Literature, American Style: The Originality of Imitation in the Early Republic 9780812295290

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
Introduction. Style and the Cisatlantic
Chapter 1. To Form a More Perfect Language: Noah Webster’s American-Style English
Chapter 2. Transatlantic Correspondences: Crèvecoeur and the Incorrect Style
Chapter 3. “New Forms of Sublimity”: Charles Brockden Brown and the Irregular Style
Chapter 4. “Homespun Habits”: Seduction, Sentiment, and the Artless Style
Coda. Stock and Soil
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments

Citation preview

Literature, American Style

PAGE i

This page intentionally left blank

LITERATURE, AMERICAN STYLE THE ORIGINALITY OF IMITATION IN THE EARLY REPUBLIC

EZRA TAWIL

universit y of pennsylvania press phil adelphia

Copyright 䉷 2018 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Tawil, Ezra F., author. Title: Literature, American style : the originality of imitation in the early Republic / Ezra Tawil. Description: 1st edition. 兩 Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2018] 兩 Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018002988 兩 ISBN 978-0-8122-5037-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: American literature—1783–1850—History and criticism. 兩 National characteristics, American, in literature. 兩 Nationalism and literature—United States. 兩 English language—United States—Orthography and spelling—History—18th century. 兩 English language—United States—Style. Classification: LCC PS195.N35 T39 2018 兩 DDC 810.9/35873—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018002988

PAGE iv

For Kirsten and for Jules

PAGE v

This page intentionally left blank

The literature that should characterize a great people is always interesting to examine, I believe: the literature of an enlightened people, who have established liberty, political equality, and manners in harmony with such institutions. Right now the Americans are the only nation in the universe to which these reflections are applicable. Americans may still have no developed literature, but when their men in public office are called upon to address public opinion they obviously possess the gift of touching the soul’s affections with simple truths and pure feelings. Anyone who can do this already knows the most useful secrets of style. —Germaine de Stae¨l, On Literature (1800)

PAGE vii

This page intentionally left blank

CONTENTS

Introduction. Style and the Cisatlantic

1

Chapter 1. To Form a More Perfect Language: Noah Webster’s American-Style English

38

Chapter 2. Transatlantic Correspondences: Cre`vecoeur and the Incorrect Style

87

Chapter 3. “New Forms of Sublimity”: Charles Brockden Brown and the Irregular Style

121

Chapter 4. “Homespun Habits”: Seduction, Sentiment, and the Artless Style

149

Coda. Stock and Soil

182

Notes

191

Index

247

Acknowledgments

255

PAGE ix

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction Style and the Cisatlantic

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. —T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Original Imitations Cre`vecoeur’s epistolary regional narrative, Letters from an American Farmer (1782), is sometimes credited with the first embodiment of a distinctly American voice in its naı¨ve narrator, Farmer James. Yet the work’s true founding gesture, ontologically prior to the invention of this narrative voice, is to imagine the offstage voice of James’s urbane British correspondent, whose letters are never represented, but against whose “refined style” the farmer repeatedly defines his own distinctly non-British voice: “However incorrect my style, however inexpert my methods, however trifling my observations may hereafter appear to you, assure yourself they will all be the genuine dictates of my mind. . . . I am neither a philosopher, politician, divine, or naturalist, but a simple farmer.”1 What is hiding in plain sight here is simply this: Cre`vecoeur needs British English in order to delineate his farmer’s more immediate, spontaneous, authentic, and American form of expression. This “British” voice is a rhetorical straw man, to be sure. But it is far more than that, for without this absent term of contrast, the “American” voice literally cannot speak. The simple fact that the latter is defined in a string of negative identifications—neither a this, nor a that, nor the other—further underscores the point. For the farmer’s style can only really be described in privative terms, as incorrect and inexpert. The logic so

PAGE 1

2

Introduction

perfectly encapsulated here can be generalized across late eighteenthcentury Anglo-American letters, where literary Americanness was quite literally being invented as a set of characteristics, not just incidentally distinct from Britishness but explicitly constructed in a differential relation to it, and in that sense, generated directly out of the British norms it claimed to leave behind. During the 1780s and 1790s, anglophone writers in the United States first began to claim that their writing incarnated “American” qualities. It was, at least in part, a kind of marketing slogan aimed at capturing a larger share of an increasingly competitive transatlantic literary market. Working in popular literary forms and modes already well established in Europe, these writers could offer recognizable and readable literary commodities; yet they also got to insist that they were creating something new and different. In the most basic terms, that newness had to do with their location on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. The condition of being “cis-Atlantic,” to use the awkward-sounding neologism Thomas Jefferson coined in 1782,2 made it possible to claim that U.S. writing was infused with some distinct quality of “Americanness.” The only problem was, before authors could offer such a thing to readers, they would have to figure out what on earth it was. During the colonial period, Anglo-American authors had been far more interested in demonstrating their ability to write within a British tradition of belles lettres than in boasting of any distinctive characteristics associated with American subjectivity, geography, or social conditions.3 In fact, prior to around 1780, had such a phrase as “American literature” been used at all, it would most likely have been taken to refer to works by British authors with New World settings, like John Dryden’s The Indian Emperour (1665), Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), or Charlotte Lennox’s Life of Harriot Stuart (1750)—early examples of what Paul Giles has recently termed “the American tradition in English literature.”4 Between 1780 and 1800, however, authors in the new United States began to formulate their own concept of a properly American literature. Yet that new concept preceded its referent, not just in the way usually asserted by our literary histories—that the call would have to wait a half century or more for its fulfillment—but in the more fundamental sense that, at the moment the idea was born, no one had really considered yet what it would mean to write like an American, what literature with an American origin would look like, nor what literary characteristics the elusive quality of Americanness could be expected to generate. Literature, American Style returns to this moment, decades before

PAGE 2

Introduction

3

the romantic nationalism of James Fenimore Cooper, the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, or the iconoclastic poetics of Walt Whitman, when a fantasy about the unique characteristics of U.S. literature and culture first took shape—and when, for particular reasons, that notion came to be yoked to literary style. To tell this story is to confront head-on the foundational question of American literary studies: by what logic do we carve out a particular slice of anglophone literary production and then proceed to treat it as a distinct national tradition with special characteristics? For most of the twentieth century, it was an essentially unspoken, and hence undefended premise that, as Lawrence Buell has recently put it, “anyone who cares about U.S. literature and culture has a natural interest in trying to understand what is distinctive about it.”5 But since the 1980s—the decade at the end of which William Spengemann famously held up a “mirror for Americanists” in which they might glimpse the distorted reflection of their own uninterrogated assumptions6 —the critical cathexis of “American” originality has justifiably come under attack for its tendency toward exceptionalism and its willful blindness to transnational cultural dynamics, both hemispheric and global.7 As will be abundantly clear in the pages that follow, it is no nostalgia for an older exceptionalist common sense that leads me to pose the question of national style. On the contrary, my aim is to investigate the eighteenth-century literary origins of the logic that made twentieth-century critical exceptionalism possible in the first place. For, some two centuries before it became the site of heated polemics in the academy, the question of national distinctiveness was first posed as a rather concrete problem of literary production and marketing. My project here, then, is more historical and genealogical than it is polemical; my question is not whether it is true or false that U.S. literature has distinct and identifiable qualities, but when that notional aspiration first arose, why it did, and most important, how it came to be lodged in style. Far from wanting to make a new fetish of national originality under the sign of “style,” what this book emphasizes is really the opposite: the very idea of American literary novelty was not something new under the sun but rather a particular spin on cultural developments that originate elsewhere and have a long European literary history. In fact, early U.S. literary producers gravitated to the realm of style precisely because it provided a way of grappling with that uncomfortable problem of cultural indebtedness.

* * *

PAGE 3

4

Introduction

The early anglophone writers of the United States made their case for national distinctiveness in rather different terms than their more storied mid-nineteenth-century counterparts or the literary critics who later codified that “great tradition” as a national fetish. Those differences make the post-Revolutionary bid for national originality a fascinating object of study, even if we believe scholars have dwelled for far too long on the comparable claims and desires of later generations. For even as early U.S. authors began to insist that they were generating a new and distinctly cisatlantic literary tradition, they set out to do so by self-consciously imitating transatlantic forms and then adapting them to a new environment. “Originally the writer designed to imitate, in the several parts, as many British Poets,” wrote Timothy Dwight in the introduction to his seven-part American georgic, Greenfield Hill (1794).8 In a similar spirit, Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 advertisement for his first novel rested its claim for “originality” in gothic fiction squarely on the author’s “employ[ment] of the European models”; yet by “adapt[ing] his fiction to all that is genuine and peculiar in the scenes before him,” he promised to offer readers a literary performance “unexampled” in America in the form of a “tale that may rival the performances of this kind which have lately issued from the English press.”9 If it seems peculiar that the assertion of national originality could walk hand in hand with the acknowledgment of foreign emulation, this double gesture was entirely typical of the period. In fact, as Michael North argues in a fascinating recent study, Novelty: A History of the New, the concept of innovation throughout most of its Western history consistently presumed that it was less an act of “radical creation” out of nothing and “more a matter of adjustment and recombination” of “preexisting elements.”10 In accordance with this general principle, early U.S. literature presented itself not as a sui generis tradition, but as a set of original imitations. To modern readers, though, the very notion of attempting to arrive at originality through imitation might appear to be a plain contradiction in terms. In the Anglo-American context in particular, this is largely because “imitation” came to connote something so different to later generations of artists and critics. It is well documented that for those writers whom we now associate with the mid-nineteenth-century “American Renaissance,” literary imitation represented a kind of cultural malady. This was the problem to which Herman Melville addressed himself in the pseudonymous 1850 essay, “Hawthorne and His Mosses, By a Virginian Spending July in Vermont.” Speaking through a literary-nationalist persona, Melville

PAGE 4

Introduction

5

launched a spirited Emerson-like attack on cultural imitation and, along with it, made a call for a more vigorous kind of literary nationalism under the banner of Nathaniel Hawthorne: “But it is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation. . . . And we want no American Goldsmiths; nay, we want no American Miltons. It were the vilest thing you could say of a true American author, that he were an American Tompkins. Call him an American, and have done; for you can not say a nobler thing about him.”11 As the callouts to Milton and Goldsmith suggest, this whole business of an American so-and-so seemed to Melville to belong more properly to the colonial past; to compare a nineteenth-century American author to a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century English one is to turn the hands of the cultural clock back to a prenational state before the United States could boast any models of its own. In actuality, Melville’s “Virginian” asserts, Hawthorne was nothing less than a true American original and the living antidote to the disease of transatlantic imitation. Such claims started to crystallize around the figure of Hawthorne between Melville’s 1850 essay and Henry James’s 1879 assessment of “the celebrated American romancer” as “the most valuable example of the American genius” in his biography of Hawthorne.12 As James and others were fond of pointing out, Hawthorne’s birthdate alone (he was born on the Fourth of July) seemed to predestine him to play a part in this crucial cultural-literary phase of American independence. By the 1950s, critics such as Richard Chase elevated this commonplace image of Hawthorne into a full-scale literary-historical argument about the American “romance” as a native species of prose fiction crucially distinct from those of Europe, with Hawthorne as its first truly effective practitioner.13 In a sense, Hawthorne himself was always more of a pawn in this literary-nationalist game than one of its players. His own discussion of the romance in the preface to The House of the Seven Gables (1851), for example, staged only a generic distinction—not a national one. By calling his long fictions “Romances,” Hawthorne explained, he only hoped to “claim a certain latitude . . . which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume, had he professed to be writing a Novel.” If the novel must bind itself to the real and assert a certain kind of mimetic fidelity, the romance has more freedom to roam: “While, as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably, so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart,” the romance still “has fairly a right to present that truth, under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing or creation.”14 Even so, while Hawthorne’s use of this generic

PAGE 5

6

Introduction

distinction thus made no explicit bid for national originality, his language of legal rights and responsibilities, along with the very notion of a proprietary literary claim, do suggest what the argument could become in other hands: American literature is not merely different but unique; it is structured differently, obeys different internal rules, and has a different kind of epistemological responsibility to the referent and to the world of objects. Perhaps no nineteenth-century author voiced the proposition more boldly than Walt Whitman in his 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass: “The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. . . . In the history of the earth hitherto the largest and most stirring appear tame and orderly to their ampler largeness and stir.”15 These more jingoistic expressions of American literary nationalism have received a great deal of scholarly attention, whether in the spirit of celebration or rebuke, in part because they invite associations with American exceptionalism in its explicitly political forms—that fateful fantasy of a uniquely structured society, endowed with peculiar rights and responsibilities on the international world stage, while also being exempt from rules held to be universally binding for all other nations.16 Even Hawthorne’s relatively modest invocations of romantic literary license could be recruited on behalf of literary exceptionalism. From his experiments in fictional form, the story goes, arose a prose tradition that possessed a unique power to conjure what Richard Poirier called a “world elsewhere”—a kind of heterotopia called forth by, and dwelling in, literary language itself.17 My purpose in taking this brief forward peek is simply to point out that, to readers familiar with later, more extravagant expressions of literary uniqueness, the scene of a nascent U.S. literary culture actually boasting of local versions of British types tends to seem rather quaint by contrast. Where is the declaration of radical alterity? Where is D. H. Lawrence’s heterotopic version of American literature, peopled by what he called “strangers, incomprehensible beings . . . creatures of an other-world”?18 In fact, the late eighteenth-century works under consideration here made a different kind of claim. This earlier generation of Anglo-American writers sought not to produce new literary forms but to put a local stamp on borrowed ones.19 The later attack on their imitativeness (Melville’s “better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation”) is evidence, not that it took until the generation of Hawthorne and Whitman for American writers finally to succeed in being original where their predecessors had failed, but rather a sign that a new notion of “originality” came to wage war on an

PAGE 6

Introduction

7

older one, redefining the concept of “imitation” in the process. The literary historian’s challenge, then, is to apprehend the earlier formation in its own terms, rather than understanding it merely as an uncompleted cultural gesture—that is, without orienting it at the outset toward its more famous teloi. The first order of business is to recover that older sense of literary originality, according to which one could, without derision or triviality, without inconsistency or absurdity, actually celebrate an American Milton or an American Goldsmith. To do analytical justice to that literary logic of adoption and adaptation—to see it as anything other than a failure to become a later idea of literary art—will require us, first of all, to shift our frame of reference to pre-Romantic notions of artistic originality, where literary genius could consist in the exemplary performance of an existing form.20 Transplantation, translation, transfer, conversation, correspondence, commerce—these are the terms in which early U.S. authors conceived of transatlantic literary relations. The concept anchoring their literary nationalism was not absolute alterity but rather, as Leonard Tennenhouse has put it, “repetition, with a difference.”21 Yet they still boasted not just of radical novelty, but of national originality by virtue of what Charles Brockden Brown called their “unexampled” quality. What, then, might these writers have to teach us by violating the Emersonian dictum, “Insist on yourself; never imitate”?22 To begin to answer this question, we must become far more interested in the eighteenth-century origins of a notional “American literature” than in its nineteenth-century destinations.

Inventing the Cisatlantic I have called the idea of literary Americanness a late eighteenth-century marketing scheme, but it was also a recognizable cultural project very much of its historical moment—one particular expression of a postRevolutionary imperative, after having established a new sovereign body politic, to define the “American” as a new figure and endow it with a distinct, even unique national character. One of the most revealing aspects of this project was its unabashed, undisguised arbitrariness; rather than some organic substance, “American character” clearly named a lack or absence that would have to be remedied by a deliberate cultural exertion. This is not merely some retrospective poststructuralist conceit. As Anglo-American

PAGE 7

8

Introduction

statesmen began to insist at the time, and social and cultural historians closer to our own time have emphasized in turn, the Revolution was not the end of a process of national self-definition but its merest beginning. To put it in the simplest terms, the problem was this: “Americanness” did not yet exist as a positive entity with concrete attributes, but for a host of political, social, cultural, and economic reasons, AngloAmericans suddenly found it increasingly necessary to speak as if it did. Yet unless they were willing to embrace an indigenous definition modeled on the continent’s native inhabitants—a cultural road generally not taken during this period, despite certain symbolic gestures in that direction— they had but one alternative. To produce the American as a category in its own right, they would have to begin by defining it in opposition to the Briton. That simple logic of negation cut a path through a thicket of cultural self-definition. Through it, the cultural space of the “cisatlantic” would henceforth be constituted in a complex differential relation to the transatlantic cultural spaces against which it seemed to distinguish itself. “People in America have always been shouting about the things they are not,” D. H. Lawrence long ago observed in Studies in Classic American Literature.23 Terence Martin, lending some rigor and specificity to this formulation, has investigated the “rhetoric of negation” that served for a long time as the predominant mode for American acts of self-definition.24 Late eighteenth-century Americans, Martin observes, display a particular “tendency (perhaps a need) to negate Europe in order to identify and possess America,” thus producing a vast canon of “negative catalogues” and “statements mark[ing] the difference between an old world and a new by enumerating what is missing in the new.”25 Paradoxically, the “form and impulse” of this kind of negative cultural definition itself had roots in the European cultures that were being negated; moreover, as I will indicate in the pages that follow, some of the actual content of these privative definitions of Americanness had observable European counterparts and equivalences. Yet in this kind of cultural myth making, even borrowed gestures could be turned back against the lender in an insistent act of disidentification. Out of this cultural dynamic was born what Martin calls “the powerful dialectic that fostered a sense of American identity” during the Early Republic: “From the Old World came a conception of the New, from the New a conception of the Old by means of which Americans could announce what they were not . . . and thereby proclaim their superiority.”26

PAGE 8

Introduction

9

My subject here is not this larger cultural process as such, but the literary problem that was its particularly concrete homologue. According to some Anglo-American thinkers at the end of the eighteenth century, the solution to the vast and abstract problem of cultivating a new national identity might begin with language itself. “Every engine should be employed to render the people of this country national,” Noah Webster insisted in Dissertations on the English Language (1789). “However they may boast of Independence, and the freedom of their government, yet their opinions are not sufficiently independent; an astonishing respect for the arts and literature of their parent country, and a blind imitation of its manners, are still prevalent among the Americans.”27 As we can immediately infer from this oft-quoted description, Webster did not believe that the solution could be a political one; after all, the problem had not yet taken care of itself in the course of achieving political independence, nor even a bold act of federal reconstitution. There was now a new national “government,” to be sure, but not yet a national culture; there was a new “country,” but not yet a nation; this country had “people” in it whom he can call “the Americans,” but Americans were not yet a people. This peculiar deficiency could only be remedied, Webster was convinced, in the realm of language. “A national language is a band of national union.”28 U.S. national character would eventually arise from the invention of a language which was English, but no longer British. For reasons I will detail in Chapter 1, Webster went to work on a technical level to purge American spellings of the inconsistencies and polyglossic baggage British English had acquired from long proximity to other European tongues. A completely rationalized and simplified mode of spelling, he wagered, would immediately pay off at the level of cultural reproduction; children of all ranks would learn the language faster and more expertly, as would immigrants with different mother tongues. In this way, a purified English language would bring a principle of uniformity to bear on the diverse contact zone that was the social reality of eighteenth-century North America, binding together a host of languages and regional and class dialects into a single new linguistic community. This would make it difficult for another European language to compete with English as the language of America. It would also keep African Americans and Native Americans at the cultural margins by defining America as English in an ethnolinguistic sense. The “American tongue,” Webster asserted, would have to be based on English, for that language is “the inheritance which the Americans have received from their British

PAGE 9

10

Introduction

parents”; yet the language would define itself as American by virtue of its departures from British English. In order to perfect the language while making it distinctly “ours,” then, Webster set out—as he put it rather strikingly—to “make a difference”29 between British and American English. Certainly, we should understand this phrase quite literally: the desired national distinction would have to be made, that is, manufactured through the technical means of orthographic reform. But we would also do well to hear in Webster’s word “difference” the mathematical denotation of that term, namely, the result of a subtraction. For this was a bid for linguistic novelty that proceeded, in effect, by taking something away. Webster would define American English precisely by negating or abjecting those aspects of British English which he regarded as corrupt or irrational. What was left over after this deductive operation would constitute a “new” language practice. Meanwhile, as linguists and lexicographers were trying to puzzle out what it was going to mean to speak English on this side of the Atlantic, authors of imaginative literature were busy working out the analogous literary problem that centrally concerns me here: how their works could exist within the larger body of anglophone writing and yet still claim to lie apart from it as a distinct national tradition. The linguistic solution I have just summarized in fact pre-traced the exact path the literary solution would take, while also suggesting why literature could be a productive medium for working out fundamental problems of cultural identity. Anglo-American literature, like its language, was essentially and inescapably derivative. Yet it too would insist on defining itself not as a repetition of past practices, but by virtue of what it is not: not aboriginally American because it is English in origin, but at the same time not British because it is American in practice. After all, Noah Webster did not propose, as some of his contemporaries are said to have done, that the North American republic adopt a truly American language such as Iroquois or Algonquian in order to provide itself with the necessary “national band”; rather, he began with Johnson’s English and then made certain local modifications to it in order to recast the language in a putatively American form. Just so, Anglo-American literary artists did not, say, begin to write trickster tales as a way of asserting the indigeneity of their tradition; nor did they embrace African American literary forms like the slave narrative as the (arguably far stronger) basis of a culturally distinct tradition. Instead, these authors began with the established forms of English letters and then set out to alter those forms in ways

PAGE 10

Introduction

11

that would render them uniquely “American.”30 By analogy to the JudeoChristian creation myth, we might say that the creation of U.S. culture was less like that of the first man and more like that of the first woman; “Americanness,” that is, was less a miraculous ex nihilo creation than a generation of radical difference through an act of subdivision and derivation.

* * * The exception, as the saying goes, is constituted by the rule; just so, “American literature” began to self-generate by first defining a British literary norm from which it might then “except” itself. We can call it a literary version of what Amanda Emerson, drawing on the social theory of Georg Simmel, has termed “negative affiliation.”31 That is, the very idea of the unique singularity of our literature, or of its distinct national character, first originated with the authors’ self-conscious negation of certain characteristics of British literary culture rather than having grown organically from any distinctive features of the American scene. Thus, for example, if British letters were supposed to be hypercultivated and artificial, Cre`vecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer refashioned their American counterpart as blessedly rude and therefore as manifestly authentic (Chapter 2). If the British culture of the aesthetic was an art of the polished and the beautiful, Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly rewrote the gothic romance as an aesthetic of the difficult that mirrored the rough sublimity of America’s geography (Chapter 3). And if British courtship practices and their fictional expressions relied on artifice, disguise, and hypocrisy, seduction novels like Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple and Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette argued, American expression was artless, sincere, and plainspoken (Chapter 4). In many if not all instances of this kind of national selfdefinition, the so-called British norm is little more than a stereotype serving the obvious function of enabling Anglo-American differentiation by contrast. More than that, as I have already noted above, this whole logic of negative or subtractive originality, along with some of its characteristic cultural contents, were often themselves direct borrowings from specifically British rhetorics of negation. Even as U.S. writers asserted their distance from British literary culture, they repeated structurally identical gestures of differentiation with which that British culture had set itself against (for example) a French literary culture that it had cast in comparable terms as

PAGE 11

12

Introduction

extravagant and hypercultivated, over-polished and insincere. For all of its claims to novelty, then, this kind of national differentiation did not invent any “new” cultural values. Far from it. In fact, it usually proceeded by grasping onto a cultural opposition already active in British culture, adopting one of its poles as the axis of a supposedly American characteristic, and consigning the other side of the binary to a residual British cultural stance. This was precisely what Noah Webster did, for example, when he embraced certain phonetic spellings that had already been put forward by certain British lexicographers (including color for “colour” or public for “publick”), and then extrapolated from them an “American” mode of spelling. In spite of its rhetorical tenor, then, the American negation of British literary culture was not really a cultural “disaffiliation”; it would be more accurate to theorize it as an inverted form of affiliation.32 My belief is that this basic reorientation immediately reframes the old question of what makes American literature American. If the set of positive literary features we later came to associate with an American aesthetic (characteristics like naı¨vete´, vernacularity, a demotic style, and so on) were not the origin, but the product, of a process of negative definition, then our literary-historical objective must shift accordingly: instead of setting out to discover the “American” characteristics that generated a literature, we would look for the moment when a U.S. nationalist cultural attitude first defined an abjected norm, and, in that very same process, defined itself as the exception. What we thus discover is that the claim of cisatlantic literary originality itself has an irreducibly transatlantic source. “To be sure of what they were,” as Terence Martin puts it, Americans “converted a European tradition to their own use and proclaimed (with developing conviction) what they were not.”33 The case I consider in Chapter 2 furnishes a particularly concrete example, for this was precisely what Cre`vecoeur did when he used a (fictional) learned British correspondent as a transatlantic foil for that of his “simple [American] farmer” (Letters, 49). So, too, by having Farmer James describe his own writing almost exclusively through grammatical privatives (“However incorrect my style, however inexpert my methods” [49]), Cre`vecoeur signaled that the style of his “simple farmer” had to be negatively derived, as it were, from a putatively British norm. New stereotypes of “American” identity, language, and literature began to emerge at this historical moment, some of which may still have cultural traction for us; yet we have systematically, perhaps willfully, forgotten the gesture of negative definition which first gave rise to them.

PAGE 12

Introduction

13

The Anglophobia Thesis As I hope is already becoming clear, I mean by all this something quite different from the familiar idea of a “cultural declaration of independence” from Britain which was supposed to complete the act of political separation in literary or artistic terms.34 Literary history has made a cliche´ of the independence trope, but, slogans aside, post-Revolutionary literary culture was shaped more profoundly by the realities of transatlantic exchange than by the desire for national isolation.35 If we feel compelled for some reason to nominate a founding political document as a symbol of this literary culture, why not, at least as a thought experiment, consider alternative candidates? Take the Treaty of Paris, for example.36 After all, nearly all of what we have canonized as U.S. literature is not just “post-Revolutionary,” but “post–Treaty of Paris” as well—less sonorous, but not less true. The treaty, which in 1783 marked the formal commencement of international relations between the United States and Britain as sovereign states and trade partners, used a different sort of performative language than its famous declaring cousin: in it the United States of America “treat[ed] with”37 the British crown to recover “the good Correspondence and Friendship which they mutually wish to restore, and to establish such a beneficial and satisfactory intercourse, between the two countries upon the ground of reciprocal advantages and mutual convenience.”38 The “perpetual Peace and Harmony” thus restored—whose language anticipated the cosmopolitan vision of Immanuel Kant’s “Toward Perpetual Peace” essay a decade later—was to be political, cultural, and not least, economic, reconnecting the circuits of communication and commerce “unhappily interrupted” by the Revolution, rejoining a formerly severed transatlantic tie.39 A declaration of interdependence: how different would American literary history look with that as its governing statement?40 The question is rhetorical, but it should help to explain a peculiar feature of Literature, American Style: my object of study is the aspiration toward national originality, but my methodology and angle of approach are entwined with a recent wave of scholarship that has radically questioned that very idea. Clearly, an alternative paradigm has been emerging in early American studies, one which signals a general change in the status of the nation as an organizing concept.41 But I want to describe it in rather more specific terms than that of a “transnational turn” in order to focus more narrowly on its revision of our assumptions about how anglophone Americans apprehended their relationship to Britain.42 To put a fine point on it,

PAGE 13

14

Introduction

I will term the older common sense the “Anglophobia thesis,” for it proceeded from the premise that U.S. culture was born out an intense desire to cut itself off from Britain. For the sake of parallelism, we can call the revisionary paradigm the “Anglophilia thesis,” partly to indicate its kinship with the “Anglicization” argument in political and social history, but also in a nod to Elisa Tamarkin’s 2008 book, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America. At issue is whether, as Cold War–era cultural histories tended to assume, the new nation immediately began to distance itself from all that is British, or whether, as scholars have recently begun to suggest, Britain still remained a model for cultural definition in the Revolutionary and early national periods and beyond. Rather than capitulating to the commonsense assumption that the Revolution was the accomplishment of a long-standing desire to be separate from Britain—and that the most important cultural products were those that first produced that revolutionary ideology and then sustained the new nation-state—recent scholarship has instead emphasized the complex exchange of political ideas, literary forms, and ideas about group identity and cultural reproduction that began long before, and continued long after, formal political independence. We can see the new emphasis rather clearly in social and political histories of the period. According to the strain of historiography associated with John Murrin, T. H. Breen, Jack Greene, and others, Anglo-Americans were increasingly insistent throughout the colonial period not on increasing or even maintaining their social distance from Britain, but in fact on replicating its institutions and its forms of consumption.43 Murrin’s term for this process, Anglicization, best expresses the paradoxical nature of U.S. national identity as it emerged over the course of the eighteenth century: to the extent that Anglo-Americans did experience a growing sense of political cohesion during this period, “Britain had been the major focus of unity and the engine of change.”44 On this account, the Revolution itself was “the culminating moment in the process of Anglicization”45 rather than an inevitable becoming-American of a settler culture. Literary historians, arguing along comparable lines, have begun to refigure our understanding of transatlantic literary relations precisely by questioning the assumption “that different national governments mean different national literatures,” as Leonard Tennenhouse put it. In his 2007 book, The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750–1850, Tennenhouse gives us an entirely different explanatory model for transatlantic cultural relations at the end of the eighteenth

PAGE 14

Introduction

15

century than the reflexive oedipal narrative according to which a new national identity was “born” and then naturally grew up to assert its maturity and independence.46 Instead, he takes the counterintuitive line that early U.S. culture is nothing more nor less than a branch of a British diaspora, that is, an explicit attempt to reproduce the characteristic elements of English culture outside of England itself.47 Tamarkin’s Anglophilia, published the following year, deploys a different category to do comparable work (though the fact that one of her sections is entitled “The Importance of Being English” is an immediate indication that she and Tennenhouse were independently thinking along similar lines).48 If Tamarkin rounded out the national picture by reaccentuating a tradition of American Anglophilia central to the antebellum period, recent work by Edward Larkin and Philip Gould recovers the critical role of loyalist voices in early U.S. cultureformation.49 Taken together, we might say, all this work tends to find something like “Anglicization” precisely where we have been trained to look for “Americanization.”50 Now, since much of this scholarship questions the self-evidence of the nation as a category of cultural analysis, thus unseating the exceptionalist premises that dominated Cold War–era literary scholarship, it may at first seem an uncomfortable entryway into my inquiry, if not to obviate my question entirely. Yet Literature, American Style is born from the conviction that these disciplinary turns and methodological revisions provide the perfect opportunity to reconsider the old question of “our national literature” in a fresh way. To do so is not perversely to redraw the borders around U.S. literature at the very moment transatlantic, hemispheric, and global approaches are rendering them permeable and subsuming the nation into larger geocultural units.51 Rather, as I hinted at the outset, it is to return to the early national history of our academic present. In this way, my project is motivated more by questions of cultural genealogy than debates about scholarly methodology. To the extent that I engage hemispheric revisions to the literary field, for example, I do so by exposing the origin of the central mystification they redress: the moment when literary production in the U.S. first began to refer to itself as “American literature,” not only obscuring its transatlantic debts and resonances but making the nation stand synecdochically for the continent in what has become a peculiarly powerful cultural distortion. This moment inaugurated a fateful cultural process by which “U.S. literature” famously took hold of the conceptual space of “American literature” and claimed rights to it; so powerful was

PAGE 15

16

Introduction

this appropriation that it now requires us to deploy “new” hemispheric methodologies to restore what should really have been a simple matter of denotation.52 But just as importantly, something of the opposite cultural formation also dates back to this same historical moment. The decades after the Revolution marked, in a sense, the original “transatlantic turn,” when just-emerging concepts of U.S. identity first did battle over the precise nature of its relation to Britishness—not as a theoretical matter of critical method, but a practical matter of cultural production and ethnic identification. My most difficult and most important task is to come up with a satisfactory account of the relationship between these strangely twinned cultural formations.

* * * Joseph Roach has observed that stories of cultural origin proceed “along two general axes of possibility”—that they come, in effect, in two flavors. First, “the diasporic, which features migration,” and second, “the autochthonous, which claims indigenous roots deeper than memory itself.”53 This distinction is related to a structural opposition often framed in anthropological work as allochthony versus autochthony. This is the opposition often implicitly at work when competing claims to political power are symbolically resolved by assigning a myth of origins to a ruler: the allochthon is the stranger-king, the ruler who has come from elsewhere and brought his exotic power with him; the autochthon is the local king with wholly indigenous roots, whose legitimacy springs from the earth itself.54 At issue in my project is how such myths are used to tell origin stories about literature and culture, rather than to legitimate political rule, but the same conceptual possibilities are in play. Is American literature an allochthonous body of Old World learning and letters that has been transferred to the New World, or is it an autochthonous growth from American earth? From where does its prestige and vitality originate, its transatlantic origins or its cisatlantic destination? Or, to put it in terms that I will explore in the book’s coda: Which is determinative, stock or soil—varietal or terroir? One of my most surprising findings is the manner in which these seemingly incommensurable origin stories powerfully, if illogically, mingled in the late eighteenth-century invention of “American literature” and have continued to do so ever since.55 Their strange coexistence is one of the reasons that both the nation-centered versions of our cultural history and its various

PAGE 16

Introduction

17

transnationalist revisions will always continue to have interpretive traction. Ultimately, there is no choosing between these alternatives, simply because they are not just argumentative positions or methodological paradigms; they are aspects of a contradictory definition of U.S. national character that lie at the very historical source of that idea. What I try to capture in this book, then, is the double logic by which an emergent U.S. literary culture at once asserted its continuities with, and its radical departures from Britishness—abjecting and incorporating it at once. The logic of negative affiliation was what enabled its first cultural producers to manage this inherent contradiction. As I have already indicated, this way of understanding the problem is intended, first and foremost, as a revision of the Anglophobia thesis that used to govern the literary history of the Revolutionary period. But at the same time, its differential logic should also sound distinct in emphasis from that of Tennenhouse’s “British diaspora” or Tamarkin’s “Anglophilia.” On the one hand, AngloAmericans were explicitly attempting to transfer the characteristic elements of English culture elsewhere. On the other hand, however, some of the authors of this transferred culture then immediately turned around and claimed a radical originality generated by that “elsewhere.” In the terms of the botanical figure which was so often used to frame such matters of cultural transfer, a transplanted stock has sent down roots into unaccustomed earth, and that new soil has in turn begun to exert a transformative effect on the old stock. In order to tell both sides of this story, we must grasp how Anglo-American literary culture sutured the fantasy of autochthony to the reality of cultural allochthony. It did so not by claiming a kinship with actual indigenous cultures but rather by asserting that Englishness itself underwent a process of being positively transformed by the American genius loci. Neither “Anglophobia” nor “Anglophilia” can capture the full range of cultural affect involved in this logic of negative affiliation.

Literary Foreign Debt and the Order of Style Though I have occasionally referred to American literary distinctiveness as an “idea,” my most significant argument in this book is that literary Americanness was not thought into existence as a concept so much as written into existence as style. I have already used that term several times in the pages above, but I have now to theorize it properly, to account for its

PAGE 17

18

Introduction

particular usage in the late eighteenth century, and to explain why such a concept would have come to bear such crucial cultural weight in the context of the literary problem I am investigating. The word “style” sees a lot of use in the period (“stile” was the more typical eighteenth-century spelling), but I am interested less in tracking the occurrences of a word than analyzing the functioning of the concept, whether or not the term itself was inked to paper on a given occasion. Style, I shall argue, was the concept that a burgeoning national literature seized on as a solution to the problem of literary foreign debt—a notion I borrow from Franco Moretti and Roberto Schwarz. Recruiting worldSystems theory in order to rethink literary relations on the model of global economy, Moretti’s “Conjectures on World Literature” (2000) argued that literary history too should recognize a world “simultaneously one, and unequal: with a core, and a periphery (and a semiperiphery) that are bound together in a relationship of growing inequality” (56). He then adapted and generalized a trope from Schwarz’s study of Brazilian literature in particular: “Foreign debt is as inevitable in Brazilian letters as in any other field.”56 The economic metaphor is always “subterraneously at work in literary history,” writes Moretti, but what would it mean to elevate it into a fully realized theory of literature: “ ‘foreign debt’ as a complex literary feature”57 of international literary relations? With the novel supplying the test case, Moretti arrived at “comparative morphology,” the study of how a literary form is forced to adapt as it moves from its original context into a new one, where the now “foreign form” encounters new “local materials.” Thus the importation of the novel from its Western European points of origin into India, Japan, Brazil, the Philippines, and so on turns out to provide so many models of this “compromise between foreign form and local materials,” while what we thought was “the rule of the rise of the novel (the Spanish, the French, and especially the British case)” turn out instead to be the exceptions.58 Adaptation of a foreign form is the “law of literary evolution.”59 While examples from and references to the United States are notably absent from “Conjectures on World Literature,” there is no question that its central dialectic of formal adoption and adaptation is an enormously productive lens for the emergence of U.S. literature. For as I have already indicated, early U.S. writing was intensely aware of itself as a set of local varieties of borrowed types, and the literary dynamics of foreign debt remained a constant presence throughout the early national period, not

PAGE 18

Introduction

19

only in the wake of the War of 1812. From this vantage point, the fashioning of a U.S. literary culture looks less like a “rise” of a national literature and more like one of those “compromise[s] between foreign form and local materials”60 by which Moretti characterizes the novel’s adaptation into Japan, Brazil, or the Philippines. But I am just as interested in the limits of this comparison. For in these other scenarios of literary adaptation, the adapted form immediately differs from the borrowed model in one irreducible respect: language itself. As the novel moves to Brazil or Japan, it crosses not just a geographical barrier but also a national-linguistic one; adaptation coincides with translation and is thus overdetermined by it. In the anglophone literature of the United States, however, imported British literary forms crossed an ocean but no such language boundary. With no distinct vernacular in place to mark the instant and irreducible difference of the transferred form, this emergent literature had to find some other basis for its putatively national character if it wanted to claim the existence of such a thing. “Customs, habits, and language, as well as government, should be national,” wrote Noah Webster in 1789. “America should have her own distinct from all the world. Such is the policy of other nations and such must be our policy, before the states can either be independent or respectable.”61 Note the counterfactual mood that reigns here, as it tends to do in Webster’s writing in particular and early U.S. cultural nationalisms in general: America “should” have a national language, it “must” have one, but even after a bold act of federal reconstitution, it as yet does not. How, then, could this nation hope to bind itself to itself as a unity without even possessing its own tongue? “Nations arose from languages, and not languages from nations,” Isidore of Seville had written in his seventh-century treatise The Etymologies.62 Webster’s linguistic plan, insofar as it attempted to form a national language after the constitution of a national government, inverted this age-old law of the generation of languages: it proposed to make a language from a nation.63 And whether Webster and his contemporaries succeeded at all in doing so remained a point of contention and mockery well into the nineteenth century. “The Americans,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge pointedly quipped in 1822, “presented the extraordinary anomaly of a people without a language.”64 Against the background of this linguistic problem, the cultural object we call “American literature” would seem to be an even more perverse impossibility: How could a nation with a borrowed language even dare to

PAGE 19

20

Introduction

dream of producing its own authentic tradition of letters? To use the economic metaphor again, founding a national literature in such a cultural environment was something like founding a national economy without minting a new currency. This problem made the literature of the anglophone United States a particular case but by no means a unique one, for here it was shaped by a set of cultural relations shared with all nations born from settler colonialism. As Donald Denoon and other scholars of comparative colonialism have demonstrated, the disparate cultural histories of South Africa, Australia, Argentina, and others share not only particular economic structures but also “ ‘exceptionalist’ ideologies . . . common to settler regimes.”65 The remarkable irony yielded by this comparative view, put simply, is that American exceptionalism—whether in its political, economic, or cultural incarnations—is unexceptional. And yet, as this scholarship also makes clear, the cultural elites in such settler societies do tend rather insistently to represent the nation in exceptionalist terms. As Michael Denning argues, the ideological formation we know as American exceptionalism is thus best and most accurately understood as a particular local variety of what he calls “settler exceptionalism.”66 To explain this in the simplest terms: it stands to reason that a settler nation, for which “foreign debt” is an ineluctable social fact, might insist on its cultural uniqueness and autonomy in a compensatory way. It was a way of dealing with the problem of culture endemic to the settler nation: cultural life is lived in a metropolitan language rather than in a unique vernacular. This problem deeply affects the project of a literary nationalism and determines the shape any such formation seems logically bound to take. And, in the case of the anglophone United States, at least, I believe that style was the solution to this cultural and linguistic dilemma.

* * * “Stile” could be glossed in the eighteenth century, rather simply, as “the choice of words and the manner of arranging them.”67 In this technical sense, style was a second-order linguistic concept, consisting not in the words themselves but in the particularity of their selection and combination. Thus, in its more generalized sense, style signified a mode of expression, a way of referring to how different speakers, orators, or writers might wield the same linguistic elements in distinct ways. This made it possible to name different poetic or prose styles as baroque, plain, pastoral, and so on.

PAGE 20

Introduction

21

The later sumptuary or sartorial senses of the term were built upon these primary linguistic meanings (etymologically, the English word “style” is derived from the Latin “stilus,” a writing instrument),68 thus playing on the traditional association between modes of dress and styles of address. The important point is that across the range of its usage, “style” always points to a locus of difference in repetition: one exhibits a style when one participates in a common practice but does so in a particular manner. Also significant here is that, where later usage tends to associate style with individual differences (the singular mark or “signature” of an author), during this period it more commonly referred to collective distinctions of class, occupation, region, or nation.69 The logic of “national style” thus provided American writers at the end of the eighteenth century with exactly what they needed: a way of asserting that they borrowed literary forms but “wore” them differently: English literature, American style. This is not to say that the concept of style itself is in any way an invention of modern settler cultures. Obviously, we can look to classical rhetorical manuals, and particularly those of Latin antiquity, for a theoretical and practical body of writing on style that remained very in circulation during the eighteenth century. As has been well documented in early American scholarship, not only were the political structures of the Roman Republic an ever-present point of comparison and contrast (both in idealizing and cautionary terms) for the new United States, but the cultural products and oratorical traditions of ancient Rome were treated as a crucial training ground for aspiring American writers and rhetoricians.70 I would sharpen the point further: in Latin rhetorical treatises, post-Revolutionary Americans found not only practical manuals of style—their “Strunk and White,” so to speak—but also a theoretical model for the use of “style” to establish cultural uniqueness in the face of foreign influence. When Roman rhetoricians began to deal with the Greek inheritance within their own particular sphere of activity, the question of style similarly began to take on a broader cultural denotation, rather than simply referring to a feature of individual expression. The locus classicus is Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, published in the late first century CE. Though many sections of the work address the cultivation of style in the Roman schoolboy, citizen, and would-be orator, the most crucial discussion appears in Book VIII: “What the Greeks call φρασς we in Latin call elocutio or style. Style is revealed both in individual words and in groups of words. As regards the former, we must see that they are Latin, clear, elegant and

PAGE 21

22

Introduction

well-adapted to produce the desired effect. As regards the latter, they must be correct, aptly placed and adorned with suitable figures.”71 The words must be Latin: that a fact so obvious must be stated, and recursively instantiated by distinguishing the Greek and Latin signs for “style” itself, indicates that the point is far from trivial. This question of cultural distinction is what marks the emphasis of Book VIII as distinct from Quintilian’s discussions of style earlier in the work: “I have already, in the portions of the first book dealing with the subject of grammar, said all that is necessary on the way to acquire idiomatic and correct speech. But there my remarks were restricted to the prevention of positive faults, and it is well that I should now point out that our words should have nothing provincial or foreign about them.”72 In other words, it is now a matter of cultivating not just a proper style but a properly Roman one. “Idiomatic and correct speech” will not be a function only of choosing the words from the reservoir of the Latin language but also, he emphasizes, of combining those chosen words in a particular way. This is why “idiomatic” and “correct” are conjoined as goals: “For you will find that there are a number of writers by no means deficient in style whose language is precious rather than idiomatic.”73 An idiom (etymologically, a thing that is made one’s own) is a combination of words that, placed in certain relation to one another, have a peculiar meaning in a particular language community. One simple way of putting it is this: even if all of the component words of an idiom were identical or cognate from one language to another, the overall linguistic effect could not be simply translated by substitution of words. This notion of idiomaticity is crucial enough to Quintilian that he gives it anecdotal support in an excursive passage worth quoting at length: “As an illustration of my meaning I would remind you of the story of the old woman at Athens, who, when Theophrastus, a man of no mean eloquence, used one solitary word in an affected way, immediately said that he was a foreigner, and on being asked how she detected it, replied that his language was too Attic for Athens. Again Asinius Pollio held that Livy, for all his astounding eloquence, showed traces of the idiom of Padua. Therefore, if possible, our voice and all our words should be such as to reveal the native of this city, so that our speech may seem to be of genuine Roman origin, and not merely to have been presented with Roman citizenship.”74 Quintilian’s use of one Greek and one Roman example conceals, in a way, that this problem is far more acute in the latter case, which is to say, to his own audience—members of a culture indelibly marked by linguistic and cultural foreign debt. For the

PAGE 22

Introduction

23

Greeks, who recognized no prior or foreign model to which they need aspire, “correct” speech was simply that which obeyed objective laws of expression. But for Roman rhetoricians, there was an added layer of cultural exertion and aspiration, namely Latinity—being correctly Latin. I have taken this detour through Latin rhetoric not only for the historical and institutional reason that this rhetorical tradition in general, and Quintilian’s text in particular, would have been intimately familiar to late eighteenth-century authors, readers, and politicians, but more fundamentally because the distinction between these two relationships to language seems to me to be structurally similar to the transatlantic dynamic at work in British-American cultural relations. Beginning at midcentury, standardbearers of British English like Samuel Johnson had attempted to stabilize the English language and to encode a lexical standard. Later in the century, those British attempts would be countered by American lexicographers like Noah Webster, who set out to address its endemic inconsistencies in spelling and construction and to cultivate an American orthographic system distinct from it and capable of forming a more perfect standard of its own. We might say by analogy that Johnson’s English thus played “Greek” to Webster’s “Latin.” But the linguistic analogy immediately breaks down. For Roman rhetoricians and poets, the problem of imitatio inherently coincided with the fact of translatio. “What the Greeks call φρασς we in Latin call elocutio or style.”75 That is to say, at least there were different words for the same concept; at least the idea of style was voiced by different phonemes, visualized by different graphemes. Even under such linguistic circumstances, it was difficult enough to address the problem of speaking a genuinely Roman Latin; imagine how much more difficult had the problem been that of speaking Greek as a Roman. But that, in effect, was the AngloAmerican predicament as I have described it: the cultural-nationalist impulse had to be conducted within the same language as the “foreign” culture whose influence must be managed. This sociolinguistic dilemma, and the cultural problem it signals, was a far more intractable one than Quintilian had faced; nonetheless, his theory of idiomatic style cut a path for American cultural nationalism. And this explains, finally, why style was destined to become even more crucial in the American case. I would go so far as to say that only the order of style—which is to say, the register, not of the language reservoir itself, but of the choice of words and the manner of their combination—could provide American speakers of English with the grounds for claiming a

PAGE 23

24

Introduction

national-linguistic distinction. “American English,” if the phrase itself was not to be an absurd contradiction in terms, would have to be something capable of boasting (to paraphrase Quintilian) genuinely American origin, rather than merely English presented with U.S. citizenship. But with no “new language” in circulation to distinguish colony from metropole, the only available ground on which to claim linguistic distinctness is a new way of inhabiting the metropolitan language. Again, this rests on a conception of novelty not as ex nihilo invention, but as a distinctive selection and recombination of already existing elements. If Noah Webster performed this operation on American language by proposing a modal revision of British English—what we might call American-style English—the authors of imaginative fiction I consider here did the same for American literature by proposing to rewrite British letters as “literature, American style.” Precisely because it was modal in the same way as Webster’s orthographic solution, literary style was the only conceptual register capable of performing this sublimation of foreign language and letters into an original vernacular tradition.

Vernacular Anxiety Without a Vernacular Literature, American Style will focus, as its title baldly enough indicates, on the nationally and historically specific ways in which these literary concerns played out in early U.S. literature, and obliges itself to describe this process in thick cultural detail. At the same time, however, it would be a problematic distortion to treat it as a singular phenomenon isolated from the long European literary history that lay behind it. At the very least, any account of the problem of national literary distinctiveness ought to begin by registering a long history of various European literatures confronting similar questions of linguistic and cultural identity, and at times generating strikingly similar discursive strategies for addressing them. That longer literaryhistorical vista is important, not only for the virtues of what we blandly call “context,” but for a more fundamental argumentative reason. It forces us to confront the central paradox of the U.S. insistence on cultural novelty, namely, that it not only repeats but even self-consciously emulates much earlier European arguments and cultural logics. To leave this gear out of the critical machine—to treat the idea of American originality as a selforiginating discourse that could be isolated from prior or similar cultural

PAGE 24

Introduction

25

formations—would only result in a pseudohistory of that phenomenon that in reality did little more than amplify its central assumptions and capitulate in advance to its mystifications. This is a serious danger in any scholarly treatment of the topic—the present work included. The first fence I shall build against the exceptionalist fallacy is simply to recognize this late eighteenth-century desire for American originality as a late moment in a much longer European genealogy. Of course, early U.S. culture had particular political, demographic, and geographical matters to address; the literary nationalism some of its participants embraced was inflected by historically modern conceptions of the nation-state; and the whole question of literary national character thus took on a particular cast in this historical context. To describe that particularity will be my primary critical responsibility in the chapters that follow. Nonetheless, I must begin by acknowledging the fact that nearly all of the “American” cultural problems and solutions I will identify have specific and concrete cultural and historical precursors, far beyond, and long before, the obvious BritishAmerican axis of transatlantic comparison. To begin with, as I have already suggested, the core tension I am identifying in late eighteenth-century U.S. literature had a counterpart in Latin antiquity. Roman authors had similarly to contend with the prestige of foreign models of thought and writing while simultaneously attempting to forge a sense of a distinct cultural identity.76 “If the Greeks were the first in Europe to create and record culture,” Elaine Fantham writes, “the Romans, paradoxically, scored a different first. They were the first cultural community to inherit literary models—those set up for them by the Greeks— before they began to compose their own literature.”77 We might say, in other words, that this represents the moment “foreign debt” first entered European literature as a problem to be overcome. Obviously, to draw comparisons between “Rome’s groping toward cultural maturity and selfdefinition”78 and the cultural politics of the post-Revolutionary United States is already to indulge in a certain level of transhistorical abstraction. The utility of the analogy has its limits, but that doesn’t make it any less illuminating. It is not simply that “cultural activity and state interest”79 came to be yoked together in both instances. More suggestive is how the problem played itself out as a dialectic between alternatives similarly held in discursive tension. Would cultural achievement result from the emulation of imported models, or would it issue from the “well-springs of native soil”80 —allochthony or autochthony? This question would repeat itself over

PAGE 25

26

Introduction

and over throughout European literary history, but the moment of its first articulation has the advantage of laying the logic bare like almost no later iteration. For, framed in those terms, it was an insoluble dilemma: the problem of foreign cultural influence could not be met simply by either the incorporation or the abjection of Greek models.81 Insofar as the foreign model is practically coterminous with cultural prestige itself, the guardians of the emergent culture can no more “reject” it than they can give up any claim to legitimacy; yet insofar as the prestige culture is irreducibly foreign, it cannot simply be adopted wholesale without abandoning the search for national characteristics.82 What was needed was a third possibility. In the Roman context, as elites and cultural producers “gradually came to terms with a culture . . . that they affected to scorn but in fact assimilated and absorbed,” they eventually arrived at a complex way of “adapting Greek forms to convey a Roman character within a Hellenistic context.”83 This Roman “manipulation of the Hellenic legacy”84 has much to teach us about the comparable twists and turns of early U.S. cultural nationalism and the British and European cultural legacies it claimed to sublimate. Through a similar dialectic of adoption and adaptation, U.S. literary culture would have to come to terms with a set of models it regarded as indispensable, yet problematically foreign. Eventually, that dialectic, too, claimed somehow to have yielded an authentically national culture as its final term.85 Beginning in the Middle Ages and intensifying during the various European “renaissances,” this same set of linguistic and cultural questions reasserted itself, though now at one remove: here, the Latin auctores became the objects of influence-anxiety, rather than its subjects and sufferers. This is the problem that shadowed the emergence of the vernacular literatures, where, as with the Roman relationship to the Greeks, the continued necessity of emulating a prestigious tradition (in this case, an antique and no longer “living” foreign one) coincided quite pointedly with the selfassertion of the “vulgar tongue.” This logic played itself out within all of the European vernaculars, starting with Italian. The earliest and most significant case in point is Dante’s De Vulgari Eloquentia (ca. 1307), an unfinished treatise on language which argues for the unique power of the Italian vernacular as the most “illustrious” possible medium for poetry.86 Dante asserts more globally that a spoken language is always more immediate, vital, and natural than that “secondary kind of language” which sits “at one remove from us”—namely, the dead and artificial language of the ancients—and that vernacular language is thus, in principle, “the more

PAGE 26

Introduction

27

noble” kind.87 Steven Botterill refers to this “revolutionary” assertion as “the Declaration of Independence of the ‘modern languages.’ ”88 Americanists should not only take note of the invocation, but also consider what light Dante’s “declaration” might shed on our familiar objects of study and our perennial cultural-historical problematics. The first thing to note is that, as “revolutionary” as the content of Dante’s linguistic argument may be, its style and structure betray the tension between opposed impulses upon which I have already remarked above: to elevate the new national language, on the one hand, and to lay claim to traditional forms of discursive authority, on the other. The most obvious sign of this is the simple fact that Dante must compose his celebration of the vulgar tongue not in Italian but in Latin—and as Botterill observes, a particularly “graceful” and “mellifluous” Latin, at that.89 These are the same paradoxes that abound in Revolutionary rhetoric; when Thomas Jefferson declared independence from England, he did so in English.90 In Dante’s case, the use of Latin spoke not only to the complex negotiation between emulation and disaffiliation, but even more fundamentally to the central problem of his treatise: after sorting through the “cacophony of the many varieties of Italian speech,” Dante must conclude that the “illustrious, cardinal, aulic, and curial vernacular”91 he promises does not yet exist in Italy—except as a potential. It must still be brought into being. To an Americanist, this too calls to mind the complex problem faced by such “linguistic pioneers” of the Revolutionary period as Noah Webster, who loudly sang the praises of an “American tongue” even as he acknowledged that such a language was still but “a prospect” rather than “an entity already in existence.”92 Within the realm of poetry more particularly, we might look ahead to Walt Whitman’s 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, a politico-poetic manifesto in a very real sense descended from De Vulgari Eloquentia. Whitman, too, weighs the power of “the English language” against “the grand American expression”—not quite as the relationship between a dead language and a living vernacular, but certainly as that between a morbid inherited language system (like the “corpse” that is “slowly borne” from the house in the first paragraph of the preface) and the vital speech of a new language community (“the stalwart and wellshaped heir who approaches”).93 Dante’s argument on behalf of the Italian language would be succeeded by many more on behalf of different “illustrious” vernaculars. “If our language is not as copious and rich as Greek or Latin,” wrote Joachim Du Bellay in the Ple´iade manifesto, La Deffence et Illustration de la Langue

PAGE 27

28

Introduction

Franc¸oise (1549), “that should not be imputed to any defect in it.”94 The French vulgaire has simply been insufficiently cultivated and “illustrated” (that is, made illustrious, given luster). “I cannot better . . . persuade you to write in [the vulgar tongue] than by showing you how to enrich it and render it illustrious [l’enrichir et illustrer].”95 For Du Bellay, the means to “illustration” is strategic imitation: French poets must begin to imitate the poetry of the ancient Greeks and Romans,96 as well as the best poets among the Italians and Spanish97—yet to do so in their own vernacular. After all, this was precisely what the Romans had done to cultivate their own vernacular when it lay in the shadow of Greece: “By what means were [the Romans] able so to enrich their language, indeed to make it almost the equal of Greek? By imitating the best Greek authors, transforming themselves into them, devouring them, and, after having thoroughly digested them, converting them into blood and nourishment, selecting, each according to his own nature and the topic he wished to choose, the best author, all of whose rarest and most exquisite strengths they diligently observed and, like shoots, grafted them . . . and adapted them to their own language.”98 Du Bellay draws here on a long tradition of theorizing imitation; in fact, the digestive metaphor with which he begins is itself an imitation of an analogy first used by Seneca.99 The most important thing to note about digestion as a figure for emulation—one that was utilized by a range of Renaissance authors—is that it suggests not just the copying of a model, but its transformation.100 Du Bellay’s prescription is to begin by selecting the “best author” from the past to suit present purposes; yet once that model is “devoured,” “digested,” and “converted” in this way, he is no longer the same author who had been plucked from tradition. Having been remetabolized and combined with one’s organic material, he now belongs to the vernacular culture.101 The result of that process is thus—and here Du Bellay shifts from a metaphor of animal digestion to one of botanical growth—a graft, a new hybrid. If the French poets learn this double lesson well, he argues, the “time will perhaps come—and with the help of the good fortune of France, I have high hopes for it—when this noble and powerful kingdom will in its turn seize the reins of universal dominion and when our language . . . which is just beginning to put down roots, will spring from the ground and grow to such height and girth that it will equal the Greeks and Romans themselves, producing, like them, Homers, Demosthenes, Virgils, and Ciceros.”102 Here, Du Bellay isolates the arboreal

PAGE 28

Introduction

29

variant of the organic metaphor which would serve Anglo-American culture so well: a transplanted culture had been bedded out to unaccustomed soil, shot down roots, and somehow become sui generis after the fact. As we shall see in Chapter 2, Cre`vecoeur in particular would make maximum use of this arboreal trope in his bid to argue for the ex post facto originality of a borrowed or derivative cultural form. Yet the most general lesson for Americanists in this literary prehistory is the manner in which imitation and innovation, in some sense opposed impulses, are never represented as mutually exclusive. They are inextricable aspects of the same cultural gesture, no more separable than the two sides of a coin. The assumption common to these cultural scenarios is that literary and cultural production will necessarily be constituted out of a dialectic between deference to borrowed traditions and the independence of vernacular expression. If emulation is performed properly, adoption is really adaptation; imitation is really supplementation; and the “copy” is capable of becoming a new and distinctive origin.103 This cultural fantasy of the copy that displaces the original was perhaps the single most important idea animating later Anglo-American literary arguments on behalf of national originality. The earliest literature in the English vernacular displayed a very similar dynamic in the interplay between deferential emulation and the selfassertion of originality. Yet this dynamic took on a peculiar hue in English writing, which may have had a uniquely “uneasy” cultural status for specific historical and linguistic reasons. As outlined in a recent treatment of the subject, The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520, early literature in the English vernacular effectively incorporated into itself a “theoretical” argument about the distinctive features of the English language, and the sorts of literary style it was capable of voicing, as part of a “broader literary reflection on the complex position occupied by English literature (a newcomer in fifteenth-century European terms) in relation to other European vernacular literatures and to their great precursors.”104 The historical origins of this argument lie in the late fourteenth century, when English emerged as a literary language that could claim legitimacy alongside languages with far greater cultural prestige.105 Prior to that point, as Paul Strohm notes, “English had been almost entirely sidelined by Latin (as the language of record keeping and theological disputation), Anglo-Norman (as the language of courts and the law), and Continental French (as the literary language of the cosmopolitan English

PAGE 29

30

Introduction

court).”106 What English writing there was between 1200 and 1330, as Nicholas Watson argues, was “relatively rare” and “seems on the whole to have been more the product of local efforts to create an English literary style from the ground up than the expression of a continuous . . . tradition.”107 In the late fourteenth century, though, the use of English “surged”; helped by the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and Thomas Usk, it “began to win respect as a literary language” in its own right.108 English writers drew immediately and deeply on Latin and French sources, but they also necessarily found themselves confronting “issues specific to the [English] vernacular”—a language marked by “flexibility and dialectical variety,” one that “had yet to be standardized, bore a close relation to the spoken word, and was struggling for cultural recognition.”109 English vernacular writing emerged, then, amid a pervasive “sense of insufficiency about the language’s Germanic core” and the correlative expansion of the English lexicon, via loans from French and Latin, that was taking place in the latter half of the fourteenth century.110 Literature in English, marked at its inception by a self-consciousness about the belatedness of its arrival, and emerging in the context of assumptions about the relative limitations of English as a literary medium, thus had to be “justified and defined” at once.111 As I discuss in Chapter 1, we can still (many centuries later) see this awareness of English’s foreign indebtedness, along with an avowal of the problems it created for English spelling and rules of construction, in Samuel Johnson’s mid-eighteenth-century attempt to “fix” the language and in Noah Webster’s more aggressive attempt to provide a new and more rational lexical standard. This history helps explain the pull within English-language writing toward modes associated with the “plain” or “low” style, and, relatedly, the pervasiveness of conventional modesty or humility topoi within that writing. As I will clarify in Chapter 4 below, the ideal of stylistic plainness is by no means an exclusive feature of the English cultural tradition (its definition has obvious sources in ancient Greek and Latin rhetoric). And the topos of linguistic humility (also with clear classical precursors, as I discuss in Chapter 2), was to some extent characteristic of all vernacular literary traditions as they struggled to differentiate themselves from earlier languages of prestige, whether those be “dead” classical languages or better established contemporary vernaculars. Nevertheless, modesty topoi did take on a very particular emphasis in English-language writing—baked, as we might say, into anglophone literary culture at its very origins. Many Middle English texts immediately and clearly adopt an

PAGE 30

Introduction

31

apologetic tone, expressing a particular concern for their “rudeness” and lack of polish. The editors of The Idea of the Vernacular easily compile a catalog of such conventional rhetorical gestures: Geoffrey Chaucer avers that “ryme in Englissh hat such skarsete” that rhyming becomes a “gret penaunce” for him; John Walton laments the “defaute of langage and of eloquence” limiting his attempt to translate Boethius; Thomas Usk apologizes for his “rude wordes and boystous [i.e., rough and unpolished diction],” George Ashby for his “blondryng,” John Metham for his “rude endytyng [i.e., composition or writing],” and so on.112 Now, given the linguistic and literary-historical context to which I have just alluded, one might first assume that all these apologies for the deficiencies of English simply reflected anxiety about the relative “poverty” of the lexicon compared to more established languages, along with a more specific insecurity “in the face of the high cultural tradition of France.”113 Though there is truth in both, it would be a serious mistake simply to take such expressions at face value. For “anxiety” in these texts is less a form of affect than it is “a controlled rhetorical attitude.”114 That much may be obvious to readers familiar with such topoi, but it must be added that this “attitude” performs more work here than the traditional rhetorical function of inoculation against negative criticism.115 In the vernacular context, as I have already indicated above, expressions of modesty in relation to great precursors served, in a somewhat paradoxical way, precisely to “establish both a poet’s own achievement and that of the vernacular literary tradition in which the poet is working.”116 In the English case, one clear historical indication of this logic is the fact that “expressions of diffidence or defensiveness about the lexical and stylistic resources of English” actually seem to become more frequent during the very period when writing in English was finally becoming more established.117 Another tell is that it is the most “highly elaborate” literary performances that tend to “apologize most often for their rough language.”118 The paradoxical result is an abundance of “luxuriantly expressed anxiety about the ‘dullness’ of English” in fifteenthcentury invocations of an English literary tradition that was coming into its own.119 In these ways, linguistic and authorial modesty topoi could actually “function as inverted self-advertisement.”120 The ability to unravel these complex rhetorical tangles is absolutely crucial to understanding the much later “American” career of these topoi of self-deprecation and the literary styles they attended. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century negotiations over “American language” and “American

PAGE 31

32

Introduction

literature” are in a direct line with earlier dynamics in the history of English, with one obvious difference: (British) English itself has now become the language of prestige, the standard in relation to which American English must be “justified and defined.”121 But beneath the reshuffling of linguistic subjects and objects, these rhetorical performances on behalf of English and other self-styled “anxious” vernaculars are remarkably indicative of the American arguments later to unfold on behalf of its own. In Chapter 2, for example, I locate Cre`vecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, which makes ample use of the topos of stylistic humility, very much in this rhetorical lineage. And yet, as I have already argued, the historical repetition of these earlier episodes in Western literary history was marked by a fundamental difference. The late eighteenth-century American version of this cultural process was marked by the linguistic situation specific to a settler nation, which is to say, a culture marked by all the discursive formations of “vernacular anxiety,” yet strangely lacking its own vernacular (“a people without a language,” in Coleridge’s cutting phrase).122 In effect, it was “style” that filled this peculiar gap. In the absence of a unique vernacular, the idea of literary style served as a particularly effective mechanism for resolving this age-old dialectic between imitation and innovation. The concept was indispensable here precisely for its second-order nature: style located originality not in the language itself, nor in the generic form, but in the manner of its utterance. In linguistic terms, an accent. In literary terms, a style. The conceptual movement here can be visualized spatially as a vertical shift of level, something like the combination of a letter with a diacritical mark. Just as the diacritic draws the eye to a space above the line and the ear to the distinguishing tonal differences between homographs, the concept of a style draws the mind from a primary order of language to a second-order metalanguage hovering in the space above it. Like an accent, a style is an overlay; the distinctions it asserts are not substantial, but modal. It offers no new forms, but points to a distinct way of enunciating the old ones. This cultural logic of difference-in-repetition is definitive and constitutive for U.S. literature, for only through some such notion can a settler culture explain how it has turned something borrowed into something new.

* * * Precisely because it resided on the side of neither “form” nor “content,” style made it possible for writers to assert simultaneously that they were

PAGE 32

Introduction

33

emulating British models and that their enunciations of those models had a “native” originality tied to some peculiarly American quality. In all of the literary cases this book considers, then, the American work explicitly understood itself in correspondence to a foreign model it emulated, and yet defined itself in opposition to this same model. A founding premise of my book is that such “arguments” were most importantly articulated not in a critical corpus of writing about early U.S. literature, but in the literary texts themselves. This was not only an argument about style but also one conducted through style and immanent in style. In that sense, as “American literature” was writing itself into existence, it was simultaneously theorizing itself as such. This may seem clearest in the case of someone like Charles Brockden Brown, for example, in whose work critics easily find metafictional elements and other signs of intense self-consciousness about its aesthetic goals; but I would argue that it is more broadly true of the period’s literary production. The readings that follow thus key into the selftheorizing dimension of early U.S. literature to see how it cast itself, at one and the same time, as a set of emulations of British models and as pure products of America. Indeed, as I suggest in the book’s coda, a striking number of later critical conceptions about what is American about American literature were in a sense elaborate scholarly glosses on arguments made first in literary form. While the logic of literary debt is central to the premise of this book, I do not pursue it by means of a comparative literary inquiry in the standard sense. While I make frequent and substantial reference to British literary culture in the period, and while I will continue to refer back on occasion to the European sources of American claims to national originality, I do not proceed by holding transatlantic literary works side by side in order to gauge their similarities and differences. For I am less interested in evaluating American assertions of literary distinction (say, by subjecting it to comparative readings that would give the lie to them by exposing what was imitated) than in anatomizing the fantasy of national originality and analyzing the cultural materials out of which it was built. In order to do that properly, of course, one cannot only tease out novelty claims immanent in literary works; one needs also to reconstruct and understand the broader critical and aesthetic milieu that animated the self-theorizing and metaliterary gestures of the period’s imaginative literature. It is an interesting feature of this first wave of literary nationalism that there appears at first to be no robust archive of extraliterary source material

PAGE 33

34

Introduction

alongside the literary work to which we can turn for such context. This seems to set it apart from the later waves of literary nationalism, which produced a discrete and still familiar body of such material. So, for example, we feel we can learn at least as much about the nationalist aims of Cooper’s fiction from the periodical literature of the decade that preceded it—such classic pieces as Walter Channing’s “Essay on American Language and Literature” (1815) and Edward Tyrell Channing’s “On Models in Literature” (1816), along with other American entries in the transatlantic “Paper Wars,” that exchange of cultural salvos fired in the pages of periodicals like the North American Review and the Edinburgh Review. Similarly, as much as we ask the literary works of the American Renaissance to stand on their own as our version of a “great tradition,” any investigation of their culturalnationalist underpinnings would likely begin with Emerson’s “The American Scholar” address, the critical writings of the mid-nineteenth-century “Young America” movement, or Melville’s satirical treatment of it in “Young America in Literature.” By contrast, the apparent lack of a similar critical archive parallel to the literary works of the post-Revolutionary period—or, rather, preceding the literary production and feeding into it, as in the above examples—may be partly what entices us to read forward in time, hastily assimilating them to the literary production of later periods and finding the earlier works wanting in comparison. Yet there was in fact a critical context proper to this earlier literary tradition, though it was not the exclusively “American” one we expect it to be by analogy with later waves of literary nationalism. That context is the transatlantic, but chiefly British, writing on “taste” during the eighteenth century. By replacing early U.S. literature in that critical environment, it becomes possible to recover the cultural conversation that finds early American writers implicitly responding to earlier British critics and theorists like Joseph Addison, Edmund Burke, and Hugh Blair, and rather selfconsciously locating themselves in relation to eighteenth-century, and largely pre-Kantian, theories of what would later be termed “the aesthetic.” We stand to learn much more from these more contemporaneous transatlantic exchanges than from imagining a transhistorical communion that finds Charles Brockden Brown and Joel Barlow calling prophetically ahead to their future countrymen Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman. Specific aesthetic concepts will receive focused discussions in the individual chapters below, but the general claim that is fairly consistent across the range of the literary examples I consider is the fantasy that a cisatlantic

PAGE 34

Introduction

35

literature would finally instantiate and fully actualize an aesthetic that British criticism had already been able to describe on the far side of the Atlantic, but that Britain’s literature had never itself been able to incarnate. That fully realized “American aesthetic” is most familiarly described in terms of characteristics like “authenticity” or “sincerity” (the pair of concepts Lionel Trilling explored in a 1972 book), vernacularity (a feature of the “best” American prose that is generally thought to have reached it apotheosis in Twain), the triumph of the “plain” style (“the presiding rule of American prose,” according to Perry Miller), and so on.123 But what I will frequently emphasize in the earliest articulations of these and other literary characteristics is the crucial fact that they were always defined privatively rather than positively, for they aimed above all to claim for themselves a world apart from the polish and disguise of European traditions of letters. Thus, what we call Cre`vecoeur’s rustic style was self-described as “incorrect” and “inelegant”; Brown’s tortuous style was sublimely “irregular”; and the plain style valued by the seduction plot really could ever only identify itself as “artless,” that is, as the salutary absence of ornament and artifice. The utter consistency of all of this subtractive definition ought to make us reconsider the old saws about the American “voice” and to recognize the idea not as some organic expression of a national character but as the mythic end result of a self-conscious cultural exertion. Whatever an “American voice” in literature is or has become, it does not have its source in some originary set of national characteristics; rather, it was derived, I am convinced, out of a deliberate operation of cultural negation or subtraction—rather like an algebraic solution to a cultural equation. The chapters that follow trace several versions of this process as it unfolded in relation to specific genres and literary figures. These were “literary arguments” in a dual sense: arguments about literary form conducted largely through literary form. To lay the groundwork for the literaryhistorical sequence that follows it, Chapter 2 begins with the purely linguistic side of the story: Noah Webster’s plan to “introduce order and regularity into the orthography of the american tongue” as the cultural location where the logic of difference-in-repetition was being worked out most clearly in the late eighteenth century. Webster’s solution to the problem of a national language was not to invent a new vernacular but rather to “reform the mode of spelling.”124 Orthographic reform went to work at a very particular level of linguistic practice, between surface and substance. For once Webster committed to modifying an existing language rather than

PAGE 35

36

Introduction

building a new one from scratch, he had to think up a way to alter the manner in which the language was used without discarding the basic materials of that language. Put simply, he needed to propose a modal change. What Webster thus devises is less an “American language” than “Americanstyle English.” This linguistic solution was thus the perfect analogy for a literary solution, which would use a similarly modal logic to describe the distinction between English literary culture and its Anglo-American rearticulation as a change in style. Chapter 2 turns to Cre`vecoeur’s epistolary narrative Letters from an American Farmer (1782) as one of the most successful attempts to define literary Americanness in stylistic terms. The linchpin of Cre`vecoeur’s prose style is the self-deprecating gesture of contrast between the American’s awkward language and the elegance and polish of polite English letters. Thus, while most critics focus on the work’s naı¨ve narrator, Farmer James, I focus on the ontologically prior imaginative act that enables James to show himself: the invention of the farmer’s urbane British correspondent. This correspondent is everywhere and nowhere; we never read his letters, but James everywhere defines his own epistolary voice by contrast with them. Moreover, despite the farmer’s extravagant posture of “American” naı¨vete´, Cre`vecoeur cannily fashions this version of an American style out of traditional European literary topoi and theories of the aesthetic. The farmer’s letters recombine these literary materials and then recirculate them for a transatlantic audience fascinated by literary Americanness as an exotic new cultural substance. Ever since, American literary history has had to grapple with the awkward possibility that an Anglophilic French gentleman may have pioneered “our” literary style. Charles Brockden Brown, the subject of Chapter 3, worked within the gothic novel form to make a different kind of “Americanness” claim supposed to be linked to the unique topographical features of the American landscape. This, too, was a skillful modal revision of a variety of concepts from British literary culture, for he deliberately mapped his American landscapes according to all of the features associated with the natural sublime in British criticism and the stock settings of gothic fiction: high cliffs and deep chasms, cataracts and obscure recesses. What I call Brown’s “aesthetic fallacy”—the deliberately cultivated illusion that the natural world produces particular literary effects—served symbolically to dispel this anxiety of influence by displacing the author function onto the landscape itself and concealing the elaborate labor of adapting British gothic for a putatively

PAGE 36

Introduction

37

new national mode. In so doing, he also linked this set of topographical features to a stylistic gambit, crafting a prose style that flaunted a kind of sublime “irregularity” meant to lift its readers to precipitous and dizzying aesthetic heights. The particular manner in which Brown brought the gothic novel across the Atlantic thus resulted in a curious paradox: if, from a certain perspective, “American gothic” could be nothing but an imitation of the European model, there was nonetheless a powerful illusion that the copy exceeded the originality of the original. I turn in Chapter 4 to the American seduction plots of the period, in both their theatrical and fictional forms. Works such as Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1791), Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette (1797), and Royall Tyler’s play The Contrast (1787), though known more for their moral and political arguments than for their aesthetic impact, in fact made strong and influential arguments about the unadorned virtues of plain American speech and writing. While these stories posed the same character oppositions as the British seduction plot—between the double-tongued Chesterfieldian seducer and the plainspoken man of feeling, or the parallel opposition between the elegant and artful highborn woman and the artless beauty of the virtuous “fair”—American authors refigured them as the opposition between European and American character and language, marking the latter as a more authentic mode of expression. In doing so, they recruited the “plain style,” which was in fact an expressive mode with a long European genealogy, as the basis of a putatively American way of speaking or writing. In this way, the American seduction story repackaged manifestly borrowed literary materials as unique signs of national originality.

