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

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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

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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