L-G-0003929871-0002428749.Pdf

Reading the American Novel 1780–1865 READING THE NOVEL

General Editor: Daniel R. Schwarz

The aim of this series is to provide practical introductions to reading the novel in both the British and Irish, and the American traditions.

Published Reading the Nineteenth-Century Novel Harry E. Shaw and Alison Case Reading the Modern British and Irish Novel 1890–1930 Daniel R. Schwarz Reading the Novel in English 1950–2000 Brian W. Shaffer Reading the American Novel 1780–1865 Shirley Samuels Reading the American Novel 1865–1914 G. R. Thompson

Forthcoming Reading the Twentieth-Century American Novel James Phelan Reading the American Novel 1780–1865

Shirley Samuels This edition first published 2012 Ó 2012 Shirley Samuels

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Samuels, Shirley. Reading the American novel, 1780–1865 / Shirley Samuels. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-631-23287-2 (cloth) 1. United States–In literature. 2. American fiction–19th century–History and criticism. 3. American fiction–18th century–History and criticism. 4. National characteristics, American, in literature. 5. Social history in literature. 6. Identity (Psychology) in literature. 7. Social psychology in literature. 8. Literature and society–United States. 9. Literature and history–United States. 10. Books and reading–United States–History. I. Title. PS374.U5S26 2012 813’.209–dc23 2011032108

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is published in the following electronic formats: Wiley Online Library 978-1-4443-5435-5

Set in 11/14pt Minon by Thomson Digital, Noida, India 1 2012 Contents

Preface vii

Acknowledgments xv

1 Introduction to the American Novel: From Charles Brockden Brown’s Gothic Novels to Caroline Kirkland’s Wilderness 1

2 Historical Codes in Literary Analysis: The Writing Projects of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Elizabeth Stoddard, and Hannah Crafts 23

3 Women, Blood, and Contract: Land Claims in Lydia Maria Child, Catharine Sedgwick, and James Fenimore Cooper 45

4 Black Rivers, Red Letters, and White Whales: Mobility and Desire in Catharine Williams, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville 67

5 Promoting the Nation in James Fenimore Cooper and Harriet Beecher Stowe 91

6 Women’s Worlds in the Nineteenth-Century Novel: Susan B. Warner, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Fanny Fern, E. D. E. N. Southworth, Harriet Wilson, and Louisa May Alcott 119

Afterword 151

Further Reading 165

Index 171

v

Preface

...... “Did you ever hit anything human or intelligible?” James Fenimore Cooper, The Deerslayer (1841) “Is this the end? Is life as fragile, as frail?” ...... Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills (1861)

This book pays attention to how fiction works as a historical practice. In particular, it introduces ways to think about novels written in the United States during its early development as a national enterprise and before the historical break we know as the Civil War. The early chapters present an overview of such novels as well as introducing fictional genres; they include possible ways for readers to interpret these genres. The later chapters carry out more specific examinations of particular novels, asking how they establish and develop grounds of inquiry. Such inquiries include stories about murder, seduction, and sea voyages, as well as housekeeping, lamp lighting, and errands into the wilderness. Throughout the book, critical attention is paid to how to interpret a relation between the volatile (and sometimes quiet) events that take place in different locations and at different times, and the stories that people in the United States made up to explain those events and themselves. To tell stories about the ongoing enterprise we now call the United States engages readers in a relation between history and the narrative events that this book will sometimes take for granted, yet the position of narrative will, of necessity in a book about making fiction, always