PAGE 37

CHAPTER 1

To Form a More Perfect Language Noah Webster’s American-Style English

Purity of style consists in the use of such words, and such constructions, as belong to the idiom of the language which we speak; in opposition to words and phrases that are taken from other languages, or that are ungrammatical, obsolete, new-coined, or used without proper authority. . . . The introduction of foreign and learned words, unless where necessity requires them, should never be admitted into our composition. Barren languages may need such assistance, but ours is not one of these. A multitude of Latin words, in particular, have, of late, been poured in upon our language. On some occasions, they give an appearance of elevation and dignity to style; but they often render it stiff and apparently forced. In general, a plain, native style, is more intelligible to all readers; and, by a proper management of words, it can be made as strong and expressive as this Latinised English, or any foreign idioms. —Lindley Murray, English Grammar

Making a Difference In the late 1780s, Noah Webster began to represent national linguistic distinction both as an aspirational goal and as an historical inevitability in North America: “Whatever predilection the Americans may have for their native European tongues, and particularly the British descendants for the

PAGE 38

To Form a More Perfect Language

39

English, yet several circumstances render a future separation of the American tongue from the English, necessary and unavoidable.”1 On the one hand, “unavoidable”: linguistic differentiation was a future certainty. On the other hand, “necessary”: it was imperative that Americans somehow catalyze that ineluctable process and ensure that it unfolds in a properly regulated fashion. In his seminal treatment of American English, David Simpson identifies Noah Webster as the foremost of the first wave of “linguistic pioneers” of a recognizably American English that would not really exist until around 1850.2 For all of that, Webster did not set out to create a new vernacular or even a distinct dialect of English; his reforms focused on the creation of what Simpson calls a new “linguistic practice, if not quite a language.”3 Webster’s boldest and most counterintuitive idea was that the abstract problem of forming a new national cultural identity might find a strangely concrete and technical solution: this broad social transformation could be accomplished merely by inventing a new system of English spelling. A few simple alterations in orthography would change everything. “This will startle those who have not attended to the subject,” he granted, but the institution of such seemingly humble linguistic reforms was in reality “an object of vast political consequence.”4 Its “capital advantage,” simply put, would be to “make a difference between the English orthography and the American.”5 But why spelling? Of all the ways to approach language reform and all the realms of linguistic practice one could target, why focus on orthography? It was not just that new spellings were a clearly visible and immediately apprehensible way to “make a difference” between American and British English. There was a more fundamental reason that it had to be orthographic reform. Spelling represented change at the right level of the language: it was not merely superficial, and yet it was not deeply substantial. Spelling reform went to work at this middle register between surface and depth, form and content. To change “the mode of spelling”:6 something of this order was literally required by the nature of Webster’s national linguistic project. Once he committed to modifying the existing English language rather than building a new one from the ground up, Webster had to find a way to alter the manner in which the language was used, without discarding the actual materials of that language. What was needed, in short, was a modal change. This is why a book about “style” as the anchoring concept of American literary exceptionalism might begin with Webster, who was not a literary

PAGE 39

40

Chapter 1

figure but a language reformer—and not even the most innovative one of his time. For the modal logic at which Webster arrived is the linguistic analogue of the concept of literary style. In each case, something borrowed is said to have been rearticulated as something new. Webster’s technical solution to the problem of American English—though we might do better to call it “American-style English,” by analogy with American-style democracy or Soviet-style socialism—thus put into circulation a set of critical concepts about the nature of transatlantic emulation-cum-innovation that literary producers would need to describe their own sense of the relationship between English literary culture and its American imitations.

* * * Because Webster called so powerfully for “the Americans” to manufacture linguistic distance from “their parent country,”7 he has long been a symbol of the so-called cultural declaration of independence supposed to have begun around the end of the eighteenth century.8 One quotation from his 1783 letter to John Canfield, for example, has become ubiquitous in scholarly and popular writing about the period: “America must be as independent in literature as she is in politics, as famous for arts as for arms.”9 As for his linguistic works of the late 1780s—most notably Dissertations on the English Language along with its oft-quoted appendix, “An Essay on the Necessity, Advantages, and Practicality of Reforming the Mode of Spelling”—they, too, are easily mined for such stirring culturalnationalist declarations.10 Webster has thus become a poster boy for the brand of nationalism associated with what I have called the “Anglophobia thesis” in historiography, with all of its oedipal undertones. After all, was not his cry for the “separation of the American tongue from the English” just such a revolt against paternal law at the level of language itself? Did not his system of spelling add up to a declaration of “orthographic independence” (as Jill Lepore calls it)?11 David Simpson, having some fun with this same revolutionary analogy, quips that “it was to prove more difficult to declare independence from Samuel Johnson than it had been to reject George III.”12 Yet we must guard against the presumption, however playfully expressed in these cases, that linguistic “independence” was ever Webster’s goal to begin with. To be sure, Webster’s linguistic project was entirely of its political and cultural time and place. The 1780s was the decade in which “American

PAGE 40

To Form a More Perfect Language

41

English” first emerged as a cultural question that demanded some accounting and theorization.13 In 1781, the Scottish American educator John Witherspoon first coined the term “Americanism”—by analogy to the existing term “Scotticism”—to refer to the linguistic departures from the British standard that were starting to proliferate in North America.14 In 1782, Robert Ross produced an American Grammar, followed in 1785 by his New American Spelling Book.15 The timing of all this is surely no coincidence. The ongoing military conflict with Britain at the turn of the decade had lent the matter of American English cultural and political charge; after the formal declaration of peace in 1783 it came to seem even more urgent; and the question was simply unavoidable after the establishment of the federal government of the United States in 1787. In 1788, Benjamin Rush laid out a “Plan for a Federal University” in which he emphasized the central importance of “philology” as a subject for the new nation: “our intercourse must soon cease with the bar, the stage, and the pulpits of Great-Britain, from whence we received our knowledge of the pronunciation of the English language. Even modern English books should cease to be the models of stile in the United States.”16 That same year, the Philological Society of New York was formed “for the purpose of ascertaining and improving the American Tongue.”17 From the federal to the local, then, this question seemed to be everywhere at the end of the 1780s. Webster’s own work was thus perfectly suited to, and clearly shaped by, this milieu. In 1787, Webster tellingly renamed part one of his earlier Grammatical Institute of the English Language from its former title, An Accurate Standard of Pronunciation (as he had called it in 1783), to the American Spelling Book, thus rebranding it along the lines of the nationalist spellers of Ross and others.18 And while (as I will emphasize in this chapter) his proposed linguistic reforms were guided by a coherent linguistic philosophy, at times his rhetoric suggested that it was merely the production of “difference”—perhaps any difference at all—that was paramount: “As a nation, we have a very great interest in opposing the introduction of any plan of uniformity with the British language, even were the plan proposed perfectly unexceptionable.”19 What else would we want to call this, then, if not a linguistic declaration of independence? It is an understandable temptation, but as I shall insist in the pages that follow, a more careful consideration of Webster’s plan, its fuller contemporary context, and its historical predecessors tells a rather different story. Certainly his writing is full of highly quotable nationalist slogans, but the arguments in which these declarations are embedded are

PAGE 41

42

Chapter 1

far less Anglophobic and far more deferential to transatlantic cultural authority than is commonly acknowledged. The trick is not to mistake slogans for theses. Particularly in the 1780s, the young Webster was not at all shy about cranking up the rhetorical winch when he wanted a point to hold maximum tension. Rhetorical bravado aside, however, Webster’s project for linguistic reform was ultimately animated not by static nationalist oppositions but by a deeply dialectical understanding of transatlantic cultural relations, the balance between tradition and innovation, and the interplay of cultural adoption and adaptation. Webster’s invectives against “our rage for imitating the errors of foreigners,”20 for example, may appear to be motivated by a revolutionary animus against British models as a bar to national originality—and it may even be fair to say that Webster himself was invoking and manipulating that animus for rhetorical purposes—but as I will demonstrate, he understood transatlantic emulation as such to be a neutral and inevitable fact of American life. Anglo-Americans simply needed to ensure that they imitated the proper models, and imitated those models properly. Once we begin to take account of these complexities, Webster’s linguistic project begins to look less like post-Revolutionary cultural nationalism par excellence and more like a layering of postRevolutionary rhetoric atop a much older problem of standardizing English spelling. By returning Webster’s argument to the context of transatlantic debates about language and grammar in the second half of the eighteenth century, and by reconnecting that modern debate to a much older British conversation about the English language stretching back to the Renaissance, this chapter views Webster’s linguistic nationalism against a richer and more multidimensional background, and by doing so recovers some of its lost nuances. To begin with, while Webster may have been the most important of the American language reformers, he was by no means the most radical. This much-vaunted linguistic pioneer was in fact rather conservative in his approach to the question of what American language could look like. What first bears remarking upon is a fact so obvious it may almost be neglected: Webster determined that, in order to form a distinctly “American” language, he would have to begin with English in the first place. Though, to be more precise about it, Webster didn’t really make the case for American English so much as he made the case appear to make itself: English, he tells us early in Dissertations, was “the inheritance which the Americans have received from their British parents.”21 Webster thus treated it as a foregone

PAGE 42

To Form a More Perfect Language

43

conclusion that “English is the common root or stock from which our national language will be derived.”22 Yet by referencing, with equal matterof-factness, the “predilection the Americans may have for their native European tongues,”23 he also acknowledged the fact that “the Americans” in 1789 were a polyglot population with multiple national origins. I will have more to say later about this cultural situation and what Webster did to address it. For the moment, my point is simply that it was not inconceivable to him that the national language might end up being built on a basis other than English; it was just highly undesirable. This is the side of the story that Leonard Tennenhouse will not allow us to forget in his discussion of the post-Revolutionary language debates in The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750-1850.24 Anglo-American language reformers like Webster were not attempting to cut the American language off from English, Tennenhouse emphasizes. In a sense, Webster’s goal was the same as that of late eighteenth-century British language reformers like Samuel Johnson: to “stabilize English usage.”25 This approach to the question of American language thus illustrates Tennenhouse’s “diaspora” argument in miniature: AngloAmerican culture before and after the very moment of political independence conceived of itself as a branch of a British diaspora, which is to say, it was intent on reproducing the characteristic elements of English culture outside of England. Webster’s project of perfecting American English would certainly seem to be a clear case in point. Yet, as I will argue here, his dream of a distinctly American English also indulged a cultural fantasy of autochthony, despite a cultural reality that looks more like diaspora. As Webster saw it, the English “root or stock,”26 once transplanted to American soil, would reach downward and tap somehow into the primitive Saxon past of the English people, their culture, and its language. According to this strange, seemingly illogical, and yet culturally powerful argument (which I will explore in detail later in this chapter), American English would thus replicate a more original and primordial form of the language than currently existed in Britain itself. Naturally, none of this could occur if Americans rejected English outright; instead they ought to seek to perfect it. This was by no means a universal presumption. While Webster was focusing his efforts on reconfiguring the system of English spelling, others among his contemporaries proposed building the American language on a basis other than English. One curious notion in circulation at the time, and often mentioned ever since, was the possibility of establishing Greek or

PAGE 43

44

Chapter 1

Hebrew as the national language.27 It is doubtful that the idea was actually ever seriously considered for adoption, but we can understand why it made for such a good story: such a move would have ensured maximum separation from English, yet without sacrificing the undeniable prestige of an established language. On the other hand, the often-referenced proposal to adopt an indigenous North American language such as Iroquois or Algonquian was almost certainly apocryphal,28 but here again, that only makes its logic more telling: in one stroke, it would have achieved linguistic distance from the metropole, which in itself was merely a negative distinction, while also grounding a positive claim of American autochthony or indigeneity. Webster, as we shall see, would cut his own peculiar path to that claim, even though his starting point was the “inherited” English language. Even among those who took the same basic tack of Americanizing English, there were more innovative orthographic proposals than Webster’s. The primary line of demarcation was whether the existing twenty-six-letter alphabet was deemed sufficient in itself to support a rational system of spelling, or whether new characters need be introduced to refine the instrument. In 1793, a few years after Webster published his Dissertations, William Thornton proposed and devised a new thirty-character alphabet in Cadmus, or, A Treatise on the Elements of Written Language.29 Even the earlier (1768) plan of Benjamin Franklin had proposed to introduce some additional characters.30 Franklin’s proposal was in fact what awakened the young Webster to the necessity of spelling reform (he had earlier ridiculed any such plans), yet Webster nevertheless continued to insist that the medium of spelling remain the same Roman alphabet in which modern English was already encoded.31 It is telling that this is the site of the only criticism Webster leveled, with some delicacy, against Franklin—to whom he reverently dedicated Dissertations. The problem with Franklin’s “reformed alphabet,” though it solved the problem of imprecise orthography, was that it did so in an inefficient manner: “If any objection can be made to his scheme,” wrote Webster, “it is the substitution of new characters, for th, sh, ng, &c. whereas a small stroke connecting the letters, would answer all the purposes of new characters.”32 In other words, why invent new letters when one might achieve the same result through a clever reapplication of the existing ones? The idea was to retain the standard English alphabet but to make it serve American purposes. And this was what a reformed “mode of spelling”33 would accomplish: not a new lexicon, not a new alphabet, but a new manner in which

PAGE 44

To Form a More Perfect Language

45

phonemes are made to correspond to graphemes. Webster lays out the proposed reforms (as he then envisioned them) in a separate essay which serves as the appendix to Dissertations on the English Language, “An Essay on the Necessity, Advantages, and Practicality of Reforming the Mode of Spelling.”34 There were three pillars to his plan. First, the elimination of all silent or unvoiced letters, which serve only to widen the gulf between spelling and pronunciation. Second, the use of definite- rather than indefinite-sounding letters in spelling all words, thus correcting some of the notorious inconsistencies and absurdities in English orthoepy. The third and least often discussed proposal was to implement diacritical marks (such as existing accents, the addition of points or dots atop standard letters, or the use of ligatures to connect two letters) whenever necessary to indicate that the standard letters, whether alone or in combination, are making a new sound. In this way, “a trifling alteration in a character, or the addition of a point would distinguish different sounds, without the substitution of a new character. Thus a very small stroke across th would distinguish its two sounds. A point over a vowel . . . might answer all the purposes of different letters. And for the diphthong ow, let the two letters be united by a small stroke, or both engraven on the same piece of metal, with the left hand line of the w united to the o.”35 This rather arcane bit of business is actually quite illuminating, once we read past its technical details to the principle underlying it. For, in the idea of innovation through diacritical modification—with the placing of a dot over a letter as its most elemental iteration—we find a perfect synecdoche of Webster’s entire linguistic project. The elements will remain the same; difference will be lodged in the manner of their arrangement. The modal principle underlying this position about the alphabet is the same premise that animates the whole of Webster’s proposed reforms. The remaining sections of this chapter systematically take up the logical dimensions and historical layers of this crucial language debate, in an effort to demonstrate its implications for the literary history that issues from it. First, I take a close look at the relationship between Johnson’s and Webster’s language projects and the reasons for their divergent approaches to orthography—reasons that turn out to do less with Revolutionary politics than with the relationship between English and other European vernaculars. I then provide much-needed historical depth to that eighteenthcentury discussion about English spelling by tracing its Renaissance roots. Next, with that history in mind, it becomes possible to see how the transatlantic debates about “American language” layered colonial geopolitics and

PAGE 45

46

Chapter 1

Revolutionary rhetoric atop an older argument about spelling. The chapter’s final section returns to the problem of polyglossia, considering the critical problem of “foreign”—that is, non-English—languages in Webster’s cultural imaginary.

Dr. Johnson and Mr. Webster The problem of carving an authentic linguistic practice out of an obviously borrowed language had a very concrete parallel in Webster’s own intellectual labors: how, from the starting point provided by his great British precursor, would he arrive at his own American theory of English? Webster had begun his linguistic career as very much a Johnsonian, advocating only the standardization of English and hostile to any scheme of actual reform.36 His break with Johnson occurs only in the late 1780s, and coincides with the increasingly nationalistic tone of Webster’s writing on language.37 In this sense, the relationship he posits between the two national languages in Dissertations on the English Language is mirrored in the relationship between himself and Dr. Johnson. American English would be a version of British English, but at the same time, a variation on it; just so, Webster’s plan was explicitly derived from Johnson’s, while also deviating from it. As Webster worked out the larger problem of linguistic foreign debt, then, he was simultaneously navigating a more local problem of indebtedness. Samuel Johnson, “the great leviathan of lexicography,” as Mathew Carey called him,38 died in 1784, the year after Webster had published his first major work, the so-called Blue-Backed Speller. And while all American reformers of English necessarily hearkened back to Johnson, no one was more deliberate in doing so than Webster. Like Johnson, Webster wanted to standardize the English language; but unlike Johnson, he didn’t believe one should look to British usage as a basis for doing so: “Great Britain, whose children we are, and whose language we speak, should no longer be our standard; for the taste of her writers is already corrupted, and her language on the decline.”39 To put a still finer point on it, Webster warned against emulating the English of Samuel Johnson in particular, “whose pedantry has corrupted the purity of our language.”40 In Dissertations on the English Language, “Dr. Johnson” is everywhere Webster’s foil, the object of his harshest criticisms, and the target of his most acerbic rhetoric.41 But we

PAGE 46

To Form a More Perfect Language

47

would do well, I think, to understand this as a measure of Webster’s anxiety of influence, rather than as a symptom of his total opposition to the Johnsonian project. Precisely by arguing so carefully for a set of “departures” from the Johnsonian model, Webster’s own linguistic project almost reduces itself to a kind of running commentary on Johnson’s dictionary. For all of his rhetoric of renovating the language, Webster defines the “new” entirely in correspondence to the “old”: American English is quite literally constituted as a re-forming of a British standard. Webster’s departures from Johnson’s system of spelling, then, were not animated by political hostility to the English lexicon. Far from simply aiming to “make a difference” of any kind and at any cost, each of his innovations was in fact backed by a specific rationale, and all of his proposals were united by a coherent linguistic philosophy. The most fundamental issue was whether the spelling of a word ought to proceed in agreement with its etymological origins, as Johnson believed, or according to its pronunciation, as did Webster. Their divergent theoretical convictions on this point, in turn, directly reflected the different sociolinguistic problems each lexicographer had before him. Johnson was attempting to standardize a language that had long been in use by an already existing speech community; his emphasis was on shoring up the boundaries of this community and protecting its language from corruptions in usage. Webster, on the other hand, was attempting to call a unique speech community into being through language; he thus had to devise a linguistic system perfect enough in its structure to be able, all by itself, to turn a population into a people. These entirely different social objectives inevitably shaped their linguistic policies. With regard to orthography, for example, Johnson’s emphasis dictated that he find a way to stabilize spelling in the face of what he saw as imminent chaos—a tangle of variant spellings without any agreed-upon standard. The policy at which he arrived, for complex reasons I will detail in a moment, was to ground proper spelling on the authority of precedent: Johnson will choose what he considers the best spelling for each word, based on the prior usage of a writer of “classical reputation or acknowledged authority.”42 In turn, an ordinary user of the language would find out which spelling he ought to adopt by consulting—you guessed it—Johnson’s dictionary. But this kind of approach would have been entirely inappropriate to Webster’s purpose. Webster needed to fashion a systematic and rulegoverned approach that would render the language system transparent, internally consistent, and therefore easy to acquire, since it must succeed in

PAGE 47

48

Chapter 1

suturing former speakers of different national languages into a new national speech community.43 Someone new to the language would thus be able to derive proper forms for himself by deduction from universal laws of construction, rather than consulting a dictionary each time to arrive at each bit of proper usage. A word’s spelling, then, would not only be regular and easy to derive, but it would act as a guide to pronunciation and would in turn be guided by it. The spoken and written dimensions of the language would thus mutually support each other, and both would buttress the community of language users. In this way, “a regular national orthography”44 would not only maintain or preserve social stability; it would actively generate it. This thumbnail sketch should give some initial sense of why a topic as dry as spelling would have become such a highly charged point of contention. But in order to see just how much of Johnson’s thinking Webster in fact adopted while adapting it to a different set of social conditions, we will first have to take a close look at Johnson’s dictionary.

* * * From Samuel Johnson’s first articulation of his project in the 1747 Plan of A Dictionary of the English Language to his description of it as ultimately realized in the first edition of his dictionary, he represented the “great end of this undertaking” quite simply: to “fix the English language.”45 This did not mean that English was damaged and in need of repair; to “fix” a language meant to stabilize it, to settle it (a related Johnsonian term was to “ascertain,” to render certain, from the Latin certus, settled). A language that remained unfixed and unsettled, by contrast, was in constant danger of being unmoored by the various forces of linguistic drift, which for Johnson was synonymous with corruption and degeneration. That was why one wrote a dictionary: not solely, as we might casually assume, to help the users of a language navigate its corridors, but to police those corridors—to serve and protect the language itself. “This, my Lord,” Johnson writes in his Plan, “is my idea of an English dictionary; a dictionary by which the pronunciation of our language may be fixed, and its attainment facilitated; by which its purity may be preserved, its use ascertained, and its duration lengthened.”46 Eight years later, in the preface to the dictionary itself, Johnson repeats his ambition to “fix our language, and put a stop to those alterations which time and chance have hitherto been suffered to make in it

PAGE 48

To Form a More Perfect Language

49

without opposition,” but here he adds a telling metaphor: the lexicographer attempts to “embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay.”47 The lexicographer’s ground zero is a deceptively simple problem: which words to put in his dictionary and which ones to leave out. “In the first attempt to methodise my ideas,” writes Johnson in the Plan, “I found a difficulty, which extended itself to the whole work. It was not easy to determine by what rule of distinction the words of this dictionary were to be chosen.” Decisions about lexical inclusion and exclusion were not merely a practical matter of limiting the extent and size of a finite volume. What is really at issue is nothing less than patrolling the borders of a national language. The “chief intent” of his dictionary, Johnson asserts, is “to preserve the purity, and ascertain the meaning of our English idiom; and this seems to require nothing more than that our language be considered, so far as it is our own.”48 The phrasing is deliberate and bears important conceptual weight. An idiom, here used in the sense of a regional dialect rather than a local figure of speech, is language which belongs to a unique speech community and to that community alone, as Johnson’s gloss—“our language . . . considered, so far as it is our own”—makes clear. It is telling, then, that Johnson must immediately qualify that objective: “This is, perhaps, the exact and pure idea of a grammatical dictionary, but in lexicography, as in other arts, naked science is too delicate for the purposes of life. The value of a work must be estimated by its use.”49 The context in which this qualification appears, we can assume, is highly significant: at this moment in the Plan, Johnson is confronting the problem of how to deal with words from other languages. “If [all] foreign words . . . were rejected, it could be little regarded, except by criticks”; but “it is not enough that a dictionary delights the critick, unless, at the same time, it instructs the learner.”50 Johnson must thus develop a system of inclusion that would determine when foreign words will be turned away from the national linguistic border, and when they must be, however reluctantly, admitted. Since this problem and the lexical policies that it generates in Johnson’s dictionary will be targets for Webster’s polemic—and since the issue of foreign languages will, for entirely different reasons, pose a serious challenge for Webster’s own national linguistic project—I will need to walk through the issue in some detail. Johnson’s real problem, it turns out, is not so much what to do with foreign words but what to do about the fact that they are intrinsic to

PAGE 49

50

Chapter 1

English itself. This is true not only in the quotidian sense that “the terms of particular professions” in circulation in modern English, along with “the arts to which they relate,” are “generally derived from other nations,” but also in a much more fundamental sense having to do with the origins of the language.51 “Our language is well known not to be primitive or selforiginated,” says Johnson, “but to have adopted words of every generation, and, either for the supply of its necessities, or the increase of its copiousness, to have received additions from very distant regions; so that in search of the progenitors of our speech, we may wander from the tropick to the frozen zone, and find some in the valleys of Palestine, and some upon the rocks of Norway.”52 Put simply, much of what now constitutes that language which is distinctively “our own” has come into English from the outside.53 Even as he promises to “preserve” its “purity,”54 then, Johnson is forced to reveal that English, as it was given to him, was an impure language to begin with. Johnson’s somewhat sidelong acknowledgement of this issue touches on a widely held common sense about the nature of modern English. English has borrowed from (“received additions from”) other languages, he has mentioned in passing, “either for the supply of its necessities, or the increase of its copiousness.” The understanding of the language implicit here was at least a few centuries old by the time Johnson wrote. Its origins lie in the fourteenth century, when English emerged as a literary language on the order of already established and more prestigious languages such as French and Latin.55 Middle English, largely derived from the Saxon branch of the Teutonic language, already understood itself as in some ways deficient in relation to the “Romance” (that is, Roman-derived) languages, not only by virtue of their cultural prestige, but also because of its own intrinsic properties. English “had yet to be standardized” as a written language and was “struggling for cultural recognition”56 alongside Latin and the European vernaculars. Most significantly, Middle English writing was marked by a “sense of insufficiency about the language’s Germanic core,” which made it less copious and, it was feared, less expressive than its more established neighbors in the Romance family.57 (Johnson is still referring, in 1747, to “more polished languages” such as French.)58 And so, starting in the latter half of the fourteenth century, the English lexicon expanded itself via incorporations from French and Latin.59 The prevailing understanding, in short, was that English had to take out loans from other languages in order to supply its own deficiency.

PAGE 50

To Form a More Perfect Language

51

In one of the more peculiar and fascinating passages of the Plan, Johnson discusses this phenomenon of linguistic incorporation via an elaborate citizenship metaphor: words from another language are “foreigners” or “aliens”; to admit them formally into the idiom is to “naturalize them,” and even, in one fanciful phrase, to permit them “to settle themselves among the natives.”60 Obviously Johnson is playing out this scenario of linguistic immigration with tongue planted in cheek, but we begin to suspect that the wit has a serious core when, rather than dropping the joke, he extends it further: “Of such words, however, all are not equally to be considered as parts of our language; for some of them are naturalized and incorporated; but others still continue aliens, and are rather auxiliaries than subjects.”61 On the basis of this finer distinction between different types of linguistic “foreigners,” he develops, so to speak, an immigration policy: “Of those which still continue in the state of aliens, and have made no approaches towards assimilation, some seem necessary to be retained, because the purchasers of the Dictionary will expect to find them. Such are many words in the common law, as capias, habeas corpus, præmunire, nisi prius: such are some terms of controversial divinity, as hypostasis; and of physick, as the names of diseases.”62 Most significant here is something hiding in plain sight: the graphical code by which Johnson distinguishes “naturalized” foreigners from unassimilated “aliens.” He is already using that scheme in the passage just quoted, and explains its logic on the following page: “There ought . . . to be some distinction made between the different classes of words; and, therefore, it will be proper to print those which are incorporated into the language in the usual character, and those which are still to be considered as foreign, in the Italick letter.”63 In this way, the lexicographer makes his concessions to usage and practicality while still guarding the language against chaos and the collapse of the outside upon the inside. I have already touched on many of the areas in Johnson’s thinking in which Webster found—or made—openings for his own lexicographical departures, but I have yet fully to explain the most significant: the position Johnson took in what he calls “the great orthographical contest . . . between etymology and pronunciation.”64 Johnson’s policy follows in part from the problem of linguistic incorporation I have just been discussing. First, he acknowledges that English is plagued by inconsistency between spelling and pronunciation, in part because of the diversity of its origins. As “alien” words entered into English, part of their “naturalization” entailed their

PAGE 51

52

Chapter 1

adjustment to English construction (for example, “the change of a foreign to an English termination, and a conformity to the laws of the speech into which they are adopted”);65 but inevitably the fit will be imperfect. And by virtue of the promiscuity of its incorporations, this is a systemic rather than an occasional problem for English. Its polyglossia results in a sort of patchwork at the surface of the language. By contrast, it stands to reason that the more self-contained a language is, and the less polyglot in its origins, the more it will naturally tend towards regularity and consistency in its structure. For example, the “accuracy of the French, in stating the sounds of their letters, is well known.”66 The lexicographer of modern English thus faces a peculiarly difficult task. English is crisscrossed by “numberless irregularities, which in this Dictionary will be diligently noted.”67 In every corner of the language—and not just at the highly visible level of spelling, but also in its deeper rules of construction—Johnson keeps finding the same thing, namely, a “regular form”68 with almost as many departures from the rule as standard applications of it. Though they are “familiar to those who have always used them,” these “very frequent” exceptions do, of course, “interrupt and embarrass the learners of our language.”69 Johnson runs through an illustrative handful, including some of the same inconsistencies that English speakers today are apt to mock in their own language—“fox makes in the plural foxes, but ox makes oxen” while “sheep is the same in both numbers,” and so on in the formation of plurals, the construction of comparative and superlative adjectives, and the conjugations of verbs.70 Obviously, when every rule comes surrounded by such a large nimbus of exceptions, “rule” itself no longer enjoys its customary privilege. And since proper English “cannot be reduced to rules,” learners of the language will find that its usage “must be learned from the dictionary rather than the grammar.”71 This is more than just a deft act of self-advertisement. It is a way of staking a position in a debate about linguistic standards, and already an implicit declaration about where, if not in “rules,” those standards might reside. “When I took the first survey of my undertaking,” Johnson wrote in one of the most famous passages in his preface to the dictionary, “I found our speech copious without order, and energetick without rules: wherever I turned my view, there was perplexity to be disentangled, and confusion to be regulated; choice was to be made out of boundless variety, without any established principle of selection; adulterations were to be detected, without a settled test of purity; and modes of expression to be rejected

PAGE 52

To Form a More Perfect Language

53

or received, without the suffrages of any writers of classical reputation or acknowledged authority.”72 This description of the problem already contains, in its closing phrases, the terms of its own resolution: inconsistencies will be managed, and fixity restored, by referring the vagaries of usage to “writers of classical reputation or acknowledged authority.” This embrace of authoritative usage may sound like mere lexicographical fiat, but it also follows from Johnson’s acknowledgment that English, by virtue of its polyglot origins, “is too inconstant to be reduced to rules.”73 People learning the language cannot hope spontaneously to generate proper usage from universal laws of derivation (“from the grammar”) as they would be able to do if learning a more regular language; here, the “grammarians can give little assistance.”74 Thus, English “is not to be taught by general rules, but by special precedents; it is not in our power to have recourse to any established laws of speech; but we must remark how the writers of former ages have used the same word.”75 Nor will any “former” writers do; Johnson’s exemplary “precedents” must be drawn from what he calls “the best writers,”76 and his readers must be absolutely convinced that he knows the difference: “In citing authorities, on which the credit of every part of this work must depend, it will be proper to observe some obvious rules; such as of preferring writers of the first reputation to those of an inferiour rank; of noting the quotations with accuracy; and of selecting, when it can be conveniently done, such sentences, as, besides their immediate use, may give pleasure or instruction, by conveying some elegance of language, or some precept of prudence or piety.”77 Certainly, ordinary users of the language, much less those in the process of learning it, cannot be expected to scour the history of authoritative usage for themselves in this way; they will need a trusted meta-authority to sift through it for them. Only a lexicographer can perform this labor. Whether in the realm of spelling, pronunciation, construction, or style, what constitutes “proper” English must be “learned from the dictionary.”78 In the realm of orthography, what the reader of Johnson’s dictionary will learn is that the spelling of a word bears the traces of its etymological origins, whether those origins be Saxon, French, Latin, or what have you. (“In the investigation both of the orthography and signification of words,” Johnson announces in the preface, “their Etymology was necessarily to be considered.”)79 This approach is meant to address an empirical problem: as Johnson looks around him at modern English usage, he sees countless words that “continue to be variously written, as authours differ in their

PAGE 53

54

Chapter 1

care or skill.”80 To fix the spelling of those words once and for all, “it was proper to enquire the true orthography, which I have always considered as depending on their derivation, and have therefore referred them to their original languages.”81 In making the case for this approach in the preface, Johnson gives some choice examples of how etymological origin will help him settle some thorny spelling problems: “thus I write enchant, enchantment, enchanter, after the French, and incantation after the Latin; thus entire is chosen rather than intire, because it passed to us not from the Latin integer, but from the French entier.”82 For this reason, Johnson is often said to have “Latinized” or “Romanized” the English language—a charge to which I shall return below. But as this handful of examples also indicates, to determine “true” spelling by following etymology also means, crucially, not to derive it from the way that word is pronounced; to choose “entire” over “intire” is to side with derivation over pronunciation. Johnson’s orthographic philosophy is thus also generally understood to be linked to his privileging of writing over speech: “It has been demanded, on one hand, that men should write as they speak; but . . . it may be asked, with equal propriety, why men do not rather speak as they write.”83 This position would earn Johnson the contemptuous charge of pedantry—a barb Webster would aim more than once at his great predecessor.

Everything New Is Old Again Based on the above account, we might be inclined to speculate that Webster zeroed in on the problem of spelling for tactical reasons: given its intricate lines of connection to so many aspects of Johnson’s project, orthography would be an effective thread to pull in order to unravel his lexical authority. This would be to presume, of course, that the assault on Johnson was Webster’s primary end. Webster’s polemic was broad and unmistakable, and I will explore its specifics below. But did the critique of Johnson determine Webster’s linguistic choices, or was it merely one of their effects? As I have already noted, part of the difficulty in sifting through the layers of Webster’s polemic against Johnson is our tendency to read it rather reflexively through a national political lens. Webster’s own manipulation of Revolutionary rhetoric seems to beckon us in that direction. That political context, of course, is relevant; but it only reveals part of the story. And to look at

PAGE 54

To Form a More Perfect Language

55

the language debate exclusively from that angle is to risk seriously misreading some of its most basic facets and missing vast aspects of its historical and cultural contexts. One thing is indisputable: Webster famously chose the opposing side in Johnson’s “great orthographical contest.”84 He casts his lot with pronunciation rather than etymological derivation as the source of proper spelling, which is to say, he advocates for “a perfect correspondence between the spelling and pronunciation.”85 From a Johnsonian perspective, this would be rather like mooring a ship to a boat; it made just as little sense to try to fix spelling by tethering it an even more unstable realm of language. Webster was aware of this position, which he poses as the last of five “Objections” in a dialogical section of his appendix devoted to confronting potential counterarguments: “ ‘It is idle to conform the orthography of words to the pronunciation, because the latter is continually changing.’ ”86 Webster explicitly identifies this as “one of Dr. Johnson’s objections,” and pronounces it “very unworthy of his judgement.”87 He then proceeds to turn the argument exactly around: “So far is this circumstance from being a real objection,” he asserts, “that it is alone a sufficient reason for the change of spelling.”88 In fact, it is Johnson’s own position that is absurd: “On his principle of fixing the orthography, while the pronunciation is changing, any spoken language must, in time, lose all relation to the written language; that is, the sounds of words would have no affinity with the letters that compose them.”89 He gives a few examples from current usage (“no mortal would suspect from the spelling, that neighbour, wrought, are pronounced nabur, rawt”)90 and then delivers the coup de grace: “Admit Johnson’s principles, take his pedantic orthography for the standard, let it be closely adhered to in future, and the slow changes in the pronunciation of our national tongue, will in time make as great a difference between our written and spoken language, as there is between the pronunciation of the present English and German. The spelling will be no more a guide to the pronunciation, than the orthography of the German or Greek. This event is actually taking place, in consequence of the stupid opinion, advanced by Johnson and other writers, and generally embraced by the nation.”91 But in order to understand this dispute properly, it is crucial to recognize where the two lexicographers agree. To begin with, they were in total agreement on the nature of the problem: “It has been observed by all writers on the English language,” wrote Webster, “that the orthography or spelling of words is very irregular”; Johnson, of course, was the most famous of

PAGE 55

56

Chapter 1

those “writers on the English language.”92 And they agreed on the source of this problem: apart from the more general fact of the “changes to which the pronunciation is liable” in any language, the principal cause in the case of English particularly, writes Webster, is its “mixture of different languages.”93 Johnson, as we have already seen, had acknowledged the same problem, but Webster put a much finer point on the various linguistic strains competing for dominance within English. In a section of Dissertation I on “The History of the English Language,” Webster accounts for the hybridity of modern English by narrating its development.94 His linguistic history is an essentially agonistic one, moving from conquest to conquest in order to identify some of the key moments of linguistic incursion, incorporation, and transformation, including the Roman invasion of Britain around the beginning of the “Christian era,”95 which superimposed Latin on top of the “native Celtic language”96 that he calls the “primitive” language of Britain; the fifth-century invasion of Britain by Saxons from the North, whose dialect of the Teutonic language replaced the “jargon of Celtic and Roman”97 and formed the true basis of modern English; the Norman Conquest in 1066, which introduced Norman French into British culture, especially in polite society and at Court;98 and King Edward III’s 1362 Statute of Pleading, which ordered the English vernacular to be used to plead all cases in court, but establishing Latin (rather than French) as the official language for recording legal proceedings. For better or worse, “our present English” emerged from this history as essentially a mixture of “the Saxon, the Norman French and the Latin.”99 In the appendix to the Dissertations, Webster focuses on the orthographic chaos this polyglot composition has created: “when words have been introduced from a foreign language into the English, they have generally retained the orthography of the original, however ill adapted to express the English pronunciation.”100 Here of course, Webster’s account of the problem, which is substantially the same as Johnson’s, has already begun to make the case for his own solution, which famously departs from Johnsonian spellings by substituting more definite-sounding characters for less definite-sounding ones wherever possible, and eliminating unsounded letters entirely, in order to bring orthography in line with pronunciation. Unless the language were to be allowed to remain in its current state of chaos, Webster wrote the following year (in a preface testing out his new spelling scheme), “there iz no alternativ.”101

PAGE 56

To Form a More Perfect Language

57

But where Webster most profoundly departs from Johnson was not in the particulars of his orthographic solutions, but rather in his determination to “solve” the problem at all. Webster was completely committed to what he saw as the lexicographer’s responsibility to “remove causes of error,”102 not just to identify them. By contrast, what is most striking about Johnson is how little he actually attempted to do about the fundamental linguistic problems that both of them understood so similarly. “Our inflections,” writes Johnson at one point in the Plan, “are by no means constant, but admit of numberless irregularities, which in this Dictionary will be diligently noted.”103 Not corrected, mind you, but just “diligently noted.”104 And so when it comes to spelling, it can be surprising how much Johnson is willing to accommodate his dictionary to an orthographic status quo that he describes so pejoratively: “The present usage of spelling, where the present usage can be distinguished, will, therefore, in this work, be generally followed; yet there will be often occasion to observe, that it is in itself inaccurate, and tolerated rather than chosen.”105 From the perspective of a true language reformer like Webster, Johnson’s willingness to tolerate the intolerable must have seemed a scandalous abdication of lexicographical duty. Not content to say, as Johnson did, that English spelling “is too inconstant to be reduced to rules,” nor that it is simply “not in our power to have recourse to any established laws of speech,” Webster absolutely refuses the underlying assumption that comprehensive reform was impracticable or impossible. However variable they may seem, Webster insists, “it does not follow that pronunciation and orthography cannot be rendered in a great measure permanent.”106 It just “requires some labor to adjust the parts and reduce them to order.”107 Where Johnson saw it as his job to make a note of irregularities, Webster determines to regulate. Where Johnson proposed to “embalm”108 the language in order to arrest its decay, Webster believes he can actually revive the patient. Johnson’s reluctance to take corrective linguistic action was a principled lexicographical philosophy he had first announced in his Plan: “The chief rule which I propose to follow is, to make no innovation without a reason sufficient to balance the inconvenience of change; and such reasons I do not expect often to find.”109 This conservative aversion to anything that smacks of reform is fueled by Johnson’s conviction that “all change is of itself an evil, which ought not to be hazarded but for evident advantage; and as inconstancy is in every case a mark of weakness, it will add nothing

PAGE 57

58

Chapter 1

to the reputation of our tongue.”110 The irregularity of English, it is true, is a form of “inconstancy” intrinsic to the nature of the language; but to move too hastily to innovate would only be to compound it with the inconstancy of all human art. Johnson’s highest priority, as he repeatedly asserts throughout the Plan, is to stabilize the language, not to perfect it. This dictates that—for all of his rhetoric of imposing order on chaos—some degree of linguistic confusion be allowed to remain. As a result of this conviction, Johnson finds any attempts to perfect the language dangerous in principle. In the preface to the dictionary, Johnson confesses to having once been tempted by the dream of a bolder and more comprehensive lexicographic achievement, which he compares to a fantasy of epic heroism: “When first I engaged in this work, I . . . pleased myself with a prospect of the hours which I should revel away in feasts of literature, the obscure recesses of northern learning, which I should enter and ransack, the treasures with which I expected every search into those neglected mines to reward my labour, and the triumph with which I should display my acquisitions to mankind.”111 But ultimately he chooses to deny himself these fantastical pleasures, which he calls “the dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer.”112 What he awakens to is the explicitly anti-utopian realization that “thus to persue perfection, was, like the first inhabitants of Arcadia, to chace the sun, which, when they had reached the hill where he seemed to rest, was still beheld at the same distance from them.”113 In the 1747 Plan, Johnson had already warned against those bearing such schemes of linguistic perfection: “There are, indeed, some who despise the inconveniencies [sic] of confusion, who seem to take pleasure in departing from custom, and to think alteration desirable for its own sake; and the reformation of our orthography, which these writers have attempted, should not pass without its due honours, but that I suppose they hold singularity its own reward, or may dread the fascination of lavish praise.”114 Now Johnson, to state the obvious, was not referring to Noah Webster (who was born the year after the Plan was published), but Webster would seem to be the kind of thinker Johnson cautioned against—those who “take pleasure in departing from custom” and “think alteration desirable for its own sake.” Was not departure from (British linguistic) custom his goal? Was not an “alteration” of British English regarded as an end in itself, and did he not settle specifically on “reformation of our orthography” as the means to that end? Beyond that, is there not more than a hint of the utopian in Webster’s wish that “the inhabitants of America can be brought to

PAGE 58

To Form a More Perfect Language

59

a perfect uniformity in the pronunciation of words” and in his explicit pursuit of “a perfect correspondence between the spelling and pronunciation”?115 The first thing we can infer from the seeming applicability of Johnson’s critique to his posthumous American successor is simply that Webster’s reforms must not have been so unprecedented. Those to whom Johnson referred in the lines above were, in a manner of speaking, the Noah Websters of the prior two centuries—men who, indeed, did so “despise the inconveniencies of confusion” that they proposed to correct irregularities through a comprehensive reform. Since one of my goals is to add nuance to a rather flattened historical narrative of a linguistic declaration of independence, a revolution against British orthographic authority, it is essential to understand this whole matter in its full cultural and historical context. And that entails reading backward from this transatlantic late eighteenthcentury dispute to its much earlier English origins.

* * * The story of modern spelling reform in English properly begins with the arrival of print in England in the late fifteenth century (William Caxton set up the first printing press in England in 1476).116 At this time, there was still nothing like a “generally recognized standard form of English speech, and only the beginnings of a standard orthography.”117 The new possibility of rapid reproduction and circulation of printed copies put more pressure on this problem than had the circulation of manuscripts.118 By and large, “printers of the early sixteenth century demonstrate little obvious interest in working towards a standardized orthography” (Salmon, “Orthography and Punctuation,” 27), which made them the targets of invective by commentators on the state of English spelling such as John Hart, who in 1551 noted “the divers vices and corruptions which use (or better abuse) mainteneth in our writing.”119 Vivian Salmon summarizes these “abuses” according to Hart, which include some of the same orthographic defects of which Webster would complain later: “Arguing that ‘vicious’ writing ‘bringeth confusion and uncertainte in the reading’ . . . he lists the major faults as ‘diminution,’ ‘superfluite,’ ‘the usurpation of one letter for another, by their confusible double powers,’ and ‘the mysplacing and disordering of them.’ ”120 By the end of the sixteenth century, “the ‘correct’ relationship between the spoken and the written word . . . occupied printers and grammarians alike.”121 This led to a period of “intense discussion” about “the

PAGE 59

60

Chapter 1

lack of a standard orthography and the possibility of providing a more satisfactory one,”122 such as those proposed by Sir Thomas Smith in 1568, Hart in 1569, and William Bullokar in 1580. Some advocated the reform of spelling on phonetic lines, while others merely aimed for more consistency of any kind, regardless of the gap between spelling and pronunciation. Some called for a new or revised alphabet more capable of capturing English speech, while others (like Bullokar) opted for “the traditional alphabet with a great variety of diacritics.” In turn, these attempts also brought about strong counterarguments against spelling reform, such as those by John Caius and John Baret in 1574.123 The early modern phase of orthographic reform culminated with Richard Mulcaster’s 1582 treatise, Elementarie, which was “the first consistent attempt to codify and promulgate detailed rules for normalising and regularising traditional English spelling.”124 The work bears some comparison to that of Webster, not so much in the particulars of its suggestions for reform (Mulcaster opposed a purely phonetic spelling system) but in its general aspirations and its rhetorical tone. Driven “by his typically Renaissance esteem for the English language, and by his desire to bring it to the utmost perfection,”125 Mulcaster refused to yield to an acceptance of its faults or of the impossibility of correcting them; he argued instead that the language is “as readie to yeild to anie rule of Art, as anie other is”126 —much as Webster would later claim in opposition to Johnson’s tolerance for irregularity. And in Webster’s famous claim that his is the “situation the most favorable for great reformations; and the present time is, in a singular degree, auspicious,”127 we see shades of Mulcaster’s assertion that every language has a moment in which it is “fittest to be made a pattern for others to follow” and that “such a period in the English tung I take this to be in our daies, for both the pen and the speche.”128 This Renaissance orthographic debate was enough in circulation by the 1590s that Shakespeare could mine it for satire in Love’s Labour’s Lost: in act 5, scene 1, the pedantic scholar Holofernes complains of the linguistic style of Don Armado, specifically castigating him for not actually pronouncing the b in doubt or debt as they are written: He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument. I abhor such fanatical phantasimes, such insociable and point-devise companions; such rackers of

PAGE 60

To Form a More Perfect Language

61

orthography, as to speak dout, fine, when he should say doubt; det, when he should pronounce debt,—d, e, b, t, not d, e, t: he clepeth a calf, cauf; half, hauf; neighbour vocatur nebor; neigh abbreviated ne. This is abhominable,—which he would call abbominable . . . (lines 1750–59) The real “racker of orthography” in this scene, of course, is Holofernes; though more accurately, it is orthoepy he places on the rack, by insisting that these graphemes be spoken. By having him do so, Shakespeare dramatizes the absurdity that can result from uttering words as they are written— particularly when, in the case of words like debt and doubt, the “b” is only present by virtue of historically recent attempts to reflect the Latin roots, debitum and dubitare, respectively.129 (Webster would respell “indebted” as “indeted.”) In other words, not only is the general linguistic practice being satirized here the exact counterpart of Johnson’s later suggestion that men ought to “speak as they write,” but these particular spellings are directly in line with the Johnsonian principle of making orthography follow etymological origin. With this deeper history in view, then, it becomes clear why Johnson refers in 1747 to “the great orthographic contest [that] has long subsisted between etymology and pronunciation”130 —acknowledging that the debate already had some historical legs—and it is also clear whom Johnson might have had in mind when offering somewhat sarcastic “honours”131 to previous attempts at orthographic reform. Most significantly for my purposes, it becomes clear that Webster’s late eighteenth-century argument in favor of the perfectibility of English was not in fact a call to “innovate” the language, but rather an attempt to restore it to an earlier and more perfect state. For all of his association with linguistic novelty, Webster was in fact placing himself in a lineage of language reformers who preceded Johnson and his contemporaries by two centuries. This was no secret; on the contrary, it was one of the explicit terms of Webster’s cultural authority. “In the essays, ritten in the last yeer,” he wrote in a 1790 preface testing out his revised orthography, “a considerable change of spelling is introduced by way of experiment. This liberty waz taken by the writers before the age of Queen Elizabeth, and to this we are indeted for the preference of modern spelling over Gower and Chaucer.”132 In the appendix to the Dissertations, Webster cites, as precursors to his own attempts, those “formerly made in England

PAGE 61

62

Chapter 1

to rectify the orthography of the language,” including those of Sir Thomas Smith in 1568 and two early seventeenth-century reformers, Alexander Gil and Charles Butler.133 In this way, Webster framed his own reforms as a resumption of an unfinished Renaissance project. “Every possible reezon that could ever be offered for altering the spelling of wurds,” he asserts, “still exists in full force; and if a gradual reform should not be made in our language, it wil proov that we are less under the influence of reezon than our ancestors.”134 This was to be a rather different kind of “American Renaissance” than F. O. Matthiessen’s: not a renaissance of America’s own so much as America’s completion of a cultural rebirth that had begun in England centuries earlier but had stalled in its country of origin. From Webster’s long historical perspective, Johnson is the innovator, one of a group of eighteenth-century Englishmen whose “modern” usage had not only failed to improve the language and rectify its faults but had vitiated it further. In the following section, I shall discuss some of the other writers Webster singles out for this critique, but perhaps it is already clear how Johnson might have opened himself to the charge. It was not just that he dug in his heels against past and future attempts to regulate the language or render it consistent. More grievously, as Webster sees it, Johnson actually corrupted the language further by, first, basing orthography on etymology, and then showing no preference for earlier Anglo-Saxon primitives over later French or Latin ones. “Dr. Johnson ought to have gone back some centuries,” Webster complains, “and given us, in his dictionary, the primitive Saxon orthography, wol for will; ydilnesse for idleness; eyen for eyes; eche for each, &c. Nay, he should have gone as far as possible into antiquity, and, regardless of the changes of pronunciation, given us the primitive radical language in its purity.”135 Instead, Johnson “Latinized” the language, thus taking it further away from its truest source. And, as goes Johnson’s orthography, so goes his writing style: “Johnson’s stile is a mixture of Latin and English, an intolerable composition of Latinity, affected smoothness, scholastic accuracy and roundness of periods. The benefits derived from his morality and his erudition, will hardly counterbalance the mischief done by his manner of writing.”136 In order to “counterbalance the mischief” perpetrated by Johnson, Webster doesn’t just contravene his authority by himself; crucially, he invokes other British authorities in order to trump it. “In the singularity of spelling certain words,” he establishes in the preface, “I am authorized by

PAGE 62

To Form a More Perfect Language

63

Sidney, Clarendon, Middleton, Blackstone, Ash, or other eminent writers, whose authority, being supported by good principles and convenience, is deemed superior to that of Johnson, whose pedantry has corrupted the purity of our language, and whose principles would in time destroy all agreement between the spelling and pronunciation of words.”137 The broader claim here is that, by following the lead of the true British authorities on the English language, Webster will be able to restore the language to a purer state, which for him is that closer to its archaic form. For this reason, his tends to cite “ancient” British authors more often than modern ones. “It will perhaps surprize my readers to be told that, in many particular words, the modern spelling is less correct than the ancient. Yet this is a truth that reflects dishonor on our modern refiners of the language.”138 He instantiates this claim with some examples: “Chaucer, four hundred years ago, wrote bilder for builder; dedly for deadly; ernest for earnest; erly for early; brest for breast; hed for head; and certainly his spelling was the most agreeable to the pronunciation. Sidney wrote bin, examin, sutable, with perfect propriety. Dr. Middleton wrote explane, genuin, revele, which is the most easy and correct orthography of such words; and also luster, theater, for lustre, theatre. In these and many other instances, the modern spelling is a corruption.”139 What is striking about this catalog of spellings from the fourteenth century to the eighteenth is how perfectly in line they are with Webster’s orthographic philosophy: they dispense with unvoiced or silent letters, and they sound vowels with simplicity and without ambiguity. So Webster-like are these short and direct spellings that they would seem to have been generated by his orthographic system; on the contrary, he cites them as its inspiration. The significance of this cannot be overstated: Webster corrects Johnson’s orthography not by innovating or modernizing it, but by returning to pre-Johnsonian authorities. This is not to say that Webster rejects all contemporary British authorities on the language. On the contrary, the Dissertations also occasionally cites Johnson’s contemporaries and successors as positive foils to his errors. Some of the spelling choices we most strongly associate with Webster’s reforms come from such sources: “Johnson, who has been usually followed by succeeding compilers of dictionaries, preserves the u in honour, favour, and similar words, as also the final k in publick, &c; Ash, followed by many writers, very properly restores these words to the Roman spelling, by omitting the u and k.”140 The reference here is to the contemporary English

PAGE 63

64

Chapter 1

lexicographer John Ash, whose New And Complete Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1775.141 In embracing such spellings, then, Webster wasn’t taking a stand against transatlantic emulation; he was simply emulating Ash rather than Johnson. To omit the u and the k, then, was not to choose the “American spelling” over the “British spelling,” though, from our vantage point, we can hardly stop ourselves from thinking of it in such terms. In the context of Webster’s own argument, he was merely choosing one British spelling over another, and then adopting the preferred one for his “regular national orthography.”142 Even as he cautions his countrymen against servile imitation of the wrong British authorities, he enjoins them to follow the right ones, and he himself models the kind of salutary transatlantic emulation he has in mind. Now, at first glance, Webster’s appeal to such “eminent writers”143 as the source of exemplary spellings may appear to be at variance with his contempt for linguistic arguments from authority: “Ask the most of our learned men, how they would pronounce a word or compose a sentence, and they will immediately appeal to some favorite author whose decision is final. Thus distinguished eminence in a writer often becomes a passport for innumerable errors.”144 First of all, let us recognize the implicit doublelayered swipe at Johnson here. On the one hand, Johnson explicitly arbitrated usage by referring troublesome questions to “writers of . . . acknowledged authority.”145 On the other hand, Johnson, the writer, often served as just such an authority to many of his contemporaries. As Webster sarcastically puts it: “The ipse dixit of a Johnson, a Garrick, or a Sheridan, has the force of law, and to contradict it, is rebellion.”146 Yet Webster evidently does not regard his own citation of the “proper” spellings of “Sidney, Clarendon, Middleton, Blackstone, Ash, or other eminent writers”147 as accountable to this critique of ipse dixit reasoning. “It has been my aim to support my opinions by numerous and respectable authorities,” Webster advertises in his preface. “Many other ancient authors would have been consulted, had it been practicable; but the most valuable of these are very scarce, and many of them I have not heard of in America.”148 It is hard to deny that these are somewhat awkward moments in the Dissertations, if only because they are tonally out of step with the rhetoric of national originality that prevails elsewhere in the work, its declarations of the “folly of imitating our parent country,” and its outright attacks on “the rage for copying the English.”149 In this connection, what is most significant is the way Webster navigates a path between excessive servility to

PAGE 64

To Form a More Perfect Language

65

tradition, on the one hand, and excessive innovation, on the other. He accomplishes this by choosing a third position: when he cites the usage of a particular writer, he is not invoking the authority of the writer himself, but that writer’s illumination of the intrinsic principles of the language: If the most eminent speakers are not to direct our practice, where may we look for a guide? The answer is extremely easy; the rules of the language itself, and the general practice of the nation, constitute propriety in speaking. If we examine the structure of any language, we shall find a certain principle of analogy running through the whole. We shall find in English that similar combinations of letters have usually the same pronunciation, and that words, having the same terminating syllable, generally have the accent at the same distance from that termination. These principles of analogy were not the result of design—they must have been the effect of accident, or that tendency which all men feel towards uniformity.150 The writerly authorities who get the nod, then, are those who have grounded their linguistic practices in what we might call the genius of the language. Whether it is a spelling employed by Chaucer in the 1370s, or one promoted by Ash in the 1770s, what makes them worthy of adoption is not adherence to dogma, and still less is it an appeal to fashion or currency. “Fashion is usually the child of caprice and the being of a day; principles of propriety are founded in the very nature of things, and remain unmoved and unchanged, amidst all the fluctuations of human affairs and the revolutions of time.”151 To follow those authors, past or present, whose usage hews closest to “the very nature of things” is to ground one’s practices in the eternal structure of the language rather than in “usage” per se—in langue rather than parole.152 In all of these ways, then, Webster positions himself as a linguistic conservative, which is to say, a preserver of the primordial rules of the language and a restorer of original spellings and pronunciations that have been corrupted by “the modern refiners of the language.”153 He will do what he has explicitly accused Johnson of failing to do: give us “the primitive radical language in its purity.”154 As his association of “radical” with “primitive” clearly signals, Webster advocated a linguistic “radicalism” only in the etymological sense of that term (a return to the root or origin), which is nearly the reverse of the word’s contemporary connotation (drastic or extreme

PAGE 65

66

Chapter 1

reform).155 In a broader sense, this inverts our customary image of Webster’s “revolution” against “traditional” British linguistic authority. For Webster repeatedly asserts the opposite: he wants to restore proper, which is to say prior, forms of usage from the corruptions of modern fashion. Not only by reviving pre-Johnsonian proposals for orthographic reform, but also, as I shall fully explain in the following section, by turning back the linguistic clock to a more primordial form of English, one closer to its Anglo-Saxon origins, and hence freer of the later superimposition of foreign tongues atop its original “ground-work.”156 As this deeper history of the orthographic debate should make abundantly clear, none of this added up to a particularly “contemporary” dispute. First of all, the contenders in this eighteenth-century argument about spelling arrayed themselves across the same range of positions that had developed during the English Renaissance: to reform spelling or to leave it as is?157 If to reform it, to do so in the direction of phonetic agreement, or merely that of consistency? To replace the alphabet altogether, supplement it diacritically, or continue it in its traditional form? In one sense, then, none of this had much to do with revolutionary-era politics; it was a debate about temporality more than about nationality, having much in common with the set of European cultural arguments about “ancients and moderns,” from the late seventeenth-century French querelle to its turn-of-theeighteenth-century British variants. Having said that, even if the content of the debate was a retread of a much earlier cultural conversation, the context in which it now unfolded undoubtedly gave the question a new character. When the issue of English language reform was revived in a settler-colonial context—whether it was being taken up on the side of the (former) settler colony, or on the side of a metropolitan culture aware of the colonial situation elsewhere—it inevitably took on an entirely different life. In a word, what ultimately made the transatlantic eighteenth-century spelling debate distinct from its antecedents was its geopolitics.

English in America / American English The editor of the third volume of The Cambridge History of the English Language explains the historical endpoint of the volume, 1776, as the date of the “notional birth of the first (non-insular) extraterritorial English.”158

PAGE 66

To Form a More Perfect Language

67

That is as good a description I have found of what Webster set about doing in the 1780s: to claim that English was in a process of being reborn outside of England and its territories. It was a “notional” birth, because it was not the first time that English had travelled abroad or that it was extended into colonial spaces; yet this idea was central to Webster’s ideological imaginary. And Webster would indeed derive great argumentative advantage from his emphasis on the “non-insular” quality of American English.159 A cisatlantic rearticulation of the language, far from the British Isles, would accomplish something fundamentally unlike Scottish, Irish, Welsh, and other subvarieties of the language and its usage could possibly have done. Whether one is inclined to regard American English as the corruption of the language, on the one hand, or as the best chance for its renewal, on the other, will determine what one emphasizes in telling the story of the transfer of English to North America. The language was carried to the New World, we might say, by British explorers starting in the fifteenth century (like John Cabot, an Italian who in 1497 led an English expedition to North America on behalf of Henry VII), or would-be settlers starting in the sixteenth (like Walter Raleigh, whose failed attempt at colonization in 1584 and “lost colony” of 1587 established the pattern for English settler colonialism). But language is not like other cargo; it can only be established in a new place—“planted” there, in the colonial parlance—after the formation of a functional and reproducible settler colony. By most historical accounts of the language, then, American English properly begins in 1607, with the founding of the first permanent English-speaking settlement at Jamestown.160 By way of linguistic and cultural context, this was four years after the death of Elizabeth I, whose reign inaugurated the golden age of English, according to Johnson and Webster alike. (“Of antiquated or obsolete words,” Johnson declares in the Plan, “none will be inserted, but such as are to be found in authors, who wrote since the accession of Elizabeth, from which we date the golden age of our language.”)161 During roughly the first year of the Jamestown settlement, Shakespeare was likely composing Timon of Athens, along with (his portion of) Pericles, Prince of Tyre, and also Coriolanus. He composed his New World–inspired play, The Tempest, a few years later, the same year in which the King James Bible was published (1611). In other words, in Johnson’s terms, English was at the undeniable peak of its form at the moment of its transfer to North America. What followed after the language left the metropole and began to live a parallel life in the colonies, however, is where the argumentative paths

PAGE 67

68

Chapter 1

about “American English” diverge. For Johnson, what happened to English in the colonies was not only the drift, but more pointedly, the “corruption” of the language—not simply according to his general conviction that “all change is of itself an evil,”162 but in a more particular sense having to do with the fate of a metropolitan language in the colonial environment. More than a decade before European naturalists and philosophers like the Comte de Buffon and Corneille de Pauw hypothesized that nature’s productions were bound to be diminished in stature and vigor in the American climate, it would appear that Johnson was thinking much the same thing with regard to language. In the 1755 preface, Johnson refers twice to the “degeneration” of language, each time by analogy to other objects and other causes. In one instance, he compares language to political structures: “tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to degeneration.”163 This sentiment expressed Johnson’s Toryism along with its typical intellectual trappings: things tend to get worse as they move forward in time; progression is really declension. Still more interesting to my purpose, Johnson makes reference to another form of degeneracy in the preface: “it is incident to words, as to their authours, to degenerate from their ancestors, and to change their manners when they change their country.”164 Here, the drift of a language is analogized, first, as the degeneration of a species from its original progenitors to latter progeny, and second, as the decline that follows geographical migration. Nowhere in the Plan or in the 1755 preface does Johnson mention America in particular, but elsewhere around this same time, he published his thoughts about the deficiencies of what he called “the American dialect.”165 In his review of Geographical, Historical, Political, Philosophical, and Mechanical Essays (written by Lewis Evans, a Welsh-born surveyor working in North America, and published by Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia in 1755), Johnson wrote: “This treatise is written with such elegance as the subject admits, tho’ not without some mixture of the American dialect, a tract of corruption to which every language widely diffused must always be exposed.”166 This was highly charged rhetoric in the era of the New World degeneracy thesis, which hypothesized the inevitable diminution both of indigenous American species and of those transferred to the American climate. As Corneille de Pauw put it most strongly in his Recherches philosophiques sur les Ame´ricans (1771), the “Americans” were “a degenerate species of the human race, cowardly, impotent, without physical strength, without vitality, [and] without elevation of the mind.”167 But De Pauw and Buffon

PAGE 68

To Form a More Perfect Language

69

were speaking specifically of indigenous Americans. In that sense, their argument doesn’t exactly correspond to Johnson’s negative evaluation of American English. Johnson’s aspersions against English in the American colonies are better understood as a variant of the creole degeneracy thesis in particular—the notion that European bodies transported to a colonial setting would become degraded as a result of changes in climate and diet.168 The encyclopedist Abbe´ Raynal was the figure most notoriously associated with the cultural form of this argument, thanks to an often-quoted line from his Histoire philosophique et politique des deux Indes (1770): “One must be astonished that America has not yet produced [n’ait pas encore produit] one good poet, one able mathematician, one man of genius in a single art or a single science.”169 The presumptive implication was that deferral (“not yet”) might signal devolution. Johnson’s linguistic version of this argument circa 1750 anticipated these natural-scientific and ethnological iterations by a couple of decades, but they shared the same basic logic: transplanted from the European metropole to the New World colonies, animal and vegetable bodies, along with language and culture, seemed bound to decline, diminish, and degenerate. Noah Webster not only defends American English against this imputation of linguistic degeneracy; he goes on the counteroffensive. In what is surely the most fascinating argument presented in the Dissertations, Webster claims that, far from having been corrupted in America, English is in fact being spoken in a more “pure” form there in 1789 than it is in the mother country: “On examining the language, and comparing the practice of speaking among the yeomanry of this country, with the stile of Shakespear and Addison, I am constrained to declare that the people of America, in particular the English descendants, speak the most pure English now known in the world. There is hardly a foreign idiom in their language; by which I mean, a phrase that has not been used by the best English writers from the time of Chaucer.”170 Webster pulls off this remarkable—some might say preposterous—sleight of hand through a captivating combination of argumentative volleys which I will briefly summarize here and then explore in greater detail. First, he makes his own version of the “golden age” argument: at the historical moment when English made its transatlantic voyage, the language was close to its highest “stage of improvement,” which in agreement with Johnson he dates from “the age of Queen Elizabeth.”171 Then, by telling a story at once historical, demographic, and mythic, Webster establishes that the particular version of English that was

PAGE 69

70

Chapter 1

planted in America was its best and purest form, because it remained connected to the Anglo-Saxon roots of the language. Finally, in an implicit but unmistakable inversion of Johnson’s degeneracy hypothesis, Webster could argue that this more originary strain of English was in fact carefully preserved by virtue of its transplantation to America, where it remained safely isolated while, in the meantime, its usage was becoming corrupted in England.

