Founded in Fiction: The Uses of Fiction in the Early United States 9780691219820

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fou n ded i n f ic t ion

Founded in Fiction t he uses of fict ion i n t he e a r ly u n i t ed stat es

Thomas Koenigs

pr i nc e­t on u n i v e r si t y pr e ss pr i nc e­t on & ox for d

Copyright © 2021 by Prince­ton University Press Prince­ton University Press is committed to the protection of copyright and the intellectual property our authors entrust to us. Copyright promotes the pro­gress and integrity of knowledge. Thank you for supporting ­free speech and the global exchange of ideas by purchasing an authorized edition of this book. If you wish to reproduce or distribute any part of it in any form, please obtain permission. Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to permissions@press​.­princeton​.­edu Published by Prince­ton University Press 41 William Street, Prince­ton, New Jersey 08540 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR press​.­princeton​.­edu All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Koenigs, Thomas, 1985-­author. Title: Founded in fiction : the uses of fiction in the early United States / Thomas Koenigs. Description: Prince­ton : Prince­ton University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020045233 (print) | LCCN 2020045234 (ebook) | ISBN 9780691188942 (hardback ; acid-­free paper) | ISBN 9780691219820 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: American fiction—18th ­century—­History and criticism—­Theory, ­etc. | American fiction—19th ­century—­History and criticism—­Theory, ­etc. | Lit­er­a­ture and society—­United States—­History—18th ­century. | Lit­er­a­ture and society—­United States—­ History—19th ­century. | Politics and lit­er­a­ture. | Social prob­lems in lit­er­a­ture. Classification: LCC PS375 .K64 2021 (print) | LCC PS375 (ebook) | DDC 813/.209—­dc23 LC rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2020045233 LC ebook rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2020045234 British Library Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data is available Editorial: Anne Savarese and Jenny Tan Production Editorial: Ellen Foos Jacket Design: Chris Ferrante Production: Erin Suydam Publicity: Alyssa Sanford and Amy Stewart Copyeditor: Jennifer Harris This book has been composed in Miller Printed on acid-­free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca 10 ​9 ​8 ​7 ​6 ​5 ​4 ​3 ​2 ​1

For my parents, who made it pos­si­ble for me to imagine writing this book. And for Erica, who helped me make it a real­ity.

con t e n ts

Introduction

PA RT I

1

25

chapter 1

The Prob­lem of Fictionality and the Nonfictional Novel

27

chapter 2

Republican Fictions

49

chapter 3

Fictionality and Female Conduct

84

PA RT II

125

chapter 4

The Shifting Logics of Historical Fiction

131

chapter 5

Hoaxing in an Age of Novels

169

chapter 6

Fictionality and Social Criticism

192

chapter 7

Fictionality, Slavery, and Intersubjective Knowledge 213



Coda: Romance and Real­ity in the 1850s and Beyond Acknowl­edgments ​· ​265 Notes ​· ​269 Index ​· 319

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Introduction

histor ies of fiction in the early United States have long centered on the rise of the American novel.1 The genre’s privileged place in the national cultural imagination has produced a preoccupation with its origins: scholars have sought in early American fiction both a sense of the novel’s unique relationship to the new nation and the foundations of a “tradition” of the American novel that would culminate in the “­Great American Novels” of the ­later nineteenth and twentieth centuries.2 This book, however, argues that this long-­standing fixation on the origins of the American novel has obscured the remarkably diverse uses and understandings of fiction found in the early republic. Where ­later writers would grapple with what it meant to write a distinctly American novel, early US writers wrestled with a more fundamental question: what constitutes a legitimate form and use of fiction? Founded in Fiction reframes the history of the novel in the United States as a history of competing va­ri­e­ties of fictionality. In his 1857 work The Confidence Man, Herman Melville wrote that “in books of fiction,” we look for “even for more real­ity, than real life itself can show.”3 Melville has sometimes been read as an author who helped to consolidate a national lit­er­a­ture, and twenty-­first-­century readers are comfortable with the concept of fiction that he promoted. His eloquent description of what we want from “books of fiction” neatly encapsulates what Raymond Williams has identified as the fundamental ele­ment of our modern understanding of “fiction”: “we can now . . . ​say that . . . ​bad novels are pure fiction, while . . . ​serious fiction tells us about real life.”4 Yet to many Americans in the de­cades following the Revolution, Melville’s claim would have seemed absurd, even nonsensical. In the early United States, ­there was a pervasive suspicion of fiction.5 In 1798, Charles Brockden Brown sent Thomas Jefferson a copy of his “American Tale,” Wieland, with a letter lamenting the ascendant attitude ­toward fiction in the republic: “What­ever may be the merit of my book as a fiction, it is to be condemned b ­ ecause it is a fiction.”6 Many of Brown’s [ 1 ]

