, it would inspire you with a fallacious 137

Cobbett’s chief rhetorical device of gesturing to already-circulating gossip was popular at the turn of the nineteenth century. Hamilton’s first Federalist alluded to the

“private circles” that “whispered” about the viability of the new constitution. More memorably, one of the most famous serialized political attacks, James T. Callender’s

1802 Recorder pieces, exposed Thomas Jefferson’s affair with Sally Hemings by referring to what people already knew to be true. Serialized in the months before

Sincerity was first published, Callender buttressed his claims by drawing upon community gossip. His first essay began: “It is well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps, and for many years past has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves” (Recorder, 1 Sept. 1802). Sally Hemings’ children, according to

Callender, “are said to bear a striking although sable resemblance to those of the president himself.” Though the story had “once or twice been hinted at in Rind’s

Federalist,” Callender dismissed it as “an absolute calumny.” But now, years later,

Callender has proof because “there is not an individual in the neighborhood of

Charlottesville who does not believe the story, and not a few who know it.” Tellingly,

Callender’s brand of investigative reporting places a great emphasis on the accounts of

Jefferson’s local community—an actual community that shares gossip and promotes speculation. By transcribing these rumors, Callender becomes an essayist who brings gossip into the public sphere—and he becomes a gossip himself.

sense of your own importance, and if she resolves to indulge her audience with another epilogue at her next benefit, I would particularly advise her not to mention your name” (413). Swanwick’s defense of Rowson, then, affirms that a woman should not involve herself in pamphlet wars to defend her honor. Rather, she should enjoy her “commendation and applause” and leave men to defend her reputation from public scandal.

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Likewise, Callender’s December installment repeatedly gestures to what “is said”:

“It has been said, that for a number of years Mr. Jefferson, the father of a family, has been living in cohabitation with one of his own mulatto slaves, against all law divine or human.” Furthermore, Callender says: “Other information assures us that Mr. Jefferson and Sally and their children are real persons, that the woman herself has a room to herself at Monticello in the character of seampstress [sic] to the family, if not as housekeeper; that she is an industrious and orderly creature in her behaviour, but that her intimacy with her master is well known, and that on this account, she is treated by the rest of the house as one much above the level of his other servants” (Recorder, 15 Dec. 1802). Without specifying who said what, Callender manages to raise suspicions about Jefferson by insinuating that these truths have been verified by the many people who whisper and gossip—whose non-textual consensus has determined this information to be true. Just as

Cobbett’s power lay in his ability to make sweeping generalizations about public opinion and interpersonal conjecture, so too does Callender rely on rumor to inflame his readers’ imaginations. Undoubtedly the serial nature of Callender’s essays contributed to their titillation as well, as readers were made to wait weeks or months at a time for the story to unfold. Though Callender might have sought to expose Jefferson’s misconduct for political reasons, he certainly capitalized on the entertainment that serializing such a scandal undoubtedly brought.

Because Rowson’s later work has often been characterized as moralistic and conservative, we might imagine that she wished to distance herself from the scandals of public figures. Instead, Rowson’s Gossip urges readers not to entertain misgivings about other people, no matter how accurate. In one crucial installment, the Gossip wrestles with

139 his decision to not print a letter from “A.Z.,” who wishes to publicly criticize a man whom he believes to be a calumniator. A.Z’s complaints against this calumniator are “not singular,” says the Gossip, but “I feel myself obliged to tell A.Z. that to make his letter public would be literally doing, what he so highly, and justly reprobates. [. . .] Reputation is so delicate a thing, so easily tarnished and so hard to be restored to brilliancy, when once a spot is thrown on it, that every attempt to eradicate, serves but to spread the blemish, and make it more conspicuous” (“The Gossip—No. XLIV,” Boston Weekly, 8

Oct. 1803, 201). While the Gossip “honour[s] A.Z for the motive which prompted him to apply to me,” he also warns that publishing such sentiments, no matter how justified, would do more harm to A.Z. than anyone else. And then, more pressingly, the Gossip urges his readers to be skeptical when they hear reports “injurious to a neighbour; how few would be at the trouble of refuting such a report” (201). For Rowson, even the calumniator deserves the benefit of the doubt.

By censoring “A.Z.,” Rowson argues that one must stem his impulse to publish or credit inflammatory material, no matter how compelling or how justified. In particular, an author or editor should always “investigate” allegations of wrongdoing as fully as possible. More importantly, the Gossip echoes the opinion of the “Vaticinator” by alleging that gossip works by distorting the perceptive subject’s observations. “Slander is a vice with which the female sex have been charged,” the Gossip says, but men are just as

“guilty of it” in “any mercantile pursuit, or indeed where competition exists even in arts, sciences, or literature.” And the kind of slander that men perpetuate among other men is often more insidious:

I have myself often witnessed the murder of a character from a shrug, a wink, which has, perhaps, at a very critical moment, when an

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advantageous bargain was on the point of being struck, intimated a doubt of the credit of a young trader,--the wink from the next who conveys it, becomes an audible report; the credit of an industrious man who first coined the idea, and gave it circulation, will avail himself of the opportunity which he deprived the other; make the purchase upon credit, sell again for ready money, and in a few months break, to the almost total ruin of many honest families, whose small property, and small gains will not bear such heavy encroachments, as this unexpected bankruptcy will make upon them. (201)

Several statements here are significant. First, the Gossip proposes that a “wink” or a

“shrug” has the power as an audible statement—that, in a sense, gossip thrives in a moment of suggestiveness rather than explicit or “audible” report. Such minor gestures— even those that remain unarticulated—have the power to deprive persons and entire communities of wealth and economic stability. Slander and gossip have the ability to permeate all aspects of social life, affecting even those innocent bystanders with small and fragile financial holdings. But more importantly, Rowson’s Gossip avers that men’s communication exists in the realm of the non-verbal. As Marion Rust points out,

Cobbett’s scathing critique of Rowson’s work “played into the association of women’s prelinguistic physicality that justified their exclusion from citizenship” (129). Rowson assigns the same prelinguistic physicality to men, alleging that their winks and nods do more than threaten an individual man or woman’s reputation; rather, they endanger the entire economic wellbeing of the republic, victimizing the average citizen’s ability to trade in his good credit. Men, according to the Gossip, are guilty of all the same false and unbecoming behaviors so often associated with women, and their actions often carry much greater consequences. As Sincerity often demonstrates, hints and associations can often damage a person’s reputation, causing her to retreat from society. Worse, many of the causes of a ruined reputation stem from acts of the imagination—or the willingness to

141 encumber those intangible hints or fragmented pieces of information (or the absence of information) with great consequence. When the Gossip refers to the “murder of a character” by such prelinguistic gestures, he seems to speak of Sarah’s rational fear of social death at the hands of her calumniators.

Sarah’s Exemplary Final Act

Though Rowson uses the serial form to depict more accurately the processes by which the communal imagination takes hold, she also seemed aware that seriality posed certain problems for her readers. Toward the end of Sincerity’s run, Rowson published an advertisement concerning the need to republish the work as an integral whole:

a very large number of our present patrons were not subscribers to the first volume, and consequently are not in possession of the former part of the above work, it is our intention, in order to accommodate those who may be desirous of perusing the whole, to reprint, as speedily as possible, this moral and interesting little novel in a volume by itself. (“Republication of Sincerity,” Boston Weekly, 16 June 1804, 136)

Coupled with Sarah’s prefatory acknowledgement that Sincerity was “a degree incorrect,” this advertisement reveals Rowson’s early dissatisfaction with the form.

Though Rowson saw seriality as adequately rendering the everyday correspondence of the novel’s subjects, she also understood that its ability to imitate life did not make it a cohesive piece of literature. Rowson seems to want to give readers the ability to enjoy an integral text: to return to previous chapters, for instance, or to read the novel on their own time. In many ways, this need to accommodate those readers “desirous of perusing the whole” anticipates nineteenth-century attitudes about seriality. Rowson’s desire to reprint

Sincerity “as speedily as possible, this moral and interesting little novel in a volume by itself” also underscores her concerns about seriality’s practical drawbacks.

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Rowson’s acknowledgement is a powerful one. Though she repudiates the serial, she also calls attention to the features that make it unique—that it is ephemeral, for instance, surviving within the reader’s memory rather than the bounds of a discrete codex, or that it is a product of improvisation (the same improvisation that makes it

“inaccurate”). These features helped her design a story that critiqued the same processes of anticipation and imagination that seriality made manifest.

But even as Rowson seems to “retreat” from the serial to the book, she does not entirely recant one major benefit of seriality: its continuousness. By including a preface to Sarah, Rowson underscores her text’s amendability. Rowson’s habit of updating and reissuing books with new prefaces (as she did in 1814 with Rebecca) affirms the idea that discrete codices are also something of a work in progress. Indeed, Rowson’s preface attempts provide an outside, authorizing voice that claims to possess the authority necessary to produce and guide a sound reading experience. But rather than gendering this arbiter as male (as she had with “The Gossip”) she privileges her own voice and marital experiences as a “key” to reading the narrative. “It may be objected that the example will lose its effect,” she writes, “as my heroine is not in the end rewarded for her exemplary patience, virtue, and forbearance; But it was because I wished to avoid every unnatural appearance, that I left Sarah to meet her reward in a better world” (i). When

Rowson writes of the “key effect,” she is referencing the story’s lack of predictable teleology—the didactic sensibility that makes sentimental fiction a powerful arbiter of morality. In addition, Sarah’s lack of uplift avoids “every unnatural appearance” that sentimental fiction tends to celebrate. In other words, Rowson here reaffirms her dedication to creating realistic fiction—a dedication that she previously explored by

143 embracing Sincerity’s piecemeal delivery and uninterrupted successive chain of events.

Later in the preface, Rowson again emphasizes that many of the novel’s scenes are drawn from life, and that the novel was inspired by true events. However, rather than the “Tale of Truth” subtitle of Charlotte Temple, with its implication that the story was widely circulated and known by many people, Rowson asserts that she witnessed these events— and perhaps lived them to some extent—and in doing so, she testifies to her own authority as an author while reinscribing the story to a personal realm: “Many of the scenes delineated in the following work are drawn from real life; some of them have occurred within my own knowledge; but it was in another hemisphere, and the characters no longer exist” (iii.). Significantly, by ascribing these events to her own personal experience, Rowson waylays opportunities to misappropriate or misrepresent Sarah’s story—or to avoid inflaming suspicions about that “unnatural appearance” (used here a different way) that readers might seize upon. The story is a true one—but it also occurred outside the communities of early American readers. While it provides fodder for readers’ imaginations, it also took place in a completely different hemisphere—a place that must have seemed beyond most readers’ frame of reference. By removing the story to a very different physical and temporal location, Rowson attempts to preclude the imaginary practices that might implicate her, her husband, or their friends in readerly speculation.

Additionally, Rowson uses the work’s preface to once again underscore

Sincerity’s central preoccupation: that people do not evaluate potentially inflammatory material with enough caution. Intriguingly, Rowson’s preface shifts the blame, though, so that Sarah is guilty of the same faults of which Rowson is so critical in other characters:

Sarah is not a faultless monster; she comes as near perfection as is the lot of humanity; but she was credulous, impetuous, and apt to decide with too

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much precipitation. Yet under all her misfortunes she is represented as drawing comfort and consolation from a source that is never fallacious, can never be exhausted. She looks up to her heavenly Father with love and confidence, she endeavors to make his laws the rule of her actions, and trusts in his promises for her reward. [. . .] Here let the young voyagers, just entering on the turbulent ocean of life, fix their eyes, and they will find a comforter in disappointment, a support in the heaviest calamity, a safe and sure passport to eternal peace. (iii)

As a “credulous” and “impetuous” person who is “apt to decide with too much precipitation,” Sarah resembles many of the other characters of Sincerity who draw conclusions based on scant pieces of evidence—people like Anne and Frederick, who were willing to believe the worst about Sarah without possessing a full account of the evidence. This raises an interesting question: why does Rowson shift the blame to accuse

Sarah of credulity and impetuousness when she is the victim of these vices?

Sincerity’s critique rests on its conviction that imaginative impulses exist beyond the control of even the most perfectible of sentimental heroines. It is, in essence, an outlook that betrays a sense of skepticism that any kind of moral integrity or personal conviction will truly stem the impulses of speculation and desire. Most productively,

Rowson’s text might lead us to a greater understanding of what it means to speculate, and how speculation related to the serial form. Previously, critics have traced the rise of the novel alongside the rise of capitalism, noting that novelistic thinking and speculation go hand-in-hand. Critics such as Deidre Lynch, Catherine Ingrassia, and Elizabeth Dillon have argued that novels contributed to a speculative epistemology that characterized both economic and interpersonal relationships. In particular, Lynch writes that “rounded” characters “promise a fund of meanings, one infinitely generative of second looks and speculation” (154). Dillon makes the point that credit “involves an explicitly fictive

145 element—stories, sayings, and apparitions are all forms of the imaginative work upon which contract and credit rely” (“The Original American Novel” 245). In terms of speculation Rowson’s Sincerity opens up a few different avenues for our consideration.

Rowson aligns speculative thought processes with the serial more than the discrete, closed text. But since the serial form more closely approximates reality, it demonstrates the ways in which fragmented information is a permanent feature of everyday life.

Therefore, people are constantly put in the position to make judgments about what they have seen, read, or heard. They do not have the option of perusing the entire text. For

Rowson, the novelistic form actually tends to preclude speculation—to shut down, perhaps, the inevitable misreading and miscalculations that inevitably arise when one can access only the “snatches of time” that make up a serialized existence.

Sincerity asks us to rethink the various literary forms that were available to early

American writers. For Rowson, the serial is not simply a publishing mechanism; it is also a distinct form that allowed her to explore the vexing issue of gendered surveillance. It is this form that also allows her to take such a complicated and evolving stance on the issue, balancing various perspectives that complicate, for us, any straightforward and politically cohesive reading of her political and literary legacy. Like the other authors I have explored so far in this study, Susanna Rowson used the serial form to achieve certain effects, and this use of the serial form also influenced how she encountered particular events.

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Chapter 4

Serializing the Archive: Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry

Of Modern Chivalry—Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s expansive multivolume work—only one thing can be said for certain: it is the longest (and longest-running) narrative of its time. Spanning seven volumes and including more than 290,000 words, the work allows us a glimpse of what it meant to serialize a text over the course of twenty-three years. Brackenridge began the work in 1791—a time that had just seen the consolidation of the Constitution and the beginning of the French Revolution. By the time he published the last volume in 1815, the country had undergone a major war and perhaps put to rest the Federalist politics from which the initial volumes had taken their inspiration. As a serialized picaresque, Modern Chivalry incorporated these historical developments as they occurred, delivering very little in the way of narrative or ideological consistency. As Grantland Rice remarks, Modern Chivalry is “painstakingly discontinuous”—a feature that Brackenridge fosters by choosing to release his volumes from different publishers. According to Rice, this approach enables Brackenridge to undermine the “unarticulated but uniform intolerance” of print culture (262).

