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The Cambridge Introduction to the
Nineteenth-Century American Novel

Stowe, Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain: these are just a few of the
world-class novelists of nineteenth-century America. The
nineteenth-century American novel was a highly fluid form, constantly
evolving in response to the turbulent events of the period and emerging
as a key component in American identity, growth, expansion, and the
Civil War. Gregg Crane tells the story of the American novel from its
beginnings in the early republic to the end of the nineteenth century.
Treating the famous and many less well-known works, Crane discusses
the genre’s major figures, themes, and developments. He analyzes the
different types of American fiction – romance, sentimental fiction, and
the realist novel – in detail, while the historical context is explained in
relation to how novelists explored the changing world around them.
This comprehensive and stimulating introduction will enhance students’
experience of reading and studying the whole canon of American fiction.

Gregg Crane is Associate Professor of English at the University of
Michigan.



Cambridge Introductions to Literature

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Accessible and lively, these introductions will also appeal to readers who
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� Ideal for students, teachers, and lecturers
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Titles in this series:

The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Studies Christopher Balme

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The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s History Plays
Warren Chernaik

The Cambridge Introduction to T. S. Eliot John Xiros Cooper

The Cambridge Introduction to Francophone Literature Patrick Corcoran

The Cambridge Introduction to the Nineteenth-Century American Novel
Gregg Crane

The Cambridge Introduction to F. Scott Fitzgerald Kirk Curnutt

The Cambridge Introduction to Early English Theatre Janette Dillon

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Tragedies Janette Dillon

The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf Jane Goldman

The Cambridge Introduction to Herman Melville Kevin J. Hayes

The Cambridge Introduction to George Eliot Nancy Henry

The Cambridge Introduction to W. B. Yeats David Holdeman

The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures C. L. Innes

The Cambridge Introduction to Walt Whitman M. Jimmie Killingsworth

The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism Pericles Lewis

The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Beckett Ronan McDonald

The Cambridge Introduction to Emily Dickinson Wendy Martin

The Cambridge Introduction to Mark Twain Peter Messent

The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing David Morley

The Cambridge Introduction to Ezra Pound Ira Nadel

The Cambridge Introduction to Nathaniel Hawthorne Leland S. Person

The Cambridge Introduction to Joseph Conrad John Peters

The Cambridge Introduction to Harriet Beecher Stowe Sarah Robbins

The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story Martin Scofield

The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare Emma Smith

The Cambridge Introduction to English Theatre, 1660–1900
Peter Thomson

The Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen Janet Todd

The Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy Jennifer Wallace



The Cambridge Introduction to the

Nineteenth-Century
American Novel

GREGG CRANE



CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Cambridge University Press

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First published in print format

ISBN-13    978-0-521-84325-6

ISBN-13 978-0-511-47862-8

© Gregg Crane 2007

2007

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For Robert David Crane and Barbara Gregg Crane





Contents

Acknowledgments page ix

Introduction 1

The early American novel 6

Chapter 1 The romance 26

What is the romance? 26
The historical romance 32
The philosophical romance: Poe, Hawthorne,

and Melville 67
The sensational romance – a taste for excess 94

Chapter 2 The sentimental novel 103

What is the sentimental novel? 103
Theme and variations: a young woman’s story 113
Sentiment and reform: Uncle Tom’s Cabin 125
Sentiment and the argument against reform:

The Planter’s Northern Bride 136
Sentiment, upward mobility, and the African

American novel 140
Moving toward realism 148

Chapter 3 The realist novel 155

What is American literary realism? 155
Realist technique and subject matter 164
Tensions, divergences, and extremes within

realism 179

vii



viii Contents

The taste for excess – sensationalism redux 203

Notes 208
Works cited 220
Index 231



Acknowledgments

For their counsel and encouragement, I am indebted to Sara Blair, George
Bornstein, Jonathan Freedman, John Kucich, Kerry Larson, Robert Levine,
Dianne Sadoff, and Eric Sundquist. I also wish to express my gratitude for
the many thoughtful revision suggestions made by John Whittier-Ferguson
and Samuel Otter. From the book proposal through to final revisions, Ross
Posnock and Cindy Weinstein have generously helped me with indispensable
advice and critique. Leslie Ford deserves special thanks for her meticulous and
insightful appraisal of the manuscript. And I want to acknowledge and thank
my daughter, Zoe, for our ongoing conversation about the ingredients of a
good story.

While writing this book, I have frequently found myself thinking about
pedagogy and the alchemy of excitement and knowledge that characterizes
good teaching. This train of thought always seems to conclude with some
memory of my parents. Over the years, I have been in many classrooms but
none more inspiring than those of my mother and father. I know of no better
teachers.

ix





Introduction

The early American novel 6

Defining the novel is easy: it is a fictional prose narrative of substantial length.
While one may question the distinction between fact and fiction or the require-
ment that the novel be written in prose, this simple definition seems generally
apt, describing the books we commonly label as novels. It does not, however,
say anything about why we read novels. A few key features accounting for the
genre’s appeal seem fairly plain. First, the novel lives and dies by its ability to
create the fictional illusion of a complete world. This world may be highly real-
istic in the sense that it conforms closely to a recognizable historical moment,
or it may be utterly fantastic. In either case, we must be able to see ourselves in
it, imagine breathing its atmosphere and encountering its creatures and land-
scapes. Second, the reader must be driven to know what happens next, or, in all
likelihood, he or she will put the book down. The other pleasures of the prose
will probably not be sufficient to hold the reader in the absence of a compelling
storyline and/or characters. Third, even if it is only to suggest the impossibility
of finding meaning in art and experience, the narrative will have some signif-
icance beyond a mere recitation of characters and events. Stories of all types
tempt us to connect them with explanations of larger meanings, values, and
phenomena. Indeed, it is often impossible to explain such things without resort
to stories (as any parent, lawyer, cleric, or scientist giving a public lecture can
attest).

Having glanced at features shared by all novels, we should briefly consider
a couple of traits apparently dividing the genre. First, while some novels are
easily consumed, others obstruct our progress through the narrative. These
“slower reads” are characterized by a density of description and/or complexity
of plot and/or opacity of language resisting translation or paraphrase. Balk-
ing the reader’s progress through a book of some length would seem to be a
considerable risk. Why take that chance? Answers would probably vary, but
it seems likely that the authors of these more taxing stories generally hope
that their readers will feel that the extra work was rewarded by some deeper,

1



2 Introduction

broader, or richer experience or some significance not otherwise available.
Second, some novels overtly seek to push society in a particular direction.
All artifacts, even those posing as pure entertainments, have some economic,
material, psychological effect on society, but certain works of art are mani-
festly designed to advance social change, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle
Tom’s Cabin (1852) or Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906). As a result of these
differences, novels can be arrayed on a sliding scale of complexity or a gra-
dient of social engagement, and, for some critics, complexity and social effi-
cacy represent competing principles of literary appreciation (though we might
well demur that this opposition of values is neither inevitable nor particularly
coherent).

When compared to the elaborate structural and metrical requirements of
certain poetic forms, such as the sestina or villanelle, the novel seems remark-
ably flexible. Open-ended and amorphous, it is capable of taking any number
of particular shapes and drawing on a wide variety of formal elements. It is
“plasticity itself,” in Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s words, “a genre that is ever questing,
ever examining itself and subjecting its established forms to review” (39). As a
highly plastic form, the novel readily receives the impress of historical change,
and many scholars and theorists focus on historical change to define and locate
the genre. In a well-known essay, Walter Benjamin distinguishes the novel from
the earlier narrative form of storytelling. The term “storytelling” conjures the
image of people sitting around a fire, listening to tales that have been told and
retold over the ages. It is a communal occasion, a practice not a product. The
novel, by contrast, is purchased or borrowed by the individual and consumed
individually. The storyteller’s oral tale invisibly weaves new or discrepant facts
into a seamless and apparently unchanging web of tradition. Once such a tale is
in print, however, discrepancies between different versions become apparent,
and continuity is replaced by a sense of change (Benjamin 87).

In a similar vein, Northrop Frye, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Georg Lukács, Ian
Watt, and Michael McKeon describe the novel as a modern replacement for
the epic. Unlike the epic recounting the larger-than-life actions of heroic char-
acters caught up in an archetypal and timeless drama, the novel resembles a
newspaper or a history. Its dramas are time bound, and its characters are par-
ticular individuals rather than mythic types. The epic addresses universal issues
and eternal conflicts, but the novel (even in its more fantastic formulations)
describes specific causes and effects. Emphasizing social change, particular
individuals rather than mythic types, and the concrete particularities of the
world it describes, the novel is, as Georg Lukács says, “the epic of an age in
which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the
immanence of meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in



Introduction 3

terms of totality” (56). The novel may be epic in scope (e.g., Tolstoy’s War and
Peace (1863–69) or Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862)), but it uses grand conflicts,
such as war and revolution, as a backdrop for its main concern – the smaller,
more particular triumphs and defeats of specific and flawed individuals.

This account of the “rise of the novel” is propelled by a particular historical
narrative. In this story, Western societies were once unchanging, primarily rural
affairs in which the people shared bloodlines, religion, language, and culture,
but things have changed. Modern society is highly volatile, primarily urban and
industrial, and largely held together by either various forms of economic and
political coercion or voluntary agreements. With the splintering of traditional
society comes the alienation of the individual from society and the fracturing of
the individual’s identity (Lukács 66; Todorov 103). For Lukács, Watt, McKeon,
and others, the novel is plainly marked by such momentous changes as the
Reformation, the emergence of print culture, and the advent of mechanical
reproduction, empiricism, and capitalism, as well as the rise of the middle
class. The stream-like linear narrative of what happens to a character becomes
a vital element of continuity in the novel’s always-changing world. Whatever
else changes, including the characters themselves, a measure of coherence and
unity is furnished by the mere fact that the events of the narrative happen to
or are observed by a particular set of individuals.

