Sisters Are Doing It for Themselves

My knowledge of early American women writers is embarrassingly small. I’ve read the usual poems by Anne Bradstreet and Phillis Wheatley, and once in a survey course I struggled through Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, which I ended up abandoning in disgust. My situation is, I suspect, not that different than other literary scholars who focus on other eras, and to my credit or debit, I’d never read other writers of the era (Charles Brockden Brown, for example) until very recently.

My committee added a few women writers of the early days of the republic to my comprehensives list, however, and it was with a certain amount of dread that I looked forward to Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple and Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie. How wrong I was. These two books are by far the most enjoyable and interesting pieces I’ve read thus far from the days before the American Renaissance—and the fact that I’d not heard of them until this year suggests a tragic and gaping hole in my education.

Charles Brockden Brown is justly called the father of American literature, but just as often he’s rather unjustly called the first American novelist of note. I am, let me be clear, a fan of the Canon and think that every student of literature, no matter what his or her specific area of study, should have to read the “classics” (preferably in a multiple-semester and interdisciplinary core curriculum required of all university students, but that’s a topic for another post).

I am therefore generally unsympathetic toward arguments that call the Canon racist or sexist or otherwise exclusionary—I am certain that women writers from the Elizabethan era would be added to the Canon were there enough of them of the same quality as Shakespeare, Marlowe, etc., and it is not Shakespeare’s fault that there is no female Hamlet, Aphra Behn notwithstanding. (Another topic for another time: I do accept Paul Lauter’s suggestion that the Academy should have multiple canons, but even so, I wish to maintain the large one in the center, even though it’s composed of Dead White Men. Oronooko is simply not as important as Dr. Faustus, not as influential or as important to Western culture. I have not read it, but I suspect it is also not as good. Please no comments calling the Canon into question.)

So it means something when I say that Brown is unjustly called the first American novelist of note. One of the first things one learns about Charlotte Temple is that it was the first American bestseller, and among the next things one learns is that more than two hundred editions of the novel were printed between its first appearance in 1791 and its virtual disappearance from study in the early twentieth century. It sold far more copies than Wieland or Edgar Huntly, inspired far greater devotion, and was much more of a cultural touchstone. It seems obvious that Rowson is both the mother of American literature and our true first novelist of note.

But its cultural impact wouldn’t matter if it were a mere eighteenth-century version of Twilight, a weepy melodrama for young women that had nothing to say to the larger world. (God help my academic descendents who will have to fight against Stephanie Meyer’s inclusion in the Canon.) No, Charlotte is incredibly rich for its genre (sentimental romance) and length (just over one hundred pages in my edition); its message is complex and not easily stated, and its actors move beyond the stock characters who generally populate such novels.

Rowson sets Charlotte Temple up as a moralistic tale of a fallen woman, taking breaks throughout the narrative to reassure readers (constantly assumed to be either impressionable young women or their censoring matrons) that the moral is forthcoming. But it never really does—Charlotte falls, but she does so even after doing her very best to live uprightly, and unlike many other novels of this type, her seducer genuinely loves her and provides for her even after external circumstances move him to leave her.

You can find the criticism in your local university’s database that will tease out the implications of the plot-moral dualism in Charlotte Temple to much more effect than I am willing or able to in this space. I bring it up only to note that it’s far more complicated and intellectually engaging than the canonical novels of Charles Brockden Brown—who set out to raise moral questions, best I can tell.

As good as Charlotte Temple is, however, it pales in comparison to Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, first published several decades later as Early Times in Massachusetts. When Sedgwick is discussed at all—apparently a relatively and tragically rare occasion—it is as either a domestic novelist amongst domestic novelists, i.e., an American Jane Austen; or else it is as a female counterpart to James Fenimore Cooper’s frontier romances.

I must take this opportunity to express my absolute loathing of James Fenimore Cooper. I don’t hate him as much as Mark Twain famously did, but I’ve read both The Last of the Mohicans and The Pioneers, and if the former is bearable for the interest of its implications about race, the latter is among the most boring books I’ve ever read. Cooper has a lot of characters in these novels—characters who never, with a very few exceptions, rise above their status as characters to become human beings (especially not Natty Bumppo). The plots are interesting enough in places, but Cooper can’t write a battle scene to save his life. These are, simply put, bad books.