But Modern Chivalry’s painstaking discontinuity reveals another pressing issue: that the nation was a temporally precarious venture—one that, for Brackenridge, at least, may not have been able to maintain an integrated sense of identity or legality across time.

In recent years, early American studies has concerned itself with the disparate spatial

147 distance that shaped life in the early republic, spaces that undermine our previous assumptions about national identity formation. By turning the hemispheric, the transnational, the regional, and the transatlantic, scholars have located the U.S. in a geopolitical matrix of interdependent cultural, economic, and political activity. Even more recently, critics have examined an even more fundamental distance: that of time. In particular, Lloyd Pratt’s recent Archives of American Time explores the varying temporalities that existed in nineteenth-century life, arguing that print culture did not consolidate citizenry into a homogeneous temporality but instead “magnified this pluralization of time when it made literature’s various printed avatars increasingly commonplace” (3-4). Pratt focuses on the novel as a site that attempts to absorb, if unevenly and problematically, “several different temporal dispositions” (4).

In this dissertation, I have discussed how the serial form allowed writers the opportunity to constitute some of the most pressing issues of early nationhood. In this chapter more particularly, I explore how seriality allows us to access more directly the conflicting temporalities that are absorbed by the novel’s integrated materiality. In the eighteenth century, the serial was the dominant form, and its extended approach to publication, as I have argued, offered authors a particularly reflexive relationship to the passage of time. As authors wrote and published, they were free to incorporate historical developments as they occurred, weighing recent events against predictive philosophies, and attempting to reconcile the narrative’s temporality with the incidents in the world at large. No author in this time period better dramatizes this effort than Brackenridge, whose Modern Chivalry retains key characters and themes but otherwise takes its shape from the sweeping historical changes it accompanied. Rather than integrate Modern

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Chivalry into a seamless reading experience, Brackenridge fosters a sense of disruption, refusing to publish a discrete codex or offer a cohesive narrative. He uses his text to constitute and then render ineffective the institutional safeguards that purport to stabilize society from one period of time to the next.

Why does an author write a serial? Or rather, why does an author choose to extend or revisit his work across a vast period of time, continuing to generate a narrative publicly without the ability to revise or perfect his previous work? For Jeremy Belknap, the purpose of writing a serialized allegorical history of the United States is to collapse the temporal distances that disconnect citizens from a receding revolutionary moment. By insisting that the nation’s first settlers and later constitutional framers are the same characters, and by locating the history of America in an allegorical no-place, Belknap erases the gaps in time that undermine national cohesion. Additionally, by consolidating

The Foresters into a book—an ever-expanding but cohesive singular text—Belknap strives to textually expunge the fissures that separate each installment from the last, rendering them invisible by making revisions to both the text and to the history it contains. For Belknap, then, history is able, with some effort, to be assimilated into not only a single and cohesive temporality but also an integrated material artifact.

We might understand Brackenridge as doing the opposite. He calls attention to the gaps in time that thwart attempts to render the nation a seamless narrative experience. As both a text artifact and a narrative, Modern Chivalry makes transparent the manifold challenges that time posed to legal and social cohesion: it exists both as a longer narrative and as a series of smaller installments capable of capturing only the present moment.

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Each of Modern Chivalry’s volumes encounters the most pressing debates of its particular time period, chronicling them with absolute specificity, and also pretending to assemble documents that capture history as an unmediated experience. By incorporating these supposedly “found documents,” Brackenridge argues that the serial is intrinsically linked to its specific moment and perhaps best used when it captures its present situation.

Simultaneously, though, Brackenridge undermines this “archival impulse,” highlighting the absurdity of trying to use artifacts and objects to locate an unmediated historical event. In Modern Chivalry, Brackenridge interrogates the processes by which people try to assemble historical consciousness, often asking whether the rise of archival practices actually obscure meaning rather than revealing an intrinsic historical experience. While other thinkers in Brackenridge’s time began to understand that critical source analysis might provide a more accurate and less mediated way of preserving history, Brackenridge believes otherwise. These “found documents” that make up much of the narrative demonstrate for readers often thwart the narrative with an obscurantist discourse.

But Modern Chivalry, of course, is not simply an archive of authentic documents.

It is also an ongoing picaresque narrative about Captain Farrago and his hostler Teague

O’Regan. Throughout Modern Chivalry, Brackenridge juxtaposes the story of Teague and the captain with the strange artifacts and authentic texts that frequently purport to chronicle the present moment. As a loose narrative concerned more with current political issues, Modern Chivalry asserts only a tenuous continuity, choosing to stress the topicality of each volume. Thus, its serial continuity both persists and simultaneously stagnates, thereby demonstrating the ways attempts to represent present moments actually reveal an absence of coherence. Historical artifacts, for Brackenridge, are so often

150 dependent upon specific context that they become immediately confounding when isolated from this context. More centrally, these efforts demonstrate Brackenridge’s conviction that collecting and archiving entail willful effort. In order to create coherence where none exists, authors and historians must engage a process of fetishizing an otherwise neutral and benign object. Twentieth-century thinkers have theorized the act of archiving as selective forgetting;64 I would maintain, though, that Brackenridge engages the archive in ways that do not coincide with more familiar late twentieth-century

Derridean arguments. For Brackenridge, the archive is not a place that consolidates power by privileging certain documents and events. Instead, it signifies an obsession with the past’s byproducts. Fixing oneself on “things”—texts, artifacts, objects, laws, and old institutions—shuts down adaptable thinking.

My chapter pays close attention to how Brackenridge uses the serial form to interrogate the practice of using texts to codify a singular transtemporal consistency.

Aware of his own text as an historical artifact, Brackenridge acknowledges that to preserve such an object merely calls attention to its failure to transcend specific contexts.

By making this argument, I add a critical dimension to the common critical conversation about Modern Chivalry and Brackenridge’s other work, which focuses largely on space, geographies, and representative politics. As many critics have argued, Brackenridge

64 In “Archive Fever,” Jacques Derrida traces the history of the archive to ancient Greece, pointing out that archons, or magistrates, were charged with producing and maintaining knowledge—a practice that gave way to the storage of information and the consolidation of power. Describing the archive as “”never closed” and “open[ing] into the future,” (57) Derrida sees the process of collecting relics and primary texts as “the function of unification, of identification, of classification” (12). Not merely a collection of information, the archive “keeps, it puts in reserve, it saves, but in an unnatural fashion” (12). In the same vein, Thomas Osborne suggests that the archive is a hallmark of modern, liberal societies—a “center of interpretation” that systematically performs the function of remembering that was previously performed by individuals (52). Whereas pre-modern societies “organized their relations to the past [. . .] through oral forms, story-telling, mythologies, druidic incantations” (52-53), modern societies assigned the task of remembering to state-sanctioned institutions and publicly funded historical societies. 151 pursued questions about whether republic government and the expanding West would integrate diverse peoples in a way that would exempt the U.S. from the ravages of cyclical history as propelled by factionalism.65 For Brackenridge, according to these critics, time figured as it did in classical republican thought, with the U.S. inevitably slated for decay.66 But I think that we have perhaps given too much credence to classical republican teleology as an explanatory mechanism that guided the creative thought processes of early American writers. In Modern Chivalry, at least, we see Brackenridge detach from conceptions of events as unfolding according to teleological or Stadialist theories of history. While classical republican thought asserted that a society could forestall decay by instituting certain structures and controlling mechanisms (legal and governmental), Brackenridge implies that such structures will always fail to transcend particular contexts. For Brackenridge, time is a very “material force” that cannot necessarily be controlled by adhering the right law or the correct government.

65 In his introduction, Ed White observes that Modern Chivalry essentially is about a “fundamentally fractured” society (xxi). Likewise, Dana Nelson argues that the “dialogic form of Brackenridge’s novel becomes an ideal place, however humorously, to explore the fundamental conflicts that emerge in the process of political representation” (26). And more to the point, Christopher Looby links Brackenridge’s republicanism to matters of conquest and empire. Brackenridge’s 1771 “The Rising Glory of America,” according to Looby, promoted Christian redemption and westward expansion as a way to “remove American from the cyclical course of events” (237). Similar to Madison’s Tenth Federalist’s conviction that factionalism itself will provide a solution to its potential for fragmentation, Brackenridge’s early poetic work evinces a deep belief that geographical expansion will add to the republic the kind of disunity that will paradoxically ensure its success. Modern Chivalry too depicts diversity as connected with westward expansion, but it also demonstrates deep skepticism that such a fractured nation could overcome its fissures.

66 Madison’s tenth Federalist proposes a solution to this inevitably, arguing that geographical expansion will provide a way for the U.S. to stem the problem of factionalism. See White’s “The Value of Conspiracy Theory,” which points out that Madison understood that factions “were not to perceive that they were blocked, but were to be brought into the government to continue acting as interest groups. What would check their success was not solely the absolute, objective complexity of the constitutional apparatus, but, just as importantly, its perspectival murkiness. Hence the importance, for Madison, of the republic’s size and processes of delegation” (22). 152

Modern Chivalry’s unpredictable publishing schedule authorizes Brackenridge to use the passage of time itself to represent thematically and formally time’s attenuating effect on institutions, structures, ideologies, and the process of meaning-making.67 Its structure and content both comment on and constitute the effects that the passage of time had on early America’s ability to define itself in the early national period. Its disparate pieces illustrate that the productions that people use to draw the country together may actually evince that time inevitably distances citizenry from the nation’s original purpose.

More importantly, Brackenridge argues that most efforts to preserve the documents and artifacts of America actually draw attention to the artifice of historiography, and that

Modern Chivalry’s most educated and institutionally-bound characters come to resemble the illiterate Teague and his Native American counterparts underscores Brackenridge’s conviction that archiving, historicizing, and fetishizing the past’s relics actually thwart efforts at understanding. As I will explore in this chapter, Brackenridge portrays hyperliteracy as functioning very similarly to illiteracy—not as a way to distance republican citizenry from the nation’s indigenous inhabitants but as a sign of the two groups’ uncomfortable proximity to one another.

Ultimately, though, Brackenridge does privilege one aspect of his work consistently, and it is through this aspect that he hopes to forestall the dangers of both literacy and hyperliteracy: style. But style is indefinable and abstract—a concept that defies precise codification even as it purports to be a recognizable aesthetic quality.

67 Tellingly, Modern Chivalry ultimately never comes together as a cohesive text either thematically or materially. Rice suggests that Brackenridge saw an unholy alliance between republicanism and capitalistic mass culture, and that his celebration of discontinuity deliberately thwarts the uniformity that republican mass culture strives to provide. I argue instead that Brackenridge navigates this tension between continuity and discontinuity, alternating between the quest for coherence and the acknowledgment such coherence might not be possible. In due course, he contends that most cultural productions inadvertently expose the existence of incoherence rather than preserving the ideal of unmediated experience. 153

Indeed, by emphasizing style as a consistency, Brackenridge implies that his work’s one consistency is not consistent at all—that it functions much like the serial installment itself, at the crux of its current context. But for eighteenth-century writers, style held innate properties that appealed to the mysterious faculty of taste. How style functioned in connection with the material world was a matter of debate. Writing in 1712, Joseph

Addison defined taste as “the faculty of the soul, which discerns the beauties of an author with pleasure, and the imperfections with dislike” (471). Throughout the eighteenth century, philosophers and writers would attempt to clarify how taste operated, with philosophers such as David Hume and Shaftesbury arguing that the ability to apprehend aesthetic quality was located in the mind, and with Joseph Addison and Edmund Burke drawing a closer relationship between human response and the external object. But

Brackenridge resists engaging these arguments, instead embracing style’s ineffable properties as a way to both guide society and allow it to detach from what has come previously. As he continually deploys the conceit of style without defining it, he asserts that it exists somewhere beyond the material text itself and perhaps beyond the minds of readers.

At the end of this chapter, I argue that Brackenridge eventually connects “style” to what he calls the “spirit of the law,” eliding the differences between state politics and art. Both concepts speak to the conviction that artistic and legal apparatuses rely on an extratextual force that is neither grounded in material artifacts nor wholly detached from concrete cultural productions. I do not want to argue that Brackenridge sees value in merely aestheticizing the law, as many eighteenth-century legal philosophers were wont

154 to do,68 but instead that he understands both style and the law as functioning beyond textuality while still requiring some kind of embeddedness in the material world. The key to governing with “style” and “spirit,” argues Brackenridge, is to understand that textual artifacts might be necessary to sustain the law, but that the law, like style, must continually be adapted while simultaneously appealing to humans’ innate faculties. By arguing that Brackenridge ultimately privileges “style,” I depart from the critical tendency to assert that early nineteenth-century authors retreated from the political realm by way of an aesthetic sensibility.69 In addition, I argue that literary stylistics facilitated for Brackenridge a very political policy of westward expansion—what Chris Looby calls his “genocidal wish” for the Native Americans (263). Brackenridge deploys his concept of style to justify a policy of westward expansion, or of the imperialistic pragmatism that continually redrew national boundaries and disregarded previous Indian treaties. By drawing similarities between literary style and governance, and by setting both in opposition to the temporally-bound material text, Brackenridge argues that adhering to the law does not mean following what is written. Instead, it means intuiting the law’s applicability to situations that were unforeseen by its framers. If people must refashion the law at certain points in time, they can take comfort in the knowledge that doing so does not automatically invalidate their claim to the law’s legitimacy. For Brackenridge, the serial form allows him to outline the epistemological limits of the material text while

68 Blackstone is a most prominent example of the tendency to aestheticize British law to “persuade the reader of its excellence” (Boorstin 91). 69 See, for instance, William Dowling’s Literary Federalism, which argues that the early nineteenth century saw “the gradual withdrawal of the Federalist writers from the overt political opposition to Jefferson into a specific realm of literary or aesthetic values” (ix). Paul Gilmore makes a similar argument in Brackenridge’s context, writing that “Brackenridge’s sketch of an aesthetic sphere” poses “an alternative realm to a rationally organized, machinelike republican government” and an “aesthetic retreat from politics” (302). 155 also fostering in readers an appreciation for stylistic innovation. Better yet, this stylistic innovation solves the dilemma of how to set the republic’s Western inhabitants apart from their uncomfortably close indigenous counterparts.