This intertwined narrative of Western history and the emergence of the novel
can be easily extended into the American context. What Ian Watt describes as
the novel’s Protestant focus on the interior landscape of the individual’s mind
and its empiricist emphasis on a perspective in which the individual is respon-
sible for his own scale of moral and social values can also serve as a sweeping
description of the perspective of the American novelist (Watt 78–80, 12–22).
Looking at the rise of the American novel, critics find an emphasis on notions of
independence and beginnings. As Terence Martin puts it, the American novel
seeks “to wipe the slate clean of European history and institutions (sometimes
with festival energy) and thus establish the conditions for a national identity”
(x). For William C. Spengeman, an appetite for discontinuity helps to define
the national character of the American novel. The British novel, Spengeman
contends, centers on the domestic scene as a source of social repose and conti-
nuity. Home “represents the unconditioned ground of man’s being; the eternal
unchanging place from which he has fallen into the world of time and change;
the native land to which the exiled pilgrim longs to return so that he may be
blessed” (71). American fiction, by contrast, is characterized by a competition
between the poetics of adventure and the longing for domestic equilibrium
(3, 69). Romances by Twain, Hawthorne, and Melville, he argues, embody
both dreams, and “they prove just how irreconcilable the two visions are. For it



4 Introduction

is the failure of these abortive romances to recover the sheltering assurances of
a home long since abandoned which confirms, finally and ironically, the lesson
of the Romantic American adventure: we have made ourselves and our world
and cannot go home again” (117).

Given the scale of the transformations characterizing the nation in the nine-
teenth century, it is not surprising to find critics focusing on change as a central
theme in the era’s fiction. By conquest, purchase, and treaty, the nation’s land
mass quadrupled. Its population grew from approximately 4 million to 76
million by 1900. It endured the bloodiest war in its history (at least 620,000
soldiers were killed in the Civil War, almost as many as in all other US wars com-
bined) and the assassination of two presidents, Lincoln and Garfield (McKinley
was assassinated in 1901). Bloody conflicts were waged with Native Americans,
Britain, Mexico, and Spain. At its inception, the nation’s economy was predom-
inantly agrarian, and its society was chiefly rural. Barter and trade were still
prevalent modes of economic exchange. By 1900, after undergoing an indus-
trial revolution of its own, the United States produced 35 percent of the world’s
manufactured goods, more than the combined output of Germany, France,
and Great Britain. The nation’s population had relocated to urban centers.
The slower agrarian economy had been replaced by heavy industry, the stock
market, currency controversies, and boom and bust economic cycles, produc-
ing an astonishing number of bankruptcies, panics, and depressions as well as
a staggering record of economic growth. As Melville put it in Pierre (1852),
the fortunes of nineteenth-century “families rise and burst like bubbles in a
vat” (13).

The book trade exemplified the rapid pace and thoroughgoing nature of the
era’s transformation. In the early republic, publishing was a small and primarily
local affair. From these relatively rudimentary beginnings, the production and
sale of printed material underwent a technological and commercial revolution
in the first half of the nineteenth century. The advent of mechanized printing
and improvements in papermaking, book binding, and improved means of
shipping books (by new roadways, turnpikes, canals, and railroads) lowered
the cost and greatly facilitated book production on an unprecedented scale.
During the same period, the audience of literate readers grew. These and other
factors resulted in the emergence of a mass market for printed materials of all
kinds and the novel in particular. As Cathy Davidson and others have shown,
novels attracted wide readership among both genders and across other social
divisions (Davidson vii, 9–10). Where sales of a few thousand copies of a novel
in the early republic would have been a dramatic success, by 1860 sales of
hundreds of thousands of copies of a novel were not uncommon (Davidson
16–37; Gilmore 46–54).



Introduction 5

Never homogeneous and always stratified by differences in wealth, religion,
race, ethnicity, and gender, in 1790 the nation’s populace included free and
enslaved African Americans, different Native American tribes or nations, and
people of English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, German, Dutch, and French back-
grounds. There were Anglicans, Congregationalists, Quakers, Presbyterians,
Dutch and German Reformed, Lutherans, Mennonites, Catholics, Jews, and
Baptists. This social picture would become considerably more diverse in the
course of the nineteenth century, as the nation expanded into Texas, Califor-
nia, and the Southwest, and as wave upon wave of immigrants came to the US
from England, Ireland, Wales, Germany, Scandinavia, China, Austria-Hungary,
Poland, Russia, Romania, Italy, and Greece.

This growing, increasingly diverse, and often fractious society was charac-
terized by a considerable degree of ferment, much of it violent, such as Shay’s
Rebellion of 1786–87, the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, Nat Turner’s Slave Rebel-
lion of 1831, the Anti-Rent War of 1839, John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry
in 1859, the Draft Riots of 1863, the Haymarket Affair in 1886, the Homestead
Strike in 1892, the Pullman Strike in 1894, as well as race riots and the rise of
lynching following Reconstruction. Even a simple list of such incidents gives one
a sense of the significant social divisions running through nineteenth-century
American society. Reform movements, such as abolitionism, suffragism, the
temperance movement, and the labor union, played a role in inspiring some
of the period’s tumult, and such arguments for reform did not go unopposed.
Newspapers and politicians inveighed against the abolitionists and the nascent
women’s movement. Organized labor had to contend with increasingly power-
ful corporations, the Pinkerton Detective Agency (which played a central role
in repressing the Homestead Strike and in infiltrating the Molly Maguires in
1875), hostile courts, and elected officials. Some Americans were convinced
that the unlimited immigration of certain groups posed a threat to the nation
(the antebellum Know-Nothing party and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882
were products of such xenophobia). But reformers also had victories, such
as Reconstruction, the Civil War Amendments, Married Women’s Property
Acts, statutory regulations protecting the health and safety of workers, and
the Sherman Antitrust Act. In the early part of the twentieth century, reform-
ers succeeded in pushing through the federal Income Tax and the Nineteenth
Amendment entitling women to vote. Reforms of a different sort included the
Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924 and eugenic sterilization laws.

American fiction could not help reflecting something of the turbulence
of nineteenth-century life. The ups and downs were simply too dramatic
to overlook or ignore. “In this republican country,” Nathaniel Hawthorne
wrote, “amid the fluctuating waves of our social life, somebody is always at the



6 Introduction

drowning point” (Seven Gables 35). Some novels directly engage in a cultural
tug of war over whether or how to transform American society. For exam-
ple, some vehemently call for the end of slavery; others stridently support the
South’s peculiar institution and reject the very notion of reform as contrary to
the design of God and nature. Often the conflict is internal to the individual
novel. Many nineteenth-century fictions simultaneously embrace and reject
various forms of social mobility, such as the greater autonomy and freedom of
women or the crossing of class, racial, or ethnic boundaries. At times, the era’s
fiction seems to desire a rational compromise or balance between change and
stasis, freedom and order, being able to create or revise the society one inhabits
and having to yield to certain traditional, natural, or divinely prescribed values
and forms of association. At other times, it seems intent on plunging into the
tides of change, come what may.

The early American novel

The nation’s earliest novels express considerable uncertainty about the coher-
ence and stability of American society. How far would the ideal of self-rule
be extended? What happens to the social order when each member of society
is authorized to judge for him (or her?) self what is proper? The Revolution
ostensibly represented a powerful endorsement of such autonomy. Ordinary
people, according to republican political theory, are “the best Judges, whether
things go ill or well with the Publick,” for they are “the Publick,” and “Every
ploughman knows a good government from a bad one” (Wood 235). State
a moral case to a ploughman and a professor, said Thomas Jefferson, echo-
ing this line of thought, “the former will decide it as well, and often better
than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules” (Wood
240). But this belief in the agency of the common folk to decide for themselves
how to live licenses a considerable degree of social innovation. Is one really
comfortable with the resultant movement and change? If not, what does the
feeling of discomfort say about one’s egalitarianism, one’s faith in democratic
principles such as self-rule? And how would one regulate or curb such rev-
olutionary enthusiasm without betraying the principles authorizing the new
republic?

For the person recalling the ringing endorsements of self-rule justify-
ing the American Revolution, it is perhaps surprising to find that the very
first American novels were seduction tales. In novels such as William Hill
Brown’s The Power of Sympathy (1789), Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple
(1791), and Hannah Foster’s The Coquette (1797), the exercise of independent
judgment and the flouting of convention are criticized and dutiful obedience



The early American novel 7

to established authorities is recommended.1 The storyline of these tales is fairly
straightforward – a young man seeks to conquer the virtue of a particular
maiden. The young woman resists but ultimately succumbs to her own desire
and/or to her beau’s fraud or coercive measures. In each case, the romantic
connection violates some norm of social and sexual propriety, and the affair
results in disaster for both parties. In Rowson’s Charlotte Temple, the epony-
mous heroine deviates from accepted social norms (instead of waiting for her
parents’ approval and patiently enduring a proper courtship, she elopes) only
to be deceived and abandoned, dying pitifully after being briefly reunited with
her father. Her lover Montraville lives but is tortured by the memory of the
evil his cavalier disregard for social custom and sexual morality has wrought.
Foster’s independent and freedom-loving heroine, Eliza Wharton, dies with
her illegitimate baby unattended by family and friends in a remote inn. Losing
everything – his wife, his estate, and his good name – Eliza’s lover, Peter San-
ford, cautions, “Let it warn you, my friend, to shun the dangerous paths which
I have trodden, that you may never be involved in the hopeless ignominy and
wretchedness of Peter Sanford” (Foster 255). In Brown’s The Power of Sympa-
thy, Harriot and Harrington’s love affair is doomed by the fact that she is the
offspring of her mother’s prior seduction by Harrington’s father. When faced
with the choice between incest and living apart, the lovers commit suicide. It
is hard not to feel some retrenchment of revolutionary ardor in the fact that
these first American novels feature disasters brought on by various breaches of
convention.

But these tales do not simply recommend deferring to parental authority
and the imperatives of tradition. They also voice many of the overt themes of
the American Revolution: independence, freedom, and equality.2 For example,
Rowson plainly endorses the decision of Charlotte Temple’s father to marry a
poor but worthy girl in defiance of paternal instruction (18–21). And despite
the fact that Brown’s would-be rake, Harrington, pays lip service to social class,
deeming Harriot too lowborn for marriage, he also expresses disgust at the
spectacle of class prejudice: “i n e q ua l i t y among mankind is a foe to our
happiness . . . and were I a Lycurgus no distinction of rank should be found in
my commonwealth” (11, 34). Hannah Foster condemns her heroine’s coquetry,
but she also appreciates Eliza’s independence of spirit. When one female char-
acter defers to male authority in all things political, another responds, “‘Miss
Wharton and I,’ said Mrs. Richman, ‘must beg leave to differ from you, madam.
We think ourselves interested in the welfare and prosperity of our country; and,
consequently, claim the right of inquiring into those affairs, which may conduce
to, or interfere with the common weal’” (139).