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contemporaries did, in fact, condemn all fiction on the grounds of its epistemological unreliability. Pedagogues, preachers, and politicians insisted that ­because fiction did not have a firm basis in fact and real­ity, it could only mislead readers with false pictures of the world: “to supplant a real­ity by a fiction,” wrote one critic in 1810, “is a preposterous method of diffusing truth.”7 Early American critics objected, in short, to the fictionality of fiction. ­Until recently, fictionality—or the quality of being fictional—­had been largely overlooked by literary historians.8 Although scholars recognized fictionality as a constitutive feature of the novel genre, they gave it l­ittle attention. Over the past de­cade, however, Catherine Gallagher’s groundbreaking essay “The Rise of Fictionality” (2006) has provoked a flurry of new studies that have put fictionality at the center of recent developments in novel studies and novel theory.9 But even as this new scholarship on the history of fictionality in France and ­England has provided a means of rethinking conventional narratives of the rise of realist fiction, the history of fictionality in the United States has been ­either ignored or dismissed: “Fictionality,” as Gallagher herself puts it, “seems to have been but faintly understood in the infant United States.”10 This reproduces a long-­standing and surprisingly per­sis­tent critical narrative: suspicion and misunderstanding slowed the development of the novel in the United States, leading to the poverty of its early fiction. Founded in Fiction challenges this narrative by expanding our focus beyond the novel genre to the varied uses of fiction in the early republic. In ­doing so, it reveals an era of dynamic experimentation during which US fiction was dialectically engaged with the republic’s pervasive antifictional discourse. Writers who broke the taboo against fictionality argued for the mode’s unique worth within frameworks of value they shared with fiction’s critics, such as civic virtue and instructional efficacy. By approaching fictionality as a set of historically variable structures of supposition rather than a stable, genre-­ defining characteristic, Founded in Fiction recovers the array of theories and va­ri­e­ties of fictionality that early US writers developed as they wrestled with the most pressing social and po­liti­cal questions of their moment. It offers a history of how t­ hese dif­fer­ent fictionalities structured American thinking about issues ranging from republican politics to gendered authority to the intimate vio­lence of slavery. Founded in Fiction focuses on the United States out of neither a sense of American exceptionalism nor an investment in the distinctive Americanness of early US fiction, but to account for the new nation’s sociopo­liti­cal specificity in a time of transatlantic exchange: US fiction emerged in relation to both a robust culture of transatlantic circulation and reprinting and the republic’s uniquely virulent antifictional discourse.11 Faced with a widespread suspicion that fiction was, as one periodical put it in 1798, “one of the most fruitful sources of ignorance,” early American writers interrogated the dangers and possibilities of diverse va­ri­e­ties of fictionality.12 Twenty-­first-­century readers