* * * As I have already mentioned in passing, Webster’s agonistic history of the English language revolved around the internal competition between its primordial Anglo-Saxon source and the later overlays of Latin and Norman French. Before even commencing his discussion of “The History of the English Language” in Dissertation I, he clearly indicates the perspective from which he will narrate its development: “Believing, with the author of ‘Diversions of Purley,’ that the peculiar structure of our language is Saxon, and that its principles can be discovered only in its Teutonic original, it has been my business, as far as the materials in my possession would permit, to compare the English with the other branches of the same stock, particularly the German and the Danish.”172 The “author” Webster here references is John Horne Tooke, a Cambridge-educated philologist whose 1786 treatise Epea Pteroenta, or, The Diversions of Purley had made an explicit practice of turning to “Anglo-saxon, from which our language immediately descends” in order to understand and adjudicate rules of English construction.173 Webster proceeds according to this same conviction: “The primitive language of the English nation was the Saxon, and the words derived from that, now constitute the ground-work of modern English. Hence all the rules of inflection, and most of the rules of construction, are Saxon.”174 Then, having adopted this philological argument from Tooke and other British antiquarians,175 Webster cannily adapted it to his particular defense of American English. To do so, he first went backward in time to establish a British lineage of demotic English that had always remained closer in spirit to the fifthcentury origins of the language: even after 1066, when the Norman Conquest imposed “Roman and other foreign tongues”176 upon English, those whom Webster calls the “body of the people, descendants of the Saxons, still retained their primitive tongue.”177 In this way, Webster can say that

PAGE 70

To Form a More Perfect Language

71

Saxon was always the “vulgar language of the English,” even as French became the “polite” language and the language of “court,” and Latin established itself among “the learned, who were mostly the regular and secular clergy.”178 Significantly, he associates the preservation of the Saxon strain of the language specifically with an agricultural or “yeoman” class: “in the Saxon, the ground-work of the whole [language], the yeomanry find all the words for which they have any use in domestic life or in the agricultural and most simple mechanical employments.”179 The figure of “the yeomanry” is instrumental to this story for two reasons. First, in Webster’s linguistic version of the “Norman yoke” narrative, they signify a pragmatic, plainspoken subset of true Englishmen capable of resisting “the language of the conquerors”180 and heroically preserving a vernacular tradition close to the Saxon source.181 Second, this figure then enables Webster to draw a line of filiation from “the yeomanry of the English nation” to American farmers associated with the same practical and linguistic qualities: “Language is the effect of necessity, and when a nation has a language which is competent to all their purposes of communicating ideas, they will not embrace new words and phrases. This is the reason why the yeomanry of the English nation have never adopted the improvements of the English tongue. The Saxon was competent to most of the purposes of an agricultural people; and the class of men who have not advanced beyond that state which in fact makes the body of the nation, at least in America, seldom use any words except those of Saxon original.”182 In this way, Webster turns the American yeoman into “the ally and image of his British counterpart,” as David Simpson observes.183 By doing so, Webster not only authorizes himself seamlessly to slide from one figure to the other, as he does above. He can also fold historical time and geographical space around this mythic figure: just as “the yeomanry of the English nation” had resisted the imposition of the Norman yoke from the eleventh century on, Webster’s American yeomen have also been sustaining the Saxon core of the English language since the early seventeenth century, thus keeping the forces of foreign influence at bay. But in the latter case, as we shall see in a moment, the “foreign” imposition is represented by the fashionable “improvements” of modern British usage itself. Part and parcel of Webster’s celebration of “yeoman” linguistic practices is his emphasis on a farmer class as distinct from a wealthy planter class, along with his consequent privileging of New England rather than the southern states as the cradle of idealized language use. Webster unfolds

PAGE 71

72

Chapter 1

some of these associations in a revealing passage from Dissertation I in which he distinguishes the language of “the yeomanry of New England” from that of the residents of southern states: “People of large fortunes, who pride themselves on family distinctions, possess a certain boldness, dignity and independence in their manners, which give a correspondent air to their mode of speaking. Those who are accustomed to command slaves, form a habit of expressing themselves with the tone of authority and decision.”184 The linguistic usage of that region is thus explicitly opposed to that of “New England, where there are few slaves and servants, and less family distinctions than in any other part of America.”185 Such social differences, he insists, immediately manifest themselves in language use: “Not possessing that pride and consciousness of superiority which attend birth and fortune, their intercourse with each other is all conducted on the idea of equality, which gives a singular tone to their language and complexion to their manners.”186 This gives rise to a rhetorical style which he identifies as characteristic of New England: “the people are accustomed to address each other with that diffidence, or attention to the opinion of others, which marks a state of equality. Instead of commanding, they advise, instead of saying, with an air of decision, you must, they ask with an air of doubtfulness, is it not best? or give their opinions with an indecisive tone, you had better, I believe.”187 Readers of Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography will immediately associate Webster’s embrace of rhetorical “diffidence” with Franklin’s promotion of the same rhetorical posture after encountering it in “an English grammar.”188 Yet Webster’s most striking argument in this section is that sociopolitical differences shape regional language use, not only at these structurally higher levels of rhetorical style (“mode of speaking”), but also down to the level of phonemic utterance (“tone”). Thus, even the pronunciation of vowel sounds and stress patterns is socially determined: “It may surprize those who have not turned their thoughts to this subject, that I would ascribe the manner of speaking among a people, to the nature of their government and a distribution of their property. Yet it is an undoubted fact that the drawling nasal manner of speaking in New England arises almost solely from these causes.”189 Clearly, this account of linguistic differences between New England and the South takes part in an ongoing argument about regional differences in culture, manners, and morals already becoming embedded in American thought at the time. What may not be as obvious is that this discussion also has a multilayered transatlantic subtext. First and most generally, this

PAGE 72

To Form a More Perfect Language

73

particular regional distinction is linked to ideas about the demographics of the various migrations to British North America and the (English) regional characteristics they brought to different colonies. By placing his emphasis on the New England farmer instead of the Virginia planter, Webster privileges the Puritans (who originated largely from East Anglia and began their migration to Massachusetts Bay in 1629), over the migrants to the Chesapeake Bay area and Virginia (generally understood to have come from the southwestern counties of England, and composed of Cavaliers loyal to the monarchy during the English Civil War).190 More specifically, when Webster is talking about regional North American differences in “tone,” he is always doing so in an intellectual context defined by contemporary British discussions about class and regional dialects in England and the styles of intonation prevalent in each. John Hurt Fisher argues that by “defending New England pronunciation against what he perceived as the more peremptory intonation of the Virginia elite,” Webster was in the same gesture taking aim at the “fashionable metropolitan pronunciations” current in London at the time he wrote.191 (Webster gets particularly worked up about a particular voicing of “u” following the consonant in words like “education” or “nature,” such that “education must be pronounced edyucation, nature, natyure, and superior, syuperior.”)192 For Webster, the linguistic association between fashionable Londoners and American slaveholders would have made sense because the “Virginia elite were . . . British aristocracy, often educated in England, who preserved the intonation patterns of RP [Received Pronunciation].”193 Moreover, the speech of London elites specifically was a frequent touchpoint in British debates about pronunciation contemporaneous with Webster’s early work. Two years after the publication of the Dissertations, John Walker famously celebrated the metropolitan mode of speaking in his 1791 Critical Pronouncing Dictionary: “The pronunciation of London,” Walker declared, is “undoubtedly the best; that is, not only the best by courtesy, and because it happens to be the pronunciation of the capital, but best by a better title, that of being more generally received.”194 In case the implication was not clear, Walker spelled it out: the farther one gets from London, the worse English becomes. “Harsh as the sentence may seem, those at a considerable distance from the capital do not only mispronounce many words taken separately, but they scarcely pronounce with purity a single word, syllable, or letter.”195 Walker was focusing on the differences between the English of “the metropolis” and that of “the provinces,”196 but one would have to

PAGE 73

74

Chapter 1

assume that a wholly extraterritorial English would suffer an even more radical devolution. It is obvious that Webster must hold this metropolitan standard of pronunciation in contempt. What is more interesting, however, is that he figures out a way to make its association with the English capital serve his purposes. Throughout the Dissertations, Webster associates “fashionable” pronunciations with two English social spaces: the “London theaters”197 and “at court.”198 He labels certain locutions “stage pronunciation,”199 and lays the lion’s share of the blame for these before the English actor David Garrick for having given certain corrupt but fashionable pronunciations “a very rapid and extensive diffusion in the polite world”200 and created a rage for imitating them. Webster’s use of the term “court pronunciation”201 is indebted to Thomas Sheridan, the Irish-born stage actor who wrote widely on elocution, pronunciation, and grammar.202 Webster credits Sheridan’s 1780 General Dictionary of the English Language203 with having “attempted to give us a standard” for uniform English pronunciation, but criticizes him for having “made the attempt on false principles” and holds him responsible, along with Garrick, for disseminating specious “modern” pronunciations.204 While Webster doesn’t attribute the term “court pronunciation” specifically, he would have seen the phrase in Sheridan’s earlier work, Course of Lectures on Elocution (1762), which Webster had read and cited respectfully.205 In Sheridan’s Lecture II, “court pronunciation” denominated the kind of English that prevailed in London among “the lot of that which prevails at court, the source of fashions of all kinds.”206 Thus, in the same manner in which other lexicographers like John Walker would note differences in pronunciation between “the metropolis and the provinces,”207 Sheridan was parsing the “dialects” of English within “the very metropolis itself.”208 One can hear “two different modes of pronunciation . . . by which the inhabitants of one part of the town, are distinguished from those of the other. One is current in the city, and is called the cockney; the other at the court-end, and is called the polite pronunciation.”209 In the preface to his 1780 dictionary, Sheridan gives some historical background to this court English, which he declares to have been at its peak during “what may be called the Augustan age of England, I mean during the reign of Anne [1702– 1714], when English was the language spoken at court, and when the same attention was paid to propriety of pronunciation, as that of French at the Court of Versailles.”210 The result was a prevailing “uniformity of pronunciation” which was highly salutary, “as it is probable, that English was then

PAGE 74

To Form a More Perfect Language

75

spoken in its highest state of perfection.”211 Since that time, there has been a general decline in usage; yet, the very mode of pronunciation which had prevailed “at the court of Anne,” Sheridan argued, is “still the customary one among the descendants of all the politer part of the world bred in that reign.”212 It is not “yet too late to recover it in that very state” of perfection, and Sheridan sets out to do just that, taking the court usage as his model.213 If Webster did in fact lift this phrase from Sheridan’s pages, simply by putting it into play within the context of his own argument, he had already changed it. To begin with the most obvious point, when a postRevolutionary American linguist writes of “the court pronunciation,” the words instantly take on a new and extremely provocative connotation: they now refer to the linguistic practices of a foreign court, which is another phrase Webster uses on a handful of important occasions, and which he plays to its maximum rhetorical effect. “No consideration can warrant us,” he admonishes his readers at the end of Dissertation II, “in resigning our practice to the authority of a foreign court, which, thro mere affectation, may have embraced many obvious errors.”214 In Dissertation III, he issues the same admonition via a rhetorical question: “Shall we then relinquish what every man must acknowlege to be right, to embrace the corruptions of a foreign court and stage?”215 Yet even here we mustn’t let the rhetoric of national sovereignty drown out a more nuanced cultural argument. Webster’s reference to the menacing “authority of a foreign court”216 was also a play on a much deeper historical reference, for which his history of the English language in Dissertation I had already carefully paved the way: at a critical earlier point in its history, English culture itself had struggled against the forces of foreign influence, when a new Norman ruling class imposed French on the English nation and enforced a new set of standards for courtly language. Significantly, the only other context in which Webster refers to a foreign court is in the context of 1066: “The court of William [the Conqueror] consisted principally of foreigners who could speak no language but French. . . . Public business was transacted in the French, and it became dishonorable or a mark of low breeding, not to understand that language. Indeed under the first reigns after the conquest, it was a disgrace to be called an Englishman.”217 This consonance in usage suggests the remarkable subtlety of Webster’s many-layered invocation of the Norman yoke narrative. It suggests, too, that Webster might have taken such pains to clarify the association of French language with the Anglo-Norman “court” and with “polite” social

PAGE 75

76

Chapter 1

classes precisely in order to prepare the ground for the crucial turn later in his argument about American English. Just as the “body of the [English] people”218 after 1066 hewed closer to the Saxon substance of the language while the official language of court abandoned it, the demotic language of the American yeoman preserved that Saxon core while a different form of courtly usage threatened to corrupt it centuries later. This is not exactly to say that, in Webster’s account, England plays the role of the “Norman” to America’s “Saxon,” thus rendering revolutionary anglophobia in terms of an “English yoke.” The axes of identification are more fractured and complex, on both sides of the cultural equation.219 First, Johnson and the other modern refiners of the language are not stand-ins for the Norman invaders; rather, they are Englishmen who have embraced foreign fashions, while the common men of their nation refused such socalled improvements. The problem with these modern elites, then, is not that they are too English; rather, with their “predilection of the learned, for words of foreign growth and ancient origin,”220 they are insufficiently English. They have figuratively sold their Anglo-Saxon birthright for a mess of pottage. Meanwhile, Webster argues for a symbolic commonality between the people of his emergent nation and “the yeomanry of the English nation.”221 In both ways, Webster does not take distance from Englishness but affiliates himself all the more closely with it. America is a kind of cultural preserve of the best aspects of the English cultural past; but this time, the original source of culture will remain pure because it is better protected from foreign influence. Meanwhile, since modern Britain itself has polluted it, it is the only access the world may have to these virtues and values. In this way, Webster articulates what I believe we must call an American exceptionalism; but it is an American exceptionalism built upon an earlier English nationalism. And here, finally, is where Webster recruits geography in order to complete his brilliant countersuit against the colonial degeneracy argument. In what is generally understood among linguistic historians to be a precocious articulation of the “colonial lag” hypothesis—which was theorized by linguists in the late nineteenth century and given its familiar phrasing in the early twentieth—Webster argues that this language “has not suffered [the] material changes” in the colonial environment to which it would have been subject in the metropole.222 Thus, having already established that the form of the language brought to America represented its most original and most vital strain, he then argues that this “golden age” English has been preserved

PAGE 76

To Form a More Perfect Language

77

by virtue of its distance from Europe and by its own geographical insularity: “It is remarked by a certain author, that the inhabitants of islands best preserve their native tongue. New England has been in the situation of an island; during 160 years, the people except in a few commercial towns, have not been exposed to any of the causes which effect great changes in language and manners.”223 The figure of “160 years,” counting backwards from the 1789 publication of Dissertations, dates the transfer of English back to 1729, the year of the founding of the Massachusetts Bay colony. “Hence,” he says, as if giving a perfectly reasonable explanation of an exotic fact, “the surprising similarity between the idioms of the New England people and those of Chaucer, Shakespear, Congreve, &c. who wrote in the true English stile.”224 We can thus “look among the New England common people for ancient English phrases,” for the same language that is so seriously endangered in the Old World is perfectly protected in the New, having been for a century and a half “sequestered in some measure from the world.”225 The choice of words here is telling: “sequestered” suggests not only separation, but also safekeeping from the forces of mutation.226 English, he implies, is in need of such protection because contemporary England has entrusted the stewardship of its most valuable cultural resource—its language—to intellectuals who have further corrupted it, thus abusing that which they ought to have safeguarded. To put it in botanical terms: the English plant had been transported to American soil, where it immediately flourished as if it had always been meant to grow there; meanwhile, it suffered a blight on its continent of origin. “The corruption,” Webster writes, “has taken such deep root in England, that there is little probability it will ever be eradicated.”227 According to this logic, it could truly be said that the vigor of the transplant truly surpassed that of the original stock. This all amounts to more than just a rejoinder to colonial degeneracy; it was a complete inversion of that proposition. Let us appreciate what a brilliant argumentative jujitsu this reversal represents: British lexicographers from Johnson to Walker presumed that the language would worsen the farther one gets from the center; Webster argued, to the contrary, that only at some distance from England might it be possible to speak perfect English. Webster effectively accepts the opposition between metropolitan and extraterritorial English, but reverses the valuation and thus stands the whole argument on its head. As I have already mentioned, Webster even turns Johnson’s assertion of the “corruption” of “the American dialect” back against him, accusing Johnson of having “corrupted the purity of our

PAGE 77

78

Chapter 1

language.”228 But let us not miss the extraordinary detail hiding in plain sight here: English is “our language.” This goes beyond even the bold assertion that the original language is now inferior to its colonial copy; it enacts a symbolic exchange of original and copy. American English is more original (closer to the linguistic origin), more radical (still connected to the roots of the language), and more primordial (still linked to Saxon primitives and faithful to its rules of construction). And if American English is the authentic form, British English is a kind of bad forgery. “To most people in this country, the English pronunciation appears like affectation.”229 This is a social observation from which Webster here seems to maintain some distance, but in an important sense, the whole shape of his own argument accords with it. More than just an iteration of that old chestnut of American philistinism, “British people talk funny,” it is in fact a straight-faced claim carefully supported by the historico-linguistic, demographic, and geographical arguments I have just explored in detail. It is merely a logical extension of that argumentative sequence to suggest that British speech is more mannered, less natural, than the American pronunciations of the same English words: “Wrath, the English pronounce with the third sound of a or aw, but the Americans almost universally preserve the analogous found, as in bath, path. This is the correct pronunciation; and why should we reject it for wroth, which is a corruption? If the English practice is erroneous, let it remain so; we have no concern with it. By adhering to our own practice, we preserve a superiority over the English, in those instances, in which ours is guided by rules; and so far ought we to be from conforming to their practice, that they ought rather to conform to ours.”230 Notice that Americans don’t only pronounce words better; they “preserve” the correct sound of the word. The verb only makes sense if we have internalized Webster’s argument that American English precedes British English—not chronologically, of course, but ontologically, by virtue of its tapping into an historically deeper and more original core of diction and pronunciation. And as I have already observed, the partly historical, partly mythical figure of the “yeoman” is often found nearby when time is folded in this way: “The Americans still adhere to the analogies of the language, where the English have infringed them. So far therefore as the regularity of construction is concerned, we ought to retain our own practice and be our own standards. The English practice is an authority; but considering the force of custom and the caprice of fashion, their practice must be as liable to changes and to errors, as the practice of a well educated yeomanry, who

PAGE 78

To Form a More Perfect Language

79

are governed by habits and not easily led astray by novelty.”231 Here, even old and new are inverted, as England stands for “novelty” while America “retains” older, better practices. In short, Americans speak true English; it is the British who speak an accented dialect. What the world has witnessed since 1729, then, is not the degeneration of the English language in the western hemisphere, but its regeneration. Against all common sense, against the forward direction of time, against the very name of the language itself, “English” is an American invention.

“Foreigners and Our Own Children” In the course of turning the tables on linguistic degeneration, Webster essentially came up with an imaginative resolution to a far more intractable problem: that of cultural foreign debt. As I have already argued in the introduction to this book, early U.S. cultural production was fundamentally structured by this problem. In the most basic sense, it issued from the linguistic situation of a former settler colony that continued to conduct its cultural life in the mother tongue despite the spectacular achievement of political independence. The awareness of this state of affairs was reflected on every page of Webster’s Dissertations on the English Language, for it was the work’s condition of possibility. When he wrote at the end of Dissertation III, for example, that “Customs, habits, and language, as well as government should be national” and that “America should have her own distinct from all the world,” he signaled—merely by having to argue the point—that the situation of the United States was not that of a European nation, culturally and linguistically speaking. “Such is the policy of other nations,” he continued, “and such must be our policy, before the States can be either independent or respectable.”232 This was precisely where Webster’s anti-imitation rhetoric becomes most shrill: “We should not adopt promiscuously their taste, their opinions, their manners.” To do so was not only unusual, it was unnatural: “To copy foreign manners implicitly, is to reverse the order of things, and begin our political existence with the corruptions and vices which have marked the declining glories of other republics.”233 In a way, Webster’s linguistic argument against colonial degeneracy already attempted to address this problem. Far from American English being uniquely indebted by virtue of its reliance on British English, almost

PAGE 79

80

Chapter 1

the reverse is asserted to be the case: American English will be more autonomous than its British counterpart ever could be, not only in the sense that America will enjoy linguistic self-determination, but also because it is better shielded from foreign influence than England itself ever was or, given European geopolitics, ever could be. “The vicinity of the European nations, with the uninterrupted communication in peace, and the changes of dominion in war, are gradually assimilating their respective languages. The English with others is suffering continual alterations.”234 For Webster, then, the agonistic history of English is not merely ancient chronicle; it speaks to an everpresent fact of European cultural life. That English people speak English at all—rather than the “native Celtic language” that preceded the Roman invasion, or the “jargon of Celtic and Roman”235 that preceded the Saxon— testifies to their continued vulnerability to foreign incursion, as does the fact that the language had to accept incorporations from Norman French after 1066. Meanwhile, the putative stability of North American English is simply the other side of this geopolitical coin: American usage is insulated from the distinctly European sources of “corruption by conquest” by a host of cultural, geographical, and political factors, including “the Atlantic ocean, the total separation of America from Great Britain, the pride of an independent nation.”236 This whole line of argument, effective though it undoubtedly is, rests on several forms of disavowal. It is not just that it reflects a mirror image of the actual linguistic situation, which is that of a post-Revolutionary nation continuing to speak the language of foreign power. More significantly, Great Britain does not represent the only “foreign” cultural presence with which the North American republic must contend. From that perspective, Webster’s almost exclusive focus on the relationship between “the Americans” and “their British parents”237 keeps a far more troublesome set of cultural problems at bay by focusing the attention elsewhere. This results in a paradoxical situation in which the problem of foreign influence is a central theme in Webster’s thinking, yet only in a displaced form that masks another, more urgent concern. This, then, is the issue that lies deep in the political unconscious of Dissertations on the English Language: the status of non-English languages in and around the North American republic. Jill Lepore takes Webster perhaps too much at face value when she asserts that “foreign languages . . . simply did not concern him” because he “believed the extinction of all

PAGE 80

To Form a More Perfect Language

81

languages [in North America] other than English inevitable.”238 It is certainly true that he represented this as a foregone conclusion; but on my reading, that was less a belief than a canny rhetorical choice. When he matter-of-factly notes that “English is the common root or stock from which our national language will be derived,”239 it may appear as if an alternative never occurred to him—as if he simply assumed that this new North Atlantic republic was forever to peopled by, and ruled by, anglophone immigrants. Similarly, when he describes English as “the inheritance which the Americans have received from their British parents,”240 thus rendering cultural descent in familial terms, he seems to rule out the possibility that there might be children of other “parents” within the boundaries of the present or future United States. Yet at the same time, Webster is certainly aware, as he tells us on the very next page, that the “United States were settled by emigrants from different parts of Europe.”241 As he thus oscillates between avowal and disavowal of the actual sociolinguistic situation before him, it becomes clear that the apparent side-stepping is not blind presumption nor blithe ignorance but in fact one facet of a carefully measured strategy of containment. Webster may not have ruminated on the problem of foreign languages as explicitly as Johnson did, but that does not mean it concerned him less. In fact, we would have to say the opposite: the competing claims of other languages in North America represented a far greater cultural “threat” to Webster’s constituency—or rather his attempt to call a particular constituency into existence through language— than they ever did for Johnson. “If ever there were a polyglot place on the globe—other than Babel’s spire,” wrote Marc Shell in a seminal essay on multilingualism in the United States, it was “the American colonies between 1750 and 1850,” a cultural space in which “three continents—North America, Africa, and Europe—met one another.”242 Were we to take a snapshot of the “linguistic makeup” of the United States the year Webster published the Dissertations, for example, we would find non-English European settlers accounting for one-quarter of the total white population (with 40 percent of Pennsylvania’s population alone speaking German), a range of African languages spoken among the more than one-fifth of the total population represented by African Americans, still numerous and widespread Native American languages, and, of course, populations of French and Spanish speakers, largely outside the 1789 borders of the United States, but later to be Americanized

PAGE 81

82

Chapter 1

after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848.243 Given this remarkable polyglossia, the achievement of “linguistic union” at all was an improbable enough task; for it to have crystallized around a specifically “anglophone unilingualism” must be considered one of the “great historical feats of social language-engineering.”244 It was precisely because Webster was so concerned about securing the dominance of English on the continent of North America that he insisted on the need to perfect and simplify the language through orthographic reform. Even as Webster tried to establish that American English (and especially the form of it spoken in New England) had strong Saxon bones, he also argued with force that its current orthography was intolerably deficient, by virtue of the gap between spelling and pronunciation. But why, we may ask, was this even a problem? If American English is already so pure and so protected, why not just “embalm” it,245 to use Johnson’s phrase? In fact, had Webster’s goal had been identical to Johnson’s—namely, to stabilize the language against drift—he would not have cared about the rationality of its spelling scheme any more than Johnson had. Even prior to any remedial efforts, after all, American English was supposed to be a superior incarnation of the language; and since the European causes of linguistic instability simply “cannot be supposed to exist in North America,”246 Webster could simply have declared the linguistic mission already accomplished. The urgency Webster attached to spelling reform, then, tells us something absolutely crucial about the social realities at which he aimed those reforms. Unlike Johnson, he did not aspire only to preserve English. Rather, he had to find a way to reproduce it—and to do so among a new linguistic community that included former speakers of foreign languages, and was bound to include far more. The connection between the ability to acquire a language and the consistency of its spelling system was neither surprising nor unprecedented. For obvious reasons, such discussions commonly revolve around children and foreigners—twin subjects of language acquisition, and hence analogous figures, linguistically speaking. Johnson had conceded that English was a difficult language to learn due to its irregularity; its “anomalous” aspects are “very frequent, and, though familiar to those who have always used them, interrupt and embarrass the learners of our language.”247 Johnson’s phrase “learners of our language” is general enough to refer to both children and foreigners, but it is fair to say that overall, he did not seem particularly focused on the phenomenon of foreign speakers coming to English

PAGE 82

To Form a More Perfect Language

83

in order to adopt it. At one point in the 1755 preface, he mentions the possibility that “the present prevalence of our language should invite foreigners to this dictionary,”248 but this way of framing it already indicates that he is thinking of these foreigners not as naturalizable citizens so much as admirers of the language across a national border. Webster, on the other hand, was thinking seriously about foreigners not only as distant strangers but as would-be immigrants—not only as admiring students of English but potential users of it. It is no coincidence, then, that the appendix in which Webster details the necessity of adopting a new orthographic scheme is the only place in the Dissertations where “foreigners” internal to North America receive direct and significant mention. In typical fashion, Webster moves from the child to the foreigner as he makes the case for spelling reform: It is now the work of years for children to learn to spell; and after all, the business is rarely accomplished. . . . But with the proposed orthography, a child would learn to spell, without trouble, in a very short time, and the orthography being very regular, he would ever afterwards find it difficult to make a mistake. It would, in that cafe, be as difficult to spell wrong, as it is now to spell right. Besides this advantage, foreigners would be able to acquire the pronunciation of English, which is now so difficult and embarrassing, that they are either wholly discouraged on the first attempt, or obliged, after many years labor, to rest contented with an imperfect knowlege of the subject.249 The concern expressed here is supported both by common sense and by research on second-language acquisition: the problems a given language presents to new learners might constitute mere stumbling blocks to a child born into a mother tongue but insurmountable obstacles for adults who have already achieved full competence in a primary language system with different rule structures and a different tolerance for irregularity. Mathew Carey observed the same phenomenon in 1835: “The difficulty of the pronunciation [of our language] to foreigners, is probably not exceeded by that of any other language. It frequently happens, that foreigners, who have resided with us for five, ten, or fifteen years are unable to pronounce our language with tolerable correctness: whereas Americans, English, and Irish,

PAGE 83

84

Chapter 1

acquire the pronunciation of the French or Spanish, in a year or two, without much difficulty.”250 Johnson might have agreed with the thesis, but he was not moved to do anything about it; even when “the present usage” was flawed and inaccurate, he would generally follow it, calling it “tolerated rather than chosen”— but accepting it nonetheless.251 It stands to reason that Webster’s refusal to “tolerate” these limitations was shaped by the prospect of many more nonanglophone Europeans entering the North American speech community. Webster might argue until the end of the day that “America, placed at a distance from [European] nations, will feel, in a much less degree, the influence of the assimilating causes”252 to which British English had been susceptible; but these “nations” were closing the distance, culturally speaking, through migration and settlement. And since the success of American English would depend upon its ability to bring new users constantly into the language, a different kind of “assimilating” ability was its most important feature, namely, its capacity to assimilate foreign speakers into the language—and without the language itself incorporating too many foreign elements in turn. Let me stress the importance of this last point and appreciate the irony it produces: Johnson, who seemed to care little about making the language accessible to users with other mother tongues, also freely accepted that his English dictionary should admit as many foreign elements as necessary in order properly to reflect the actual polyglot construction of the language. Meanwhile, even as Webster aimed to make English easier for “foreigners” to acquire, he militated against the presence of any foreign—which is to say, any non-Anglo-Saxon—elements within the language itself. As he set out to reverse the damage done by Johnson’s “predilection” for “words of foreign growth,” and to contravene Johnsonian spellings by “Rendering the Orthography of Words Correspondent to Pronunciation,” Webster essentially attempted to excise all signs of foreignness from written English. Johnson’s orthography had been explicitly designed to remind one at a glance that, for example, “entire” came into English “not from the Latin integer, but from the French entier.”253 Yet where Johnson boasted of rendering a word’s foreign origin visible in its spelling, Webster militated against that practice of following the orthography of the original language in those many instances where it is “ill adapted to express the English pronunciation”: “Thus fatigue, marine, chaise, [currently] retain their French dress, while, to represent the true pronunciation in English, they should be spelt

PAGE 84

To Form a More Perfect Language

85

fateeg, mareen, shaze.”254 These “American-style” re-spellings, then, would eradicate the visible traces of foreign origins. In Webster’s telling sartorial metaphor, they would strip the words of their foreign “dress.” In order to perfect the language while making it distinctly American, Webster went to work on a technical level to purify American spelling of the polyglossic baggage British English had acquired from long proximity to other European tongues. The net result of this process would be a new American version of English that had been scrubbed clean of the impurities and inconsistencies English had acquired by absorption of other European languages. Only a language so reformed could serve as an effective machine of cultural reproduction—in Webster’s terms, an “engine . . . to render the people of this country national.”255 A rational orthography that aligned with pronunciation “would lessen the trouble of writing, and much more, of learning the language; it would reduce the true pronunciation to a certainty; and . . . it would render the pronunciation uniform, in different parts of the country, and almost prevent the possibility of changes.”256 This would in turn make proper speech and writing available to “persons of every rank,” promote a general national uniformity, and “conciliate mutual affection and respect.”257 Children would learn the language faster and more expertly, as would immigrants who had brought different mother tongues to the New World. Language would thus bring a principle of uniformity to bear on the diverse contact zone that was the social reality of eighteenth-century North America; it would bind together a host of languages, and regional and class and professional dialects into a single new linguistic community. Last, but not least, it would be economical; by virtue of the elimination of extraneous letters, presses would “save a page in eighteen; and a saving of an eighteenth in the expense of books, is an advantage that should not be overlooked.”258 All these reasons boil down, in the end, to a strategy for allowing the culture to reproduce itself with ultimate efficiency, whether socially, politically, or economically. In this way, an English stripped of its European baggage would ensure the dominance of American English over other transferred European languages, ensuring that U.S. culture would remain English though not British. And this same gesture kept Native Americans and African Americans at a cultural distance by defining America as ethnolinguistically English. As David Simpson aptly puts it, “to have set out to build up the language from a completely new beginning . . . would also have involved some clear recognition of the claims of various interests in American society to be a

PAGE 85

86

Chapter 1

part of this language.”259 We might say by extension that, to have built the language from any basis other than English would have required a recognition of the claims of cultural interests other than that of Anglo-Americans. Webster’s argument about the autochthony of American English thus cuts in two directions: if, on the one hand, it represents the English language as an American original, on the other hand, it represents America as originally English.

* * * Most of Webster’s most striking orthographic innovations were never realized as such. We don’t spell “women” like “swimmin” (perhaps unfortunately). We do “edyucate,” much as it would have chagrined Webster. And the most newsworthy adoptions—“color” for “colour,” “Atlantic” for “Atlantick”—were not really Webster’s proposals in the first place. By this measure, we could not declare the reforms he proposed in the 1780s as successful in a conventional sense. Yet the underlying logics of his linguistic argument live on, I would argue, in the arguments about an American literary style which also originated in the 1780s. Both areas of cultural debate employed a logic of negative definition or negative affiliation, in which the British standard serves as the basis for an American distinction that departs from it, and in so doing, defines itself in deep relation to it. Both staged a kind of dialectical struggle between foreign emulation and national originality, and both attempted to generate a third term in a concept like original imitation. And both arrived at a “modal” solution to the problem of foreign debt: in the realm of linguistics, a new mode of spelling or a diacritical modification to the Roman alphabet; in the realm of literary production, a new “style” of English literature.

PAGE 86

CHAPTER 2

Transatlantic Correspondences Cre`vecoeur and the Incorrect Style

It having pleased the Divine Providence to dispose the hearts of the most serene and most potent Prince George the Third, by the grace of God, king of Great Britain, . . . and of the United States of America, to forget all past misunderstandings and differences that have unhappily interrupted the good correspondence and friendship which they mutually wish to restore, and to establish such a beneficial and satisfactory intercourse, between the two countries upon the ground of reciprocal advantages and mutual convenience as may promote and secure to both perpetual peace and harmony . . . —Treaty of Paris, 1783 Correspondence consists in reciprocal letters. —J. Hector St. John de Cre`vecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, 1782

Mysterious Obligations, Reciprocal Advantages Cre`vecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer has long enjoyed the status of a foundational work of American literature, an “embryo from which . . . a succession of significant American works has developed.”1 We might regard it as ironic that, after a century and a half of critical indifference toward the work, it was a British writer, D. H. Lawrence, whose early

PAGE 87

88

Chapter 2

twentieth-century critical discussion of it first established the Letters as a fixture of our national literature.2 Though it received important treatments by American scholars such as Vernon Parrington in the 1920s and Marcus Bewley in the 1950s, it was in the 1960s that the farmer’s stock really began to rise, spurred in part by a New American Library edition of the work in 1963. “American literature, as the voice of our national consciousness, begins in 1782 with the first publication in England of Letters from an American Farmer,” Albert Stone dramatically declared in his introduction to that volume.3 With Penguin’s republication of Stone’s edition in the 1980s, mass availability now coincided with such arguments for the work’s cultural impact to make it a ubiquitous presence in survey courses on American literature ever since. Alongside the book’s publication history, moreover, the work’s most famous section—Letter III, “What is an American?”—has led a parallel life as one of the most frequently anthologized works of eighteenth-century America. To endow Cre`vecoeur with this status as a “literary founding father,” however, has always required negotiating some tricky features of his biography.4 The man who wrote as J. Hector St. John, “an humble American planter, a simple cultivator of the earth,”5 was in fact a French gentleman, born Michel-Guillaume-Saint-Jean de Cre`vecoeur, who had received his classical education from the Jesuits at the Colle`ge Royal de Bourbon. Though he wrote in the guise of “a man who possesses neither titles nor places, who never rose above the humble rank of a farmer,” Cre`vecoeur was the son of a marquis, born into an ancient (though unaffluent) branch of the Norman gentry. He came to America in 1755 with a cadetship in the French colonial army, serving for four years as a soldier and cartographer before selling his commission and leaving New France for the British colonies. In 1769, he married into a prosperous Tory family and purchased land in New York, where he wrote his letters “from a farmer in Pennsylvania.” He returned to Europe in 1780, sold his work to a British publisher, and then returned to his ancestral seat at Caen. When he came back to New York in 1783, he did so as a French consul and an official representative of Louis XVI. He left America again in 1790 never to return. Even from this skeletal biography, it is already clear that Cre`vecoeur occupies an unusual place in a field largely governed by the assumption that American literature is defined, first and foremost, by its Anglo-American heritage. One pointed example of this uncomfortable fit is the historical irony connecting Cre`vecoeur to the most famous literary founder of a later

PAGE 88

Transatlantic Correspondences

89

generation, James Fenimore Cooper. Having risen to the rank of lieutenant at the onset of the French and Indian War, Cre`vecoeur was in the regiment that oversaw the siege on the British Fort William Henry in 1757, whose surrender and subsequent massacre would supply Cooper with the opening to his historical romance, The Last of the Mohicans, some seventy years later. But there can be no more extravagant example of the disconnect between Cre`vecoeur’s political location and his literary significance than his activities during the 1770s. Having left Canada for British America, Cre`vecoeur—a loyalist Tory in the age of the American Revolution—would again find himself on the “wrong” side of an international military conflict of founding significance for American national identity.6 While it would be hard to imagine a less promising biographical resume for the office of “literary founding father,” Cre`vecoeur’s claim to the title has ultimately always rested, not on places of birth, residence, or death, but on matters of theme, style, and voice. This is the ground on which Stone built his assessment of Cre`vecoeur as literary founder, placing Letters alongside Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography as works that “could scarcely have been composed elsewhere or by members of another society.” These are “representative American” books in the sense that they “bear unmistakably the stamp of this locale.”7 According to a familiar version of literary exceptionalism, Americanness is constituted not by the author’s national pedigree but in an intangible, even quasi-magical quality inhering in the writing. Literary Americanness is not a matter of citizenship or political affiliations; rather, to use that favorite eighteenth-century trope later deployed so effectively by D. H. Lawrence, it is a “spirit of place” animating a work and moving across its surface.8 To be sure, these now familiar literary-historical gestures—if we analyze them closely—raise more questions than they answer. It is certainly possible to make the sarcastic argument that, in installing Cre`vecoeur at the origin of our national literature in this way, critics from Lawrence to Stone simply refused to let the facts get in the way of a good story. Partly in a reaction against this critical tradition and its argumentative liberties, some of the best scholarship produced on the Letters in recent decades places it in the context of the transatlantic history of ideas in the eighteenth century, rather than defining it as a foundational work of “American literature” per se.9 In so doing, recent critics have produced more nuanced readings of Letters that confront and account for, rather than evade or bracket, the complexities of its author’s cultural position. The Letters emerges from this act of

PAGE 89

90

Chapter 2

critical revision as an artifact of the transatlantic Enlightenment rather than a generative “embryo” in an origin story of national literary development.10 Edward Larkin, for example, has argued against the familiar use of the Letters as an exemplary statement of American exceptionalism. Larkin shows that this standard interpretation erases, most obviously, Cre`vecoeur’s loyalism and despair over the Revolution, but also the work’s “Enlightenment cosmopolitanism” more generally. In order to recruit the work for a sociological narrative about the birth of an American identity, Larkin argues, exceptionalist readings greatly overemphasize the radical newness of this identity, while suppressing Cre`vecoeur’s own insistence on transatlantic continuities and emphasis on “the link to European roots.”11 As will become clear in these pages, I am sympathetic with this critical revision and very much indebted to its interventions. Even so, I admit to finding perversely appealing the notion that an Anglophilic French gentleman not only wrote a “representative American” book, but indeed also gave us one of the earliest voicings of a literary style that would come to seem distinctly American—a “new and arresting voice in American letters,” as Norman Grabo puts it.12 A critical error, and a nationalist fantasy, perhaps, but an error and a fantasy that force us to reckon with the broader literaryhistorical paradox at the heart of my project, namely, that much of what we regard as “American” in literature has irreducibly transatlantic origins. We can begin by noting that the critical problem Cre`vecoeur presents is only a starker and more striking version of a problem already endemic to the cultural historiography of the Revolutionary period, where the “American” is by definition an emergent category, and we bestow stable American “identities” on even its most famous actors only retroactively and in a manner always tinged by anachronism. Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin, for example—who in different ways also earned their “founding” status through authorship, and whose writing shares some similar features typically described as “American” in style—wrote and identified themselves as “Britons” prior to the Revolution.13 From this perspective, Cre`vecoeur can indeed take his place alongside such “founders,” provided we recognize them all as cosmopolitan European intellectuals whom we now understand, only retrospectively, as originary points in a genealogy of American thought. By enacting this shift in perspective, then, we not only illuminate Cre`vecoeur’s writing but can also cast a different kind of light on other foundational texts of the period, whose scenes of production are perhaps less extravagantly cosmopolitan than the Letters, but which nonetheless

PAGE 90

Transatlantic Correspondences

91

need to be replaced within the transatlantic literary context to which they belonged in order to be understood in their own terms. What appears at first to be a bizarre exception to a rule turns out in fact to be a highly illuminating and deceptively typical case. With this in mind, we might place Letters alongside a contemporary work by another American “founder”: Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. There is more connecting Jefferson’s Notes to Cre`vecoeur’s Letters than might at first be apparent. To begin with, both texts are marked by the structuring presence of another axis of transatlantic cultural relation—Franco-American rather than Anglo-American. In a sense, these two works represent the two directions of the vector: if the Jefferson of Notes is the American viewing his homeland in relation to an imagined French gaze, the Cre`vecoeur of Letters is the Frenchman crossing the Atlantic in order to imagine himself as an American. At issue in both cases is the act of writing America in an explicit relation of correspondence with Europe.

* * * Though modern readers tend to encounter Jefferson’s Notes looking for a “founding father’s” account of his state and country, the well-known facts of its composition speak to a different shape and purpose. While its author was most famous for authoring an earlier “declaration” of national sentiment, the Notes is not a performative act of self-constitution but a reply to a question. Jefferson wrote it between 1780 and 1782 in response to a questionnaire circulated among members of the Continental Congress by the secretary of the French legation at Philadelphia, Franc¸ois Marbois. When Jefferson reluctantly authorized the first full-scale publication of the work in London in 1787, he made it clear in the preface that the work was written “in answer to Queries proposed to the Author, by a Foreigner of distinction, then residing among us.”14 And even this revised version of the work, though meant to stand on its own, reminds us of this original compositional context by naming its segments not chapters but “Queries” —each corresponding to one of Marbois’s posed questions, which also supply the language for the title headings. “I am at present busily employed for Monsr. Marbois without his knowing it,” wrote Jefferson in a letter to another Frenchman, Chevalier D’Anmours, in 1780, “and have to acknolege

PAGE 91

92

Chapter 2

[sic] to him the mysterious obligation for making me much better acquainted with my own country than I ever was before.”15 These familiar circumstances of the work’s publication and structure of address curiously align with those of Cre`vecoeur’s Letters, a work which is also framed as a document of transatlantic communication. At the outermost frame of the work, Cre`vecoeur’s extended dedication to Abbe´ Raynal (who is also, as we shall see, an important figure of reference in Jefferson’s Notes) calls out to France from America: “Behold, sir, an humble American planter, a simple cultivator of the earth, addressing you from the farther side of the Atlantic and presuming to fix your name at the head of his trifling lucubrations.”16 The remainder of the narrative repeats this posture of transatlantic address, though now in the fictionalized terms of the epistolary narrative. According to the conceit Cre`vecoeur develops in his introductory “Letter I,” his narrator, Farmer James, is writing to an English correspondent, identified in the text only as “Mr. F.B.”17 Having returned to Europe after his travels in America, during which he had visited with James, Mr. F.B. initiates a correspondence with the farmer, who agrees to “describe our American modes of farming, our manners, and peculiar customs.”18 The letters are thus supposed to be written—and here we can reapply Jefferson’s language in his own preface—“in answer to Queries proposed to the Author, by a Foreigner of distinction.”19 As Thomas Philbrick has observed, Farmer James’s European pen pal is thus “in control of the correspondence.”20 It is not just that he has initiated it (“Remember that you have laid the foundations of the correspondence,” James writes),21 but also that his suggested topics call each letter forth (“Remember, you are to give me my subjects, and on no other shall I write,” insists James at the outset).22 Precisely as Marbois did for Jefferson’s Notes, then, Mr. F.B.’s “rather random requests set the topics for the majority of the letters.”23 Cre`vecoeur’s sections might just as easily have been designated “queries” as “letters,” and the headings given to each have substantially the same form as Jefferson’s. But what, for Cre`vecoeur, was merely an effective formal conceit was, for Jefferson, literally true. Though Jefferson’s work is not epistolary, his Notes actually are, as Cre`vecoeur’s Letters pretend to be, the written record of one side of a transatlantic exchange, initiated by a European and fulfilled by an American, who published it, reluctantly, only later. In each case, the European sets the topics for discussion, and each “American” thus owes him, in Jefferson’s words, a “mysterious obligation” for his own knowledge of country.

PAGE 92

Transatlantic Correspondences

93

From a certain perspective, these peculiar similarities in rhetorical framing are obviously no more than random coincidences; there is no reason to suggest any direct influence between the two works, published within a year of each other, and both written some years prior to publication. But I believe that the homology between the two has broader implications for how we can conceptualize American writing during this period. We might begin by noting that the epistolary narrative conceit in general, and transatlantic letter writing in particular, was often used to structure accounts of “America” during the last decades of the eighteenth century. Many of these accounts—whether written by native-born Americans, European emigrants, or European travelers—were published as letters to a European correspondent, in much the same way as Cre`vecoeur’s Letters. Gilbert Imlay’s A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America (1792) takes the form, as the subtitle designates, of “A Series of Letters to a Friend in England,” and begins with the voice of his English correspondent introducing the letters to the public.24 Thomas Cooper’s Some Information Respecting America (1794) employs the same conceit, carrying the heading, “Letters From America to a Friend in England.”25 Looking ahead a couple of decades, we can see this kind of narrative becoming more contentious on the eve of the War of 1812, as is evident from the title page of Charles Jarod Ingersoll’s 1810 work, Inchiquin: The Jesuit’s Letters, During a Late Residence in the United States of America, Being a Fragment of a Private Correspondence, Accidentally Discovered in Europe, Containing a Favorable View of the Manners, Literature, and State of Society of the United States, and a Refutation of Many of the Aspersions Cast Upon this Country by Former Residents and Tourists.26 Beyond its use as a narrative device, the figure of transatlantic epistolary correspondence has a crucial resonance with British-American political, economic, and cultural relations during the period between the Revolution and the War of 1812. The Treaty of Paris, which in 1783 marked the commencement of international relations between the two as sovereign states and trade partners, explicitly used the language of “correspondence” in its plea for the reestablishment of political, economic, and cultural harmony. Signed in 1783, within a year of Jefferson’s Notes and Cre`vecoeur’s Letters, the treaty prays for the British crown and the United States of America “to forget all past misunderstandings and differences that have unhappily interrupted the good correspondence and friendship which they mutually wish to restore, and to establish such a beneficial and satisfactory

PAGE 93

94

Chapter 2

intercourse, between the two countries upon the ground of reciprocal advantages and mutual convenience as may promote and secure to both perpetual peace and harmony.”27 The recovery of “good correspondence and friendship”—a common formula in seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury British treaties—refers here, of course, not to epistolary exchange but to friendly reciprocal communication more generally, taking its place in a cluster of related period terms such as “intercourse,” “conversation,” and “commerce.” In this larger cultural context, moreover, “correspondence” not only denoted communication but also hinted at the philosophical sense of the term: agreement, harmony, but also analogy, similarity.28 Read against its philosophical and political backgrounds, then, the narrative posture of transatlantic address is the formal expression of this ethos of international exchange. A book composed of transatlantic letters—or of queries and responses—thus begins to look like the incarnation of a cultural and economic world system in a literary genre.29 In Cre`vecoeur’s Letters, perhaps nothing makes this underlying vision clearer than the long dedication to Abbe´ Raynal which opens the work. In it, the narrator recounts a scene of reading: his first encounter with Raynal’s Histoire Philosophique et Politique des . . . Deux Indes (1770). “For the first time in my life,” writes Cre`vecoeur, “I reflected on the relative state of nations; I traced the extended ramifications of a commerce which ought to unite but now convulses the world; I admired that universal benevolence, that diffusive good will, which is not confined to the narrow limits of your own country, but, on the contrary, extends to the whole human race.”30 This passage not only invokes, in a sidelong fashion, the politico-economic ruptures caused by the Revolution and repaired by the 1783 treaty. Beyond that, it articulates, as Larkin has argued persuasively, a much broaderranging philosophical embrace of cosmopolitan universalism. The dedication thus concludes with an ecstatic vision of an interconnected world system: “There is, no doubt, a secret communion among good men throughout the world, a mental affinity connecting them by a similitude of sentiments: then, why, though an American, should I not be permitted to share in that extensive intellectual consanguinity?”31 The otherwise idiosyncratic structure of Jefferson’s Notes also becomes more culturally resonant in this larger context, and the “mysterious obligation” he avers to his European questioner comes to seem not merely a reference to its occasional composition, but also an apt metaphor for the work’s conceptual foundation: the act of looking at America from across

PAGE 94

Transatlantic Correspondences

95

the Atlantic. “Virginia is bounded on the East by the Atlantic,” read the first words of Jefferson’s first query, and the rest of the long first sentence draws the remaining boundaries with precise latitudes and longitudes.32 At first glance, the banal first clause marks nothing more than an accident of composition meeting an inert geographical fact: Marbois’s query concerned the state’s boundaries, and Virginia is on the Atlantic. But it is not only literary texts whose beginnings matter, after all, and as Robert Ferguson has argued compellingly, it would be a serious mistake to underestimate how carefully Jefferson crafted Notes. In fact, as it turns out, Jefferson’s first query corresponds not to the first item on Marbois’s questionnaire (“The Charters of your State”) but to the third (“An exact description of its limits and boundaries”).33 It is at least interesting that Jefferson would reposition Marbois’s first inquiry and then choose to begin the query in exactly this way, by drawing the reader’s attention to a location along the western edge of the Atlantic. For Virginia’s Atlantic border is not only the easiest to name; it is also its most important one, symbolically speaking, for a work which is concerned not only with the state’s relationship to its neighbors but also with the relationship between all of these states and those across the ocean. It makes perfect sense, then, that this particular line would be the first one Jefferson’s language would draw for us. It is important to emphasize that the relationship between America and Europe, the two spaces Jefferson calls the “Cis [and] Trans-Atlantic,”34 is not merely the site of a rivalry but also one of mutually constitutive value. This is clearest when Jefferson inscribes another figure of his own “mysterious obligation” to Marbois in Query IV of his work. After describing present-day Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, in terms dripping with references to the Burkean sublime, Jefferson concludes: “This scene is worth a voyage across the Atlantic. Yet here, as in the neighborhood of the natural bridge, are people who have passed their lives within a half a dozen miles, and have never been to survey these monuments of a war between rivers and mountains, which must have shaken the earth itself to its center.”35 Representing America’s geography as sublime (a theme to which I shall return in the next chapter) is only part of Jefferson’s point here. For at the same moment that Jefferson is endowing Virginia’s natural landscape with the ultimate kind of aesthetic value, the same stroke of the pen represents those who inhabit it as lacking the interest to view it, or perhaps even the taste to appreciate it. Discussions of the natural sublime from Joseph Addison’s Pleasures of the Imagination (1712) to Kant’s Critique of Judgment

PAGE 95

96

Chapter 2

(1790) put the aesthetic competency of the perceiving subject front and center in the phenomenon of aesthetic perception. Burke, for example, began his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) with an introductory section “On Taste.”36 In Jefferson’s account of Virginia’s natural sublime, then, the land must be shown to provide the raw materials for the exercise of the aesthetic faculty, but it is equally important that Jefferson, as the exemplary American subject, demonstrate that he has the refined taste properly to appreciate it.37 Like Jefferson, as he describes himself in the preface and his letter to D’Anmours, the hypothetical native Virginian of Query IV cannot see the sublimity in his own backyard unless he views it as if from “across the Atlantic.” Through this “as if,” the Notes thus imagines a transatlantic gaze at Virginia’s “particular geography”38 in order to awaken the local resident from his imperceptive torpor. In exactly this way, Jefferson himself has had to travel imaginatively across the Atlantic in order to look back at his “own country” and see it properly. This aspect of Jefferson’s relation to the European gaze is somewhat counterintuitive. It is certainly obvious enough that the work poses a transatlantic conversation. Yet since its philosophical center of gravity is Jefferson’s dispute with Buffon and other European thinkers over the theory of New World degeneracy—the notion that various species of flora and fauna were comparatively diminished in the degenerative climate of the Americas—modern readers can get the misleading impression that Jefferson wrote exclusively as a patriot vociferously defending his homeland against the aspersions of Europe. Certainly the section in which Jefferson counters the degeneracy thesis (“led,” as he tells us, “by a proud theory”)39 is the work’s most extensive one and the one with the greatest argumentative heat. Yet to read Notes solely as a nationalistic philosophical salvo fired back across the Atlantic is to distort the tone of the work as a whole. Jefferson’s narration places him very much in a productive dialogue with European thought. One basic but highly significant sign of this, lost in some contemporary American editions, is the work’s multilingualism: Jefferson quotes Vespucci in Italian, Linnaeus in Latin, Antonio de Ulloa in Spanish, and Buffon and Raynal in French, to name just a few. Another small but significant sign of this at the level of language can be found in Jefferson’s list of “vegetable productions” in Query VI, where he indicates that he will be “adding the Linnaean to the popular names, as the latter might not convey precise information to a foreigner.”40 Jefferson thus

PAGE 96

Transatlantic Correspondences

97

clearly sees himself as addressing a “foreign” audience—both in the immediate sense that he is answering Marbois’s queries, but also by extension in the larger sense that he imagines his work finding a transatlantic readership. In that larger global context, the Latinate names are a common currency, exchangeable signs in a world republic of letters.41 With regard to French culture in particular, it is a measure of its exalted status in Jefferson’s thought that, even as he contends fiercely with the opinions of Buffon and Raynal on the New World, he cites them and other French scientists and philosophes reverentially, representing France as the world’s center of learning: “we are just becoming acquainted with her, and our acquaintance so far gives us high ideas of the genius of her inhabitants. It would be injuring too many of them to name particularly a Voltaire, a Buffon, the constellation of Encyclopedists, the Abbe´ Raynal himself, &c. &c.”42 We need not read this gesture of deference merely as a rhetorical tactic, and it is in no way inconsistent with his philosophical quarrel with Buffon and Raynal. For according to the epistemological principles assumed in this cosmopolitan public sphere, Jefferson must produce his reasonable counterargument in dialogue with these European men of genius, and place his language in the polyglossia of the Atlantic world, if it is to have any value in an “international republic of enlightened letters.”43 In short, to read Notes as a defensive nationalist diatribe—a kind of natural-scientific supplement to the war of independence—risks flattening out these polyglot and cosmopolitan dimensions, or at least rendering them obscure and incongruous. The overall tone and direction of Jefferson’s argument is neither to sweep aside European culture nor exactly to assert his distance from it, but more accurately to replicate the best of it while perfecting it in the process of bearing it across the Atlantic. He can claim to do so with such rhetorical efficiency because he is drawing on the traditional concept of translatio imperii, or the transfer of empire—the notion that the world’s center of civilization and political power had shifted westward over the centuries. According to this metahistorical narrative, which was “basic for medieval historical theory,” empires were not born in different locations throughout time so much as transferred from one location to another, usually as a “result of sinful misuse of that dominion” by the declining imperial center.44 In the medieval use of this formula, dominion—and learning and the arts along with it, according to the linked concept of the translatio studii— had been transferred from Athens to Rome, and then from Rome to Charlemagne’s Paris. In the centuries thereafter, other locations in Europe (France

PAGE 97

98

Chapter 2

proper, Britain, or Germany, depending on when and where the history was being told) could be claimed as the true modern heir to the Roman empire. When Jefferson wrote at the end of the eighteenth century, the most significant recent articulation of the translatio imperii et studii was Bishop Berkeley’s claim that the final stage in the westward movement of empire would take it across the Atlantic to America.45 First written in 1724 and published in a revised form in 1752, Berkeley’s “Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America”46 predict “another golden Age, / The rise of Empire and of Arts”47 (lines 13–14), which would be located in the New World: Westward the Course of Empire takes its Way; The four first Acts already past, A fifth shall close the Drama with the Day; Time’s noblest Offspring is the last.48 “America” in this discursive context is the name for a place toward which European learning and power are inexorably migrating and where they will reach their highest points. Jefferson’s contemporaries would certainly have understood him to be invoking this last iteration of the translatio trope when he linked the “rising glory” of America to the descending glory of Great Britain: “The sun of her glory is fast descending to the horizon. Her philosophy has crossed the Channel, her freedom the Atlantic, and herself seems to be passing into that awful dissolution, whose issue is not given for human foresight to scan.”49 In the argument as a whole, moreover, Jefferson is intent on showing that “philosophy,” having “crossed the Channel” to France, is now equally poised to make the transatlantic journey to the Americas, along with “freedom.” Once this project is fully realized, America will complete the transfer of empire and learning that Berkeley had predicted, and constitute itself as the ultimate incarnation of the Roman imperium—what Jefferson will later call an “empire for liberty.”50 The conceptual framework of the “rising glory” trope thus assumed a continuity between Old World and New, rather than a radical break, and presumed a mutual influence between the two, rather than their stark isolation as incomparable cultural singularities. There is an important lesson to be learned here about this early form of American exceptionalism and the emergent forms of nationalism with which it coexisted. Jefferson’s logic is

PAGE 98

Transatlantic Correspondences

99

simultaneously exceptionalist and cosmopolitan—and if this sounds like a paradox it is because we wrongly assume these cultural impulses to be necessarily and fundamentally opposed. But the brand of exceptionalism at issue in the late eighteenth century could affirm the value of “Americanness” as a unique particularity, while at the same time placing it in a conversation with other such particularities in a cultural world system. In this logic, cultures need not be isolated to be defined and celebrated for their distinct characteristics; to the contrary, they have meaning and value only in correspondence with comparable singularities in a kind of differential system of cultures.51 Having said all that, Raynal’s Histoire Philosophique et Politique—the work that inspires in Cre`vecoeur the transports of sublime sentiment—is the site of real friction in Jefferson’s Notes. Raynal is mentioned a few times throughout the Notes, but his most significant appearance comes in Query VI, where Jefferson quotes Raynal’s scandalous aspersions against AngloAmerican capability: “On doit etre etonne´ (he says) que l’Amerique n’ait pas encore produit un bon poe¨te, un habile mathematicien, un homme de genie dans un seul art, ou une seule science.”52 (“One must be astonished . . . that America has not yet produced one good poet, one able mathematician, one man of genius in a single art or a single science.”) Carefully parsing Raynal’s statement in order to respond to all of its component parts, Jefferson begins to list American “products” who incarnate the types of genius supposed to be lacking: Washington is our genius in “war,” Franklin in “physics,” and Rittenhouse our self-taught “astronomer.” On the basis of such instances, he concludes: “As in philosophy and war, so in government, in oratory, in painting, in the plastic art, we might shew that America, though but a child of yesterday, has already given hopeful proofs of genius.”53 The part of Raynal’s argument that gives Jefferson the most trouble, however, is the literary piece: “America has not yet produced one good poet.” As much it rankles him, on this particular point, Jefferson is forced to offer a response that is almost entirely defensive: “When we shall have existed as a people as long as the Greeks did before they produced a Homer, the Romans a Virgil, the French a Racine and Voltaire, the English a Shakespeare and Milton, should this reproach be still true, we will inquire from what unfriendly causes it has proceeded, that the other countries of Europe and quarters of the earth shall not have inscribed any name in the roll of poets.”54 As the use of the future perfect tense indicates, this is little more than a strategy of deferral; Jefferson proceeds by imagining a moment when

PAGE 99

100

Chapter 2

the “hopeful proofs”55 of American genius “shall have” come to fruition, the literary promissory note shall have been paid, and the argument shall have simply disappeared. This rather unsatisfactory thought experiment, in fact, marks the most profound point of connection to Cre`vecoeur’s Letters. For Cre`vecoeur, we might say, crafts a narrative that, while not capable of commenting on the status of literature in America—to do so would be outside the bounds the farmer-narrator sets for himself—is nonetheless positioned to participate in it directly. The Letters does this not in the realm of poetic language but through epistolary prose. It is obvious enough how the themes of this narrative insist on its Americanness, but the Letters made this claim most strongly not in its themes but in its style. In this way, the farmer’s letters represent a prose experiment as much as a thought experiment. Thus, where Jefferson can only deflect the philosophes’ charge of American cultural backwardness, Cre`vecoeur’s narrative can be seen actually to redress it, incarnating American genius in the epistolary style of his “farmer of feeling.”

Cre`vecoeur’s Prosaic License Cre`vecoeur, of course, was not aiming to inaugurate a new national literature. That was a role into which he stumbled, rather than stepped—a place retrospectively carved out for him by a nationalist criticism, as I observed at the outset of this chapter. As a matter of critical reception, yes, Cre`vecoeur became the “American farmer” who first spoke in a new and distinctly American voice. But as a matter of composition, we might also place this work, as many of its more astute commentators have done, in the context of the French Enlightenment.56 Rousseau’s Confessions, the first parts of which were published the same year as Cre`vecoeur’s Letters, is an excellent place to start, for the basic reason that both authors were quite self-conscious about the relationship between their subject matter and their choice of writing style. Rousseau suggests that in his case, the problem takes him far beyond the traditional rhetorical question of aptum, the fitness of style to subject matter, into truly exceptional writerly territory. “For what I have to say,” Rousseau wrote in an early version of the Confessions, “it would be necessary to invent a language as new as my project: for what tone, what style does one adopt in order to unravel this immense chaos of feelings so diverse, so contradictory,

PAGE 100

Transatlantic Correspondences

101

often so low and sometimes so sublime, with which I am ceaselessly agitated?”57 Rousseau thus claims that the extraordinary variability of his “project” makes it impossible to settle on a single level of style that would uniformly suit it. Moreover, he has subjected himself to another unprecedented restriction: he will be more honest with us than any author has ever been with any reader. “Never has a man said about himself what I have to say about myself. . . . I will be truthful; I will be so without reserve; I will say everything; the good, the bad, in sum, everything.”58 In order to give such a completely truthful accounting of himself, with perfect sincerity and without disguise, he must construct a unique linguistic medium capable of serving the purpose. The problem Rousseau faces is that the adoption of anything that can be recognized as a “writing style” immediately renders his sincerity suspect. As Richard Lanham observes of this rhetorical bind: “From the beginning, from Aristotle (Rhetoric 1404B), style was not supposed to show. This was the great desideratum at any level. ‘Excess’ meant any style which showed.”59 As Jean Starobinski has argued in relation to Rousseau’s style in particular and autobiographical style in general, “style . . . seems to serve the conventions of narrative, rather than the realities of reminiscence. It is more than an obstacle or a screen, it becomes a principle of deformation and falsification.”60 Rousseau’s solution in the Confessions is to construct a style which mirrors his “vow of sincerity”61 on the level of language, by refusing stylistic order and regularity and embracing a chaotic style that expresses the “immense chaos of feelings”62 and conveys the immediacy of unfiltered reminiscence. Only such a style—which Rousseau presents, rather, as something of an antistyle—can serve as a delivery mechanism for authentic sentiments: If I want to compose a carefully written work like the other ones, I will not be depicting myself, I will be disguising myself. The issue here is my portrait, not a book. I am going to work in the camera obscura so to speak; no other art is necessary than to follow exactly the features I see marked. Thus I decide the style as I do the things. I will not tie myself down to making it uniform; I will always have the one that comes to me, I will change it according to my mood without scruple, I will tell each thing as I feel it, as I see it, without refinement, without bother, without troubling myself about motley. By abandoning myself at the same time to both the remembrance

PAGE 101

102

Chapter 2

of the received impression and to the present feeling, I will depict the state of my soul doubly, namely at the moment when the event happened to me and at the moment when I described it; my uneven and natural style, sometimes sharp and sometimes diffuse, sometimes wise and sometimes foolish, sometimes serious and sometimes gay, will itself form a part of my story.63 The style tells the story; the linguistic medium is the life’s message. Yet, as Starobinski notes, Rousseau’s self-styled “new language” is less the novel “invent[ion]”64 he claimed it to be than a canny reapplication of an old rhetorical conceit, forged by the Latin epistolary writers, and later deployed to masterful effect in the French vernacular by Montaigne: quicquid in buccam venit, to write just as things come into one’s mouth. The principle imagined here is that “the spontaneity of the writing, copied closely (in principle) from the actual spontaneous sentiment (which is given as if it were an old, relived emotion), assures the authenticity of the narration.”65 This is the same rhetorical axis on which Cre`vecoeur’s Letters pivots. The work is “conceived,” Farmer James tells us, in accordance with “the spontaneous impressions which each subject may inspire. This is the only line I am able to follow, the line which Nature has herself traced for me.”66 In much the same way as Rousseau—though, as I will explain in a moment, for entirely different generic reasons—Cre`vecoeur also defines his writing very self-consciously as a deliberate marriage of theme and style. When James’s minister says of the farmer’s letters that “if they be not elegant, they will smell of the woods a little and be a little wild,”67 he refers simultaneously to their farmerly content and their epistolary looseness of form.68 Thus Cre`vecoeur’s narrator sets out to describe the day-to-day realities of American husbandry in a “style and manner” both “plain and familiar,” for a “familiar” presentation is fittest for the transmission of “local and unadorned information.”69 On this point, the farmer’s letters mirror Rousseau’s embrace of a self-described “natural style”: Rousseau “go[es] to work in the camera obscura,” where “no other art is necessary than to follow exactly the features I see marked”; just so, Cre`vecoeur simply follows “the line which Nature has herself traced for me.”70 For both writers, subject matter is supposed to dictate a mode of presentation that grows organically from it.71 And both represent this more immediate, more organic kind of presentation as somehow closer to speaking than to writing: Rousseau, as Jacques Derrida has famously argued, by representing writing as a mere

PAGE 102

Transatlantic Correspondences

103

“supplement” to the ontological primordiality and presence of speech;72 and Cre`vecoeur by having his farmer conceive of his epistolary narrative as “nothing more than talking on paper” and as “expressed exactly in the same language as if he [the correspondent] was present.”73 Cre`vecoeur’s adoption of these stylistic claims, I must hasten to add, has often confused his readers and critics. In particular, the conceit of the farmer-narrator’s rustic or rough-hewn speakerly voice seems to be immediately belied by complex sentence structures and high-toned diction (words like “lucubrations” and phrases like “salubrious effluvia”74 tend to strike us as not particularly uncontrived). The farmer’s letters are supposed to “smell of the woods a little”;75 contemporary readers are often tempted to say with D. H. Lawrence that they smell rather more of the ink bottle.76 As Myra Jehlen argues in a similar vein, “Any aromas wafting about the letters are most refined.”77 That is, though the letters are supposed to be “a little wild,”78 the first sentence of the first letter, “with its balanced clauses, alliterations, and elevated syntax, is hardly wild.”79 And though the farmer delights in nature, Jehlen continues, he does so without recourse to “the alternative conventions that were establishing themselves in his time nor the Puritan plain style nor Wordsworth’s simplified diction.”80 Readers may feel similarly about the thematic content of the Letters: this telling of “local and unadorned information”81 seems quickly to transgress the humble boundaries it draws for itself, ranging far outside the purview of a merely descriptive pastoral knowledge to matters scientific, philosophical, political, and moral. Yet both these apparent violations—that of style and that of content—can be illuminated at once by correctly positioning Cre`vecoeur’s work in relation to the tradition of the georgic.82 Cre`vecoeur was one of a group of authors on both sides of the Atlantic who attempted to adapt the georgic mode—derived from Virgil’s firstcentury BCE “poem of the earth,” The Georgics—to late eighteenth-century literary culture. As a poetic genre, georgic was a didactic form characterized by its ability to comprehend other realms of knowledge as it ostensibly retained its focus on the craft of farming. “Among these different kinds of subjects . . . which the Georgics go upon,” Joseph Addison wrote in an essay on the genre, are included “moral duties, as those of Theognis and Pythagoras; or philosophical speculations, as those of Aratus and Lucretius, or Rules of practice, as those of Hesiod and Virgil.”83 Thus, what we might initially experience as an incongruity between James’s self-consciously humble social status and his highly cultivated mode of expression is, in a

PAGE 103

104

Chapter 2

sense, the whole point of the Letters. Cre`vecoeur’s farmer-narrator literalizes the link between culture and agriculture: on every page we can observe how an “untutored” farmer has been improved and elevated by the soil on which he labors. The very didacticism of that narrative voice thus bears witness to the fact that, while the farmer has been cultivating the land, the land has been cultivating him.84 This is the central argument of the work—though, to be clear, it is an “argument” residing somewhere between its theme and its form. Eighteenth-century critics were quite emphatic about the style in which this content ought to be couched. Addison, in dictating “the Style . . . proper to a Georgic,” warned that the poet must “be careful of not letting his subject debase his style, and betray him into a meanness of expression, but everywhere to keep up his verse in all the pomp of numbers, and dignity of words.” Thus, for example, “the low phrases and terms of art, that are adapted to Husbandry, have [no] place in such a work as the Georgic, which is not to appear in the natural simplicity and nakedness of its subject, but in the pleasantest dress that Poetry can bestow on it.”85 In cautioning authors to avoid “too great a turn of familiarity” which risks “sinking into a plebian style,”86 Addison distinguishes georgic from the related poetic tradition of the pastoral (with which the georgic was then, as now, often confused). The difference is that the linguistic address of a georgic does not itself “imitate” the “style of a Husbandman . . . as that of a Shepherd is [imitated] in Pastoral.”87 So while “the scene of both these Poems lies in the same place; the speakers in them are of quite a different character, since the precepts of husbandry are not to be delivered with the simplicity of a Plowman, but with the address of a Poet.”88 Thus the proper style for a Georgic is the so-called middle style, and Virgil’s Georgics was, in fact, the work Renaissance authors most often cited as an instance of that stylistic level.89 According to what was traditionally diagrammed as “Virgil’s wheel” (rota Virgilii), the author chose for his three main works (the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the Aeneid) three different levels of style (low, middle, and grand, respectively), thus making his writing career a progressive model of aptum. The in-betweenness of the middle style has always made it difficult to define clearly and with precision. Thus, as David Scott Wilson-Okamura observes, for example, it is “often defined negatively, in terms of what it avoids.”90 Moreover, since it partakes of elements of the high and low style, it is also sometimes referred to as a “mixed” rather than a pure style. For

PAGE 104

Transatlantic Correspondences

105

these reasons, perhaps, middle style can tend to be something of a forgotten man among the other two levels. This may partly explain why Cre`vecoeur’s farmer has thrown off modern commentators. At moments he borrows from the low mode, using a so-called “running” style91 composed of short, paratactic sentences intended to simulate the directness of plain speech;92 at others he can take on the “pomp” and “dignity” (to use Addison’s terms)93 of the high styles. More than anything, though, what likely misleads some readers into associating Cre`vecoeur’s project with “plain” style—in which it manifestly is not composed—is his liberal use of the humility conventions commonly associated with it. Cre`vecoeur voices his claims to stylistic sincerity rather specifically from behind what Ralph Bauer calls “a narrative mask of self-effacement,” or in what Albert Stone identifies as the “posture of the provincial.”94 The first order of business in the Letters is to establish this voice by confessing in advance to many of the deficiencies of the narrative and narrator. In the front matter and first chapter alone, Cre`vecoeur has James doubt whether he is “capable of writing with propriety and perspicuity,”95 declare himself “a confessedly inexperienced writer”96 whose “trifling lucubrations”97 betray “a very limited power of mind,”98 confess to marring his account with “errors in language”99 and “awkwardness,”100 and lament the “variety of talents which I do not possess.”101 The epistolary structure is critical here, for through it, he can have his farmer-narrator repeatedly declare his own deficiencies in contrast to the excellence of his absent, second-person correspondent. “You used, in your refined style, to denominate me the farmer of feelings; how rude must those feelings be in him who daily holds the axe or the plough, and how much more refined on the contrary those of the European, whose mind is improved by education, example, books, and by every acquired advantage!”102 Yet at the same time, he also indicates that the lowliness of his presentation is at least suited to the humility of his themes: “It is true I can describe our American modes of farming, our manner, and peculiar customs with some degree of propriety because I have ever attentively studied them; but my knowledge extends no farther. And is this local and unadorned information sufficient to answer all your expectations and to satisfy your curiosity?”103 Apart from its obvious posture of self-doubt, however, this rhetorical maneuver has a second phase we must be careful not to miss: for if it is true that “local and unadorned information” is of value to his British correspondent, then it is also certain that a more “elegant”104 or “refined

PAGE 105

106

Chapter 2

style”105 would be entirely improper—out of keeping. In short, the “simplicity” of the farmer’s representational powers perfectly serves his object; who better than an “artless countryman”106 to describe an artless country? In this way, it is apparent how with a slight alteration in tone, many of the narrative’s self-styled defects can be made paradoxically to authenticate it as a source of “unadorned information” written in an “unaffected and candid” manner—in a word, as truth.107 Like Rousseau, then, Cre`vecoeur builds his narration on the twin columns of the admission of imperfection and the subtle boast that confession ironically enables: no artifice will you find here, dear reader, only the simple truth of nature. In just this way, by the end of the first letter, a near complete reversal has taken place to this effect: However incorrect my style, however inexpert my methods, however trifling my observations may hereafter appear to you, assure yourself they will all be the genuine dictates of my mind, and I hope will prove acceptable on that account. . . . I am neither a philosopher, politician, divine, or naturalist, but a simple farmer. I flatter myself, therefore, that you’ll receive my letters as conceived, not according to scientific rules to which I am a perfect stranger, but agreeable to the spontaneous impressions which each subject may inspire. This is the only line I am able to follow, the line which Nature has herself traced for me. . . . Had you wanted the stile of the learned, the reflections of the patriot, the discussions of the politician, the curious observations of the naturalist, the pleasing garb of the man of taste, surely you would have applied to some of those men of letters with which our cities abound. But since on the contrary, and for what reason I know not, you wish to correspond with a cultivator of the earth, with a simple citizen, you must receive my letters for better or worse.108 The passage is the fullest accounting the Letters gives of what we might call, borrowing from one of its phrases, the paradoxical virtues of incorrect style. Its signature effect is a certain kind of rhetorical reversal: Farmer James’s insistent self-critique only elevates him in the reader’s eyes, for each time he apologizes for his “rude” and “unrefined” feelings,109 he proves that he possesses matchless sensibility untainted by pride. In so doing, he raises his language to a higher truth status than that of those with whom he unfavorably contrasts himself (the “learned,” the “man of taste,” “those men of

PAGE 106

Transatlantic Correspondences

107

letters with which our cities abound”) and, by implication, higher than his British correspondent himself. This inversion is the rhetorical power source of the Letters. As Albert Stone puts it, James’s “posture of the provincial” in fact functions as “slyly satiric of the European before whom the untutored colonial pretends to prostrate himself.”110 The end of the above passage bears this kind of reading out rather well. James claims to have no idea why Mr. F.B. might have asked him, of all people, to write to him about such matters. But we readers understand quite well why he has done so: through James alone can his British correspondent gain access to “genuine” information, presented in a natural “stile,” far surpassing the “pleasing garb”—which is to say, the artifice and disguise—of his presumably fashionable metropolitan cohort.111 In this way, Cre`vecoeur deliberately constructs a narrative voice that is supposed to mark a particularly American way of writing, formally lacking in comparison with British eloquence, yet more authentic and substantial. Since this whole rhetorical structure is rife with associations to the nineteenth-century U.S. canon, one understandable critical desire at this point would be to explain how these features of theme and voice gave rise to that “American” literary idiom. They do indeed hint at deep conceptual connections to the “organic form” Matthiessen identifies as central to the transcendentalist tradition; to Emerson’s celebration of “untaught sallies of the spirit,” triumphing over “preciseness and infallibility” with “entire humility”; and to the rough-textured style of Whitman’s self-described “jagged” poetics; or even to the naı¨ve juvenile narration of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn—to suggest but a few of the future directions in which the “incorrect style” seems to beckon us.112 Yet I am less interested here in its later American destinations than its earlier European sources.