The founders’ notion of an indwelling moral sense shared by the ploughman
as well as the professor is the central theme of The Power of Sympathy. The



8 Introduction

epistolary form of Brown’s novel, in effect, allows us to overhear Harrington
planning his seduction of Harriot. He tells a friend that he intends to use the
venerable lover’s gambit of arguing that the lovers’ natural passion should take
precedence over mere social conventions: “Shall we not . . . obey the dictates
of nature, rather than confine ourselves to the forced, unnatural rules of –
and – and shall the halcyon days of youth slip through our fingers unenjoyed?”
(14). Harrington’s invocation of nature is a familiar one (recalling Andrew
Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”), but, in the revolutionary context, one is
also reminded of the rebellious colonists’ claim that their natural rights trump
the hollow traditions of royal preeminence and authority. When Harrington’s
own innate feelings of sympathy prevent him from pursuing his illicit sexual
ends, the connection between the seduction tale and the founding fathers’
political philosophy comes to the fore. Faced with Harriot’s implicit question,
“because I am a poor, unfortunate girl, must the little I have be taken from
me?,” Harrington finds himself incapable of pursuing her seduction (14–15).
His native compassion stops him from ruining Harriot. The founders’ claims for
the legitimacy of the Revolution and the propriety of self-government depended
in part on the assumption of an inherent human ability to discern right from
wrong by means of such feelings of sympathy.

The seduction novelists’ belief in the capacity of the common man and
woman for virtuous self-rule is manifest in the overt didacticism of their
tales. If ordinary people were not capable of learning and using their own
judgment, there would be no point in tutoring them by fictional or other
means. Primarily justifying their fiction on the basis that it educates young
women about the dangers of seduction, Brown, Rowson, and Foster also hope
that their tales model the kind of fellow feeling that should animate and knit
the commonwealth together. Because fiction can speak “the language of the
heart,” the novel’s combination of educational material and gripping enter-
tainment makes it uniquely useful to the education of a virtuous citizenry
(Brown Sympathy 53). To advance this goal, these novelists are quite willing to
sacrifice complexity, ambiguity, and irony. Thus, Rowson embraces the novel as
a lesser art, which is redeemed by its potential moral instruction rather than its
artistry:

If the following tale should save one hapless fair one from the error
which ruined poor Charlotte, or rescue from impending misery the
heart of one anxious parent, I shall feel a much higher gratification in
reflecting on this trifling performance, than could possibly result from
the applause which might attend the most elegant finished piece of
literature whose tendency might deprave the heart or mislead the
understanding. (L)



The early American novel 9

Given the presence of both more and less socially conservative views in these
novels, we may well doubt that these tales are quite as simple and clear as Row-
son and others claim, but it is nonetheless telling that these authors expressly
conceived of their fictions as unvarnished moral lessons (Brown Sympathy 7,
Foster 241).

For Brown, Rowson, and Foster, the educative function of fiction requires
that characters, events, and emblems should be relatively transparent in their
significance. For instance, when Charlotte’s father meets the young woman who
will become his bride, he sees that “a pellucid drop had stolen from her eyes,
and fallen upon a rose she was painting. It blotted and discoloured the flower.
‘Tis emblematic,’ said he mentally, ‘the rose of youth and health soon fades
when watered by the tear of affliction’” (8). Emblems, for Rowson, should be
pellucid, transparently communicating a clear and single meaning. The tears
staining the painting cannot be permitted to improve it in some curious fashion,
for that would obscure the meaning of the comparison of the painted rose and
the young girl. If the painting became subtly more beautiful by the accident
of the tears, the unforeseeable or the unknowable would be introduced into
Rowson’s consideration of suffering. Suffering might become something to
be appreciated, even courted, and Rowson’s depiction of Charlotte’s suffering
might be rendered ambiguous. Instead, the seduction tale wants to insist that
the interpretive task before its characters and its readers (especially the young
female reader) is to recognize the signs of moral character and reach correct
conclusions about people and their intents. Thus, in The Coquette, Eliza is
warned that Sanford is “a second Lovelace” and that she may wind up a second
Clarissa if she is not careful (134).3 Foster’s equation of fiction and life assumes
that real people as well as fictional characters are highly legible.4

However, the sheer frequency of the insistence that moral character is legible
(e.g., that blushes offer indisputable evidence of Harriot’s feeling for Harring-
ton and Charlotte’s feeling for Montraville or that Charlotte’s features convey
her unmistakable goodness) hints at a fear that some people will not be read-
able (Brown Sympathy 9, Rowson 3, 66, Foster 130, Ziff 17). This fear is plainly
manifest in the figure of the rake, who uses fraud and disguise to deceive the
young maiden and her friends. The prominence of anonymous or mysteri-
ous characters in these novels suggests a general apprehension that, as society
becomes more fluid, it becomes increasingly obscure and undecipherable. The
absence of a well-established and clear social context and well-known family
histories creates the possibility of some rather nasty surprises: Harriot turns
out to be Harrington’s sister, Mademoiselle La Rue is not a proper young lady
of impeccable virtue, and Sanford is not wealthy. Seduction novels hold up the
value of legibility but acknowledge its frequent absence; as a consequence, their



10 Introduction

endorsement of independent judgment is hedged. Because she is incapable of
reading Montraville, her suitor, or La Rue and Belcour, Montraville’s confed-
erates, Charlotte Temple must not rely on her own reason but must submit to
parental authority and clear-cut traditional prohibitions.

Even if Charlotte were more experienced and skilled, interpreting such char-
acters as Mademoiselle La Rue would be a considerable challenge given their
mutability. La Rue approaches human connection as an entrepreneur speculat-
ing about the desirability of a particular asset and, consequently, her relations
are entirely fungible (Rowson 60–1). Appalled by the shifting affections of La
Rue and Belcour, Charlotte questions Montraville about Belcour’s decision
not to keep his word and marry La Rue. “Well, but I suppose he has changed
his mind,” Montraville says, “and then you know the case is altered” (65).
Charlotte is horrified to realize that her romantic relation with Montraville is
secured only by their continuing mutual affection and their ongoing consent
to be with each other. Everything could change, and she could be replaced
by another (of course, the stakes of this fungibility for Charlotte as a woman
without other practical means of support are much greater than they are for
Montraville [65]). What Charlotte wants and expects is a romantic relation that
will be as pure and fixed as her relation to her parents. Instead of the frighten-
ing specter of an endlessly changing society held together only by temporary
agreements based on shifting notions of self-interest, Charlotte wants what is
freely chosen to ascend to the level of the given or ordained, which is what the
founding fathers wanted the American Revolution to seem like – a choice made
inevitable by certain fixed and inalienable principles and rights.5 La Rue and
Belcour, as their French names suggest, represent the excesses of the French
Revolution, the pursuit of self-interest without restraint of divine norms or
social traditions, which results ineluctably in a “vortex of folly and dissipa-
tion” (55). In The Power of Sympathy, the monstrous potential of consensual
relations severed from the restraint of moral tradition can be felt in Harriot
and Harrington’s temptation to commit incest (Brown 86–7). Unalloyed with
some other principle of regulation or restraint, consent will permit any form
of human relation, including incest.

In Foster’s novel, Major Sanford represents both the allure and the danger
of this more volatile manner of existence. Unlike Eliza’s “good” suitor, the Rev.
Boyer, Sanford is, as he puts it, “a mere Proteus, and can assume any shape that
will best answer my purpose” (121). This is part of Sanford’s appeal to Eliza.
The Rev. Boyer offers Eliza a calm and sedate life as a minister’s wife; by con-
trast, Sanford represents the excitement and pleasure of variety, invention, and
excess (118, 126, 135). And, despite the fact that such a response is not overtly
sanctioned by the novel’s sad outcome, contemporary readers are justifiably
tempted to endorse the appetite for transformation and excitement manifest



The early American novel 11

in Eliza’s attraction to Sanford. Eliza’s desire for moments of hilarity which
engross every faculty and swamp reason can be seen as intimations that not all
of experience can be neatly divided into either the good category of knowable
and unchanging things or the bad category of unknowable and mutable things.
Something of value may yet exist outside the bounds of rationality and balance.
Permanence may turn out to be a prison, such as a marriage to the Rev. Boyer
would surely have been for the spirited Eliza Wharton. In the seduction novels
and other early American fiction, one ever feels a tension between the divergent
attractions of stasis and metamorphosis. The image of a stable society operat-
ing by immemorial traditions and commonly held beliefs has its appeal, but so
does the vision of a highly mutable society, constantly in motion, offering new
opportunities and new conceptions of life.

For early Americans, the social transformation unleashed by the Revolution
held great promise but it also raised important questions.6 What would the
nature of that change be? Would it go far enough? Would it go too far? Would it
work in a genuinely positive direction? Or would it pervert society? Some feared
that the old hierarchical social system would simply be replaced with another:
“There are some among us who call themselves persons of quality,” an early
republican ranted, but these were really a sort of “mushroom gentry” – fakes
aping a displaced aristocracy (Wood 241). The use of the phrase “mushroom
gentry” strikes a curious note in a republican diatribe. Literary precedents, such
as Ben Jonson’s Every Man Out of his Humour (1599) and Henry Mackenzie’s
The Man of Feeling (1771), use the figure of “mushroom gentlemen” to express
a fear that social hierarchy will be undermined by upstarts and impostors infil-
trating the upper class, not a concern that such distinctions will be erected. In
Kelroy (1817), Rebecca Rush (niece of Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declara-
tion of Independence) worries, in this more conservative vein, that the social
mobility authorized by the Revolution will substantially erode the quality of
American society. She describes a disreputable character named Marney as a
gentleman “of the mushroom sort” who “can pop up in a night’s time out
of the dirt nobody can tell how.” He is the antithesis of the gentleman who
has “come of a decent old stock, that has been growing some time” (149). In
Modern Chivalry (1792–1815), Hugh Henry Brackenridge uses the figure of
the gourd to similar effect:

In the natural world there is a gradation in all things. Animals grow to
their size in a course of years; trees and plants have their progress;
Jonah’s gourd might spring up in a night by a miracle; but in general all
productions of nature have a regular period of increase. The attainments
of men are made to depend upon their industry. As ye sow, so shall ye
reap. (222)



12 Introduction

In the context of the new republic, the sudden, insubstantial, and unwholesome
growth of the mushroom or gourd represents the threat of swift and unmerited
change. Brackenridge would permit upward movement but only at a slow pace
warranting the genuineness of the social improvement. To elect the ignorant
Irish servant, Teague O’Regan (Modern Chivalry’s version of Sancho Panza),
to the legislature without the incremental progress of education would be a
monstrous perversion of democracy, and, by requiring education, Brackenridge
can respect the egalitarian ideals of the Revolution and retain the meritocratic
ideal of awarding leadership roles to those best able to lead: “Genius and virtue
are independent of rank and fortune; and it is neither the opulent, nor the
indigent, but the man of ability and integrity that ought to be called forth to
serve his country” (21). For Brackenridge, gradualism offers a way to marry
egalitarianism and a hierarchical social structure.