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tend to regard fictionality as a singular characteristic: a text is e­ ither fiction or nonfiction. This binary, however, is of ­little value for understanding the many va­ri­e­ties of fiction circulating in the early United States. In the republic, fictions could be governed by possibility, probability, or pure fancy. Their narratives could be suppositional, counterfactual, or based on a­ ctual events. They could invoke widely divergent conceptions of fictional “truth,” a term that might refer to a narrative’s moral vision, its mimetic accuracy, or its aesthetic impact. Counterintuitively, the prevailing skepticism about fiction’s ability to serve as a source of knowledge about “the world as it is” made early American writers especially attuned to the unique kinds of speculative and suppositional knowledge that fiction could impart. Recovering the many va­ri­e ­ties and uses of fiction in the early United States, Founded in Fiction breaks with our most influential histories of fictionality: where many scholars have followed Gallagher in tracing a monolithic emergence of fictionality in the realist novel, I trace the multiple fictionalities circulating during the novel’s slow rise to dominance in the United States. In d ­ oing so, Founded in Fiction also revises our ascendant histories of American fiction, which have focused almost exclusively on the novel genre, overlooking how many of the books that we have long considered the earliest American novels insist, in their paratexts and narratives, that they are not novels at all. While modern readers tend to regard t­ hese extended prose fictions as self-­evidently novelistic, their writers explic­itly disavowed the novel genre: they developed self-­consciously extra-­novelistic va­ri­e­ties of fiction in order to distance their work from a genre widely associated with privacy, idleness, and licentiousness. Retrospectively consolidating t­ hese varied fictions ­under the generic umbrella of “the novel,” we have overlooked the remarkable diversity of early American fiction. Founded in Fiction restores to view the varied logics of fictional writing that novel history has tended to normalize, including many that do not conform to the conception of fiction-­reading as a private leisure activity oriented ­toward aesthetic appreciation and personal self-­cultivation that became ascendant in the ­later nineteenth ­century. The story of fictionality in the republic is not one of isolated authors struggling with literary theory, but one of the individuals and movements that used dif­fer­ent modalities of fiction for community building and social reform. This book charts how early US writers used diverse va­ri­e­ties of fictionality as tools for deliberation, education, and persuasion.13 ­These writers sought to harness the m ­ ental pro­cesses elicited by dif­fer­ent fictional logics—­evaluations of possibility, considerations of counterfactual scenarios, speculations on dif­fer­ent potential f­ utures, or identification with suppositional persons—­for a range of social proj­ects. They developed new fictionalities for intervening in po­liti­cal debates, training engaged citizens, shaping conduct, constructing a national past, and advancing social criticism.

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This era’s many instrumental fictions caution against the modern tendency to conflate the fictional with the literary—­a tendency that prevails even in recent historicist scholarship. The late antebellum period, however, also saw the emergence of an understanding of fiction as a distinctly literary art that anticipates many of our con­temporary assumptions about fiction’s value and purpose.14 In addition to uncovering an array of early theories of fictionality from which we have become historically estranged, Founded in Fiction traces the development and consolidation of this more familiar understanding of fiction’s value. ­These two proj­ects are intimately intertwined. In tracing the historical emergence of the idea that fictionality is a sign of literariness (in its ­later nineteenth-­century sense), I hope to denaturalize an understanding of fiction that we too often take for granted. While the rise of this familiar conception of fiction often has an air of inevitability in histories of American fiction, Founded in Fiction shows it to be only one among a host of competing theories of fictionality circulating in the antebellum United States. Only by tracing a genealogy of this l­ater understanding of fiction can we recover t­ hose theories of fictionality that are obscured when we back-­project it onto e­ arlier moments. To understand the often-­unfamiliar ways in which early Americans conceived of, to tweak Brown’s phrase, the merits of their books as fiction, we must first examine the implicit assumptions governing our own approach to fiction.

The Fictional and the Literary In much Western literary theory, fictionality is regarded as a marker of a text’s literary nature and its orientation t­ oward aesthetics. Gerard Genette’s Fiction and Diction—­his ambitious answer to the question “What is Lit­er­a­ture?”—is exemplary. Invoking the “widely accepted definition” of literariness as “the aesthetic aspect of lit­er­a­ture,” Genette neatly sums up the prevailing conception of fictionality: “Fictionality,” means that “a (verbal) work of fiction is almost inevitably received as literary . . . ​­because the approach to reading that such a work postulates . . . ​is an aesthetic attitude.” Fictionality, Genette suggests, is almost universally regarded as both a sign of a text’s “literariness” and a signal for an aesthetic approach to the text.15 For Genette, this is the received wisdom about “literariness” from which he advances a new theory of lit­er­a­ture: literariness, he argues, has evolved in two distinct ways, which eventually converge. In addition to what he calls the “constitutive regime” of literariness—­defined and signaled by fictionality—he identifies what he calls the “conditional regime” of literariness, which encompasses t­ hose texts that are not primarily oriented t­ oward the “aesthetic aspect” but become so over time—­a “page of history . . . ​may outlive its scientific value or its documentary interest” yet be retained for its aesthetic interest: “What is at question ­here is thus the ability of any text whose original, or originally dominating, function was not aesthetic but rather, for example, didactic or