vii Preface take priority. A literary history of the United States assumes both history and literariness, however interconnected and interpenetrating these terms. The utility of such a position will emerge in the pages that follow. The major authors who appear in these pages – Louisa May Alcott, Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe – keep com- pany with authors who might not be as familiar as they once were to readers – Fanny Fern, Caroline Kirkland, George Lippard, Catharine Sedgwick, and E. D. E. N. Southworth. They certainly read each other and this book reads them in conversation as well as exploring writers whose works are still being discovered, writers such as Hannah Crafts and Julia Ward Howe. In the meantime, the epigraphs with which I open my investigation are meant to refer to the important relation between human life and intelligibility in the novels that appear here. For the historical novelist James Fenimore Cooper, the question of how a man on the frontier decides his manhood in the early American republic often revolves around killing. The enigmatic inquiry posed in The Deerslayer defines the boundary between human and animal species as the place where a hunter decides if he kills for food or for some more difficult cause, such as revenge or the bounty of scalps. For Rebecca Harding Davis, writing of the coal mines of West Virginia not long after Cooper’s frontier has pushed further west, the fragility of life under industrial capitalism makes an emphatic argument about immigrants and the laboring classes in terms of their access to another category of human life, the ability to understand art. Formulating the connections among reading, affective beliefs, and familial ideology in the context of the rise of democratic political identifications has been the project of critical works since F. O. Mathiessen’s American Renaissance appeared to produce a field of study aligned with his title.1 In many ways a study of how national identifications with democracy are enacted in the literature of the 1850s, Mathiessen’s influential treatise has been followed by several excellent studies on the rise of the novel as an explanatory force for social order. These works include Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1960), Cathy Davidson’s Revolution and the Word (1986), and Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction (1990).2 More recent work by critics such as Elizabeth Barnes and Lauren Berlant has encouraged

viii Preface inquiry into the relations of democratic traditions and the work of fiction.3 Critics like Karen Sanchez Eppler and Caroline Levander have engaged in new attention to childhood as a literal nursery for education and belief.4 What happens to childhood, they ask, in the context of democracy and the novel? Fiction that repeats a narrative progression toward familial for- mation, often expressed through a culminating marriage, provides reassurance. That reassurance might emerge through a narrative progression that enables and endorses family formation as well as endorsing a family formation that produces satisfactory anticipations and resolutions in the narrative form of the novel. Not simply chiasmatic, such a relation declares mutually dependent and mutually constitutive the arrangements of novels and families that produce and endorse an especially satisfying relation to a social order that can maintain both marriage and the novel. Questions remain about queer identifications that could cross and perhaps, by their very tensions, reinforce the dominance of hetero- sexual marriage plots.5 So, for instance, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, the uncertainty of the narrator, evocatively named Miles Coverdale, and his several attachments might seem betrayed rather than elucidated by his final confession. After tortuous scenes in which the seemingly reluctant narrator spies on lovers through back parlor windows or from tangled vine-produced bowers in trees, Coverdale asks the reader to guess his amative longing. Or rather he announces that the secret must have been visible long before. The nondescript declaration at the novel’s close – “I – I, myself – was in love with Priscilla!” – leaves readers in a place of regret and longing. One reason for such regret is that the purported object of his affection has long been married to a rival and a fellow inhabitant of their utopian alternative to familial order, Hollingsworth. Yet the reader’s longing might more plausibly be situated in relation to the desirability of Hollingsworth, the brawny blacksmith about whom Coverdale has already expressed his strong love. The brawn and heft of Hollingsworth operate in odd relation to the perpetually evanes- cent Priscilla, whose early life as a seamstress has operated in close proximity to the suggestion that her body as well as her little woven purses might be available for purchase from her pandering father. The secondary effect of such choices, an effect usually invisible or relegated

ix Preface to the afterlife of an epilogue, might also be understood to be a primary desire. Once a romantic choice has been consummated, at least in the predominantly heterosexual world of such fiction, the plot might close down possibilities and the novel can end. Since The Blithedale Romance is set in Hawthorne’s immediate past rather than in the earlier centuries of a novel like The Scarlet Letter,it might seem peculiar to treat this novel in the context of nationalism and historical fiction. By presenting the novel in such a context, I want to call to mind Hawthorne’s fame as a historical romancer, and, via The Scarlet Letter, as author of the founding text of American identification based on extramarital desire and illegitimate birth. The very unease of the narrative voice in both novels – as well as the hesitations and concealments carried out by the narrators of The House of the Seven Gables and The Marble Faun – suggests that the production of a steady relation to the nation made available through fiction has deteriorated by the 1850s. Such attention to the difference in novels and other forms of writing produced in the United States during the 1850s has a long critical history. Ever since The American Renaissance, the question of how American democracy was at once reformulated and re-described has challenged prior norms of narrative production. The potential distortions that the presence of non-normative desire might encour- age in the plotting of fiction appear not only in Hawthorne’s historical fiction but also in the overtly national plottings of novels such as the redemptive Civil War narratives by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (in The Gates Ajar [1868]), Augusta Evans (Macaria [1863]), and John William De Forest (Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty [1867]). All three show the at once riveting and rivening effects of war on national identifications and all refuse to find satisfactory marital resolutions, a refusal that operates as a commen- tary on what possible identifications might remain to characters who have suffered from death and disintegration during wartime. These modifications of how to read fiction sometimes fly in the face of the challenge that historical moments – notably the long historical moment of the American Civil War – provide in fiction. Modifying the idea of the nation to conform at once to the practices of the state, the place where the apparatus of government resides, and to draw on the place of belonging, novels present the appeal of a group larger

