The shift toward transatlantic frames of reference has thrown up an interesting literary problem: how do we reconcile the period’s repeated calls to produce an original, distinctive “American” style of writing (issued by Webster, Brockden Brown, Miller, Mitchell, Tyler, to name just a few) with the fact that many novelists self-consciously borrowed and reproduced the cultural materials of European and British sources? This is a constitutive paradox of many novelistic productions of the early republic, and recent attempts to address it have argued that the very concept of “originality” was a peculiar one at the end of the eighteenth century. It meant different things to different writers as they sought to negotiate the received cultural authority of established forms with “native” innovation. Two recent studies have tackled the related literary problems of “originality” and “dependence” in particularly generative ways. The first is Ezra Tawil’s forthcoming Literature, American Style, which argues that the now critically unfashionable idea of literary exceptionalism was an historical category of thought, circulating throughout the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, that placed debates over national style in dialogue with cultural emulation. The second is William Huntting Howell’s Against Self-Reliance (2015), which makes a distinction between “the broad strokes of American cultural dependence – the ways in which the artists, writers, and artisans of the United States borrow from Europeans” and “the intimate mechanics of individual artistic, linguistic, and behavioral dependence” (10-11). “Not all art,” Huntting Howell argues crucially, “seeks origination, individuation, or timelessness; there are other registers of signification and other metrics for success, including instrumentality, historicity, and the assertion of common cause” (12).
In many ways, this new critical interest in the
dialectical relationship between imitation and literary autochthony is the
eventual response to Cathy Davidson’s concession in Revolution and the Word (1986) that “everyone knows that the first
American fiction imitated earlier
British originals, but we are not so sure just what that means” (10). Of course, any study that makes “originality”
its object is potentially dogged by hermeneutic perils when it runs the risk of
reproducing national-exceptionalist frames of reference. My contribution to our discussion is
therefore a cluster of questions about the politics of originality and
dependence in the early American novel that orbit around the vexing problem of
exceptionalism. To provide some context,
I have conceived these queries largely in response to those imitative works of
fiction that reproduce, without apology or stated concession to the project of
cultural indigeneity, the conventions of their European counterparts: Adventures in a Castle, “Written by a
Citizen of Philadelphia” in 1806, say, or the 1800 Julia and the Illuminated Baron, “By a Lady of Massachusetts,” now
identified as Sally Wood. These are works,
in other words, that stand on their very refusal to claim anything resembling “origination,
individuation, or timelessness.”
So, how did the novel in the New World theorize
as well as enact the concept of imitation?
What are the workable differences between emulation, imitation,
dependence, repetition, and reproduction? Taking Huntting Howell’s assertion as
a starting point, we might ask what “other metrics for success” could be used
to measure the early American novel once we abandon liberal individualist
interpretative paradigms that devalue the imitative, derivative, or iterative? How did the early novel engage the logic of translatio
studii? Could teaching “derivative” fiction
serve as a useful pedagogical counterpoint to the neoliberal ideology of
entrepreneurship, disruption, and the free market-affirming power of innovation?
Are there thematics of begging, stealing, imitation, or borrowing that we have typically
read typologically, but would benefit from a more formalist approach?
While
I don’t claim to have anything resembling fully formulated answers to these
questions, I’ve chosen Tabitha Tenney’s Female
Quixotism (1801) as an interesting case study precisely because literary
criticism has tended to focus on those elements of the novel that render it
unique, even though it wears its cultural borrowings on its sleeve (the most
well-known of which is Charlotte Lennox’s The
Female Quixote, but which also include any number of popular English
novels, like Pamela, Sir Charles Grandison, and Roderick Random, that were available in
the colonies). In other words, we tend
to read Female Quixotism for what it
does differently, or what the editors of the Oxford edition call Tenney’s
“original twists” (xxi). I have no quarrel
with these readings: as Gillian Brown and others have shown, Tenney’s
innovations brought the quixotic fallacy to bear on some of the most urgent
problems facing the new United States, from the operations of consent to the
unilateralism of anti-Jacobinism. But I
find one particular episode in Female
Quixotism interesting for how it theorizes cultural imitation.
At the age of 48 and besotted with the
illiterate peasant John Brown (whom she is convinced is a nobleman in
disguise), Dorcasina purchases a wig for the not inconsiderable sum of thirty
dollars, partly because she has heard that “wigs were all the rage among the
ladies in Philadelphia,” and partly because
“her own grey hair” (254), which she has shaved off, is beginning to belie her
age. She decorates the wig with a very
small hat, and she and John go riding. Then
Dorcasina’s horse bolts, the wig flies off her head, and she gallops through
town, where every inhabitant witnesses her baldness and embarrassment. The wig
meets an even more ignominious fate: first, it is seized by a pig who drops it
in its wallow, then some passing boys, “being ignorant of its value” (256),
poke it with a stick, dredge it out, and throw rocks at it. The bedraggled wig is eventually returned to
Dorcasina, who, unwilling to lose her investment (“I gave thirty dollars for it,”
255), tries to recover its value: “the poor thing underwent anew all the
tortures of papering, pinching, boiling, and baking, but after all their labour
and all their anxiety, it never regained its pristine elegance” (257).