In this chapter, I first establish how Brackenridge uses seriality to demonstrate that texts fail to stabilize a temporally disconnected society. I then discuss how

Brackenridge’s concept of style argues for a sense of improvisation that urges citizens to adapt the past’s institutions by appealing to a belief in the law as an intuitive and extra- rational phenomenon. And I then turn to the large-scale implications of Brackenridge’s argument as he applies it to Native American treaties—that it actually engenders a process of deliberate refashioning, allowing citizens the justification to break treaties and expand ever more widely into the west. For Brackenridge, “style” becomes a colonizing force.

Brackenridge’s Serial-Archive

Modern Chivalry intervenes directly in contemporary efforts to stabilize society against the passage of time. Interestingly, it imagines many institutions as arising from this particular need to not only ensure stability but also generate documents that attempt to codify and control American history and culture. Suggestively, Brackenridge takes aim at both written artifacts and also philosophical societies, governments, universities, and laws. For Brackenridge, these structures and institutions all performed a function similar to the historical artifact: they served as reminders of the past and of the ways in which past people designed institutions to fit their own needs, and they also worked to ensure a nation’s viability in the future. Again and again, Brackenridge equates these stagnant objects with laws and institutions. Just as objects calcify and lose their ability to function,

156 so too do laws and governments become objects of the past, relics that do not perform in the way they were originally intended. For Brackenridge, institutions such as philosophical societies, governments, universities, and laws all performed a similar function: they ensured that the nation would continue to persist despite wide-ranging and unpredictable challenges. However, these institutions themselves were often unpredictable, and were susceptible to misinterpretation, self-interest, and manipulation, and, for Brackenridge, they often exposed the cracks in policy rather than secure the present society.

Interestingly, Brackenridge’s satire takes aim at burgeoning methods of historiographical thought. To understand Brackenridge’s objections, we must recall the precise conditions of history-writing at the turn of the nineteenth century. In

Brackenridge’s time, historians endeavored to apply grand narratives of providential meaning to the course of history, even as growing interest in antiquarianism promoted a fidelity to primary documents. According to Eileen Cheng, Revolutionary historians were

“committed to the moral function of history” and espoused a “great man” theory that furnished readers with biographies for imitation (The Plain and Noble Garb of Truth).70

At the same time, new Enlightenment schools of historiography sought to displace these classical theories by privileging both “philosophical history” and critical source analysis.

Philosophical history pursued a “basis for science of society that would explain and further the progress of humanity” while critical source analysis sought impartiality through the sustained examination of authentic historical artifacts (Cheng, “On the

70 George H. Nadel calls this exemplary—or classical—theory of history a “teacher of virtue especially for the young” (306). For much of the Enlightenment, this perception of history’s didactic potential informed the creation of historical texts. 157

Margins” 102). Philosophical history’s privileging of grand narratives seemed to stand in sharp contrast to the antiquarian’s intense interest in authentic primary sources and textual historical artifacts. Voltaire, in fact, denounced such antiquarian interests as obsessive erudition. However, according to Cheng, historians of the eighteenth century began to synthesize both large-scale societal progress and the minute particulars of critical source analysis.71 Even Jeremy Belknap, who clearly subscribed to a “great man” theory of classical historiography, also grounded his work in careful citation of primary sources.

Thus, we might imagine that turn-of-the-century historiography wrestled with some of the same issues that Brackenridge did in his serial: negotiating the tension between part and whole, or between isolated episode and grander narrative. More importantly, we might understand how such post-Revolution developments in historiography lent themselves to the invention and rise of the historical societies and sites that Brackenridge so often satirizes. On a very obvious level, these societies and institutions exist to house and preserve the relics of ages past. For Brackenridge, they also become objects themselves, serving as a synecdoche for systems of historical and social reproduction. And lastly, we might understand Modern Chivalry itself as actually constituting these ideas through its form. In a sense, Modern Chivalry describes such institutions and acts of historical preservation, but it also performs them by setting up entire chapters to encompass these kinds of texts, becoming a kind of archive. Indeed,

71 Cheng’s chief example of this kind of scholarship is Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which combines the pursuit of impartial truth (as set forth by German historians) with the philosophical history privileged by Voltaire and similar theorists (102-103). 158 many antiquarian collectors understood books as small museums or archives.72 Thus,

Brackenridge comments on such practices, but he also relies heavily on Modern

Chivalry’s disjointedness in order to illustrate the factitious nature of such historiographical activity. In Modern Chivalry, both types of historiographical activity break down as time progresses: grand narratives seem anachronistic or fail to translate from one episode to the next, and artifacts prove mere trivialities.

In the early republic, antiquarianism negotiated the problems of historiography’s general direction. Considered a different discipline from historical writing, antiquarianism privileged not the grand narrative but the specific artifact. The two disciplines were considered by many historians to be almost incompatible; they were not brought together until the nineteenth century, when historians explicitly made clear that preserving American artifacts provided a very real way to sustain American culture.

Nonetheless, early historians like Belknap and Ebenezer Hazard saw value in both approaches and attempted to bring both to bear on early American history. In 1790,

Belknap began to sketch the plans for a society that would collect materials and make them publicly accessible, convinced that a repository of historical material would someday inform the way historians characterized the past.73 Interestingly, he even called this project an “antiquarian society.” His correspondent Ebenezer Hazard had even more ambitious plans: as early as the 1770s, he proposed a central system to house the most important legal documents of the colonies, arguing that their gradual rise to prominence justified an increased interest in “even their earliest History” (Historical Collections iii).

72 See Alea Henle, who points emphasizes that printed works could be considered archives during this time period (11). 73 See Lamb and Harrison’s History of the City of New York (507). 159

According to Hazard, it was necessary to collect these “much dispersed” documents to

“lay the Foundation of good American History.”74 But Hazard’s ambition would not initially result in an antiquarian society. Instead, he published Historical Collections in the 1790s, which gathered important papers into a bound volume. His aim was to preserve the collection of documents “as had escaped the Ravages of Time and Accident”

(iv). Quoting Thomas Jefferson in his prospectus, Hazard outlined his project more explicitly, writing that the only way to preserve this history was “not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use, in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies as shall place them beyond the reach of accident”

(qtd. in Henle 38). Significantly, then, Hazard blamed societal disintegration not solely on the passage of time itself but on the methods of historical preservation that locks artifacts away from the general population. For Hazard, the solution is clear: original documents must be copied and distributed widely.

Hazard’s convictions about antiquarianism’s democratic potential sharply opposed prevalent attitudes about antiquarian’s erudition. For many thinkers, antiquarians were beset by an overwhelming attention to trivial minutiae and a decidedly pedantic purpose. Echoing Voltaire, critics satirized antiquarians, mocking and demeaning their obscurantist obsessions. As Rosemary Sweet points out, antiquarians were thought of as

“unrelieved by any reflection. There would be no sustained narrative, and the result was

‘dry’ and deeply unappealing to all but those who had a specialist knowledge of the subject” (6). True to form, New Hampshire lawyer William Plummer wrote in 1787 that the “antiquary” “expends his wealth” and “unwearied industry rescu[ing] from ruin old

74 From “American State Papers, Collection for Proposal,” 23 August 1774. 160 manuscripts, replete with error and absurdity—whose folly & dullness, the more lenient hand of time had concealed in merited obscurity” (qtd. in Henle 13). Hazard’s project of making widely accessible the primary documents of the colonies seemed to stand in sharp contrast to such attitudes. Still, few people shared Hazard’s convictions. Even Belknap, who advocated for historical and antiquarian societies, felt that Hazard’s Historical

Collections would be too obscure to arouse widespread interest. He urged Hazard to write narrative history instead, convinced that narrative would be more profitable and appealing to non-elite readers.

Hazard resisted, eschewing the trappings of a narrative project. Document reproduction, according to Hazard, represented a way to present history “free from the glosses of commentators” (qtd. in Henle 39). Narrative history was too biased and the most efficient way to preserve history was to reproduce the textual artifacts of the nation.

By simply presenting the primary source documents without commentary, Hazard argued in favor of archival compilation’s objective virtues. Perhaps predictably, though,

Hazard’s portable book-sized archive did not sell enough copies to actually finance the costs of printing and distribution, and in the end, its failure seemed to affirm the erudite and obscure nature of antiquarian research.

Modern Chivalry’s first volumes emerged during this debate about the direction of historiography. Brackenridge designs a text that is both a narrative and an archive— and it is also neither of the two. In the broadest narrative sense, the picaresque work follows the adventures of the elite federalist Captain Farrago and his uneducated hostler

Teague, who travel about the Western territories examining the flaws in the U.S.’s democratic system. But the events of the story do not connect to an overarching narrative;

161 rather, they seem to spring organically from whatever political issue troubled

Brackenridge most at the time, and Brackenridge makes use of the picaresque mode to push his characters westward and into the thorny issues of colonial expansion without much concern for the principal direction of the narrative. Provocatively, Brackenridge’s narrator (who may or may not speak for Brackenridge himself) seems lackadaisical about the larger story that such a work should produce. At the very beginning of the first volume, he makes clear that he will deliver only “something to read without the trouble of thinking” (3). Towards the end of the first volume, he explains that he began writing simply because of his “solitary residence” in the “western country, at a distance, from books and literary conversation” (49). If he returns to the city, he explains, then he “shall avoid tedium by other means” (49). At the end of the second volume, he revisits this sentiment, describing himself as “writing harmless nonsense” (100). And by the second part of the second 1805 volume, he recasts the principle goal of his narrative as provoking laughter in his readers. He writes that “a great part can have no meaning or effect; farther than to raise a laugh, or to make a person smile for a moment” (336).

Moreover, says the narrator, “the whole book from beginning to end, has a moral, which, if any one has not found out, let him read again” (336). Absent from these assertions is any mention of the work’s characters, theme, or larger concerns.

On a more thematic level, Modern Chivalry changes directions often, shifting its focus from one installment to the next and failing to follow up with what it has introduced previously. This feature is not unusual for long-running serial publications. As

I have detailed in previous chapters, serialists often confronted the difficulties of writing and publishing across considerable periods of time. At times serialists exploited the gaps

162 between installments, as Rowson did, using pauses and silence to provoke interest in readers. Belknap worked to bridge these gaps, working against temporal distances to produce a veneer of narrative stability. Modern Chivalry, however, seems ambivalent about either approach, accepting the passage of time as a destabilizing reality rather than a challenge to overcome. It embraces its open-endedness in the face of an unscripted future, extending forward with no plans to conclude earlier narrative threads.

The most striking example of this narrative disjointedness comes when Teague departs for France. Placed at the end of the 1797 volume, the episode gestures toward following up with the French Revolution. But, as Ed White explains, the French

Revolution descended into Jacobin radicalism while Modern Chivalry was on hiatus.

That Brackenridge cuts short Teague’s adventure “shows just how dramatically the political and cultural context had changed” (xviii). The beginning of the 1804 volume, then, briefly sketches Teague’s involvement with France before turning to other matters.

“Here is a great gap,” writes the narrator. “Not a word said about the travels of the

Captain, from the packing up of Teague, and sending him off to France, until after the termination of the French revolution, and the armistice or convention of Amiens. Though the fact is, that he had been, all this time, travelling, and Teague had rejoined him, in the capacity of pediseque, or foot-boy, as before” (231). We are told only briefly that Teague had been “a real sans culotte” and “was a good deal distinguished during the reign of

Robespierre” but was “vomited with the others from the caverns in which he had been included. How he ever got to America again it is difficult to say” (231). This vivid example—or “great gap”—illustrates the challenges of serial writing during the early national period—and the practice of backpedalling out of previous commitments. Indeed,

163

Brackenridge’s own political investments proved particularly unstable: his involvement in the Whiskey Rebellion, White reminds us, left him “cast, by his enemies, as a French- sympathizing radical” (xviii). For this reason, perhaps, Brackenridge had to abandon further discussion of the French Revolution. But the break between volumes—the gap that Brackenridge acknowledges so clearly—makes all the more apparent the shift in

Brackenridge’s point of view. More than that, the serial’s utter dependency on current events also makes extensive ideological coherence almost impossible. Even as

Brackenridge gestures to the previous volume, he must concede that the narrative’s direction has been altered by the circumstances of the world at large.

In very vivid ways, these serialized installments represent the opposite of a cohesive narrative: each installment functions similar to a snapshot of the existing state of affairs, offering a glimpse into a specific moment, and refusing a complete assemblage of pieces that might offer a seamless reading experience. Rice’s assertion, that Brackenridge resists turning Modern Chivalry into the discrete codex to unravel the hegemonic potential of the novel, only partially describes Brackenridge’s undertaking. By refusing totality, Brackenridge not only unsettles the dominance of print culture but also the idea of framing history—or society at large—as a coherent possibility. At times, the installments of Modern Chivalry gesture to the ways that serial writing can preserve the specificity of the historical moment rather than assert broader and more expansive claims to history. But Brackenridge also undermines the attempt to preserve history by accessing these isolated fragments. For Brackenridge, the response to the factitiousness of historical narrative is not the artifact. Artifacts, in fact, prove even more disorienting than attempts at coherence, and they invite misinterpretation and signify contrivance. Just as historical

164 narrative is an act of distortion, so too is antiquarianism a method of historiography that sets objects apart from greater contexts, privileging the pedantic and the esoteric, and imbuing with meaning that which should be irrelevant. In sum, both approaches for

Brackenridge represent faulty attempts to make meaning from events that should defy easy access. Societal consistency is destabilized by the passage of time; the material artifacts and legal institutions that people create inadvertently reveal the past’s distance from the present.

Throughout Modern Chivalry, Brackenridge repeatedly waylays narrative progress in order to highlight and then satirize the practice of antiquarian collecting. The third volume, published in 1793, combines narrative with a selection of supposedly authentic documents that purport to capture some aspect of the culture of the republic.

The first half of this volume focuses almost exclusively on a set of unrelated documents that have little, if anything, to do with the adventures of the Captain or Teague—a review from “Young’s Magazine,” an oration that the narrator delivered two years before, and a

Hudibrastic poem that the narrator attributes to an unknown foreign writer. That all these documents are invented for the narrative underscores Brackenridge’s satirical project— they are treated with feigned seriousness while they quite clearly lampoon the people and societies that find such cultural productions exceedingly meaningful. On the surface, their purpose in the narrative seems to gather together the cacophonous voices of the republic, demonstrating that absolute plurality produces a disordered and anti-intellectual society.

But upon closer examination, it is clear that Brackenridge is considering the efficacy of centralized cultural safeguards. These relics function in the text in very specific ways: they undermine the project of antiquarianism, and they also execute a larger critique of

165 society’s efforts to unite all its citizens—past and future—under the auspices of cultural institutions, archives, and constitutions.