* * * The first step in lending these familiar critical reference points greater literary-historical depth is to recognize that Cre`vecoeur’s humble and selfdenigrating narrative pose is a highly conventional topos with a very long literary history. Ernst Robert Curtius traces it back to the judicial oratory of antiquity, where “the orator’s referring to his feebleness . . . is intended to dispose the judges favorably.”113 From there the topos migrated into literary genres, where authors could similarly use it to dispose readers

PAGE 107

108

Chapter 2

favorably toward their work, or to immunize it against anticipated criticism. Sometimes it signals an author’s awareness that he is working in a less exalted prose genre rather than in epic or verse drama, or in a modern vernacular rather than Latin. In Boccaccio’s Decameron (ca. 1349), for example, it served to do both. In choosing to work in a humble literary mode and to compose in the lowly Florentine vernacular, Boccaccio explained archly, he kept to “a course not merely on the plain, but, by preference, in the depth of the valley; as should be abundantly clear to whosoever looks at these little stories, written as they are not only in the vulgar Florentine, and in prose, and without dedicatory flourish, but also in as homely and simple a style as may be.”114 As I have already mentioned in the introduction, early literature composed in the English vernacular made ample use of such modesty topoi. One excellent medieval example, widely recognized among scholars of the period as a rhetorical tour de force, is Thomas Usk’s prologue to The Testament of Love (ca. 1387).115 Since the work it prefaces is clearly indebted to two Latin texts, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and Anselm’s De concordia, Usk is clearly concerned at the outset to present himself as a “resourceful English writer learning from past auctores without being threatened by them.”116 Yet his success or failure will necessarily be “bound up with the particular qualities of the much-deprecated English vernacular.”117 Usk is thus confined by the limitations of his “mother tongue”: “Let clerks compose in Latin, for they have the specialized knowledge and the expertise; and let the French compose their idiom in their French tongue, for it is natural to them; and let us, finally, express our creativity in such words as we learned from our mothers.”118 Usk’s rhetorical performance in the prologue thus moves in two directions at once. On the one hand, he is certain he will become “the object of scorn and jests” for daring to present the noble Boethian theme “unmeritoriously arrayed in obscurity and ignorance”; on the other hand, he advertises his accessibility to “ordinary [English] folk” and hints that his very rhetorical deficits will at least earn him the badge of sincerity. The hinge between these two gestures is the antirhetorical position he establishes from the first lines of the prologue: “There are many people, ears wide open, who indulge themselves in the taste for rhetoric. They gulp down jokes and rhymes and find them delicious because of the curious, intricate and colorful knots of rhetoric that compose them. . . . Truly, though, none of this indulgence in rhetoric will be found in this work of mine, so deeply have anxiety and distraction

PAGE 108

Transatlantic Correspondences

109

undermined my spirits.” Thus dispirited, Usk then consoles himself that his “less ornate, perhaps even undistinguished composition” will at least have its own kind of value: “There are some people who decorate their work with rich colors and some theirs with very ornate forms; for example, they rubricate their work to make it fancy. There are others, though, who work in charcoal and chalk. . . . Such contrasts are useful for the way in which they highlight other, more distinguished, perhaps even unique, compositions, which are then held in higher esteem.” In this way, his own dull performance will allow the more polished works of others to shine brighter.119 Underlying all these avowals of authorial anxiety is a familiar and oft-repeated defense of low or plain style, namely, that lack of stylistic ornament is proof of substance: “Though this book of mine should merit little praise on account of the plainness and simplicity of the work,” Usk writes, “still, such compositions can and do inspire men to contemplate essentials in their lives.” So, too, by denying himself the pleasure of rhetorical “indulgence” along with the “praise” it would garner, Usk has slyly gathered to himself a greater honor—that of showing forth “the firm knowledge of truth, without any admixture of deceit,” and without impiously gilding God’s already perfect creation “with rich colors and . . . ornate forms.”120 In a manner perfectly analogous to Cre`vecoeur’s self-effacing narrator, then, Usk’s defense of his own rude composition comes to us bundled with an implicit criticism of his superiors, precisely for their superior polish. It is a kind of rhetorical alchemy: self-abasement, bordering almost on the masochistic, suddenly becomes a boast of authenticity and power. Meanwhile, bowing and scraping before one’s literary betters imperceptibly mutates into a satirical swipe at any who would, in Usk’s phrase, “rubricate their work to make it fancy.” This brand of vernacular humility topos also has a long French history, stretching back from Rousseau and Cre`vecoeur to their Renaissance predecessors. As I see it, there is perhaps no more illuminating literary precursor for Cre`vecoeur’s style in particular than that of Michel de Montaigne, who cannily employed modesty formulas throughout the vernacular prose experiment he called the Essays. Indeed, for all of the recent literary scholarship reconsidering the possibilities for generically classifying the Letters, it is perhaps surprising that more attention has not been given to Harold Kulungian’s argument, some forty years ago, that Cre`vecoeur is “an essayist in the tradition of Montaigne.”121 I am particularly interested in how Cre`vecoeur adapted aspects of Montaigne’s style and approach to structure, and

PAGE 109

110

Chapter 2

then reapplied it to the kind of prose narrative he imagines an American farmer might write. Montaigne succeeded Joachim Du Bellay and other poets of the French Renaissance in their search for distinction for the French vernacular, which they would achieve by forging their own poetic tradition and their own ars poetica, commensurate with those of antiquity, yet suited to the French vulgaire. These poets thus confronted the problem of emulating a prestigious cultural tradition in a new cultural location with considerably less prestige. This response to the problem of vernacular authority, which echoed the comparable prior debate among Italian writers (and anticipated a similar debate among English writers), turned on the role of literature in creating the sense of a French nation.122 Du Bellay is thus an interesting Renaissance point of comparison for Cre`vecoeur: like Cre`vecoeur, Du Bellay was descended of minor nobility; like Cre`vecoeur, he was well schooled at university despite his claim to have been poorly educated;123 and comparable to Cre`vecoeur, an Anglophilic Frenchman in British America, Du Bellay occupied a “liminal position at the edges of both France and Italy.” Writing from this position, Timothy Hampton argues, Du Bellay “invented a new notion of French character”124 —much as Cre`vecoeur arguably did for the American. One of the group of French poets whom Pierre de Ronsard dubbed “la Ple´iade” after the third-century BC group of Alexandrian Greek poets—a designation which itself performed an act of emulation in miniature—Du Bellay wrote the polemical text that served as the manifesto for their poetic revolution, The Defense and Illustration of the French Language (1549). Du Bellay wrote his Defense in response to Thomas Se´billet’s 1548 poetic treatise, Art Poe´tique Franc¸ois, which had asserted the essential continuity of French poetry with the tradition that had begun with the Greeks, passed through the ancient Romans to the Italians, and arrived at last in France— thus invoking the translatio imperii and positioning France as the cultural heir to the Roman empire.125 Yet where Se´billet advocated the imitation of the ancients primarily through the simple act of linguistic translation into French, Du Bellay argued more forcefully that the French vernacular in its current state was insufficiently prepared to receive these gifts from antiquity. He expresses this state of affairs through an elaborate horticultural metaphor which has some obvious connections to Cre`vecoeur’s later use of similar figures. Du Bellay begins from the premise that French “is just beginning to flower without bearing fruit, or rather, like a seedling and

PAGE 110

Transatlantic Correspondences

111

fresh shoot, has not yet flowered, much less yielded all the fruit it is capable of producing.” While some of Du Bellay’s first readers and critics accused him of denigrating the French tongue,126 his real purpose was to call for its cultivation. Its current lack of fertility “comes certainly not from any defect in its nature, [which is] as apt to engender as others, but through the fault of those who have had it in their care and have not sufficiently tended it; but like a wild plant in that same uncultivated place where it was born, they have let it grow old and nearly die, without ever watering it, pruning it, or protecting it from the bramble and thorns that shaded it.”127 French writers ought, then, to emulate the Greeks and Romans not through slavish imitation, but by being as “diligent” in the cultivation of their vernacular as the ancients were in the cultivation of their own.128 While Montaigne was an admirer of Ronsard and Du Bellay, we might say that his own prose experiment in the Essays relocated the project of French literary enrichment in a different generic medium—in much the same way that Cre`vecoeur would later transpose aesthetic arguments about poetic enthusiasm into prose style. In “Of Vanity” (III: 9), Montaigne compares the leaping rhythms of his own prose to the gamboling movements of poetry: “I go out of my way, but rather by license than carelessness. My ideas follow one another, but sometimes it is from a distance, and look at each other, but with a sidelong glance.”129 He compares this prosaic form of “license” to its famous poetic cousin (“I love the poetic gait, by leaps and gambols”) and suggests that in some cases, prose may actually incarnate it even better: “A thousand poets drag and languish prosaically; but the best ancient prose . . . shines throughout with the vigor and boldness of poetry, and gives the effect of its frenzy.”130 While Montaigne himself might be said to employ a prose technique just as carefully thought-out as any poetics before him, it is a technique that hides itself. “I do not like a fabric in which the seams and stitches show, just as in a handsome body we must not be able to count the bones and veins: Let the language devoted to truth be plain and simple. Who speaks carefully unless be wants to speak affectedly? [Seneca] The eloquence that diverts us to itself is unfair to the content.”131 In both content and style, then, Montaigne embraces a “negligence” (nonchalance) informed, as some critics have observed, by Baldassare Castiglione’s ideal of sprezzatura in The Book of the Courtier (1528).132 Montaigne is aware, of course, that this form of studied carelessness suggests its opposite, namely pure affectation—an affectation all the worse since what is being affected is an unaffected posture.133 Yet he insists that his stylistic choices entail more

PAGE 111

112

Chapter 2

than mere rhetorical pretense. Because the goal is to represent the spontaneous workings of his own mind, and because those processes elude any attempts to corral them into an orderly unity, lack of structure can be the only structuring principle. As he declares in “Of Vanity”: “I want the matter to make its own divisions.”134 Montaigne’s opening address, “To the Reader,” famously opens the work on a note of modesty. “I have had no thought of serving either you or my own glory. My powers are inadequate to such a purpose.”135 He then follows with the standard claim that the work was written for “domestic” and private purposes (“the private convenience of my relatives and friends”), rather than to “seek the world’s favor,” and that the work’s “defects” follow from these circumstances.136 Montaigne metaphorizes the work’s plain style as the choice of everyday attire when sitting for a portrait: “I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without straining or artifice; for it is my self that I portray. My defects will here be read to the life, and also my natural form, as far as respect for the public has allowed.”137 Playing in this way on the conventional association between literary style and sumptuary fashion, he figures naturalness as sartorial plainness. Extreme lack of artifice thus becomes nakedness: “I assure you I should very gladly have portrayed myself here entire and wholly naked.” “Thus, Reader,” Montaigne concludes, “I am myself the matter of my own book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject.”138 If this voice is indebted to conventional modesty formulas, it goes beyond them in two ways. First, its rhetorical basis is subtly distinct: the voice of the Essays does not claim to possess a certain genuineness despite its confessed faults; it claims genuineness precisely because of them—the same inversion I find at the heart of Cre`vecoeur’s “incorrect style.” Second, and Cre`vecoeur follows him in this as well, Montaigne’s use of the modesty topos departs from the common standard in the extent of its use: no longer merely confined to one or two apologies for feebleness in the traditional paraliterary locations (prefaces, prologues, dedications), it is woven throughout the entire fabric of the Essays. These reflections on style, scattered throughout the Essays, constitute something of a self-referential layer to the work as a whole. In this way, “humility” ceases to be a “topos” and becomes a full-blown theory of style, immanent in the prose narration itself—an ars prosaica on the level of the Ple´iade ars poetica. In “Of the Power of the Imagination” (I: 21), for example, Montaigne asserts that “I have neither composition nor development that is worth anything” and

PAGE 112

Transatlantic Correspondences

113

that this expressive limitation, in turn, imposes limits on his subject matter: “And so I have chosen to say what I know how to say, accommodating the matter to my power.”139 In “Of Presumption” (II: 17), he sharpens his selfcritique, lamenting that “everything I write is crude” in both matter and in style—“at least,” he adds parenthetically, “if I should give the name of style to a shapeless and undisciplined way of talking, a popular jargon, and a way of proceeding without definitions, without divisions, without conclusions, and confused.”140 His style, then, is really a nonstyle—not even worthy of the name. Nor is this a matter of choice: “If I should attempt to follow that other style that is even, smooth, and orderly, I could not attain it.”141 The sections on rhetoric in “Of the Education of Children” (I: 26) necessarily take a slightly different angle into similar territory, for Montaigne is forced by the context (the essay is framed as a letter to a countess offering pedagogical advice) to lay aside the mask of self-parody and take up, with some seriousness, the question of what expressive ideal he would teach a young gentleman. He begins with a negative prescription: it is not important “to know rhetoric, or how in a preface to capture the benevolence of the gentle reader.” This parodic assault on rhetorical and literary conventions as useless forms of artifice then leads him into a positive prescription of a “natural” style: “In truth, all this fine painting is easily eclipsed by the luster of a simple natural truth.”142 Montaigne then arrives at the oft-quoted formula for a natural writing style that is more like speech in its immediacy and authenticity: “The speech I love is a simple, natural speech, the same on paper as in the mouth [tel sur le papier qu’a` la bouche]; a speech succulent and sinewy, brief and compressed, not so much dainty and well-combed as vehement and brusque . . . rather difficult than boring, remote from affectation, irregular, disconnected and bold.”143 From the quicquid in buccam venit to Montaigne’s tel sur le papier qu’a` la bouche to Cre`vecoeur’s “talking on paper”: if the foregoing discussion explores some of the sources on which Cre`vecoeur might have drawn in order to shape his American farmer’s style, I now turn to the contemporary context in which his Anglo-American readership would have received it.

“Splendid Barbarism,” or, Cre`vecoeur’s Bardic Nationalism144 For anglophone readers in Britain and America, the most important cultural reference point for these kinds of rhetorical tactics would have been

PAGE 113

114

Chapter 2

the idea of “original genius” that had been developing in British poetic criticism throughout the eighteenth century. As John Dennis theorized it early in the century, the hallmark of poetic genius was “enthusiastic passion”—and not, say, skill or polish.145 Since the great poets are characterized less by correctness than by imaginative vitality, as Sir Richard Blackmore put it in a 1716 essay on epic, they are often “defective in some points that relate to external embellishments.”146 The argument is not simply that extraordinary genius at times fails to attend to formal niceties. The key move is the reversal by which artistic genius exists in certain stylistic flaws, not just despite them. “Extraordinary minds,” as Blackmore explains, “are so taken up with great objects, that they have no time or inclination to attend to the low and minute affairs of rhetoric, therefore their omissions are not so much to be imputed to want of skill, as to . . . the strength and elevation of their conceptions.”147 In later aesthetic treatises such William Duff’s An Essay on Original Genius (1767) and James Usher’s Clio; or, A Discourse on Taste (1769), we can see the trope of the blessed defect elevated into a recognizably pre-Romantic cult of poetic genius. The “original Genius,” Duff argues, is ever characterized not merely by “greatness” but more particularly by “irregular greatness”: “Sometimes indeed he will be happy enough to paint his very thought, and to excite in others the very sentiments which he himself feels: he will not always however succeed so well, but, on the contrary, will often labour in a fruitless attempt; whence it should seem, that his composition will upon certain occasions be distinguished by an irregular and unequal greatness.”148 Yet this very susceptibility to failure is ultimately the mark of the highest success, for “the imperfection here suggested, is . . . a certain proof of an exuberant Imagination” whose “errors and excellencies are equally inimitable.”149 The literatures of the ancient Greeks, Romans, Celts, or Hebrews were all capable of standing for this kind of stylistic vitality and authenticity in British criticism. Nowhere was this transvaluation of artistic imperfection into aesthetic power more obvious than in the cult of the ancient bards. Treatises like Thomas Blackwell’s Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (1735) and Hugh Blair’s Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian (1763) argued that the poets of Europe’s antiquity were capable of reaching the highest heights precisely because no regular forms had yet arisen to constrain their untutored imaginations. In effect, these critical works seized on such poets as particular case studies of the concept of “original genius” that Duff and

PAGE 114

Transatlantic Correspondences

115

Usher would theorize in general terms. The primitive poets of antiquity, as Blackwell put it in his influential study of Homer, had a unique access to the poetic spirit because “they lived naturally and were governed by the natural Poise of the Passions.”150 As a result, they could offer modern readers an “irresistible and enchanting” kind of aesthetic delight: “They give us back the emotions of an artless mind.”151 Building on Blackwell’s earlier work, Blair placed even greater emphasis on how the apparent defect of a “barbarous” age—its “rudeness”—in fact brings it closer to aesthetic pleasures that a more civilized age cannot as easily enjoy: “Irregular and unpolished we may expect the production of uncultivated ages to be; but abounding, at the same time, with that enthusiasm, that vehemence and fire, which are the soul of poetry: for many circumstances of those times which we call barbarous, are favorable to the poetical spirit. That state, in which human nature shoots wild and free, though unfit for other improvements, certainly encourages the high exertions of fancy and passion.”152 And if a barbarous nation can produce an exalted literature by virtue of its “rudeness,” it followed that the refinements of a more civilized age are at an aesthetic disadvantage by comparison. “In the progress of society,” wrote Blair, “the genius and manners of men undergo a change more favourable to accuracy than to . . . sublimity.”153 Blackwell had put it more strongly still: “The moderns admire nothing but Pomp . . . they exclude themselves from the pleasantest and most natural Images that adorned the old Poetry.”154 Modernity itself is thus, from the aesthetic point of view, the triumph of disguise and falsity: “We love to disguise everything, and most Ourselves. All our Titles and Distinctions have been represented as Coverings, and Additions of Grandeur to what nature gave us: Happy indeed for the best of Ends, I mean the publick Tranquillity and good order; but incapable of giving delight in Fiction or Poetry.”155 By this line of reasoning, then, ancient poetry offers access to a more genuine form of delight, and its very lack of perfection is the surest mark of its authenticity: “Their Passions are sound and genuine, not adulterated or disguised, and break out in their own artless Phrase and unaffected Stile. They are not accustomed to the Prattle, and little pretty Forms that enervate a polished speech . . . Before they are polished into flattery and falsehood, we feel the force of their Words, and the Truth of their Thoughts.”156 Blackwell used a horticultural figure to express this opposition between natural and artificial uses of language as the difference between wild plants and those cultivated in a hothouse: “Our first business, when we sit down to poetize in the higher

PAGE 115

116

Chapter 2

strains, is to . . . adopt a set of more natural manners, which however are foreign to us; and must be like plants raised up in hot-beds or green-houses, in comparison of those which grow in soils fitted by nature for such productions. . . . We live within doors, covered, as it were, from nature’s face; and passing our days supremely ignorant of her beauties, we are apt to think the similes taken from her low, and the ancient manners mean, or absurd.”157 Cre`vecoeur certainly manipulated similar tropes to distinguish Old World hyperculture from raw New World nature. No figure better illuminates this logic of blessed barbarism than Ossian, the presumptive third-century author of a Scots Gaelic epic, supposedly “translated” but in fact largely created by the eighteenth-century Scottish poet James Macpherson. Hugh Blair’s celebration of the work of “our rude Celtic bard,” first published in 1763, tellingly proceeded by focusing on Ossian’s poetic faults in relation to the more polished and skillful Homer. Ossian is characterized by “a few improprieties”; he is at times “uncouth and abrupt”; and he lacks “the extensive knowledge, the regular dignity of narration, the fullness and accuracy of description, which we find in Homer and Virgil.”158 Yet according to the counterintuitive aesthetic I have been describing, by virtue of these very features, Ossian’s poetry is “sublime . . . in an eminent degree.”159 Thus, once this critical inoculation is complete, Blair can declare that “a few beauties of this high kind, transcend whole volumes of faultless mediocrity.”160 The emergence of this aesthetic cleared a discursive path for AngloAmericans who might later wish to elevate their own “rude bards” over the modern poets of hypercivilized Europe. This logic would become crucial to the authorization of American geniuses, who would be pitted imaginatively against European artifice, polish, and inauthenticity. Yet long before Walt Whitman sounded his “barbaric yawp” as a point of literary-nationalist pride, some American critics began to celebrate the “splendid barbarism” of American writing—a remarkable phrase from Edward Tyrell Channing’s 1816 essay, “On Models in Literature,”161 whose oxymoronic pull is indebted to the uncultivated aesthetic I have been tracing here. When it was not desirable actually to represent themselves as symbolic barbarians in relation to European civilization, Anglo-Americans could use the Native American as a mediating figure.162 As frequently as AngloAmericans celebrated the “American savage” as a kind of natural poet, they seldom gave examples of Native American poetry, narrative, or myth. As if the aboriginal literary competency the Indian represents could never itself

PAGE 116

Transatlantic Correspondences

117

be realized in a literary tradition of his own, it is invoked essentially as a kind of arche-literature163 which shores up the autochthony of an AngloAmerican literary tradition by proxy. Aided by this highly productive figure—often metaphorized as a spectral residue of the primitive164 —Anglo-Americans could lay claim to an immemorial and distinctly American “genius of the place” in much the same way that modern Scots such as Macpherson and Blair could look to Ossian as a authorizing literary ancestor. Thomas Jefferson, for one, seemed explicitly to recognize the model Ossian provided for this kind of “native” cultural nationalism.165 So fascinated was Jefferson by his encounter with Macpherson’s “translation” that he wrote to request a copy of the original manuscript and the materials to learn Gaelic—evidence not of Jefferson’s credulity so much as his excitement with its possibilities for a narrative of American cultural development. He completed this gesture, we might say, in Notes on the State of Virginia when he recruited the “sublime oratory” of the Native American as a point of pride for the English creoles who share their continent.166 It is clear that such representations of Native American sublimity had enormous symbolic utility for late eighteenth-century U.S. nationalism. Yet the picture is not complete unless we recognize that European thought had already paved the way for this exact critical move—not just in relation to its own “primitives” but those of America in fact. As I will discuss further in the following chapter, British criticism used New World spaces to signify a certain type of exceptional aesthetic power. Just as “America” in Enlightenment political theory connoted the zero degree of society—think of John Locke’s “In the beginning, all the world was America” (II.49)—the New World also functioned in European philosophy as a limit case for inquiries into beauty and taste, and reached for American examples when it was necessary to allude to the extremes of aesthetic experience. This writing also frequently recruited the aboriginal American as a proxy for those experiences, and the “sublime savage” thus became a commonplace of aesthetic philosophy. “An American chief, at this day,” wrote Blair in his Ossian treatise, “harangues the head of his tribe, in a more bold metaphorical style, than a modern European would adventure to use in an epic poem.”167 When Anglo-Americans exploited an “aboriginal” symbolic presence on behalf of their own aesthetic claims, they were repeating a move that had been made by earlier British critics and theorists.

* * *

PAGE 117

118

Chapter 2

It is perhaps significant that most of the British critics relevant to my discussion above, including those who produced the influential theories of the sublime, were located outside of England proper. Edmund Burke and James Usher were both born in Dublin and studied at Trinity College; Hugh Blair taught at Edinburgh; James Macpherson studied at Aberdeen and brought out his “Ossian” poems in Edinburgh at Blair’s urging; and Thomas Blackwell and William Duff were also associated with the Aberdonian circle. In other words, all in some way or another wrote as Englishmen yet from the off-center of the British empire. From this perspective, it is no coincidence that they produced many of those concepts that would become most influential in the American context. For, as the recent work of Leonard Tennenhouse suggests, their work is animated by a problem fundamentally comparable to that facing anglophone American intellectuals of the time: the “importance of feeling English,” as Tennenhouse puts it, even or especially outside of England. Their turn to ancient authors and primitive cultural contexts, in a sense, implicitly analogizes temporal-historical distance from the present to geographical distance from the metropolitan center. And by locating cultural vitality and authenticity in these temporal and spatial peripheries, they did not only complicate the dominant metropolitan narratives associating cultural perfection with proximity to the center; indeed, they produced a powerful counterpoint. Cre`vecoeur made the strongest possible form of this cultural argument: he “proved,” in narrative terms, that the transplantation of English culture results in a more vigorous and vital form of that culture. If “transplantation” was the most common and the most concrete figure for cultural translation during this period, there is no one who deployed it better or more selfconsciously than Cre`vecoeur.168 Farmer James, who can ingenuously inform us at one point that “men are like plants,” does us the service of unfolding this figure of speech into a full-blown simile: “Every industrious European who transports himself here may be compared to a sprout growing at the foot of a great tree,” he writes. “Wrench it from the parent roots, transplant it, and it will become a tree bearing fruit also.”169 So, too, when the farmer has to be convinced that his rough-hewn letters will be of value to his urbane British correspondent, Cre`vecoeur has James’s minister elaborate the same arboreal figure to assure the farmer that the humble American “sprout” can and will flourish far from the “parent roots.” The untutored farmer’s letters will be “something like one of our wild American plants, irregularly luxuriant in its various branches.”170

PAGE 118

Transatlantic Correspondences

119

The note of ambivalence in Cre`vecoeur’s emphasis on the irregularity of that American “plant” suggests that, like Jefferson, he too was aware that, by addressing his “letters” from America to Europe, he was implicitly engaging the “dispute of the new world.”171 As we have seen, Jefferson vociferously rejected the scientific argument that flora and fauna tended to be smaller and less vigorous in the more extreme climates of the American continent than in Europe’s “temperate zone.” This thesis applied most obviously to the wild plants and native species of the New World, but under a prevailing theory of generation that gave the natural environment such an enormous shaping power, it posited the diminution of transplanted species as well. Thus the domesticated livestock of Europe, and by extension its humans, were bound to diminish upon removal to the New World climate. Cre`vecoeur’s transplanted English “sprout” has a very particular resonance against this discursive background, though, as it is for Jefferson, what is at issue for him is the migration not only of bodies but also of books. Would transplanted European learning and culture degenerate in the New World as well? On the contrary, the exchange between James and his minister in fact seems to encode a subtle rejoinder to the degeneration thesis. For while the American tree is “irregularly luxuriant,” that irregularity evidences not a degenerate nature but only insufficient culture: in fact, the minister explains, “this exuberance is . . . a strong proof of fertility, which wants nothing but the progressive knowledge acquired by time to amend and correct it.”172 America simply needs some pruning. Yet what is most significant about this clarification is how it enables him to wield the shears in the other direction, so to speak. For European nature seems to suffer from an excess of that kind of regulatory culture: “Were I in Europe,” says the minister, “I should be tired with perpetually seeing cespaliers, plashed hedges, and trees dwarfed into pygmies.”173 Cre`vecoeur thus goes further than Jefferson, not simply attempting to disprove the hypothesis of colonial degeneration, but turning it on its head. According to this symbolic reversal of the diminution thesis, it is European flora that have become miniaturized, and the exuberant American nature-writing turns out to provide an indispensable antidote to European hyperculture: “Do let Mr. F.B. see on paper a few American wild-cherry trees, such as nature forms them here in all her unconfined vigour, in all the amplitude of their extended limbs and spreading ramifications—let him see that we are possessed with strong vegetative embryos.”174 We would need something like Le´vi-Strauss’s “culinary triangle” fully to elaborate this logic,

PAGE 119

120

Chapter 2

according to which America is made to represent “raw” nature, and Europe stands for a culture not so much “cooked” as overcooked or “rotten.”175 Three quarters of a century later, Whitman would draw on this logic and apply it rather pointedly in the service of his literary nationalism: “The genius of all foreign literature is clipped and cut small, compared to our genius, and is essentially insulting to our usages, and to the organic compacts of These States. . . . Much that stands well and has a little enough place provided for it in the small scales of European kingdoms, empires, and the like, here stands haggard, dwarfed, ludicrous, or has no place little enough provided for it.”176 This figuration of Old and New World cultures owes something fundamental to Cre`vecoeur’s Letters. In his frame narrative and the construction of the voice of Farmer James, Cre`vecoeur produced an allegory of American writing according to which the wild yet copious fertility of fresh soil is bound to produce a revitalized culture. And once this figure is in play, he can use it in the service, for example, of his famous question in Letter III, “What is an American?” “In this great American asylum,” he writes in some of that letter’s most oft-quoted lines, “the poor of Europe have by some means met together. . . . Urged by a variety of motives, here they came. Everything has tended to regenerate them; new laws, a new mode of living, a new social system; here they have become men: in Europe they were as so many useless plants, wanting vegetative mould and refreshing showers; they withered, and were mowed down by want, hunger, and war; but now, by the power of transplantation, like all other plants they have taken root and flourished!”177 Fruit ripens on the limbs of the American tree while that of Europe decays and rots. Far from degeneration and diminution, then, the American soil would seem to promise the regeneration and expansion of the European stock. And we mustn’t allow Cre`vecoeur’s naı¨ve narrative posture to distract us from the most interesting point of all: that it is a French-born Anglophile who articulates this cultural exceptionalism on behalf of America. Like D. H. Lawrence’s later donation to an American cultural exceptionalism, this is not merely curious and not merely incidental. For Cre`vecoeur takes his place in a whole cultural milieu of late eighteenth-century European fantasizers about America and its political, cultural, or aesthetic possibilities.178 As a result, Americans do indeed owe a “mysterious obligation” to this European narrative for their own exceptionalist fantasies.

PAGE 120

CHAPTER 3

“New Forms of Sublimity” Charles Brockden Brown and the Irregular Style

I passed through the cave and reached the bridge which my own ingenuity had formed. At that moment, torrents of rain poured from above, and stronger blasts thundered amidst these desolate recesses and profound chasms. Instead of lamenting the prevalence of this tempest, I now began to regard it with pleasure. It conferred new forms of sublimity, and grandeur on this scene. —Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly

In the recent renaissance in Charles Brockden Brown criticism, a range of complex cultural-historical questions have displaced the old obsession with Brown’s paternity of the American literary tradition.1 Brown has emerged from this criticism as a largely new figure—“revised and expanded,”2 as Bryan Waterman has recently put it. This work has made a great deal more of Brown’s generically diverse oeuvre than was possible under an earlier exclusive focus on his novels, and has simultaneously placed his writing in the richer context of transatlantic political and literary relations at the turn of the nineteenth century. As a result, the earlier critical assumption that Brown ought to be read exclusively in relation to “Americanist exceptionalism and continualism” has come to seem questionable.3 In fact, the most interesting such scholarship has put some distance between Brown and nationalist ideology, finding in his fiction of the 1790s and his political writings in the following decade a dissenting voice to early American exceptionalism and expansionist ideology.4

PAGE 121

122

Chapter 3

In this chapter, I return to the unfashionable question of Brown’s literary “Americanness” and even focus on the novel traditionally adduced to do so; yet I attempt to approach the question with the nuance of recent Brown criticism and informed more generally by recent work on transatlantic literary relations at the end of the eighteenth century.5 By doing so, I arrive at some counterintuitive answers to the familiar questions. It is not without reason that earlier generations of critics found in Brown an available figure for literary exceptionalism and a point of origin for an indigenous American literary tradition.6 Yet most critical assessments of that kind have somehow to manage certain ironies in Brown’s literary practice: Brown staked this claim to literary indigeneity by working in an established European literary form (the “gothic romance”) and self-consciously adapting concepts from British aesthetic philosophy (the notion of poetic novelty and the descriptive theory of the sublime). His most profound borrowing from European culture was perhaps the most counterintuitive, for it is the one that was most successful in establishing his claim to literary autochthony: his fictions exploited a longstanding European representation of the New World as a place of peculiar aesthetic power. If Brown did produce what we can consider an early version of literary exceptionalism, he did so, paradoxically, out of given European materials. This is not merely a curious irony of Brown’s aesthetic practice, but in fact it tells us something significant about how eighteenth-century arguments for American literary nationalism were quite explicitly shaped by the European culture of the aesthetic.7 Brown is frequently described as “the self-conscious pioneer” of a distinctly American literary mode;8 indeed, the notion of self-consciousness is a recurrent one in Brown criticism. The phrase is apt because it registers Brown’s abiding awareness of his writing and its goals—a concern we can trace in his prefaces, letters, advertisements for the fiction, and magazine sketches such as “The Rhapsodist” and “Walstein’s School of History.” Yet a certain formal self-consciousness is also woven into the novels themselves. Surely one of the most notable and familiar aspects of Brown’s fiction is its nearly obsessive concern with reading, writing, interpretation, and the whole realm of signification more generally. This is most obvious when his characters read and talk about books, but also in a range of episodes in which manuscripts are written, read, lost, or found; characters write letters or draw sketches; and scenes of storytelling thematize the workings of narrative from within the narrative itself. Cathy Davidson has thus described Brown’s novels as “metafiction, fiction about the making of fictions.”9

PAGE 122

“New Forms of Sublimity”

123

In order to put this self-reflexivity into its proper context, we must recall that the kinds of mises en abıˆme in which his fiction abounds are characteristic of the novel form in general as practiced by American authors in the 1790s. Many of the first novels published in the United States—such as William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy (1789), Enos Hitchcock’s Memoirs of the Bloomsgrove Family (1790), Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive (1797), and Tabitha Tenney’s Female Quixotism (1801), to name just a few—contain scenes in which characters or narrators themselves read or talk about novels. “What books would you recommend to put into the hands of my daughter?” asks Mrs. Bourn of the assembled company in The Power of Sympathy, thus setting off a series of discussions among the characters about the differential literary and moral value of writing in various generic and national contexts.10 Such explicit discussions of reading provide only the most obvious moments of self-referentiality, alongside other episodes in which all manner of books, letters, and interpolated tales call the reader’s attention to the activity of reading itself and the utility of the novel in his or her hand. Certainly, such moments constitute neither a distinctly American literary characteristic nor a particularly modern one. The Homeric epics deployed an elaborate machinery of interpolated tales, internal audiences, ekphrases of visual artworks, and so on, in order to call their own audiences’ attention to the act of storytelling and its pleasures and powers. And with Cervantes, the novel in its modern form was born in an extraordinary act of literary self-reflection. The question, then, is what function this metaliterary dimension served in the anglophone literature of the Early Republic. Perhaps the most compelling answer is the simplest: during the decades after the Revolution, the question of what relationship American literature would have to the English models that dominated the marketplace became increasingly insistent. “America must be as independent in literature as she is in politics,” declared Noah Webster in 1783, “as famous for arts as for arms.”11 Placed in the context of the subsequent burgeoning literary nationalism, it is reasonable to assume that one function of literary self-reflexivity was to join the selfconscious project of adapting a “foreign” literature with a simultaneous process of representing and theorizing those adaptations as new and specifically American. Put most simply, it was a moment when American literature appeared to be thinking of itself. As Carlos Alonso has suggested in an illuminating study of a comparable phase in Latin American literary history, works which claim cultural

PAGE 123

124

Chapter 3

autochthony—a concept central to my reading of Brown here—may be particularly prone to such formal self-reflection. Since the writer of such a text is forced to reflect on the features of his or her own cultural context, rather like “becoming an anthropologist to one’s own culture,” Alonso argues, “the project of writing an autochthonous literary text is as much a critical endeavor as a literary one, or more exactly, one where literature and criticism swiftly become entangled.”12 Such works may tend toward an aesthetic self-referentiality that authorizes the work to function simultaneously as its own criticism. In just this way, I will argue, Brown used his fiction not only to provide instances of “American romance” but also to guide readers’ reception of this new mode along the way.13 By both enacting and simultaneously theorizing the distinctness of American literature, and doing so in explicit relation to contemporary theories of aesthetic experience, Brown’s novels in effect operated not only as criticism but more radically as a kind of aesthetic theory by other means.

Brown’s Novelties It is an irreducible paradox of Brown’s quest for an indigenous literature that he turned to a form that was very much in vogue in Europe in the 1790s: the gothic novel.14 In terms of my argument here, it makes perfect sense that Brown would do so. For in the European context, the gothic novel was peculiarly self-conscious about the aesthetic effects it aimed to produce in the bodies of its readers. The closely related genre known in Germany as the Schauerroman (literally, “shudder novel” or “thrill novel”) bore perhaps the most obvious connection to the discourse of aesthetics in both its broad philosophical sense, as the science of sensation and its relation to knowledge, and in the narrower eighteenth-century sense of the study of taste and the pleasure produced by the beautiful.15 In the British context, Horace Walpole made his own aesthetic intentions explicit in the second edition of The Castle of Otranto. Explaining how he came to the literary form that his subtitle was the first to designate the “gothic story,” he explains for several pages how much his new genre could lay claim to novelty and how much it relied on imitation and convention. “Desirous of leaving the powers of the fancy at liberty to expatiate through the boundless realms of invention, and thence of creating more interesting situations,” he

PAGE 124

“New Forms of Sublimity”

125

attempted to “blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern”16 and thereby to fashion “a new species of romance.”17 Clara Reeve’s preface to The Old English Baron: A Gothic Story similarly aimed to “elucidate the design, and, it is hoped, . . . induce [the reader] to form a favorable, as well as a right judgment of the work before him.”18 In doing so, Reeve makes particularly clear how closely linked were the two senses of the “aesthetic” to which I have just alluded, for she invokes the technical language of faculty psychology to frame her artistic goals as designs on the reader’s mind and body: “The business of Romance is, first, to excite the attention; and secondly, to direct it to some useful, or at least innocent, end. . . . To attain this end, there is required a sufficient degree of the marvelous, to excite the attention; enough of the manners of real life, to give an air of probability to the work; and enough of the pathetic, to engage the heart in its behalf.”19 But it was in Ann Radcliffe’s hands that the gothic novel was at its most theoretically robust in the sense that it displayed an abiding intertextual engagement with contemporary aesthetic theory. Scholars have excavated in her fiction the echoes of and near-explicit allusions to such works as Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) and Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783). In its explicit descriptions of the power of terror and its paradoxical association with pleasure, the gothic novel almost cannot help commenting on its own relation to its readers, subjected to analogous negative affects and yet presumed to have the aesthetic competency—or, to use the eighteenth-century term, the taste—to experience delight in their presence. By tracing the intricate changes in a character’s sensation and cognition, Radcliffe’s fiction showed the reader the way to effect this kind of transformation. When, for example, Madame de Menon of A Sicilian Romance (1790) finds herself overwhelmed with anxiety about the fate of her former charge, Julia Mazzini, her evening walk through the “wild and grotesque” scenery with its “terrific aspect” inspires her with “reverential awe” and “thrilling and delightful wonder.”20 Immediately after this elevation of perspective, as if being rewarded for it, she finds the long-lost Julia. Brown may have been drawn to the gothic novel form, then, in part because it had proven to be a genre well suited to producing aesthetic effects while simultaneously thematizing those effects. Like Walpole and Reeve, Brown cannily used his prefaces to announce his aesthetic goals. Like Radcliffe, he subjected his characters to aesthetic effects fundamentally

PAGE 125

126

Chapter 3

related to those occurring at a higher register in his readers’ relation to his text. To use such borrowings to build an argument for a “native” literary voice was necessarily a delicate proposition. The rhetorical maneuvers in Brown’s 1798 prospectus for his novel Sky Walk demonstrate the point. In it, he announced to the readers of the Weekly Magazine the upcoming publication of “a tale that may rival the performances of this kind which have lately issued from the English press” and one that “will be unexampled in America.”21 The remainder of the advertisement keeps circling back to these terms, attempting to claim at once a kinship with English forms and some kind of “native” originality: “To the story-telling moralist, the United States is a new and untrodden field. He who shall examine objects with this own eyes, who shall employ the European models merely for the improvement of his taste, and adapt his fiction to all that is genuine and peculiar in the scenes before him, will be entitled at least to the praise of originality.”22 More than making a virtue of a necessity, this performs an effective rhetorical slippage: literary underdevelopment becomes instead unprecedented and limitless potential: a “new and untrodden field.” According to a logic that would become central to literary exceptionalism, the country’s very cultural youth—its lack of “models” of its own—authorizes it as a potential source of “unexampled” originality and novelty. One inescapable irony of Brown’s claim to literary novelty is that the assertion itself is an entirely conventional rhetorical feature across the Western literary tradition. Ernst Curtius traces “the topos ‘I bring things never said before’ ” to ancient Greece, where it was used to signify the “rejection of trite epic material.”23 But the claim becomes particularly pervasive in the modern novel, which by virtue of its name bears an obvious relationship to novelty as a value. And the eighteenth-century gothic novel, in spite of its connection to antiquated times and modes of representation (its practitioners most often called it the “gothic romance” in order to distinguish it from the new novel), insisted on its own peculiar access to novelty. As Robert Miles comments in a study of the genre in the 1790s, “the Gothic follows the first law of genre: to deviate and make it new.”24 Walpole initiated his generic experiment with the claim of writing a “new species of romance,”25 and nearly every subsequent work in the mode, to a more or less implicit degree, followed suit in claiming some kind of innovation. In Edgar Huntly, Brown takes the novelty topos about as far as it will go, for he moves the claim out of its traditional paraliterary locations—the title page, preface, or prologue—and stitches it into the narration itself. We

PAGE 126

“New Forms of Sublimity”

127

can attribute this narrative strategy not only to authorial brazenness but also more productively to a formal decision on Brown’s part: the entire novel (save its last few pages), is a letter written by the eponymous hero to his fiance´e, Mary Waldegrave. By virtue of this thinly stretched epistolary conceit, Brown can essentially have his narrator, who is also its fictive author, repeatedly testify to the work’s novelty from within. Probably the clearest example of this follows the long narrative of the Irish immigrant Clithero Edny. When Brown’s first-person narrator describes his reaction to Clithero’s tale, he does so in a way that seems designed to guide the reader’s reception of the novel itself: “I did not consider this tale merely in relation to myself. My life had been limited and uniform. I had communed with romancers and historians, but the impression made upon me by this incident was unexampled in my experience. My reading had furnished me with no instance, in any degree, parallel to this.”26 The passage nearly flaunts its metaliterary dimension, not only because it references the writing of “romancers and historians,” but also because it simultaneously comments on the nature of the story Brown has just inserted into his own novel. Through this combined intertextuality and self-referentiality, the novel can attest to its “unexampled” uniqueness among all the other texts provided by the protagonist’s reading. Apparently, in all the annals of literature we will not find a story like it. It is thus not difficult to hear, beneath the narrator’s commentary, the author’s prod to his own reader similarly to become conscious of the radical novelty of the work in hand. Similar passages in which Brown essentially has his narrator insist on the novelty of the work can be found throughout Edgar Huntly. Describing his pursuit of Clithero through the wilderness, for example, Huntly testifies that “my rambles were productive of incessant novelty,” as “new tracks were pursued, new prospects detected, and new summits were gained.”27 All of this newness naturally brings with it unaccustomed and unusual effects; though he had grown up in the region and thought himself familiar with its features, Huntly tells us, none of his previous excursions “had led me wider from my customary paths than that which had taken place when in pursuit of Clithero.”28 In a related cluster of passages, Huntly interrupts his narration to mark the difficulty of giving adequate expression to his experience: “Here, my friend, thou must permit me to pause. The following incidents are of a kind to which the most ardent invention has never conceived a parallel.”29 He

PAGE 127

128

Chapter 3

sounds a similar note some pages later when he must narrate another ineffable experience and hence finds himself at another representational threshold: “No fancy can conceive a scene more wild and desolate than that which now presented itself.”30 In both these cases there is an implicit authorial bravado lurking beneath the insistence on experiential newness: no other faculty of “fancy” or “invention”—that is, no prior or contemporary artistic imagination—can beat the scene which is about to be painted. In effect, these passages use the classical topos of inexpressibility as a kind of authorial throat-clearing, setting the reader on notice that what is about to come is a putatively unparalleled aesthetic performance.31 At one point, Brown’s narrator-author makes this an almost explicit boast, that of one-upping previous romancers and poets: “Few, perhaps, among mankind have undergone vicissitudes of peril and wonder equal to mine. The miracles of poetry, the transitions of enchantment, are beggarly and mean compared with those which I had experienced. Passage into new forms, overleaping the bars of time and space, reversal of the laws of inanimate and intelligent existence had been mine to perform and to witness.”32 It is quite easy to understand such claims to formal innovation—whether in a preface, periodical notice, or woven right into the fabric of a literary work—simply as advertising copy aimed at claiming a larger market share. Let us grant that it served that promotional function; but it did much more than that. For the concept of literary newness and originality was linked via the philosophical discourse of the aesthetic to the impact a work could hope to have on the minds and bodies of its audience. “Novelty” was not only the preeminent buzzword but also perhaps the most universally legitimate value of eighteenth-century criticism. It is clear not only in an explicitly physiological theory of aesthetics such as Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry (whose first section is entitled “Novelty”), but across the range of aesthetic theory that a work of art could spur the imagination only if it was delivered by something novel. “Novelty . . . is the parent of admiration,” wrote Sir Richard Blackmore in a 1716 treatise.33 Thus a poet’s language must not only be elevated but must also engender surprise, utilizing the extraordinary and unaccustomed to “open” the reader’s mind. Blackmore used an eighteenth-century physiology of emotion to explain the power of poetry. According to this model, “admiration” served as a kind of pump-priming: “When the poet intends to give delight and convey instruction, as admiration engages attention, so it prepares and opens the mind to admit the force of the poet’s sentiments, and receive from them deep impressions.”34 Poetry is a delivery mechanism for

PAGE 128

“New Forms of Sublimity”

129

sentiments; the more wonderful the language, the more the reader’s mind is opened and prepared to receive the impressions deeply. By contrast, the familiar or the customary tends to produce in the reader a psychological state of indifference akin to the physiological state of lethargy.35 Custom, then, emerges as the enemy of sublimity, as John Baillie explained in his 1747 Essay on the Sublime: “Uncommonness, though it does not constitute the sublime of natural objects, very much heightens its effects upon the mind: for as great part of the elevation raised by vast and grand prospects, is owing to the mind’s finding herself in the exercise of more enlarged powers, and hence judging higher of herself, custom makes this familiar, and she no longer admires her own perfection.”36 As if heeding this philosophical warning, the gothic literature of the period answered the call with unrelentingly uncommon settings, themes, and events. As E. J. Clery has suggestively argued of Walpole’s fiction, “like Burke’s theory, Otranto originates in the problem of boredom and satiety.”37 American writers in the last decades of the eighteenth century necessarily had a different relationship to this cult of novelty. In the most general terms, is not difficult to imagine how post-Revolutionary Americans could appropriate aspects of such an aesthetic in a self-serving manner. A “new Republic,” after all, particularly one situated in a “New World,” might reasonably be expected to provide a unique point of access to aesthetic novelty, originality, and power. And since its governance was not founded on ossified forms of authority, it seemed immune to the lethargy of the given and the customary. This new society thus occupied a symbolic location akin to the primitive societies of antiquity, whose poets (according to eighteenthcentury antiquarians, as I will discuss more fully below) enjoyed a privileged access to artistic originality because no traditions, customs, or regular cultural forms had yet arisen to constrain their primitive imaginations. By analogy, then, to observe the newly forming modern society in this new quarter of the world is like returning to a moment when everything was by definition novel and unfamiliar; in essence, it is to be afforded a vision of the original first stages of civilization. According to this recurrent temporal paradox, if America was a “neotopia,” it was simultaneously a place of primitive aesthetic power—a new old place. It is critical to emphasize, however, that America had long served this aesthetic function first for European eyes. Just as “America” in Enlightenment political theory connoted the zero degree of society—“In the beginning,” wrote John Locke in Two Treatises on Government, “all the world

PAGE 129

130

Chapter 3

was America”38 —the New World also functioned in aesthetic philosophy as a limit case for inquiries into beauty and taste. Influenced by accounts of New World travel and exploration since the Renaissance, eighteenthcentury aesthetics turned to American examples and imagery to convey the extremes of aesthetic experience.39 As I have mentioned in the previous chapter, this writing commonly made the Native American a kind of symbol of those experiences. Hugh Blair attributed to the “American chief” a “more bold metaphorical style, than a modern European would adventure to use in an epic poem.”40 Immanuel Kant’s 1764 Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime similarly gives the Indian an exceptional status among all non-European peoples: “Among all savages there is no nation that displays so sublime a mental character as those of North America.”41 To choose one final instance, Edmund Burke’s discussion of obscurity as a feature of the sublime references as an example the “barbarous temples of the Americans at this day.”42 In Germaine de Stae¨l’s work at the end of the century, it was not the aboriginal American but the European creole in the New World who represented this supreme aesthetic potential. Though she did not regard its literature as mature enough to warrant the systematic treatment she accorded other national literatures in On Literature Considered in Its Relationship to Social Institutions (1800), “America” occupies a very significant location in her argument, for it represents a space of unparalleled cultural possibility: The literature that should characterize a great people is always interesting to examine, I believe: the literature of an enlightened people, who have established liberty, political equality, and manners in harmony with such institutions. Right now the Americans are the only nation in the universe to which these reflections are applicable. Americans may still have no developed literature, but when their men in public office are called upon to address public opinion they obviously possess the gift of touching the soul’s affections with simple truths and pure feelings. Anyone who can do this already knows the most useful secrets of style.43 In a sense, Stae¨l can represent America quite literally as sui generis—“the only nation in the universe” of its kind—precisely because it is presumed to have no developed character of its own, and hence can embody a kind of

PAGE 130

“New Forms of Sublimity”

131

pure plasticity. And yet its already established “gift” for political expression ensures for it a positive literary destiny.44 Though Stae¨l appears not to have been aware of Charles Brockden Brown’s work, Brown’s prefaces at roughly the same historical moment, as I have already noted, also represented America as an “untrodden field” capable of generating “unexampled” literary work. Stae¨l’s formulation of American cultural exceptionalism here is as extravagant as anything American intellectuals would articulate until Walt Whitman’s 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, but she herself was already drawing on a long European tradition for which America was a place of peculiar aesthetic power. Thus, when eighteenth-century Americans adopted these concepts of novelty and sublimity in order to claim a unique New World aesthetic, they were in effect acting out a philosophical script that had already been written in European thought. Brown was by all appearances the most successful at manipulating this set of concepts for his own purposes; thus, it is against this transatlantic cultural backdrop that we must understand his claim that what is new about his fiction is intimately linked to what is American about it. From the first page of the preface to Edgar Huntly, the value of his “new performance” is bound up with the claim to produce a form of literature in keeping with the new nation. Here again invocations of novelty and originality quickly accumulate in a familiar fashion. Just as “America has opened new views to the naturalist and politician,” it should supply the novelist with “new springs of action, and new motives to curiosity.” As a result, the “native of America” can draw on “sources of amusement to the fancy and instruction to the heart, that are peculiar to ourselves” as they are “opened to us by our own country” and hence “differ essentially from those which exist in Europe.”45 As we move out of the novel’s preface and into the action of the novel, however, it is at first difficult to grasp how exactly it aims to make good on this promise. Clithero’s extended interpolated tale constitutes chapters 4 through 8 of Brown’s novel, and a significant portion of the chapters immediately preceding and following them serve the narrative function of framing Clithero’s story. The story’s events make a cosmopolitan sweep from rural Ireland to the continent, then back to Dublin, and from there to the New World via East India trade routes. As for its thematic content, the tale is filled with what we must call stock “Old World” plot elements—vassalage in Europe, aristocratic libertines and their dissipated sons, and marriages constricted by the exigencies of rank and situation.

PAGE 131

132

Chapter 3

What kind of way is this, we might well wonder, to begin to tell an “American story,” one “opened to us by our own country” and hence essentially different from “those which exist in Europe”? It would be relatively easy to say that the “American” part of the story arrives only with the novel’s second half, and even to argue that Clithero’s European backstory stands in precisely as the sign of what will be displaced by the novel as a whole. Yet from another perspective, Clithero’s tale plays a more direct and straightforward role in the claim of an American literary mode. The key to understanding how lies not in the tale’s content but in the way Brown uses setting to stage the scene of its telling. For the narrative framing of Clithero’s European story everywhere emphasizes the regional American geography in which it is told and against which this telling is narrated. Though Clithero’s story will not actually be told until the fourth chapter, we might say that a place is prepared for it from the novel’s first pages. At the moment Clithero is first encountered as the moonlit “shape of a man” unaccountably digging in the earth, Brown is careful to plant this “figure, robust and strange” in the distinctive regional geography of Western Pennsylvania, in “the desert tract called Norwalk” and the neighboring “Solebury.”46 Almost all of what passes for action in the opening chapters is constituted by Huntly’s pursuit of Clithero “through breaks and dells” in a landscape that is “in the highest degree, rugged, picturesque, and wild.”47 When, after a long period of evasion and pursuit, Clithero finally agrees to tell his story, the novel rather explicitly sees to it that the telling itself will occur in an appropriate setting: Clithero suggests that “we could go into the wood together: and find some spot, where we might discourse at our leisure, and be exempt from interruption.”48 Huntly immediately accepts this “invitation,” and the two search for a suitable place: “We turned from the road into the first path, and proceeded in silence, till the wilderness of the surrounding scenery informed us, that we were in the heart of Norwalk. We lighted on a recess, to which my companion appeared to be familiar, and which had all the advantages of solitude, and was suitable to rest. Here we stopped.”49 Solitude is a simple enough motivation for heading into the woods to “discourse,” but as the narrative lingers over these details it becomes clear that the change in scene to accompany Clithero’s narrative performance also is designed to provide certain aesthetic benefits: wild nature, the substitution of the path for the road, and particularly Brown’s favorite type of space, the recess, all provide the ideal “surrounding scenery” for the drama about to be enacted. Similarly, after Clithero completes

PAGE 132

“New Forms of Sublimity”

133

his story, he abruptly “started from the spot where he stood . . . and disappeared amidst the thickest of the wood.”50 However cosmopolitan are its actual events, Clithero’s tale is literally embedded in the local geography by the scenery of its telling. And however relentlessly “Irish” are Clithero’s history and character, it becomes clear that the “robust and strange” figure and this particular “uncultivated region” are peculiarly made for each other.51 Lest we miss the point, Brown has his narrator effectively say as much during a later round in his pursuit of Clithero: “Should he have concealed himself in some nook or cavern, within these precincts, his concealment was not to be traced. This arose from the nature of that sterile region.”52 Indeed, by this point in the novel we have already had abundant evidence that the land provides a natural labyrinth which not only assists but makes possible Clithero’s habitual concealments: “The track into which he now led me was different from the former one. It was a maze, oblique, circuitous, upward and downward, in a degree which only could take place in a region so remarkably irregular in surface, so abounding with hillocks and steeps, and pits and brooks as Solebury.”53 If we take the narrator’s assertion seriously, the features of the region are explicitly said to be not only unique, but uniquely suited to the mysterious events taking shape. Such passages clue us in to Brown’s larger project in this novel: using putatively distinctive features of an American landscape to announce the arrival of a distinctively American literature.

Geographical Exceptionalism and the Privative Style American literary historians have long identified the relationship between the country’s geography and its literature as the most distinctive mark of American literature, or to be more precise, of the ideology of the “American tradition.”54 So, too, Brown’s particular use of American settings is an extraordinarily obvious feature of his writing, since he himself underscored it in his prefaces, and later generations of literary critics essentially repeated Brown’s self-promotional gestures, celebrating his “native” literary turn on behalf of an “American” gothic. But if we read this use of landscape solely as declaring a “break” from European forms, rather than a claim that is profoundly and inextricably linked to European thought, we run the risk of confusing a specifically eighteenth-century cultural politics of the aesthetic with later forms of cultural nationalism.55

PAGE 133

134

Chapter 3

It is true that Brown’s use of natural spaces seems almost to outstrip the notion of “setting” in the ordinary sense of the term. A setting implies an inert background to events, whereas in fact the landscape has a certain agency in Brown. We might go so far as to say that the land functions almost like a character, endowed as it is with what narrative theorists call an “actantial” function.56 This is one way, at least, to register Brown’s predilection for giving his landscapes physiognomic features: he refers to the “face” of a district,57 the “brow” of a hill, and the “mouth” of a cave.58 A more conventional kind of characterological significance is attributed to the land by virtue of what John Ruskin called the “pathetic fallacy”: the attribution of emotions to natural objects. Thus Brown refers to the “melancholy umbrage of pines,”59 the “gloom of forests,” “solemnities and secrecies of nature,” and so on.60 Another link in this semantic chain is his use of the word “romantic” as a natural descriptor, as when the narrator refers to “districts so romantic and wild” or “caverns . . . of romantic structure.”61 Because of the word’s inescapable aesthetic connotations—referring here not to “romanticism,” for the term had not yet come into currency, but rather to the romance as a species of prose fiction—to call a place “romantic” performs more than merely the pathetic fallacy. It is more accurate to term it the “aesthetic fallacy,” for it quite literally represents the landscape not as possessing human sentiments but rather as generating the aesthetic productions to which those sentiments give rise. A land of romantic caves and districts is a land that inspires romances. This perspective leads us to make a somewhat more literal reading than is customary of Brown’s stated aesthetic goal, “to exhibit a series of adventures growing out of the condition of our country.”62 Critics most commonly read this as an allusion to political and social conditions, and hence as a rationale for reading Brown’s fiction in relation to the political upheavals of its historical moment—an interpretive emphasis which has generated rich and varied historicist readings.63 But what might we add to such readings if we understand “the condition of the country” to refer quite concretely to certain geographical and topographical features of “America”? Indeed, this logic is everywhere in the narration of Edgar Huntly, once we know to look for it. Consider for example Edgar’s description of the region of Norwalk, which suggests that the land somehow gives rise to the events which move the plot: “The basis of all this region is limestone; a substance that eminently abounds in rifts and cavities. These, by the gradual decay of their cementing parts, frequently make their appearance in spots where they

PAGE 134

“New Forms of Sublimity”

135

might have been least expected. My attention has often been excited by the hollow sound which was produced by my casual footsteps, and which shewed me that I trod upon the roof of caverns. A mountain-cave and the rumbling of an unseen torrents are appendages of this scene, dear to my youthful imagination.”64 This passage does a remarkable amount of semantic work, if we take its details seriously. In a literal way, we are told that the geological characteristics of the region are productive of precisely those topographical features—cavities, rifts, caves, hollows, and recesses—that enable all of the central actions of the novel. A land of recesses and underground caverns is a land of secrets, romantic mysteries, and freaks of fancy. And by virtue of its irregularly decaying surface, where “cavities . . . make their appearance in spots where they might least have been expected,” this land also lends itself to surprise, unexpected occurrences, excitements to the attention, and other spurs to the “youthful imagination.” In short, the landscape provides the material conditions of possibility of aesthetic novelty and the gothic plot elements Brown uses to produce readerly pleasure. In this respect, geography is not merely significant; it is determinative and generative. Thus the preface’s peculiar assertion that the book is “growing out of the conditions of our country”65 turns out to designate quite perfectly the fantasy of an autochthonous literature in a peculiarly literal sense of the term: one growing out of the earth itself. The American landscape doesn’t only inspire, it effectively authors an American literature. Brown’s works with predominantly rural settings—Wieland, Edgar Huntly, and the first section of the fragmentary Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, all located in the “rude precincts” of Pennsylvania—repeatedly emphasize the same set of natural features. In the most general terms, these are “wilderness” settings rather than cultivated landscapes. Brown’s America is evidently a place of extremity and verticality, abounding in cliffs and cataracts, which repeatedly subjects inhabitants or visitors to dizzying ascents and precipitous declivities. More significantly, it is also a land of negative spaces scooped out of the landscape in a kind of reverse relief: a topography carved with caverns, cavities, recesses, hollows, and chasms, to name just a few of the most frequently repeated ones. These features make up a particularly American type of wilderness supposed to be different from typically British uncultivated spaces such as the heath, the moor, or the fen. And yet what it directly borrows from these types of spaces is a particular style of privative description by which a “wild” space is defined almost entirely in negative terms—as an absence of culture.

