American Fragments: The Political Aesthetic of Unfinished Forms in the Early Republic 9780812298406

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American Fragments

AMERICAN FRAGMENTS The Po­liti­cal Aesthetic of Unfinished Forms in the Early Republic

Daniel Diez Couch

universit y of pennsylvania press phil adelphia

 Copyright © 2022 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 Amer­ic­ a on acid-­free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Couch, Daniel Diez, author. Title: American fragments : the po­liti­cal aesthetic of unfinished forms in the early Republic / Daniel Diez Couch. Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021042923 | ISBN 9780812253795 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780812298406 (eBook) Subjects: LCSH: American lit­er­at­ ure—1783–1850—­History and criticism. | Lit­er­a­ture and society—­United States—­History— 18th ­century. | Lit­er­a­ture and society—­United States—­History— 19th ­century. | Marginality, Social, in lit­er­a­ture. Classification: LCC PS193 .C68 2022 | DDC 810.9/002—­dc23 LC rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2021042923

CONTENTS

Introduction. Thinking in Parts in American Lit­er­a­ture

1

Chapter 1. Eighteenth-­Century Philosophies of the Fragment

29

Chapter 2. Wounded Bodies and the Typographies of War

62

Chapter 3. Ruinous Designs and the Novel of Seduction

97

Chapter 4. Biblical Economy and the Miracle of the Loaves and Fish

130

Chapter 5. Au­then­tic Authorship and the Composition of Sick Fragments

163

Epilogue. Fragments in the Nineteenth ­Century

197

Notes 207 Bibliography 245 Index 269 Acknowl­edgments

277

INTRODUCTION

Thinking in Parts in American Lit­er­a­ture

The Taste for Fragments, we suspect, has become very general; and the greater part of polite readers would now no more think of sitting down to a w ­ hole Epic, than to a ­whole ox:—­And truly, when we consider how few long poems ­t here are, out of which we should not wish very long passages to have been omitted, we w ­ ill confess, that it is a taste which we are rather inclined to patronize—­ notwithstanding the obscurity it may occasionally produce, and the havoc it must necessarily make, among the proportions, developments, and callidæ juncturæ of the critics. —­Francis Jeffrey, review of Lord Byron’s The Giaour, a Fragment of a Turkish Tale (1813)

In January 1787, the Irish American writer and printer Mathew Carey released the first issue of his new periodical in Philadelphia: the American Museum. The opening pages featured essays by Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Rush, William Barton, and other early American luminaries, and included writing on subjects such as the wavering confederacy, the economic state of the populace, and the international entanglements of the nation. In one way or another, nearly every­t hing in the pages of the inaugural publication that month spoke to the pressing condition of the country in 1787. It was a polity faltering u ­ nder the Articles of Confederation. Amid the collection of articles that concentrated on large-­scale po­liti­cal and commercial themes relevant to a broad readership, Carey also printed three curious essays subtitled “fragments”: “The prostitute.—­A fragment,” “The Slave.—­A

2 Introduction

fragment,” and “Negro trade.—­A fragment.”1 Unlike the majority of the compositions published in the opening installment of the magazine, t­ hese fictional texts did not explic­itly deal with the current state of crisis. Instead, they turned away from the center and t­ oward the periphery to look at the private lives of ­those whom the middling and elite classes called the “lower sort”: the disregarded, the destitute, the ill, and the disabled, as well as other victims of social maladies.2 The brief essays shifted the magazine’s focus from the macro-­scale of con­temporary events to the everyday p ­ eople residing in Philadelphia and places like it all over the young nation. Carey’s writings provided an unusual glimpse into the positionality of individuals that existed on the margins of the United States. To title his texts, Carey chose a word—­“ fragment”—­t hat evoked the impression of an unimportant residue of textual ephemera used to fill space on the page; however, the “fragment” did not actually occupy a trivial position within the literary culture of the period. A reader picking up the January 1787 copy of the American Museum would have immediately recognized the artfully contrived fragments as partaking in a long tradition of eighteenth-­century partial writing that populated both sides of the Atlantic. Furthermore, the widespread interest in the form also continued in the years a­ fter the release of Carey’s periodical. Public fascination with fragments reached its apex a few de­c ades l­ater; as the noted literary critic Francis Jeffrey commented in the Edinburgh Review in 1813, the “polite reader” of the era evinced a “Taste for Fragments” that, “we suspect, has become very general.” In his review of Lord Byron’s The Giaour, a Fragment of a Turkish Tale, Jeffrey also admitted that such a taste was one that he, the learned critic, was “rather inclined to patronize” in his own reading. In the years that spanned the in­de­pen­dence of the colonies and the start of the Jacksonian age, American readers consumed an enormous number of literary fragments. ­These texts ­were intentionally constructed by their authors to give the impression of having survived from the wreckage of a larger ­whole, even if that w ­ hole did not exist. Carey’s “fragments” are not actually broken off from a longer work, but they do suggestively imply the presence of such a text. W ­ hether they ­were imported from E ­ ngland and Eu­ rope or authored by writers in their hometown, published within a novel or released in an issue of the Mas­sa­chu­setts Magazine, early national audiences encountered fragments throughout the entire pa­norama of media produc-



Thinking in Parts in American Lit­er­a­ture 3

tion. Readers of all types and ages enjoyed the texts, emerging as they did from print outlets across the entire eastern seaboard. Though the fragments from the American Museum do not overtly scrutinize the array of po­liti­cal prob­lems facing the nation in 1787, the ample number of fragments that appeared in the periodical, newspaper, poetic, and prose archives of the early United States raises a complex question about the relationship between aesthetic and national realities: What kind of artistic creation was a fragment, and how did deliberately unfinished writing play into an Amer­i­ca that was itself still unfinished? Despite the prominence of literary fragments throughout the nation’s printscape, virtually no scholarly work exists to answer this question. Yet quite the opposite has taken place outside of the American context; fragments have received extensive attention in studies of British and German writing. “Incompleteness, fragmentation, and ruin,” Thomas McFarland argued in Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin, “not only receive a special emphasis in Romanticism but also . . . ​seem actually to define that phenomenon.”3 Writing ­after McFarland’s study, Marjorie Levinson categorized the more specific British romantic fragment poem, which she recognized as “a peculiarly Romantic form,” and argued that literary criticism assigns fragments “an unusually motivated and expressive condition within the early nineteenth c­ entury.”4 At least since the publication of McFarland’s work in 1981, literary historians have presented fragments as an “exemplary Romantic expression,” to borrow Levinson’s phrasing, and the form bears repeated study with each successive generation.5 “Romanticism is central to us,” as Alexander Regier put it recently, “and fragmentation is central to Romanticism.”6 This statement should hold true for studies of the nascent United States, which similarly experienced a rage for fragments. Yet forms like the “fragment” have fallen through the cracks, often b ­ ecause scholars have been slow to take up a line of argumentation that resituates American romanticism around turn-­of-­t he-­century aesthetics, instead locating the movement in the ­middle of the nineteenth ­century. To take romanticism earnestly means revising the theory that American culture develops in a stunted and belated manner, and demands that we study concurrent transatlantic practices, even if they w ­ ere employed uniquely on each side of the ocean. American authors ­were, in fact, immersed in precisely such an exchange of culture by way of the unfinished literary forms that crisscrossed the Atlantic world throughout the late eigh­teenth and early nineteenth centuries.7

4 Introduction

American Fragments: The Po­liti­cal Aesthetic of Unfinished Forms in the Early Republic recovers the history of a neglected aesthetic form that articulated distinct sociopo­liti­cal ramifications in the United States. Fragments, I contend, played a major role in reshaping the artistic and po­liti­cal landscape ­a fter the Revolution. To demonstrate the pervasive presence of the form, American Fragments treats both canonical and noncanonical sources to identify the large-­scale production and consumption of literary fragments. ­These previously undertreated or unstudied texts reveal that fragments ­were not, by any means, a minor ele­ment of cultural life. Alongside this recovery, I situate ­these creations within their dense historical context, demonstrating how fragments dealt with po­liti­cal questions surrounding individual identity. The postulation that eighteenth-­century artistic practices like the fragment ­shaped sociopo­liti­cal configurations and vice versa stems from a well-­established consensus that writers in the period did not clearly demarcate between the two domains: rather, they existed in an entangled arrangement. In work on early American lit­er­a­ture produced in the last several de­cades, the analy­sis of the interrelated nature of the aesthetic and the sociopo­liti­cal has achieved a robust presence. From prominent studies in the 1980s and 1990s by scholars such as Cathy N. Davidson and Michael Warner, to more recent writing including that by Eric Slauter and Edward Cahill, the field has expanded the consequence of aesthetics, and shown how the lit­er­a­ture of the emergent nation developed out of a composite and dialectical pro­cess with culture and politics.8 Adding to this chorus of voices, American Fragments approaches its objects of study through a predominantly formalist lens by analyzing their style, structure, and visual appearance, proposing its own argument regarding the way ­these aesthetic dimensions engaged with the sociopo­liti­cal state of the country in the years ­after in­de­pen­dence.9 The artistic dynamics of the fragment provided writers with an ave­nue for probing the pro­cess by which a diverse public could both exist as individuals and unify as a collective. Early national Amer­i­ca faced “dire po­liti­cal contention and exigent popu­lar disunity, as well as . . . ​a power­f ul countervailing aspiration to national solidarity,” in the words of Christopher Looby, generating a contentious state of affairs that made vis­i­ble “the unresolved prob­lem of national unity.”10 Carey’s three illustrative examples from the American Museum provide a rich introduction to the kind of cultural work that the form implemented to explore the relationship between “popu­lar disunity” and “national unity.” The



Thinking in Parts in American Lit­er­a­ture 5

individuals represented in his texts did not fit neatly into the social fabric of the nation, nor did they have a secure place in designs for the country’s ­future. However, Carey’s texts at once recognized the separation of ­these ­people from their larger communities and si­mul­ta­neously envisioned innovative means of renovating their identities, in a way that spoke to the congealing notion of the liberal individual. Fragments proved to be apt texts for such a reparative proj­ect, as their unfinished quality enabled audiences to conceive of newly ­imagined ­wholes that could complete the broken parts. Readers who encountered the form ­ iddle, and closed found texts that began in medias res, lacked parts in the m without a proper ending. A ­ fter the abrupt conclusion of each fragment, the prostitute could hypothetically rejoin her ­family, the enslaved man could live a ­free life, and the immoral slave trader could be redeemed. In this way, the very nature of fragments generated a spectrum of pos­si­ble completions, and thereby unveiled new, forward-­t hinking terrain in the construction of identity.11 By investigating the “form” of fragments—­that which Samuel Otter calls the “disposition, contour, structure, and specificity” of a work which “opens . . . ​questions about the relations of parts to wholes”—­the readings ­here demonstrate the ways in which writers used art to reshape the kinds of statements and ways of being that w ­ ere pos­si­ble in the po­liti­cal sphere.12 At the same time, the sociopo­liti­cal dimension of fragments cut in another direction. What was in some ways a progressive form did not develop purely for the benefit of the marginalized. The white, bourgeois writers who composed fragments ultimately opened the door to change by attributing metamorphic capacities to the lower sort; nevertheless, ­these authors also buttressed their own standing by labeling ostracized individuals as “fragments” and thereby confirming their own, loftier status. In this way, the form partakes in the tension at the heart of liberal traditions in the era, which sought to open up demo­cratic participation in the country while limiting the scope and power of such membership to t­ hose in elevated stations. The role of individuals who did not fit squarely into the texture of the nation was up for debate; by and large, fragments gauged this situation by focusing on beggars, prostitutes, veterans, hermits, and other alienated figures who spawned controversy. And yet, despite the presence of self-­interested motivations for producing fragments, the archive reveals the form’s principal usage in terms that promoted inclusivity. Many authors—­even ones who benefited

6 Introduction

from the institutional circumscription of lower-­status populations—­scrutinized the “unresolved prob­lem of national unity,” and used fragments as a po­liti­cal testing ground for thinking through ways of bettering the circumstances of marginalized individuals.13 As the ensuing chapters show, writers wielded the artistic form of the fragment as an apparatus for surveying the disputed positionality of the lower sort. Time and again, fragments asked a searching question: What kind of identity did marginalized individuals have, and how did a fictionalized version of their life story influence the sociopo­liti­cal circumstances of conceptual frameworks like national membership, familial relation, and religious association? In their most progressive moments, the writers of fragments depicted their subjects as “in-­process” individuals, opting for a fluid and in-­development version of the self instead of a bounded and coherent one. Such a framework endowed ­t hose represented in fragments with a potentiality that skirted any static categorizations of identity. B ­ ecause of its prolific spread through literary culture, the form afforded a means of envisioning novel modes of existence for subaltern groups across the early republican world.14 Foregrounding this claim, my study of fragments begins with a time when Americans used the printed page to chart innovative ways for individuals to exist, frequently in ways that cut against officially sanctioned modes of being. But the transformative self that sought to redefine societal limitations eventually underwent a declension. L ­ ater chapters, centered around the early nineteenth c­ entury, acknowledge the attenuation of the fragmentary experiment and the concomitant infiltration of the more stable—­t hough still incipient—­liberal individual. As the final movements of this study make vis­i­ble, writers eventually converted the fragment from a po­liti­cally progressive form into one that shed its transgressive origins. By the m ­ iddle of the nineteenth ­century, the fragment ultimately took its place as a canonical genre within the broader production of lit­er­a­ture. In plotting the movement of the fragment from reformism to canonicity, American Fragments also reveals a previously untold story about romantic-­era lit­er­a­ture in the United States. The history of the form clarifies how American romanticism began not in in the ­middle of the nineteenth ­century, when it is typically situated, but alongside the fragment’s aesthetic and po­liti­cal experimentations during the transatlantic years of the early republic. Indeed, as the conclusion of this study shows, following this history forces us to examine anew the conditions for the emergence of some of our most hallowed writers—­like Nathaniel



Thinking in Parts in American Lit­er­a­ture 7

Hawthorne and Herman Melville—­whose entrances into print were facilitated by the fragment.

The Po­liti­cal Aesthetic of the Early American Fragment A literary fragment establishes a relationship between a part and a ­whole, whereby the part is presented to the reader without the completing ­whole. This seemingly ­simple form took on a special relevance in the years surrounding the American Revolution ­because it aptly modeled the circumstances of the emergent United States. An individual (the part) could only maintain a hy­po­thet­i­cal and tenuous relationship with the solidifying but still imaginary nation (the ­whole). Such a precariousness was even more pronounced for ­those on the outskirts of society, who ­were severely barred from fully participating in their communal environment. As a result, writers like Mathew Carey took advantage of this parallelism, using the fragment to critique the treatment of the lower sort. Yet what affordances did the arrangement of part and w ­ hole create for the fictionalized lives of outcasts? An account of the fragment that examines its philological basis and its structure—­via a comparison with a kindred form, the episode—­clarifies the means by which authors used aesthetics to delineate their conceptualization of the po­liti­cal sphere. The word “fragment” has been in written use since the late ­Middle Ages and early modern period. It consists of both a literal definition—­a “part broken off or other­w ise detached from a whole”—as well as a figurative signification of a “detached, isolated, or incomplete part.”15 ­These usages arose around the same time in the sixteenth c­ entury from the Latin fragmentum and the French fragment, likely as a result of the rising influx of French words into En­glish.16 The physical denotation refers to a rupture between a piece and its larger ­whole in a synecdochical relationship, as when a rock falls off of a cliff side or when a hunk of marble breaks off of a statue. On the other hand, the figurative sense serves a more emblematic function, as when an alienated person feels disconnected from their ­family or another social group. In the latter case, t­ here does not necessarily exist an indexical bodily separation, only a symbolic split. While each definition highlights a dif­fer­ ent type of fragmentation, they jointly emphasize the rupture between a smaller part and a larger w ­ hole. Both meanings of the word are at play in the publication of literary fragments in the years surveyed ­here. The texts examined in the coming chapters

8 Introduction

si­mul­ta­neously represent a corporeal rupture—­the condition of a torn page, broken body, or other kind of physical breakage—­alongside a figurative sense of detachment for the individuals portrayed in the content of the works. Rarely did t­hese denotations disentangle as clearly as separate entries in a dictionary might suggest, and both w ­ ere made evident in the narrative articulations of the form. More often than not, writers composed literary fragments that gave readers the impression of a material split while concurrently pointing ­toward a figurative separation in the text’s subject m ­ atter, so that the ostensible physical condition of the text mirrored its intellectual concerns. Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte ­Temple (1791) exemplifies just such a doubling. Early in the novel, Charlotte’s letters to her parents are torn up by her seducer, Montraville, and she elopes with him to the United States; t­hese physical fractures contribute to her emotional disconnection from her f­ amily, and she becomes a residue of her previous self as the novel progresses. Authors like Rowson employ the materiality of fragments in order to orient readers around the empirical physicality of the form, thereby establishing a grounding for a more figurative fragmentation—­a ­woman “ruined” in body could convincingly be depicted as estranged from society. The physical sense of the word undergirds its symbolic manifestations in literary texts, and the readings that follow track the interplay of ­these two ele­ments. The dual sense of the word “fragment” was identified by lexicographers such as Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster, but more sustained definitions of the form took place in periodical writing. Focusing on the specifically literary ele­ments of fragments, the nineteenth-­century critic Francis Jeffrey describes how their partial and residual nature distinctly affected the reading experience of the audiences who encountered them. In his characterization of how the form overturned readerly habits, Jeffrey observes that the fragment wreaks “havoc” on “the proportions, developments, and callidæ juncturæ of the critics.” For him, fragments do not conform to the “proportions” or “developments” typically anticipated by t­ hose accustomed to encountering a story unified by a beginning, m ­ iddle, and ending, and accompanied by a narrative discourse explaining the sequence of events. Adding to ­t hese omissions, Jeffrey also perceives that fragments do not contain the appropriate “callidæ juncturæ” of lit­er­a­ture, a Latin phrase meaning “skillful juncture,” “expert combining,” or “fine link.”17 In Jeffrey’s view, fragments not only defy the fundamental rudiments of narrative organ­ization and progression, they also withhold the finishing touches that provide connective tissue for the vari­ous ele­ments of a literary



Thinking in Parts in American Lit­er­a­ture 9

text. That is to say, a fragment stands alone as an individual part, without the combinatory components of a longer work; the delicate sutures that bring together ele­ments of character, event, setting, and plot within the narrative discourse are notably minimal in the form. Despite ­these lapses and the “havoc” they inevitably generate for audiences, Jeffrey nonetheless insists that the current taste of the “polite reader” tends ­toward the fragment, as does his own. But the dictionary entries of the word “fragment” and Jeffrey’s analy­sis of the “havoc” of the form leave a pivotal question unanswered: How exactly did authors mobilize the relation between part and ­whole, particularly since it consisted of peculiar absences, and lacked “proportions, developments, and callidæ juncturæ”? The definitions of “fragment” elaborate the overall organ­ization of the form, but do not vividly explicate its use on the page. A comparison with the most relevant cognate form of the era, however, exposes the way the denotative ele­ments of the fragment take on a dynamic narrative life, one which further reveals the literary-­political stakes of this study. Out of all of the recent studies of early American writing, my approach to the fragment most closely aligns with Matthew Garrett’s methodology in Episodic Poetics (2014), a work which examines the small-­scale form of the “episode,” and places it in a dialectical relationship with the culture and politics of the early United States. In many ways, the pages of American Fragments complement Garrett’s writing on the episode. Like the fragment, the episode is both formal and po­liti­cal. “If form is disregarded,” Garrett contends, “not only do we lose the complexity (and therefore the interest) of the w ­ hole process—we miss its strictly po­liti­cal significance too.”18 He also inverts the expected hierarchy of narrative importance by attending to the seemingly unimportant episode, showing how it reshapes its historical moment. The po­liti­cal intricacy of this outwardly minor form provides a counterpart to the fragment’s place in the same milieu. And, like the episode, the fragment is directly engaged with the tempestuous relationship between parts and ­wholes that dominated public debate both during and ­after in­de­ pen­dence. Yet fragments differ from episodes in three notable ways that bear discussion at length. Th ­ ese distinctions expose how each respective form achieves separate and, at times, contradictory sociocultural work. Garrett’s analy­sis of the episode chiefly considers the means by which such literary productions ultimately eliminate the partial from their totality. In the hands of middling and elite writers, the episode enforces a movement t­ oward unity

10 Introduction

at the expense of minority individuals at odds with the reigning powers; the form thus reveals an ideological tendency in ­favor of narratives that coalesce and overwrite the social multiplicities extant in the United States. Grounded in the logic of an increasingly cap­i­tal­ist federalist power, episodes seek to bring the many into the one through an elision of the viewpoints, perspectives, and ­peoples contained within the nation. During the very same historical moment, however, fragments worked in a contrasting direction that was at odds with the amalgamating power of the episode. Fragments stipulated their own unique narrative structure, temporality, and subject, all of which dramatically altered their po­liti­cal function. The narrative structure of a fragment builds directly on the definition of the term: the form avoids closure ­because it constantly foregrounds a tense relationship between the narrative part (the text presented to the reader that then abruptly ends) and the non-­narrative w ­ hole (what the reader conceives of as the pos­si­ble completion for the text beyond the page).19 No expansive plot—­the development or ending Jeffrey remarks on—­provides a cohesive explanatory context. Yet this lack proved to be an advantage in the early national period. ­Because of this characteristic, fragments afforded writers, readers, editors, and critics a large degree of imaginative power over that undefined w ­ hole, which categorically existed as an illusory ele­ment outside of the printed piece of writing. Fragments invited completion even as such an effect could only be accomplished outside of their own textual world and in the minds of readers. They generated “an agglomerative space, [where] certain areas of the text [are] correlating other meanings outside the material text,” in the words of Roland Barthes.20 By depicting an abbreviated text that gave the appearance of being physically cut off, fragments deliberately troubled the line between narrative and non-­narrative, requiring that audiences consider the implications of the fracture and the means by which it could be remedied. Even fragments that w ­ ere placed within entire novels that would supposedly give coherence to the broken text ended up existing in an uneasy relationship with their larger frameworks. Unlike the interpolated stories, digressions, or anecdotes common to eighteenth-­century novels, the very invocation of the word “fragment” indicated that the total sum of the novel could not produce completion for the inset fragment. For instance, in Samuel Jackson Pratt’s novel about the American Revolution, Emma Cor­ bett (1780), he abruptly places a fragment that relates the story of a ­family of military veterans in the m ­ iddle of the plot. While the overall ending of



Thinking in Parts in American Lit­er­a­ture 11

Emma Corbett provides a conclusion, the fragment itself finishes without any definitive resolution, visibly hanging halfway through the text and forgotten by the close of the book except by readers who might concoct its next development. Pratt’s fragment cuts its audience off, implying that readers should work alongside the text to imagine new ­wholes. The writers of fragments thus pre­sent a narrative-­adjacent aesthetic that situates the reader between the text and what could come a­ fter. To put it another way, an essential quality of fragments is the way that they suspend the reader between the written fragment and the potential for a larger work that could encompass it, the latter being something necessarily grounded in the original text but also distinct from it. In addition to their irregular narrative arrangement, fragments also offer a temporal contrast to the progressive, chronological movement of a gradually expanding cap­i­tal­ist society.21 Early American fragments refrain— as much as pos­si­ble—­from positioning subjects within such a system. The form designates a sharp rupture that takes place in an indeterminate past, an analeptic breakage that si­mul­ta­neously creates a proleptic sense of pos­si­ ble reattachment to an abstract ­whole in an eventual ­future, to use Gérard Genette’s terms for narrative time.22 While Genette’s analy­sis refers to the way that the discourse (the style of telling and the narrative manipulation of occurrences) informs the story (the a­ ctual chronology of events), his terms prove equally applicable for considering how fragments concurrently point to the past and the ­future outside the text. Without even explic­itly referring to their prior breakage and pending completion, fragments nonetheless disturb what Genette identifies as “our reassuring ideas about retrospection and anticipation,” and establish what David Herman calls “a baroque temporal syntax.”23 The insinuation of a former breakage and impending cohesion primes audiences to receive fragments in a way that moves beyond the reading pre­ sent. Fragments stymie any exclusive attention to the con­temporary moment, asking audiences to consider the past histories of the individuals represented on the page, and to imagine a potential ­future for t­hose same textual subjects.24 Readers encountering such texts could thereby distinguish the c­ auses of poverty, sexual vio­lence, debility, and other issues represented in the writing, and strive to counteract them in the ­f uture. The most far-­reaching changes suggested by the form did not take place in the pre­sent but, ­because the temporality of fragments opened the door to the potential creation of a coherent ­whole, they instead introduced the possibility

12 Introduction

of rejuvenation in the years to come. By projecting forward a vision of change, the form encouraged its readers to participate in reforms that could assist individuals living on the margins of society. Fi­nally, and most notably, when authors set pen to paper to write fragments in the late eigh­teenth and early nineteenth centuries, they largely focused on the lives of the lower sort: p ­ eople who w ­ ere marginalized, o ­ stracized, or excluded in a variety of ways from the early nation. By depicting figures like wounded veterans, seduced w ­ omen, prostitutes, and beggars, a range of middling Anglo-­American writers drew an intentionally broad net that ­imagined how t­ hese individuals might be remade as cohesive entities or reintegrated into the communal fabric, even if something like a national identity only served as a distant ideal. The fragments published in the American Museum, for example, do not turn away from the ­trials of the prostitute, the strug­gles of the enslaved man, or the ill effect of the slave trade on victim and enslaver alike; rather, they place ­t hese individuals front and center both in their subject ­matter and in the cultural work they perform.25 The narrative and temporal divisions of the fragment, and the way it focused on the prob­lems of the disenfranchised, speak to the broad-­scale issues of disunification that ­were at play in the American experiment.26 In its embryonic years, the nation suffered from a host of internal rifts that severed it from the po­liti­cal goal of establishing and maintaining a cohesive republic. As Trish Loughran has lucidly demonstrated, the years ­after the Revolution exhibited an uneven network of communication and transportation that prevented any au­t hen­tic ­union from taking place. For her, this disarray “is amply indexed throughout the early national archive, which is strewn with the wreckage of imperfect or aborted communications—­lost (and crossed) letters, suspended newspapers, failed magazines, and books that went unbought and unread.”27 The lack of a functioning, reliable infrastructure meant that the government only had a tenuous hold on any unifying power, and Loughran convincingly punctures the myth of an incipient national identity as just that: a myth unsupported by material connections and merely asserted as an ideal. This quantifiable, network-­based disorder only intensifies when juxtaposed alongside the disunified character of the republic in the years a­ fter in­de­pen­dence. Among many other illustrations of turbulence, the country experienced the rampant spread of po­liti­cal factionalism, lack of economic stability, domestic unrest, xenophobia, international entanglements with



Thinking in Parts in American Lit­er­a­ture 13

­ ngland and France, and conflagrations of demo­cratic strug­gle, all of which E generated the impression that the nation was falling apart at the seams.28 Such a state of affairs made the viability of the new government seem tenuous at best, and the identification between individuals and the larger polity would have been highly contingent, if existing at all. The inhabitants of the United States not only lived unable to expect reliable communication and transport, they also resided in a country emerging from violent revolution and moving into the throes of po­liti­cal dysfunction—­jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. In a very real sense, the United States was a conglomeration of fragments that sought to shape itself through the pro­cess of e pluribus unum. Yet how could individuals who lived their lives fragmented from anything resembling a national community affiliate themselves with—­much less legally identify as citizens of—an unstable po­liti­cal organ­ization that had a deeply disintegrated infrastructure, geography, party system, and populace? Fragments served as a mode of working through such a question ­because they performed a movement between a smaller part and a larger w ­ hole that brought into relief the relationship between the two—­the part was always extant while the w ­ hole was projected in a conceptualized fashion. This literary schematic proved practical for testing out how individuals might partake in the illusory cohesiveness of the United States. ­Because it asked readers to consider the circumstances of other p ­ eople in their geographic area, the fragment provided a basis for Benedict Anderson’s notion of “­imagined communities”; but even as the form displayed this nationalistic awareness, it made vis­i­ble the subjugation of many who composed this i­ magined community.29 In this way, the fragment concurrently exemplified the country’s potential for incorporation and its ­actual disincorporation by calling attention to the fractured individuals living on the margins. Authors of fragments did not seek to codify a certain variety of nationalism—­after all, the abstract quality of the larger ­whole in the form would preclude any such stability—­ but to interrogate the contours of the fracture between the disenfranchised and the American polity. While Loughran does not discuss the fragment, the form nevertheless provides a con­spic­u­ous literary example that displays the means by which authors engaged with the very questions she pre­sents. By associating the textual fragment with the individual and the ­imagined ­whole with national, familial, and religious communities, writers utilized the split within the form itself to construct implicit and explicit analogies

14 Introduction

to the condition of the developing republic. In this way, authors could depict the very pro­cess by which individuals experienced disaffiliation.

The Subjects of Fragments The fact that writers latched onto the fragment to generate an analogy between individuals and their sociopo­liti­cal circumstances is not surprising in and of itself. A ­ fter all, authors consistently used aesthetic devices to comment on their current state of affairs. To take only a few instances: Charles Brockden Brown sent a copy of his novel Wieland (1798) to Thomas Jefferson in 1799; Royall Tyler wrote dramas, novels, and newspaper essays, and also served on the Vermont Supreme Court; and Joel Barlow’s The Columbiad (1807) served as one of the first national epics that celebrated the origins and founding of the American republic. Without question, art and politics ­were entangled in this era. What is striking, however, is that authors of fragments did not choose to portray the lives of the Anglo-­American bourgeoisie. The identities represented in fragments did not accord with the rising ­middle class that displaced the elite gentry in the late eigh­teenth ­century: the merchants, doctors, ­lawyers, planters, and other well-­to-do p ­ eople often represented in lit­er­a­ture. Instead, fragments represented t­hose who lived their lives on the margins of society. Explaining such a decision necessitates examining the longer literary usage of the word “fragment” and its connection to the history of the self, and contextualizing the reasons why white bourgeois writers directed their time, energy, and public compositions ­toward the disenfranchised. The association between marginalized identities and fragments was no coincidence; the very meaning of the term evolved in relation to ­t hose whom society deemed lesser. Even as far back as the early modern period, t­here existed a sharp link between marginalized or “defective” individuals and fragments. In William Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (1602), Achilles calls an unwelcome Greek soldier, Thersites, a “core of envy” and a “crusty batch of nature.”30 Thersites then delivers Achilles a letter and Achilles expands on his invectives, asking “From whence, fragment?”31 In calling Thersites a “fragment,” Achilles demotes Thersites’s humanity and indicates his dislike of the messenger, a portrayal that builds on the Dramatis Personae of the play, which visualizes Thersites as “a deformed and scurrilous Grecian.” The usage comes up again in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (c. 1605–1608) when,



Thinking in Parts in American Lit­er­a­ture 15

near the beginning of the play, Caius Martius angrily exclaims, “Go get you home, you fragments!” to a group of irate, rioting citizens.32 And, in Antony and Cleopatra (1607), Mark Antony expresses his anger at Cleopatra when he tells her that “you ­were a fragment / Of Cneius Pompey’s.”33 As in Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare puts the word “fragment” in the mouths of characters who want to show disdain for ­others: Martius calls an undifferentiated group of citizens “fragments” and Antony identifies Cleopatra as a “fragment” of Pompey. They do not stand as individuals b ­ ecause they only count as a fraction of a person. ­These cases display an emerging sense of the word “fragment” that, when applied to a person, degrades them and implies that they are somehow less than a complete individual. Shakespeare’s use of the term also pre­sents an unmistakable power dynamic. In each example, a person in a highly elevated position—­Achilles’s status as a legendary warrior, Martius’s rank as general, and Antony’s station of military might—­slurs a character they take to be lowly: a disabled soldier, a mob of protesting citizens, and a suicidal, if formidable, ­woman. In the mouths of Achilles, Martius, and Antony, “fragment” is used to restrict humanity and emphasize a liminal existence that is neither fully inside of nor outside of society. Thersites, the citizens, and Cleopatra are all, in one way or another, excluded from the power structures of the plays. Yet where Shakespeare’s characters deploy the word “fragment” as a rude insult that diminishes the humanity of individuals, eighteenth-­ and nineteenth-­century writers recover the word and instead use it to convey a sense of resilient liberty. The coming chapters identify how writers composed fragments that detailed the lives of marginalized figures and sought to envision their potential. In casting their attention on the lower sort, ­t hese fragments leveraged the structure of the form to speculate about the liberated nature of an in-­process individual, even as such a viewpoint diminished as the nineteenth ­century progressed. In analyzing the way in which writers of fragments presented the malleability and latent prospects of the disenfranchised, American Fragments engages with and revises one of the major claims under­lying studies of the eigh­teenth c­ entury and romanticism, which contends that the period saw the emergence of the “liberal individual.” Such a person—­nearly always a white, property-­owning, outwardly heterosexual male—­achieved unpre­ce­ dented liberty and autonomy via changes in po­liti­cal standing, property rights, and the discursive differentiation of race and gender.34 In early Amer­i­ca, this transition also took place through the uneven movement

16 Introduction

from a republican ethic that prioritized communal bonds to a liberal model of identity that prized choice and self-­determination.35 Largely a product of cap­i­tal­ist changes that necessitated the freer movement of bodies as well as po­liti­cal legislation that decentered the authority of monarchical regimes, the liberal individual looms large in philosophical accounts of identity, and also plays into histories that situate lit­er­a­ture in relation to subjectivity. Of course, critiques of this model propose counterexamples of radical, corporate, and utopian alternatives to the individualistic schematic. Furthermore, scholars contest the degree to which liberal subjects actually maintained personal sovereignty, suggesting that they merely experienced it in a way that aligned with institutional apparatuses of control. Despite t­ hese contestations and revisions, the notion of an individual with a developed subjectivity making decisions in modern po­liti­cal and economic systems remains a pervasive and convincing formulation within the historical rec­ord. Such a development took place across a range of discourses, but intellectual historians have repeatedly returned to the central place of lit­er­a­ture in the establishment of the liberal individual, with Charles Taylor noting the momentousness of the “expressivist” regime of the self that took hold in the poetry of the years studied ­here.36 Nancy Armstrong, too, recognizes how “what we now call ‘the novel’ won its title in a field of argumentation as it figured out how to adjust to, incorporate, and abject competing ways of thinking about the individual,” and attributes “the longevity of liberal individualism to its [the novel’s] skill at defending the very concept of the ­individual against . . . ​other modes of subject formation.”37 For Armstrong, novels provide one of the main testing grounds for the development of liberal individualism on both sides of the Atlantic. At the same time, other genres provided their own contributions and counterpoints to such formations. American Fragments does not dispute the overall transformation to the episteme of the liberal individual—it examines the exact method by which that alteration happened, and clarifies the nature of the subject that was emerging in the early United States. Fragments pre­sent an incipient liberalism in their depiction of fractured minoritarian identities, but in contrast to more familiar accounts of the liberal individual, the version of identity offered by the form focused entirely on the flexibility and possibility of disenfranchised p ­ eoples. Such a progressive potential for change was directly tied to the narrative structure of the form. The irregular aesthetic composition of the fragment guaranteed that its version of subjectivity diverged from the



Thinking in Parts in American Lit­er­a­ture 17

one that has typically been held up in studies of the period: the reign of the bounded, cohesive, autonomous, white, property-­owning man that increasingly took hold throughout the nineteenth ­century. The ruptured nature of fragments foregrounded the fact that the identities discussed in their content did not exist in a coherent state in relation to institutional powers, but instead contained within them a fissure that could only be resolved beyond the text. Writers of fragments conceived of t­ hose living on the margins of society as having transformable identities, an act that in and of itself sought to improve the positionality of subordinate individuals in a society that by and large relegated such figures to static and constricting categorizations. The form thus partakes in what Dror Wahrman calls in The Making of the Modern Self the ancién regime of identity. Charting a course through bureaucratic documents, theatrical per­for­mances, novels, and print culture at large, Wahrman identifies how, before the American Revolution, Atlantic Eu­ro­ pean culture largely assumed that identity existed as “potentially malleable, unfixed, unreliable, changeable through circumstances or even through self-­conscious choice.”38 In the late eigh­teenth ­century, this view shifted “from mutability to essence, from imaginable fluidity to fixity, from the potential for individual deviation from general identity categories to an individual identity stamped indelibly on each and e­ very person”—­but not, as Wahrman crucially notes, in the United States.39 In the new nation, ­t here still existed the “potential for identity metamorphosis,” particularly for “individuals falling between . . . ​[the] cracks” of social categories.40 Via a narrative structure that designated its subjects as in process, fragments instantiated a version of individuality based in the “identity metamorphosis” Wahrman details. In a similar vein, Siân Silyn Roberts has recently argued that writers in nineteenth-­century Amer­i­ca “refus[ed] to reaffirm or reinvigorate an originary, ordered, proprietary self,” and instead created “porous, fluid singularities that circulate through wider networks.”41 With this formulation, Roberts picks up where Wahrman leaves off at the turn of the ­century. She lucidly shows how writers of gothic fiction challenged the British “proprietary self”—­what Wahrman calls the “modern self”—­through an intersubjective “relation among reciprocally implicated social entities.”42 The fragment makes a related experiment, revealing that ­t hese same issues extend beyond Roberts’s purview of the gothic and actually traverse the corridors of print media. Furthermore, ­t hese claims about individuality find the most traction with ostracized Americans who existed

18 Introduction

between the cracks of identity categories.43 As I show, it is through the fragment’s attention to the lower sort in the early United States that the sense of a fluid identity so vital to modern conceptions of individuality can be recognized and unfolded. Yet with regard to disenfranchised groups in the period, the question still remains: Why would a growing ­middle class that had only recently established itself as part of the governing authority of the nation seek to empower subordinate groups of ­people through fictional means? The story of fragments si­mul­ta­neously shows how writers appealed to their audiences, shored up the bound­aries of class, and l­imited the scope of their intervention, all while still committing to the mutable identities of the marginalized in a progressive way. That is to say, the fragment cut both ways: it was objectifying and reformist. From a comparatively safe vantage point within republican society, authors used the fragment to entice readers with pleasing sentimental topics and descriptions of the figures that inhabited inferior social spheres, a kind of voy­eur­is­tic practice into how the lower sort lived. For Rowson, writing about the separation of a ruined ­woman from her f­amily provided a means of investigating a sensational character who commits a dangerous act of in­de­pen­dence. Readers could experience literary catharsis and excitement through the pain of Charlotte’s seduction, her abandonment at the hands of Montraville, and her subsequent death. Rowson’s tragedy sought to attract an audience trained in sentimental discourses of pity who felt gratified by touching repre­sen­ta­t ions on the page. Depicting such emotional distress in writing confirmed the sensibility of the text, attributing a moral worth to the lit­er­a­ture that would have been legible to virtually anyone.44 The pre­sen­ta­tion of sentimental scenes to readers and the experience of plea­sure that accompanied them ­were not the only nonprogressive reasons for the creation of fragments, which also had a broader, self-­serving purpose. By labeling other ­people as “fragments,” authors could ensure that they themselves ­were decidedly not part of a group that lacked an affiliation with the normative social frame. In other words, identifying certain individuals as being “fragmented” obliquely meant that the creators of the texts ­were not in such a circumstance themselves; they w ­ ere simply describing it for the sake of their readers. “ ‘Personhood’ in late eighteenth-­century Amer­ i­ca,” as William Huntting Howell explains, “designated a par­tic­u­lar set of sociocultural coordinates—­white, propertied, male—­defined by its difference from (or frank opposition to) other sets of sociocultural coordinates:



Thinking in Parts in American Lit­er­a­ture 19

­ omen, slaves, Indians, immigrants, c­ hildren, the poor.”45 Nearly always, w the establishment of “personhood” in the period was leveraged through an oppositional logic. Classifying marginalized individuals as fragments implicitly meant that the writers, in contrast to their chosen subjects, did not experience such crises of identity. Unlike t­ hose portrayed in their fragments, the authors and their demographic groups could claim an unblemished, stable, consistent, and undivided personality that held a secure place in their larger community—­even if such security was only notional. In addition to the stature that fragments accrued for t­hose composing and reading them, the form also had limitations in its repre­sen­ta­tional content. Notwithstanding their progressive thrust, the texts w ­ ere still bounded in their scope ­because the writers of fragments refrained from taking too many risks with their descriptions of the ostracized. With only a few exceptions (Carey’s fragments being one), authors did not create fragments that focused on ­people classified as ontologically inferior by eighteenth-­century standards. Enslaved p ­ eople, f­ ree Blacks, indigenous p ­ eoples, and non-­European ­others seldomly appeared in fragments. This notable omission originates in a systematic ascription of sub-­humanity to t­ hese groups. In order to justify the increasing structure of chattel slavery, the expansionist displacement of native tribes, and the growing appetite for exotic goods outside of Eu­rope, racialized discourses emphasized the subordinate biological position of the affected populations.46 The attention and motivation of fragments—­their cultural and po­liti­cal work—­focused not on radical upheaval that would alter the status of the dehumanized, but on progressive changes that could conceivably reincorporate marginalized individuals who had fallen out of the fold. Just as the definition of a fragment implies a temporality in which a severed part was formerly joined to a ­whole, so too the individuals represented in the form ­were previously sutured to their community and could be reconstituted in the f­ uture. By far the majority of literary ventures in this period—­from Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive (1797) to Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok (1824)—­ used fiction to explore subjectivities and pre­sent them to an audience. Fragments, too, brought forth a disenfranchised individual for the spectatorship of readers and implicitly situated their authors as more power­ful. Yet such curtailing did not fully inhibit the form’s progressive power.47 The narrative affordances of fragments enabled audiences to imagine a new, uncharted ­future for the individuals depicted in the content of the text; moreover, each reader would not have envisioned precisely the same outcome for

20 Introduction

the life of a poor f­ather trying to support his f­amily, to take one recurring example. The multiplicity of completions and ­f utures contained within any single fragment proves crucial b ­ ecause they collectively ensure that no singular version of the “­whole” exists. In any given case, an overabundance of “finished” texts exists, and each person in the chain of creation, publication, dissemination, and reception can generate inventive pluralities. ­These pluralities might take the following shapes: the author envisions other texts to write that might complete the fragment; an editor considers the fragment in relation to other se­lections in an anthology, periodical, or newspaper; the bookseller places the small text in a group of other texts for more con­ve­nient sales; a reader conceives of an entirely dif­fer­ent ending to the work; and the critic reflects on diverse interpretations that complement or conclude the fragment. Even though most literate readers in the early republic would have belonged to the increasingly power­ful middling class, each could still respond to a fragment in his or her own par­tic­u­lar way. To borrow a phrasing from Barthes, the fragment acts as a “polysemous” text, an “entrance into a network with a thousand entrances; to take this entrance is to aim, ultimately, not at a ­legal structure of norms and departures, a narrative or poetic Law, but at a perspective (of fragments, of voices from other texts, other codes).”48 More than anything, fragments dramatize a multifaceted sense of “perspective” for their audiences, an aesthetic effect that was particularly remarkable when applied to a person like a disabled beggar or a seduced ­woman. Based as they are in representing the split nature of figures that lived on the margins of society, fragments function as a way of articulating an ontological status of identity that differs from the white, property-­owning, bourgeois male subject. Even so, as the final chapters of this study reveal, the form’s fate cannot be disentangled from its co-­opting by the ideology of the liberal individual, especially as market-­oriented practices and ways of being gained more prominence. But before that nineteenth-­century moment, writers of fragments largely opted for flexibility and mutability in place of coherence and stability. Through their partiality, fragments indicate that the realm of identity is a deterritorialized one that exists in terms of prospect, not definition. Fragments refrain from determining how the individual in question might attain legibility in relation to a nation, f­amily, or religious community—­topics that ­w ill be covered in the coming pages—­but through their narrative and temporal structures, they urge the audience to imagine such possibilities. Instead of establishing restricted ­f utures delineated by



Thinking in Parts in American Lit­er­a­ture 21

birth, wealth, gender, class, property, or other determinations, fragments move away from such constraints by presenting an individual as in process. The inherent possibility contained within the form allowed writers, readers, editors, and critics to create a large range of pasts, pre­sents, and f­ utures for ostracized p ­ eople, with the ultimate goal of creating a more inclusive social body. The connective tissue—­the “callidæ juncturæ”—­between individual and society could thereby be ­imagined using the liberatory qualities contained within the fragment.49

The Liberty of Fragments The limitations of fragments and the explic­itly self-­interested reasons for representing ostracized minorities within them should not be overlooked, but the cumulative effect of fragments still tended in the direction of reform. The means by which fragments envisioned a more expansive liberty and social position for the individuals they represented is amply documented in the lit­er­a­ture of the era. In article ­after article published in newspapers and periodicals, writers used the form to convey the possibility of liberation followed by f­ uture change. In one telling example titled “The captive liberated: a fragment,” which appeared in the July  1788 issue of the American Museum, an owner of a caged bird realizes that as “charming as is thy song . . . ​yet more pleasing w ­ ill be the reflection to have given thee freedom.”50 Turning away from the desire to keep the bird for personal enjoyment, the owner realizes that the larger, morally substantial goal should be to make the bird “happy in the enjoyment of freedom and the society of kindred beings.”51 This short article depicts the importance of localized instances of freedom; no living ­thing, even a bird, is too small to enjoy its liberty. The bird not only earns the “enjoyment of freedom,” but the destruction of its cage further allows it to create a new social community with “kindred beings.” A yearning to spread freedom to captives arises in other fragments published during the period as well. In the March 1790 issue of the Mas­sa­chu­ setts Magazine, the editors published the anonymous “Henry; or the Captive. A Fragment.” In this brief story, an unnamed individual breaks into a prison and f­ rees an unjustly imprisoned man named Henry, who extolls his newfound “liberty to range t­ hese bounded fields ­today.”52 By the end of the text, the narrator exultingly exclaims that “Henry is ­free!” from his inequitable

22 Introduction

captivity, celebrating the victory over the oppressive forces that strove to keep him confined for the duration of his life.53 In the articles from the American Museum and the Mas­sa­chu­setts Magazine, the word “fragment” becomes synonymous with a specific instance of breaking out of a state of imprisonment; the bird and Henry emerge out of physical containment and into bodily freedom. Their prisons become, as it ­were, fragmented. As a final example, perhaps one of the widest bases for the connection between fragments and liberty occurs in “The Origin and Properties of the Cap of Liberty. A Fragment,” which appeared in the February 22, 1785, issue of the Pennsylvania Packet. The article offers a brief history of the liberty cap, an ancient Roman hat that was worn by formerly enslaved p ­ eople who had been manumitted, which was taken up as a symbol of liberty in the eigh­ teenth c­ entury. The text describes the cap’s color, texture, and size, and then turns to a po­liti­cal interpretation of the headpiece. “The Pileus [the cap’s Latin name], or Cap of Liberty, is quite ­simple in its form, common in its texture, and of a whitish colour. It is in the form of a sugar-­loaf, broad at the bottom, ending like a cone. This prefigures that freedom stands on the broad basis of humanity; and it turns up to a pyramid, the emblem of eternity, to shew it ­ought to sit forever.”54 The author pays close attention to the universality of the cap, associating the simplicity, commonality, and expansive bottom of the pileus with “the broad basis of humanity” that scaffolds freedom. No exceptions are made; the fragment insists on an inclusivity ­here that exceeds the realities of life in early Amer­i­ca. As the text finishes, the narrator exclaims that in ancient times the pileus “became the badge of freedom; and when a slave was made a freeman, he had a cap given to him. . . . ​Oh! may ­every American thus wear this sacred cap! Let them preserve it by them undefiled; and . . . ​wear it nobly in the face of the world.”55 With its forward-­ looking gaze, the ending of the essay highlights the creation of universal liberty as something that ­w ill take place in the ­f uture of “­every American.” The figure of the captive set ­free with a “badge of freedom” was a recurring favorite of writers, but it was certainly not the only type of individual referenced in fragments. Examples from the American romantic period cover a multitude of identities with titles that fixate on the lower sort: “The Unfeeling ­Father. A Fragment” (1789); “The beggar. A Fragment” (1790); “Peter Pennyless.—­A fragment” (1790); “The Condemned Prisoner. A Fragment” (1791); “The Poor Old Man.—­A Fragment” (1791); “Slavery. A Fragment” (1792); “The Mad Girl of St. Joseph’s. A Fragment.” (1793); and “The ­ ese texts presented Soliloquies of a Highwayman. A Fragment” (1795).56 Th



Thinking in Parts in American Lit­er­a­ture 23

readers with brief insights into the lives of broken families, seduced w ­ omen, poor beggars, and criminals. They always ended on an unfinished note, and included an appeal to the audience for tolerance, charity, personal action, and social change. Even this small sampling of titles from the era shows how the form brought readers into contact with individuals from the lower sort who might not fit clearly into day-­to-­day life in early Amer­i­ca or, if they did, ­were held in definitively subservient roles. Yet in stark contrast to Thersites’s position as a degraded and insulted servant in Troilus and Cressida, the fragments that abounded in early national print culture evoked a sense of mobility and change: the captive is always liberated, the beggar finds a morsel of hope, the criminal discovers redemption, and freedom is universally anticipated. ­These metamorphoses are not necessarily found in the existing content of a fragment, but they are almost always promised in a forthcoming time contiguous to the narrative itself. Such a kinesis not only emerged from the narrative structure of the form and the mutable practices of identity chronicled by Wahrman, but also depended on a development in the meaning of the word “fragment.” One of the earliest usages of “fragment” as a verb occurred in 1818, with the publication of John Keats’s Endymion: Copious wonder-­draughts Each gazer drank; and deeper drank more near: For what poor mortals fragment up, as mere As marbles was ­there lavish, to the vast Of one fair palace, that far far surpass’d Even for the common bulk, ­t hose olden three, Memphis, and Babylon, and Nineveh.57 Instead of being used as a noun—­referring to a body, text, or piece of sculpture from antiquity—­authors began using the word “fragment” as a verb in the de­cades surrounding the publication of Keats’s poem, thereby generating a sense of movement within the term itself. The broken bodies and fractured texts did not stay in an inert state, but took part in what Nathaniel Hawthorne, much ­later in the nineteenth ­century, called a “fragmentary pro­cess.”58 Keats’s use of “fragment” demonstrates the idea of change ­because he uses “fragment” not just to convey a breakage, but to communicate a piecing together—­what “mortals fragment up.” Rather than exclusively focusing on the rupture implied by the word, American writers anticipated Keats by

24 Introduction

considering the way fragments could create a collage of pieces. Fragments, then, w ­ ere a way to construct lives, not destroy them. While legislative restrictions and social mores ­limited the lives of the marginalized, fragments established an imaginative rubric that could place ­these figures in new contexts. Writers used the form to portray configurations of identity that w ­ ere in process and could be adapted to society in innovative ways. Depending on the specific fragment, though, an author might choose to emphasize the material aspect of the form or its temporal nature. The texts analyzed in the upcoming chapters thus move between the spatiality of the form and its analeptic and proleptic natures, all of which ­were employed in order to showcase the potential transformations of the marginalized. Reading the fragments of the romantic years thus turns attention away from a cohesive repre­sen­ta­tion of liberal individualism to what Anne-­Lise François calls “an ethos of attending to unobserved, not-­ for-­profit experience rather than results entered on the public rec­ord . . . ​ and of mea­sur­ing difference not by what an action materially produces but by the imaginative possibilities revelation may e­ ither open or eclipse.”59 By reaching audiences in periodicals, novels, newspapers, and popu­lar poetry, fragments could start changing the kinds of lives and ­f utures made available to figures who w ­ ere thought to be out of balance with the social fabric. American Fragments brings into sharp clarity an archive that appreciates the romantic period as one highly invested in the use of aesthetic forms for po­liti­cal ends. Each chapter examines a central aspect of colonial and early national society—­the discourses of ruins and art within Atlantic culture, the mourning of war­time vio­lence, the problematics of seduction, the religious culture of reform, and the rise of authorship—­and explores how the fragment afforded writers an incisive means of imagining the mutability of subaltern figures. The chapters also examine the presence of physical ele­ ments (Chapters 2 and 3) and temporal qualities (Chapters 3 and 4) within the fragment, while charting an eventual course to the aestheticization of the fragment in the early nineteenth ­century (Chapter 5 and the epilogue). ­Later portions of the study (Chapters 4, 5, and the epilogue) also begin to highlight the incipient nature of a more bounded, coherent, and market-­ oriented liberal individual that took on an increasingly prominent role throughout the nineteenth c­ entury. Our path begins, however, with the traditions of unfinished forms that populated eighteenth-­century discourse. Chapter 1 surveys the work of thinkers like Benjamin Franklin, Alexander



Thinking in Parts in American Lit­er­a­ture 25

Hamilton, and George Washington, who—in contrast to most of the figures studied ­here—­feared the veneration of ruins and fragments, an obsession they associated with the de­cadence of Eu­rope. In their view, only by repudiating cultural fragmentation and focusing on an integrated unity could the American nation persevere into the f­uture. But theirs ­were not the only voices throughout the eigh­teenth c­ entury, and the second half of the chapter moves into a comparative analy­sis of the British and Eu­ro­pean phi­los­o­ phers, writers, and artists who laid the groundwork for an American appreciation of fragments. Turning to the years surrounding the American Revolution, Chapter 2 begins with pro-­American and pro-­British war pamphlets, and then concentrates on Samuel Jackson Pratt’s novel about the conflict, Emma Corbett. His text pre­sents a fragmentary aesthetic that seeks to memorialize vio­lence, rather than disclaim its victims. In a section titled “A Military Fragment,” Pratt uses extended lines of asterisks and dashes to signify the fractured bodies and lives of veterans, employing visual approximations of fragments to make his point. More so than the language on the page, the punctuation that Pratt uses testifies to the wounds acquired by soldiers over a lifetime of fighting for the British Empire. By aligning bodily, textual, and national fractures, Pratt critiques the injuries perpetuated by both sides of the revolutionary conflict and seeks to promote a stateless identity premised on peace. This chapter then closes with periodical repre­sen­ta­tions of veterans, and considers the way fragments w ­ ere taken up as a form that could uniquely observe the brutality of the past. Some early American fragments—­like ­those in Pratt’s novel—­could be represented visibly on the page with typography, but ­others made their influence felt through their invisibility. Chapter 3 takes as its subject the curious cases of fragments that dis­appear from their texts—­t he lost, torn, and missing writing of seduced w ­ omen. In Charlotte T ­ emple (1791) and The Co­ quette (1797), Susanna Rowson and Hannah Webster Foster borrow from writings on the sublime to align the sexual “ruination” of a fallen ­woman with the literary “ruins” that she also composes. While the spatial and temporal dynamics of being a “ruin” placed ­women outside of the families that constituted the body politic, their fragmented writing fashioned an alternative discourse of identity. The absences and gaps within the literary ruins reflect—­but do not reproduce—­the trauma of seduction. Fragments acknowledge abuse without giving it the final say, providing a key ave­nue of repre­sen­ta­tion for oppressed w ­ omen. Utilizing theories of the sublime that

26 Introduction

articulated the power of silence and ruination, authors turned feminine fragments into a rejoinder to patriarchal authority. Chapter 4 examines another significant basis for the fragment—­a scriptural one—­and shows how writers sought to attach the marginalized to a universal religious community that extended beyond the nation. In the only miracle described by all four Gospels, Christ feeds thousands of his followers with only five loaves of bread and two fish. He first breaks up the food and feeds ­those around him; then, he tells his followers to collect the crumbs, saying, “Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.”60 Miraculously, the collected crumbs transform into a surplus of food that feeds the crowd of p ­ eople. Adaptations of this event appeared throughout the print culture of the romantic era. The verses ­were cited by figures as varied as Benjamin Franklin, Lydia Maria Child, and Lydia Sigourney, and ­were used to emphasize the need to maintain a frugal, religious economy. For Franklin, the dividends w ­ ere found in the furtherance of national prosperity, yet by far the most common version of the miracle centered on the dispossessed, individuals who could be miraculously “gathered up” into a religious community. Th ­ ese fragments maintain a progressive bent: through an invocation to action—­telling readers to “gather up” suffering figures—­ this chapter argues that writers turned the miracle into a temporal message of reform for the ­f uture. However, the economic focus of the retellings also opened the door to the burgeoning liberal individual. The first few de­cades of the nineteenth ­century saw the full expression of British and German romanticism, movements which turned the fragment into an even more ubiquitous presence. Whereas previous chapters emphasized the interlocking po­liti­cal and artistic stakes of the form, Chapter  5 centers its attention on the increasing aestheticization of the fragment. Writers like Charles Brockden Brown, Sarah Went­worth Morton, and Richard Henry Dana exemplify the transition from the progressive politics of the form to its less reformist incarnation. They began to use the label of “fragment” to represent not just a desire for sociopo­liti­cal change but also a stage in the artistic pro­cess. In a historical moment that saw the rise of the professional author and the increasing autonomy of art from politics, writers used the fragment as a paradoxical means of establishing their professional skill. Fragmentary texts could reveal artistic process—­a crucial ele­ment in naming a person an “author”—­and make such an identity vis­i­ble for audiences. This culminating chapter therefore tracks how—­even when marginalized figures ­were loosely invoked—­nineteenth-­century writers published



Thinking in Parts in American Lit­er­a­ture 27

networks of texts (sketches, drafts, and unfinished compositions) that could “fragment up” into evidence of artistic pro­cess. Where the beginning of this study considers the role of unfinished writing in an American polity that was itself still unfinished, the epilogue extends the discussion of the fragment into the ­middle of the nineteenth ­century. In that period, the fragment moved from being an explicit facet of literary production (often signaled in titling the work “A Fragment”) into an implicit one. Tracking the oeuvres of William Cullen Bryant, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville—­a ll of whom wrote fragments in early stages of their c­ areers and continued to incorporate the form into their more mature works—­t he closing of American Fragments examines how the form became embedded in literary practice as fragmentation, a legacy that reaches into the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries. Such an entrenchment of fragmentation into aesthetic practices meant that the unfinished style became an under­lying and established part of literary production in the nineteenth ­century, a condition that diminished the transgressive po­liti­cal power the fragment once wielded. American Fragments tracks the movement of a literary form out of Eu­ro­ pean philosophy and aesthetics, revealing how writers used the fragment as a way of testing out the position and identity of the lower sort. In presenting marginalized figures within the narrative content, but leaving their ­f utures as narrative-adjacent prospects, fragments emphasized the potential of such individuals, leaving their lives open to change in a way that had not been previously explored. Through its lapses, absences, and ragged edges, the form guides its readers to articulate alternate social existences. The missing, broken, and illegible moments within fragments create a space of readerly consciousness set ­free that points t­oward the extremities of literary repre­sen­ta­tion.61 However, in the final turn, this study shows how the popularization of the form began to diminish its capacity for imagining po­liti­cal change and eventually transformed it into a major market force for the sale of lit­er­a­ture. The power of literary fragments stems from their unfinished structure and the multitude of dif­fer­ent ends contained therein, a position that flouts Frank Kermode’s depiction of the critic’s need for coherence: “We are in love with the idea of fulfillment,” he observes.62 He discerns that “somehow, in some occult fashion, if we could only detect it, every­t hing ­w ill be found to hang together,” and that we are “pleromatists; we all seek the center that ­w ill allow the senses to rest, at any rate for one interpreter, at any rate for one moment.”63 Kermode critiques the desire to be “pleromatists,” building on

28 Introduction

the Greek word pleroma, which means “fullness” or “completion,” usually in a religious sense. Critics work from a textual state of emptiness to the pleroma of a text, imbuing it with a lustrous interpretation that completes it. Yet the movement from emptiness to completion falls short when it attempts to capture the fragment’s dynamics of partiality. Fragments ask us to restrain from drawing definitive conclusions and to avoid being pleromatists as much as is achievable. Rather than any one conclusion having dominance, the constant potentiality of fragments grounds their energetic and fascinating aesthetic structure.64 The examples inspected throughout Amer­ ican Fragments offer a protocol of reading for an unsettled state which evades a “center that w ­ ill allow the senses to rest.” The pages that follow accordingly focus on fragments that enlisted the vibrant imagination of readers in the ser­v ice of the periphery, empowering ­those same audiences to reconstitute the shape of the world in novel ways.

CHAPTER 1

Eighteenth-­Century Philosophies of the Fragment

In our endeavors to establish a new general government, the contest, nationally considered, seems not to have been so much for glory, as existence. It was for a long time doubtful w ­ hether we ­were to survive as an in­de­pen­dent Republic, or decline from our foederal dignity into insignificant and wretched Fragments of Empire. The adoption of the Constitution so extensively, & with so liberal an acquiescence on the part of the Minorities in general, promised the former. —­George Washington, letter to Henry Lee, September 22, 1788

George Washington was relieved. In the months before writing to his longtime friend Henry Lee in September of 1788, Washington had been greatly troubled by the fact that the young nation seemed to be teetering on a precipice that would determine its fate. With the ratification of the Constitution, his fears ­were alleviated. Washington’s epistle to his close associate evinces his happy embrace of the newly created national unity at the same time that it expounds upon his distaste for weak po­liti­cal u ­ nions. He stridently contrasts the strength and “foederal dignity” of the “in­de­pen­dent Republic” established by the Constitution with the “wretched Fragments of Empire” that the collection of former colonies would have become had the founding document not been accepted by the states. The use of the word “foederal” not only signifies an energetic amalgamation, but also etymologically conveys a

30 Chapter 1

sense of covenantal agreement and faith: The root of “foederal” stems from the Latin foedus, meaning a settlement that combines two into one, and fi­ dere, faith.1 The phrase “foederal dignity” both communicates Washington’s appreciation of national unity, and also gives the consolidation of the United States a covenant-­like mandate. The ­union is conceived in terms that fulfilled governmental and religious aspirations for the ­f uture of the country. Moreover, in Washington’s view, “Fragments” are incompatible with any kind of long-­standing po­liti­cal durability b ­ ecause their “insignificant and wretched nature” lacks any “dignity.” The letter implies that fragments remain subject to the larger ­whole of an empire and cannot exist as a self-­ sufficient totality. He links “Fragments” to “Empire,” worrying that the United States might have become broken, in­de­pen­dent colonies separated from the imperial center of E ­ ngland, but still dependent on the m ­ other country for existence. At the same time, in the very appearance of the writing on the page, the letter places an emphasis on the concept of “Fragments.” Like “Republic,” “Empire,” “Constitution,” and “Minorities,” Washington capitalizes the word, giving it a more poignant presence on the page—­neither “government” nor “foederal” receive the same treatment—­and drawing Lee’s attention to it. The potential for the nation to exist as “Fragments of Empire” is a real threat for Washington, who believes in a “general government” made out of the extensive adoption of the Constitution and the “acquiescence on the part of the Minorities in general.” Unity, agreement, and general consensus prove paramount for his vision of the United States, a vision that was also held by a number of other American thinkers in the period. In contrast to a nation of fragments, which suggested disagreement, fracture, imbalance, and, ultimately, failure b ­ ecause of “Minorities” r­ unning rampant, Washington and other po­liti­cal elites concocted dreams of cohesive una­nim­it­ y. Over a span of time that included the Revolution, the turbulent years ­under the Articles of Confederation, the ratification of the Constitution, and the first de­cades of the early republic, po­liti­cal writers iterated vari­ous versions of legislative concord that all communicated a re­sis­tance to fracture. Members of the ruling class in Amer­i­ca faced the prospect of forging a harmonious new country that needed to exist as a legible ­whole, even if such an entity was out of grasp. As a result, revolutionaries, Federalists, Anti-­ Federalists, and Democratic-­Republicans alike did not want their platforms to announce indecision or partiality, and thereby lack a discernable outcome. ­These groups felt pressure to draw ideological lines that would clarify



Eighteenth-­Century Philosophies of the Fragment 31

the ­future course of the nation, and writers from all sides of the partisan spectrum prized Enlightenment models of order that emphasized consensus, ­wholeness, impartiality, and universality.2 Colonial and early national elites equated terms like “fragments,” “ruins,” “relics,” “remnants,” “scraps,” and “remains” ­because they all affronted a young polity that looked forward to a prosperous f­ uture, e­ ither as colonies before the Revolution or as a nation afterward. However, a word like “part” received less derision ­because of its potential to create unity. A “part” conveyed a self-­sufficient quality; as Samuel Johnson’s dictionary explained, it is “a portion” or a “member,” a denotation that indicates a sense of belonging and stability uncharacteristic of fragments.3 Unlike the ac­cep­tance of po­liti­cal and literary parts, any fascination with detritus and its repre­sen­ta­tion in cultural productions stood in the way of a nation bent on establishing stable, long-­lasting institutions that would not be prone to failure. Historical ruins, relics, and fragments might contain information about past civilizations, but they still symbolized societal collapse. The criticisms produced by leaders like Washington in opposition to “wretched Fragments” ­were broadly leveraged against the widespread cultural valuation of fragmentation and ruination rather than the literary form of the fragment as such; ­these thinkers w ­ ere not specifically reflecting on Mathew Carey’s periodical essays, for example. But in crafting a framework for the country, they needed a narrative of unity and cohesion to prevail. While their critiques took a thematic approach to the topic rather than a formal one per se, such discussions nonetheless prove decisive for the category of writing American Fragments examines throughout its chapters. The literary fragments analyzed in this study ­were generated within the overarching contextual setting of prose like Washington’s. Writers of fragments thus produced an alternative valorization of fragmentation via their progressive stance. Yet if individuals like Washington held such disparaging views, how did literary fragments gain traction in the print culture of the era? In contrast to the po­liti­cal discourse of the day, transatlantic literary, artistic, and intellectual sources celebrated the form. The historical conditions that nurtured and pop­u­lar­ized the fragment in ­England and Germany likewise spurred its success in American culture. The fragment’s transatlantic origins further reveal, as we ­w ill see, the establishment of a clear formal tie between the fragment and the experience of liberty, a correlation that speaks to the form’s “optative mood”—­a disposition articulated by Ralph Waldo Emerson and F.  O. Matthiessen that

32 Chapter 1

conveyed a sense of demo­cratic possibility, one that was at once dissatisfied with the pre­sent and optimistic for ­future change.4 Incompletion—­even if artificially constructed by an author or artist—­could generate an imaginative liberty for audiences to transform texts, an “optative” position that lays the foundation for the lit­er­a­ture surveyed in Chapters  2, 3, and 4. As the Baron de Montesquieu summarized in The Spirit of the Laws (1750), “No word has received more dif­fer­ent significations and has struck minds in so many ways as has liberty,” and the fragment’s unfinished nature parallels Montesquieu’s sense of liberty via the form’s potential to generate “dif­fer­ent significations.”5 In delineating two outlooks on the fragment—­the re­sis­tance to its thematic allure and the appreciation of its liberatory potentials—­I argue that it primarily served as a threat for the ruling class in the United States and, that in response to t­ hese fears, American writers and artists reversed the dominant logic by drawing on Eu­ro­pean traditions and elucidating the productive nature of the form. For the latter cohort, it was an optative style of potentiality, not limitation. Charles Brockden Brown, with whom this chapter concludes, serves as a culminating example of the two opposing positions described throughout the chapter: he at once ventriloquizes the fear of fragmentation while asserting his own preference for the form’s liberating prospection.