One of these documents, the Hudibrastic poem “Cincinnatus,” is supposedly a genuine relic found in Philadelphia in the garret of a dead author. Its existence in the volume itself, as well as its theme, addresses directly the problems of antiquarianism. The poem, which occupies more than thirty pages, is a textual artifact that details the celebration and consequent misinterpretation of a symbol. A member of the Society of

Cincinnatus comes to a village with a badge that represents his “institution” (as

Brackenridge calls it), and the people of the village “altercat[e] with him respecting the demerits of the institution, and the propriety of the emblem which he wore” (114). This institution to which the people of the village refer was a society designed to preserve the history and special character of a group of discharged soldiers who “seek an agricultural fame” among the ordinary citizens of the republic they have just fought to protect.

Desiring to ensure the “memory” of their efforts, they form an “institution” of a “society and badge” (114-115). This “society” vexes the citizens of the town who believe the badge represents a “nobility of title” (115), thus undermining the American claim to a democratically structured society. The Cincinnat finds himself among a group of the townspeople who misinterpret the badge’s symbol—an eagle—as a number of different things. A pedagogue, for instance, believes the badge to be a turkey and then a goose. He questions “what resemblance is there here/To him of Roman character,/Who wore no brochet at his button” (116). After all, says the pedagogue, the American’s connection to ancient Rome is a strained one: “The Roman had no much to leave, /And would have laugh’d himself in’s sleeve, /T’ have these words applied to him” (116). According to the

166 pedagogue, the American soldier distorts ancient history in an attempt to preserve the memory of his own historic sacrifice.

Brackenridge’s satire here addresses a number of issues. Primarily, the

Cincinnat’s badge demands the same kind of unthinking reverence as other historical relics. It becomes a kind of relic in itself, a sign, serving to remind the wearer of the near past and the distant past, attempting to collapse the distinction between ancient Roman and recent American civilization. And because it is an object, it invites multiple interpretations and misinterpretations on the part of the townspeople, who are suspicious of the object’s meaning and ideological import. Though the townspeople reveal themselves to be paranoid and uninformed of the barest historical knowledge, they also underscore something very crucial about a devotion to such objects: that an object’s existence actually provokes the bearer’s purpose or the present-day misinterpretation more than it does any inherent significance. A clergy member, for instance, believes the symbol is “heathenish and vain,” representing a form of idolatry (122). The pedagogue believes the symbol to be “a grey goose or a drake” (116). So often, Brackenridge has been described as an elitist—one who demonstrates time and time again that democracy inevitably leads to the multiplicity of uninformed misinterpretation and mob rule that haunts the Cincinnat’s episode. But in this case Brackenridge makes clear that the very act of preserving objects is weighted with a factitious ideological charge, incapable of preserving what it claims to preserve. When the Cincinnat comes forward to defend his society, he reveals that he actually knows very little about the original Cincinnatus or other extant Roman traditions: “But though I know not Cincinnatus,/Or other Roman that begat us,/ The club named after him is good” (117). Eventually the Cincinnat implicates

167 himself in the charge of elitism, saying that an officer “has a right to wear, / The emblem of his victor” because “there must be low and high;/ And what is better born and bred, /

‘Tis reasonable should be the head” (129). The mob reacts badly to these sentiments, punishing the Cincinnat by bringing “violence, and blows along” to silence him and drive him out of the town (132).

After the poem concludes, the narrator reveals two conflicting sentiments about these events. First, the narrator focuses his commentary on the Society of Cincinnati, speculating about its overarching implications for the republic itself. The narrator remarks that the poet was not American and that “foreigners were more alarmed at the institution of the society than Americans” because of its association with “orders of nobility” (138). The narrator, though, dismisses the poet’s paranoia, claiming that the order of Cincinnatus is harmless because it will soon pass away and be forgotten: “I could never see that it was of any consequence whether this institution existed or not. For it must naturally evaporate in a few years, the spirit of the times being wholly changed, from what it was in the days of chivalry, and not capable of supporting an excrescence which has no natural root, or foundation, in the opinion of the people” (138). Both perspectives are particularly relevant to Brackenridge’s project, and both underscore the dual attitudes toward historiographical activity at this particular point in time. The poet worries that preserving history in the form of an institution will ultimately lead to a hierarchical and anti-democratic movement within society. The narrator believes the opposite: that these institutions paradoxically reveal their irrelevance to modern-day society, and that they pass away with the passage of time. Though seemingly incompatible, these perspectives share a crucial commonality: they assert that time’s

168 passage inevitably removes people from the events that caused them to act or behave in certain ways, and that institutions are the way that people try to carry the past into the present. Institutions, however, do not preserve the past; instead they reveal the yearnings of their present-day members. The poet and the narrator may disagree on the impact of such dissimulation, but they both agree that institutions, organizations, and historical artifacts fail to preserve consistency between the present and the past. Institutions call attention to their limitations as historical and cultural safeguards.

Other chapters and volumes of Modern Chivalry satirize the practice of preserving artifacts for posterity, many of them also incorporating these artifacts in their pages. The second volume, for instance, contains a long sermon and an oration delivered by a black slave to the American Philosophical Society. The slave, Cuff, has recently made a discovery—“a stone, with a cavity sufficient to receive a man’s foot” that Society considers to be an Indian’s petrified moccasin. This discovery prompts the society to offer Cuff a position in their ranks. They also record his oration, which is reproduced in unintelligible prose in the volume’s pages—an authentic artifact within the text of

Modern Chivalry itself. The society cannot wait to acquire a copy of the oration so they can publish it and preserve it, but Modern Chivalry already achieves this goal, setting it apart from the rest of the narrative.

Cuff’s oration, transliterated in exact dialect, is an artifact that describes the discovery of an artifact. Interestingly, Cuff’s master encourages Cuff to make this oration precisely to counter what the master considers to be erroneous beliefs about scientific racism. Having previously heard “that the Africans had once been white, had sharp noses, and long hair; but by living in sun-burnt climates, the skin had changed colour, the hair

169 become frizzled, and in the course of a generation, the imagination of the mother, presenting obtuse objects, had produced an offspring with flat noses” (73), the master encourages Cuff to correct these misperceptions and do “justice to his countrymen [. . .] to prove that all men were once black, and that by living in snowy weather, and being bleached by the weather, the skin had gradually become white” (74). Cuff follows his master’s orders. But in his enthusiasm for the philosophical society, he either unknowingly or willfully misinterprets his master and thereby reveals the humorous grotesqueries of race science: “Now shentima, I say dad de first man was de black a man, and de first woman de black a woman; and get two tree children; de rain vasha dese; and de snow pleach [. . .] and van cash by de nose, an pull; so de nose come lang, sharp nose”

(74). Suggestively, Brackenridge satirizes all parties involved with this production—the

American Philosophical Society for exalting the obscure artifacts and the narratives of scientific racism, the slave master for keeping slaves despite his conviction of their shared humanity, and the slave himself, whose fanciful take on human history demonstrates how erroneous information can become enshrined as public record or artifact. More to the point, he satirizes the antiquarian impulse to juxtapose these opposing perspectives, without analysis, as equally deserving of preservation. The society is obsessed not only with the petrified moccasin but also the strange account of its discovery, and it also seeks to preserve this discovery as it was spoken. For the society, all artifacts deserve equal attention, and all need to be housed and preserved for future generations. Even more suggestively, Modern Chivalry replicates this process, encompassing texts as they were spoken and including meeting minutes and charters.

Like Hazard’s Historical Collections, Modern Chivalry is, at certain times, the sort of

170 multivolume work that Belknap decried as too obscure for average readers. It forestalls its plot to include exact reproductions of documents and transcriptions of scientific analysis.

One of Modern Chivalry’s most striking scenes details a similar effort to catalogue and understand artifacts and relics, sometimes in a way that dredges up more conjecture under the guise of discovery. Farrago and Duncan travel to the Western frontier to look at some caves. When coming across some petrified statues that appear to have been left by an earlier civilization, the Captain endeavors to discover whether these

“rude sculptures” had “been made by the animals themselves, while the rock had been in a plastic state, and before it had hardened from clay into stone, or whether it was the work of savages, before the Europeans had possession of the country” (194). The Captain

“lamented that he had not a philosopher at hand, to determine this” and regrets that he does not have Teague with him since Teague was nearly admitted to the Philosophical

Society” (194). The captain and Duncan find more than just sculptures; they also locate skeletons, petrified bows and arrows, petrified wasps nests, and petrified animals. The

Captain is particularly entranced by an Indian man “reduced to stone” (195). The narrator wonders if these figures shouldn’t be sent to Europe “to compare with the statues that have been made by hands” and argues that it would be “advisable for the connoisseurs of

America, to apply to the legislature of the state, where the cave is, to prevent such exportation” (195).

Modern Chivalry’s outdoor museum expresses complexities about the project of unearthing and preserving a collection of such objects. Primarily, the narrator emphasizes that these artifacts have been petrified and “reduced” to stone, implying that their

171 suitability for study depends on their supposed fixity and inability to progress or change.

Moreover, this stasis removes the objects from understanding or accessibility in that they become even more difficult to understand or categorize. Upon viewing the Native

American caves and artworks, the captain reveals that he needs a scholar to interpret them; he also asserts that he will have to enlist expertise from overseas in order to discover who made them or what they were used for. For Farrago, the explanation for these objects does not lie in the American landscape itself—or among Americans—but in a far-off and removed location where scientists can make careful analysis. Not only are the objects rendered as inaccessible fragments in their petrification, but they are also further “distanced” from their origin through a process of scientific discovery.

As Modern Chivalry progresses, it becomes clear that Brackenridge sees a link between this penchant for scientific analysis—with its strange antiquarian erudition—and the stasis of American progress. More centrally, he forges a connection between the hyper-literate producers of science and antiquarianism and the illiterate mob and population of indigenous and Irish inhabitants. On one level, Brackenridge shows that these societies that safeguard and practice antiquarianism are willing to make Teague and

Cuff full members, despite their lack of learning, which implies that such institutions are not necessarily run by people who understand the artifacts that they presume to collect.

On another level, Brackenridge depicts the practice of collecting itself as indicative of the futility of preserving meaning—and, consequently, as an act that ushers in the potential for absolute misreading and inevitable illiteracy.

Many of Teague’s adventures in the novel portray him as coming dangerously close to safeguarding the culture and history of the republic—even as he does not

172 understand or read any of the objects that he is meant to preserve. It is this proximity that

Brackenridge uses to collapse the distinction between the illiterate Teague and the erudite antiquarian. In one particular instance, the captain discovers that Teague, though

“illiterate and uncultivated,” may be masquerading as a university professor—a profession that Brackenridge depicts as obsessed with the same antiquarian erudition as the philosophical society. Upon going to the university to find Teague, he discovers that another Irishman teaches Greek at the university. Punning on the Irishman’s pronunciation of the word Greek (as sounding like Creek), he tells him that “there were whole tribes who spoke the Craike language in the States” (81). The Irish professor misapprehends the captain, assuming that the “aborigines” of America speak Greek and therefore represent a lost link to European civilization. With astonishment, the Irish professor explains, “If what you tell me be a trut, [. . .] it is a crate discovery, perhaps dese may have been de fragments o’ de books o’ de philosophers and poets that are lost, and de professors cannot come acrass in their own country” (81). Here Brackenridge’s satire targets not only the arcane efforts of the university itself to study and collect languages but also the fashionable obsession with finding the missing link between

Native Americans and European cultures. The Irish professor, so ill-equipped for his profession that he cannot understand the difference between Greek and Creek, is easily taken by the prospect of locating more lost relics—the books and fragments that will unlock the code to another ancient civilization.

Brackenridge and Farrago assert continuously that Teague is illiterate and uncultivated. However, Teague frequently manages to insinuate himself into the highest ranking bodies of government and culture. In one instance, Teague is mistaken for an

173 excise officer and falls victim to mob violence. After being tarred and feathered, Teague runs away into the wilderness but is eventually captured by the philosophical society, which mistakes him for a wild and yet-undiscovered creature native to the Americas.

Shot and caged, he is taken to the capital where “proprietors, after having published an advertisement, began to exhibit him as a curiosity” (222). Teague is then subject to a rigorous scientific analysis spearheaded by the philosophical society and exhibited in order to generate revenue. Chronicling everything about Teague, the society writes a report charting his movements, actions, habits, and sleep patterns: “If this animal is to be referred to the quadruped, or beast kind, it would most naturally be classed with Ouran

Outang, or Wild Man of Africa; If with the bird kind, we shall be totally at a loss to assign the genus. For though it has a head and a face not like the ouzel, or the grey owl, yet in body it has no resemblance” (224). The society’s document is reproduced in full, revealing a number of popular scientific theories of the time—that Teague is “the animal” that forms “the link between the brutal and the human species”; but that his feathers—a crucial part of his disguise—thwart any easy categorization (224).

Brackenridge here satirizes the philosophical society for its attempts to complicate the most mundane elements of society. But more important than this straightforward satire, however, is his effort to make indistinguishable the esoteric activities of the philosophical society and the barbarous actions of the angry mob that tortures Teague in the first place. This strain of thought runs through Brackenridge’s narrative more generally, and critics such as White have read this satire as evidence of Brackenridge’s skepticism about democratic processes and a decentralized society. However, I would point out here that Brackenridge is not simply satirizing the pitfalls of democratic

174 interpretation; rather, he is concerned by the problems of antiquarian erudition, which isolates objects from greater contexts. Democratic thinking merely exacerbates the possibilities of extracting artifacts from their contexts, adding a violent dimension to the project of cataloguing objects. Before Teague was subjected to the philosophical society’s rigorous and misguided examination, he found himself at the hands of an angry anti-tax mob—one that is an overt representation of the democratically-organized militias in the Whiskey Rebellion. With the shouts of “liberty and no excise,” the mob advances upon Teague, erects a “liberty pole,” and tars and feathers Teague before the captain and other witnesses (213). Later, when the philosophical society captures Teague, they subject him to a similar kind of humiliation—though all under the guise of science. They purchase Teague; their documents reveal that they do so “for the purpose of examining it more fully, in their own hall, and possibly of sending it to the societies abroad, for their examination also” (225). Teague is immediately distressed that the philosophical society’s true purpose is to “cut me up as you would a dead cat, and put my skin upon a pitchfork, just to plase deir own fancies; rader let me stay where I am, and shew me to de good paple, dat gape and stare, but keep deir teeth in deir mouths, and luke foolish, but don’t affer to bite” (226).