Not so with Hope Leslie, which covers the Pequod uprisings of the seventeenth century with far more grace than that with which Cooper handles the French and Indian War in The Last of the Mohicans. The characters ring true—the titular protagonist has more depth in the course of her three hundred pages than Cooper grants to Bumppo in more than a thousand, and her ideas (which, big surprise, is what I really read for) are far richer and more complex than anything Cooper can come up with.

Critics read the novel particularly for Sedgwick’s remarkably progressive views on race and gender. Her most likeable character is Magawisca, an Indian woman who does her very best to function as an emissary between Pequod and white society and ends up torn to pieces for her efforts. (She doesn’t die, but in one particularly gory scene, she has her arm chopped off by a tomahawk while trying to re-enact Pocahontas’ defense of John Smith.) She is tragic but never melodramatic, never approaching the “tragic mulatto” portrayal of race that would prove so popular later in the century. Magawisca is the route by which Sedgwick can express her views on racial reconciliation and female empowerment, but the incredible thing, to say it again, is that her use as a symbol does not detract from the verisimilitude of her portrayal. She is one of the most memorable characters in American literature.

I am ready, in fact, to name Hope Leslie the single greatest American novel before The Scarlet Letter, and to pronounce ex cathedra that no American literature class should ever teach The Last of the Mohicans without teaching it alongside Sedgwick’s far superior novel—unless, of course, the class is called “Novels Called Classics That Aren’t That Good.” It is leaps and bounds above Brown, Cooper, Poe, and all but the best sketches of Washington Irving; it stands with the best of our literature from any era.

I have joked before that I don’t read women authors. Susanna Rowson and Catharine Maria Sedgwick are going a long way in convincing me to change that habit.

The Anxiety of Influence

Most Western cultures have an epic poem that attempts to tell the mythological history of the country. The Greeks, of course, had The Iliad and The Odyssey, and the Romans, building from those two poems, had The Aeneid. The British have The Faerie Queene; the French have La Chanson de Roland; the Italians have the little-read Orlando Furioso.

America, as you’ve no doubt realized, does not have an equivalent poem. To some extent, I suppose, the notion of the “Great American Novel” is our corollary to the nationalist epic poem—but the fact that no one has ever been able to agree on what exactly that novel is (and the more recent assertions that we should just eliminate it as an ideal category altogether) suggests that America’s mythological history is to some extent up in the air.

(Were I to suggest an American epic, incidentally, it would be neither poetry nor in the strictest sense fiction. Instead, I’d say Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography is about as close to the mythic roots of this country as it’s possible to get. Franklin makes a lot of stuff up, mostly to make himself look better, and in the process of doing so creates the American Dream, the bugaboo that has haunted American writers ever since.)

The absence of a national epic—and the unwillingness or inability of our early American authors to construct one—created in the first literary century of the new country an enormous anxiety, one that is never far beneath the surface of the fiction of the era. We’d thrown off the chains of “oppression” from our Mother Country and earned our freedom, and we’d come up with a radical system of government that we were enormously proud of.

But Britain still had Shakespeare, and Milton, and Spenser, and Chaucer, and Beowulf, and a whole host of lesser writers who were nevertheless more respected and more widely read than anyone produced in the colonies. We had, at the time of the Declaration of Independence, Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, Phillis Wheatley, a few other notable Puritans—plus the political and social writings of the founding fathers. We couldn’t compete on the global market, and American books did not sell well in England and on the Continent—even when they were printed there.

The result of this imbalance of artistic power is a dual impulse on the part of American writers of the early 19th century. On the one hand, they wished to say in no uncertain terms that American had its own literature, one that could compete in philosophy and artistic effect with the best Europe had to offer. On the other hand, they were forced to lean hard on the models of the past—none of whom were American.

James Fenimore Cooper is probably a good place to start. Cooper wrote enormous bestsellers that dealt with the American frontier and wilderness; they are historical romances with a heavily patriotic edge. Like many other authors of the time, Cooper begins each chapter in his novels with a quotation from an outside source. The texts he quotes are illuminating. In his most famous and popular novel, The Last of the Mohicans, he provides the reader with 34 epigraphs. Only two of them come from American writers, William Cullen Bryant and the now-forgotten Fitz-Green Halleck. The rest are all British, with Shakespeare receiving the lion’s share (twenty chapters, more than half of them, feature a quote from him).