The novelistic form Brackenridge uses in Modern Chivalry, the picaresque,
is particularly well suited to a consideration of the pros and cons of social
mobility. The hero of the picaresque is usually in constant motion, traveling
geographically and socially and crossing boundaries of both kinds. Propelled
by coincidence, the string of adventures making up the narrative are connected
only by the fact that they happen to the protagonists rather than by any notion
or requirement that one scene build or necessarily lead to the next, and this
episodic freedom allows the author to explore the widest array of social milieus
and settings. The genre’s appeal derives in large part from the reader’s taste
for a series of reversals in which the main characters are alternatively raised
up and brought low by the hand of fate. For example, in Fortune’s Foot-Ball
(1797), James Butler tells of the ups and downs of Mercutio, who escapes one
catastrophe only to be threatened by another. Involving a series of romantic
adventures and such perils as sea battles, the Algerian slave trade, and the
British impressment of sailors, the novel moves forward by a series of adverse
accidents – “the kicks of fortune” – but also by the kindnesses of strangers and
friends. Charles helps Mercutio, Mercutio and Charles help George, George
helps Mercutio and Lenora, George and Mercutio help Eugenio escape with
his beloved Terentia, and so on. The net effect of these compassionate gestures is
to valorize sympathy as the proper foundation of community and to emphasize
the importance of community to the individual’s well-being. Butler’s wild tale
ends in a series of happy marriages, and this felicitous conclusion removes some
of the metaphysical significance of the reversals and turmoil Mercutio and the
other main characters have endured. Despite his many reversals of fortune and
his experiences of different cultures, Mercutio remains highly conventional, so
conventional in fact that he and his beloved Isabella do not share a bed after
their Roman Catholic marriage because Mercutio is aware that that ceremony



The early American novel 13

would not satisfy the Church of England (II, 186). They happily renew their
nuptial vows in an Anglican ceremony at the end of the novel, signifying the
enduring force and stability of social traditions in the face of even radical
changes in circumstance.

In his narration of the comic adventures of the patrician Captain Farrago
and Teague O’Regan, Brackenridge takes social mobility a bit more seriously,
wondering whether or how society might genuinely be changed by individ-
ual reversals of fortune. Unflinchingly bold in his ignorance and relentlessly
opportunistic, Teague has a series of brief successes as a fashionable man about
town, a popular actor, a tax collector, the King of the Kickapoo Indians, and a
scientific exhibit at the American Philosophical Society. Part of the comedy of
Teague’s career derives from the fact that he never really changes. He is always
the same ill-educated “bog-trotter.” Yet, while Teague’s assumption of fitness
for any and all positions and roles is ludicrous, even potentially dangerous, as
Farrago points out, there is something appealing in the energy and sheer tenac-
ity of the Irishman. His irrepressibility is charismatic. As Christopher Looby
points out, Brackenridge is drawn to Teague’s ability to “maneuver socially
between contexts, to imagine himself crossing boundaries and transgressing
hierarchies, and to express himself intelligibly in social contexts for which his
upbringing and education did not fit him” (255).

Beneath Brackenridge’s laughing and satiric depictions lie both a genuine
concern about unchecked social mobility and an appreciation of the vitality and
insight contributed to the new republic by common people striving to better
their condition.7 At one point, the good Captain urges that each member of
society ought to keep to his/her place, declaring “Every thing in its element is
good, and in their proper sphere all natures and capacities are excellent . . . Let
the cobbler stick to his last” and “There is nothing makes a man so ridiculous
as to attempt what is above his sphere” (11, 14). But Farrago also speaks out
against the notion that birth and breeding determine who should have power
and hold sway in society:

Do we not find that sages have had blockheads for their sons; and that
blockheads have had sages? It is remarkable, that as estates have seldom
lasted three generations, so understanding and ability have seldom been
transmitted to the second . . . I will venture to say, that when the present
John Adamses, and Lees, and Jeffersons, and Jays, and Henrys, and other
great men, who figure upon the stage at this time, have gone to sleep
with their fathers, it is an hundred to one if there is any of their
descendants who can fill their places. Was I to lay a bet for a great man, I
would sooner pick up the brat of a tinker, than go into the great houses
to chuse a piece of stuff for a man of genius. (7–8)



14 Introduction

In Teague’s ambitious antics and Farrago’s kindly but critical responses, Brack-
enridge creates a synecdoche for the dual pressures shaping and informing
American democracy – the upward force of those seeking to advance and the
downward exertions of those seeking to regulate the lower orders. At times,
Brackenridge agrees with Duncan, a Scotsman, who observes, “Every thing
seems to be orsa versa here: the wrang side uppermost” (267). But he also
appreciates the nutritive potential of the conflict between the “multitude” and
the “patrician” class:

There is in every government a patrician class, against whom the spirit
of the multitude naturally militates: And hence a perpetual war; the
aristocrats endeavoring to detrude the people, and the people
contending to obtrude themselves. And it is right it should be so; for by
this fermentation, the spirit of democracy is kept alive. (19)

The push and pull of this democratic confrontation of different sectors of soci-
ety leads to hybrid conclusions, new compromises, and unforeseen solutions
to political and social problems (21).

The targets of Brackenridge’s satire are the “errors” and “excesses” of democ-
racy not the thing itself (507). Carried to an excess, democracy can create
oppression and tyranny as horrible as any enacted by monarchs. “[T]he rules
of justice,” as James Madison observes in the Federalist Papers, can be sup-
planted in a democracy by “the superior force of an interested and overbearing
majority” (123). As a protection of discrete political minorities, Brackenridge
endorses the Federalists’ constitutional division of powers, checking direct
democratic power: “It is the balancing with stays and braces of distributed pow-
ers that gives safety” (740). Of course, the minority Madison and Brackenridge
are worried about is comprised of wealthy landowners, who may be dispos-
sessed by a democratic majority bent on using political power to redistribute
wealth, but we should note that their reasoning contains nothing logically
preventing it from being extended to other minorities. Mocking democracy’s
excesses, Modern Chivalry recommends not an unqualified deference to tradi-
tion and social hierarchy but a balance between forces for and those resistant
to social transformation.

Tabitha Gilman Tenney’s picaresque, Female Quixotism (1801), and Rebecca
Rush’s novel of manners, Kelroy (1817), skeptically examine the effect of social
mobility on the drama of courtship and marriage and the domestic founda-
tion of American society. Female Quixotism recounts the amorous adventures
of Dorcas “Dorcasina” Sheldon and her maid, Betty. The narrative is pro-
pelled by Dorcasina’s desire for a romantic passion that will transport her to
a romantic Elysium beyond reason and social convention. In pursuit of this



The early American novel 15

ideal, she embarks on a series of romances. Each time, disaster is narrowly
averted, sometimes by a fortuitous accident (e.g., a sleigh accident that results
in the revelation of an impostor), sometimes thanks to the efforts of her father
or friends. The only alternative offered to this string of increasingly painful
and ridiculous fantasies is Dorcasina’s first and only genuine suitor, Lysander,
who courts her in an honest but plain style. Lysander, to his credit, offers rea-
sonable friendship rather than overwhelming passion, the kind of friendship
which promises to ripen into a stable and wholesome marital partnership. Dor-
casina rejects what she sees as Lysander’s pale and tepid imitation of romance.
Betty, like Sancho Panza, brings a common-sense perspective to Dorcasina’s
misadventures (though, over time, Betty is susceptible of being influenced by
Dorcasina, just as Panza is swayed by Don Quixote; late in the narrative, Betty
has a romantic delusion of being courted by a man who is her social supe-
rior). Unlike Charlotte Lennox’s Female Quixote or The Adventures of Arabella
(1752), a precedent for Tenney’s novel, Female Quixotism does not end well for
its heroine. Dorcasina’s foolish romanticism is mocked with increasing blunt-
ness, and her end is pathetic. Much of the blame for her fall is attributed to
the romantic novels she loves. Novel reading is dangerous for young women
because it fills their heads with flights of fancy rather than spurring them to
develop a rational and pragmatic plan for life (4–5).

Tenney’s satiric vision is squarely focused on the status of women in the new
republic. Unmarried women could hold property but could not vote, and they
had very few economic alternatives to marriage as a means of support. Once
married, they could not possess property separate from their husbands, could
not enter into contracts, or make wills. Divorce was very hard to obtain, and
divorce laws in this period were unfavorable to women. These circumstances
raised the stakes of the marriage decision. It was not merely one of many
important decisions a young woman in the early republic would make, but the
sole and absolutely determinative choice she would make (assuming she was
allowed to make it at all). Dorcasina’s romantic pratfalls are shadowed by very
serious potential consequences. She could marry badly and be saddled with
an unscrupulous and cruel husband who would deplete her inheritance and
doom her to a life of poverty and abuse. Even if her marriage proved to be a
happy one, like that of General and Mrs. Richland in The Coquette or that of
Harriot Stanly and Captain Barry in Tenney’s novel, it would not be romantic.
In the best of circumstances, marriage includes a steady round of severe trials
and challenges, including childbirth, the sickness and death of children, and
economic or other material misfortunes (Tenney 321).