The American Modes of Unification Late eighteenth-­century American writing and iconography was saturated with images and ideas taken from the classical world. ­These cultural objects and philosophical ideals w ­ ere not naïvely a­ dopted into the social fabric, though. The builders of the nation w ­ ere attempting to revolutionize their side of the Atlantic by creating a republic that could leave b ­ ehind the corruptions of Eu­rope and the failures of previous civilizations. As Nick Yablon explains, “ruins,” which ­were often viewed as synonymous with fragments, “functioned in postrevolutionary Amer­i­ca more as emblems of po­liti­cal peril than objects of aesthetic plea­sure” ­because they represented instability and degradation.6 Ruins ­were useful for understanding how to avoid repeating the miscarriages of empire that led to the fall of Greece and Rome, but they did not represent the teleological purpose of late eighteenth-­century po­liti­cal development. For the instigators of the Revolution and the framers of the federal republic, the young nation needed stability and forward



Eighteenth-­Century Philosophies of the Fragment 33

pro­gress—­not backward-­looking reflections—to help it take its place in the world as a power­ful global empire that was fully unified. Despite the republican interest in classical relics and writing, po­liti­cal elites evinced a sharp distrust of the way such cultural artifacts emblematized dissolution.7 Any insight gleaned from the past, any symbol borrowed from Rome, and any aesthetic plea­sure felt from broken fragments needed to be leavened by a healthy skepticism of the appropriation. This borrowing also needed to be accompanied by an explic­itly stated desire for a dif­fer­ent, more unwavering path that avoided the undue liberties of e­ arlier empires. The enthralling beauty of ancient ruins and recovered relics might lead citizens astray into a self-­indulgent or gratuitous freedom that could rot the nation in the very moment of its inception. A characteristic sample of the rejection of fragments can be seen in the mindset of John Aikin’s letters to his son in the 1790s, versions of which circulated widely in the new nation: “I cannot but think . . . ​t hat the extraordinary passion for ruins of e­ very kind which at pre­sent prevails, has in it a good deal of the rage of a predominant fashion, and goes beyond all bounds of sober judgment” by concentrating on “decay and desolation.”8 Through their creation of “extraordinary passion” and their emphasis on “decay”—­t he very ele­ments which drew artists to them—­fragments and ruins exuded an air of insecurity that made them dangerous for republican pro­gress. They ­were too likely to be taken up by individuals in a “passion” or a “rage” that would sideline civic virtue. Yet the anx­i­eties surrounding discourses of ruination can be traced back to before the 1790s, through persuasive writing in the revolutionary and post-­revolutionary years. In de­cades that saw the transformation of a heterogeneous set of colonies and colonists into a so-­called nation, unification—­not fragmentation—­was the key word that rallied the attempt to transform the many into the one.9 Starting with the lead-up to the American Revolution in the 1760s, ruins w ­ ere articulated as a hazardous aesthetic model for the country. Up ­until the full outbreak of vio­lence in the 1770s, even many radicals rejected separation and sought to maintain harmony with their imperial home. The preponderance of colonists wanted ­England to reform its diplomatic ties in order to continue the fruitful economic relationship that had been established in recent de­cades. Separation—­that is, fragmentation—­from the British empire was viewed as something to be avoided if at all pos­si­ble. In an infamous print from the 1760s titled “Magna Britania her Colonies Reduc’d” (figure 1), Benjamin Franklin supported exactly such a position of reconciliation through his protest of the Stamp Act. Franklin’s image makes

34 Chapter 1

Figure 1. Benjamin Franklin, “Magna Britania her Colonies Reduc’d” (c. 1766). Courtesy Library Com­pany of Philadelphia.

its argument by depicting a violent bodily rupture between ­England and the American colonies. The foreground represents ­England as a disheveled ­woman who leans against a globe b ­ ecause all four of her limbs have been cut off and are lying on the ground nearby; the arms are labeled “Pennsyl–” and “New-­York,” and the legs are labeled “Virg–” and “New-­Eng–.” On the bottom left of the image, the “Pennsyl–” arm reaches ­toward a fallen olive branch of peace outside of its grasp. On the right side, a long spear sticks out of the “New-­Eng–” leg and cuts left across the center of the print, indicating the deep injuries of New ­England; however, the tip of the spear also comes menacingly close to the figure of “Britania,” threatening the already weakened empire. Fi­nally, the right side shows a dead tree and two stunted sprouts that imply the death that would come from imperial division. Franklin’s graphic critique of the Stamp Act reminds E ­ ngland that a unified colonial empire serves the interests of both parties, and that strength derives from cooperation rather than alienation.10



Eighteenth-­Century Philosophies of the Fragment 35

Organic meta­phors also play a central role in “Magna Britania.” The dismembered corpus of Britania (which is also tied to Belisarius, a Roman general), the figure’s state of penury, the diminutive growth of the trees, and the fallen olive branch collectively generate a vision that cohesion is natu­ral and good for po­liti­cal bodies. The alternative, for Franklin, only involves impotent, unfruitful landscapes and broken, disassembled governments. Building on the arresting symbolic ele­ments of the image, Franklin often accompanied it with a written text that sought to elaborate the self-­destructive absurdity of ­England’s decisions. In a section titled “Explanation” that was routinely printed ­under “Magna Britania,” Franklin writes that “­GREAT BRITAIN is supposed to have been placed upon the globe; but the COLONIES, (that is, her limbs,) being severed from her, she is seen lifting her eyes and mangled stumps to heaven”; as a result, “BRITTANIA herself is seen sliding off the world, (no longer able to hold its balance) her fragments overspread with the label, DATE OBOLUM BELLISARIO [Give a penny to ­ ngland’s diplomatic failure with Belisarius].”11 In Franklin’s estimation, E the colonies diminishes the strength of the empire and results in a broken body politic represented by strewn parts. While “BRITTANIA” should be “placed upon the globe,” no power can now assist her, as she raises her “mangled stumps to heaven” and sits amid what Franklin disparagingly calls the “fragments” of her former imperial w ­ hole. In the “Explanation,” the visual weakness and dismemberment of ­England is described using the pejorative language of fragmentation. For Franklin, po­liti­cal bodies that are not entirely unified transform into fragmented governments that cannot act; such polities exist only as inert pieces of a larger ­whole that cannot move or function. In a section ­after the “Explanation”—­ simply titled “The Moral”—­Franklin reiterates this point by observing, “History affords us many instances of the ruin of states, by the prosecution of mea­sures ill suited to the temper and genius of their p ­ eople.”12 ­Here, he pre­ sents the specter of former civilizations as a warning sign for ­England. If British powers continue in their oppression of the colonies, the “­whole state is weakened, and perhaps ruined for ever!”13 The desire for unity, more than anything ­else, is wound through Franklin’s image and the text published alongside it. From his perspective, ruins and fragments provide an unstable foundation on which to build the f­ uture of the empire. Protecting the organic ­whole of a cohesive po­liti­cal body took center stage even when the tide shifted ­toward the Revolution and the splintering

36 Chapter 1

of the British empire. When imperial reconciliation no longer proved to be a ­viable option, colonists turned to an internal, American unity that could challenge a newly externalized British authority. Paul Revere, for one, fashioned an image asking for indivisibility as the masthead of the newspaper, the Mas­sa­chu­setts Spy (figure 2).14 Revere’s masthead depicts the disunited colonies as the shattered body of a snake under­neath the phrase, “JOIN OR DIE.” Adjacent to each portion of the snake’s body, he places the initials of one of the colonies and, following Franklin’s lead, groups all of New E ­ ngland together. Only by fusing the colonies into one complete body that eschewed individual and local identity could Americans take on the threat of the British dragon pictured next to the dismembered snake. Crucially, while the images about the Stamp Act and the ­union of the revolutionary colonies work ­toward dif­fer­ent ends—­reconciliation with ­England versus military opposition to its empire—­t he logic of Revere’s piece follows that of Franklin’s. They both strive for an organic model of completion using visual, bodily meta­phors. For them, the natu­ral and correct state of the American colonies must be ­wholeness, ­either derived from an imperial connection or an internal national consolidation. Bodies ­were not the only means by which the concept of unity was presented to the American populace. As the visual lexicography of the eigh­ teenth ­century shifted from “depictions of government that reference the ­human body,” according to Eric Slauter, to “depictions of a depersonalized po­liti­cal apparatus identified most often in architectural constructions,” ruins and fragments migrated from the organic physical form to the constructed national edifice.15 In par­tic­u­lar, as the states considered ­whether they should consolidate ­under the proposed Constitution, newspapers and periodicals used architectural comparisons to expose the dangers of disunity. A persuasive graphic from the August 2, 1788, edition of the Mas­sa­ chu­setts Centinel (figure 3) depicts the solidity of the federal structure ­after New York ratified the Constitution, and contrasts the strength of the newly combined states with the threat of conflict elicited by North Carolina and Rhode Island.16 The artist of the illustration draws the eleven states that have agreed to the Constitution as united and solid columns, while North Carolina and Rhode Island both stand apart from the group, falling into ruin. In the final pillar, the name of Rhode Island can barely be distinguished as “R. Island”: the re­sis­tance of the state to the ratification of the Constitution means that it now lacks the most basic form of identification. In addition, the poem ­under the drawing of the pillars italicizes the word “­whole” in the



Eighteenth-­Century Philosophies of the Fragment 37

Figure 2. Paul Revere, Masthead of the Mas­sa­chu­setts Spy for Thursday, July 7, 1774. Courtesy American Antiquarian Society.

phrase “Soon ­o’er the ­whole, ­shall swell the beauteous DOME,” emphasizing the sense of totality and completion created by the founding document. The verse purposefully neglects North Carolina and Rhode Island in its panegyric to Columbia’s “ELEVEN STARS” and “ELEVEN COLUMNS.” Instead, ­t hese two states are characterized by absence and fracture, rather than presence and identity. As the image from the Mas­sa­chu­setts Centinel implies, the re­sis­tance to internal divisiveness and the quest for unified governmental stability came to the forefront in the years a­ fter the Revolution, especially when Americans debated the utility of instituting a confederacy or a federation. During the strug­gle for constitutional ratification, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay wrote their series of essays called “The Federalist” (­later dubbed The Federalist Papers), published in the In­de­pen­dent Journal, the ­ ese texts sought to convince New York Packet, and the Daily Advertiser. Th New Yorkers to support the Constitution. In a discussion in Federalist No. 6, from November 14, 1787, Hamilton delineated the importance of avoiding dissensions between states. As he explained, “If ­these States should ­either be wholly disunited, or only united in partial confederacies, the subdivisions into which they might be thrown would have frequent and violent contests with each other.”17 Like other Federalists who supported the ratification of the Constitution, Hamilton feared the creation of “partial confederacies” that might establish competing “subdivisions” and throw the country into “frequent and violent contests with each other.” The language ­here is reminiscent

38 Chapter 1

Figure 3. “The Federal Edifice” from the Mas­sa­chu­setts Centinel for August 2, 1788. Courtesy Prints and Photo­graphs Division, Library of Congress, USZ6245591.

of the warning written by Washington with which this chapter began: as a po­liti­cal unit, the fragment ­will unequivocally lead to dissension and violent disorder. Throughout all of “The Federalist” essays, the authors insist on the necessity of controlling the divergent localities and factions within the United States, especially in light of the widespread instabilities caused by the Articles of Confederation. Amid the complex international entanglements of the 1780s, the country also suffered from economic turmoil and the potential for domestic insurrection along the lines of Shays’s rebellion. In his probing reading of “The Federalist” essays, Matthew Garrett identifies how the plurality of the nation is ultimately dissolved into unity through the style and structure of Hamilton’s writing; in Garrett’s interpretation, “the parts are the prob­lem” throughout the series of publications, and “they must be contained, comprehended, subordinated, [and] bound” by the homogenizing



Eighteenth-­Century Philosophies of the Fragment 39

force of the nation.18 “The Federalist” essays discuss variety, heterogeneity, and fragmentation only so that they may then be subordinated ­under a regimenting federalist force, one that “contained, comprehended, subordinated, [and] bound.” Such a philosophy invokes minoritarian presences only to eventually—­and entirely—­subsume them. Where Hamilton sought the containment of the heterogeneous multiplicity in order to unify the nation and avoid “frequent and violent contests,” Madison explored a dif­fer­ent solution to the prob­lem of “partial confederacies”: the geo­graph­i­cal expanse of the United States. Building on the work of David Hume, Madison argued that a large republic would produce competing factions that would effectively neutralize one another. Paradoxically, in Madison’s view, the single federal government could function ­because of a constant internal tension that would always and unquestionably be resolved into the superior w ­ hole. In one of the most cited and discussed of the essays—­Federalist No. 10, published on November 22, 1787—­Madison explains how an extensive territory provides the opportunity for more minority differences: “Extend the sphere [of the nation], and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the w ­ hole w ­ ill have a common motive to invade the rights of other 19 citizens.” Federalist No. 10 and the other essays emphasize a teleology of unified resolution, rather than one that grants autonomy to individuals, localities, and states. Factions might be useful or even necessary for Madison’s schema, but they are always supervened by a broader governmental cohesion. Minorities prove compulsory for the national body—­they provide a “greater variety of parties and interests” that can check one another—­yet they do not constitute its purpose. According to the Federalist thought that or­ga­nized the po­liti­cal practices of much of late eighteenth-­century Amer­i­ca, the gathering together of multiple subgroups into a single nation provided a realized state of completion for the formerly incomplete parts of the country. At issue for the writers of the articles was what Robert Ferguson calls “an aesthetics of ratification,” an idea that “signifies the capacity to convey a po­liti­cal goal in an artistic manner by joining meaning to beauty in a way that also suggests a unifying simplicity of appreciation and control. For [John] Jay [and the other writers], the trope of u ­ nion supplied just that combination of beauty, aspiration, simplicity, and conviction.”20 Moving beyond a ­simple ele­ment of discourse, Ferguson rightly elevates ­union to a “trope,” a figurative ele­ment of the writing that was used as a rhetorical appeal time and again in “The Federalist”

40 Chapter 1

essays and other texts. For the elites hoping to solidify the government of the United States, unity symbolized “beauty, aspiration, simplicity, and conviction,” qualities that ruins and fragments most certainly lacked. The examples surveyed h ­ ere only represent the most prominent instances of the fears surrounding ruins and fragments. The desire to place the populace on a path toward unity and comprehensive w ­ holeness was deeply ingrained in colonial and national consciousnesses; moreover, the very same tropes similarly presented themselves in less well-­k nown channels. Fragments and ruins ­were not only maligned in the highly circulated works of American leaders, but ­were also pre­sent in the daily intercourse of ­t hese same individuals. In a letter convincing Eu­ro­pean powers that American colonists ­were strongly in support of the Revolution, John Adams asked his reader “to co[nsider this,] and to ask himself, if he was an American, ­whether he would wish to [run un]der the broken, falling Fragments, of an Empire that is dashed to [Pieces, li]ke a China Vase, and commence a fresh War, against a Combination [of all the] nations of the World, who now discover a degree of Esteem and regard [for Am]erica?”21 Adams posited the British government as constructed of dangerous “falling Fragments” that all the rebelling colonials would want to avoid, even using a simile that compares the empire’s status to the broken pieces of a “China Vase.” In contrast to such a failing empire, he advances the combination of the “nations of the World”—­a more unified and structured support for rebelling Americans. Such anti-­fragmentary language extended to other writers as well. In a letter to William Short in 1790, Thomas Jefferson lamented that a “fragment of barbarism” still existed in France’s laws, and urged him to alter it; likewise, Jefferson complained of his administrative position in 1792 as cutting “his time into the most useless fragments” and giving him “from time to time the most poignant mortification.”22 Associated with “barbarism,” uselessness, and “mortification,” the very word “fragment” could be invoked as an overt means of denigration, and audiences would be expected to immediately comprehend its adverse connotation. Jefferson also remarked in his Autobiography that in the tumult of the revolution in France, ­t here arose a disintegration of the rebelling populace into fragments: “But when they proceeded to subordinate developments, many and vari­ous shades of opinion came into conflict, and schism, strongly marked, broke the Patriots into fragments of very discordant princi­ples.”23 In a variety of contexts and uses, the concept of ruins and the word “fragment” connoted negative—­and even violently dangerous—­prospects.



Eighteenth-­Century Philosophies of the Fragment 41

Union, however, was a nearly universal good in the discussions of po­liti­ cal elites. Yet their descriptions ­were at odds with the real­ity of everyday experiences. In stark contrast to the definitive proclamations offered by the arguments in ­favor of unification, the early United States presented an atmosphere of events that neutralized any ideological emphasis on harmony. As many scholars have attested, late eighteenth-­and early nineteenth-­ century government, social conditions, and economics placed Amer­i­ca in a state of local chaos. ­After the tumult of revolution, the Articles of Confederation, and a tenuous ratification pro­cess, the nation faced, as Sarah Knott describes, “the contentious character of state politics, inflation strains and currency depreciation, rising criminality and social unrest,” as well as “fierce party antagonism,” “sustained rural insurgency,” and “unremitting factionalism.”24 All too aware of the fracturing influences pervading the climate of the republic, legislators optimistically insisted on ­union in the face of failure, even if such unification only existed in aspirational terms. While founding documents created “a superstructure that could balance the par­tic­u­lar tension between unity and difference,” in the words of Edward Larkin, the truth of internal difference continually manifested as a fragmentary threat.25 Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s magnum opus, Modern Chivalry: Contain­ ing the Adventures of Captain John Farrago, and Teague O’Regan, His Ser­ vant, serves as an illustrative example of how delicate that “balance” was perceived to be. In the first place, Brackenridge published the text in multiple parts in 1792, 1793, 1797, 1805, and 1815, a production schedule that itself reflects a fragmentary disposition. Even more remarkable, the factionalism ­running rampant throughout the period is registered in the main character of the novel, Captain Farrago, who cynically remarks that the disunion of the states is “an event certain, and inevitable; but which, the wise and the good delight to contemplate as remote; and not likely to happen for innumerable ages.”26 Farrago’s pessimistic perspective in the years following the ratification indicates the sense of hesitancy and uncertainty that trailed the formation of the country—­nothing could be certain in t­ hose de­cades. Even his own name, “Farrago,” means a confused mixture or hodgepodge, a definition that reflects the condition of the nation that his picaresque travels take him through, ironizing his attempts to uphold Federalist standards of conduct throughout the novel.27 The trepidation that the country would fall back into Washington’s feared “Fragments” always persisted. Yet such anx­i­eties ­were not universally embraced in eighteenth-­century writing and philosophy. While Americans who vied for the unity of the

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nation cast ruins and fragments in a starkly negative light, writers and artists across the Atlantic viewed such concepts from an entirely dif­fer­ent ­angle. Instead of condemning the weakness of fragments and associating them with po­liti­cal and aesthetic failure, a host of thinkers sought to investigate how unfinished forms could be leveraged in a culturally productive fashion. This viewpoint explains the increasing transatlantic popularity of fragments as the eigh­teenth ­century progressed and, furthermore, speaks to the way fragments afforded an expansive imaginative arena for readers. Fragments ­were valued not for their pitfalls and limitations, but for their liberatory prospects. As succeeding chapters w ­ ill show, American writers throughout the romantic period—­the years surrounding the turn of the ­century when experimental transatlantic aesthetic thought took flight—­ actively sought out such a mode of thinking, rejecting the critique formulated by figures like Adams, Jefferson, and Washington. Instead, they embraced a Eu­ro­pean emphasis on fragments that drew on a long history of partial writing.

The Historical Evolution of the Fragment The voices of the aforementioned politicians ­were certainly not the only ones that controlled early republican cultural discourse, nor was po­liti­cal philosophy the only approach to aesthetics in the period. In fact, the American fragment finds its origins in an emphasis on the unfinished in seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century Eu­ro­pean culture, becoming popu­lar in the same years that fragments took hold in ­England and Germany. The practices of partial writing reach back to writers such as Michel de Montaigne, François de La Rochefoucauld, and the Earl of Shaftesbury, who experimented with incomplete styles of composition. A haphazard aesthetics of unsystematic thoughts, spontaneous reflections, and peripatetic essays broke from more regimented techniques and mapped out an exploratory terrain of thinking. Moreover, throughout eighteenth-­century lit­er­a­ture, ­t hese styles of incomplete writing took on a physical manifestation through the partial shape of chapters in novels, volumes of books, serials, interpolated stories, entries in encyclopedias, anthologies, books of beauties, pieces of fugitive verse, and other similar orga­nizational structures. In the words of Philippe Lacoue-­Labarthe and Jean-­Luc Nancy, authors experimenting with such methods and means of publication advanced a “paradigm . . . ​for all of modern



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history” through strategies that acknowledged the nature and consequence of unfinished forms.28 In addition to t­ hese genres of lit­er­a­ture and modes of production, fragments in Amer­i­ca developed out of a broad set of traditions that crisscrossed the Atlantic via the export trade from Eu­rope.29 Throughout the eigh­teenth ­century, the attraction to fragments emerged out of a series of interrelated cultural ele­ments that included a pervasive interest in antiquarianism, the popularity of fragmentary writings by philological imposters, and the publication of unfinished, posthumous texts. ­These modes of engaging with a ruinous aesthetic set the historical conditions for the composition and subsequent reputation of literary fragments in E ­ ngland, Germany, and the United States. In contrast to the vehement criticisms leveraged by a host of American po­liti­cal elites against such styles, t­ hese three influences opened the door to widespread admiration of the form. In the first place, spurred by archeological excavations in the classical world, scholars throughout Eu­rope eagerly recovered, translated, and published fragments of writing from antiquity.30 Ancient texts from Greek writers including Anacreon, Epictetus, and Sappho found their way into periodicals and newspapers, and commentators provided readers with glimpses of the erudite cultural life of another era. Translators made ­t hese works available to a wide audience, and ­t hese “found fragments” helped publicize the concept of incomplete writing: audiences became more familiar and comfortable with the idea of reading fragments. The period’s recovery of such texts focused on transmuting the past into available materials for the pre­sent. Shards of history from bygone eras could be reassembled into a coherent ­whole and revitalized by the insights of scholars. This proj­ect required au­ then­tic repre­sen­ta­tions from the past—an authenticity that historical fragments could easily supply. As Cornelia Vismann lucidly explicates, “Historical fragments are assigned a clear epistemic place as an unintentional source,” ­because no agency created them other than history itself.31 The lack of intention proved decisive b ­ ecause such artifacts “­were not intended to be sources,” a fact that made them—­according to eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century thinkers—­testify more objectively to the caprices of historical change.32 Such “historical fragments” w ­ ere thereby used as a means of understanding the passage of time itself. Objects like relics and antiquities—­and the texts that described them—­enjoyed an increasing historiographical reputation among a growing class of educated individuals throughout Eu­rope and the British empire.

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But the recovery of fragments through archeological and philological work did not simply preserve historical veracity in the eigh­teenth c­ entury. ­These recoveries also led to an unintended consequence that similarly buttressed the position of unfinished forms: the publication of literary hoaxes by charlatans (or virtuosos, depending on one’s outlook) who exploited the growing interest in the past. Authors appropriated antique styles and wrote their own fictional fragment poems that purported to be au­then­tic antiquarian findings. Most notoriously, the Scottish poet and philological imposter James Macpherson manufactured an epic cycle of poetry ostensibly collected from oral tradition throughout the Highlands and translated from Scottish Gaelic. This literary deception, Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Col­ lected in the Highlands of Scotland, and translated from the Gaelic or Erse Language (1760), was narrated and supposedly authored by a long-­dead poet named Ossian.33 The collection of poetry capitalized on the appetite for ruinous works from the past and earned Macpherson an infamous, international literary celebrity when it exploded in reputation. Defenders and skeptics alike battled over the text’s authenticity on both sides of the Atlantic. Macpherson’s text modeled itself on the recovery of ancient classical fragments, but by imaginatively assembling his purported poetic relics into a widely celebrated work, he also helped pave the way for authors who wanted to compose explic­itly fictional fragments. Recognizing a growing market for antique fragments and a willingness on the part of the reading public to consume such writing, editors, publishers, and literary executors jumped into the fray by releasing unfinished, posthumous writing by famous authors. Th ­ ese leftover fragments of writing usually appeared in anthologies that claimed to pre­sent the “collected works” of a recently deceased author.34 ­These authorial fragments included scraps of verse, journal reflections, letters, forgotten works that had never been completed, or (most commonly) texts that the author was working on right before his or her death, as in the case for Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimen­ tal Journey Through France and Italy (1768). By including the unfinished material in “complete” editions, editors could advertise the comprehensiveness of the volumes and even suggest to readers that the book contained the intangible components of an author’s life; the writing in the months and weeks before death might convey some glimpse of near-­death reflections. The agents of the literary market encouraged the perception that the final, incomplete writings of an author portrayed him or her more authentically; this premise allowed editors and publishers to continue releasing new and



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revised editions even ­after an author died and ­stopped producing lit­er­a­ture, a trend that continues into the pre­sent. ­These conditions created a fertile ground for the production of literary fragments, a practice that took hold most prominently in British, German, and American aesthetics. Yet the evolution of the form did not occur in a parallel fashion in t­ hese three geo­graph­i­cal areas. Comparatively situating the American romantic fragment in relation to the other two lineages of fragmentary lit­er­a­ture illuminates the means by which American authors developed their own style appropriate to their specific sociopo­liti­cal context. As I described in the Introduction, the writers of American fragments utilized the form’s narrative incompletion and irregular temporality in a way that urged audiences to rearticulate the in-­process identities of marginalized figures. British and German fragments each offer a contrast to this formulation. By and large, British fragments throughout the eigh­teenth ­century and romantic era tended to be nostalgic and reflective, while German fragments borrowed from transcendental philosophies to argue for an aesthetic revolution so pure it rejected the specificities of par­tic­u­lar po­liti­cal stances. American fragments might be situated, then, at the crossroads of the more backward-­looking tradition of British texts and the German compositions that sought radical artistic change. To take a previously mentioned piece of writing from the British extraction, Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy not only remained unfinished at Sterne’s death, but it also included a fragment within the narrative. The piece is titled just that—­“A Fragment”—­and it interrupts the action of the plot to exemplify one of the principal beliefs of the main character, Yorick, who believes that love functions as a universally positive force in the world. “A Fragment” pre­sents the story of Abdera, an ancient city that was “the vilest and most profligate town in all Thrace. What for poisons, conspiracies and assassinations—­libels, pasquinades and tumults, ­there was no g­ oing t­ here by day—’twas worse by night.”35 However, a major shift occurs in the village a­ fter a per­for­mance of Andromeda (412 b.c.e.), a tragedy written by the Greek playwright Euripides. Shockingly, the play transforms the temperament of the entire citizenry, who begin to publicly proclaim the importance of virtuous love and miraculously cease their immoral be­hav­ior. A ­ fter the per­for­ mance, all of the men in the town begin speaking in iambics and astonishingly refuse to purchase the poison and weapons so crucial to the local economy. Love magically ­settles over Abdera, and the brief tale serves to deepen and extend Yorick’s credibility; his readers now see his dogma in action.

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At the same time, Sterne undercuts the moral lessons of the interpolated text. The reference to Andromeda in “A Fragment” is quite telling, as the text of the play only survived in an incomplete, fragmented form. Andromeda existed in the eigh­teenth ­century only in glimpses, mostly through references to the tragedy in other texts like Thesmophoriazusae and The Frogs by Aristophanes, an anecdote by Diogenes Laertius, and an account of the play in the writings of Lucian. (Indeed, to this day we only have glimpses of the play through ­t hese sources).36 The complete content of the play was unavailable and inaccessible to Sterne and his readers, meaning that Euripides’s text could not be referenced or completely understood, and the curious story about Abdera in A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy could not be substantiated with definitive textual evidence. “A Fragment” is situated irremediably in a long-­distant past that cannot be recovered, and even though Yorick might try to reproduce the phenomenon it details in the eigh­ teenth ­century, the corrupted history of Andromeda’s textual transmission makes such an endeavor unfeasible. Sterne’s novel trades in the nostalgia that was so evident in eighteenth-­ century fragments and would l­ater become even more apparent in the ­romantic era, yet also subtly critiques that very viewpoint through his acknowl­edgment that the past cannot be recovered; Yorick’s errand to reestablish the humanizing effects of Andromeda is an impossible one. By far, the majority of fragments published in t­ hose years did not contain Sterne’s ironic sharpness, and instead simply sought to entertain readers with bucolic glimpses of bygone ages. Such a perspective became especially pronounced around the turn of the c­ entury in 1798, when William Words­worth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published the first two editions of Lyrical Bal­ ­ other’s Tale. A lads. The first edition included a poem titled “The Foster M Dramatic Fragment” and the 1800 edition added one simply called “A Fragment,” which was l­ ater renamed “The Danish Boy. A Fragment.”37 ­These poems stressed an appreciation of the past without bringing it into the cacophonous temporality of the pre­sent. And while British fragments might have occasionally focused on marginalized individuals like hermits or orphans, the texts notably situated them in the past, in a world outside of po­ liti­cal change that froze them in place for the spectatorship of the viewer. Unlike the nostalgic fragments that generally dominated British literary culture, similar texts by German romantics sought to construct an entirely original aesthetic milieu. Most influentially, perhaps, in 1798, the scholar Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel proposed a theory of the form that tried to



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make sense of his artistic moment: “Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many modern works are fragments as soon as they are written.”38 Schlegel believed that the passage of centuries turned beautiful, complete works of ancient art into mere fragments of their former, astonishing glory. Using only t­ hese partial glimmers of beauty for inspiration, modern artists—­from Schlegel’s viewpoint—­were unable to recover that original totality and instead produced works that conveyed a lapsed state of fragmentary, inadequate creation. Yet this belief did not produce a situation of hopelessness for him. Perhaps the most famous conceptual framework for the fragment to come out of German romanticism insisted on the organic unity and usefulness of the form: “A fragment,” in Schlegel’s words, “like a miniature work of art, has to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world and be complete in itself like a porcupine.”39 He turns the essence of the fragment into animalistic individuation, separating it completely from the sociocultural world in which it exists. The form thus exists “isolated” and in­de­pen­dent of constraints, ­free to innovate a completely newfangled artistic entity. Such a view only accounted for one piece of German romanticism’s take on the form. Schlegel and his turn-­of-­the-­century contemporaries (the group, known as the “Jena romantics,” was most active from 1798–1804) also thought that such individual parts could be put together into the creation of what he called a “universal work.” Combining the ancient fragments with the modern could reach for what Lacoue-­Labarthe and Nancy call the “peak of intensity,” “the absolute, harmonic, and universal work” that would contribute to Schlegel’s vision of the transcendent “life of the Spirit.”40 The focus of many of the Jena romantics was not on the fragment as such, but rather how—in the words of Lacoue-­Labarthe and Nancy—­the “radical individuality” of the form could “dialectically re­unite and sublate . . . ​the thinking, living, and working dialogue of ancient and modern fragments.”41 The broad-­ranging philosophical proj­ect of the Jena romantics sought to restructure the artistic field by linking the ancient with the modern. But the ancients ­were not used simply for inspiration or reflection, as they ­were more commonly implemented in British lit­er­a­ture. Instead, they ­were reintegrated and recast into a pioneering aesthetic system. In between the conservative and the radical, the American fragment provided a m ­ iddle path of progressive po­liti­cal reform. While the same historical influences led to the rise of En­glish, German, and American fragments, the par­tic­u­lar sociopo­liti­cal context of colonial and early national

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United States turned the fragment into a tool of potential change. While writers of American fragments might invoke and depict the recent past, they tended not to rely on nostalgia for antiquity, nor did they see the form as a means of instigating an aesthetic revolution. Instead, they experimented with an alternative type of individualism through their depictions of marginal figures: an individualism based in the partial, rather than the complete, autonomous, and bounded self. Yet the optative mood of fragments that so distinguished the American examples from other traditions did not exclusively derive from the eighteenth-­century pathways just described. This historical grounding explains the rising popularity of the form and its differing implementation among geopo­liti­cal areas, but the progressive nature of the American fragment drew on another series of intellectual and aesthetic ideas. The sense of liberty inscribed in the American romantic fragments of the turn of the ­century built on specific philosophical and artistic practices that collectively set the scene for the way the form enlivened the reader’s imaginative capacities.

Potentiality, Aposiopesis, and the Non Finito As the delineation of the narrative and temporal structures of the fragment in the Introduction revealed, the form operated at the intersection of part and ­whole, narrative and non-­narrative, and pre­sent and ­future. It was in the collective interplay of ­these dyads that the form enabled the liberty of its audience. Readers could use the text as a jumping-­off point for reaching their own ideas and conclusions about the identities represented within the text’s content. Such a scope of possibility allowed for a previously unheardof construction and renewal of alienated ­peoples throughout the early republican era. It was a form that—in the words of Marjorie Levinson—­created an “ideology of reading” that produced “a remarkable freedom” for ­those interacting with it.42 In her view, “the real victor was the reader. The liberty he won was the self-­determination of textual construction.”43 However, this readerly freedom also traded on eighteenth-­century philosophies that prized an imaginative “self-­determination” that was accessed through incompletion.44 This intellectual history reveals that the literary fragments of the American romantic period—­examined in the remainder of this study—­drew on a deep well of writing that sought to elevate the cultural and philosophical standing of the partial. Th ­ ese ways of thinking gave authors an alternative



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to the official po­liti­cal writing that sought to limit the place of the partial in American society. The liberating possibilities of the fragment derive first and foremost from a conceptual lineage that focuses on the “potential,” an idea that ancient Greek thinkers established in distinction to the “­actual.” In his Meta­ physics, Aristotle describes how the “potentiality” of a ­t hing, or its dunamis, is primarily defined through a kinetic change that alters a substance into actuality—­energeia or entelecheia—­a state that proves to be the proper end of the t­ hing itself. He explains the distinction with a set of examples: “Actuality, then, is the existence of a t­hing not in the way which we express by ‘potentially’; we say that potentially, for instance, a statue of Hermes is in the block of wood and the half-­line is in the w ­ hole, b ­ ecause it might be separated out, and we call even the man who is not studying a man of science, if he is capable of studying.”45 Through specific conditions—­like an artist hewing the block of wood or a man applying himself to the study of science—­ potentiality can teleologically result in the ­actual. Aristotle by and large privileges the concept of the ­actual over the potential ­because the former provides the final telos and allows objects to reach their proper end. At the same time, though, potentiality proves necessary ­because it provides the capacity for objects to transform into their ultimate state. But the word “potential” only accounts for one aspect of the Greek word dunamis. The many commentators on Aristotle’s philosophy emphasize that dunamis does not equate in a ­simple way with the word “potential,” and observe that it also includes meanings like “capacity,” “ability,” “power,” or ­ eople to have dunamis meant that they held the “faculty.”46 For objects or p power or the ability to metamorphose, to change their current state into an entirely new one. In the late seventeenth c­entury, John Locke borrowed from Aristotelian metaphysics when he correlated dunamis with “power” in An Essay Concerning ­Human Understanding (1689). In his explanation of ­human volition, he describes “power,” an overarching term that combines notions of faculty, ability, and capacity, all of which for Locke “are but dif­ fer­ent names of the same t­ hings.”47 Power proves fundamental to Locke’s understanding of ­human volition, and he identifies its creation at a specific point in the decision-­making pro­cess. He argues that in the moment prior to making a choice, h ­ umans can suspend their decision; an interval of hesitation then opens onto a field of self-­reflection and the individual considers the vari­ous possibilities of action. In Locke’s schematic of volition, the suspension of choice creates a state of potentiality that can move in any number

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of directions: “For the mind having in most cases, as is evident in Experience, a power to suspend the execution and satisfaction of any of its desires, and so all, one a­ fter another, is at liberty to consider the objects of them; examine them on all sides, and weigh them with o ­ thers. In this lies the liberty man has . . . ​we have a power to suspend the prosecution of this or that desire, as ­every one daily may Experiment in himself. This seems to me the source of all liberty; in this seems to consist that, which is (as I think improperly) call’d ­Free ­will.”48 Through the “power to suspend the prosecution of this or that desire,” Locke argues that h ­ umans establish their individual liberty. He highlights the universal extension of the concept to any self-­ reflecting person and observes that “­every one daily may Experiment in himself” with the “power to suspend.” The Lockean experiment focuses on a select moment in the pro­cess of decision-making: before a choice is made, when a person has the “liberty to consider the objects of them [their desires], examine them on all sides, and weigh them with ­others.” While Locke’s account provides a mechanistic conception of h ­ uman choice that proceeds from consideration to deliberation and then to weighing, his emphasis on the state of suspension proves revealing. For him, h ­ uman liberty stems from the opportunity to consider dif­fer­ent options that can then lead to a choice; as he states, the power to suspend is “the hinge on which turns the liberty of intellectual Beings.”49 By relying on the juncture of the narrative and the non-­narrative, fragments enact an aesthetic version of Locke’s framework by resisting the immediate “prosecution of this or that desire.” They bring readers to the edge of language—­where it suspends—­and leaves them at “the hinge” of liberty. Unlike Locke’s delineation of volition, in which an individual eventually reaches an object of desire a­ fter examining pos­si­ble choices, fragments stay frozen in a moment of suspension and thereby continually resist “the execution and satisfaction” of conclusions to the text. Within that suspension, readers create—­following the associationist phi­los­op ­ her Thomas Reid, who was inspired by Locke’s empiricism to formulate theories of m ­ ental pro­ cesses and decision-­making—­a “state of fermentation,” “a constant ebullition of thought, [and] a constant intestine motion” within the mind that considers vari­ous completions to the text.50 Audiences encounter the bridge between the properly narrative ele­ments of the text and the narrativeadjacent completions they produce within their minds through Reid’s “constant intestine motion.” While fragments could, and often did, imply a par­tic­u­lar ending or suggest the next turn in the story, they still deployed an



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essentially inconclusive structure to preserve the dunamis of the text. They inhabited a zone of m ­ ental suspension that, in an eighteenth-­century schema, looked strikingly close to a readerly liberty. As Giorgio Agamben explains in his commentary on Aristotle’s understanding of potentiality and actuality, “The root of freedom is to be found in the abyss of potentiality. To be f­ ree is not simply to have the power to do this or that ­t hing, nor is it simply to have the power to refuse to do this or that ­thing. To be ­free is . . . ​to be capable of one’s own impotentiality, to be in relation to one’s own privation.”51 Reluctant to prioritize actuality over potentiality, Agamben reverses the two b ­ ecause the articulation of restraint provides a necessary ele­ment of what it means to be f­ree. Actuality only exists, as it ­were, through an impotential state of being. His hierarchical alteration redefines dunamis and places it at the nexus of branching possibilities. In their capacity to pre­sent a static state that can then transform into something ­else altogether, fragments invite their readers into a state of suspension that constitutes an essential component of freedom. The variety of reactions that readers might have to a fragmentary text exceeds the ones they would have to a nominally “completed” work of lit­er­a­ture. To be sure, “the potential text is infinitely richer than any of its individual realizations,” to borrow Wolfgang Iser’s formulation, and even more so in a work that deliberately undercuts a conclusive structure.52 The imaginative freedom generated by the fragment stems from philosophical works concerned with the diagnosis of individual liberty—­texts that w ­ ere republished throughout the c­ entury in major printing centers. Yet this was not the only intellectual influence on the form; the fragment’s liberty also derived from a par­tic­u­lar rhetorical convention keyed to literary writing. Fragments exemplify an expanded, more fully developed version of a rhetorical figure called “aposiopesis.” Meaning “to keep s­ ilent” or “to fall ­silent” in its original Greek, aposiopesis refers to the sudden halt of words in the m ­ iddle of a sentence, usually b ­ ecause a character trails off, a narrator interrupts, or an event occurs that halts the statement.53 In his twelve-­ volume textbook on rhe­toric, Institutio Oratoria (95 c.e.), Marcus Fabius Quintilian rec­ords occurrences of aposiopesis, indicating that the strategy is “used in testifying something of passion or anger . . . ​or anxiety and conscientious hesitation.”54 Crucially, he distinguishes an ellipsis—­a trailing off of words—­from aposiopesis b ­ ecause the latter contains a greater degree of uncertainty and a higher level of emotional investment. As Anne Toner explains in her study of punctuation and pauses in En­glish lit­er­a­ture, for

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Quintilian, “if the omitted words can be supplied exactly from the context, the omission is an ellipsis. If the omission is only paraphrasable or is uncertain it is an aposiopesis.”55 Aposiopesis establishes an aleatory ele­ment within texts by posing a relationship between a definitive statement and its vague completion; the remainder of the sentence exists only through implication and eludes any exact definition. While not as emblematic of radical liberty as the power of Lockean suspension or Agamben’s impotentiality, this rhetorical figure does set the stage for the exercise of an interpretive freedom. Quintilian primarily considers the oral use of the figure, but authors throughout the early modern period and the eigh­teenth ­century also imported it into their writing. Shakespeare’s King Lear, for example, offers one of the more well-­k nown illustrations of aposiopesis. Lear expresses his anger ­toward his two incorrigible ­daughters, Goneril and Regan, when he exclaims No, you unnatural hags, I ­w ill have such revenges on you both That all the world ­shall—­I w ­ ill do such t­ hings— What they are yet I know not, but they ­shall be The terrors of the earth!56 Lear interrupts his own threatening statements t­ oward his d ­ aughters, holding himself back from describing the enormity of his revenge against them. ­Either Shakespeare or his editors place dashes a­ fter Lear’s statements to emphasize the way the fallen monarch “keep[s] s­ ilent” in his anger. The aposiopesis provides an implication of what Lear might say, but it leaves open an interpretive domain that points equally to his anxiety, confusion, excitement, and anger. Dashes hold the place of unspoken language h ­ ere, a technique that many authors and printers incorporate into their publication of fragments in the romantic period. The interest in aposiopesis extended into the eigh­teenth c­ entury as well. In an effort to more clearly delineate the relevance of the rhetorical device, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele took up an analy­sis of it and commented approvingly on its use. “Silence is sometimes more significant and sublime than the most noble and most expressive Eloquence,” they write in the Tatler no. 133, “and is on many Occasions the Indication of a ­great Mind.”57 They even argue that the use of “certain Stops and Pauses” in lit­er­a­ture generates



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“­great Beauty.”58 Not just a rhetorical device used for emphasis and emotion, Addison and Steele elevate aposiopesis to the aesthetic domain, calling it “sublime,” “noble,” and “expressive.” They not only distinguish the technique for special notice in the essay, but also comment on its popularity, observing that “I must not close my Discourse upon Silence, without informing my Reader, that I have by me an elaborate Treatise on the Aposiopesis, call’d an Et cætera, it being a Figure much used by some learned Authors.”59 As this issue of the Tatler implies, rhetorical manuals (which proliferated throughout the period) mention aposiopesis in their lists alongside other major literary and oratorical terms, and Addison and Steele give the figure a preeminent place in lit­er­a­ture that stretches from Greek and Roman epics all the way to their contemporaries.60 Quintilian’s definition of aposiopesis—­a constitutive ele­ment of nearly all of the rhetorical treatises published in the eigh­teenth c­ entury—­connects to the concept of dunamis through the phrase “conscientious hesitation.” The moment of “hesitation” created by an interruption in a speech provides a brief pause that parallels the Lockean “power to suspend.” Aposiopesis thus provides a rhetorical analogue for the philosophical doctrine of volition that Locke and Agamben unfold. Its minute span of silence or hesitation indicates a searching thought, a space in which the writer, speaker, and reader imagine the numerous branching possibilities for the conclusion of the statement. In syntactical terms, aposiopesis pre­sents its readers with a sentence fragment, an unfinished grammatical statement that trails off into implied or absent meaning. Literary fragments thus exemplify a macro-­ version of the sentence fragment by expanding it into a larger form. If aposiopesis, with its instant of “conscientious hesitation,” exemplifies Locke’s “power to suspend” action, then the literary fragment pre­sents a magnified version of this dynamic. It mimics a sentence fragment by interrupting the words of a story and bringing readers to the very edge of the narrative. By engaging in a deferral of language that circumvents the fulfillment of any single plot, fragments use their syntactical deviations to establish a state of textual liberty that maintains indeterminacy. Through an interplay of form and formlessness, narrative and non-­narrative, fragments articulate a literary moment of freedom: with e­ very i­magined completion within the mind of readers, fragments instantiate a new version of themselves in a radical textual plurality. Lockean theories of the individual w ­ ill and eighteenth-­century usages of rhe­toric help to clarify how fragments brought readers to the brink of the

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text and incited their imaginative capacities. At the very same moment that ­these intellectual currents ­were in development by phi­los­o­phers and writers, artists sought to create a corollary connection between visual culture and m ­ ental liberty. Unfinished sculptures, canvases, and drawings took on a unique role in the artistic world—­t hey w ­ ere used to stimulate the viewer’s creative freedom. While such works of art lacked the progressive politics of the American fragment, they did analogously encourage spectators to consider the spatial intersection of incompletion and completion. Just as authors explic­itly engaged with the fragment, artists overtly drew attention to the partial nature of their visual productions. Beginning in the Italian Re­nais­sance, artists—­particularly sculptors—­ developed the concept of the non finito, the incomplete work of art that was nonetheless presented as finished. As Paul Barolsky explains, “Michelangelo was one of the first major artists to sign in the imperfect when he carved his Rome Pietà”; at nearly the same time, Lorenzo de’Medici “wrote an Ovidian poem in which he captured the metamorphosis of a nymph into stone by referring to the figure in mid-­transformation as if an unfinished sculpture—­ bozzata, sketched, and non finita, unfinished.”61 The widespread interest in the unfinished can also be seen—as Barolsky argues—in the essayistic writings of Montaigne, the imperfect intervals of ­music described by Baldassare Castiglione, or the interruptive and inconclusive manner of Ariosto’s Or­ lando Furioso. Throughout the early modern era, writers and artists pushed the bound­aries of their aesthetic milieu by placing a distinct value on work that flirted with its own incompletion. Such thinking was translated into eighteenth-­century conceptions of art, particularly in visual traditions. Even as critics and phi­los­o­phers prized unified works of art that demonstrated organic totalities—­notably in writings by Hume, in Karl Philipp Moritz’s On the Plastic Imitation of the Beau­ tiful (1789), and in the Kantian aesthetics of the 1790s that enshrined the “idea that works of art should be considered as rounded ­wholes,” in Slauter’s words—­they si­mul­ta­neously opened the door to considerations of the partial.62 A rounded ­whole, a­ fter all, could only be composed of parts. In his influential Ele­ments of Criticism, a book that found ­great success on both sides of the Atlantic, Lord Kames extolls certain architectural and landscape features that “give play to the imagination.”63 He lauds topographies that “hide the termination of their lakes: the view of a cascade is frequently interrupted by trees, through which are seen obscurely the ­waters as they fall. The imagination once roused, is disposed to amplify ­every object.”64



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­ ere, the hidden “termination” of the lake, the interruption of the landscape, H and the obscure perception of the cascade collectively function to invigorate the h ­ uman imagination and strengthen its powers. Partiality enriches the mind’s liberty rather than detracting from it. William Gilpin, too, in his Three Essays on the picturesque, revels in the experience of being surrounded by antiquities. He enjoys looking at and describing “the elegant relics of ancient architecture; the ruined tower, the Gothic arch, the remains of ­castles, and abbeys,” contending that they “are the richest legacies of art” available to the world and w ­ ill thus compel ob65 ­ uman creation and natu­ral servers to “veneration.” The combination of h degradation proves paramount for him. ­These ruined physical forms are central to Gilpin’s understanding of how the picturesque functions; moreover, he also views his own work as partaking in ­those “richest legacies of art,” recalling the origin of the essays when “I amused myself with writing a few lines in verse on landscape-­painting; and afterwards sent them, as a fragment (for they ­were not finished) to amuse a friend.”66 For Gilpin, the beauty of the unfinished originates with the visual “relics” that he observes around him, yet it can also be carried into his own work through the composition of a poem that he calls “a fragment.”67 Studies of visual art thus abounded with an interest in the incomplete and the ruined, drawing a distinct connection between an unfinished style and the invigoration of the imagination. For a host of thinkers, imperfection allowed for the f­ ree play of the senses and the mind. In the same period in which Kames was celebrating unfinished architectures and Gilpin was composing fragments about ruins, Edmund Burke also ruminated on the beauties of the partial in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, writing how, “In unfinished sketches of drawing, I have often seen something which pleased me beyond the best finishing.”68 For Burke, the effect of an incomplete drawing extends beyond being merely pleasing. In response to “unfinished sketches of drawing,” he observes that “the imagination is entertained with the promise of something more, and does not acquiesce in the pre­sent object of the sense.”69 Unfinished artworks push the imagination beyond “the pre­sent object of the sense” and ask it to consider alternate means of “finishing” the creation. The mind does not simply “acquiesce”; it continues to imagine “the promise of something more,” extending beyond that which is simply pre­sent. Potentiality, aposiopesis, and the non finito ­were not, of course, what Washington specifically had in mind when he wrote to Henry Lee about his

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fear of the American ­union devolving into “wretched Fragments of Empire.” Yet ­t hese three cultural ele­ments provided an alternative basis for art that counteracted the criticisms of the fragmentary employed by the po­liti­cal elites in Amer­i­ca. They offer a win­dow into how eighteenth-­century readers might have responded in an imaginative fashion upon encountering a fragment. Writers of the form leveraged the fact that audiences could be familiar with the Lockean basis for freedom, the evocative nature of aposiopesis, or the way artists and theorists associated unfinished aesthetic objects with liberty. The intellectual under­pinnings of the period encouraged experimentation with unfinished styles, and the fragment emerged as a mode that crystallized many of ­t hese philosophical and artistic features in its formal ele­ments. Each of the characteristics surveyed ­here laid the groundwork for the narrative and temporal qualities of the form, which encouraged readers to go beyond the writing on the page. In such a way, individuals could create a new ­mental version of a literary text.

Charles Brockden Brown and the Allure of Unfinished Forms American writers w ­ ere deeply influenced by the Eu­ro­pean styles that crossed the Atlantic. Writings by Locke, Addison, and Kames—­and many of the other thinkers analyzed ­here—­a ll crossed the ocean to the colonies and the early United States in the cargo holds of ships, and ­were subsequently reprinted in authorized and unauthorized American editions, and released in extracts published in periodical and newspaper venues. As Catherine Kelly summarizes, the development of “taste” in the early republic was “facilitated by an expansive print culture that made works by Joseph Addison; Edmund Burke; Henry Home, Lord Kames; Archibald Alison; and, most especially, Hugh Blair available in multiple forms,” all of which contributed to an “extensive, transatlantic discourse on taste.”70 Even ­after in­de­pen­dence, Americans continued to feel culturally tied to E ­ ngland, looking abroad for ideas and approaches they could incorporate into their own writings. “Lit­er­a­tures ­were not born within the nation through an insular pro­cess of organic unfolding,” as Joseph Rezek remarks, “nor did they develop as symptoms of nationally delimited historical contexts. They w ­ ere made in the transatlantic marketplace through an uneven pro­cess of strug­gle and triumph.”71 The aesthetics of the fragment ­were made available to early republican Ameri-



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cans precisely through the “strug­gle and triumph” of the transatlantic exchange of ideas. Yet as the images and texts of individuals like Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, and o ­ thers suggest, to write of fragments and ruins in t­ hese years was to write in a distinctly po­liti­cal vein. The constant association between such aesthetic forms and weak governmental structures made it clear to reading audiences that the new American nation was to be founded on princi­ples of universal w ­ holeness. Ruinous and fragmentary parts played a very minor official role in an incipient republic that was focused on developing national and imperial unity. Writers of literary fragments in Amer­i­ca thus approached the form with two traditions in mind: the local trepidation ­toward the unfinished, and the aesthetic practices developed in Eu­rope that sought to invigorate the imagination. While writers examined in subsequent chapters largely opted for the latter position—­employing the narrative and temporal ele­ments of the fragment to motivate the imaginative possibilities of the partial—­t he apprehensiveness surrounding the form still troubled their texts. Charles Brockden Brown registered ­these contradictory views ­toward fragments in his gothic narrative, Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist (1803– 1805). From November 1803 through March 1805, Brown serialized Memoirs in the Literary Magazine, but the text remained unfinished at his death.72 The events that take place precede the incidents in Brown’s most well-­k nown novel, Wieland; or, The Transformation: An American Tale (1798), and try to explain the occurrences in Wieland by investigating the early history of its ventriloquizing antagonist, Carwin. At the same time that Brown examines the faulty nature of partial forms in Memoirs, he also opens the door to the transformative capacities of the fragment that w ­ ere suggested by Eu­ro­pean philosophy and aesthetics. Despite the constant assault on the fragmentary in Amer­i­ca, writers like Brown persisted in considering the implications of the literary fragment, and what it might mean for a nation that was itself still in pro­cess. ­Because po­liti­cal writers and thinkers had turned the form into an ideological one, literary authors responded in a like fashion. Memoirs introduces Carwin before his infamous machinations in Wieland, when he is merely a young man whose naïvety, trust, and ambition lead him astray. The narrative depicts the way in which he falls prey to an aristocratic patron named Ludlow, who grooms Carwin as his acolyte. They often converse on philosophical topics, and at one point in their discussions they consider the possibility of creating a new po­liti­cal state. In a rapture of fancy,

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Carwin avows his interest in secret organ­izations dedicated to creating utopias in uncivilized lands: “Resting on the two props of fidelity and zeal, an association might exist for ages in the heart of Eu­rope, whose influence might be felt and might be boundless, in some region of the southern hemi­ sphere; and by whom a moral and po­liti­cal structure might be raised, the growth of pure wisdom, and totally unlike ­t hose fragments of Roman and Gothic barbarism, which cover the face of what are called the civilized nations.”73 Carwin imagines the possibility of a new geo­graph­i­cal space unhampered by the “fragments of Roman and Gothic barbarism” that tie Eu­ rope to the past and prevent it from promoting “the growth of pure wisdom.” His desire for a new utopic space takes his thoughts to the southern hemi­ sphere, where the lack of “civilized nations” (and therefore the lack of a po­ liti­cal past) ­w ill help create a vision of futurity based around a pure “moral and po­liti­cal structure.” Carwin’s ideal government is premised against the “fragments” he describes, much as how Washington’s letter expressed relief that the United States had not fallen into “Fragments of Empire.” Like many of the late eighteenth-­century American elites examined in previous pages, Carwin exhibits an apprehension ­toward fragments of all kinds ­because of their degraded and weak structure. Shortly a­ fter Carwin envisions this new “moral and po­liti­cal structure” that could be raised by a secret association, Ludlow acquaints him with precisely such an organ­ization and offers Carwin membership u ­ nder the condition that Carwin submits to extensive scrutiny and swears complete “fidelity and zeal.” In the days following Ludlow’s offer, Carwin considers the circumstances of entrance into the society. Over the course of his reflections, he wanders into Ludlow’s library for some light reading. While t­ here, he looks over a set of volumes and finds a book of maps that includes an unfamiliar repre­sen­ta­tion of two islands: “From the ­great number of subdivisions, and from signs, which apparently represented towns and cities, I was allowed to infer, that the country was at least as extensive as the British isles. The map was apparently unfinished, for it had no names inscribed upon it.”74 Out of keeping with his criticism of the “fragments of Roman and Gothic barbarism,” Carwin feels intrigued by the map he finds, especially b ­ ecause “it had no names inscribed upon it.” He surmises that the map of the islands exposes that “Ludlow’s plans of civilization had been carried into practice in some unvisited corner of the world.”75 While the “unfinished” nature of the map connects it in some degree with the “fragments of Roman and Gothic barbarism” that Carwin deni-



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grates, the difference in temporal valence generates a key distinction. In Carwin’s view, fragments hold a strong association to the failed civilizations of the past, making them an analeptic form tied to outmoded customs and defunct governments. However, Carwin also draws a pivotal division between the meanings under­lying the fragmented and the unfinished, reacting anxiously to the former and inquisitively to the latter. He even explains how “having such and so strong motives to curiosity, you may easily imagine my sensations on surveying this map,” testifying to the alluring nature of the incomplete and the way it at once engages his curiosity and sensations; moreover, he translates his feelings to “you,” his readers.76 In contrast to the fragments of barbarism left in Eu­rope, the map symbolizes a proleptic idealism for Carwin, as if it represented a non finito piece of artwork. It exists in an unfinished state, so it contains a creative potential that could be taken in any number of directions in the f­uture. While Carwin does not encounter and react to the literary form of the fragment per se, he is nonetheless inspired by the unfinished state of the map. Such a reaction counterbalances his previous antagonism to fragments. The narrative walks a fine line between the plea­sure of containing the partial and the sense that it holds within it the potential for new, utopic creations. Yet while Carwin himself stays cautious—­emblematic, perhaps, of a figure like Thomas Jefferson who worried over his fragments of time but also helped translate an edition of Comte de Volney’s Ruins; Or Meditations on the Revolution of Empires—­Brown himself goes beyond his fictional character by embracing fragmentary forms throughout his textual productions. Notably, he left Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist unfinished despite that fact that he did not die ­until several years a­ fter its serialization. In the first narrative account of Brown’s life published ­after his death, his friend William Dunlap commented on Brown’s writing pro­cess which, “as was always his custom, left an opening for a continuation, or for another romance. Accordingly Mr. Brown . . . ​began, and partly published ‘Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist.’ This very in­ter­est­ing fragment, the reader w ­ ill find well worthy of perusal, and ­w ill regret that the author did not finish a work so replete with novelty and interest.”77 Dunlap calls the work a “fragment,” as do biographers and critics for years a­ fter Brown’s death, and Brown himself did not avoid applying the term to his own writings. Brown’s incomplete narrative thus serves as the presiding genius of the variations of the fragment in the early republic: it voices the re­sis­tance to fragmentation on the part of po­liti­cal elites through Carwin’s disgust with

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“fragments”; it considers the allure and po­liti­cal potential of ­those very same qualities via the map; and it asserts Brown’s own preference for the specific form of the literary fragment, a point I take up more thoroughly in Chapter 5. Brown encapsulates the romantic American dispositions ­toward the fragment, elaborating both its destructive ruins and its constructive prospects; moreover, his position as a middle-­class author writing from a position of relative security stands in for many of the figures who composed fragments. Like the writers who appear in the pages that follow, Brown did not want to radicalize the possibilities of the fragment, but instead hailed it as a po­liti­cally progressive form. Through Carwin’s interest in the unfinished nature of the map and Brown’s own creation of fragments, Brown locates a con­temporary fascination with the form that was inspired by the Eu­ro­pean attention to the partial. In direct opposition to the discourse outlined in the early section of this chapter, writers across romantic Amer­i­ca expressed their inclination ­toward the fragment. This, despite the fact that the form worked in tension with republican theories of restraint that populated Enlightenment philosophies. As Edward Cahill argues, the dynamics of constraint defined much of the artistic production in the era: “As with po­liti­cal liberty, however, all such forms of aesthetic liberty are understood only in the context of their constraint. They are typically l­imited by the regulation of empirically derived princi­ples, the logic of association, ideals of social harmony, or the moral necessity of moderation.”78 For Cahill, the republican aesthetics of the period writ large move through a dialectic of restriction and excess, toggling back and forth between the two. Fragments also create a context of constraint by limiting readers to the written part, but the liberty of fragments is less restrained than the schema outlined by Cahill, and is less regulated by “empirically derived princi­ples” and “ideals of social harmony.”79 The unfinished nature of the fragment allows the form to engage with Svetlana Boym’s understanding of the mysterious realm of the imaginative: “Only through imagination does one have the freedom to picture other­wise, of thinking ‘what if’ and not only ‘what is’ ” within society, a practice that establishes a space “not bound by the borders of a single system of coordinates.”80 Indeed, the historical basis of the fragment in Eu­ro­pean writings, as well as its narrative features, ­were in tension with the “regulation” defined by Cahill, thus opening the door to exploring the “borders” of early republican systems. The following chapter turns its attention to one figure that resided on the periphery of the romantic era—­the wounded soldier. Such a person was es-



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pecially impor­tant to the development of the nation and the success of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and ­others, yet was also restricted from fully partaking in the life of the republic. Fragments dispensed a style that si­mul­ ta­neously characterized the wounded soldier’s bodily injuries, recognized his liminality, and sought to imagine his liberty. Drawing on the force of thought developed by Lockean f­ree ­w ill, aposiopesis, and the imaginative sway of ruins and other partial forms, the fragments explored in the next chapter probe how the spatial printing of fragments breaks ­free from “the regulation” of “moderation.” Fragments represented veterans through a narrative form that systematically broke off from the empirical world, seeking to create new possibilities for completion outside of the text in the mind of readers. In their implementation within lit­er­a­ture—­and, most importantly, in their amplification of marginal ­people who w ­ ere not granted full visibility or participation in the early republic—­fragments generated an imaginative mode that could be used to restructure the way that freedoms ­were made available within American society.

CHAPTER 2

Wounded Bodies and the Typographies of War

In the years leading up to the American Revolution, an anonymous author in ­England published The History of The Old Fring’d Petticoat; A Fragment: Translated from the original MS. Greek of Democritus. With an Epistle and Dedication to Lord N——­(1775). Addressed to the prime minister of ­England, Lord Frederick North, the short pamphlet indexes the current disagreement between the colonies and E ­ ngland as a “­great bustle in the fore-­ castle, and outcries of breakers and shipwreck” that plague the formerly warm relationship.1 The narrative begins with a row of asterisks and the Latin phrase, “Ingens hiatus ceu dilaceratio In Exordium M.S.,” an expression meaning “­there are huge tearing gaps in the beginning of the manuscript.”2 The very start of the text foregrounds its fragmented nature and prepares the reader to find “huge tearing gaps” throughout. The story that follows consists of a thinly veiled allegory about a laboring ­mother (­England) who raises several d ­ aughters and eventually gives them a set of farms across a river (the American colonies). Beset by attacking gypsies (Native Americans), the ­daughters request the help of their ­mother, who strides over to their homes and beats away the irritating visitors with her favorite oak stick. In the pro­cess, she tears her prized possession: her most beloved petticoat which she values above all ­else. She asks her ­daughters to help her sew it back together since she tore it in their defense (­England taxing Amer­i­ca for expenditures in the French and Indian War), but the ­daughters rebelliously refuse to contribute to her effort. As in so many of the writings surrounding the conflict between the colonies and ­England in the 1760s and ’70s, The History of The Old Fring’d Petticoat takes a familial perspective on the disagreement by displaying the colonies as insubordinate c­ hildren who stubbornly refuse the mandates of parental authority.3



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The pamphlet comes to an abrupt ending as the d ­ aughters sit in council and realize that “the old w ­ oman herself had taken boat, and was actually coming among them with her crutch stick new rubbed up and very bright.”4 Right when the d ­ aughters are about to react to this new piece of information, the text ends with several lines of asterisks, a­ fter which the author writes “parva lacuna in MSS.,” meaning, “a small lacuna in the manuscript”; a few more lines of asterisks follow and the pamphlet fi­nally concludes with the statement “desunt cætera,” or “the rest is wanting,” a phrase often found at the end of eighteenth-­century fragments.5 Time and again the text points out its own partiality, noting repeatedly via typography and Latin phrases that it is unquestionably a fragment. Furthermore, the provisional conclusion mirrors the uncertain po­liti­cal state of affairs in 1775. Lacking a clear sense of how the American colonies might react to E ­ ngland’s aggression, the writer of the pamphlet leaves the reader anxiously hanging off the precipice of the historical moment. The text envisions a serious conflict between governments—allegorized by the m ­ other and her d ­ aughters—­but elides the specific occurrences of the forthcoming war through the fragmentation indicated by the asterisks and the missing parts. It invites the reader to take a stance, yet refrains from anticipating how the growing conflict might end.6 The History of The Old Fring’d Petticoat was just one text that used fragments to symbolize the conflict between E ­ ngland and its American colonies. A few years ­later and on the other side of the Atlantic, the United States Magazine published an article entitled “View of the early inroad, and the pro­gress of the Tyranny of Britain. A Fragment” (1779). The article begins with a geo­graph­i­cal claim for Americans that the author punctuates with an extended dash, giving the essay the feeling of beginning in medias res: “———­EMIGRANTS from Britain, e­ ither by conquest or discovery, had an equal claim with ­those who had remained upon the island, and by occupancy, a more indubitable title.”7 The initiatory dash generates a feeling of immediacy and curtness, and throughout the remainder of the text the anonymous writer continues to produce pieces of evidence in f­avor of American emigrants. ­After reciting a set of repressive l­egal decisions on the part of E ­ ngland, the author concludes with an unfinished and unanswered question: “What ­shall we say of that law of the legislature of ­Great Britain.”8 The invocation of a “we” suggests a bond among patriots supporting the cause for in­de­pen­dence, but it is a unity that does not produce a discernable outcome. The lack of a question mark in the final sentence makes it

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grammatically incoherent, turning the point about “­Great Britain” into an incomplete idea. Immediately following this fragmentary observation about the unjust “law of the legislature,” the writer abruptly closes the article with a set of four asterisks—­“****”—­and the phrase “the rest is wanting.”9 In ­t hese final lines the author inserts a lacuna, implying that words of protest no longer suffice; punctuation takes their place instead. The final flourish of “the rest is wanting” also suggests that the text has something more to say, but cannot provide it for the readers in the space of the essay. Instead, “View of the early inroad” implies that the readers of the nationally oriented periodical should deliver their own words and actions against the tyranny of Britain. Such an interpretation is corroborated by the writer’s decision to end the prose piece with the word “wanting,” a term denoting a lack that is accompanied by a desire. The response from readers of the essay is both absent and wished for by the author of the fragment. While the text emphasizes the history of the ruptured ties between the colonies and ­England, the ending of the essay situates action beyond the narrative itself and within the hands of the readers. By looking into the ­f uture with the comment that “the rest is wanting,” the work also establishes the possibility of a new body politic created by an American populace working against British tyranny. The author begins “View of the early inroad” by calling the colonists “emigrants,” and near the end calls them “the p ­ eople of Amer­i­ca,” resituating their identities in terms of the American continent, rather than ­England.10 The writers of The History of The Old Fring’d Petticoat and “View of the early inroad” navigate the tensions between E ­ ngland and the rebelling colonies in an unveiled, stark light. Each work highlights the pressing need for their audience to take a side in the growing conflict and decide what to do next, yet the texts refrain from providing an easy answer for what ­will happen in the immediate f­uture. Through a temporal mood that constantly looks forward, the essays depict the crisis as an unpredictable geopo­liti­cal strug­gle that lacks any apparent end result. The texts do not simply declare such a state of unpredictability in prose, however. They represent it visibly on the page via asterisks and italicized phrases in both Latin and En­glish. Readers are then left with obvious evidence that the subsequent steps of the conflict cannot be foreseen. Crucially, the aesthetic structure of fragments—­t heir tendency to start abruptly, contain missing pieces, and end unexpectedly—­resonated with the chaotic and tentative atmosphere of the 1770s. Particularly when their



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content focused on the growing conflict, as t­hese examples do, fragments called attention to the belligerent and contingent relationship between the American colonies and ­England. The uncertainty of the revolutionary period proved particularly worrisome for the lived realities of many of the parties involved in the upheaval. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur famously ended his Letters from an American Farmer with a description of the oncoming storm of the war: “Whichever way I look, nothing but the most frightful precipices pre­sent themselves to my view, in which hundreds of my friends and acquaintances have already perished. Of all animals that live on the surface of this planet, what is man when no longer connected with society, or when he finds himself surrounded by a convulsed and a half-­dissolved one?”11 The conclusion of Letters from an American Farmer conveys the narrator’s sense of the “frightful precipices” on all sides that faced t­ hose pulled into the conflict, w ­ hether by choice or involuntarily: both governments teetered on the point of compromise before the outbreak of vio­lence; ­after the eruption of war, colonials faced intense scrutiny of their loyalty to crown or country; land and property could be easily taken from nonparticipants, Tories, or ­t hose mistaken as such; and the escalation of the war into a global calamity made day-­to-­day life a harrowing real­ity. Fragments could represent such a state of affairs without providing the illusion of an easy solution. In contrast to the championing of the American cause in Thomas Paine’s series of essays The American Crisis, or the critique of such a position in Samuel Johnson’s tract Taxation No Tyranny—­both of which presented explicit and conclusive ideological viewpoints regarding the crisis between ­England and the colonies—­fragments positioned readers to imagine a British victory just as easily as a colonial success or a truce of some kind. Texts that began in medias res, lacked portions from the ­m iddle, and required a conclusion provided a narrative analog for the inability to predict the outcome of the tumultuous state of affairs. Works like Paine’s and Johnson’s considered the appropriate conclusion of the Revolution as a foregone event, yet fragments presented a visual lexicon of omission, damage, and rupture that denied any overt narrative attempts at completion. At the end of both The History of The Old Fring’d Petticoat and “View of the early inroad,” the authors turn away from definitive language, instead relying on distinct typographical markings that indicate the pos­si­ble ­futures for the two bodies politic. Italicized words, asterisks, and editorial phrases create a paratextual space for readers to interject their own words and actions in support of a po­liti­cal cause, or perhaps to prompt the cessation of conflict. For ­t hese

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fragments, the f­ uture exists as an undetermined variable, made even more unknowable due to the cataclysmic military strug­gle enveloping the Atlantic world. The History of The Old Fring’d Petticoat and “View of the early inroad” maintain an aleatory quality by refusing to draw specific conclusions about the events taking place; moreover, they also refrain from commenting on what ­will happen to the p ­ eople involved. The ­f utures of the ­mother and her ­daughters are left inconclusive in the former, as are the prospects of Americans and their strug­gle against the British in the latter. ­These brief texts treat individuals in a transient fashion and primarily situate them within the geopo­liti­cal incidents of the war and its eventual outcome. The larger historical considerations of the conflict take pre­ce­dence over the ­people living through the conflict. Other fragments in the period, however, centered more explic­itly on the embodied consequences of war and the way in which vio­ lence generated fractured bodies and subjectivities. The historical and temporal focus of The History of The Old Fring’d Petticoat and “View of the early inroad” takes an unmistakably spatial turn when authors of other fragments represent physical wounds on a person’s body. Samuel Jackson Pratt’s popu­lar transatlantic novel about the Revolution, Emma Corbett: Or, the Miseries of Civil War (1780), makes precisely such a move by examining the injured individuals who suffered at the hands of the conflict. Pratt makes use of fragments and typographical “signs of omission”—to borrow a phrase from Anne Toner—­t hat visually depict the effects of traumatic injury resulting from warfare.12 In fact, Pratt argues against the emphasis on the body politic exemplified by the two essays just described, and opts for a mode that studies the embodied affect of the individuals traumatized by the Civil War. Rather than highlighting the imperial stakes of the b ­ attles, Pratt homes in on the way that survivors of war exist in a literally fragmented state—­with their bodies missing limbs—­a condition that nonetheless forms its own kind of identity. Through spatial fragments on the page of Emma Corbett that are signified through asterisks, ellipses, and dashes, Pratt brings readers to the liminal edge of the narrative to recuperate the bodies of disabled veterans from the eigh­teenth c­ entury. His typographical choices convey how print could serve as a repre­sen­ta­tional component for the injured members of the lower sort. In contrast to the stable, market-­driven liberal individualism that was taking hold throughout the Atlantic world, the injured veterans in Pratt’s novel highlight the promise of mutable identities.



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Typography was often used to delineate bodily states, especially injured and fragmented ones, throughout the writing of the eigh­teenth c­ entury and the romantic era. Drawing on texts by a range of writers and printers, I begin by showing how typographical decisions w ­ ere not simply practical considerations in the late eigh­teenth ­century, but instead rooted in a logic of embodiment. Writers and printers actively reflected on the physical real­ity of the text and used the experimental typography of fragments—­even more so than the content of writing—to communicate bodily presence. The connection between the visual architecture of printing and wounded bodies comes to the foreground in the fragmentary typography contained in several editions of Emma Corbett, a text which partakes in romanticism’s turn-­ of-­the-­century modality of studying “the effect of war mediated, brought home through a variety of instruments” in the words of Mary Favret.13 Pratt’s novel depicts the lives of veterans to show how torn, wounded, and dispossessed bodies resulted from military engagements between nation-­ states. In direct response to the incipient development of nationalist affiliations in the period, Pratt constructs the appearance of his printed page in a way that acknowledges traumatized figures, their unspeakable existences, and their affective power. His novel conveys the idea that wounded individuals exist in a fluid state of identity b ­ ecause they appear in multiple repre­sen­ta­ tional registers. Most importantly for Pratt, veterans survive as individuals beyond the nation, ­people who ultimately exist outside the confines of national patrimony, despite their constant association with such formations. This perspective was not unique to Pratt, as it turns out. The wounded, denationalized, and fragmented body of the soldier persisted in periodical and newspaper culture following the American Revolution. Such popu­lar repre­sen­ta­tions of vio­lence via textual and physical fragmentation worked to extend the proj­ect that Pratt brought to light.

A Prosthetics of Print Throughout the eigh­teenth c­ entury, the visual appearance of the page was an interpretable ele­ment of textual productions.14 Far from exclusively governing syntactical organ­ization, the blank space of the page, as well as markings like hyphens, dashes, and asterisks, could be used to construct a physical presence in printed m ­ atter. Punctuation did not exist in a l­imited, static state that only denoted pauses between words; rather, Jennifer DeVere

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Brody lucidly explains that “as it lifts itself from the page . . . ​punctuation moves from the ‘flat’ two-­dimensional surface to become a three-­dimensional frame.”15 Printers and writers could even use such a framing of the page to spatialize injured and disabled bodies. Literalizing Jacques Derrida’s understanding of “paper as support or backing for . . . ​prosthesis,” printers and writers could craft what I call a “typographical prosthesis” that sought to illustrate wounded individuals on the space of the page.16 Typographical markings create a s­ilent break in language, but they still exist visibly impressed on the page; authors deployed this repre­sen­ta­tional energy in a way that paralleled the phenomenological condition of absent materiality. Instead of casting dashes and asterisks out into a vague field of meaning, t­ hese markings could be used to create a textual extension of the book that outlined the ­human body. Unlike The History of The Old Fring’d Petticoat and “View of the early inroad,” which only provided a cursory look at the agents involved in the war, fragments could also be used to prioritize the experience of individuals wounded in conflict. The correspondence between the architecture of the page and the injured body drew on two interrelated practices in the era: the playful innovations of literary writers and printers, as well as a growing interest in the way punctuation could reflect embodied states. In the first place, authors such as Jonathan Swift and Samuel Richardson experimented with the visuality of their books. Their inventive uses of typesetting, printer’s ornaments, visual images, and mise en page confirms Janine Barchas’s observation that “the printer’s trade and writer’s art ­were by no means as distanced from one another as now,” a fact evidenced by Richardson’s own dual c­ areer as a writer and a printer.17 By configuring visual ele­ments of the page in specific ways, eighteenth-­century authors conveyed the appearance of manuscript (Swift), the meaning of character (Richardson’s use of dif­fer­ent printer’s flowers in Cla­ris­sa for dif­fer­ent characters), subjective m ­ ental states (the “mad” letters Cla­ris­sa writes), and oral speech (Sterne’s infamous dashes in Tristram Shandy).18 In The Tale of a Tub, Swift’s 1704 satire, the presumed “editor” of the text identifies multiple places where a piece of the manuscript is missing, and almost always accompanies ­t hese comments with asterisks that denote the absence. Writing in Latin, the editor makes remarks like “hic multa desiderantur” (­here much is wanting), “desunt nonnulla” (several t­ hings are missing), “pauca desunt” (a few ­t hings are missing), and “desunt cætera” (the rest is missing).19 ­These instances are only four of the many vis­i­ble hiatuses



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that populate the text. The injured manuscript presented by the presumed editor of The Tale of a Tub continually foregrounds a sense of spatial absence by presenting omission ­after omission. And the comments in Latin also indicate that what is available on the page exists in relation to a larger textual ­whole that cannot be accessed, an exclusion that Swift gestures ­toward by placing lines of asterisks ­after each phrase. For Elizabeth Wanning Harries, Swift “deliberately constructs his texts to reveal imperfections and emptinesses of mind and world” by “leaving gaping holes where narrative (or at least words) ­ought to be.”20 Yet the “gaping holes” in Swift’s text not only reveal an epistemologically imperfect mind and world, they also posit a physical argument about the deficiencies of texts and their propensity to contain illegible, torn, or missing portions. Through his fictional approximation of a partially destroyed manuscript, Swift conveys a distinct sense of the fragmentation endemic to the production and preservation of writing. This archival sense of disjointedness would be revised by Richardson l­ater in the c­ entury in his depiction of letters. Expanding on Swift’s practices, Richardson adopts a unique typographical style to approximate a physiological state in Cla­ris­sa (1748). ­After Cla­ris­sa Harlowe’s rape at the hands of Robert Lovelace, Richardson designs her epistles in a way that portrays her erratic and disoriented mindset. Instead of presenting Cla­ris­sa’s letters according to the typical conventions of epistolary novels that Richardson himself helped establish (or­ga­nized lines with a clear sender and receiver), he places her short, fragmented statements at varying ­angles throughout the page in an attempt to reveal her anguished feelings. He also uses vari­ous untried techniques to express the ­mental conditions of the novel’s characters; among other features, Christopher Flint lists “a fold-­out sheet of m ­ usic . . . ​cursive print that mimics penmanship, pages of aggressive indices . . . ​copious cross-­referencing footnotes, bullet points designating restored passages, [and] asterisks and bracketed inserts.”21 Reading Cla­ris­sa becomes a multimodal experience designed to convey physiological conditions not just through the content of the novel, but also through its suggestive typographical renderings. ­Because of the robust textual commerce with Amer­i­ca, ­t hese practices also crisscrossed the Atlantic as printing centers in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston matured. One of the most vivid examples of such innovations with typography and physiology in the early United States comes from a 1787 article by Francis Hopkinson published in Mathew Carey’s American Museum. Hopkinson, a signer of the Declaration, a designer of the American

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flag, and a noted writer of fiction, poetry, and essays, makes the case in his “Plan for the Improvement of the Art of Paper War” that typography provides a well-­defined means of communicating an author’s feelings. He lays out his plan plainly for his readers: “My pre­sent design, which I offer with ­great modesty, re­spects an improvement in the art of printing, so as to make it expressive not only of an author’s narrative, opinions, or arguments, but also of the peculiarities of his temper, and the vivacity of his feelings.”22 For Hopkinson, specific kinds of printing can be used to be “expressive” not just of content—­“narrative, opinions, or arguments”—­but also of the very characteristics of an author, their “temper,” and their “vivacity” of feeling. The type employed in printing proves to be much more than an inert object used to impress inked letters on the page; it also conveys the emotional state of the writer. ­Later in the article, Hopkinson takes his readers through a variety of circumstances in which a printer might want to use dif­fer­ent fonts of type. He recommends that “an author of cool and equable spirits might take Brevier Roman, for his medium, and would prob­ably never rise higher than ­Great Primer; whilst a passionate man, engaged in a warm controversy, would thunder vengeance in French Canon.”23 The essay at once advertises the typographical capabilities of Carey’s periodical, and also makes a serious point about the way that the art of printing can replicate the “spirits” of the author on a spectrum stretching from “cool and equable” to “passionate” and “thunder[ing] vengeance.” As Lawrence Wroth summarizes about the article, “It is suggested that in literary composition the several emotions of joy, earnestness, passion, and agitation be expressed by vari­ous sizes and ­faces of type. In setting this ingenious essay Carey made use of fourteen type sizes.”24 A ­ fter appearing in the American Museum, “Plan for the Improvement of the Art of Paper War” was ­later reprinted as “A Typographical Method of Conducting a Quarrel” in Hopkinson’s Miscellaneous Essays, a decision that testifies to its impact on his c­ areer and its relevance for an early American audience.25 The writings and publications of authors such as Swift, Richardson, and Hopkinson undoubtedly demonstrate the prominence of experimental typo­ graphy throughout the period. Printing was a realm in which writers could try out new ways of making meaning in a spatial fashion, even using something as mundane as punctuation or the size of a piece of type to display emotions and show the “peculiarities of [an author’s] temper.” The versatility of printing opened it up to a diverse field of pos­si­ble significations,



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including “joy, earnestness, passion, and agitation,” as well as the depths of Cla­ris­sa’s despair and injury a­ fter Lovelace’s vio­lence; that is to say, the embodied affect of a writer or a fictional character could be magnified on the page for readers. Authors throughout the period did not restrict themselves to the denotative qualities of typography, but elevated it from syntactical usages to create repre­sen­ta­tional devices that spoke to bodily conditions. The concept of a typographical prosthesis detailed ­here also builds on a second major historical influence: the grammatical connotations of dashes, asterisks, and ellipses, and the way ­t hese markings w ­ ere adapted to indicate injured or fragmented bodies. Notably, the construction of books depended heavi­ly on bodily discourses. Equipment used by printers relied on terminology derived from the ­human physique, and the printing of paper depended on the l­abor of ink-­stained, sweaty p ­ eople. Most conspicuously, as Lisa Maruca notes, “a ‘body of type’ meant a complete run of letters of all one font and size, such as French Canon, Greatprimer, Pica, and so forth.”26 Throughout her account of printing manuals, Maruca tracks the tangled terminology of printing and h ­ uman physiology throughout much of the eigh­teenth ­century. She also identifies the more literal “coupling of man and machine that produces the body of type” and notices how print “always bears traces of both bodies’ l­abor.”27 The production of print was unmistakably embedded in a physical environment that produced a complex dialectic between “man and machine.” The embodiment of print and the printing of the body becomes even more interwoven in symbols of punctuation. Dashes, asterisks, and other devices afforded printers a means of concurrently figuring presence and absence. In The History and Art of Printing. In Two Parts (1771) by Philip Luckombe, he explains that asterisks serve two primary purposes in texts: the indication of plenitude and of lack.28 On the one hand, asterisks act as a footnoting mechanism and “are used in ­matter which has ­either side or bottom Notes; and as serve to direct the Reader to the observations which are made upon such passages of the Text as are distinguished by them, and demand a Reference of the same likeness to be put to the Notes by which the ­Matter is illustrated, or other­w ise taken notice of.”29 Much like a footnote, asterisks could take the reader from the main portion of the text to an elucidating explanation or citation. On the other hand, Luckombe comments that “Asterisms [a variant of asterisk], again, denote an omission, or an hiatus, by loss of original Copy; in which case the number of Asterisms is multiplied according to the largeness of the chasm; and not only ­whole lines, but

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sometimes ­whole pages are left blank, and marked with some lines of Stars.”30 Asterisks referred the reader to an additional space outside the main portion of the text and also designated a space of “omission” that could include “­whole pages.” Along with asterisks, ellipses and dashes could also signify an abundance (an addition that explains the main portion of text) as well as point ­toward a hiatus (a portion of the text that is missing). ­These customs extended from printer’s manuals and grammars, and found applications throughout literary texts. Luckombe exemplifies Maruca’s points when he describes the printer’s page using a vocabulary of physical topography, mentioning the “side or bottom” of the page and “the largeness of the chasm” indicated by punctuation. Books of guidelines like The History and Art of Printing played a central role in understanding printing and writing in the period, but the rules ­were flexible and proved notoriously slippery in practice.31 Punctuation was, in fact, open to be creatively adapted to the ­human body. But this physicality becomes explic­itly problematized in Joseph Robertson’s An Essay on Punc­ tuation, in which he tabulates vari­ous punctuation marks in a chapter titled “CHARACTERS in grammar, rhe­toric, and poetry, explained”: “An Asterisk or ­little star * directs the reader to some note in the margin, or at the bottom of the page. Two or three asterisks generally denote the omission of some letters in a word, or of some bold or indelicate expression, or some defect in the manuscript.”32 As with Luckombe, Robertson explains how an asterisk can serve to indicate a footnote or designate an omission, yet his choice of language h ­ ere is telling, particularly his description of “some defect in the manuscript” that punctuation can imply. The categories of “defect” and “deformity” played a fundamental role in eighteenth-­century depictions of disabled bodies, as Lennard Davis argues, and they appeared throughout print discourses even more commonly than “disability” as evidence of “a dramatic physical event or bodily configuration.”33 The association of the word “defect” with a “bold or indelicate expression” gives it a decidedly negative connotation. But more importantly, the use of “defect” to denote an imperfection in a manuscript provides a charged example of the way that the physicality of the page existed in an analogous way to “defective” ­human bodies in the period. Even the emphasis on manuscript, rather than print, places the roots of the “defect” Robertson mentions close to the functioning of the h ­ uman hand tracing imperfect words and spaces on the page. The “defect” then moves to the printed page in a way that emphasizes an intertwining of text and body.