PAGE 135

136

Chapter 3

The first thing to be said about this cisatlantic fetish of “wilderness” is that it relied on a much older European discourse. As Mary Campbell has shown in a study of European travel narratives, early modern narratives of New World discovery brought with them a new focus on natural descriptions of place, a dimension that had been relatively unimportant to earlier narratives of travel to the holy land or Asia. Campbell first observes this shift in Columbus’s representations of the Indies, but it was Walter Raleigh’s Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana (1596) that marks the real turn toward a modern notion of a travel narrative as including a responsibly documentary description of the geography of another region.66 In other words, geography as such entered the travel account at the same time that European exploration turned to the New World, and that simultaneity is significant for European conceptions of both that place and that form of writing. “ ‘America gradually became the place to talk about if one were talking about places,” writes Campbell. “But America was also the place that could not be talked about in the old ways,” Campbell continues.67 The literature of New World discovery provides two kinds of examples of this discursive phenomenon. Most obvious is its negative version. When the Hungarian poet Stephen Parmenius wrote to Richard Hakluyt to describe his New World travels, for example, he quite literally declared himself to be at a representational loss: “The manner of this Countrey, and people remayne nowe to bee spoken of. But what shall I say, my good Hakluyt, when I see nothing but a very wildernesse?”68 The specific place in question, Newfoundland, no doubt presented a “more homogeneous and uninhabited landscape than those of the West Indies,” but as Campbell explains, “the problem is generic all over the Americas.”69 The land is frequently described in the Renaissance literature of travel as empty, wasteland, wilderness.70 This European topos of privative description had an enormous influence on the way later writers in the Americas came to describe their new place. But what Campbell calls the “nothingness of the written New World”71 had a conceptual flip side as well. If America was an empty wasteland, it was paradoxically also a place overfull of unfamiliar things, not a lack but an excess of things that needed to be described—what Campbell calls “the paradox of the superabundant wasteland confronted by an inadequate vocabulary.”72 This was the positive side of the representational problem: how do you describe a place “empty of churches and full of things for which there are no words?”73 To choose one of Campbell’s most compelling

PAGE 136

“New Forms of Sublimity”

137

examples of this problem, we find Walter Raleigh in the awkward position of having to describe a cataract without the word “cataract” available to him: “There falleth over it a mightie river which toucheth no parte of the side of the mountaine, but rusheth over the toppe of it, and falleth to the ground with a terrible noise and clamor, as if 1000 great belles where knockt against one another. I thinke there is not the world so strange an overfall, nor so wonderfull to beholde.”74 As if rushing in to fill a representational vacuum, a whole new set of such words for natural phenomena would enter the English vernacular during the first century of English exploration of the New World: “Waterfall, cataract, lagoon, whirlpool, swamp, keys, hurricane, tornado, thunderstorm.”75 The travelers, explorers, and settlers who first wrote “America” thus did so as if the geographical, topographical, and climatic features they encountered there fit only uneasily into old categories.76 This longer discursive history of the representation of American geography is certainly in the deep background of Brown’s representations of American nature as a dangerous and extreme place whose materiality overwhelms representation and cognition. The written New World also came to serve what some would call a mythic function, but what I will consider an aesthetic function in the most general sense of the term: that is, descriptions of this place generated not just knowledge but also pleasure for European readers.77 The America represented in the travel literature was a place for vicarious European consumption. At the same time, however, this place was associated with a particularly challenging and sometimes unsettling form of “pleasure.” To use concepts which would enter currency in British culture during the eighteenth century, American nature tended to be described in terms more akin to the sublime than to the beautiful or the picturesque.78 Though the roots of the concept of the sublime are typically traced back to Longinus’s thirdcentury treatise, it was during the long eighteenth century that theorists supplemented the poetic or rhetorical sublime with an account of “the sublime of natural objects.” The symbolic geography of the sublime abounded with many of the same kinds of natural spaces I have detailed in Brown’s fiction: high cliffs and deep chasms, cataracts, rough and uneven topography, and obscure recesses. “We are moved . . . by dreadful precipices; great ruins, subterraneous caverns, and the operations of nature in those dark recesses,” wrote Hildebrand Jacob in his 1735 discussion of “How the mind is rais’d to the Sublime.”79 Edmund Burke’s extensive treatise on the sublime two decades later echoed and greatly expanded this list of natural

PAGE 137

138

Chapter 3

features; indeed, so extensive are the parallels between the sections of Burke’s discussion of the natural sublime and the wilderness setting of Edgar Huntly that it is possible to lay them side by side and tick off Brown’s use of nearly every feature given importance by Burke. Yet we can find much more direct precursors in the American nature writing of the decade immediately before Brown, from Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) to Bartram’s Travels (written during the 1780s and first published in 1791).80 For Jefferson in particular, the discourse of the sublime was evidently an explicit point of reference. His enumeration of Virginia’s sublime natural features shares so many parallels with Burke’s theoretical discussion of sublimity in A Philosophical Enquiry (1757) that one cannot avoid the suspicion that Jefferson, like Brown, may have been using Burke as a kind of template. In any case, Jefferson clearly drew rather self-consciously on the general conception of the sublime to endow America’s “particular geography”81 with peculiar majesty and power. His description in Query IV of the “passage of the Patowmac through the Blue ridge” (the site of present-day Harpers Ferry, West Virginia), whose “terrible precipices” are “wild and tremendous” up close and yet “placid and delightful” when viewed at a distance, designates the phenomenon as among “the most stupendous scenes in nature.”82 So, too, he introduces his description of the Natural Bridge by glossing it as “the most sublime of Nature’s works.”83 “It is impossible,” he tells us while narrating his downward-looking perspective on the scene, “for the emotions, arising from the sublime, to be felt beyond what they are here: so beautiful an arch, so elevated, so light, and springing, as it were, up to heaven, the rapture of the Spectator is really indescribable!”84 In these and other like passages, superlative descriptors and declarations of unique particularity collaborate to produce what we can only call a geographical exceptionalism. As he says of Harpers Ferry, in a sentence whose tone reverberates throughout the work: “This scene is worth a voyage across the Atlantic.”85 Brown’s novelistic settings some fifteen years after Notes on the State of Virginia undoubtedly inherited much from Jefferson’s exceptionalist geography in ways both specific and general. Like Jefferson’s Virginia, Brown’s Pennsylvania functioned simultaneously as a particular regional locale and as a synecdoche for American geography as such. I detect Brown’s footprints most clearly in Jefferson’s Query V, “Cascades.” This is the chapter that concludes with the above-mentioned section on the Natural Bridge,

PAGE 138

“New Forms of Sublimity”

139

but not before detailing a cataract in Augusta and the “lime-stone country” with its “caverns of considerable extent.”86 If Jefferson’s Virginia was modeled on the features of Burke’s natural sublime, it seems in turn to map out for Brown some of the features of his “Norwalk” setting in Edgar Huntly, which as I have already noted, abounds with its own caverns, cataracts, and limestone formations. And perhaps most compelling parallel between the two is undoubtedly that between Jefferson’s paragraph on the “Blowing cave”—which “inhales” and “emits” air in “regular inspirations and expirations”87—and Edgar Huntly’s entrance into the similarly “breath [ing]” cavern in chapter 10 of Brown’s novel.18 If Jefferson used the distinctive characteristics of America’s geography to bolster an argument about American culture, Brown tethered this geographical exceptionalism more specifically to an argument about autochthonous aesthetic production and literary form. Yet, to return to the specifically literary context of transatlantic gothic, it is unclear how Brown might have even hoped to use such spaces to generate a supposedly “American” aesthetics. Since the British gothic fictions of the period were also deeply and explicitly engaged with the theory of the sublime and the picturesque, their settings used a comparable cluster of geographical features to generate similar aesthetic effects. The “labyrinth of caverns” in Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, for example, would seem to be one particularly obvious precursor to the caves and tunnels in the landscape of Edgar Huntly.88 Walpole’s Otranto, Radcliffe’s Sicily, and other British gothic settings also seem inseparable from the events staged against their backgrounds. Each new novel in the gothic mode managed to represent its locale as uniquely abounding in picturesque or sublime effect. The reason later Romantics so idolized “mother Radcliff,” as Keats called her, was her masterful use of natural setting.89 In his essay on Radcliffe in Lives of the Novelists, Sir Walter Scott (who called her the “first poetess of romantic fiction”) quoted Thomas Mathias on the novelist as a female necromancer fostered by “the Florentine muses in their secret solitary caverns.”90 Whether it was held up for admiration or subjected to satirical critique, everyone agreed that Radcliffe’s signature effect was a certain use of mise-en-sce`ne to generate aesthetic pleasure.91 In a word, the natural features of Brown’s landscapes drew rather conventionally on the settings of British gothic. But there are two important senses in which the comparison makes the difference. The first distinction to be made is that setting in British gothic was not exactly a natural

PAGE 139

140

Chapter 3

environment—or, to be more precise, it was a nature everywhere marked by human culture, particularly the remnants of built spaces. Wholly uncultivated natural locations typically occupy relatively little of the narrative space—at least when compared to Brown’s fiction. When they do appear, they tend to function as escape routes; wild heaths, forests, natural caverns, cliffs, and declivities typically form the nodes through which the imprisoned hero or heroine must pass in order to move from captivity to freedom, like the system of “caverns that reach out to the sea-coast” in The Castle of Otranto.92 In the British gothic, the nonhuman landscape is thus both an absolutely indispensable and yet a largely passive background to the human actions staged within the ruined walls of built spaces—remnants of castles, abbeys, mansions. “On the northern shore of Sicily,” begins Radcliffe’s Sicilian Romance (1790), “are still to be seen the magnificent remains of a castle, which formerly belonged to the noble house of Mazzini. It stands in the centre of a small bay, and upon a gentle acclivity, which, on one side, slopes towards the sea, and on the other rises into an eminence crowned by dark woods. The situation is admirably beautiful and picturesque, and the ruins have an air of ancient grandeur, which . . . impresses the traveler with awe and curiosity.”93 The narrator’s oscillation between the natural environment and the built spaces placed upon it are entirely typical of Radcliffe’s settings and those of British gothic in general. It is significant, then, that when Brown took a swipe at the European gothic in the preface to Edgar Huntly, he zeroed in on its use of architecture: his novel would proudly eschew the “gothic castles and chimeras . . . usually employed” by romancers in favor of more appropriately American themes and locales.94 This formulation makes particularly clear, first, how the symbolic architecture of the castle—undoubtedly the signature convention of British gothic—came to be located at the intersection of literary and political exceptionalism. According to a familiar logic, nearly axiomatic of later American literary nationalism, American artists should not ape a European literary form centered on the castle because the American republic should not replicate the values of a culture ruled by a nobility. The full-scale lampoon of the “modern romance” which Brown published pseudonymously in the Weekly Magazine in 1798 over the signature “Anti-Ghost,” also took aim at just such ruinous architectural details of setting. “Take an old castle,” began Brown’s satirical recipe, “pull down a part of it, and allow the grass to grow on the battlements, and provide the owls and bats with uninterrupted habitations among the ruins.”95 He then

PAGE 140

“New Forms of Sublimity”

141

goes on to imprison a young lady in this castle, releasing another train of sarcastic details, still focused very much on setting rather than “plot” or “character”: “Convey her, perhaps, on the second night of her arrival, through a trap-door, and from the trap-door to a flight of steps downwards, and from a flight of steps to a subterraneous passage, and from a subterraneous passage, to a door that is shut, and from that to a door that is open, and from that to a cell, and from that to a chapel, and from a chapel back to a subterraneous passage again; here present either a skeleton with a live face, or a living body with the head of a skeleton, or a ghost all in white, or a groan from a distant part of a cavern, or the shake of a cold hand, or a suit of armor moving.”96 Radcliffe would seem to be a particular target here (whether by accident or design, the details here are particularly reminiscent of the second chapter of Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest). Certainly she was the largest target by virtue of her extraordinary popularity and stylistic recognizability. Yet for this very reason, we shouldn’t let the satirical gesture obscure Brown’s own deep debts to the very form he is here parodying. We might suspect instead that it serves in part as Brown’s attempt to exorcize his anxiety of influence. Fully aware that he was indebted to European forms, he nonetheless claimed to achieve radically new ways to employ them—new combinations of familiar literary elements.97 The realm of setting, then, was clearly one focal point for this novelty claim. Brown’s settings emphasize not only a purely wild and undomesticated natural environment, but also one entirely alien to human culture and indeed hostile to it. To put it most simply, we might say that Brown took the staples of gothic interiors—recesses, labyrinthine passages, and cavities—and relocated them out of doors, embedding them in a natural environment. In that way, he produced a landscape with gothic features quite literally built into it. One particularly concrete example is that commonplace of gothic settings, the “recess.” In Brown’s Wieland, the place most often called “the recess”—and the central location of much of the intrigue and mystery of the plot—is an exterior space at the edge of the steep river bank, where a stream of water springs from a crevice of a rock.98 In the British romance, however, this word nearly always denoted an interior enclosure. In the “gothic remains of an Abbey” in which the fugitive La Motte family of Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest are forced to hide, the word “recess” is used to describe a dark enclosed space at the end of a “narrow passage,” and more typically the “private apartments” secreted beneath the known chambers of the abbey beneath a “trap door,” a

PAGE 141

142

Chapter 3

“gloomy abyss” that offers both a space of concealment and a threat of confinement.99 Similarly, the eponymous setting of Sophia Lee’s 1783 novel The Recess is a subterranean “apartment” in which the narrator is imprisoned. Indeed, the narrator’s very first description of this space deliberately casts it as an unnatural enclosure, in other words, as the result of human labor: “This Recess could not be called a cave,” the narrator begins, “because it was composed of various rooms; and the stones were obviously united by labor.”100 There is no better example of Brown’s refiguration of typically architectural spaces as natural ones than the description of the “interior space” of the cavern in chapter 10 of Edgar Huntly: As I had traversed the outer, I now explored the inner edge of this hill. At length I reached a spot where the chasm, separating the two rocks, was narrower than at any other part. . . . So far as my eye could estimate it, the breadth was thirty or forty feet. I could scarcely venture to look beneath. The height was dizzy, and the walls, which approached each other at top, receded at the bottom, so as to form the resemblance of an immense hall, lighted from a rift, which some convulsion of nature had made in the roof. Where I stood there ascended a perpetual mist, occasioned by a torrent that dashed along the rugged pavement below.101 If the narrator of Lee’s Recess described a series of “rooms” that “could not be called a cave,” Brown’s narrator here describes a cave that could precisely be called a room. Everything proceeds as if Brown has taken the gothic castle and carved it out of the earth, placing his protagonist in its “immense hall” complete with a skylight. “For the haunted castle and the dungeon,” as Leslie Fiedler observed, “Brown substitutes the haunted forest (in which nothing is what it seems) and the cave, the natural pit or abyss from which man struggles against great odds to emerge.”102 This may have be the most obvious innovation of Brown’s use of gothic setting: architecture became topography. The Domestication of Gothic and the Irregular Style This feature of Brown’s use of natural environment also signals the final and most significant way in which he crossed the wires of gothic setting: he

PAGE 142

“New Forms of Sublimity”

143

domesticated it.103 I mean that, however, in a very specific and rather concrete sense. The British gothic novels were, almost without exception, set in foreign locales—that is, in places marked foreign to their authors and intended readership. Julia Kristeva has linked the cultural impulse behind the gothic mode to the psychic process of abjection, the “throwing-off” of unacceptable psychic contents or threatening social contradictions onto ghostly or grotesque figures.104 What we find at the level of setting is a spatial form of this logic: the abjection of gothic events onto alien spaces. As has often been noted by scholars of British gothic, the genre thus bears a deep connection to eighteenth-century travel writing such as Tobias Smollett’s Travels through France and Italy (1766) and, more generally, to the cultural geography of the “grand tour.” The predilection of the British romancers for southern European settings in particular—locales frequently named in the titles, as in Walpole’s Castle of Otranto or Radcliffe’s Sicilian Romance—results in part from the association of ignorance, violence, and transgressive excess with the residual spaces of semifeudal, Catholic, and outlying Europe. Radcliffe also famously experimented with northern European, and particularly Alpine settings in The Romance of the Forest (1791) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). The important point is that, for nearly all British fictions in the genre, “gothic” events take their place, as if by a formal necessity, in foreign settings.105 Jane Austen’s satire of the form in Northanger Abbey—published posthumously in 1818, but written in the late 1790s, when Brown was writing Edgar Huntly—indirectly drives this point home by giving us a quixotic heroine credulous enough to imagine that contemporary England might be productive of gothic events. Even the novel’s mildly oxymoronic title (given to Austen’s manuscript by her brother Henry) performs this satire in miniature by yoking a British-sounding locale with a stereotypically southern European structure. In effect, what Catherine Morland ridiculously fails to realize is that the gothic is supposed by definition to reside elsewhere, and that “taste” consists in pleasurably observing the foreign and exotic from the vantage point of the domestic and familiar. We might understand this geographical distancing of the gothic, in part, as a measure of the ambivalence built into the concept of the sublime, at once the highest form of aesthetic experience and a volatile site best kept at a conceptual distance. Because of its connection with intensely negative affects such as terror, the sublime must always be discursively contained even as it is being celebrated. One explicit sign of this ambivalence in

PAGE 143

144

Chapter 3

eighteenth-century criticism is the association between aesthetic power and political or social instability. Thomas Blackwell ruminated on the contradiction in his Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (1735): “The marvelous and wonderful is the nerve of the epic strain: but what marvelous things happen in a well-ordered state? We can hardly be surprised; . . . everything happens in order, and according to custom or law.”106 By contrast, the poet of a barbarous people or an uncultivated time enjoys certain aesthetic advantages: “In a wide country, not under a regular government, or split into many, whose inhabitants live scattered, and ignorant of laws and discipline; in such a country, the manners are simple, and accidents will happen every day: exposition and loss of infants, encounters, escapes, rescues, and every other thing that can inflame the human passions while acting, or awake them when described, and recalled by imitation. These are not to be found in a well-governed state, except it be in a civil war; which, with all the disorder and misery that attends it, is a fitter subject for an epic poem.”107 The catalogue of “accidents” Blackwell offers here—“encounters, escapes, rescues,” and so on—were, of course, the same events that provided British readers of his time with the most reliable and entertaining plot elements of popular prose, from narratives of exploration to captivity narratives and early novels such as Daniel Defoe’s Life and Strange Suprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719). And yet, in a familiar crossing of the aesthetic and the moral, what is delightful in art is not desirable in life. Blackwell thus concludes his line of reasoning with an ironic wink at his patron and addressee: “Although the pleasure arising from a taste of the sublimer kinds of writing, may make your lordship regret the silence of the muses, yet I am persuaded you will join me in the wish, That we may never be a proper subject of an heroic poem.”108 The sentiment is not uncommon in eighteenth-century British criticism, where, by a typical reversal, contemporary Britain’s relative aesthetic poverty corresponds to the happiness and stability of its political and social order: “It is thus that a people’s felicity clips the wings of their verse.”109 In this way, Britons are symbolically positioned not as producers but as cultivated consumers of a sublime aesthetic that is located elsewhere.110 This explains the indispensable cultural function served by the ancient bards. In works like Blackwell’s Enquiry, Hugh Blair’s Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian (1763), and Robert Lowth’s Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1753), the ancient Greeks, Celts, or Hebrews serve as spectacles for modern Britons, who thus get to experience aesthetic delight from within their ordered state. To be

PAGE 144

“New Forms of Sublimity”

145

British “persons of taste”111 was evidently to be spectators of the sublime from a safe distance, whether temporal or spatial. Brown’s claim, then, that his extraordinary literary adventures “grow out of the condition of our country” is not only a departure from the British literary practice of setting gothic events in an exotic foreign locale, it is also a subtle reconfiguration of a similar conceptual geography in British criticism. This reminds us, first, that even as Brown addresses his novels quite explicitly to an American readership (“our country”), he was simultaneously staging American sublimity for the benefit and pleasure of European spectators and in relation to an imagined European aesthetic subject. If we replace his fiction in the transatlantic critical and theoretical context I am emphasizing here, is not hard to see how Brown’s extravagantly sublime America could claim to offer just such an “elsewhere” for European readers. We can perhaps regard it as a measure of his success that some of the key figures of British romanticism—including Keats, Shelley, and Hazlitt— numbered among Brown’s admirers.112 Even so, we must recognize that setting the gothic “here and now” in relation to his implied American reader interpellates that reader in a particular way. In effect, Brown puts his American readership in the same zone as his fictional madmen and antiheroes. A curious feature of his earliest novel titles makes this point. Both the unpublished Sky Walk; or, The Man Unknown to Himself and Wieland; or, The Transformation carry the same additional subtitle, An American Tale. Taken by itself, the phrase seems like a standard assertion of literary nationalism and the arrival of a “tale” for, by, or about Americans. But appending this phrase to these works in particular raises the question why Brown would label a story about a man “unknown to himself,” or about one who slaughters his family in a fit of enthusiastic madness, as particularly “American” ones. It makes perfect sense to suggest that the titles thus open up an ironic dimension, and by extension, that Brown used his fiction to issue cautionary political tales to the young nation. But what interests me here is what we might term the aesthetic politics of the gesture. Such a “domestication” of the gothic brings its effects within the readers’ symbolic circle of influence and gives them a front-row seat for the manifold and wondrous “disorders” and “diseases” paraded before them. If this implied that American readers were symbolically susceptible to these disorders and subject to their terrors, they also—by virtue of the epistemological alchemy of the sublime—had a unique kind of proximity to its pleasures. “The imagination in Brown’s

PAGE 145

146

Chapter 3

fiction,” argues Edward Cahill along similar lines, “is the site of fanatical delusion and deceptive error, to be sure, but also correct judgment, rational speculation, and transformative sublimity.”113 The particular manner in which Brown brought the gothic novel across the Atlantic thus resulted in a curious paradox: if from a certain perspective “American gothic” could be nothing but an imitation of the European model, there was nonetheless a powerful illusion that the copy exceeded the originality of the original. This was a bold aesthetic ploy on Brown’s part, but it was also a logical outgrowth of the different relationship the form had to its two cultural contexts. As the “new old place” long fantasized by Europe, America could claim access to the kind of aesthetic novelty and originality available to the primitive poets of antiquity. Brown’s way of bringing the gothic “home,” and collapsing the distance between the reader and story-world, not only illuminates his choice of themes—his much-vaunted turn to “native” landscapes, characters, and events—but also gives us a purchase on some of his characteristic stylistic choices. Brown’s predilection for first- rather than third-person narrators—or, to put it more suggestively, for an immanent rather than transcendent narrative voice—is perhaps the formal feature that corresponds most closely to the “domestication” of the gothic. Arthur Mervyn, Memoirs of Stephen Calvert, and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist are all framed as first-person memoirs in which, by definition, the narrative voice issues from the person who has experienced the bizarre events firsthand, rather than a stable narrator who tells the story at an epistemological distance. The loosely epistolary form of Wieland and Edgar Huntly—both of which are long first-person narratives forming one side of a fictional correspondence—allows Brown to take this further by directly interpellating the reader as the “you” addressed by the narrator. Nor is it coincidental that both Clara Wieland and Edgar Huntly begin their relations very much in medias res, plunging the reader into the swirling aftermath of the catastrophic and mysterious “late events” which motivate the narration. Since both narrators struggle to comprehend and coherently to narrate hallucinatory recent events, they visit this epistemological instability upon the similarly disoriented reader. Even when events are clarified retrospectively in the novels’ resolutions—as per the Radcliffean formula that came to be known as the “explained supernatural” —Brown’s novels do not fully dispel this narrative disorientation nor do they terminate in stable epistemological resolutions.

PAGE 146

“New Forms of Sublimity”

147

In Edgar Huntly, Brown was particularly adept at making his narrative style mirror the themes of the plot. One of his primary strategies for doing so is to invite an analogy between the topographical features of the region and the surface of the narrative itself. Nearly every description of the landscape—an “uncultivated region” that is “in the highest degree, rugged, picturesque and wild,”114 “a maze, oblique, circuitous, upward and downward, . . . remarkably irregular in surface,”115 and so on—seems to apply to Brown’s prose style in this work. By extension, Edgar’s pursuit of the inscrutable Irishman through the “desert tract” corresponds in a peculiar way to the reader’s experience in the face of the similarly inscrutable text. Just as Edgar Huntly pursues Clithero, we pursue Edgar Huntly and are subject to as many bewildering twists and turns as its indefatigable narrator. There is every indication that forging this kind of correspondence between setting and style lay at the core of Brown’s aesthetic experiment of “growing” a literature “out of the condition of our country.” But he did so by exploiting the textural language British criticism often employed to describe the sublime. “Beauty should be smooth and polished, the great, rugged and negligent,” wrote Edmund Burke in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Burke frequently invokes such synesthetic formulations in which touch occupies the position of the master sense.116 By extension, it becomes possible to describe language itself as if it had textural features. Thus, when Burke turns to language in the concluding part of the Philosophical Enquiry, he can describe “cultivated” and “rude” languages as “polished” and “unpolished,” respectively. These designations were commonplace in eighteenth-century criticism, but in Burke’s text they have a particular force because of his constant use of the textural metaphor. Since he everywhere argues that smoothness is more conducive to beauty and roughness to sublimity, the unpolished languages thus have an aesthetic advantage over the polished ones: “It may be observed that the very polished languages, and such as are praised for their superior clearness and perspicuity, are generally deficient in strength. The French language has that perfection, and that defect.” On the other hand, “the oriental tongues, and in general the languages of most unpolished people, have a great force and energy of expression; and this is but natural.”117 Adapting this analogy between the linguistic and the tactile for his own purposes, Brown thus gave his own prose bumps and irregularities, as if attempting to endow the surface of the writing with the same textural

PAGE 147

148

Chapter 3

effects as he gives his regional topography: roughness, unevenness, complexity and irregularity. This stylistic gambit thus has points of contact with what I have called the “incorrect style” I have discussed in Chapter 2. And like Cre`vecoeur’s experiment in prose style, Brown’s too is something of a stylistic high-wire act, for what appears intended to enact a certain linguistic naı¨vete´ or an authentic roughness of execution comes off to Brown’s detractors as the opposite: overwrought prose, linguistic pyrotechnics, and embarrassing conceptual excesses. For such readers, Brown’s narratives are rather like broken-down automata from another time; readers can observe and even admire their complexity of design but cannot switch them on and watch them run. Yet even when Brown’s attempts at a sublimely “uncultivated” aesthetic are apprehended instead as clumsy and ill-formed, the point is clear in any case: its roughness is a studied formal effect and a significant part of his experiments toward a putatively American literary mode. We might say that Walt Whitman’s poetics a half century later constitute the high-water mark of this cultural logic, for Whitman also insistently used textural language as the badge of his American aesthetic: “Here are the roughs and the beards and space and ruggedness and nonchalance that the soul loves,”118 he announced in the 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, a work whose very “jaggedness,”119 he claimed, authorized it as the “autochthonic record and expression . . . of the soul and evolution of America.”120 What is less often recognized is that this “jagged” American aesthetic has its roots in eighteenth-century British criticism. Brown used his fiction to produce a theoretical argument for the unique power of American art that would, in fact, inform similar arguments in the coming half century. The result was a common sense about an intrinsically American aesthetic on which successive generations of American artists— and literary critics—have relied. The problem with the old critical accounts of Brown as the inventor of an “American Gothic” and the progenitor of a “native” literary tradition is not so much that they are false but rather that they simply adopt the terms of Brown’s canny acts of self-description and self-promotion. By endowing his fictional narratives with a critical and even theoretical function, Brown himself had produced an argument for literary autochthony that was stylistic more than it was thematic or formal. But what is most often left out when we repeat this argument and call it literary criticism is that even Brown’s strongest arguments for literary indigeneity paradoxically relied on European representations of the New World and its aesthetic possibilities.

PAGE 148

CHAPTER 4

“Homespun Habits” Seduction, Sentiment, and the Artless Style

We will also need a new theory of style. Of all the unexamined premises rhetoric took over from serious philosophy, clarity has perplexed the most. Since Aristotle it has figured as a central goal for verbal expression. Theorists, without giving the matter special thought, seem to have considered clarity a property of the text. Yet clarity describes many styles and audiences. Used to describe a particular verbal configuration, clarity cannot mean anything at all. Style’s central term is hollow. It simply points to success. The most intellectual, conceptual, scientific virtue of style turns out to be entirely emotional. If everyone is happy, clarity has arrived. . . . Hemingway is as self-conscious and allegorical a stylist as Henry James. —Richard Lanham, Motives of Eloquence

From Perry Miller’s American Language to Pamela’s Plain Style In a posthumously published essay entitled “An American Language,” Perry Miller returned to a theme that he had treated with definitive precision earlier: the “plain style.”1 Miller was obviously one of our great readers of the Puritan plain style, and his treatment of the subject in The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (1939) is still required reading on the subject. What sets Miller’s later essay apart, however, is that rather than just

PAGE 149

150

Chapter 4

accounting for “the sermon, the treatise on polity, the history, the explanation of political theory,”2 Miller attempts to generate out of these forms a full-scale argument about American literary style that he can carry forward into our nineteenth-century great tradition and beyond. This was a radical departure from Miller’s earlier insistence that “any criticism which endeavors to discuss Puritan writings as part of literary history” or to “estimate them from any ‘aesthetic’ point of view” was inappropriate to the object.3 In “An American Language,” by contrast, Miller tells a story about the cultural career of “the ideal of the plain style as it was brought to New England,”4 where it first became the cornerstone of “the Puritan aesthetic”5 and then “the presiding rule of American prose.”6 This path takes Miller from the “founders of New England” all the way up to Ernest Hemingway, with stops along the way at Revolutionary political discourse,7 the American Renaissance,8 and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (“as Mr. Hemingway rightly proposes, the progenitor of modern American literature”).9 Through this remarkably bold act of critical extrapolation, Miller thus traces how the plain style developed from a “colonial dialect” into an “American language” which he can pursue “into the extending vistas of American self-expression.”10 This chapter, too, will argue that plain stylistics acquired an important cultural status in the imaginative literature of the early United States, though I stop short of declaring it the “presiding rule of American prose.”11 Moreover, I will focus on a subgenre absent from Miller’s account, namely, the sentimental novel of seduction. Post-Revolutionary seduction fiction, for all its self-conscious typicality and conventionality, in fact made an aggressive bid for cultural novelty and articulated an argument about the plainspoken virtues of American expression that radiated far outside its presumed sphere of influence, eventually becoming assimilated into our common sense about the distinctive features of our literary tradition. Even Perry Miller’s idea of an “American language,” I shall suggest later, bears the unwitting influence of this abjected subgenre and the theory of style immanent in it. Let me begin by making a simple prima facie case: it must be more than coincidence that the same moral and characterological features valorized by the seduction tale—simplicity of style, authenticity of expression, and homespun virtue, perhaps lacking in elegance or splendor but thereby of greater power and substance—correspond to some of the most familiar positive stereotypes about an “American” literary aesthetic. These correspondences

PAGE 150

“Homespun Habits”

151

ought to be obvious, but criticism has yet to explore the possibility that the seduction novel could have been central to this literary story, it seems to me, for at least two reasons. First, because we generally prefer to emphasize, along with Miller, the colonial Puritan origins of these aspects of the American literary voice. Second, judging from the tradition Miller self-consciously authorizes from this origin, we might suspect another reason lurking behind the first: like the larger sentimental tradition to which it belongs, the seduction novel has been branded a derivative cultural form whose failure of originality qualifies it only to play the foil to the truly American voice embodied in a properly literary—and properly masculine—canon flourishing elsewhere. By digging around in this little pocket of literary history, this chapter wagers, we stand to learn a lot about the role of the plain aesthetic in American literary history, about the way our idea of “national style” has been explicitly or implicitly gendered, and about the ways we have conceived transatlanticism and what those conceptions reveal and conceal. It should not surprise us that the “simple” matter of stylistic plainness opens onto such wide critical vistas. Now, any attempt to fathom plainness as a national literary characteristic must immediately confront the fact that the “plain style” is in no conceivable way an American invention. For his part, Miller is very well aware of this; indeed, the way he negotiates that fact as a problem for his literary history is precisely what makes “An American Language,” though a minor work in his critical oeuvre, worthy of greater attention. The argumentative legerdemain of this late essay is not only conceptually interesting in itself; for reasons I will explain, it retrospectively illuminates the eighteenthcentury literary problem that will be my ultimate subject. But let me clarify at the outset that, while Miller’s scholarship is monumental in its scope and its influence, I do not turn to this essay for what it has to teach us about the actual origins of the plain aesthetic. Puritan scholarship since Miller has built upon his study of plain-style homiletics, refining his analysis and correcting some of the limitations of his historical account.12 So, too, a vast body of scholarship has made complementary inroads into the broader subject of plain expression, locating other contexts for seventeenth-century style in the emergence of scientific rationalism, in rhetorical debates associated with the Renaissance revival of classical rhetoric, and in the political history of the Restoration.13 Viewed against this critical background, the cultural genealogy of the plain style presumed by “An American Language” turns out to be both shallower and narrower than it need be. The first

PAGE 151

152

Chapter 4

section of my chapter, by reading Miller in this broader critical context, also aims to elucidate enough about the operations and the history of the plain style to ground my own reading of seduction fiction in the remaining sections. At the same time, “An American Language” is of great interest in its own right as a document of twentieth-century criticism; in its machinations, we can observe a critical tradition straining to produce a workable theory of American literary distinctness, while negotiating the paradoxes that any such theory is bound to encounter along the way. In fact, the problem Miller must confront in critical terms, namely, how a rhetorical mode with evident European origins comes to connote something natively “American,” is structurally the same problem American literary producers confronted in practical terms after the Revolution: how might we fashion a distinct national tradition out of a set of borrowed cultural materials? In this way, eighteenth-century literature and twentieth-century criticism navigated similar waters; in each, the clear realities of transatlantic influence contended with a desire to produce a distinctly cisatlantic tradition that could claim, if not to be free of literary foreign debt, at least to have dialectically transformed its borrowings into something radically different.14 And because of this isomorphism between critical and literary forms of tradition-making, a brief symptomatic reading of Miller’s critical argument might teach us much about the cultural argument that seduction novels first helped to make. Miller’s essay tells transatlantic literary history as a series of events in the development of a “doctrine of the word”15 —that “trusty spade with which [Puritanism] had from the beginning dug its foundations”16 —that ultimately resulted in a distinctly colonial expressive style. From the beginning of their colonial experiment, the first New England Puritans had invested their writing with the same desire that animated much of their cultural and social activity, namely, to establish a “New Testament polity”17 that would represent a transformative version of the England they had left and serve as a model for the perfection and completion of the Reformation. On the way to fulfilling this historical prophecy, a funny thing happened to the “word” that essentially changed the Puritans’ relationship to language and saw their “literature eventually [become] the badge of a colonial eccentricity.”18 The primary aspect of this change was a shift in the dominant mode of expression: “The founders had dedicated [themselves] irrevocably to what they called the ‘plain style,’ ” which was the term the Puritans used

PAGE 152

“Homespun Habits”

153

for the discursive ideal of perfect linguistic transparency, achievable through an expressive mode marked by clarity and simplicity.19 This style, Miller readily admits, was evidently of European origin; it formed part of the “vast concourse of ideas and systems of thought the Puritans [had] brought with them into the wilderness.”20 And here, in a nutshell, is the tension which interests me: on the one hand, the plain style is merely one parcel of cultural baggage which these Englishmen carried with them across the Atlantic; on the other hand, it somehow becomes a “colonial eccentricity,” the distinct mark of a “provincial” difference—code words, in Miller’s critical narrative, for the space of the protonational.21 Miller has various ways of explaining how and why these cultural materials would come to live a different life in a new “setting” than they had on their continent of origin.22 The most basic is the condition of “colonial isolation”23 itself: merely by transplanting them to a location far flung from their points of origin, the Puritans willy-nilly found certain aspects of English culture fundamentally changed by the new environment. But for Miller, of course, this was not just any new environment; it was a specific place with special characteristics. The load-bearing term here is “wilderness,” which appears half a dozen times in “An American Language” and is certainly one of the most powerful keywords in Miller’s critical imaginary generally.24 It first enters the essay via a quotation from the preface to Thomas Hooker’s Survey of the Summe of Church-Discipline (1648): “That the discourse comes forth in such a homely dresse and course habit, the Reader must be desired to consider, It comes out of the wildernesse where curiosity is not studied.”25 “Out of the wildernesse”: Miller reads this phrasing rather specifically to suit his critical purpose. Hooker’s (or his printer’s) italics indicate that he alluded to a rather standard piece of Old Testament diction (e.g., “And the children of Israel took their journeys out of the wilderness of Sinai”).26 In Miller’s account, however, this biblical trope merges with the condition of the country the English Puritans came to occupy, as if it literally described the exceptional geography of New England. “In Europe and in England,” Miller tells us, “life was so complicated that even Calvinists learned to speak and write with baroque flourishes;”27 but in a “wilderness setting, the plain style, without changing a single syllable of its formal profession, subtly, rapidly became no longer a manifesto of the scholars but a method of dealing with the environment.”28 The argumentation here is extravagant and impressionistic, yet Miller makes it work by supplementing historical with tropological thinking. A

PAGE 153

154

Chapter 4

transplanted English stock is transformed by American soil; terroir trumps varietal. Consider, for example, the following passage from “An American Language,” which almost seems lifted from the pages of D. H. Lawrence’s “Spirit of Place” essay: “Corn! We must understand that what the settlers meant by corn is what we call wheat; what Thoreau means by corn is American corn, Indian corn. The natives of New England had learned this transubstantiation precisely as they had learned how to employ the plain style for purposes not foretold in the prospectus of the founders: in that beginning, nobody had intended to declare a ‘belief’ in the American night in which the maize grows.”29 In this peculiarly Lawrentian moment, Miller uses the “transubstantiation” of European wheat into American corn not just as a metaphor for, but almost a descriptive theory of, the cultural translation of plain style from its European origins into a “native” American crop. With the metaphors stripped away, however, Miller’s underlying proposition is something like this: the plain style, after having been transferred to North America from England, underwent a transformation to become the essentially American rhetorical principle that it somehow already had been. Its historical sources may have been elsewhere, but it was always meant to flourish here; its origins were European, but its destiny was American.30 Thus, after initially emphasizing transatlantic indebtedness by so clearly naming the English sources of New England’s culture, Miller’s account comes about to a distinctly national emphasis. In this way, the essay almost manages to defeat its own transatlantic orientation, for it ends up describing how American conditions overwhelmed European training to yield a distinctive national culture: “We are plain speakers not so much because we learned simplicity in European universities, but because we have to do with the wilderness.”31 As I have already noted, Miller’s argument here obscures as much as it reveals about the actual origins and history of the plain style. Put simply, in order to draw a line of filiation from seventeenth-century English homiletics to twentieth-century U.S. prose fiction, he must elide anything that would complicate that lineage. To begin with, the strictly Anglo-American axis of focus forecloses a wider European consideration of plain stylistics. Not simply a seed planted by Englishmen in the American wilderness, it had far more diffuse branches in the Renaissance, when a certain antiCiceronian rhetorical posture in Spain, France, Italy, and elsewhere in Europe began to oppose itself to the copiousness and excessive ornamentation of the higher rhetorics.32 So, too, Miller’s account foreshortens the

PAGE 154

“Homespun Habits”

155

deeper genealogy of the plain style.33 As anyone who has engaged the critical literature on plain style can attest, any attempt to identify a first cause tends to spark a disorienting historical regression from the seventeenth century back to several centuries before the common era, in a kind of stylistic “turtles all the way down.” No invention of seventeenth-century English protestants, the plain style reaches back not only through Wyclif and the Lollards to the fourteenth-century origins of the English Reformation, but back still further to Augustine’s fourth-century embrace of sermo humilis, the demotic Latin style designed to appeal to the convertible masses.34 For this entire Christian tradition, moreover, the key scriptural source is the “great plainness” of Paul’s first-century epistles,35 while Paul himself was drawing on a much older Hebrew distrust of artifice and ornamentation in worship in order to fashion a distinctly “Christian” expressive style.36 Alongside this Judeo-Christian lineage, of course, is the classical Greek and Roman rhetorical tradition: the topographical metaphor that distinguishes a “plain” or “low” mode of speaking or writing from higher levels of style has its source in the genus humile of classical Roman rhetoric (the first of the traditional genera dicendi), whose roots stretch back through Aristotle to the Greek forensic style of oratory.37 This Greco-Roman rhetorical thread is woven through the Christian debates about preaching and writing style, with greatest visibility in Late Antiquity and after the revival of classical learning by Renaissance humanists.38 Miller’s earlier work on plain style, it is interesting to note, had at once a broader range of reference (it gives some attention to “the various secular elements in the intellectual heritage” which Puritans syncretized with Calvinist theology),39 and a more precise focus (the “direct and decisive influence” of Ramist dialectic).40 In the later essay, by contrast, “plain style” has far less specificity, or to put it more positively, greater elasticity. Naturally, this comes at the cost of precision; at times, plain style seems to denote little more than the refusal of certain ornaments, or even, perhaps, the mere rhetorical assertion of such a refusal. Now this looseness of usage, to be fair, is not entirely of Miller’s creation. The concept of plain style has always led a kind of double life in the aesthetic and rhetorical cultures in which it circulates. On the one hand, it can designate a specific technology of expression with certain objectively identifiable formal features. In a sermon, for example, plainness might consist in a certain mechanical division of argument into a rigid structure of headings and subheadings, often compared to a legal brief or a mathematical proof, and seemingly intent on stripping

PAGE 155

156

Chapter 4

rhetoric away from bare dialectic.41 In prose writing, plainness might be found in a restriction to “everyday” diction, the use of short and concise clauses, “loose” rather than “periodic” syntax, a tendency toward parataxis and asyndeton, and so on.42 On the other hand, “plainness” can also function as what Claude Le´vi-Strauss calls a “floating signifier.”43 Not unlike the anthropological concept of mana that Le´vi-Strauss described in those terms, the notion of plain style can accommodate a wide variety of contents that elude “finite thought.” The point is not that a floating signifier lacks meaning; on the contrary, it is full of significance precisely because it is “a simple form, or to be more accurate, a symbol in its pure state, therefore liable to take on any symbolic content whatever.”44 The notion of rhetorical plainness often functions as just such a “simple form” capable of being filled with a broad range of conceptual contents. When, for example, Erich Auerbach settles on the term “sermo humilis” to designate the “over-all style” so important in Christian Late Antiquity, he must also concede that “humilis” is but one link in a long chain of associated signifieds which he did not choose: “tenuis, attenuatus, subtilis, quotidianus, submissus, demissus, pedester, planus, communis, abiectus, comicus, trivialis, vilis, sordidus.”45 As Stanley Fish has observed more generally, “the plain style has always been available for appropriation by any party”46 for the simple reason that “one man’s plain is another man’s distortion.”47 Thanks to this combination of fullness and emptiness, specificity and plasticity, we might add, plainness shares something else with mana: whoever controls it can command “a secret power, a mysterious force.”48 Its bearer wields a magical kind of rhetorical influence—what Peter Auksi calls an “unworldly, ineloquent, prophetic power”49 —for it is premised, paradoxically, on the disappearance of rhetoric and the stylist’s self-denial of prestige.50 While we cannot lay the imprecision of the concept of plain style entirely at Miller’s doorstep, then, we must recognize that he has a vested critical interest in rendering it as elastically as possible in “An American Language.” It is this elasticity that enables him to draw the transhistorical, trans-generic line of influence from seventeenth-century preaching to twentieth-century prose. Setting aside the question of historical origins and the problem of precise definition, however, it is hard to deny that there is some form of kinship between the protestant claim to a plainer kind of truth-telling and certain related characteristics of later American prose style. One need not subscribe to a myth of the Puritan origins of all things American in order to appreciate its persistence in a certain commonsense

PAGE 156

“Homespun Habits”

157

narrative about the sources of Anglo-American literature and culture. We can demonstrate both the appeal of such a narrative of cultural filiation, as well as some of its blind spots, by looking briefly at one of the works Miller cites as an originary statement of the “Puritan aesthetic”:51 the preface to The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre (1640), more commonly known as the Bay Psalm Book. The Bay Psalm Book is a frequent reference point for accounts of American cultural origins, not least because it famously holds “the Honour of being the First Book Printed In North America.”52 The context for its preface is that a Protestant Psalter in 1640 had to be preceded by a defense of psalmody itself, in the form of a “discourse declaring not only the lawfullnes, but also the necessity of the heavenly Ordinance of singing Scripture Psalmes in the Churches of God.”53 In order to manage the basic ambivalence, foundational to dissenting theology, about conveying spiritual truths through a pleasurable medium, this discourse had simultaneously to defend the psalm’s propriety and mitigate its importance. The conclusion of the preface does both via a brilliant rhetorical double gesture: it first apologizes for the lack of elegance and polish in its poetry, and then sublimates that apparent defect into a higher form of plain truth: “If therefore the verses are not alwayes so smooth and elegant as some may desire or expect; let them consider that God’s Altar needs not our polishings: Ex. 20. for wee have respected rather a plaine translation, then [sic] to smooth our verses with the sweetnes of any paraphrase, and soe have attended Conscience rather then Elegance, fidelity rather then poetry, in translating the hebrew words into english language.”54 The specific issue to which the editors here address themselves, of course, is not preaching or writing style but rather translation and the politics of vernacular scripture. Nevertheless, the way they militate for a “plain translation” is linked directly to the seventeenthcentury style debates.55 And as in so many similar rhetorical apologies for self-described “roughness” or rudeness of expression, the apologetic mode shows its teeth rather clearly here: in fact, it is the previous translators of the Psalms into English verse (such as Henry Ainsworth and Sternhold and Hopkins), and indeed any reader who would “desire” a similar performance from these New England translators, who are implicitly rebuked for putting man’s carnal pleasure above God’s spiritual truth.56 The use of Exodus chapter 20 as the intertext is a remarkably canny way to drive this association home, for it links the translators’ refusal of “smooth” poetic “polishings” to God’s injunction that his altar be rough and unhewn: “An

PAGE 157

158

Chapter 4

altar of earth thou shalt make unto me. . . . And if thou wilt make me an altar of stone, thou shalt not build it of hewn stone: for if thou lift up thy tool upon it, thou hast polluted it.”57 Thus, beneath the allusion to these particular scriptural verses, we can detect a broader figuration: the translators delivering the Psalms to readers are as Moses bringing the Book of the Covenant to the Israelites at the foot of Sinai; their admonition against “elegant” verses of worship repeats the Mosaic prohibition against idolatrous “gods of silver” and “gods of gold,” itself an elaboration on the second commandment.58 In this way, Exodus 20 is called upon as an Old Testament reference point for the Puritan antiaesthetic, just as the “subtile” and “beguil[ing]” speech of the serpent in Genesis 3 can be recruited as a scriptural source for an antirhetoric animated by the fear of dangerous eloquence.59 To my eye, the rhetorical maneuvers of this preface strongly parallel some of those prefacing later novels; I will draw some pointed comparisons to Charlotte Temple in particular. But in order to produce an adequate narrative of literary development, we need a satisfactory account of how this influence actually flowed and by what cultural mechanisms of dissemination or diffusion. Moreover, we must have the nuance to grasp how, in spite of observable cultural continuities and similarities, such ideas about expression are reshaped across historical periods, rather than persisting in some kind of transhistorical suspension from the early seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth. This is the question that gives rise to the least satisfying argumentative turns in “An American Language”—those moments when Miller must explain the continuing influence of Puritan rhetorical practices on prose style long after the corresponding theological doctrines had passed into obscurity. Thus, for example, “in rhetoric the result of a highly elaborated doctrine could survive” while “in virtually every other department of thought and expression, the original assumptions, the machinery of proof, fell away and can hardly be recovered by modern research.”60 Miller’s own rhetoric here substitutes a throwing up of the hands for any real attempt to narrate historical development. To render the historical passage in such terms is to account for later prose style only by gesturing vaguely toward an absent, forgotten, or unrecoverable point of origin, rather than to do the work of tracing any of the intermediate lines of descent.61 My goal in the remainder of this chapter is to supply what I regard as one of the missing links in our literary histories, by reading the sentimental

PAGE 158

“Homespun Habits”

159

novel of seduction into the development of plain style as a feature of a later prose aesthetic.62 In doing so, I hope not only to add another strand to the genealogy of an important literary mode, but also in particular to trace a rather different cultural itinerary by which it might have traveled from its European origins to its American destinations. To interpose the seduction novel into Miller’s story is not to discard but rather to supplement his familiar narrative of colonial origins by adding a piece to the story of transatlantic literary influence and the exchanges it involved. Even if we stipulate that a Puritan cultural strain fed into later U.S. prose fiction, it makes more sense to account for its influence not as a quasi-metaphysical seepage from New England soil, but as a reproduction of the narrative conventions of the eighteenth-century British sentimental novel—a form that was itself, after all, historically connected to the moral and aesthetic traditions animating Protestant culture. Samuel Richardson, more influentially than any other figure, brought the Puritan ethos of plainspoken virtue into the sentimental story of seduction by embodying it in his epistolary heroines and incarnating its negative counterpart, morally suspect eloquence, in his libertines. Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), the Richardson novel celebrated by American readers throughout the eighteenth century, everywhere displayed this kind of aesthetic, though most self-consciously in the novel’s 1741 sequel, in which Richardson has his now famous heroine repeatedly avow her predilection toward a plain epistolary style.63 “I am convinc’d that no Style can be proper, which is not plain, simple, easy, natural and unaffected,” writes Pamela, vowing to keep to the plains as much as possible in her narration.64 Yet it appears that she can only define her own style by drawing contrasts to other, less plain, less “natural” modes. This at least would be one way of explaining why Richardson has Pamela stray from her own stylistic rule several times: precisely in order to give her occasions to reemphasize it. When, for example, Pamela succumbs to enthusiasm on the subject of marital happiness, and momentarily allows her language to expand and elevate accordingly, she begs her correspondents’ forgiveness “if my Style on this subject be raised above that natural Simplicity which is more suited to my humble Talents.”65 Similarly, in a later letter, she briefly tries on the “allegorical or metaphorical Style, I know not which to call it,” but insists that she does so only “for the sake of a Friend, who is fond of such a Style” and takes the occasion to voice her disapproval of it.66 And in the most telling example of all, after transcribing one of Mr. B’s verbatim narrations at

PAGE 159

160

Chapter 4

length, Pamela expresses the difficulty not of recalling its content, but of emulating its style: “As near as I remember, (and my memory is the best faculty I have) it is pretty exact; only he was fuller of beautiful Similitudes, and spoke in a more flowery Style, as I may say.”67 By way of such excursions away from Pamela’s preferred mode, then, we learn what constitutes it in negative terms: the plain style must be that which avoids the excesses of another’s style. “It is extremely difficult,” writes James J. Murphy, “to discuss in theoretical terms a movement (one cannot call it a theory or a doctrine) seeking simplicity.”68 By its very nature, such forms of expression cannot really be theorized, for they are “based ultimately on nonform or antitheory.”69 Since their practice thus eludes precise, positive definition, plain stylists tend to define it in negative terms as an avoidance of ornament, figurative language, elevation—as a certain refusal of style itself. Even the set of frequently named characteristics such as “bareness,” “nakedness,” or “baldness” of expression, “austerity” or “soberness” of style—as is clear from a moment’s reflection—are privative concepts, even if grammatically speaking they appear to be positive terms.70 “Clarity” and “transparency” similarly advertise a lack of opacity, the elimination of any corrupting substance which would cloud the linguistic medium. As if in an outward projection of this privative tendency, then, the affirmation of one’s own style as plain or artless almost always seems to require a vain or artful other against which to distinguish it. For example, in the 1578 sermon that Harold Fisch identifies as the “earliest full expression” of the Puritan “rhetorical, or rather, antirhetorical ideal,”71 Lawrence Chaderton begins by declaring: “I purpose to speake particularly not in the excellencie of wordes, or in the inticyng speech of mans wisedome, but in plaine euidence and demonstration of the trueth.” Yet rather than leaving this declaration to stand on its own feet, Chaderton immediately follows by predicting a hostile reception and critiquing the other sort of preacher: “But alas, who preacheth thus? nay who doth not iudge this kinde of preaching to be voyde of learning, discretion and wisdome? Wherfore many doe stuffe their sermons with newe deuised words, and affected speaches of vanitie. . . . Many with unnecessary sentences, prouerbes, similitudes, and stories collected out of the writings of prophane men: many with curious affected figures, with Latine, Greeke, and Hebrue sentences, without any iust occasion offered by their texte.”72 In this way, as James J. Murphy observes, “the history of Christian preaching is filled with recurrent cycles of antipathy to rhetorical form”73

PAGE 160

“Homespun Habits”

161

stretching back to Paul, to whom Chaderton in fact directly alludes in the first passage quoted above.74 The targets of this antipathy have been themselves varied and promiscuous, thus lending further instability to any positive attempt at definition or nomination. In the seventeenth-century context, when style became intensely polarized and polemicized, this instability became uniquely visible as, for example, Puritan and Anglican preachers each accused each other of “rhetorical excess” and “extravagance of language” while claiming for themselves the moral high ground of sincerity free from artifice.75 This is why, as Stanley Fish argues, “it will not do . . . to look to the controversy between Puritan and Anglican for a solution to the puzzle” of seventeenth-century style: “the two parties refuse to stay on their respective sides of the fence.”76 In fact, the whole phenomenon “raises the intriguing possibility that there was no Restoration reform of prose style and that the so-called ‘rhetorical’ preacher was a phantom opponent who could be invoked by anyone who found it convenient to do so, but who could not himself be found.”77 In just this way, as Le´vi-Strauss argues, a floating signifier will tend to generate antinomies whose poles do not remain in place.78 The oppositional tendency of the plain aesthetic, the difficulty of precise definition, and the privative gesture essential to its identification not only shed light on Richardson’s use of epistolary style but also contribute something crucial to my understanding of American seduction novels at the end of the same century, which engaged in their own form of stylistic negation. My more basic point in invoking Richardson here, however, is that without this piece of the story, Miller’s account of the colonial origins of an “American” prose voice—and any similar account that would draw a vector from colonial theology to modern belles lettres—skips a crucial step. Once we replace it, the literary history of this voice instantly begins to look less like a linear story of national development and more like a tangled transatlantic genealogy. The plain style, to put it baldly, did not simply cross the ocean once and for all with the Great Migration; there were multiple and multidirectional crossings at work. To take the point historically further, American literary and cultural history does not simply cease being “transnational” with the constitution of the United States—nor, indeed, at any later point that might signal its ultimate arrival at a “national” telos, or the final severance of transatlantic cultural ties. No such moment ever arrives. The argument of “An American Language” teaches this lesson primarily by counterexample. Its conceptual foundation is transatlantic, yet only in a

PAGE 161

162

Chapter 4

very specific and temporally bounded sense; Miller’s transatlanticism has a colonial moment, but not a long history. Everything proceeds as if, after the initial transfer, the rest of American cultural development took place in relative isolation from contemporary developments in Europe. Insofar as Miller’s story is about how English Puritans “brought to these shores”79 European aesthetics and theological doctrine, his governing paradigm, we might say, is that of an Atlantic passage rather than anything like an Atlantic world. Thus, it is not that Miller chooses a national over a transnational conceptual framework, exactly. It would be more accurate to say that, by the very nature of his argument, he must somehow retain both. By supplementing the “English plain style” with the “wilderness setting”—by emphasizing how transplanted cultural materials got transformed by the American genius loci—Miller attaches a fantasy of indigeneity to the reality of diaspora.80 My argument in this chapter, however, does not add up to a simple admonition that we ought to restore the transnational story and abandon the national one. As I see it, the fact that a set of irreducibly transatlantic literary conventions can still be apprehended and talked about as aspects of an “American aesthetic” is not just an error to be corrected or reversed but something far more fascinating: a cultural paradox that, no matter its accuracy, still possesses power. What remains is for me to explain how the seduction novel was instrumental in producing that strange cultural argument in the first place.

The Arts of Seduction and the Artless Style The seduction novel would at first glance seem to be an unpromising place to look for an American prose aesthetic, much less its self-conscious theorization. While this subgenre of sentimental fiction has certainly emerged from its former critical obscurity and presumed triviality to assume a position of some seriousness in recent studies of the early republican period, it is also fair to say that it enjoys its new prominence less in “literary” terms than in political-historical or cultural-historical ones. The reason may be simple enough: American versions of the seduction plot seem to possess no formal literary quality distinguishing them from their transatlantic counterparts. “One cannot overstate the redundancy of these narratives,” writes Leonard Tennenhouse of post-Revolutionary seduction stories. “Whether

PAGE 162

“Homespun Habits”

163

British or American in origin, artful or banal, this fiction invariably featured the same array of cruel libertines, foolish coquettes, heartbroken parents, ruined women, stillborn babies, and destinies misshapen by desire. Indeed, the fact that seduction is such an oft-repeated story with only minor variations seems to be precisely the point.”81 The great virtue of this description is to recognize what is usually regarded as a negative attribute, the “limitless tolerance for repetition,” as the constitutive feature of the form rather than merely a failure of imagination.82 We might say that the seduction tale flaunted its conventionality, for this quality lay at the heart of how it understood itself; repetition and typicality were the very keys to its social function. Like a course of medical treatment, the form prescribes a steady dosage of moral medicine to keep the reader free of the disease of seduction. In short, on either side of the Atlantic, the seduction tale appears not at all conducive to claims of originality; on the contrary, it seems qualified only to serve as a case study in cultural derivation. To further compound the matter, American seduction stories then added another layer to this notion of salutary repetition: they kept their relationships to their transatlantic precursors always in view, parading their cultural indebtedness via a constant stream of intertextual allusions to British novels and their characters. The Richardsonian tradition in particular is a frequent intertextual touchpoint. In Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette, for example, Mrs. Richman warns Eliza Wharton: “I do not think you seducible; nor was Richardson’s Clarissa, till she made herself the victim, by her own indiscretion. Pardon me, Eliza, this is a second Lovelace.”83 Far from hiding its transatlantic literary debts, then, the American seduction narrative made an explicit theme of them. Yet, at the same time, these novels frequently found ways of asserting that the American version of the story had unique moral and aesthetic properties distinguishing it from, and elevating it above its European counterparts. This paradoxical conjunction—born of a tension between the opposed impulses of transatlantic emulation, on the one hand, and cisatlantic distinction, on the other—must be properly understood if we want to grasp the literary-historical significance of American seduction fiction. And we must be prepared to avoid either-or thinking in order to grasp the way this body of writing was able to fashion a cultural-nationalist argument out of “foreign” cultural materials. Whether by accident or by design, these love stories were telling a parallel tale about the differences between American and European language use.

PAGE 163

164

Chapter 4

In this way, American seduction novels actually theorized themselves as part of an emergent national literature and ruminated on the nature of its ties to the tradition from which it was so obviously derived. This was a “literary theory” in a strikingly concrete sense of that term: a theory of literature incarnated in a literary form. I would argue, first, that this subgenre was exceptionally capable of doing this kind of work because it had a metaliterary gear built into its formal machinery: as it told its tales of “destinies misshapen by desire,”84 it simultaneously constructed an implicit metalanguage in which it told stories about language itself. To see this, we can simply begin by noting the central function of language as a theme in the standard seduction plot. Across the form, and not just in its American incarnations, the seducer is characterized by a particular kind of language use. In Michel Rene´ Hilliard-d’Auberteuil’s Miss McCrea: A Novel of the American Revolution (1784), for example, the seductive British gallant “possessed to an eminent degree that false good breeding and dexterity of language which . . . too often conceals a hard and deceitful heart.”85 So, too, the whole range of literary seducers whose capacity for verbal and written persuasion, rather than physical force, is their most dangerous weapon— from Montraville in Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple, whose seduction of Charlotte begins when he “slipped a letter he had purposely written, into Charlotte’s hand,”86 to Peter Sanford in Foster’s The Coquette, whose “eloquence”87 charms Eliza Wharton and “captivate[s]” her “fancy.”88 Unlike the pornographic versions of the seduction plot, which can of course represent sexual acts themselves, the sentimental novel is obviously bound by convention only to represent the acts of language that surround them. Yet under the force of repetition, seduction becomes an essentially linguistic act in the sentimental novel. “I listened to him involuntarily,” says Foster’s Eliza, by way of explaining how the libertine’s speech overpowered her will and forced itself upon her.89 On the other side of the coin, the properly regulated female characters and the men who would be the appropriate objects of their desire are all characterized not just by moral rectitude but by proper linguistic conduct as well. As Tennenhouse observes of the twinned courtship plots of William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy, for example, the aptly named Worthy serves as the foil to the dissipated Harrington men because he “observes only the rules of taste and sensibility—the rules governing the novel itself” in his courtship practices.90 And this is why the epistolary structure is so important to the novel’s workings: “Through their written intercourse, Worthy emerges as the man of

PAGE 164

“Homespun Habits”

165

sensibility who will care for Myra. . . . The object of his desire undergoes a corresponding transformation that makes her his feminine counterpart, a writing subject. . . . Their exchange of letters not only constitutes the marriage contract, but also constitutes the pair, male and female, as individuals capable of entering into such a contract of their own volition.”91 This chapter follows the metalinguistic dimension of the seduction plot in the opposite direction: not how an argument about language bolstered one about courtship, but how the courtship plot actually gave rise to an aesthetic argument about literary style. For Tennenhouse’s observation not only explains how letter writing reveals character in such novels, but also hints at how epistolarity could open up a self-referential space within the work, within which various characters’ language use indicates something about “the rules of taste and sensibility . . . governing the novel” and its consumption by a readership.92 The novels made this conceptual jump by encouraging readers to abstract the seduction plot and apply it to the scene of reading itself—that is, by getting them to believe that the relations among characters could be reproduced, for better or worse, in the transactions between authors and readers. In this respect, all seduction fiction tended in the direction of metafiction, though it bears little resemblance to the later experimentations with literary form with which we associate that mode. Let us simply call this narrative structure a Quixotic one, thus indicating at a stroke that it has a European literary history preexisting any of its eighteenth-century deployments, whether British or American. In the seduction plot, this brand of formal self-awareness is a function of its didacticism and its insistence on hitting its moral marks. Over and over, seduction novels make the point that the dangers of certain kinds of sex have their counterparts in the dangers of certain kinds of reading, while on the other hand, a properly regulated tale of truth can serve as a prophylaxis against moral disease. If seduction is the potential of language to overpower individual judgment and strip the protagonist of her identity—that property she has in herself—then we as readers have to endorse writing that defends against the seduction of body through the mind, and condemn fiction that does harm by practicing artifices like that of the seducer himself. By this simple sleight of hand, fiction turns protagonist and reader into the twin subjects of a form of seduction that works in and through improper language use. Such claims are frequent in the authors’ prefaces of the period, where the writer, standing at some rhetorical distance from the controversial activity of novel writing, conventionally begins by defending

PAGE 165

166

Chapter 4

against an anticipated attack: “Novels have ever met with a ready reception into the Libraries of the Ladies,” begins Brown’s preface to The Power of Sympathy, “but this species of writing hath not been received with universal approbation.”93 The author then takes the novelist’s equivalent of a Hippocratic oath: ideally to heal, but at least to do no harm. Of novels which “expose no particular Vice, and which recommend no particular Virtue,” he admits, one might level the charge “that if they are harmless, they are not beneficial.”94 In the present case, we are assured, “this errour on each side has been avoided—the dangerous Consequences of seduction are exposed, and the Advantages of female education set forth and recommended.”95 Prefaces and title pages are the traditional paratextual locations for such self-conscious declarations,96 but the underlying axiom is watermarked on every page of every seduction novel: only the artless, truthbearing fiction is the antidote to, or better still, an inoculation against, the delusive magic of eloquent language. Thus language in general, and literary style in particular, do not merely serve as the medium through which the story of seduction is delivered; they are the very substance of that story. The very first letter of The Power of Sympathy, for example, immediately shows us how Harrington’s dissipated temperament and questionable erotic intentions toward Harriot quite literally dwell in the features of his elevated epistolary elocution, a prose style rife with high-flown diction, excessive ornamentation, and elegant rhetorical figures such as apostrophe and personification: “Hail gentle God of love! . . . How dost thou smooth over the roughness and asperities of present pain, with what thou seest in reversion! Thou banishes the Stygian glooms of disquiet and suspense, by the hope of approaching Elysium—Blessed infatuation!”97 Worthy’s reply in letter two responds in turn, not only with moral argument, but what we might call “argument by style”: he critiques his friend’s linguistic incontinence (“Who is this lady of whom you have been talking at such an inconsistent rate?”)98 and then self-consciously disciplines it by modeling a more proper linguistic conduct (“weighing matters maturely, and stating the evidence fairly on both sides, in order to form a right judgment”).99 Harrington mocks the gesture, but then makes a telling admission: “I cannot but laugh at your dull sermons, and yet I find something in them not altogether displeasing.”100 Worthy’s salutary plain speech may not “smooth over . . . roughness and asperities,”101 but that is precisely its point; for all of its humility and lack of artifice, it offers its own distinct kind of pleasure. In this way, moral conduct is explicitly reframed

PAGE 166

“Homespun Habits”

167

as an aesthetic matter. By modeling plain style, the eighteenth-century novel thus aims not to reject aesthetic pleasure, as in the Puritan antirhetorical mode, but instead to reform it, to make it morally purer and more effective—which is to say, more pleasing, enduring, and revelatory. The restaging of the seduction plot as an allegory of reading may be at its clearest and most aggressive in Charlotte Temple, in which Rowson seamlessly slides back and forth between the dangers of seduction and those of seductive literary production: “If the following tale should save one hapless fair one from the errors which ruined poor Charlotte . . . 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.”102 According to the analogy implicit here, the libertine is to the “man of feeling” as the “elegant finished piece of literature” is to the “tale of truth.” Rowson plays up this correspondence, of course, entirely to her own advantage. It allows her not only to defend her literary practice but also to mount a preemptive attack on the competition. She might begin by humbly acknowledging the inelegance of her literary trifle—defending it, in Hippocratic terms, as morally salutary at the very least—but as is often the case with such modesty rhetoric, there is a sting in the tail. Just as in the “apologetic” preface to the Bay Psalm Book, or Lawrence Chaderton’s “plaine” sermon, self-critique morphs imperceptibly into its opposite, its aggression redirected outward. It is the supposedly superior literary performance, the one that would garner “applause,” that is in fact branded as morally depraved. The larger irony here, of course, is that the novel’s avowal of sincerity is thus in itself a form of hypocrisy, for its humility conceals a biting sarcasm. In this way, Rowson takes the conventional modesty topos (indulgent reader, forgive my feebleness of expression), hollows it out like a Trojan horse, and deploys it to destroy the enemy. As this very example indicates, there is nothing distinctively American about this rhetorical perversity; Charlotte Temple is, after all, a British novel, published first in London, by a British author. What does seem to be the case, however, is that the American tales had the tendency, or at least the potential, to cast the distinction between proper and improper conduct and writing as the mark of a national difference. As a result, what was primarily a class argument in the British context got mapped onto nation in its American retellings. Thanks to the work of Nancy Armstrong and others, we know the first part of the story: how the novels and conduct books of the

PAGE 167

168

Chapter 4

emergent English middle classes waged a quiet but deeply successful cultural revolution largely by differentiating their own modes of consumption and cultural reproduction from the “excesses of a decadent aristocracy” and a “political system that made sumptuary display the ultimate aim of production.”103 But as that middle-class ideology, and the domestic novel as its formal correlative, moved across the Atlantic, the class critique was appropriated to serve emergent ideas of U.S. national character: the wholesome middle-class subject became emblematically American, and the decadent aristocrat stood for Europe. In the early U.S. seduction novel, then, the heroine assumed an overtly allegorical dimension as “the American fair” (a phrase Hannah Foster uses in her 1797 novel The Coquette)104 and thus became a “synecdoche for America,” as Robert Ferguson has put it.105 Meanwhile, the seducer came to personify European culture itself, a Europhilic desire to pass for European, or else membership in a world of rank, frequently the military, where distinctions mark the body in the manner of a European aristocracy. “In affairs of love, a young heart is never in more danger than when attempted by a handsome young soldier,” Rowson’s narrator tells us in Charlotte Temple; “a man of an indifferent appearance, will, when arrayed in a military habit, shew to advantage; but when beauty of person, elegance of manner, and an easy method of paying compliments, are united to the scarlet coat, smart cockade, and military sash, ah! well-a-day for the poor girl who gazes on him: she is in imminent danger.”106 Language use and sexual conduct merge here into the broader semantic constellation we know as “style”—manners, modes of dress, and other forms of consumption—as the novels repeatedly warn young American women about the dangers of splendid-looking, well-spoken, but morally depraved gallants. To thus personify gender in national terms, as if to say that American femininity has something to lose by admiring European “distinction” (in Bourdieu’s sense of the term) is to make the traditional seduction story receivable as a national allegory. I will have some important qualifications to make below about this allegorical reading, but let me first present the evidence in its favor. We find a prime example in Hilliard-d’Auberteuil’s novel Miss McCrea. Like other “sentimental novels of captivity”—Michelle Burnham’s term comprising novels of Indian captivity like Miss McCrea and seduction novels like Charlotte Temple—Hilliard-d’Auberteuil used the sexual plot to “allegorize the threat of British corruption to colonial virtue.”107 This fictional treatment of the widely publicized captivity and death

PAGE 168

“Homespun Habits”

169

of Jane McCrea thus refashioned her captivity as “a story not of Indian rape but of British seduction.”108 If we take the longer literary-historical view, then, what is particularly remarkable about this work is how it folded the narrative structure of the colonial captivity narrative into that of the eighteenth-century novel. In the earlier narratives by English settlers about their Indian captivities, the prime danger was that of losing one’s Englishness by being separated from one’s culture of origin. But in the postRevolutionary rewriting of captivity as seduction, the more damaging source of pollution is Britishness itself: no longer is the central threat that of an Anglo-American settler “going native,” but instead, that of an American protagonist “going British,” so to speak. The heroine’s demise is thus attributed “to her allurement by British wealth and gallantry” in the person of the hypocrite Belton.109 It is about this figure that the narrator tells us that “false good breeding” walks hand in hand with a “dexterity of language” to conceal “a hard and deceitful heart.”110 This is the cultural nexus of “gallantry” and “hypocrisy” as Jenny Davidson has recently analyzed it in eighteenth-century British culture;111 but here, an essentially class-coded critique of conduct could be put in the service of an emergent BritishAmerican cultural rivalry. This is not to say that we ought to conflate what I am calling “style” with manners in general—a complex of cultural mores of which literary style, plain or otherwise, is merely a subset. It is true that representations of language, manners, and other forms of cultural performance so intimately interact with one another in the eighteenth century as to seem at times inextricable. But I believe that the question of linguistic style takes on a gravity and a seriousness all its own, particularly in the literature of the early United States—or at least that it rewards semiautonomous treatment as a cultural question unto itself. And, of course, I am focusing my attention on imaginative literature, rather than sermons or other forms of cultural performance, for precisely that reason. Other forms of material culture like dress, equipage, forms of consumption, and so on may always be recruited or deployed for metaphorical purposes, or treated as analogues for linguistic style, but need not be collapsed with it. No early republican author did more than Royall Tyler to wield this cluster of cultural arguments in the service of a specifically literary nationalism. When he burst onto the New York cultural scene in 1787 with The Contrast—marketed from the start as the first play authored and professionally produced by a citizen of the United States—Tyler immediately

PAGE 169

170

Chapter 4

assumed the role of protector of the new nation’s fledgling culture from corrupting foreign influences and the paralyzing tendency to “imitate” our transatlantic counterpart. The play’s often-quoted verse prologue begins on an unabashedly nationalist note, at once celebrating republican art and denigrating Old World patronage: “EXULT, each patriot heart!,” it opens, “—this night is shewn / A piece, which we may fairly call our own; / Where the proud titles of “My Lord! Your Grace!” / To humble Mr. and plain Sir give place.”112 This rhetorical cause was aided further by the fact that the prologue was spoken on stage by Thomas Wignell, the actor who played Jonathan, and who could thus speak in praise of the play’s anonymous author as if from another trustworthy location: “Yet one, whilst imitation bears the sway, / Aspires to nobler heights, and points the way. / Be rous’d, my friends! his bold example view; / Let your own Bards be proud to copy you!”113 Spoken, presumably, in costume as the rural Yankee simpleton, these words would have lent the character’s artless sincerity to the playwright himself. Indeed, one of Tyler’s signature moves was to use clothing as a figure for culture, sumptuary style as a figure for literary style.114 The prologue establishes this correspondence, and in so doing introduces what will be a central theme of the play, namely, the transatlantic influences on domestic fashion: Modern youths, with imitative sense, Deem taste in dress the proof of excellence; And spurn the meanness of your homespun arts, Since homespun habits would obscure their parts; Whilst all, which aims at splendour and parade, Must come from Europe, and be ready made. Strange! we should thus our native worth disclaim, And check the progress of our rising fame.115 As with the seduction novel’s cautionary characterizations of splendid but depraved gallants, the codes of class here take on a national hue. Tyler will play this idea out fully within the courtship plots of The Contrast, where the markers of style help tell us which characters are authentic and which are hypocrites. In the Prologue—as in the paratextual spaces of the seduction novels I mentioned above—we find these properties attaching themselves not to characters but to cultural products, hence serving an argument about the need for a bona fide national culture and the obstacles posed by

PAGE 170

“Homespun Habits”

171

the domestic imitation of foreign style. “Our Author pictures not from foreign climes / The fashions or the follies of the times,” it insists. “On native themes his Muse displays her pow’rs; / If ours the faults, the virtues too are ours.” The Prologue draws rather self-consciously on this braiding together of “faults” and “virtues,” as national pride and aesthetic modesty keep trading places with one another in an intricate discursive dance. But in the end, it is fair to say that the posture of authorial anxiety about negative criticism couches a much stronger rhetorical ploy: Who travels now to ape the rich or great, To deck an equipage and roll in state; To court the graces, or to dance with ease, Or by hypocrisy to strive to please? Our free-born ancestors such arts despis’d; Genuine sincerity alone they priz’d; Their minds, with honest emulation fir’d; To solid good—not ornament—aspir’d; Or, if ambition rous’d a bolder flame, Stern virtue throve, where indolence was shame.116 More than simply a warts-and-all defense of American “homespun,” our humble cisatlantic “arts” here trump more celebrated transatlantic forms on the basis of sincerity, honesty, solidity, and virtue. The net result is an explicitly nationalist version of the aesthetic transvaluation we found in the Bay Psalm Book, and then again in Rowson’s preface, where the superficial values of elegance and polish are exposed as literary vanities concealing moral dangers, while the apparently “meaner” arts are implicitly elevated despite the disingenuous posture of humility. In the preface to his 1797 novel, The Algerine Captive, we find Tyler, a decade after The Contrast, still using the seduction topos to lament the state of literature in his native country. While the novel as a whole is no seduction story in any usual sense of the term, its preface essentially stages a mini-seduction plot in which books are seducing readers. Tyler expresses his dismay at “the extreme avidity, with which [English] books of mere amusement [are] purchased and perused by all ranks of his countrymen.”117 This obsession with foreign productions, in turn, retards the development of a home-grown literature: “while so many books are being vended, they are not of our own manufacture.”118 And here again clothing provides a

PAGE 171

172

Chapter 4

ready-made metaphor, so to speak, for the importation and circulation of literary culture: “If our wives and daughters will wear gauze and ribbands, it is a pity, they are not wrought in our own looms.”119 The mania for foreign fashions so cuttingly satirized in The Contrast is again invoked as a figure for the dominance of literary imports and the neglect of a plain “homespun” culture. An imported literature “paints the manners, customs, and habits of a strange country; excites a fondness for false splendour; and renders the homespun habits of [our] own country disgusting.”120 The language of “excitement” subtly raises a specter more menacing than that of a cultural trade gap, namely, the danger (and this is no joke) of the “farmer’s daughter” becoming corrupted by the “gay stories and splendid impieties of the Traveller and the Novelist”: “Novels being the picture of the times, the New England reader is insensibly taught to admire the levity, and often the vices of the parent country. While the fancy is enchanted, the heart is corrupted. The farmer’s daughter, while she pities the misfortune of some modern heroine, is exposed to the attacks of vice, from which her ignorance would have formed her surest shield. If the English Novel does not inculcate vice, it at least impresses on the young mind an erroneous idea of the world, in which she is to live.”121 All the apparatus of the seduction plot is clearly in play here to tell a metaliterary seduction story in which British books are corrupting American readers. The English novel is, at best, like a bad parent who cannot be trusted to safeguard the purity of the American character, and, at worst, a libertine who actually corrupts it. What is sometimes easy to miss in such cultural arguments is that, beneath the inflammatory nationalist rhetoric that animates them, it is often difficult to apprehend “Americanness” as a positive substance. The whole purpose seems to be a defensive celebration of “American” characteristics; yet on closer examination those characteristics are in fact defined only in terms of lack and absence.122 American culture is being impeded by European influences: that assertion tells us little about the former besides the fact that it is under threat from the latter. There are two primary reasons for this. The more general one is that these expressions of cultural nationalism in this post-Revolutionary period are often voiced, so to speak, in a future tense and a subjunctive mood. They call for a cisatlantic national culture that is presumed not yet to exist, and aim their discursive aggression at the transatlantic obstacles preventing it from arriving, triumphantly, at a present indicative. Simply put, those obstacles are more clearly and tangibly defined than whatever they obstruct. Moreover, the absence of positive substance here is also a

PAGE 172

“Homespun Habits”

173

side effect of using a story of seduction to represent cultural identity as innocence imperiled by foreign corruption. “Purity” and “innocence” may sound like positive attributes, but that is merely a nominative illusion. They are chiefly defined here—and in an important sense, can only ever be defined—in privative terms, either as the blessed ignorance of vice or even as a certain lack of culture that contrasts to decadence. In a parallel way, as I have already observed of Richardson’s Pamela and other plain stylists, plainness often defines itself as the negation of certain ornamental characteristics that alone can receive clear positive descriptions. This is precisely why the sentimental literary mode and the plain style, while not coterminous, join one another in the seduction plot. In Richardson’s Pamela, Brown’s Worthy, and the other heroes and heroines of seduction fiction, properly regulated sexual conduct, properly cultivated sentiment, and properly curated style meet in perfect communion. Sincerity is born from the ashes of artfulness, just as virtue is consummated in the elimination of vice. The seduction novel’s adoption of an “artless style,” however, was neither antiaesthetic nor antirhetorical in the ways we often attribute to seventeenth-century Puritan expression. Rather, this strain of eighteenthcentury fiction drew deeply on what we would call aesthetic theory, but which, in the more proper terminology of the period, would be called “criticism” and the philosophical inquiry into taste.123 The American seduction novels that concern me here were no less indebted to this tradition of thought, and its British strain in particular, though of course they adapted it to different cultural-political ends. And while seduction fiction did so in a generically specific way, it thus participated in a broader literary-historical phenomenon of which it formed merely one part: the act of “negative affiliation” by which literary Americanness was being defined not just as incidentally distinct from Britishness but as explicitly constructed in a differential relation to it—and in that sense, paradoxically, generated directly out of it. Little could serve this cultural purpose better than plain style— which as I have already shown, thrives on antinomies, constitutes itself through dialectical acts of privative definition, and insists on the moral stakes of linguistic choices. Transatlantic Emulation, Cisatlantic Virtue And here, finally, is where we need to depart from a tidy national-allegorical reading, even while acknowledging that the rhetoric of the works

PAGE 173

174

Chapter 4

themselves beckoned readers in that interpretive direction. The problem, so to speak, is that the transnational facts keep getting in the way of a good national story. Let me begin on a rather concrete literary-historical level. Take, most obviously, Charlotte Temple—as I have already noted, a British work, written by a British author, published first in London. Only through a process of transplantation, re-publication and re-reception, well documented by Cathy Davidson, did it become the “first American novel” and the urtext of Davidson’s own seminal work of U.S. literary history, Revolution and the Word.124 Yet even at the level of Rowson’s plot, it is clear that the translation—the process of literary naturalization, so to speak—was never quite complete. Charlotte dies in America after giving birth to her illegitimate daughter, but in the novel’s sequel, that daughter is raised in England by Charlotte’s parents. So, too, with my other banner literary example, Miss McCrea: A Novel of the American Revolution. This still rather obscure novel has nonetheless enjoyed its own claim as an American literary “first”: Lewis Leary identifies it as “the first book-length prose narrative to deal wholly with a national American incident and with America as the entire scene of action.”125 No less a personage than President Jefferson lavished advance praise upon its author when he learned of the work in progress: “America cannot but be flattered with the choice of the subject, on which you are at present employing your pen.”126 All well and good, but what do we do with the fact that the author in question was a Frenchman, Hilliard-D’Auberteuil, that he wrote his “American” novel in French, and published it in Brussels or Paris—though the title page identifies its place of publication as “A Philadelphie”? Much like the letters of another Frenchman’s “American farmer,” or a just transplanted Briton’s “American” brand of common sense, such transatlantic crossings are beginning to seem, no longer exceptions, but some strange sort of rule. From this perspective, Charlotte Temple and Miss McCrea stand alongside other recently rediscovered works like Unca Eliza Winkfield’s The Female American; or, The Adventures of Unca Eliza Winkfield (1767), as American-set, Americanthemed, American-charactered novels not published in America or authored by Americans. As archival work turns up and publishers reprint more of these “first American novels” that are not in fact American novels, and as emergent paradigms of literary scholarship give us new ways of understanding them, our sense of the transatlantic literary field to which they belong is bound to change accordingly.