By juxtaposing the activities of the democratic mob and the philosophical society,

Brackenridge argues that obsessive chronicling and erudition do not necessarily set one apart from the basest elements of society; rather, they provide a smokescreen for accomplishing very similar activities. More importantly, the purported intellectual project of the philosophical society merely obscures that they too are a mob—one that also makes possible a kind of collective and public spectacle. As Teague notes, the

175 philosophical society will bring people to “gape and stare” (226) at him as he remains a prisoner. And indeed, Teague-as-exhibit attracts large mob-like crowds who come to make their judgments: they are “divided in opinion; some believing it to be a monster, or a new animal in the creation; others disposed to be of opinion, and others confidently asserting, that it was a real man” (226). Reminiscent of the townspeople in the

Cincinnatus poem, this episode demonstrates the inanities born of fetishizing objects.

Additionally, these inaccuracies and inanities spring from the obsession with Teague as an object to preserve.

We might further contextualize Brackenridge’s satire among some of the documents that circulated about the necessity of building state archives and antiquarian societies. In 1794, Jeremy Belknap sent a letter to other, smaller societies and individual donors, encouraging them to participate in the creation of a centralized archive. The aim of this archive, according to Belknap, “is to collect, preserve and communicate all the materials which we can get for a natural and political history of America.” Encouraging them to send whatever they possessed, Belknap asserted that the society’s aim was to have “as large and complete a collection as can be had of American productions, animal, mineral, and fossil.” For the animals that are too “unwieldy,” Belknap encouraged sending smaller pieces—feathers, talons, claws, and other parts.75 For Belknap, preserving pieces of animals were able to stand in for the whole, offering as much knowledge and understanding as the entire body. Brackenridge satirizes this impulse, understanding it as an act of destruction rather than preservation.

75 Jeremy Belknap Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. 176

More importantly, Brackenridge collapses the two opposing strains of revolutionary thought, averring that they actually produce a similar praxis of selective remembering and willful forgetfulness. Much revolutionary ideology emphasized the importance of detaching from the past and starting anew by disregarding the tyranny of history. The philosophical society, on the other hand, fixates on the past but by way of isolating individual objects to the point of actually inventing history. Brackenridge looks to philosophical basis for both the behavior of the mob and the philosophical society—or the source of civic humanism that inspired both revolutionary activity and its antithesis.76

The mob, though not necessarily conscious of its ideological foundation, takes its inspiration from the most extreme principles that inspired the American and French revolutions, a reality that Brackenridge makes clear throughout the installment.

Brackenridge spotlights Paine’s writings, the “Age of Reason” and “Rights of Man,” making it a topic of debate between the captain and other characters. Upon reading

Paine’s “Age of Reason,” a valet becomes increasingly abusive to those who practice religion, even attempting to intimidate and accost Duncan for what he considers to be

“superstition” (183). In another instance, the captain ruminates on the “Rights of Man” with a marquis, admitting that he is “a good deal disposed to subscribe to the elementary principles of that work; a leading doctrine of which, that at no time can the pact or customs of ancestors forestall or take away the right of descendants to frame whatever kind of government they think proper” (218). This dedication to throwing off the customs and belief systems of previous generations inspires mob-driven violence—the instigators,

76 See William Dowling’s “Joel Barlow and the Anarchiad,” which discusses the “paradigm of civic humanism” that became “one of the ideological wellsprings of the revolution in the American colonies” (25). 177 though “uninformed men,” take issue with an “obnoxious, unequal law” and attempt to overthrow the regime that commands their revenue. In other words, mob violence is born of a project of throwing off the past: of forgetting laws and ignoring the past’s pacts, constraints and traditions. To adhere to Paine’s philosophy is to commit oneself to the kind of anarchical rule that sanctions the act of forgetting. This revolutionary dedication to forgetting spurns a passionate and unruly application of principles and ideals.

This idea was not unique to Brackenridge. When he became involved in the

Whiskey Rebellion, he expressed certainties that popular political organizing would lead to chaos and uncivilized behavior. His Incidents of the Insurrection betrays convictions that the democratic organizers will become little more than the Native American savages of the Western frontier. Characterizing the insurrectionists as “a large and enraged body of men, under the command of one as mad as themselves” (51), Brackenridge writes that the unthinking application of democratic ideals engendered “the anarchy of a period; a shock to the government; and possibly a revolution—a revolution impregnated with the

Jacobin principles of France, and which might become equally bloody to the principal actors” (85). In some senses, the insurrectionists are actually more unruly and ungovernable than Native Americans. When Brackenridge attempted to neutralize the

Whiskey Rebellion, he “put [the insurrectionists] in good humour” and “indulged a good deal of pleasantry at the expense of the executive, on the subject of Indian treaties: I introduced general Knox on the one side, and Cornplanter on the other; and made them speeches. Now, said I, if Indians can have treaties, why cannot we have one two [sic]?”

(34). For Brackenridge, the insurrectionists’ uncontrollable behavior stems from their inability to obey or recognize the value of binding agreements, such as treaties or agreed-

178 upon governments. Even Indians, Brackenridge argues, can recognize the benefits of common agreements.

Brackenridge’s misgivings about democratic ideology do not make him unique to his generation. Like many hyphenated democratic-republicans of his era, he harbored doubts about the U.S.’s democratic experiment, mixing his classical republican leanings with conservative and anti-democratic thought.77 However, according to this democratic- republican worldview, the philosophical society should seem to provide an antidote to such untethered and emotional attitudes. First, antiquarianism and scientific analysis devote themselves to the kind of measured, detached scrutiny that would be unmoved by democratic insurgencies.78 Second, the philosophical society’s obsession with artifacts would seem to profess a greater sense of connectedness to the past. But Brackenridge implies that the antiquarian project of unearthing genuine artifacts actually manufactures fictive history.

Additionally, Brackenridge equates the democratic mob with the obsessive and esoteric philosophers, reducing both to barely-literate and uncivilized savages. White argues that Brackenridge is indeed critical not only of the democratic masses but also of the elitism expressed by people like the captain. The philosophical society, says White, is composed of “lamebrain philosophers” who are “engaged in pseudointellectual pursuits” that evince that “elite culture” is “simply a variation of” plebian culture or perhaps even

“the causes and abuses of plebian culture” (xi). But Brackenridge does more than simply

77 For a fuller discussion of Brackenridge as hyphenated democratic-republican, see White’s introduction, which explains that Brackenridge was “committed to two competing perspectives: ostensibly committed to ‘democracy’ and any number of popular measures, but nonetheless fundamentally hostile to popular beliefs and values” (xx). 78 As Cheng emphasizes, much critical historical scholarship was thought to be devoid of emotion and therefore closer to impartial truth (“On the Margins” 102). 179 repudiate pseudointellectual elites for their propagation of plebian culture: he makes evident that obsessive archiving and antiquarianism actually make possible a wider culture of illiteracy and stagnation. To do so, he uses the serial form itself to demonstrate the means by which people credit relics and artifacts, imbuing them with power. Within the narrative, artifact-like pieces of text are made to be deliberately estranging. They are sometimes difficult to understand—as with Cuff’s oration, legal jargon, or Latin references—and they often overwhelm the narrative arc of any particular volume. As the pieces of Modern Chivalry expand to include more “found documents,” they focus less on narrative cohesion and more on the very-particular minutiae of the moment.

More importantly, the novel’s obsession with “found documents” unveils the limits of historiography’s project to order the past, make sense of the present, and ensure social coherence into the future. Brackenridge likens these stagnant and petrified historical artifacts to laws and institutions, even to the point that these stationary objects come to stand in for institutions. The Society of Cincinnatus is emblematized by its badge; the philosophical society by the numerous textual artifacts it celebrates. But even beyond these ready examples, Brackenridge often describes how the law or government itself calcifies over time, becoming a hollow relic that does not translate from one epoch to the next. In many instances, Brackenridge incorporates found legal documents to extend his discussion of historiography to the realm of the law. For instance, in the middle of Teague’s desperate and humorous plight to escape philosophical society,

Brackenridge includes a lengthy legal proceeding that has the same effect that many of the other “textual artifacts” have within the text: it provides an unmediated glimpse at

180 society’s governing fixtures while also appearing estranging and alienating within the narrative itself:

May it please your honours, I take this to be an animal in which there can be no property or absolute or qualified, being feræ naturæ, or of an untamed nature, such as a panther, or a buffalo; of which it is laid down no larceny can be committed, as not being the subject of property. 4 Black. 235; referring for authorities to 1 Hal. P. C. 511. Fost. 366. 1 Hawk. P. C. 94. Here counsellor Patch read the authorities.

Brackenridge reproduces parts of the Treatise on the Law of Evidence in reference to

Teague’s legal proceedings, perhaps, in some ways, to satirize legal discourse in all its inaccessibility and inapplicability to the (rather insignificant) situation at hand. But this satire serves another function: it illuminates not only the arcane nature of the law but also its opposition to narrative. As yet another incorporated artifact, this selection of legalese equates this particular discourse with the esoteric discourses of the philosophical society.

More crucially, the law—as a supposedly rational force—offers no clarity or insights into

Teague’s humanity, and it is capable of being distorted to support farcical ideas. While the philosophical society launches an argument “to establish his brutality,” their lawyer ascertains that Teague’s capability for language does not prove that he is human because

“it was no uncommon thing in early ages, and in many countries, for beasts to speak some language” (227). After hearing these arguments, the court finds in favor of the philosophical society and “the thing [is] remanded to custody” (227). Through

Brackenridge has spent volumes establishing and lampooning Teague’s animality, his major critique here centers on the way republican citizens fetishize hollow cultural and historical artifacts. This blind adherence to the law and this worship of cultural fixities facilitate the republican citizen’s own animal behavior. In Brackenridge’s text, Teague—

181 as well as other marginalized figures such as Native Americans and slaves—are never recovered as human; rather, white republican citizens become more like Teague when they turn for guidance to the fixed cultural artifact. Since “beasts” can “speak some language,” then it follows that large repositories of language do not exempt one from being or becoming a beast.

The Law as Relic

Brackenridge certainly wasn’t the only thinker to give shape to the conviction that laws did not and perhaps should not translate from one time period to another. Most notably, and as I discussed in Chapter Two, Thomas Jefferson argued that laws, constitutions, and regulations represented the past’s undue and antidemocratic influence on the present. Like Brackenridge, Jefferson understood that the passage of time inevitably distanced people from the agreed-upon ideals of a past age, and that the rules and regulations that had governed one period might be completely inappropriate in another. Jefferson supported a society that would pursue the continual cycle of renewal and revolution, arguing that such moments of regeneration were in keeping with natural law.

While Brackenridge does depict the law as quickly growing irrelevant, he becomes as time goes by less convinced by the idea that all laws should be abolished. He concedes that laws and regulations quickly become antiquated and incapable of serving their supposed purpose, but he does not advocate throwing them off altogether. Even though laws amount to little more than the calcified and petrified statues in the cave,

Brackenridge recognizes that the lack of any kind of structuring consistency produces the illiteracy of Teague and the anarchy of the frontier mob. Brackenridge’s argument is two-

182 fold: Teague and other illiterate and uncivilized folk have no laws and no order, but the elite philosophers, with their erudite obsession with chronicling and fetishizing artifacts, also hold no claim to clarity, even perhaps causing a kind of illiterate chaos. At certain instances in the text, Brackenridge’s narrator goes so far as to assert that the process of writing itself paradoxically causes a loss of coherence and memory. “Certain it is,” writes the narrator, “that the taking of notes, detracts from the exercise of memory; but much more from the exercise of understanding. The mind is divided, and the act of putting upon paper, detracts something from the operation of putting it in the head. [. . .] It is impossible that a man who writes, can more than half think” (361-362). The Captain tells his charges: “When a man gets a thing in his book, he neglects to put it in his head”

(336). In other words, literacy operates in opposition to memory and improvisation.

But for Brackenridge the solution is not to spurn intellectual pursuits altogether.

He also satirizes the ignorant and the willfully illiterate. In the previous installment, he mocks an angry mob that mobilizes itself against a scholar of “vain learning” (303). And indeed, as a material text, Modern Chivalry itself embodies this conflict between the need to preserve the past and the impossibility of accurately doing so. It is a print artifact that both necessitates and refuses coherence, recognizing that its long gaps make any kind of consistency impossible. It provides a window into its particular moment, but it also concedes that this moment has likely passed by the time the installment makes it into print. The text itself reminds us that a specter of anachronism reigns over almost all cultural productions.

Brackenridge uses this tension in his later volumes especially to describe the impossible task of the law—both in its legislative and judicial capacities. By likening the

183 law to a serialized installment, he demonstrates that the law is always almost immediately antiquated and outdated, evincing the mores of the past rather than providing the overarching stability and civility with which it is charged. The 1805 volume, which handles the legal problems plaguing the territories, details a number of issues where the law seems as calcified as the statues on the frontier. The “passion of the time changes,” says the narrator, “like the fashions of dress” (368). Importantly, though, Brackenridge makes the distinction between legislation and constitutional law. Legislative bodies change with the “prejudices of the people” and “must yield to the prejudices of their constituents even contrary to their own judgment” (315), but the judicial system must necessarily be different. The “hostility to laws and a disposition to overthrow establishments, and judges” according to the narrator, “is the fountain which is to be corrected” (315).