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Printing and punctuation routinely transformed the physical corpus into a printed one, and vice versa. Such a view is succinctly summarized by a laudatory poem published in the Mas­sa­chu­setts Magazine in 1790, titled “The Art of Printing.” In the poem, the writer calls printing a “mystick art!” that holds the enviable power “to speak to eyes and paint unbody’d tho’t!”34 More than simply addressing the eyes of the reader and painting thoughts, the writer of the poem argues that the page actually acts as a substitute for the other senses: Tho deaf and dumb; blest skill reliev’d by thee, We make one sense perform the task of three; We see, we hear, we touch the head and heart.35 In ­these acclamatory words, the writer notes how the absence of senses is replaced by the “blest skill” of printing. The “one sense” of sight is able to “perform the task of three” and convey a multitude of thoughts to the reader. Physical conditions like being “deaf and dumb”—­conditions that ­were viewed as “defects”—­could, in such a way, be supplemented by the appearance of the page. As the result of typographical experimentation by writers and printers, as well as the way printing and punctuation was tied to the ­human body, “defective” individuals could be made spatially pre­sent in texts. Punctuation especially could push t­ oward a non-­linguistic means of communication that was useful for depicting the effect of traumatic events on individuals. Samuel Jackson Pratt’s examination of disabled veterans forms the subject of the remainder of this chapter; his treatment adapts the abrupt halts of punctuation to focus on the physical outlines of the wounded. His typography accords with Brody’s sense that “punctuation appears in/as writing as a means of inscribing bodily affect and presence i­ magined to be lost.”36 Lexicons of typography and defect come together for a po­liti­cal purpose in Pratt’s phenomenological account of textual bodies. Rather than focusing on the events of the war and the conflict’s unforeseeable ­f uture—­t he viewpoint elaborated by the essays discussed at the beginning of this chapter—­ Pratt’s novel uses the visuality and spatiality of print to represent embodied wounds. His text protests the vio­lence of the American Revolution and urges both groups to lay down their weapons. As an author, printer, and bookseller, Pratt was especially suited to draw connections among the narrative creation of texts, the physical production

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of books, and the consumption of books by readers. By including areas of blank space on the printed page of Emma Corbett filled only with punctuation, Pratt creates a non-­referential space that attempts to communicate experiences that are nearly unrepresentable. Building on the plot ele­ments and the discourse that entwines the vari­ous events in the novel, Pratt makes some of his most decisive repre­sen­ta­tional decisions by moving away from language and creating a paratextual level of punctuation. He makes the spatial appearance of the page, more so than its content, speak to the embodied affect of injured individuals. By positioning punctuation in relation to statements about the bodies of soldiers, Pratt demonstrates Johanna Drucker’s point that “no letter has a ‘character’ in a discrete sense but rather, it assumes a character according to its use (position, juxtaposition, and context).”37 His asterisks and dashes take on a special weight as a result of their juxtaposition with the words of veterans. Pratt locates a liminal space of physicality through his deployment of asterisks and dashes, activating something close to David W ­ ills’s description of prosthesis. W ­ ills calls prosthesis “a complex play of displacements; prosthesis being about nothing if not placement, displacement, replacement, standing, dislodging, substituting, setting, amputating, [and] supplementing.”38 Instead of suggesting that prosthesis somehow completes or extends an individual, ­Wills emphasizes how prosthesis directs notice to the tensions innate in the placement and displacement of limbs. Pratt’s typographical prosthesis not only works in relation to ­Wills’s definition, but also reaches back to the etymological origins of the word itself. Originally used to mean the “addition of a letter or syllable to the beginning of a word,” the word “prosthesis” takes on its more familiar, modern meaning in the early eigh­teenth ­century: “the replacement of defective or absent parts of the body by artificial substitutes.”39 By using punctuation to represent absent body parts, Pratt harkens back to the ­earlier concept of prosthesis—­a prefix that attaches to a word—­with the decisive difference that asterisks and ellipses add a silence, rather than an additional vocalized syllable. To characterize veterans who lost limbs in imperial wars, Pratt resorts to a typography of elision to show his readers the simultaneous presence and absence of bodily parts. The ­future outcome of the Revolution is less impor­ tant for him than portraying the specific injuries inflicted on individuals. Drawing on the intimate relationship between printing and bodily function, he remediates discourses about national conflict, disability, and narrative by making the bodies of injured soldiers vis­i­ble on the page in an innovative



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fashion. Just as Richardson used printer’s fleurons, erratic typesetting, and the imitation of manuscript pages to convey the m ­ ental states of Cla­ris­sa and other characters, Pratt uses such devices to represent physical states of injury. He makes the doubling of typographical and bodily “defect” apparent in Emma Corbett by demonstrating how printing techniques can visually depict the identities of wounded veterans. The text amply demonstrates how exceptional bodies did not need to be l­imited to ­simple linguistic discourse: the silences and gaps involved in the setting of type and the punctuation in between words proposed a way of understanding the experiences and potentials of fragmented identities.

Samuel Jackson Pratt’s “Remnant of a Noble Figure” Pratt first printed Emma Corbett during his residence in Bath in 1780, a place where he enjoyed a reputation as a local celebrity.40 He relished the strong literary presence in the town, even though his relationship with other artists and intellectuals like David Garrick and Sarah Siddons was at once productive and contentious. In that same year, a printing of his novel appeared from Robert Baldwin in London, and Emma Corbett reached a further audience when it went through a number of British and Irish editions over the course of the coming de­cade. The text achieved Continental success with a French translation, and it found a transatlantic audience when it was republished in Amer­i­ca at least three dif­fer­ent times in the 1780s: first by Robert Bell in Philadelphia in 1782; again by Bell in 1783; and, fi­nally, in a 1784 edition by John Mycall in Boston.41 Bell and Mycall ­were not inconsequential printers in late eighteenth-­ century Amer­i­c a. During the revolutionary years, Bell published a large number of texts that ideologically defended the violent strug­gle for in­de­ pen­dence, including, and perhaps most notably, Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense.42 So, his decision to print and sell Pratt’s Emma Corbett, a novel written by a British subject living in ­England no less, places it alongside distinctly pro-­American texts. By the same token, John Mycall primarily published po­liti­cal tracts, revolutionary Jeremiads, almanacks, hymnals, psalters, and elocution books in the 1770s and 1780s. In fact, the only other British novel that Mycall printed in ­those years was Oliver Goldsmith’s hugely successful The Vicar of Wakefield in 1780. Yet despite the radical leanings of Bell and Mycall, and their interest in supporting the cause of in­de­pen­dence,

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Emma Corbett’s plot tends ­toward po­liti­cal pacifism rather than revolutionary action. Pratt foregrounds the victims of the war, rather than the conflict’s events.43 The publishing history of the novel in Amer­i­ca moves in a year-­by-­year succession from the colonies in revolt (1782), to the year of peace (1783), and fi­nally to the establishment of the new nation u ­ nder the uncertain auspices of the Articles of Confederation (1784). B ­ ecause of the quick progression of events in the early 1780s, an American readership for Emma Corbett understood the novel in markedly dif­fer­ent ways, perhaps first reading it as supportive of the American cause, then as a recognition of the need for peace, and fi­nally as a reflection on the events of recent history. The work pushes for an ac­cep­tance of the colonial perspective, even as it points out the necessity of a more universal and sympathetic ­human affiliation that surpasses national identity. As Eve Tavor Bannet argues, Emma Corbett provides a prime illustration of a transatlantic success ­because it transcended partisanship by reaching audiences on both sides of the Atlantic; in short, the novel dealt with topics that mattered to rebelling colonials, loyalists, neutral parties, and British subjects alike.44 Emma Corbett was opposed to glorifying the outcome of martial c­ auses, and instead took as its subject the disabled figures created by the conflict. At the start of the novel, the main character, Emma Corbett, feels caught between her ­father, Charles, and her suitor, Henry Hammond. Despite living in E ­ ngland, her ­father vehemently supports the American Revolution and loudly proclaims his allegiance to the colonies. Henry, on the other hand, decides to commit himself to the British war effort and goes to Amer­ i­ca as a commissioned officer to fight in the “Civil War.” Not surprisingly, Charles views Henry’s actions with severe disapprobation, and even decides to withdraw his approval of the upcoming u ­ nion between Henry and Emma. He decisively forbids her from continuing any kind of correspondence with a so-­called supporter of tyranny. The heated familial conflict only worsens as the plot progresses. Lovesick and anxious for Henry’s safety ­after he ships off for the colonies, Emma falls ill while her ­father—­ignorant of her true feelings—­tries to lift her spirits by encouraging her to marry an old friend of his, Robert Raymond. In the midst of t­hese heartrending occurrences, a friend of Emma’s named Caroline Arnold writes her a letter and encloses a transcription of a memoir in the envelope; the account is titled, “A Military Fragment: THE CARBINES.” Caroline mistakenly believes that the tale told in the fragment



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­ ill comfort Emma and assuage the pain she feels a­ fter being separated w from Henry. In her misguided attempt at sympathy, Caroline wants to show her friend that Henry’s humanity w ­ ill not be lost in ­battle; even a­ fter the war, Caroline believes that he w ­ ill continue to be a virtuous individual capable of having a ­family. Caroline introduces the fragment by noting that, for her, it demonstrates how “humanity and bravery are nearly allied, and that the tender husband and good soldier often form the same character, though they cannot always exert themselves in the same moment.”45 Yet this naïve interpretation of war does very l­ittle to mitigate the anxiety that Emma feels on Henry’s behalf. A ­ fter reading “A Military Fragment,” Emma reacts by exclaiming, “Oh, what does your Caroline’s fragment prove, but that WAR, at best, is terrible as glorious!”46 Through her emphasis on the “terrible” nature of war, Emma clearly expresses the fact that the text she receives from Caroline contradicts the reassurance her friend seeks to provide. “A Military Fragment” begins in medias res when an unnamed narrator—­taking a tour of a military hospital—­sees a wound on the cheek of a veteran. The narrator states that he observes “a tear upon the cheek of the person appointed to show me the hospital,” a description that initiates an ambiguous correspondence among the bodily “tear” on a wounded person, the sentimental eye’s “tear” that provides sympathy for the veteran, and the textual “tear[s]” that make the tale a fragment.47 And, as we ­will see, the word anticipates Pratt’s experimentation in subsequent pages with extended dashes that “tear” across the white space of the page. ­After the narrator sees the injury on the man’s cheek, he immediately exclaims, “Oh for the history of that wound!”48 This desire for a narrative explanation of the injury fits closely with the concept of narrative prosthesis elaborated by David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, who argue that the “very need for a story is called into being when something has gone amiss with the known world, and, thus, the language of a tale seeks to comprehend that which has stepped out of line.”49 Pratt does not reject “the language of a tale” per se, but he does expand on the schema established by Mitchell and Snyder by using narrative-­adjacent typography to describe that which “has gone amiss.” He does not stay ­limited to the story of the novel, nor does he remain content with the discourse that he weaves to “comprehend that which has stepped out of line”—­t he typography that represents the wounds of the veterans exists at the edge of his linguistic narrative. The former soldiers in “A Military Fragment” are represented by the technical aspects of the printed page.

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­After the narrator of the fragment asks about the man’s cheek, the hospital guide flourishes the stump of his left thigh and pre­sents it as “a more impor­tant subject of curiosity,” signaling the fact that his body contains a multitude of stories from his lengthy ­career as a soldier.50 He then introduces himself to the narrator as Julius Carbine and takes him to another hospital room where he pre­sents his nieces, nephews, and elder ­brother, Nestor Carbine, a “remnant of a noble figure.”51 Both Carbine ­brothers proceed to discuss the injuries and stumps on vari­ous parts of their bodies, describing the lost limbs as badges of honor that ­were acquired in ser­v ice of the British empire. The narrator sees more than just a similarity in the appearance of the siblings. He identifies a resemblance “in the misfortunes which had happened to ­t hose invisible parts which lay scattered in dif­fer­ent quarters of the globe.”52 The “invisible parts” of the two ­brothers are geo­ graph­i­cally and temporally distributed, existing in dif­fer­ent countries and across a long history of military action. Their limbs are spread across time and place b ­ ecause of imperial wars, an account that makes the history of their corporeal selves vague and ungrounded in any par­tic­u ­lar locale. ­A fter their introductions, the two ­brothers go into more precise explanations of their life histories, and Pratt relies on typography to demonstrate the partial presence created by the former existence and current absence of their arms and legs. Pratt’s depiction of the veterans c­ ounters the imperial erasure created by the nation: their country relegates the ­brothers to the forgotten space of the hospital, a place that instantiates what Joseph Roach calls “the outer limits of ­imagined community.”53 When Julius explains his relationship with his ­brother, he comments on the history of their upbringing: We slept in the same cradle, and w ­ ere nursed up for the ser­v ice. Our l­ ittle arms— He flourished a stump which projected about four inches from the right shoulder—­Our ­little arms— But I have begun the m ­ atter wrong and prematurely, for before I relate the account which Carbine gave of himself, I should offer some description of his person, as well as that of his ­brother Nestor. It is the stump of Julius which reminds me of this.54 ­ ese sentences contain interruptions and narrative redirections endemic Th to oral storytelling, and the dashes accentuate the shifts in voice; however,



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Pratt’s typography extends beyond the spoken to the physical. In the Bath edition, the London edition, and the Dublin edition—­t he latter two of which follow the Bath edition closely in typesetting and publication date—­the printers use extended dashes ­after “arms,” “shoulder,” and the repetition of “arms.” Pratt himself almost certainly oversaw the printing of the first edition ­because from 1779 to 1780 he worked as a printer and a bookseller on Milsom Street in Bath (and he unquestionably approved the layout). Mycall’s 1784 Boston edition (figure  4) takes the suggestion provided by the versions published across the Atlantic and extends the dashes even further, interrupting the space of the page and presenting the reader with a graphic repre­sen­ta­tion that hangs off the end of the “arms.” The typographical gestures of bodily prosthesis begin in the bourgeois literary atmosphere of Milsom Street in Bath, but the novel travels to revolutionary Boston and Philadelphia, where a consciousness of war reinscribes the physical and emotional pain of the injured soldiers. Emma Corbett’s republication in Mycall’s print shop embellishes the typography of the original edition, and turns an already anti-­war novel into an even more dramatic repre­sen­ta­tion of po­liti­cal protest. The revolutionary climate on the eastern seaboard ­shaped the printing of the novel, demonstrating the way that fragmented texts and bodies resonated with a populace in the midst of strife. Pratt’s text explic­itly signals a physical epistemology of the body. The specificity of the comment that the stump “projected about four inches from the right shoulder” provides a discrete sense of how the soldier’s body occupies the space of the hospital room and the narrator’s visual field. Yet instead of relying solely on a quantitative mea­sure of the body, Pratt generates a repre­sen­ta­tional approximation. The mention of the “­little arms” refers to bodily states that move across the span of the Carbine b ­ rothers’ lives: the arms the veterans had when they ­were ­children, the weapons they used to fight in the wars of the British Empire, the limbs they lost in ser­v ice of the empire, and the “­little arms” of their stumps. Adding to this proliferation of meaning, the “­little arms” also signify the dashes that extend outward from the lines of text and reach into the white space of the page. ­These dashes stick out against the blank surface and are repeated three times, the final one with an even longer extension. Using this punctuation, Pratt and the printers of Emma Corbett work out a typographical prosthesis for the disabled veterans. The dashes roughly estimate the way ­human arms proj­ect into space and take up room, or the way that the veterans might remember the space of their arms as they “slept in the same cradle,” before they lost

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Figure  4. Detail of Samuel Jackson Pratt, Emma Corbett. In Two Volumes. Newbury-­Port, Mas­sa­chu­setts: Printed by John Mycall for Ebenezer Battelle and William Green, Booksellers in Boston, 1784, 1:185. Courtesy American Antiquarian Society.

them in combat. At the same time, the fragile slenderness of the lines hanging off into the white space creates a vulnerable physical presence prone to complete erasure. Replete with the simultaneity of presence and absence, the words and pauses spoken by Julius Carbine as he “flourished a stump” express the tenuous physicality of his textual body. The concurrent visibility and invisibility of the limbs is modulated by the relationship between the black ink and the white space on the page—­ oddly enough, the arms are constructed at the same moment that they are shown to be lost. Lisa Gitelman’s description of the printing of blanks provides an analog h ­ ere; she points out that print itself is “paradoxically what made most blanks blank.”55 Gitelman’s observation carries over to the dashes in Emma Corbett, an instance in which the pro­cess of making something vis­i­ble also shapes an absence. Pratt’s page seeks to represent limbs that existed in the past, and which only persist into the pre­sent through the physiological memories of Julius and Nestor. And while the punctuation in the passage already signals the visibility of an absence, the encroachment of the white page a­ fter the dashes forms an even more durable space of reserve. As Bonnie Mak notes, “The spaces between words, between lines, and around ­ ese the text block can be understood as visual and cognitive breaks.”56 Th “visual and cognitive breaks” provide a decrescendo from the slender lines of the dashes into a blank space of non-­representation. By winnowing down



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the physicality of the narrative, Pratt and his printers restructure the syntax of the text around what Mak calls the “architecture of the page.”57 The frame of the material page arranges “A Military Fragment,” and the whiteness from the extremities of the page move into the dialogue, a blankness that threatens to overtake the already fragmented, fragile text enclosed in the letter. Taking the veterans out of the sick room, Pratt moves them onto the reading page instead, creating an alternative architecture of physicality that attends to the prosthetic state of their bodies. Yet the fact that Julius “flourished” his stump also endows the passage with a sense of physical movement departing from absence. A printer’s ornament—­a design, border, or special illustration that could designate a section break—­was also called a mark, a fleuron, or a flourish, giving the usage of the word in Pratt’s novel a specific definition in relation to the printing trade.58 While printer’s flourishes ­were typically more elaborate than an elongated dash and usually referred to ele­ments of design, the repre­sen­ta­ tion of the bodily flourish through the typography of dashes reveals Pratt’s reliance on the imaginative aesthetic potentials of ink. Instead of presenting Julius and his b ­ rother in a static corporeal state that fixes the connotations of their disability, Pratt opts for a kinetic, visual depiction that moves them outside of language and provides their figures with a gestural component. In the same way that Laura Mandell suggests that “new technologies can make ­people fantasize a ­whole new system of relations as a body,” bodies can inspire the creation of new systems of relation within technologies.59 Perhaps most meaningfully for Pratt and the printers that follow in his footsteps, the experience of reading the passage calls attention to the body of the reader. The “­little arms” mentioned by Julius reflexively denote the arms of the ­woman, man, or child reading the novel, who becomes conscious of the fact that he or she is sitting down, holding the book, and turning its pages. As an object of media technology, the book and its pages rely on the composition of the reader’s body, the ability to turn pages, to see the writing on the pages, and to hold the book up.60 In Emma Corbett, the rich multimodality of the book inheres itself in readers ­because the visual aspects of the text draw attention to physical discrepancies between their corporeality and that of the veterans. In other words, Pratt establishes a relay extending from the content of the fragment (the bodily tears of the soldiers), to its pre­sen­ta­tion on the page (the typographical tears), to the body of the reader (the shedding of sentimental tears). For a moment at least, the story and discourse fall into the background of “A Military Fragment,” favoring

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instead the paratextual ele­ments, the way that the typography invokes fictional bodies that contrast the reader’s physical state. Yet Pratt purposefully makes the relay an imperfect one by bringing to the surface the incommensurability of the three focal points just mentioned. The readers might shed tears for the Carbines as a result of the moving textual repre­sen­ta­ tions, but a discrepancy still exists; the Carbines miss multiple limbs while the reader presumably enjoys his or her health (though this was surely not always the case). The fragments on the bodies of the Carbine ­brothers extend to the telling of their story as well, ­because the story that Julius and Nestor relate does not survive in a complete form in Caroline Arnold’s letter. Thus, the broken physicality of the soldiers aligns with the missing parts of “A Military Fragment,” imbricating body and text even further. In the m ­ iddle of Julius’s narration, an unnamed editor writes the following: “­Here the fragment is torn.”61 ­A fter that, the story jumps and continues describing the ­career of the two b ­ rothers, but only a few lines a­ fter the first interruption the editor again mentions a gap: “A second rent in the fragment.”62 The title of the story, “A Military Fragment,” not only refers to the broken, missing body parts of the Carbine b ­ rothers, but also to the shape of the text itself, which breaks off from the narrative, begins in medias res, contains gaps that prevent the transmission of a full history, and makes liberal use of ellipses that indicate a trailing off of words. Like the bodies of the soldiers, the body of the text needs its own prosthetic that memorializes lost passages. All of the printers of Emma Corbett strive to visually emphasize the gaps in Caroline Arnold’s story. The 1782 and 1783 printings of the novel, both by Bell, depict ­these two breaks in the story with lines of dashes that attempt to physically represent a rupture in the narration (figure 5). In the 1784 edition, Mycall makes a similar effort to craft a punctuated space of asterisks that roughly give the page the appearance of a jagged piece of ripped paper (figure 6).63 In all of the editions of Emma Corbett, the printers use extended punctuation marks in order to provide a depiction of torn manuscript paper in print form. In this moment, Pratt’s novel brings manuscript and print technologies together on the page, but also highlights the impossible task of recovering absent language and fractured tales. By filling in the missing text with blank spaces, an editor’s italicized words, dashes, and asterisks, the printers synchronously indicate the replete presence of language and its irremediable loss.

Figure  5. Samuel Jackson Pratt, Emma Corbett: Exhibiting Henry and Emma, The Faithful Modern Lovers, as Delineated by Themselves, In Their Original Let­ ters. Philadelphia: Printed and Sold by Robert Bell, 1782, 2:11. Courtesy Library Com­pany of Philadelphia.

Figure 6. Samuel Jackson Pratt, Emma Corbett. In Two Volumes. Newbury-­Port, Mas­sa­chu­setts: Printed by John Mycall for Ebenezer Battelle and William Green, Booksellers in Boston, 1784, 1:189. Courtesy American Antiquarian Society.



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The spatiality of the page in “A Military Fragment” and its repre­sen­ta­ tion of body and text work to replace the setting of the pensioner’s hospital, the kind of locale that Erving Goffman would describe in the twentieth ­century as a “total institution”: a closed world that utterly controls the lives of inmates and cuts them off from a wider community.64 A practicing eighteenth-­century hospital exemplified an incipient version of such a “total institution”; Michel Foucault has described such a place as an “enclosed, pestilential domain that . . . ​creates further disease in the social space in which it is placed.”65 Yet the fictionalized version of the hospital in Emma Corbett, and the strategies that Pratt uses to reconceptualize its inhabitants, function more like what Foucault calls a “heterotopia,” a site that has “the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect.”66 Pratt’s construction of the Carbine ­brothers on the page provides a heterotopia “of deviation” that fictionally inverts the oppressive implications of hospitalization.67 It is essential to again stress that using punctuation to represent missing text is not exceptional in this period; the point, instead, is that Pratt builds on this typographical practice to create a print-­based prosthesis. This latter fact makes Emma Corbett distinctive in Pratt’s oeuvre, as his other writings attend to the work of typography in more conventional ways. Only a short time before the release of Emma Corbett, Pratt wrote a satire of Philip Stanhope’s (the Earl of Chesterfield) Letters to His Son (1774), entitled The Pupil of Plea­sure (1778). Written ­under Pratt’s pseudonym, Courtney Melmoth, The Pupil of Plea­sure provides a comical account of the social foibles of a group of travelers in Bath. It was printed multiple times in E ­ ngland, and also saw two transatlantic editions, one by Bell in 1778, and another by John D. M’Dougall in 1780. The editions by the two American printers follow the British version closely instead of altering it the way Bell and Mycall did for Emma Corbett. In The Pupil of Plea­sure, Pratt and his printers rely on extended dashes, exclamations, and italicized words to spice up fast-­paced comic language. But the typography follows orthodox eighteenth-­century interpretations of punctuation, in contrast to his work in Emma Corbett. In an especially telling scene, Pratt pre­sents the staccato inflections of a group of ­women looking for a fash­ion­able novel to read in a bookshop. The narrator, Horace Homespun, a s­ imple and plain man, explains the experience of watching his wife and her friends plunder the shop for novelties: “Lord! (cried one of the damsels) h ­ ere’s DELICATE EMBARRASSMENTS—­Oh!

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the very t­ hing—­worth all the Spectators that ever w ­ ere wrote. Aye, take it, and let us go read it directly——­It d ­ on’t end well, I think, objected another; I had rather read EACH SEX IN THEIR HUMOUR.——­Here is Something New, ladies, said the haberdasher—­As old as the poles, said the fair ones.—­ What say you to ELOISA?——­Oh! by all means—­Have you got ELOISA?—­ reach it this moment—­Oh, the dear book!——­t here are three letters in the first volume of that book, worth all the world.——”68 Throughout the passage, Pratt pre­sents rapid vocal statements and interruptions, and symbolizes them with dashes and exclamations, even providing emphasis with italics. The typography in the bookstore scene dramatically captures the dif­ fer­ent verbal inflections used by the group of ­women, and tries to re­create the vivacity of in-­person conversation—as such, the passage improves if it is read or acted out loud instead of read silently in private. Similar punctuation threads its way through much of the social comedy of The Pupil of Plea­ sure, but Pratt connects t­hese instances to the body only insofar as they represent pauses and breaks in the oral speech of the characters. In sharp distinction, the punctuation in Emma Corbett exists as a kind of tribute, or epitaph, to the lost limbs of the soldiers and the missing words of the story. Readers of Emma Corbett experienced fragmentation on a visual and material level, not just a thematic one. Pratt moves from the plot of the story by supplementing the narrative with the paratextual: the typographical “tears” that indicate the lost limbs and the interrupted and inconclusive termination of the inset tale. By placing large pauses on the page, the printers of the novel made language and narrative partially invisible in the same way that the Carbine b ­ rothers lost limbs—­yet retained their memory of them—­over the course of their lives. While contained within the larger novel, Pratt views the fragment that Caroline Arnold pre­sents as a distinctive and definitive portion of the text. For Pratt and his printers, the telling of the story of war necessitates the visualization of ruined bodies and lost words.

The Defaced Texts of Eighteenth-­Century Soldiers Unlike the two pamphlets analyzed at the start of this chapter, The History of The Old Fring’d Petticoat and “View of the early inroad,” which concern themselves with the outcome of the military conflict between ­England and the colonies, Pratt’s text focuses on the embodied state of individuals. In



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fact, Emma Corbett denationalizes Julius and Nestor Carbine, making them less available for appropriation as symbols of geopo­liti­cal success or failure. The novel accordingly offers a counterpoint to the ways in which eighteenth-­ century soldiers ­were often used as a means of constituting inchoate forms of nationalism, a practice continued into l­ater centuries and extending into the pre­sent day. Elaine Scarry famously charts the relationship among injury, war, and nation in The Body in Pain, arguing that “war is relentless in taking for its own interior content the interior content of the wounded and open ­human body,” a woundedness that she takes as manifestly national.69 For her, ­there is a “literalness with which the ­human body opens itself and allows ‘the nation’ to be registered t­here in the wound.”70 Yet such a clear indexing of the nation in the body did not always take place in unambiguous terms. Pratt’s typographical maneuvers—­ones taken up in early national periodicals as well, as I ­will show—­elude a legible “interior content” that can be demonstrably tied to ­England or the colonies in revolt. The veterans do not exist as homogeneous and bounded selves in coordination within the nation—­t his is not Pratt’s concern. Instead, he narrows in on the subjectivities of the wounded soldiers, decoupling their individuality from imperial conflicts and exclusively focusing on the partial contours of their physiological state. For him, print offers a way of separating the significance of wounds from the nation and reinvesting the veterans with their own identity. While Pratt does point to violent conflict as the cause of the Carbine ­brothers’ wounds, he drains nationality of its overall consequence: throughout the fragment, he depicts their physiological states and not the specific events that led to their injuries. This narrative decision works in tension with official, event-­based histories of war that scaffold nation building. The descriptions provided by the b ­ rothers do, however, emphasize the way wounds and injuries occur to them as the result of illness, e­ nemy bullets, and military ­orders aligned with imperial offensives and defensives. Some of the accounts of their injuries mention geographic markers like Flanders, but crucially the narration of the Carbines avoids mentioning a specific engagement, such as the War of the Spanish Succession or the French and Indian War. They are always at war, though—­after their “virgin engagement,” Julius states that “we had no lazy periods of peace. Some part or another of Eu­rope was continually beating the drum or sounding the trumpet in the ear of ­England. It was our duty to go forth in her defense.”71 Julius’s portrayal of the wars demonstrates an extended geopo­liti­cal agency over their battered bodies. Eu­rope

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beats the drum of ­battle or sounds the trumpet “in the ear of ­England,” and ­England responds by sending out troops in defense. Yet by not naming the specific conflicts in which the Carbines partook, Pratt carves out a space that registers the militaristic nature of their lives without attaching them to events that buttressed imperial might. The coalescence of vio­lence and nationality has long been a legacy of eighteenth-­century imperialism. Linda Colley explains that the unrelenting recurrence of Eu­ro­pean wars, especially with France, was a key component in the construction of a collective British identity in the period: “Time and time again, war with France brought Britons, w ­ hether they hailed from Wales or Scotland or ­England, into confrontation with an obviously hostile Other and encouraged them to define themselves collectively against it.”72 The British “came to define themselves as a single p ­ eople not ­because of any po­liti­cal or cultural consensus at home, but rather in reaction to the Other beyond their shores,” according to Colley.73 Instead of partaking in a collective Anglo identification against the French in “A Military Fragment,” the Carbine b ­ rothers experience the conflicts with “the Other beyond” domestic shores in a way that disperses their limbs and their identities. They become less identifiable rather than more. Furthermore, the Romance derivation of the ­family name (“Carbine” stems from French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese roots) associates the ­brothers with a range of Eu­ro­pean states that Britain repeatedly fought throughout the c­ entury.74 Pratt thereby aligns the Carbine ­brothers with a liminal identity that exists in distinction to the developing sense of British citizens as a “single p ­ eople.” By withholding the specific details of the military engagements, he creates an absence of information and grants the two soldiers an unreadable form of identity that exists beyond the power structures central to state formation. ­Because of the unknown origin of the multiple tears on the bodies of the soldiers and in the pages of their narrative, the two ­brothers live apart from the nation. Their limbs exist across historical time and geography, a fact that Pratt correlates with the way that the text of “A Military Fragment” lacks a definite provenance. Necessary to the construction of the national community, but also detached from it, the Carbines live in the marginalized space of the hospital and yearn for the sympathy and understanding of visitors. The history of the soldiers’ bodies reveals them as physically ostracized, a designation that places them out of line with the healthy functioning of a body politic. But Pratt turns the two ­brothers into a locus of re­sis­tance by making their ruined physiological conditions a residual effect of the pro­cess



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of imperial state formation; he observes that in the course of creating a British nation, the ­brothers become fragments who leave ­behind parts of their bodies in other countries, breaking apart the solidity of anything like the cohesive British identity that Colley identifies. The fragmented identities emerge at the exact same moment that a violent national birth takes place. Neither the British nation nor the emergent American one can reclaim the lost limbs of the ­brothers or heal their wounds. Remarkably, out of this critique of the nation and the empire, Pratt develops a sense of an emergent subject: not a coherent and autonomous self that is situated in the cap­i­tal­ist marketplace, but one whose identity could be constructed as separate from the po­liti­cal structures that instigated trauma. Unattached to a par­tic­u­lar national affiliation, the fragmented bodies and texts of the ­brothers provide a sense of transformative possibility in a world outside the codified norms of the state. Rather than existing as a fixed point or a stagnant identity, the disabled physicality of the Carbine b ­ rothers lives more in Pratt’s fluid typography than in any national schema, a repre­sen­ta­tional method that emphasizes the way their bodies brush up against unboundedness. Through his figurative illustrations of the b ­ rothers, Pratt generates what Jody Greene calls a “technology of emotion” that demarcates their sense of identity.75 The separation of Emma Corbett from any national narrative can also be tracked within its ­later publication history. Not surprisingly, the novel appeared repeatedly in the cata­logs of American booksellers and libraries throughout the rest of the eigh­teenth c­ entury and into the first two de­ cades of the nineteenth c­ entury. Booksellers like Mathew Carey and Isaiah Thomas included Pratt’s novel in their stock, and the book circulated across the country through major arteries of literary dissemination: it appeared in Philadelphia, New York City, Boston, and Worcester, and also surfaced in port cities like Charleston, Baltimore, and Providence.76 The popularity of the novel reveals a widespread interest in the conflict that led to the establishment of the American nation, yet also marks the intense anxiety surrounding the destruction and personal vio­lence that occurred during the Revolution. Equally impor­tant, the text did not always circulate in a complete form; “A Military Fragment” provided editors with a portion of text that could easily be detached from the ­whole. In an early review of Emma Corbett from the Critical Review, for example, the publication pre­sents its readers with

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the fragment in order to exemplify the entire text.77 In addition, the fragment appeared in The Paternal Pre­sent: Being a Sequel to Pity’s Gift, Chiefly Selected from the Writings of Mr. Pratt, a book of extracts published in 1807 by Jacob Johnson in Philadelphia.78 The book followed in the tradition of popu­lar anthology genres and found a place on the bookshelf next to collections, repositories, books of beauties, se­lections, flowers of lit­er­a­ture, and trea­suries of poems.79 Editorial decisions to publish the fragment separately from the novel detached the fragment from its embedded, explanatory context and turned it into a freely circulating entity that lacked any specific mention of the Revolution. In 1780, Pratt’s fragment already functioned in an anachronistic fashion since it was written in Caroline Arnold’s youth and referenced e­ arlier military ­battles in E ­ ngland’s history; by extending this anachronism into the early nineteenth ­century, the repeated excerpting of “A Military Fragment” reveals an interest in the way that the consequences of national conflicts reverberated from the past into the pre­sent. For many American readers in the romantic era, the violent establishment of the nation carried with it an unrelenting legacy of physical fragmentation that could be represented through textual—­a nd typographical—­ means. The practice of presenting the figure of an injured soldier without precise references to a named conflict continued throughout American periodicals. Despite the cultural need to have Revolutionary soldiers symbolize the po­liti­cal birth of the United States, popu­lar publications surprisingly insisted on the separation of wounds from nationality. As in Pratt’s novel, fragments became a way of representing trauma that stemmed from—­but could not be confined by—­imperial military entanglements. In the very years that historians have identified a tendency to sacralize the revolutionary generation, writers w ­ ere si­mul­ta­neously occupied with the way that war wounded and fragmented the bodies of soldiers beyond recognition. In “The Dead Soldier. A Fragment,” an anonymous story published in the Philadel­ phia Minerva in 1797, the narrator relates a heart-­rending account of a wife discovering her dead husband. “Oh war!” the narrator exclaims, “when wilt thou cease.”80 The soldier “had fought bravely, had acquired laurels, vain triumph!—­a musquet-­ball pierced his heart—he fell. . . . ​His wife had with terror sought him in the b ­ attle: she found him—­found him, alas! weltering in his blood. Poor fellow!”81 “The Dead Soldier” does not depict war as a glorious or triumphant event; in fact, it counterbalances the “laurels” and “triumph” offered up to the revolutionary generation in the early nineteenth



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c­ entury with the physical terror of the battlefield. In addition, the style of the fragment is one of distress and interruption. The prose is at once impassioned and halting as exclamations are juxtaposed with dashes to punctuate the bodily and emotional vio­lence described by the text. Near the end of the fragment, a soldier standing near the wife sees her misery and feels pity for her circumstances. The narrator describes how “the tear of pity glistened in his eye” as he looked at the ­woman and her dead husband.82 Such a sentimental description not only reinscribes the wife’s affect on a new person, but also resonates with the “fragment” designated by the title. The soldier’s body is torn open by “a musquet-­ball [that] pierced his heart,” which then creates a new kind of emotional “tear.” “The Dead Soldier. A Fragment” finds no po­liti­cal consolation in the death of the soldier; it provides no message about sacrifice or country, only the realization that a man has died and left his f­ amily. This mode of non-­national grief appeared in early American print culture much more than we have previously recognized. B ­ ecause the years around the turn of the ­century w ­ ere formative for the po­liti­cal development of the United States, our collective attention has been drawn t­oward patriotic elegies for figures like George Washington or cele­brations of the success of the Revolution, not texts which look at the aftermath of war’s devastation.83 Yet Pratt’s novel and the brief story in the Philadelphia Minerva are only two such examples of the protest against vio­lence that was agitated by the Revolutionary War and other conflicts. Many more populated print outlets in ­t hese de­cades; “The Soldier’s Funeral. A Fragment” (1799), offers another such critique. The poem begins with the “dead tone” and “the mute and mourning train” of a funeral for a deceased soldier, and continues by observing that he was “From the ties of life / Unnaturally rent.”84 True to its formal designation as a fragment, the poem ends on an unfinished note, lacking any conclusive statement about the unnamed man’s death. The speaker simply observes that p ­ eople like the soldier are “Fram’d . . . ​like miracle[s] [through] the work of God,” even though they have to continue in their toil. He goes on to assert that they Must, as th’unreasonable beast, drag on A life of ­labor, like this Soldier ­here, His wond’rous faculties bestow’d in vain; Be moulded by his fate, till he becomes A mere machine———.85

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­ ere is no elegiac consolation offered at the end of the poem. The writer Th only focuses on the vanity of the soldier’s “wond’rous faculties” that ­were bestowed by God and came to no useful end. Another power—­t he less intimate, more instrumental “fate”—­controls the man’s life and molds him into a “mere machine,” destroying any evidence of individual w ­ ill or identity and submitting the man to impersonal pro­cesses. He is described as a nameless soldier, without any descriptions of personality or nationality, or even a mention of the war that led to his death. At the same time, the concluding dash—­extended, like the ones that populate Emma Corbett—­creates a continuation of the poem into pure silence. It at once cuts into the partial line, “A mere machine,” and elongates it through punctuation. The fragmentary ending of the poem suggestively points ­toward the hope for some kind of meaning b ­ ehind the death, some kind of explanation, but ultimately the text cannot provide such consolation. One final example w ­ ill suffice to display the collective cultural concern with the figure of the fragmented soldier in t­ hese years.86 In “The Wounded Soldier: A Fragment” (1803), published in the Weekly Visitor, the narrator looks to the end of a soldier’s life, at the moment when, ­after a lifetime of fighting for his country, he is re­united with his long-­lost f­ amily. The ­daughter does not recognize her ­father at first; she only sees how, on the soldier’s face, “misfortune seemed to have anticipated the furrows of age, and his faltering voice bespoke the feelings of a troubled mind. One arm was slung through an old silk kerchief, whilst a ragged pair of trowsers half concealed his necessary appendage,. . . . ​a wooden leg.”87 His body exhibits the “misfortune” of his life through a “faltering voice,” an arm in a sling, and the clothing that barely covers a “wooden leg.” As in the vari­ous editions of Emma Corbett, the printers of the Weekly Visitor seem to approximate his prosthetic through typography. A comma and a long ellipsis connect the phrase “necessary appendage” to the more explicit report of “a wooden leg.” The punctuation h ­ ere plays a similar role as the dashes in Pratt’s novel, offering a rendition of a slender wooden leg attached to the soldier’s body. “The Wounded Soldier: A Fragment” does, however, provide readers with the gesture of an ending, unlike the other periodical fragments. The reunion between the soldier and his ­family is not the last turn in the story. ­After the initial shock of finding her ­father again, the veteran’s d ­ aughter, Mary, “gazed on the mutilated limbs of him with whom she had erst enjoyed so much happiness”; she then listens to his account of “where the ­enemy’s cannon deprived him of two of his limbs. The dreadful idea quite overpowered her,



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and she sunk into the arms of her astonished parent.*****.”88 While the reconstitution of the ­family provides a sense of closure for the soldier’s life, the final lines emphasize the ­father’s “mutilated limbs,” the “cannon” that deprived him of them, and the overwhelming feeling of dread and sorrow felt by the ­daughter. The text provides no indication of where the soldier fought, nor for which country he lost his limbs; instead, it only concentrates the reader’s attention on the cruel fact of the man’s broken body. H ­ ere, too, the printer chooses to finish the text with a set of five asterisks, at once referring to the unspeakable nature of Mary’s grief and the mutilated “arms” that she sinks into. The fierce collision of military powers did not only hold consequences for the shape of borders and territories; it also changed the course of individual lives in decidedly adverse ways. At the same time, the fragment proved to be a potent vehicle for restructuring the official narratives of conflict in the late eigh­teenth and early nineteenth centuries. By focusing on the broken bodies of veterans, writers could create texts that critiqued the violent events of war and the way they scaffolded nationality. Authors such as Pratt manipulated typography, transforming it into a narrative-­adjacent technique capable of approximating the subjectivities of wounded soldiers. Yet scholars have largely avoided ­t hese micro-­tales of woundedness; in our desire to look for synthetic narratives that tell comprehensive stories about the construction of the nation or empire, we have tended to miss texts that give partial glimpses into the specific bodies that w ­ ere implicated in such conflicts. Instead, historical texts that exist in clear dialogue with founding documents like the Declaration of In­de­pen­dence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution are given a privileged place in literary studies, regardless of w ­ hether the interpretation is critical or admiring. Recent work has helped to re­orient this approach, but much scholarship continues to provide a distorted view of the early republic by imposing the weight that our con­temporary American society gives to the founding po­liti­cal documents. In the romantic era, writers engaged the po­liti­cal imaginations of their readers through a broad continuum of possibilities, opting, in many cases, for writing that approached their society as an unfinished proj­ect that had not yet fully accounted for the individuals residing within its borders. The unfinished form of the fragment was viewed as a crucial means of representing such injured individuals in general, and wounded soldiers especially. In ­t hose cases, typography—as much as written content—­generated an alternative semiotic system of identity. Accustomed to reading for content,

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rather than the visual architecture of the material page, literary historians have tended to focus on what texts overtly communicate in their language. Avoiding such an explicit approach, printers and writers of fragments jointly created a syntax of punctuation that sought to obliquely represent the presence of “mutilated limbs” and bodies, to borrow a phrase from “The Wounded Soldier: A Fragment.” Almost vanis­hing from the page, the dashes, asterisks, and other liminal punctuation marks used to figure wounds acknowledge the trauma of war while opening the door to a new repre­sen­ta­tional method. Only by viewing veterans as distinct from the nation does Pratt believe they can attain a humanity which they have been denied. Pratt’s novel avoids any simplistic resolution to the prob­lems facing Nestor and Julius Carbine. In the conclusion of “A Military Fragment,” he turns ­toward a personal, sympathetic system of emotional reconstitution instead of a national affiliation. Caroline Arnold believes that the story she sends to Emma showcases “the best parent, the most loyal subject, and the most valuable citizen,” but the ­actual events and descriptions do not fulfill this promise.89 The pages at the end of the fragment are defaced and illegible, according to the editor, and large swaths of the narrative are missing; furthermore, the final moments of the interpolated text hold out the possibility of a sentimental resolution that is nevertheless left incomplete. It ends with the narrator giving money to Nestor, who feels so thankful that “a tear ­ ntil he bows to the started from his eye.”90 The tear hangs in Nestor’s eye u narrator and his ­daughter: “The tear had verged off, possibly while he was bowing. It had got upon my ­little girl’s face; and ­there it hung like a dew-­ drop from a rose-­bud. Good God, said I, how rapid an exchange! In saying this, I found it had vanished from the cheek of my ­daughter, in the time that I was making the exclamation! Alas, it is quite gone then! said I. No! upon lifting my hand to my face sometime ­after, I found the precious offering of sympathy had changed a third time its residence, and was trembling on my own cheek. I blessed it, and . . .”91 Pratt demonstrates the infectiousness of sentiment by describing how the tear physiologically moves from Nestor, to the narrator’s d ­ aughter, and, fi­nally, to the narrator himself. In the ideal sentimental mode, the tear might then move to the face of the reader. Instead of perpetuating a legacy of national conflict and proleptically envisioning ­future military engagements, this tear passes from the veteran to child to narrator, creating an alternative genealogy of identity, one based in the porousness of bodily bound­aries and sentiment. But the possibilities embedded in the exchange abruptly end midsentence. The narrator “blessed it,



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and . . .”—­the line ends without a conclusion. Pratt decides to make the final scene of the fragment an unfinished one, foregoing any momentous culmination. He thereby proj­ects an uncertainty surrounding this touching moment. The rest of Emma Corbett fulfills the prophecies implied by the wounded bodies of the Carbine ­brothers. Emma feels driven to despair by her longing for Henry, so she crosses the Atlantic to Amer­i­ca in the disguise of a sailor, finds him and, ­after a brief marriage, they both die. Charles Corbett’s only son, Edward Corbett, dies only weeks before Henry and Emma, and Edward’s wife, Louisa, also dies. Th ­ ese deaths extinguish the rising generation, leaving Charles Corbett alone in his old age except for the legacy of two infant grandchildren. Even more so than the depredations experienced by the Carbine ­brothers, the violent birth of the nation takes a severe toll on the Corbett and Hammond families. Their bodies are not only injured, but erased completely. As a substitute, Pratt fashions a spatial syntax within his novel that attempts to represent broken bodies, emotions, and minds, and their potential for intersubjective connections with the reader. ­These narrative locales—­ones that border on the non-­narrative and the paratextual—­emphasize a preservational economy of fragments, rather than an additive one that seeks to remedy injuries. In contrast to projecting an ideology of curative restoration in the hospital, Pratt highlights the ­simple need to illustrate marginal identities on the page.92 His progressive typography depicts the embodied affect of the veterans, deemphasizing the stagnant space of the institution and ­instead highlighting the varied history of their bodies. The flexibility of punctuation provides a basis for figuring the multi-­layered meanings of their physiologies. While Pratt’s canvas is primarily the spatiality of the printed page, his work also holds an impor­tant temporal aspect. The memorial focus of the fragments analyzed ­here bring out a retrospective view of individuals that counteracts the prospective, future-­oriented events of the Revolution. The fragments show the trauma that has occurred and the means of symbolizing it, rather than the po­liti­cal events to come. Such a detachment from the forward march of the American colonies and the British Empire creates a temporally dislocated identity b ­ ecause the remnants of broken bodies from past conflicts exist within the national pre­sent, yet in Pratt’s hands they also offer a more compelling and just vision of futurity. As we w ­ ill see in the next chapter, such a temporal dislocation is even more pronounced in the figure of the “ruined” ­woman, who at once originated in the past and held tremendous

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consequences for the ­future of American society. In Emma Corbett, however, the separation of the Carbine b ­ rothers from the empire and the presence of their embodied affect on the page creates the possibility for individuals to be rehabilitated outside the sphere of the nation. Alongside the other fragments that focus on veterans, Pratt’s novel reveals that—­especially ­because of the success of the Revolution—­broken bodies ­will exist in tension with national identity. In this way, the very moment of American po­liti­cal genesis also propagates a broken, non-­national identity that finds repre­sen­ta­tion at the verge of language.

CHAPTER 3

Ruinous Designs and the Novel of Seduction

Vio­lence was not, of course, a topic ­limited to narratives of war in the ro­ mantic period, nor ­were fragments exclusively represented through typo­ graphy. Fragmented bodies ­were the primary ele­ment of one of the most widely read literary genres—­the seduction novel—­which portrayed cruel sexual vio­lence enacted on w ­ omen. Such texts did not escape the notice of the major po­liti­cal figures of the era. The oft-­cited basis for the seduction narrative’s prominence within early American culture and politics came from none other than John Adams. In an 1804 letter to William Cunning­ ham Jr., the former president famously explained his fear of democracy and its capacity to corrupt the p ­ eople: “You say, the awful spirit of democracy is in ­great pro­gress. I believe it, and I know something of the nature of it. It is a young rake who thinks himself handsome and well made, and who has ­little faith in virtue.—­ . . . ​Democracy is Lovelace, and the p ­ eople are Cla­ ris­sa. The artful villain w ­ ill pursue the innocent lovely girl to her ruin and her death. . . . ​The time would fail me to enumerate all the Lovelaces in the United States. It would be an amusing romance to compare their actions and characters with his.”1 Not one of Adams’s antagonists is safe from criti­ cism in the epistle to Cunningham. He attacks both the failing Federalist party as well as what he perceives to be the machinations of Jefferson’s ad­ ministration. More broadly, he expresses his apprehension for the f­ uture of the country. In his view, the “awful spirit of democracy” ­will mislead the populace and pervert the order of a republican system of government, an anxiety that takes the allegorical shape of the plot of Samuel Richardson’s seduction novel, Cla­ris­sa. In Adams’s reimagination of the text, the demo­ cratic deception of a “young rake,” a libertine, ­will destroy the innocent vir­ tue of the citizenry, an “innocent lovely girl.” His strange conceit envisions the singular Robert Lovelace as a mass of “Lovelaces” that have infiltrated

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the nation and seek to bring chaos to its organ­ization. Surprisingly, Adams’s literary gloss on the state of American politics mutates into amusement when he fancies himself reading the con­temporary unfolding of events as  a narrative. He envisages “an amusing romance” that would position American “Lovelaces” in relation to the fictional character from Richardson’s novel. The intricate analogy in Adams’s letter testifies to the overwhelming importance of seduction plots in eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century American culture. His comparison of Cla­ris­sa to the American ­people and Lovelace to the spirit of democracy uncovers the way in which characters from novels could grasp the popu­lar imagination; Adams takes the fictional inventions of Cla­ris­sa and Lovelace as representative of a­ ctual trends in his milieu. Novels of seduction, which so often focused intently on a single subjectivity or identity, promised audiences a meeting point of the imaginative and the real, creating what Elizabeth Fowler calls a “social person,” a textual feature that “expresses the h ­ uman figure in its social form” by dialectically connecting an artistically contrived interiority with the larger world.2 Such a perspective is dramatized in the way that “characters funnel w ­ hole socie­ties of beings into shapes that are compact, elegant, manipulable, and portable,” in the words of Aaron Kunin.3 The fictional character was a socially oriented figure that was, by and large, viewed as a narrative ele­ment that could speak to the conditions of life in the early republic. In the seduction novel, it is the compressing and constricting of a character—­the detachment of a ruined ­woman from her community throughout the plot and her eventual death—­ that readers like Adams responded to so intensely. Such texts make the diminishment of an individual central to their strategies. However, for all of the interpretations of the seduction novel and American politics that cite Adams’s observation regarding the characters from Cla­ris­sa, the words “seduce,” “seduction,” and “seducer” do not actually appear in his letter.4 Without a doubt, Adams is thinking of the genre in his reference to Richardson’s work, but his attention ­here is on what happened to Cla­ris­sa ­after her seduction at the hands of Lovelace: “her ruin and her death.” The fears surrounding the lives of virtuous young ­women often took the shape not of seduction as such, but of the “ruin” and “ruination” of their lives that would swiftly follow. This emphasis was a major aspect of seduction novels, as well as the periodicals, conduct books, essays on virtue, and didactic poetry that made up a sizable share of literary production in t­ hese years. Avoiding “ruination”—­often used as periphrasis for rape and its at-



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tendant consequences—­and preserving feminine virtue was the central pedagogical lesson of nearly all of the instructional and recreational lit­er­a­ ture directed ­toward ­women. Adams’s letter thus evokes the anx­i­eties surrounding ruins that ­were a dominant theme in American po­liti­cal writing (as described in Chapter 1) and identifies a parallel threat of ruination on the individual level. Crucially, throughout romantic discourses the unfinished form of the fragment was often so closely associated with ruins and ruination that they ­were nearly indistinguishable, a correspondence that the following pages investigate. Tales of ruination w ­ ere most commonly found in sentimental seduction novels, a genre that sought to provoke physiological and emotional responses on the part of the reader by presenting them with scenes of distress.5 Hypothetically, readers could then sympathize with the person enmeshed in the unfortunate state of affairs by imagining their suffering. Of course, arguments over the precise meaning of “sentiment” during the eigh­teenth c­ entury ensured that no single definition pervaded all of the term’s cultural usages; it was actually a malleable concept that could be used in a variety of ways.6 Nonetheless, a key ele­ment involved repre­sen­ta­tions of the lower sort. Stephen Shapiro identifies how sentimental scenes used “the socially disempowered (­women, el­derly, c­ hildren, servants and the poor) or the parahuman (animals and botanical and geological formations)” to “act as a prosthetic technology over long-­d istance.” 7 While necessary and vital critiques of sentimentalism—­both in the eigh­teenth ­century and in recent scholarship—­ have examined the objectifying nature of its gaze and its substitution of po­ liti­cal action with emotional response, the seduction novels that sought to valorize ruins offered a means of reconceptualizing the subjectivity of fallen ­women. Rather than exclusively demanding emotional engagement, they sought to emphasize what was left over. As I argue throughout this chapter, the very word “ruin” indicated only ­limited—­not complete—­destruction. To be “ruined” was not to be fully erased, and it certainly did not mean elimination from memory. So-­called “fallen ­women” in fictional and didactic lit­er­a­ture served an instructive purpose, in that they gave readers a means of calibrating their own be­hav­ior in response to developing behavioral and sexual mores. In addition to this purpose, which historians and literary scholars have consistently identified as one of the primary roles of the genre, writers also utilized the language of ruination to yield an alternative ave­nue for imagining identity. Through the trope of the “ruin,” writers expounded on how the character of a fragmented

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­ oman could be rearticulated and transformed into a textual site of re­sis­ w tance. As Toni Bowers has recently demonstrated, narratives of “rape, seduction, and courtship” overlapped with one another and articulated “a model for subordinate agency (almost always coded female) that emerges again and again in eighteenth-­century seduction writing [as] . . . ​‘collusive resistance’—­a paradoxical exercise of re­sis­tance through submission.”8 Ruins and ruination provided a way to recast rape, the threat of rape, or the blurred boundary between rape and seduction through something akin to Bowers’s “collusive re­sis­tance.” Instead of categorically castigating a fallen w ­ oman, the figuration of her as a “ruin” could be used as a way of recoding patriarchal scripts. This “collusive re­sis­tance” stemmed from the crucial fact that the word “ruin” was not only used in seduction novels, but also held an impor­tant architectural definition. More to the point, such physical ruins from bygone ages ­were closely associated with the language of sublimity. Consequently, when fallen ­women are conceived as a ­human “ruin” in literary texts, their lives index the sublime experience of beauty and power that phi­los­o­phers described in accounts of classical ruins, a quality that added to the progressive spirit of such depictions. Like the expressive pages analyzed in Emma Corbett, ruins held a spatial significance—­they ­were locales that could be observed on a walk or described in a notebook—­and w ­ ere perceived to hover between absence and presence. Seduced w ­ omen ­were figured as a physical ruin from the past that concurrently symbolized privation and excess, absence and presence, and fragmentation and the potential for change. At the same time, in distinction to the more topographical emphasis of the previous chapter, the physical structure of ruins also conveyed a temporal dynamic, one that cast the past in terms of the pre­sent, and vice versa. The “ruined w ­ oman” existed in a spatiotemporal nexus, one that used sublimity to elude clear categorizations of identity and highlight a transformative self. Where Adams evokes fears surrounding sexual and po­liti­cal ruination, the works examined ­here use fragments to consider how ­human “ruins” could be sublimated in a way that accentuated their po­liti­cal dissonance, a premise discernable in Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte ­Temple (1794) and Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette (1797). “One of the staples of the ruin narrative is invective against the individual,” writes Elizabeth Dill, a theme which generates “a sense of identity outside the realm of the rights-­bearing individual and its attendant notion of self-­possession.”9 ­These texts reveal how such an “invective against the individual” could actually be leveraged



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in the ­woman’s ­favor through the sublime, spatiotemporal nature of ruins.10 But unlike the vis­i­ble fragments of Pratt’s novel, Rowson and Foster each consider what can be sal­vaged from tragedy by referencing the existence of written and bodily fragments rather than producing them on the page. ­These novels elide the writing of Charlotte ­Temple and Eliza Wharton and depict their deaths, but they do so in a manner that emphasizes the broken fragments left over from the lives of the protagonists. Rowson and Foster exploit a discourse of the sublime to enunciate the transgressive female identity of t­ hese “fallen” w ­ omen. The progressive potential of the fragment is on full display in t­ hese narratives, as authors use what readers would have identified as an utterly ruined life to instantiate new ways of being.

The Architecture of Seduction Conduct books and novels obsessively fixated on the theme of seduction, and nearly always used the language of ruination to indicate the corruption of virtue. In some of the most influential texts on the subject, writers rehearsed the path to ruination in a way that unequivocally condemned its ­ other worries at the occurrence. In Richardson’s Pamela (1740), Pamela’s m very beginning of the novel that her servant ­daughter is “to be ruin’d and undone!” by the attentions of her new young master, Mr. B——­; Pamela artlessly asks in return, “What could he get by ruining such a poor young Creature as me?”11 Not too much ­later, Pamela explic­itly ties her chastity to her reputation in society, pointing out that “such a ­Thing [like her seduction] would ruin his Credit as well as mine, you know.”12 From the very beginning of the narrative, Pamela’s sexual innocence is tied to her reputation within her community—­her “Credit” with ­others—­confirming that her ruination would spell her total indigence. The plot continually pre­sents the danger of seduction and constantly holds the threat of Pamela’s destruction directly over her head u ­ ntil, that is, her marriage to Mr.  B——. The word “ruin,” which appears nearly a hundred times throughout the novel, almost completely vanishes ­after this crucial event. At the very moment that Pamela’s ­f uture is fully secure, the menace of ruination dis­appears from the epistolary correspondence. Texts like Richardson’s emphasized the potential for young ­women to lose their virtue and subsequently break off from their ­family and community. Seduction meant familial, economic, and moral injury, the blame for

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which was primarily placed on the victim. However, in the de­cades a­ fter Richardson’s writings, Mary Wollstonecraft and ­others sought to rectify such a misogynist perspective by vigorously struggling for the education of young ­women, locating the cause of their ruin in the failures of pedagogy. Wollstonecraft observed that w ­ omen can be “broken off from society, and by one error torn from all t­hose affections and relationships that improve the heart and mind. It does not frequently even deserve the name of error; for many innocent girls become the dupes of a sincere, affectionate heart, and still more are, as it may emphatically be termed, ruined before they know the difference between virtue and vice.”13 Wollstonecraft lays the culpability of being “ruined” at the doorstep of faulty education that fails to provide ­women with any substantive knowledge. Their “sincere, affectionate heart[s]” lead to confusion about the nature of “virtue and vice” and, ­after their seduction or rape, they are left “broken off from society.” What is chiefly in­ter­est­ing about Wollstonecraft’s text is that she does not let the terminology of seduction go unremarked; instead, she highlights the exact language employed by the critics of “innocent girls.” She perceives that the eventual outcome “may emphatically be termed, ruined,” noting the force that such a designation holds. For Wollstonecraft, the word is key—­she typographically emphasizes it and mentions its forceful use throughout discussions of seduction. The term plays an essential role for her in the oppressive control and management of female sexual virtue. The language of seduction and ruination extended across the Atlantic to the colonies and the early United States.14 Particularly for a society that was in the early years of codifying po­liti­cal and social practices, the threat of seduction—as Adams explic­itly points out in his letter—­was an especially apt meta­phor for cata­loging the dangers to the republic. But it was not just a meta­phor. The lived threat of seduction and rape encircled w ­ omen living during the period, and writers sought to represent such realities in their fiction. William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy (1789), considered by many to be the earliest American novel, helped set the stage for the cultural fascination with narratives of “ruin.” In Brown’s novel, the word is used in reference to the corruption of female virtue and its accompanying results; one character observes that seduction ­will “introduce affectation—­pride—­ envy—­clandestine marriages—­elopements—­division of families—­and ultimately terminate in the ruin of very many innocent, but inconsiderate females.”15 Just as Wollstonecraft did, Brown distinguishes the term “ruin,” highlighting its visibility on the page and drawing attention to it. In his ren-



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dition, the word conveys the final outcome of a long train of abuses that extend beyond a single individual; seduction results in the destruction of the entire ­family unit and alters the community at large.16 The typographical emphasis on ruin in Wollstonecraft’s and Brown’s writings reifies the term, making it stand out on the page. Ruin was not just any way of talking about seduction and rape; it was a particularly evocative and damning one. Despite its notorious association with seduced ­women, “ruin” did not have a solitary denotation throughout the time period. In fact, its layered definition created multiple impressions in the minds of readers, bringing together female virtue with material culture in an intersecting palimpsest. Encountering “ruin” on the page—­even if it was closely tied to the fate of a young w ­ oman—­would thereby evoke more than a single connotation. Most impor­tant for my discussion h ­ ere, the term primarily referred to a physical structure that had fallen apart, and its etymology consists of the old French ruine and the Latin ruīna, both referring to a collapse or a tumbling down.17 The spatiotemporal meaning of a ruin as a collapsed historical structure circulated widely throughout American print culture. As previously discussed in Chapter 1, po­liti­cal elites in the colonial and early national periods often viewed ruins from past civilizations with suspicion: They w ­ ere a reminder of the potential dangers that faced the new nation. To imitate ruins would inevitably lead Amer­i­ca down the same path that eventually led to the fall of Greece and Rome. Just as the ruins from the classical world provided a pressing symbol of what the American po­liti­cal course should not be for many writers and thinkers, the lives of fallen w ­ omen ­were used in didactic essays and pedagogical novels to scare young ­women away from leading careless lives that would seal them off into the past, transforming them into a ­human ruin.18 ­W hether used in a pejorative manner or not, the connection between the material and the ­human ruin coursed through the lit­er­a­ture of the era. Writers invoked the architectural definition of the word to describe seduced ­women, and actively situated seduction narratives in ruinous settings. In her unfinished, fictional follow-up to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman—­ titled Maria: Or, The Wrongs of W ­ oman (1792)—­Wollstonecraft concentrates on the symbolic resonance of physical debris. Near the start of the novel, the protagonist, Maria, describes her imprisonment in an asylum by her vicious husband, George Venables, a man who physically assaulted her prior to her arrival at the institution. She lives in a chamber which looks out on “a desolate garden, and of part of a huge pile of buildings, that, a­ fter having been

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suffered, for half a ­century, to fall to decay, had under­gone some clumsy repairs.”19 From that same room, she turns to consider the other inhabitants of the institution and “contemplated the most terrific of ruins—­that of a ­human soul. What is the view of the fallen column, the mouldering arch, of the most exquisite workmanship, when compared with this living memento of the fragility, the instability, of reason, and the wild luxuriancy of noxious passions?”20 Wollstonecraft’s depiction of Maria’s mistreatment at the hands of her insensate, libertine husband links an external desolation of “a huge pile of buildings” that had fallen “to decay” to an internal state of ruination represented by the “living memento” of h ­ uman “fragility.” Maria herself identifies with such an affect of desolation as she pines away her life immured in impregnable walls. Outward realities rhyme with inward ones for Maria, as “the fallen column” and “the mouldering arch” are compared to “the most terrific of ruins—­t hat of a h ­ uman soul.” The connection between architectural and individual ruination populated seduction narratives throughout the period. Along the same lines as Maria, a 1795 tale titled “Melancholy Effects of Seduction,” published in the Mas­sa­chu­setts Magazine, describes the repentance of a man who “seduced the ­daughter of Farmer Hodges, a tenant of mine.”21 The man, who only signs his name Bellamour, insists that he is not “an abandoned libertine” and that “the above unhappy affair was more the effect of sudden impulse” than any carefully laid intrigue.22 Ashamed of his destruction of female virtue, he retreats to solitary spots where he surveys “the richness of the prospect of broken cliffs, woods, and water-­falls” and sees “the ruins of an old Abbey, whose ivyed walls, in that romantic situation, had the finest effect imagination could form”; as he tells his friend, “You know my passion for antiquity.”23 At the exact moment in which he delights in the “ruins” of the old abbey, a participant in a passing funeral train informs him of a w ­ oman who has just died b ­ ecause she was “deluded and ruined by some ­great gen­ oman tleman.”24 Unsurprisingly, the funeral turns out to be for the precise w that the man seduced. The brief story in the Mas­sa­chu­setts Magazine uses the physical ruins of the countryside to set the stage for the funeral of the fallen ­woman, drawing a sharp connection between the deterioration of building and body. By associating victims of sexual vio­lence with ruins, authors created a correlation between individual and physical remnants left over from the past. Building on the topography of the page examined in the previous chapter, ruined ­women in seduction novels not only conjured the spatial architec-



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ture of historical buildings, but they also evoked the temporal dimension of bygone eras. Like fallen civilizations and their relics, seduced ­women ­were placed in a disjointed historical state. They existed in the pre­sent as mere remnants of their previous existence, creating a tension with the forward-­ moving progressive time that the early republic continually invoked.25 For many, such exemplifications of the past needed to be excluded from society; their very condition of ruination made them productive only insofar as they offered negative didactic examples. Other writers, though, took a nearly opposite approach. Ruined w ­ omen—­and their recursive presence—­could bring a haunting and even sublime quality to the pre­sent and the ­future, and in this way trou­ble the po­liti­cal voices that wanted to relegate them to the casket of history. Through a contrapuntal registering of material and ­human ruins that placed the past, pre­sent, and ­future in intimate proximity, writers could work to reconstitute the place of fallen w ­ omen in early American society. Such ­human and material remnants from the past often served a pivotal role of critique in eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century Amer­i­ca. Susan Stabile has contended that the recursivity of memorials typified “a unique way of knowing, which undercut, subverted, and reapplied” the prescriptive roles of ­women in the period.26 Ruinous ­women in par­tic­u­lar, I argue, elicited a way of existing that countermanded invocations for pro­gress, development, and growth that dominated the era’s discourse. Jacques Derrida’s notion of “hauntology” proves especially useful for comprehending such figures by providing a concept which delineates a mode of being derived neither from the past nor the pre­sent—­but seeming to come out of the past—­ that upsets an expected chronological stability. In the words of Colin Davis, Derrida’s “hauntology supplants its near-­homonym ontology, replacing the priority of being and presence with the figure of the ghost as that which is neither pre­sent nor absent, neither dead nor alive.”27 Derrida’s contribution recognizes that the “figure of the ghost” does not clearly exist within the past b ­ ecause of its location within the pre­sent, and it surely does not belong to the pre­sent, a paradox that makes any steady temporality impossible. Again and again throughout his analy­sis of hauntology in Specters of Marx, Derrida repeats a key phrase from Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “The time is out of joint.”28 This indeterminacy registers “a place/non-­place between presence and absence, appearance and disappearance,” in the words of Christopher Prendergast.29 Derrida’s recasting of the concept of ontology fits closely with the kind of cultural work performed by ruins. Throughout the eigh­teenth ­century,

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ruins existed both in the past and the pre­sent, constantly evoking bygone eras as well as demonstrating their per­sis­tence into con­temporary times, truly belonging to neither historical moment. Through such an “out of joint” quality, the ruined w ­ oman challenged any definitive derivation of cause and effect that sought to lucidly delineate the instant of ruination. Just as the repre­sen­ta­tion of the fragmented limbs of the Carbine ­brothers in the previous chapter spread across an ambiguous geo­graph­i­cal landscape, early American novels that focus on the fragmented subjectivity and writing of seduced w ­ omen reveal how the moment of seduction loses traction in the face of a ruined figure who moves from the past through the pre­sent, and perhaps even into the ­f uture. By way of an alternative to a discrete approach that fixates on the event of seduction—­the specific occurrence that engrossed so many moralists and writers—­t he concept of ruination illustrates the persisting ramifications of seduction within a patriarchal system that sought to contain such incidents to a definitive sexual transgression in the past. Like a “ghost,” the ruined ­woman of narratives could live in the pre­ sent and extend into the f­ uture—­“neither dead nor alive”—­and partake in society in a way that undercut and subverted its restrictions to her identity. The power under­lying the Derridean “hauntology” contained within the figure of the ruined w ­ oman is also closely related to the way architectural ruins brought vestiges of former empires into the con­temporary world in a distinctly sublime fashion. For Derrida, the “spectral rumor . . . ​invades every­thing: the spirit of the ‘sublime’ and the spirit of ‘nostalgia’ cross all borders,” a contention that brings the “spectral” into direct dialogue with the “sublime” excessiveness so often associated with ruins.30 While the love of ruins was closely tied to Eu­ro­pean aesthetics, early Americans, too, ­were fascinated by crumbling structures, reprinting works from abroad and composing essays about the topic.31 Excavations at Herculaneum, Pompeii, and other sites throughout the period spurred an interest in the remnants of past civilizations, and popu­lar illustrated texts such as Robert Wood’s The Ruins of Palmyra (1753), Robert Sayer’s The Ruins of Athens (1759), and Thomas Major’s The Ruins of Pæstum (1768) inspired the curiosity of audiences by familiarizing them with images of archeological discoveries.32 Eu­ro­pean aesthetes felt nostalgia, marvel, and—­most importantly—­sublime won­der in the presence of remains from antiquity. In his indispensable delineation of the sublime, Edmund Burke famously considered, “What­ever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, what­ever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a



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manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime.”33 For Burke, anything that excited the ideas of “pain” and “danger,” or anything that operated like “terror” was a “source of the sublime.” Objects like ruins, then, w ­ ere particularly suited to his definition in manifold ways: they reminded the viewer of the damaging passage of time, evoked danger through their crumbling structure, and even served as a memento mori that intimated mortality. Burke also makes the connection between ruins and sublimity explicit in his treatise. Not long a­ fter his explanation of the sublime, he considers the appeal of thinking about the collapse of a nation: “The prosperity of no empire, nor the grandeur of no king, can so agreeably affect in the reading, as the ruin of the state of Macedon.”34 Positive concepts like “prosperity” and “grandeur” have less of an agreeable effect than considering “the ruin” of a state, an experience which is far more likely to engage the interest and won­ der of an audience. Images of destruction are what whet the appetites of readers, not stories of success. This assessment of ruins translates to individuals too, as Burke describes how “Scipio and Cato are both virtuous characters; but we are more deeply affected by the violent death of the one, and the ruin of the ­great cause he adhered to . . . ​for terror is a passion which always produces delight when it does not press too close.”35 Vio­lence and ruin appeal to Burke’s ­imagined audience, even producing something like “delight” as long as they do “not press too close” to real­ity. Macedon and Cato provide Burke relevant cases that would have been recognizable to his audience, yet an even more pertinent example was close at hand. His descriptions of ruins took on their most affecting shape in his writings about the city of London. Reflecting on the recent earthquake that destroyed the city of Lisbon in 1755—­a cataclysmic event that influenced theories of geology and spurred Immanuel Kant’s own thinking about the sublime—­Burke ­imagined the coinciding feelings of dread and interest that such an event would spark if located in London: “This noble capital, the pride of E ­ ngland and of Eu­rope, I believe no man is so strangely wicked as to desire to see destroyed by a conflagration or an earthquake, though he should be removed himself to the greatest distance from the danger. But suppose such a fatal accident to have happened, what numbers from all parts would croud to behold the ruins, and amongst them many who would have been content never to have seen London in its glory?”36 Time and again in his delineation of the sublime, Burke invokes ruins, ruination, and other partial forms, attesting to the fascination they hold over the minds of spectators. Even for a person that might lament the destruction of London, or

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someone who had never been to visit it before the “conflagration,” Burke acknowledges an interest in “such a fatal accident” and believes that “numbers from all parts” would “behold the ruins.” Throughout Burke’s treatise, ruins not only invite curiosity, but also bring audiences into close juxtaposition with the “pain,” “danger,” and terror that constitute the sublime. The relationship between ruins and the imaginative sublime was not only explicated by Burke; indeed, it was iterated throughout the entire period’s thinking. Viewing ruins was thought to encourage reverie and help individuals employ their creative faculties.37 In one of the most famous examples of such a mode of contemplation, Denis Diderot explains his poé­ tique des ruines in “Le Salon de 1767” by describing the emotional force generated by simply looking at ruins: “What an effect! What grandeur! What nobility!”38 Diderot considers how the “ideas ruins evoke in me are g­ rand. Every­t hing comes to nothing, every­t hing perishes, every­thing passes, only the world remains, only time endures. How old is the world!”39 Simply observing ruins leads Diderot to reflect on impressive themes, including death, the world’s tendency to decay, and the constant passage of time—­a hauntology if t­ here ever was one. But the ideas are also “­grand,” a word that conveys the imposing majesty of the ruins, and the affective state he immerses himself in is one of “grandeur,” “nobility,” and excitement. The emotional and aesthetic inspiration created by ruins is a tremendous, encompassing rumination on the ­whole of creation: “Every­thing” is subject to the deterioration of time. Diderot is at once minimized by the passage of time, and also enlarged in his ­mental ability to comprehend such vastness. Emboldened by Diderot’s paean to the majesty and glory of ruins, Constantine François de Chassebœuf, Comte de Volney, likewise expressed the solemnities and deep musings evoked by crumbling structures from past civilizations. At the beginning of his 1791 Ruins; Or Meditations on the Revo­ lution of Empires, Volney rev­er­ent­ly writes, “Hail solitary ruins, holy sepulchres and ­silent walls! you I invoke; to you I address my prayer. While your aspect averts, with secret dread, the vulgar regard, it excites, in my heart, the charm of delicious sentiments, sublime contemplations. How many useful lessons, how many reflections, affecting and profound, do you suggest to the mind which knows how to consult you!”40 Volney goes further than Diderot’s exclamations of grandeur and nobility, arguing that crumbling monuments evoke “delicious sentiments, sublime contemplations,” and “affecting and profound” thoughts. Ruins attain a poignant affective dimension in Volney and more pervasively influence his emotional and



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­ ental states. Indeed, the beginning of the text takes the shape of an invom cation, treating ruins as “holy sepulchres” and “address[ing]” them with a “prayer.”41 Material ruins ­were thus not to be solely lamented. They ­were often, in fact, viewed as sources of sublime inspiration. In Eu­ro­pean writing—­which was republished in Amer­i­ca ­either in its entirety or in extracts in newspapers and periodicals—­ruins w ­ ere viewed as aesthetic openings into the world of the past that could decidedly influence the pre­sent and the f­uture. Writers such as Burke, Diderot, and Volney forcefully expressed the larger cultural interest in the affective force of ruinous buildings, one that was specifically tied to sublimity. For such thinkers, even “in decay, the monumentality and sublimity of t­ hese ruins of the past w ­ ere more impressive than the miserable pre­sent,” as Andreas Huyssen writes in his description of the work of the Italian painter, Giovanni Battista Piranesi.42 Bringing together the sublime with theories of aesthetic fracture, Alexander Regier claims that the eighteenth-­ century sublime “relies on the moment of total breakdown. . . . ​The secular sublime, together with its ruins, discloses a disruptive and breaking quality at its core.”43 The retrospection created by ruins was initiated by a “disruptive and breaking quality” that drew in an audience e­ ager “to behold the ruins.” Yet as we have already seen, the meaning of “ruins” and “ruination” was not l­imited to crumbling monuments from the past. In American writing, ruins w ­ ere repeatedly used to cast the fallen w ­ oman in relief. This usage differed from much Eu­ro­pean lit­er­a­ture, where the belief in the “monumentality and sublimity” of ruins transformed in popu­lar British romantic fragment poetry, especially a­fter early publications by Words­worth and Coleridge. Such a trajectory emphasized ruins as “synechdoches for vanished hospitality and shelter” in the words of Susan Stewart, a function that contrasted with the more expressly po­liti­cal frameworks examined h ­ ere, 44 which w ­ ere exemplified by Adams’s interest in ruination. While victims of seduction w ­ ere often pathologized, repressed, and treated as negative exemplars, American writers also presented female “ruins” as individuals that evoked “sublime contemplations,” to borrow Volney’s phrasing. Rather than depleting their presence from the con­temporary moment, the evocation of sublime ruins served to endow such figures with power. As Barbara Claire Freeman suggests, an attention to gender in discussions of the sublime shows that “the sublime involves an encounter with a radical alterity that remains unassimilable to repre­sen­ta­tion. Such an encounter marks the very limits of the representable.”45 For Freeman, what she calls the “feminine

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sublime” involves “taking up a position of re­spect in response to an incalculable otherness,” noting that its “most enduring commitment would be instead to sustain a condition of radical uncertainty as the very condition of its possibility.”46 Just as invoking Derrida’s hauntology reveals an instability at the core of the repre­sen­ta­tion of a ruined w ­ oman, Freeman identifies a feminine sublime that contains a “radical uncertainty” that forms “the very condition of its possibility.” The writers analyzed in the remainder of this chapter seek to reclaim the status of fallen w ­ omen by preserving the remnants of their lives. The use of the word “ruin” to refer to a seduced w ­ oman indicates something that is left over, something that remains and persists despite its partial deterioration. ­W hether referring to the remnants of classical antiquities or the life of a ­woman who has been seduced, t­ here is the sense of a trace left b ­ ehind: the ruin is a ruin precisely ­because it continues to exist, even if not in a legible, bounded, and coherent fashion. The discussion h ­ ere builds on the fragments analyzed in the previous chapter, which use the space of the page to depict fragmented subjectivities and their potentials. In contrast, Rowson and Foster both focus on the way in which fragments register a spatiotemporal identity that conveys the “radical uncertainty” and its “possibility” that Freeman identifies. Instead of considering how fragments can be represented on the page, t­ hese two authors use language to ultimately point t­ oward a space beyond language itself—­toward a sublime lacuna constituted by fragments, a Bartleby-­like place in which “impassivity is a source of impossible power and intolerable re­sis­tance,” in the words of Wendy Anne Lee.47 Rowson and Foster do not examine how bodily and written fragments can be seen on the page, but rather how such fragments silently proj­ect a sense of uncertainty that scaffolds the potentiality of characters. Th ­ ese authors articulate a politics of absence rather than presence by making reference to fragmented writing that does not appear; this move advocates a gender politics of refusal rather than admission, reform rather than capitulation, and sublimity rather than passivity.