PAGE 174

“Homespun Habits”

175

The cases of Rowson and Hilliard-D’Auberteuil—like that of Cre`vecoeur —may make this point most concretely in terms of literary biography, but the significance runs a good deal deeper. Even when the author’s pedigree is indisputably American, the same tensions and paradoxes are bound to assert themselves. In order to read Royall Tyler’s works with the grain of their own cultural-nationalist aspirations, for example, we must pass rather lightly over some of their most interesting contours and contradictions. In the preface to the Algerine Captive, yes, the seducers are British novelists and the seduced are female American readers. But Tyler does not use a precisely national terminology there: not Britain and America but rather “England” and “New England” are his operative terms. Thus, even while he stages a cultural nationalism in which American virtues need protection against British incursions, the very names he uses emphasize a commonality—quite literally, a shared Englishness— between its “old” form and its “new” iteration, as if they were not so much different places as different times. This admittedly small detail of terminology may be regarded as a symptom of a deeper and more fundamental cultural irony on display here: his story of national seduction replayed an argument that was already well established within the British discourse on culture and education. His central problematic of exposure to vice as a source of peril, and ignorance of vice as a shield against it, stretched back at least to Locke’s 1693 treatise, Some Thoughts concerning Education. And by the late eighteenth century, this cultural argument was everywhere being applied to the British controversy over novel reading, as critics like Hannah More warned of the seductive influence of novels on the purity of English womanhood. The argument, then, was entirely commonplace in British literary culture. But no matter: like American seduction novels, Tyler’s preface simply casts the specifically English novel in the role that had been played by “the novel” in the British debates. The problem is that by doing so, he opens up a glaring contradiction between his means and his ends: he blithely builds a cultural nationalism on the basis of a borrowed cultural argument. The prologue to The Contrast is marked by just this contradiction. The series of characteristics Tyler celebrates as the features of good old American homespun—to recall, “genuine sincerity,” “honest emulation,” “solid good,” and “stern virtue”—may now be familiar stereotypes of American expression, but Tyler’s contemporaries would have associated them, first

PAGE 175

176

Chapter 4

and foremost, with an Anglo-Saxon cultural heritage. Tyler clearly intends this resonance in the reference to “our free-born ancestors” and their resistance to courtly hypocrisy. Implicitly but unmistakably invoking a midseventeenth-century historical narrative about a Saxon golden age prior to the imposition of a “Norman yoke,” Tyler’s U.S. nationalism thus piggybacks on a much older British nationalism. The notion was a prevalent one in the Revolutionary period: America would restore Britain’s Anglo-Saxon origins, which in the mother country itself have been buried beneath Norman overlays.127 Figures like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson were particularly adept at recognizing the political potential of the “Norman yoke” trope: America would achieve “British liberty” while contemporary Britons were in symbolic chains. Noah Webster, as I have explained in depth in Chapter 1, refashioned this same concept into a linguistic manifesto: American English would recover the pure Saxon core of the English language before it had been corrupted by French incorporations, and before modern Englishmen like Samuel Johnson had compromised it further in an illadvised pursuit of Latinity. Scrubbed clean of these French and Latin superimpositions, the “American tongue” would thus be more properly English than British English. The implication of these quite different, but essentially related projects is a profound one: this was a form of cultural nationalism as intent on asserting its continuities with Englishness as in declaring its “independence” from it. A revolution, not in the sense of a rejection of the past, but via a return to origins. In accordance with this cultural logic, Tyler finds a specifically literary way of reapplying Anglo-Saxonism to Americanism: America would recover an aesthetic sincerity that Britain had seen corrupted by its descent into “ornament[al]” decadence. The plot of The Contrast yields a cultural argument that is ambivalent in precisely this way—which is to say, one that simultaneously invites and frustrates national allegory. To begin with, as Trish Loughran has argued, only according to an extremely flattened and reductive reading can the play’s title be taken to refer to the opposition between the United States and Britain.128 Even if one wished to gloss the title in propositional terms as a statement of cultural identity, it would only do to render the “contrast” in question as that between different sorts of Americans.129 The particular focus falls, first, on differences between American states or regions (New York versus New England, particularly Boston), and how those regional differences, in turn, inflect social class and modes

PAGE 176

“Homespun Habits”

177

of consumption (comically concretized in the characters of Billy Dimple and Colonel Manly, and again in their “men,” Jessamy and Jonathan). When the play does concern itself with the differences between America and Europe, it does so at one remove, by exploring these Americans’ cultural relations to home and foreign nations. But even those characterizations are not so simple to unravel, as we realize when we attempt to gloss the courtship plot around which much of the play’s action and characterization revolve. Before we meet Maria Van Rough, we learn that she has begun to despair of her intended marriage to Billy Dimple. Billy has traveled abroad to England, as his Anglophilic father had done before him, “to see the world, and rub off a little of the patroon rust.”130 And sure enough, he returns from his English tour quite different. Maria finds that the “good natured, decent, dressing young fellow”131 for whom she had felt some affection is now rather changed in “his conduct and conversation.”132 Significantly, the change is described in literary terms: Billy has begun to resemble certain protagonists in Samuel Richardson novels. The discerning Maria realizes “that [Billy] had by travelling acquired the wickedness of Lovelace without his wit, and the politeness of Sir Charles Grandison without his generosity.”133 So, too, is Maria’s change of heart described in Richardsonian terms: “Clary Harlow would have scorned such a match.”134 It is more than fitting, then, that the courtship is first turned off course by a matter of literary style. While Billy is still abroad, as Maria reads works of literature alongside his letters from England, the widening gap between the two bodies of writing weakens her affection. As the bemused Letitia narrates it: “she read Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa Harlow, Shenstone, and the Sentimental Journey; and between whiles, as I said, Billy’s letters. But as her taste improved, her love declined. The contrast was so striking betwixt the good sense of her books, and the flimsiness of her love-letters, that she discovered she had unthinkingly engaged her hand without her heart.”135 Not much is said about the substance or style of Billy’s letters here, but Letitia gives us one hint: while in England, he has begun to fashion himself after Lord Chesterfield: “The ruddy youth who washed his face at the cistern every morning, and swore and looked eternal love and constancy, was now metamorphosed into a flippant, palid, polite beau, who devotes the morning to his toilet, reads a few pages of Chesterfield’s letters, and then minces out, to put the infamous principles in practice upon every woman he meets.”136 This passing detail says much with great economy. It

PAGE 177

178

Chapter 4

is, first of all, a contemporary literary allusion: Billy has read and absorbed the lessons of a book widely reviled as a notorious manual of gallantry and hypocrisy, Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son.137 This literary fact implies a whole cluster of other facts about Billy’s character; Tyler’s use of this figure is typical in its combination of sumptuary style, sexual immorality, and corrupt linguistic conduct in a complex characterological cocktail. The figure of the “Chesterfieldian” seducer has a rich cultural milieu in the period. His letters having been published in 1774 (they were written to his illegitimate son in 1748 and published posthumously by that son’s widow), Chesterfield was a readily available shorthand for a negative sexual and moral ideal in the American seduction novels of the 1780s and 1790s.138 He appears, for example, in William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy, whose Mrs. Holmes warns of “those insidious gentlemen, who plan their advances towards us on the Chesterfieldian system.”139 By the time Foster writes The Coquette in 1797, the adjective, derived from a name, has again become a noun: “He looks to me like a Chesterfieldian,” writes Julia Granby of Major Sanford.140 In this way, he became a portable figure for a corrupt type of manhood and—the publication of his letters on the eve of the Revolutionary War lending momentum to the association—a symbol of the worst qualities of British sexual conduct and cultural reproduction. It is perhaps not a coincidence, then, that Brown’s Mrs. Holmes uses a military metaphor in cautioning against the “advances” of the Chesterfieldian: “Let me advise you to beware. A prudent commander would place a double watch, if he apprehended the enemy were more disposed to take the fort by secrecy and undermining, than by an open assault.”141 The metaphor invites us to cast this in Revolutionary terms as, say, the defense of an American stronghold against British martial treachery. To caution the “American fair” in this way, as if the figure being satirized represented some kind of British ideal of conduct, was a deliberate distortion in the sense that Chesterfield was every bit as likely to be vilified in British culture at the time—extravagantly so, as Jenny Davidson has demonstrated.142 Thus, by making this figure available to serve a national allegory, American authors were effectively turning it into “myth” in Roland Barthes’s sense—that is, evacuating it of its actual cultural history, placing it in a distinct signifying context, and filling it with new meaning. The same can be said of the contrasting character, the “man of feeling”: just as the Chesterfieldian is not simply a synecdoche for the Englishman, his sentimental counterpart is by no means an “American” one—he too has a definitively

PAGE 178

“Homespun Habits”

179

British cultural lineage, both as the foil to the rakes of seduction novels and as a protagonist in his own right.143 With this in mind, we are in a better position to understand a peculiar but crucial detail of Tyler’s metaliterary courtship plot: the very men of letters who shape Maria’s taste and draw her affections away from Dimple by “contrast” are Fielding, Shenstone, Sterne—and, of course, Richardson. What is hiding in plain sight here is simply this: the sentimental literary tradition in relation to which Dimple is found lacking is itself an unmistakably British one. If the disease is English, so is the cure. We can see this assumption writ large in the most extraordinary irony by far of the cultural nationalism of The Contrast—namely, that this “piece, which we can fairly call our own” is to a large extent the product of Tyler’s own deliberate act of transatlantic literary emulation. As is well documented, Tyler drew inspiration from the immensely popular comedy by the Irish playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The School for Scandal. Staged first in London 1777, Sheridan’s play had been revived in New York in 1787 and attended by Tyler as he conceived his own American comedy of manners. Tyler tore more than a few pages from Sheridan’s script as he hastily wrote The Contrast: among other features, the use of a verse prologue advertising and praising the play, the characterization of Billy Dimple as a narcissistic hypocrite in the mold of Sheridan’s “Joseph Surface,” the very name of his heroine, Maria, and, more generally, the themes of class pretension and self-display as the primary target of satire and “situation” comedy. Lest the audience miss the correspondences, Tyler paid metatheatrical homage to Sheridan in his own play by having the Yankee Jonathan stumble into a performance of The School for Scandal and buffoonishly misrecognize it as real life in the next house over. Tyler may begin The Contrast with a satirical swipe at the “imitative sense” of “modern youths,” but his own elaborate act of transatlantic literary imitation is the play’s condition of possibility and, by extension, that of Tyler’s exemplary “American” literary career. For this late eighteenth-century brand of cultural nationalism, then, the “imitation” of foreign forms is simply not the same crime against cultural sovereignty that it will represent in nineteenth-century texts from Emerson’s “American Scholar” to Whitman’s 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, and to Melville’s essay on “Hawthorne and His Mosses.” Consider the words of Brown’s Mrs. Holmes as she clarifies what exactly is ridiculous about young American men playing at Chesterfield: “I cannot but smile sometimes, to

PAGE 179

180

Chapter 4

observe the ridiculous figure of some of our young gentlemen, who affect to square their conduct by his Lordship’s principles of politeness . . . trifling affectations, the ridicule of which arises, not so much from their putting on this foreign dress, as from their ignorance or vanity in pretending to imitate those rules which were designed for an English nobleman.”144 The real target of her satire, then, is not the English nobleman himself but the young American gentleman who—in a phrase which curiously doubles the charge of inauthenticity—“pretend[s] to imitate” him. What is thus implied is that “imitation” is not essentially ridiculous in itself; more precisely, it is the indiscriminate affectation, the imitation of the “wrong” parts of British culture, and finally, the inability to adapt manners and morals, mode of dress and style of address, to a new place with a new genius loci. The American seduction story thus accomplished, in literary terms, the same result as Perry Miller’s historical narrative about American language, namely, to repackage manifestly borrowed cultural materials as unique signs of national originality. By doing so, it helped cement the plain aesthetic into a theory of American prose that still has a hold on our thinking. This is why I began with Miller’s critical machinations, which thus serve a far more important purpose for me than that of a straw man. For I read Miller’s theory of “American self-expression” as evidence of an abiding cultural logic whose origins lie in late eighteenth-century literary production. Born of a moment when a cultural imperative for a distinct national culture clashed with a clear awareness of cultural foreign debt, American seduction novels essentially articulated a theory of transnational influence and transformation; they just did so through and within literature itself, rather than in a critical or theoretical corpus residing outside it. Miller’s critical narrative is not only structurally analogous to, but also directly indebted to this post-Revolutionary argument about the unique pleasures and virtues of the plain aesthetic as the mark of national expressive authenticity. The show of splendor versus true interior merit; the frivolous amusements of fictional entertainment versus the instructive virtues of factual narratives; levity and gaiety versus gravity and rectitude; and, as an expression of them all within the realm of style, ornament and artifice versus plain simplicity and authenticity—these were the familiar oppositions that animated seduction stories on both sides of the Atlantic. American seduction stories asked that readers receive them in implicitly national terms, but in truth, this set of concepts was no less culturally charged in the British context. As these internal oppositions were, in effect, turned sideways, stretched to span the

PAGE 180

“Homespun Habits”

181

Atlantic, and made to code a distinction between Old World and New, they produced new stereotypes of American identity, American language, and American style. But “Americanness” in these instances was initially little more than the name for the best qualities of English culture, transplanted, and flourishing in new soil. Only much later, after a carefully curated process of cultural forgetting, would that transplanted culture come to represent itself as originally distinct.

PAGE 181

Coda Stock and Soil

After only two generations in New England the first Yankees noticed that their stock had changed. . . . Uprooted from the native soil, planted in strong aboriginal earth, this thing happened to the English stock. —D. H. Lawrence, “The Spirit of Place” (early version, 1918)

In 1913, the American essayist John Macy published his attempt to “survey the four corners of the national library and to give an impression of its shape and size.”1 The Spirit of American Literature describes itself as a “collection of appreciative essays” on our nineteenth-century authors from Washington Irving to Henry James.2 If Macy’s nationality, subject matter, and Hegelian title lead us to expect from him a clear articulation of the Geist of our nation’s literature, it is clear from the first sentence that the work may defy or disappoint this expectation: “American literature is a branch of English literature, as truly as are English books written in Scotland or South Africa.”3 In this sense, “American literature” evidently doesn’t quite qualify as a separate tradition; it is just another term for “English literature made in this country.”4 If there is a literary-critical form of exceptionalism on display here, in fact, it is an English one: “The ideas at work among . . . English men of letters are world-encircling and fly between book and brain. The dominant power is on the British Islands, and the prevailing stream of influence flows west across the Atlantic.”5 American writing does reflect its particular locality; literature “by the inhabitants of New York, Ohio, and Massachusetts, does tell us something of the ways of life in those mighty commonwealths, just as English fiction written by Lancashire men about Lancashire people is saturated with the dialect, the local habits and scenery of that country.”6 Yet regional markers

PAGE 182

Coda

183

do not a distinct national literature make, as his comparisons everywhere indicate: “Wherever an English-speaking man of imagination may dwell, in Dorset or Calcutta or Indianapolis, he is subject to the strong arm of the empire of English literature; he cannot escape it.”7 The Spirit of American Literature thus issues a call for American literary distinction rather than a declaration of an actually existing one; its title turns out to name an absence, a lamentable “lack of American quality.”8 To a student of the early national period, it is fascinating to see, a century or so on, literary Americanness still being framed as counterfactual. Our national literature, Macy concludes, is still “insufficient to the opportunity and the need”; the “American Spirit may be figured as petitioning the Muses for twelve novelists, ten poets, and eight dramatists, to be delivered at the earliest possible moment.”9 From the historical belatedness of this “petition,” we may be inclined to wonder whether there is some peculiar rhetorical or argumentative benefit to be derived from voicing our national achievement in the subjunctive mood, or locating its maturation just beyond some historical horizon.10 Interestingly, however, at roughly the same historical moment, a British essayist offered a rather different assessment of Anglo-American literary development. In 1917, D. H. Lawrence began his work on the American “classics” that was eventually to result in Studies in Classic American Literature, published in book form in 1923.11 Where his American counterpart found nothing distinctive in his own national tradition, Lawrence—looking at America through the “wrong end of the telescope, across all the Atlantic water”12 —made perhaps the strongest and most extravagant case imaginable for the uniqueness of the American literary voice: “The American artspeech contains a quality that we have not calculated. It has a suggestive force which is not relative to us, not inherent in the English race.”13 The earliest version of the introductory essay, “The Spirit of Place,” begins with a distinct echo of Macy’s position as a foil to the argument Lawrence intends to develop: “It is natural that we should regard American literature as a small branch or province of English literature,” Lawrence acknowledges, but “there is another view to be taken.”14 The alternative view entails emphasizing the profound difference lurking beneath the superficial appearance of repetition. “We have thought and spoken till now in terms of likeness and oneness. Now we must learn to think in terms of difference and otherness.”15 Whether or not one has eyes to see it, Lawrence insists, an alien other moves beneath the skin of the American familiar: “There is

PAGE 183

184

Coda

a stranger on the face of our earth, and it is no use our trying to gull ourselves that he is one of us, and just as we are. There is an unthinkable gulf between us and America, and across the space we see, not our own folk signaling to us, but strangers, incomprehensible beings, simulacra perhaps of ourselves, but other, creatures of an other-world.”16 Moreover, it is literature—“the genuine American literature”—which “affords the best approach to the knowledge of this othering.”17 It is no exaggeration to say that, in the work that resulted from this line of argument, Lawrence produced the definitive twentieth-century statement of American literary exceptionalism. This early twentieth-century moment in transatlantic literary historiography provides a remarkably rich condensation of many of the cultural dynamics that have concerned me in the foregoing pages—in part, because the terms and concepts Macy and Lawrence use to think through the British-American literary relationship were still, in so many ways, indebted to an eighteenth-century cultural imaginary. The most obvious lesson that the critical interplay between the two critics has to teach us is to attend to the complexities and paradoxes of transnational cultural relations. Common sense would seem to dictate a certain alignment of national identity and literary valuation: on the cisatlantic side of the divide, we always expect to hear the call of an American culture shrilly asserting its own aesthetic rights; on the far side, we listen for the dismissive charge of American philistinism. Certainly, the history of transatlantic relations offers up many such scenes.18 But we also find the opposite cultural dynamic repeatedly staged, particularly in the eighteenth century, where positive European fantasies about America’s unique aesthetic power mingled with the voices of American settlers humbly avowing their own cultural poverty and underdevelopment. The players in this less familiar cultural scenario are not American jingoists and British snobs, but American Anglophiles and British (and European) Americophiles.19 The contrast between Macy and Lawrence recalls this chronically underemphasized dynamic and thus cautions us to mind the gap between nationalism and exceptionalism. Macy’s argument is intensely nationalist without being exceptionalist, while Lawrence’s exceptionalist argument on behalf of American culture can certainly not be characterized as nationalist. Where the American critic sees between Europe and America a lengthening chain, the British critic celebrates the “unthinkable gulf” between them.20

PAGE 184

Coda

185

More telling than their differences, however, are the places where the two critical arguments overlap—and in particular, where they silently agree to the basic terms, concepts, and tropes through which literary history will be adjudicated. For as much as these figures represent the familiar argumentative poles in debates about the “Americanness” of American literature—those poles being, on the one hand, the essential continuity between British and American letters and, on the other hand, American literary uniqueness—both critics assume that America’s national literature was derived from Great Britain’s in the first place. This notion relies on the interrelated assumptions that “American literature” is coterminous with the literature of the United States, and that it is the anglophone culture of that nation that is most essentially its national culture. However, having made these conceptual reductions, both critics are also very invested in a narrative of derivation and descent. Macy throws his critical weight behind the essential connection between American letters and their British roots. His argument everywhere emphasizes the “prevailing stream of influence flow[ing] west across the Atlantic”21 along the traditional vector of the translatio imperii et studii. What might not be as evident is how equally Lawrence’s “Spirit of Place” is premised on the assumption that American culture begins its life as a British export. The point is obvious, but conceptually important: any argument about the “othering” of a cultural tradition must, after all, first posit a common point of origin prior to the forking of the paths. Lawrence’s argument thus presumes not the ex nihilo birth of an autonomous American literature, but the transformation of British literature into something new by “the English-speaking Americans”: “Life itself takes on a new reality, a new motion, even while the idea remains ostensibly the same.”22 The source of this novelty, as the essay’s title suggests, is place, “the American continent itself.”23 Beginning with the axiom that “all art partakes of the Spirit of Place in which it is produced,” Lawrence reasons to the conclusion that “America, the new continent, seething in English veins, has produced us the familiar American classics, of Hawthorne, Poe, Whitman, or Fenimore Cooper.”24 The theory, if impressionistic, is nonetheless logically perfect; for it enables Lawrence to explain how American language and literature, though inescapably borrowed from British models, turned into something altogether new and strange. Finally, also critical to both accounts—and further evidence of their kinship with late eighteenth-century cultural arguments—is the use of a

PAGE 185

186

Coda

particular kind of agricultural or botanical metaphor as a way of mediating these questions of transatlantic literature and culture. Lawrence’s use of such tropes go hand in glove with his accentuation of geography and his self-conscious resuscitation of the old notion of the genius loci: “Different places on the face of the earth have a different vital effluence. . . . The Nile valley produced not only the corn, but the terrific religions of Egypt. China produces the Chinese, and will go on doing so. The Chinese in San Francisco will in time cease to be Chinese.”25 The problem of diaspora at which Lawrence arrives—What happens to British culture when it leaves the continent that produced it and migrates to one with a different “vital effluence”?—is thus rendered, according to the botanical metaphor, as a transplanting followed by some kind of engrafting to the new local conditions. This is distinct from the familiar American myth of a transformative sea passage—that the Englishman’s eyes and bones “suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange”—for Lawrence lends transformative agency not to the sea but to the earth on its far side. “Uprooted from the native soil, planted in strong aboriginal earth,” the original “English stock” underwent a fundamental change, one effected by the “vital effluence” of the new place, its strange new soil.26 And, as goes this transplanted Englishman, so goes his literary tradition: over the generations following removal to the colonies, English letters underwent a parallel process of becoming, arriving at last at the alien “American art-speech”27 Lawrence finds so weird and wonderful. While it is difficult to imagine another critic who would walk the path from corn to culture with as much panache as Lawrence, the abiding question and the botanical tropology are just as surely the governing terms of Macy’s account in The Spirit of American Literature. From his opening assertion that American literature is a “branch” of English literature, Macy implicitly figures literary descent as a family tree.28 According to the terms of the metaphor, the limbs of British culture may stretch outward over borders and across oceans, to the far reaches of the empire, but those branches remain always connected to the trunk from which they spring. Similarly, the image of a root system lurks beneath Macy’s laments that the American writer has not yet “struck deep into American life” and that “American literature . . . has too little savour of the soil.”29 His readings of individual authors everywhere bear out this insistence that the original stock, British literature, proves stronger than the distinguishing force of local soil. So, for example: “California did not ‘produce’ Bret Harte; the

PAGE 186

Coda

187

power of Dickens was greater than that of the Sierras and the Golden Gate.”30 In other words, it was the shaping lineage of the anglophone tradition, and no regional particularity, that left its most enduring mark on (we had thought) our quintessential California writer. If we were to put all this in oenological terms: varietal trumps terroir. All of this leads Macy to the polar opposite of Lawrence’s position that geography overwhelms descent, and that by this axiom, the New World has produced a culture fundamentally alien to the Old.31 Yet the important point is that both arguments are conducted through the metaphor of transplantation; one critic simply emphasizes the original plant, while the other emphasizes the new soil in which it was replanted.

* * * Stock and soil: I would argue that these are still the underlying concepts (though not always, of course, the literal terms) that mediate the question of difference-in-repetition central to this book: Is American literature best described as English literature with an American passport, or as a “native” production of the American scene? Which is determinative, stock or soil, varietal or terroir? As I argued in the book’s introduction, these two seemingly incommensurable origin stories for anglophone American culture— either as an allochthonous corpus of Old World learning and letters that has been transferred to the New World, or as an autochthonous growth from American earth—in fact tended to mingle and mix in the late eighteenth century. Their coexistence and collaboration may seem strange in logical terms, but the simple fact is that these are not simply opposed positions or methodological paradigms; they are the parts of a dialectic that have defined U.S. literature from its first articulation as a cultural object. The intrinsic ambivalence of the figure of transplantation, then, may well be one reason for its durability as a symbol of cisatlantic culture. The trope of the transplant can lean in either direction, depending on where one places the emphasis. Thus, Macy’s antiexceptionalist critical narrative emphasizes the original stock—American literature is merely a “branch of English literature”32 —as a way of lending greater rhetorical weight to the realities of cultural foreign debt. Exceptionalist arguments such as Lawrence’s, on the other hand, tend to emphasize the strangeness of the new soil in their bid for uniqueness via indigeneity.

PAGE 187

188

Coda

Now Lawrence may have been out of step with his immediate contemporaries in this emphasis, but in another sense, he was merely drawing on older tropes of autochthony intrinsic in the American literary tradition in which he had immersed himself as he worked on Studies. I have focused above on the eighteenth-century articulations of this logic, but it also had powerful nineteenth-century iterations. “Out of the soil of New England he sprang,” Henry James wrote of Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1879, thus invoking one of the most reliable myths in American literary history, that of the autochthon—he who is sprung from the earth itself.33 Whitman, in a sense performing this same conceptual operation on his own behalf, characterized his Leaves of Grass as the “autochthonic record and expression . . . of the soul and evolution of America,”34 a claim bolstered both by the poem’s formal gestures toward organicism and the strategy of lifelong revision that made the work itself seem to partake of life, of growth. In the end, such literary gestures don’t really convince us, perhaps, to place unquestioning faith in the hocus-pocus of autochthony and blind ourselves to the cultural realities of allochthony and diaspora. But they provide us with a conceptual framework for mediating the basic cultural dialectic endemic to settler exceptionalism—which always, in effect, must begin with something borrowed and arrive, somehow, at something new. In the preceding chapters, “style” has been my predominant term for this kind of cultural repackaging, because I think it accurately describes, without resorting to metaphor, the process of adoption and adaptation as a specifically linguistic and literary act. Style, I have argued, is the register of the “original imitation.” It makes it possible to represent, to choose but one example, the “Romance”—a literary mode with obviously European roots—as if it were somehow a native species of prose fiction. And, as I have emphasized throughout, specific generic problems like this one have greater resonance in part because they also gesture to a larger cultural problem of foreign debt. “Style” thus represents a kind of literary resolution to the cultural problem of the anglophone cisatlantic: how to render a settler culture in its own terms when it is clearly entirely derivative of imported elements. The trope of “soil” performs many of the same conceptual functions I have here ascribed to style, but it has certain advantages that term lacks. By adopting a naturalist framework for thinking about literature, “soil” tells a particularly effective story about how a transplanted culture had been bedded out to unaccustomed earth, shot down roots, and somehow become sui generis after the fact. The notion of soil thus hints at the

PAGE 188

Coda

189

transformation of an allochthon into an autochthon, or more precisely, the dialectical production of a hybrid third category—a peculiar kind of illogic that we might call post facto indigeneity, which accounts for my frequent reliance on such internally contradictory formulations as “negative affiliation” or “original imitation.” The problem with “style,” we might say, is that it is too honest; it gives the game away. “American-style literature” does make a vigorous claim to national expression, but it necessarily also reminds us that “Americanness” is a second-order literary property, a peculiar spin on the old metropolitan culture, a metalanguage. We would need, then, to succumb to a particular kind of cultural amnesia in order to begin to believe that this manufactured difference, this originality produced by subtraction, is a truly new thing under the sun. To believe, for example, that “color” is an “American” spelling, rather than an opportunistic borrowing from certain British lexicographers. To believe that the authentic “natural” prose style of a FrancoAmerican farmer is a distinctly “cisatlantic” voice, rather than a complex pastiche of European styles. To believe that the extremities of American topography and the careening prose style that captures it somehow constitutes a “native” literary mode, rather than a canny and almost mechanical application of the Burkean sublime to a prose experiment. To believe, finally, that plainness and sincerity might somehow be national literary characteristics, rather than sentimental artifacts lifted from the very culture that is presumed to have been left behind. The trope of transplantation encourages us to forget just these kinds of debts, by rendering cultural transfer in natural and organic terms, effectively erasing the marks of the cultural labor that transfer actually entails. In short, it passes culture off as nature. Thanks to this critical operation, some of the literary features that post-Revolutionary writers had derived negatively from British literary culture could eventually, by a strange reversal, be represented in positive terms. “American literature,” which had begun its discursive career quite explicitly as a negative emulation of a foreign tradition, thus arrived at a point where it appeared to be self-originating.

PAGE 189

This page intentionally left blank

NOTES

Introduction Note to epigraph: T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (Orlando: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014 [1943]), 59. 1. J. Hector St. John de Cre`vecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America (New York: Penguin Classics, 1986), 49. 2. The Oxford English Dictionary credits Jefferson with the first known combination of the Latin spatial prefix “cis-,” (meaning “on this side of,” as in “cisalpine”) with the Atlantic ocean, in his Notes on the State of Virginia. See “cis-, prefix,” OED Online, September 2016, Oxford University Press. The context of that new usage was Jefferson’s argument with Buffon over whether, as Jefferson puts it, “nature has enlisted herself as a Cis- or Trans-Atlantic partisan” in the sense of making American flora and fauna less vigorous than their European counterparts. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. Frank Shuffelton (New York: Penguin Classics, 1998), 68. On Jefferson’s invocation of cisatlantic/transatlantic, see David Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” in David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, second ed. (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 23–24. 3. See David S. Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997) and “British-American Belles Lettres,” in Sacvan Bercovitch, ed., The Cambridge History of American Literature Volume 1: 1590–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 307–44. 4. See Paul Giles, Atlantic Republic: The American Tradition in English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 5. See Lawrence Buell, The Dream of the Great American Novel (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), 10. 6. See William C. Spengemann, A Mirror for Americanists: Reflections on the Idea of American Literature (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1989). One of the fascinating aspects of Spengemann’s reconsideration of “American literature” as an object of study is its radical questioning of the assumptions that had animated his own earlier works, such as The Adventurous Muse: The Poetics of American Fiction, 1789–1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). In A Mirror for Americanists, Spengemann narrates this metacritical revision as a kind of conversion experience, awakening from a dogmatic slumber to look around and wonder what everyone, including himself, had agreed to treat as “American literature” and whether that category held up to scrutiny. 7. Scholars have continued to write on traditionally nation-oriented topics, of course, but as Buell has observed, any such project risks irrelevance unless it grapples with “the

PAGE 191

192

Notes to Pages 4–6

challenge [to] anything that smacks of exceptionalist thinking and, in the case of literary studies specifically, to direct critical thinking away from the ‘national’ toward the subnational or the transnational” (Buell, Dream, 15). 8. Timothy Dwight, Greenfield Hill: A Poem in Several Parts (New York: Childs and Swaine, 1794), 8. On the proper categorization of Dwight’s poem as a georgic, see Larry Kutchen, “Timothy Dwight’s Anglo-American Georgic: Greenfield Hill and the Rise of United States Imperialism,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 33 (2000). 9. Charles Brockden Brown, The Rhapsodist, and Other Uncollected Writings, ed. Harry R. Warfel (New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1943), 135. 10. Michael North, Novelty: A History of the New (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 203–4, 205, 31. It is only at the very end of that long cultural history, North argues, that we began to fetishize novelty as ex nihilo creation, and accordingly began to “demand of it those thunderclaps of change” by which we imagine the new breaks with everything prior to itself (204). 11. Herman Melville, The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces 1839–1860, ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma MacDougall, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1996), 247–48. 12. Henry James, Hawthorne (London: Macmillan, 1879), 2. 13. See Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957). William Gilmore Simms had similarly seized on the category of the romance as a literary mode of “loftier origin than the Novel” in The Yemassee: A Romance of Carolina (1835). In an expanded preface to the 1854 edition, Simms went further than Hawthorne, making the explicit claim that this mode was distinctly American in his hands, as certain features of his own “American romance” were “so styled as much of the material could have been furnished by no other country” (Simms, The Yemassee: A Romance of Carolina [Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1994 (1854)], xxix–xxx. Emphasis in original. 14. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1965 [1851]), 1. Not only does Hawthorne himself seem uninterested in the claim that the Romance is a distinctly American mode (a claim Simms makes for his own romances and some critics make on behalf of Hawthorne’s), in his other prefaces he tends to gesture in the opposite direction. The prefaces to The Blithedale Romance and The Marble Faun, for example, explicitly associate the Romance with Europe and lament the fact that American writers are not granted that “certain latitude” provided by the Romantic mode, since they are held to the limiting standard of verisimilitude. My thanks to Russ Sbriglia for helping me to clarify this point. 15. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Michael Moon (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 617. 16. For a range of historical scholarship on the problem of American exceptionalism, see for example Michael Kammen, “The Problem of American Exceptionalism: A Reconsideration,” American Quarterly 45:1 (1993), 1–43; Seymour Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: Norton, 1997); John Murrin, “The Jeffersonian Triumph and American Exceptionalism,” Journal of the Early Republic 20:1 (2000), 1–25; and Godfrey Hodgson, The Myth of American Exceptionalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). More theoretically inclined work of late has drawn on the work of Giorgio Agamben. See Giorgio Agamben, The State of Exception (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2006), and Donald Pease, The New American Exceptionalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

PAGE 192

Notes to Pages 6–7

193

17. See Richard Poirier, A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985 [1966]). I attach Michel Foucault’s notion of “heterotopia” to Poirier’s argument here—and to D. H. Lawrence’s just below—because I believe the term illuminates the elements of geocultural fantasy at work in these literary critical accounts. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994 [1966]), xviii. I should also note that my overall argument in this book shares an obvious connection with Poirier’s account. Like Poirier, I am concerned with the presence within the American literary tradition of a “dialectical struggle” having to do with “the fight for literary as well as political independence from Europe” (ix–xx). Also like Poirier, who traces “theories of literary and stylistic independence, articulated if not originated by Emerson” (27), I locate the site of this phenomenon at the level of literary “style.” But from that similar starting point, I make several fundamental departures. First, I see this working-out at the level of style beginning long before Emerson, in the last decades of the eighteenth century. Second, “style” in the sense of these post-Revolutionary writers was not an individual signature, but a collective and a national style. For Poirier’s mid-nineteenthcentury authors, he makes clear, the notion of expressing an American national style would be a “prison” for the artist (21–22); the whole thrust of style is the “defiance of convention” (27). Third, I emphasize that this national style was also a notional one, which is to say, it was “American” in assertion more than in substance. The very features supposed to mark cisatlantic writing as distinctive, in my account, were manifestly borrowed from transatlantic literary culture. In order to contend with this contradiction and to mask it, U.S. literary culture aimed to solve the problem by abjecting or negating aspects of transatlantic literary style in order to lay claim to cisatlantic distinction. The cultural dialectic I see operating here was thus more specifically a “negative dialectic” which yielded as a final term a literary culture built on a set of binary oppositions to the culture from which it was expressly derived. In this way, emulation was at once both avowed and disavowed. 18. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 168. The passage I cite here is from an early version of “The Spirit of Place,” first published in the English Review in 1918. I will return to Lawrence’s critical account in the book’s coda. 19. Even to call them “borrowed” forms is, strictly speaking, to capitulate to an assumption I question here, for it presumes that these authors thought about form in the same kind of national terms we do. As I discuss below, Leonard Tennenhouse has argued to the contrary that early U.S. writers understood themselves to be writing English literature outside of England. 20. This particular concept is well-covered ground in scholarship on neoclassical or Augustan literature in the European context, but it bears emphasis here because we are accustomed to locating the claims of American literary exceptionalism in later periods in which largely Romantic and post-Kantian aesthetic assumptions prevailed. For one seminal discussion of the transition from neoclassical to Romantic aesthetics, see M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953). For a more general account of the concept of genius and its changes over time, see Darrin M. McMahon, Divine Fury: A History of Genius (New York: Basic Books, 2013). For a general historical overview of the history of imitation as an aesthetic concept, see Matthew Potolsky, Mimesis (New York: Routledge, 2006). Finally, for a rather more broad-ranging discussion of the cultural dynamics of imitation that also engages the subject of style in relation to that question, see Marcus Boon, In

PAGE 193

194

Notes to Pages 7–11

Praise of Copying (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010). Recent work on U.S. literature in the Early Republic has begun to emphasize the importance of neoclassical aesthetic assumptions, rather than reflexively looking for a Romantic or “proto-Romantic” literary origin point. See for example William Huntting Howell, Against Self-Reliance: The Arts of Dependence in the Early United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); Eric Slauter, The State as Work of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 180–203. It is true that the eighteenth-century critical and philosophical works on which I largely focus here are those associated with what is often termed a proto-Romantic strain, but to describe it that way is already to render it a teleological necessity. I will simply situate them in the eighteenth-century currents from which they emerged, rather than orienting them toward their later “fulfillments.” To the extent that literary history has tended to cast the early national period as the inert and derivative backdrop to the drama of our great tradition, one can say that it has also ratified the victory of a romantic over a neoclassical aesthetic. This also suggests more broadly that the prestige of a particular type of literary exceptionalism—characterized by claims of individuality, uniqueness, and radical alterity—is linked to the dominance of a certain reflexive romanticism in American literary scholarship itself. 21. Leonard Tennenhouse, The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750–1850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 128, cf. 18. 22. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” Essays (Boston: J. Munroe, 1841), 68. 23. Lawrence, Studies, 15. 24. Terence Martin, Parables of Possibility: The American Need for Beginnings (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), x. 25. Ibid., 47–48. 26. Ibid., 6. 27. Noah Webster, Dissertations on the English Language, With Notes Historical and Critical, To Which is Added, By Way of Appendix, An Essay on a Reformed Mode of Spelling (Boston: Isaiah Thomas, 1789), 397–98. 28. Ibid., 397. Emphasis in original. 29. Ibid. 30. This paradoxical way of asserting American literary novelty has followed it down into the twentieth-century critical tradition most committed to the exceptionalist premise: “It is tempting to insist . . . we are merely a branch of Western culture,” wrote Leslie Fiedler, “and that there is no ‘American novel,’ only local variants of standard European kinds of fiction: American sentimental, American gothic, American historical romance, etc. Certainly no single sub-genre of the novel was invented in the United States. Yet the peculiarities of our variants seem more interesting and important than their resemblances to the parent forms.” Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, rev. ed. (Champaign, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1966), 24. Fiedler even explicitly structured his argument around this logic; the first part of the book, entitled “Prototypes and Early Adaptations,” pairs European and American versions of different subgenres. He then linked this prototype/adaptation language to the trope of “soil” to explain how a transplanted old-world stock can emerge as a new-world growth: “It is necessary, in understanding the fate of the American novel, to understand what European prototypes were available when American literature began, as well as which ones flourished and which ones disappeared on our soil” (ibid., 31). The metaphor, as well as the whole conceptual gesture—to begin with an acknowledgment of literary derivation, and then to

PAGE 194

Notes to Pages 11–13

195

produce an assertion of novelty out of it—was essentially a repetition of a late eighteenthcentury literary argument. 31. See Amanda Emerson, “From Equivalence to Equity: The Management of an American Myth,” differences 14 (2003), 78–105, and Georg Simmel, Conflict and the Web of Group Affiliations, trans. Kurt H. Wolff and Reinhard Bendix (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1955 [1908]). 32. Christopher Hanlon makes a comparable argument about a later (antebellum) historical context, in relation to Emerson’s 1856 work, English Traits. Critics like Dana Phillips, Hanlon argues, emphasize “the sense in which [Emerson’s] examination of the English is ultimately geared toward the affirmation of a certain American bent Emerson imagines to find its roots in England.” But, Hanlon adds, “Emerson doesn’t simply shore up this American character as essentially and unproblematically English.” He also engages in the cultural project Werner Sollors has called the “process of ethnic dissociation” in the service of U.S. national formation. See Christopher Hanlon, America’s England: Antebellum Literature and Atlantic Sectionalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 21–22. 33. Martin, Parables of Possibility, 49. 34. As will be clear, moreover, my purpose is not to restage the familiar literary-historical argument about “revolutionary” literature and the role of culture in the consolidation of political sovereignty and nation formation. See for example Benjamin T. Spencer, The Quest for Nationality: An American Literary Campaign (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1957); Emory Elliott, Revolutionary Writers: Literature and Authority in the New Republic, 1725–1810 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); and Larzer Ziff, Writing in the New Nation: Prose, Print, and Politics in the Early United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). 35. Bryce Traister makes this point particularly well in “The Object of Study, or, Are We Being Transnational Yet?” Journal of Transnational American Studies 2:1 (January 2010), 1–28. 36. “Definitive Treaty of Peace, signed at Paris September 8, 1783,” in Treaties and Other International Acts of the United States of America, Vol. 2, 1776–1818, ed. Hunter Miller (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1931), 151–57. 37. Ibid., 152. 38. Ibid., 151. 39. Ibid.; Immanuel Kant, “Toward Perpetual Peace,” in Practical Philosophy, trans. M. J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 [1795]), 311–52. 40. The notion of the “governing statement” as the “root” of the “tree of derivation of a discourse” is from Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 147, though my usage of the term here plays on that of Houston Baker, who adapted the concepts of discourse, archaeology, and the “governing statement” to literary history; see his “Figurations for a New American Literary History: Archaeology, Ideology, and Afro-American Discourse,” in Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 15–63. 41. While my project is in closest dialogue with the scholarship on the British/American axis of transatlantic cultural and literary relations referenced just below, it must be said that other wings of the “transnational turn” more radically reorganize the cultural field formerly oriented around national literatures. With regard to the American continent, a formerly nation-centered literary field has been challenged by “hemispheric” American studies. For

PAGE 195

196

Notes to Pages 13–14

one representative collection, see Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine, eds., Hemispheric American Studies (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008). For examples of the hemispheric remapping of “U.S. literature” see Anna Brickhouse, Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), and Rachel Adams, Continental Divides: Remapping the Cultures of North America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Hemispheric work on colonial American literature includes Ralph Bauer, The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), and Anna Brickhouse, The Unsettlement of America: Translation, Interpretation, and the Story of Don Luis de Velasco, 1560–1945 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Expanding the terrain of the national-literary along a different spatial axis than the hemispheric, the “Atlantic” paradigm shifts the frame of reference from the national culture to what Joseph Roach terms an “oceanic interculture” as the model for a literary history. For an excellent recent overview of the Atlantic literary history, see Eric Slauter, “History, Literature, and the Atlantic World,” Early American Literature 43:1 (2008), and its responses in a forum jointly published in Early American Literature and the William and Mary Quarterly. See also Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 5; Laura Doyle, Freedom’s Empire. Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Stephen Shapiro, The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel: Reading the Atlantic World-System (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009); Elizabeth Dillon, New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649–1849 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). Finally, recent “planetary” literary paradigms expand the scope even more dramatically, as scholars comprehend a cultural terrain that used to be divided into distinct national literatures under the concept of “world literature.” See for example Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (Jan.–Feb. 2000), 54–68; Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2004); Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Caroline Levander, Where Is American Literature? (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013); Paul Giles, The Global Remapping of American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 42. For a range of recent work focused on British-American transatlantic cultural relations, see Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Paul Giles, Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730–1860 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); Paul Giles, Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); Giles, Atlantic Republic; Meredith McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Elisa Tamarkin, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Tennenhouse, Importance of Feeling English; Edward Cahill, Liberty of the Imagination: Aesthetic Theory, Literary Form, and Politics in the Early United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Jennifer Clark, The American Idea of England, 1776–1840: Transatlantic Writing (London: Routledge, 2016 [2013]). See also the Atlantic literary scholarship referenced in the preceding note. 43. See for example T. H. Breen, “An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690–1776,” Journal of British Studies 25:4 (1986), 467–99; John Murrin, “A Roof

PAGE 196

Notes to Pages 14–15

197

Without Walls: The Dilemma of American National Identity,” in Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity, ed. Richard Beeman, Stephen Botein, and Edward C. Carter II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of American History and Culture, 1987), 333–48; Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Knopf, 1992). Recent works in this vein include Mark Hulliung, The Social Contract in America: From the Revolution to the Present Age (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2007); Kariann Akemi Yokota, Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 44. Murrin, “A Roof Without Walls,” 340. 45. Ibid. 46. Jay Fliegelman explores the parental metaphors animating revolutionary politics in Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 47. See especially Tennenhouse’s first chapter, “Diaspora and Empire,” in which he explains the diasporic model (Importance of Feeling English, 1–18). In theorizing early American literature as a problem of “writing English in America” (19–42), shaped by the difficulty of replicating that culture far from its point of origin, Tennenhouse is also in effect interested in (to put it in Moretti’s terms) the resistance of local materials to foreign forms—though they can no longer be conceived as “foreign” in the same way, according to the diasporic model. One of the most surprising implications of Tennenhouse’s argument is thus that in failing to produce a perfect simulacrum of that literary culture, a distinct Anglo-American literary tradition did eventually come into being. 48. Tennenhouse’s The Importance of Feeling English had come out the previous year while Tamarkin’s Anglophilia was in press. 49. See Philip Gould, Writing the Rebellion: Loyalists and the Literature of Politics in British America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Edward Larkin, The American School of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 51–79. 50. This shorthand comparison should not be taken to imply that these literary scholars actually constitute a coherent “Anglicization” school of literary history. Larkin, it should be noted, elsewhere articulates a critique of “Anglicization” as still indebted to a national model where he wants to reanimate the (more historically accurate) model of empire. See Edward Larkin, “Nation and Empire in the Early U.S.,” American Literary History 22:3 (2010), 501–26. 51. It is certainly worth emphasizing that, even in the scholarship most radically committed to a literary archive structured in terms of the world rather than the nation, national literary contexts never simply disappear. Exemplary in this respect is Franco Moretti’s recent articulation of a “world literature” methodology, spearheaded by the enormously influential “Conjectures on World Literature.” Though its most newsworthy gesture is its call for a “distant reading,” the essay’s conceptual core is the recruitment of world-systems theory in order to rethink literary relations on the model of global economy. Insofar as this approach emphasizes the movements of forms across cultural lines rather than the “autonomous development” of distinct national cultures (58), it is meant to rub “against the grain of national

PAGE 197

198

Notes to Pages 16–18

historiography” (61). But as the very terms of this claim also make clear, the nation retains a critical operational function in Moretti’s global paradigm; formal translation is constituted in the transactions between literary cultures, those large unities still conceived in essentially national terms. “No matter what the object of analysis is,” Moretti emphasizes, “there will always be a point where the study of world literature must yield to the specialist of the national literature, in a sort of cosmic and inevitable division of labour” (66). See also Moretti’s earlier work, An Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1998), in which he began to develop his account of literary adaptation, and the later continuation of that inquiry in Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London: Verso, 2005). 52. Particularly symptomatic here is the fact that there is, strictly speaking, no suitable terminological alternative. With no exclusive adjectival form of “United States,” standard usage virtually enforces the metonymic substitution of “American literature” for what we cannot really nominate “United States literature.” Thus, in this work I have had to make peace with the inelegant and paragrammatical phrasing “U.S. literature” simply as a way of clarifying the reality of the cultural objects I am discussing. When I refer to “American literature,” then, I do so with the awareness that I am referring less to that set of cultural objects than to the manner in which they wrapped themselves in the mantle of Americanness. 53. Roach, Cities of the Dead, 42. 54. Cultural anthropologists Henri J. M. Claessen and Jarich G. Oosten, in their conclusion to a comparative study of ideologies of early states and kingdoms (European, precolonial West African, early continental Southeast Asian, Mesoamerican, and Polynesian), remark on the oscillation between these different myths of rule. Claessen and Oosten, eds., Ideology and the Formation of Early States (New York: E. J. Brill, 1996), 386. Because of the way they link issues of legitimacy and power to the question of indigeneity and foreignness, the operation of these concepts has also been explored in contemporary, often postcolonial, contexts. See for example Bambi Ceuppens and Peter Geschiere, “Autochthony: Local or Global? New Modes in the Struggle over Citizenship and Belonging in Africa and Europe,” Annual Review of Anthropology 34 (October 2005), 385–407. See also Dvora Yanowa and Marleen van der Haar, “People Out of Place: Allochthony and Autochthony in the Netherlands’ Identity Discourse,” Journal of International Relations and Development 16 (2013), 227–61. 55. “Surprising,” perhaps only because of the irresistibility of binary thinking, even when we know better. Roach also points out that these opposed cultural logics often “coexist . . . within the same tradition” (Cities of the Dead, 42). And Claessen and Oosten specify in the anthropological context that “the two aspects of allochthony and autochthony” “may both be valorized” and “may also be combined.” They give the example of “the case of Aeneas, the king of Trojans, who settles in Italy, marries the daughter of the local king, and is transformed into an indigenous god (Ioves indiges) after his death” (386). This notion of a post-facto indigeneity—the transformation of an allochthon into an autochthon, or more precisely, the dialectical production of a hybrid third category—is of utmost significance to the cultural formation I am investigating. 56. Roberto Schwarz, quoted in Moretti, “Conjectures,” 56. See also Roberto Schwarz, “The Importing of the Novel to Brazil and Its Contradictions in the Work of Roberto Alencar,” in Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture (London: Verso, 1992), 50. 57. Moretti, “Conjectures,” 56. 58. Ibid., 60–61.

PAGE 198

Notes to Pages 18–20

199

59. Ibid., 58. 60. Ibid., 60. 61. Webster, Dissertations, 179. 62. Stephen Barney et al., eds., The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 192. 63. As I will demonstrate in Chapter 1, however, this is only part of the story, for Webster also acknowledged that until this national language existed, the new “country” would not yet qualify as “national” in the proper sense. His plan, in this sense, was an attempt to intervene in the chicken/egg problem of origins by nationalizing an already existing language. There was no real parallel to this problem in Isidore of Seville’s clear causal sequence. 64. Quoted in H.L Mencken, The American Language (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012 [1919]), 28. A century and a half later, T. S. Eliot threw cold water on the proposition that “English and American” might yet be considered “different languages”: “The differences are no greater than between English as spoken in England and as spoken in Ireland, and negligible compared to the difference between English and Lowland Scots.” See T. S. Eliot, “American Literature and the American Language,” Sewanee Review, 74:1 (Winter 1966), 1–20. Eliot lampooned a recent work that styled itself a dictionary “of the American language”: “Perhaps I am unconsciously bi-lingual, so that whichever language I hear or read seems to me my own; but certainly the vast majority of the words in this dictionary are words belonging to both America and England, and having the same meaning in both. And the definitions seemed to me to be written in English too” (4). As for whether, at some point in the future, such a “transformation . . . of English into two distinct languages on the two sides of the Atlantic [is] likely to take place” (8), Eliot also preached caution in the face of such patriotic fantasies. He diagnosed H. L. Mencken’s The American Language (first published in 1919), for example, as “a mistaken assimilation of language to politics. Such prophets seem to be issuing a kind of linguistic Declaration of Independence, an act of emancipation of American from English. But these patriotic spirits may be overlooking the other side of the picture” (Eliot, 8–9). 65. Donald Denoon, Settler Capitalism: The Dynamics of Dependent Development in the Southern Hemisphere (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). The quotation is from Michael Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (New York: Verso, 2004), 207. Denning’s discussion of settler colonialism draws on Denoon’s earlier account, which does not treat the U.S. case but provides a range of comparative examples, juxtaposing the economic and political histories of six settler societies—Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay—and identifying a mode of economic production common to all, which he designates “settler capitalism” (206–8). 66. Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds, 207. For Denning, Denoon, and other Marxist political and cultural historians, the core of exceptionalist ideology is a particular form of class mystification: across these colonial contexts, we find creole elites advancing the notion that the settler nation is a classless society abounding in unique opportunity and essentially free of the social-economic divisions plaguing the metropole (Denoon, Settler Capitalism 225, 227). This ideology derived in part from the fact that “permanent class divisions had no fixed place in the settler societies,” but primarily from the settler governments’ ideological interests in deemphasizing class division and emphasizing “opportunities for personal advancement” (227). That class fantasy certainly has significant points of connection to the ideologies of American literary history—as with the old critical commonplace that the novel,

PAGE 199

200

Notes to Pages 20–25

class-bound in its European form, could not flourish in the U.S. without some kind of fundamental mutation to its formal DNA, or the related axiom that the U.S. novel substituted race for class. On this class/race logic, see for example Nancy Armstrong, “Why Daughters Die: The Racial Logic of American Sentimentalism,” Yale Journal of Criticism 7:2 (1994), 1–24. 67. Webster, Dissertations, 35. 68. Complicating this etymology is the fact that, though the English word is derived from stilus, the more typical term for style in Latin rhetorical treatises (and throughout the history of rhetoric) is elocutio. See John Guillory, “Mercury’s Words: The End of Rhetoric and the Beginning of Prose,” Representations 138:1 (2017), 74–75. This is not just a curious etymological fact; it has crucial implications for any attempt to think the genealogy of the concept, as opposed simply to the history of the word. 69. On the more familiar concept of individual style, see C. Altieri, “Style as the Man: From Aesthetics to Speculative Philosophy,” in Richard Shusterman, ed., Analytic Aesthetics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). See also Altieri, “Personal Style as Articulate Intentionality,” in C. Van Eck, J. McAllister, and R. van de Vall, eds., The Question of Style in Philosophy and the Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Also Altieri’s “Style,” in Richard Eldridge, ed., Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 420–41. Altieri argues that World War II marks the historical moment when an emphasis on larger, more collective conceptions of style gave way to an emphasis on what was purely individual in a work of art: “In all the relevant disciplines, theory of style after the Second World War had as its first priority to establish significance for the artists’ individual manners of making meaningful work” (422). 70. On Anglo-American adoptions and adaptations of classical rhetoric and the role of eloquence in U.S. nation formation, see for example Sandra Gustafson, Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), and Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). See also Christopher Looby, Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). On the more general role of the classics and the status of ancient Greece and Rome as cultural markers in the United States, see for example Meyer Reinhold, Classic Americana: The Greek and Roman Heritage in the United States (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1984); Carl Richard, The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994); and William Vance, America’s Rome, Volume 1, Classical Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). 71. Quintilian, The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, trans. Harold Butler (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), 195. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid., 195, 197. 74. Ibid., 197. 75. Ibid., 195. 76. Erich Gruen historically locates Rome’s “encounter . . . with the legacy of the Greek East” in the third and second centuries BCE, when Roman elites began to feel newly “compelled to articulate national values and to shape a distinctive character for their own corporate persona” and, by so doing, to “establish [Rome’s] place in the cultural world of the Mediterranean.” Erich S. Gruen, Culture and National Identity in Republican Rome (Ithaca: Cornell

PAGE 200

Notes to Pages 25–27

201

University Press, 1992), 1. See also Thomas N. Habinek, The Politics of Latin Literature: Writing, Identity, and Empire in Ancient Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); William Dominik, Roman Eloquence, Rhetoric in Society and Literature (London: Routledge, 1997). 77. Elaine Fantham, “The Growth of Literature and Criticism at Rome,” in George A. Kennedy, ed., The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 1: Classical Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 220. 78. Gruen, Culture and National Identity, 2. 79. Ibid., 2. 80. Ibid. 81. As Gruen points out, for example, the Roman nobiles who “projected themselves as custodians of the nation’s principles [and] champions of its characteristic virtues” were the very same persons “most drawn to Greek literary achievements” (Culture and National Identity, 1–2). 82. As Thomas N. Habinek points out, for example: “The social milieu from which Latin literature emerged and in the interests of which it intervened was that of the elite sector of a traditional aristocratic empire. Many of the characteristics of Latin literature can be attributed to its production by and for an elite that sought to maintain and expand its dominance over other sectors of the population through reference to an authorizing past” (Politics of Latin Literature, 3). Though he makes this point in an unrelated context, it contains a more nuanced explanation for why these elites could never simply abject Greek learning—and moreover furnishes an illuminating parallel to how and why eighteenth-century Anglo-American elites might similarly continue to accentuate the authority of the British heritage even as they claimed to advocate for a distinctly American culture. 83. Gruen, Culture and National Identity, 2–4. 84. Ibid., 2. 85. “The American novel is only finally American,” asserted Leslie Fiedler in a particularly Hegelian turn of argument; “Its appearance is an event in the history of the European spirit— as, indeed, is the very invention of America itself” (Love and Death, 31). 86. Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, trans. Stephen Botterill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 87. Ibid., 2. 88. Ibid., xviii. 89. Ibid., xvi. 90. The observation is David Simpson’s: “It is immediately intelligible to those against whom it is directed and from whom it declares itself disaffiliated. No act of translation is required. The Declaration speaks the language of the tyrant power, opposing from a common linguistic contract the ‘long train of abuses & usurpations’ which that power had so often used the language to implement. At the same time, Jefferson’s draft perhaps signals its common ground with the republican tradition that was thought to have brought about the most precious liberties of the British themselves” (The Politics of American English, 1776–1850 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1986], 19). And in a similar spirit, we might add, Thomas Paine mobilized a self-consciously “plain” English style that his readers would have recognized as “Saxon” in its authenticity and simplicity, in order to claim access to a common sense—or as his original working title had it, a “plain truth”—that had its origins in British tradition, but which, in contemporary Britain itself, had come to be buried beneath layers of cultural

PAGE 201

202

Notes to Pages 27–28

disguise. This stylistic argument, then, is part and parcel of the political idea that the Revolution represented the triumph of “English liberty” and the rescue of this authentic tradition from the corruption and tyranny of contemporary British politics. On Paine’s style, see Robert A. Ferguson, “The Commonalities of Common Sense,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 57:3 (2000), 465–504; Edward Larkin, Thomas Paine and the Literature of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1–24 passim. 91. Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, 41. 92. Ibid., 3–4. 93. Also very evocative of the Dante-Whitman connection is Botterill’s gloss of Dante’s four descriptors for this emergent vernacular: “Dante’s explanations of these unusual adjectives [“illustrious,” “cardinal,” “aulic,” and “curial”] are notable for the frequency with which they draw on the rhetoric of politics, consistently interpreting linguistic issues and aesthetic judgements in essentially political terms. (Both “aulic” and “curial” have an immediate etymological derivation from the names of political institutions [Latin aula and curia], but even the more generic word ‘illustrious’ is explicitly connected by Dante with the honours available to successful politicians rather than with any more obviously poetic conception.) Throughout, the argument intimately connects the idea of the political pre-eminence possessed by a court with that of the poetic supremacy to be enjoyed by the ‘illustrious vernacular’; the best in the one sphere requires, of necessity, the best in the other. . . . Along with the attempt to define the language of the poet, then, goes the desire to establish the language of a nation” (Dante, xxiii–iv). This is strikingly resonant with Whitman’s national literary project in the 1855 preface as well as in his 1871 Democratic Vistas. 94. Joachim Du Bellay, “The Regrets,” with “The Antiquities of Rome,” Three Latin Elegies, and “The Defense and Enrichment of the French Language”: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Richard Helgerson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 326. 95. Ibid. 368–69. 96. Ibid., 369. 97. Ibid., 370. 98. Ibid, 336. 99. On the Renaissance uses of the digestive metaphor and its classical precedents, see George Pigman, “Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance,” Renaissance Quarterly 33:1 (1980), 1–32; Thomas Greene, A Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982); Maggie Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). 100. See Pigman, “Versions of Imitation,” 3–9. 101. If the arboreal or botanical variant of this organic metaphor was, as I shall discuss in the book’s coda, prevalent in Anglo-American letters until the twentieth century, the digestive variant had a fascinating and apt descendant in Oswald de Andrade’s Brazilian poetic Manifesto Antropo´fago (1928). See Oswald de Andrade, “Cannibalist Manifesto,” trans. and introduction by Leslie Bary, Latin American Literary Review 19:38 (1991), 38–47. Andrade effectively begins with the same problem as Noah Webster, which is nothing more nor less than the structural problem of culture in the former settler colony. “Our independence has not yet been proclaimed,” writes de Andrade. “We expelled the [Braganc¸a] dynasty. We must still expel the Bragantine spirit, the decrees and the snuff-box of Maria da Fonte” (47). (This exactly parallels Webster’s argument: “However they may boast of Independence, and the

PAGE 202

Notes to Pages 28–31

203

freedom of their government, yet their opinions are not sufficiently independent; an astonishing respect for the arts and literature of their parent country, and a blind imitation of its manners, are still prevalent among the Americans” [Dissertations, 397–98].) Andrade then argues for a “cannibalism” (antropofagia) of foreign cultural materials. To devour and digest is, here again, neither a wholesale adoption nor a replication of the foreign. It is, instead, an adaptation and incorporation of the best qualities of the foreign (in this case, European) culture into the “native self” (Bary, 36). “Cannibalism alone unites us,” declares the first point of the manifesto. “In this schema,” writes Bary, “Brazilian cultural production becomes both native and cosmopolitan” (Bary, 35). This alerts us to the central paradox of this act of brasileiro self-definition: national originality stems from the inevitability of cultural debt; the texture of the national culture is formed by this orientation toward the other. Brazilian culture is in this sense governed by what de Andrade calls the “law of the cannibal”: “I am only concerned with what is not mine.” At the same time, however, the cannibalism metaphor makes clear that the borrowed culture is going to be changed fundamentally by its incorporation into cultura brasileira. At another point, he uses Freud’s opposition of totem and taboo to make the same point: “The permanent contradiction between Man and his Taboo . . . Cannibalism. Absorption of the sacred enemy. To transform him into a totem” (43). 102. Du Bellay, “The Regrets,” 328. 103. See Pigman, “Versions of Imitation,” on the complex nomenclature of indebtedness, and the subtle distinctions between “following,” “imitation,” and “emulation.” 104. Jocelyn Wogan Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans, eds., The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 10. 105. Ibid., 3. 106. Paul Strohm, Chaucer’s Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury (New York: Penguin, 2014), 246. 107. Nicholas Watson, “The Politics of Middle English Writing,” in Wogan-Browne et al., Idea of the Vernacular, 332. 108. Strohm, Chaucer’s Tale, 246. 109. Ibid., xv. 110. Ibid., 9; see also 331–34. 111. Ibid., 3. I am focusing, for reasons of parallelism to the American case, on the composition of new vernacular literature. What is thus not clear from my summary of this medieval material is that much of this discourse about the linguistic resources of English swirled around the problem of translation, in particular, and whether the English vernacular was a medium fully capable of presenting texts written in Latin, Greek, or Hebrew. Many of the vernacular prefaces compiled by Wogan-Browne et al., Idea of the Vernacular, are thus prologues to translated texts. 112. See Wogan-Browne et al., Idea of the Vernacular, 8–9. 113. Ibid., 9–10. 114. Ibid., 10. 115. This is the standard description of the rhetorical function of modesty topoi in ancient rhetoric. See Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. William Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 83–84. 116. Wogan-Browne et al., Idea of the Vernacular, 10.

PAGE 203

204

Notes to Pages 31–40

117. Richard Foster Jones, for example, in The Triumph of the English Language (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1953) tends to take these expressions of self-depreciation and depreciation of English as entirely in earnest as evidence of “something like an inferiority complex on the part of those writing in the vernacular” (27; see also 20, 30). Jones does acknowledge that there is another cultural strain that would find virtue in the lack of eloquence—though he associates it too narrowly perhaps with a Puritan “antirhetorical spirit” (31). 118. Wogan-Browne et al., Idea of the Vernacular, 9. 119. Ibid., 3–4. The “dullness” reference is to David Lawton, “Dullness and the Fifteenth Century,” ELH 54:4 (1987), 761–99. 120. Wogan-Browne et al., Idea of the Vernacular, 10. 121. Ibid., 3. 122. Coleridge, quoted in Mencken, American Language, 28. 123. See Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972). For a trenchant ideological critique of the “vernacular thesis” in American literary history, see Jonathan Arac, “Babel and Vernacular in an Empire of Immigrants: Howells and the Languages of American Fiction,” boundary 2 34:2 (2007), 1–20. For an account of the centrality of “plain style,” see Perry Miller, “An American Language,” in Nature’s Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 208–40 (the quotation above appears on 213). I take up the plain style in greater detail in Chapter 4 below. 124. Webster, Dissertations, 391.