Though it warns of the dangers of novel reading, Female Quixotism endorses
the education of women, reproaching those “enemies to female improvement”



16 Introduction

who “thought a woman had no business with any book but the bible” (14).
The target of Tenney’s criticism is not Dorcasina’s independent judgment as
such; rather, Tenney’s criticism is leveled at Dorcasina’s preference of emotional
excess over rationality. Lysander’s courtship is doomed to fail because Dorcasina
insists on being overwhelmed by rapture and love at first sight. Lysander repre-
sents the rational choice of mate based on established and plausible compan-
ionability. His careful and balanced approach is bound to disappoint Dorcasina,
who “never considered that the purest and most lasting affection is founded
upon esteem and amiable qualities of the mind, rather than upon transitory
personal attractions” (11). Instead, Dorcasina falls for Patrick O’Connor, who
proves to be a more sinister version of Teague O’Regan (19). Having been lead
by her devotion to romantic novels to mistake fiction for life, she is easy prey
to his fake passion (28). She devours his fable about a noble birth, a fine family
fortune, and disobeying his father’s injunction to marry a cousin whom he
does not love (30–31). Though played for farce, the courtship between Dor-
casina and O’Connor represents a serious social problem. In a changing and
anonymous society of immigrants and strangers, identities are as easily put
on and off as clothing (72). The stakes of the marital game, particularly for a
woman, are considerably raised by the presence of such impostors.

As Dorcasina’s series of courtship fantasies continues, the comedy becomes
bleaker. As she ages, the implausibility of her romantic delusions reaches a
level of grotesque exaggeration. Mistaken by Dorcasina for a gentleman in
disguise, her servant John Brown fails not only to save her from an unruly
horse, as a romantic hero should, but he cannot even save her fallen wig from
being devoured by a hog (227). Presumably, this harsh, even cruel humor was
justified, for Tenney, by the threat posed to the social order by Dorcasina’s
romantic exploits. Betty expresses the conservative social view of the novel
when she urges John Brown to “stick to [his] kind” (233). Betty and her fellow
servants are just as unhappy as Dorcasina’s genteel friends are at the spectacle of
John’s sudden elevation. Eventually, brought very low by her desire for a grand
passion, Dorcasina gives up her assumed, romantic name, signing the letter
closing the book with her given name – the more prosaic “Dorcas.” In Female
Quixotism, Tenney mocks not only the romantic fantasy of an all-consuming
passion but also the notion of attempting to create a substantially different
or idealized vision for one’s life instead of humbly accepting one’s inherited
station and role in life. Apparently willing to tolerate certain social innovations,
Tenney seems to approve of Dorcasina’s father’s liberal views on slavery and
religion, but she carefully surrounds Mr. Sheldon’s new-fashioned notions with
his otherwise impeccable conventionality, his respect for the opinion of others,
and his balanced and rational approach to life.



The early American novel 17

In Rebecca Rush’s Kelroy (1812), economic and social instability make the
kind of rational balance and social equilibrium recommended by Tenney seem
impracticable. People of various sorts and backgrounds are continually rising
and descending the social scale, including the family at the center of Rush’s
novel, the Hammonds. As the novel begins, Mr. Hammond has died, leaving
his family comfortable but not flush. Mrs. Hammond wants a more luxurious
life than her husband’s modest estate will provide, so she undertakes to prepare
and market her marriageable daughters to wealthy men. Under the pretext of
grief, she removes her family from Philadelphia to the countryside where she
can make the most of her limited financial resources. There she trains her
daughters in the social skills and fashions necessary to make them attractive
to the highest class of suitor. Then in a bold and risky venture, she gambles
her remaining money on a return to Philadelphia society in a grand manner,
showcasing her beautiful and talented daughters in opulent attire and costly
parties. Unknown to her daughters, Mrs. Hammond will soon go broke if they
do not quickly marry to economic advantage. The young Miss Hammonds,
Lucy and Emily, are very marriageable. In addition to being beautiful and
accomplished, their lavish home and fashionable dress promise substantial
dowries.

The eldest daughter, Lucy, succeeds brilliantly, attracting and marrying a
wealthy English lord, the good-hearted Walsingham. The younger daughter,
Emily, falls for Kelroy, a handsome and romantic young man whose father
has died leaving his estate mired in a legal dispute. In Mrs. Hammond’s view,
Kelroy’s problematic financial situation utterly disqualifies him as a suitor, but,
because she has not been frank regarding her own dire financial circumstances,
Emily and others cannot understand her objection. Later, when Walsingham,
who is friendly toward Kelroy, discovers Mrs. Hammond’s motives, he attempts
to compel her to permit the engagement, giving Kelroy a chance to improve
his monetary situation. Superficially assenting to the engagement, Mrs. Ham-
mond works behind the scenes to thwart Kelroy’s suit by means of fraudulent
correspondence. As a result, Emily marries Mr. Dunlevy, who is likely to inherit
a vast estate from his uncle. Mrs. Hammond does not, however, live to enjoy
the fruits of her deception. After her mother’s death, Emily discovers the ruse
and dies of shock. Revelation of the fraud drives Kelroy to the brink of insanity.

Rush’s divided feelings about social mobility are evident in her depiction of
the Gurnets, a nouveau riche family living in the neighborhood of the Ham-
mond’s country home. Mr. Gurnet is a peddler, who metamorphoses first into
a “wholesale huckster” and then into a “monstrously” rich salt merchant (153).
Rich enough to send their children to school, the Gurnets attempt the project of
social uplift, but remain decidedly vulgar. Old Mr. Gurnet’s habits are described



18 Introduction

as “inveterately low,” and their new “style of living” is “so little congenial to their
natures, that they [are] perpetually committing blunders which [subject] them
to unavoidable ridicule” (154–55). When Emily Hammond and her friends
visit this “set of originals,” the ensuing comedy’s cutting edge comes from the
apparent contrast between the genteel visitors’ easy elegance, good manners,
and sympathy and their hosts’ uncouth, blunt, and potentially brutal qualities.
Replete with the distinctive pronunciations, grammatical errors, and the col-
loquialisms of her class, Mrs. Gurnet describes the travails of their move from
the city to the country:

I packed up every morsel of glass and chany my own self, and an ugly
job it was for a lusty body like me to go through! – I saw every thing put
into the wagons too, safe enough as I thought; yet for all that, the
careless creeters of gals out here, broke four blue chany plates, and I
don’t know how many of my very best ankeen cups and saucers . . . And
Gurnet, he always gets so made when any thing’s broke. (156–57)

The Gurnets’ earthy dialect is accompanied by a straightforwardness that strikes
Emily and company as comic. Unlike the highly restrained and complex social
decorum characterizing the courtship rituals of the upper class, the Gurnet
girls are blunt and open in their appraisals of the male visitors. Miss Eleanor
unblushingly tells Helen that her brother, Charles, is “a very pretty man” (157).

The Gurnets’ raucous energy and directness clearly offers some comic relief
to the story’s romantic intrigues, and, on a superficial reading, one might be
tempted to dismiss them as clowns. But such an interpretation would flatten
the scene into simple snobbery and ignore the signs of an appreciation of the
Gurnets’ uncontainable energy. The guests are engaged by the Gurnet girls’
pranks, and they enjoy the meal prepared by Mrs. Gurnet. There is humor
and industry in these people. They embody the democratic and sometimes
explosive energy from below that Rush, like Brackenridge, finds appealing.
When Mr. Gurnet’s black servant Ben breaks a punch bowl, spilling the wine,
Gurnet sallies forth to give him “a good licking” (161). An explosion worthy of
George Washington Harris’s Sut Lovingood follows. The entire company goes
out, “impelled by curiosity,” to behold

old Gurnet, furious with rage, chasing Ben, who had escaped from his
grasp, and taken refuge among the cows, where he dodged about, until
his master in the heat of the pursuit, happening to tread on the edge of a
puddle, slipped and fell sprawling at full length, with his face in the
mire. The negro then jumped over the fence, and ran out of sight. The
Miss Gurnets, the maid who was milking, and the man who was feeding
the horses on the other side of the yard, burst into a roar of laughter in
which Helen, Charles and Emily joined. (162)



The early American novel 19

This “roar of laughter” shared by both sides of the class divide represents
a contagious form of emotional and psychic energy that runs through the
crowd at the sight of this pratfall. To be sure, this is fairly broad comedy (not
without serious implications as regards Ben’s racial status), but it is also a
scene in which the surge of slapstick energy temporarily demolishes the class
divide. Instead of being embarrassed as members of the genteel class would
have been, the Gurnets share in the laughter. In this lack of self-consciousness,
this freedom from shame and constraint, there is a measure of power (163).
The Gurnets’ social pretensions may be absurd, but their energy, honesty, and
material success is not. Rush leaves open the question of what the Gurnets
and their descendants will become. It is, as yet, too soon to say, but some
development seems unavoidable, and the Gurnets’ upward trajectory would
seem to be a bellwether for American society.

Part of what keeps the reader from becoming too alarmed by the Gurnets’
ascendance is that they are what they seem to be. Whether in marriage or in
business, no potential partner will suffer an unpleasant surprise as to the real
character of the Gurnet family. The essential qualities defining all of Rush’s
characters, for good or ill, do not shift or undergo any metamorphosis. At the
novel’s conclusion, Emily Hammond and her mother are as good and bad as
they are, respectively, at the beginning. Trouble comes in Kelroy when people
disguise their real natures, as when Lucy Hammond successfully deceives Wals-
ingham as to her character. Mrs. Hammond, in particular, is singled out as the
tale’s chief villain by virtue of her steadfast unwillingness to allow anyone to
see her real nature. As Walsingham observes, Mrs. Hammond is a veritable
“Proteus” – “Last night she was all gaiety and animation! – This morning,
the emblem of despondency: – next, raving like a fury! – then immoveable as
marble: – and now, she is weeping like a fountain to disarm me of my purpose”
(88). Even when she is facing bankruptcy and the loss of her house to fire, Mrs.
Hammond exercises considerable restraint to prevent anyone from registering
how happy she is at winning the lottery: “exerting every particle of energy that
nature had gifted her with to remove the civil impressions which might remain
from her having fainted, [Mrs. Hammond] received [Kelroy’s] congratulations
with considerable apparent composure, whilst her heart throbbed with con-
vulsive joy” (129). While inwardly she can be shaken by “convulsive joy,” her
appearance remains under her control. The tragedy of Kelroy is the triumph of
artifice and control over sincerity. Bad social mobility takes the form of disguise
and deception. Good social movement, such as that embodied in the Gurnets,
is transparent and legible. But in neither case is the change substantive.