Charlotte ­Temple and the Care of Neptune Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte ­Temple, first published in E ­ ngland in 1791 and then in the United States in 1794, was one of the most widely read novels in Amer­i­ca. The story of seduction begins with a dashing British soldier named



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John Montraville trying to convince the young and impressionable Charlotte ­Temple to leave her boarding school and travel with him to the American scene of war during the Revolution. Charlotte’s guardian at school, the indecent Ma­de­moi­selle La Rue, supports Montraville in his encouragements; eventually, ­after e­ very type of persuasion seems to fail, Montraville thrusts Charlotte into a carriage and they make their way to a ship readying for the voyage. Played out against the divisive strug­g le between colony and empire, the events of the novel turn away from large-­scale po­liti­c al fractures and instead focus on Charlotte’s life, her day-­to-­d ay emotions, and the series of tragedies that befall her. Taking a dif­fer­ent approach than Pratt’s Emma Corbett, the plot of Charlotte ­Temple considers the displacements endemic to war­t ime travel, yet almost entirely resists commenting on the military conflict itself in f­avor of a focus on Charlotte’s tribulations. Throughout the novel, the narrator makes it evident that, despite Charlotte’s severe transgressions against her loving parents and her familial responsibilities, she never loses her faith in her ­family and persists in her belief that Montraville ­w ill marry her (­until, that is, he violates that trust by marrying another ­woman). In fact, a­ fter Charlotte leaves her boarding school with Montraville but before she yields to his seduction on their transatlantic passage, she pens a letter to her parents informing them of her destination and her hopes of marriage. She gives the letter to Montraville to mail to her ­family, but he “knew too well the consequences that must unavoidably ensue, should this letter reach Mr. ­Temple: he therefore wisely resolved to walk on the deck, tear it in pieces, and commit the fragments to the care of Neptune, who might or might not, as it suited his con­ve­nience, convey them on shore.”48 By ripping up her letter, Montraville demolishes her words and further severs the connection between Charlotte and her ­family—­the ocean swallows up the fragments of Charlotte’s writing and makes any reconciliation with her parents nearly impossible. Montraville’s destruction of Charlotte’s letter is by no means his last attempt to keep her isolated. He continues to deceive her throughout the novel and circumvents her attempts to communicate with anyone ­else. ­After they cross the Atlantic and arrive in the revolting colonies, he sets her up in a dwelling near New York City. He visits Charlotte periodically—­though in her view, he rarely comes—­and ­every time he visits, she gives him letters to send back to ­England. Montraville promises to mail them for her but, predictably, destroys all of them. B ­ ecause neither her f­ather nor her m ­ other

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reply to any of her letters, Charlotte begins to believe that they no longer hold any affection for her and view her as being outside of their domestic unit. Equally consequential, Montraville’s eradication of Charlotte’s letters denotes a violation of her personal identity. Her missives contain information about herself addressed not to Montraville but to her relatives. As Mark Seltzer explains, the development of epistolary media technology and the extension of the postal system in the eigh­teenth ­century set the conditions for a private identity which could then be undermined and thwarted: “Once it becomes pos­si­ble to write on sheets of paper that can be folded back on themselves (rather than, say, rolled into a scroll), once it becomes pos­si­ble for the handwritten and folded sheet of paper to be inserted in an envelope, sealed, and posted on schedule, the technical conditions of interiority and privacy are in place.”49 On the other hand, such “technical conditions” that contributed to privacy cut the other way as well. “At this point,” Seltzer explains, “it becomes pos­si­ble for the writing of letters to get in the way of letters, for the technical conditions of intimacy to get in the way of intimacy,” and for someone like Montraville to use Charlotte’s letters to further his own ends, not hers.50 Charlotte can communicate her innermost feelings and thoughts to her ­family in a letter, but the “technical conditions” of that interiority—­t he requirement that her feelings be written in a letter, folded, and mailed—­can be managed and controlled by someone like Montraville, who carries her epistles for her and ends up tearing them into fragments. If writing was indeed an impor­tant way of symbolizing and constructing selfhood and identity, as so many historians and scholars have observed, then the abandonment and destruction of personal writing like letters, diaries, and journals depicted how easily this pro­cess could be cut short by libertines like Montraville or his co-­conspirator, Belcour. Similar visions of tattered manuscripts, torn and missing letters, ripped newspapers, and broken books adorn the pages of late eighteenth-­century novels, essays, and poems.51 ­These fragments of writing that appeared in the lit­er­a­t ure of the era not only act as markers of the written conditions of interiority, but also demonstrate the fragility of that condition and its susceptibility to transformation and, more importantly, ruination. Charlotte’s letters never make it across the Atlantic. ­Later in the novel, however, she does find a receptive audience when she tells the story of her woes to a kindly neighbor named Mrs. Beauchamp. Mrs. Beauchamp immediately recognizes Montraville’s deception and helps Charlotte to recon-



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stitute her communication network. As Mrs. Beauchamp wisely declares, “I rather suspect . . . ​t hey have never had your letters,” knowingly pointing out Montraville’s desire to rupture any interaction between Charlotte and her ­family circle.52 By acting as Charlotte’s agent and delivering her letters to the packet boat sailing for ­England, Mrs.  Beauchamp puts Charlotte back in touch with her ­mother and ­father. But the help from Mrs. Beauchamp is too ­little and too late. She leaves Charlotte to go on a trip and, meanwhile, Montraville’s insidious companion Belcour sets his sights on Charlotte. Belcour attacks on two fronts. He defames her in Montraville’s eyes by suggesting her faithlessness, and also tries to convince Charlotte that Montraville no longer loves her and that only he, Belcour, should be entitled to her trust. Not surprisingly, when the ingenuous Charlotte gives Belcour letters addressed to Montraville that plead for money and assistance, Belcour destroys the writing to make Charlotte completely dependent on him. Rather than deliver her letters to her former lover, Belcour “never suffered [them] to reach the hands of Montraville.”53 He repeats the actions of Montraville, and the final rupture of Charlotte’s epistolary network seals her fate; the obliteration of her writings leads to her tragic death. Charlotte’s letters do not appear anywhere in the narrative; they are only referenced before they dis­appear into the watery depths of the ocean a­ fter being torn up by Montraville and, ­later, Belcour. The loquacious narrator often provides a brief summary of their contents, but the exact words are not produced for the reader, Montraville does not appear to read them, and Charlotte’s f­ amily never receives them. Her written communications—­t hat is, her authored statements—­lack existence in the very novel that takes her name. If, as Seltzer and ­others have suggested, letters not only represent interiority but create its technical conditions, then ­those destroyed epistles represent a ­violated identity. As Charlotte declines in the final portions of the narrative, Rowson transfers the ruination of her letters to the literal ruination of Charlotte’s body. Fragmented words have tremendous consequences; the broken words of Charlotte’s epistles take on a bodily exemplification as she deteriorates throughout the text. Near the end of the novel, the effect of Charlotte’s seduction on her physiological condition becomes painfully clear. She turns for help to La Rue, who rejects her out of hand, but Charlotte is taken in by a kindly servant in whose h ­ ouse she gives birth to a d ­ aughter. Unable to hold on to reason, Charlotte mistakenly conceives that the baby belongs to another person and pleads that the newborn be re­united with its ­mother: “If you knew how hard

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it was for a m ­ other to be parted from her infant: it is like tearing the cords of life asunder. Oh could you see the horrid sight which I now behold—­there—­ there stands my dear m ­ other, her poor bosom bleeding at e­ very vein, her gentle, affectionate heart torn in a thousand pieces, and all for the loss of a ruined, ungrateful child.”54 In her delirious state, Charlotte emphasizes the unnatural state of being “parted” from f­ amily, the pain of “tearing the cords of life,” and her own ­mother’s heart as being “torn in a thousand pieces” ­because of the actions of a “ruined, ungrateful child.” Her agonizing description of familial breakage serves as an emotional culmination of the much ­earlier event in the novel, when Montraville de­cided to “tear” her letters into fragments before they set sail for Amer­i­ca. At the same time, Charlotte is not simply a passive recipient of injury; Rowson pre­sents her as an emblem of the sublime.55 In this heartrending scene, Charlotte at once distances herself from her current moment—­she thinks the baby belongs to someone e­ lse and envisions a “horrid sight”—­ and also pre­sents her anguish to the reader. By disassociating from the events in front of her, Charlotte si­mul­ta­neously experiences the sublime and conveys it in evocative phrases: the agony of “tearing the cords of life,” “bleeding at ­every vein,” having a “heart torn in a thousand pieces,” and being “ruined,” all speak directly to eighteenth-­century theorizations of the concept. The passage even parallels Burke’s interest in ­people who “would croud to behold the ruins” of London with Charlotte’s “behold[ing]” of the “horrid sight” of her grieving m ­ other. Situated near the end of the text, this section delivers a climax of sorts, especially since Rowson immerses the narrator’s language in the lexicon of the sublime throughout the novel, observing the “dangerous arts” that ­w ill ensnare Charlotte, the “imminent danger” she ­faces, the “misery [of] the heart of one anxious parent,” the “anxiety of t­ hese affectionate parents [Mr.  and Mrs.  ­Temple],” the way in which Charlotte feels “distracted with terror and despair,” and how “Charlotte is held up as an object of terror.”56 Charlotte’s seduction proves affecting only insofar as she maintains influence over the reader via the terror, fear, pain, and anxiety she evokes. The sublime may not be explic­itly mentioned in the novel, but its presence is undeniable, although the way it grants Charlotte a sentimental sway has gone unremarked by critics. As a result of her seduction—­and her passivity at vari­ous points in the novel—­her character elicits the partial, instead of the complete, and the ruinous instead of the w ­ hole. Her literary ruins lead to her transformation into a ­human ruin. Yet such a decimation does not



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imply failure; rather, it indicates the presence of the unspeakable. Charlotte’s final moments in the novel prove to be an extension of her fractured voice within the destroyed letters. In the penultimate scene of the text, Charlotte gives her illegitimate baby to her f­ather, who has arrived from ­England: “ ‘Protect her,’ said she, ‘and bless your d ­ ying—’ Unable to finish the sentence, she sunk back on her pillow.”57 Charlotte’s death writes her out of f­ uture communities in E ­ ngland and in Amer­i­ca. She can neither return with her ­father to ­England, nor can she stay and establish a ­family in the new nation that is to come. Charlotte’s death scene also makes use of the rhetorical trope of aposiopesis, a device in which a character stops talking, a narrator halts mid-­ sentence, or an event occurs that interrupts a statement.58 Charlotte’s last piece of dialogue before her death consists of a final aposiopesis that provides a micro-­version of the broken, lost speech of her torn letters. While the reader might fill in a missing word from Charlotte’s statement—­the words “­daughter” or “Charlotte” are both strong candidates, to be sure—­a multitude of pos­si­ble completions exist. Her last moment exists as an indeterminate one, available to reinterpretations and recreations that make her identity kinetic rather than static. Collectively, Montraville and Belcour prevent Charlotte’s written words from reaching their destination, a set of actions that precipitate her ruination and lead to her unfinished statement. And, moreover, the lack of conclusion to Charlotte’s words indicate that—­like the novel itself which Rowson writes a sequel to—­Charlotte’s life traverses into the f­ uture in a hauntological fashion. Her words linger into the pre­sent and remain open to futurity. Such unfinished sentiments are not rejected by Rowson, but rather embraced, as her own narrative takes that very shape on a larger scale. She subtly makes her penchant for partiality evident in the opening pages. In the preface to the novel, Rowson writes that she pre­sents her work in “an imperfect state” and “­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.”59 Rowson introduces her readers to Charlotte with this statement, giving it a location of prominence prior to the novel itself, and her language h ­ ere is telling. A “trifle” is, as Samuel Johnson’s dictionary defines it, “a t­ hing of no moment,” and something “trifling” is “wanting worth; unimportant; wanting weight.”60 On the one hand, Rowson plays into conventional tropes of female writing that denigrate the author and the work of art by calling her own carefully

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crafted novel a “trifle.” On the other hand, she preferentially asserts a style of writing that opposes itself to the “most elegant finished piece of lit­er­a­ ture.” Even from the start of the novel, Rowson elaborates an aesthetic sympathy with unfinished forms, one that closely rhymes with what the narrator calls “the untimely fate of the lovely Charlotte T ­ emple.”61

The Tombstone of the Coquette Like Charlotte ­Temple, Hannah Webster Foster’s 1797 epistolary novel, The ­ oman through the use of ruptured Coquette, seeks to reconfigure a ruined w speech. Yet Foster goes even further than Rowson in the attention she gives to the fragmented writings of her tragic protagonist, Eliza Wharton. While Charlotte’s aposiopesis at the end of her life implies her last words and completes her statement in a haphazard way, Eliza’s final deathbed writings offer an even less lucidly delineated mode of expression. Contrary to the events presented in Charlotte ­Temple, in which the seducers destroy Charlotte’s letters and trigger her unfinished plea to her ­father, The Coquette demonstrates how Eliza’s seducer, ­family, and friends are all responsible for fragmenting her words and her writing. The damaging role of the libertine, Major Peter Sanford, goes beyond the single man who ruins Eliza, extending instead to her entire community. Through the absence of Eliza’s voice within the latter half of the novel, Foster articulates a form of female agency that harnesses a ruined and sublime passivity; the text thus stands as a counterpoint to systems of oppressive power that seek to assign blame to the victim. This patriarchal viewpoint is made clear at the end of the novel. Foster’s text concludes with Eliza’s engraved tombstone (figure 7), which dispenses a brief moral for her tale of seduction. The writing on the tombstone emphasizes Eliza’s honorable character, the “superior acquirements,” and the “uncommon tenderness” that distinguished her life.62 It provides a well-­intentioned perspective, but the commemoration also makes Eliza legible according to conventional strictures of didacticism. In contrast, near the end of her life, Eliza moves herself out of the spotlight and communicates using fragments of writing that include partial letters, abbreviated messages, and “miscella­ fter the socially acceptable Reverend Boyer rejects neous reflections.”63 A Eliza’s offer of love and the rakish Major Sanford successfully seduces her, she silently removes herself from her community, withdraws from her epistolary network, and retreats from day-­to-­day interactions. Eliza’s fragmented

Figure 7. Hannah Webster Foster, The Coquette; Or, The History of Eliza Wharton; A Novel; Founded on Fact. Boston: Printed by Samuel Etheridge, for E. Larkin, 1797, 260. Courtesy Albert and Shirley Small Collections Library, University of ­Virginia.

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writings diverge from the kind of discourse exemplified by the description on the tombstone—­one that constructs her history as fully legible. Even if the written fragments that she creates are not explic­itly produced on the page, their very absence clarifies the means by which Eliza’s friends, ­family, and seducer dampen her voice. Just as Charlotte ­Temple’s main character lingers through her aposiopesis, Eliza’s unlocatable and unfinished words associate her with the tradition of the sublime and emphasize the power of her ruinous existence. While previous studies of The Coquette have mentioned the missing ele­ ment of Eliza’s final texts in passing, their absence is much more than a mere plot device. They ultimately distort the unity of the novel’s narrative structure.64 By including a description of Eliza’s fragments in the story but excluding them from the discourse itself—­which, as an epistolary narrative, is ostensibly controlled by Eliza’s friends—­Foster emphasizes the extent to which Eliza lacks control over the telling of her own story. In order to understand Foster’s sense of ruined identity, I argue, it is necessary to investigate the fact that Eliza’s final writings are reported by other characters, but not reproduced for the reader, unlike her other letters. The tragedy is thus not ­limited to a physical ruination; it represents a linguistic one as well, one that marks the extent of Eliza’s discursive powers. And, most importantly perhaps, ­these lost words not only signify Eliza’s fragmentation, but the intentional way in which Foster undercuts the unity of her own novel, adopting what Rowson calls a “trifle” that contrasts with the “elegant” and “finished” style. The novel does not wholly eliminate fragmentary words from its confines, and Foster stresses the importance of Eliza’s suppressed language in response to the totalizing perspective of the tombstone. The remainder of the chapter attempts to conform to Eliza’s own hidden and fragmented self-­representations, which are crucial to understanding her character and her sublime power. As Julia Stern comments, “Silence itself becomes an expressive venue when ­there is no audible space for dissent.”65 ­Because the ending of the novel pre­sents fragments that are mentioned but not depicted—­Eliza’s language only survives through references that do not result in the appearance of words—­she only exists through the elusive syntax of a fragmentary identity. She withdraws from society and, in her wake, leaves b ­ ehind remains which pre­sent her as unnamable and unreadable, placing her outside of the era’s gendered conscriptions. Through t­ hese partial communications, Eliza adopts what Andrew Bennett calls “self-­ defensive strategies of self-­effacement.”66 To be sure, Eliza’s ruptured lan-



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guage expresses her position as one of recessive action and non-­liberal identity, a formulation that Jacques Khalip refers to as a “radically impersonal and dispossessed” kind of life, one that “resists the requirement to inhabit a social category and remains open to change and redescription.”67 Such a state of being leads to what he calls “romantic constructions of impoverished subjects, absented from social recognition and self-­ display, [who] became instances of new potentialities that found ethical and aesthetic value.”68 ­These openings to “change and redescription” and “new potentialities” play a major role at the end of the novel, when all that remains of Eliza’s words are her fragmented and unreported writings—­key instances of the “self-­effacement” that structure Eliza’s identity and the novel itself. While Eliza’s voice proves to be garrulous in the first half of the novel, this talkative style only serves to create a more severe contrast with her increasing silence ­after the seduction. Time and again before Sanford seduces her, Eliza writes letters to her friends and ­family that express her wish to “not confine myself in any way,” a statement of freedom that baffles the social expectations of ­t hose around her.69 As Ivy Schweitzer has pointed out, Eliza focuses her efforts on establishing friendships in distinction to marriage, the former being the kind of relationship which allows her to “be si­mul­ta­neously in­de­pen­dent and attached, admiring spectator and enthusiastic participant, aware of the center but not . . . ​centered or fixed.”70 Vying against the chorus of female voices that constantly peppers her with letters of advice and recommendations to marry the tedious Reverend Boyer, Eliza resists a state of de­pen­dency by holding her suitors at bay and maintaining an “in­de­pen­dent” situation as long as pos­si­ble.71 She fluently states this desire for in­de­pen­dence to her network of friends via epistolary communication, and her voice clearly dominates the early parts of the novel. In response, her friends and ­family express concern that Eliza’s desire to maintain an active and unattached social life interferes with her other­wise moral constitution. When the unthinkable fi­nally happens—­the socially suitable but overly sanctimonious and monitorial Boyer decides to wash his hands of Eliza and her fickle decision-­making—­she falls into a deep despair and Foster increasingly diminishes Eliza’s voice in the remainder of the novel.72 ­After Boyer’s rejection and Sanford’s subsequent seduction, Eliza increasingly contracts herself, refusing to engage any longer via epistolary correspondence, even with Lucy Sumner and Julia Granby, her closest friends. In this way, Foster short-­circuits the possibility of sentimental connectivity

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between Eliza and her community. Eliza explic­itly details her withdrawal: “Writing is not so agreeable to me as it used to be. I love my friends as well as ever; but I think they must be weary of the gloom and dulness which pervades my pre­sent correspondence. When my pen ­shall have regained its original fluency and alertness, I ­w ill resume and prolong the pleasing task.”73 Instead of returning to her correspondence, Eliza continues her retreat from society ­because, as she says, “Writing is an employment, which suits me not at pre­sent.”74 All she comments on is how the aftermath of her seduction “harrows up my very soul,” using an agricultural meta­phor of plowed and broken earth to convey her sense of being mentally fractured by the event.75 As her friends and ­family repeatedly inquire into her condition, Eliza eventually leaves her home and retires to Salem to avoid unwanted gazes. Only Sanford is aware of her location, and it is only in her d ­ ying moments that Eliza tries to get back in touch with her friends and f­amily. But rather than revealing Eliza’s submission, ­t hese final written ruins prove to be unreadable and resistant to interpretation, located beyond the discourse of the text. Foster thus creates an asymmetrical novel in which Eliza’s presence is larger than life in the early parts of the narrative, only to dissipate and nearly vanish ­after the seduction. It is an asymmetry that takes place through the very character and voice of Eliza. In a way, Eliza becomes a minor character over the course of the novel, to borrow a concept from Alex Woloch, transitioning by the text’s end into one of the “subordinate beings who are delimited in themselves while performing a function for someone ­else.”76 In the early stages of the novel, she is singled out b ­ ecause of her centrality; as the text progresses, she is singled out ­because of her absence. Indeed, at the conclusion of The Coquette, Eliza is completely “delimited” while her friends use her tombstone to perform “a function for” the community at large. Yet the “social problematic” of the minor character, as Woloch describes it, becomes “a socio-­narrative” one as Eliza dis­appears into her fragments.77 While Eliza might not be a conventional example of the “minor character”—­a ­great deal of narrative space is devoted to her, even while it comes through the language of ­others—­her missing voice creates a notable gap in her final characterization. Perhaps what is so discernable in The Coquette might also be said of the novel of seduction more generally: that by the end of most texts that examine the ruination of w ­ omen, the main character is no longer the central personage precisely ­because she is written out of the text. Seduction novels establish their appeal by turning main characters into minor



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ones by the end of the story, the implication being that friends, f­ amily, and successive generations must carry on the tale. At the same time, Foster—­and Rowson before her—­indicates that the ruined language of t­ hese characters punctures such a structure of conclusive finality on the level of narrative, carry­ing figures like Charlotte and Eliza forward into the f­ uture. To return to Bennett’s phrase, ­these “self-­defensive strategies of self-­ effacement” begin with Eliza’s preference for silence and transform into an even more poignant rejoinder when she creates fragmented writing on her deathbed. Though an unlikely source of the sublime, Eliza’s written remains actually serve to recall the notions of partiality and ruination so central to the evocative power of Burkean aesthetic discourse. Focusing on Eliza’s final material texts endows her tragedy with its own significance, emphasizing the weight of her emotional and physical trauma. Her suppressed epistles help clarify and give prominence to her comment to Lucy Sumner that she feels absolutely broken down and “shipwrecked on the shoals of despair!” 78 For Foster, Eliza’s sense of being fragmented and stranded serves as an indication that the culture of epistolary sentiment—so dominant during this period—­cannot fully account for Eliza’s harrowing emotional life. The fragmented texts that Eliza creates contradict Revered Boyer’s superficial assertion that “the disappointments of ­human life” are “legibly written on ­every page of our existence.”79 In contrast, Eliza’s experience gives testimony to the paradoxical expressiveness of a silence which is deeply embedded in a ruinous sublimity.

Eliza’s Sublime Ruins Eliza’s status as a ruined w ­ oman achieves its force from fragmentary writing that opposes her restrictive community. However, instead of actively defying the ideological forces that seek to confine her, Eliza finds another way of responding. Her broken language functions as the antithesis to the coherent, tombstone-­version of her life that her friends wish to proj­ect. Reacting to her legibility throughout the first half of the novel, Eliza shrouds her identity by using fragmentation to define herself in a nonnormative fashion. Such a rejoinder is embedded, too, in discourses of sublimity throughout the era, nearly all of which comment on the power of dif­fer­ent forms of privation. The Earl of Shaftesbury, for one, notes in the early eigh­teenth c­ entury that natu­ral spaces can exist as a “noble Ruin,” and observes that “­Here

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Space astonishes. Silence it-­self seems pregnant; whilst an unknown Force works on the Mind.”80 For Shaftesbury, the ruins naturally found in the world instill a sense of “Silence” that works on the mind in a mysterious, “unknown” way. Other philosophical texts from the period, too, comment on the sway of “Silence.” Most influentially, perhaps, Burke writes that, “All general privations are ­great, b ­ ecause they are terrible,” including ones such as “Vacuity, Darkness, Solitude and Silence,” several of which play into Eliza’s self-­ representations as the text progresses.81 Her status is si­mul­ta­neously “­great” and “terrible” for readers, encouraging an admiration for her character at the same time that she eludes any clear designation ­because her life becomes nearly absent from the text as she retreats into solitude. Several de­cades ­after Burke, Hugh Blair, in his Lectures on Rhe­toric and Belles Lettres, similarly observes that “it is proper to remark, that all ideas of the solemn and awful kind, and even bordering on the terrible, tend greatly to assist the Sublime; such as darkness, solitude, and silence.”82 While philosophical accounts of the sublime make it seem like an easy task to identify “darkness, solitude, and silence” in the natu­ral world and in art, The Coquette shows a slow, progressive accretion of such qualities that creep into the text quietly. In contrast to the event of Eliza’s death and the description of the tombstone, the moments of silence are not overt and dramatic; they do not announce themselves with aplomb. Over the course of the novel, Eliza diminishes herself in a way that becomes—­paradoxically and through the logic of the sublime—­quite power­f ul. Literary historians prefer to avoid focusing on her remains in the novel in ­favor of the documents that Foster used to compose the fiction. They routinely cite the newspaper account of the writings left over at Elizabeth Whitman’s death, the w ­ oman who provided Foster with a factual model for Eliza. ­After Whitman’s untimely death in a roadside tavern in Danvers, Mas­sa­ chu­setts, periodicals and newspapers throughout the region immediately published articles describing her life and death, even printing and reprinting a poem written by Whitman before she died. Th ­ ese realities certainly deepen a contextual understanding of The Coquette, but surely the description of what Eliza leaves ­behind in the novel merits study.83 Yet no critic has closely examined Eliza Wharton’s written remains. The attention to the historical rec­ord which is available to researchers as an object for analy­sis overshadows Eliza’s final fragmented writings, which are understated in the novel and difficult to locate. A comparable prob­lem arises in Page duBois’s



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analy­sis of the poetic fragments of Sappho. As she describes it, “The art of reading is problematized in the encounter with t­hese fragments, as the reader is made to confront her desire, her desires for w ­ holeness, for more, 84 for coherence, for linear, narrative familiarity.” Ignoring fragments reveals how our “interpretive practices,” in duBois’s words, are “based on the desire for a w ­ hole always out of reach, denying the fragmentary nature of all cultural artifacts.”85 While the study of Whitman’s death and the documents surrounding it offer the potential for a satisfying historical “­wholeness,” Eliza’s writings short-­circuit this desire. Even if late eighteenth-­century readers of The Co­ quette came to the novel with the recent event of Elizabeth Whitman’s death in their minds, this fact did not change Foster’s emphasis on Eliza’s unreadable fragmentation. Instead of connecting Eliza’s remains to the remains of Whitman—­who did leave scraps of writing ­behind, including a posthumously published poem—­Foster makes it clear that Eliza’s f­ amily and friends suppress the fragments, thereby pushing her readers to consider Eliza’s writing as a unique, fictional event.86 History makes the fiction pos­si­ble, but Foster does not stay circumscribed to Whitman’s story and her death. Disconnected from an overt comparison to Whitman’s writings, Eliza’s textual fragments at the end of the novel only refer to her own position as a silenced person. Foster demonstrates the intertwining of fragments and silence in Eliza’s last interaction with Sanford, in a moment just before she composes her final pieces of writing. As Eliza nears her impending death, she tells Sanford that he should give up his libertine ways, and she imagines that her “unhappy story [might] serve as a beacon to warn the American fair of the dangerous tendency and destructive consequences of associating with men of your character, of destroying their time, and risking their reputation by the practice of coquetry and its attendant follies!”87 In this section of dialogue, Eliza seems to surrender to the viewpoint of the female community by condemning her own be­hav­ior and urging a didactic reading of her experiences. Unlike the longevity of the tombstone, however, this ephemeral, vocalized lesson quickly fades away into silence. Foster depicts the power­f ul effect of the speech on Sanford, an effect that anticipates the ruinous fragmentation in Eliza’s coming days: “I begged leave to visit her retirement next week, not in continuation of our amour, but as a friend, solicitous to know her situation and welfare. Unable to speak, she only bowed assent. The stage being now ready, I whispered some tender t­hings in her ear, and kissing her cheek,

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which was all she would permit, suffered her to depart. My body remains ­behind; but my soul, if I have any, went with her! . . . ​I hope, when she recovers, she ­w ill resume her former cheerfulness, and become as kind and agreeable as ever.”88 Sanford, much like Eliza’s community of friends, wants Eliza to “resume her former cheerfulness,” ignoring the tragedy and suffering she has endured, and erasing it from any rec­ord of her life. Eliza marks her own inability to return to her previous mood when she turns from her didactic lesson to Sanford to stand silently and “[bow] assent,” performing a minimal physical gesture indicative less of an active agency than of the “self-­ defensive . . . ​self-­effacement” described by Bennett in his account of femininity in the romantic period. This minimal gesture, an emblem of her linguistic absence, ruptures Sanford’s mind and body. As if in sympathy, Sanford reacts to Eliza’s lecture and to her departure by breaking apart his own constitution. His “body remains ­behind” but his “soul” takes off and follows Eliza on her painful journey. The seconds of lingering—­the bow of assent, the whisper of “some tender ­t hings in her ear,” the kiss on her cheek—­a ll constitute a recognition of Eliza’s imminent departure; however, the affectionate rituals of leave-­taking function through silence (the bow, the kiss) and unrecorded, inaudible speech (the whisper). The result of the didactic lesson Eliza gives is not one of piecing together, but of falling apart, a logic that contradicts conventional views presented in ­ fter she dis­appears from her ­house, Sanford reports sentimental novels.89 A on one of the last pieces of Eliza’s writing, telling his close friend and correspondent, Charles Deighton, that “she chose to go where she was totally unknown. She would leave the stage, she said, before it reached Boston, and take passage in a more private carriage to Salem, or its vicinity, where she would fix her abode; chalking the initials of my name over the door, as a ­ ecause Eliza focuses on her privacy and signal to me of her residence.”90 B tries to travel incognito, she writes in a medium that can easily be expunged. Chalk would be subject to virtually any form of erasure: wind, rain, or a multitude of other external forces might break apart the particles of writing and make the initials dis­appear. No longer inscribing letters with ink that could be preserved, copied, typeset, and published, Eliza’s writing lasts barely long enough to send its message. This re­sis­tance to permanence works in conjunction with Eliza’s move away from lasting, readable language in letter form. And, in a novel so focused on the epistolary, the initials Eliza writes on the doorframe—­P.S.—­not only indicate Peter Sanford, her libertine



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seducer, but also “postscript,” the afterthought or fragment of information that comes a­ fter the body of a letter. In this case, the addendum—­ostensibly trivial, unimportant, and tacked on at the end ­after the primary content has already been discussed—­might contain the most valuable information. Eliza uses it, a­ fter all, to refer to her own location. In an epistolary novel that itself contains no postscripts, Eliza’s self-­ representation as “P.S.” shows how she places herself outside of what is locatable, recognizable, and legible. That Eliza signals her physical location by a P.S. divulges the fact that she views herself as occupying the same situation as a momentarily forgotten or fragmentary piece of information. In contrast to this recessive positionality, the novel’s final tombstone shows how Eliza’s community takes up what it sees as the didactic ele­ments of her life, without acknowledging the end of her life as unrecognizable. They depict her as legible, rather than as indecipherable. This collective forgetting also takes the form of active suppression ­after Eliza has died: Eliza’s ­brother has been to visit her last retreat; and to learn the particulars of her melancholy exit. He relates, that she was well accommodated, and had ­every attention and assistance, which her situation required. . . . ​Mr.  Wharton has brought back several scraps of her writing, containing miscellaneous reflections on her situation, the death of her babe, and the absence of her friends. Some of ­t hese ­were written before, some a­ fter her confinement. Th ­ ese valuable testimonies of the affecting sense, and calm expectation she entertained of her approaching dissolution, are calculated to sooth and comfort the minds of mourning connections. They greatly alleviate the regret occasioned by her absence, at this awful period.91 It is striking that the novel provides e­ very letter Eliza wrote to her community except the ones composed at her death, the very writings “calculated to sooth and comfort the minds of mourning connections.” And it is h ­ ere that Eliza’s minority—in Woloch’s sense—­becomes apparent. Her characterization still looms over the final pages of the novel, but the “narrative’s continual apportioning of attention” to the voices of her ­family and friends makes it obvious that they are the only ones who can speak in the closing pages.92 If anything, it might be assumed that Eliza’s friends, so heavi­ly invested in the didactic proj­ect of turning her life into an exemplary one, would want to reveal to the world Eliza’s graceful exit from her life with her “valuable

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testimonies,” her “affecting sense,” and the “calm expectation” she showed when faced with death. Strangely, they only briefly recount the contents, simply commenting on the reassuring nature of the “scraps” while neglecting to cite Eliza’s own words that they have in hand. But even though her friends obscure the content of the writing, the comment that they contained “miscellaneous reflections” confirms their fragmentary style. As a result, Eliza experiences fragmentation in several ways: she suffers physical ruination at the hands of Sanford; her compositions take on the materiality of “scraps” of paper; and the sentiments ­t hose pieces contain are described as “miscellaneous.” Yet Lucy Sumner’s letter also uses aty­pi­cal phrasing to portray Eliza’s demise. The description of Eliza’s death as an “approaching dissolution” does suggest some minimal recognition of Eliza’s multiply imbricated state of ruination. The word “dissolution” conveys a separation of a ­whole into its component parts in several ways: Noah Webster’s 1828 dictionary lists the usage in politics (the disincorporation of an assembly or congress), natu­ral science (changing from a solid to a fluid state), corporeality (reducing a body into its parts), and h ­ uman life (the separation of the soul and the body).93 By the end of The Coquette, Eliza’s body, writing material, and writing style approach a state of dissolution that conveys her ­silent—­and sublime—­presence within the novel. The final pages of the text are suffused with bits of information about her that nonetheless lack any precise recapitulation of her movements, words, and emotions. The depiction of the concealed writing as “several scraps . . . ​containing miscellaneous reflections” indicates the unfinished, incomplete state of Eliza’s mind at her death. Like the implication of her existence as a postscript, the “scraps” of writing and “miscellaneous reflections” puncture the orderly construction of Eliza’s story, and introduce a formal repre­sen­ta­tion of her death that breaks off from the coherent, sentimental ideology symbolized by her tombstone. The “dissolution” of Eliza’s body, her material pages, and her words exist within the story of The Coquette, but none of them are reproduced within the discourse. As readers, we know that certain ­things happen to Eliza—­her seduction and her composition of t­ hese final fragments—­even though they do not actually appear written in the text except through circumlocution. ­These notable absences can be directly ascribed to the way that Julia Granby and Lucy Sumner suppress Eliza’s last words, since the two of them are ostensibly in control of the dissemination of information within the concluding letters. But Foster has another goal in mind. She uses the epistolary community that surrounds Eliza to construct a legible con-



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clusion (unmistakably symbolized by the tombstone on the last page); nevertheless, she maintains the indeterminacy surrounding Eliza by leaving her final words unspoken and in a fragmented state. In a paradoxical way, this absence within the structure of the novel tilts the easy morality provided at the ending by Eliza’s friends, countering it with the potential of what Eliza said in ­those lost moments. ­After all, the goal of Eliza’s community as expressed on the tombstone is to make her an exemplar, and to be an exemplar one must be legible as a figure, a type reproducible by ­others in society. Foster’s insertion of lost language ensures that Eliza can never completely embody the kind of exemplarity expected by her community.

Postscript In delineating the difference between “fracture” and “fragmentation” in romantic lit­er­a­ture, Alexander Regier describes the former as “a break that is located on a structural level. It is not a pro­cess, and does not encompass a temporal ele­ment in that sense. Rather, it is a rupture of a structural and logical kind, a break that acts as an unbridgeable division between two spheres.”94 The latter, then, is “a pro­cess. Even though it can be final, it is defined by a series of changes. It is the unfolding of a break that happens ­either once or over and over again.”95 ­Because Foster does not pre­sent Eliza’s written fragments in the novel, the unfinished form of her writing generates a temporal pro­cess of fragmenting “over and over again” in considerations of her character. Sanford’s fracture takes place on a material level—­his estate falls into shambles and creditors harass him at ­every turn. His deterioration seems reactive and a bit foolish; Eliza’s, on the other hand, reaches for something entirely dif­fer­ent, something that cannot be located. As she comments in her final reproduced letter, “I cannot write all my full mind suggests on this subject.”96 Much like the sense of hauntology described in ­earlier pages, Eliza’s remains exist in “a place/non-­place between presence and absence, appearance and disappearance,” in the words of Prendergast.97 They are referred to in the story but not disclosed, making their content and meaning perpetually open to interpretation. While Foster’s placement of Eliza’s ruinous writings within The Coquette does not prove to be an ideologically aligned and explic­itly articulated form of po­liti­cal critique, it does ensure that her protagonist cannot be conclusively interpreted. Unexpectedly, this might be the strongest way in which

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Foster creates a female identity that is not delimited, but unbounded and outside of categorization. The ruinous tragedy that befalls Eliza generates a mutable legacy extending into the f­ uture, not a fixed one. Foster’s characterization of Eliza and her invention of Eliza’s fragments thus deliver a startling form of re­sis­tance in the early republic: Eliza provides a fictional template that proposes an ave­nue of response for ­women who could not openly rebel. ­Because a market-­oriented individualism was the professed domain of men, female individuality needed recourse to the alternative identity represented by Eliza’s model of fragmentation.98 The tombstone epitaph composed by Eliza’s community gives the sense that her life and actions come to a sharp and definite conclusion, yet Foster’s references to the suppressed writings indicate that Eliza’s story and her life remain undefined. Even at the end of the novel, Eliza Wharton’s life remains a fragmented story. The last reported moments of her life exist in tension with the conclusion of the text. At the same time, Foster does open a potential door to Eliza’s compositions. Our collective inattention to the fragments of writing that are interwoven in so many eighteenth-­century texts has led scholars to overlook what appears to be a single, pos­si­ble repre­sen­ta­tion of Eliza’s unfinished inscriptions. A ­ fter Julia Granby briefly mentions the “several scraps of her writing, containing miscellaneous reflections on her situation,” she goes on to state that Eliza’s “elopement can be equalled only by the infatuation which caused her ruin.”99 The pieces of writing left at Eliza’s death are brought into close alignment with her status as a ruined ­women; however, what follows proves even more in­ter­est­ing, a verse quotation that reads, But let no one reproach her memory. Her life has paid the forfeit of her folly. Let that suffice.100 No modern editor has currently identified the source for this quotation. While the novel cites from a range of unattributed eighteenth-­century texts, ­every other extract has an identifiable origin. Th ­ ese three lines of poetry, included by Julia Granby right next to her description of Eliza’s literary ruins, might indicate that some of Eliza’s own words are, in an anonymous and muted fashion, presented in the epistle. ­There are no attributing nor distinguishing notes for the quotation. Eliza’s words—if they are, indeed, hers—­stand unmarked and uninterpreted at



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the end of the novel. The verse lends itself to two significations. On the one hand, the lines are closely tied to the intimacy of Eliza’s death b ­ ecause they recognize her impending demise, thereby bringing the reader into close proximity with her final moments. On the other hand, they indicate a detachment from her community and, in par­tic­u­lar, a re­sis­tance to the “reproach” that her life might elicit and which her friends conduct through her tombstone. H ­ ere, Foster suggests that her life is sufficient to answer for her actions. ­These are not the final words of the novel, but they divulge—­ perhaps—­a more poignant means of representing the end of her life than the tombstone. The brief fragment of writing displays an acknowl­edgment of her “folly” without capitulating to the “reproach” of her community: her ruinous life and writing must simply “suffice.”

CHAPTER 4

Biblical Economy and the Miracle of the Loaves and Fish

When the pastor James Dana gave an election sermon for the general assembly of the state of Connecticut in 1779, he used his public platform to expound on the necessity for separation from E ­ ngland. He wanted to ignite his auditors with the spirit of American in­de­pen­dence. In the years before the Revolution, Dana’s communal standing had suffered due to his association with the liberalized theologies of revivalism coming out of Boston during the religious controversy between the “Old Lights” and the “New Lights,” even though he held a comfortable position as the pastor of the Congregational church in Wallingford, Connecticut. Yet the tumult of the war gave him a fresh opportunity to regain the support of his peers, and his fervent appeals for in­de­pen­dence made him a highly regarded voice throughout the entire colony. He even became the pastor of the first church in New Haven in 1789 as a result of his popularity during the revolutionary years.1 Of the many points that he made in his 1779 election sermon, Dana repeatedly insisted that separating the colonies from E ­ ngland would improve morality and uphold God’s providential vision. This was a tried-­and-­true method in revolutionary sermons; New ­England preachers who ­were pro-­ independence almost universally depicted ­England as a despotic and de­ cadent place that threatened to corrupt the American colonies. In Dana’s view, E ­ ngland’s monarchical and hierarchical depravity needed to be avoided at all costs in the establishment of a government in Amer­i­ca: “Detested be the thought of supporting a few individuals in magnificence and dissipation on the spoils of an industrious ­people. . . . ​We may date the loss of liberty from the time we lose our equality. Bribery, corruption and tyranny prevail wherever luxury doth, and nearly in the same proportion.”2 To prevent the



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noxious desire for luxury from taking root, Dana even goes as far as hinting at the establishment of sumptuary laws for legislators, who could then provide a model of be­hav­ior for the populace of the new nation: “Their simplicity of manners ­w ill be followed. Frugality should be reputable in a christian commonwealth. For our Lord hath taught us to gather up the fragments, that nothing be lost.”3 ­After his invocation to “gather up the fragments,” Dana proceeds to immediately reassure the general assembly that he is “persuaded t­ here is not a legislature on earth entitled to fuller confidence than that I have the honor to address.”4 He intends his statements not as an admonishment of current conditions but as a pos­si­ble course of action for the f­ uture. Despite his reassurance, the transgressive impulse of his sermon scaffolds an advocacy of frugality, simplicity, and anti-­elitist equality. The basis of Dana’s logic does not, however, stem from the passion of the revolutionary years. It instead originates with the biblical command to “gather up the fragments, that noth­ ing be lost,” a verse from the only miracle recorded by all four Gospels of the New Testament, in which Christ feeds thousands of followers ­after saying a blessing over five loaves of barley and two fish. He then divides up the loaves and fish, distributing the pieces to the p ­ eople who are sitting near him. A ­ fter they eat, he tells his disciples to go among the crowd and “gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost”; following his request, “they gathered them up, and from the fragments of the five barley loaves, left by ­t hose who had eaten, they filled twelve baskets.”5 The disciples find, much to their astonishment, that the crumbs provide a surplus of food that ­w ill nourish the crowd of followers. The miraculous event also serves to confirm their collective faith in Christ: “When the p ­ eople saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, ‘This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world.’ ”6 An economy of physically “gather[ing]” up the fragments is thereby linked to spiritual replenishment. Even the tiniest crumb of food proves crucial in the feeding of the multitude, as the miracle came to be known. Christ’s invocation to “gather up the fragments” stresses a prudence that works to preserve all of that which is left over. The passage highlights the leftovers, the remains, and the detritus, all of the ­things that would normally be swept away without a thought ­after a meal, centering attention on the practice of economy over jointly held goods. Through a display of careful frugality, the apostles assist Christ in producing a surplus of food for the larger population. They invert the triviality of detritus by endowing it with a greater presence that helps to meet the

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appetite of the community. Though appearing small, insignificant, and unimportant, fragments take on a power­ful and miraculous existence when they are collected together. This logic—in which an insignificant part transforms into something consequential—­mirrors the way in which typography and sublime ruins generate meaning out of an injured soldier or a fallen ­woman, as we have seen in e­ arlier chapters. Yet the previous texts analyzed in this study did not necessarily mark a concise path for reform, emphasizing instead how fragmentary figures existed in a liminal, albeit flexible, positionality. In contrast, throughout the romantic period the feeding of the multitude served as an exemplum that stressed praxis alongside the more abstract goal of representing marginalized bodies. Reformers used the miracle to appeal directly to their readers, entreating a rethinking of society in the name of po­liti­cal pro­gress. Such a mode of address can be seen in Dana’s sermon, which conveys the stakes of failure to his audience by making the prob­lem immediate and urging them to act. Should the influx of luxury lead to “bribery, corruption and tyranny,” as he suggests, then the nascent freedoms of the rebelling Americans w ­ ill falter, and the new nation w ­ ill simply replicate the immoralities of the En­glish. This backsliding goes against the frugal and egalitarian values stipulated by scripture, and also perpetuates a system of in­equality that ­w ill inevitably lead to the “loss of liberty.” The preventative mea­sure, in Dana’s view, is the religious economy of fragments, which provides a cornerstone for his vision of American society. Through the equitable collection and distribution of goods, equality and liberty can be protected and the “industrious p ­ eople” of Amer­i­ca w ­ ill flourish. For Dana, the success of the po­liti­cal system depends not on geography, military power, or liberal or republican thought, but on a concept of biblical economy inspired by Christ’s miracle. His followers, then, must act on that princi­ple. The church h ­ ouse was decidedly not the only place where early Americans encountered descriptions of the miracle of the loaves and fish. Condensed summaries of the verse appeared in a wide range of manuscripts, printed media, and oratories. It was a common component of letters, essays, sermons, poetry, and stories in revolutionary Amer­i­ca and the early republic, and the extracted phrase “gather up the fragments” appeared even more broadly.7 As Elizabeth Wanning Harries puts it in her consideration of the fragment in British lit­er­a­ture, “The reverberations of the biblical passage ­were in the air, both in religious and in more purely literary circles.”8 According to Harries, descriptions of the miracle ­were employed in Britain as



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a meta­phor for gathering together biblical quotations and knowledge more generally; however, in the United States, such allusions ­were used as a way of inciting action on behalf of the marginalized. The recurrence of the feeding of the multitude in the writing of the era indicates the degree to which audiences both recognized and responded to its moral commands. While the discourses of typography and sublime ruination explored in previous chapters ­were surely ingrained in American culture, the religious rehearsals surveyed ­here formed an even more central part of everyday life. The invocation to “gather up the fragments” was deployed in a way that testified to the substantive attention given to the concept of fragments. Dana’s sermon at once affirms the importance of the biblical verse for the colonies—­its impor­tant role in rallying the revolutionary cause—­while also recommending a radical social reconfiguration through the demo­ cratizing and liberalizing force of the miracle. While writers like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine homed in on the former nationalistic usage of the religious miracle, it was far more often employed in the latter sense to pursue the improvement of the lower sort. Perhaps even more so than the other texts studied in American Fragments, the works that referenced the biblical passage concentrated on the plight of marginalized figures. They used a compassionate, Christian sentimentalism and a radical form of temporality to argue for the amelioration of living conditions. Just as works like Emma Corbett and The Coquette provided a corporeal basis for the fragment through the wounded soldier and the ruined w ­ oman, the fragments of food rooted the biblical miracle in a certain physicality, one that writers used as the foundation for their metamorphosis of personal identity. At the same time, while we have examined how writers deployed the spatiality of fragments in the embodied affect of typography and the spatiotemporal nature of ruins to provide an inventive vision of the self, the biblical miracle moves from the physicality of the loaves and fish to focus more exclusively on an optative vision of temporal change for individuals. The material improvement of individuals functions as a vital goal for interpreters of the miracle, but the concept of temporality postulates the specific means of change. Mathew Carey, for one, envisioned the pro­cess of “gathering up” through the magazine page. For him, the heterogeneous organ­ization of periodicals provided an especially fruitful ground for his concept of “gathering” together p ­ eople over time, a proj­ect which not only sought economic improvement but broader reforms for the ostracized in the ­future. Similarly, the establishment of a charity organ­ization called the “Fragment Society” and

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writings by Lydia Maria Child and Lydia Huntley Sigourney display how “gathering up the fragments” was a means to improve the social class of the lower sort, especially ­women. But unlike the mutability of the individual seen in ­earlier chapters, in the hands of Carey and o ­ thers the biblical miracle begins to construct a less fluid identity, one that culminates in the auto­ nomous subject of the nineteenth c­ entury. The commercial motivations of ­these writers point ­toward the emergence of the market-­oriented individual, a person who was fully enmeshed in a rapidly developing cap­i­tal­ist system. Yet such an idea is only incipient; texts that cite the miracle still center their concern on the ostracized. Despite the emergent liberal self, the texts explored in this chapter combine the economic and the biblical for progressive change, arguing that the preservational l­abor of gathering fragments yields miraculous results. The invocation of the miracle thus provides a culmination of the po­liti­cal work promised by the fragment, demonstrating how the form was used as a tool for imagining new f­ utures for the marginalized.

Franklin, Paine, and Po­liti­cal Piety Benjamin Franklin was surely one of the most influential commentators on American economy. From 1732 to 1758, he published the popu­lar Poor Rich­ ard, An Almanack, which provided readers with a calendar interlined with helpful counsel, puzzles, ­house­hold hints, and amusements. Among many other topics, the monthly publications describe the importance of frugality and the way to accumulate material wealth over time. Even the very first almanack begins with Richard Saunders—­Franklin’s famous pseudonym—­ explaining that he has begun the proj­ect b ­ ecause “I am excessive poor, and my Wife, good ­Woman, is, I tell her, excessive proud . . . ​and has threatned more than once to burn all my Books and Rattling-­Traps (as she calls my Instruments) if I do not make some profitable Use of them for the good of my ­Family.”9 Saunders begins his almanacks with a candid declaration of his own poverty and the need to make “profitable Use” of his books and scientific instruments for his ­family. The money promised to Saunders by selling the almanack ­will help him sustain his ­children and placate his wife. In addition, the text not only declares the relevance of economy, but visually exemplifies it through its use of space. Franklin (via Saunders) places poetry, bits of advice, and well-­k nown aphorisms at the top of the calendar, and squeezes phrases into the spaces in



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between dates and weather predictions so that the reader has to jump from fragment to fragment to piece together the complete statement. The act of “reading” Franklin’s almanack is not by any means seamless; the eye has to trace the lines carefully, looking for where the sentences pick up and drop off as they abruptly shift places. In a sharp difference from the lucid delineations of calendrical time and celestial movements described in the quantitative ele­ments of the publication, Franklin’s own advice has to be collected together by the reader—­until, of course, Franklin performs that l­abor himself with the printing of The Way to Wealth in 1758. Poor Richard, An Almanack was certainly not the only time that Franklin meditated on the value of amassing what might seem trivial. His attention to fragments and their biblical derivation came to the foreground when he considered the importance of thrift for families in the colonies. In a 1768 letter to the Philadelphia physician Cadwalader Evans, Franklin remarks on the need for Americans to focus on both agriculture and manufacturing in their daily lives: “In Families also where the c­ hildren and Servants of Farmers have some spare time, ’tis well to employ it in making something; and in Spinning or Knitting &c. to gather up the fragments (of Time) that nothing may be lost; for ­those Fragments tho’ small in themselves amount to something ­great in the year, and the ­Family must eat ­whether they work or are idle.”10 Crucially, Franklin interrupts the biblical axiom with a parenthetical—­ “(of Time)”—­that at once breaks up the line and modifies it for his own purposes. As if inserting a temporality of the pre­sent into the eternal biblical miracle, Franklin makes the verse relevant to the lives of colonials by discussing the moments of “spare time” that “­children and Servants of Farmers” experience throughout the day. Perhaps most meaningfully, Franklin confidently asserts that “Fragments tho’ small in themselves” can eventually “amount to something ­great in the year,” positing how minor, repetitive actions can accumulate wealth. Only through attention to ­free moments during the day can lives be altered in material ways. In Franklin’s hands, creating the physical surplus promised by the miracle of the loaves and fish requires the establishment of a temporal sense of extensive “gathering,” one that functions via an elongated timespan of economizing that proj­ects forward to the duration of an entire year (a calculation of collecting which could be carried forward even more). Like the broken lines of advice that appeared in each month of the almanack testifying to the careful use of space and the worth of paper, Franklin believed that small gaps of time should be actively gleaned and put to work.

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They should not be disdained, but highly valued for their utility. For Franklin, the “growth of money” functions in “a natu­ral and procreative pro­cess,” in the words of Mitchell Breitwieser, moving “along an arithmetical progression which can make the minuscule huge in a relatively short time.”11 The letter to Evans was only the first time Franklin mentioned the biblical miracle in an economic and temporal context. In 1774, the London writer George Whatley, a friend of Franklin’s with whom he corresponded a g­ reat deal, composed a pamphlet entitled Princi­ples of Trade. Franklin assisted Whatley with the composition of the text (though exactly how much is uncertain) and even wrote notes for the second edition; he told Whatley in a letter that “I find I have kept your original notes on the Princi­ples of Trade, ­those we agreed in, ­t hose I added, and ­those I dissented from, and ­were not published; moreover, some other ideas you favored me with. . . . ​I have prepared copies of t­ hose notes, and s­ hall hope to collate them with your grand­ son.”12 The notes mentioned by Franklin include an extended description of fragments of time that resonates closely with the letter he wrote to Evans, even mentioning spinning and knitting as admirable pursuits during unoccupied moments. Years ­after his epistle to Evans, Franklin continued to deploy references to the feeding of the multitude to accentuate the necessity of accruing the materials and minutes of daily life: Work that can be taken up, and laid down, often in a Day, without Damage; such as Spining, Kniting, Weaving, &c. are highly advantageous to a Comunity: ­because, in them, may be colected al the Produce of t­ hose Fragments of Time, that ocur in F ­ amily Busines, between the constant and necesary Parts of it, that usualy ocupy Females; as the Time between rising, and preparing Breakfast; between Breakfast, and preparing for Diner, &c. &c. The Amount of al ­these Fragments, is, in the Course of a Year, very considerable to a single F ­ amily; to a State proportionably. Highly profitable therefore it is, in this Case also, to folow that divine Direction, Gather up the Fragments that nothing be lost. Lost Time is lost Subsistence; it is therefore lost Trea­sure. Hereby in several F ­ amilys, many Yards of Linen have been produc’d from the Employment of t­ hese Fragments only, in one Year.13 The reference to the female ­labor of “Spining” and “Kniting” draws on Franklin’s letter to Evans, as does his emphasis on l­abor that can be completed in the brief moments of the day. For a more public audience, he also



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recaps the temporal meaning of fragments in Princi­ples of Trade, noting that “work that can be taken up, and laid down” like knitting and weaving, can be used to collect together the “Fragments of Time” that grow on a daily basis. However, the passage from Princi­ples of Trade pre­sents a more extended meditation on the nature of fragments than the letter to Evans. In the first place, Franklin’s repetition of the word “fragment” several times attests to its central role in his philosophy of economy. He also reiterates his temporal conception of fragments, viewing them as small increments of time within a day that can be harnessed in order to create a larger tapestry over the course of a year, or more. By carefully using all of the fragments of time, Franklin believes that a f­ amily can reap more “Produce” and accordingly attain greater “Subsistence,” protecting the economic integrity of the ­family unit and, he hopes, the “State.” While Franklin’s stress on the “highly profitable” nature of this activity for ­family and country demonstrates a pragmatist orientation, he also cites the biblical roots of his advice, telling his readers to “folow that divine Direction, Gather up the Fragments that nothing be lost.” Franklin’s invocation of the miracle brings together “divine Direction” with individual action and the larger national good over a course of time. The gathering of fragments only proves noticeable insofar as it is practiced over a span of a year or more, making the temporal ele­ment of the miracle paramount. While the physicality of the feeding of the multitude provides the basis for Franklin’s economics, and the improvement of material conditions functions as his goal, it is the temporality of “gathering” that provides the possibility for change. Though he does not go as far as Dana in his economic recommendations—­Dana’s interest in the preservation of equality and liberty through the equitable distribution of goods would have been too transgressive for Franklin’s matter-­of-­fact mindset—­Franklin certainly sees the gathering together of fragments as a potentially transformative act, one that can produce ramifications far beyond the individual spending time weaving or spinning. By twining together religious “Direction,” individual frugality, and temporal accrual, Franklin argues for a broad-­scale, miraculous change that alters the situation of a “State proportionably.” As Breitwieser mentions, Franklin acts as “a theorist of accumulation,” throughout the eigh­teenth ­century.14 From small collections of time, Franklin believes that large alterations can be miraculously wrought. The nationalistic interests subtending Franklin’s explanation of fragments come to the foreground in the work of his revolutionary collaborator—­and

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arch-­atheist—­Thomas Paine. Paine, too, made use of the biblical passage in the opening to his pamphlet “The American Crisis, Number III,” the third part of a number of “American Crisis” pamphlets he wrote in fervent encouragement of in­de­pen­dence. Paine employs the miracle to voice his support for the colonial war against E ­ ngland, arguing for the need for Americans to learn from their recent experiences. Like Franklin, he believes that the feeding of the multitude delineates a model for individual and national pro­ gress: “We [Americans] have crouded the business of an age into the compass of a few months, and have been driven through such a rapid succession of ­things [during the Revolution], that, for the want of leisure to think, we unavoidably wasted knowledge as we came, and have left nearly as much ­behind us as we brought with us: But the road is yet rich with the fragments, and, before we fully lose sight of them, w ­ ill repay us for the trou­ble of stopping to pick them up.”15 Paine’s appeal for American pro­gress almost certainly draws on the miracle of the loaves and fish, and the “rich” “fragments” collected by Christ’s disciples. “The American Crisis, Number III” worries that the “rapid succession of ­things” during the revolutionary years has “crouded the business of an age into the compass of a few months,” speeding up the movement of politics and thereby skipping over useful ideas. Only by slowing down and having the “leisure to think” can the populace collect the knowledge that they have left ­behind: the “fragments” that lie on the road, and are almost out of sight. Paine places weight on frugality and economy when he worries over the “rich” pieces of “wasted knowledge” left in the past. And, as with Franklin, he invokes a forthcoming temporal sense, observing that the gleaning of knowledge w ­ ill “repay us” (itself an economic turn of phrase) with a budding nationalism. He proj­ects into the ­future a vision of pro­gress for the American revolutionaries. Unlike Franklin, however, Paine does not include a complete reference to the biblical verse that includes “gather up the fragments,” nor does he reference the “divine Direction” issued by the command. The lack of such an explicit reference is not surprising, considering Paine’s l­ater crusades against institutionalized forms of religion, especially in The Age of Reason (1794), but his exclusion of the verse does not speak to an ideological aversion to the bible in this par­tic­u­lar text. It also does not signify any lack of awareness on Paine’s part of the scriptural pre­ce­dent. Throughout the rest of the pamphlet, he mentions the course of Providence and its influence on ­human action, and he continues to express the importance of frugality as a value for the colonies. Pieces of knowledge left ­behind must be preserved,



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and so too must the economic viability of the revolutionary cause: “This method of considering men and t­ hings together, opens into a large field for speculation, and affords me opportunity of offering some observations on the state of our currency.”16 To support the cause, Paine devises a system by which the paying of taxes to the Continental government w ­ ill help determine loyalty to in­de­pen­dence and make vis­i­ble the “set of avaricious miscreants, who would sacrifice the Continent to save themselves, or a banditti of hungry traitors, who are hoping for a division of the spoil.”17 ­Here, too, notions of economy—­and the individual’s ability to account for it—­prove central to the improvement of the national body. As writings by Franklin and Paine make clear, the biblical miracle could be invoked in a nationalistic fashion by upholding the economic viability of the individual and the ­family, and, therefore, the larger po­liti­cal body. Even by enacting change on a small scale, a g­ reat deal could be accomplished within a single year and in the time to come. Yet while a preacher like Dana would concur on almost all of the points made by Franklin and Paine, Dana’s use of the parable contains a dispersive sense of equality that the other two writers only lightly touch on. The primary concern in his election sermon is not necessarily the nation, but the consideration of what he calls the “industrious p ­ eople,” and the preservation of egalitarianism through the elimination of bribery and corruption. The interpretation of the feeding of the multitude within the sermon goes beyond a means of promoting in­de­ pen­dence and economic health; instead, it pre­sents an alternative po­liti­cal ideal based on distributive power. This sense of equality was not ­limited to Dana’s text. Other writers, especially in the post-­revolutionary years, conceived of the invocation to “gather up the fragments” not just as a means of spurring familial, communal, and national economies, but as a way to explic­ itly improve the general social order through the future-­oriented temporality of “divine Direction.”

The Temporality of Miraculous Fragments Writings by Franklin and Paine focus on the consolidation of nationalistic strength through an acquisitive accretion of material fragments over time; however, such a biblical economy could also be harnessed in a contrapuntal fashion. How did writers exploit such a proto-­capitalist model of individual accumulation in the ser­v ice of social reform? Franklin emphasizes the

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pro­cess of gathering up fragments of time for the ser­v ice of the country, but ­later writers adapted his descriptions to apply more specifically to marginalized individuals. Such authors employ the biblical verse in order to argue for the improvement of social conditions for the lower sort—­only through the verse’s miraculous temporality can the material lives of the destitute be improved. Crucially, this viewpoint was not l­ imited to a select few texts. While a wide variety of scriptural proverbs circulated continuously throughout the era’s print culture, the ubiquity of the feeding of the multitude gave it an aphoristic quality. Gary Saul Morson calls a statement with such traction a “wise saying,” a statement that “carr[ies] the sense of orality: they are say­ ings, what is said and what has been said, now and before the time of writing.”18 “Proverbs seem to step out of the historical pre­sent, out of history altogether, to speak the eternal,” Morson continues; “they carry the aura of endless time and universality of place.”19 This characteristic of stepping “out of the historical pre­sent” stems from the way in which the proverb made the biblical past and the pre­sent coalesce. The succinctness of a quotation like “gather up the fragments” helped distinguish it from other verses circulating in the period by providing writers and readers with an easily digestible command. And, to reiterate, it was the only miracle that appeared in all four of the New Testament Gospels, giving it a rather singular reputation. The verse could effortlessly be detached from the larger biblical account and used instead as an injunction to an audience. Simply by referencing the four words of scripture, writers and orators could express the principal message ­behind the miracle, rapidly conveying the “aura” that Morson describes. A host of colonial and American texts quoted directly or obliquely from the Gospel retellings of the miracle to generate this power­ful rhetorical effect, speaking directly to readers through an appeal that carried an authoritative “aura of endless time and universality of place.” Despite the transcendent impression contained within the phrase “gather up the fragments” and the way it brought the biblical past into the romantic pre­sent, it still always reached early republican audiences in a par­tic­u­lar historical context undergirded by con­temporary po­liti­cal stances, social mores, religious schisms, publishing practices, routes of dissemination, and a range of other exigencies. In fact, individuals who deployed the miracle worked to bring the sense of “endless time” into the specificity of their historical moment, not out of history altogether. ­After all, the force of Dana’s sermon and Paine’s pam-



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phlet would be severely attenuated without the immediate need to rally support for the war. Viewed through a dual temporality, the feeding of the multitude existed “now and before the time of writing”: both in the biblical past and around the turn of the ­century. The phrase “gather up the fragments” adds an even more complicated temporal presence ­because of the word “fragments,” which bridges past and pre­sent. Unlike most literary forms, fragments contain a prior fracture that brings a recursive quality to the moment of their publication. They constantly communicate a sense of past rupture, as we saw in the previous chapter, through their association with a haunting sense of lingering. As Heather McHugh observes, “The fragment is a form we approach in aftermath. . . . ​The study of fragments is the study of time’s effects, and an artifact’s endurances.”20 The past, then, is made pre­sent by the “effects” and “endurances” of the fragment. Even more notably for Carey, Child, and Sigourney—­t he writers examined in the coming sections—­t he past and the pre­sent function in the ser­ vice of a ­future prospect. The feeding of the multitude recounted in the Gospels delivers the promise that in the forthcoming time, material and spiritual needs w ­ ill be fully met.21 While the plot of texts that incorporate the feeding of the multitude tend not to describe in precise detail the methods by which the crumbs from the loaves and fish ­w ill be converted into plentiful meals, they typically do indicate to readers that certain changes should be made, usually through the actions of the audience. Religious fragments thus exist within a charged field of temporality that moves between a fragmented biblical past and a pre­sent—­both of which exist contained within the text—­and a miraculous f­uture that only exists in a prospective form for the reader. More so than the previous fragments analyzed in this study, this projection into the ­f uture created an optative mood for the individuals represented in the texts. But rather than providing a progressive movement of cause and effect from past to pre­sent and pre­sent to ­f uture, the citation of the verse in eighteenth-­century texts presented audiences with the intervention of the miraculous. When the biblical event was used in reference to a prospective change, it did not suggest a gradual movement. Instead, the invocations of the feeding of the multitude insisted on the temporality of the past and pre­sent unspooling into the f­ uture in an immediate and miraculous way. At first glance, the temporal mode of biblical fragments seems to move in a progressive fashion, but it actually offered an alternative to such

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chronologies. One of the most prominent theories of progressive time in the eigh­teenth c­ entury was the concept of stadial history, which was also called “conjectural” or “universal” history.22 Set forth by Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, stadial theories of ­human development outlined stages of society that moved from a perceived savage state to an increasingly civilized one. Philosophies of stadial history also ­shaped the way po­liti­cal thinkers such as Jean-­Jacques Rousseau described the evolution of governments. In contrast to ­t hese prevailing ideas, the biblical time set out by the repeated citation of the miracle of the loaves and fish motivated a progressive vision of a dif­fer­ ent sort. Though still attentive to improvement and movement into the ­future, the pro­cess of “gathering up the fragments” combines material accumulation with a miraculous transformation. It depends first and foremost on individual action—­the gathering—­which is followed by a transcendent renovation instigated by Christ. Religious fragments use a progressivist vision based not in the development of the state or the advancement of civilization, but rooted in the moral calculus of “collecting.” The actions of an individual gathering pieces together set the scene for the mysterious evolution that then takes place. Indeed, the influential nature of the biblical miracle depended on its transmission from authors to readers throughout the period, particularly ­because t­hese narratives sought to stimulate change outside the sphere of lit­er­a­ture. Writers and orators could only bring the biblical story into the light of day; audiences then needed to act on the command to gather fragments together and initiate a miraculous temporality. Of course, as Dana’s sermon reveals, the phrase was intimately bound up with concepts of American frugality in the attempt to differentiate and separate the colonies from ­England.23 But biblical fragments ­were not only referenced in the heat of revolutionary passion. They also played a crucial function in reform discourses throughout the romantic era. Dana’s focus on the rights of the “industrious p ­ eople” of the colonies and his insistence on the need to preserve equality in the establishment of the new nation makes clear that his religious zeal also extended ­toward po­liti­c al priorities, a trend that was exhibited throughout the period in references to the biblical verse. The demo­cratic impulse of Dana’s sermon syncs up with the way that the phrase was cited in texts that dealt with a variety of dispossessed figures; unlike fragments treated with in the previous chapters, this version of the fragment sought to encompass a large swath of the lower sort. The biblical



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passage’s message of frugal piety worked to reconfigure the place of t­ hose individuals in society. Such a progressive vision originates with the telling of the miracle in the Gospel of John, which notes that the crowd initially gathers around Christ as a result of his miraculous healing and “­because they saw the signs that he was ­doing for the sick.”24 The miracle begins, then, with Christ’s attention to ­people suffering from illnesses. Even the name by which the miracle came to be known, “the feeding of the multitude,” proves suggestive of a re­distribution of wealth that would provide for all. Relying on the universalizing force of Chris­tian­ity—­which, in a par­tic­u­lar version of the religion, sought to nurture equalizing forces instead of establishing hierarchical stratification—­reformers tried to incite their readers to action which could, in the ­future, improve the condition of ostracized individuals and even remediate larger social ills.25 Tracking the use of the miracle through print culture brings to light a tradition of pious economy that pursued po­liti­cal reform, largely through a recognition of past trauma and the desire to amend it in the ­future. Remaking an enslaved person, a prostitute, or a corrupted slave trader by “gathering them up” fulfilled a universality of religious exhortation that exceeded the bounds of politics (or divulged a means to alter it), and presented a vision of change rooted in individual action and miraculous transformation. Franklin, Paine, and ­others set the groundwork for the economic implications of the miracle, while ­later writers centered such a moral calculus on ostracized figures whose status could potentially be improved. To be sure, the idea of an individual’s potential held a central place in economic thought of the eigh­teenth ­century. “The importance of potentiality cannot be overemphasized,” explains Jennifer Baker, and narratives of enterprise and opportunity treated even “the most unlikely of figures.”26 It is ­here, fi­nally, that we see something more like the traditional liberal subject enmeshed in an increasingly cap­i­tal­ist and eco­nom­ically driven world; however, the individual represented in such a narrative is a destitute one, not an already bourgeois and autonomous white man. Like the fluidity seen in the typographical repre­sen­ta­tions of veterans and the writing of ruined w ­ omen, the biblical miracle emphasized first and foremost the “potentiality” of the lower sort: a potentiality chiefly envisioned in economic terms. The combination of frugality, social reform, and miraculous renovation threads through the biblical fragments discussed in the remainder of this chapter. Always, however, t­hese fragments also pre­sent a structure of demand: authors telling

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their readers to “gather up the fragments” and enact improvements in the lives of ­others.

