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CULTURAL SECRETS AS NARRATIVE FORM Reid Fm 3Rd.Qxd 2/2/2004 4:22 PM Page Ii Reid Fm 3Rd.Qxd 2/2/2004 4:22 PM Page Iii Reid_fm_3rd.qxd 2/2/2004 4:22 PM Page i CULTURAL SECRETS AS NARRATIVE FORM Reid_fm_3rd.qxd 2/2/2004 4:22 PM Page ii Reid_fm_3rd.qxd 2/2/2004 4:22 PM Page iii CULTURAL SECRETS AS NARRATIVE FORM ᇿሀᇿ Storytelling in Nineteenth-Century America Margaret Reid The Ohio State University Press Columbus Reid_fm_3rd.qxd 2/2/2004 4:22 PM Page iv Copyright © 2004 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Reid, Margaret (Margaret K.) Cultural secrets as narrative form : storytelling in nineteenth-century America / Margaret Reid. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-8142-0947-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8142-5118-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8142-9038-8 (CD-ROM) 1. American fiction—19th century—History and criti- cism. 2. Historical fiction, American—History and criticism. 3. Literature and history—United States-History—19th century. 4. Storytelling—United States-History—19th century. 5. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864. Scarlet letter. 6. Cooper, James Fenimore, 1789–1851. Spy. 7. Wister, Owen, 1860-1938. Virginian. 8. Culture in literature. 9. Narration (Rhetoric) I. Title. PS374.H5 R45 2004 813'.309358—dc22 2003023639 Cover design by Dan O’Dair. Type set in Adobe Caslon. Printed by Thomson-Shore Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992. 987654321 Reid_fm_3rd.qxd 2/2/2004 4:22 PM Page v for my parents, James D. Reid and Anne Donohue Reid and in memory of their parents, Agnes Carmody Donohue Gerald Donohue Katherine O’Leary Reid Richard Reid Reid_fm_3rd.qxd 2/2/2004 4:22 PM Page vi For here were God knew how many citizens, deliberately choos- ing not to communicate. It was not an act of treason, nor pos- sibly even of defiance. But it was a calculated withdrawal, from the life of the Republic, from its machinery....[T]his with- drawal was their own, unpublicized, private. Since they could not have withdrawn into a vacuum (could they?) there had to exist the separate, silent, unsuspected world. —Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 Reid_fm_3rd.qxd 2/2/2004 4:22 PM Page vii ᇿሀᇿ CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Introduction: The Storyteller in American National Romance xi PART ONE: Imagining Cultural Origins in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy i 1 Storytelling on the Neutral Ground 3 2 The Creation of American Martyrs 12 3 From Revolutionary Legend to Historical Romance 36 4 Remembering the Revolution in The Spy 49 PART TWO: History’s Revolutions in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter 69 5 The Artifact in the Attic 71 6 New England’s Revolution in Hiding 81 7 Hester Prynne’s Ancestry 98 8 From Artifact to Archetype 106 PART THREE: “Traces of a Vanished World” in Owen Wister’s The Virginian 133 9 Romance and Nostalgia in The Virginian 135 10 Imagined Contexts for Frontier Heroes 144 11 Storytelling and Evolution’s Losses in The Virginian 160 Conclusion: The Storyteller’s Legacy from Quentin Compson to Oedipa Maas 177 Notes 193 Bibliography 235 Index 251 Reid_fm_3rd.qxd 2/2/2004 4:22 PM Page viii Reid_fm_3rd.qxd 2/2/2004 4:22 PM Page ix ᇿሀᇿ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AM so happy to have the chance to offer my gratitude to those who I have provided so many kindnesses to me. My deepest thanks are reflected in the dedication of this book to my parents, James D. Reid and Anne D. Reid; I thank them both for their boundless love and support and for the fact that they are remarkable individuals whom I deeply admire. I thank my brothers, too: Jim for his generous enthusiasm, and Jerry for being the finest friend I can imagine. This book never could have come to be without the exceptional gen- erosity, patience, and kindness beyond measure of Sacvan Bercovitch; to him I offer tremendous and particular gratitude. During the course of this project, I have met extraordinary friends; of these I am especially grateful to Susan Mizruchi, Amelia Zurcher, Clifton Spargo, and George Justice. Their engagements with my work and com- ments on my writing—along with their pervasive qualities of intelligence, understanding, and humor—have kept me afloat during difficult times. I am grateful as well to Wai Chee Dimock, Philip Fisher, Christine Krueger, Albert Rivero, and Helen Vendler for years of encouragement, support, and advice. For their countless acts of generosity woven into our nearly lifelong friendships, I thank Kimberly Browne Martin, Dana Deubert, and Sandra Berardo. For lively discussions, friendship and support during the challenging years of graduate school, I am grateful to Allison Pingree and Debbie Lopez. Thank you, too, to Robert Cording, Philip Devlin, and Patrick Ireland, who provided me with