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polemical to transcend or submerge that function by virtue of an individual or collective judgment of taste that foregrounds the text’s aesthetic qualities.”16 For Genette, then, “literariness” is defined by the prioritization of a text’s “aesthetic aspect” over such extra-­literary functions as education or polemic. This reflects a widespread twentieth-­century understanding of lit­er­a­ture as an autonomous art defined by its internal “aesthetic qualities” and formal arrangement.17 (As Richard Brodhead has shown, this conception of literariness r­ ose to ascendance in the United States in the late nineteenth ­century and it would remain the dominant one through most of the twentieth ­century.18) Genette distinguishes between the constitutive and conditional modes of literariness in order to suggest the need for a theory of literariness capable of addressing how “lit­er­a­ture” could encompass both the fictional (epic, drama, novel) and the nonfictional (lyric, autobiography, history). Fictionality, for Genette, always means “constitutive literariness”—­ “conditionally literary fiction” is “a notion that strikes [him] as passably contradictory.”19 Yet insofar as we accept his understanding of the “literary”—­ those texts that have a primarily aesthetic function—­much early US fiction represents exactly this kind of “conditionally literary fiction.” Many early national fictions have “dominating” functions other than an appeal to aesthetic appreciation. Some have the “didactic” and “polemical” functions that Genette mentions, while o ­ thers have religious, civic, and historiographical functions. It was t­ hese instrumental ambitions that led to mid-­twentieth-­ century critical judgments about the poverty and unsophistication of early US fiction: the modern assumption of an identity between the fictional and the literary transformed a group of texts without primarily aesthetic aspirations into failed works of art. The association of fictionality with this modern kind of literariness was so strong that Terence Martin in 1961 invoked the “sub-­ literary” character of early US fiction—­the subordination of “an in­de­pen­dent, autonomous form of expression” to instrumental concerns—as evidence that early Americans simply did not understand fiction: “It has long been obvious to us that t­ hese early American writers produced distinctly sub-­literary fiction, we may even perceive what was evidently not so obvious to them, the principal condition of their failure—­more primary than a relative innocence of technique—­the lack of a concept of fiction.”20 Subsequent generations of critics have revised this obsolete narrative that early US fiction failed to rise to the level of lit­er­a­ture, showing the literary interest, aesthetic complexity, and imaginative power of t­ hese fictions. This extended scholarly effort to overturn characterizations of early US fiction as “sub-­literary” has culminated in the recent “aesthetic turn” in early American studies. Scholars such as Edward Cahill, Edward Larkin, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Christopher Looby, Cindy Weinstein, Russ Castronovo, Christopher Castiglia, Matthew Garret, and Philipp Schweighauser have offered robust accounts of the complex aesthetics, variously understood, of early US fiction