Reform Writing in Carey’s American Museum When Mathew Carey published the first issue of his new periodical, the American Museum, in January  1787, he featured the writings of Franklin, Paine, Benjamin Rush, and other well-­k nown figures. As described in the Introduction, the pages also included three essays subtitled “fragments”: “The prostitute.—­A fragment,” “The Slave.—­A fragment,” and “Negro trade.—­A fragment.”27 Each of t­hese short narratives presented a vignette which depicted an individual in dismal circumstances. Insofar as the essays advocate for an increasing awareness of social ills within the growing nation, they align with Franklin and Paine’s interest in the promotion of the American po­liti­cal experiment. Yet the fragments in Carey’s periodical also take a decidedly subjective stance, shifting from abstractions of economic improvement to the traumatic events experienced by prostitutes and slaves, as well as the pain and suffering inflicted by the slave trade. Throughout much of his life, Mathew Carey moved across the Atlantic world. He was a disabled, radical, pro-­American Irish Catholic who left his native country b ­ ecause of persecution and sought asylum first in France and ­later in Amer­i­ca. In Carey’s infancy, his caretaker accidentally let him fall, an event which injured his foot and gave him a limp, physically distinguishing Carey from his peers for his entire life.28 Then, in early adulthood, a nineteen-­year-­old Carey landed in trou­ble when he published a pamphlet in 1779 Dublin titled “The Urgent Necessity of an Immediate Repeal of the Whole Penal Code.” He subversively included a preface that addressed the “Roman Catholics of Ireland” and tried to excite the “Just Sense of their Civil and Religious Liberty as Citizens of a F ­ ree Nation,” a phrasing that no doubt placed him at odds with pro-­English Protestant politics.29 Fearing retribution for the essay, his f­ ather sent him to France, where Carey’s radical sympathies earned him an introduction to the Marquis de Lafayette and Benjamin Franklin, the latter of whom he worked with while they ­were both in Paris. His status as a refugee did not end t­ here, though. He migrated back to Ireland in 1780 a­ fter the danger subsided, but again took up a dissident stance when he published a seditious cartoon in 1784. The Irish House of Commons demanded his immediate arrest, and Carey fled that same year.



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This time, he left Ireland for Amer­i­ca and, as James Green recounts, “legend has it that he was smuggled on board dressed as a ­woman.”30 Before he settled in the early United States in 1784, Carey moved from country to country to escape discrimination. As a result of his tumultuous life experiences, he stands as an ideal figure for understanding how religion intersected with po­liti­cal progressivism in the early national years. Despite the barriers to entry that would have excluded him from elite circles in Philadelphia, he eventually developed impor­tant relationships with politicians and thinkers, becoming a figure of much repute. Notwithstanding this success, his ­earlier transatlantic persecutions pushed him to commit to a reformist agenda when he arrived in the United States.31 Indeed, his publications in the late eigh­teenth and early nineteenth centuries by and large display a marked critique of the ways that American nationalism and imperialism might constrict, rather than expand, dif­fer­ent ways of belonging to community and country. Throughout the publication of the American Museum (1787–1792)—­which the historian Frank Luther Mott calls “perhaps the most impor­tant American magazine file of its ­century”—­Carey uses the fragment form to consider the ways in which identity could be altered and remade.32 As Harries reminds us, the “fragmentary was always connected with the notion of overflow—or plenitude in apparent dearth,” a concept that Carey leverages to proj­ect forward a vision of “the significance of the apparently insignificant.”33 The American Museum took an editorial approach that balanced the contentious po­liti­cal climate of the years before and ­a fter the ratification of the Constitution. As Sarah Knott explains, “At the American Museum, Mathew Carey held an early Anti-­Federalist hope for the u ­ nion but promoted the periodical’s support among prominent Federalists like Tench Coxe and George Washington.”34 Even though Carey’s politics ­later shifted when Federalists more openly rejected republican France, in the 1780s and early 1790s he printed writing that tried to split the difference between competing interests. The neutrality of the magazine helped Carey maintain a critical distance from con­temporary events, thereby presenting himself as a selfless individual interested in the health and success of the po­liti­cal experiment, rather than any single, partisan view. He went beyond the “ethnic” and the “parochial,” as Green argues, and also beyond the national and nationalistic.35 The underdeveloped concept of the “nation” served as the premise for the American Museum—­its starting point indicated by its very title—­but the periodical also went to ­great lengths to highlight the ways in which the states had not yet fully cohered into a unified governmental body.

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­ fter all, the first issue was released before the ratification of the ConstituA tion, and long before the document took on a long-­lasting, durable life in the history of the nation. A unified United States was still an aspiration, not a real­ity. As opposed to exclusively using his magazine pages to help consolidate the embryonic national body, Carey also used his editorial position to underline the lives of mistreated individuals, hoping that they could be given compassionate treatment in the new society being established. A lifetime of struggling against the authorities in Ireland helped Carey maintain a skeptical view of the incipient government, and his experiences with the oppression of Irish Catholics made him dubious that legislation could fairly account for e­ very American. In his fragments, he moved away from the fledgling, disparate, and conjectural concept of national identity to promote a more lucidly delineated sense of a universal religious community: one that drew on an established biblical pre­ce­dent, carried with it a sense of urgent immediacy, and evoked a miraculous promise for the f­ uture.36 By recasting the miracle of the loaves and fish in con­temporary terms, Carey could use a Christian definition of community and sympathy to impress upon the country the need for the inclusion of not some, but all individuals. In each prose fragment that appeared in that first issue of the magazine, a speaker encounters a figure in need of assistance: a prostitute, a newly freed slave, and an immoral slave trader. Carey is careful to distinguish the three fragments from other articles, and, more to the point, he also thoughtfully extricates fragments from other categories of identity. In early republican discourse, a phrase like “a character,” for example, was applied to unique individuals, but not to ­t hose who experienced deep exclusion from the body politic.37 Just before the pages with the three fragments, Carey publishes a contrasting triptych of articles: “Character of a whimsical Man,” “Character of a bachelor,” and “Character of a married man.” “Character of a whimsical Man” portrays a man whose lifestyle accords to vari­ous idiosyncrasies. The narrator mentions that p ­ eople generally view him as “a queer dog—an odd fish—­a comical fellow—­old sly and dry—or a most extraordinary oddity.”38 The “whimsical Man” might be queer, odd, comical, and sly and dry—­and even animalized as a “dog” and a “fish”—­but he certainly does not exist on the extreme borders of society. Instead, he amuses the audience and the ­people he interacts with through his “extraordinary oddity.” Such language might seem strong, but the whimsical man is still an accepted part of daily life in the period.



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Following the description of the whimsical man, the essay on the “Character of a bachelor” builds on the “queer dog” by showing how a bachelor “is a sort of a whimsical being,” a portrayal that makes the two figures overlap.39 The narrator goes through “the life of a bachelor” for the reader, commenting on his quotidian routine, his habits, and his likes and dislikes. Again, the bachelor might be slightly odd, eccentric, or “whimsical,” but he still exists comfortably within a mundane system of early republican life. ­There is nothing too outré or exceptional about e­ ither the whimsical man or the bachelor in the articles published in the American Museum. Carey then completes the series of articles with the “Character of a married man,” a piece which builds on the two previous portraits with an image of domestic bliss located around “an ­union with the gentlest, the most polished, most beautiful part of the creation” and infants “lovely as the spring.”40 The married man functions as a kind of culmination of the other two, delivering a gentle corrective to their strangeness. ­These prose pieces not only disclose Carey’s interest in the artistic form of the triptych, but also serve to clarify his definition of a “character”: an individual with peculiar foibles and notable personality traits who does, however, play an unmistakable role in early American society. While a bachelor or a whimsical man might be viewed a bit suspiciously—­especially for their potential sexual deviance—­Carey still emphasizes their place within typical comings and ­goings, w ­ hether that be attending church and occupying a “par­tic­u­lar pew in a par­tic­u­lar church,” or g­ oing to a “coffee-­ house,” a bachelor’s “sanctum sanctorum.”41 Queer, comical, or sly and dry, the individuals represented in t­hese articles are endowed with a sense of ­wholeness, a completion that offsets the partiality expressed by the broken figures who are called “fragments” in the succeeding pages. In the set of three fragments that immediately follow the three characters, Carey only uses the word “character” once—in an extremely negative and moralistic way. The narrator of “The prostitute.—­A fragment” compares the prostitute to Mary “Magdalen,” but says that “SHE HAS THE WORST CHARACTER IN THE WORLD,” a far cry from the quirky vignettes published just before the fragments.42 Two more crucial variances exist between the usage of “character” and “fragment” in Carey’s periodical. First, all three fragments contain information provided by a narrator and include a section in which the ruined individual speaks for herself or himself. Unlike the whimsical man, the bachelor, and the married man, we find that the prostitute, freed slave, and

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slave trader all verbally express their status. They represent their existence in their own words instead of solely relying on the mediation of a narrator, a literary decision that centers attention on their own subjectivity. The fragments replace the generality of a “character” with the particularity of an individual. Second, none of the articles that treat the characters demand that readers take any kind of action. They provide passive descriptions that simply go through an explanation of personality, habits, and daily routine. Yet the narrators of the fragments are involved in the lives of the prostitute, enslaved man, and slave trader, and also directly petition the audience to take action in order to ameliorate social ills. The articles plead for understanding, charity, and sympathy to help alleviate intense suffering. A “sentimental eyewitness” in the eigh­teenth ­century, Knott argues, “was invited more thoroughly into the scene itself, not to pass through, but to enter spontaneously and to dwell as if a pre­sent character. Sentimental scenes . . . ​ [could model] how the reader might sympathetically respond” to the situation.43 Despite critiques of sentimentalism—­stretching from Carey’s time to our con­temporary moment—­that describe its objectifying nature and its tendency to diminish suffering as both inert and pitiable, the articles published by Carey nonetheless foreground a transformable identity and incite social change.44 Like the biblical miracle from which they draw inspiration, the fragments in the American Museum provide an injunction to the reader to commit themselves to compassionate action. In the three essays that come a­ fter the character sketches, Carey “gathers up the fragments” by juxtaposing splintered individuals alongside one another.45 For each text, the narrator points to a path of ­f uture redemption by which the marginalized figure can rejoin the ranks of society. “The prostitute.—­A fragment” begins with the prostitute pleading to a stranger walking by: “I Have neither eat nor drank for two days—­nor have I laid my head upon a pillow for a week—­and I am drenched with the snow that falls upon my almost naked body—my limbs are almost numbed with cold—­O relieve me for heaven’s sake!”46 Carey’s first fragment commences with the voice of the prostitute—­instead of a narrator or another character—­a narrative decision that immediately centers attention on her life. The repeated dashes in the w ­ oman’s pleading statement heighten her multiple complaints and punctuate her deprivations. The stranger walking by listens to her speech and begins to talk to her. Coincidentally, a “short conversation discovered she was the d ­ aughter of an old friend. It had been the ­father’s misfortune to spend his patrimony in



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the ser­vice of one who paid him with promises. Disappointment broke his heart—­grief deprived his ­w idow of life—­and seduction robbed his ­daughter of her virtue.”47 Her story takes readers back to an ­earlier moment before her seduction, when she lived what would have been viewed as a respectable, domestic existence with her parents. Unscrupulous transactions between her f­ather and an unnamed associate resulted in a financial crisis in the ­house­hold, which took the life of her ­mother. No longer living in a financially ­viable ­house­hold, the monetary ruin of her ­father results in her sexual ruination.48 The coincidence that “she was the ­daughter of an old friend” implies that any anonymous, neglected person on the street might have a connection to a reader of the American Museum; accordingly, help should be given in ­every circumstance. By the end of the fragment, the passing gentleman commits himself to aid the prostitute; in a loaded phrase, he tells her, “I w ­ ill take care of thee, Magdalen.”49 All at once, he takes on the role of an adoptive ­father (replacing his old friend), models a virtuous deed for the readers, and places a biblical tenor on his actions. Instead of viewing her through any kind of national lens, the sympathetic stranger understands her based on her ­family history, emphasizing both a position of Christian sympathy in the current moment, and how she might miraculously transform. He believes that she “is a child that providence has thrown in my way,” reflects that she requires “five out of the seven works of mercy,” and calls her “Magdalen.”50 The fragment pre­sents the point of view of the prostitute and her personal history, and begins to imagine her metamorphosis within a community that ­w ill care for her. Like the narrative on the prostitute, Carey’s other fragments envisage the formation of new interpersonal connections that ­w ill resonate into the ­future. At the very beginning of “The Slave.—­A fragment,” the narrator ­frees an enslaved man from servitude, a person who “had a wife in Africa. Often did he speak of her—­and as often would the uplifted eye seem to call heaven to witness the purity of his love.”51 The man’s strong emotional connection to “a wife in Africa” implies that he ­w ill attempt to rejoin her, or perhaps help her cross the Atlantic to join him. Carey conceives of the reconstitution of previous familial ties as the result of a release from bondage; moreover, he also represents the establishment of fresh relationships based on a sympathetic humanity. The narrator announces that one eve­ning, the “cry of fire echoed through the house—my d ­ aughter was in imminent danger. The slave, whom I had freed, impelled by gratitude, rushed through the flames—­rescued her from danger—­brought her safe to my arms—­and

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dis­appeared.”52 By releasing the enslaved man from chains, the man inadvertently saves his own d ­ aughter and helps to maintain the existence of his own ­family unit. The narrator’s actions at the beginning of the piece make the man feel “gratitude” for his newfound liberty, which in turn leads him to risk his life for his former enslaver’s d ­ aughter. Carey’s fragment demonstrates how sympathy multiplies itself and how charitable action provides a return on moral actions, a view that encourages readers to act in a similar manner.53 “The Slave.—­A fragment” also critiques the larger systemic flaws of greed that lead to the perpetuation of slavery, calling the readers to account for their individual actions. At the end of the short essay, the narrator exclaims, “Ye proudly rich! let your hearts for once be softened: let compassion sit on your brow, and have mercy on your debtors!”54 Carey’s essay briefly recounts a portion of the life of a single man in an argument against enslavement, but also addresses the broader issues of avarice and immorality that plague the “proudly rich” in the young nation, making his brief text a commentary on two pervasive social ills. He deploys a similar double interest in the final fragment on what he calls “negro trade”—he promotes individual compassion at the same time that he offers a critical evaluation of the institution of chattel slavery as a ­whole. While the title proves puzzling at first glance (Why would Carey, a moderate anti-­slavery advocate in the late eigh­teenth c­ entury, be invested in the figure of an enslaver?), it explicates a strain of morality in f­ avor of abolishing the inhumane practice. The fragment begins by describing the physical dangers that a group of sailors experienced at sea. The “captain of a ship in the negro trade” relates how “the crew had been thirty—of whom only three returned” b ­ ecause of disease, onshore murders, the loss of an entire ship, and a slave mutiny.55 Friends, wives, d ­ aughters, and sons ask for their f­amily members, but almost the entire crew has perished, along with many of the enslaved ­people. Carey laments the systemic tolls of the slave trade on both sides; he sees its corrupting influence on the enslaved and on the individuals who perpetuate bondage through the sale of ­humans. But he points out that much of the responsibility for the continuation of African slavery lies elsewhere. The end of the fragment turns to the actions of the reader: the narrator asks, “And why is this cruelty practiced? That we may have sugar to sweeten tea that debilitates us—­Rum to make punch to intoxicate us—­And indigo to dye our clothes. In short, thousands are made wretched—­nations are dragged into slavery—to supply the luxuries of their fellow creatures!”56 Carey’s fragment examines the depredations that exist within all aspects of the slave trade,



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and seeks ameliorative action on the part of his audience. He directly instructs his readers to stop consuming the goods created by enslaved l­ abor so that the “cruelty” can be amended in the ­f uture. The placement of the prostitute, slave, and slave trader within the magazine already begins to alter their status as splintered from society; now, the three can be brought together and collectively recognized as needing assistance. Together, they fit into a miniature network. The freed man and the slave trader work together as a diptych that illustrates the depravity of the slave trade, though in such a formulation, the prostitute proves to be the odd ­woman out. Racially, the prostitute and the slave trader can be aligned—­ since the writer makes no mention of race in ­either case, the default would have been white—­and b ­ ecause of their subservient positions, the prostitute can be coupled with the slave. This round-­robin of identification and mutual attachment begins to establish ties that exemplify the kinds of manifold bonds that help constitute reconnections with communities. Simply by comparing the three figures together on the pages of the periodical, Carey begins to construct a print-­based connection, one that gathers up marginalized figures in ways that exemplify the progressive fragments seen in previous chapters.57 He employs the spatial structure of the magazine to envision a ­f uture in which each figure attains greater social ac­cep­tance. Most importantly, all three of the fragments urge the readers of Carey’s periodical to take personal action in the years to come by clothing the prostitute, freeing the slave, and civilizing the slave trader; or, put differently, extending charity and ceasing the consumption of sugar, rum, and indigo, small choices that ­w ill ameliorate the tremendous social prob­lems facing the nation. Yet the ­f utures of the fictional individuals from the texts are unfinished and untold. Each fragment leaves off with a sense of urgency, but without a definite conclusion. This vital narrative decision means that Carey leaves it to his readers to consider how they might contribute to the improvement of the individuals represented within the fragments. He is explicit, however, that any metamorphosis of identity derives from a religious axis rooted in the logic of what Dana calls a “christian commonwealth.” The fragments in the American Museum invoke the voice of “Charity,” the “Magdalen,” the power of “providence,” “works of mercy,” the support of “heaven,” and the extension of “compassion” and “mercy” to all individuals.58 A religious mindset of miraculously ordained “gathering” structures the ethics Carey pre­sents for his readers, even as they must act to further the workings of “providence” over time.

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This was not the only time Carey broached the status of marginalized figures through the form of the fragment. He returned to this topic when he composed a longer prose fragment in pamphlet form entitled “Fragment. Addressed to the Sons and D ­ aughters of Humanity, By a Citizen of the World” (1796).59 Written in the same vein as the pieces published in his magazine, the text focuses on a poor ­family that has just lost their ­father, the sole money-­earner in the f­ amily. And, like the fragments published in the American Museum, the narrator supplicates the reader in terms of Christian sympathy with an ending that moves beyond the text by implying that the direct actions of the audience can aid individuals in dire circumstances. The title of the fragment also indicates Carey’s interest in transcending the nation in ­favor of a more universal affiliation; writing as if the pamphlet ­were a letter, he addresses it to “the Sons and D ­ aughters of Humanity,” making his audience as broad as pos­si­ble. He extends beyond the nationality implied by the American Museum, instead hailing a larger group. In conjunction with his i­magined expansion of readership, Carey also aligns his own authorship not with the nation, but with the world, presenting a cosmopolitan reach that moves beyond the confines of the United States. His use of the phrase “Citizen of the World” establishes a tension between his membership in the growing country and his wider attachment to humanity at large, the latter connection evidenced by his own movement from Ireland to France, back to Ireland, and then to the United States. In his composition and publication of fragments, Carey applied himself to the construction of sympathetic communities that existed outside of nationally codified forms of identity. Through his depiction of an enslaved man, a slave trader, a prostitute, and an impoverished ­family, Carey indicates that marginalized individuals in the early American republic are not the exception. By projecting their inclusion into humanity, Carey imaginatively heals their previous fracture and places them within a sympathetic religious community that ­w ill transform their identity. Carey’s commitment to Christian ethics was not only exhibited in the articles of the American Museum, but over the course of his entire publishing c­ areer. Most famously, perhaps, he published the first Catholic edition of a bible in the early United States. Paul Gutjahr notes that the fact that “Carey would embark on his first bible publishing venture only five years ­after opening a [print] shop bears witness to his daring. In 1790, Carey printed 471 copies of the Catholic Douay bible.”60 While the publication of the



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Douay bible was not a complete success, it gave Catholic identity an increased visibility in the country, and Carey marketed it not just to Catholics, but also to broad-­minded Protestants.61 It was not the only time he invested in the publication of bibles. He notoriously “kept certain editions of the Bible in standing type in the early 1800s,” as Gutjahr explains; this proj­ect was not insignificant, as the “cost was im­mense, and it required an entire room to hold the preset blocks for a single bible edition.”62 Carey was undoubtedly devoted to the publication of the bible; nonetheless, he did not forget that he was ­running a printing business that required returns on investments. He was well aware that his venture required an im­mense cost, and that he still needed to sell his printings, an economic focus that can also be seen in his ­later textual productions. Whereas the fragments published in the Ameri­ can Museum primarily instruct the reader ­toward benevolent Christian action, Carey also composed fragments that w ­ ere increasingly invested in the concept of religious economy employed by Franklin in his eighteenth-­century writings. Carey began to describe in a more explicit and detailed manner how economic improvement could reshape individuals. In 1791, the American Museum overtly brought economy and religion together by publishing an advice article entitled, unsurprisingly, “Gather up the fragments, that nothing be lost.”63 The under­lying themes of pecuniary charity pre­sent in the triptych of fragments came to the foreground in this text, which offered a moral that joined day-­to-­day frugality together with providential authority. As the narrative voice states, “The power of providence is exercised with the same wise economy, as the power of miracles. Neither of them is prostituted to the gratification of luxury, or the encouragement of negligence and laziness.”64 The article underlies “providence” and “miracles” with “wise economy,” a formulation that indicates the potential of everyday actions to tremendously alter social circumstances. It goes on to tell the story of a ­father named “Providus” who practices careful husbandry by working to “prepare my fields well—­sow them early—­fence them effectually—­gather my grain when it is ripe—­house it before the rains have ruined it—­thresh it before the rats have eaten half it—­and what I mean to spare, I sell, when I have a good market.”65 Providus’s day is meticulously broken up into fragments of l­ abor that he combines together in order to support his f­ amily. Providus also describes how he tries to convince his neighbors to follow in the path he has laid out so that they can be included in his success.

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As in Franklin’s advice in the letter to Evans and his note in Princi­ples of Trade, Carey’s essay pays attention to domestic routines and the need to or­ga­nize the daily schedule of the ­house­hold in order to gather up fragments of time. Providus is not even the only one who participates in the familial economy. He also mentions that “my wife in her department, uses the same economy. She gathers up the fragments, and suffers nothing to be lost. What cannot be immediately applied to ­human use, she applies to some other use, which ultimately turns to the benefit of the f­amily.”66 Collectively, the ­family combines frugality with piety to produce what “ultimately” appears to neighbors as a miraculous bounty. A prudent economy can thereby transcend the material world and seem to represent “the power of miracles.” By 1791—­only a few years a­ fter the publication of the first issue of the American Museum—­the story of Providus in “Gather up the fragments, that nothing be lost” looks more and more like a proto-­capitalist version of the incipient liberal individual. Unlike the spatial mutability of injured veterans and ruined w ­ omen, or the potential for the triptych of figures to transform in the ­f uture through Christian charity, the teleological nature of Carey’s 1791 fragment tends t­ oward accumulation. As in Franklin’s discussion, the way repetitive individual actions accrue holds the power to convert a poor ­family into a more prosperous one. Such a narrative evidently found traction within the rapidly changing economy. ­A fter the initial publication of “Gather up the fragments, that nothing be lost,” the article was republished in at least three other periodicals: the Universal Asylum and Columbian Magazine in 1791, the Philadelphia Repository, and Weekly Register in 1801, and the Medical and Agricultural Register in 1807.67 The story—­a nd its origin in the biblical miracle—­hit a nerve with reading communities in the period. Notably, the republication of the article in the Universal Asylum and Columbian Magazine adds a subtitle to the essay: “Economist No. I.” The alteration makes explicit the relationship between material changes in circumstance and spiritual ones: if individuals can be good stewards of their property and increase it, their thrift can translate into a spiritual expansion too. Invoking the feeding of the multitude at once evinces a proto-­capitalist ideology of accumulation and also instills a belief in bodily and spiritual change for the f­ uture.68 From his more radical beginnings focusing on the potential for individual transformation into “Sons and ­Daughters of Humanity” in the first issue of the American ­Museum, to his l­ ater economies of accumulation, the fragments from the



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feeding of the multitude underlie Carey’s vision of social change for the marginalized.

Child, Sigourney, and the Domestic Economy of the Fragment The repurposing of the miracle of the loaves and fish in the colonial and early national periods was not ­limited to male authors. Even in the examples adduced so far, ­women are repeatedly featured in the religious economy. Franklin’s letter to Evans considers the importance of “families,” and his note in Princi­ples of Trade highlights the fragments of time “that ocur in ­Family Busines, between the constant and necesary Parts of it, that usualy occupy Females.” In ­these passages, the words “­family” or “families”—as in so much eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century writing—­primarily signify the work of the ­women in the h ­ ouse­hold. Carey, too, in his fragments, considers the status of a broken ­family, the reconstitution of a ­family, and the loss of ­family members at sea, all topics that fall u ­ nder the purview of the h ­ ouse­hold. As a result of the enduring association between the miracle and domesticity, female writers and reformers themselves began to take the story up as a means of promoting their l­abor during ­t hose “fragments of time.” Gathering together the fragments afforded them an archetype that combined the ­human with the miraculous; their industry could thus work ­toward the renovations promised by the feeding of the multitude. Straining against the position of a figure like the “ruined w ­ oman” or the prostitute, female writers began to use the concept of “gathering” to establish an incipient version of the self-­sufficient liberal self. ­Under the sanction of the biblical story, ­women started to envision their own—­a lbeit still fragmentary—­place in the economic life of the early republic. On October 19, 1812, a group of w ­ omen began a charitable organ­ization that they called “The Fragment Society of Boston.” The founding of the society demonstrates how the biblical concept of reform extended beyond written texts and took a strong hold in the cultural consciousness of concerned residents. The organizers wanted to use Christ’s miracle as “a most distinguished example of benevolence and frugality” and “gather up the fragments” within their own community.69 Specifically, the group wanted action that would help marginalized individuals. Like many of the organ­izations that ­were part of the Evangelical United Front—­a loose co­a li­tion of groups that focused on improving social ills through Christian benevolence—­the

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Fragment Society tried to reach out to the lower sort in order to improve their position.70 The reform-­minded association took its name from the biblical miracle, and chiefly consisted of a sewing circle committed to collecting scraps of rags and stitching them together to make clothing for the poor. The Fragment Society of Boston was incorporated in 1816; over the course of the nineteenth c­ entury it grew and expanded geo­graph­i­cally, and the society is still in existence t­ oday.71 In the same way that Dana’s sermon, Franklin’s invocations to economy, and Carey’s triptych promoted aid and improvement, the Fragment Society tried to assist dispossessed ­people by ameliorating their material condition and thereby transforming their identity. The invocation of the biblical miracle for progressive purposes was not ­limited to the eigh­teenth ­century—­the members of the Society carried it forward into the nineteenth. Like Franklin and Carey, the Society took an expansive approach to their proj­ect of reform, claiming in their act of incorporation that “the ­w idow, the orphan, the infirm, the sick, the idiot, are to be found among us, and look to the Fragment Society for relief.”72 The goal of the organ­ization was thus not constrained to specific categories of individuals—it sought to mend the state of a wide swath of New En­glanders. Reformers like t­hose who joined the Fragment Society considered the reintegration of an individual into a community an uncontested good. By materially assisting the ostracized person, they could heal the wounds that society had inflicted. While such a local organ­ization might have had a ­limited influence on communities in the northeast, the interest in the feeding of the multitude reached its apex in the early nineteenth c­ entury. It was not writing by Franklin or Carey that made the miracle appear in ­every ­house­hold, nor was it the distribution of material aid by the Fragment Society: it was Lydia Maria Child’s monumentally successful The Frugal House­wife (1829). At the very beginning of her domestic manual, Child writes, “The true economy of house­ keeping is simply the art of gathering up all the fragments, so that nothing be lost. I mean fragments, of time, as well as materials.”73 For Child, the “fragments” she describes are both abstract temporal ones and physical, material items within the ­house­hold that can be collected and reused. In her hands, the biblical miracle turns into an invocation to gather, preserve, and reuse the items of daily life over years, taking a spiritual economy and turning it into a domestic one. She also recognizes the skill required to do so; she labels it an “art,” one that she ­w ill unfold over the succeeding pages. While Child’s goals in her book might seem overtly materialistic—­Franklinian,



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even—­like Carey, she believes that fragments can amend po­liti­cal realities. The central moral of her text lies in “the art of gathering up all the fragments,” an adage that she directs at impoverished ­women. She contends that “the information conveyed [in this book] is of a common kind; but it is such as the majority of young h ­ ouse­keepers do not possess, and such as they cannot obtain from cookery-­books. Books of this kind have usually been written for the wealthy: I have written for the poor!”74 Her exclamation for the poor highlights her intention that the book, in its most idealistic version, ­w ill break down class barriers by providing information about ­house­hold economy to the w ­ omen who need it most.75 ­There is also a sense in Child’s book, however, that she desires to place ­t hese poor w ­ omen into an economic system of accumulation and improvement. Like the men around them, they, too, can strive to become stable, market-­oriented individuals who participate in Amer­i­ca’s emergent m ­ iddle class. Like Carey’s writing, her text thus cuts both ways, at once seeking to uplift the lower sort of w ­ omen—­seeing the potential that they have to “gather up the fragments” over years—­while also placing them on a preordained cap­it­ al­ist path.76 For Child, the advice within The Frugal House­wife has a transformative potential for its users. By following the practices of the miracle that turns a small amount of food into an abundance, Child believes that large changes can be wrought: “If any persons think some of the maxims too rigidly economical,—­let them inquire how the largest fortunes among us have been made. They ­w ill find thousands and millions have been accumulated, by a scrupulous attention to sums ‘infinitely more minute than sixty cents.’ ”77 The Franklinian nature of her advice is all too evident; in the words of Jennifer Goloboy, the text “provided solace for ­those who had difficulty weathering con­temporary economic turbulence . . . ​[and] advocated the same qualities of self-­restraint and diligent l­ abor as Franklin.”78 At the same time, whereas Franklin wrote for readers interested in the perpetuation of a national economy—­the literate men of the colony—­Child writes directly to the “poor,” providing specific, hands-on instructions for how to keep a h ­ ouse­hold. Franklin stays in the abstract, while Child proposes both conceptual and agential means of changing a f­ amily’s economic situation. Of course, not ­every person that reads her book ­w ill accumulate “thousands and millions,” but she implies that a close attention to the economy of fragments ­w ill inevitably yield significant results.79 Child’s concern with the agency of w ­ omen in the ­house­hold provides a practical means of putting into effect the miraculous biblical transformation,

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activating the potential for poor w ­ omen to accrue more material wealth. Yet the transformative power of fragments for ­women is at its most poignant in the odes of Lydia Huntley Sigourney. While Child’s writing works in the Franklinian mode and the style of cap­i­tal­ist accretion represented by Carey’s ­later writing in “[g]ather up the fragments, that nothing be lost”—­a lineage that accords to the rising power of the liberal individual in the nineteenth ­century—­Sigourney recurs to the radical possibilities of transfiguration contained within the narrative structure of fragments that we have seen in previous chapters. As in Carey’s triptych in the American Museum, though, Sigourney pays par­tic­u­lar attention to the biblical instantiation of fragments. In a set of three poems composed in the 1830s and ’40s titled, “To a Fragment of Cotton,” “To A Shred Of Linen,” and “To a Fragment of Silk,” Sigourney investigates the potentiality of fragments and their relationship to female ­labor and identity. Each of the poems concentrates on a scrap of material that was central to ­house­hold care. “To a Fragment of Cotton” begins with the speaker addressing the cotton and asking it to “tell me of thy birth” when the cotton was a younger ­brother of the fleece, And of the flax of Egypt.80 The speaker considers the agricultural chronicle of the commodity, reflecting that since cotton’s h ­ umble origins, Thy race have multiplied exceedingly, And sown themselves in ­every sunny zone Of both the hemi­spheres.81 Like any invocation of the biblical miracle, Sigourney’s poem begins with a vast historical viewpoint that brings the past into the pre­sent. Planters, merchants, and artisans alike have helped to spread cotton throughout the world. The movement of the plant across a vast temporal span and its appearance in so many products leads the speaker to reflect on “thy many transmigrations,” a pro­cess that seems nearly miraculous b ­ ecause, Yea, when thou seem’st to die, Thou only dropp’st thy grosser ele­ments To commune with the soul.82



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For Sigourney’s speaker, the fragment outgrows its own material state and seems to “commune with the soul,” bridging the physical and spiritual worlds. Reaching back across the breadth of agricultural history, Sigourney’s poem also places cotton in both her historical moment and in the near ­f uture. She saves the final apotheosis of the fragment for the concluding lines, when the cotton completes its decisive transformation into a piece of paper, an object held by the poem’s speaker and, ostensibly, Sigourney herself: But who can say what form Thou next may’st wear? Perchance the pictured page Through which the lisping and delighted child Hath its first talk with knowledge . . . Or with some message from the Book of Life, Wake the dead slumber of benighted lands?83 In this formulation, the fragment of cotton found on the ground shifts from a worthless piece of cloth to a new “form” that cannot be anticipated. It might become a “pictured page,” a “chart / That saves the mari­ner,” a “tablet of the sage,” a sheet for “The bard’s rich m ­ usic,” or—­most importantly—­“the Book of Life” that ­w ill carry a Christian message to “benighted lands.”84 Along with the possibility that the cotton w ­ ill transform into paper for the speaker to write her verse on, “To a Fragment of Cotton” emphasizes the potentials of the fragment, without limiting the poetic vision to a single pos­ si­ble outcome. All of the f­ utures are held in suspension within the pre­sent moment; no single one is selected as the determining ele­ment of the page. This interest in the transformative capacities of fragments was not ­limited to the one poem. “To A Shred Of Linen,” written only a few years before her cotton poem, also considers the past, pre­sent, and ­f uture of a forgotten scrap of cloth that the speaker finds on the floor, a residue of a domestic proj­ect. As in “To a Fragment of Cotton,” the speaker reviews the history of the rag as a flax plant, its current life as a “defunct pillow-­case,” and its ­imagined f­ uture, where it w ­ ill go down Into the paper-­mill, and from its jaws, Stainless and smooth, emerge.—­85

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The pro­cess of becoming paper models a religious redemption for Sigourney: the speaker says that “Happy s­ hall be / The renovation” for the shred of linen, implying that the paper-­mill w ­ ill grind it to pulp so that it can be reborn and reconstituted into a useful product.86 “Renovation” carries a religious meaning that contributes to the value of the new paper, which w ­ ill contain Wisdom and truth, their hallow’d lineaments Trace[d] for posterity.87 As in “To a Fragment of Cotton,” “To A Shred Of Linen” takes a small piece of forgotten cloth and describes the pro­cess by which it becomes a new creation. Yet in a significant move, the content of the writing on that paper is kept vague; it is simply “hallow’d lineaments” that ­will exist for “posterity” in Sigourney’s odes. The papers described in her poems—­which are coded as feminine—­are open to f­ uture manifestations. The rag poems convey a submerged sense of religiosity that takes explicit form in other writings. Sigourney displays her knowledge of the bible and the miracle of the loaves and fish in a work titled “Bread in the Wilderness,” which recounts the feeding of the multitude. The poem focuses on the craving for food felt by Christ’s followers, their “weak flesh” and how the “Hunger came” as they followed him through the desert.88 In response to their pains, Sigourney recounts how Christ gave them all food: He bless’d, and brake, the slender store of food, And fed the famish’d thousands. Wondering awe With renovated strength inspired their souls, As, gazing on the miracle, they mark’d The gather’d fragments of their feast, and heard Such heavenly words as lip of mortal man Had never utter’d.89 Like the “renovation” of the shred of linen, the food provided by Christ gives “renovated strength” to his followers, feeding their bodies and inspiring “their souls.” The poem does not dwell exclusively on the miraculous past of the bible, though; it invokes Sigourney’s pre­sent as well. The speaker appeals to Christ in the current moment, saying,



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Thou, whose pitying heart Yearn’d o ­ ’er the countless miseries of ­those Whom thou didst die to save, touch thou our souls With the same spirit of untiring love.90 The miracle of the loaves and fish stretches from the past and into the pre­ sent, and, remarkably, asks for miraculous intervention for all ­people; “Howe’er by rank or circumstances disjoin’d,” the speaker believes that all ­people should be “renovated.”91 Neither “rank” nor “circumstances” should be taken into account. While Franklin and Paine used the feeding of the multitude for ends that ­were close to commercial nationalism—­though they acknowledge providence’s “divine Direction”—­and Carey and Child ­imagined a specific form of economic uplift for the lower sort, Sigourney takes a dif­fer­ent approach, one that activates the more radically egalitarian ele­ments of the fragment. Like writing by Pratt, Rowson, and Foster—­and the early productions from Carey—­Sigourney’s poems recognize the fragment as a form that is most power­ful in its potential to create a new identity. Yet ­whether embracing the full potentiality of the ostracized or scaffolding the development of the liberal individual, invocations of the biblical miracle throughout the romantic era sought to generate po­liti­cal reform. All of the writers examined in this chapter attempt to create what Elaine Scarry calls “the site of stewardship in which one acts to protect or perpetuate a fragment of beauty already in the world.”92 Through notions of “stewardship” rooted in economic frugality, religious equality, and the action of “gathering up the fragments,” ­these writers could reinvent the miracle in order to recognize—­because they could not legally enfranchise—­marginal figures. Even if prostitutes, enslaved p ­ eople, and the poor could not obtain ac­cep­tance into society in their pre­sent moment (though such might be the hope of reformers), the miracle distributed a vision of dramatic change that could impact the ­future. Such concerns became especially prominent in the work of w ­ omen writers in the early nineteenth ­century, who used the fragment’s simultaneous minority and excess to cata­log their restricted, though ultimately weighty, role in early national society. The texts authored by Child and Sigourney demonstrate the distinct value each author places on the elevation of w ­ omen via a biblical economy of fragments. Yet Sigourney’s poems also reach ­toward a dif­fer­ent mode of

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understanding the fragment. In her evocative odes, she detaches the fragment from its exclusively po­liti­cal connotations, and foregrounds its power to make vis­i­ble her ­labor as a writer. By reaching back into the history of the fragment of cotton, considering its agricultural origin and spread, its usage in the production of paper, and the relationship it holds to writing, she posits her authorship of poems in conjunction with the fragments she composes. Fragments are constitutive of, rather than destructive of, her position as an early nineteenth-­century writer. As I show in this book’s culminating chapter, such a view was ­adopted more widely in the early nineteenth c­ entury. Less inclined to limit fragments to a form of identity, authors began to utilize them to buttress the visibility of their ­labor in the profession of authorship. As such, the emergent use of the fragment in relation to a liberal individual becomes realized as the form becomes a fully fledged, market-­ oriented genre.

CHAPTER 5

Au­then­tic Authorship and the Composition of Sick Fragments

The first de­cades of the nineteenth ­century saw a revolution in the publication of literary fragments. In t­ hese years, the form exploded in popularity across the Atlantic print sphere: William Words­worth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge helped bring it to public attention in their Lyrical Ballads, and the interest in the fragment also advanced through the release of works from the subsequent generation of poets, especially in widely admired poetry by John Keats and Lord Byron. While British audiences had already encountered fragments in the prose writing of eighteenth-­century novelists (many of whom have been mentioned in preceding chapters), romantic poets around 1800 further raised the profile of the form, making it more vis­i­ble to reading audiences. Moreover, the interest in fragments was not just l­imited to an elite group of taste-­makers. Writers of all stripes and backgrounds started to publish fragments in periodicals, newspapers, broadsides, and collections of verse, even more so than in e­ arlier years.1 In Germany, too, writers like Schlegel and Novalis used the form as a poetic tool of philosophical investigation, a trend that ­others followed. As American Fragments has chronicled across the foregoing pages, the late eighteenth-­century obsession with fragments took hold in the United States; so, too, the eruption instigated by Words­worth, Coleridge, and o ­ thers spread to both sides of the Atlantic. Yet the advent of the nineteenth c­ entury also witnessed a shift in how Americans deployed the form. ­Earlier chapters in American Fragments have argued in no uncertain terms that the narrative structure of fragments afforded writers a productive means of reimagining po­liti­cal possibilities for the lower sort in American society. In lit­er­a­ture that dealt with war, seduction, and religion—­v ia

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typographies of incompletion, architectures of ruination, and miraculous temporalities—­fragments pushed readers to move beyond their texts and imagine new ways of being for ­t hose with disabilities, seduced and ruined ­women, prostitutes, and the poor, among o ­ thers. Along the way, each chapter has revealed how the homogeneous, bounded, and market-­oriented liberal individual did not hold firm in all arenas of romantic culture. Instead, writers sought to envision an individual that was perpetually in pro­cess, undefined by the specificities of a static identity; the fragment thus centered on the potential of that person. At the same time, in many of the examples identified in the previous chapter, an incipient market-­oriented sense of personhood began to develop, one that saw the economic improvement of the individual as a definitive social goal. This closing chapter marks the final culmination of such a transition. While the authors examined h ­ ere still pay attention to the way that the fragment can be used to represent nonnormative identities—as we ­w ill see with Charles Brockden Brown’s emphasis on sleepwalking—­the early nineteenth ­century saw a movement away from the po­liti­cal, and ­toward the use of the fragment as an instrument in a construction of authorship specifically geared ­toward the marketplace. Fragments ­were no longer consigned to the lower sort; instead, they could be used to mobilize the work of liberal individuals in an economic system. As the form began to saturate the literary marketplace in the wake of British and German romanticism, writers began to realize that such an aesthetic structure could be used not only in the ser­v ice of disabled soldiers, ruined ­women, prostitutes, and other liminal figures, but also to extend their own reach into an emerging reading public. More and more, the form was used to signal the position of “author” in a historical moment in which such a livelihood was only just becoming a ­v iable c­ areer path.2 To attain the status of “professional author”—­t hough it would not have been phrased as such in the period—­writers needed to demonstrate their artistic ability to a rapidly increasing readership. The fragment, with its unhewn aesthetic and expanding popularity, was ready at hand and valued precisely ­because it revealed writing not as a completed product, but as something in transition. Writers could use fragments to indicate a phase in the composition of a text, proving an author qua author by showing their work. Even if a text ­were “finished,” publishing it as a fragment gave it the appearance of being u ­ nder development, and ensured it would be perceived by audiences as a stage in the creation of art. “Kubla Khan,” for example, was complete in the sense that Coleridge had ended his l­abors on it, but the poem still conveyed a



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sense of incompletion to readers who ­were left hanging by the professedly missing parts. The unfinished ele­ments in fragments afforded writers formal features that could ostensibly display the steps undertaken in writing. Fragments published during the romantic period reveal that authorship was not exclusively premised on the publication of complete novels and texts. It was underwritten by the partial. To be sure, a finished artistic product was not the only means by which a writer could prove to publishers and audiences that they deserved to be called an author. Such an aesthetic style was only one pathway to exhibiting authorship. In contrast, partially completed works that denied definitive closure offered readers blatant evidence of a writerly method. As Marjorie Levinson describes it, “The poet’s publication of his own fragment implied a compositional history which the reader—if he w ­ ere to appreciate the text as a poem—­had both to believe and to acknowledge as a legitimate mode of literary production.”3 Even just titling a text a “fragment” invoked a “compositional history” that pushed readers to imagine how it began, why it was interrupted, and how it could be completed by the writer in the f­ uture. Typically, an author titling a piece a “novel,” “story,” or “essay” would not elicit ­t hose same speculations. Placing the reader in the midst of the “literary production” that ­shaped the work meant acknowledging the text as a text and the author as an author.4 Without such an impetus, readers could simply peruse a finished product without being obliged to consider the means by which authors took up the pen.

Reading Through Irving The authorial dynamics of fragmentary writing can be unmistakably identified in one of the most impor­tant figures of the era, Washington Irving. Irving largely established his reputation through a deployment of unfinished forms in works including Salmagundi (1807–1808), A History of New York (1809), and, most famously, The Sketch-­Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819– 1820). Collectively, t­ hese writings furnish an impression of a spontaneous, haphazard method of assembly that rambles through vari­ous topics and histories. But Irving doubtlessly intended to fashion such a style, appealing to a literary marketplace that was hungry for miscellaneous works exuding an incomplete air. He also represents one of the few writers of this period that Americanist scholars have studied in terms of a fragmentary aesthetics.

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Other authors simply do not receive the same kind of attention for their unfinished forms. When critics approach his writings, they reflect on his development of “multiple tensions and fractures,” muse on how he “deploys one of the eigh­teenth ­century’s most weighted and elusive aesthetic concepts: the picturesque,” and identify how his “imagination exemplifies exorbitance . . . ​in ways that reveal outlandish a­ ngles of fresh perspective.”5 ­Because critical consensus has agreed—to the extent that it can—on Irving’s fragmentary practices, he can serve as a lens to re­orient our view of early nineteenth-­century American literary production. Reading through Irving reveals a world of fragmentary texts that scaffolded his own authorship. All three of the aforementioned pieces of lit­er­a­ture employed a compositional manner that underscored the partial rather than the complete. Sal­ magundi, a serial periodical written and released over the course of about a year by Irving, his ­brother, and a cohort of friends, compiled a medley of social commentaries on New York public life. The topics of the issues range widely, and the contributors to the magazine make no discernable attempt to systemize its thought pro­cess. Titles of articles include “From the Elbow-­ Chair of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq.,” “Letter from Mustapha Rub-­A-­Dub Keli Kahn, to Asem Hacchem principal slave-­driver to his highness the bashaw of Tripoli,” “On Style, by William Wizard, Esq.,” and “The Stranger in Pennsylvania, by Jeremy Cockloft the Younger.”6 The self-­conscious playfulness in the titles and the pastiche-­like nature of the periodical are pre­sent throughout the content of the essays as well; the very beginning of the first issue explains that the “exhibition” w ­ ill “include a vast variety of figures” that w ­ ill “pre­sent a striking picture of the town.”7 Irving and his friends also pay close attention to their own positions as authors throughout the essays, observing that they act as “true and able editors” but also as “criticks, amateurs, dillitanti, and cognoscenti,” at once claiming their specialized position in belles lettres and asserting their apprenticeship.8 The fragmentary style underlies, instead of undercutting, their authorial flourishes. A History of New York likewise begins with a dual emphasis on the miscellaneous “variety” that ­w ill be included in the forthcoming narrative and a reflection on the authorial position. It commences with the goal of rescuing Diedrich Knickerbocker’s writing from oblivion by “gather[ing] together all the fragments of our infant history which still existed.”9 At the same time that the narrator echoes the biblical refrain examined in the previous chapter, he stresses the significance of the “fragments of our infant history” and highlights his own position in historical preservation: “doubly thrice happy



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is it [New-­York] in having such an historian as myself . . . ​t he patient narrator who cheerfully rec­ords their prosperity as they rise—­who blazons forth the splendour of their noontide meridian—­who props their feeble memorials as they totter to decay—[and] who gathers together their scattered fragments as they rot.”10 The narrator casually reminds his readers that they should be “doubly thrice happy” to have “such an historian as myself,” bringing attention to his own active role in the narrative and projecting an ac­cep­tance of his position onto his audience. Moreover, the authority of the “patient narrator” stems directly from his preservation and display of the “feeble memorials” undergoing decay and the “scattered fragments” of documents that he finds. His management of ruins—­and his decision to gather them together—­ situates him as a storyteller, a fact which he believes his readers should recognize. Even in his early works, Irving made unfinished forms central to his self-­presentation as an author. Most famously, The Sketch-­Book, too, is littered with the acknowl­edgment that Geoffrey Crayon’s style originates in his desire to show readers an array of unfinished views: he variously introduces readers to a “fragment of a world,” “a few fragments” of lit­er­a­ture “scattered in vari­ous libraries,” “fragments of antiquity,” and even “a fragment of London as it was in its better days” in “­Little Britain.”11 Irving also employs unfinished or partially deteriorated material texts as the basis for many of his sketches, mentioning ancient newspapers, moldy manuscripts, posthumous papers, and other textual pieces that he encounters. His larger aesthetic structure derives from the picturesque, that eighteenth-­century pictorial mode pop­u­lar­ized by William Gilpin that underlined the centrality of rough landscape features, moldering buildings, and partial glimpses on canvases.12 The Sketch-­Book translates Gilpin’s visual flourishes into written ones and depicts Crayon as an energetic creator within the scenes. Crayon stands as both a pictorial and writerly figure whose accomplishments with his audience stem from the manipulation of brief sketches. That a writer as successful and impor­tant as Irving made a c­ areer out of a fragmentary style calls for further attention. Reading the early nineteenth ­century through Irving’s aesthetics means encountering other fragmentary authorial practices alongside his. By bringing t­ hese into sharper definition, American Fragments resituates the consequence of partial, rather than complete, literary forms, and establishes their importance for the construction of authorship. While Irving—­a longside James Fenimore Cooper and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—­has been lauded as a foundational figure in American

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lit­er­a­ture and scholars have carefully analyzed his indebtedness to partial forms of writing and visual culture, other writers and works have not received the same treatment.13 Unfinished stylistic qualities and print ele­ments w ­ ere surely not exclusive to Irving. They ­were, in fact, major facets of literary culture, and help explain what Christopher Looby calls “­t hose frayings, fracturings, and inelegancies of the text that betray the performative act of writing—­for example, the ill-­sorted fragments that make up Franklin’s account of his life, even the physical form of his autograph manuscript; or the conglomerated pieces that make up Brackenridge’s cumbersome, jerry-­built novel.”14 It was precisely in the relationship between “frayings, fracturings, and inelegancies” and “the performative act of writing” that the fragment acquired so much traction for romantic authorship. ­These formal ele­ments provided a means of emphasizing the compositional, in-­process nature of writing that could confer the status of “author.” Discussing British and German romanticism, Andrew P ­ iper identifies a well-­defined “engagement with the fragmentary, secondary, and collective nature of books. Romantic books and romantic lit­er­a­ture . . . ​a lso foregrounded the relational structure of books, that ­t here was a bibliographic elsewhere, before, and ­after with which books and their texts ­were increasingly engaged.”15 The bibliographic imagination that ­Piper describes places reading audiences in touch with the “elsewhere, before, and ­after” that constituted the material life of literary texts. Fragments, with their invocation of a prior rupture, w ­ ere particularly successful at foregrounding such a “relational structure” by emphasizing “the performative act of writing.” Despite their use in the construction of authorship, fragments in the early nineteenth ­century did maintain some continuity with the po­liti­cal considerations of e­ arlier periods. The most effective fragments w ­ ere presented to their readers with an explanation of their origin. A title or subtitle labeling a text a “fragment” might provide it with an aura of authenticity for audiences, but writers could go a step further by offering an explanation for the breakages within their lit­er­a­ture. Texts that simply broke off might be misconstrued as lacking authorial skill, but ones that provided a justification would display the writer’s control over the reception of their own text (“Kubla Khan,” for example, famously uses the person from Porlock as an explanation for its fragmentary status). With one foot still in the mode of po­liti­cal fragments, writers made recourse to nonnormative physiological



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states as an explanation for their unfinished works. In par­tic­u­lar, bodily illness provided an effective means of accounting for the breaks and gaps within fragments. W ­ hether the ailment was experienced by a character narrating a text as in Charles Brockden Brown’s work, or by the authors themselves—as the latter portion of this chapter shows—­writers used sickness to explain the fragmentary condition of a text. By placing a discussion of illness in the formal mode of the fragment, writers sought to translate a phenomenological experience into a written one. Bodily conditions of liminality functioned in parallel to the textual liminality of fragments, collectively endowing the piece of writing with an uncontestable authenticity for reading audiences. Alongside war­time vio­lence, the trauma of seduction, and religious reform, the narrative breaks in literary fragments in the early nineteenth ­century sought to represent the experience of illness, sometimes in the subject of the fragment, and sometimes in an autobiographical fashion. At the same time, such breaks exemplified the composition pro­cess for readers. Physiological pain provided a ready-­made authenticity that could verify the cause of an interrupted composition. Trauma “does not simply undermine narrative capacity,” Max Cavitch argues, it “alters our perspective on the narrative capacities that remain. It makes narrative risky; it makes us wary of occasions for storytelling.”16 This chapter examines such risky authorial maneuvers through liminal physiological states that w ­ ere pathologized during the period—­sleepwalking, “insanity,” bed-­ridden sickness, and even death—­ and which writers used to “undermine narrative capacity” and highlight a restless, fragmentary state of writing. In Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-­ Walker (1799) and a series of texts related to it, Brown’s depiction of sleepwalking as an incomplete mode of experience coalesces with his fragmentary method of publication. He represents this physiological state in the content of his texts and transfers it to a highly vis­i­ble structure of publication, making the unconscious conscious. ­These “sleepwalking” compositions contributed to his critical status as an author. ­Later in the nineteenth c­ entury, the poetry of Sarah Went­worth Morton and Richard Henry Dana reveals how they coupled their own autobiographical states of illness with fragmentary writing. For them, being sick in bed meant composing lines of verse that ­were interrupted or unfinished, thereby presenting audiences with a view into the method of their writing. The literary productions of ­t hese authors

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exemplify how reading through the lens of Irving helps to uncover the early nineteenth ­century’s fragmentary style.

Sleepwalking Fragments When James Watters died in Philadelphia in the yellow fever epidemic of 1798, he took a piece of literary history with him. Watters was the owner of the popu­lar periodical the Weekly Magazine and a well-­k nown printer in the area; when he died, he was also in the pro­cess of setting the type for Charles Brockden Brown’s first completed novel, Sky-­Walk; or, The Man Un­ known to Himself, a text that focused on themes of sleepwalking in a frontier landscape. Brown began Sky-­Walk in late 1797, circulated it among his friends in New York, and subsequently sent it out for publication. He even released an extract from the novel in the Weekly Magazine in March 1798 in order to advertise the forthcoming work and stimulate the appetite of a reading public. Much to Brown’s surprise, the finished novel would never be released. A ­ fter Watters died during the epidemic, the executors of his estate set the price of the finished sheets so high that neither Brown nor his friends could repurchase them.17 The entirety of Sky-­Walk was lost, and the only t­ hing that remained w ­ ere references to the work in letters and the short piece from the Weekly Magazine simply titled “Extract from the ‘SKY-­WALK.’ ” Instead of forming the first of Brown’s novels, Sky-­Walk disappeared, and the extract which he published became a fragment as the result of the vicissitudes of history. It was a remainder: a small piece of a larger ­whole that had vanished in the fallout of the epidemic. Yet Sky-­Walk did not entirely dis­appear from literary history. The residual text that was forged by the epidemic spurred the creation of other works by Brown, writings that w ­ ere now intentionally penned by him as fragments. Based on the extract, title, and notes about it in letters and diaries by Brown and his friends, Sky-­Walk’s content, themes, and publication align it with a series of other fragmentary texts that Brown published: “Extract from the ‘SKY-­WALK,’ ” of course; “Edgar Huntly: A Fragment” (1799), a periodical advertisement for the novel Edgar Huntly; “Death of Cicero, A Fragment” (1800), which was annexed to the third volume of Edgar Huntly; and “Somnambulism. A fragment” (1805), which was likely composed from Brown’s memories of Sky-­Walk. Despite Sky-­Walk’s disappearance into the literary dustbin, it continued to exert an influence on Brown’s c­ areer. Further-



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more, just as the loss of the manuscript was incited by a widely observed outbreak—­one of the yellow fever epidemics that raged throughout coastal cities during the period—­Sky-­Walk itself focused on a physiological condition that intrigued early national Americans: sleepwalking. In fact, Brown’s sense of the partial, interrupted, and incomplete nature of composition stemmed from his thinking on a bodily condition that eighteenth-­century society aligned with illness. Picking up on the themes presented in Sky-­Walk, he published a range of fragmentary texts that all examined sleepwalking, a condition that fascinated phi­los­o­phers and physicians ­because it displayed interrupted or attenuated experiences of agency. Not satisfied with solely representing sleepwalking in the content of his work, Brown also transformed the liminal bodily state into the liminal fragments that he published. By reading with and from the thematic content of the story, we can see that Brown’s structure of composition emerges as one rooted in the dynamics of physiologically fragmented experience. While scholars have carefully examined the way Brown integrates somnambulism into the content of his work, I argue that he builds the condition into the overall schema of his publishing c­ areer. D ­ oing so helped Brown inaugurate new repre­sen­ta­t ional possibilities for sleepwalking at the same time that he facilitated the establishment of his authorial position in the romantic period. The interest in what Brown called in the preface to Edgar Huntly “one of the most common and most wonderful diseases or affections of the h ­ uman frame” was not unique to him.18 Throughout medical treatises and periodical publications, writers depicted somnambulism as a bizarre, mysterious occurrence. In Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia; or the Laws of Organic Life (1794)—­a text that was quickly republished in Amer­i­ca, heavi­ly influencing Brown, Elihu Hubbard Smith, and other members of the so-­called “Friendly Club”—­Darwin analyzes the condition of sleep and its accompanying aberrations. He begins with the premise that the “immediate cause of sleep consists in the suspension of volition,” an everyday occurrence that Darwin then contrasts with the dangerous real­ity of somnambulism, a state which violates that suspension: “No one in perfect sanity walks about in his sleep, or performs any domestic offices.”19 The lack of “perfect sanity” described by Darwin confirms that he saw the condition as a kind of disease, although, as Kristen Friedman writes, “Darwin could not quite bring himself to commit to separating ‘reverie’ entirely from somnambulism, but was also quite in ­favor of wielding somnambulism as an example of disease.”20 This delicate

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balance often tended in the direction of classifying sleepwalking as a disorder, something that—in Darwin’s words—­“ becomes a formidable disease,” an “inaptitude of the mind,” a “wonderful malady,” an “astonishing disease,” or even “a disease of the epileptic or cataleptic kind.”21 For Darwin, somnambulism takes individuals out of their normal “suspension of volition,” contradicting a “perfect sanity” by spawning a diseased mixture of fact and imagination in the mind. His medical account of sleepwalking in Zoonomia was only one of several accounts that circulated in early Amer­i­ca; the condition was further diagnosed in Benjamin Rush’s discussion in Medical Inquiries, in which Rush fervently argues that somnambulism “is a transient paroxysm of madness. Like madness it is accompanied with muscular action, with incoherent, or coherent conduct, and with that complete oblivion of both, which takes place in the worst grade of madness.”22 As in Darwin’s explanation, Rush pathologizes the condition as one that results in m ­ ental “madness,” a state that has bodily consequences in the “incoherent, or coherent conduct” of the individual. Rush calls sleepwalking a “paroxysm of madness,” and even identifies it as corresponding to “the worst grade of madness,” turning it into an abhorred m ­ ental state. Alongside Darwin, Rush characterizes sleepwalking as a kind of illness that takes individuals outside of their locus of agency, splitting a person from their own experiences; this repre­sen­ta­tion is very similar, as we ­will see, to the way that Brown uses it as a means of splitting texts from themselves.23 Sleepwalking was not just a medical marvel that occupied the attention of physicians. It was also remarked upon in newspaper and periodical notices throughout the period, texts that reached a wider and more variegated audience than writings by Darwin and Rush. In 1790, the Universal Asylum and Columbian Magazine briefly recounted “Two surprising instances of Sleep-­Walking” that involved a man collecting a nest of swallows and an old ­woman who walked half a mile away from her ­house.24 While the notice in the Universal Asylum was only a few lines long, the portrayals of somnambulists that audiences encountered ­were typically much longer. More often than not, they included meticulous accounts of the vari­ous motions and maneuvers that sleepwalkers made throughout the night, explaining the “decisions” made by the sleepwalker, where they went, and what they did in their nocturnal state. Such reports would give readers insight into what was perceived to be an uncommon and fascinating condition. In “Account of a remarkable Sleep-­walker” (1792), the writer relates a series of medical observations about Sieur Devaud, “a lad thirteen years and a half old, who lives in



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the town of Vevey [in Switzerland], and who is subject to the singular affection or disease, called Somnambulism.”25 The article goes on to elaborate in ­great specificity the precise circumstances of Devaud’s sleepwalking: “He is subject to the disease generally two nights successively, one fit lasting for several hours. The longest are from three to four hours, and they commonly begin about three or four ­o’clock in the morning.”26 ­After introducing the general princi­ples of Devaud’s condition, the article goes step by step through one of his unquiet sleeps. Somnambulists like Devaud ­were certainly a curiosity for Americans, but they also presented a potential threat to the stability of the new nation and its requirement that the citizenry comport themselves in a rational manner. The condition of sleepwalking gave the afflicted what Darwin and Rush believed was an excessive volition that made them distinct from individuals with typical sleep patterns. Since the decisions of sleepwalkers lacked reliable control, they w ­ ere often aligned with other unruly figures that ­were Eu­ro­pe­anized, racialized, classed, or other­wise adversely categorized around the turn of the ­century. In “A Par­tic­u­lar Account of a Singular Sleep-­Walker” (1798), the narrator of the article explains the somnambulism of John Baptiste Negretti of Vicenze, Italy, who was “a domestic of the Marquis Louis Sale” and “a man of a brown complexion, of a very dry, hot constitution, by nature choleric, and by custom a drunkard.”27 The account begins by making a class-­based distinction, racializing his body as “brown,” delineating his emotional constitution, and making his abusive drinking habit a crucial ele­ment of his identity, a fact which then comes up in his nocturnal motions. Before even beginning to track the movements of Negretti’s sleepwalking, “A Par­tic­u­lar Account of a Singular Sleep-­Walker” associates his condition with the disorderly bodies of poor, racialized eastern Eu­ro­pe­ans who cannot control their own actions even when awake. His illness is enmeshed with certain naturalized qualities, and his Eu­ro­pean body is presented for the spectatorship of Americans via the printed periodical. So, too, the oft-­reprinted “The History of Cyrillo Padovano, the noted Sleep Walker” (1790) considers the case of “the famous Cyrillo Padovano,” who was a “native of Padua in Italy, a ­little, brown complexioned man, and, while awake, remarkable for his simplicity, probity, piety, and candour; but, unfortunately for him, his dreams w ­ ere of the strongest kind, and seemed to overturn the w ­ hole system of waking morality; for he e­ very night walked in his sleep, and upon such occasions was a thief, a robber, and a plunderer of the dead.”28 The beginning of the description of Padovano bears a striking

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similarity to the one of Negretti: their racialized “brown” complexions are posited as crucial for understanding their bodily aberrations. Despite becoming a strict member of the Carthusian order of Catholic monastics, Padovano continues to overturn his “­whole system of waking morality” ­every night; even membership in a notoriously austere religious order cannot help him extend control over his ethical conduct while sleepwalking. If a system of waking morality fails to manage the unconscious decisions one makes during the night, then sleepwalking pre­sents a distinct challenge to systems of ethical responsibility that demand individual agency and responsibility. Sleepwalking posed a serious prob­lem for determining the nature of ­human action, especially within a new nation that relied on the theory that the majority of individual choice would be governed by objective decision-­making—­people suffering from this affliction w ­ ere not even internally consistent.29 Brown follows the pre­ce­dent set by the accounts of Negretti, Padovano, and o ­ thers with his own characterization of sleepwalking. Edgar Huntly focuses on two somnambulists: Clithero Edny and, l­ater in the novel, Edgar himself. At the beginning of the text, Brown pre­sents Clithero as an enigmatic figure who might be responsible for the murder of Edgar’s friend, Waldegrave. ­After numerous narrative convolutions, it is revealed that Clithero did not commit the initial murder of Waldegrave but that he did, in fact, kill his patron’s b ­ rother in Ireland, and even attempted to kill his patron, Mrs. Lorimer. Moreover, when Clithero learns that Mrs. Lorimer has arrived in New York near the end of the novel, he sets out to finish the attempt that he began in Ireland. Sleepwalking comes to Amer­i­ca via Europeans—­the Swiss, Italians, and Irish—­who also bring with them a stain of criminality in their conscious and unconscious lives. Thus, while Brown’s preface to the novel states “that the field of investigation, opened to us by our own country, should differ essentially from ­t hose which exist in Eu­rope,” and he purports to pre­sent “a series of adventures, growing out of the condition of our country,” the central trope of the novel stems from the transatlantic exchange of medical accounts, narratives of sleepwalking, and individuals who crisscross the ocean.30 Like the works by Darwin and Rush, and the notices and articles published in periodicals, Brown viewed sleepwalking as a means of disrupting conventional philosophical notions of the bounded, autonomous self; he even saw it as a potentially criminal form of agency, as in the actions of Clithero.



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Yet Brown also affords the condition an alternative repre­sen­ta­tion. His first reference to sleepwalking uses the word “disease” in the preface, but in the remainder of the text, he pointedly resists pathologizing it in such a way, instead using other descriptors such as “condition” or “affection.” Unlike medical accounts of the period, he largely refrains from labeling somnambulism in an overtly negative way. In fact, his publication of textual fragments begins by including sleepwalking as content, and then takes it on as a narrative form, crisscrossing, interconnecting, contracting, and weaving threads through one another in often fantastical ways. The fragmentary series of texts surrounding Edgar Huntly considers how the experiences of a sleepwalking individual might be represented formally and materially. ­These texts thereby illustrate, sympathetically, I argue, the way in which a physiological condition can be elucidated in a non-­clinical manner: for Brown, sleepwalking is not a failure of identity that needs to be pathologized, but simply another pos­si­ble instantiation of it. As Leslie Fiedler wrote of Edgar Huntly many years ago, “The bound­aries between person and person are abrogated; ­people are always turning into each other,” an assessment that lucidly identifies the pressure that Brown places on the autonomous individual.31 Instead of classifying a sleepwalker by listing symptoms, physiological characteristics, and nocturnal decisions, Brown constructs a condition of somnambulism through his very style of writing and structure of publication.

Publishing Edgar Huntly Sleepwalking transforms into a compositional form in Brown’s hands. The vari­ous publications that surround Edgar Huntly—­“Extract from the ‘SKY-­ WALK,’ ” “Edgar Huntly: A Fragment,” “Death of Cicero, A Fragment,” and “Somnambulism. A fragment”—­demonstrate Brown’s involvement in cultures of literary art that encouraged partiality. Taken as a group, t­ hese texts pressure any understanding of Brown as a novelist per se, and emphasize his participation in the fragmentary print ecologies pre­sent around the turn of the c­ entury.32 Indeed, each work has a distinct mode of relation to Edgar Huntly: Brown’s “Extract from the ‘SKY-­WALK’ ” was his first take on the sleepwalking theme; he wrote “Edgar Huntly: A Fragment” as an advertisement for the full-­length novel; he and his printers attached “Death of Cicero, A Fragment” to the ending of Edgar Huntly; and he continued to consider

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the phenomenon of sleepwalking in “Somnambulism. A fragment.”33 Paradoxically, such a haphazard style of writing helped bolster Brown’s own position as a well-­regarded author. Through this set of publications, Brown pre­sents his reading audiences with the pro­cess of composition: the bits and pieces of text that went into Edgar Huntly, and the bits and pieces that ­were left out.34 Despite the intersecting nature of Brown’s writing, most critics who treat Edgar Huntly tend to mention the facts that Brown wrote a lost book called Sky-­Walk, placed an extract from Edgar Huntly in his magazine, appended “Death of Cicero, A Fragment” to the novel, and ­later published “Somnambulism. A fragment,” but t­hese realities do not change Edgar Huntly for them. In books and articles written on Brown in the last few de­cades, the information surrounding the publication of Edgar Huntly functions as a piece of historical minutiae that fills out the background of Brown’s c­ areer, instead of working as a determining ele­ment that adds to a critical understanding of the novel and Brown’s compositional methods.35 Early Americans, on the other hand, ­were immersed in a world of sketches, essays, notices, anecdotes, fragments, and other heterogeneous publications, and they knew that the genre of the novel did not occupy the exclusive center of their readerly attention.36 Brown’s fragmentary texts not only thematize unconscious movement in their content but also represent it through the heterogeneity of their publication.37 Such narrative breaks actually contribute to Brown’s engagement of his audience; by divesting authorial control, he is able to more per­sis­tently convince readers to continue turning the page. Based on the content of the extract published in the Weekly Magazine, Sky-­Walk; or, the Man Unknown to Himself focused on the sleepwalking movements of a young man in the Pennsylvania borderlands, marking it as an e­ arlier version of Edgar Huntly. ­After his loss of the Sky-­Walk manuscript during the yellow fever epidemic, Brown continued working on the themes from the lost work in his larger series of texts. As he did with Sky-­Walk, Brown published an extract of Edgar Huntly in the Monthly Magazine in April  1799  in order to advertise the novel’s imminent release. This time, though, he did not simply call it an extract. The prefatory paragraph to the text states, “The following narrative is extracted from the memoirs of a young man,” yet he also titles the text “Edgar Huntly: A Fragment” (figure 8).38 This double nomenclature of extraction and fragmentation posits an overt and unquestionable contradiction of agency through the clash between se­lection and rupture.



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Figure  8. Charles Brockden Brown, “Edgar Huntly: A Fragment.” Monthly Magazine, and American Review 1, no. 1 (1799), 21. Courtesy Library Com­pany of Philadelphia.

