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In all cases we have filmed the best available copy. University Microfilms International 300 N. ZEEB RD., ANN ARBOR, Ml 48106 8207249 Robinson, David Bruce CREATING THE PAST ANEW: THE VARIETIES OF AMERICAN HISTORICAL FICTION The Ohio State University Ph.D. 1981 University Microfilms International 300 N. Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, M I 48106 Copyright 1981 by Robinson, David Bruce All Rights Reserved CREATING THE PAST ANEW: THE VARIETIES OF AMERICAN HISTORICAL FICTION DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By David Bruce Robinson, A.B., M.A. ■k * ~k k k The Ohio State University 1981 Reading Committee: Approved By Daniel R. Barnes, Adviser John M. Muste Mark S . Auburn Adviser Department of English VITA June 13, 1950............... Born--Mansfield, Ohio 1971................ '........A.B., Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio 1971-1972 ................... Fellow, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 1974......................... M.A., University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 1974-1981....................Teaching Associate, and Lec­ turer, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio PUBLICATIONS Review of Rosalie S. Perry's Charles Ives and the American Mind. American Literature, 47 (1975), 458-60. "Children of the Fire: Charles Ives on Emerson and Art." American Literature, 48 (1977), 564-76. FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: American literature to 1900. Professor Daniel R. Barnes Eighteenth-century British literature. Professor John Sena Medieval literature. Professor Alan Brown The Novel. Professor Mark Auburn ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page VITA ............................................... ii Chapter I. THE VARIETIES OF AMERICAN HISTORICAL FICTION................................... 1 II. JANET LEWIS'S."FABLES OF AUTHORITY" 31 • III. MELVILLE AND AMERICAN HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS............................ 78 IV. TWO BESTSELLERS: OLIVER WISWELL AND THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER........... 125 V. FROM FAULKNER TO E. L. DOCTOROW......... 163 BIBLIOGRAPHY..................................... 207 iii CHAPTER I THE VARIETIES OF AMERICAN HISTORICAL FICTION Historical novels are seldom respectable among academ­ ics and other serious readers of contemporary fiction. While courses are now routinely taught in science fiction and detective stories--two other kinds of fiction once con­ sidered sub-literary--few universities offer classes in the historical novel from Scott to the present, and few scholars publish articles studying its textual or interpretive issues. Reviewers of serious fiction who do recommend such works may begin with a mea culpa. Roger Sale has written of two books "whose excellence has shamed me into realizing that there may be other good novels that I have never looked at because they are about historical figures." He continues, "It may well be that an almost sure formula for remaining unknown is to write a serious historical novel; who will believe it isn't Desirde or Dinner at Antoines?"^- The nineteenth century was less prejudiced. Among European writers Dickens, Tolstoy, Stendhal, Flaubert, Gogol, Pushkin, and Manzoni wrote historical fiction, and Goethe compared Sir Walter Scott favorably to Shakespeare. In the United States, Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain wrote such works. But until quite recently, the important American novelists of this century (with the great exception of Faulkner) rarely concerned themselves with the history of earlier generations. Scholarship on American historical fiction has been, on the whole, sketchy, ill-defined, or otherwise unsatisfactory. The seminal work on historical fiction generally is Georg LukAcs's The Historical Novel, which was first published in 1937; although a translation into English came out in 1962, the work was not revised to include any works after the thirties. The only Ameri­ can author LukAcs mentions is Cooper, and the book's Marxist tendentiousness limits its value as a study of the varieties of fiction. Until the mid-seventies, the only book-length study devoted entirely to the American histor­ ical novel was Ernest Leisy's book of that title, published in 1950. This work, too, is outdated, it makes only a perfunctory effort to define the genre, and it hardly dis­ tinguishes between major and minor authors. (Melville's Israel Potter gets only a paragraph, and Hawthorne does not appear at all. But Kenneth Roberts, Walter D. Edmonds, and James Boyd are discussed in detail.) Since the 1960's, the situation has changed both in fiction and scholarship. In 1960 John Barth published The Sot-Weed Factor, set in eighteenth-century Maryland and written in a pastiche of eighteenth-century styles. William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner, based on accounts of an 1831 slave rebellion, was a controversial best seller in 1967. Norman Mailer divided his book The Armies of the Night (1968) into two sections: "History as a Novel" and "The Novel as History." The seventies saw the publication of E. L. Doctorow's Book of Daniel and Robert Coover's The Public Burning, both of which draw (directly or indirectly) on the Rosenberg case, and Doctorow also wrote Ragtime, in which Freud, Houdini, Emma Goldman, and J. P. Morgan are characters. As for scholarship, Harry Henderson's Versions of the Past: The Historical Imagin­ ation in American Fiction (1974) is an important book about the treatment of history by our great writers from Cr^ve- coeur and Cooper to Mailer. A number of articles about these works and authors appeared, and Joseph Turner's fine theoretical essay on the genre came out in 1979. These new studies suggest that the American contri­ bution to the genre has just begun to be evaluated. Ver­ sions of the Past offers a new way of looking at our classic authors, and Turner's article shows that previous attempts to define the historical novel have been misguided. Before turning to them, however, I wish to examine what has traditionally been considered "historical" about such fiction, and how the genre originated. The "past-ness" of historical fiction is presumably its distinctive characteristic, yet this quality has sel­ dom been precisely defined. In fact, it is not very clear how far in the past a work may be set, let alone what its relationship to that past must be, for the book to be "historical." Sir Walter Scott felt that the historical work must be set at least fifty years before the author's own time, but he realized this figure was arbitrary. Harry Henderson has said only that it must be set "in the unexperienced past, in the world that existed before the author was born."2 But many best-selling "cape and sword" romances set in the distant past may strike us as fundamentally "unhistorical," perhaps because their set­ tings often seem arbitrary--their plots formulaic, their creation of past societies confined to externals.^ The best historical fiction usually attempts to re-create the sensibility, or the unique historical character, of a period as well as its costume. The first writer to succeed at this was Scott, and to understand how the genre has changed, we must begin with his accomplishment. According to most literary historians, Scott invented the genre with Waverley in 1814. He was not the first to write fiction set in the remote past; The Castle of Otranto, to take one famous example, exploited the late- eighteenth-century taste for medieval romance. But Otranto and the seventeenth-century French "historical" fictions, as Georg Lukhcs has commented, lack "derivation of the individuality of characters from the historical peculiarity of their age.”^ The psychology and manners of characters in these works were like those of the wri­ ter's own day, as with the "costume dramas" now. Scott, as I shall demonstrate in a moment, gives a sense of his characters' rootedness in a particular time and place; their moral crises, and the ways they resolve them, reflect their historical circumstances. Moreover, Scott had a new sub­ ject matter. An Augustan by birth and training, he never­ theless saw the inadequacy of the Augustan view of society, and his works dramatize a different view.