x Preface than the family that yet invokes the emotional resonance of the family. To yoke this practical aspect of state governance to the symbolic order of nation identification has been the work of a posited family order. What most powerfully conveys the symbolic order of family structure especially in the stages of formation might be the fiction produced at once to be consumed in the private space of the family and to be (evocatively in relation to itself) part of a serial telling of the relation of such order to the state.6 What makes it possible to articulate a new understanding of the production and consumption of literature in the nineteenth-century United States? Further, what has happened to the relation between such new literatures and what was for much of the twentieth century identified as classic American literature? The recent increase in critical and theoretical energy being brought to bear on both canonical and non-canonical writers has revitalized both the texture and detail of the literature we read. Reading such literature has become a new activity through exploring its connection to the popular culture that appears, for instance, in the proliferating propaganda of the American Tract Society, the snippets of poetry in newspaper columns bordered by lithographed announcements of new patent medicines, the stories bound so beautifully into gift books next to engravings of sleeping children, and the fashion plates of Godey’s Lady’s Book. Critics can now ask what conversations might take place among these disparate forms of writing. They can examine the correlations between varying scenes of production, from crowded parlors with crying babies to attic rooms. Critics can question who read these works, and how they read, including presidents of the United States who not only wrote poetry but submitted publicly to such extraordinary acts as producing their heads for phrenological examinations. Even as they engage these new understandings of historical context, critics still want to know what makes the fictional work compelling. Each new generation asks about the relation between the originality of their claims and the careful attention to prior modes of critical comprehension. The categories proposed in the first chapter as crucial for readings of the nineteenth-century novel in the United States – categories such as violence, nationalism, and water – will be explicated and fleshed out in the chapters that follow. The first chapter provides an overview of authors and genres in American fiction, noting

xi Preface especially how categories of boundary crossing affect its proceedings. The second chapter makes a case for working in the archives to develop historical readings of figures such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe. The third interprets legal concepts such as contract as a basis for proposing a reading of women’s bodies in key historical fiction such as James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans and Catharine Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie. In the fourth chapter, I consider the role of water and mobility in works such as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter in relation to the true crime story told by Catharine Williams in Fall River. The fifth chapter makes a case for historical interpretation in works such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home – Who’ll Follow? and James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer. The sixth chapter takes on a range of popular women’s fiction, including works by Louisa May Alcott, Maria Cummins, E. D. E. N. Southworth, Susan B. Warner, and Harriet Wilson. In the Afterword, I return to the question of what still might occur, for students and scholars alike, both through newly re-discovered works and from the emergence of new critical languages for under- standing them. Throughout this book, the critical account of fiction as a presence in the historical projects of the United States is interrogated as at once ongoing and contested. The pleasure of reading fiction has remained throughout the centuries that now separate us from the early American republic; the pleasure of identifying reading as at once an aesthetic and a political action also persists.