Extracts served as a common form of newspaper and periodical advertising in the early United States; they granted audiences a glimpse of the longer text in order to attract attention and lure p ­ eople into purchasing the next issue or the entire work. The concept of an extract also foregrounds the role of ­human choice; it implies that an editor or an author completes the l­ abor of trimming the larger text, and selects a shortened version

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that ­will exemplify impor­tant features of the entire work.39 An extract does the work of representing, embodying, and typifying the essential features of a longer text: it functions as a stand-in for the w ­ hole. In complete contrast, fragments exclude the possibility of fastidious, rational se­lection; their existence depends on contingencies. While an extract intentionally uses the part to represent the w ­ hole, a fragment posits a connection between the two that is theoretically incidental and lacks any appearance of deliberate decision. By placing “Edgar Huntly: A Fragment” in both camps, Brown blends authorial se­lection with inadvertent occurrence in a way that undermines the establishment of a sensible literary arrangement. While the word “extract” occurs in the description of the text, the overarching title designates it as a “fragment,” taking it out of the realm of Brown’s control.40 Even fragments that ­were intended to be fragments pre­sent the appearance of an interruption. As a result, it is no coincidence that imperfect ­human control is depicted in the content of “Edgar Huntly: A Fragment.” Brown’s fragment begins when Edgar emerges from complete darkness in a cave to see “a gleam [of light] infinitely faint.”41 The readers of the text enter the narrative in a moment of shared bewilderment; neither they nor Edgar has any idea why he is trapped inside of a cave. L ­ ater in the novel it is made known that he walked in his sleep to get to the cave, a fact that reveals the under­lying somnambulistic logic to Brown’s compositions. But Edgar’s (and the reader’s) confusion in the cave turns into a cautious hope when he realizes he has found a pos­si­ble way out by following the “infinitely faint” bit of light. Thus, the publication of “Edgar Huntly: A Fragment” in the Monthly Magazine pre­sents an impor­tant transitional moment, when Edgar realizes that he can find a way out of the cave and possibly live through his strange imprisonment. The periodical fragment commences with the movement from one space to the next, from the utter darkness Edgar experiences to the minute gleam of light and the anticipation of leaving the dangerous cave. Remarkably, this alternation between interior and exterior, between dark cave and escape, models the textual movement between the space of the periodical and the novel; the fragment published in the Monthly Magazine ­later gets enfolded into the complete version of Edgar Huntly. As the periodical text continues, Edgar reaches the “gleam” only to realize that a group of Delaware Indians have taken shelter in the space; moreover, they have brought with them a captive young ­woman. ­After he ­frees the w ­ oman, Edgar shields their departure from the cave by murderously killing some of the men. As the two of them flee the scene, he notices that



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the landscape around them “was nearly covered with sharp fragments of stone. Between t­ hese sprung brambles and oak-­bushes, whose twigs, crossing and intertwining with each other, added to the roughness below, made the passage infinitely toilsome. Scattered over this space w ­ ere single trees and copses of dwarf-­oaks, which w ­ ere only new emblems of sterility.”42 The passage stresses the broken, unkempt, hostile “roughness” of the natu­ral world—­even the trees cannot grow past a certain height and stand apart from one another or in small “copses.” Nature proves threatening not just to ­humans but even to itself in Edgar’s account, since it only provides “new emblems of sterility” that ­w ill not procreate into the ­f uture, but languish in the pre­sent and eventually die. Most importantly, though, Brown writes that the soil surrounding Edgar and the young ­woman “was covered with sharp fragments of stone,” borrowing a term he uses for the piece of prose published in the magazine and applying it to Edgar’s setting. This description of the ground strikes an especially relevant note b ­ ecause the audience encountered the word “fragment” on e­ very single page as they read Brown’s writing: at the top of the magazine page ran a ­running header with the title in italics, “Edgar Huntly: A Fragment.” The visual juxtaposition of the two meanings of “fragment” establishes a resonance that highlights the degree to which Brown imbricates the geography of Norwalk (the name of the area that Edgar traverses) with the fragmentary architecture of the story.43 Edgar arrives in the wilderness of Norwalk as the result of sleepwalking, sees the “gleam infinitely faint,” and then travels through the unkempt landscape, all of which are encoded by Brown into the periodical publication; by classifying it as a fragment, he aligns ­those disjunctive internal ele­ments of the story with the overarching formal category of the piece. Furthermore, Brown’s unfinished style within the Monthly Magazine publication are also pre­sent within the entirety of the novelized version of Edgar Huntly, not to mention his ­later fragment on somnambulism published in 1805. The unfinished quality of the novel version of Edgar Huntly is suggested at the very beginning of the text by Edgar himself. He begins the intricate convolutions of the story by explaining to his fiancée, Mary Waldegrave, that “at length the drama is brought to an imperfect close.”44 For Edgar, the events of the novel have already taken place and have reached what he calls “an imperfect” conclusion. The ending of the text confirms such an assessment. A ­ fter Edgar re­unites with his former mentor, a man named Sarsefield, Edgar decides to tell Clithero that Clithero’s former patron, Mrs. Lorimer,

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has arrived in Amer­i­ca. Clithero immediately betrays Edgar’s trust by traveling to New York in order to hunt Mrs. Lorimer down. A ­ fter the one long letter from Edgar to Mary that comprises almost the entirety of the narrative, Brown dispenses three final, abrupt letters between Sarsefield and Edgar, in which Edgar explains his ­mistake (of informing Clithero about Mrs.  Lorimer’s location) and Sarsefield chastises his impetuous nature. Sarsefield informs the authorities, who apprehend Clithero on his way to New York, but Clithero jumps into the ­water in an attempt to reach the shore, never surfacing again. The convoluted novel ends with Clithero’s apparent drowning, yet no body is recovered and the characters uneasily—­but uncertainly—­concede that he has died.45 Brown’s interest in sleepwalking and Edgar’s convoluted travels throughout Norwalk provide a counterpoint to what Siân Silyn Roberts calls the “fantasy combination of reason, autonomy, self-­government, and property owner­ship in an exclusively masculine body.”46 As Roberts has argued, Edgar pre­sents an alternative form of the self, one that I contend continues in the fragmentary tradition set forward by writers like Pratt, Rowson, Foster, and Carey (in his ­earlier fragments). In the work of ­these writers, the mutability of identity—­rather than its fixity—­proves to be the most significant ele­ment in the repre­sen­ta­tion of liminal groups. In the same vein, Edgar’s sleepwalking through the terrain results in a fraught, complicated intersubjectivity that clashes against a clearly delineated individuality; crucially, however, his identity unfolds not only over the course of the novel, but over the publication of multiple texts, as if Brown turns somnambulism into a compositional form. Edgar’s sleepwalking is not represented by a single work. In an inversion of the consonance of subjectivity with the careful construction of a unified novel, Brown generates a character who displays a marked disaggregation of subjectivity, and publishes him in a series of texts consisting of parts that overlap with one another without necessarily completing each other. Yet in the very same stroke, Brown was able to leverage fragmentary states of identity and textual production as a means of furthering his own authorial ­career in a rapidly developing marketplace of letters. Edgar’s identity—­modeled in the structure of publication—­scaffolds Brown’s own entrance to and success in the c­ areer of authorship. The Edgar Huntly texts and their publication history helped define Brown’s status as an author in the romantic period. Instead of detracting from his reputation, con­temporary commentators noted that his unfinished style contributed—­a lthough sometimes frustratingly—to the reading experience.



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His close friend, William Dunlap, reflected on Brown’s ­career and evaluated his idiosyncratic writing pro­cess in The Life of Charles Brockden Brown (1815), an account written a few years a­ fter Brown’s death that helped cement his place in early American culture. “It is no apology to the purchaser or reader of a book,” wrote Dunlap, “that the author is occupied at the same time with several distinct works, some progressing in composition alone, some in both composition and printing, some just begun and ­others nearly finished.”47 The temporalities of authorship overlap in complicated ways in Dunlap’s description: “Several distinct works” occupy Brown’s attention “at the same time,” and they are all in differing states of completion, “some just begun and o ­ thers nearly finished.” But ­t here needs to be “no apology” to the reader ­because the reading experience is actually improved by the variable stages of composition coexisting. Indeed, Dunlap approvingly observes that “all his works of a fanciful character pre­sent to the eye this chequered and motley appearance,” a variegated aesthetics that threads through Brown’s entire corpus and comes to the foreground in the conception of Edgar Huntly.48 Even more so than in other works, Brown used an “unsystematic mode of composition” in the 1799 novel that gave it “a motley appearance.”49 As Dunlap’s visual description suggests, the aesthetic proportions of Brown’s writing extended ­toward the senses as well. His fragmentary texts impressed themselves upon the minds of his readers in Dunlap’s portrayal: “One mystery gives hint to another, and the reader is fi­nally left in the lurch wondering how the last was intended to have been elucidated. He must not be surprised, therefore, if in the unfinished works of the author, he finds them bearing the same cast of character with the productions which he gave to the world. It is equally obvious that an attempt to explain what the author had particularly in view in ­these unfinished manuscripts, must always remain a mystery.”50 Brown’s unfinished style offers readers mysteries that build on mysteries, leaving them “wondering” about the conclusion of the text. Dunlap uses “the unfinished works of the author”—­including Brown’s incomplete study of geography and Memoirs of Stephen Calvert—as representative of Brown’s entire corpus, which all contain “the same cast of character” that leaves audiences with a feeling of being “left in the lurch.” Other commentators in the nineteenth c­ entury similarly saw the qualities that Dunlap identified. Brown’s successful authorial status was described in an article from the North American Review as being rooted in his preference for “publishing them [his books] when unfinished to laboring

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upon them a­ fter they had lost their interest to himself: they are proofs or signs of power rather than the result of its complete and steady exertion; but they shew the character of his mind.”51 The writer of the review goes even further than Dunlap and openly compliments Brown’s work, attesting to the unfinished “strength” of the partial, seeming to prefer it to the “complete and steady exertion” evidenced by other authors. Brown provides the evidence—­the “proofs or signs of power”—­that establish him as a writer. “He never, indeed, shews a desire to complete a story,” a lack of desire which “answers the author’s purpose, and gives room for the display of g­ reat strength.”52 Again and again, the writer of the review connects the “display of g­ reat strength” within the fragmentary style to Brown’s position as an author who successfully publishes books for an early American audience. Such a “display of ­great strength” throughout Brown’s novels not only answers his own compositional goals, but also produces a significant effect on the readers of his fiction. The author of the article from the North Ameri­ can Review continues his encomium by observing, “We generally close a story with a belief that as much more might be said. He was engrossed by single, separate scenes . . . ​and while we can account from this fact for our feeling ­little solicitude about the story as a ­whole, we must at the same time form a high estimate of an author’s power, who can carry us through almost disconnected scenes without any considerable failure of interest.”53 Despite the occurrence of “disconnected scenes” in the prose, ­t here is no “failure of interest” on the part of the reader, who must “form a high estimate of the author’s power.” The fragmentary style that Brown employs gives his audience the sense that “more might be said,” but by holding back any definitive conclusion he continues to engage their curiosity. No less a literary thinker than Sir Walter Scott commented that Brown’s “suggestive manner of treating ­every subject, aims at keeping the mind constantly on the rack of uncertainty.”54 Throughout the nineteenth c­ entury, the “suggestive manner” and “the rack of uncertainty” of Brown’s prose contributed to positive opinions regarding his authorial power. Brown’s fragmentary writing thus served multiple, distinct roles: it provided him with the means of representing pathological states of disease within the content and structure of his works; it allowed him to compose a variety of texts all at once; and it confirmed his position as an author who could engage his readers and sell books.55 While twentieth-­century critics of Brown often noted his irregular style and critiqued his tendency to leave plot threads hanging, nineteenth-­century reviewers saw the potential in his



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unfinished writings. In the words of one more of the many elegiac notices published ­after Brown’s death, “In reading his works, we cannot help pausing ­every now and then amidst the stirring and kindling excitements they afford, to reflect of what sleepless midnights of voluntary misery the impression is borne by pages.”56 Such readerly reflections on the “stirring and kindling excitements” and the creation of “sleepless midnights” solidifies a position of authorship premised on a fragmentary—­rather than unified—­ prose aesthetics.

Sarah Went­worth Morton and Elegiac Incompletion Brown’s somnambulistic style of writing and publication helped set the stage for authors ­later in the nineteenth c­ entury who connected their own illness—­not a character’s—to a fragmentary style. Their publications showcased a compositional pro­cess by displaying writing that was in the ­middle of completion, halted, interrupted, or other­w ise deviated by sickness. ­These “sick fragments” afforded texts a degree of authenticity in two significant ways. First, they built on the methods employed by eighteenth-­century novelists who established a sense of “writing in the moment,” a practice that sought to establish the credibility and plausibility of fiction. Richardson, for one, emphasized in the preface to Cla­ris­sa that “the letters [of the characters] on both sides are written while the hearts of the writers must be supposed to be wholly engaged in their subjects . . . ​so that they abound not only with critical situations, but with what may be called instantaneous descriptions and reflections, which may be brought home to the breast of the youthful reader.”57 In Richardson’s claim, the verisimilitude of the “instantaneous descriptions” can be exemplified by the narrative’s effect on the audience; just as the characters of the novel are “wholly engaged in their subjects,” he hopes that his epistles transfer affect from the page to “the breast of the youthful reader” in a sentimental exchange. Richardson’s style also resonated with a writerly development by Jean-­ Jacques Rousseau, who emphasized the importance of spontaneity in his compositions. Drawing on the essayistic style of Montaigne, Rousseau believed in the importance of quicquid in buccam venit, or the practice of immediately writing what­ever comes into the head. As Rousseau states, “I ­w ill 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,” a methodology

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that carries the initial occurrence of the “event” into the act of writing itself.58 In the doubling that Rousseau describes, “the spontaneity of the writing, copied closely (in princi­ple) from the ­actual spontaneous sentiment (which is given as if it w ­ ere an old, relived emotion), assures the authenticity of the narration,” in the words of Jean Starobinski.59 For Rousseau, the writing itself could refer back to the “spontaneous sentiment” of the author, providing a “relived emotion” that would ensure a certain kind of “authenticity” for the readers. Both Richardson and Rousseau created forms of written prose for their readers that endowed their texts with the aura of real occurrences. One of the primary goals for each author was to generate a style of composition that verified itself by proving its authenticity to audiences. The “instantaneous descriptions and reflections” and “the spontaneity of the writing” could successfully convey just such a legitimacy; moreover, Richardson and Rousseau each emphasize the kinetic ele­ment of writing in their diction. The sense of writing in the “moment” out of “spontaneity” implies a hurried dashing off of a letter or a page of writing. Fragmentary styles of writing proposed a nineteenth-­century version of Richardson’s and Rousseau’s aesthetic ploys. By delivering an account of illness that justified their irregular writing, authors returned their audiences to the moment of composition—in t­ hese instances a moment of sickness—­and thus gave “instantaneous descriptions and reflections” on the writing pro­cess. Such a closeness to the pro­cess ensured the “authenticity of the narration.” Sick fragments also carried the quality of authenticity in a second way, one derived from the literary market: they built on the popularity of posthumous “nachlass” published in edited collections. The nachlass, or “leftovers,” of literary writers became an impor­tant part of the artistic marketplace in the early nineteenth c­ entury, a detail mentioned in Chapter 1. Any nachlass of famous authors—­especially German romantic writers like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schlegel, who approached the posthumous publication and archivization of their works quite seriously—­ took on a commercial value ­because they could be added to collections, providing additional content that gave publishers the opportunity to repackage literary products a­ fter an author’s death. Through strategic marketing, posthumous fragments of writing provided readers with a sense of closeness to the moment of a writer’s death, thereby creating an intimacy with the recent pro­cess of composition. As Gillian Silverman observes, books offered a



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means by which “long-­dead authors resurrect themselves,” and nineteenth-­ century readers saw them as a “metonymic link to the deceased.”60 The literary market encouraged t­hese perceptions and used the final, incomplete writings of an author as a means to portray them more faithfully; this premise allowed editors and publishers to continue releasing “new” and revised editions even a­ fter an author’s death halted the production of new lit­er­a­ture.61 Drawing on the sacralized forms of “relics” and “remains” familiar to Catholic and Protestant readers, the marketing of manuscript-­to-­print nachlass created an intimate connection with the life and death of an author through their words. Dunlap’s The Life of Charles Brockden Brown, for one, participated in this discourse by releasing new, unfinished work by Brown that the public had not seen. Furthermore, writers all throughout the c­entury composed their own sick fragments as if anticipating the use of their writing for nachlass ­after their death. Such a fetishization of leftover manuscript writings generated a reflexive response: The practice of publishing posthumous papers influenced authors who identified this trend and de­cided to imitate it, fashioning lit­er­a­ ture in the style of nachlass. ­Because of the popularity of unfinished writing and its association with authenticity in the literary market, writers started to use their own nearness to death to appeal to readers. In 1823, Sarah Went­worth Morton’s My Mind and Its Thoughts, in Sketches, Fragments, and Essays presented just such a dynamic. Known as the “American Sappho,” Morton was particularly prolific in the late eigh­ teenth ­century, and enjoyed a large network of elite connections through her husband, Perez Morton, a Boston ­lawyer and speaker of the Mas­sa­chu­ setts House of Representatives. He also, however, embroiled her in scandal in the 1780s when he had an illegitimate child with Fanny Apthorp, Sarah’s ­sister, an affair that was fictionalized in William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy. Despite this startling event, her ­career continued. In 1799, she published The Virtues of Society. A Tale Founded on Fact and, a­ fter a hiatus of a ­little over two de­cades, returned to publication with My Mind and Its Thoughts, the only volume she released ­under her real name.62 The latter collection consists of an uncategorizable combination of epigrammatic thoughts, philosophical reflections, descriptions of paradoxes, essays, poems, songs, and elegies. It is a miscellany that delights in its own pastiche—­Angela Vietto notes that “the book genuinely gives the impression that the author has sought to reproduce her thinking in something like its genuine associativeness

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and recursiveness while offering in the ­table of contents an index to her mind.”63 Yet it did not reach her audience’s hands without an apology from her for its idiosyncratic form. At the start of the collection, Morton provides a self-­assessment of her sense of style, beginning the work with a section titled “Response Courteous To The Question Imperius, By Way of Introduction,” the question being, “AND what are your thoughts like? or what are they worth?”64 In answer to such a haughty question from an i­ magined surly reader, she simply observes that the pages that follow give “poor ­t hings utterance” and that she has acquired “the temerity to throw them en dishabille before the glaring eye of public remark.”65 Her comments align with t­ hose of other eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century female authors, who often used self-­denigration as a means of making their writing palatable to “public remark” at the same time that they flaunted their excessive “temerity.” Morton, however, goes beyond the characteristically polite description of her boldness as “temerity” and her writing as “en dishabille.” ­Later in her prefatory reflections, she explains the composition of My Mind and Its Thoughts through the language of partiality and deformity: “But as it is easier to design than to discern, and more usual to attempt e­ very t­ hing, than to succeed in any t­ hing, the author has felt and known, that the imperfect and the incomplete—­ possibly the features of ignorant deformity, are to be placed before critical eyes, habituated to, and of course, interested only in, the finished and the beautiful. Yet it may be confessed, the pre­sent is merely an experiment, unadvised, and without promise, consequently not liable to be the victim of disappointment.”66 The start of the collection thus furnishes an extended meditation on the aesthetic characteristics of her fragmentary writing. While the “design” of her work takes a comprehensive view that w ­ ill “attempt every­thing,” she notices that such a totalizing endeavor ensures a lack of success. As a result, her verse is “imperfect” and “incomplete.” It contains “the features of ignorant deformity,” and she fears that the “critical eyes” that examine her work are “habituated to, and of course, interested only in, the finished and the beautiful,” an assertion that recalls the influence of unified theories of aesthetics stipulated by British romanticists like Coleridge. By acknowledging her decision to not follow the tradition of “the finished and the beautiful,” she posits the alternative value of deformity, disproportion, and experiment, aligning herself with the style of the fragmentary: a romanticism not invested in complete aesthetic w ­ holes but in the techniques of the authors discussed in previous chapters. Like Charles Brock-



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den Brown, Morton’s experimental mindset indicates a willingness to piece together writing in unexpected ways, an artistic outlook corroborated by the medley of genres contained in the text. The introductory statements do not prove enough for Morton, however. She feels the need to continue explaining her authorial decisions at the very end of the volume, a­ fter the reader has perused her eclectic compilation of prose and verse compositions. The final section consists of a formal “Apology” that explains why she de­cided to write the text in the first place: “Far from having originally presumed to attempt regulating the capacities, or amending the hearts of o ­ thers; the sole view of the author has been, to correct and console her own. A series of disappointments, with distress, cruelly aggravated by the premature death of very dear ­children, having left that stagnation of heart, and that pulsation of brain, which sometimes seems to precede the most deplorable of ­human miseries; to avert the apprehended possibility of this, the aid of constant occupation, and continued self-­ examination, was resorted to.”67 My Mind and Its Thoughts is a decidedly personal work that neither worries about “regulating” the “capacities” of its purchasers nor “amending the hearts of ­others.” It principally focuses on Morton’s life, and the pain and disappointments that she has recently experienced. Through writing, she hopes to “correct and console” the affliction of “premature death” that has led to her own “stagnation of heart” and “pulsation of brain”; the l­abor of her composition is thereby inscribed with the evidence of her physiological condition. In Morton’s description, text is fully resonant with body. Intriguingly, Morton leaves the eventual result of her “stagnation” and “pulsation” vague. She only fears that ­t hose physical and ­mental conditions might eventually lead to “the most deplorable of ­human miseries.” While no further details are provided, the implication of her statement is almost certainly her death. In the sentimental logic of the period, overwrought feelings of excessive grief had the potential to end life; however, Morton holds back from fully envisioning such a scenario ­because she relies on the ameliorating effects of composition. Writing provides a form of regulation—or a means by which she is able to amend her heart—­t hat gives her control over the traumatic events she has recently experienced. More to the point, she sublimates her expected death into prose and poetry. As Cavitch explains in his account of elegiac forms, “To imagine the remembrance of one’s own death is to attempt some control over the meaning of one’s life.”68 In her “Apology,” Morton at once seeks “some control” through “the aid of constant

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occupation, and continued self-­examination,” and displays the writing pro­ cess for her readers so that they can empirically see its curative properties enacted on the page. Morton even goes so far as to describe the tempo of her work in the succeeding pages, putting the audience—as Richardson would say—in the moment of writing to display her authorial identity. She explains how the thoughts of the “early morning and the late eve­ning” ­were “committed to fragments of paper, with the single intent of being referred to, and acted upon by the author’s solitary self, who—­not of the world, yet stood among them—­and met the frowns, and passed the smiles of the many, and had THOUGHTS, and essayed to write of them also.”69 ­These “fragments” are constituted by the a­ ctual, material pieces of paper that Morton uses as her compositional substrate at the extremes of the day, and are also transcendently reflective of her subjective position as a “solitary self.” She places her readers in the temporal locale of her creation of literary fragments in the morning and at night, and also connects them to the emotional experience of alienation that she feels during their writing. In both the physical and spiritual senses—­during the “early morning and the late eve­ning,” and in being “not of the world”—­she introduces readers to the liminal state of her daily life and invites them to take part in her experience of standing apart. ­Here, more than anywhere ­else in previous examples, fragments coincide with a sense of autonomous self-­description, a kind of identity that rhymes with an emergent sense of individualism. Nevertheless, that reflexive sense of personhood is consistently put into question. Her insistence that she is “not of the world, yet stood among them” reconceptualizes a trope of existential alienation that Lord Byron pop­u­lar­ized in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. When Harold is in the crowd They could not deem me one of such; I stood Among them, but not of them; in a shroud Of thoughts which w ­ ere not their thoughts.70 Morton and Byron draw on the Christian renunciation of the worldly in John’s Gospel, when Jesus prays for his disciples and says “they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world.”71 Morton’s writing stands as part of a longer tradition of disavowal in which body and identity is felt to be out of place with the rest of the world, and she conveys that feel-



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ing of dislocation through her explanation of the fragmented writings. The reference to the Gospel would have been familiar to nineteenth-­century readers immersed in religious writing, or t­hose familiar with the work of  Byron. Rather than alienating Morton’s audience—as the text would suggest—­t he reference has the ironic effect of including them in the sense of being “not of the world.” Paradoxically, any sense of estrangement in her text is also predicated on a shared phrasing that reaches backward through literary history. Her final turn in the apology is perhaps the most impor­tant for the tripartite commingling of illness, fragments, and exposition of the writing pro­cess for her readers. In its conclusion, she fully invites her audience into a state of fellow feeling: “And yet, ­under e­ very personal and par­tic­u­lar discouragement, the author could think that t­ hose poor fragments, which had done so much for the dispositions of her own mind, might, ­under similar exigencies, effect something for the benefit of o ­ thers.”72 It is ­here that Morton makes her most extensive claim. She avers that her “poor fragments” have “done so much for the dispositions of her own mind,” and also anticipates that their ameliorative qualities might not be ­limited to her own condition. Th ­ ese writings helped her recover from her traumatic experiences, and she hopes that o ­ thers might obtain a similar remedy from them simply by reading them. Her “solitary self”—­t heoretically bounded and separate—­ appears to be porous and fluid, rather than solidified. The “poor fragments” are not only evidence of trauma and the curative powers of writing, but are transferable to the readers, who can reuse the words in their own lives. By “effect[ing] something for the benefit of o ­ thers,” her writing would verify itself; its claim to being au­t hen­tic fragments composed in a state of suffering would be confirmed through its efficacy in the emotional life of the readers. Morton’s interventions in her writing create a form of interruption that continually seeks to revise and reinterpret her own work, generating a halting cadence that fragments the collection. Yet it is quite telling that in a work that Morton titles My Mind and Its Thoughts, in Sketches, Fragments, ­ ere are vari­ous pieces tiand Essays, only one fragment actually appears. Th tled thoughts, sketches, or essays, but Morton saves the label of “fragment” for a deeply personal text, one that focuses on the “series of disappointments, with distress, cruelly aggravated by the premature death of very dear ­children” that instigates the collection in the first place. The poem, titled “Apostrophe, To the Memory of my Beloved ­Daughter Charlotte. Fragment,”

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offers an elegiac remembrance of her d ­ aughter’s life, lamenting the powers that took Charlotte to an early grave.73 Morton employs traditional tropes of the elegy throughout the poem, comparing her ­daughter to an angel, observing her concordance with the natu­ral world, and apotheosizing Charlotte’s entire life, but the ending shows Morton innovating on the genre. Like Charlotte’s life, the poem ends on an unfinished note: ­a fter the last couplet that laments, A ­mother’s hope, and lost despair, Has led his haunting spectres ­there, Morton places a line of nine asterisks.74 As in so many other fragments published in the eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries, the punctuation indicates the intertwining of depletion and excess. No more can be said about the subject since the poem is cut off at the end, yet more could and should be said, as the asterisks provide a proxy for further elegiac reflections. Standing in, as they do, for further language or emotion, the line of punctuation reminds the reader that the subject of death cannot be fully described, and to do so would also exhaust the memory of Morton’s ­daughter. Leaving the poem unfinished and naming it a “Fragment” suggests that t­ here is always more to be said about Charlotte, a suspension that keeps her—at least in print—­infinitely alive. Writing is curtailed ­here by qualifying the ending of the verse with the tension of an unspeakable grief that oscillates between the need to say more and the inability to do so. Philippe Ariès famously described the nineteenth ­century as a moment that “crossed the threshold into the unspeakable, the inexpressible” in regards to death, a threshold that finds repre­sen­ta­tion in Morton’s writing via a line of punctuation about her d ­ aughter that is at once evocative and 75 s­ ilent. The fragment does not only seek to embody Morton’s feelings about her ­daughter’s death; it also depicts, as she explains, the very pro­cess of writing. Despite the abrupt ending to the fragment, Morton does not stay ­silent about the poem; once again, she cannot resist the urge to explain more, and she reflects on the short verse in the explanatory notes she creates for the collection. Her note to the poem begins by reproducing the final couplet and the line of nine asterisks. She then relates how “Apostrophe” was written ­after finding a piece of writing by her deceased d ­ aughter: “This fragment was immediately impelled by reading her last faithfully fond Letter to a dear



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and distressed m ­ other.”76 The “Apostrophe” serves as a kind of epistolary continuation to the “last faithfully fond Letter” that Charlotte wrote to Morton. Just as Charlotte left b ­ ehind a piece of writing for her m ­ other, Morton picks up the chain of correspondence by providing a final—­t hough unfinished—­ verse eulogy for her ­daughter. By Morton’s own account, the poem provides evidence of the very moment of composition; filled with emotion a­ fter reading her d ­ aughter’s final letter, Morton felt “immediately impelled” to pen “Apostrophe.” The assonance of the phrase and its suggestion of rapid motion places the reader of Morton’s volume at the scene of creation, revealing the under­lying mechanics of writing and the evocative power of fragmentary work. My Mind and Its Thoughts synthesizes several aspects of Morton’s life and aesthetic style: it depicts her distressed physiological state ­after the death of Charlotte; it c­ouples a bodily phenomenology of “stagnation of heart” and “pulsation of brain” with a fragmentary style; and it reveals the means by which Morton intertwined body with pen, at once representing her condition and hoping that the fragments would have a similar palliating effect on her readers. Her “solitary self” was thus a kind of model for her readers. The miscellaneous collection continued to underwrite the association between fragments and liminal subjectivities—­Morton’s sense of being “not of the world”—­and also demonstrated a shift t­oward the use of fragments as evidence of a coherent authorship. In Morton’s note to “Apostrophe,” she describes precisely how her emotional response to her ­daughter’s letter results in the incomplete nature of the elegy: The pain she labored ­under, the speed with which she composed the verse, and the constant memory of her ­daughter all collectively form the fragment. Such reflections on fragments made writing feel more au­t hen­tic to their readers in the nineteenth ­century. As authors reflected on their own conditions of authorship, audiences could see more precisely where a writer’s thoughts began and ended. Through the fragment form, an authorial identity—­even a liminal one—­could be represented on the page.

A Fragmentary Tradition Brown uses a sleepwalking character as a means of organ­izing the fragments he produces and Morton relies on her own experiences with illness to justify her use of the form. Their depiction of the relationship between

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illness and the writing pro­cess is, in its own way, somewhat insular, ­because it does not cite the work of other writers. Both focus on a highly fraught repre­sen­ta­tion of the subjective self—­dependent on intersubjectivity, partial consciousness, grief, and shared affect—­even as such depictions scaffolded the basis for their well-­regarded positions of authorship. Unlike the work of authors in previous chapters, who largely focused on the mutable self and only rarely experimented with the development of the liberal individual, the writers examined ­here establish a dialectic between the in-­process self of the fragment and the more clearly delineated locus of authorship. Such market-­ oriented considerations became more and more discernible with the explicit incorporation of the Eu­ro­pean romantic tradition of fragments. More so than Morton’s oblique reference to Byron, other writers during the period ­were keen to link their own fragmentary writing style to long-­standing literary customs. Richard Henry Dana  Sr., one the most impor­tant American critics in the early nineteenth c­ entury, sought to overtly place his writing in a lineage of literary practice. And, like Morton, Dana sought to transpose his physiological state onto his publication of fragments. In the September  1825 issue of the New-­York Review, and Atheneum Magazine—­a publication edited by Dana’s colleague, the poet William Cullen Byrant—­Dana released the first version of his “Fragment of a Poetical Epistle.”77 The poem did not come without an introduction. As in Morton’s case, the text arrived with a prefatory note explaining its fragmentary quality, one that situated the reader in the moment of composition. Before the verse commences, Bryant (or Dana) includes the following bracketed notice: “[Messrs. Editors,—­Last winter, I received from a friend, then slowly recovering from severe illness, a letter in verse, partly humorous, partly serious. I take upon me to send you the graver half. Yours, &c.].”78 As the brief paratext indicates, the poem is already fragmentary on at least two levels. Like Morton’s response to her ­daughter’s letter, Dana’s poem is a segment of an epistolary correspondence, making it a part of a longer back and forth to which the readers do not have access. Moreover, the editor or Dana then divides the poem even further, choosing to only pre­sent the “graver half” for publication in the magazine. Even before the verse begins, then, it is situated as a fragment of a fragment. The content of Dana’s poem serves to further expand on the incomplete ele­ments indicated by the paratext. It begins with an extended dash and thankfulness to his friend (ostensibly Bryant himself) for listening to his vari­ous complaints:



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———­No more, my friend, A wearied ear I’ll urge you lend My tale of sickness—­aches I’ve borne From closing day to breaking morn—.79 The extended dash at the start of the poem follows the practice of using punctuation to represent partiality, a trend seen again and again throughout the era’s fragments. It also points backward to the rupture between the “partly humorous” portion and “the graver half” printed for readers. What­ ever comedic portion came before, the start of this poem focuses on Dana’s vari­ous complaints—­the “tale of sickness” and “aches” that he has “borne” from “closing day to breaking morn”—­and punctuates them with even more dashes, reminding the readers of the initiatory break. Yet despite the production of the verse as an occasional poem around the time of Dana’s sickness, it was not exclusively released in the New-­York Review. Two years l­ater in 1827, Dana released his Poems; By Richard H. Dana, which reprinted the text with a major change in the title, altering it to read “Fragment of an Epistle. Written While Recovering From Severe Illness.”80 The new title immediately centers attention on his experience of illness, as well as the pro­cess of writing that took place during his recovery—­after all, the composition was penned “While Recovering.” Along with the new title, Dana made slight alterations to the structure of the verse and the punctuation and, notably, de­cided to preface the entire collection with a lengthy explanation of his poetry. The introductory remarks provide a detailed account of all of the titles published in Poems, but Dana easily spends the most time describing the background and logic of “Fragment of an Epistle.” He acquaints the reader with the text by explaining the circumstances surrounding its composition, as well as its publication history: “Of the remaining pieces [in Poems], the first four have appeared in the New York Review; and are ­here republished with the consent of my friend Bryant, the editor of that late work. One of t­ hese, ‘Fragment of an Epistle,’ is taken from a letter which I wrote to amuse myself while recovering from a severe illness.”81 Dana first identifies the poem with Bryant’s editorial and authorial reputation, placing it in relation to a poet who himself wrote a number of noteworthy fragments in the first half of the ­century. He also distinguishes it from the other three “remaining pieces,” which receive no notice whatsoever in the preface. Fi­nally, he reiterates its personal nature—it was initially meant as part of “a letter”—­and underscores the setting of the writing. He observes

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that he “wrote [it] to amuse myself while recovering from a severe illness,” highlighting his skill at composition (even while sick), as well as the physiological state that influenced the poem. Dana is not content to leave it at that, though; the preface continues with a further explanation of the poem’s form. As in Morton’s book, Dana feels the need to excuse and explain why the verse is presented as a fragment: I must be pardoned giving it as a fragment. The lines are much more broken than is usual in the octo-­syllabic verse; though Milton has taken ­great liberties in this re­spect in his two exquisite ­little poems in the same mea­sure. This he could have done neither through ignorance nor carelessness. Lord Byron has justly spoken of the “fatal fa­ cil­i­t y” of this mea­sure; and he might as truly have remarked upon its fatal monotony, ­unless varied in all pos­si­ble ways. So far from abrupt pauses not being allowable in it, t­here is scarcely a mea­sure in the language which becomes so wearisome without them; as ­every one must have experienced in reading Scott, notwithstanding his rapidity and spirit.82 Dana begins his description by asking for ­pardon, noting that the fragment’s partial structure requires some kind of explanation to the reader. Yet he immediately shifts away from his defensive posture to place his poem—­a lbeit its lines being “much more broken than is usual”—­w ithin a storied tradition of poetic composition. Dana argues that his fragmentary octosyllabic verse is a fundamental part of literary history. Having already invoked Bryant as the initial editor of his work in the prefatory materials, Dana proceeds to compare the octosyllabic verse of “Fragment of an Epistle” to John Milton’s “two exquisite l­ittle poems” written in the same meter, “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso.” Dana also justifies his aesthetics of brokenness by observing that Milton, too, took “­great liberties” with the verse form; if Milton can play with the structure, then surely Dana can as well. Such a gesture not only places “Fragment of an Epistle” in the same vein as Milton’s two companion poems, but it also reveals Dana’s view of himself as a writer. Citing Milton as a pre­ce­dent confirms for his audience that Dana not only composes verse, he does so self-­consciously and with a view ­toward continuing literary traditions from the past. The formal defense of the poem then leaps forward in time to Lord Byron’s comment on the “fatal fa­cil­i­t y” of octosyllabic verse. In Byron’s dedica-



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tion to The Corsair, inscribed to the Irish poet Thomas Moore, he writes that “Scott alone, of the pre­sent generation, has hitherto completely triumphed over the fatal fa­cil­i­t y of the octo-­syllabic verse.”83 By “fatal fa­cil­i­t y,” Byron means that tetrameter has a fluidity that can actually detract from the complexity of the writing, though in Byron’s view, Sir Walter Scott has actually avoided this pitfall. Dana, though, further describes this characteristic of the verse form as a “fatal monotony” endemic to the rhythm; lines that are too smooth and graceful can prove tedious over time. To counteract such ele­ments of octosyllabic verse, Dana asserts the need to create variations “in all pos­si­ble ways” throughout the poem. This argument contributes to Dana’s sense of his “broken” lines as being both a necessary and aesthetically defensible component of the poem. Following Milton and Byron, octosyllabic verse needs “abrupt pauses,” other­w ise the verse becomes “wearisome” from its “fatal fa­cil­i­t y,” a characteristic he—­demurring from Byron’s estimation—­ identifies in the writing of Scott. By aligning himself with Bryant, Milton, and Byron—­and disassociating his writing from that of Scott—­Dana uses his poem and its introductory remarks to demonstrate for his readers his own position as an author within the field of literary history. His writing places audiences in the moment of his sickness, and he leverages that spontaneity to support his claim for a storied place in artistic traditions. For Dana, writing the fragment and reflecting on it thus becomes an exercise in navigating what kind of author he is and what kind of lit­er­a­ture he produces. Such writing discloses an account of professional “position-­taking,” in the words of Pierre Bourdieu, a means by which authors consider their place in the literary field in relation to other writers, critics, readers, and institutions that consecrate artistic work. As Bourdieu explains, “One cannot take the author’s point of view . . . ​ ­unless the author’s situation in the space of constitutive positions within the literary field is grasped anew: it is this position that . . . ​is at the root of the ‘choices’ this author makes in a space of artistic position-­takings.”84 Sickness provides an initial means of explaining Dana’s own “situation” for a growing public readership. And, in the preface to Poems, Dana builds on his illness to pre­sent his own version of the “constitutive positions” within literary tradition that he aligns himself with and distances himself from in order to convey his writing to his audience. Even the latter act—­t he separation of his verse from Scott’s tetrameter—­functions as a comparative ele­ment that identifies Dana as being more skillful, in his view, of course, than Scott.

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Like Morton, Dana’s illness instigates the production of the verse, yet by the end of his explanation, the memory of his time in the sick bed has all but dissipated. The prefatory remarks on “Fragment of an Epistle” vaguely reference its origin in his sickness, but the attention is almost completely given over to considerations of Dana’s literary lineage and his position as an author. In his hands, fragmentary writing functions less and less to demarcate a specific kind of liminal identity, and more to establish a par­tic­u­lar relationship between the author and his audience. As the nineteenth ­century progressed and the fragment became an even more prevalent aspect of literary culture, writers increasingly employed it as a compositional method that could confirm their status as an “author” and signify a position within the literary field. And, moreover, Dana’s writing represents the culmination of a form of romantic authorship that had been building for de­cades. William Duff, one of the earliest commentators on the notion of “genius,” noted in 1767 that the most successful author’s “composition ­w ill upon certain occasions be distinguished by an irregular and unequal greatness.”85 Like many of the other thinkers described in this study, Duff viewed the height of artistic achievement as asymmetrical, rather than symmetrical. Dana brings his readers into the very pro­cess of creating his “irregular” and fragmentary work, showing the audience how both his sickness and his considerations of octosyllabic verse led to the poem’s composition. Even though the works by Morton and Dana form complete and bounded texts, they emphasize the constitutive form of the fragment in their compositions. And, by making that vis­i­ble, they make their own authorship available for display, an innovation that aligns with a view of production delineated by Karl Marx only a few de­cades ­later. As Marx argued, “It is generally by their imperfections as products, that the means of production in any pro­cess assert themselves in their character of products. A blunt knife or a weak thread forcibly remind us of Mr. A., the cutler, or Mr. B, the spinner.”86 In this way, the imperfections of lit­er­a­ture cease to be exclusively seen as imperfections. Instead, they exist as evidence of the “means of production” established by an author at their writing desk.

EPILOGUE

Fragments in the Nineteenth ­Century

American Fragments has sought to describe the po­liti­cal and sociocultural consequence of literary fragments throughout the romantic period, beginning in the years surrounding the American Revolution and ending with the start of Jacksonian Amer­i­ca and the market revolution. Yet while the de­cades of the late eigh­teenth and early nineteenth centuries pre­sent some of the most significant examples of fragments, this form continued to be a crucial ele­ment of writing in ­later years as well. As American lit­er­a­ture gained more distance from the po­liti­cal headiness of the post-­revolutionary period, authors kept incorporating the fragment into their texts, although the form assumed slightly less urgency. Writers of fragments no longer exclusively depicted the travails of the lower sort; they increasingly used the form as a means to buttress their position within the marketplace, as we saw in the final chapter. The potentiality of prostitutes, the disabled, and the destitute took a back seat to the establishment of a legible and coherent authorial self. And, as the ­century progressed, a new development emerged: the word “fragment” still appeared in titles and subtitles of texts, but it more regularly became embedded in a work rather than unmistakably denoted at the beginning. Fragments became implicit stylistic features, not explicit ones denoted by title, typography, inclusion of ruins, or reference to the miracle of the loaves and fish. Paradoxically, such an entrenchment into writing offers evidence of the success of fragments instead of their disappearance. It depicts a historical turn away from the overt creation of the form to the interest, more broadly, in an aesthetic of fragmentation. Moving from object to pro­cess, authors in the nineteenth ­century turned away from the label of “the fragment” in f­ avor of a more method-­oriented usage. The examples of Charles Brockden Brown, Sarah Went­worth Morton, and Richard Henry Dana Sr. explored in the previous chapter point precisely

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t­ oward such a transition. Temporally, each of t­ hese figures is situated at the turn of the ­century: Brown authored his major works in the 1790s and 1800s; Morton wrote in the years a­ fter the Revolution but continued to publish into the nineteenth ­century; and Dana, the latest of the three, grew up in the milieu of early nineteenth-­century romanticism and was active in literary circles beginning in 1817. Their fragments speak to the conditions of a marginal sense of self, yet they also resist residing in an exclusively po­liti­cal vein. To a certain extent, all three detach their writing from the concerns of the lower sort and employ the literary fragment as a means of displaying a compositional style. Shifting in the direction of an autonomous literary sphere that was more aloof from civic life—­a version of aesthetic development described by Bourdieu and other theorists—­t hese authors endeavored to appeal to the growing appetite for fragments. Even so, at the height of the romantic interest in the fragment, other literary artists began to migrate away from presenting it as an unmistakable narrative feature. The form thus ceased to activate the narrative dynamics that pushed readers to reimagine the identities of the lower sort in an extratextual manner. In the place of an overt structure, the fragment became increasingly embedded into lit­er­a­ture in a subtler fashion. To take just one example from the early nineteenth c­ entury, the September 1817 issue of the North Ameri­ can Review and Miscellaneous Journal featured “Thanatopsis,” a poem by then-­seventeen-­year-­old William Cullen Bryant. “Thanatopsis” set the stage for a noted ­career spanning the ­century and, ­after its publication, it drew a large and eminent audience.1 Yet despite the profuse attention that literary critics across history have paid to the publication of “Thanatopsis,” most accounts overlook another crucial detail of the September 1817 edition of the North American Review. “Thanatopsis” was not the only poem the young Bryant published in that issue. On the same page where the last lines of “Thanatopsis” appeared, t­ here began a more obscure poem, simply titled “A Fragment.” Attracting much less notice than “Thanatopsis,” “A Fragment” provided readers with a sense of Bryant’s interest in solitude and nature; it began, STRANGER, if thou hast learnt a truth which needs Experience more than reason, that the world Is full of guilt and misery; and hast known Enough of all its sorrows, crimes and cares To tire thee of it—­enter this wild wood, And view the haunts of Nature.2



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In preparing his Poems for publication in 1821, Bryant heavi­ly revised the work and changed its title to the now-­familiar “Inscription for the Entrance Into a Wood” (which was l­ater retitled “Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood”).3 Biographers and scholars who study Bryant seldom comment on the poem’s original appearance in the North American Review. The ­earlier history of the poem’s publication is obscured in f­avor of the 1821 or 1832 “finished” versions that include Bryant’s ­later edits. Perhaps most notably, by referring to the poem by its l­ ater title—­not “A Fragment”—­literary historians bury a vital detail. W ­ hether Bryant himself titled the poem “A Fragment” and the editors followed his indications, or they themselves created the title is unclear. What is certain is that a reader picking up the magazine in 1817 would have recognized “A Fragment” as partaking in a long tradition of unfinished literary forms. Yet only a few years l­ater, Bryant made the decision to submerge the unequivocally fragmentary ele­ments of the poem in his revisions. Changing the title from “A Fragment” to “Inscription for the Entrance Into a Wood” adjusts any first impression of the poem and no longer invites completion from its readers. The new name of the poem avoids evoking the fragment form straightaway, instead opting to create a mood that focuses on a sense of nature—­t he entering of “a Wood.” In addition to altering the title, Bryant also modified some of his diction and punctuation to eliminate any abruptness. In the 1821 and 1832 versions, Bryant smooths out brusque ele­ments, replacing hyphens with commas and turning hyphen and semicolon combinations into semicolons alone. The resulting verse contains fewer halting stops. While “Inscription for the Entrance Into a Wood” focuses on the moment of the speaker’s alienation from society, the categorical attention to ostracized individuals appears increasingly minimal at this moment in the history of fragments. The positionality of the lower sort proves second to Bryant’s establishment of his authorial self. Bryant’s poem thus exhibits an essential shift in the history that we have been tracking: the editorial changes from one version of the verse to the next exemplify, on a micro-­scale, the movement from the explicit fragment to the implicit one. “Inscription for the Entrance Into a Wood” still retains unfinished characteristics—­Bryant does not eliminate all of the brusqueness, nor does he modify the poem’s thematic focus on alienation—­but the unconcealed fragmentary style of the original is replaced with a more polished finish. He opts to foreground an organic cohesion rather than an irregular style. In an obvious diminishment of the trappings of the fragment that previous pages have recounted,

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the poem lacks the spatial interruptions of Emma Corbett, avoids the spatiotemporal dislocations of novels of ruination, and does not contain references to the miracle of the loaves and fish. It moves away from such narrative structure and content. Bryant’s transformation of “A Fragment” into “Inscription for the Entrance Into a Wood” depicts the transition of fragmentary epistemes on the level of formal changes made to one specific poem; however, the turn can also be observed on a broader scale within the ­careers of two of the most influential authors of the nineteenth c­ entury, Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. On the eve of what F. O. Matthiessen famously dubbed the “American Re­nais­sance,” Melville was busy publishing his earliest prose fiction and Hawthorne was preparing the release of his first collection of stories. In a pattern that epitomizes the embedding of the fragment that I have been describing, their early ­careers demonstrate a distinct interest in the overt publication of the fragment form, while their ­later work exemplifies their attention to an implicit style of fragmentation. When Melville was nineteen years old, his “Fragments from a Writing Desk” appeared in two parts in the May 4 and 18 issues of the Demo­cratic Press, and Lansingburgh Advertiser (1839). Melville’s diptych appeared in serial portions with the subtitles “No.  1” and “No.  2,” and consisted of two epistolary narratives—­ostensibly addressed to the same recipient—­signed with the pseudonymous initials “L.  A.  V.” The first installment of “Fragments” introduces the narrator and his vari­ous quirks, and explains his romantic interest in the young w ­ omen of Lansingburgh. In the second installment, a courier delivers a strange letter to L. A. V. from a w ­ oman who 4 calls herself “Inamorata.” Inamorata’s letter asks L. A. V. to follow her messenger; with some trepidation, the narrator agrees. He ultimately arrives at a mansion where a basket inexplicably lowers, allowing him and his guide to undertake an “aerial voyage.”5 When he alights from the basket through a win­dow of the villa, he is astonished to discover “a spectacle as beautiful and enchanting as any described in the Arabian Nights.”6 On entering the opulent chambers, L. A. V. encounters the lovely Inamorata of the letter; he then waxes poetic about her “matchless beauty,” subsequently “imprinting one long, long kiss upon her hot and glowing lips.”7 ­After he implores her to “Speak!” he realizes with a shock that “she was dumb! dumb and deaf!”8 At first glance, the story appears to be a derivative production, since it includes extensive citations from e­ arlier British writers. By and large, scholars have treated it as an unimportant work of juvenilia that simply displays



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Melville’s experimentation with the work of other authors.9 The narrative proves more complex than such accounts suggest, though, constituting what Gary Saul Morson appreciatively terms “a museum of utterances,” a text that “collects and displays masterpieces of phrase and thought in a small space.”10 Melville layers the story with quotations compiled by L. A. V., a young man whose citations and references draw on works by writers including Thomas Moore, Mark Akenside, Coleridge, Byron, Scott, and ­others, many of whom published their own fragments. But Melville’s gathering together of the “Fragments” of other writers also indicates his participation in the longer literary tradition that American Fragments has traced. Just as the authors examined in the previous chapter emphasized the pro­cess of writing in their fragments, the “writing desk” in the title and the use of quotations all stress the compositional ele­ments of the story. Melville uses the tale to buttress his early authorship by depicting the under­lying essentials of writing (what Irving called, in The Sketch-­Book, “The Art of Bookmaking”). And, more so than Dana in his collection of poetry, Melville affiliates himself with a par­tic­u­lar tradition of writing, extracting passage ­after passage in order to establish himself as a writer in this first foray into print. He uses fragments not only to highlight a state of disability for Inamorata, but to foreground the scene of writing in his initial authorial attempt.11 ­Later in his c­ areer, however, the categorical attention to the form diminishes. He ceases to title works with the word “Fragments.” Fragmentation becomes thematized in his writing in the place of being presented as an ordering ele­ment of the narrative, a feature that can be seen in Moby-­Dick; or, The Whale (1851). The text famously begins with two introductory sections, “Etymology” and “Extracts,” that are respectively attributed to “a Late Con­ sumptive Usher to a Grammar School” and “a Sub-­Sub-­Librarian.”12 In its first pages, Moby-­Dick considers how fragments of literary works can be woven into the very texture of a novel. The compilation of quotations that begins Moby-­Dick extends and renegotiates the formal claims of “Fragments from a Writing Desk.” ­These textual resonances make pos­si­ble a comparison between the juvenile, exuberant, and ultimately flawed L. A. V., and the jaded, overworked, and underappreciated compilers that appear in Moby-­ Dick. In the same way that L. A. V.’s initial quotations depict the pro­cess of authorship, Moby-­Dick’s extracts show how lit­er­a­ture itself can be constituted through a fragmentary style. As the promiscuous citations of Moby-­ Dick’s “Sub-­Sub” show, Melville’s earliest story resonates with and reappears within Melville’s l­ ater fictions. Clearly, the transition from explicit to implicit

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fragments did not simply take place on the scale of Bryant’s editing of a single poem; it could be seen over the course of an author’s c­ areer as well. Such a movement from fragments to fragmentation is also evident in the oeuvre of Melville’s con­temporary and friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne. He, too, found the fragment form and its aesthetic structure compelling as he started writing. Early in his c­ areer, Hawthorne worked on a series of tales that he called “The Story-­Teller,” but the cycle never attained completion in the way that Hawthorne originally envisioned. Instead, he broke down the components of the work into individual stories that he released in periodicals, gift books, and collections of his tales. In his original conception, “The Story-­Teller” began with a frame tale relating how the young, eponymous storyteller leaves his New E ­ ngland home and thereby rebels against his stern, Puritanical guardian, Parson Thumpcushion, a caricature of a zealous, bible-­thumping New En­glander. Hawthorne envisioned “The Story-­Teller” as a tale with two major components. First, it consisted of a series of frame tales detailing the history of the storyteller, including both his departure from his New E ­ ngland home and his travels around the countryside. Second, it contained inset tales that the young man recited to audiences gathered at wayside inns, town meeting halls, taverns, and other spaces of public assembly. “The Story-­Teller” tracks the protagonist’s movements and describes his encounter with another writer, a man dubbed “Oberon” who reappears in several notable pieces. The storyteller relates the end of Oberon’s life in a work published in the American Monthly Magazine, “Fragments from the Journal of a Solitary Man” (1837). Suffering from a pulmonary disease—­a physical disease that meta­phor­ically represents the lack of “inspiration” in his creative life—­t he tale begins with Oberon instructing the storyteller to dispose of his final writings: “Burn my papers—­a ll that you can find in yonder escritoire; for I fear ­t here are some ­t here which you may be betrayed into publishing. I have published enough; as for the old disconnected journal in your possession———.”13 Oberon dies as he gives his final instruction, so it remains uncertain what his intentions might have been for the “old disconnected journal”; Hawthorne’s extended dash emphasizes the unfinished and silenced quality of Oberon’s impor­tant statement. Oberon’s last wishes remain unknown b ­ ecause of a dramatic aposiopesis. The narrator of the story loyally burns the papers from the escritoire but, ­after looking over Oberon’s journal, decides to publish some of it since Oberon did not directly ask him to destroy that writing. He confesses that



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“in strict conscience I o ­ ught also to have burned that [journal]; but, casting my eye over some half-­torn leaves the other day, I could not resist an impulse to give some fragments of it to the public. To do this satisfactorily, I am obliged to twist this thread, so as to string together into a semblance of order my Oberon’s ‘random pearls.’ ”14 The narrator claims that he must alter the fragments from the journal so as to give them “a semblance of order,” in the same way that someone might string pearls together in order to fashion jewelry, combining an organic, natu­ral structure with his own rational, ­human discretion. The tension between the fragmentary ele­ments of the narrative and its organ­izing logic coincides with Melville’s “Fragments,” a tale that contains extracted citations that interrupt the pro­gress of the story. And, like Melville’s work, Hawthorne’s early story emphasizes the pro­ cess of writing as such: “I cannot better conclude t­ hese fragments than with poor Oberon’s description of his return to his native village ­after his slow recovery from his illness. . . . ​A beautiful moral may be indeed drawn from the early death of a sensitive recluse, who had shunned the ordinary ave­nues to distinction, and with splendid abilities sank into an early grave, almost unknown to mankind, and without any rec­ord save what my pen hastily leaves upon t­hese tear-­blotted pages.”15 The “half-­torn” page of Oberon’s journal highlights the material construction of his literary ­labors, as does the narrator’s comment regarding “what my pen hastily leaves upon ­t hese tear-­blotted pages.” By calling the reader into a scene of writing, Hawthorne connects the fragmentary ele­ments of his story to the pro­cess of composition, scaffolding his narrator’s position as an author. The fragments composed by both Melville and Hawthorne early in their c­ areers do not—in contrast to so much of the lit­er­a­ture examined in American Fragments—­ chiefly examine the lower sort.16 They also concentrate a ­great deal on the persona of the writer: the type of character who collects together “some fragments” of Oberon’s writing, inserts himself into the text, and is “obliged to twist this thread, so as to string together into a semblance of order my Oberon’s ‘random pearls.’ ” Not simply an editor, Hawthorne also creates an authorial identity through the figure of the storyteller.17 As with Melville, though, Hawthorne eventually moves from explic­itly labeling his texts as fragments to incorporating a fragmentary style in his writing. In Hawthorne’s much l­ater novel, The Marble Faun (1860), he titles a chapter “Fragmentary Sentences.” In this chapter, Miriam—­a ­woman with a mysterious backstory—­finds herself alone with a cryptic stranger known only as the Model, a person who alternately interests and repels her, and

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follows her almost everywhere she goes. The novel implies that they have had some prior connection, but that relationship is left unstated. The narrator’s construction of a scene at the beginning of “Fragmentary Sentences” is worth quoting at length: ­ ere have come to us but a few vague whisperings of what passed in Th Miriam’s interview, that after­noon, with the sinister personage who had dogged her footsteps ever since the visit to the catacomb. In weaving t­ hese mystic utterances into a continuous scene, we undertake a task resembling, in its perplexity, that of gathering up and piecing together the fragments of a letter, which has been torn and scattered to the winds. Many words of deep significance—­many entire sentences, and ­those possibly the most impor­tant ones—­have flown too far, on the winged breeze, to be recovered. If we insert our own conjectural amendments, we perhaps give a purport utterly at variance with the true one. Yet, ­unless we attempt something in this way, t­ here must remain an unsightly gap, and a lack of continuousness and dependence in our narrative; so that it would arrive at certain inevitable catastrophes without due warning of their imminence.18 By introducing the chapter with so much hesitation, the entire conversation between Miriam and the Model contains more than the shadow of a doubt that the scene is “utterly at variance with the true one.” Hawthorne enfolds fictionality within an already fictive romance, layering the novel through a sleight of hand in which his narrator makes other events more plausible and credible by acknowledging his limitations in this instance. Yet the novel itself is generated by the narrator’s engagement with the fragmentary. Just as “Etymology” and “Extracts” offer the initiatory and generative material for Melville’s magnum opus, the “continuousness and dependence” that constitute The Marble Faun are born out of the irreducible presence of the fragmentary. If novels from two of the most impor­tant of American authors are to be taken as complete, coherent, or even ­whole, ­those very characteristics are acquired through the adoption of—­and constitutive friction with—­practices that contradict such a tendency. Herein lies one of the dominant tensions of the fragmentary style, one that only increases in amplitude throughout the nineteenth c­ entury and beyond. The most famous authors of the era, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson—­whose styles in their prose and po-



Fragments in the Nineteenth ­Century 205

etry have decidedly been categorized as fragmentary—­move between the partial and the complete. Digressions, interruptions, and incompletions constitute the primary traits of their writing, even though their works might not explic­itly state their fragmentary qualities in the title. They are, in fact, indebted to an energetic and popu­lar literary tradition that spanned both sides of the Atlantic. Even the most impor­tant critics of the era noted the stylistic irregularity endemic to the period’s writing. In seeking to explain Dickinson’s writing, Thomas Went­worth Higginson made recourse to this statement of John Ruskin’s: “No weight nor mass nor beauty of execution can outweigh one grain or fragment of thought.”19 The clarity of his comment belies the complexity of Dickinson’s own characteristically elliptical views on the subject. In her poem, “To fill a Gap,” she considers fragments as enlisting an irresolvable suspension: To fill a Gap Insert the Th ­ ing that caused it— Block it up With Other—­and ’twill yawn the more— You cannot solder an Abyss With Air.20 The compositions of nineteenth-­century American writers serve as testimony that it is precisely such a movement between the partial and the complete—­t he gap and the attempt to fill it—­t hat establishes one of the most generative arenas of artistic creation in the eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries. The transformation of the fragment throughout the romantic period—­ its migration from a form used to represent the lower sort in a po­l iti­c ally progressive way, to one that writers employed to convey a sense of authorship, and fi­nally to its subtle integration within the style of a text—­ recommends an ave­nue for rethinking the c­ areers of American authors and the formation of American lit­er­a­ture. Through the lens of the literary history of the fragment, the texts of our most famous names become less grounded in coherent, stable, and unified narrative structures, and more distinctively engaged with the partial, the incomplete, and the fragmentary. Such a viewpoint should encourage critics to study the ways in which writers intentionally opt for the aesthetics of unfinished forms over and above complete ones: the way Transcendentalists found truth in “gleams and

206 Epilogue

fragments,” the marked obsession poets had with the creation of “Beautiful dripping fragments,” or how the lit­er­a­ture surrounding the Civil War was suffused with the remains of vio­ lence and moldering battlefields left 21 ­behind. In our search to create logical narratives that provide a satisfying historical w ­ holeness, we have often missed how t­ hese fragmentary ele­ments offer an equally impor­tant framework of understanding, one that opens into aesthetic questions in the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries. Ameri­ can Fragments has argued for the need to attune ourselves to the pro­cess by which eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century American writers drew on and transformed the formal complexity of the fragment. Such an analy­sis allows us to fill more clearly the gaps in our own accounts of the making of American lit­er­a­ture.

NOTES

Introduction Epigraph: Jeffrey, “Art. II. The Giaour, a Fragment of a Turkish Tale,” 299. 1. American Museum, 44–46. 2. On the social history of the “lower sort” in early national Philadelphia, see Simon Newman, Embodied History. He remarks that developments in “trade, population, and wealth in­equality” resulted in a discourse of “sorts” replacing “estates,” and that “this new system divided p ­ eople into the ‘better sort’ and the ‘meaner,’ ‘poorer’ or ‘lower sort’ ” (4). 3. McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin, 7. Other impor­tant studies of romanticism and fragments include Rauber, “The Fragment as Romantic Form”; Janowitz, ­England’s Ruins; Regier, Fracture and Fragmentation in British Romanticism; and Allport, “The Romantic Fragment Poem and the Per­for­mance of Form.” On fragments in eighteenth-­century British lit­er­a­t ure, see Harries, The Unfinished Manner; and Jung, The Fragmentary Poetic. On the Eu­ro­pean tradition, see Lacoue-­Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute; Behler, German Romantic Literary Theory; and Nassar, The Romantic Absolute. 4. Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem, 5. 5. Ibid., 6. Emphasis is in the original throughout my citations, u ­ nless other­w ise noted. 6. Regier, Fracture and Fragmentation in British Romanticism, 3. 7. Throughout this study, “American romanticism” functions as an artistic counterpoint to the po­liti­cal approach of historically defined frameworks like the post-­revolutionary, the early republican, and the early national (though all of t­ hese phrases w ­ ill be used in the forthcoming pages). Such a move reconfigures the era as one not exclusively defined by politics, but also grounded in an aesthetic experimentation that was scaffolded by the networks of the transatlantic book trade. The corridors of exchange across the Atlantic meant that literary forms—­e specially ones that w ­ ere integral to the formation of what scholars call “romanticism”—­were shared in commonality. My goal is not to be prescriptive about historical periods, but instead to re­orient attention around an idea that is too often dispensed with in Americanist studies. On the histories of reciprocity, imitation, and creative contribution that defined Atlantic culture, see McGill, American Lit­er­a­ture and the Culture of Reprinting; Tamarkin, Anglophilia; Gould, Writing the Rebellion; Rezek, London and the Making of Pro­ vincial Lit­er­a­ture; and Larkin, The American School of Empire. 8. See Davidson, Revolution and the Word; Warner, The Letters of the Republic; Slauter, The State as a Work of Art; and Cahill, Liberty of the Imagination. In addition to ­t hese works, the following contributions have greatly advanced the study of early American aesthetics and politics: Looby, Voicing Amer­i­ca; Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British Amer­i­ca; Stern, The Plight of Feeling; Gustafson, Eloquence Is Power; Phillips, Epic in American Culture;

208

Notes to Pages 4–7

Garrett, Episodic Poetics; Roberts, Gothic Subjects; Howell, Against Self-­Reliance; Rezek, Lon­ don and the Making of Provincial Lit­er­a­ture; Tawil, Lit­er­a­ture, American Style; and Hyde, Civic Longing. Also of note are an essay collection edited by Looby and Weinstein, American Lit­er­a­ture’s Aesthetic Dimensions, and Early American Lit­er­a­ture 51, no. 2 (2016), a special issue on early American aesthetics edited by Cahill and Larkin. 9. In performing an investigation of form grounded in detailed textual study rather than so­cio­log­ic­ al survey, American Fragments takes its cue from discipline-­shaping works that have sought to recover histories of aesthetics and practices of close reading. Among o ­ thers, see Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just; Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic; Loesberg, A Return to Aesthetics; Levine, Forms; and Levinson, Thinking Through Poetry. One of the most influential voices in the reappreciation of aesthetics is Jacques Rancière. In his view, aesthetics is precisely about the re­distribution of who is invisible and who is vis­i­ble, and what can be said and what cannot—in distinctly po­liti­cal terms (The Politics of Aesthetics, 9–45). 10. Looby, Voicing Amer­i­ca, 5. 11. The fragment emerges out of what Paul Guyer identifies as a predominant theme in eighteenth-­century British lit­er­a­ture on aesthetics: the power of the imagination. Over the course of the period, the “theory that aesthetic experience is an intrinsically pleas­ur­able play of our ­mental powers accompanied with indirect cognitive and moral benefits predominated”; at the same time, this imaginative play could influence po­liti­cal arenas b ­ ecause t­ here existed “no consensus that the concept of aesthetic experience must be rigidly separated from . . . ​other forms of ­human activity and production” (A History of Modern Aesthetics, 97, 29). 12. Otter, “An Aesthetics in All ­Th ings,” 120. Along similar lines, Caroline Levine calls form “an arrangement of ele­ments—­an ordering, patterning, or shaping” (Forms, 3). My politically progressive reading of the fragment also corresponds with Levine’s sense of how “formalists in recent years have been contending against the power­f ul argument that formalism entails an embrace of authoritarian unfreedom” (“Critical Response I,” 131). While such stark terms overstate the case slightly, my approach to the fragment in this study by and large aligns it with imaginative and liberating expression, rather than reigning ideological power. In addition, the location of the fragment within the late eigh­teenth and early nineteenth centuries urges us to recognize how “form” had only recently been associated with aesthetics. As Abigail Zitin has demonstrated, in the m ­ iddle de­cades of the eigh­teenth ­century formal inquiry became a constitutive ele­ment in the study of aesthetics via the practical ele­ments of art—an artisanal “shaping” (Practical Form, 1–27). The written fragment’s phenomenological ele­ments—­ its invocation of a par­t ic­u ­lar shape, as we w ­ ill see—­invites the kind of “spatio-­formal abstraction” which Zitin identifies, even as it has distinct po­liti­cal consequences that counteract the association between formalism and authoritarian ideology (Practical Form, 12). 13. Looby, Voicing Amer­i­ca, 5. 14. The fragment thus rhymes with what Carrie Hyde observes as the “po­liti­cal subjunctive” formulation of lit­er­a­ture. For her, “po­liti­cal efficacy resides in subjunctive formulations—­ where the pos­si­ble (which might or could be) and the prescriptive (what should or o ­ ught to be) collide in language that seeks to compel by persuasion. The ‘po­liti­cal subjunctive’ . . . ​concretizes dif­fer­ent ways of envisioning po­liti­cal membership that have clear implications for how it might or should be defined, but nonetheless lack the law’s coercive power” (Civic Long­ ing, 16). 15. Oxford En­glish Dictionary Online, s.v. “fragment, n.”



Notes to Pages 7–12

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16. Ibid. 17. All Latin translations ­were completed with the generous help and expertise of Brittney Szempruch. This was not an uncommon literary-­critical phrase in the period. For example, a review of a play performed at the Haymarket Theater uses the expression to describe the polish that an actor lacks: “He still wants a certain completeness and finish; is too much in extremes; and neglects the callidæ juncturæ, the fine links, by which the feeling must be conducted, like the electric fluid” (“Haymarket Theater,” New Monthly Magazine and Liter­ ary Journal, 389). 18. Garrett, Episodic Poetics, 2. In addition to Garrett’s work on partial writing, see Pethers, “The Early American Novel in Fragments.” 19. In contrast, the texts Garrett examines attain varying levels of completion through their interweaving of literary parts within a unifying story. As he states, an “episode is a rela­ tional term: it indicates a relationship between a narrative unit (a scene, an event) and a necessarily larger narrative that comprehends that unit” (Episodic Poetics, 13). The fragment diverges from the concrete ­wholeness presented by the episode, and moves in the direction of Clare Pettitt’s description of the nineteenth-­century serial: “A dynamic form which collects individual parts ­towards the completion of an ­imagined w ­ hole” and which is “always incomplete” (Serial Forms, 19, 21). 20. Barthes, S/Z, 8. The way that fragments invite pos­si­ble completions speaks to Barthes’s understanding of “connotation.” He observes that “connotation makes pos­si­ble a (­limited) dissemination of meanings, spread like gold dust on the apparent surface of the text. . . . ​ Functionally, connotation, releasing the double meaning on princi­ple, corrupts the purity of communication: it is a deliberate ‘static,’ painstakingly elaborated, introduced into the fictive dialogue between author and reader” (S/Z, 8–9). 21. Garrett shows how the episode’s temporality progressed in accordance with economic commerce, serving as part of a merchant-­class push for national unity. Through its powers of unification, the episode consigned the individual to the monetized temporality of cap­i­tal­ist circulation (Episodic Poetics, 49–53). 22. Genette, Narrative Discourse, 35–47. 23. Ibid., 83. Herman, Story Logic, 218. 24. As such, fragments partake in what Lloyd Pratt identifies as the heterogeneous temporality of American lit­er­a­ture. While they imply a past, pre­sent, and f­ uture, they do not delineate the nature of that past or f­ uture. Instead, they establish “a reading subject faced with a relationship to the f­ uture in which that f­ uture is a disconcertingly undefined vector made so by virtue of the fact that any given pre­sent is felt to incline ­toward several dif­fer­ent ­f utures (and pasts) at once” (Archives of American Time, 7). 25. Ele­ments of structure, temporality, and content constitute the central features of fragments in the period examined h ­ ere, but as Toril Moi reminds us in her Wittgensteinian account of language, “­t here i­ sn’t a specific set of features” that provide a totalizing sense of a concept “that w ­ ill account for all pos­si­ble cases of use” (Revolution of the Ordinary, 97). 26. As Daniel Walker Howe suggests, in this period the “analogy between the construction of individual character and the construction of the commonwealth permeated much of public discourse,” resulting in a “close affinity between the individual/psychological and the public/po­liti­cal” (Making the American Self, 7). 27. Loughran, The Republic in Print, 116. For more on the disarray of paper in the period, see DiCuirci, Colonial Revivals, 1–51.

210

Notes to Pages 13–17

28. Alongside many historians, Robert Ferguson rec­ords the prob­lems of the era when he observes that the “late 1790s experienced unpre­c e­dented factionalism and vituperation as growing divisions between emerging parties, Federalist against Republican, reached [a] breaking point”; he also notes that “divisions arose in the 1790s when new conflations of religious and po­l iti­c al understanding added fuel to the flames” (Reading the Early Republic, 19, 34). 29. See Benedict Anderson, ­Imagined Communities, 37–65. 30. Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, 5.1.4–5.1.5. For the history of this usage, see Oxford En­glish Dictionary Online, s.v. “fragment, n.” 31. Ibid., 5.1.8. 32. Coriolanus, 1.1.222. 33. Antony and Cleopatra, 3.13.117–3.13.118. 34. The liberal individual corresponds with what E. P. Thompson calls the “Acquisitive man” in The Making of the En­glish Working Class (832), and what C. B. Macpherson, in his critique of such a positionality, names “possessive individualism” in The Po­liti­cal Theory of Possessive Individualism. For Thompson and Macpherson, the formation arose out of early Enlightenment thought but realized its clearest expression in the nineteenth ­century. Along similar lines, but in the American context, Howe approvingly identifies “the conception of the autonomous self [or] . . . ​balanced character” which fully “emerged in the nineteenth ­century” (Making the American Self, 5, 109). 35. For a summary of the two concepts in early Amer­i­ca, see Shapiro, The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel, 14–20. As Shapiro explains, republican positions “look to the ideas of ‘commonwealth’ . . . ​claims for personally disinterested virtue, exemplified in the dedication to a civic humanist” position (14). On the other hand, liberalism is based on “the postaristocratic assertion that the monadic subject can participate in the f­ ree market of exchange by instrumentalizing itself, and the ­labor of ­others, as commodities and determine the course of its life apart from physicalized status” (14). The scholarly lit­er­a­ture on ­t hese topics is extensive; however, for the most impor­tant discussions see Bailyn, The Ideo­ logical Origins of the American Revolution; Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Re­ public; Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment; Banning, “Jeffersonian Ideology Revisited”; Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism; and Appleby, Liberalism and Republi­ canism in the Historical Imagination. 36. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 368–390. 37. Nancy Armstrong, How Novels Think, 10–11. 38. Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self, 86. 39. Ibid., 128. 40. Ibid., 161–162, 143. Drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben, Isobel Armstrong calls such individuals falling between the cracks “the deficit subject, the subject that falls outside accounts of the fully h ­ uman, consigned to bare life” (Novel Politics, 7). 41. Roberts, Gothic Subjects, 19. Isobel Armstrong, too, convincingly identifies the nineteenth-­century novel as a site in which novelists “attempted to model a fully h ­ uman personhood” that was distinguished by “open and fluid and non-­hierarchical” characteristics belonging to “an emergent reading of a horizontal society” (Novel Politics, 28). Scholars—­Armstrong among them—­have spoken in comparable ways regarding the process-­based nature of democracy, showing how a fluid “self” could extend from individuals to politics. Alan Keenan, for one, remarks that “demo­cratic politics is thus caught in a perpetual state of transition, with democ-



Notes to Pages 17–20

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racy never fully, or once and for all, achieved, and with the demo­cratic ‘we’ always uncertain, the site of perpetual contestation” (Democracy in Question, 12–13). In the context of early Amer­ i­ca, Michelle Sizemore argues that “the p ­ eople are a potentiality always on the horizon of realization in the f­uture and always guaranteed by their mythic realization in the past,” through which we can “catch the people-­in-­process” (American Enchantment, 74). 42. Roberts, Gothic Subjects, 19. 43. On the theoretical side, too, the deconstruction of liberal identity begins with minority groups. As Judith Butler comments, minoritarian groups must “pre­sent ourselves as bounded beings—­distinct, recognizable, delineated, subjects before the law”; however, she protests that “although this language may well establish our legitimacy within a l­egal framework ensconced in liberal versions of h ­ uman ontology, it does not do justice to passion and grief and rage, all of which tear us from ourselves” (Precarious Life, 24, 25). 44. Stephen Shapiro explains how, in the logic of eighteenth-­century sentimentality, the per­for­mance of feeling gives “evidence of one’s sense of appropriate be­hav­ior in ways that ensures the viewer’s inclusion within the benefits and privileges of collective approbation” (The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel, 64). For the means by which the marginalized ­were sometimes able to participate directly in the print sphere, see Weyler, Em­ powering Words. She rightly observes that even though “the poor and unfree frequently appeared in print in English-­speaking Amer­i­ca in the last half of the eigh­teenth c­ entury, they did so primarily as objects of print” (Empowering Words, 5). 45. Howell, Against Self-­Reliance, 49. 46. Shapiro reminds us that “the initial motivation for the elaboration of scientific racism did not come from any intrinsically perverse attitude by Eu­ro­pe­a ns ­toward ­peoples from other continents. Instead it emerged as a needed solution to cultural obstacles holding back the expansion of a cap­i­tal­ist world-­system” (The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel, 87). 47. To exclusively view the counter-­radical ele­ments of fragments would be to follow what Isobel Armstrong, in her reading of nineteenth-­century En­g lish novels, calls “the conservative default mode,” the disciplinary tendency to align lit­er­a­ture with an ideological closure derived from the historical context (Novel Politics, 15 and passim). Edward Cahill and Edward Larkin similarly offer the admonition that the “shift from textualism to contextualism also implies the reduction of lit­er­a­ture to merely another form of discourse—­a nd thus discourages attention to its par­tic­u ­lar qualities, rules, and expressive capacities,” warning scholars about the capitulation of formal ele­ments to historical ideologies (“Aesthetics, Feeling, and Form in Early American Literary Studies,” 242). In Armstrong’s case, she treats novels that have typically been viewed as conservative texts and re­orients our attention to the progressive potentials within the interstices of the writing. She opts—as I do h ­ ere—­for the idea that texts produce their own version of history through their formal ele­ments, that “works of lit­er­a­ture are capable of moving beyond the consensus of print culture from which they emerge, capable of moving beyond its debates and conflicts, and, in the well-­k nown phrase of Adorno, imagining other­w ise” (Novel Politics, 51). 48. Barthes, S/Z, 6, 12. Working from a book historical perspective, Roger Chartier states, “What­ever it may be, reading is a creative practice, which invents singular meanings and significations that are not reducible to the intentions of authors of texts or producers of books” (“Texts, Printing, Readings,” 156). This condition is only amplified by the inconclusive nature of fragments.