This is a way of asserting America’s equality, both political and literary, with its Mother Country. Further, several of the epigraphs are clearly used ironically—one, from The Merchant of Venice, is just a bunch of nonsense words—suggesting that Cooper is taking down British literature at the same time he is praising American works. And finally, the last epigraph in the book is from Halleck, suggesting that America has come out on top in the final analysis. Cooper dismantles the master’s house using the master’s tools.

That’s not to suggest that he wastes any opportunity of making fun of the British outright, of course. Early in the novel, our narrator informs us that the Britain who fought the French and Indian War was a dying animal, waiting to be euthanized by its colonies just a few years later. This may be my favorite paragraph in the entire novel:

The imbecility of her military leaders abroad, and the fatal want of energy in her councils at home, had lowered the character of Great Britain from the proud elevation on which it had been placed, by the talents and enterprise of her former warriors and statesmen. No longer dreaded by her enemies, her servants were fast losing the confidence of self-respect. In this mortifying abasement, the colonists, though innocent of her imbecility, and too humble to be the agents of her blunders, were but the natural participators.

Charles Brockden Brown is less up front in Wieland, America’s first novel. Wieland owes less to British sources than to the Continent, specifically the rich German tradition of the Gothic novel, into which it fits like a hand into a glove—with a single exception. Perhaps the most defining feature of the Gothic novel is the great castle in which it takes place. The castle allows the Gothic novelist to present her reader with a score of easy thrills—cobwebs, creaking doors, unexplained drafts, etc., etc.

Not so with Brown. America, of course, does not have thousand-year-old castles the way that Germany does, and so there’s no castle in Wieland. (There’s not even a cave, the other grand setting of the European Gothic romance, although caves play a major role in Brown’s later Edgar Huntly.) One might be tempted to imagine that the castle is absent from the novel because it is absent from America. Brown disagrees, saying that his “one merit [is] that of calling forth the passions and engaging the sympathies of the reader by means hitherto unemployed by preceding authors. Puerile superstitions and exploded manners, Gothic castles and chimeras are the materials usually employed for this end.” The setting of Wieland—along with Brown’s unfortunate need to explain everything that happens—is in itself a protest against the literature of the Old World and an attempt to forge a new American literature.

Of the three major American writers of fiction before the American Renaissance, Washington Irving is the most read today and the most interesting in terms of his treatment of Britain. The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon is openly nationalistic and patriotic but begins with a lengthy explanation as to why Europeans are better than Americans:

I had read in the works of various philosophers that all animals degenerated in America, and man among the number. A great man of Europe, thought I, must therefore be as superior to a great man of America as a peak of the Alps to a highland of the Hudson; and in this idea I was confirmed by observing the comparative importance and swelling magnitude of many English travelers among us, who, I was assured, were very little people in their own country.

Irving, obviously, is being sarcastic here; later, in an essay on the treatment of America by British authors, he will say that America has heretofore been “visited by the worst kind of English travelers . . . the broken-down tradesman, the scheming adventurer, the wandering mechanic.” And if the book begins with “Crayon” traveling to England to see a superior race, it spends an awful lot of time in the New World instead.

So he’s forever ambivalent on the subject of Europe vs. America, an ambiguity that is only heightened in his two most famous stories, “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” These have come to be regarded as two of the most quintessentially American short stories—I can’t get close to Halloween without thinking about upstate New York, thanks to Irving—but they’re not American at all, strictly speaking, as they are based on German and Dutch fables. Irving cannot create an American literary identity out of whole cloth but must borrow and adapt.

This is, in fact, Irving’s solution to the anxiety of influence. Unlike Cooper, who openly mocks the Old World and subverts their literature to use against them, and Brown, who simply purges Old World styles of the elements that don’t mesh with rural Pennsylvania, Irving suggests a common lineage with the British and suggests a more open and universal approach to reading and writing:

Generation after generation, both in animal and vegetable life, passes away, but the vital principle is transmitted to posterity and the species continue to flourish. Thus, also, do authors beget authors, and having produced a numerous progeny, in a good old age they sleep with their fathers, that is to say, with the authors who preceded them—and from whom they had stolen.

Literature becomes the bearer of a kerygma, and authors become merely the birds who drop the seeds. The question of a national literature thus becomes, at least to some extent, moot. Irving reaches higher than creating an American literature—he wishes to be ranked outside of nationality and by truth instead. Two hundred years later, now that American authors generally do not feel inferior to their European counterparts, his route to authorial courage seems much more attractive: Admit your smallness in the grand scheme of things and your importance in transmission.