In the stability of her characters’ moral natures and even in the prodi-
gious ability of her prime villain to control her appearance, Rush sidesteps a
more disturbing prospect. While the completeness of her disguise is troubling,



20 Introduction

Mrs. Hammond’s rational self-possession is reassuring. Once discovered, her
motives and means are understandable and predictable. However, what if the
Proteus-like metamorphoses associated with Mrs. Hammond were more than
mere changes of clothes and expression? What if her convulsive feelings over-
whelmed her self-discipline, resulting in a substantial transformation of her
character in some unforeseeable fashion? This is the type of question posed by
Charles Brockden Brown’s Gothic novels. Dispensing with notions of rational
equilibrium and taking mutability seriously as something more than a matter
of mere appearances, Brown plunges the reader into a doubtful realm where
meaning and character are perpetually in flux. Centrally addressing transfor-
mation and identity and embracing the strange and fantastic, Brown’s Gothic
novels are a subspecies of the romance and precursor of many nineteenth-
century examples of that genre of fiction (the subject of the next chapter).

Beginning with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1765), the Gothic
novel uses spectral apparitions, dark and labyrinthine settings, the figure of
the vulnerable woman, and the sudden appearance of moral peril to arouse,
intensify, and prolong the reader’s emotional reaction. Brown described the
desired effect of his Gothic tales as “wind[ing] up the reader’s passions to
the highest pitch” and overwhelming reason with “catastrophe” of the most
“unexpected and momentous” nature (Pattee xxvii). Often, the hero and the
villain of the Gothic novel resemble each other in some fundamental aspect
(to the hero’s consternation as he or she comes to recognize the similarity),
and the novel’s setting is marked by decay – the mansion, castle, or abbey in a
state of ruin, the overgrown and corrupted garden, the monstrous wilderness
(e.g., the caves of Brown’s Edgar Huntly).8 Strange and mysterious events, such
as the disembodied voice in Wieland (1798) or sleepwalking in Edgar Huntly
(1799), are used to suggest realities or perceptions which defy cool analysis and
exceed human understanding. For many, the Gothic novel’s terrifyingly fluid
world warns of the nightmare society heralded by the French Revolution, a
society driven by unregulated desire and open to monstrous forms of social
and political experimentation.9 While apt, such associations do not account
for the genre’s continuing appeal. Since its first appearance, the Gothic novel
has continued to prove useful as a means of expressing skepticism about the
sufficiency of reason and logic as guides to the meaning of existence and the
order of society.

While other types of early American fiction consider how social mobility
may threaten the coherence and stability of society, Brown pushes notions of
individual and social mutability to a philosophical extreme (Ringe 49–50).
Brown’s fiction generates a kind of philosophical terror by dissolving bound-
aries. Is Edgar Huntly a savage beast or a civilized man? Is Clithero Edny mad or



The early American novel 21

sane? Is Wieland listening to a voice in his head or to Carwin’s ventriloquism?
The fact that we can answer “both” to each of these questions signals Brown’s
intent to cast doubt on our rationalist efforts to separate reason and imagina-
tion, progress and regress, growth and decay, life and death, the corporeal and
the non-corporeal (Cameron Corporeal Self 8).10 Like these distinct categories,
discrete beings in Brown’s Gothic novels tend to merge into or transfigure each
other. The sleepwalking and murderous Clithero Edny’s very state of being
proves to be contagious, and, after close contact with Edny, Huntly becomes a
sleepwalker and a killer.

Brown shifts back and forth in Edgar Huntly between settlement and wilder-
ness as though the geographical movement signified a distinction between the
rational world of civilized people and the irrational world of savage people.11

However, by the end of the tale, the distinction between civilization and
wilderness has come to seem doubtful, even delusional.12 The event gener-
ating Brown’s convoluted narrative is an act of vengeance by a small group of
Delaware Indians under the influence of an ancient squaw-sachem known as
Old Deb. Huntly’s comparison of Old Deb and “Queen Mab,” the Celtic fairy
of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, suggests the interpenetration of dream and
waking worlds characterizing Brown’s novel (200). At the outset, the novel
seems as though it is going to be a murder mystery. Huntly seeks to dis-
cover the identity of the person who has murdered his friend Waldegrave.
But the tale soon departs from this relatively straightforward project. Almost
as an afterthought, it is revealed near the novel’s conclusion that Waldegrave
has been the random victim of marauding Indians. Early in his investigation,
Huntly comes into contact with Clithero Edny, an Irish servant of mysterious
background. At night, Clithero wanders about in an apparently somnambu-
lant state, regretting his hard fate and bad deeds. When Huntly confronts him,
Clithero confesses not to Waldegrave’s murder but to the killing of another
man.

Clithero recalls his humble Irish family and how a great lady, Mrs. Euphemia
Lorimer, took him in and raised him like a son. Obsessively grateful to her,
Clithero becomes her loyal steward. Like boxes within boxes, Mrs. Lorimer’s
story is contained within Clithero’s. Arthur Wiatte, Euphemia’s twin brother,
thwarts her courtship with Sarsefield (who later turns up as Edgar Huntly’s
tutor) and manages to have a rich but immoral suitor imposed on her. For-
tunately, Euphemia’s husband soon dies, leaving her the master of her own
fate and fortune with Clithero’s able assistance. Wiatte turns to crime and is
deported, and Euphemia raises Clarice, Wiatte’s abandoned illegitimate daugh-
ter, as her own child. Clithero and Clarice fall in love, and Sarsefield reappears.
For a moment, a happy ending seems imminent, but Wiatte returns and is



22 Introduction

killed by Clithero in self-defense. When his mistress swoons on hearing that
her brother is dead, Clithero flees, turning up in rural Pennsylvania. Edgar’s
desire to bring Clithero some psychic relief leads to nighttime searches for
the tortured Irishman. Thus, Huntly’s story mutates from detective story to
mission of mercy, eventually becoming a nightmare of human metamorphosis
when he enters the wilderness.

The novel repeatedly questions whether various antitheses may not prove
to be somehow mistaken, whether the opposed terms are not in fact either
intertwined or merely different words for the same thing. We might assume
that the earth under Huntly’s foot is solid, stable, and unchanging, but it is
not. It is riddled with caves and constantly undergoing a process of erosion
and decay (22). The sleepwalking Clithero is both like and unlike a wakeful
man. Though asleep, he labors, speaks, weeps, and looks about him when
called (10–12). When urged by Edgar to act like a man, Clithero shudders (31).
Like his somnambulism, Clithero’s shuddering reminds us of the many actions
and reflexes that are not subject to our control, raising a question about the
degree to which human existence is made up of involuntary acts and reflexive
impulses. Edgar’s apparently rational inquiry into the murder of his friend
(“Curiosity, like virtue, is its own reward”) merges with “the most complex
and fiery sentiment in [his] bosom,” making it hard to separate the quest for
knowledge from the desire for vengeance (16).

The evil Arthur Wiatte and his noble sister, Euphemia Lorimer, are uncannily
similar: “Nature had impressed the same image upon them, and had modeled
them after the same pattern. The resemblance between them was exact to a
degree almost incredible. In infancy and childhood they were perpetually liable
to be mistaken for each other.” While the original mental and physical similarity
of the twins is offered as a sign that the choices people make in life are more
important than their origins, the narrative’s insistence on the twins’ identical
“intellectual character” and “form” is disconcerting (43). The fact that such
different people can come from identical materials makes reading the outward
signs of inner character difficult and renders the confident prediction of an
individual’s career in life impossible. At moments, the novel seems to endorse
the kind of personal transformation and upward social mobility represented by
Clithero, who is raised from peasant to educated gentleman, but this positive
appraisal is shadowed by the fact of his descent into a homicidal insanity. Was
Clithero’s madness engendered by the effort to lift him out of his original place
in life? The obsessive nature of his earliest devotion to Mrs. Lorimer hints that
his mind may have begun to deteriorate when she adopted him.

Not stopping with the destabilization of the categories we use to organize
experience and knowledge (e.g., blurring the boundary between cool reason



The early American novel 23

[“curiosity”] and hot imagination [“fiery passion”]), Brown further disrupts
our mental equipoise by suggesting that things and people are constantly mutat-
ing, often becoming their opposites. Human metamorphosis is most dramat-
ically instanced in the transformation of the peace-loving Huntly into a wild
animal or savage being. Having become a sleepwalker himself, Huntly falls into
a pitch-black pit. On awakening, he is overwhelmed by sensations of hunger
and thirst:

I tore the linen of my shirt between my teeth and swallowed the
fragments. I felt a strong propensity to bite the flesh from my arm. My
heart overflowed with cruelty, and I pondered on the delight I should
experience in rending some living animal to pieces, and drinking its
blood and grinding its quivering fibres between my teeth. (156–57)

He kills a panther with his “Tom-hawk” and feasts on its still warm blood and
twitching flesh (159–60). Finding his way to the cave where a group of Indians
hold a young woman captive, he kills the Indian sentry with the same spon-
taneous predatory skill he displayed when killing the panther (172). Though
repeatedly claiming that he is averse to violence and bloodshed, Huntly becomes
a ferocious killer, creeping about on all fours and not hesitating to take life (191).
He is quickly “inured to spectacles of horror . . . grown callous and immove-
able,” thinking only of his physical survival (222). The rapidity and extent
of Huntly’s metamorphosis would seem to be intended to shake the reader’s
confidence in the immutability of human personality.

Brown uses the human mind’s capacity for delusion and madness to make
facile invocations of the human capacity for self-rule and the progress of civi-
lization seem distinctly ridiculous. His prefatory comment in Wieland that he
wants to offer the reader the “most instructive and memorable” examples of the
human psychology suggests that we read the portrait of Theodore Wieland’s
horrible descent into madness as representative of a general human propen-
sity to self-destructive fantasy (3). From this perspective, it becomes hard to
trust the independent judgment or the moral compass of the average citizen.
And without this confidence, the idea of a society cut loose from the moorings
of hierarchical authority and time-honored tradition becomes frightening. In
Wieland, the disembodied voice that moves the characters to various misap-
prehensions and delusional acts allegorically represents the chaos potential in
choosing one’s inner lights over well-established social customs and roles.