212

Notes to Pages 21–27

49. On the character of liberty in the period, see Clark, The Language of Liberty; Gordon Wood, Empire of Liberty; Rozbicki, Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution; and Cahill, Liberty of the Imagination. As Christopher Looby rightly points out about ­t hese years, “Liberty was always qualified as ‘En­g lish,’ and usually specified as a set of historically given, constitutionally secured civil freedoms. Once in­de­pen­dence was declared, the national adjective was forthwith abandoned, and the semantic field of ‘liberty’ was immediately enlarged and generalized. The word acquired a new charge, and a new indefiniteness” (Voicing Amer­i­ca, 34). This “new charge” and “new indefiniteness” match the way the fragment afforded the ability to conceive of possibility within the lives of the marginalized. Fragments are also tied to ideas of freedom. The indefinite nature of fragments and their association with the marginalized accords with Svetlana Boym’s sense of freedom, in which “the experience of freedom is about the encounter with uncertainty” in the “complex interactions between the individual and the world” (Another Freedom, 10). In her words, freedom requires for its existence “virtual spaces of consciousness” that allow for “heterotopic logics” (Another Freedom, 17). The related, but more far-­reaching, concept of “freedom” in the work of Zygmunt Bauman moves away from constitutional or Lockean foundations and begins with the s­ imple recognition of asymmetry in social conditions—­a characteristic that fragments addressed in their content (Freedom, 1–9). 50. “The captive liberated: a fragment,” 94. 51. Ibid. 52. “Henry; or the Captive. A Fragment,” 178. 53. Ibid., 179. 54. “The Origin and Properties of the Cap of Liberty. A Fragment,” 3. For more information on the hat’s revolutionary importance, see Korshak, “The Liberty Cap as a Revolutionary Symbol in Amer­i­ca and France,” 52–69. For another example that considers liberty in an encompassing fashion, see “Nature: A Fragment,” 438–439. 55. “The Origin and Properties of the Cap of Liberty. A Fragment,” 3. 56. “The Unfeeling ­Father. A Fragment,” 2; Tom Taciturn, “The beggar. A Fragment,” 44–45; John Carey, “Peter Pennyless.—­A fragment,” 207–210; Caloc, “The Condemned Prisoner. A Fragment,” 43–44; “The Poor Old Man.—­A Fragment,” 489–490; “Slavery. A Fragment,” 2; “The Mad Girl of St. Joseph’s. A Fragment,” 1; “The Soliloquies of a Highwayman. A Fragment,” 30–34. Julia Stern comments on the way in which the period’s lit­er­a­ture “suggests that the foundation of the republic is in fact a crypt, that the nation’s noncitizens—­women, the poor, Native Americans, African Americans, and aliens—­lie socially dead and inadequately buried, the casualties of post-­Revolutionary po­liti­cal foreclosure” (The Plight of Feeling, 2). 57. Keats, Endymion, 3.849–855. See Oxford En­glish Dictionary Online, s.v. “fragment, v.” for the usages of “fragment” as a verb. 58. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 349. 59. François, Open Secrets, 21. 60. John 6:12, The New Oxford Annotated Bible. 61. Fragments take part in Richard Poirier’s liberating vision of how the “extravagances of language are an exultation in the exercise of consciousness momentarily set ­f ree” (A World Elsewhere, 7). As Christopher Castiglia observed more recently, lit­er­a­ture affords a “capacity to use imaginative speculation to envision social arrangements that have never existed and, more importantly, the efficacious social transformation it enables” (“Revolution Is a Fiction,” 400). Castiglia’s The Practices of Hope also expresses the notion that “lit­er­a­ture’s unreality is



Notes to Pages 27–34

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what makes it most socially relevant” by “refusing the imperative ‘real­ity’ that limits the pos­ si­ble to what is or has been, to pre­ce­dent and presence” (The Practices of Hope, 3). Along similar lines, Chantal Mouffe argues that “works of art allow us, through imagination and the emotions they evoke, to participate in new experiences and establish forms of relationships that are dif­fer­ent from the ones we are used to” (Agonistics, 97). 62. Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy, 65. 63. Ibid., 72. Kermode also observes that “­there must be supra-­literary forces, cultural pressures, which tend to make us seek narrative coherence, just as we expect a conundrum to have an answer, and a joke a point” (ibid., 53). The expectations presented by Kermode are particularly noticeable in a discipline that prizes the explication of aesthetic structure. 64. As Alexander Regier observes, “Fragmentation, by definition, resists totalisation” (Fracture and Fragmentation in British Romanticism, 5).

Chapter 1 Epigraph: Washington, The Papers of George Washington, 6:529. 1. Oxford En­glish Dictionary Online, s.v. “federal, adj. and n.” On the vari­ous interpretations of the word “federal” in the era, see Holt, Reading Th ­ ese United States, 17–54. 2. As Eric Slauter states, “A term like ‘union’ almost always had positive valences” (The State as a Work of Art, 225). By the same token, Robert Ferguson concisely summarizes the dialectical spirit of the moment that valorized u ­ nion: “­Because the better idea of ­union would always be pre­sent, each negative had to be understood through the themes of decay and ruin. . . . ​As unity bespoke beauty and pleasant vistas, so ruin and decay promised ugliness, po­liti­cal entrapment, and local chaos or absence of form” (Reading the Early Republic, 161). 3. Johnson, A Dictionary of the En­glish Language, s.v. “part, n.” 4. F. O. Matthiessen begins American Re­nais­sance with a consideration of the optative mood, citing Emerson’s “The Transcendentalist” in the epigraph: “Our American lit­er­a­ture and spiritual history are, we confess, in the optative mood” (American Re­nais­sance, 3). Cindy Weinstein describes it as a mood in which “optimism” competes with “a nagging sense that all is not well” (“Introduction,” 2). 5. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 154. 6. Yablon, Untimely Ruins, 30. He further states that “even as Americans celebrated the Roman Republic as a source for their own po­liti­cal oratory, sculptural iconography, and constitutional arrangements, they also cited the fate of the Roman Empire as a historical lesson of how liberty, by inducing imperial growth, ensures its own demise” (ibid.). For further discussion of ruin imagery in the early federal period, see Yablon, 19–37. 7. Robert Ferguson observes that the “early republican appropriators of classical symbols and terminology had to worry about what each sign meant and might come to mean, particularly in light of the failures of the Greek and Roman republics” (Reading the Early Republic, 174). 8. Aikin, Letters from a ­Father to His Son, 251, 255. In contrast to the disparagement of ruins, Aikin approvingly uses the word “part,” noting that an increasing strength of character “is a part of the natu­ral pro­g ress of the ­human system” (ibid., 19). 9. On the vari­ous forms of legislative unity attempted in the seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries, see Holt, Reading Th ­ ese United States, 21–25. 10. For the history of this image and its reprintings, refer to Olson, Benjamin Franklin’s Vision of American Community, 77–111, and Wolf, “Benjamin Franklin’s Stamp Act Cartoon,” 388–396. H ­ ere, I use the spelling of the Philadelphia printing of the image.

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Notes to Pages 35–39

11. Franklin, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Benjamin Franklin, ed. William T ­ emple Franklin, 1:219. As Wolf explains, ­Temple Franklin was the first to mention “Magna Britania” in an account of his grand­father’s life (“Benjamin Franklin’s Stamp Act Cartoon,” 388). 12. Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Benjamin Franklin, 1:220. 13. Ibid. 14. Revere’s masthead borrowed from two of Franklin’s visual creations: an ­earlier image of the “Join or Die” slogan urging unity during the French and Indian War, as well as Franklin’s critique of the Stamp Act just described (Brigham, Paul Revere’s Engravings, 136). 15. Slauter, The State as a Work of Art, 41. 16. The image discussed ­here forms part of an illustrated series published by the Mas­sa­ chu­setts Centinel and the In­de­pen­dent Chronicle over the course of several months. Other images can be found in the January 16, 1788, June 11, 1788, and June 25, 1788, issues of the Mas­ sa­chu­setts Centinel and the February  7, 1788, and June  26, 1788, issues of the In­de­pen­dent Chronicle. ­These images ­were often reprinted in other newspapers. 17. The Federalist Papers, 26. 18. Garrett, Episodic Poetics, 31. Garrett provides an illuminating interpretation of how the “episodic poetics” of the essays unify through the creation of a prior dispersion—­t hat is, multiplicity is always extinguished in the conception of the larger po­liti­cal (and literary) body. He observes that the essays carve “a complex world into slices that inventory multiplicity (of coins, of p ­ eoples), even as they eliminate that multiplicity through the general equivalence of all t­ hings ­under the sign of value” (35). 19. The Federalist Papers, 52. On the influence of Hume’s thought on Madison’s po­liti­cal philosophy, see Spencer, David Hume and Eighteenth-­Century Amer­i­ca, 154–187. To track the longer debate regarding Hume’s influence on Federalist No. 10, see Adair, “ ‘That Politics May be Reduced to a Science,’ ” 343–360, and Morgan, “Safety in Numbers,” 95–112. 20. Robert Ferguson, Reading the Early Republic, 157. Such tendencies t­ oward unification at the expense of partialities was even notable in the writings of Anti-­Federalists. As Holt writes, “Despite their name, [they] w ­ ere firmly committed to the princi­ples of federalism” (Reading ­These United States, 24). Authors like Patrick Henry, George Clinton, and Richard Henry Lee argued that geo­graph­i­cal unity would inevitably fail and that the nation needed a dif­fer­ent kind of cohesiveness. “ ‘Cato’ III,” published in the New York Journal on October 25, 1787, delineates a critique of Madison’s view: “But whoever seriously considers the im­mense extent of territory comprehended within the limits of the United States . . . ​t he dissimilitude of interest, morals, and policies, in almost e­ very one, ­w ill receive it as an intuitive truth, that a consolidated republican form of government therein, can never form a perfect u ­ nion, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to you and your posterity . . . ​t his unkindred legislature therefore, composed of interests opposite and dissimilar in their nature, w ­ ill in its exercise, emphatically be, like a h ­ ouse divided against itself.” (“ ‘Cato’ III,” 214–215). Borrowing an argument that Montesquieu developed in The Spirit of the Laws, the Anti-­Federalists argued, in Saul Cornell’s words, that “republicanism could survive only in a small, homogeneous republic,” taking as their model the smaller size of democracies in ancient Greece and Rome (The Other Founders, 58). ­Because of “the dissimilitude of interest, morals, and policies” displayed in the diverse American populace, any attempt t­oward “a consolidated republican form of government” must necessarily fail in a territory the size of the United States. Like the Federalists, though, the Anti-­Federalists set the goal of creating a “perfect ­union” and a “unified h ­ ouse”; they simply envisioned t­ hose



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existing on a smaller scale. Coming from two sides of the po­liti­cal spectrum, the Federalist and Anti-­Federalist positions held one t­ hing in common: they each believed that the nation’s ­f uture rested on the creation of unification, w ­ hether on a larger or smaller scale. See Cornell, 51–80, for the Anti-­Federalist interest in the small republic theory, and also Kenyon, “Men of ­Little Faith,” 3–43. 21. Papers of John Adams, 9:352. Brackets provided by the editors of the Papers of John Adams. 22. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 17:432, 23:363. For yet another example, see “A Description of the Monument Consecrated to Liberty” in Washington’s correspondence: “The last groupe [in the monument] represents Minerva, the patroness of the arts and sciences.—­In order to designate the country to which they owe their origin, she is seated on a fragment of an Egyptian obelisk, and holds the papyrus in her left hand” (The Papers of George Washing­ ton, 17:524–525). H ­ ere, too, the fragment is associated with a broken civilization from the past which only exists to support the new politico-­aesthetic vision of the United States. 23. Jefferson, The Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson, 152–153. 24. Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution, 198. For more on the instabilities of the period, see Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, 3–17. 25. Larkin, The American School of Empire, 25. 26. Brackenridge, Modern Chivalry, 282–283. 27. Oxford En­glish Dictionary Online, s.v. “farrago.” 28. Lacoue-­Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, 40. 29. As James Raven observes, “The export trade from Britain to its colonies in the Amer­ i­cas steadily advanced” and “the place of this demand within the British trade became increasingly impor­tant in the course of the eigh­teenth ­century” (“The Importation of Books in the Eigh­teenth ­Century,” 183). 30. Scholarship on the interest in the recovery, classification, and imitation of ancient classical fragments includes Sweet, Antiquaries; Bold, “Eighteenth-­Century Antiquarianism,” 85–93; Gelmi, “ ‘The Pleasures of Merely Circulating,’ ” 151–174; and Silver, The Mind Is a Collection, 124–129. On the contested integration of classical tropes into the eighteenth-­century and romantic gothic, see Uden, Spectres of Antiquity, 1–23. For the most recent and comprehensive account of ruins in Eu­ro­pean culture, see Stewart, The Ruins Lesson. 31. Vismann, “The Love of Ruins,” 201. 32. Ibid. See Barnett, Sacred Relics, 13–75, for an account of how colonial and antebellum Americans built a sentimental relic culture. 33. On Macpherson’s reception and the historical consciousness of his work, see Stafford, The Sublime Savage; Haugen, “Ossian and the Invention of Textual History,” 309–327; and Gidal, Ossianic Unconformities. 34. On the practice of publishing posthumous fragments, see Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem, 50–59. 35. Sterne, A Sentimental Journey, 29. 36. On the references to Andromeda in ancient Greek drama, see Gibert, “Falling in Love With Euripides (Andromeda),” 75–91, which examines “the rec­ord of the reception of An­ dromeda in antiquity” and draws attention to the way in which the play influenced love plots (76). 37. Coleridge and Words­worth, Lyrical Ballads, With a Few Other Poems (1798) and Lyri­ cal Ballads, with Other Poems (1800). As Elizabeth Wanning Harries writes, British culture

216

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saw fragments as “conservative nostalgia on the one hand, [and] the vision of ruins as a quarry and resource on the other” (The Unfinished Manner, 57). 38. Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, 21. 39. Ibid., 45. 40. Lacoue-­Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, 46. See also Behler, German Ro­ mantic Literary Theory, 141–153, and Nassar, The Romantic Absolute, 126–154. 41. Lacoue-­Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, 47. 42. Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem, 48. In the context of periodical publication in Amer­i­ca, Jared Gardner observes that “the fragment, the disjunction, the refusal of totalizing narratives and dominant univocal authorship alone can provide room for the reason and imagination of the individual reader to create new knowledge” (The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture, 64). 43. Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem, 48. 44. While I focus ­here on several specific aesthetic influences on the literary fragment, for a broader survey of the prominence of the ­f ree play of the imagination in philosophies of the British eigh­teenth c­ entury, see Guyer, A History of Modern Aesthetics, 64–73, 116–118, 131–135, 150, and passim. 45. Aristotle, Metaphysics 9.6.1048a31–34. 46. For more on the Aristotelian distinctions between potential and ­actual, and the meanings of dunamis, see Witt, Ways of Being, 17–37. 47. Locke, An Essay Concerning H ­ uman Understanding, 244. 48. Ibid., 263. Locke continues by arguing that this suspension of desire is “the end and use of our Liberty; and the farther we are removed from such a determination, the nearer we are to Misery and Slavery” (264). 49. Ibid., 266. 50. Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, 406. Reid’s work was also widely read and reprinted in Amer­i­ca, as in Reid, “Of the Train of Thought in the Mind,” 709–713. On the relevance of associationist philosophy for the development of American lit­er­a­ture, see Theo Davis, who emphasizes how the American reader “is asked to suspend one’s particularity and to move into a form of being governed entirely by the typical. . . . ​It asks us to abandon our subjectivity altogether and to consider the experience of a text as a composition made from the analytic narration of emblematic images” (Formalism, Experience, and the Making of American Lit­er­a­ture in the Nineteenth ­Century, 27). See also Larson, Imagining Equality in Nineteenth-­Century American Lit­er­a­ture, which builds on the work of Davis by examining the typicality of character that emerges in the nineteenth ­century, arguing that literary texts are entrenched in generality. 51. Agamben, Potentialities, 182–183. Agamben argues that Aristotle actually views privation as an active power. For example, by seeing shadows, ­humans not only recognize the absence of light but use their sense to recognize privation. If all potentiality turned to actuality, then potentiality (in itself) could not exist. By placing the potential above the a­ ctual in his determination of h ­ uman freedom, Agamben re­orients Enlightenment followers of Aristotle who consider an action to be the culmination of liberty. In the context of early American studies, Michelle Sizemore explicates two related positions in her analy­sis of demo­cratic forms of enchantment: “Since Aristotle, Western metaphysics has had a decisive bias for perduring physical ­t hings. Within this tradition substance takes priority. Substantialists believe



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the primary units of real­ity, substances, to be stable and static, and while most do not deny the existence of pro­cesses, they view pro­cess as secondary. By contrast, pro­cess metaphysicians give priority to pro­cesses, reversing the basic premises of substantialists. Rather than conceiving of real­ity as a cluster of t­ hings, pro­cessists believe physical existence consists of pro­cesses. ­Th ings are considered ­either bundles or outcomes of pro­cesses. Thus the pro­cessist perspective endows emotions, bodily movements, and trajectories with as much claim on real­ity as bodies, maypoles, or statues” (American Enchantment, 33). 52. Iser, “The Reading Pro­cess,” 285. Iser convincingly argues that “one text is potentially capable of several dif­fer­ent realizations, and no reading can ever exhaust the full potential, for each individual reader w ­ ill fill in the gaps in his own way, thereby excluding the vari­ous other possibilities; as he reads, he ­w ill make his own decision as to how the gap is to be filled. In this very act the dynamics of reading are revealed” (285). 53. Oxford En­glish Dictionary Online, s.v. “aposiopesis.” 54. Quintilian, Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory, 167. Ezra Tawil notes that the “rhetorical tradition in general, and Quintilian’s text in par­t ic­u ­lar, would have been intimately familiar to late eighteenth-­century authors, readers, and politicians” (Lit­er­at­ ure, American Style, 23). 55. Toner, Ellipsis in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture, 7. 56. Shakespeare, King Lear, 2.4.278–2.4.282. 57. Addison and Steele, Tatler, no. 133, 1. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid., 2. For examples of popu­lar rhetorical treatises that describe the figure, see Stirling, A System Of Rhe­toric, In A Method Entirely New, and Holmes, The Art of Rhe­toric Made Easy. 60. The most notorious instance of aposiopesis in the eigh­teenth c­ entury occurs in Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759–1767). At one point in the novel, Tristram pre­sents a scene in which his u ­ ncle Toby leaves a bawdy sentence unfinished: “ ‘My s­ ister, mayhap, quoth my ­u ncle Toby, does not choose to let a man come so near her ****.’ Make this dash,——’tis an Aposiopesis.——­Take the dash away, and write Backside——’tis bawdy.————­Scratch backside out, and put Cover’d-­way in,——’tis a Meta­phor” (72). 61. Barolsky, “The Interpretation of Art is Never Finished,” 197. For more on the non finito in art, refer to Schulz, “Michelangelo’s Unfinished Works,” 366–373; Rothstein, “ ‘Ideal Presence’ and the ‘Non Finito’ in Eighteenth-­Century Aesthetics,” 307–332; Guentner, “British Aesthetic Discourse, 1780–1830,” 40–47; Gilbert, “What Is Expressed in Michelangelo’s Non-­Finito,” 57–64; and Hui, The Poetics of Ruins in Re­nais­sance Lit­er­a­ture, 6–7, 117–122. 62. Slauter, The State as a Work of Art, 117. 63. Home, Ele­ments of Criticism, 3:318. 64. Ibid., 3:318–3:319. 65. Gilpin, Three Essays, 46. 66. Ibid., v. 67. Duncan Faherty argues that in the United States “the Republic was actually (and knowingly) built amid a complex series of residual structures,” meaning that previous settlements and ruins made it an “architectural graveyard” (Remodeling the Nation, 7, 38). 68. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beauti­ ful, 77. 69. Ibid.

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Notes to Pages 56–63

70. Kelly, Republic of Taste, 23. Along similar lines, Leonard Tennen­house observes that “George Campbell’s The Philosophy of Rhe­toric (1776) and Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhe­toric and Belles Lettres (1783), ­were published more frequently in Amer­i­ca than in Britain” and that “Lord Kames’s Ele­ments of Criticism went through ten editions in Amer­i­ca from 1796–1835 and Blair’s Lectures on Rhe­toric went through fifty-­six editions from 1784–1823” (The Impor­ tance of Feeling En­glish, 35, 39). For more on aesthetic treatises published in the early United States, refer to Schweighauser, Beautiful Deceptions, 34–53. 71. Rezek, London and the Making of Provincial Lit­er­a­ture, 3. 72. Brown was not only the author of the tale but also the editor of the Literary Magazine, the periodical in which he published Memoirs. 73. Brown, Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, 256. 74. Ibid., 270. 75. Ibid., 272. 76. Ibid., 270. 77. Dunlap, The Life of Charles Brockden Brown, 2:15. 78. Cahill, Liberty of the Imagination, 19. 79. Of course, Cahill’s view does accord with the many aesthetic theorists in the era who thought that the curtailing of the imagination was necessary to keep artistic works in proportion, thinkers such as Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, and Francis Hutcheson. But the fragment works in closer coordination with the eighteenth-­century view espousing the ­f ree play of the imagination as summarized by Paul Guyer: the “cele­bration of the imagination as a power of invention and response that is not completely restricted by the ordinary constraints of cognition and conduct, that is, by the demands of knowledge on the one hand and morality on the other” (A History of Modern Aesthetics, 23). 80. Boym, Another Freedom, 27.

Chapter 2 1. The History of The Old Fring’d Petticoat, i. 2. Ibid., 1. 3. On this revolutionary and early national trope, see Samuels, Romances of the Republic. Samuels observes, “The notion that the f­ amily was an appropriate model for institutional as well as po­liti­cal discourse and organ­ization became increasingly power­f ul in the early republic” (21). Howe, too, considers how the “church and state” functioned as “the f­amily writ large” for thinkers in the nineteenth c­ entury (Making the American Self, 180). 4. The History of The Old Fring’d Petticoat, 23. 5. Ibid., 23, 24. 6. For another example of a pamphlet that similarly pre­sents a thinly veiled allegory, see Charles Polhill’s The Chronicle of the Kingdom of the Cassiterides. Polhill’s pamphlet comments on the need for two ancient civilizations to reconcile (“Amer” and the “Cassiterides”—­ the latter denotes the Greek term for a group of islands west of Eu­rope). At the end of the pamphlet, Polhill pre­sents a scene of treaty and encourages both sides to unify against non-­ Anglo powers: “Unite the ­whole for your own and their preservation; unite them for the Salvation of your country; and reflect, (with deep concern reflect) that all united may prove unequal to the task!” (37). Like the History of The Old Fring’d Petticoat, the Chronicle ends on an unfinished note signified by asterisks. Polhill ends right when the citizens of the two nations wait to see the outcome of an impor­tant treaty meeting.



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7. “View of the early inroad,” 331. For another example of a war­t ime fragment published in Amer­i­ca in the midst of the conflict, see “A Fragment of the Famous Past and Prophetic History of John Bull, and his Fancy D ­ aughter Bett,” 1. 8. “View of the early inroad,” 332. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer and Other Essays, 149–150. This sense of trepidation is also amply recorded in the personal rec­ords of the period. In a letter written to Abigail Adams ­a fter the signing of the Declaration, John Adams fearfully i­magined that “Amer­i­ca s­ hall suffer Calamities still more wasting and Distresses yet more dreadfull” (Ad­ ams F ­ amily Correspondence, 2:28–29). Not long ­a fter, Nathanael Greene warned Adams not to be “too confident” b ­ ecause “the fate of War is uncertain, l­ittle incidents has given rise to ­g reat events” (Papers of John Adams, 4:230). Adams replied with acknowl­edgment and some commentary, noting that he was “obliged to you for your Caution not to be too confident. The Fate of War is uncertain—­So are all Sublunary Th ­ ings” (4:325). Perhaps most famously, Abraham Clark, a delegate from New Jersey, wrote to his friend Col­o­nel Elias Dayton, “We are now, Sir, embarked on a most Tempestuous Sea; Life very uncertain, seeming dangers scattered thick around us” (Buffett, “Abraham Clarke,” 446). 12. Toner, Ellipsis in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture, 170. 13. Favret, War at a Distance, 11. Favret specifically identifies the formation and temporality of “war­t ime culture” within the years surrounding romanticism (18). 14. For recent accounts of typography in the eigh­teenth ­century, see Flint, The Appear­ ance of Print in Eighteenth-­Century Fiction, 105–153, and Toner, Ellipsis in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture, 54–86. Flint argues that the printer’s ornaments in Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub “multiply points of view rather than resolve them dialectically. That is, print, as a medium tends to subsume rather than establish authority” (114). For both Flint and Toner, punctuation can create an expansive and ambiguous viewpoint. 15. Brody, Punctuation, 8. 16. Derrida, “Paper or Me, You Know . . . ,” 43. Derrida’s description of the supplement in Of Grammatology applies ­here as well: For Derrida, the supplement “adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-­the-­place-­of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void. If it represents and makes an image, it is by the anterior default of a presence. Compensatory [supplé­ ant] and vicarious, the supplement is an adjunct, a subaltern instance which takes-(the)-­place [tient-­lieu]” (translator’s notes in brackets, 145). Despite the applicability of the supplement for understanding prosthesis, Colleen Glenney Boggs registers the following warning: “While the supplement can account for a connection that posits the mass by infinite interchangeability, it remains theoretically empty in terms of explaining the pro­cesses by which interchangeability is generated and the unevenness that substitutive relations grow from and accrue” (“The Civil War’s ‘Empty Sleeve’ and the Cultural Production of Disabled Americans,” 48). 17. Barchas, Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-­Century Novel, 13. 18. The following sources provide a starting place for understanding the place of typography in the work of ­t hese and other eighteenth-­century authors. On Alexander Pope’s use of typography, see Hunter, “From Typology to Type,” 41–69, and McLaverty, Pope, Print, and Meaning. For Richardson’s Cla­r is­sa, see Barchas, 118–152, who discusses marginal manicules, printer’s flowers (or fleurons), Cla­r is­s a’s disjointed thoughts in her “mad” Paper X, and

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Notes to Pages 68–72

Cla­ris­sa’s cursive script in letters to Anna and her final w ­ ill. Also see “Richardson’s Flowers” in Flint’s The Appearance of Print in Eighteenth-­Century Fiction, 126–140, and Kvande, “Printed in a Book,” 239–257. On Sterne’s publications, see Fanning, “On Sterne’s Page,” 429– 450, which considers the importance of aposiopesis, and also Fanning, “Small Particles of Eloquence,” 360–392. For a broad-­scale view of the significance of visual culture and print in the early eigh­teenth ­century, see Mannheimer’s Print, Visuality, and Gender in Eighteenth-­ Century Satire. Mannheimer considers the centrality of vision-­based epistemologies for Pope, Swift, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, especially in relation to the gendered body (see the introduction and 67–135). 19. Swift, The Tale of a Tub, 170, 208, 265, 278. 20. Harries, The Unfinished Manner, 31. 21. Flint, “The Material Book,” 126. 22. Hopkinson, “Plan for the Improvement of the Art of Paper War,” 437. 23. Ibid., 439–40. 24. Wroth, The Colonial Printer, 93. Along similar lines, Wendy Bellion remarks that Hopkinson’s essay “attempts to fix the forms of words to their signifying functions” and “focuses the reader’s attention on the antics of text as image” (Citizen Spectator, 199). 25. Hopkinson, “A Typographical Method of Conducting a Quarrel,” 179–193. 26. Maruca, The Work of Print, 40. Maruca tracks how the body progressively dis­appears from descriptions of printing in the eigh­teenth c­ entury and is replaced with an abstract notion of authorial persona; however, the typography studied h ­ ere emphasizes the continuing importance of h ­ uman physiology in printing. 27. Ibid., 43–44. The relay between the mechanisms of typesetting, the body of the compositor, the pro­cess of printing, and the reading of the page aligns closely with Mark Seltzer’s understanding of the “body-­machine complex.” He argues that “a becoming vis­i­ble of the technology of writing in machine culture risks making vis­i­ble the links between the materiality of writing and the making of persons, and thus the internal relations between persons and machines” (Bodies and Machines, 79). 28. Toner notes the elision among “dots, dashes, series of hyphens and asterisks” in this period, which all represent an interruption or break within the text (Ellipsis in En­glish Lit­er­a­ ture, 1). 29. Luckombe, The History and Art of Printing, 257. 30. Ibid., 260. This definition of asterisks is repeated verbatim in numerous other manuals of the period. See, for example, Smith’s The Printer’s Grammar, 88. 31. On the loose significations of punctuation, see Adorno, “Punctuation Marks,” and Watson, “Points of Contention.” This view was current in the eigh­teenth ­century as well. Robert Lowth’s guide mentions that “the doctrine of Punctuation must needs be very imperfect: few precise rules can be given, which ­w ill hold without exception in all cases; but much must be left to the judgment and taste of the writer” (A Short Introduction to En­glish Grammar, 169). James Burrow seconds this observation and cites Lowth in A Few Thoughts Upon Point­ ing and Some Other Helps ­Towards Perspicuity of Expression (1768). 32. Robertson, An Essay on Punctuation, 125, 127. 33. Lennard Davis, “Dr. Johnson, Amelia, and the Discourse of Disability in the Eigh­teenth ­Century,” 58. For the classic example in early modern studies of the relationship between the “defective” and the “unfinished,” see the opening soliloquy to Richard the Third, in which Gloucester calls himself “Deformed, unfinish’d, sent before my time / Into this breathing



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world, scarce half made up” (1.1.20–21). And, on the “anomalous body” in Anglo-­A merica, see Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, and Nussbaum, The Limits of the ­Human. 34. “The Art of Printing. A Poem,” 567. 35. Ibid. 36. Brody, Punctuation, 7. 37. Drucker, “Graphical Readings and the Visual Aesthetics of Textuality,” 270. See also Drucker’s Graphesis, in which she pre­sents the argument for a “visual epistemology,” which focuses on the interpretive potential of graphic images, rather than their function as conveying mere information (8). 38. ­Wills, Prosthesis, 9. Pratt’s use of a “prosthesis” does not, as in so many accounts of the word, reinforce a normalizing sense of the body. B ­ ecause his typography does not seek to exactly reproduce the body on the page, it is able to navigate the fine line between repre­sen­ta­ tion and normalizing tendencies. The printed bodies he creates stand in tension with the formations of typical bodies established in the eigh­teenth c­ entury, especially in spaces like hospitals. Jody Greene pre­sents a comparable approach when she considers how, for tradesmen, print “has the capacity to produce change, and it is in this sense that I want to think about the press as a prosthesis . . . ​a ‘technology of emotion’ ” (“Ego non sum Ego,” 128). 39. Oxford En­glish Dictionary Online, s.v. “prosthesis.” 40. Josephine Grieder describes Pratt’s status of provincial celebrity in “ ‘Amiable Writer’ or ‘Wretch’? The Elusive Samuel Jackson Pratt.” 41. See Pratt, Emma Corbett: Exhibiting Henry and Emma, The Faithful Modern Lovers, as Delineated by Themselves, In Their Original Letters (1782 [and 1783]), and Emma Corbett. In Two Volumes (1784). ­Unless other­w ise noted, references ­w ill be to a modern edition: Emma Corbett, Or The Miseries of Civil War, edited by Eve Tavor Bannet. For further background on the publishing history of Emma Corbett, see Bannet’s introduction to this edition. 42. Robert Bell’s decision to print Emma Corbett not once but twice during the Revolution provides a necessary context that gives insight into the novel’s American reception. ­A fter Bell crossed the Atlantic from Scotland (where he was already practiced in the reprint trade), he quickly made himself central to the literary scene in Philadelphia through his vigorous advertising and enterprising publishing practices. He played a crucial role in the publication of pre-­revolutionary and revolutionary documents that, as James Green describes, “­were vigorous, even defiant statements of American in­de­pen­dence. They ­were key texts for ­t hose intellectuals who had protested the Stamp Act and or­ga­nized the nonimportation agreements” (“En­g lish Books and Printing in the Age of Franklin,” 287). For more information on Bell’s publishing, see ibid., 283–298. 43. For an analy­sis of Pratt’s focus on neutrality via the masculine figures of the text, see McMichael, “Gender, Neutrality, and the Nursing ­Father in Pratt’s Emma Corbett.” 44. Bannet, “Introduction,” in Emma Corbett, 23 and passim. 45. Pratt, Emma Corbett, 116. 46. Ibid., 127. 47. Ibid., 116. 48. Ibid. 49. Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 53. 50. Pratt, Emma Corbett, 116. 51. Ibid., 117. 52. Ibid.

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Notes to Pages 78–89

53. Roach, Cities of the Dead, 91. 54. Pratt, Emma Corbett, 117. 55. Gitelman, Paper Knowledge, 23. “Blanks” included bureaucratic documents like l­egal forms, school papers, and insurance documents that provided blank space for signatures and personal information. Printers made good money printing and selling blanks throughout the eigh­teenth ­century (Benjamin Franklin made much of his wealth this way), since they ­were in constant demand. 56. Mak, How the Page ­Matters, 17. 57. Ibid., 5 and passim. The architecture of the page also reconstructs what James Krasner, building off of the work of Gaston Bachelard and Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, calls “the practices of material daily life” that encompass how “grief becomes a series of slight physical adjustments based on the fact that a body that was always h ­ ere, in a certain relation to our own, is now gone” (Home Bodies 23, 22). 58. Oxford En­glish Dictionary Online, s.v. “flourish.” 59. Mandell, “Introduction: Histories of Print, Histories of Emotion,” 124–125. 60. Derrida, of course, reminds us that “paper is utilized in an experience involving the body, beginning with hands, eyes, voice, ears; so it mobilizes both time and space” for the reader (“Paper or Me, You Know . . . ,” 44). 61. Pratt, Emma Corbett, 119. 62. Ibid. 63. Both the Dublin and Bath editions from 1780 pre­sent the same kind of gaps (using asterisks) as Mycall’s edition. 64. See Goffman, Asylums, especially the introduction. 65. Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, 18. For Foucault, hospitals perpetuated a medicalized gaze that worked in coordination with clinical practices to enforce princi­ples of bodily normality. The rise of a normalizing society in coordination with a medical gaze resulted in bodily categorization and established definitions of social disorder that placed individuals in a continuum from ill to healthy. Foucault explains that a hospital fulfilled a need “for the sick who have no ­family, but it is also needed in cases of contagion, and for difficult, complex, ‘extraordinary’ patients with whom medicine in its ordinary, everyday form cannot cope” (The Birth of the Clinic, 42). 66. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 24. 67. Ibid., 25. 68. Pratt, The Pupil of Plea­sure, 29–30. 69. Scarry, The Body in Pain, 81. 70. Ibid., 112. 71. Pratt, Emma Corbett, 122, 123. 72. Colley, Britons, 5. See also Watts, The Republic Reborn. 73. Colley, Britons, 6. 74. Oxford En­glish Dictionary Online, s.v. “carbine.” 75. Greene, “Ego non sum Ego,” 128. 76. See the following examples for representative cases. While this list ends in 1807, Emma Corbett continued to appear in the broadsides and cata­logs of bookstores and circulating libraries in the United States ­u ntil at least 1817: Just imported from London, And to be Sold by John Car­ter, At the Printing-­Office, at Shakespear’s Head [sic], an Assortment of Books and Stationary, among which are the following Articles, viz (Providence, 1783), 1; Cata­logue of



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Books to be Sold by Isaiah Thomas, at his Bookstore in Worchester, Mas­sa­chu­setts (Worchester, 1787), 14; Mathew Carey, No. 118, Market-­Street, Philadelphia, Has imported from London, Dublin, and Glasgow, an Extensive Assortment of Books (Philadelphia, 1792), 10; Cata­logue of Books, to be sold by Samuel Hall, At No. 53, Cornhill, Boston (Boston, 1792), 1; The Charter, Bye-­Laws, and Names of the Members of the New-­York Society Library: With a Cata­logue of the Books Belonging to the said Library (New-­York: Printed by T. & J. Swords, 1793), 40; A Cata­ logue of Books Belonging to the Charleston Library Society (Charleston: Printed by W.  P. Young, 1806), 63; A Cata­logue of the Baltimore Circulating Library; Kept by William Munday (Baltimore: Printed by John W. Butler, 1807), 37. 77. As Christopher Flynn points out in his study of the novel, the June 1780 review provides a “discussion of Emma Corbett [that] focuses almost entirely on this section of the text” (Americans in British Lit­er­a­ture, 29). See pages 29–35 for his analy­sis of the fragment. 78. Pratt, The Paternal Pre­sent, 124–135. 79. For an understanding of how the anthology functions as “a genre in its own right rather than a container for o ­ thers,” see Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel, 3. 80. “The Dead Soldier. A Fragment,” 2. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid. 83. On the formation of nationalism through the practice of ritual and cele­bration during the revolutionary era, see Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes, 17–52; Purcell, Sealed with Blood; and McDonnell, Corbould, Clarke, and Brundage, Remembering the Revo­ lution. For information on the formation of national affect in print culture, see Rigal, The American Manufactory, 21–54. And, on the simultaneous erasure and overdetermination of veterans in lit­er­a­ture a­ fter the Revolution, see Benjamin Cooper, Veteran Americans, 27–99. 84. “The Soldier’s Funeral. A Fragment” (1799), 4. 85. Ibid. 86. For other anti-­war fragments from the period, see “From a Fragment of Solon,” 559; Lavinia, “The Indian Victory: A Fragment,” 763–764; Lavinia, “Godolfin:—­A Fragment,” 241–242; and “The Soldier’s Funeral. A Fragment” (1814), 160. 87. “The Wounded Soldier: A Fragment,” 189. 88. Ibid. 89. Pratt, Emma Corbett, 116. 90. Ibid., 126. 91. Ibid., 127. 92. Disability studies distinguishes between two models: the “medical model” and the “social model.” The former emphasizes the need for medical intervention in the lives of the disabled, striving to find cures for illnesses and impairments. The latter (with which I associate Pratt) reverses the tendency and argues broadly that social discourses and environment need to be altered to fit bodies, suggesting that it is social perception and environmental inaccessibility that actually define a body as disabled.

Chapter 3 1. Adams, Correspondence Between the Hon. John Adams, Late President of the United States, and the Late Wm. Cunningham, Esq., 18–19. 2. Fowler, Literary Character, 28. Along similar lines, John Frow writes that “in the case of the novel, typological abstraction works as an informal and secular operator of extrapolation

224

Notes to Pages 98–103

through layers of ‘so­cio­log­i­cal’ generality” (Character and Person, 107). On the ways that single characters like Pamela spread through dif­fer­ent media outlets in the eigh­teenth ­century (via what he calls the “Text-­Network”), see Stein, When Novels ­Were Books, 92–124. 3. Kunin, Character as Form, 8. 4. On the relationship between the perils of seduction and democracy vis-­à-­v is Adams, see Lewis, “The Republican Wife,” 689–721; Barnes, States of Sympathy, 40–48; Dillon, The Gender of Freedom; and McIntosh, “Constituting the End of Feeling,” 321–348. 5. For definitions of “sentiment” in the eigh­teenth c­ entury, a category which was far-­ reaching in its influence on politics, economics, and cultural productions, see Todd, Sensibility; Barker-­Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility; Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility; Burgett, Sentimen­ tal Bodies; Howard, “What Is Sentimentality?”; Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-­Century Britain and France; Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution; and Britton, Vicarious Narratives. 6. Th ­ ese arguments “left definitions imprecise and flexible,” according to Markman Ellis, which led to “a philosophical nightmare of muddled ideas, weak logic, and bad writing” (The Politics of Sensibility, 5, 7). 7. Shapiro, The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel, 52, 94. 8. Bowers, Force or Fraud, 9, 4. See also Frances Ferguson, “Rape and the Rise of the Novel,” 88–112, for the l­egal history of definitions of rape in the period, and Gillian Brown, “Consent, Coquetry, and Consequences,” 625–652, for the relationship between Lockean and Rousseauian consent in the seduction novel. 9. Dill, Erotic Citizens, 2, 10. 10. Dill also argues, “The erotic and violent extremes of the ruined body’s sensate life pre­ sent an ontological porousness,” creating a “polyontological subject, a figure that in the ruin narrative is defined by an identity with multiple valences” (Erotic Citizens, 5). 11. Samuel Richardson, Pamela, 13, 15. For a conduct manual discussing this topic, see John Bennett’s Strictures on Female Education, which observes that men provide “flattery [which] has frequently l­ ittle more in view, than a momentary plea­sure, which must borrow its existence from their [­women’s] misery and ruin” (5). 12. Richardson, Pamela, 17. Cla­r is­sa, too, makes reference time and again to the ruin or ruination of the main character. For the importance of Pamela, Cla­r is­sa, and their adaptations and reprints in American print culture, refer to Tennen­house, The Importance of Feeling En­glish, especially 43–72. 13. Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of W ­ oman, 121. On Wollstonecraftian ideas in American novels, see Cayton, Love in the Time of Revolution, 211–238, and Shapiro, The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel. 14. On the transatlantic circulation of sentimental texts in this era, see Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-­American Emotion; Barnes, States of Sympathy; and Tennen­ house, The Importance of Feeling En­glish. 15. William Hill Brown, The Power of Sympathy, 45–46. 16. In another example of the ramifications of seduction, Susanna Rowson’s The Inquisi­ tor portrays the titular inquisitor accusing a young seducer, asking, “Is it not enough that you have ruined an innocent girl who was ­under my protection; left her and her helpless infant to shame and want, and by base and fraudulent methods taken from me near a thousand pounds, but you must add to the cata­logue of your crimes the ruin of this amiable lady, and break the heart of her worthy ­father[?]” (38). The accusations move from the corruption of the



Notes to Pages 103–105

225

virtue of two ­women, to the economic destruction of the speaker and the division of a ­family—­r uin takes on an economic ramification as well in this scenario. On the role of credit in seduction, see Leslie Richardson, “Who S­ hall Restore My Lost Credit,” 19–44. 17. Oxford En­glish Dictionary Online, s.v. “ruin, n.” Sometime in the sixteenth c­ entury, another meaning of the word came into existence that tied it to the fate of an individual; the term began to be used to designate the downturn of economic fortune. In an increasingly mercantile and cap­it­ al­ist system in which money was tied to the unpredictable movements of goods across oceans, the loss of wealth became an impor­tant theme in writings that sought to comprehend the changing structure of the world. Novels including Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Moll Flanders (1722), and Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), as well as dramatic works like George Lillo’s The London Merchant (1732), examined the reversals and abrupt changes endemic to an emergent cap­i­tal­ist society. On the structure of class changes within early American and Atlantic society, see Burnham’s sense of the “fraught context of long-­distance transoceanic travel and commerce” (72) in Transoceanic Amer­i­ca; Shapiro, The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel; Baucom, Specters of the At­ lantic; and Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order. 18. In a sense, the ruined w ­ oman functions as a reversal of anachronism, which is the movement of the past into the pre­sent. Jerome Christensen calls anachronism “the potent icon of the past’s incapacity to coincide with itself, to seal itself off as a period or epoch or episode with no necessary consequences for our time” (Romanticism at the End of History, 3). In this case, seduced ­women are sealed off into the past and are shown to be incommensurable with the pre­sent (except through exclusion). 19. Wollstonecraft, Maria: Or, The Wrongs of W ­ oman, 16. 20. Ibid., 29. 21. Bellamour, “Melancholy Effects of Seduction,” 468. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 470. 24. Ibid., 471. 25. The pro­gress of chronological time did not, of course, preclude the possibility of other, coexistent forms of temporality. Thomas Allen, for example, considers a multiplicity of temporal states in the period, arguing that they w ­ ere all central to the construction of nationality: “Temporal heterogeneity thus becomes central to the experience of modern collective belonging. . . . ​[The heterogeneous temporalities] are themselves the threads out of which the fabric of national belonging has long been woven” (A Republic in Time, 11). 26. Stabile, Memory’s ­D aughters, 16. More generally, Clare Pettitt observes that in nineteenth-­century ­England, “antiquarians ­were mocked as ‘naive nominalists’ who ­were distracted by the quiddity and the multiplicity of the t­ hings they collected and w ­ ere unable to arrange them into a properly disciplined chrono-­scalar order,” a characteristic which reveals them to be “refusing a progressive or stadial model of development” (Serial Forms, 79, 80). 27. Colin Davis, “Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms,” 373. “Spectrality,” as Fredric Jameson describes it, argues “that the living pre­sent is scarcely as self-­sufficient as it claims to be; that we would do well not to count on its density and solidity, which might ­under exceptional circumstances betray us” (“Marx’s Purloined Letter,” 39). 28. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 18 and passim, and Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.5.188. On Derrida’s use of Hamlet, see Prendergast, “Derrida’s Hamlet,” 44–47. 29. Prendergast, “Derrida’s Hamlet,” 45.

226

Notes to Pages 106–109

30. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 169. 31. For more on the Eu­ro­pean tradition of “ruin love,” see Sweet, Antiquaries, and Harries, The Unfinished Manner, 56–97. 32. Th ­ ese texts w ­ ere also republished in the colonies and early United States. For two examples of the American interest in reprinted descriptions of Eu­ro­pean ruins, see “Account of the Ruins of Herculaneum, Pompeia, and Pæstum,” 31–36, and “The Plea­sure of Ruin,” 253–258. 33. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beauti­ ful, 39. 34. Ibid., 45. 35. Ibid., 46. 36. Ibid., 47–48. Regier makes the connection between the two earthquakes in his interpretation of Burke; for his discussion, see Fracture and Fragmentation in British Romanti­ cism, 75–94. 37. In relation to Burke’s concept of a ruinous sublime, William Gilpin, one of the prime movers of the idea of the “picturesque,” remarked that, “We rather wish for that degree of dilapidation, which gives conjecture room to wander; and the imagination some ­little scope. A certain degree of obscurity adds dignity to an object” (Observations, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, 1:31). A ­little bit of ruination gives the “imagination” room to expand and “wander” in a productive—­not destructive—­fashion. 38. Diderot, Diderot on Art, 197. 39. Ibid., 198. For more on Diderot’s poétique des ruines, see Thomas, Romanticism and Visuality, 81–84. 40. Chassebœuf, A New Translation of Volney’s Ruins, 1:ix. Volney at once allowed himself to be enthralled by ancient ruins while also subordinating them to his desire for Enlightenment pro­g ress. His thinking thus made his Ruins a fitting object for Jefferson’s po­liti­cal views, even though Jefferson expounds ­these themes indirectly—­through an anonymous translation that he left unfinished and that Joel Barlow ­later completed. In a letter to Volney, written on March 17, 1801, Jefferson asks about the receipt of the translation: “Did you ever receive the residue of the translation to the end of the [20th] chapter inclusive?” (The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 33:341). For further information on the attribution to Jefferson, see Sowerby, Cata­logue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, 2:20, and Caron, “Friendship, Secrecy, Transatlantic Networks and the Enlightenment,” 1–38. 41. Artists, landscape designers, and architects, too, moved to imitate ruins and re­create their style in what Rose Macaulay calls a “fash­ion­able gloom,” “the fashion of building artificial ruins, which raged over Eu­rope through the eigh­teenth c­ entury and well into the nineteenth” (Plea­sure of Ruins, 22, 24). Th ­ ese human-­made ruins emphasized a combination of natu­ral decay and ­human artistry, and catered to the growing interest in fragmentary remains. Ruins ­were thus not only part of the intellectual culture of the period, they w ­ ere literally brought into (or made part of) the h ­ ouse­hold. On this practice, refer to Zucker, “Ruins—­A n Aesthetic Hybrid,” 119–130. 42. Huyssen, “Nostalgia for Ruins,” 15. 43. Regier, Fracture and Fragmentation in British Romanticism, 94. On the relationship between ruins and the sublime, see Duffy, Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime, 37–48, and Regier, 83–94. 44. Stewart, The Ruins Lesson, 240.



Notes to Pages 109–116

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45. Freeman, The Feminine Sublime, 11. She argues for “a radical rearticulation of the role gender plays in producing the history of discourse on the sublime and the formulation of an alternative position with re­spect to excess and the possibilities of its figuration” (10). 46. Ibid., 11, 12. 47. Lee, Failures of Feeling, 3. 48. Rowson, Charlotte ­Temple, 55. 49. Seltzer, True Crime, 81. Tennen­house also observes the influence of the epistolary on the formation of identity, noting that “Richardson demonstrated at such elaborate length the necessity of casting one’s interior life in written form” (The Importance of Feeling En­glish, 57). In historical terms, Konstantin Dierks identifies how “ordinary writers of letters . . . ​rarely consciously i­ magined that they represented a broader social pattern of any sort, yet in giving a semblance of coherence and meaning to their experiences in letters” they actually “invoked—­a nd they reshaped—­conventions of expression, notions of identity, modes of evaluation, and understandings of experience available in the culture around them” (In My Power, 158, 160). 50. Seltzer, True Crime, 81–82. 51. As Christina Lupton comments, “Pieces of abandoned writing are among the objects represented most commonly in the sentimental lit­er­a­ture of the 1750s, ’60s, and ’70s” (Know­ ing Books, 125). 52. Rowson, Charlotte ­Temple, 78. 53. Ibid., 94. 54. Ibid., 111. 55. Marion Rust, in a description applicable to this moment, observes that “even when it [Rowson’s writing] proclaims the benefits of social conformity, it defies its proclamations through its own exaggerated gestures” (Prodigal ­Daughters, 179). 56. Rowson, Charlotte ­Temple, 5, 28, 6, 51, 86, 99. 57. Ibid., 115. 58. See Chapter 1 for a more extended discussion of aposiopesis. Rust interprets this moment as evidence of the indecision that populates the novel, as well as its unfinished style: “That Charlotte does not finish the sentence that accompanies this gesture further suggests continuity between m ­ other and d ­ aughter. The reader is left hanging on the sounds of a wordless infant girl to find out how Charlotte would last have named herself. ­Will her ­daughter embody Charlotte’s final courage and decisiveness, or the meandering anomie that led to her conception?” (Prodigal ­Daughters, 67). 59. Rowson, Charlotte ­Temple, 5, 6. Stern comments on the way “the mourning pro­cess inaugurated by the narrative frame is incomplete,” and notes that in Rowson’s novel, t­ here is “no guarantee of closure in the work of grief . . . ​it is a novel that cannot say farewell” (Plight of Feeling, 58, 67). 60. Johnson, A Dictionary of the En­glish Language, s.v. “trifle, n.” and “trifling, adj.” 61. Rowson, Charlotte ­Temple, 118. Complementing her rejection of the “finished” in Charlotte ­Temple, Rowson also attends to such a style in The Inquisitor. Near its beginning, the narrator buys a packet of strawberries and finds a “fairy tale, but wrote in an uncommon poetic stile [sic]” (17) in the wrapping paper. He calls the poem that follows “The Fragment,” and the short, three-­page poem tells a story of a young, wandering maiden named Alzada who must return to the home of her royal parents. In ­doing so, she receives help from a rustic named Abradan and a monarch who swears to return her to her ­father’s court. Right ­a fter the

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Notes to Pages 116–118

monarch agrees to help her, the poem cuts short and, disappointed at the lack of an ending, the narrator of The Inquisitor “turned the paper, but t­ here was no more———­There are times when the mind is affected by mere trifles; such now was my case—­I was vexed at not finding the conclusion of the story, and determined to go back to the fruiterer’s and inquire if they had the remainder.—­A few moments brought me to the place” (emphasis mine, 20). The exaggerated dash marks the moment when the narrator turns the page and finds nothing instead of a conclusion, a detail that demonstrates the halting reading experience of encountering a broken narrative. Rowson’s narrator expresses his e­ ager hope that the grocer knows where to find the conclusion to this piece of trash paper, but when he arrives to speak with the vendor, he immediately forgets about the poem and becomes involved in another adventure that takes his episodic tale in an entirely dif­fer­ent direction. 62. Foster, The Coquette, 169. 63. Ibid., 162. 64. Two main trajectories govern criticism on The Coquette. One argues for the novel’s insistence on female autonomy, while the other approach argues for Foster’s codification of conservative gender relations. According to the former view, Eliza’s withdrawal from social relations at the end of the text functions as an emancipatory escape that transcendently looks from late eighteenth-­century history to larger feminist movements in the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries. Ironically, this move threatens to replicate the constrictive gender ideologies that lead to Eliza’s effacement; by reading self-­mastery into her self-­negation and fragmentation, t­ hese critics affirm and impose their own version of history without looking at the way Foster shows Eliza’s response to the traumatic events of her life. Taking Eliza’s withdrawal from the gaiety of her social life as a radical claim—­particularly without looking at the form of Eliza’s protest—­fails to take her story at face value. Representative examples of this viewpoint include Harris, “Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette,” 1–22; Pettengill, “Sisterhood in a Separate Sphere,” 185–203, and Mower, “Bodies in ­Labor,” 315–344. Siding with the view that Foster ultimately conscripts Eliza into early republican social norms, another set of critics argue that Eliza—­though she may be a proto-­liberal, individualistic ­woman—­falls prey to the pressures of her community. They collectively agree that Eliza’s “desire for freedom devolves into sexual acquiescence,” that she “colludes with a majority that has denied her both freedom and expression by offering at last what it wants to hear,” and that the novel participates in the construction of oppressive roles b ­ ecause it “does l­ittle to disrupt the hegemony of middle-­class gender norms” (Davidson, Revolution and the Word, 149; Stern, The Plight of Feeling, 147; Burgett, Sentimental Bodies, 100). Th ­ ese critics believe the novel argues for a po­liti­cal agenda that ultimately condones the sentimental ideology of Eliza’s friends and ­family. 65. Throughout her incisive interpretation of the novel, Stern emphasizes the “double-­ voiced” quality of Eliza’s writing, commenting on its ironic and highly self-­conscious style, a style her correspondents ­either refuse to engage with or fail to recognize (98 and passim). Stern, however, sees Eliza’s final letters (received in the text only by the refractory eye of what Stern calls the female chorus) as indelible evidence of Eliza’s conversion to martyrdom for republican communal values. More likely, I argue, Eliza’s “double-­voiced” wordplay continues in an attenuated, less obvious form. 66. Andrew Bennett, Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity, 66. Bennett considers how female writers during the romantic period deploy “a concerted privileging of the moment, of the momentary, of ephemeral and transient experience” in reaction to a masculine



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culture of longevity (68). This description corresponds to how Eliza turns away from her community to create a fragmentary space of dissent rather than a procreative one. In addition, Heather Love’s Feeling Backward pre­sents a model of approaching figures who “choose isolation, turn t­oward the past, or choose to live in a pre­sent disconnected from any larger historical continuum,” all of which take place in “texts that resist our advances” (8). Love’s sense of negative emotions applies to The Coquette, particularly when Love thinks about “a range of negative affects as indexes of social trauma” (12) and how an “image of character as stamped or branded by its early experience of shame captures a sense of the indelible nature of ideology’s effects” (19). See also Harries, The Unfinished Manner, 98–121, in which Harries describes how eighteenth-­century thinkers associated the fragmentary with the irregular and the feminine. 67. Khalip, Anonymous Life, 3. 68. Ibid., 4. 69. Foster, The Coquette, 51. 70. Schweitzer, Perfecting Friendship, 114–115. Similar to Schweitzer’s view, Elizabeth Barnes explains that in seduction novels, “a ­woman might pre­sent herself as virtually ‘unreadable’—­a coquette who personifies the indeterminate b ­ ecause overdetermined subject of both sexual and narrative possibility” (States of Sympathy, 68). Such a description clearly evokes the way Eliza holds the door open to a number of pos­si­ble suitors early in the novel (without yielding to any of them) and even resists choosing between Sanford and Boyer. 71. My sense of the patriarchal stance of Eliza’s female correspondents comes directly from Stern’s analy­sis of the novel, in which she describes the “female chorus” as a stand-in for a power­f ul patriarchy (The Plight of Feeling, 75 and passim). Nonetheless, I do ultimately disagree with Stern regarding Eliza’s eventual capitulation to t­ hese forces. 72. On the monitorial nature of the male characters in the novel, see Shuffelton, “Mrs. Foster’s Coquette and the Decline of the Brotherly Watch,” 211–224. 73. Foster, The Coquette, 127. 74. Ibid., 134. 75. Ibid., 142. 76. Woloch, The One vs. the Many, 27. 77. Ibid., 60. 78. Foster, The Coquette, 105. 79. Ibid., 15. 80. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Characteristicks & c., 390. 81. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beauti­ ful, 71. 82. Blair, Lectures on Rhe­toric and Belles Lettres, 58. Volney, too, makes the connection between ruins and the experience of silence and solitude: “Who knows if some traveller, like me, ­shall not one day sit on their ­silent ruins, and weep in solitude over the ashes of their ­people, and the memory of their greatness?” (Chassebœuf, A New Translation of Volney’s Ru­ ins, 1:13). 83. Alone among commentators on the novel, Stern does discuss the remains, noting that the “remnants of her writing from the period of her confinement surface and circulate as community property, enabling the chorus to re-­cover its vision of Eliza by selectively revising the words its members had found so problematic” (The Plight of Feeling, 143). 84. duBois, Sappho Is Burning, 53.

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Notes to Pages 123–132

85. Ibid. 86. Stern writes that Foster “rejects the historical archive of male-­authored newspaper and sermon accounts denouncing the depravity of the ­actual Elizabeth Whitman in order to rescript her tragic story into a compelling fictional portrait of Eliza Wharton; by so ­doing, Foster privileges her own acts of imagination over the powers of reason” (The Plight of Feeling, 105–106). 87. Foster, The Coquette, 159. 88. Ibid., 160. 89. A ­ fter all, a sentimental reading demands that readers fill in the cracks with their empathetic feelings and thoughts, making the pieces “­whole.” Elizabeth Wanning Harries explains how “the sentimental novelist creates a partial, fragmentary framework for the ‘imaginative expansion’ of the text” (The Unfinished Manner, 101). 90. Foster, The Coquette, 157. 91. Ibid., 162–163. 92. Woloch, The One vs. the Many, 13. 93. Webster, An American Dictionary, s.v. “dissolution, n.” 94. Regier, Fracture and Fragmentation in British Romanticism, 7. 95. Ibid. 96. Foster, The Coquette, 156. 97. Prendergast, “Derrida’s Hamlet,” 45. 98. A half-­century ­later, Bartleby’s insistent refusal to act in Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener. A Story of Wall-­Street” puzzles any attempt to impose a recognizable identity on him, both by characters in the story and by scholars. This could be ­because he is a man employing a female mode of re­sis­tance, one that aligns with Foster’s use of silence and her evasion of strict closure. See Couch, “A Syntax of Silence,” 167–190. 99. Foster, The Coquette, 163. 100. Ibid.

Chapter 4 1. For information regarding Dana’s c­ areer, see “James Dana,” Appletons’ Cyclopædia of American Biography, 65. 2. James Dana, A Sermon, 40–41. On the use of passionate language in Revolutionary discourse, see Eustace, Passion Is the Gale, 385–437. 3. James Dana, A Sermon, 41. 4. Ibid., 41–42. 5. John 6:12–13, The New Oxford Annotated Bible. The version of the miracle described in John was the most commonly cited one in the period. On the significance of the phrase in the early modern era, see Adcock, “Gather up the Fragments, that nothing be lost,” 209–215. 6. John 6:14. 7. Robert Ferguson identifies a transition of cultural authority in the early republic from the clergy to ­lawyers, describing an “abrupt removal of religious voices from controlling po­ liti­cal discourse in the post-­Revolutionary era” through commercialism, the separation of church and state, and secularization (particularly through law) (Reading the Early Republic, 54). His account makes sense from a certain perspective; however, this chapter shows that much of the clerical authority migrated to the biblical sayings and moralities that circulated



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in the print culture of the period. Clerical authority thereby transformed—or was embedded into print—­rather than simply disappearing. 8. Harries, The Unfinished Manner, 51. For information on Laurence Sterne’s employment of the miracle in his fiction, see 48–53. 9. Franklin, The Complete Poor Richard Almanacks, 1:2. Jennifer  J. Baker argues that Franklin’s writing throughout his life “indicates that he saw his writing as a means to effect economic change” (Securing the Commonwealth, 75). 10. Franklin, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 15:52. See Fin­ger, Doctor Franklin’s Medi­ cine, 105 and passim, for descriptions of the correspondence between Franklin and Evans. 11. Breitwieser, Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin, 220. Scholars have often commented on Franklin’s interest in the minute, which extends to his partial composition of his own life in the text that would come to be called the “autobiography.” As Douglas Anderson writes, “Within a few weeks of his death, Benjamin Franklin was dispersing rather than consolidating his written legacy, giving parts away rather than joining the pieces together. . . . ​ Unlike the colonies whose ­u nion Franklin was among the first to urge, his life story must remain a series of provocative fragments in order to be complete, disassembled in order to be ­whole” (The Unfinished Life of Benjamin Franklin, 10). Taking a comparable perspective, Matthew Garrett contends that for Franklin, “A ­little becomes a lot: the miniscule specs [sic] of dust accumulating in many individuals’ eyes amount to a public nuisance of ‘Weight & Consequence.’ . . . ​Franklin had some sense of what he saw as the weight of accumulated minor events, of which the text of the Autobiography bears the traces”; such an attention to the “weight of accumulated minor events” leads, Garrett argues, to the suppression of heterogeneous perspectives in the early republic (Episodic Poetics, 79). Franklin strives, in Garrett’s words, “to account for every­thing, to close down the possibility that too many parts w ­ ill overwhelm, or radically transform, the w ­ hole” (81). 12. The Works of Benjamin Franklin, 10:148. As the economist Jacob Viner writes, “Benjamin Franklin helped in the preparation of this book [Princi­ples of Trade], and the notes, which are generally superior to the text, have especially been attributed to him” (“En­g lish Theories of Foreign Trade Before Adam Smith,” 427). 13. Franklin and Whatley, Princi­ples of Trade, 11–13. For more information on Franklin’s authorship, see Higgs, Bibliography of Economics, 1751–1775, 581. 14. Breitwieser, Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin, 222. 15. Paine, “The American Crisis, Number III,” 116. Edward Larkin reads the beginning of this pamphlet as Paine’s argument for history: “History ­here serves to order the pre­sent and direct the f­ uture, and in so ­doing it also provides the fundamental basis for all criticism. In this re­spect, history becomes the crucial form of knowledge for h ­ uman society ­because without it we would be incapable of discerning the proper course of action in the pre­sent” (Thomas Paine and the Lit­er­a­ture of Revolution, 92). Such a “crucial form” is figured—­notably—­t hrough the concept of fragments. 16. Paine, “The American Crisis, Number III,” 143. 17. Ibid., 145. 18. Morson, The Long and Short of It, 122. 19. Ibid. For extended discussions of the significance of oratory in the context of the early republican lit­er­a­ture and politics, see Looby, Voicing Amer­i­ca, and Gustafson, Eloquence Is Power. 20. McHugh, Broken En­glish, 68.

232

Notes to Pages 141–145

21. McHugh explains how fragments can call on both the past and the f­ uture to “operate like perpetual motion machines, enacting poised antinomies—­opposites equally charged, abiding no exclusive resolution, and operating to create fields of force.” In her view, “The polarities or terminals, in other words, do not annihilate each other’s meanings,” but instead extend them (Broken En­glish, 18). 22. Nick Yablon connects “ruins” to stadial theories as well, writing that they “­were identified with the idea that ­every empire traversed a cyclical course. More specifically they denoted that cycle’s final stage, the aftermath of its dissolution, by which time its legacy had passed on to an emerging empire elsewhere. As citizens of a republic that was at an ­earlier stage in its po­liti­cal, economic, territorial, and urban development, Americans assumed themselves—­a nd w ­ ere assumed by Europeans—to be spatially, temporally, and temperamentally distant from ruins, even if they still needed to heed their warnings” (Untimely Ruins, 20). For more on the centrality of progressive theories of civilization and history in the period, see O’Brien, “Between Enlightenment and Stadial History,” 53–64; Howe, Making the American Self, 53–54; and Wolloch, “The Civilizing Pro­cess, Nature, and Stadial Theory,” 245–259. 23. Not surprisingly, writers throughout ­England also employed the phrase. Only a year ­a fter Dana’s sermon, the eminent Quaker minister Samuel Fothergill (who lived on both sides of the Atlantic) used the phrase as a meta­phor for the dissemination of his writings. At the beginning of Fothergill’s collection of sermons and writings, the title page describes how his vari­ous texts within have been “collected and re-­published, that the instructive and impor­ tant Truths therein contained, may be spread and become more generally useful,” and then continues with the command to “Gather up the Fragments that remain, that nothing be lost” (The Necessity and Divine Excellency of a Life of Purity and Holiness, 1). “Gather up the Fragments” stands as a self-­evident assertion separated in its own in­de­pen­dent clause, thus acting as a command to the reader. Fothergill hopes that the reader w ­ ill pick up even the tiniest words from his text and transform them into greater spiritual nourishment. 24. John 6:2, The New Oxford Annotated Bible. 25. It is, of course, necessary to heed the warning issued by Justine Murison and Jordan Stein that many of the phrases used to describe religion in con­temporary scholarship “are necessarily anachronistic attempts to render early Amer­i­ca in con­temporary conceptual terms” (“Introduction: Religion and Method,” 3). Tracing the use of the phrase “gather up the fragments” across religious, po­liti­cal, and economic discourses reveals the interrelationship of ­these concepts in the eigh­teenth ­century (as an alternative to applying a con­temporary disciplinary separation) and situates writers in their complex historical milieu. 26. Baker, Securing the Commonwealth, 25. 27. American Museum (January 1, 1787), 44–46. 28. Green, Mathew Carey, 3. For more information on Carey’s life, see Green’s overview as well as Carey, Autobiography, his autobiography collected from letters in the New-­England Magazine from 1833–1834. 29. Carey, “The Urgent Necessity of an Immediate Repeal of the Whole Penal Code Candidly Considered.” For more on this publication, see Higgins, “Mathew Carey, Catholic Identity, and the Penal Laws,” 176–200. 30. Green, Mathew Carey, 4. 31. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that “if the writer is in the margins or completely outside his or her fragile community, this situation allows the writer all the more the possibility



Notes to Pages 145–146

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to express another pos­si­ble community and to forge the means for another consciousness and another sensibility” (Kafka, 17). Throughout his lifetime, Carey believed in a government that could include a diverse array of individuals. As Maurice J. Bric explains, for Carey, “the ideal polity was where its citizens could work together to secure the interests of the wider community and thereby promote their own virtue as well as the happiness of the w ­ hole” (“Mathew Carey, Ireland, and the ‘Empire for Liberty’ in Amer­i­ca,” 417–418). However, on his less-­t han-­ equitable racial politics during the yellow fever crisis in Philadelphia, see Spires, The Practice of Citizenship, 34–78. 32. Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1:30. Carey’s interest in fragments began before he started the American Museum. When he worked on the Columbian Magazine, he wrote “Hard Times. A Fragment” and “The Shipwreck. A Fragment” for its first issue in 1786. The former was a short prose piece on the prob­lems of lavish expenditure during a difficult economic period. He encourages the readers of the fragment to save, rather than spend, in order to prevent widespread poverty. 33. Harries, The Unfinished Manner, 48. 34. Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution, 217. Jared Gardner mentions that “the vast majority of the magazines of the age explic­itly eschew po­liti­cal debate, avoiding ‘local’ politics and any attempts at a unified ideological program in preference for representing the best ideas and knowledge of the age” (The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Cul­ ture, 98). 35. Green, Mathew Carey, 25. Green, however, ultimately suggests that the American Mu­ seum was “neither ethnic nor parochial, it was national and nationalistic. As the debate over ratification of the Constitution raged in 1787 and 1788, it printed many power­f ul arguments in f­ avor . . . ​as well as a few opposed, as a token of non-­partisan status. The pro-­Constitution party was quick to see the Museum’s potential as a propaganda medium and Carey on the ­whole was cooperative” (25). In contrast, the essays discussed in this chapter largely demur from a nationalistic sense of the publication. For further discussion of how Carey’s po­liti­cal sympathies shifted throughout his life from Federalist to Republican, and then to apo­liti­cal civic concern, see Green’s work, as well as Remer, Printers and Men of Capital, 24–38. For more information on Carey’s publishing ­career, see Kenneth Rowe, Mathew Carey: A Study in Ameri­ can Economic Development, and Clarkin, Mathew Carey: A Bibliography of His Publications. 36. Carroll Smith-­Rosenberg describes the centrality of po­l iti­c al magazines in discussions of identity in the early republic, noting that “magazines w ­ ere sites of productive performativity—­not only for their editors and contributors but for their readers. H ­ ere, alone in their imaginations or through conversations with friends (since eighteenth-­century magazines ­were often read collectively and w ­ ere displayed and discussed, making them occasions for polite sociability), readers studied the divergent roles that abounded on the magazines’ pages, played at being cosmopolitan readers, patriotic republicans, liberal gentlemen, abolitionists, or, alternatively, racists. Reading and discussing the magazines, urban readers learned to perform a new American identity (though, as we know, this identity was never static or unified)” (This Violent Empire, 31). 37. On the relationship between bodily appearance and character, see Lukasik, Discern­ ing Characters. For Lukasik, a person’s “character” serves as a discriminatory characteristic that gauges social differentiation, often through an analy­sis of physiognomy. A more encompassing category than a fragment, “character”—­according to Lukasik—­generated a means of reconceiving social relations and pre­sen­ta­t ions of the self in the late eigh­teenth c­ entury.

