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 Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell. 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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