Thematically, Modern Chivalry finds no easy answer to the tension between the need for long-term stability and the law’s immediate antiquated nature. These concerns manifest in earlier volumes—namely, in discussions of the certificates that soldiers sold to creditors after the Revolution, and whether the speculators who purchased them should be able to profit at such steep rates. The question, the narrator emphasizes, is whether or not these soldiers and creditors are “bound by contract, and the transferee ought to take the whole sum from the public” (151). On the one hand, the contract is a binding force— a law that unites the citizen to the government in agreement. On the other hand, the market distorted the terms of this agreement, and soldiers suffered from the adherence to the law (and the willful manipulation of the markets by speculators). Later the narrator issues his own decision on the matter: “Let any man putting a thousand dollars in his

184 pocket from the bank of the United States, look at the war-worn soldier, or the widow and fatherless who has parted with them, and say if his conscience is not touched with a sense of the unreasonable gain” (155). The narrator argues that contracts can be abolished and previous agreements disregarded for the needs of the present. This point of view is pragmatic, no doubt, but it also recognizes the ways that laws and contracts fail to hold the same importance or meaning from one generation to the next. Laws do not (and should not) attempt to author cohesion or to bridge the gaps in time because such attempts at cohesion may actually be unjust.79

But in later volumes of Modern Chivalry, Brackenridge expresses misgivings about this pragmatic attitude toward the law, doing something of an about-face on his earlier critiques. His change in perspective was undoubtedly influenced by the early nineteenth-century judicial scandals that shook the ground of his chosen profession— scandals that revealed the frightening possibility that people could ignore or abolish the law for political ends. When Jefferson took office in 1800, he began subjecting the judiciary to more stringent executive controls, hoping to curb the court system’s

Federalist leanings. To do so, he launched impeachment proceedings to remove influential Federalist judges from the bench. In Pennsylvania, these efforts “took a more radical expression” and “local party members developed populist critiques of legal

79 In his early nineteenth-century legal writings, Brackenridge also espoused the idea that laws needed to be revised. In Considerations on the Jurisprudence of the State of Pennsylvania, No. 1, Brackenridge asserted that the “American empire is so peculiar in its general construction” that “to examine this subject in a national aspect is an impossibility” (3). The U.S. should not adhere to Britain’s common law as its “identity” “cannot be preserved in both countries” (5). The English change their law periodically, writes Brackenridge, and so too should Americans feel unconcerned about throwing off old customs. “When the common law thus becomes different in the two countries,” writes Brackenridge, “and in different parts of the same country, its identity as a system is subverted, and must be gradually lost” (5). America’s vast geographic spaces and its temporal distance from its founding are key matters for Brackenridge, and they constitute reason enough for constantly revising the law. 185 institutions” (White xiv). Brackenridge himself was swept up in this event. After writing a letter in support of his Federalist colleagues, he found himself similarly under attack and at risk of losing his position. Pennsylvania governor Thomas McKean vetoed the removal of the judges, but the event would have a profound impact on Brackenridge. The later volumes of Modern Chivalry take up the question of the law’s strained role in the new republic, with Brackenridge vacillating between a need for consistency and a need for constant adaptation.80 A pragmatic approach to the law, unfortunately, could lead to the kind of power jockeying and political gamesmanship that Jefferson almost accomplished.

Modern Chivalry’s 1804 volume touches upon many of these debates. Introducing a character named “Tom the Tinker” who stands in for the anti-Federalist Jeffersonians,

Brackenridge satirizes the talk of “abolishing the courts, and the judges,” which “is more general than I imagine. I am afraid it may affect ultimately the democratic interest” (316).

Brackenridge expounds upon this idea further, expressing anxiety that changes to the

Constitution will ultimately distort the law beyond its original democratic purpose:

My concern is in the case of innovations, doubtless meant for improvements, has been that the experiment would not shew wisdom in the framers; but, on the contrary, discredit the administration by which they had been introduced; or, if tolerated, and approved, would lead to aristocracy, and despotism in the end. This by trace gradatim, how, and why this would be brought about; and after all it may be a spectre of the imagination. (323)

80 Interestingly, many of the missives from anti-Federalist critics share Brackenridge’s earlier sentiments regarding the erudition of elites. Portraying judges and lawyers as “monkish elites monopolizing esoteric knowledge to the disadvantage of ordinary citizens” (White xiv), radicals felt that British common law needed to be abolished and in its place erected a “code of laws free of Latin phrases and technical terms, which they believed would be more consistent with the ‘plain and simple nature of a Republican form of government’” (Ellis 161). Sentiments populist alienation led Thomas Paine to advocate for “legislative law” rather than “lawyers law,” stressing that the law must originate with popular legislative maneuvers rather than with elite and inaccessible lawyers (White xix). In 1805, Paine denounced the Constitution for its “negativing power inconsistently copied from England” (qtd. in Ellis 176). For Paine and others in his party, the judiciary’s reliance on British common law proved a detrimental model for the new nation. 186

In this instance, Brackenridge argues that shifting the law to favor the current administration actually damages the law’s legitimacy—precisely because such an act undercuts the administration’s ties to a larger transhistorical project. Moreover, the act of

“innovating” or “improving” the law is likely to be self-serving. Interestingly,

Brackenridge notes that coopting the law will doubtlessly lead to aristocracy and despotism—an argument that aligns him closely with classical republicans of the same era. Here Brackenridge espouses sentiments for which classical republicans are widely known, and sentiments which he has spent several volumes criticizing. He argues that laws and structuring institutions must be preserved in order to prevent—or at least slow—society’s slow decline.

But even as he espouses this point of view, he also undermines it. While mounting a defense of preservation of the law, Brackenridge simultaneously critiques the impulse to preserve the past. He compares disregard for the law to “pulling down Churches, or burning Colleges. [. . .] What if any one should say, let us have no books, and no doctrines, but the Ten Commandments, the Lords prayer, and the Apostles Creed? [. . .]

That would be more than is said of the law; why cannot we have it in a pocket-book, and let every man be his own lawyer?” (312). In the same volume, he also espouses a contradictory sentiment: that the law cannot be applied to all people and time periods without restraint—and that exceptions always frustrate the law’s consistent application.

As the serial progresses, though, Brackenridge begins to espouse a slightly different attitude toward the law, one that implies that the law itself contains a deep and unquantifiable power that exists outside the artifact or the text. The law, he begins to

187 argue, is not contained within archives, books, or constitutions. It is instead a larger entity that eclipses attempts to codify it in a textual mode, appealing to man’s higher faculties or perhaps existing within them. For instance, when discussing William Cobbett’s many libel lawsuits, Brackenridge weighs the importance of liberty against the allowances of the law. A case like Porcupine’s, he writes, demonstrates that the “necessity of the case justifies the exception to the general rule” of liberty, as the “parts of the law must be taken together” (318). In other words, a Porcupine actually engenders the justification for disavowing one of the most central tenets of the Constitution—that of a free press— because Cobbett’s specific case provides a ready-made exception to such principles.

Brackenridge accords the law an almost supernatural power: it is greater than the sum of its parts, capable of being detached from its specific codification and applied differently when someone like a Porcupine flouts what protection that law supposedly offers. It naturally protects those who were attacked by Porcupine. For the same reason, citizens and readers do not have to fear that they will be wrongly accused of libel. The specifics of Porcupine’s case allow for exceptions to freedom of speech, even as the law protecting freedom of speech continues to remain secure. The “rogue only needs fear” the law

(319). The law is self-justifying; it preserves itself because it is from the people even as it is necessarily distanced from their passions and prejudices.

It’s no mistake that Brackenridge’s stance here seems epistemologically unstable and maddeningly contradictory. Indeed, he argues that the same law that allows for a prosecution of a Porcupine also protects the freedoms of other citizens because it is the

“spirt” behind the law—a spirit that exceeds the law’s written tenets—that makes sure that justice is done. This moment marks something of a change in Brackenridge’s attitude

188 toward legal institutionalism. Over the course of several volumes, he has criticized the undue faith that citizens and lawmakers put in textual relics. But in light of Jefferson’s total disregard for constitutionality, he argues against the “pulling down” of laws and institutions—and he even expresses skepticism that they should be revised at all. This conflict also emerges in Brackenridge’s attitude toward seriality itself. After abandoning the possibilities of textual and thematic coherence, he turns in the last volumes toward a greater understanding of “stile,” concluding that a literary work can only really be a vehicle for “stile” since no other binding force can possibly bring together such a long work. But style, of course, is notoriously difficult to define and even more challenging to trace. Whereas other writers and philosophers debated the exact properties of style and the origins of taste, Brackenridge embraces style as a mysterious and indefinable quality.

It is something that one can know only by intuiting; it may originate in the mind or it may exist in the external object. As I explore in the next section, Brackenridge’s attitude toward the mysteries of style and the unknowability of its exact properties is an attitude he also applies to the law. Other critics, most notably Eric Slauter, have argued that early

American lawmakers saw the state and the constitution as works of art. American writers,

Slauter argues, “increasingly depicted the state as a work of art and even artifice, an object at once beautiful and potentially deceitful” (16). But Brackenridge, I argue, appeals less to the idea that the law is an art and more to the notion that one must exercise aesthetic judgment when applying the law to specific situations. The legal document itself is an object; but it also signifies a larger sensibility that one can access only by appealing to an extra-rational sense of taste.

Brackenridge and Style

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Brackenridge does not promise consistency throughout Modern Chivalry. Unlike

Belknap, he does not even strive to create a coherent text. But Brackenridge does reiterate one particular commitment across several volumes: that of literary style. Promising in the first volume that he will provide readers with “a model of perfect stile of writing” (3),

Brackenridge revisits the undertaking in the volume’s postscript, stating that he “value[s] the book for little but the style” (49). He returns to the issue throughout the entirety of

Modern Chivalry. In fact, “style” transcends the boundaries of each discrete volume, purporting to link them together with consistency. Style, apparently, is the one theoretical approach that can overcome the problem of time and the limitedness of the historical artifact.

But what is style, and what is its precise value? And how does its value relate to the marginalized characters like Teague, slaves, and Native Americans? Even when discussing style directly, Brackenridge refuses to give any easy answer or straightforward definition. In the third volume especially, he ruminates on “style’s” application. Style, he writes, is intuited by the “perfectly instructed, and delicately discerning” (103), but

“perhaps none will be more apt to pass them by than the learned of the academies, and the most versed in grammar rules of writing, for there is a greenness in the judgment of the school critics with respect to what is simple and natural in composition” (103). To further complicate the matter, Brackenridge compares literary style to dance:

Let a dancing master pass his judgment on the movements of the best bred man in life; and not finding in his position and attitudes, an evident conformity to the lessons of the saltatory art, he will conclude that he has not been taught to move with propriety. He does not know that it is this very circumstance that constitutes the excellence of the movements of the easy and perfectly genteel man; to wit, that when you observe him, it will never once come into your mind that he thinks of his attitudes or positions in the least; but that every movement is just as it happens, and without any

190

intention on his part. Ars est celare artem. To wit: It is the secret of good taste and perfection in behavior to conceal that you ever think of it at all. (103)

To bring his comparison back to the matter of literary style, Brackenridge concludes that

“when you read the composition, you think of nothing but the sense; and are never struck with the idea that it is otherwise expressed than every body would express it” (103).

Brackenridge asserts that matters of style come naturally to the well-bred, so much so that their way of movement lacks the ornate elegance taught by the dance master. Indeed,

Brackenridge emphasizes in this particular volume that style cannot be taught; on the contrary, instruction might actually impede one’s apprehension of an unmediated aesthetic experience. And while Brackenridge immediately assigns such aesthetic refinement to the elite, he also admits that this experience is available to “every body.”

Thus, style is both an exclusive behavior and an intuitive response. This assertion is perhaps less contradictory than it appears: this volume also details Teague’s improbable rise to political power and the Captain’s futile efforts to introduce Teague to a world of greater refinement—including dance lessons. Though the Captain believes that

“awkwardness of manner is not at all inconsistent with the highest literary and political abilities” (146), he must also confront the fact that Teague cannot learn how to dance and proves himself a menace to a democratic system.

Brackenridge’s own sentiments about style also shift slightly from one volume to the next. Again, this vagueness is something that Brackenridge cultivates rather than conceals. In his first volume, he states that he endeavors to perfect the English language

“without regarding sentiment, or subject” and “give an example of good language [. . .] which might serve as a model to future speakers and writers” (2). In the same chapter, he

191 declares that his book is one “without thought or the smallest degree of sense” (3) and that this commitment to style exempts him from criticism. He wants to “give [people] something to read without the trouble of thinking” (3). By the third volume (1793),

Brackenridge develops a more robust definition of style—as an experience or impression that is not imparted by education or refinement but seamlessly executed nonetheless. The secret to possessing good style, says Brackenridge, is to give the appearance that it requires no effort. While “no man will ever possess a good stile that has not well studied, and exercised himself in writing,” says Brackenridge, “he must go beyond this, and be able to deceive the world, and, never let it come into their heads that he has spent a thought on the subject” (103). But by 1805, Brackenridge moves away from efforts to perfect the English language to attempts to provoke laughter. The moral is to “ally pain” through an “abstraction of solid thought” (336). Style slowly metamorphoses into a desire to distract the reader from the painful events of everyday life. And by the 1815 volume,

Brackenridge turns to the question of “stile” again with renewed urgency. He writes that if readers “should not be able to extract a sentiment, let them confine their observation, to the stile, which, at our entrance on the task of writing this book, we declared to be our primary object. I will acknowledge at the same time, that stile is what I never could exactly hit, to my own satisfaction” (418-419). Interestingly, Brackenridge admits that he himself has never really been able to achieve style—or set it down in ways that are definitive and quantifiable—even as he argues that style is the book’s chief purpose. He also registers the complication of temporal distance, noting that his promise at the book’s outset has been necessarily ruptured by the passage of time. Even as “style” remains the book’s principal assertion, it is also difficult to sustain a consistent measure of style

192 throughout several volumes. This failure, in a sense, brings into focus once again the challenge of transcending particular temporal moments and the shortcomings of the serial form, which can really only represent its present moment. The serial requires other creative deployments—on the part of readers and writers—to achieve any kind of meaning.

Because Brackenridge does not offer a consistent or definitive definition of style, he is able to maintain its mystique throughout Modern Chivalry. More importantly, he is able to invoke its power and affirm its significance without tying it to specific realms of logic that can be codified or fully delineated. “Style” is never located within any precise artifact even though it does, according to Brackenridge, need to be linked to a written text. I would argue that Brackenridge understands that legal interpretation must function like aesthetic interpretation. People need to adapt it for different situations by appealing to a force of intuition. Rather than adhering to law because it is an artifact that has been preserved to ensure consistency, Brackenridge advises calling upon an innate and indefinable faculty to determine the law’s precise applicability. In his 1805 volume, he admits that “uncertainty of the law arise[s]” because of a multiplicity of interpretation. He draws a distinction between the “letter of the law, Litera scripta magnet” and the “spirit, that is the construction of laws” (382). There is a difference, then, between the written law and its construction. In this concept of “construction,” Brackenridge locates a kind of emotion or intent. It is this emotion or intent, which Brackenridge does not really unpuzzle, that provides the law with its legitimacy. Even though “two men may not in some cases, construe alike” and “no two judges, or two lawyers, will agree precisely in

193 their statements of the same decision,” the law’s very existence speaks to its validity as a sublime guiding force (382).

Even as Brackenridge implies that, like aesthetic valuation, legal authority is an extra-textual force, he is still very careful not to divorce it completely from the textual artifact. Brackenridge’s logic, then, grows more and more contradictory and imprecise.

The law—like art—has intrinsic and phenomenological properties that transcend the boundnessness of the textual artifact. But it also must be anchored to a text of some kind.