234

Notes to Pages 146–150

38. American Museum (January 1, 1787), 42. 39. Ibid. On the figure of the bachelor in this period, see Warner, “Irving’s Posterity,” 773–799, and Looby, “Republican Bachelorhood,” 89–100. On the related figure of the “lounger,” see Rigal, The American Manufactory, 114–141. 40. American Museum (January 1, 1787), 43. 41. Ibid., 42–43. 42. Ibid., 45. 43. Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution, 56. 44. On the one hand, Philipp Schweighauser notes that sentimental novels “elicit our sympathy for socially marginalized groups and our moral outrage at their plight” (Beautiful Deceptions, 114); on the other hand, George Boulukos argues that sentiment “turns out to be a cultural form without a predetermined content,” and that “the sentimental aspect of the grateful slave trope engages an established tradition—­familiar from the late seventeenth ­century—of using emotional response to oppression and torture as a way of distancing oneself from responsibility for such aspects of colonial enterprise” (The Grateful Slave, 14). 45. The juxtaposition of the three articles implies a continuity that closes the gap among disparities like race, gender, and class. As Russ Castronovo argues, an analogical viewpoint can “help us to compare ostensibly dif­fer­ent forms and search for the ways in which they might in fact be equivalent, corresponding, and even in harmony with one another” (“Occupy Bartleby,” 264). Todd Carmody likewise advocates “a practice of reading that listens for the hiss and crackle of resemblance rather than the digital on/off, either/or of sameness” (“Rehabilitating Analogy,” 433). The danger of analogic comparisons exists in a tendency to suppress differences in identity, but Castronovo and Carmody identify the rehabilitative nature of analogy, one that uncovers ways in which identities ­were productively constructed in relation to one another. 46. American Museum (January 1, 1787), 44. On the complicated issues of consent, power, and class involved in eighteenth-­century American prostitution and sexuality, see Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early Amer­i­ca, and Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in Early Amer­i­ca. Carey’s fragment not only invokes the feeding of the multitude, but it also resonates with the parable of the Good Samaritan. 47. American Museum (January 1, 1787), 45. 48. By considering the actions of the ­father in the ­daughter’s decline, the short narrative addresses the “culpability of men,” a point which Clare Lyons notes occurred “only rarely” in texts about prostitutes (Sex Among the Rabble, 322). Throughout early republican lit­er­a­ture, the responsibility for the fall away from virtue was almost always exclusively attributed to the agency of the ­woman. For more on texts about prostitution, see Lyons, 312–322. 49. American Museum (January 1, 1787), 45. The impetus to give hospitality to strangers also has biblical roots in Hebrews 13:2. 50. Ibid. The seven works of mercy consist of refreshing the thirsty, visiting the sick, ransoming the captive, clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless, feeding the hungry, and burying the dead. 51. Ibid., 46. 52. Ibid. 53. This fragment, of course, relies on the trope of the “grateful slave” identified by Boulukos. Yet while the relationship between the freed man and the former enslaver rings strange



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to modern ears, this fragment offers a clear example of an attempt to rehabilitate the status of the humanity of the enslaved in the period. More so than the other two fragments, Carey’s piece on the enslaved man functions in critique of exclusions codified by the federal government. When the Constitutional Convention ­adopted the “Three-­fi fths Compromise” in 1787, the nation counted enslaved individuals as three-­fi fths of all other persons in determining state population for purposes of legislative repre­sen­ta­t ion. Carey could not have known that the Constitutional Convention would agree to this specific resolution in the months a­ fter the publication of his article, but similar proposals in which enslaved p ­ eople comprised a fraction of an individual circulated in the years a­ fter the Revolutionary War. By turning the fragmented “slave” into a freed man, Carey depicts the manner in which nongovernmental forms of sympathetic affiliation can reconstitute an individual and thereby create a change that persists into the ­f uture. ­Later in his life, though, Carey would acquiesce to the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and its embedded expansion of slavery. 54. American Museum (January 1, 1787), 46. 55. Ibid., 45. 56. Ibid., 46. 57. Carey’s structure of the fragments accords with what Joseph Rezek calls a “politics of format,” which refers to the way the material construction of texts could provide evidence of the author’s, printer’s, or publisher’s po­liti­cal viewpoint (“The Print Atlantic,” 23). 58. American Museum (January 1, 1787), 45–46. 59. Carey, “Fragment. Addressed to the Sons and ­Daughters of Humanity.” 60. Gutjahr, An American Bible, 23. For more information on the publication of Carey’s bible, see Carey, “Address to the Subscribers for the Doway Translation of the Vulgate Bible”; Clarkin, Mathew Carey: A Bibliography of His Publications; Gutjahr, An American Bible, 23–31; Car­ter, “­Under the Benign Sun of Toleration,” 437–469; and Abruzzo, “Apol­o­getics of Harmony,” 5–30. 61. Abruzzo observes that Carey hoped that “Protestants might use his Catholic Douay edition themselves. He pitched an advertisement to Protestants, boasting that the Douay Bible could serve as a corrective” to m ­ istakes in the King James version (“Apol­o­getics of Harmony,” 15). 62. Gutjahr, An American Bible, 13. 63. “Gather up the fragments, that nothing be lost,” American Museum 10, no. 1 (1791): 27. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid. 67. “The Economist. No. I,” Universal Asylum and Columbian Magazine, 13; “Gather up the Fragments, that Nothing be Lost,” Philadelphia Repository, and Weekly Register, 4; “Miscellaneous Articles,” Medical and Agricultural Register, 349–350. 68. In an even more Franklinian vein, Carey continued to expound on the importance of gathering fragments in The New Olive Branch, a book that emphasized the importance of American agriculture and manufactures. In describing a manufacturer in Providence, Rhode Island, he mentions that the workers ­were able to live in “circumjacent farm-­houses” and “­were thus enabled to gather up the fragments of time, which would other­w ise have been inevitably lost. It is not improbable that the profits of their ­labour ­were nearly equal to the profits of the farming” (The New Olive Branch, 180).

236

Notes to Pages 155–159

69. The Act of Incorporation and Constitution of the Fragment Society, 6. 70. On the history of the Evangelical United Front, see Charles Foster, An Errand of Mercy. 71. Fragment Society Rec­ords, 1812–1993. Schlesinger Library, Cambridge, Mas­sa­chu­setts, MC 338. See also “The Fragment Society,” https://­w ww​.­f ragmentsociety​.­org ​/­. 72. The Act of Incorporation and Constitution of the Fragment Society, 11. 73. Child, The Frugal House­wife, 3. Later, Child changes the title to The American Frugal Housewife. 74. Ibid., 8. 75. Tara Robbins Fee observes that unlike many nineteenth-­century writers on poverty, Child “wishes to address the pre­sent realities of t­ hose living within it” and “acknowledges, dignifies, and addresses the concerns of the poor as moral questions” (“The Real House­w ives of New ­England,” 2, 3). 76. On Child’s relationship to the rising m ­ iddle class, Susan Strasser writes, “Thrift became ever more impor­tant as more ­people depended on factory wages and factory-­made goods. It was essential for families with ­little cash; even for ­t hose in somewhat better circumstances, saving was a way for w ­ omen to affect ­house­hold bud­gets. Lydia Maria Child’s The American Frugal House­wife went through seven editions in its first three years, suggesting that ­t here was a market for a book whose title promised such advice” (Waste and Want, 27). In addition, Hildegard Hoeller describes how in “Child’s demo­cratic patchwork economy, all parts contribute equally. Every­t hing is valuable and workable material: time, c­ hildren, parents, rags, health, philosophy, and so on,” and that “Child offers her readers a ­recipe for survival that encourages them to think in purely economic terms about their materials, time, and ­family members. Child’s advice book allows ­women to see themselves as a class of entrepreneurs that can further their wealth and power by following the laws of industrial capitalism in their own h ­ ouse­hold economies” (From Gift to Commodity, 76, 77). 77. Child, The Frugal House­wife, 8. 78. Goloboy, “The Early American ­Middle Class,” 542. 79. The initial publication of Child’s book was underwhelming, but in its l­ ater editions, it found an audience ready to take advantage of her instructions. Kyla Wazana Tompkins notes that Child’s book did not receive as positive a reception as she had hoped: “The image of gathering up fragments nicely captures the sense of chaos held at bay [in the disor­ga­ni­za­t ion of the text], but it did not hold at bay Child’s early reviewers, who harshly criticized the organ­ ization of the book. . . . ​Middle-­and upper-­class ­women writers responded to the devaluation of domestic work and their own changed relationship to the management of physical chores not only with reformist writings meant to restore social value to w ­ omen’s work but also through the explicit discourse of cleanliness” (Racial Indigestion, 40–41); Tompkins also argues that books like Child’s separated individuals on racial lines, observing that “the ­house­w ife, while safely inserted in the domestic sphere, is held at arm’s length from the l­ abor that she commands from the Irish or African American maid” (39). 80. Sigourney, Pocahontas, 188. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid., 189, 190. 83. Ibid., 190. The ellipsis is not in the original. 84. Ibid. 85. Sigourney, Select Poems, 52. On Sigourney’s sense that rag poems ­were a topic befitting a wife and m ­ other, see Senchyne, The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-­Century



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American Lit­er­a­ture, 92–100. Senchyne also observes how Sigourney’s poems on rags “are part of her larger proj­ect of linking the secular and spiritual” (93). 86. Sigourney, Select Poems, 52. 87. Ibid., 52–53. 88. Sigourney, Pocahontas, 55. 89. Ibid. 90. Ibid. 91. Ibid. 92. Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, 114.

Chapter 5 1. Andrew Allport observes that, in ­England, “the fragment form was a very popu­lar one: t­here are hundreds of fragment poems in the newspapers of the mid-­nineteenth ­century, though very few are as compelling as ‘Kubla Khan’ ”; for Allport, the overwhelming number of fragments results from “a pro­cess of replication, repeating the same themes and imagery but without the freshness of the original” (“The Romantic Fragment Poem and the Per­for­ mance of Form,” 414, 415). Allport makes a valuable point by commenting on the increasing visibility and the “pro­cess of replication” evident in ­England in the early nineteenth ­century, though he overemphasizes the homogeneity of the newspaper productions by romantically idealizing the “freshness of the original.” 2. William Charvat identifies this period as the “first era of successful professional authorship in Amer­i­ca,” when the ave­nues to authorship increased and writers could theoretically support themselves by their writing alone (though they might choose to take on other ­careers as well) (Literary Publishing in Amer­i­ca, 38). For revisions to Charvat’s thesis, see Gilmore, American Romanticism and the Marketplace; Rice, The Transformation of Author­ ship in Amer­i­ca; and McGill, American Lit­er­a­ture and the Culture of Reprinting. 3. Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem, 36. 4. As Susan Ryan describes it, this was a period in which “Americans invested increasing energy in the elusive proj­ect of knowing their favorite authors,” so readers would have been curious to know the circumstances ­behind the compositional history of fragments—­eager to understand the “authors’ personal selves” and their position as authors (The Moral Economies of American Authorship, 16). 5. McGann, “Washington Irving, A History of New York, and American History,” 352; Redmond, “Trou­ble in Paradise,” 2; Marr, “Exorbitant Optics and Lunatic Pleasures,” 11. 6. Irving, Salmagundi, 1, 2. 7. Ibid., 4. Matthew Garrett observes how Salmagundi jettisons the concept of the ­whole: “In place of that w ­ hole, we have the pre­sen­ta­tion of a purely subjective expression of the parts-­as-­parts, unified primarily by their princi­ple of whim” (Episodic Poetics, 119). 8. Irving, Salmagundi, 4. 9. Irving, A History of New York, 5. 10. Ibid., 7, 8. 11. Irving, The Sketch-­Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., 15, 115, 117, 213. 12. See Chapters 1 and 3 for more information on ruins and the picturesque. 13. For further examples of this treatment of Irving, see Rubin-­Dorsky, “Washington Irving and the Genesis of the Fictional Sketch,” 226–247, and Pethers, “Transatlantic Migration and the Politics of the Picturesque in Washington Irving’s Sketch Book,” 135–158.

238

Notes to Pages 168–176

14. Looby, Voicing Amer­i­ca, 7. 15. ­Piper, Dreaming in Books, 14. 16. Cavitch, American Elegy, 11. 17. Dunlap, The Life of Charles Brockden Brown, 1:259. 18. Brown, Edgar Huntly, edited by Philip Barnard and Stephen Shapiro, 3. Further citations w ­ ill be to this edition. 19. Darwin, Zoonomia, 158, 144. For Darwin’s influence on Brown and his circle, see Waterman, Republic of Intellect, and Friedman, Soul Sleepers. On Darwin’s importance in the ­period, see Fara, Erasmus Darwin. And, for background on the longer history of somnambulism, see Reiss, Wild Nights, 91–118. 20. Friedman, Soul Sleepers, 198. 21. Darwin, Zoonomia, 161, 161, 162, 163, 165. 22. Rush, Medical Inquiries and Observations, 304. 23. As Justine S. Murison comments in her study of Brown, “The popularity of an emerging medical discourse about the mind and the way in which it promised—­yet failed—to offer coherent, stable theories of personal identity made it a productive site for po­liti­cal reflections” (“The Tyranny of Sleep,” 246). Siân Silyn Roberts, too, examines how in Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, “the subject does indeed find himself split in two when his nocturnal activities are not even recalled by his waking self (a mode of anti-­individualism that Brown exploits more fully in Edgar Huntly)” and notes that the letters in Edgar Huntly “break down the bound­a ries between individuals on which the sentimental h ­ ouse­hold is predicated” (Gothic Subjects, 55, 75). 24. “Two surprising instances of Sleep-­Walking,” 21. 25. “Account of a remarkable Sleep-­walker,” 427. 26. Ibid. 27. “A Par­t ic­u ­lar Account of a Singular Sleep-­Walker,” 250. 28. “The History of Cyrillo Padovano,” 48. 29. Robert Ferguson, among many ­others, describes how the American Enlightenment emphasized the centrality of agency: “The autonomy of reason controls ­human action,” in the ideal schema outlined during the eigh­teenth c­ entury (The American Enlightenment, 73). 30. Brown, Edgar Huntly, 3. 31. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, 158. In a more philosophical vein, Sharon Cameron describes the condition of “impersonality” as “moments when characters seem weirdly permeable to each other” and alternately distant (Impersonality, 183). 32. Over a span of ten years, Brown also published and likely wrote a number of other short fragments: “The Punishment of Ridicule: A Fragment,” 257–259; “The House­hold. A Fragment,” 81–87; “New Year’s Day. A Fragment,” 22–23; “Pressing. A Fragment,” 52; “The Value of General Rules. A Fragment,” 89–91; and “Insanity: A Fragment,” 165–168. While historians remain unsure that Brown authored all of ­t hese, he did oversee the publication of each article, and most likely wrote many of them. For further discussion of the attribution of ­these periodical texts, see Brown, The Charles Brockden Brown Electronic Archive, and Somnambulism and Other Stories. 33. Such a network of texts generates what Deleuze and Guattari call an “assemblage,” a construction of interconnected portions that lack a precise ending or beginning. For them, “a book composed of chapters has culmination and termination points. What takes place in a book composed instead of plateaus that communicate with one another across microfissures,



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as in the brain? We call a ‘plateau’ any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial under­g round stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome” (A Thousand Pla­ teaus, 22). More recently, Wai Chee Dimock retreats from a definitive categorization of genres, instead presenting the case for what she calls “weak theory.” “Weak theory” considers the tenuous relationships that bridge disparate characters, events, and literary texts, “the chaotic, far-­flung, but also fairly reliable input of other­w ise weak players, the off-­center and off-­ focus energy of meandering threads” (“Weak Theory,” 745). She argues for “dispersed, episodic webs of association, not supervised and not formalizable, [that] make it an open question what is primary, what is determinative, what counts as the center and what counts as the margins” (737). 34. The incomplete and overlapping works also constitute what Brown called a “series.” The word “series” comes from Brown’s advertisement for his first published novel, Wieland (1798), in which he comments that the “following Work is delivered to the world as the first of a series of per­for­mances, which the favorable reception of this w ­ ill induce the Writer to publish” (Wieland, 3). One year ­a fter the release of Wieland, Brown takes his description of a “series of per­for­mances” and uses it to describe Edgar Huntly, which w ­ ill “exhibit a series of adventures” (Edgar Huntly, 3). Brown even describes in the preface to Edgar Huntly how the novel rises out of “the flattering reception that has been given, by the public, to Arthur Mervyn” and he “solicit[s] a continuance of the same favour” (3). In part, then, Edgar Huntly continues the novelistic proj­ect he began with Arthur Mervyn, but not in the clean, chronological fashion that the preface might suggest. When Brown published the first volume of Edgar Huntly in May 1799, only the first part of Arthur Mervyn had been published (the second came out in the summer of 1800), meaning that Arthur Mervyn was itself a work in pro­ gress that was then incomplete. The publication of Edgar Huntly divides the sequential volumes of Arthur Mervyn, de-­emphasizing a single novel with a beginning, m ­ iddle, and end; instead, Brown promotes a novelistic model focusing on fragmented—­t hough interlinked—­ prose texts. 35. Recent criticism of Edgar Huntly follows along two main interpretive tracks which closely follow Richard Chase’s proleptic statement that Brown’s writings “tend to ideology and psy­chol­ogy; they are ­adept at depicting the largest public abstractions and the smallest and most elusive turn of the inner mind” (The American Novel and Its Tradition, 41). Psychological interpretations of Edgar Huntly began primarily with Fiedler’s classic account and, since then, critics like George Toles and Beverly Voloshin have followed Fiedler in analyzing the inward prob­lems of identity and morality that plague Edgar. See Toles, “Charting the Hidden Landscape,” 133–153, and Voloshin, “Edgar Huntly and the Coherence of the Self,” 262–280. In response to this inward focus, critics in the 1990s turned their gaze outward by politicizing Brown’s novel and bringing it into conversation with the ideologies of the early republic, particularly with reference to the emergent American empire. Beginning with Sydney J. Krause and Jared Gardner, critics like John Carlos Rowe, Eric Goldman, and Andrew Newman took Brown’s investigation of po­liti­cal realities seriously and ­either lauded him for critiquing American colonialism, or condemned him for his complicity with oppressive state regimes. This historical, po­liti­cally oriented writing has largely governed studies of Edgar Huntly since the ’90s. See Krause, “Penn’s Elm and Edgar Huntly,” 463–84; Gardner, Master Plots, 52–80; Rowe, Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism, 25–51; Goldman, “The ‘Black Hole of Calcutta’ in Charles Brockden Brown’s Amer­i­ca,” 557–579; and Newman, “ ‘Light might possibly be requisite,’ ” 322–357.

240

Notes to Pages 176–180

36. Clare Pettitt reminds us about the “danger of retrospectively attributing characteristics to the form of the book in the early nineteenth ­century at a moment when readerships ­were expanding and the technology of reading and reception ­were undergoing very significant changes” (Serial Forms, 74). 37. In contrast to exclusively psychological and po­l iti­c al readings, in recent years critics like Cahill, Roberts, Garrett, Tawil, and o ­ thers have made a de­cided turn ­toward the formal ele­ments of Brown’s work. For example, Drexler and White read Brown’s Ormond (1799) as “a series of fantasy studies” of U.S. republicanism “rather than a unified narrative,” a system by which po­liti­cal structure gains a violent coherency (“Secret Witness; or, the Fantasy Structure of Republicanism,” 334). William Huntting Howell, too, considers how the same novel “finds instruction in unsettlement” of what he calls the art of de­pen­ dency for individuals, a theme that finds its formal corollary in the fact that a “final paragraph that in one sense closes out the narrative’s epistolary frame thus serves in another sense as a gesture of radical inconclusion” (Against Self-­Reliance, 190). As with Ormond, the formal structure of Edgar Huntly itself makes an argument for Brown about sociopo­liti­cal realities in the period. 38. Brown, “Edgar Huntly: A Fragment,” 21. 39. Brown, however, admits that a part could never fully represent the w ­ hole in his introduction to the extract from Sky-­Walk. The editorial note written by Brown explains that, “unable to fix on any part capable of conveying a perfect idea of the ­whole, we trust the following may serve as a specimen of the work” (“Extract from the ‘SKY-WALK,’ ” 228). 40. As Sean Braune argues, “The fragment offers a conceptual writing of plenitude in that it is a textuality that has been authored by destructive forces, offering seemingly infinite pos­ si­ble texts that may theoretically ascribe ‘completion’ to any fragment” (“How to Analyze Texts That ­Were Burned, Lost, Fragmented, or Never Written,” 253). 41. Brown, “Edgar Huntly: A Fragment,” 21. 42. Ibid., 28. 43. Ezra Tawil explains the centrality of landscape for Brown’s novel in aesthetic terms: “Brown was particularly a­ dept 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. . . . ​Brown thus gave his own prose bumps and irregularities, as if attempting to endow the surface of the writing with the same textural effects as he gives his regional topography: roughness, unevenness, complexity, and irregularity” (Lit­er­a­ture, American Style, 147–148). Duncan Faherty, too, argues that “Brown deconstructs the optimistic figuration of a cohesive American subjectivity (which his preface taps into) by mapping how North Amer­i­ca’s complex settlement histories destabilize cultural cohesion” (Remodeling the Nation, 57). 44. Brown, Edgar Huntly, 5. The emphasis on the imperfect also confirms what Cahill calls “the multiple aesthetic registers in Brown’s fiction” that paradoxically push t­oward closure and liberation; for Cahill, ­t hese vari­ous registers display the “wide and often contradictory range of its [the imagination’s] sources and effects,” and the seemingly unrelated publication of “Death of Cicero, A Fragment” capitalizes on this “contradictory” and unexpected range (Liberty of the Imagination, 165). 45. Dana Luciano focuses on the tense positioning of closure and liberation when she argues that “Brown’s novel vigorously resists closure in the absorbing effects of its structure, its narrative, and its rhe­toric,” and she points to the three letters “appended to the memoir



Notes to Pages 180–185

241

without explanation, letters that throw the very possibility of termination into doubt” as evidence of this re­sis­tance (“ ‘Perverse Nature,’ ” 19). Norman Grabo similarly states that the letters at the end of Edgar Huntly “may not be the happiest of devices, but we can see why he may have chosen this way of concluding the story. The letters give the sense of immediacy, urgency, and inconclusiveness that the memoir by its nature cannot. . . . ​Brown’s theme of sons and lovers is never concluded” (The Coincidental Art of Charles Brockden Brown, 82–83). Just as the loose end of the plot and the addition of three letters to Edgar’s epistle bring the conclusion of the novel “into doubt,” Brown’s decision to append Edgar Huntly with “Death of Cicero, A Fragment” furthers this doubt. Placing the fragment at the end of the volume reaffirms Edgar’s sense of the “imperfect” by extending the incomplete status of the novel from Edgar’s explanation of events to the published structure of Edgar Huntly itself. The full title of the third volume thus reads, Edgar Huntly; Or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker. To Which is Annexed, The Death of Cicero, A Fragment. Interestingly, the use of the verb “annexed” brings the third volume of Edgar Huntly together with “Death of Cicero, A Fragment” in a very physical way ­because the etymology of the word reaches back to mean “to tie to” or “to tie, bind” (Oxford En­glish Dictionary Online, s.v. “annex, v.”). During Brown’s lifetime, the tying and binding of pages carried a literal meaning for the production of books; a­ fter a printer composed the type and printed the sheets for a novel, they ­were then sent to a ­binder, who folded the sheets, placed them into gatherings, and stitched them together. The manual pro­cess of folding, arranging, and binding abruptly contrasts the partiality and ragged edges denoted by a fragment. Rather than supplementing and completing the book—­a typical way in which a story or essay could be “annexed” to eighteenth-­century novels—­“Death of Cicero, A Fragment” elicits a number of questions regarding the conclusive finality of Edgar Huntly. 46. Roberts, Gothic Subjects, 125. Michelle Sizemore also recognizes that Brown’s novels “convey the startling possibility that each person may be a profusion of selves, a hodgepodge of parts” (American Enchantment, 100). 47. Dunlap, The Life of Charles Brockden Brown, 2:40. 48. Ibid., 1:260. 49. Ibid., 1:259. 50. Ibid., 1:260. 51. “The Life of Charles Brockden Brown,” 63. 52. Ibid., 75. 53. Ibid. 54. Goodrich, Recollections of a Lifetime, 2:203. 55. Garrett, for one, finds in Brown “limitless narrative potential, then, but also a peculiar desire not to develop that potential but, rather, to store it up” (Episodic Poetics, 100–101). A similar move can be seen ­here in the way that such narrative potential is leveraged for the establishment of an authorial c­ areer—­storing it up, as it w ­ ere. 56. “American Writers,” 125. Sari Altschuler similarly contends that “Brown’s gothic fiction not only gave readers the sense of what it was like to live with disease but, Brown believed, could make readers a l­ ittle sick as well” (The Medical Imagination, 78). 57. Richardson, Cla­r is­sa, 35. 58. Rousseau, The Confessions and Correspondence, 589. 59. Starobinski, “The Style of Autobiography,” 81. For more on Rousseau’s style and its influence on early American lit­er­a­ture, see Tawil, Lit­er­a­ture, American Style, 100–113. 60. Silverman, Bodies and Books, 64, 80.

242

Notes to Pages 185–198

61. See Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem, 50–59, for more on the cultural background of posthumous writing. For further information on the undead character of romanticism, see Swann, Lives of the Dead Poets. 62. Early in the nineteenth ­century, she published the occasional poem, several of which ended up in My Mind and Its Thoughts, in Sketches, Fragments, and Essays. For more on Morton’s publishing ­career, see Vietto, ­Women and Authorship in Revolutionary Amer­i­ca, 107–116. 63. Vietto, ­Women and Authorship in Revolutionary Amer­i­ca, 114. 64. Morton, My Mind and Its Thoughts, in Sketches, Fragments, and Essays, xv. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid., xvii. 67. Ibid., 287. 68. Cavitch, American Elegy, 45. 69. Morton, My Mind and Its Thoughts, in Sketches, Fragments, and Essays, 287–288. 70. Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 132.5–132.8. 71. John 17:16, The New Oxford Annotated Bible. 72. Morton, My Mind and Its Thoughts, in Sketches, Fragments, and Essays, 288. 73. Ibid., 264. 74. Ibid., 265. 75. Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, 405. 76. Morton, My Mind and Its Thoughts, in Sketches, Fragments, and Essays, 283. 77. Richard Henry Dana, “Fragment of a Poetical Epistle,” 319–322. 78. Ibid., 319. 79. Ibid. 80. Richard Henry Dana, Poems, 91. 81. Ibid., vii. 82. Ibid., vii–­v iii. 83. Byron, The Corsair, viii. 84. Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, 88. 85. Duff, An Essay on Original Genius, 165. 86. Marx, The Marx-­Engels Reader, 348.

Epilogue 1. Richard Henry Dana Sr., a founding editor of the North American Review, famously exclaimed—­years before Bryant would edit Dana’s poetry—­“That [“Thanatopsis”] was never written on this side of the w ­ ater” (cited in Charles H. Brown, William Cullen Bryant, 79), and Rufus Griswold included it first in his se­lection of Bryant’s poetry in his seminal 1842 anthology, The Poets and Poetry of Amer­i­ca (127). ­Later in the nineteenth c­ entury, Walt Whitman celebrated Bryant in Specimen Days & Collect, describing him as “pulsing the first interior verse-­t hrobs of a mighty world—­bard of the river and of the wood . . . ​beginning and ending his long ­career with chants of death” (Complete Prose Works, 181). As in other assessments of Bryant’s work, Whitman emphasizes Bryant’s youth, the “beginning” of his vocation, and “the first interior verse-­t hrobs” of the United States that came with “Thanatopsis.” The publication of “Thanatopsis” provided critics with a site to mark the flowering of a distinctly American aesthetics. 2. Bryant, “A Fragment,” 340. An exception to early critics overlooking “A Fragment” comes from Richard Henry Stoddard, who wrote, “American poetry may be said to have



Notes to Pages 199–206

243

commenced in 1817 with the September number of the North American Review, which contained ‘Thanatopsis’ and the ‘Inscription for the Entrance of a Wood,’ the last being printed as a ‘Fragment’ ” (“Memoir,” xviii). 3. Bryant, Poems, 31. 4. Melville, “Fragments from a Writing Desk,” 197. 5. Ibid., 201. 6. Ibid., 202. 7. Ibid., 202, 204. 8. Ibid., 204. 9. Hershel Parker’s biography of Melville spends no more than two or three pages on “Fragments.” He calls Melville’s story “characteristic Melvillean mood-­stuff,” and discounts the possibility that “Fragments” pre­sents a complex authorial voice. According to Parker, Melville’s “precious prose style [was] . . . ​just enough overdone to allow him to deny that he was taking his style seriously” (Herman Melville, 1:138). Other critics similarly dismiss the story as a “literary dalliance,” “a halting but crucial step ­toward freedom,” “prose overheated in the manner of Poe, with sexually charged echoes of Byron,” or a confirmation that Melville “read and studied poems” (Robertson-­Lorant, Melville, 68; Short, Cast by Means of Figures, 19; Delbanco, Melville, 27; Renker and Robillard, “Melville the Poet,” 9). 10. Morson, The Words of O ­ thers, 34. 11. For a further account of the compositional style of “Fragments,” as well as how the two parts do try to address questions surrounding disability in the nineteenth c­ entury, see Couch and Nicholson, “­Silent Eloquence,” 7–23. 12. Melville, Moby-­Dick, xv, xvii. 13. Hawthorne, The Snow-­Image, 487. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 422. 16. As with the examples in the previous chapter, Melville and Hawthorne are intrigued by such figures—­t he disabled Inamorata and the suicidal Oberon—­but they do not occupy the exclusive attention of the stories. 17. For a recent treatment of Hawthorne that examines the interplay of author and storyteller, see Colacurcio, “The Teller and the Tale,” 99–129. 18. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 92–93. In addition, on Hawthorne’s interest in the unfinished ele­ments of the archive, see DiCuirci, Colonial Revivals, 45–51. 19. Higginson, “Preface,” vi, quoting Ruskin, Modern Paint­ers, 12–13. 20. Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, [poem number 647] 290. 21. Emerson, “Circles,” 256; Whitman “Spontaneous Me,” 110.

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250 Bibliography Castronovo, Russ. “Occupy Bartleby.” J19: Journal of Nineteenth-­Century Americanists 2, no. 2 (2014): 253–272. A Cata­logue of Books Belonging to the Charleston Library Society. Charleston: Printed by W. P. Young, 1806. Cata­logue of Books to be Sold by Isaiah Thomas, at his Bookstore in Worchester, Mas­sa­chu­ setts. Worchester: Printed by Isaiah Thomas, 1787. Cata­logue of Books, to be sold by Samuel Hall, At No. 53, Cornhill, Boston. Boston, 1792. A Cata­logue of the Baltimore Circulating Library; Kept by William Munday. Baltimore: Printed by John W. Butler, 1807. “ ‘Cato’ III.” In The Debate on the Constitution: Federalist and Antifederalist Speeches, Articles, and Letters During the Strug­gle over Ratification, Part 1, ed. Bernard Bailyn, 214–218. New York: Library of Amer­i­ca, 1993. Cavitch, Max. American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Cayton, Andrew. Love in the Time of Revolution: Transatlantic Literary Radicalism and Historical Change, 1793–1818. Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early Amer­i­ca, University of North Carolina Press, 2013. The Charter, Bye-­Laws, and Names of the Members of the New-­York Society Library: With a Cata­logue of the Books Belonging to the said Library. New-­York: Printed by T. & J. Swords, 1793. Chartier, Roger. “Texts, Printing, Readings.” In The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt, 154–175. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Charvat, William. Literary Publishing in Amer­i­ca: 1790–1850. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959. Chase, Richard. The American Novel and Its Tradition. New York: Anchor Books, 1957. Chassebœuf, Constantine François de [Comte de Volney]. A New Translation of Volney’s Ru­ ins; Or Meditations on the Revolution of Empires. Made ­under the inspection of the Author [Trans. Joel Barlow and Thomas Jefferson]. 2 vols. Paris: Printed for Levrault, quai Malaquais, 1802. Child, Lydia Maria. The Frugal House­wife. Dedicated to those who are not ashamed of Econ­ omy. Boston: J. H. Eastburn, Printer, 1829. Christensen, Jerome. Romanticism at the End of History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Clark, J. C. D. The Language of Liberty 1600–1832: Po­liti­cal Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-­American World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Clarkin, William. Mathew Carey: A Bibliography of His Publications, 1785–1824. New York: Garland Publishing, 1984. Colacurcio, Michael. “The Teller and the Tale: A Note on Hawthorne’s Narrator.” Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 45, no. 2 (2019): 99–129. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, and William Words­worth. Lyrical Ballads, With a Few Other Po­ ems. Bristol: Printed by Biggs and Cottle, For T. N. Longman, Paternoster-­Row, London, 1798. —­—­—. Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems. London: Printed for T. N. Longman and O. Rees, Paternoster-­Row, by Biggs and Co. Bristol, 1800. Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

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252 Bibliography Diderot, Denis. Diderot on Art [Vol.] II: The Salon of 1767. Trans. John Goodman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Dierks, Konstantin. In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early Amer­i­ca. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Dill, Elizabeth. Erotic Citizens: Sex and the Embodied Subject in the Antebellum Novel. Charlottesville: University of V ­ irginia Press, 2019. Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock. The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. Dimock, Wai Chee. “Weak Theory: Henry James, Colm Tóibín, and W. B. Yeats.” Critical In­ quiry 39, no. 4 (2013): 732–753. Drexler, Michael J., and Ed White. “Secret Witness; or, the Fantasy Structure of Republicanism.” Early American Lit­er­at­ ure 44, no. 2 (2009): 333–363. Drucker, Johanna. Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. —­—­—. “Graphical Readings and the Visual Aesthetics of Textuality.” Text 16 (2006): ­2 67–276. duBois, Page. Sappho Is Burning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Duff, William. An Essay on Original Genius; And Its Vari­ous Modes of Exertion in Philosophy And The Fine Arts, Particularly In Poetry. London: E. and C. Dilly, 1767. Duffy, Cian. Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Dunlap, William. The Life of Charles Brockden Brown: Together with Se­lections From the Rar­ est of his Printed Works, from His Original Letters, and from his Manuscripts Before Un­ published. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Published by James P. Parke, 1815. “The Economist. No. I.: Gather up the fragments, that nothing be lost.” Universal Asylum and Columbian Magazine (July 1791): 13. Ellis, Markman. The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Ellison, Julie. Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-­American Emotion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Circles.” In Essays, 249–266. Boston: James Munroe and Com­pany, 1841. Eustace, Nicole. Passion Is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolu­ tion. Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early Amer­i­ca, University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Faherty, Duncan. Remodeling the Nation: The Architecture of American Identity, 1776–1858. Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2007. Fanning, Christopher. “On Sterne’s Page: Spatial Layout, Spatial Form, and Social Spaces in Tristram Shandy.” Eighteenth-­Century Fiction 10, no. 4 (1998): 429–450. —­—­—. “Small Particles of Eloquence: Sterne and the Scriblerian Text.” Modern Philology 100, no. 3 (2003): 360–392. Fara, Patricia. Erasmus Darwin: Sex, Science, and Serendipity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Favret, Mary A. War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern War­time. Prince­ ton: Prince­ton University Press, 2010. The Federalist Papers. Ed. Ian Shapiro. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

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258 Bibliography Kvande, Marta. “Printed in a Book: Negotiating Print and Manuscript Cultures in Fantomina and Cla­r is­sa.” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 46, no. 2 (2013): 239–257. Lacoue-­Labarthe, Philippe, and Jean-­Luc Nancy. The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Lit­er­a­ ture in German Romanticism. Trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988. Larkin, Edward. The American School of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. —­—­—. Thomas Paine and the Lit­er­a­ture of Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Larson, Kerry. Imagining Equality in Nineteenth-­Century American Lit­er­a­ture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Lavinia, “Godolfin:—­A Fragment.” Mas­sa­chu­setts Magazine 3, no. 4 (April 1791): 241–242. —­—­—. “The Indian Victory: A Fragment. Decorated by the Pencil of Fancy.” Mas­sa­chu­setts Magazine 3, no. 12 (December 1791): 763–764. Lee, Wendy Anne. Failures of Feeling: Insensibility and the Novel. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018. Levine, Caroline. “Critical Response I: Still Polemicizing A ­ fter All ­These Years.” Critical In­ quiry 44, no. 1 (2017): 129–135. —­—­—. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 2015. Levinson, Marjorie. The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. —­—­—. Thinking Through Poetry: Field Reports on Romantic Lyric. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Lewis, Jan. “The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic.” William and Mary Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1987): 689–721. “The Life of Charles Brockden Brown.” North American Review and Miscellaneous Journal 9, no. 24 (June 1819): 58–77. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning ­Human Understanding. Ed. Peter  H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Loesberg, Jonathan. A Return to Aesthetics: Autonomy, Indifference, and Postmodernism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Looby, Christopher. “Republican Bachelorhood: Sex and Citizenship in the Early United States.” Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques 33, no. 1 (2007): 89–100. —­—­—. Voicing Amer­i­ca: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Looby, Christopher, and Cindy Weinstein, eds. American Lit­er­a­ture’s Aesthetic Dimensions. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Loughran, Trish. The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770– 1870. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. Lowth, Robert. A Short Introduction to En­glish Grammar: With Critical Notes. 2nd ed. London: Printed for A. Millar and R. and J. Dodsley, 1763. Luciano, Dana. “ ‘Perverse Nature’: Edgar Huntly and the Novel’s Reproductive Disorders.” American Lit­er­a­ture 70, no. 1 (1998): 1–27.

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INDEX

Abruzzo, Margaret, 235n61 “Account of a remarkable Sleep-­walker” (New-­York Magazine; Or Literary Repository), 172–173 Adams, John, 40, 97–99, 219n11 Addison, Joseph, 52–53 aesthetics: in early U.S., 60, 218n70; and formalism, 208n12, 211n47; philosophical tradition, 48–56, 218n79; and politics, 4–6, 7–14, 24, 208n9, 208n11, 212n61 Agamben, Giorgio, 51, 216n51 Aikin, John, 33, 213n8 Allen, Thomas M., 225n25 Allport, Andrew, 237n1 American Monthly Magazine, 202 American Museum, 1–3, 4–5, 12, 69–70, 144–151, 233n35; “The captive liberated: a fragment,” 21–22; “Gather up the fragments, that nothing be lost,” 153–155; “Negro trade.—­A fragment,” 150–151; “The prostitute.—­A fragment,” 148–149; “The Slave.—­A fragment,” 149–150 American Revolution, 4, 7, 10, 12–13, 25–41 passim, 111, 197, 198, 221n42; and Dana’s sermon, 130–134, 140–141, 142; lead up to, 62–67, 219n11; and Paine, 137–139; and Pratt, Samuel Jackson, 73–96 Anacreon, 43 Anderson, Benedict, 13 Anderson, Douglas, 231n11 Anti-­Federalists, 145, 214n20 antiquarianism, 43–44, 55, 225n26. See also ruins aposiopesis, 51–53, 115, 202, 217n60, 227n58 Ariès, Philippe, 190 Ariosto, 54 Aristophanes, 46

Aristotle, 49 Armstrong, Isobel, 210nn40–41, 211n47 Armstrong, Nancy, 16 “The Art of Printing” (Massachusetts Magazine), 73 authorship, 26–27, 162, 164–170, 180–183, 191–196, 237n2, 237n4, 241n55 Baker, Jennifer J., 143, 231n9 Bannet, Eve Tavor, 76 Barchas, Janine, 68 Barlow, Joel, 14, 226n40 Barnes, Elizabeth, 229n70 Barolsky, Paul, 54 Barthes, Roland, 10, 20, 209n20 Barton, William, 1 Bauman, Zygmunt, 212n49 Bell, Robert, 75–76, 82–83, 85, 221n42 Bellion, Wendy, 220n24 Bennett, Andrew, 118, 121, 124, 228n66 Bennett, John, 224n11 bible, the: Carey’s bible, 152–153, 235n61; and economy, 134–139; and reform, 26, 130–134, 139–144, 146, 148–149, 153–161, 230n5, 234n46, 234nn49–50; and renunciation, 188–189 Blair, Hugh, 122, 218n70 Boggs, Colleen Glenney, 219n16 Boulukos, George, 234n44, 234n53 Bourdieu, Pierre, 195, 198 Bowers, Toni, 100 Boym, Svetlana, 60, 212n49 Brackenridge, Hugh Henry, 41 Braune, Sean, 240n40 Breitwieser, Mitchell Robert, 136, 137 Bric, Maurice J., 233n31 Brody, Jennifer DeVere, 67–68, 73

270 Index Brown, Charles Brockden: ambivalence about fragments, 32, 56–60; Arthur Mervyn, 239n34; and authorship, 26, 180–183, 241n55; Edgar Huntly, 174–180, 239nn34–35, 240n37, 240n45; “Edgar Huntly: A Fragment,” 176–179; fragmentary style of, 175–183, 197–198, 240nn43–44; fragments of, 175–179, 238nn32–33, 239n34, 240n39; Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, 57–60, 218n72; nachlass of, 185; Ormond, 240n37; Sky-­Walk, 170–171, 176; and sleepwalking, 164, 169, 170–171, 174–175, 175–180, 238n23; Wieland, 14, 57, 239n34 Brown, William Hill, 102–103, 185 Bryant, William Cullen, 27, 192, 193, 198–200, 242nn1–2 Burke, Edmund, 55, 106–108, 114, 122 Burrow, James, 220n31 Butler, Judith, 211n43 Byron, George Gordon (Lord), 1, 2, 8–9, 163, 188–189, 194–195 Cahill, Edward, 4, 60, 211n47, 218n79, 240n37, 240n44 Cameron, Sharon, 238n31 capitalism: and the episode, 10, 209n21; and fragments, 11, 134–139, 154–155, 157–158, 236n76; and the liberal individual, 16, 143; and racism, 211n46; and ruin, 225n17 “The captive liberated: a fragment.” See American Museum Carey, Mathew: and the bible, 133–134, 141, 152–153, 234n46, 235n61; “Fragment. Addressed to the Sons and ­Daughters of Humanity,” 152; progressive reform, 144–155, 233n31, 235n68; as publisher, 1–3, 4–5, 7, 69–70, 89, 233n32, 235n57; religious universalism of, 146, 152. See also American Museum Carmody, Todd, 234n45 Castiglia, Christopher, 212n61 Castiglione, Baldassare, 54 Castronovo, Russ, 234n45 “ ‘Cato’ III,” 214n20 Cavitch, Max, 169, 187 character: generality of, 216n50, 223n2; opposed to fragments, 146–148, 233n37; in seduction novel, 98, 110, 120–121, 125–126; and typography, 68, 69, 71, 72, 74–75 Charlotte ­Temple. See Rowson, Susanna

Chartier, Roger, 211n48 Charvat, William, 237n2 Chase, Richard, 239n35 Child, Lydia Maria: The Frugal House­wife, 156–158, 236nn75–76, 236n79; and the Gospels, 26, 134, 141; Hobomok, 19 Clark, Abraham, 219n11 Clinton, George, 214n20 close reading, 208n9 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 46, 109, 163, 164–165, 168 Colley, Linda, 88–89 Cooper, Anthony Ashley, 42, 121–122, 218n79 Cooper, James Fenimore, 167 The Coquette. See Foster, Hannah Webster Cornell, Saul, 214n20 Couch, Daniel Diez, 230n98 Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St. John de, 65 Critical Review, 89–90, 223n77 Dana, James, 130–133, 137, 139, 140–141, 142, 151 Dana, Richard Henry, Sr., 26, 169, 197–198, 242n1; “Fragment of a Poetical Epistle,” 191–193; Poems, 193–196 Darwin, Erasmus, 171–172 Davidson, Cathy N., 4 Davis, Colin, 105 Davis, Lennard J., 72 Davis, Theo, 216n50 “The Dead Soldier. A Fragment” (Philadel­ phia Minerva), 90–91 Delbanco, Andrew, 243n9 Deleuze, Gilles, 232n31, 238n33 Demo­cratic Press, and Lansingburgh Advertiser, 200 Derrida, Jacques, 68, 105–106, 219n16, 222n60 Dickinson, Emily, 204, 205 Diderot, Denis, 108 Dierks, Konstantin, 227n49 Dill, Elizabeth, 100, 224n10 Dimock, Wai Chee, 239n33 Diogenes Laertius, 46 disability, 220n33, 223n92; bodily illness, 169, 183–196; sleepwalking, 164, 169–183, 238n23; wounded soldiers, 25, 60–61, 66–68, 72–75, 77–82, 86–89, 90–91, 92–94, 95–96 Drexler, Michael J., 240n37 Drucker, Johanna, 74, 221n37



Index 271

duBois, Page, 122–123 Duff, William, 196 dunamis, 49, 51, 53 Dunlap, William, 59, 181, 185 Edgar Huntly. See Brown, Charles Brockden Edinburgh Review, 2 Ellis, Markman, 224n6 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 31–32, 204, 205–206, 213n4 Emma Corbett. See Pratt, Samuel Jackson Epictetus, 43 episode, the, 9–10, 209n19, 209n21, 214n18 Euripides, 45–46, 215n36 Evangelical United Front, the, 155 Faherty, Duncan, 217n67, 240n43 Favret, Mary A., 67, 219n13 The Federalist Papers, 37–40, 214n18 Fee, Tara Robbins, 236n75 Ferguson, Robert A., 39, 210n28, 213n2, 213n7, 230n7, 238n29 Fiedler, Leslie A., 175, 239n35 Flint, Christopher, 69, 219n14 Flynn, Christopher, 223n77 formalism, 4–5, 9, 24, 208n9, 208n12, 211n47 Foster, Hannah Webster: The Coquette, 25–26, 100–101, 110, 116–129, 228nn64–66, 229nn70–71, 229n83 Foucault, Michel, 85, 222n65 Fowler, Elizabeth, 98 fragment: aestheticization of, 24, 26, 197–198, 205–206; analogy with fragmented U.S., 4–5, 13–14, 21, 33–37, 40, 57, 64–66, 215n22; antiquarianism, 43–44, 55, 225n26; aposiopesis, 51–53, 115, 202, 217n60, 227n58; authenticity of, 43–44, 168–169, 183–191; and authorship, 26–27, 162, 164–170, 180–183, 191–196, 197–206, 237n4, 241n55; biblical fragments, 26, 130–134, 135–144, 148, 152–161; in Britain, 3, 26, 42–43, 45–46, 62–63, 75, 109, 110, 132–133, 163, 168, 208n11, 215n37, 237n1; and critique of vio­lence, 86–96; economy of, 134–139, 155–161; elegiac fragments, 187, 189–191; and episodes, 9–10, 209n19, 209n21, 214n18; etymology of, 7, 23; and extracts, 176–178; fallen ­women as, 8, 18, 25–26, 98–106, 109–110, 112–118, 120–129, 147, 148–149, 224nn10–12, 224n16, 225n18;

fear of, 24–25, 29–31, 33–41, 55–56, 215n22; form of, 2, 4–5, 7, 8–12, 16–17, 19–21, 23–24, 27–28, 45–48; fragmented bodies, 25, 66–68, 73–75, 77–82, 86–89, 90–91, 92–94, 95–96; in Germany, 3, 26, 42–43, 45, 46–47, 163, 168, 184; historical evolution of, 2, 6–7, 26–27, 42–56, 208n11; and illness, 169, 171, 183–196; as implicit style, 197–206; and liberty, 15, 21–24, 31–32, 42, 48–56, 60–61, 130–132, 208n12, 212n49; multiplicity of, 20, 28, 211n48; nachlass, 184–185; optative mood of, 31–32, 48, 133–134, 141, 213n4; popularity of, 2–3, 6, 27, 42–43, 48, 163–164, 185, 237n1; posthumous publication of, 43, 44–45, 184–185; and potentiality, 10–11, 16–17, 24, 27–28, 32, 48–51, 100–101, 110, 119, 143–144, 157–162, 164, 210n41, 216n42, 216n51, 217n52, 240n40, 241n55; and progressive reform, 5–6, 11–12, 18, 19, 21–24, 26, 27–28, 47–48, 100, 130–134, 137–152, 153–162; temporality of, 11–12, 115, 133–134, 139–144, 209n24, 225n27; of time, 135–137, 153–155, 156; as verb, 23–24; in visual culture, 54–55. See also disability; identity; marginalized p ­ eople; romanticism; ruins; typography “Fragment. Addressed to the Sons and ­Daughters of Humanity.” See Carey, Mathew “Fragment of a Poetical Epistle.” See Dana, Richard Henry, Sr. Fragment Society, the, 133–134, 155–156 François, Anne-­Lise, 24 Franklin, Benjamin, 1, 133, 144, 168, 231n11; “Explanation,” 35; letter to Cadwalader Evans, 135–136; “Magna Britania her Colonies Reduc’d,” 33–36, 214n11; “The Moral,” 35; and Paine, 138–139; Poor Richard, 134–135; Princi­ples of Trade, 136–137, 231n12; religious economy, 26, 153–158, 231n9; The Way to Wealth, 135 Freeman, Barbara Claire, 109–110, 227n45 Friedman, Kristen Anne Keerma, 171 Frow, John, 223n2 Gardner, Jared, 216n42, 233n34, 239n35 Garrett, Matthew, 9–10, 38–39, 209n19, 209n21, 214n18, 231n11, 237n7, 240n37, 241n55

272 Index “Gather up the fragments, that nothing be lost.” See American Museum Genette, Gérard, 11 Gibert, John, 215n36 Gilpin, William, 55, 167, 226n37 Gitelman, Lisa, 80 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 184 Goffman, Erving, 85 Goldman, Eric A., 239n35 Goloboy, Jennifer L., 157 Gospels, the. See bible, the Grabo, Norman S., 241n45 Green, James N., 145, 221n42, 233n35 Greene, Jody, 89, 221n38 Greene, Nathanael, 219n11 Griswold, Rufus Wilmot, 242n1 Guattari, Félix, 232n31, 238n33 Gutjahr, Paul C., 152–153 Guyer, Paul, 208n11, 218n79 Hamilton, Alexander, 24–25, 37–39 Harries, Elizabeth Wanning, 69, 132–133, 145, 215n37, 230n89 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 23, 27, 200, 202–204, 243n16 Henry, Patrick, 214n20 “Henry; or the Captive. A Fragment” (Mas­sa­chu­setts Magazine), 21–22 Herman, David, 11 Higginson, Thomas Went­worth, 205 “The History of Cyrillo Padovano, the noted Sleep Walker” (Mas­sa­chu­setts Magazine), 173–174 The History of The Old Fring’d Petticoat; A Fragment, 62–64, 65–66, 68, 86 Hoeller, Hildegard, 236n76 Holt, Keri, 214n20 Home, Henry [Lord Kames], 54–55, 218n70 Hopkinson, Francis, 69–70, 220n24 Howe, Daniel Walker, 209n26, 210n34, 218n3 Howell, William Huntting, 18–19, 240n37 Hume, David, 39, 54 Hutcheson, Francis, 218n79 Huyssen, Andreas, 109 identity, 4; analogy between forms of, 151, 234n45; and embodiment, 86–87, 88–89, 93–96; and epistolary media, 112–114, 227n49; fragmentation of, 89, 92, 118–121,

123–124, 126, 128; the liberal individual, 5, 6, 15–16, 20, 24, 26, 134, 143, 154, 157, 162, 164, 188, 210nn34–35, 211n43; malleability of, 6, 15, 16–18, 20–21, 24, 48, 89, 99–101, 145, 148–149, 151, 152–153, 154–155, 156–161, 180, 210n41; and the nation, 88; and print culture, 233n36; relation between public and private identity, 11, 209n26, 218n3; religious universalism, 146, 152 In­de­pen­dent Chronicle, 214n16 Irving, Washington, 165–168, 237n7 Iser, Wolfgang, 51, 217n52 Jameson, Fredric, 225n27 Jay, John, 37, 39 Jefferson, Thomas, 14, 40, 59, 226n40 Jeffrey, Francis, 1, 2, 8–10 Johnson, Jacob, 90 Johnson, Samuel, 8, 31, 65, 115 Kames, Lord. See Home, Henry Keats, John, 23, 163 Keenan, Alan, 210n41 Kelly, Catherine E., 56 Kermode, Frank, 27–28, 213n63 Khalip, Jacques, 119 Knott, Sarah, 41, 145, 148 Krasner, James, 222n57 Krause, Sydney J., 239n35 Kunin, Aaron, 98 Lacoue-­Labarthe, Philippe, 42–43, 47 Larkin, Edward, 41, 211n47, 231n15 Larson, Kerry, 216n50 Lee, Richard Henry, 214n20 Lee, Wendy Anne, 110 Levine, Caroline, 208n12 Levinson, Marjorie, 3, 48, 165 Literary Magazine, 57, 218n72 Locke, John, 49–50, 53, 216n48 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 167 Looby, Christopher, 4, 168, 212n49 Loughran, Trish, 12, 13 Love, Heather, 229n66 Lowth, Robert, 220n31 Lucian, 46 Luciano, Dana, 240n45 Luckombe, Philip, 71–72 Lukasik, Christopher J., 233n37



Index 273

Lupton, Christina, 227n51 Lyons, Clare A., 234n48 Macaulay, Rose, 226n41 Macpherson, C.B., 210n34 Macpherson, James, 44 Madison, James, 37, 39 Major, Thomas, 106 Mak, Bonnie, 80–81 Mandell, Laura, 81 marginalized ­people: analogy with fragments, 5, 14–15, 18–19; identity of, 6, 16–18, 20, 24, 27, 45, 88, 207n2; and progressive reform, 6, 7, 11–14, 18, 19, 21–24, 26, 28, 61, 132–134, 139–144, 144–162, 212n49, 232n31; repre­sen­ta­t ion of, 2, 5, 8, 12, 18, 19, 48, 61, 66, 95, 197–199, 212n56; and sentimentality, 99, 211n44, 234n44 Maruca, Lisa, 71, 220n26 Marx, Karl, 196 Mas­sa­chu­setts Centinel, 36–37, 38, 214n16 Mas­sa­chu­setts Magazine, 21–22, 73, 104 Mas­sa­chu­setts Spy, 36, 37 Matthiessen, F.O., 31–32, 200, 213n4 McFarland, Thomas, 3 McHugh, Heather, 141, 232n21 Medical and Agricultural Register, 154 Medici, Lorenzo de’, 54 “Melancholy Effects of Seduction” (Bellamour), 104 Melville, Herman, 7, 27, 200–202, 203, 204, 230n98, 243n9, 243n16 Milton, John, 194 Mitchell, David T., 77 Moi, Toril, 209n25 Montaigne, Michel de, 42, 54 Montesquieu, Baron de, 32, 214n20 Monthly Magazine, 176–179 Moritz, Karl Philipp, 54 Morson, Gary Saul, 140, 201 Morton, Perez, 185 Morton, Sarah Went­worth, 26, 169–170, 197–198, 242n62; My Mind and Its Thoughts, in Sketches, Fragments, and Essays, 185–191; The Virtues of Society, 185 Mott, Frank Luther, 145 Mouffe, Chantal, 213n61 Murison, Justine S., 232n25, 238n23 Mycall, John, 75–76, 79–80, 82, 84

My Mind and Its Thoughts, in Sketches, Fragments, and Essays. See Morton, Sarah Went­worth Nancy, Jean-­Luc, 42–43, 47 nationalism, 4–5, 7, 12–13, 62–65, 209n21, 214n20, 225n25; and American Museum, 145–146, 233n35; and the fear of fragmentation, 25, 29–31, 32–33, 35–42, 103; and the Gospels, 26, 130–133, 136–139, 142; and the wounded soldier, 67, 86–96 “Negro trade.—­A fragment.” See American Museum Newman, Andrew, 239n35 Newman, Simon P., 207n2 New York Journal, 214n20 New-­York Review, and Atheneum Magazine, 192 non finito, the, 54–55 North American Review, and Miscellaneous Journal, 181–182, 198–200, 243n2 Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg), 163 novel of seduction, the, 97–110, 120–121, 125–126, 224n10, 234n48; Charlotte ­Temple (Rowson), 8, 18, 25–26, 100–101, 110–116, 227n55, 227nn58–59; Cla­r is­sa (Samuel Richardson), 69, 97–98, 183–184, 224n12; The Coquette (Foster), 25–26, 100–101, 110, 116–129, 228nn64–66, 229n70–71, 229n83; Maria (Wollstonecraft), 103–104; “Melancholy Effects of Seduction,” 104; Pamela (Samuel Richardson), 101; The Power of Sympathy (William Hill Brown), 102–103 “The Origin and Properties of the Cap of Liberty. A Fragment” (Pennsylvania Packet), 22 Otter, Samuel, 5 Paine, Thomas, 65, 75, 133, 138–139, 140–141, 144, 231n15 Parker, Hershel, 243n9 “A Par­t ic­u ­lar Account of a Singular Sleep-­Walker” (Weekly Magazine), 173 Pennsylvania Packet, 22 Pettitt, Clare, 209n19, 225n26, 240n36 Philadelphia Minerva, 90–91

274 Index Philadelphia Repository, and Weekly Register, 154 ­Piper, Andrew, 168 Poirier, Richard, 212n61 Polhill, Charles, 218n6 Pratt, Lloyd, 209n24 Pratt, Samuel Jackson: Emma Corbett, 10–11, 25, 66–67, 73–90, 94–96, 221n42, 222n76, 223n77; The Pupil of Plea­sure, 85–86 Prendergast, Christopher, 105, 127 Price, Leah, 223n79 “The prostitute.—­A fragment.” See American Museum punctuation. See typography Quintilian, Marcus Fabius, 51–53, 217n54 Raven, James, 215n29 Regier, Alexander, 3, 109, 127, 213n64, 226n36 Reid, Thomas, 50, 216n50 Renker, Elizabeth, 243n9 Revere, Paul, 36–37, 214n14 Rezek, Joseph, 56, 235n57 Richardson, Samuel, 68, 69, 97–98, 101, 183–184, 224n12 Roach, Joseph, 78 Roberts, Siân Silyn, 17, 180, 238n23, 240n37 Robertson, Joseph, 72 Robertson-­Lorant, Laurie, 243n9 Robillard, Douglas, 243n9 Rochefoucauld, François de La, 42 romanticism: and authorship, 164–165, 168, 192, 196, 198; in Eu­rope, 26, 45, 46–47, 109, 163; and experimentalism, 186–187; periodization of, 3, 6, 197, 207n7; po­liti­cal aesthetic of, 24, 42, 45, 47–48, 60, 93, 132, 142, 161, 205–206, 228n66; and ruins, 99, 109; and war, 67, 90 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 183–184 Rowe, John Carlos, 239n35 Rowson, Susanna: Charlotte ­Temple, 8, 18, 25–26, 100–101, 110–116, 227n55, 227nn58–59; The Inquisitor, 224n16, 227n61 ruins: aesthetics of, 43, 55, 226nn40–41; architecture, 103–109, 217n67; as emblems of dissolution, 25, 31–36, 40, 213n2, 213nn6–7; etymology of, 103, 225n17; ruined ­women, 8, 18, 25–26, 95–96,

98–106, 109–110, 112–118, 120–129, 147, 148–149, 224nn10–12, 224n16, 225n18; and stadial history, 232n22; as sublime, 106–110, 121–122, 226n37, 229n82 Rush, Benjamin, 1, 144, 172, 173, 174 Ruskin, John, 205 Rust, Marion, 227n55, 227n58 Ryan, Susan M., 237n4 Samuels, Shirley, 218n3 Sappho, 43, 123 Sayer, Robert, 106 Scarry, Elaine, 87, 161 Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich, 46–47, 163, 184 Schweighauser, Philipp, 234n44 Schweitzer, Ivy, 119 Scott, Walter, 182, 194–195 selfhood. See identity Seltzer, Mark, 112, 220n27 Senchyne, Jonathan, 236n85 sentimentalism, 18, 183–184, 187, 211n44, 227n51, 234n44, 238n23; and Carey, 148; and Emma Corbett, 94; and the Gospels, 133; and seduction novels, 99, 124, 126, 228n64, 230n89 Shaftesbury, Earl of. See Cooper, Anthony Ashley Shakespeare, William, 14–15, 52, 105, 220n33 Shapiro, Stephen, 99, 210n35, 211n44, 211n46 Short, Bryan C., 243n9 Sigourney, Lydia Huntley, 26, 134, 141, 161–162, 236n85; “Bread in the Wilderness,” 160–161; “To a Fragment of Cotton,” 158–159; “To a Shred of Linen,” 159–160 Silverman, Gillian, 184–185 Sizemore, Michelle, 211n41, 216n51, 241n46 Slauter, Eric, 4, 36, 54, 213n2 “The Slave.—­A fragment.” See American Museum Smith-­Rosenberg, Carroll, 233n36 Snyder, Sharon L., 77 “The Soldier’s Funeral. A Fragment” (Dessert to the True American), 91–92 Stabile, Susan M., 105 stadial history, 142, 225n26, 232n22 Starobinski, Jean, 184 Steele, Richard, 52–53 Stern, Julia A., 118, 212n56, 227n59, 228n65, 229n71, 229n83, 230n86



Index 275

Sterne, Laurence, 44–46, 68, 217n60 Stewart, Susan, 109 Stoddard, Richard Henry, 242n2 Strasser, Susan, 236n76 subjectivity. See identity sublime, the: and ruins, 106–110; in seduction novel, 25–26, 100–101, 105, 109–110, 114, 116–118, 121–122, 227n45; and silence, 52, 121–122, 126 Swift, Jonathan, 68–69, 219n14 Tatler, 52–53 Tawil, Ezra, 217n54, 240n37, 240n43 Taylor, Charles, 16 Tennen­house, Leonard, 218n70, 227n49 Thomas, Isaiah, 89 Thompson, E.P., 210n34 Toles, George, 239n35 Tompkins, Kyla Wazana, 236n79 Toner, Anne, 51–52, 66, 219n14, 220n28 transatlantic exchange, 2, 31, 42, 43, 47–48, 56–57, 69, 163, 205, 215n29, 218n70, 225n17; and Brown, Charles Brockden, 174; and Carey, 144–145; Emma Corbett, 66, 75–76, 79, 85; and romanticism, 3, 6, 207n7; and seduction novel, 102, 111–113 Tyler, Royall, 14, 19 typography: and embodiment, 66–68, 71–73, 86, 91, 220nn26–27; experimentation, 68–71, 219n14, 220n31, 221n37; inconclusiveness, 63–64, 65, 92; prosthesis, 25, 73–75, 77, 78–82, 85, 86, 89, 92–94, 95, 221n38; ruination, 102–103; and rupture, 82, 193, 220n28; and unspeakability, 190 United States, the: and biblical economy, 26, 130–132, 133–134, 135–138, 142, 232n25; democracy in, 5, 13, 32, 97–98, 210n41; as fragmented, 12–14, 30, 41, 210n28; modes of unification, 4–5, 6, 13, 21, 29–31, 32, 33–42, 57, 64, 130–132, 133, 134, 135–139, 209n21, 213n2, 214n20, 215n22, 218n6; native tribes, 19; print culture, 3, 56, 133, 175–176, 177–178, 211n44, 216n42, 221n42, 230n7, 233n34, 233n36 (see also typography); romanticism in, 3, 6, 207n7; and ruins, 103, 105, 106, 109, 213n6, 217n67,

232n22; slavery, 19, 144, 149–151, 234n44, 234n53; as unfinished, 3, 4, 7, 27, 60, 93, 144, 145–146. See also American Revolution; capitalism; identity; marginalized ­people; nationalism; transatlantic exchange United States Magazine, 63–64 Universal Asylum and Columbian Magazine, 154, 172 veteran. See disability Vietto, Angela, 185–186 “View of the early inroad” (United States Magazine), 63–64, 65–66, 68, 86 Viner, Jacob, 231n12 Vismann, Cornelia, 43 Volney, Comte de (Constantine François de Chassebœuf), 59, 108–109, 226n40, 229n82 Voloshin, Beverly R., 239n35 Wahrman, Dror, 17, 23 Warner, Michael, 4 Washington, George, 25, 29–31, 38, 41, 55–56, 58, 215n22 Watters, James, 170 Webster, Noah, 8, 126 Weekly Magazine, 170 Weekly Visitor, 92–93 Weinstein, Cindy, 213n4 Weyler, Karen A., 211n44 Whatley, George, 136 White, Ed, 240n37 Whitman, Elizabeth, 122–123, 230n86 Whitman, Walt, 204, 206, 242n1 ­Wills, David, 74 Wolf, Edwin, 2nd, 214n11 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 102–104 Woloch, Alex, 120, 125 Wood, Robert, 106 Words­worth, William, 46, 109, 163 “The Wounded Soldier: A Fragment” (Weekly Visitor), 92–93, 94 Wroth, Lawrence, 70 Yablon, Nick, 32, 213n6, 232n22 Zitin, Abigail, 208n12

ACKNOWL ­E DGMENTS

It gives me ­great plea­sure to account for the tremendous amount of support and generosity from my community that has gone into the writing and production of this book. In the final stages of composing ­these pages, I have continually reflected on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s comment in “The Over-­ Soul”: “I am constrained ­every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the ­w ill I call mine.” The ­people assembled ­here constitute the “higher origin” of my thinking, and I only hope that I have preserved their spirit in my study of literary fragments. This book first took shape as a dissertation in the En­glish Department at UCLA, a place that w ­ ill always be meaningful in my memory. During my years ­there, several members of my committee surpassed all expectations for scholarly mentorship. Michael Colacurcio taught me the seriousness and necessity of studying American literary history, and he has been one of my greatest sources of intellectual inspiration. Questions that he asked me years ago about my proj­ect still hover in my consciousness. Michael Cohen has been a wellspring of advice, support, and mea­sured critique over the years. His probing questions and thoughts have strengthened my thinking and my writing immeasurably. Chris Looby provided unflagging support throughout gradu­ate school and the years that followed, when I moved from fellowship to fellowship and entered into academic employment. Over that time, he has patiently listened to my questions, read countless pages, advised me on professional tasks, and showed me how to be a responsible and caring academic (as well as how to find the best negronis in Florence). Chris’s mentorship and friendship has proved incredibly formative for me, and he has shown me the best version of a curious and creative scholarly life. Many o ­ thers, too, at UCLA helped make this book a real­ity by influencing my early thinking in American lit­er­a­ture. Seminars with Michael North, Felicity Nussbaum, and Mark Seltzer w ­ ere crucial to my development, as ­were dialogues with Joe Dimuro, Jonathan Grossman, Carrie Hyde, and

278

Acknowl­edgments

Sarah Mesle. An especially lucky feature of my time at UCLA was the Americanist Research Colloquium. It would be hard for me to imagine a more collegial and supportive community than the one I found at our Thursday after­noon meetings: Ben Beck, W ­ ill Clark, Mark Gallagher, Jessica Horvath Williams, Jay Jin, Christian Reed, Grant Rosson, Sam Sommers, and Jordan Wingate all made my work better, and I continue to benefit from their exper­ tise to this day. Outside of the UCLA orbit, I still draw energy from conversations with them, ­whether in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston, or as far afield as Vilnius. For their continuing fellowship in the time ­after gradu­ate school—­despite their fatal flaw of not being Americanists—­I want to thank John Fernandes-­Salling, Michael Nicholson, Lindsay Wilhelm, Amy Wong, and Alex Zobel. As I developed this proj­ect, I was fortunate enough to spend a year at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. I have a tremendous debt of gratitude to Dan Richter and Jim Green for their intellectual support during my year in Philadelphia. In many ways, it felt like my professional life commenced at the McNeil Center, a place that contains within its walls an infectious enthusiasm for all ­t hings early American. During that year, the many members and fellow travelers of the Early American Lit­er­a­ture and Material Texts Initiative helped shape my writing and my scholarship, especially Lara Cohen, Marcy Dinius, John Garcia, Sonia ­Hazard, Andrew Inchiosa, Jessica Linker, Alex Mazzaferro, Mark Mattes, Sarah Schuetze, Danielle Skeehan, Lindsay Van Tine, and Michael Winship. For coffee breaks, happy hours, and seminar discussions at the Woodland Walk building, thanks to Liz Ellis, Max Dagenais, Alex Manevitz, and Rachel Walker. Thanks as well to Elizabeth ­Eager, Lauren Kimball, Don James McLaughlin, and Laura Soderberg, who each contributed their thoughtful commentary to my writing. A postdoctoral fellowship at the American Acad­emy of Arts and Sciences helped to propel this writing in the right direction at exactly the right time. During my year in Cambridge, I appreciated the careful mentorship of Larry Buell, who assiduously read over the proj­ect and provided guidance on the direction of the introduction. Paul Erickson, too, served as a thoughtful and generous interlocutor, and I greatly benefited from the presence of the other postdoctoral fellows: Minou Arjomand, Kathleen Bachynski, Houman Harouni, Daniel Morales, Jessie Wilkerson, and Kristi Willsey. The Boston Americanist circle was very welcoming to me during my year



Acknowl­edgments 279

t­ here, especially Joe Rezek and Theo Davis, who invited me to attend their Mahindra Humanities Center seminar on American lit­er­a­ture and culture. Since the day I arrived at the United States Air Force Acad­emy, uncertain of what it would be like to teach at a ser­v ice acad­emy, my colleagues in the En­glish department have welcomed me, read my work, assisted me with the daily l­abor of teaching, and provided me with the support necessary to complete this book. I want to recognize my chair, Kathleen Harrington, for providing me with a much needed course release during Spring 2020 and for supporting my summer research endeavors. Donald Anderson, José Antonio Arellano, Dave Buchanan, Amy Cooper, Lori Davis-­Perry, Ross Gresham, Nicole Jerr, Rich Johnston, Mark Kaufman, Krystal McGuiness, Tom McGuire, Jonathan McGregor, Marc Napolitano, Erich Nunn (by way of Auburn), Diana Polley, Melody Pugh, and Brittney Szempruch have all provided a community of support, encouragement, and intellectual ferment over the years, for which I dearly thank them. One marvelous individual from my department deserves special note and a place of his own in t­ hese acknowledgements. At this point, I have lost count of just how many times Greg Laski has dedicated himself to reading over this manuscript. He has spent an incredible amount of his own energy advising me, commenting on ideas, and assisting with editing, and it oftentimes felt like he prioritized my own work ahead of e­ very other item on his schedule. The real­ity, though, is that Greg’s work with me on American Fragments is only the tip of the iceberg. Nearly ­every day, I am utterly humbled by his generous collegiality, his commitment to intellectual life, and his passion for lit­er­a­ture (and yoga!). Like so many of the p ­ eople already mentioned in ­t hese acknowledgements, Greg is a model scholar, and I can only hope that this work lives up to the brilliance he sees in it. Thank you, Greg. Bookending the writing of this manuscript at the Air Force Acad­emy, I had the opportunity to work with two amazing scholars who arrived at my institution as distinguished visiting professors: John Whittier-­Ferguson and Keri Holt. Just as I was embarking on the pro­cess of envisioning how this manuscript might look to an editor, John kindly offered to read drafts of my proposal and my introduction, providing helpful framing information and perspective. And just as I was finishing the manuscript, Keri arrived in Colorado Springs. Both before her sojourn at USAFA and over the course of that year, Keri has read over many chapters of the manuscript, offering her insight and expertise into the inner workings of the early national period. I

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Acknowl­edgments

also want to thank her for the many cold nights spent on our back deck avoiding Covid-19 while toasting to convivial friendship. Outside of the En­glish department at the Air Force Acad­emy, Colorado Springs has proven to be a vibrant l­ ittle hub of Americanist scholarship and community. Maria Windell took it upon herself to or­ga­nize a Front Range reading group, and I want to thank the participants who have taken time to help me sort out the wheat from the chaff: Maria, Greg Laski, Lesley Ginsberg, Sylvan Goldberg, Zack Hutchins, and Arielle Zibrak. I also genuinely ­don’t know what I would have done in Colorado Springs without reliable friends who are willing to walk up the Manitou Incline with me and have a beer or two afterwards, especially Sylvan, Leslie, Max, Amy, Brittney, Martin, José Antonio, Krystal, Kevin, Nicole, Rich, and Greg. So, too, I ­wouldn’t have been able to stay grounded t­hese past years if it h ­ adn’t been for other far-­ flung friends, especially Patrice Fabel, Max Nagano, and Rajiv Thairani. Individuals from a number of organ­izations—­especially the Charles Brockden Brown Society, the Society of Early Americanists, and C19—­ deserve recognition for their collegiality over the course of the past years. Conversations with all of ­t hese individuals have energized my scholarship and my appreciation of academic life: Sari Altschuler, Ed Cahill, Julia Dauer, Bert Emerson, Duncan Faherty, Tim Fosbury, Laurel Hankins, Tom Koenigs, Andrew Kopec, Peter Jaros, David Lawrimore, Mike Monescalchi, Meredith Neuman, Matthew Pethers, Chris Phillips, Bill Ryan, Michelle Sizemore, and Lisa West. Several research institutions provided financial support for my work on this proj­ect: the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Library Com­pany of Philadelphia, the American Philosophical Society, the American Acad­emy of Arts and Sciences, the University of ­Virginia’s Albert and Shirley Small Library, and the Huntington Library. Certainly not least, I also want to thank my editor at University of Pennsylvania Press, Jerry Singerman, who saw the potential of this proj­ect and was willing to support it from day one. His expertise has not only guided the practical concerns of this proj­ect, but the intellectual ones as well. The two reviewers for this manuscript—­Matthew Garrett and Michelle Sizemore—­ were si­mul­ta­neously caring and meticulous, and I am beyond grateful for the time and attention they gave to my writing. I’m also thankful for the efforts of my indexer (and friend), Max Sater, who helped me to see the book from an entirely new perspective. The greatest debts surely come last, and ­they’re also the ones that are hardest to articulate. When I wrote the acknowl­edgments for my disserta-



Acknowl­edgments 281

tion, I tried to capture ­t hese sentiments, and this time I ­w ill try again, even though I’m certain that my effort w ­ ill still fall far short of the real­ity. But maybe I ­w ill “fail better,” to borrow Beckett’s phrasing. Since I was very young, my f­ amily has worked hard to teach me the value and importance of learning and reading. My parents, Don and Marilú, have given me every­ thing they could and more, and have trusted me and supported me as I chose a scholarly path. W ­ hether visiting ­family in Mexico or at home in California, they have always encouraged my love of lit­er­a­ture. My b ­ rother, Lalo, taught me from an early age to argue and debate, as siblings do, and I hope that American Fragments gives him a theory of lit­er­a­ture that lives up to his high standards. With tremendous luck, my f­ amily has grown significantly in recent years, and I want to thank Emily, Penelope (just arrived as I write this), Susan, Tyler, and Kelly for the joy they bring into my life. Fi­nally, t­ here’s absolutely nothing I can say ­here that can account for the way that Sarah Nance has changed my life since the moment she entered it, years ago. It is certainly true that she’s read this manuscript many times, talked over lit­er­a­ture almost daily with me, and argued over nearly ­every theoretical topic in existence, but all of that is just holding up a candle to see the sun rise, to use, again, one of Emerson’s formulations. The energy and love that she pours into her life and her work—­whether it is walking Pico, writing poetry, or teaching her classes—is astounding and inspiring, and I feel like a better, luckier person, for getting to experience that on a daily basis. I find it astonishing and strange how much a single person altered the entire course of my existence, and for that I am infinitely thankful. Sarah, all of ­t hese words are for you. A portion of Chapter 2 is taken from “Printing Emma Corbett: Revolutionary Vio­lence and the Prosthetics of Typography,” reprinted from The Eigh­teenth ­Century: Theory and Interpretation 59, no. 4 (Winter 2018), copyright University of Pennsylvania Press, and a portion of Chapter 3 is taken from “Eliza Wharton’s Scraps of Writing: Dissipation and Fragmentation in The Coquette,” reprinted from Early American Lit­er­a­ture 49, no.  3 (2014), copyright University of North Carolina Press.