Chapter 1 Note to epigraph: Lindley Murray, English Grammar: Adapted to the Different Classes of Learners (New York: Collins and Perkins, 1809) 274–75. 1. Noah Webster, Dissertations on the English Language, With Notes Historical and Critical, To Which is Added, By Way of Appendix, An Essay on a Reformed Mode of Spelling (Boston: Isaiah Thomas, 1789), 22. 2. David Simpson, The Politics of American English, 1776–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 3. 3. Ibid., 25. 4. Webster, Dissertations, 399. 5. Ibid., 397. 6. Ibid., 391. 7. Ibid., 398. 8. This has been a reliable—indeed, a nearly universal—cliche´ in critical and historical treatments of Noah Webster. For one early twentieth-century example, see H. L. Mencken, The American Language: A Preliminary Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States, Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged (New York: Knopf, 1921), 45–47. For a more recent example, see Jill Lepore, A Is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States (New York: Knopf, 2002). “The new United States,” Lepore writes, “cast off all things British and instead created its own holidays (the Fourth of July, Washington’s birthday), produced its own literature (Cooper, Emerson, and more), invented its own founding moments (including the Pilgrims’ landing at Plymouth Rock), and adopted new, decidedly un-English ancestors, the noble but savage American Indian. To Webster and his supporters, the passion for American distinctiveness naturally extended to language. America could never

PAGE 204

Notes to Pages 40–43

205

be fully independent from England, or fully united as a nation, without its own peculiar but common tongue” (5). 9. Noah Webster, Letters of Noah Webster, ed. Harry Warfel (New York: Library Publishers, 1953), 4. 10. See for example this typical passage: “Now is the time, and this the country, in which we may expect success, in attempting changes favorable to language, science and government. Delay in the plan here proposed, may be fatal. . . . Let us then seize the present moment, and establish a national language, as well as a national government” (Webster, Dissertations, 406). 11. Lepore, A Is for American, 6. 12. Simpson, Politics of American English, 33. 13. For some important scholarship on this basic context of “American language” debates in the 1780s, see Mencken, American Language; Dennis Baron, Grammar and Good Taste: Reforming the American Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982); Simpson, Politics of American English; Michael P. Kramer, Imagining Language in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Lepore, A Is for American. 14. John Witherspoon, The Works of the Rev. John Witherspoon, vol. 4 (Philadelphia: William J. Woodward, 1801), 460. 15. Robert Ross, The American Grammar: or, A Complete Introduction to the English and Latin Languages (Hartford, Conn.: Nathaniel Patten, 1782), and The New American Spelling Book; or A Complete Primer (New Haven, Conn.: Thomas and Samuel Green, 1785. 16. Quoted in John Hurt Fisher, “British and American, Continuity and Divergence,” in John Algeo, ed., Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume 6, English in North America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 61. 17. Allen Walker Read, “American Projects for an Academy to Regulate Speech,” PMLA 51 (1936), 1148. 18. Noah Webster, A Grammatical Institute of the English Language (Hartford: Printed by Hudson and Goodwin, 1783), and The American Spelling Book (Hartford: Printed by Hudson and Goodwin, 1787). 19. Webster, Dissertations, 171. 20. Ibid., 135. 21. Ibid., 18. 22. Ibid., 21. 23. Ibid., 22. 24. Leonard Tennenhouse, The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750–1850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 25. Ibid., 19. Fisher makes a similar point: “John Adams’s 1780 proposal for an American academy to improve and fix the English language is only one item in a movement traced from 1721 to 1925 by Allen Walker Read. This movement was motivated more by the European neoclassical desire to ascertain and refine all language than by any desire to distinguish American from British English. The literati in Boston and Philadelphia were as aware as Swift and Johnson of the variations in eighteenth-century English and of the British failure to establish an academy on the French model to standardize the language. They felt, quite simply, that America could succeed where the mother country had failed, by creating an academy to choose among variations and enforce uniformity in English worldwide” (“British and American,” 61–62).

PAGE 205

206

Notes to Pages 43–48

26. Webster, Dissertations, 21. 27. See Mencken, American Language, 45; Simpson, Politics of American English, 31–32; Lepore, A Is for American 21–22. 28. Simpson, Politics of American English, 32. 29. William Thornton, Cadmus, or, A Treatise on the Elements of Written Language (Philadelphia: R. Aitken and Son, 1793). 30. Franklin’s plan for a phonetic alphabet was first published by Webster in the appendix to Dissertations on the English Language (406–10). 31. Lepore, A Is for American, 31–35. 32. Webster, Dissertations, 406–7. 33. Ibid., 391. 34. Ibid., 391–410. 35. Ibid., 395–96. 36. Jill Lepore’s description of the young Webster, for example, sounds like a description of Johnson: “In his 1783 spelling book, Webster had mocked all proposals ‘to alter the spelling of words, by expunging the superfluous letters.’ He had wanted to standardize and Americanize spelling, not simplify it. . . . Webster didn’t dispute the irregularity of English spelling, only the wisdom of trying to change it” (A Is for American, 31). On the shift in Webster’s thinking circa 1787, see Fisher, “British and American,” 62. 37. Ibid., 32. 38. Mathew Carey, “Remarks on the Ortho¨epy and Orthography of the English Language,” in Philosophy of Common Sense: Practical Rules for the Promotion of Domestic Happiness (Philadelphia: E. L. Carey and A. Hart, 1838), 86. 39. Webster, Dissertations, 20. 40. Ibid., xi. 41. Ibid., xi, 30, 32, 168, 205, 403, 404. 42. Samuel Johnson, “Preface,” A Dictionary of the English Language, vol. 1 (London: Printed by W. Strahan et al., 1755), i. 43. Related to this tendency to “nationalize” Webster’s disagreements with Johnson is the temptation to map the disagreement between the two onto a left/right political binary. Given Johnson’s emphasis on stability and the authority of elite precedents as a bulwark against chaos, we can understand the impulse to connect his lexical project to Tory politics. And given Webster’s cultural-nationalist and even at times revolutionary rhetoric, as I have already mentioned, it is easy to see why some would attempt to accommodate his linguistic project to a more populist model of authority in which all users of the language have equal access to its rules and equal rights to its expertise. But we should proceed very carefully in attempting to reduce these poles in a linguistic debate to clear political positions. As Simpson points out, Webster was a Federalist; we wouldn’t expect him, then, to espouse a “democratic” theory of language that empowered popular usage over and against a centralized authority. Certainly their political predilections must have shaped their theories of language, but my larger point in this chapter is that the divergence in approaches to language were more directly determined by the very different circumstances in which each wrote and the sociolinguistic realities to which each had to address himself. 44. Webster, Dissertations, 404. 45. Samuel Johnson, The Plan of A Dictionary of the English Language (London: Printed for J. and P. Knapton, T. Longman, and T. Shewell, 1747), 12.

PAGE 206

Notes to Pages 48–52

207

46. Ibid., 35. The Lord in question was his patron, Philip Stanhope, fourth Earl of Chesterfield, to whom Johnson addressed the Plan. 47. Johnson, “Preface,” ix. 48. Johnson, Plan, 4. In another 1747 printing of the Plan, apparently from later in the year, the phrase appears as “the English idiom” rather than “our.” The version of the Plan reprinted in the 1825 Oxford edition of The Works of Samuel Johnson agrees with the first edition, which I have followed here. 49. Ibid., 5. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid., 4. Tennenhouse emphasizes this diversity of dialects within English: “In his preface to the Dictionary (1755), Samuel Johnson represents his task as bringing order to a language whose spoken dialects were proliferating along with his nation’s commercial ventures.” I am concerned here with a more fundamental problem of the “impurity” of English itself. The problem of foreign languages is more central to Johnson’s thinking in the earlier Plan than in the preface. 52. Ibid., 15–16. 53. We might note here a small but exceedingly revealing irony in Johnson’s own usage: his phrase “our English idiom” is quite literally at odds with itself, for “idiom” had only recently come into English in the late sixteenth century (via the Middle French idiome, from the Latin idio¯ma, private property); Johnson’s own definition of “idiom” in the 1755 dictionary cites its French and Greek etyma: “I´diom. n.s. [idiome, French; δωμα.] A mode of speaking peculiar to a language or dialect; the particular cast of a tongue; a phrase; phraseology” (1039). 54. Johnson, Plan, 4. 55. Jocelyn Wogan Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans, eds., The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 3. 56. Ibid., xv. 57. Ibid., 9. 58. Johnson, Plan, 14. 59. Wogan-Browne et al., Idea of the Vernacular, 9; see also 331–34. 60. Johnson, Plan, 5–6. Compare this passage from the preface to the 1755 Dictionary: “The words which our authours [sic] have introduced by their knowledge of foreign languages, or ignorance of their own, by vanity or wantonness, by compliance with fashion, or lust of innovation, I have registred [sic] as they occurred, though commonly only to censure them, and warn others against the folly of naturalizing useless foreigners to the injury of the natives” (iv). 61. Johnson, Plan, 6. 62. Ibid., 7. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid., 10. 65. Ibid., 6–7. 66. Ibid., 14. 67. Ibid., 18. 68. Ibid., 19. 69. Johnson, “Preface,” iii.

PAGE 207

208

Notes to Pages 52–57

70. Johnson, Plan, 18–19. 71. Ibid., 19. 72. Johnson, “Preface,” i. 73. Johnson, Plan, 20. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid., 21. 76. Ibid., 31. 77. Ibid., 23. 78. Ibid., 19. 79. Johnson, “Preface,” ii. 80. Ibid. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid. 83. Johnson, Plan, 10. 84. Ibid. 85. Webster, Dissertations, 35. 86. Ibid., 403. 87. Ibid. 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid., 403–4. 90. Ibid., 404. 91. Ibid. 92. Ibid., 391. 93. Ibid. 94. Ibid., 40–60. 95. Ibid., 40. 96. Ibid., 45. 97. Ibid., 46. 98. Ibid., 55. 99. Ibid. 57. As I shall explain in the next section, this competition between the “original” Saxon strain and the later Latin and Norman French overlays or impositions turns out to have crucial implications for Webster’s argument about the fate and state of American English. 100. Ibid., 393. In the appendix to the Dissertations, Webster also gets in a subtle dig at Johnson on this point, when he adds as a further occasion for this hybridization the “predilection of the learned, for words of foreign growth and ancient origin” (391)—a clear signal of where Webster’s argument will ultimately lead, and one of many ways (as I will discuss this in the following section) he will take Johnson’s own observations and turn them back on Johnson himself. 101. Noah Webster, A Collection of Essays and Fugitiv Writings on Moral, Historical, Political, and Literary Subjects (Boston: I. Thomas and E. T. Andrews, 1795), xi. 102. Ibid., 91. 103. Johnson, Plan, 18. 104. In a similar passage from the same section of the Plan: “The syntax of this language is too inconstant to be reduced to rules, and can be only learned by the distinct consideration of particular words as they are used by the best authors” (20). The response to inconsistency,

PAGE 208

Notes to Pages 57–61

209

that is, is not the imposition of a new system—not a remedy—but rather, a “consideration” of past usage. 105. Ibid., 11–12. 106. Webster, Dissertations, 35. 107. Ibid., 78. 108. Johnson, “Preface,” 9. 109. Johnson, Plan, 11. 110. Ibid. 111. Johnson, “Preface,” 8. 112. Ibid. 113. Ibid. 114. Johnson, Plan, 11. 115. Webster, Dissertations, 23, 35. 116. My discussion of early modern spelling reform in the English context is drawn from Vivian Salmon, “Orthography and Punctuation,” in Roger Lass, ed., The Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume 3, 1476–1776 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 13–55. 117. Salmon, “Orthography and Punctuation,” 15. 118. In a historically deeper sense, orthography had been a “problem” for English since the first Christian missionaries began to translate Latin religious texts into Old English: “The problems which the early missionaries encountered in trying to base Old English orthography on the Latin alphabet were never satisfactorily solved, and the results have been with us to the present day; phonemes which occurred in English but not in Latin were not provided, on a permanent basis, with specific and unambiguous graphemes, and efforts at reform made by medieval scribes trained in the French orthographic tradition failed to establish a satisfactory phonemic alphabet either. As a result, there was no consistent, one-to-one relationship between grapheme and phoneme at the beginning of this period; one grapheme could represent more than one phoneme, and vice versa” (Salmon, “Orthography and Punctuation,” 14). 119. John Hart, quoted in Salmon, “Orthography and Punctuation,” 25. 120. Ibid. 121. Ibid., 18. 122. Ibid., 21. 123. Ibid., 20–21. 124. Ibid., 20. 125. Ibid., 32. 126. Mulcaster, quoted in Salmon, “Orthography and Punctuation,” 32. 127. Webster, Dissertations, 405. 128. Mulcaster, quoted in Salmon, “Orthography and Punctuation,” 32–33. 129. See Salmon: “A third attempted improvement by sixteenth-century printers (and also by many of their fifteenth-century predecessors) was to regularise the orthography of words borrowed from medieval French by altering them so as to reflect their supposed Latin etyma. . . . Since Latin itself had developed a regular and standardised spelling system, assimilation of English spelling to the Latin equivalent obviously made for a form of standardisation, at least for those who were educated in the classical languages. At all events, many etymological spellings appeared such as adventure (ME aventur), advice (ME avis), debt (ME dette) and

PAGE 209

210

Notes to Pages 61–65

doubt (ME doute). Many of these etymological spellings are listed by Hart, with disfavour (1955 [1951]: 122). The problem with this ‘improvement’ was that it sometimes led to a greater disparity between sound and script” (“Orthography and Punctuation,” 27–28). 130. Johnson, Plan, 10. 131. Ibid., 11. 132. Webster, Collection of Essays, xi. 133. Webster, Dissertations, 394n. Sir Thomas Smith’s De recta & Emendata Lingvæ Anglicæ Scriptione, Dialogus was begun in the 1540s and published in 1568. Alexander Gil’s Logonomia Anglica was printed in 1619. Charles Butler published his English grammar in 1633. 134. Webster, Collection of Essays, xi. 135. Webster, Dissertations, 404. 136. Ibid., 32. 137. Ibid., xi. 138. Ibid., 400. 139. Ibid. 140. Ibid., 77–78. 141. John Ash, The New And Complete Dictionary of the English Language (London: Edward and Charles Dilly and R. Baldwin, 1775). For references to Ash in the Dissertations, see xi, 78, 159n, 378, 400. 142. Webster, Dissertations, 404. As John Algeo explains more generally: “What are often thought of as Webster’s ‘reforms’ were for the most part spelling variants found on both sides of the Atlantic but popularized in America through Webster’s enterprise and prestige.” Algeo, “External History,” in John Algeo, ed., Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume 6, English in North America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 34. Algeo offers some historical perspective on the specific spelling I have just adduced as an example: “During the seventeenth century, when America was first settled, English spelling was far from standardized. During the eighteenth century, it became relatively stable, but with a number of variations, between which English writers vacillated. They included options like center/centre, honor/honour, magic/magick, paneling/panelling, and realize/realise. In the case of such options, Webster chose the one he thought simpler, more historical, or analogous, and that one generally became the American preference, whereas in many cases British English went in a different direction” (34). 143. Webster, Dissertations, xi. 144. Ibid., 168. 145. Johnson, “Preface,” i. 146. Webster, Dissertations, 168. 147. Ibid., xi. 148. Ibid. 149. Ibid., 35, 24. 150. Ibid., 27. 151. Ibid., 29. 152. See Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 3rd ed., R. Harris, Trans (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company: 1986), 9–10, 15. Webster’s invocation of “the principle of analogy” also has a Johnsonian precedent, but Johnson explicitly argued against seeking regularity in what he called “the analogy of our language”: “To our language may be,

PAGE 210

Notes to Pages 65–67

211

with great justness, applied the observation of Quintilian, that speech was not formed by an analogy sent from heaven. It did not descend to us in a state of uniformity and perfection, but was produced by necessity, and enlarged by accident, and is, therefore, composed of dissimilar parts, thrown together by negligence, by affectation, by learning or by ignorance” (Johnson, Plan, 17). That was precisely why Johnson concluded that proper spelling must be based on precedent rather than on principle. For Webster, who treats the language very much as heaven-sent, Johnson’s position amounts almost to a kind of linguistic heresy, and the linguistic doctrine he promotes as a corrective thus makes “analogy” its watchword. Instead of throwing up our hands as Johnson does, we must resolve to dig until we hit that primordial stratum of the language. If, and only if, the lexicographer finds a pocket of usage where, try as he may, he cannot identify the rule that governs it, he can then make recourse to “authoritative” practice: “Where such principles cannot be found, let us examin [sic] the opinions of the learned, and the practice of the nations which speak the pure English, that we may determine by the weight of authority, the common law of language, those questions which do not come within any established rules” (Dissertations, 78–79). Even when he is reverting to a quasi-Johnsonian arbitration of standards, then, Webster can represent this act as the identification of a linguistic lex communis. This represents a few implicit departures from Johnson’s thinking. First of all, Webster’s phrase “the weight of authority” suggests not a particular author whose usage is deemed the best, but what he elsewhere calls “the general practice of the nation” (Dissertations, 27). Second, Webster proposes to “examin,” not simply copy, “the opinions of the learned.” Third, and most importantly, Webster’s ultimate goal is thereby to (re)discover a primordial linguistic principle, not merely to “fix” a given usage. 153. This is also Simpson’s central insight about Webster; see for example Politics of American English, 24. 154. Webster, Dissertations, 404. 155. See Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 209–10. In a similar way to the concept of “radicalism,” many words changed their significance between this period and ours. “Originality” could signify fidelity to an origin, rather than a refusal of the origin and an orientation toward an unexampled future (Williams 192–93). “Revolution” was a return to, rather than a flight from, a past political state, related to its etymological meaning as a “circular return to origins” (Williams, 226–30). For a historical discussion of the development of concepts of originality and novelty, see also Michael North, Novelty: A History of the New (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 43–47. 156. Webster, Dissertations, 60. 157. Other eighteenth-century figures, besides Johnson, who opposed any systematic attempt at spelling reform included Addison, Steele, Defoe, and Swift, all of whom “objected to making the written language represent exactly the spoken one, because of possible variations in pronunciation” (Salmon, “Orthography and Punctuation,” 46). 158. Roger Lass, ed., The Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume 3, 1476–1776 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1. 159. “Non-insular” in the sense of being removed from the British Isles. As will become clear in the course of my discussion, Webster also advertised the insular nature of America in a different sense—its having been “in the situation of an island” (108n)—in order to argue for its removal from foreign European influences and hence its preservation of the “purity” of the language’s Saxon strain.

PAGE 211

212

Notes to Pages 67–70

160. Most linguistic histories of American English begin in 1607 for exactly this reason. As I will discuss below, however, Webster significantly chooses to focus on the New England colonies and thus tends to date the birth of American English—in its “best” sense, at least— from circa 1629. 161. Johnson, Plan, 30. 162. Ibid., 12, 11. 163. Johnson, “Preface,” v. 164. Ibid., iii. 165. Johnson, quoted in Mencken, American Language, 47. 166. Ibid. 167. Corneille de Pauw, quoted in Henry Steel Commager and Elmo Giordanetti, Was America a Mistake? An Eighteenth-Century Controversy (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1967), 79–80. 168. On theories of creole degeneracy, see the seminal study by Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750–1900, trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973 [1955]), and Commager and Giordanetti, Was America a Mistake?. Recent work on this idea includes Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire, and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2003), 129–68; Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 66–72, 210–33; Jim Egan, “The ‘Long’d-for Aera’ of an ‘Other Race’: Climate Identity and James Grainger’s The Sugar Cane,” Early American Literature 38 (2003), 189–212; Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Culture of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 77–102; Ralph Bauer and Jose´ Antonio Mazzotti, eds., Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Christopher P. Iannini, Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Katy Chiles, Transformable Race: Surprising Metamorphoses in the Literature of Early America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 169. Raynal, quoted in Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. Frank Shuffelton (New York: Penguin Classics, 1998), 69. Whether or not Raynal specifically intended this empirical observation as evidence of the degeneration of homo sapiens in America, his argument was taken up that way and used as a rallying cry by Thomas Jefferson and others who felt it their patriotic duty to counter the thesis of New World diminution. 170. Webster, Dissertations, 288. 171. “This period in England commenced with the age of Queen Elizabeth and ended with the reign of George II. It would have been fortunate for the language, had the stile of writing and the pronunciation of words been fixed, as they flood in the reign of Queen Ann and her successor. Few improvements have been made since that time; but innumerable corruptions in pronunciation have been introduced by Garrick, and in stile, by Johnson, Gibbon and their imitators” (Webster, Dissertations, 30). Cf. Johnson, Plan, 30. 172. Webster, Dissertations, 38. In point of fact, Johnson has a similar account of the construction of the language, albeit with a slightly different evaluation of its implications. “The two languages from which our primitives have been derived are the Roman and Teutonick,” he observes somewhat neutrally—which is to say, without celebrating the latter as the

PAGE 212

Notes to Pages 70–72

213

one “true” source of English and the former as an unwanted foreign imposition (“Preface,” iii). In some sense, Johnson does also want to emphasize the “Teutonick” lineage, which is, according to a long-standing English tradition the valued currency in producing an authentic Englishness. Thus, Johnson does demonstrate some prejudice in favor of the “Teutonick” in seeking to tap into what he calls “the wells of English undefiled, as the pure sources of genuine diction” (“Preface,” vii). And he does lament the fact that “our language, for almost a century, has, by the concurrence of many causes, been gradually departing from its original Teutonick character, and deviating towards a Gallick structure and phraseology, from which it ought to be our endeavour to recal it, by making our ancient volumes the ground-work of stile” (ibid.). But Johnson cannot ultimately commit to that goal, given the fact that he is actively promoting Latinate spellings and unambivalently incorporating Latin and Anglo-French primitives into his etymologies. It is simply not in his lexicographical interests (as it turns out to be in Webster’s) to advertise Anglo-Saxon as the true and only authentic core of the language and all the other elements as corrupt later impositions upon it. 173. John Horne Tooke, Epea Pteroenta, or, The Diversions of Purley (London: J. Johnson, 1786), 368–69. 174. Webster, Dissertations, 61. 175. Other British antiquarians associated with this emphasis on Anglo-Saxon roots included L. D. Nelme and Samuel Pegge. See Simpson, Politics of American English, 89. 176. Webster, Dissertations, 57. 177. Ibid., 56. “The conquest by William, the Norman, in 1066,” Webster explains, “introduced important changes into the language, as well as the government of the English nation. . . . The language of the conquerors, which was a mixture of Latin and Norman, immediately became fashionable at Court, and was used in all legislative and judicial proceedings. It continued to be the polite and law language of the nation about three centuries” (Dissertations, 55). Thus Webster thus establishes that “the Norman French was spoken only by the nobility, who were mostly of Norman extraction, and by the higher orders of men in office, at court, or in the cities” (55–56). 178. Ibid., 56. 179. Ibid., 80. 180. Ibid., 55. 181. See Christopher Hill, “The Norman Yoke,” in Puritanism and Revolution: Studies and Interpretation of the English Revolution of the 17th Century (New York: Schocken Books, 1958), 46–111. The implication is in line with the argument I am making at large here: Webster was taking a political and racial myth that had deep traction in British political thought since the turn of the seventeenth century, and reapplying it to early national U.S. politics. On the racial myth of Anglo-Saxonism, see Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981). On the transatlantic sources of this myth, see Laura Doyle, Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). 182. Webster, Dissertations, 57–58. 183. Simpson, Politics of American English, 69. 184. Webster, Dissertations, 106–7. 185. Ibid., 107. 186. Ibid.

PAGE 213

214

Notes to Pages 72–74

187. Ibid. 188. Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography and Other Writings (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003), 15–18. 189. Webster, Dissertations, 106. 190. See Michael Montgomery, “British and Irish Antecedents,” in John Algeo, ed., Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume 6, English in North America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 80–81. Montgomery draws on the prior work of David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 191. Fisher, “British and American,” 74. Webster makes disdainful reference to “fashionable pronunciation” on several occasions in Dissertations (see for example 134, 142, 146; cf. 118, 126, 158). I find Fisher’s larger point convincing, but I would qualify the claim that Webster defends New England pronunciations specifically. Undoubtedly, he does openly celebrate a New England “mode of speaking” in the broader rhetorical sense I have defined above. But the passage about the “nasal drawl” is not exactly celebratory; and in the larger context of this section of Dissertation III, it should be noted, Webster is in fact identifying some pronouncing “errors” prevalent in New England. 192. Webster, Dissertations, 148. 193. Fisher, “British and American,” 75. 194. John Walker, A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson and T. Cadell, 1781), xiii. See Fisher, “British and American,” 72. 195. Walker, Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, xiii. 196. Ibid., xiv. 197. Webster, Dissertations, 169. 198. Ibid., 25, 26, 148. 199. Webster, Dissertations, 109, 114, 160. 200. Ibid., 149. 201. Ibid., 114, 158, cf. 30, 148, 168. 202. Webster also on several occasions uses the spaces of “court” and “stage” in combination, as in “the court and stage in London” (Dissertations, 169, cf. 26, 114, 148, 179), or “the present pronunciation of the English court and theater” (174). Possibly because of the figure of Sheridan, an actor as well as a promoter of “court” English, these two terms are not only associated in Webster’s usage but somewhat blurred. Thus, for example: “The Authors, who have attempted to give us a standard, make the practice of the court and stage in London the sole criterion of propriety in speaking. An attempt to establish a standard on this foundation is both unjust and idle” (24). 203. Thomas Sheridan, A General Dictionary of the English Language, One Main Object of Which, is to Establish a Plain and Permanent Standard of Pronunciation (London: J. Dodsley, C. Dilly, and J. Wilkie, 1780). 204. Webster, Dissertations, 78, 148–49. 205. “Sheridan, as an improver of the language, stands among the first writers of the British nation, and deservedly. His Lectures on Elocution and on Reading, his Treatises on Education, and for the most part his Rhetorical Grammar, are excellent and almost unexceptionable performances. In these, he encountered practice and prejudices, when they were

PAGE 214

Notes to Pages 74–81

215

found repugnant to obvious rules of propriety. But in his Dictionary he seems to have left his only defensible ground, propriety, in pursuit of that phantom, fashion. He deserted his own principles, as the Reviewers observe, and where he has done this, every rational man should desert his standard” (Webster, Dissertations, 176n). 206. Thomas Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution, Together with Two Dissertations on Language (London: W. Strahan, 1762), 30. 207. Walker, Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, xiv. 208. Sheridan, A Course of Lectures, 246. 209. Ibid., 30. 210. Sheridan, General Dictionary, 3. 211. Ibid. 212. Ibid. 213. Ibid. 214. Webster, Dissertations, 130. 215. Ibid., 135. 216. Ibid. 217. Ibid., 362–63. 218. Ibid., 56. 219. For a fascinating account of how the opposition of Saxon and Norman strains in English culture, in a later period, got mapped onto American sectional divisions, see Christopher Hanlon, America’s England: Antebellum Literature and Atlantic Sectionalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 22ff. 220. Webster, Dissertations, 391. 221. Ibid., 57. 222. Ibid., 384. 223. Ibid., 108n. 224. Ibid. 225. Ibid., 384. 226. The verb entered English in the late fourteenth century from the late Latin sequestra¯re, to remove, separate, or place in safekeeping; from the sixteenth century forward, the English legal sense of “sequester” meant to hold in trust. 227. Webster, Dissertations, 176. 228. Ibid., xi. 229. Ibid., 127–28. 230. Ibid., 124. 231. Ibid., 129–30. 232. Ibid., 179. 233. Ibid. 234. Ibid. 22. 235. Ibid., 45–46. 236. Ibid., 35. 237. Ibid., 18. 238. Lepore, A Is for American, 29, 30. 239. Webster, Dissertations, 21. 240. Ibid., 18.

PAGE 215

216

Notes to Pages 81–88

241. Ibid., 19. 242. Marc Shell, “Babel in America; or, The Politics of Language Diversity in the United States,” Critical Inquiry 20:1 (1993), 105. 243. Ibid., 105–7. 244. Ibid., 103n, 103. 245. Johnson, “Preface,” ix. 246. Webster, Dissertations, 35. 247. Johnson, “Preface,” iii. 248. Ibid., vi. 249. Webster, Dissertations, 396. 250. Carey, “Remarks on . . . Ortho¨epy and Orthography,” 83–84. 251. Johnson did make a distinction between mere “anomalies,” which could be tolerated, and “improprieties,” which must be corrected: “Every language has its anomalies, which, though inconvenient, and in themselves once unnecessary, must be tolerated among the imperfections of human things, and which require only to be registred [sic]; that they may not be increased, and ascertained, that they may not be confounded: but every language has likewise its improprieties and absurdities, which it is the duty of the lexicographer to correct or proscribe” (“Preface,” i). 252. Webster, Dissertations, 22. 253. Johnson, “Preface,” ii. 254. Webster, Dissertations, 393. 255. Ibid., 197. 256. Ibid., 395. 257. Ibid., 397. 258. Ibid. 259. Simpson, Politics of American English, 47.

Chapter 2 Note to epigraphs: “Definitive Treaty of Peace, signed at Paris September 8, 1783,” in Treaties and Other International Acts of the United States of America, Vol. 2, 1776–1818, ed. Hunter Miller (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1931), 151–57. J. Hector St. John de Cre`vecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of EighteenthCentury America, ed. Albert Stone (New York: Penguin 1981), 45. 1. Albert Stone, “Introduction,” in J. Hector St. John de Cre`vecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America, ed. Albert Stone (New York: Penguin 1981), 22. Compare H. C. Rice: “One of the merits of Cre`vecoeur is to have seen, at a moment when most of his fellow Americans had neither the time nor the inclination for literature, the artistic possibilities in certain truly American themes which latter became matter for accomplished works of art” (quoted in Stone, 22). A. W. Plumstead calls Cre`vecoeur “the first in our literature to find this dramatic voice in an imaginative work of power” (quoted in Stone, 23). 2. Lawrence conceived what would become Studies in Classic American Literature as a series of essays on American literature “beginning with Cre`vecoeur” (Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003], xxxiii). I discuss the implications of this cultural irony at length in the book’s coda.

PAGE 216

Notes to Pages 88–90

217

3. Stone, “Introduction,” 7. 4. Ibid. For accounts of what is known of Cre`vecoeur’s biography, see Julia Post Mitchell, St. Jean de Cre`vecoeur (New York: AMS Press, 1966); Gay Wilson Allen and Roger Asselineau, St. John de Cre`vecoeur: The Life of an American Farmer (New York: Viking, 1987); Thomas Philbrick, St. John de Cre`vecoeur (New York: Twayne, 1970). 5. Cre`vecoeur, Letters, 37. 6. Much criticism has finessed or even suppressed Cre`vecoeur’s loyalism; my reading here is enabled by the work of a few recent critics who do not. See for example Dennis Moore, “Introduction: ‘Like the Various Pieces of a Mosaick Work Properly Reunited,’ ” in Dennis D. Moore, ed., More Letters from the American Farmer: An Edition of the Essays in English Left Unpublished by Cre`vecoeur (Athens: University of Georgia University, 1995), xviii, xlix, passim; Bryce Traister, “Criminal Correspondence: Loyalism, Espionage, and Cre`vecoeur,” Early American Literature 37:3 (2002), 469–96; Edward Larkin, The American School of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 51–79. 7. Stone, “Introduction,” 7. 8. Lawrence entitled the first chapter of his Studies in Classic American Literature “The Spirit of Place.” It is worth noting that Stone clearly echoes this phrase of Lawrence’s; he glosses “literature” as “arrangements of affective images embodied in the traditional forms of poetry, fiction, and drama, and expressing the spirit of place” (“Introduction,” 7). 9. For an excellent metacritical synthesis of some recent trends in Cre`vecoeur scholarship, which frames an analysis of the work fascinating in its own right, see Ed White, “Cre`vecoeur in Wyoming,” Early American Literature 43:2 (2008), 379–407. For some of the most astute and interesting accounts of the literary features of Letters and its use of fictional and other imaginative conventions, see especially Grantland Rice, The Transformation of Authorship in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 99–124; Christine Holbo, “Imagination, Commerce, and the Politics of Associationism in Cre`vecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer,” Early American Literature 32:1 (1997), 20–65; Nancy Ruttenburg, Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial of American Authorship (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998); Ralph Bauer, The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 200–240; Elizabeth Hewitt, Correspondence and American Literature, 1770–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 32–39; Eve Tavor Bannet, Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1680–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 275–77. 10. See for example Larkin, American School, 51–79; Christopher Iannini, Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 131–76. 11. Larkin, American School, 45. As Larkin emphasizes, the geopolitical vision of the Letters sees America as “on a continuum with Europe rather than in opposition to it” (53) and understands the “two worlds” as “inextricably bound by networks of kinship and commercial and intellectual exchange” (53–54). The disruption of those relationships, Larkin argues, “is precisely what troubles Farmer James the most about the Revolution” (54). He thus shows how the “idea of local identities engaging in free exchange across space and time was essential to Cre`vecoeur’s cosmopolitan vision” (43) and his conceptualization of a “weak imperial structure,” a version of empire as an alternative to the nation-state (42, 68). Larkin elaborates this last point in more general terms in the book’s first chapter, “Nation and Empire in the Early United States” (15–39).

PAGE 217

218

Notes to Pages 90–94

12. Norman Grabo, “Cre`vecoeur’s American: Beginning the World Anew,” William and Mary Quarterly 48:2 (1991), 160. 13. Robert Ferguson comments of Paine that he earned his founding status entirely through authorship. Robert A. Ferguson, Reading the Early Republic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 87. Paine emigrated to America at the age of thirty-eight; when he wrote Common Sense a year later, he did so as a self-described “Englishman.” Leonard Tennenhouse discusses this phenomenon of Anglo-American cultural identity in relation to his “culturalist view of diaspora.” See Tennenhouse, The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750–1850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 1–18. On similar historiographical problems in relation to Franklin’as biography, see H. W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Anchor Books, 2000); Gordon Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Penguin, 2004). 14. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. Frank Shuffelton (New York: Penguin Classics, 1998), 2. 15. Quoted in Shuffelton, “Introduction,” in Jefferson, Notes, vii. See Robert Ferguson, “ ‘Mysterious Obligation’: Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia,” American Literature 52:3 (1980), 381–406. Ferguson’s essay takes Jefferson’s fascinating phrase as its title, but his overall argument doesn’t emphasize the aspect of the phrase that interests me most here, namely, the calling forth of a national/local account by a foreigner’s request. The phrase thus perfectly designates the paradoxical way in which an exceptionalist posture can be voiced from the perspective of Europe on behalf of America. 16. Cre`vecoeur, Letters, 37. 17. Ibid., 41–48 passim. 18. Ibid., 39. 19. Jefferson, Notes, 2. 20. Philbrick, St. John de Cre`vecoeur, 75. 21. Cre`vecoeur, Letters, 49. 22. Ibid. 23. Philbrick, St. John de Cre`vecoeur, 75. 24. Gilbert Imlay, A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America: Containing a Succinct Account of Its Soil, Climate, Natural History, Population, Agriculture, Manners, and Customs . . . In a Series of Letters to a Friend in England (London: J. Debrett, 1792). 25. Thomas Cooper, Some Information Respecting America (London: J. Johnson, 1794), 1. On the proliferation and popularity of letter-writing manuals in post-Revolutionary America, see Hewitt, Correspondence, 11. 26. Charles Jared Ingersoll, Inchiquin: The Jesuit’s Letters (New York: I. Riley, 1810). 27. “Definitive Treaty of Peace, signed at Paris September 8, 1783,” in Treaties and Other International Acts of the United States of America, Volume 2, 1776–1818, ed. Hunter Miller (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1931), 151. 28. Many commentators on Cre`vecoeur have noted the valences of the term “correspondence” as a reference both to the epistolary form and to some of the philosophical concepts and political contexts that made letter writing such a resonant form in eighteenth-century print culture. See for example Hewitt, Correspondence; Bannet, Empire of Letters; Traister, “Criminal Correspondence.”

PAGE 218

Notes to Pages 94–98

219

29. Larkin makes a similar point, though in slightly different terms (American School, 65, 110). For other work on transatlantic epistolary form in relation to other eighteenth-century texts and figures, see Chiara Cillerai, “ ‘A Continual and Almost Exclusive Correspondence’: Philip Mazzei’s Transatlantic Citizenship,” in Sharon M. Harris, ed., Letters and Cultural Transformations in the United States, 1760–1860 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016 [2009]), 17–34; and Eve Tavor Bannet, “Letters on the Use of Letters in Narratives: Catharine Macaulay, Susannah Rowson, and the Warren-Adams Correspondence,” in Harris, Letters and Cultural Transformations, 35–56. 30. Cre`vecoeur, Letters, 37. 31. Ibid., 38. 32. Jefferson, Notes, 5. 33. This is one of several instances of Jefferson’s account reordering (or in some cases omitting) items on the questionnaire. Ferguson provides a table indicating these emendations (“Mysterious Obligations,” 394). The original queries are offered in the appendix to Shuffelton’s edition of Jefferson’s Notes (265). 34. Jefferson, Notes, 68. 35. Ibid., 21. 36. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful and Other Pre-Revolutionary Writings, ed. David Womersley (London: Penguin, 1998), 63–78. 37. That contemporary readers of Notes would have read Jefferson in this light can be inferred from Richard Price’s letter to the author: “I have read it with singular pleasure and a warm admiration of your Sentiments and character. How happy would the united States be were all of them under the direction of Such wisdom and liberality as yours?” (quoted in Notes, 270). 38. Jefferson, Notes, 20. 39. Ibid., 71. 40. Ibid., 39. 41. See Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2004). 42. Ibid., 70. 43. Grabo, “Cre`vecoeur’s American,” 160. 44. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. William Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 29. 45. On the composition and reception history of Berkeley’s poem, and on the “rising glory” trope as a theory of cultural renewal based on the topos of translatio imperii, see Tennenhouse, Importance of Feeling English, 12–18. 46. George Berkeley, “Verses by the Author on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America,” in A Miscellany Containing Several Tracts on Several Subjects (London: J. and R. Tonson and S. Draper, 1752), 186–87. 47. Ibid., 186. 48. Ibid., 187. 49. Jefferson, Notes, 70–71. 50. Jefferson, letter to James Madison, 27 April 1809, in Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, eds., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 12 (Washington, D.C.: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1904), 277.

PAGE 219

220

Notes to Pages 98–102

51. This formulation is indebted to Pierre Macherey’s discussion of Germaine de Stae¨l, which emphasizes both her “cosmopolitan imaginary” and the coexistence of her cosmopolitanism with her fascination with national characteristics. See Macherey, The Object of Literature, trans. David Macey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 13–37. My argument in applying that concept to the Early Republic is not to suggest that the literature of this period was in some way more cosmopolitan than antebellum literary nationalisms, but rather, that the earlier formation may help us to recognize the frequent coexistence of cosmopolitanism and nationalism even, or especially, in exceptionalist cultural arguments. As F. O. Matthiessen long ago observed of Representative Men, for example, Emerson’s choice of subjects alone (Plato, Swedenborg, . . . Goethe) is “ample enough evidence of his freedom from any restrictions of nationalism” (Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941], 631. Yet at the same time, Matthiessen has no trouble reconciling that gesture of fellowship “in the whole cultural heritage” (that is, the Western tradition) with the overall goal of defining and distinguishing a specifically American tradition, and with identifying the “natively” or “distinctively American thing[s]” that populate it and the “autochthonous vein” it taps into (631, 640). The entirety of The American Renaissance is marked by the oscillation between these two gestures. Thus for example, Thoreau was “an actor in the great cyclic drama” of Western civilization, yet “he didn’t give up his New England accent” (647); Horatio Greenough shows us how the American builder might “learn of the Greeks to be American” (149); Whitman (via Emerson) found in Coleridge’s delineation of the “organic form” a map for a putatively American approach to meter (134–35); and so on for many other iterations of this kind of logic in Matthiessen’s text. 52. Raynal, quoted in Jefferson, Notes, 69. 53. Jefferson, Notes, 70. 54. Ibid., 69. 55. Ibid., 70. 56. See for example Mary E. Rucker, “Cre`vecoeur’s Letters and Enlightenment Doctrine,” Early American Literature 13 (1978), 193–96; Myra Jehlen, “The Literature of Colonization,” in Sacvan Bercovitch, ed., The Cambridge History of American Literature, Volume 1, 1590–1820, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 140–48; Bauer, Cultural Geography, 200–240; Dennis Moore, “Introduction,” Letters from an American Farmer and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013), ix–xxxi; Iannini, Fatal Revolutions, 131–76. 57. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions and Correspondence, Including the Letters to Malesherbes, Volume 5 of Collected Writings of Rousseau, trans. Christopher Kelly (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1995), 588. This and the quotations that follow come from the preface to the Neuchaˆtel edition of Confessions. 58. Ibid., 588. 59. Richard Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 26. 60. Jean Starobinski, “The Style of Autobiography,” in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 75. 61. Ibid., 75. 62. Rousseau, Confessions, 588. 63. Ibid., 589.

PAGE 220

Notes to Pages 102–103

221

64. Ibid., 588. 65. Ibid., 81. 66. Cre`vecoeur, Letters, 50. 67. Ibid., 41. 68. For a good discussion of epistolarity and the association of letter-writing style with naturalness and simplicity, see Bannet, Empire of Letters, 76–78. 69. Cre`vecoeur, Letters, 35, 40. 70. Rousseau, Confessions, 589; Cre`vecoeur, Letters, 50. 71. In the present context, my reference to organicism in style is most directly informed by Starobinski’s exposition of “style as deviation,” a notion of a style which “obeys a system of organic metaphors, according to which expression proceeds from experience, without any discontinuity, as the flower is pushed open by the flow of sap through the stem. Conversely, the notion of ‘form superadded to content’ implies—from its inception—discontinuity, the very opposite of organic growth, thus a mechanical operation, the intervening application of an instrument to a material of another sort” (“Style of Autobiography,” 75–76). To Americanists, however, my argument here more likely conjures associations with the American adaptation of the notion of “organic form” from Coleridge, as described by Matthiessen (American Renaissance, 133–40). Matthiessen’s usage of “organic form,” in fact, is in some ways an attempt to register an aspect of what I am describing as a putatively American style. Indeed, when describing the American incarnations of Coleridge’s conception of “organic form,” Matthiessen slips into the phrase “the organic style” instead (628). From a certain perspective, Matthiessen’s whole argument is really an attempt to locate the marks of Americanness in the register of prose style, though he doesn’t describe it in those terms. He describes it rather ambiguosly instead as about some combination of content (ideas of democracy, for example) and form (essays or long prose fictions). 72. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 141–64. 73. Cre`vecoeur, Letters, 41. Bannet points out that this notion of letters as “written conversation” (Empire of Letters, 8) is a commonplace description of letter writing that “went all the way to Cicero, and that had been tireless repeated ever since” (277). On the logocentric notion of letter writing as closer to the ontological presence of speech—epistolarity as a “mode that lies somewhere between voice and print”—see Hewitt, Correspondence, 10. 74. Cre`vecoeur, Letters, 37, 47. 75. Ibid., 41. 76. I am referring here to D. H. Lawrence’s deliciously sarcastic line in his chapter on Cre`vecoeur in Studies in Classic American Literature: “Hazlitt, Godwin, Shelley, Coleridge, the English romanticists, were, of course, thrilled by the Letters from an American Farmer. A new world, a world of the Noble Savage and Pristine Nature and Paradisal Simplicity and all that gorgeousness that flows out of the unsullied fount of the ink-bottle” (32). 77. Jehlen, “Literature of Colonization,” 141. 78. Cre`vecoeur, Letters, 41. 79. Jehlen, “Literature of Colonization,” 141. 80. Ibid. 81. Cre`vecoeur, Letters, 40. 82. For a good overall exposition of the place of the georgic tradition in America, including an excellent treatment of Cre`vecoeur as part of that tradition, see Timothy Sweet, American Georgics: Economy and Environment in American Literature, 1580–1864 (Philadelphia:

PAGE 221

222

Notes to Pages 103–105

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). Other important studies of eighteenth-century American georgic poetry include David Shields, Oracles of Empire: Poetry, Politics, and Commerce in British America, 1690–1750 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 64–68, 71–73, 86–92; William C. Dowling, Poetry and Ideology in Revolutionary Connecticut (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990); Roxanne Gentilcore, “American Georgic: Virgil in the Literature of the Colonial South,” Classical and Modern Literature 13 (1993), 257–70; Larry Kutchen, “Timothy Dwight’s Anglo-American Georgic: Greenfield Hill and the Rise of United States Imperialism,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 33:2 (Fall 2000), 109–28. 83. Joseph Addison, “An Essay on Virgil’s Georgics,” in Miscellaneous Works in Verse and Prose (London: Thomas Tickell, 1726), 258. 84. Susan Manning discusses these aspects of the narrative—the relation it establishes between “ ‘genuine’ and ‘philosophic’ farming”—in relation to eighteenth-century physiocratic theory. See Manning, “Introduction,” J. Hector St. John de Cre`vecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 85. Addison, “Essay on Virgil’s Georgics,” 262. 86. Ibid. 87. Ibid., 258. Larry Kutchen has argued that, with a few notable exceptions, “ ‘georgic’ remains an unrecognized genre in criticism of American literature. Typically, it is misrecognized as one of the two other Virgilian genres it mediates, pastoral and epic” (Kutchen, “Timothy Dwight’s Anglo-American Georgic,” 126). On the erroneous conflation of the georgic with the pastoral specifically, and the concomitant critical neglect of the georgic, see also Marie Loretto Lilly, The Georgic: A Contribution to the Study of the Vergilian Type of Didactic Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1919), 19–36. 88. Addison, “Essay on Virgil’s Georgics,” 258. 89. See David Scott Wilson-Okamura, Spenser’s International Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 77–84. See also David Scott Wilson-Okamura, Virgil in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 90. Wilson-Okamura, Spenser’s International Style, 78. 91. “Running” is a common rhetorical term for the paratactic sentence style meant to mimic the “rambling, associative syntax of conversation.” Richard Lanham, Analyzing Prose (New York: Scribner and Sons, 1983), 69. 92. Bauer, Cultural Geography, 213. These stylistic features constitute an Enlightenment ideal of “linguistic or representational transparency and primitive terseness” which Barbara Stafford identifies as the “preferred mode for achieving an impression of directness” in the eighteenth-century “factual travel narrative” (Stafford, quoted in Bauer, 213). 93. Addison, “Essay on Virgil’s Georgics,” 262. 94. Bauer, Cultural Geography, 211; Stone, in Cre`vecoeur, Letters, 14. 95. Cre`vecoeur, Letters, 39. 96. Ibid., 35. 97. Ibid., 37. 98. Ibid., 39. 99. Ibid., 41. 100. Ibid., 44. 101. Ibid., 39. 102. Ibid., 53.

PAGE 222

Notes to Pages 105–109

223

103. Ibid., 39–40. 104. Ibid., 41. 105. Ibid., 53. 106. Cre`vecoeur, Letters, 54. 107. Ibid., 40, 49. 108. Ibid., 49–50. 109. Ibid., 53. 110. Stone, in Cre`vecoeur, Letters, 14–15. 111. Compare Bauer: “It was precisely James’ lack of refinement, that made him useful to Mr. F. B.” for James can thus serve as a Baconian representational ideal, the individual “whose observation was unmediated by the corruptive influences of European book learning, whose sensory perception would represent an authentic impression of the ‘volumes of the world’ not of the ‘volumes of man’ ” (Cultural Geography, 212). 112. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, 133–40; Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson’s Prose and Poetry: Authoritative Texts, Contexts, Criticism (New York: Norton, 2001), 49; Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Michael Moon (New York: Norton, 2002), xxvii. 113. Curtius, European Literature, 83. 114. Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio, trans. J. M. Rigg (London: A. H. Bullen, 1903), 258. These passages come in the introduction to the Fourth Day, written after the earlier sections of the work had been published and received criticism. After the passages just quoted, Boccaccio then turns his biting sarcasm against those who, “feigning a mighty tender regard to my fame, aver that I should do more wisely to keep ever with the Muses on Parnassus” (258–59). He thus delivers his own “scorching blast” against past and future critics: “I mean not to be niggard of my own powers, but rather, without dealing out to them the castigation they deserve, to give them such slight answer as may secure my ears some respite of their clamour; and that without delay” (259). This is not humility-asinoculation so much as a preemptive strike against critique. 115. Thomas Usk, The Testament of Love, ed. Richard Allen Shoaf (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1998). 116. Jocelyn Wogan Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans, eds., The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 8. 117. Ibid. 118. In all the passages from Usk referenced here, I use Shoaf’s modern English translation of Usk’s prologue, available online. See R. Allen Shoaf, online edition of The Testament of Love, http://users.clas.ufl.edu/ras/modusk/musk/prol/prol.htm. 119. On the this pervasive admission of “dullness” by early English writers, and the complex rhetorical career of that figure, see David Lawton, “Dullness and the Fifteenth Century,” ELH 54:4 (1987), 761–99. 120. As I discuss in Chapter 4, this is a basic Judeo-Christian theme, whose ultimate origins lie in Jewish distrust of artifice and anthropomorphic ornamentation in worship, but as an explicit rhetorical ethos was most carefully developed by Paul and owes perhaps more to him than to any other figure: “Paul is . . . scrupulous about limiting the extent to which verbal artifice and eloquence can be allowed to displace the power of God as both the theme and source of his gospel. His practice and instructions equally constitute the cornerstone of

PAGE 223

224

Notes to Pages 109–111

simplicity in Christian rhetoric. Being ‘rude in speech’ (2 Cor. 11:6) does not produce weakness in spiritual knowledge; rather, it leaves room for the admiration of substance.” Peter Auksi, Christian Plain Style: The Evolution of a Spiritual Ideal (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1995), 89. This constitutes the “central commonplace through which a Christian plain style in rhetoric justifies itself: the less there is of human skill, pride of achievement, and self-serving display in discourse which might displace God’s authorship of the words, the more evident will be his power, spirit, and inspired wording” (Auksi, Christian Plain Style, 90). 121. Harold Kulungian, “The Aestheticism of Cre`vecoeur’s American Farmer,” Early American Literature 12:2 (1977), 197–201. 122. On the relation between these language and literature debates and the emergence of the idea of the nation in Renaissance France, see Timothy Hampton, Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century: Inventing Renaissance France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). 123. Laura Willett, trans., Poetry and Language in 16th-century France: Du Bellay, Ronsard, Sebillet (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2004 ), 1. 124. Hampton, Literature and Nation, 32. 125. Willett, Poetry and Language, vii. 126. On Du Bellay’s contemporary critics, see Willett, Poetry and Language, 24–26. 127. Joachim Du Bellay, “The Regrets,” with “The Antiquities of Rome,” Three Latin Elegies, and “The Defense and Enrichment of the French Language”: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Richard Helgerson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 328. 128. “Had the ancient Romans been as negligent in the cultivation of their language when it first began to sprout, it would certainly not have become so great in such a brief time. But they, like good farmers, first transplanted it from a wild to a cultivated site. Then, so that it might yield fruit better and more quickly, pruning away the useless branches, they replaced them with fine and cultivated branches, taken in fashion from the Greek language, which were rapidly so well grafted to their trunk and made to resemble it that from that time on they have no longer appeared adopted but natural. From this were born in the Latin language those flowers and those fruits colored with great eloquence, along with meter and the skillful blending of sound with sense, all of which every language produces not by its own nature but by art” (Du Bellay, 328). 129. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), 761. 130. Ibid., 761. 131. Ibid., 127. 132. On the relation between Montaigne’s conception of negligence (nonchalance) and the sprezzatura of Castiglione, see Felicity Green, Montaigne and the Life of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 151, 166–67; David M. Posner, The Performance of Nobility in Early Modern European Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 37, 65, 71. 133. Richard Lanham’s engaging discussion of Castiglione, for example, counters what he regards as the normative rhetorical perspective that sprezzatura is merely “a rationale for hypocrisy” (Lanham, Motives of Eloquence, 151). A more nuanced reading of Castiglione’s courtly style might credit it, instead, with the open acknowledgement that effortlessness requires effort. What might at first appear to be “a manifest absurdity—a certain carefully

PAGE 224

Notes to Pages 111–115

225

rehearsed and prepared spontaneous unrehearsedness” (Lanham, Motives of Eloquence, 150) is instead being presented as an acquirable rhetorical skill. For this reason, Lanham regards this kind of performative style more genuine than the “romantic sincerity” that always defines itself against it: “Rhetorically, it is honest posing” (151). 134. Montaigne, Complete Essays, 761. 135. Ibid., 2. 136. Ibid. 137. Ibid. 138. Ibid. 139. Ibid., 76. 140. Ibid., 483. 141. Ibid., 484. 142. Ibid., 125. 143. Ibid., 126. 144. See Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 145. John Dennis, “The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry,” in Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla, eds., The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 35. 146. Richard Blackmore, Essays Upon Several Subjects, in Ashfield and de Bolla, The Sublime, 42. 147. Ibid. 148. William Duff, An Essay on Original Genius, in Ashfield and de Bolla, The Sublime, 174–75. This conception of genius dovetails with the textural language Burke attached to the concept of the sublime—roughness, unevenness, and other forms of irregularity. I discuss the traction of this conception of the sublime in relation to Charles Brockden Brown’s gothic in Chapter 2. 149. Duff, in Ashfield and de Bolla, The Sublime, 174–75. 150. Thomas Blackwell, Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (London, 1735), 55. 151. Ibid., 24. 152. Hugh Blair, A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian (London: T. Becket and P. A. De Hondt, 1763), 207. 153. Ibid., 3. 154. Blackwell, Enquiry, 25. 155. Ibid., 25–26. 156. Ibid., 55–56. Blackwell metaphorized this opposition between more and less vital uses of language as the difference between hothouse plants versus wild: “our first business, when we sit down to poetize in the higher strains, is to unlearn our daily way of life; to forget our manner of sleeping, eating and diversions: we are obliged to adopt a set of more natural manners, which however are foreign to us; and must be like plants raised up in hot-beds or green-houses, in comparison of those which grow in soils fitted by nature for such productions . . . We live within doors, covered, as it were, from nature’s face; and passing our days supremely ignorant of her beauties, we are apt to think the similes taken from her low, and the ancient manners mean, or absurd.” As I mention below, Cre`vecoeur manipulated similar tropes to distinguish Old World hyperculture from raw New World nature.

PAGE 225

226

Notes to Pages 116–119

157. Blackwell, Enquiry, 25. 158. Blair, Critical Dissertation, 74. 159. Ibid. 160. Ibid. 161. The full passage reads: “The literature of a country is just as domestick and individual, as its character or political institutions. Its charm is its nativeness. [Strangers] are not expected to feel the beauty of your old poetical language, depending as it does on early and tender associations; connecting the softer and ruder ages of the country, and inspiring an inward and inexplicable joy, like a tale of childhood. The stranger perhaps is only alarmed or disgusted by the hoarse and wild musick of your forests, or sea-shore, by the frantick superstition of your fathers, or the lovely fairy scenes, that lie far back in the mists of your fable. He cannot feel your pride in the splendid barbarism of your country, when the mind was in health and free, and the foundations of your character and greatness laid for ever. All these things are for the native. They help to give a character to his country and her literature, and he loves them too well, to be concerned at the world’s admiration or contempt.” [Edward Tyrell Channing] “On Models in Literature,” North American Review 3:7 (1816), 206. 162. This figure, implied in Edward Tyrell Channing’s “hoarse and wild music of your forests,” makes a more explicit appearance in Walter Channing’s “Essay on American Language and Literature,” North American Review 1 (September 1815), 313–14. 163. The phrase is indebted to Derrida’s concept of arche-writing (Of Grammatology, 60). 164. On figures of Indian spectrality, see Renee Bergland, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2000). See also Jonathan Elmer, On Lingering and Being Last: Race and Sovereignty in the New World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 165. On the significance of Jefferson’s interest in Ossian, see Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language and the Culture of Performance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 96–97. 166. In Query VI, for example, there is a telling proximity between Logan’s speech (cited as a counterexample to Buffon’s aspersions against the Indian [Jefferson, Notes, 67–68]) and Jefferson’s accounting of Anglo-American geniuses (cited as a defense against Raynal’s smear [69–70]). The phrase “sublime oratory” comes from the later discussion in Query IV (Jefferson, Notes, 147). On Jefferson’s uses of Logan, see Elmer, On Lingering, 118–46. 167. Blair, Critical Dissertation, 2. 168. On Cre`vecoeur’s uses of the horticultural trope of transplantation, see for example Larkin, American School, 43–46. Katy Chiles discusses the scientific sources of this naturalhistorical figure in relation to the “degeneration” argument in natural science. Katy L. Chiles, Transformable Race: Surprising Metamorphoses in the Literature of Early America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 111–16. 169. Cre`vecoeur, Letters, 71, 80. 170. Ibid., 46. 171. Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750–1990, trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973). 172. Cre`vecoeur, Letters, 46. 173. Ibid. 174. Ibid.

PAGE 226

Notes to Pages 119–122

227

175. Claude Le´vi-Strauss, “The Culinary Triangle,” Partisan Review 33 (1966), 586–95. 176. Walt Whitman, prefatory letter to Emerson, August 1856, in Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Michael Moon (New York: Norton, 2002), 641. 177. Cre`vecoeur, Letters, 68–69. 178. Most resonant among these, no doubt, were Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, who in the 1790s famously hatched a utopian American emigration scheme they dubbed “Pantisocracy”—partly inspired, in fact, by the regional narratives of Cre`vecoeur and William Bartram, as well as by other American emigration experiments and the writing that grew out of them, such as Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville’s New Travels in the United States of America (1792), Thomas Cooper’s Some Information Respecting America (1794), and Gilbert Imlay’s A Topographical Description of North America (1792).

Chapter 3 Note to epigraph: Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly, or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker, ed. Norman S. Grabo (New York: Penguin, 1988), 116–17. 1. For an overview of these changes, see Philip Barnard, Mark L. Kamrath, and Stephen Shapiro, eds., “Introduction,” in Revising Charles Brockden Brown: Culture, Politics, and Sexuality in the Early Republic (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004), iii–xxi. See also Bryan Waterman, “Charles Brockden Brown, Revised and Expanded,” Early American Literature 40:1 (2005), 173–91. For examples of criticism lionizing Brown as the father of the American novel, see Lillie Deming Loshe, The Early American Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1907). Loshe called Brown the “first really gifted American novel-writer” (29). See also Donald A. Ringe, Charles Brockden Brown (New York: Twayne, 1966). 2. Waterman, “Charles Brockden Brown,” 173. 3. See Barnard, Kamrath, and Shapiro, “Introduction,” ix. 4. See Robert S. Levine, “Race and Nation in Brown’s Louisiana Writings of 1803,” in Barnard, Kamrath, and Shapiro, Revising Charles Brockden Brown, 332–53; Mark L. Kermit, “American Exceptionalism and Radicalism in the Annals of Europe and America,” in Barnard, Kamrath and Shapiro, Revising Charles Brockden Brown, 354–84. 5. See for example Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Paul Giles, Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730–1860 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); Paul Giles, Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); Paul Giles, Atlantic Republic: The American Tradition in English Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Meredith McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Elisa Tamarkin, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Leonard Tennenhouse, The Importance of Feeling English (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Edward Cahill, Liberty of the Imagination (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). 6. See, for example, Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, rev. ed. (Champaign, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1966); Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980 [1957]); Bill Christopherson, The Apparition in the Glass: Charles Brockden Brown’s American Gothic (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994); Teresa Goddu, Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (New York: Columbia

PAGE 227

228

Notes to Pages 122–125

University Press, 1997); Allan Lloyd-Smith, American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction (New York: Continuum, 2004). 7. For a related argument, see Cahill, Liberty of the Imagination. Cahill argues that American theories of political collectivity inhere in a language of aesthetics decidedly European in origin. 8. Steve Hamelman, “Rhapsodist in the Wilderness: Brown’s Romantic Quest in Edgar Huntly,” Studies in American Fiction 21:2 (1993), 175. 9. Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 335. 10. William Hill Brown, in William Hill Brown and Hannah Webster Foster, The Power of Sympathy and The Coquette, ed. Carla Mulford (New York: Penguin, 1996), 20, 15–30 passim. For a lucid discussion of the concern with reading practices in the early American seduction novel more generally, see Christopher Lukasik, Discerning Characters: The Culture of Appearance in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 73–120. Lukasik shows more broadly how the novelistic problem of characters reading and interpreting one another’s faces, and the scientific problem of “physiognomic transparency” (102), provide discursive locations in which the culture worked out questions about the “social perception of character” (156). 11. Noah Webster, Letters of Noah Webster, ed. Harry R. Warfel (New York: Library Publishers, 1953), 4. 12. Carlos J. Alonso, The Spanish American Regional Novel: Modernity and Autochthony (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 6. 13. For a related argument about how Brown’s self-representation began the work of Brown criticism, see David Kazanjian, The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 142–47. 14. Robert Miles, “The 1790s: The Effulgence of Gothic,” in Jerrold E. Hogle, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 41–62. 15. On German gothic, see Terry Hale, “French and German Gothic: The Beginnings,” in Jerrold E. Hogle, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 63–84. The latter sense of the term “aesthetics” emerged in late eighteenth-century German thought. Alexander Baumgarten gave the term in its modern sense in his Aesthetica (1750–58), and this emergent conception of aesthetics is generally thought to have reached its high-water mark in Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790). Kant’s earlier Critique of Pure Reason used the term in its broader philosophical sense. See Werner S. Pluhar, “Introduction,” in Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), xlix. 16. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother, ed. Frederick S. Frank (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2003), 65. 17. Ibid., 70. 18. Clara Reeve, The Old English Baron: A Gothic Story, ed. James Trainer (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 2. 19. Ibid., 3. Some scholars have taken up the issue of self-reflexivity to argue against the established critical idea that the gothic reflects historical, political, or social anxieties. See Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall, “Gothic Criticism,” in David Punter, ed., A Companion to

PAGE 228

Notes to Pages 125–129

229

the Gothic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 209–28. The gothic’s preoccupation with its own aesthetic effects, as Mighall and Baldick put it, makes the form “the least reliable index to supposedly widespread anxieties” (“Gothic Criticism,” 222). See also Siaˆn Silyn Roberts, Gothic Subjects: The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 1790–1861 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 21–22; Siaˆn Silyn Roberts, “A Transatlantic View of American Gothic Criticism,” in Monika Elbert and Bridget Marshall, eds., Transnational Gothic: Literary and Social Exchanges in the Long Nineteenth Century (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013). 20. Ann Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance, ed. Alison Milbank (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 103–4. 21. Reprinted in Charles Brockden Brown, The Rhapsodist, and Other Uncollected Writings, ed. Harry R. Warfel (New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1943), 135. 22. Ibid. 23. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. William Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 85–86. Cervantes famously parodied the novelty topos in the prologue to Don Quixote—an indication that by this point the novelty topos had already become a cliche´. 24. Miles, “The 1790s,” 59. 25. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story, and the Mysterious Mother: A Tragedy, ed. Frederick S. Frank (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2003), 70. 26. Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly, or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker, ed. Norman S. Grabo (New York: Penguin, 1988), 87. 27. Ibid., 93. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 151. 30. Ibid., 174. 31. On “inexpressibility topoi,” see Curtius, 159–62. 32. Brown, Edgar Huntly, 229. This constitutes another subvariety of the novelty topos, in which the author symbolically vaunts over the bodies of one’s literary predecessors. The clearest literary precursor can be found in Dante, who used it to similar effect throughout the Divine Comedy. Indeed, the passage just cited from Edgar Huntly shares some striking parallels with the well-known lines from Canto XXV of the Inferno (lines 94–102), in which Dante’s author-hero “silences” his luminous predecessors Ovid and Lucan by offering his reader transformations far surpassing their poetic metamorphoses: “Let Ovid now be silent, where he sings / of sad Nibellius and Nasidius, / and wait to hear what flies off from my bow. / Let Lucan now be silent, where he sings / of Cadmus, Arethusa; if his verse / has made of one a serpent, one a fountain, / I do not envy him; he never did / transmute two natures, face to face, so that / both forms were ready to exchange their matter.” Dante Alighieri, The Inferno, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Bantam Dell, 2004), 231. 33. Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla, eds., The Sublime: A Reader in British EighteenthCentury Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 41. 34. Ibid., 40. 35. E. J. Clery, “The Genesis of ‘Gothic’ Fiction,” in Jerrold E. Hogle, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 28. 36. John Baillie, An Essay on the Sublime (London: R. Dodsley, 1747), 90.

PAGE 229

230

Notes to Pages 129–133

37. Clery, 29. 38. John Locke, Two Treatises on Government, ed. Peter Laslett (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), II.49. 39. British critics often used the language of exploration in general, and the image repertoire of the New World discovery narrative in particular, in order to convey the aesthetic experience of the sublime. When, for example, John and Anna Laetitia Aikin published their seminal gothic tract “The Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror” in their 1773 Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose, they metaphorized the experience of the imagination in the presence of “gothic romance” as the exploration of a “new world”: “A strange and unexpected event awakens the mind, and keeps it on the stretch; and where the agency of invisible beings is introduced, of ‘forms unseen, and mightier far than we,’ our imagination, darting forth, explores with rapture the new world which is laid open to its view, and rejoices in the expansion of its powers.” E. J. Clery and Robert Miles, Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook 1700-1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 129. In the British context, these tropes of discovery were simply a convenient and resonant way to allude to the experience of the marvelous, long associated in the European imagination with the radical novelty encountered by Renaissance explorers. But the same language would have resonated quite differently to Anglo-Americans throughout the colonial period, and was taking on an even more forceful resonance during the 1770s, when the Aikins wrote. On European constructions of the New World, see Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Jack P. Greene, The Intellectual Construction of America: Exceptionalism and Identity from 1492 to 1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Mary Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–1600 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). 40. Hugh Blair, A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, the Son of Fingal (London: T. Becket and P. A. De Hondt, 1763), 2. 41. Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991 [1764]), 111–12. 42. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful and Other Pre-Revolutionary Writings, ed. David Womersley (London: Penguin, 1998), 102. 43. Germaine de Stae¨l, On Literature Considered in Its Relationship to Social Institutions, in Major Writings of Germaine De Stae¨l, trans. Vivian Folkenflik (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 185. 44. Stae¨l’s assessment of American literary promise seems to have been based on the “voice” of political documents such as the Declaration of Independence rather than on any work of “literature” in the modern sense that she herself was helping to codify. It thus supplies a perfect example of Jay Fliegelman’s argument in Declaring Independence about the meeting point of political, rhetorical, and literary discourse in the Revolutionary period. 45. Brown, Edgar Huntly, 3. 46. Ibid., 10, 19. 47. Ibid., 19. 48. Ibid., 33. 49. Ibid., 33. 50. Ibid., 86. 51. On the function of Irishness in Brown’s gothic, see Jared Gardner, Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature, 1787-1845 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University

PAGE 230

Notes to Pages 133–136

231

Press, 1998), 61–64. See also Luke Gibbons, “Ireland, America, and Gothic Memory: Transatlantic Terror in the Early Republic,” boundary 2 31.1 (2004), 25–47. 52. Brown, Edgar Huntly, 91. 53. Ibid., 23. 54. For a succinct recent discussion of this thread of American literary history from the early twentieth-century works of D. H. Lawrence and Vernon L. Parrington to the classic statements of Henry Nash Smith and Leo Marx, see Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 33–36. 55. As Larry Kutchen has recently argued, for example, the “American picturesque landscape” has its origins firmly rooted in eighteenth-century British aesthetics—a fact which has been distorted by anachronistic narratives of national development. Larry Kutchen, “The ‘Vulgar Thread of the Canvas’: Revolution and the Picturesque in Ann Eliza Bleecker, Cre`vecoeur, and Charles Brockden Brown,” Early American Literature 36:3 (2001), 395. On Brown’s geographies within the context of the European aesthetics of the picturesque and the sublime, see also Kenneth Bernard, “Charles Brockden Brown and the Sublime,” The Personalist 45 (1964), 235–49; Dennis Berthold, “Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly, and the Origins of the American Picturesque,” William and Mary Quarterly 41:1 (1984), 62–84; Beth L. Lueck, “Charles Brocken Brown’s Edgar Huntly: The Picturesque Traveler as Sleepwalker,” Studies in American Fiction 15:1 (1987), 25–42; and Lisa West Norwood, “ ‘I May Be a Stranger to the Grounds of Your Belief’: Constructing Sense of Place in Wieland,” Early American Literature 38:1 (2003), 89–122. 56. See A. J. Greimas, Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method, trans. Daniele McDowell, Ronald Schleifer, and Alan Velie (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 174–85, 192–212. 57. Brown, Edgar Huntly, 91. 58. Ibid., 93. 59. Ibid., 92. 60. Ibid., 90. 61. Ibid., 22. 62. Ibid., 3. 63. See for example Peter Kafer, Charles Brockden Brown’s Revolution and the Birth of American Gothic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). For one of the best such readings, see Edward Cahill, “ ‘An Adventurous and Lawless Fancy’: Charles Brockden Brown’s Aesthetic State,” Early American Literature 36:1 (2001), 31–70. Cahill glosses the phrase “the condition of the country” as a reference to “the specific values, customs, and resources that engender specific cultural and psychological realities” (36). Perhaps most satisfying about Cahill’s reading is its equal attention to questions of literary form and politics, via the mediating Schillerian concept of the “aesthetic state.” 64. Brown, Edgar Huntly, 22. 65. Ibid., 3. 66. Campbell, 221–22. 67. Campbell, 224. 68. Quoted in Campbell, 222. 69. Ibid., 225.

PAGE 231

232

Notes to Pages 136–138

70. Ibid. 71. Ibid., 223. 72. Ibid., 228. 73. Ibid. 74. Quoted in Campbell, 226. 75. Campbell, 226. 76. We can attribute this representational problem in part to the actual topographic and climatic peculiarities of the New World geography, but certainly we should not treat it as an inert empirical fact. Nor would we want to overstate the extent to which the New World provoked a representational catastrophe. On the scholarly debate about how radically new the New World was in the European imagination, see Karen Ordahl Kupperman, ed., America in European Consciousness, 1493–1750 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). On the other hand, different aspects of this set of representations served specific cultural and political functions in the context of European colonial projects. Perhaps most obviously, the trope of the “superabundant wasteland” had an ideological dimension, for it represented the place in question at once as terra nullius—that is, not already claimed by another sovereign, not properly inhabited by subjects capable of rational labor—and also as the site of abundant raw material which needed only cultivation to claim its enormous value. 77. See for example Edmundo O’Gorman, The Invention of America: An Inquiry into the Historical Nature of the New World and the Meaning of Its History; Greene, The Intellectual Construction of America; Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions. 78. As Campbell notes, for example, Raleigh’s descriptions of Guiana’s natural features everywhere emphasize their “extremity” and “complicated beauty” (243). Both are present in his description of the cataract, and both also characterize his description of the Orinoco. When he first encounters the river’s complex delta, it is as an overwhelming “laborinth of rivers”: “for all I know the earth doth not yeeld the like confluence of streams and branches, the one crossing each other so many times, and all so faire and large, and so like one to another, as no man can tell which to take.” A problem of categorization and representation becomes in this context a much more concrete sort of crisis: “if we went by Sun or compasse hoping thereby to go directly one way or other, yet that waie we were also carried in a circle amongst multitudes of Ilands, and every Iland so bordered with high trees, as no man could see any further than the bredth of the river, or length of the breach . . .” (244). For an overview of the differences between the categories of the sublime, beautiful, and picturesque, see David B. Morris, “Gothic Sublimity,” in Fred Botting and Dale Townshend, eds., Gothic: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, vol. 2 (London: Routledge, 2004), 50–65; and Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 2005). 79. Hildebrand Jacob, The Works of Hildebrand Jacob (London: W. Lewis, 1735), 422. 80. As Susan Scott Parrish has explained, starting in the 1760s, “the Anglo-American territory that was the physical ground for the concept of ‘America’ expanded, giving rise . . . to concepts of vastness, immensity, and amplitude”—characteristics also associated with the Burkean sublime. Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 307. 81. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. Frank Shuffelton (New York: Penguin Classics, 1998), 20. 82. Ibid., 21.