We might think about these contradictory ideas as related somewhat to seriality itself; even as the serial runs the risk of becoming too dependent on the textual installment, which is bound to the current moment, it still is a story imparted through texts. It cannot ever exist without the text. Readers, then, are responsible for making those separate installments or pieces connect. They too must rely on an aesthetic faculty.

For Brackenridge, the law’s power might be enshrined in any particular artifact, but he still wishes to “fix” it in some way as he does with style. Perhaps this contradictory prospect is what drives much of Modern Chivalry: the attempt to understand complex systems without demystifying them. He compares his own perspective to that of Godwin and Rousseau, two “visionary men” who “have seldom more in view than to support paradoxes” (382). But Godwin “supports the idea of deciding every case on its own particular circumstances”—a practice with which

Brackenridge does not agree for its particularity. He argues that laws exist “to procure uniformity of construction, and application in a free country. The object is to produce certainty” (382). While laws are open to interpretation, Brackenridge once again emphasizes preserving the “form” of government—a nebulous concept he locates in the

194 constitution (383). To reform the law, therefore, “requires a perfect knowledge of the subject of reform” (383). Experts in the law—or lawyers—can provide this knowledge, and their grounding in constitutional boundaries and principles will effectively safeguard its basic properties. Lawyers will “reform with safety,” unlike philosophers such as

Godwin and Rousseau, who rely too much on subjective valuation, a lawyer is beholden to the constitution.

By entrusting both the law and style to experts, Brackenridge at once democratizes taste and then reasserts its exclusivity. Even as he argues that the perfection of style “requires no uncommon structure of nerves, or organization of the brain to produce good sense” (103), he still makes clear that it lies beyond the purview of people such as Teague. Though Brackenridge proclaims that the “mass of mankind is equal to this” (103), the narrative shows very explicitly that only certain kinds of people—the lawyers and the educated writers and well-to-do readers—are able to come closest to mastering the very similar institutions of aesthetics and law.

Other critics have noted that Brackenridge appeals to aesthetic sensibility once it has become clear that he has exhausted rational approaches to difficult early national debates. Paul Gilmore reads Modern Chivalry as advocating a turn away from the perfect

“republican machines” and their rational Enlightenment-era systems of regulating human behavior. In Gilmore’s reading, Brackenridge systematically critiques democratic liberalism and republican orderliness before suggesting “the need for some supplemental culture that would focus on, or appeal to, rather than simply govern, the irrational (or prerational) individual” (301). This romantic appeal to the human imagination relies upon a “democratized notion of ‘taste’” that resists the “neoclassical ideal of taste as a marker

195 for civilized achievement and toward a more romantic notion of imagination as an innate faculty” (301). But this argument ignores key aspects of Brackenridge’s text. First,

Teague and Duncan are never really taken in by supplemental aesthetic culture; on the contrary, they are depicted as people that remain unmoved by appeals to style. Second,

Brackenridge does not see this “supplemental culture” as necessarily providing an alternative to the orderly republicanism of the nation; instead, he shows that the republican law must be approached like a kind of art. This artistic sense opens possibilities for the law rather than functioning as an alternative to it. And finally,

Brackenridge offers this kind of attitude on style not as a way to appeal to people like

Teague and Duncan but to exclude them from the networks of cultural capital. Even as

Brackenridge wants to assert that style is available to anyone who is human, he also undermines this democratic belief system by asserting that the educated and trained are able to come closest to achieving it.

Brackenridge undoubtedly found precedent for aesthetic governance in eighteenth-century British political poets and philosophers such as Coleridge,

Wordsworth, and Burke. But the British were motivated by a different situation, as the

British constitution had never been formally codified. As Michael Gardiner points out, eighteenth-century Britain existed for many thinkers as an “aesthetic-theistic state […] based on an informal and necessarily metaphysical constitution” (40). Citing Coleridge’s writing about the law, Gardiner explains that state sovereignty was perceived as

“inexpressible and unrepresentable,” and that the constitution was understood as “a structuring principle which does not allow apperception of itself—harmonious, undated, self-forming, and born of natural divinity” (41).

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But for Brackenridge, the problems of U.S. legal authority are very different.

Whereas the British did not have a constitution, the U.S. had a constitution and a legal apparatus that people followed with unthinking reverence. The British turned to aesthetics to invent a constitution that did not really exist; Brackenridge worries that

Americans are too beholden to laws and texts to the point that they obscure and forget their original purpose. He therefore urges Americans to develop an aesthetic sense so that they can intuit their already-codified law’s best application to the changing political landscape. In other words, Brackenridge actually prompts people to dematerialize the law-as-artifact in order to attend more faithfully to the “spirit of the law.” Modern

Chivalry’s historiographical and literary project emerges from this paradoxical relationship to the text. Though Brackenridge uses the serial’s disjointed construction to demonstrate the limited nature of texts, he also capitalizes on ways that these texts might be made to connect across time. The serial wanders from topic to topic, but Brackenridge argues that an underlying and imaginative force might ultimately be able to unite so many different temporal perspectives. That this force must remain a mystery makes it more exclusive.

Like his British forebears, Brackenridge also relied on legal aesthetic to shore up the domain of an elite class.81 But in Modern Chivalry this elitism impacts not only class barriers but also legal and national boundaries. By concluding that the law is self- justifying, Brackenridge is able to establish a very specific validation for disregarding the laws that govern borders—Indian treaties. In general, Indian treaties have always been regarded as vague and impermanent, and many actually facilitated the erosion of Native

81 See Gardiner, who writes that the “slide from aesthetics to governance after the 1800s-10s therefore builds a standard universalist path to travel, and a new ‘class’ of arbiters can emerge” (39-40). 197

American claims to land, despite their supposed purpose of recognizing borders.82 As

Francis Prucha argues, statesmen also viewed Indian treaties as an anomaly—different from treaties with European powers. Chief Justice John Marshall argued in 1831 that

U.S.-Native American relations were “marked by peculiar and cardinal distinctions which exist nowhere else” (qtd. in Prucha 1). For this reason, the U.S. could take an

“exceptionalist” attitude toward its agreements. Because Native American tribes were not considered sovereign states—and because they were thought to be more primitive—the

U.S. could take liberties with treaties, reinterpreting them to facilitate colonization or disposing of them altogether. Far from being a binding agreement, Indian treaties were ceremoniously hollow, invented only to be dismissed.

Modern Chivalry considers Indian treaties in several different volumes. In particular, the narrative evaluates the relationship between texts, institutions, laws, and

Native Americans. It is in these specific moments that Brackenridge must carefully negotiate his ideas about literacy, written texts, artifacts, and legal authority. He has spent much of the serial deconstructing written and legal artifacts, criticizing the human tendency to fetishize these hollow relics and collapsing into a system of unthinking hyperliteracy. But Brackenridge must also be careful not to promote total disregard for the law. While Brackenridge explores the written law’s inadequacies, he recognizes that a civilization without any respect for law, writing, or institutionalism might resemble a

Native American society. For Brackenridge, because Native Americans do not have a written law, they cannot, in his legal opinion, be categorized as having a sovereign legal

82 See Caskey Russell, who argues that treaties qualify as a particular discourse that created reality for settlers and Native Americans alike. This discourse “understands the nature of meaning as contingent on negotiation and interaction rather than permanently fixed and unchanged throughout time and place” (4). 198 identity. Brackenridge must therefore locate white superiority within literacy while paradoxically undermining the binding nature of written agreements. This inconsistency allows Brackenridge to promote a specific kind of colonial mindset: that the U.S. reigns supreme over Native Americans because it can write legal agreements; it can also disregard those agreements precisely because they are written, and because the authority of such agreements springs not from textuality but from a more intuitive endeavor.

Crucially, Brackenridge does not divorce legal stylistic from textual artifacts entirely; instead, he clarifies that the text is an anchoring device, and that aesthetic and legal interpretation must take the text as its object. This clarification is crucial, as it distinguishes the republic’s literate and expert citizens from their Native American counterparts. By redefining cultural preservation as an interpretive practice, and by reinscribing this practice to a literate realm, Brackenridge establishes a confounding logic that allows for disregarding Indian treaties. Because the republic’s citizens need only to intuit the spirit of the law, and not feel bound to its letter, they can remake borders to suit contemporary needs. Native Americans, who cannot read or write, lack the written texts to provide architecture for creative reinterpretation. For Brackenridge, the Indian’s lack of written law actually justifies the colonizer’s work in reshaping or disregarding his law as it best benefits imperialistic activity.

Brackenridge revisits these claims about Native American treaties throughout the course of Modern Chivalry. In the 1793 volume, he first introduces the idea that treating with Indians is a foolish and self-defeating venture. “[A]n Indian is a man,” he writes,

“and you may bind him by words and good acts. But he is an ignorant, unenlightened man, and when you lose the affections of his heart, you have little hold upon his reason to

199 recover it: Respect for you, in the first case, is the ground of his attachment; fear of you, in the last, must be your means to reclaim him” (158). According to Brackenridge, the

Indian is an ignorant and unenlightened being precisely because he is beholden to emotional attachments rather than written, binding agreements. Without a written legal apparatus, the Indian’s “law” remains in an emotional realm—not an aesthetic one.

Although Brackenridge spends much of Modern Chivalry demonstrating that literacy may actually cause forgetfulness, he denounces the Indian’s pre-literate systems of governance as functioning more like a gift economy. More importantly, he represents the

Indian’s world as ungoverned by any kind of unifying transtemporal institution. Because the Indian has no written law to begin with, he neither has any rational extratextual force to draw upon. This distinction is important to Brackenridge: societies can work creatively within their legal system—but only if they have a legal system. Abandoning laws altogether, according to Brackenridge, would largely collapse the distinctions between white republican society and the Native Americans of the frontier.

Additionally, Brackenridge uses Indian illiteracy as a larger reason for needing to break treaties. Because Indians forge pacts with emotion and not a respect for an overarching literary-legal aesthetic, they cannot draw upon the necessary faculties of reason and logic to make agreements. As a consequence, Americans should indeed use the Indians’ pre-rationality as a prime reason to disregard their own written contracts. A

“contract with an ignorant man,” he writes, will not work “until you convince him, that you are at a world, in these matters” and will “induce him to agree to what is reasonable”

(158). Brackenridge also argues that the Indian treaty is a poorly conceived idea because

“it could not be permanent” (158). By its very nature, a “treaty and giving goods, is but a

200 transitory act, and can have but a transitory effect; whereas the means that will reduce, and the interests that will conciliate, ought to be permanent to be of any use” (160).

Against a Rousseauian tendency to regard Indians as possessing a primitive decency,

Brackenridge uses the pre-rationality of Indian thinking to justify the nation’s ever- changing attitudes toward agreed-upon borders and boundaries.83

Brackenridge’s “treaty discourse” initially emerges in the third volume, which follows Teague’s attempts to enter political life. As such, it might be understood as a comment not only on Indian inferiority but also the problems of porous class boundaries.

Teague is also unable to write (like the Native Americans he simply makes his mark), and

Farrago must educate him about the meaning of treaties in general, which he will have to manage and ratify if he is elected to Congress. But when Brackenridge returns to the treaty discourse in his 1804 volume, he draws a more potent connection between Native

Americans and the faction that wants to reform the legal system so dramatically that lawyers and constitutions are eliminated. In so doing, he assigns legal reformers to the pre-literate state of the Native Americans. Additionally, he counters the trend of romanticizing the Native American for his supposed valor. “It is true,” he writes, “that the savages of our frontier country, and elsewhere dispense with the use of letters; and at a treaty, Canajohalas and other chiefs make their marks. They are able counsellors, and bloody warriors, notwithstanding” (313). But Brackenridge elaborates, arguing that such figures could not adequately rule a modern society:

83 Russell confirms that treaties have often been disregarded precisely due to arguments regarding large- scale changes in context: “Treaties are a discursive construction whose meaning has always been contingent on multiple tensions and a nexus of sociolinguistic contexts. Later legal interpretations of preexisting treaties negotiate meaning along a new nexus of sociohistorical contexts, and tensions arise between those who interpret a treaty to the letter and those who interpret a treaty by taking into account the ethos and zeitgeist of the era in which the treaty was written” (6).

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The Little Turtle defeated general St. Clair, who is a man of genius, and literary education; yet the little Turtle can neither read nor write, any more than a wild Turkey, or a water Tarapin. But let it be considered, that the deliberations of the council-house, at the Miami Towns, embrace but simple objects; and a man may throw a tomahawk, that holds a pen, but very awkwardly. So that there is nothing to be inferred from this, candidly speaking. I grant, that Charlemagne, made his mark, by dipping his hand in ink, and placing it upon the parchment. [. . .] But what may pass, in an illiterate age, with an emperor, will not be so well received in a more enlightened period, and in the case of a common person. (314)

Brackenridge here clarifies that the law’s power or “spirit” does not emerge from a pre- literate system of governance. Importantly, it is quite different. It requires interpretive practices. Significantly, though, Brackenridge uses this opportunity to once again collapse the difference between hyperliteracy and illiteracy. The Indians are decidedly illiterate, but they also use objects to seal agreements. By invoking the “simple objects” such as the tomahawk, Brackenridge issues a warning to those who would fix great meaning to any kind of artifact (textual or otherwise). Again, Brackenridge negotiates a very contradictory and delicate position here: Indians are not to be treated with because they lack a written language; similarly, white settlers should avoid investing importance in the object, whether that object is an artifact or a legal document. To do so is to occupy a simultaneously illiterate and hyperliterate state.

In his 1815 volume, Brackenridge once again takes up these questions of temporal distance, codification, and the limits of civilization. He once again revisits the problem of having a constitution: An “honest fellow” points out that a constitution is best thought of as a “nose of wax; it is twisted by the party that is predominant. It might not however be unadvisable to have some outline of a constitution; some groove within which to move, some shape and form of the machine of government” (416). Modern Chivalry attempts to

202 find this “outline” or “groove” or “shape” of government while also underscoring that good governance, like aesthetics, can never be completely delineated. Additionally,

Modern Chivalry’s fourth volume also looks to the western frontier as the wellspring for this kind of creative governance. Even as the West is populated by the likes of Teague and Thady O’Connor—upstarts who contribute to a devaluation of democratic institutions—it also enables the kind of sublime experience that might temper more literal interpretations of written law. Brackenridge actually names his own ancestor as a paragon of frontier creativity. It seems to him, he writes, that “in new countries the human genius will receive a spring, which it cannot have in the old” (498). But Brackenridge also resists the temptation to assign the achievements of “Harrison, Brown, and Jackson” to their frontier roots. He writes that the “cause lies deeper; and in this, that the strongest minds, and the most enterprising, go [west]. They are thrown upon the vigour of their own intellect. [. . .] The same elasticity and spirit of mind, which brought [a settler] there, gives him distinction where he is” (498-499). Rather than simply assign Brackenridge to a long line of writers who promote the self-made man, we might instead consider this quote in the context of his theories about the law and the written word. Westward expansion will require not only willingness to venture into new territory but also an intuitive and a careful application of prefabricated governing structures.