Notes

1. F. O. Mathiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (Oxford University Press, 1941). 2. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (University of California Press, 1957); Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (Oxford University Press, 1986); Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford University Press, 1987).

xii Preface

3. Elizabeth Barnes, States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel (Columbia University Press, 1997); Lauren Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (University of Chicago Press, 1988). 4. Caroline Levander, Cradle of Liberty: Race, the Child and National Belonging (Duke University Press, 2006); Karen Sanchez Eppler, Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2005). 5. See, for instance, Peter Coviello, Intimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum America (University of Minnesota Press, 2005). 6. The argument here is developed further in Romances of the Republic: Women, the Family and Violence in the Literature of the Early American Nation (Oxford University Press, 1996).

xiii

Acknowledgments

As I developed the readings for this book, I had a number of valuable conversations about its topics and I would like to acknowledge my gratitude first in general terms. To begin with, thoughtful contributors to the Blackwell Companion to American Fiction, 1780–1865 (2004) gave me many ideas and I had conversations with most of them that I still mull over. Exchanges with scholars as I worked on the Anthology of American Literature were also tremendously helpfuland I am gratefulto the critics who wrote head notes for that volume. Discussions and provocations about texts, methods, periodization, and archives have taken place over decades now with colleagues encountered at the American Literature Association, the American Studies Association, the Modern Language Association, the Nineteenth-Century Women Writers Study Group, the Society of Early Americanists, and the Society fortheStudyofWomenWriters.Eachoftheseorganizationshasworked at once to make and to break canonical understandings of what can be studiedasthetaskofliterarycriticismandIhaveappreciatedthechances that each provided to formulate ideas. I have also been grateful for the feedback provided by audiences for my work in locations from China to Ithaca, from Bermuda to England. Assistance from librarians at Cornell University – notably Katherine Reagan – and at the Huntington Library – thanks to Sue Hodson! – was much appreciated. Three chapters have in some form been previously published: a version of chapter two appeared in Russ Castronovo, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2011); an earlier form of chapter three appeared in American Literary History 20:1 (2008); an extract from chapter six

xv Acknowledgments

(on Louisa May Alcott) appeared in The New Literary History of America, eds. Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors (2009); and another piece of chapter six was in Robert Levine and Caroline Levander, eds., A Companion to American Literary Studies (2011). I am grateful to the editors for their comments and support. It has been an ongoing pleasure to work with alert students at Cornell. My graduate and undergraduate students have been inspi- rational for thinking about literature and culture in the United States. Happily, several have gone on to find interesting jobs and to begin or even to complete books of their own since I began working out these ideas. Some helped with research details as well, but all have inspired me: Alex Black, Jen Dunnaway, Hilary Emmett, Sarah Ensor, Brigitte Fielder, Melissa Gniadek, Ed Goode, Theo Hummer, Toni Jaudon, Stephanie Li, Josh Nelson, Jon Senchyne, Nick Soodik, and Brant Torres. A special shout out to Hilary, Toni, Theo, Melissa, and Jon: they modeled cooperative learning as they organized peer workshops and conferences to keep working with nineteenth-century culture, at once a historical and a theoretical enterprise at Cornell. To care for children while engaged in scholarship remains an enterprise necessarily bolstered by others. Thanks here to Liliana Mladenova, Joanna Skurzewska, and Sophia Garcia. At the university, this project benefitted from the research help of Alex Black, Melissa Gniadek, Toni Jaudon, Jon Senchyne, and Jill Spivey as well as support from Darlene Flint and Jessica Smith. Administrative tasks simultaneous with the book’s composition, such as chairing the History of Art Department and living in Flora Rose House, could not have been accomplished without the wonderful collegiality of Keeley Boerman, Richard Keller, and Jen Majka. My closest colla- borators in talking about an overly engaged life while still living it have been Lisa Dundon, Maria Fernandez, and Laura Brown. Ongoing conversations with Petrine Archer Straw, Parfait Eloundou, Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Salah Hassan, Jolene Rickard, Cynthia Robinson, and Sally Shuttleworth have been crucial to my thinking as well as providing occasional relief from thinking. John Briggs Seltzer and Ruth Ayoka Samuels have engaged my life as I worked on this account of American fiction. Always entertaining, frequently challenging, their loving attention keeps me on my toes.

xvi Chapter 1

Introduction to the American Novel From Charles Brockden Brown’s Gothic Novels to Caroline Kirkland’s Wilderness

