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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 AmericanNovel 1780–1865
Shirley Samuels
This edition first published 2012
� 2012 Shirley Samuels
Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007.
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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
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 positionwill 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 themeantime, the epigraphs with which I openmy 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), CathyDavidson’sRevolution and theWord (1986), andNancy
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 declaresmutually dependent andmutually
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 secretmust 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
pursesmight be available for purchase fromher 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
andhistorical 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
howAmerican 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 inHawthorne’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.
Thesemodifications 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.
Whatmost 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 anddetail 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, fromcrowdedparlorswith crying babies to attic
rooms. Critics can questionwho 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, andwater –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
andHarriet 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’sThe 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. IanWatt, 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
Preface
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 theBlackwellCompanion toAmericanFiction, 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
AmericanLiteraturewerealso tremendouslyhelpful and I amgrateful to
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 StudyGroup, the Society of EarlyAmericanists, and the Society
for theStudyofWomenWriters.Eachof theseorganizationshasworked
at once to make and to break canonical understandings of what can be
studiedas thetaskof literarycriticismandIhaveappreciated thechances
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
(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.,
ACompanion 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 theUnited 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 SophiaGarcia. 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 anoverly engaged lifewhile 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
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Introduction to theAmerican Novel
From Charles Brockden Brown’sGothic Novels to CarolineKirkland’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.� 2012 Shirley Samuels. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
1
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 formuch 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
claimsmay 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 tomake 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” womanwriter. 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
toTheHouse 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
Reading the American Novel 1780–1865
certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would
not have felt himself entitled to assume, had he professed to bewriting
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 themid-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
Introduction to the American Novel