These vague notions of “shape” and “style” ultimately shape Brackenridge’s attitude toward Modern Chivalry as a narrative and a book. As much as he uses the serial to demonstrate that temporal fissures exist and represent a formidable and inescapable epistemological boundary, he also argues that disparate events and strange documents must also be made to connect. Readers must also be included in this attempt to serialize

203 the nation—they must rely on the ability to improvise and interpret, creatively absenting themselves from “fixity” while relying on intuition to make connections between pieces that seem isolated and disconnected. It is a project that is maddeningly vague it its application—and purposefully so. This vagueness does not represent a solely romantic appeal to human intuition and creativity; it also relies on the text as a compass, though in a way that remains deliberately obscure and imprecise. For Brackenridge, the serial form best expresses this deliberate obscurity. It vacillates between preserving things and objects and texts and promoting ties to an overarching narrative. It requires people to creatively make associations between installments while still relying on the arbitrating narrator, who represents a paragon of superior taste. When reflecting on his process in the last volume, Brackenridge writes that he “looks about and reflects upon what has gone before, and may come after” even though he has “not arranged it in the series and juncture of the particulars, so that I can tell before hand what will come next” (497). In essence, the serial in itself represents a way to unite a nation across periods of time: it must acknowledge that the isolated document represents a kind of stagnancy, and that to keep going is to find commonalities—though not necessarily a common narrative—with the citizens of the future and the past.

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Conclusion:

Toward a Greater Understanding of Serial Epistemology

It is no surprise that serials occupy a prominent position in nineteenth-century

American literary study. As magazines grew in scope and popularity, so too did serials become a mainstay of cultural life. The “magazine novel” became a recognizable genre, with serials taking up substantial portions of magazines. As Patricia Okker has documented, magazine novels “depended upon and contributed to the fantastic growth of periodicals during this time period,” with magazines like Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s

Monthly, Godey’s Lady’s Book, and the Southern Literary Messenger all featuring serialized novels, and sometimes more than two or three at once (11). By the mid nineteenth century, the serial novel was an institution, and even Harriet Beecher Stowe in

1870 wrote that “no paper is complete without its serial story” (qtd. in Okker 13). What had once barely persisted as a minor feature of magazine publishing eventually became its raison d'etre.

But serials were not universally enjoyed during the nineteenth century. The antebellum era saw an explosion of serial fiction—but it also experienced the segmentation of the literary marketplace, wherein serials were subordinated to the novels of the American Literary Renaissance. In an era that began to value the “product” more than the processes of writing, serials were often regarded as inferior to completed novels.

As Margaret Beetham writes, the serial is an “open” form rather than a closed one—a

205 form which “is associated with the potentially disruptive, the creative, the ‘feminine’”

(98). The same openness that contributed to the popularity of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The

Hidden Hand made the serial form vulnerable to tough critiques. Many well-known magazinists were ambivalent about seriality for various reasons. Though they profited from serializing narratives, these writers and editors harbored deep-seated reservations about the form’s aesthetic and narrative limitations. Horace Greeley discouraged Thoreau from publishing his work serially, writing that “‘to be continued’ are words shunned like the pestilence” (qtd. in Fink 137). Sarah Josepha Hale, during her editorship of the

Ladies Magazine, also questioned the practicality and integrity of publishing serials.

Posing as an anonymous correspondent, Hale wrote:

A good story is deprived of half its interest when a whole revolution of the moon is permitted to intervene before the curiosity excited by its beginning, is gratified with the denouement. [. . .] It is the dull, prosing pieces, admitted merely to fill up; and perhaps it will be impossible to exclude all of such description from a periodical; but, if possible, let those inserted be short, and be concluded in the same number in which they are commenced. [. . .] [. . .] O, there is not to a reader of taste and intelligence, so dull a phrase in the English language, as that same “to be continued;” nor is there but one case in which its sound is welcomed by the conductor of a literary journal. (44-5)

Hale’s sentiments are especially telling; as the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book she later went on to publish many serial novels, so it is possible that the letter is a parody rather than a reflection of Hale’s views. (The effect of “to be continued” on the reader’s nerves, says the correspondent, “will be similar to the horror of Macbeth, when saw the shadowed kings, and exclaimed, ‘What! Will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?’”). But the letter also makes a strong case against seriality, arguing that it has an adverse effect on reading practices, aesthetic value, and marketability. The letter’s central

206 claim—that seriality deprives the reader of a complete and cohesive literary experience— anticipates by more than a decade Poe’s demand for “totality” and a “certain single effect.” For Hale, the serial novel’s most obvious hallmark, its open-ended structure, was also its principal limitation. Seriality’s narrative structure, always predicated on “to be continued,” lacked literary innovation and enabled “dull” writing and tedious reading practices. Hale, a devoted magazinist and editor of serial fiction, registered the kind of literary-aesthetic concerns that later came to be associated with the “American

Renaissance.”

These opposing attitudes led to the serial’s simultaneous profitability (and popularity) and its exclusion from the canon of serious literature. But they also had a secondary, unintended effect: they erased the ubiquity of the serial form in early America and instead further cemented an ahistorical difference between books and periodicals, erecting a distinction that had not existed as prominently in the early national period. I argue that this fabricated distinction erased the potency of early national seriality. In antebellum America, periodical publishing and magazine novels certainly grew more stable and more popular, and authors produced installments predictably. Serial publication was no longer beset by overwhelming financial uncertainty or author unreliability. And in turn, authors produced work on schedule, satisfying readers and editors. If Charles Brockden Brown fantasized about a time when a large and impersonal network of people could work together to ensure the stability of the literary marketplace, then perhaps he would have thought that the mid nineteenth century was a particularly successful result.

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But I would argue that this stable marketplace also came with another price: authors were more beholden to schedules than they had been in the past, and more pressured to finish serials in a timely fashion. While eighteenth-century serials had been continually hampered by the erratic marketplace and unstable publishing conditions, they also benefited from authors’ prolonged encounters with the structures of political knowledge. The elongated gaps between installments—whether those installments were periodical pieces, volumes, or sequels—inspired authors to sometimes recast their work, reframing their commitments for a different era. Indeed, I would argue that the eighteenth century was more a “serial culture” than the nineteenth. Whereas nineteenth-century authors produced their works on a strict schedule, eighteenth-century authors were able to look at every piece of narrative work as potentially “to be continued.” These authors had to continue their work at will, finding ways to publish new installments. This uncertainty and effort gave them more time to consider how the passage of time impacted both the nation and their creative and intellectual attachments. The late eighteenth century exemplifies a “serial culture” in a true sense of the word, while the nineteenth century was a time when serial publication was more common but also more segmented and less pervasive.

Some authors in the antebellum period resisted regular interval publication and installment culture—or perhaps they were unable to partake in its newfound stability. A prime example is Martin Delany, whose Blake seems more like The Foresters in its publication history than its contemporary Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Blake was serialized in two separate magazines—in the Anglo-African Magazine in 1859 and the Weekly Anglo-

African in 1861. And though Blake was published as a novel, it was never completed.

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Indeed, the novel seems like two very distinct stories—an impression that Robert Levine assigns to the fact that Delany might have “reconceived” of the novel in the early 1860s

“to bring it more into accord with his hopes to ‘regenerate’ Africa” (179). Many critics, including Paul Gilroy and Eric Sundquist have seized upon Blake’s transnational and cross-regional setting, and its title character’s incredible mobility, in order to mount arguments about the nation’s embeddedness within a larger global context. But publishing his work in such a varied and unpredictable fashion allows Delany to reframe his ideas, all while undermining the notion that serials and books need to be stable artifacts. Much like Brackenridge, Delany seems to resist the attractions of the finished, cohesive artifact—perhaps for reasons that have to do with the inherent unpredictability of slave narration itself. Thus, Blake, the unfinished serial of the mid nineteenth century, might best represent the last vestiges of true eighteenth-century serial culture as it no longer existed by the 1860s.

The serial is currently the centerpiece of popular culture. From television dramas to film series and linked novels, the long-arc form is enjoying a renaissance in our own cultural landscape. We recognize the serial as a distinct form all its own; we understand that it speaks to concerns both contemporaneous and historical. Movies and novels, previously conceived as “one-off” productions, are now being recast as multi-part series.

TV shows are more popular than they ever have been, prompting critics to label the post-

9/11 era the “second golden age of television.” The rise of subscription cable certainly had a lot to do with the increased output and popularity of TV serials; with added economic security and a guaranteed viewership, TV writers could take risks, developing

209 complex and detailed long-arc narratives that would have previously alienated the casual viewer. Indeed, cable subscription has insulated TV shows from the immediacy of economic demands, enabling networks to secure a stable audience (in theory and in fact) rather than working week after week to draw a particular viewing demographic.

Indeed, capitalism drove the TV revolution, but it also has become somewhat invisible within its larger structure. Serials now seem to grow to prominence not because they draw a certain number of viewers but because they are evaluated by critics and viewers as good. Less popular but critically acclaimed serials survive year after year because they shore up a network’s prestige. Even on network TV, the symbolic currencies of prestige and social capital now seem to hold greater sway than actual tangible capital—but of course, these currencies of prestige and social capital are always backed up by real money. Shows that do not attract many viewers will often be renewed for other reasons—because these shows win awards, earn critical acclaim, or inspire loyal online followings. And because viewers now have a number of different ways of watching TV rather than tuning in to a show while it airs—DVR, online streaming or downloading, or DVD—they now represent a much less quantifiable (though no less profitable) market. Just as readers once perused pages of periodicals and pamphlets that other readers had left behind in coffee shops, so too do today’s media consumers look to unorthodox methods of procuring serials.

Even as these developments insulate serials from the whims of the marketplace (a marketplace that proved such a hurdle for early American serialists) they also contribute to the flowering of a “serial culture” that is in some ways similar to the unstable serial culture of the early republic. In a sense, financial security and financial insolvency seem

210 to produce very parallel methods of imparting stories. Unlike nineteenth-century serialists, today’s serialists, though backed by tangible capital, are not as beholden to a strict installment culture wherein pieces must be crafted very quickly and delivered according to schedule. TV show seasons are now released at greater intervals, allowing creators more time to plan, write, and consider the events that are unfolding in the larger public sphere. Certain TV shows—The Sopranos and Mad Men, for instance—have taken lengthy sabbaticals, leaving viewers to wait for up to two years for another season. While many of these gaps might have to do with network or studio negotiations rather than authorial choice, they still provoke an encounter with time that is as prolonged as it is complex. The TV serials of the 2000s unfolded against the backdrop of rapid historical change. The Shield, which ran from 2002 to 2008, evolved alongside the aftermath of

9/11, the Iraq War, and the beginning of the Great Recession. Breaking Bad, which ran from 2008 to 2013, and which examined the problems of health care costs as much as the pitfalls of cooking meth, saw the election of Barack Obama and the introduction of the

Affordable Care Act.

In the post-9/11 era especially, we saw how TV shows adapted continually to incorporate current events into their larger overall narrative structures. What emerged, in fact, was an era of TV wherein political developments were often both refracted and addressed directly. While Stephen Shapiro has warned us against reading such TV shows as always tackling the events of 9/11 and the War on Terror,84 I would argue that these

84 In “Cracking Ice,” Shapiro argues that though “critical orthodoxy that insists that all US cultural productions generated after September 11, 2001 (9/11), must inevitably allegorize that event and its ensuing imperial revanchism,” the TV shows of the early 2000s trace their roots to the racial and economic tensions of the long 1990s. Shows like The Shield “broke away from expected cultural fictions about foreign terrorism and the compensatory rush to experience the good life of instant retail therapy. Although these shows’ violent action, plots of paranoid foreboding, and traumatized characters might be read as indexing 9/11, they do so only as a means of pointing to a different origin of unhappiness” (189-190). 211 shows often self-consciously incorporated the political tensions and uncertainty that overshadowed the decade. In fact, we need to understand these TV shows not as simply reflecting what was going on but as also transposing events, and as provocatively courting them—or, in other words, as being equally committed to larger events and their own insular narratives. These shows were able to negotiate their fascinating parochial storylines with an outward vision of geopolitics in ways that underscore their similarity to the serials of the early republic. The Sopranos’ fourth season, which aired in 2002, integrated debates about victimhood, nationhood, and identity. In “Columbus,” AJ

Soprano reads aloud from Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, and a fight breaks out at an anti-Columbus Day protest between Native Americans and Italian

Americans. On The Shield, characters tested the limits of brute power and the attractions of torture. In the 2004 episode “All In,” which aired weeks after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal broke, Los Angeles detective Vic Mackey tortures an Armenian suspect by submerging his head in a barrel of oil. “You have the right to remain silent,” Mackey says, “but I wouldn’t recommend it.”

Most intriguingly, many of these TV shows confronted the burdens of knowledge and the rhetoric of consent. Tony Soprano, Vic Mackey, and Walter White live freely in society, passing as normal to their family members and intimate companions. The fact that people do not recognize them for what they are might speak to the “failure of imagination”—that oft-cited conclusive statement of the 9/11 Commission Report, which offered an explanatory framework for how we allowed terrorists to live among us. But the failure may run even deeper, symptomatic of what Slavoj Žižek calls the “unknown known”—or “the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not

212 to know about, even though they form the background of our public values” (137).

Importantly, post-9/11 serials seize upon the terror of failing to recognize the abuses of power that unfold in our midst. They also go one step further, involving readers in this activity of knowing, participating, and disavowing. Walter White’s own family might not have known what he was up to, but viewers had unmediated access to his secret life.

Viewers were also privy to the secrets of Don Draper, Jack Bauer, and Dexter Morgan

(that such anti-heroes were almost always white men simultaneously unraveled and then re-centered a traditional conception of power), but they were also consigned to a position of passivity, given privileged access and then denied participation in events. Like the viewing public of 9/11, TV audiences were brought into the fold—able to witness events as they occurred—only to have to confront their distance from the events and their inability to act. While all fictional works court audiences with promises of disclosure, post-9/11 serials elongated the process of discovery, dealing in the concealment of secrets for years on end, and using the mechanism of seriality to constitute in the lives of viewers key features of power and the consent of the governed. When we recognize an expanded definition of seriality, we begin to understand how creative efforts configure the passage of time and register the estranging nature of events.

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