PAGE 232

Notes to Pages 138–142

233

83. Ibid., 26. 84. Ibid. 85. Ibid., 21. 86. Ibid., 23. 87. Ibid., 25. 88. Walpole, Castle,126. 89. Miles, “The 1790s,” 45. 90. Walter Scott, Lives of the Novelists (Paris: Galignani, 1825), 53. 91. David S. Durant has described this practice as Radcliffe’s “deft substitution of geography for adventure.” David S. Durant, Ann Radcliffe’s Novels: Experiments in Setting, rev. ed. (New York: Ayer, 1980), 54. Note that Scott did not like Radcliffe’s signature of the “explained supernatural,” which he considered a sloppy device for explaining marvelous events away as the fevered hallucinations of a distempered mind. 92. Walpole, Castle, 126. 93. Radcliffe, Sicilian Romance, 1. 94. Brown, Edgar Huntly, 3. On the language of architecture in Edgar Huntly, see Duncan Faherty, Remodeling the Nation: The Architecture of American Identity, 1776–1858 (Hanover: University of New Hampshire Press, 2007), 60ff. On the trope of the castle in Edgar Huntly, see Roberts, Gothic Subjects, 65–66. 95. Charles Brockden Brown, “A Receipt for Modern Romance,” Weekly Magazine (30 June 1798), 278. See also Brown, “Terrific Novels,” Literary Magazine (April 1805). 96. Brown, “Receipt for Modern Romance,” 278. 97. This gesture of distinguishing a cheap or merely conventional European gothic from a more durable and authentic cisatlantic revision is a standard topos in twentieth-century American literary criticism. F. O. Matthiessen, for example (writing about Hawthorne rather than Brown in this instance), asserts: “The notable thing about the American handling of the weird was this it was not the manufactured Gothic article of ‘Monk’ Lewis, but something indigenous, something inescapably there” (Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941], 236). 98. Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, ed. Jay Fliegelman (New York: Penguin Classics, 1991). Though associated with a small latticework structure placed within it called the “summer-house,” this recess is first formed by natural structures. The “recess by the bank” is first introduced on p. 71. (See also 97–102, 151–54, passim.) 99. Ann Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 18, 52–56, 137. 100. Sophia Lee, The Recess: or, A Tale of Other Times, ed. April Alliston (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky), 7–8. In William Godwin’s 1794 Caleb Williams, an important influence on Brown’s fiction a few years later, there is one exterior space called a “recess,” one of a series of “cavities” in the “rude and uncultivated” country through which Caleb passes during his brief passage from one man-made space to another, from imprisonment in the dungeon to protective concealment in the thieves’ “hovel” (Godwin, Caleb Williams [New York: Penguin, 2005], 215–16). But as will become clearer in my discussion of Brown’s geographies, it is a comparison which proves the difference, not only because of Godwin’s relative

PAGE 233

234

Notes to Pages 142–147

lack of narrative emphasis but also because of the explicit differences between their uses of comparable spaces. Godwin’s narrator writes of his “caverns”: “some [were] deeper than others, but all of them so shallow, as neither to be capable of hiding a man, nor of exciting suspicion as places of possible concealment” (215). The caves of Brown’s Edgar Huntly, by contrast, are deep, suspicious, and more than capable of concealment. 101. Brown, Edgar Huntly, 99. 102. Fiedler, Love and Death, 160. 103. This argument may bring to mind Fiedler’s well-known (and well-worn) formulation that Brown “solved the key problem of adaptation” by subjecting the gothic to a “complex metamorphosis” on American soil” (Love and Death, 145), thus putting an exceptionalist stamp on the American gothic. It’s an old chestnut to say that Brown adapted the gothic to an American setting, but what I am suggesting is that this process of adaptation inheres in the language of geography itself and was not a direct act of transplantation, as Fiedler imagines it. The very process of “domestication” that Fiedler took for granted was actually a complex formal project, rather than simply a replanting of romance in an American setting. My thanks to Siaˆn Silyn Roberts for help clarifying this point. 104. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Samuel Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 17–55. 105. The two most prominent examples of British gothic novels with an English setting, Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron: A Gothic Story (1777) and Sophia Lee’s The Recess, or, A Tale of Other Times (1783) substituted, as their titles suggest, distance in time for distance in space in defamiliarizing their fictional worlds. 106. Thomas Blackwell, Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (London, 1735), 26. 107. Ibid., 26–27. 108. Ibid., 28. 109. Ibid., 28. 110. The exception that proves the rule in eighteenth-century criticism is Milton’s Paradise Lost, the British work most often cited and quoted as an instance of sublime poetry. For, as Blackwell’s reference to Milton makes clear, “it was when unhappy Britain was plunged in all the calamities of Civil Rage, that our high-spirited Poem took its Birth” (65–66). It thus fits within Blackwell’s earlier formulation of a “well-governed state . . . in a civil war” (27). The example of Milton also suggests how Americans could use their “civil war” with Britain to authorize their own sublime aesthetic in the closing decades of the eighteenth century. 111. Blair, A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, 207. 112. S. W. Reid, “Brockden Brown in England: Notes on Henry Colburn’s 1822 Editions of His Novels,” Early American Literature 9:2 (1974), 188. I discuss Brown’s reception by and reputation among these and other writers of the Romantic Era, on both sides of the Atlantic, in Ezra Tawil, “The Literary Afterlife of Charles Brockden Brown,” The Oxford Handbook on Charles Brockden Brown, Philip Barnard and Stephen Shapiro, eds. (Oxford University Press, forthcoming, 2018). 113. Cahill, “Adventurous and Lawless,” 32. 114. Brown, Edgar Huntly, 19. 115. Ibid., 23. 116. “When one is hurried over a rocky, broken road, the pain felt by these sudden inequalities shews why similar sights, feelings, and sounds, are so contrary to beauty; and with

PAGE 234

Notes to Pages 147–151

235

regard to the feeling, it is exactly the same in its effect, or very nearly the same, whether, for instance, I move my hand along the surface of a body of a certain shape, or whether such a body is moved along my hand” (Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 182–83). 117. Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 198–99. 118. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Michael Moon (New York: Norton, 2002), 617. 119. Ibid., xxvii. 120. Ibid., 788.

Chapter 4 Note to epigraph: Richard Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 20. 1. Miller delivered the public lectures that would later form the essay in 1958. For Miller’s most extensive earlier treatment of the subject, see the chapters “Rhetoric” and “The Plain Style,” in Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1954 [1939]), 300–362. 2. Perry Miller, “An American Language,” in Nature’s Nation (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1967), 208–40, 211–12. 3. Miller, New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, 362. This declaration was a target of criticism for later scholars who wished to view Puritan sermons through just such an aesthetic lens and to assess their literary-historical impact. A more fruitful starting point for that line of inquiry was William Haller’s suggestion that the real mark of Puritan expression lay not its “power of lucid and coherent thought but in their command of the art of suggestive, provocative, poetic speech” (The Rise of Puritanism [New York: Columbia University Press, 1938], 256). For a representative sample of work on Puritanism and literature, see Sacvan Bercovitch, ed., The American Puritan Imagination: Essays in Revaluation (London: Cambridge University Press, 1974). Other notable works in this vein include Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), and Larzer Ziff, Puritanism in America: New Culture in a New World (New York: Viking Press, 1973). 4. Miller, “American Language,” 213. 5. Ibid., 214. 6. Ibid., 213. 7. Ibid., 215. 8. Ibid., 215–28. 9. Ibid., 228–40, quotation on 236. 10. Ibid., 216. 11. Ibid., 213. 12. I refer here to scholarship drawing not on this late and relatively ignored essay but on Miller’s earlier treatments of Puritan sermon style. One common critique is that Miller represented Puritan modes and theories of expression in too unitary a way and, relatedly, overemphasized the difference in style between Puritan and Anglican homiletics. Lisa Gordis represents the contrast between Puritan and Anglican preaching in less “definite” terms and reminds us that “the plainness of Puritan preaching is itself more complicated than Puritan polemics suggest.” Lisa M. Gordis, Opening Scripture: Bible Reading and Interpretive Authority in Puritan New England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 15. More recently, Meredith Neuman has argued that, while recent “English scholarship has usefully blurred old

PAGE 235

236

Notes to Pages 151–153

theological and stylistic lines of distinction between the Anglican and the Puritan,” American scholarship could still “benefit from more regard to the ambiguities of doctrine and style.” Meredith Neuman, Jeremiah’s Scribes: Creating Sermon Literature in Puritan New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 3. I take further account of these and other departures from Miller’s assumptions below. 13. On the impact of scientific writing on this turn in seventeenth-century style, see the seminal essays by Richard F. Jones, “Science and English Prose Style, 1650–75,” reprinted in Stanley Fish, ed., Seventeenth-Century Prose: Modern Essays in Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 53–89; and Jones, “Science and Language in England of the MidSeventeenth Century,” reprinted in Fish, Seventeenth-Century Prose, 94–111. Another strand of scholarship emphasizes the epistemological shifts that underlie changing commitments to linguistic style. Stanley Fish argues that “two views of the human mind and its capabilities” are behind the polarization of style in the seventeenth century. See Stanley Fish, SelfConsuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 377. Michelle Burnham has argued more recently that colonial uses of the plain style emerged “as a stylistic attempt to close the . . . gap between words and things,” a gap opened by “the intertwined developments of mercantile capitalism and transcontinental colonialism that fostered and supported New World travel.” See Michelle Burnham, “Merchants, Money, and the Economics of ‘Plain Style’ in William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation,” American Literature 72:4 (2000), 698, 697. On Renaissance plain style and the critique of “Ciceronian” grandness, see Morris Croll, “Attic” and Baroque Prose Style: The AntiCiceronian Movement, ed. J. Max Patrick and Robert O. Evans (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969); Marc Fumaroli, L’aˆge de l’e´loquence: Rhe´torique et “res literaria” de la Renaissance au seuil de l’e´poque classique (Geneva: Champion, 1980); see also the English summary of Fumaroli’s argument in “Rhetoric, Politics, and Society: From Italian Ciceronianism to French Classicism,” in James J. Murphy, ed., Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 253–73. For a representative argument about a “fundamental change in preaching style” attending “the theological changes that came with the Restoration of the Established Church,” see Mary Morrissey, “Scripture, Style and Persuasion in Seventeenth-Century English Theories of Preaching,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 53:4 (2002), 686–706, quotation on 705. 14. I discuss this concept of “foreign debt” as a theme of literary history in the book’s introduction. 15. Miller, “American Language,” 211. 16. Ibid., 210. 17. Ibid., 210. 18. Ibid., 209. 19. Ibid., 211. 20. Ibid., 210. 21. The historical narrative Miller explored on an epic scale in The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953) is thus present in miniature in “An American Language.” New England Puritans had been forced by the drift of seventeenth-century European history to think of themselves in “provincial” terms, “rather than what the founders had gloriously intended, a model for the fulfillment of English reformation” (“American Language,” 213). For Miller this is an historical “irony,” for it was an

PAGE 236

Notes to Pages 153–154

237

unintended and entirely unwanted outcome. Only a gesture of compensatory defiance led them to embrace this distinction forced upon them by unwelcome circumstance: “If their dialect had to be provincial, very well, but let it be their own: let it be defiantly plain!” (211). The underlying narrative, then, is of a diasporic community increasingly adrift from its culture of origin, reluctantly taking on provincial distinctness, and then “bequeath[ing] their principles to America” (211). 22. Miller “American Language,” 209, 215. 23. Ibid., 211. 24. See, for example, the eponymous first chapter of Miller’s Errand into the Wilderness, which takes its title from a phrase in Samuel Danforth’s 1670 election sermon. Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984 [1954]). Miller’s assumption of the condition of colonial isolation, along with his figure of English Puritans in the American “wilderness,” marks another site of critiques by recent scholars. See Jonathan Beecher Field, Errands into the Metropolis: New England Dissidents in Revolutionary London (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2009); Phillip H. Round, By Nature and by Custom Cursed: Transatlantic Civil Discourse and New England Cultural Production, 1620–1660 (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999); Morrissey, “Scripture, Style and Persuasion.” Field, as his title indicates, not only takes aim at Miller’s famous essay but reverses the usual polarity of the Puritan “errand” to focus on the other side of a transatlantic exchange, namely the return of New England dissidents to London during the era of the English Revolution. Like Field, Round casts Puritan New England not as a culture in state of colonial isolation but, quite to the contrary, as part and parcel of a “broader, transatlantic field of English cultural production” (Round, By Nature, xi). Finally, Morrissey suggests that the dichotomy between “ ‘plain style’ Puritan and ‘metaphysical’ Laudian preachers” (“Scripture, Style and Persuasion,” 687)—whose origins she attributes to the work of Miller and W. Fraser Mitchell in the 1930s—has obscured the transatlantic and historical causes of a “fundamental change in preaching style” connected to “the theological changes that came with the Restoration of the Established Church” (705). In this way, recent critics argue, Miller’s critical overinvestment on the Puritan/Laudian antinomy goes hand in glove with his isolation of colonial New England culture from transatlantic historical and cultural developments. 25. Hooker, quoted in Miller, “American Language,” 215. 26. Num. 10:12 KJV. 27. Miller, “American Language,” 210–11. 28. Ibid., 215. 29. Ibid., 217. See D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 167–79. 30. “The American novel is only finally American,” asserted Leslie Fiedler in a related turn of argument; “its appearance is an event in the history of the European spirit—as, indeed, is the very invention of America itself.” Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, rev. ed. (Champaign, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1966), 31. Fiedler’s Hegelian formulation suggests the dialectical thinking underlying, I believe, Miller’s theory and many twentieth-century formulations of the “Americanness” of the Anglo-American literary tradition. 31. Miller, “American Language,” 215. 32. For an overview, see Debora Shuger, “Conceptions of Style,” in Glyn P. Norton, ed., The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 3 (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press,

PAGE 237

238

Notes to Pages 155–156

1999), 176–86; Croll, “Attic” and Baroque Prose Style; Fumaroli, L’aˆge de l’e´loquence and “Rhetoric, Politics, and Society.” 33. To be fair to Miller, there is a broad critical consensus, from which he draws and to which he contributes, that the notion of a plain style acquired a particular cultural charge in the religious and political disputes of the seventeenth century, and that the developments in style during this century were decisive and exerted a transformative influence on subsequent prose. This is the period of focus for Jones, Croll, and others in the representative collection edited by Stanley Fish, Seventeenth-Century Prose. My point here is simply that “An American Language” tends to overstate the novelty of the period’s plainspoken expressive ideal. 34. See Peter Auksi, “Wyclif’s Sermons and the Plain Style,” Archiv fu¨r Reformationsgeschichte 66 (1975), 5–23; Rebecca Wilson Lundin, “Rhetorical Iconoclasm: The Heresy of Lollard Plain Style,” Rhetoric Review 27:2 (2008), 131–46; Erich Auerbach, “Sermo Humilis,” in Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 25–82. 35. 2 Cor. 3:12 KJV. 36. For an excellent source on the plain style within the longer history of Christian expression, see Peter Auksi, Christian Plain Style: The Evolution of a Spiritual Ideal (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1995). 37. Isocrates is credited with the first extant exposition of the characters of style in the fourth century BCE, though the “genera dicendi” and specific terms such as “genus subtile” and “stylus simplex” belong of course to later Latin rhetorics. See Debora Shuger, “The Characters of Style from Antiquity through the Middle Ages,” Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 14–54; and Shuger, “The Grand Style and the ‘Genera Dicendi’ in Ancient Rhetoric,” Traditio 40 (1984), 1–42. 38. “The doctrine of the style levels,” according to Auerbach, “led a phantom existence throughout the Middle Ages and awoke to new life in the era of Humanism” (“Sermo Humilis,” 38). For a good source on rhetoric during the period that Auerbach leaves out, see James J. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A History of Rhetorical Theory from Saint Augustine to the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). 39. Miller, New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, 304. 40. Ibid., 312. 41. Ibid., 332–33. 42. For an influential analysis of the varieties of seventeenth-century plain style at the level of sentence structure, see George Williamson, The Senecan Amble: Prose Form from Bacon to Collier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951). For a related linguistic approach to what she calls “modern English prose style” (which, while not coterminous with plain style, is related to it), see Janel M. Mueller, The Native Tongue and the Word: Developments in English Prose Style, 1380–1580 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 17–39. See also John Guillory, “Mercury’s Words: The End of Rhetoric and the Beginning of Prose,” Representations 138:1 (2017), 59–86. 43. Claude Le´vi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. Felicity Baker (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987 [1950]), 63–64; 53–57. The floating signifier thus takes its place in a “system of symbols” in which it functions as “a zero symbolic value, that is, a sign marking the necessity of a supplementary symbolic content over and above that

PAGE 238

Notes to Pages 156–157

239

which the signified already contains, which can be any value at all, provided it is still part of the available reserve” (Le´vi-Strauss, 64). When Le´vi-Strauss calls mana a floating signifier, it should be noted, he refers to its status and function in the discourse of the anthropologists rather than in the indigenous cultures they study: “one wonders whether their theory of mana is anything other than a device for imputing properties to indigenous thought which are implied by the very peculiar place that the idea of mana is called on to occupy in their own thinking” (57). If I am right to make the connection to literary-historical invocations of “plain style,” Le´vi-Strauss’s suggestion has profound and potentially subversive implications for any such invocation—including Miller’s, but also of course my own—for it forces us to acknowledge that our instrumentalization of the category does not only “shed light on the phenomena we set out to explain” but is also “a party to those phenomena” (56–57). Put simply, most scholars of the plain style are not merely its historians and analysts but its heirs. 44. Ibid., 64. 45. Auerbach, “Sermo Humilis,” 40. 46. Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts, 380. 47. Ibid., 382. 48. Le´vi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss,57. 49. Auksi, Christian Plain Style, 305. 50. Sandra Gustafson describes it as “an art that disguised its own artifice, producing an effect of immediacy and transparency that became the performative sign of authentic spiritual power.” Gustafson, Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 17. Lisa Gordis calls this “the paradox of the minister as prophet and craftsman”: “If the minister’s self-effacement is successful, he has become not only a skilled artisan but also a true prophet and conduit for the Holy Spirit, a role that is no less important for its ostensible transparency” (Gordis, Opening Scripture, 31). Peter Auksi, speaking of a longer history of Christian expression, identifies this logic as the “central commonplace through which a Christian plain style in rhetoric justifies itself: the less there is of human skill, pride of achievement, and self-serving display in discourse which might displace God’s authorship of the words, the more evident will be his power, spirit, and inspired wording” (Auksi, Christian Plain Style, 90). Finally, Richard Lanham, with more contempt than admiration, refers to the plain style as a “conjuring trick” and also “a cheat, an illusion.” Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric In the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 22. 51. Miller “American Language,” 213–14. 52. Thomas Prince in the preface to its 1758 reprint calls The Whole Booke of Psalmes “the First Book Printed In north America, and, as far as I can find, in This whole new world.” See Thomas Prince, “Preface,” in The Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs, of the Old and New Testament, Faithfully Translated into English Metre (Boston, 1758), i–vi. The iconic status of The Whole Booke of Psalmes was recently underscored by its becoming the most expensive book (to date) ever sold at auction. See James Barron, “Book of Psalms Published in 1640 Sets a Record at Auction,” New York Times, 27 November 2013, A20. 53. Whole Booke of Psalmes, title page. The 1640 preface is commonly attributed to Richard Mather. 54. Ibid., xii–xiii. 55. For an account which links these two issues—the project of vernacular biblical translation and its influence on the history of English prose style—see Mueller, Native Tongue. See

PAGE 239

240

Notes to Pages 157–159

also Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Watson, Ruth Evans, and Andrew Taylor, eds. The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999). 56. “The prose of the Puritan sermon,” writes Fish, “by way of contrast [to the Anglican], is self-effacing in style, but self-glorying (in two directions) in effect, for by making no claim to be art, it makes the largest claim of all, that it simply tells the truth. The Anglicans may display language, but it is the Puritans who take pride in language, because it is the Puritans who take language seriously” (Self-Consuming Artifacts, 70). On the aggressiveness of the plain stylist’s posture of humility, compare Richard Lanham, who prefers the honesty of openly rhetorical expression: “Clarity gets back in combativeness the pleasure it sacrifices in renouncing ornament. Sanctimonious moralizing about style again gets things backwards. The honest style is self-conscious, proclaims its designs on you. Rhetorical style seems less miraculous because it does not hide the amplifying powers of language, it waves them in our faces. The real deceiver is the plain stylist who pretends to put all his cards on the table” (Lanham, Motives of Eloquence, 22). 57. Exod. 20:24–25 KJV. 58. Exod. 20:23, 20:4 KJV. 59. Gen. 3:1, 3:13 KJV. 60. Miller, “American Language,” 216. 61. This is not to dispute Miller’s underlying claim that the plain style went from a matter of deliberate doctrine to a more universal expressive mode, and that the turning point was “the end of the [seventeenth] century, when, as so many have remarked, the plain style wins the day” (Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts, 379). There is indeed a broad scholarly consensus that at the end of the century, plain style both declined as a particular rhetorical doctrine (associated, for example, with a religious faction espousing a preaching style, or with a philosophical school espousing a scientific style), and also paradoxically achieved a generality that marks its cultural ascendancy as an expressive ideal in the eighteenth century and beyond (see for example Auksi, Christian Plain Style, 304). Harold Fisch, in an influential 1952 essay on the Puritan origins of later prose aesthetics, concludes in a way similar to Miller: “One cannot, I think, avoid the conclusion that the Puritans through their stylistic habits, helped to shape the type of plain prose which became increasingly the standard after the Restoration. The fact that their political power came to an end at this period should not lead us to think that their influence on the national life had ceased. Quite on the contrary, the . . . indirect influence of Calvinist teaching in the economic and social sphere was to be felt to an increasing extent in the two hundred years that followed.” Harold Fisch, “The Puritans and the Reform of ProseStyle,” ELH 19:4 (1952), 245. Having established that the influence was only “indirect,” however, Fisch can then relinquish detailed historical explanation: “It is not necessary to pursue our subject further. The standard prose of the eighteenth century is simply a further modification and extension of that standard developed in the Restoration” (248). Thus, a critical tendency to mention while essentially passing over eighteenth-century developments is not uncommon. 62. By “downplaying the role of aesthetics in Puritan life,” writes Toulouse, “Miller not only ignored the importance of the emotional side of Puritanism . . . but also discounted the historical and literary insights made available by studying the Puritans from this perspective.” Teresa Toulouse, The Art of Prophesying: New England Sermons and the Shaping of Belief

PAGE 240

Notes to Pages 159–162

241

(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 5. Other critics have argued for cultural connections between Puritan sermons and sentimental or seduction fiction, though on bases other than my focus on the plain aesthetic. See for example Desire´e Henderson, “The Imperfect Dead: Mourning Women in Eighteenth-Century Oratory and Fiction,” Early American Literature 39:3 (2004), 487–509; and Abram Van Engen, “Puritanism and the Power of Sympathy” Early American Literature 45:3 (2010), 533–64. 63. On the early American reception of Richardson, see Leonard Tennenhouse, The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750–1850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 56–72. The following quotations from Pamela are taken from the four-volume expanded sixth edition, including the sequel, published by Richardson in 1742. See Samuel Richardson, Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded: In a Series of Familiar Letters from a Beautiful Young Damsel to Her Parents: and Afterwards, in Her Exalted Condition, Between Her, and Persons of Figure and Quality, Upon the Most Important and Entertaining Subjects, In Genteel Life, The Sixth Edition, Corrected (London: S. Richardson, 1742). Richardson’s sequel, Pamela In Her Exalted Condition, has recently been reprinted in a scholarly edition based on Richardson’s edition of 1741. See Samuel Richardson, Pamela in Her Exalted Condition, ed. Albert J. Rivero (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 64. Richardson, Pamela, Sixth Edition (1742), 4:452. 65. Ibid., 3:16–17. 66. Ibid., 4:450. 67. Ibid., 3:259. 68. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, 299. Murphy, it should be noted, is speaking in these passages only of the “homily” form of conversational preaching, yet I find his comment more broadly applicable to the plain style and its gestures toward “simplicity” and away from “formal” rhetoric. 69. Ibid., 298. 70. Terence Martin makes a similar point about the religious uses of these concepts: “Bareness, unencumberedness, and purity are thus achieved by a process of continuous negation or subtraction that culminates in ‘the nothingness of origin.’ ” Martin, Parables of Possibility: The American Need for Beginnings (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 69. 71. Fisch, “The Puritans,” 231. 72. Chaderton, quoted in Fisch, “The Puritans,” 231–32. 73. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, 299–300. Lanham suggests more globally that “it may perhaps be fruitful to view style as a self-corrective circuit. A movement toward either extreme on the spectrum generates a counterpressure back toward the middle” (Motives of Eloquence, 31). 74. Cf. 1 Cor. 2:1, 4–5 KJV. 75. Fisch, “The Puritans,” 242. 76. Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts, 375. 77. Ibid., 376. 78. Le´vi-Strauss, 63. 79. Miller, “American Language,” 211. 80. I discuss these concepts in relation to the logics of allochthony and autochthony in the book’s introduction, and also in the coda. In the case of Miller’s argument, the final product of this critical operation is a hybrid cultural category, neither English nor aboriginally

PAGE 241

242

Notes to Pages 162–169

American, but a distinct third concept: the Anglo-American. Miller uses terms like “an immigrant stock” (“American Language,” 215) to designate this third term as it initially mediates between Englishness and Americanness. Miller’s “immigrant stock” is not a transplant and not an indigenous florum, but something more like a cultural “graft.” 81. Tennenhouse, Importance, 45. 82. Ibid., 45. 83. Hannah Webster Foster, The Coquette, in Carla Mulford, ed., The Power of Sympathy and The Coquette (New York: Penguin, 1996), 134. 84. Tennenhouse, Importance, 45. 85. Michel Rene´ Hilliard-d’Auberteuil, Miss McCrea: A Novel of the American Revolution, trans. Eric LaGuardia (Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1958 [1784]), 28–29. 86. Susannah Rowson, Charlotte Temple and Lucy Temple, ed. Ann Douglas (New York: Penguin, 1991), 5. 87. Foster, Coquette, 152. 88. Ibid., 132. 89. Ibid., 132. 90. Tennenhouse, Importance, 51–52. 91. Ibid., 52. 92. Ibid., 51–52. 93. William Hill Brown, The Power of Sympathy, in Carla Mulford, ed., The Power of Sympathy and The Coquette (New York: Penguin, 1996), 7. 94. Brown, Power of Sympathy, 7. 95. Ibid. 96. In the case of The Power of Sympathy, the most explicit such statement in the paratext comes, in fact, in the dedication following the title page: “To the Young Ladies of United Columbia, These Volumes Intended to represent the specious Causes and to Explore the fatal consequences, of Seduction; To inspire the Female Mind with a Principle of Self Complacency, and to Promote the Economy of Human Life, Are Inscribed, With Esteem and Sincerity, By their Friend and Humble Servant, The Author” (title page). 97. Brown, Power of Sympathy, 10. 98. Ibid., 10. 99. Ibid. 100. Ibid., 11. 101. Ibid., 10. 102. Rowson, Charlotte Temple, 1. 103. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 73. 104. Foster, Coquette, 233, 241. 105. Robert Ferguson, Reading the Early Republic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 19. 106. Rowson, Charlotte Temple, 25. 107. Michelle Burnham, Captivity and Sentiment: Cultural Exchange in American Literature, 1682–1861 (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1997), 78. 108. Ibid., 76. 109. Ibid.

PAGE 242

Notes to Pages 169–176

243

110. Hilliard-D’Auberteuil, 28–29. 111. Jenny Davidson, Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness: Manners and Morals from Locke to Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 45–75. 112. Royall Tyler, The Contrast, A Comedy in Five Acts, Written by A Citizen of the United States (Philadelphia: Pritchard and Hall, 1790), n.p. 113. Ibid., vii–viii. It was also Wignell who, the story goes, first urged Tyler to write the play, and who published it in 1790, along with a prefatory advertisement apologizing for the “delay,” and offering some inoculative rhetoric begging for “public indulgence”: “It is the first essay of American genius in a difficult species of composition; it was written by one, who never critically studied the rules of the drama, and, indeed had seen but few of the exhibitions of the stage; it was undertaken and finished in the course of three weeks” (vii–viii). 114. This figure was a common one in Puritan invocations of plain style. It was also a frequent refrain in English writing generally, as a highly popular convention of vernacular self-deprecation. See Richard F. Jones, The Triumph of the English Language: A Survey of Opinions concerning the Vernacular from the Introduction of Printing to the Restoration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1953), 19–21. 115. Tyler, Contrast, n.p. 116. Ibid., n.p. 117. Royall Tyler, The Algerine Captive: or, The Life and Adventures of Doctor Updike Underhill. (New York: Modern Library, 2002), 5. 118. Ibid., 6. 119. Ibid., 6. 120. Ibid., 6. 121. Ibid., 6. 122. Compare Terence Martin’s argument that the negative definition of Americanness is a more general “national habit” (Parables of Possibility, 46, 47–80). 123. For recent work on early American reception of, and engagement with aesthetic theory, see Edward Cahill, Liberty of the Imagination: Aesthetic Theory, Literary Form, and Politics in the Early United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); and Eric Slauter, The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). For another recent collection with a broader historical focus, see Cindy Weinstein and Christopher Looby, eds., American Literature’s Aesthetic Dimensions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 124. See Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 125. Lewis Leary, “Introduction,” in Hilliard-d’Auberteuil, Miss McCrea, 28–29, 5–16, 5. 126. Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Monsieur Hilliard-D’Auberteuil, 20 February 1786, in Memoirs, Correspondence, and Private Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Late President of the United States, vol. 1 (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1829), 447. 127. See Christopher Hill, “The Norman Yoke,” in Puritanism and Revolution: Studies and Interpretation of the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (New York: Schocken Books, 1958), 46–111. For an application of the Norman yoke myth and the concept of British liberty to the transatlantic novel, see Laura Doyle, Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). 128. Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 178–79.

PAGE 243

244

Notes to Pages 176–183

129. Ibid. 130. Tyler, Contrast, 4. 131. Ibid., 3. 132. Ibid., 5. 133. Ibid. 134. Ibid., 4. 135. Ibid. 136. Ibid., 5. 137. On the figure of Chesterfield in The Contrast, see Roberta Borkat, “ ‘Lord Chesterfield Meets Yankee Doodle’: Royall Tyler’s The Contrast,” Midwest Quarterly 17 (July 1976), 436–39; Donald Siebert, “Royall Tyler’s ‘Bold Example’: The Contrast and the English Comedy of Manners,” Early American Literature 13 (1978), 3–11; Richard Pressman, “Class Positioning and Shays’ Rebellion: The Contradictions of The Contrast,” Early American Literature 21 (1986), 87–102; Lucy Rinehart, “A Nation’s ‘Noble Spectacle’: Royall Tyler’s The Contrast as Metatheatrical Commentary,” American Drama 3:2 (1994), 29–52. 138. For an excellent overview and analysis of the figure of “Chesterfieldianism” in transatlantic literary culture, see Christopher Lukasik, Discerning Characters: The Culture of Appearance in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 53–90 passim. See also Herbert Ross Brown, The Sentimental Novel in America, 1789–1860 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1940), 45. 139. Brown, Power of Sympathy, 53. 140. Ibid., 194. 141. Ibid., 53–54. 142. Davidson, Hypocrisy, 47–75. 143. Tennenhouse, Importance, 73. 144. Brown, Power of Sympathy, 54.

Coda Note to epigraph: D. H. Lawrence, “The Spirit of Place” (early version), in Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen, eds., Studies in Classic American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 176. 1. John Macy, The Spirit of American Literature (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921 [1913]), v. Most of the passages cited come from the introductory “General Characteristics,” which was anthologized separately in Modern Essays in 1921, the year that also saw the reprinting of Macy’s book under the Modern Library imprint. 2. Ibid., v. 3. Ibid., 4. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., 6–7. 6. Ibid., 6. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., 17. 10. In this respect, Macy was very much of his moment among American intellectuals. During the same decade, Van Wyck Brooks famously issued a similar kind of cultural petition

PAGE 244

Notes to Pages 183–187

245

for the creation of a “usable past” in the pages of The Dial. See Van Wyck Brooks, “On Creating a Usable Past,” Dial 64 (1918), 337–41. 11. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). This edition includes versions of the essays in various states of revision and publication. The passages I cite below are from the early version of “The Spirit of Place,” first published in the English Review in 1918. 12. Ibid., 121. 13. Ibid., 167. 14. Ibid., 168. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. The most famous example in antebellum literary history is the so-called Paper War between British and American periodicals in the post-1812 years. Sydney Smith’s notorious question in the Edinburgh Review in 1821, “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?”—which American authors and critics reiterated and scratched at for at least a century thereafter—is traditionally cited in U.S. literary histories as a launching pad for James Fenimore Cooper’s literary career, which finally provided a respectable answer. See Richard Ruland, The Native Muse: Theories of American Literature from Bradford to Whitman (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1976), 70–165 passim, for excerpts from some of these periodical salvos. 19. On the cultural and literary phenomenon of American Anglophilia in the nineteenth century, see Elisa Tamarkin, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 20. Lawrence, Studies, 168. 21. Macy, Spirit, 7. 22. Lawrence, Studies, 167. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., 17. 26. Ibid., 176, 17. 27. Ibid., 168. 28. Macy, Spirit, 3. The use of the arboreal metaphor to frame questions of culture has been the subject of much theoretical discussion in recent decades. See especially the discussion of “arborescent” versus “rhizomatic” thinking in the introductory manifesto to Gilles Deleuze and Fe´lix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. and foreword by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 3–25. For a suggestion of what a rhizomatic model of American literary history might look like, see Leonard Tennenhouse, “Is There an Early American Novel?” in Novel: A Forum on Fiction 40:1/2 (Spring 2006/ Fall 2007), 15–16. See also Franco Moretti’s adaptation of Darwin’s phylogenetic tree as a model for literary history in Graphs Maps Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London: Verso, 2005), 67–92. 29. Macy, Spirit, 12, 9. 30. Ibid., 6.

PAGE 245

246

Notes to Pages 187–188

31. Where Lawrence keeps emphasizing the shaping power of place, Macy generally downplays it: “Geography . . . was never, among modern European nations, so important as we sometimes are asked to believe” (Spirit, 3). 32. Ibid., 4. 33. Henry James, Hawthorne (London: Macmillan, 1879), 3. 34. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Michael Moon (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 788.

PAGE 246

INDEX

Abrams, M. H., 193n20 Adams, John, 205n25 Adams, Rachel, 196n41, 250 Addison, Joseph, 34, 69, 211n157; “An Essay on Virgil’s Georgics,” 103–5; Pleasures of the Imagination, 95 Agamben, Giorgio, 192n16 Aikin, John and Anna Letitia, 230n39 Ainsworth, Henry, 157 Algeo, John, 205n16, 210n142, 214n190 Alonso, Carlos, 123–24, 228n1 Altieri, Charles, 200n69 American exceptionalism. See exceptionalism Anglicization thesis, 14–15, 196n43, 197n50 anglophilia, 14–17, 36, 90, 110, 120, 177, 184, 196n42, 197n48, 227n5, 245n19. See also anglophobia thesis anglophobia thesis, 13–14, 17, 40, 42, 76. See also anglophilia Arac, Jonathan, 204n123, 250 Aristotle, 101, 149, 155 Armitage, David, 191n2 Armstrong, Nancy, 167, 200n66, 250 Ash, John, 63–65, 141n210; New and Complete Dictionary of the English Language, 64, 141n210 Ashfield, Andrew, 225nn145–149, 229nn33–34 Auerbach, Erich, 156, 238n38 Auksi, Peter, 156, 224n120, 238n34, 238n36, 239n49, 240n61 Austen, Jane, Northanger Abbey, 143, 243n111 autochthony and allochthony, 16–17, 25, 43– 44, 117, 122–24, 135, 139, 148, 187–89, 198nn54–55, 220n51, 228n12, 241n80. See also indigeneity Baillie, John, Essay on the Sublime, 129, 229n36

Baker, Houston, 195n40 Baldick, Chris, 228n19 Bannet, Eve Tavor, 217n9, 218n28, 219n29, 221n68, 221n73 Baret, John, 60 Barnard, Philip, 227n1, 227nn3–4, 234n112 Baron, Dennis, 205n13 Barthes, Roland, 178 Bartram, John, 227n178; Travels, 138 Bary, Leslie, 202n101 Bauer, Ralph, 105, 196n41, 212n168, 227n217, 220n56, 222n92, 223n111 Baumgarten, Alexander, 228n15 Bay Psalm Book, 157–58, 167, 171, 239n52 Behn, Aphra, Oroonoko, 2 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 191n3, 220n56, 235n3 Bergland, Renee, 226n164 Berkeley, Bishop, “Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America,” 98, 219nn45–46 Bernard, Kenneth, 231n55 Berthold, Dennis, 231n55 Blackmore, Sir Richard, 114, 128, 225nn146–47 Blackwell, Thomas, Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer, 114–15, 144, 225n156, 234n110 Blair, Hugh, 34, 114–18, 125; Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, 114–18, 130, 144, 225nn152–53; Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 125 Boccaccio, Giovanni, Decameron, 108, 223n114 Boon, Marcus, 193n20 Borkat, Roberta, 244n137 Botterill, Stephen, 27, 201n86, 202n93 Botting, Fred, 232n78 Breen, T. H., 14, 196n43

PAGE 247

248

Index

Brickhouse, Anna, 196n41 Brissot de Warville, Jacques-Pierre, New Travels in the United States of America, 227 Brooks, Van Wyck, 244n10 Brown, Charles Brockden, ix., 4, 7, 33–37, 121–22, 124–28, 173, 192n9, 230n51, 231n55, 234n103; Edgar Huntly, 11, 33, 34, 36, 131–35, 137–43, 145–48; Wieland, 135, 141, 145, 146, 233n98; Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, 135, 146; Memoirs of Stephen Calvert, 146; Arthur Mervyn, 146; “A Receipt for Modern Romance,” 140–41; “The Rhapsodist,”122; “Walstein’s School of History,” 122 Brown, Herbert Ross, 244n138 Brown, William Hill; Power of Sympathy, 123, 164–66, 178 Browne, Jocelyn Wogan, 203n104, 203n111, 204n118, 207n55, 223n116, 240n55 Buell, Lawrence, 3, 191n5, 192n7, 231n54 Buffon, Comte de, 68, 96, 97, 191n2, 226n166 Bullokar, William, 60 Burke, Edmund, 34, 95, 118, 129, 189, 225n148, 232n80; Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, 96, 125, 128, 130, 137–39, 147, 219n36, 230n42, 234n116 Burnham, Michelle, 168, 236n13, 242n107 Bushman, Richard L., 197n43 Butler, Charles, 62, 210n133 Cabot, John, 67 Cahill, Edward, 146, 196n42, 227n5, 228n7, 231n63, 234n113, 243n123, 250 Caius, John, 60 Calvinism, 153, 240n61 Campbell, Mary, 136–37, 230n39, 231nn66– 68, 232nn74–75, 232n78 Carey, Mathew, 46, 83, 206n38, 216n250 Casanova, Pascale, 196n41, 219n41 Castiglione, Baldassare, 111, 224nn132–33 Cavaliers, 73 Caxton, William, 59 Cervantes, Miguel de, 123; Don Quixote, 229n23 Chaderton, Lawrence, 160–61, 167, 241n72 Channing, Edward Tyrell, “On Models in Literature,” 34, 116, 226nn161–62 Channing, Walter, “Essay on American Language and Literature,” 34, 226n162

Chase, Richard, 5, 192n13, 227n6 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 30–31, 61, 63, 65, 69, 77, 203n106 Chesterfield (Philip Dormer Stanhope, Fourth Earl of Chesterfield), 37, 177–79, 207n46, 244nn137–38; Letters to His Son, 178 Chiles, Katy, 212n168, 226n168 Christopherson, Bill, 227n6 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 28, 221n73; anti-Ciceronianism in rhetoric, 154, 236n13 Cillerai, Chiara, 219n29 cisatlantic culture, idea of 2–4, 7–8, 12, 16, 34, 67, 95, 136, 152, 163, 171–73, 187–89, 191n2, 193n17, 233n97 Claessen, Henri J.M., 198nn54–55 Clark, Jennifer, 196n42 Clery, E. J., 129, 229n35, 230n39 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 19, 32, 204n122, 220n51, 221n71, 227n178 Congreve, William, 77 Cooper, James Fenimore, 3, 34, 89, 185, 204n8, 245n18; Last of the Mohicans, 89 Cooper, Thomas, Some Information Respecting America, 93, 218n25, 227n178 cosmopolitanism, 13, 29, 90, 94, 97, 99, 131, 133, 203n101, 217n11, 220n51 court, 29–30, 56, 71, 74–76, 202n93, 213n177, 214n202; courtly language use, 75–76; courtly style, 224n133; courtly hypocrisy, 176; “court pronunciation” of English words, 74–76, 214n202 courtship, 11, 164–65, 170, 176–79 Cre`vecoeur, J. Hector St. John de, 1, 12, 29, 35–36, 175; Letters from an American Farmer, 1, 11–12, 29, 32, 36, 87–94, 99–100, 102–7, 109–13, 116, 118–20, 148, 191n1, 216nn1–2, 217nn4–6, 217nn8–11, 221n82, 225n156, 226n168, 227n178 Croll, Morris, 236n13, 237n32, 238n33 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 107, 126, 203n115, 219n44, 229n23, 229n31 D’Anmours, Chevalier, 91–92 Dante (Alighieri), De Vulgari Eloquentia, 26– 27, 202n93; Inferno, 229n32 Davidson, Cathy, 122, 174, 195n34, 228n9 Davidson, Jenny, 169, 178, 243n111, 250 de Bolla, Peter, 225nn145–49, 229nn33–34

PAGE 248

Index Defoe, Daniel, Life and Strange Suprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 144, 211n157 Denning, Michael, 20, 199n65, 66 Dennis, John, “The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry,” 114, 225n145 Denoon, Donald, 20, 199n65 Derrida, Jacques, 102–3, 221n72, 226n163 diaspora, 14–17, 43, 186, 188, 197n47, 218n13, 237n21 difference-in-repetition. 7, 10, 21, 32, 35, 163, 183, 187–89; style as locus of, 21, 32, 36, 187–89 Dillon, Elizabeth, 196n41, 250 Dimock, Wai Chee, 196n41 Dowling, William C., 222n82 Doyle, Laura, 196n41, 213n181, 243n127, 250 Dryden, John, The Indian Emperour, 2 Du Bellay, Joachim, 110–11; La Deffence et Illustration de la Langue Francoise, 27–29, 202n94, 224n123, 224nn126–28 Duff, William, 118; An Essay on Original Genius, 114, 225nn148–49 Durant, David S., 233n91 Dwight, Timothy, 4, 192n8, 222n82 dullness, 31, 204n119, 223n119 Dwight, Timothy, Greenfield Hill, 4, 192n8, 222n82 Egan, Jim, 212n168 Eliot, T. S., Four Quartets, 1; “American Literature and the American Language,” 199n64 Elizabeth I, 61, 67, 212n171 Elliott, Emory, 195n34 Ellison, Julie, 196, 227 Elmer, Jonathan, 226n164, 226n166, 250 Emerson, Amanda, 11, 195n31 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 3, 5, 7, 107, 220n51; “The American Scholar,” 34, 179; “SelfReliance,” 7, 194n22; English Traits, 195n32 emulation. See imitation English language, 9–10, 23–24, 27, 29–32, 43, 48–54, 157–58; history of, 29–32, 50–51, 56, 70, 75, 204n117, 209n116, 210n142, 211n158, 212n160; irregularities in and instability of, 48–60, 62, 82–83; American version of, 39– 47, 66–86, 199n64, 210n142, 205n25; relation to and borrowings from other languages, 46, 50, 56; Saxon origins of, 62,

249

66, 70, 76, 84, 176, 213n172, 213n175. See also vernacularity, English vernacular epistolarity, 92–94, 100, 102–3, 105, 127, 146, 159–66, 218n28, 219n29, 221n68, 221n73 exceptionalism, 3, 6, 15, 20, 25, 76, 90, 98, 99, 117, 120–22, 126, 131, 187, 192n7, 192n16, 193n20; versus cosmopolitanism, 90, 94, 97, 99, 220n51; versus settler exceptionalism, 20, 188, 199n66; American as extension of English exceptionalism, 76, 182–84; European origins of American exceptionalism, 117, 120, 122, 131, 184, 218n15; literary exceptionalism, 3, 6, 39, 126, 140, 182–84, 194n30, 234n103; geographic exceptionalism, 137–39, 153 Faherty, Duncan, 233n94, 250 Fantham, Elaine, 25, 201n77 Ferguson, Robert A., 95, 168, 202n90, 218n13, 218n15, 219n33, 242n105, 250 Fiedler, Leslie, 142, 194n30, 201n85, 227n6, 234nn102–3, 237n30 Fisch, Harold, 160, 240n61 Fischer, David Hackett, 214n190 Fish, Stanley, 156, 161, 236n13, 238n33, 240n56, 240n61 Fisher, John Hurt, 73, 205n16, 205n25, 206n36, 214n191, 214n194 Fliegelman, Jay, 197n46, 200n71, 226n165, 230n44 foreign debt, 17–26, 30, 33, 46, 79, 86, 141, 152, 154, 163, 173, 180, 187–89, 203n101 Foster, Hannah Webster, The Coquette, 11, 37, 163–64, 168, 178, 228n10, 242n83 Foucault, Michel, 193n17, 195n40 Franklin, Benjamin, 44, 68, 72, 89–90, 99, 206n30, 218n13; Autobiography, 89, 214n88 French language and literary culture, 11–12, 28–30, 50–54, 56, 62, 66, 70–76, 80–84, 96– 99, 102, 108–11, 147, 174, 176, 205n25, 207n53, 209n118, 213n177. See also Norman French Fumaroli, Marc, 236n13, 238n32 Gardner, Jared, 230n51, 250 Garrick, David, 64, 74, 212n171 genera dicendi. See style, levels of genius loci, 17, 162, 180, 186 Gentilcore, Roxanne, 222n82 georgic mode, 4, 103–4, 221n82, 222nn83–88,

PAGE 249

250

Index

Gerbi, Antonello, 119, 212, 226 Gibbons, Luke, 231n51 Gil, Alexander, 62; Logonomia Anglica, 210n133 Giles, Paul, 2, 191n4, 196nn41–42, 227n5 Goddu, Teresa, 227n6 Godwin, William, 221n76, Caleb Williams, 233n100 Gordis, Lisa M., 235n12, 239n50 Gould, Philip, 15, 197n49, 250 Gower, John, 30, 61 Grabo, Norman, 90, 218n12, 229n26 Green, Felicity, 224n132 Greenblatt, Stephen, 230n39, 232n77 Greene, Jack, 14, 197n43, 230n39 Greene, Thomas, 202n99 Greenough, Horatio, 220n51 Greimas, A.J., 231n56 Gruen, Erich, 200n76, 201n81 Guattari, Fe´lix, 245n28 Guillory, John, 200n68, 238n42 Gustafson, Sandra, 200n70, 239n550, 250 Habinek, Thomas N, 201n76, 201n82 Hale, Terry, 228n15 Hamelman, Steve, 228n8 Hampton, Timothy, 110, 224n122, 224n124 Hanlon, Christopher, 195n32, 215n219 Harris, Sharon M., 219n29 Hart, John, 59–60, 209n119. 210n129 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 5, 6, 34, 185, 188, 192nn12–14, 233n97; The House of the Seven Gables, 5, 192n13; Blithedale Romance, 192n13; Marble Faun, 192n14 Hemingway, Ernest, 149, 150 hemispheric studies, 3, 15–16, 195n41 Henderson, Desire´e, 241n62 Hewitt, Elizabeth, 217n9, 218nn25, 28, 221n73 Hilliard-d’Auberteuil, Michel Rene´, Miss McCrea: A Novel of the American Revolution, 164, 168, 174–75, 242n85, 243nn125–26 Hitchcock, Enos, Memoirs of the Bloomsgrove Family, 123 Holbo, Christine, 217n9 Hooker, Thomas, Survey of the Summe of Church-Discipline, 153, 237n25 Horsman, Reginald, 213 Howell, William Hunting, 194n20, 250 Hulliung, Mark, 197n43

humility topoi, 30–32, 105–9, 112, 166–67, 171, 203n115, 204n117, 223n114, 240n56, 243n114 hypocrisy, 11, 167, 169, 171, 176, 178, 224n133, 243n111 Iannini, Christopher, 212n168, 217n10, 220n56 imitation, 4–7, 28–30, 32–33, 40, 64, 79, 86, 110, 146, 163, 170–71, 173–81, 188–89, 193n17, 203n103 Imlay, Gilbert, A Topographical Description of North America, 93, 218n24, 227n178 indigeneity, cultural and literary, 8, 10, 16–17, 44, 68–69, 122–24, 148, 162, 187–89, 198nn54–55, 233n97, 239n43, 242n80. See also autochthony and allochthony Ingersoll, Charles Jared, Inchiquin: The Jesuit’s Letters, 93, 218n26 innovation, cultural impulse towards, 25, 29, 32, 40, 42, 57, 65, 86, 126, 128. See also novelty Isidore of Seville, The Etymologies, 19, 199nn62–63 Isocrates, 238n37 Jacob, Hildebrand, 137, 232n79 James, Henry, 5, 149, 182, 188, Hawthorne, 5, 188, 192n12 Jamestown settlement, 67 Jefferson, Thomas, 2, 27, 139, 174, 176, 191n2, 192n16, 200n70, 201n90, 219n50, 226n165, 243n126; Notes on the State of Virginia, 91– 99, 117, 212n169, 218nn14–15, 219nn33–37, 226n166, 232n81 Jehlen, Myra, 103, 220n56 Johnson, Samuel, 23, 30, 40, 43, 46, 48, 68–70, 76–84, 176, 205n25, 206n36, 206n43, 207n51, 207n53, 207n60, 210n152; Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language, 48–49, 51, 57–58, 206n45, 207n48; “Preface,” 68, 206n34, 206n42, 207n60, 212n172, 213n172, 216n251 Jones, Richard F., 204n117, 236n13, 238n33, 243n114 Kafer, Peter, 231n63 Kammen, Michael, 192n16 Kamrath, Mark L., 227n1, 227n4 Kant, Immanuel, 34, 193n20, 228n15; “Toward Perpetual Peace,” 13, 195n39; Observations

PAGE 250

Index on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, 130, 230n41; Critique of Judgment, 95, 228n15 Kazanjian, David, 228n13 Kilgour, Maggie, 202n99 Kramer, Michael P., 205n13 Kristeva, Julia, 143, 234n104 Kulungian, Harold, 109, 224n121 Kupperman, Karen Ordahl, 232n76 Kutchen, Larry, 192n8, 222n82, 222n87, 231n55 Lanham, Richard, 101, 149, 220n59, 222n91, 224n133, 235n, 239n50, 240n56, 241n73 Larkin, Edward, 15, 90, 94, 197n49, 197n50, 202n90, 217n6, 217n10, 217n11, 219n29, 226n168, 250, 251 Lass, Roger, 209n116, 211n158 Lawrence, D. H., 6, 8, 87–89, 103, 154, 182–89, 193nn17–18, 216n2, 217n8, 221n76, 231n54, 237n29, 244n, 245n11, 246n31 Lawton, David, 204n119, 223n119 Leary, Lewis, 174, 243n125 Lee, Sophia, Recess, 142, 233n100, 234n105 Lennox, Charlotte, Life of Harriot Stuart, 2 Lepore, Jill, 40, 80, 204n8, 206n36 Levander, Caroline F., 196n41 Levine, Robert S., 196n41, 227n4, 250 Le´vi-Strauss, Claude, 119, 156, 161, 238–39n43 Lilly, Marie Loretto, 222n87 Lipset, Seymour, 192n16 Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government, 117, 129–30, 230n38; Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 175 Lollardy. See Wyclif, John Looby, Christopher, 200n70, 243n123, 250 Loshe, Lillie Deming, 227n1 Loughran, Trish, 176, 243n128 Lowth, Robert, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, 144 Lueck, Beth L., 231n55 Lukasik, Christopher, 228n10, 244n138 Macherey, Pierre, 220n51 Macpherson, James, 116–18 Macy, John, Spirit of American Literature, 182–89, 244n1, 244n10, 246n31 Manning, Susan, 222n84 Marbois, Franc¸ois, 91–92, 95, 97 Martin, Terence, 8, 12, 194n24, 241n70, 243n122

251

Marx, Leo, 231n54 Massachusetts Bay Colony, 73, 77 Matthiessen, F. O., 62, 107, 220n51, 221n71, 223n112, 233n97 McGill, Meredith, 196n42, 227n5 McMahon, Darrin M., 193n20 Melville, Herman, 4–7; “Hawthorne and his Mosses,” 4–5, 179, 192n11; “Young America in Literature,” 34 Mencken, H. L., The American Language, 199n64, 204n122, 204n8, 205n13 Mighall, Robert, 228n19 Miles, Robert, 126, 228n14, 230n39 Miller, Perry, 35, 149–62, 180, 204n123, 235nn1–3, 235n12, 236n21, 237n24, 237n30, 238n33, 239n43, 240nn61–62, 242n80 Milton, John, 5, 7, 99, 234n110 Mitchell, Julia Post, 217n4 Mitchell, W. Fraser, 237n24 modesty topoi. See humility topoi Montaigne, Michel de, 102; Essays, 109–13, 224n129, 224n132 Montgomery, Michael, 214n190 Moore, Dennis D., 217n6, 220n56, 250 Moretti, Franco, 18–19, 196n41, 197n47, 198n51, 245n28 Morris, David B., 232n78 Morrissey, Mary, 236n13, 237n24 Mueller, Janel M., 238n42, 239n55 Mulcaster, Richard, Elementarie, 60, 209n126 Murphy, James J., 160, 236n13, 238n38, 241n68, 241n73 Murray, Lindley, English Grammar, 38, 204n Murrin, John, 14, 192n16, 196n43 negative affiliation, 11, 17, 86, 189, 195n31. See also negative definition negative definition, 1, 8, 11–12, 17, 86, 104, 135, 160, 173, 189, 193n243. See also negative affiliation Neuman, Meredith, 235n12 Norman Conquest, 56, 70, 75, 213n177 Norman French, 29, 56, 70–71, 75, 80, 208n99, 213n177 Norman yoke, 71, 75, 176, 213n181, 243n127 North, Michael, 4, 192n10, 211n155 Norwood, Lisa West, 231n55 novelty, 4, 24, 192n10, 194n30, 211n155; as literary claim or topos, 7, 33, 122, 124, 126–29,

PAGE 251

252

Index

novelty (continued ) 135, 141, 150, 229n23, 229n32; by subtraction, 10, 11, 35, 189, 241n70; in language reform, 10, 12, 24, 61; association with American hemisphere, 129, 131, 135, 146, 185, 194n30, 230n39 O’Gorman, Edmundo, 232n77 Oosten, Jarich G., 198nn54–55 originality, competing definitions of, 4–7, 11, 33, 37, 128, 129, 146, 163, 203n101, 211n155 orthography. See spelling reform Ossian, 114, 116–18, 144, 225n152, 226n165, 230n40 Oswald de Andrade, “Cannibalist Manifesto,” 202n101 Paine, Thomas, 90, 176, 201n90, 218n13 Parrington, Vernon L., 88, 231n54 Parrish, Susan Scott, 212n168, 232n80 Paul, Apostle, 155, 161, 223n120 Pauw, Corneille de, 68, 212n167 Pease, Donald, 192n16 Pegge, Samuel, 213n175 Philbrick, Thomas, 92, 217n4 Pigman, George, 202n99, 203n103 plain style. See style Ple´iade, la, 27, 110, 112 Pluhar, Werner S., 228n15 Plumstead, A. W., 216n1 Poe, Edgar Allan, 85 Poirier, Richard, 6, 193n17 Posner, David M., 224n132 Potolsky, Matthew, 193n20 Pressman, Richard, 244n137 Prince, Thomas, 239n52 Puritan sermons, 151–53, 155, 160–62, 167, 173, 235n3, 235n12, 236n21, 237n24, 240n56, 240n61, 241n62 Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 21–24, 200n71, 211n152 Radcliffe, Ann, 233n91; A Sicilian Romance, 125, 139–41, 143, 229n20, 233n91, 233n99 Raleigh, Walter, Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana, 67, 136–37, 232n78 Raynal, Abbe´, 69, 92, 94, 96–97, 99, 212n169, 226n166; Histoire philosophique et politique des deux Indes, 69, 94, 99

Read, Allen Walker, 205n17, 205n25 Reeve, Clara, Old English Baron: A Gothic Story, 125, 228n18, 234n105 Reid, S.W., 234n112 Reinhold, Meyer, 200n70 repetition with a difference. See differencein-repetition Revolution, American, 8, 13–14, 16–17, 89–90, 93–94, 123, 152; English Revolution, 243n127; post-Revolutionary period, 4, 13, 21, 25, 34, 42–43, 80, 129, 150, 162, 172, 180, 189, 193n17, 218n25 Rice, Grantland, 217n9 Rice, H. C., 216n1 Richard, Carl, 200n70 Richardson, Samuel, 159, 161, 163, 173, 177, 179, 241n63; Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded, 159, 241n63; Pamela in Her Exalted Condition, 159, 241n63; Clarissa, 163, 177 Rinehart, Lucy, 244n137 Ringe, Donald A., 227n1 Roach, Joseph, 16, 196n41, 198n55 Roberts, Siaˆn Silyn, 229n19, 233n94, 234n103, 250, 251 Ronsard, Pierre de, 110–11, 224n123 Ross, Robert, American Grammar, 205n15 Round, Philip H., 237n24 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Confessions, 100, 106, 108, 109, 220n57 Rowson, Susanna, 175, Charlotte Temple, 11, 37, 164, 167, 171, 174–75, 242n86 Rucker, Mary E., 220n56 Rush, Benjamin, 41 Ruttenburg, Nancy, 217n9 Salmon, Vivian, 59, 209n116, 211n157 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 210n152 Sbriglia, Russ, 192, 250 Schwarz, Roberto, 18, 198n Scott, Sir Walter, Lives of the Novelists, 139, 233nn90–91 Se´billet, Thomas, Art Poe´tique Franc¸ois, 110, 224n123 sermo humilis, 155, 156, 238n34 Shakespeare, William, 60–61, 67, 69, 77; Love’s Labour’s Lost, 60–61 Shapiro, Stephen, 196n41, 227n1, 234n112 Shell, Marc, 81, 216n242 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, School for Scandal, 179

PAGE 252

Index Sheridan, Thomas, 64, 74–75, 214n202, 214n205; General Dictionary of the English Language, 74; Course of Lectures on Elocution, 74, 214nn202–3, 214n205, 215n206 Shields, David S., 191n3, 222n82 Shuffelton, Frank, 191n2, 218nn14–15, 232n81 Shuger, Debora, 237n32, 238n37 Siebert, Donald, 244n137 Simmel, Georg, 11, 195n31 Simms, William Gilmore, 192n13, 192n14 Simpson, David, 39–40, 71, 85, 201n90, 204n2, 206n43, 211n153, 213n175 Slauter, Eric, 194n20, 196n41, 234n123 Smith, Henry Nash, 231n54 Smith, Sydney, 245n18 Smith, Sir Thomas, 60, 62, De recta & Emendata Lingvæ Anglicæ Scriptione, Dialogus, 210n133 Smollett, Tobias, Travels Through France and Italy, 143 soil. See stock versus soil Southey, Robert, 227 sovereignty, 7, 13, 75, 93, 179, 195n34, 226n164, 232n76 spelling reform, 9–10, 12, 30, 35, 39–48, 53–66, 82–86, 205n36, 209n116, 209n129, 210n142, 211n157; British origins of “American” spellings, 12, 61–65; etymology versus pronunciation as basis of, 47, 51–62, 82, 84–86, 209n129213n172; and reformed alphabets, 44–45, 60, 66, 86, 206n30, 209n118; as modal approach to language reform, 9, 12, 39–40, 44–45, 86 Spencer, Benjamin T., 195n34 Spengemann, William C., 3, 191n6 sprezzatura, 111, 224nn132–33 Stae¨l, Germaine de, 130, 220n51; On Literature Considered in Its Relationship to Social Institutions, vii, 130, 230n43 Stafford, Barbara, 222n92 Stanhope, Philip Dormer. See Chesterfield Starobinski, Jean, 101–2, 220n60, 221n71 Steele, Ian K., 197n43 stock versus soil, 16–17, 29, 43, 77, 120, 154, 181, 182–89, 194n30, 242n80 Stone, Albert, 88, 105, 107, 216n1 Strohm, Paul, 29, 203n106, 250, 251 style, 17–24, 32–33, 39–40, 165–66, 168–69, 188–89, 193n17; levels of, 100–101, 104, 155, 237n32, 238n37, 238n38; plain, 109, 112, 149–

253

73, 204n123, 223n120, 236n13; middle, 104–5; sumptuary or sartorial, 21, 85, 112, 170, 178; as difference-in-repetition, 21, 32, 36, 187–89; as modal concept, 20, 21, 24, 32, 35–36, 39–40, 86 sublime, the, 11, 35–37, 95–96, 115–18, 121–22, 129–31, 137–39, 143–48, 189, 219n36, 225n145, 225n148, 229n33, 230n39, 230nn41– 42, 231n55, 232n78, 232n80, 234n110 Sweet, Timothy, 221n82 Tamarkin, Elisa, 14, 15, 17, 196n42, 197n48, 227n5, 245n19 Tennenhouse, Leonard, 7, 14–15, 17, 43, 118, 162, 164–65, 193n19, 194n21, 196n42, 197nn47–48, 206n24, 207n51, 218n13, 219n45, 227n5, 241n63, 250 Tenney, Tabitha, Female Quixotism, 123 Thoreau, Henry David, 3, 154, 220n51, 231n54 Thornton, William, Cadmus, or, A Treatise on the Elements of Written Language, 44, 206n29 Tooke, John Horne, Epea Pteroenta, or, The Diversions of Purley, 70, 213n173 Toulouse, Teresa, 240n62 Traister, Bryce, 195n35, 217n6, 218n28 translatio imperii et studii, 97–98, 110, 185, 219n45. See also translation translation, 7, 19, 110, 118, 154, 157, 174, 201n90, 203n111, 239n55 transplantation trope. See stock versus soil Treaty of Paris, 13, 87, 93 Trilling, Lionel, 35, 204n123 Twain, Mark, 35; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 107, 150 Tyler, Royall, 169–72, 175–76, 178–79; Contrast, 169–71, Algerine Captive, 123, 171–72, 244n137 Usher, James, Clio; or, A Discourse on Taste, 114–15, 118 Usk, Thomas, 30–31, 108–9, 223n115, 223n118 Van Engen, Abram, 241n62 Vance, William, 200n70 vernacularity, 12, 35, 204n123; vernacular literature, 26–31, 157–58, 239n55; vernacular “anxiety” and humility topoi, 19–20, 24– 32, 50, 243n114; English vernacular, 29–31, 50, 108–9; French vernacular, 27–29, 102,

PAGE 253

254

Index

vernacularity (continued ) 109–13; Italian vernaculars, 26–27, 108, 202n93, 204n117 Walker, John, 73–74, 77; Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, 73–74, 214n94 Walpole, Horace, Castle of Otranto, 124–26, 129, 139, 143, 228n16, 229n25 War of 1812, 19, 93, 245n18 Warfel, Harry R., 192n9, 205n9, 228n11, 229n21 Waterman, Bryan, 121, 227n1, 250 Watson, Nicholas, 30, 203n104, 207n55, 223n116, 240n55 Webster, Noah, 9–10, 12, 19, 23–24, 27, 30, 35– 36, 38–86, 123, 176, 199n63; Dissertations on the English Language, 9, 42, 44–45, 46–86, 194n27; American Spelling Book, 41 Weinstein, Cindy, 243n123, 250 Wheeler, Roxann, 212n168 White, Ed, 217n9

Whitman, Walt, 3, 34, 107, 116, 120, 220n51; Leaves of Grass, 6, 27, 116, 131, 148, 179, 188 Willett, Laura, 224n123, 224nn125–26 William [the Conqueror], 75, 213n177 Williams, Raymond, 211n155 Williamson, George, 238n42 Wilson, Kathleen, 212n168 Wilson-Okamura, David Scott, 104, 222nn89–90 Winkfield, Unca Eliza, Female American; or, The Adventures of Unca Eliza Winkfield, 174 Witherspoon, John, 205n14 Wood, Gordon, 218n13 Wyclif, John, 155, 238n34 yeomanry, 69, 71, 72, 76, 78 Yokota, Kariann Akemi, 197n43 Ziff, Larzer, 195n34, 235n3

PAGE 254

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

When a book takes a while to find its true shape, as this one did, it helps to be surrounded by generous and brilliant colleagues, as I have been. I began the research for this book in 2008–9, while in residence at the Dorothy and Lewis J. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. The unique resources and precious time afforded me the luxury of building a solid foundation for the book, while the friendships and comradeships I formed among my glorious Cullman cohort kept me afloat during an unusually difficult period of my life—one that proved, in retrospect, unexpectedly invigorating in ways both professional and personal. Two other formative moments in the development of this project came in late 2009, when I was invited to present my work at the Heyman Center for Humanities at Columbia University, and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Americanist Speakers and Colloquium Series. My deepest thanks to Akeel Bilgrami for organizing the Heyman Center event around my work and especially to Andrew Delbanco and Ross Posnock for honoring me by serving as respondents there. And sincere thanks to Russ Castronovo and Matt Hooley for hosting me in Madison, where I was blessed with a wonderful and engaged audience. I came away from both events with the critical firepower I needed to reorient the project in crucial ways. Portions of this work were also presented at meetings of the American Literature Association, the American Studies Association, the Modern Language Association, the Society of Early Americanists, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Northeast Modern Language Association, the Charles Brockden Brown Society, and a wonderful conference on “Race in the Americas” at Claremont College. I would like to thank my copanelists and audience members at those events, who offered memorable (to me, at least) comments and critiques. It has been a pleasure and honor to work with Jerry Singerman and the staff of Penn Press throughout this process. In particular, managing editor

PAGE 255

256

Acknowledgments

Noreen O’Connor-Abel and copyeditor Sara Lickey saw the manuscript through the editing process with clarity and good judgment. I am also deeply grateful to Edward Cahill and Paul Downes for reading a draft of the entire book and making indispensable suggestions for improvement, large and small. I owe a great debt as well to an anonymous reader of an earlier version of the manuscript for offering the kind of constructive critique that, if taken properly to heart, can only be a spur to better work; I hope that masked reader can see here my determination to rise to that occasion. Many other trusted friends and colleagues saw (or had their ears bent about) portions of this manuscript at various stages, in various contexts, and offered important suggestions. I would most like to thank: Rachel Adams, Jonathan Arac, Nancy Armstrong, Jennifer Baker, Eric Bulson, Mark Cooper, Patricia Dailey, Nicholas Dames, Jenny Davidson, Andrew Delbanco, Elizabeth Dillon, Ann Douglas, Laura Doyle, Jonathan Elmer, Duncan Faherty, Robert Ferguson, Jared Gardner, Phil Gould, Ken Gross, Sandra Gustafson, Evan Haefeli, Hunt Howell, Eleanor Johnson, David Kastan, Hari Kunzru, Kirsten Lentz, Bob Levine, Jim Longenbach, Chris Looby, Katie Mannheimer, John Michael, Monica Miller, Dennis Moore, Drew Newman, Ross Posnock, Bruce Robbins, Siaˆn Silyn Roberts, Nancy Ruttenburg, Russell Sbriglia, Jim Schapiro, Joe Shapiro, Stephen Shapiro, Frank Shuffelton, Richard Slotkin, Paul Strohm, Fred Tawil, Leonard Tennenhouse, Bryan Waterman, Cindy Weinstein, Ed White, and Sharon Willis. Matthew Skwiat provided indispensable help in the preparation of my final manuscript. A version of Chapter 4 appeared in a special issue of Early American Literature (51, no. 2, 2016) on “Aesthetics, Feeling, and Form.” I am indebted to the guest editors, Edward Larkin and Edward Cahill, to Sandra Gustafson and the readers who vetted my essay, and to the respondents for that issue, for astute readings and productive avenues for revision. Bob Levine was also kind enough to offer me feedback on an earlier draft of the article. An early version of Chapter 3 appeared in a special double issue of Novel (40, nos. 1–2, Fall 2006/Spring 2007) devoted to the subject of “The Early American Novel” and edited by Leonard Tennenhouse. My thanks to the editorial boards of EAL and Novel for permission to reprint that material here. Beyond training two crucial pieces of my book into fighting shape, the process of taking part in these collaborative special issues profoundly shaped my understanding of the book’s argument as a whole.

PAGE 256

Acknowledgments

257

Finally, I would like to acknowledge a special group of people who have had a profound impact on me and my work during the time I produced this book. First and foremost, Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, my great teachers, for always telling me what I need to hear, even when I am not quite happy to hear it. Edward Larkin and Siaˆn Silyn Roberts have been constant intellectual companions, sounding boards, and sources of encouragement for many years now. My colleague John Michael has had the most profound influence on the later stages of my work on this book, helping me to reconceive and broaden its argument; the substance of those revisions owes a great deal to John’s wonderful mind, but I am equally aware how lucky I have been to enjoy his friendship. Finally, my former colleague and forever friend Paul Strohm has been a unique kind of hero these past years, a reliable source of warmth, wisdom, and signature cocktails.

PAGE 257