The events of Wieland are contemporaneous with the debates and ferment
leading to the American Revolution.13 Clara and Theodore Wieland, sister and
brother, live on an estate outside of Philadelphia. Their lives in this idyllic set-
ting are disturbed by the apparition of a voice (later turning out to belong to



24 Introduction

Carwin, a ventriloquist). In the novel’s climactic catastrophe, Theodore
Wieland murders his wife and four children and attempts to murder his sister,
Clara, under the delusion that he is obeying a divine commandment. Clara
narrates the tale. This tragedy is foreshadowed by the career of Wieland Sr.
An isolated individual following his own unique faith, Wieland Sr. withdraws
from the mundane realities of everyday social intercourse to pursue a radically
individualistic religious vision. But his isolation increases the chance that what
he sees as divine inspiration could be madness. There is no community or
tradition to warrant that his faith is not delusional. By not making his family
comply with his religious beliefs, Wieland Sr. does not even have the benefit of
the dissent that such a requirement might produce, inspiring some modifica-
tion or qualification of his faith (13). The absence of religious instruction and
democratic dedication to freedom of conscience leaves the Wieland children
open to choose their own faiths, fatally as it turns out in the case of Theodore
(whose given name ironically means “gift of God”).

The monstrous potential of this freethinking position is manifest in the evo-
lution of Theodore’s absolutist faith. What begins as a credulous openness to
supernatural explanations of such events as his father’s death and the disem-
bodied voice becomes an unshakeable conviction that God is directly speaking
to and acting through him. Wieland is driven by the desire to know divine will
with “certainty,” and this is the essence of his murderous impulses – the desire
for and belief in certainty (186). If he could tolerate doubt, he would have
been unable to commit his heinous acts. When he sets his sights on knowing
the will of God, Wieland abandons both doubt and judgment. He does not
know or care whether his act in killing his wife and children is good or evil,
depending solely on his certainty that it has been commanded by the supreme
power: “Thou, Omnipotent and Holy! Thou knowest that my actions were
conformable to thy will. I know not what is crime; what actions are evil in
their ultimate and comprehensive tendency or what are good. Thy knowledge,
as thy power, is unlimited. I have taken thee for my guide, and cannot err”
(199). Paradoxically, Wieland’s complete submission produces the exultation
of a rush of God-like feeling:

I lifted the corpse in my arms and laid it on the bed. I gazed upon it with
delight. Such was the elation of my thoughts, that I even broke into
laughter. I clapped my hand and exclaimed, “It is done! My sacred duty
is fulfilled! To that I have sacrificed, O my God! Thy last and best gift, my
wife!” For a while I thus soared above frailty. (194)

To defy conventional notions of morality and sentiment in obedience to one’s
sense of the dictates of a higher power is to become God-like, exceeding the



The early American novel 25

limitations of human vision and behavior. When he testifies at his trial for
murder, Wieland is said to have a “significance of gesture, and a tranquil majesty,
which denoted less of humanity than godhead” (184).

Like the caves Edgar Huntly falls into, Brown’s Gothic fiction is a catacomb
of doubts and questions. When is Wieland responding to Carwin’s voice and
when is he acting on some internal revelation? Huntly’s intuitively sympathetic
response to Clithero Edny initially seems plausible but proves to be horribly
misguided. Edny is beyond sympathy and reason. How do we separate the sound
from the unsound in Theodore Wieland’s convictions, which include his ardent
rejection of primogeniture, an important theme in the Revolution?14 Brown’s
depictions of delusion and error cast doubt on individual assertions of the kind
of higher-law intuition urged by the founders as justification for the Ameri-
can Revolution, and these doubts would seem to require the testing of moral
and political presentiments in the court of public opinion. However, doesn’t
such deference to public opinion and tradition risk that meritorious though
novel or unconventional insights and inspirations will routinely be swept aside
as delusional? In addition, after reading Brown’s fiction, readers may find it
difficult to have much confidence in the possibility of a lucid public consen-
sus. Communication in these novels is no less distorted than the individual’s
impulses and perceptions. The monstrous potential of private inspiration and
the grim failures of communication depicted by Brown challenge the reader to
accept uncertainty and doubt as concomitants of the democratic experiment.
As we shall see in the next chapter, some nineteenth-century novelists could not
accept an ambiguous or experimental approach to the national narrative, turn-
ing, instead, to the mysteries of racial identity for signs of the nation’s destiny.
Others more open to change urged that we consider the nation’s always evolv-
ing and fractious process of establishing moral consensus as the only worthy
principle of national cohesion and destiny.



Chapter 1

The romance

What is the romance? 26
The historical romance 32
The philosophical romance: Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville 67
The sensational romance – a taste for excess 94

What is the romance?

As the term is used here, “romance” does not mean love story. The fictions
taken up in this chapter may or may not include love stories. Labeling these
novels “romances” has more to do with certain formal and thematic character-
istics than with notions of courtship, sexual attraction, and marriage. Romance
designates a wide variety of novels featuring out-of-the-ordinary adventures,
mysterious or supernatural circumstances, difficult quests, and miraculous tri-
umphs. These novels often have an epic or mythic cast and display a marked lack
of concern for questions of plausibility.1 Together with the sentimental novel,
the romance predominates in the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century.

The story of the novel’s emergence told by Walter Benjamin, Georg Lukács,
Ian Watt, and others helps to situate the subgenre of romance. According to
these theorists of the genre, the novel, as we know it, is a relatively late literary
invention, coming into being roughly coincident with the Reformation and
the emergence of bourgeois capitalism.2 A modern form for modern times, the
novel, observes Benjamin, marks a substantial departure from the storyteller’s
legends, fairy tales, and epics (87). Benjamin describes the storyteller as an
artisan and his/her oral tales as akin to handicrafts, such as pottery. These tales
incorporate the shared wisdom and experience of the community and change
subtly over time as the community changes. By contrast, the novel is more
like a newspaper, a vehicle of bits of information rather than a living record of
communal insight. The literary forms of the storyteller, such as the legend or
epic, feature heroic or archetypal characters and miraculous events occurring in
a timeless realm of universal truths (Benjamin 89, Lukács 66). This account of

26



What is the romance? 27

the novel tends to identify the genre with an empirical approach to experience.
Ian Watt characterizes the novel’s emphasis on plausibility as part of a general
philosophical shift away from a priori ideas toward the particulars of experience
(12, 18). Defined in part by its choice of believable fact over the improbable or
extraordinary, the novel rejects the literary conventions of the legend, epic, or
fairy tale, which, in their very conventionality, seem implausible (such as the
traditional plot and the archetypal hero).

When compared with the type of novel described by Benjamin, Lukács, and
Watt, the romance seems to be something of a throwback to the earlier forms of
the storyteller. The romance employs supernatural elements or characters with
extraordinary capabilities as well as archetypal heroes and traditional plots.
Though grounded in a specific historical context, the romance often has a
timeless quality (for example, Alymer’s attempt to rid his bride of her one visible
defect in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “The Birthmark” is set in a specific time,
but, like the story of Pygmalion, its main action could easily be staged in any
period). The romance reaches out beyond the fate of its particular characters
toward some larger issue or theme, such as the foundation of an American
race in the union of Duncan Heyward and Alice Munro at the end of James
Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826) or Ahab’s quest to penetrate
the mask of material reality and grasp the ultimate meaning of existence by
hunting down Moby-Dick. Rather than focusing on a heterogeneous society
of isolated individuals, romances describe (or lament the passing of) a world
in which communities still seem to have cohesive identities. Like the fables
and myths of a previous era and the sentimental novels of its own era, the
nineteenth-century romance is not reluctant to indulge in allegory. A small but
revealing sign of the novel’s emergence, according to Watt, is the shift away
from type names, such as Mr. Badman, to the use of realistic names, such as
Tom Sawyer (19). The romance, however, is not averse to including names with
allegorical significance, such as Cooper’s Hawkeye (The Last of the Mohicans),
Hawthorne’s Faith (“Young Goodman Brown”), and George Lippard’s Devil
Bug (The Quaker City).

Authors of nineteenth-century romances understood well that their produc-
tions represented an anomalous continuation of the epic or mythic impulse. In
prefatory material he appended to his romance The Yemassee (1835), William
Gilmore Simms expressly connects the romance with the epic and distinguishes
it from the kind of fiction described by Watt, Benjamin, and Lukács:

Modern romance is the substitute which the people of to-day offer for
the ancient epic. Its standards are the same. The reader, who, reading
Ivanhoe, keeps Fielding and Richardson beside him, will be at fault in



28 The romance

every step of his progress. The domestic novel of those writers, confined
to the felicitous narration of common and daily occurring events, is
altogether a different sort of composition. (I, vi)

Famously, Nathaniel Hawthorne appreciated the romance’s “latitude” in regard
to the novel’s requirement of a “minute fidelity . . . to the probable and ordinary
course of man’s experience” (Seven Gables 3). The romance, Hawthorne says,
furnishes a theater “a little removed from the highway of ordinary travel, where
the creatures of [the author’s] brain may play their phantasmagorical antics,
without exposing them to too close a comparison with the actual events of real
lives” (Blithesdale 1–2). In a similar vein, Simms characterizes the romance as
“seek[ing] for its adventures among the wild and wonderful. It does not insist
upon what is known, or even what is probable” (I, vi–vii).

Ostensibly, romancers, such as Hawthorne and Simms, merely desire not
to be too constrained by the requirement that fiction believably mirror life as
we know it. In writing prefaces announcing that their tales are romances and
not novels, they seek to preclude the reader’s complaint that such and such a
character or event is not believable. But to what end do they seek such latitude?
The answer is, I think, that they find in the romance’s more overtly imaginative
and inventive features, in its mingling of the marvelous and the plausible, a
superior route to certain important truths – a route that is not available to
the mere fact-gatherer and reporter. Borrowing a phrase from Henry James’s
description of the romantic, we might say that the romancer is after things “we
never can directly know; the things that can reach us only through the beautiful
circuit and subterfuge of our thought and our desire” (qtd. Carton 6). Taking
us into “a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairyland,
where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbues itself with
the nature of the other,” the romance reveals the power of the imagination
to shape or transform the raw data of experience, giving it meaning rather
than merely recording it (Scarlet Letter 111). As Joel Porte suggests in The
Romance in America, the romancer turns to fantasy, magic, archetypal heroes,
traditional storylines, parable, and allegory as a means of uncovering otherwise
inaccessible realities, such as the nature of human motivation, the destiny of a
people, and the meaning of existence (ix–x). Believing in the existence of truths
or realities that exceed or elude empirical approaches, the romancer sets aside
the requirements of plausibility in the interest of making a stronger claim on a
deeper, more imaginative form of veracity.