The practice of writing fiction in the United States developed along with the nation.1 Like the nation, the form of the novel adjusted its boundaries and expanded to make sometimes audacious claims on neighboring territories. Like the nation, the novel encompassed practices that, in hindsight, sometimes seem heroic – such as the struggle against slavery in the fiction of Harriet Beecher Stowe – and sometimes seem embarrassing. Stowe’s fiction (notably Uncle Tom’s Cabin [1852], perhaps the bestselling novel of the nineteenth-century United States) can engage the reader with what then might have appeared as picturesque dialect and now can look like racist car- icatures. The very popular frontier fiction of James Fenimore Cooper now appears as an uneasy justification for the atrocities of border warfare. The ambivalence with which a twenty-first-century reader must regard the many political decisions affecting the history of the nineteenth-century United States frequently makes for difficulties in reading the nineteenth-century novel. Fictional practices often en- gaged readers (and citizens) in supporting the separation of gendered

Reading the American Novel 1780–1865, First Edition. Shirley Samuels. Ó 2012 Shirley Samuels. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

1 Reading the American Novel 1780–1865 spheres of action as well as defending decisions such as the extension of slavery into new territories and the removal of sovereignty from the Cherokee nation. As well as encountering such a changed political climate, the expectations of a twenty-first-century reader might meet many practical interpretive obstacles. Often the attention to details that a reader brought to bear in the nineteenth century included assump- tions about shared references – including Shakespeare plays, biblical citations, and sentimental poetry – that are rarely as easily available for readers in the twenty-first century. That set of assumptions tends to permeate narrative address for much of the first half of the century, but throughout the century authors felt it necessary to address their readers and to inform them about the designs that they had on readers’ politics, sympathies, and morals. Such moral and emotional claims may now appear to belong to a premodern era, one difficult for readers to re-inhabit. A primary goal of this book is to suggest a way to read such fiction as a richly textured enterprise, one replete with satisfactions both literary and cultural. Later in the century, the burgeoning questions posed by industrial capitalism and by increased urbanization would receive few answers in fiction, yet inevitably fiction tried to make these questions as visible as possible. In the short novel Life in the Iron Mills (1861), set among the hard-working immigrant laborers of what is now West Virginia, Rebecca Harding Davis plaintively posed the question this way: “Is this the end? Is life as fragile, as frail?”2 Davis asked this question by way of making the crises of laboring classes part of an aesthetic enterprise, one bound up with their strivings as well as her own, as a disenfranchised “western” woman writer. The goal of the novel in the nineteenth century was to ask that question over and over while demonstrating a resilience and strength that suggested forms of life in every location. In writing about the nineteenth-century novel in the United States, the critic Richard Chase once drew a firm distinction between the novel and the romance. Unlike the romance, he declared, the “novel renders reality closely and in comprehensive detail.”3 As evidence, he cited the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, who explained in his preface to The House of the Seven Gables (1851): “When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a

2 Introduction to the American Novel certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume, had he professed to be writing a Novel.”4 For all the influence Hawthorne came to have on the form of the novel, such a discrimination between a category of fiction tied to “reality” and one freed by the writer’s imagination to engage with the “moonlight” Hawthorne found best to illuminate his fiction has not persisted in critical analysis of nineteenth-century fiction. Over- all, the position of what we call the novel, especially what has been called the “great American novel,” has won out over the romance. The concept of the romance, that is, has become subsumed into that of the novel and Hawthorne’s plea for latitude sometimes seems an affectation designed to free him from too close contemplation of the busy commerce and industrialization that surrounded his production of fiction. Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose novel The Scarlet Letter (1850) had a limited readership at publication, has become required reading for students of United States literary culture, a detail that would have surprised professors in the New England colleges of his day. Hawthorne’s readership was small compared to that of his contem- porary, Susan B. Warner, widely renowned in her lifetime for the intensely private universe of The Wide, Wide World (1850); yet Warner’s novel disappeared from view by the mid-twentieth century, something that would also have surprised nineteenth-century read- ers. The religious virtues Warner celebrated had become separated from a concept of great literature based on esthetic values. And the extent to which Hawthorne’s fiction sets out to provide a moral compass has become submerged in the concept of his literary production as something to be read outside of the time and space of its production in the politicized world of nineteenth-century New England.

The Role of the Novel

To adapt the architectural metaphor later proposed by the novelist Henry James in his collection of prefaces The Art of Fiction, the house of the novel was built – and then rebuilt – on American soil.5 According to James’s famous image as he described his own process

3