Reimaging Literary Histories of the Early American Novel

This panel was inspired by a series of conversations that Michelle Burnham and I had about an obscure bibliographical entry that I discovered while at the Massachusetts Historical Society.  While reading through an early twentieth-century bibliography in search of broadsides not included in Early American Imprints, I came across an entry for a 1668 Cambridge, Massachusetts, edition of Henry Neville’s novel The Isle of Pines.  The bibliographer, Worthington Chauncey Ford, who would later spend years searching for lost copies of this edition, speculated that all copies of The Isle of Pines were destroyed after being published but before circulation, because the printer, Marmaduke Johnson, had not obtained a license for its printing.   I was astonished by this bibliographical entry, because everyone knows that the American Puritans didn’t like novels—right?  At least that’s what I’ve been telling my students for the past twenty years--that Puritans didn’t read fiction because it was “telling lies.”

The Ubiquitous Fragment: Questions about Form

A major conceptual challenge to our understanding of the novel fragment as a literary genre is the traditional quantitative definition of the novel.  The novel is “sustained,” “considerable,” “long,” “extensive,” and so on, a view reinforced by a sequence of subgenres that move ever farther from the novel as they are shortened: novella, novelette, short story, and anecdote.  It is perhaps the vestigial force of turn-of-the-century short-story theory, with its emphasis on the “single impression,” that gives the impression that quantity signals quality.  And if the short story is not a reduced novel but its own kind of form with a different aesthetic, the shorter fragmentary forms--historiettes, anecdotes, and the like--must be of a different species as well, like those small birds found near the hippopotamus.

“History of the Duchess of C****, Who was Confined in a Dungeon Under Ground, By her Unrelenting Husband, Whom she saw but ONCE during her Imprisonment of NINE YEARS, in which course of time she frequently suffered the severity of extreme hunger, thirst and cold. But happily, a few days before her Tyrant’s death, he disclosed the secret of her subterraneous abode to a Friend; from which she was soon after released by her parents. From the French of Madame de Genlis.”

“The History of the Dutchess de C------” was serializd by the New York Magazine, or Literary Repository in its January through July 1790 issues. Introducing the novella, the editors noted that it “is extracted from a Work of much Merit, not generally known here, entitled, ‘Adelaide and Theodore; or, Letters on Education,’ first translated from the French of Madame la Comptesse de Genlis, and published in the English Language, in London, in 1784. The Editors presume it will not be unentertaining to their fair Readers.” 

The text’s subsequent publication history suggests that they presumed correctly; it was reprinted at least eleven times in the United States between 1792 and 1823, in cities spanning New England and the mid-Atlantic region.

Who is The Jamaica Lady? Making Space for the Caribbean in the Early American Novel

The Jamaica Lady; or, The Life of Bavia (1720) tells the purportedly true story of the amorous adventures of two “notorious women” who talk their way onto a ship bound from Jamaica to England. Holmesia is the comely daughter of a white shoplifter from London and is maintained by multiple lovers on both sides of the Atlantic; she is conceived during her mother’s transatlantic transportation, during which her mother “hold[s] too much familiarity with a mullatto belonging to the ship” (42). Bavia, who even as a child “never was tolerably handsome, or indeed passable […] though the West-India climate has something alter’d her for the worse,” is the daughter of a Scotchman; after aiding many a woman in Britain to cuckold her husband and engaging in multiple affairs herself, she is forced to flee to Jamaica to escape prosecution (53). The novel’s story takes place almost entirely in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, on the ship of Captain Fustian. The bulk of the tale is made up of four interpolated stories about the two women—two “false” tales of respectability that the ladies deploy to enable them to be allowed aboard the ship, and two “true” tales that expose the respective vices of each. The Jamaica Lady is usually attributed to William Pittis, who may never have traveled to the West Indies himself. The author enthusiastically adopts the trope of creole degeneracy nonetheless; when Bavia first boards the ship, for instance, Captain Fustian inquires, “how she came into that cursed country; for he said none but mad people and fools, when posses’d of a plentiful fortune, or even of a moderate competency in England, in paradice, would leave it, to go to Jamaica, the sink of sin, and receptacle of all manner of vices” (11).

The Novel, Secrecy, and the Expose

One of my earliest memories is of sitting with my mom watching the Watergate hearings on television. Her sudden and frequent outbursts, expressions of anger and disgust, framed what little I understood about the images before us. I understood only that something shocking was taking place, something that had my parents arguing long into the night, something that signaled a departure but from what I did not know.  The secrets hidden, and stolen, by President Nixon and his comrades, and revealed by Woodward and Bernstein at the Washington Post, are not the whole story.  They are not even the whole secret.  It is, rather, the protocols of secrecy – the underlying desire to know – that compels narrative forward and why we return again and again to such formative histories.  What if Watergate were a novel?

Other Crusoes

I. The provocation:

Robinson Crusoe is pictures of cats.  Gulliver’s Travels is lolcats.

II. The allegory:

Hundreds of years from now, a professor will teach a class called “Visual Culture of the Early Internet, 1990–2020.” One lecture will focus on the online history of cat pictures. This lecture will open with a discussion of ASCII art, proceed through the Bonsai Kitten Hoax of 2000 and the YouTube-driven rise of cat videography, and conclude with the ascent of text-overlaid feline still photography in the 2010s. There will only be room on the syllabus for a single example of this latter phenomenon. Let us suppose that it is this one:

Samuel Woodworth’s The Champions of Freedom and the End of the Early American Novel

Even compared to other early American novels, Samuel Woodworth’s The Champions of Freedom (1818) is a real mess. Set in the wake of the War of 1812, it is—among other things—a factual history of the War culled from Woodworth’s newspaper; a compilation of biographies of the War’s heroes; a series of meditations on nationalism and patriotism; a sentimental romance; a sequence of seduction plots; a medley of plays; and a coming-of-age story, advised by a “Mysterious Chief,” who may or may not be the ghost of George Washington. According to the few considerations of the novel, this messiness is due to the work’s position as a first, the first historical romance written by a US citizen (Michael T. Gilmore); a first attempt at developing a modern national culture (Joseph J. Letter); a first example of “ghosting” Native Americans (Renée Bergland). As a “first,” the novel is necessarily messy. The Champions of Freedom is a helpful starting place because, really, it can only get better from here.

The Ohians and the Kentucks: Solomon Spaulding’s Manuscript Found (1816) and the Literature of the Early Republic

Solomon Spaulding’s Manuscript Found has long been a source of contention in the Mormon community. Whether or not Joseph Smith read it, it is a fascinating text in its own right and unfairly overlooked in the annals of early American literature. This text’s history demonstrates the presumed marketability of Mound Builder novels, even before Atwater’s publication. An indebted minister trying to publish a profitable book to pay his debts, unable to finish, Spaulding gave it to a friend before he died in 1816. By the early 1830s the manuscript had circulated in the upper Hudson Valley, before it vanished, only be rediscovered in a Hawaiian attic in the 1880s, finally finding a permanent home in the Oberlin College Library. Ever since, anti-Mormon activists have used it to accuse Smith of plagiarizing it in The Book of Mormon. Nonetheless, like Ethan Smith’s A View of the Hebrews, the Mormons have kept it in print, and explained the text’s similarities to Joseph Smith’s as coincidences and, as such, counter-evidence.