Needless to say, this is a really funny
interlude (a wig, a pig, and a rig), but its comedic precision is equaled by
its discursive complexity. The wig lends itself to a variety of readings: it
explores the possibilities and limitations of scripted femininity in an
emergent age of material consumption; it participates in the novel’s broader
anti-fictional discourse by literalizing Dorcasina’s idolatrous faith in the authority
of fantasy; and it criticizes as caricature the demure, feminine Whig lady (wig
lady?) typical of the reformed picara. Additionally,
it is a mash-up parody of two popular English literary modes: it draws on the
“out-of-control-horse” trope of the romance, whereby a distressed female,
carried away by a panicking horse, is rescued from near disaster by the
fortuitous intercession of a charming stranger[1] (John – gawping,
slack jawed, and ineffectual – clearly fails to pass muster); and it appropriates
the conventions of the eighteenth-century it-narrative when Tenney offers us
“the history of this unfortunate wig” (256) after it falls from Dorcasina’s
head. Like the coins, clothing,
furniture, and other circulating objects of the it-narrative, the truant wig
(or “poor thing,” as Tenney twice calls it) acquires a life of its own as it suffers
in its encounters with humans (and pigs).
Through the representation of its suffering (“tortures”), Tenney simultaneously
claims for the wig a kind of sympathetic intimacy that inserts it into the
order of social relations and returns to her novel an earlier form of
fictionality associated with the fable.
That an animated wig is so symbolically central
to Dorcasina’s increasingly pathetic and degrading delusions about her sexual
desirability tells us that Tenney had in mind the eighteenth-century British
preoccupation with the fetishistic tendencies of an emergent material culture
and the association of coquettish desire with fashionable consumption. Perhaps
most famously, Pope lampooned that culture in The Rape of the Lock (1712), where he compares the female heart to
a “Toyshop” in which stylish trinkets vie for female attention: “Where Wigs
with Wigs, with Sword-knots Sword-knots strive, / Beaus banish beaus, and
Coaches Coaches drive” (I.100-103). At
first glance, these baubles seems to stand in metonymically for the men that
seek to assail the woman’s virtue, but the grammatically parallel inclusion of
“beaus” suggests that wigs, sword-knots, and coaches are actually animate
objects mistaken for active subjects by amorously deluded women. In a similar fashion (no pun intended, well,
maybe a bit), the quixotic fallacy – whereby the reader forgets the artificial
status of literary representation – casts over Dorcasina’s wig a luster of enchantment. Dorcasina’s restless emotions animate the
wig, creating a world in which nothing quotidian exists that is not continuous
with her own idea of herself. The soiled
fate of the wig anticipates Dorcasina’s eventual disenchantment, but more than
that, it is also arguably a case study in “thing theory,” or the process by
which an object, no longer
interpretable for its symbolic or commercial value, becomes an uncanny thing and thus reveals the strangeness
of its means of production and the operations of subjective desire that
produced it.
As I see it, the “success” of this moment of
cultural emulation lies less in any “original twist” Tenney puts on her source
material (that might distinguish it, in other words, as a somehow uniquely “American”
version of the female picaresque), and more in what thing theory invites us to
do: namely, examine how the agency of enchanted objects mediates the social and
literary relationships of the novel. As
a case in point, I find it striking that Tenney frames this episode around an
adapted (rather than appropriated) line from William Cowper’s comic ballad “The
Diverting History of John Gilpin” (1782), in which Gilpin is similarly carried
away by an errant horse: “Away went Gilpin, neck or nought; Away went hat and
wig; / He little dreamt, when he set out, / Of running such a rig” (97-100). In Tenney’s hands, these lines become “‘Away
went Dorcas, and away / Went Dorcas’s ‘hat and wig’.” Given that “the history of this unfortunate
wig” imaginatively charts the progression from the contractual possession of
property (“I gave thirty dollars for it”) to the looseness of a thing freed
from the dominion of its owner (“after all their labour … it never regained its
pristine elegance”), we might see Cowper’s composition following a similar course.
If the it-narrative is a kind of modern
fable, the (auto)biography of “something not human, formerly inanimate but now
inspired with enough passion” (Lamb xxviii) to tell the story of its own
independence, then the appropriation of Cowper’s poem at Tenney’s hands describes
a similar kind of transformation, whereby the continuity of authorial
possession is interrupted by the circulations of the modern circum-Atlantic print
market and given an independent voice that is both Cowper’s and Tenney’s and
neither. In this regard, we might read the tale of the poor wig as a
descriptive theory of cultural appropriation – the borrowed finery, as it were,
of the New World novel.
Works Cited
Cowper, William. Selected Poems. Ed. Nick Rhodes. Manchester:
Carcanet Press, 2006.
Davidson, Cathy. Revolution and the Word. New York:
Oxford, 1986.
Hunnting Howell, William.
Against Self-Reliance: The Arts of
Dependence in the Early United States. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2015.
Lamb, Jonathan. The Things Things Say. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 2011.
Pope, Alexander. The Rape of the Lock and Other Major Writings.
New York: Penguin, 2011.
Tenney,
Tabitha Gilman. Female Quixotism. San
Antonio: Early American Imprints, 2013.
[1] To cite just a few examples, Radcliffe’s
A Sicilian Romance (1790) and Voltaire’s “Le Crocheteur Borgne”
(1774) both use this trope. Melissa meets Alonzo at the beginning of Mitchell’s
The Asylum (1810) after being thrown
from her horse, and Dorcasina fantasizes about meeting her first suitor
Lysander in this way.
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