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and persuasively advocated for the importance of attending to the aesthetic dimensions of American fiction that had been neglected by the po­liti­cally engaged historicism that has dominated Americanist literary studies since the 1980s. Without reintroducing a New Critical emphasis on the text as an isolated object, this body of scholarship has uncovered early US fictionists’ sustained engagement with aesthetic theory, and it has shown how intimately bound up aesthetic and po­liti­cal concerns w ­ ere in the early republic.21 While recent recoveries of early US fiction’s literary artfulness have produced far more nuanced accounts of early national fiction than the mid-­ twentieth-­c entury dismissals, even historicist studies have sometimes assumed an association of the fictional with the literary or the specifically aesthetic dimensions of lit­er­a­ture that risks obscuring alternative conceptions of fictionality. In his recent attempt to uncover nascent conceptions of autonomous art in early US fiction, Schweighauser, for instance, sets up an opposition between a “pre-­modern understanding of lit­er­a­ture” that emphasizes ser­vice to “extraliterary purposes,” such as religion, politics, and education, and a modern understanding of lit­er­a­ture as an autonomous art in order to argue that we can detect “signs of an emergent autonomy of art” in early US fiction.22 While Schweighauser offers compelling readings of the tensions in early US writers’ attitudes t­ oward fiction, this framework introduces a teleological strand into his argument, as it assumes evolution ­toward a “modern” understanding of lit­er­a­ture as an autonomous art. This leads his account to echo old claims about early US writers’ instrumental justifications of fiction being contrary to fiction’s essential nature: the “didacticism, which pervades the prefaces of early American novels,” he writes, “hardly constitutes a ringing defense of fiction.”23 Such a statement, however, only holds if we assume that fictionality is a sign of literariness—or what Schweighauser calls the “modern understanding of lit­er­a­ture.” I do not want to resist the “aesthetic turn,” downplay the imaginative power of early American fiction, or deny ­these fictionists’ interest in aesthetics. But, as de­cades of scholarship have definitively refuted reductive claims, such as Martin’s, that early American fiction lacked literary merit or an under­ lying aesthetic theory, I believe that we are now positioned to pursue the in­ter­ est­ing insight buried in his dismissive claim that early Americans produced sub-­literary fiction: many early American uses of fiction do, in fact, lie beyond our modern conception of literariness. Martin’s claim that early Americans had “no v­ iable concept of fiction”—­were not even aware of this lack!—­does not, of course, mean that they had no “concept of fiction,” but only reveals that they do not share his distinctly modern understanding of fiction as “an in­de­pen­dent, autonomous” literary art: the “failure” of their fictions as works of art reflects their orientation ­toward other frameworks of value. Now that scholars have established the literary and aesthetic interest of early US fiction, I want to return to the instrumental justifications for fiction that critics

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such as Martin regarded as naïve and confused. Many of the prefaces of early US fiction do constitute, to use Schweighauser’s phrase, a “ringing defense of fiction”—­they just do not constitute a ringing defense of fiction as an autonomous art. In t­ hese texts, fictionality is not in tension with their instrumental ambitions, but a fundamental means of realizing them. In the early United States, fictionality itself often served extra-­literary ends. My point is neither that such instrumental fictions lack literary or aesthetic dimensions nor that literariness does not often serve extra-­literary endeavors such as religion, education, and politics.24 It is also not to suggest that early US writers never embraced fictionality as a vehicle for aesthetic autonomy or imaginative play. Rather, my point is that our own per­sis­tent association of fictionality with imaginative liberation, aesthetic play, and literary artfulness has led us to overlook alternative conceptions of fictionality’s value and purpose circulating in the early United States. The republic’s sustained periodical debates about fiction rarely focused solely, or even chiefly, on aesthetic concerns. A 1798 Philadelphia Minerva essay succinctly captures the grounds on which fiction was usually valued and judged in the early United States: “[W]hat is the use of novels? Is t­ here any par­tic­ul­ ar advantage to be obtained from perusing such books, which may not flow as easily from some other source?”25 For early Americans—­fiction’s advocates as well as its critics—­the question of fiction’s value was not principally one of aesthetics but of “use.” While dif­fer­ent writers would construe “use” in very dif­fer­ent ways, it—­along with a group of related terms, including “instruction,” “virtue,” and “knowledge”—­provided a coherent framework of value within which the strug­gle over fictionality took place in the early United States. Fictionality does not yet serve as a sign of literariness in Genette’s sense. So how does fictionality come to serve as a sign of literariness in the United States? And even more than this, how does this conception of fictionality anachronistically come to govern e­ arlier periods? Understanding this pro­cess of back-­projection requires revisiting some of the most familiar theories of fiction in order to see how they obscure e­ arlier, less familiar ones. Take, for example, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851), a text that has been regarded as both a major work and a manifesto of antebellum fiction. As Meredith McGill has shown, Hawthorne establishes his authority as national romancer in Seven Gables by embedding forms of fiction in which he had previously worked—­gothic tales, domestic fiction, sketches, ­children’s stories—in his romance in order to disavow them.26 For McGill, Hawthorne’s consolidation of the book-­length romance at the expense of ­these genres reflects a wider turn away from what she has influentially dubbed “the culture of reprinting.” I would add that it also crystallizes Hawthorne’s elevation of a specific conception of fictionality’s purpose and meaning over a host of alternative understandings: Hawthorne’s espousal of the romance as a privileged genre is tied up with his endorsement of fiction as an aesthetically oriented work of art.

