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.”

In this case, some Puritans did indeed read fiction:  the person who bought The Isle of Pines (probably in London) and liked it enough to carry it to Boston; the printer, Marmaduke Johnson, who found the novel so engaging that he invested his private capital in printing it and believed other Puritans would buy his edition and reward him with a tidy profit; the Puritan authorities, who found that Johnson had printed a novel without a license and ordered all copies destroyed. 

My research took an abrupt detour from broadsides that day.  After realizing that Isle of the Pines was a Robinsonade, albeit published thirty-one years before Robinson Crusoe, I contacted Michelle Burnham, whom I remembered had worked on Robinsonades in the course of editing The Female American; or, The Adventures of Unca Eliza Winkfield (1767).  Michelle knew of The Isle of Pines, but she’d never heard about an early American edition of the novel and was equally intrigued by the rumor of a fugitive edition. 

What ensued was a series of conversations between us, first on Facebook Messenger, of all places, then via email, and finally via Google Docs, about the importance of origin stories.  What would it mean for literary history, we wondered, if the first American novel was not, in fact, The Power of Sympathy?   What does it mean to be “first” anyway?  Did it matter if a particular edition of the novel never circulated?  How might a different origin point reshape our understanding of early America?  How might a different origin point encourage us to ask different questions?  We found that we had more questions than answers. 

We eventually took our conversation to Early American Literature, in a new occasional feature called “Provocations” that appeared in late 2016.  We owe a big thanks to Sandra Gustafson, editor of Early American Literature, for letting us try something new.  Our goal in that essay, as it is in our conference session, is to start conversations, rather than offer the last word.  Here’s what we had to say in EAL about origin stories:

We want to posit that origin stories matter:  beginnings beget endings.  They provide us with a frame of reference.  They make certain kinds of texts and narrative legible, while suppressing other kinds of texts.  By beginning with Pamela and The Power of Sympathy, we privilege the stories of middling white women, stories the majority of the academy has learned to feel comfortable with—and value—over the past thirty years.  Pamela and The Power of Sympathy set us on a sentimental path, and everywhere we look, we see more of the same:  Charlotte Temple, The Coquette, Kelroy, Dorval, Emily Hamilton, and The Female Quixote, all fixated on the marriage dilemmas of middling white men and women, a trope that emphasizes choice and the importance of consent.... (655-56)

What would American literary history look like, we wondered, if we imagined The Isle of Pines as a starting point for a history of the novel?  What other stories might become visible?  How might it decenter the marriage dilemmas of middling white women—or at least encourage us to read their stories in a different context? 

The Isle of Pines is not a sentimental story about marriage but rather is the story of a voracious and violent colonial conquest that results when an Englishman bound for the East Indies was shipwrecked with four women, including the daughter of his employer, two maidservants, and one black slave, on a deserted island.  The Englishman, George Pine, and his descendants procreate in such an excessive manner as to lead, by the third generation, to an island population of 1,789.  Rather than sharing the island peacefully, the population is wracked by racial and sexual violence, reminding us of the close and uneasy relationship between the early novel and the captivity narrative.  It also reminds us that the choice of marital or sexual partners—or even the appearance of choice—accorded to middling white women of the late eighteenth century was not uniformly available across class and race lines. 

                Neither Michelle nor I want to propose that The Isle of Pines dethrone the other contenders for the title of the first American novel.  But we do want to use that curious bibliographical episode about a fugitive edition to encourage us to question what we think we know about the history of the novel and the larger literary history of early America.   

                With that spirit of inquiry in mind, we look forward to hearing what our colleagues have to say about re-imagined literary histories of early America.

Works Cited

Ford, Worthington Chauncey, ed.  The Isle of Pines, 1688:  An Essay in Bibliography.  Boston:  Club of Odd Volumes, 1920. 

Neville, Henry.  “The Isle of Pines.” Three Modern Utopias.  Ed. Susan Bruce.  Oxford:  Oxford UP, 1999.  187-212.

Weyler, Karen, and Michelle Burnham.  “Reanimating Ghost Editions, Reorienting the Early American Novel.” Early American Literature 51.3 (2016): 655-64.