crucial time and encouragement before the years of graduate study. In addition, I am happy to be able to thank those members of a new generation who have brought me much happiness during the years in which this book was written. In order of appearance: Sascha; Cassandra, Anthony and Luke; Story and Will; Claire and Catherine; and James Elijah. ix Reid_fm_3rd.qxd 2/2/2004 4:22 PM Page x x Acknowledgments Finally, I thank Heather Lee Miller, Karie Kirkpatrick, and the rest of the editorial staff of The Ohio State University Press for their support of this project, their patience, and their expertise. Reid_fm_3rd.qxd 2/2/2004 4:22 PM Page xi ᇿሀᇿ INTRODUCTION The Storyteller in American National Romance HREE immediately popular and long influential American historical T romances, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground (1821), Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), and Owen Wister’s The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains (1902), share a cer- tain narrative poetics: In the form and language of their narratives, these three texts represent nineteenth-century American culture by interweav- ing known and planned communal self-definitions (from celebrations of independence and cohesion to belief in manifest destiny) with fragmentary images of unremembered, even secret, historical moments. Layered with elements of romantic design and cultural mystery—layered so densely, in fact, that these symbolic polarities at times may be confused with one another—these novels are expressions of particular cultural moments shar- ing an impulse toward memory. Within these texts, memory is figured as the temporal and spatial codification of a passing time self-consciously lived as the end of an era. Building the monuments of national indepen- dence, America in 1821 was learning of the mortality of the revolutionary generation while also sensing the lasting power of that set of political events. Cooper’s writings bear out his interest in this complex shift in cul- tural understanding.1 Particularly in The Spy, Cooper offers an experiment in memory that points to both the closure of an age and the exhilaration of hope, even as accompanied by anxiety. Hawthorne (we know) wrote The Scarlet Letter with an anxious eye toward rising antebellum tensions;2 his twin revivals of Puritanism and revolution as key historical themes place him at a somewhat different point (from Cooper) in the codification of memory. His work questions—for a breaking or broken nation—the effi- cacy of the fundamental, if now remote, paradigms through which his cul- ture had been defined to date. Like Cooper in 1821, Owen Wister at the xi Reid_fm_3rd.qxd 2/2/2004 4:22 PM Page xii xii Introduction turn of the century writes a novel that is part of his contemporary culture’s industry of monuments. From dime novels to the Buffalo Bill shows, Wis- ter’s United States eagerly consumed images designed to signal both cele- bration and nostalgia in the passing of the frontier. Each with some measure of celebration, these three authors put to work familiar gestures of closure, but not without surprisingly close attention to an anatomy of its costs. The following chapters pursue the specifics of these cases in depth. These three major texts are products of similar moments, moments when the culture from which each emerged was suspended between the ability to receive and the ability to articulate newly updated and urgently needed stories of communal identity.3 Each text, that is, suggests an understand- ing of itself as an expression of a world at a moment of transition. These are cultural moments imagined and predicted to be significant not only to their contemporary audiences but also to future generations. What char- acterizes each historical moment studied here is a sudden sense of times and places falling with more than ordinary speed into remoteness. First, this argument is situated in the nationalism of the early nine- teenth century, among the constructed memories of the revolutionary era at a time when so many of its major actors died; then I turn to the antebellum period, the challenges to that young nationalism in the name of homegrown ideological conflict. Finally, with Wister, the argument focuses on the reassessment of nationalism after the Civil War and expansionism, bol- stered by a new mythos of the frontier West. As a whole, this book proposes that, by looking at the particular cases of these crucial moments in the first century of American fiction, we find among the layering of texts a reveal- ing pattern. This emerging model for American cultural self-definition is rooted in a paradoxical dynamic between narrative designs and unspoken secrets.4 Specifically, these secrets—while still unspoken—are textually ren- dered as moments from history that linger, without context, in present con- sciousness.
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