We can get a feel for the formal devices and themes characteristic of the
nineteenth-century romance by looking briefly at two famous stories by
Washington Irving, “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,”



What is the romance? 29

both from The Sketch Book (1819–20). Both stories blend everyday facts with
the marvelous or strange. For instance, after beginning with a matter-of-fact
description of Rip Van Winkle’s life, his village, his clothes, personality, habits,
and home life, Irving’s story takes a romantic turn with the appearance of the
English explorer Henry Hudson and his crew of men playing nine-pins. Rip
drinks some of their liquor and falls asleep for twenty years, during which
time the Revolutionary War takes place. Similarly, in “Sleepy Hollow,” Irv-
ing’s detailed description of a rural community of Dutch folk in the Hudson
River Valley is interrupted by the appearance of the headless horseman. Want-
ing the reader “to grow imaginative – to dream dreams, and see apparitions,”
the romancer insinuates the extraordinary into the ordinary or shows how
the prosaic or unremarkable detail can cast a supernatural shadow in our
minds (994). In “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” Hawthorne describes this
state of mind as an oscillation “between fancy and reality; by turns, the pillars
of the balcony lengthened into the tall, bare stems of pines, dwindled down
to human figures, settled again in their true shape and size, and then com-
menced a new succession of changes” (1259). Whether or not the “legend” is
believed as literally true is, I think, less important to the romancer than the
reader’s sense of its imaginative and emotional power. Whether or not the
headless horseman is in fact Brom Bones is less important to Irving than
the creation of some measure of terror in the reader, pointing to the power
of the imagination to transform the bucolic countryside into a haunted and
alien terrain and otherwise rationally explainable events into a supernatural
pursuit.

Both tales are supposedly “found” in the papers of one Diedrich Knicker-
bocker. Superficially a gesture toward plausibility and historical accuracy, this
device is not uncommon in American romances. For instance, Edgar Allen
Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet
Letter (1850) purport to be documentary narratives based on historical papers.
Given the overtly fantastic nature of these fictions, such claims or allusions to
historical accuracy are plainly provocative, calling our attention to the different
kinds of truth claim made by fiction and history. Just because certain events
cannot have happened – there is no headless horseman and Rip cannot have
slept for twenty years – does not mean that such flights of imagination do not
reveal what Hawthorne termed “the truth of the human heart” (Seven Gables
3). Irving describes his tales’ “strange sights,” “voices in the air,” “marvelous
beliefs,” and “trances and visions” as the beliefs of a past era, but his success
in resurrecting these old legends, their grip on readers from his own era to the
present, suggests a truth about his audience’s continuing desire for the experi-
ence of imaginative reverie (“Sleepy Hollow” 993). The retrospective nature of



30 The romance

these fantasies makes it tempting to describe the imaginative effect of Irving’s
romances as escapist nostalgia. Taking this line, we might conclude that Irving
and his audience want to shut out the forces of historical change. Tales such as
“Rip Van Winkle” and “Sleepy Hollow” comfort the reader with images of a
seemingly static and timeless moment in the nation’s past before the nation’s
population exploded, before the national economy was shifted from agricul-
ture and handicrafts to heavy industry and capitalist speculation, and before
the substantial relocation of the nation’s population to urban centers. This
escapist interpretive line, however, is too narrow to capture Irving’s approach
to social transformation.

When Rip awakes from his twenty-year sleep, no one recognizes him. The
village is larger and more populous. Yankee names, such as Jonathan Doolittle,
have replaced the Dutch ones, such as Nicholas Vedder. Rip’s home and wife are
gone. The portrait of King George the Third on the village inn’s sign has been
changed to a picture of George Washington. Rip is no longer a subject of the
king but a citizen of a republic. In “Sleepy Hollow,” the “drowsy, dreamy” little
Dutch community is threatened with similar changes by the arrival of Ichabod
Crane (993). By marrying Katrina Van Tassel, Ichabod hopes to be able to use
her father’s considerable farm lands as a basis for future real estate speculation:
“his heart yearned after the damsel who was to inherit these domains, and his
imagination expanded with the idea, how they might be readily turned into
cash, and the money invested in immense tracts of wild land, and shingle places
in the wilderness” (999). The Yankee schoolmaster heralds the coming wave
of development in the east and expansion to the west. Irving contrasts him
with Katrina’s father, “Old Baltus Van Tassel,” who is “a perfect picture of a
thriving, contented, liberal-hearted farmer,” who “seldom . . . sent either his
eyes or his thoughts beyond the boundaries of his own farm; but within those
every thing was snug, happy, and well-conditioned” (998). Yet, despite these
signs of change, much remains constant. Rip remains the same. His appetites
and inclinations have not been altered in the slightest, and he resumes “his old
walks and habits.” Ichabod is expelled from Sleepy Hollow by the apparition of
the headless horseman. Katrina marries Brom Bones, and life goes on as before
Ichabod’s arrival. The manners and customs of Sleepy Hollow’s inhabitants
“remain fixed, while the great torrent of emigration and improvement, which
is making such incessant changes in other parts of this restless country, sweeps
by them unobserved” (994). The greater and more revealing magic of these
tales lies in their compelling portraits of continuity in the face of change. The
changes are real and visible but there are also continuities of the human heart
that wondrously withstand change and give an enduring, if not permanent,
identity to places and peoples. As we shall see in this chapter, transformation



What is the romance? 31

and identity are central themes in all formulations of the nineteenth-century
romance.

As Richard Chase, Joel Porte, George Dekker, and many others have shown,
the romance is a particularly capacious category of nineteenth-century fic-
tion. It includes the historical romances of James Fenimore Cooper, Robert
Montgomery Bird, Lydia Maria Child, William Wells Brown, and others, the
philosophical romances of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Her-
man Melville, and such sensational or popular romances as George Lippard’s
The Quaker City (1845), E. D. E. N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand (1859), or
Edward Wheeler’s Deadwood Dick (1877). Before the advent of realism in the
latter decades of the century, the romance and the sentimental novel are, in
effect, the default categories of nineteenth-century fiction. With notable excep-
tions, such as Rebecca Rush’s Kelroy (1812), Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home
(1839), and Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons (1862), most of the Ameri-
can fiction before 1870 takes the form of either the sentimental novel or the
romance. Not only were these two novelistic forms predominant for most of
the nineteenth century, they overlap substantially. Novels such as Catharine
Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie (1827) and William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853),
or Lydia Maria Child’s Romance of the Republic (1867), could be convincingly
classed as either romances or sentimental fiction. Historical romances, such as
Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, draw on the affective devices of the sen-
timental novel (e.g., scenes of tearful reunion between family members and
sorrow at the death of a child), and sentimental novels, such as Harriet Beecher
Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), share many of the traits of the romance
(e.g., supernatural apparitions and incredible escapes from danger). Indeed,
the ubiquity of the romance was such that, as Nina Baym has pointed out, the
terms “novel” and “romance” were used interchangeably in the antebellum era
(“Concepts of Romance”).

All three types of romance – historical, philosophical, and sensational –
feature the extraordinary in the form of astonishing or supernatural events,
amazing escapes, unbelievably fortuitous coincidences, characters with almost
superhuman abilities, shocking acts of violence, and/or otherworldly appari-
tions (even when they do not qualify as the Gothic version of the romance, these
novels often employ Gothic elements). And all three types claim to illustrate
some theme of epic significance, such as the fate of the nation, the malign or
benign forces animating nature, or the monstrous deformation of humanity
in the modern city. While making various claims to authenticity and accuracy,
such as the device of the found papers and the inclusion of historical events
and realistic details, the nineteenth-century romance recounts larger-than-life
tales filled with strange or astonishing events having some apparent mythic



32 The romance

significance. In effect, the romancer makes a novel of the stuff of fairy tale,
myth, and legend.

Each variety of romance will be delineated at greater length below, but here
we can use the idea of a legend, a myth-like tale containing some fundamental
human truth, to introduce briefly the key differences. The historical romance
takes some bit of history (e.g., an episode of espionage in the Revolutionary
War) and elevates it to the level of myth. The philosophical romance mines a
larger-than-life tale (e.g., the story told by sailors of a great white whale) for
its metaphysical or psychological import. And the sensational romance seeks
to create a popular legend (e.g., the tale of a notorious outlaw), which will
alternatively thrill, horrify, and excite the reader. Like the historical romance
and the philosophical romance, the sensational romance often includes Gothic
elements, and the Gothic novel could, as I have mentioned, be treated as a
subgenre of the romance. I have not focused on the Gothic as a category of
romance, because I find it not to be as capacious a category of nineteenth-
century American romances as those I have chosen. As one might expect, any
given example of one of these types of romance may well do all of these things.
Nineteenth-century novelists often produced more than one type of romance.
George Lippard, for instance, wrote both sensational romances, such as The
Quaker City, and historical romances, such as Blanche of Brandywine (1846).
These different types of romance are neither fixed nor static, and each borrows
liberally from the others. While they are not impermeable taxonomic barriers
walling one type of romance off from the others, nonetheless, such distinctions,
like many we use to classify the changing and hybrid productions of the human
imagination, help us to clarify points of emphasis in these novels.

The historical romance

As the two parts of the label “historical romance” suggest, this subgenre of the
novel blends bits of history with the strange or extraordinary. The idea con-
jured by this label may well strike us as odd. The term “historical” would seem
to point in the direction of verifiable facts and empirically persuasive demon-
strations of cause and effect, but the term “romance” suggests legendary heroes
and marvelous events – stories starkly incompatible with notions of historical
accuracy (Dekker 26, 58–59). Yet this is precisely what the historical romancer
has in mind – a merger of verifiable history and the extraordinary. William
Gilmore Simms claims both the historical accuracy of his Indian characters
and his right as a romancer to indulge in the “wild and wonderful.” In his
various prefaces