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Hawthorne’s brief definitional claim for romance—­that it is “a work of art” that reflects the “truth of the h ­ uman heart”—­serves as a kind of aside: even within a longer phrase set apart by dashes, it is subordinated grammatically, giving it the air of something that can be taken for granted. This theory of romance, however, was only one among a number of competing conceptions of fiction circulating at this moment. The preface reveals as much, when Hawthorne contrasts his romance with didactic fiction. Although Hawthorne explic­itly sets forth a moral for his narrative—­“the wrong-­doing of one generation lives into the successive ones”—he insists that he ­will not “relentlessly . . . ​ impale the story with its moral”: “When romances r­ eally do teach anything . . . ​ it is by a more subtile pro­cess than the ostensible one.”27 Hawthorne, like many ­later antebellum fictionists, does not reject didacticism, so much as he offers an alternative ideal of didactic fiction, in which fiction’s instructional potential is subordinated to—­and even hinges upon—­its aesthetic impact: fiction can teach only by offering a “high truth . . . ​fairly, finely, and skilfully wrought out, brightening at e­ very step.”28 In making didactic efficacy depend upon artful creation and aesthetic effect, Hawthorne advances an understanding of fiction as constitutively literary—­his work’s “dominating function” is “aesthetic” ­because of its fictionality—­implying, like many l­ater critics, that t­ hose writers who subordinated aesthetic concerns to didactic ones have misunderstood the purpose of fiction. Hawthorne only explic­itly disavows one alternative framework of fictional value (moral didacticism), but the understanding of fiction he advocates obscures a wide range of alternative “dominating functions” for fiction: training citizens, po­liti­cal polemic, creating knowledge about the past, and building social movements. Many of Hawthorne’s romances make this same metafictional gesture: he consistently takes up the conventions of va­ri­e­ties of fiction that appealed to other frameworks of value and redeploys them within his romances with their aesthetic “dominating function.” Just as Seven Gables draws on the gothic tale and the domestic sketch, The Scarlet Letter and The Blithedale Romance take up subgenres originally oriented to other ends (historical fiction and social movement fiction, respectively) and deploy their conventions in fictions oriented primarily to aesthetic judgments. This does not mean, of course, that Hawthorne’s romances do not comment on history and politics. Their commentaries, however, are mediated by an understanding that romances should be judged by aesthetic standards specific to fiction rather than, for instance, the standards governing history or po­liti­cal writing.29 The same is not true, as we ­will see, for many of the historical fictions and social movement fictions on which Hawthorne’s romances draw. Presenting this aesthetic orientation as constitutive of fiction, Hawthorne obscures not only the short fiction associated with reprinting, but also a host of other va­ri­e­ties of book-­length fiction and their accompanying theories of fictional value. Yet even as his romances occlude ­these e­ arlier ways of understanding fiction’s

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value and purpose, his implicit engagement with them reveals a culture in which a multiplicity of theories of fiction vied for legitimacy. Hawthorne’s romances are thus both product and vanis­hing point of an age characterized by competing conceptions of fictionality. His engagement with such a variety of fictional genres, however, is easy to overlook, ­because he explic­itly frames his artistic proj­ect in terms of only two competing forms—­ the novel and the romance. I do not want to revisit old debates about the romance/novel distinction, but rather, I hope to suggest how a fixation on it has obscured a host of other logics of fictionality.30 Hawthorne’s preface encourages exactly this oversight by setting up a binary that his fiction trou­ bles. As McGill has shown, Hawthorne’s “romance” grapples with the prosaic details of modern life, exactly the end his preface assigns to the “novel.”31 Held to its preface’s generic categories, Seven Gables is a hybrid novel-­romance. It melds the style of romance with the proj­ect of the novel: the story’s historical specificity, Hawthorne admits, has brought its “fancy-­pictures almost into positive contact with the realities of the moment” (3). My point is not that Hawthorne is disingenuous or merely inconsistent, setting forth his fiction’s proj­ect on terms it fails to fulfill. Rather, the preface is central to his proj­ect, ­because, for Hawthorne, the book’s status as a “romance” depends on how the reader approaches it: he “would be glad . . . ​if . . . ​the book may be read strictly as a romance, having a ­great deal more to do with the clouds overhead than with any portion of the a­ ctual soil of the County of Essex” (3). He pre­sents the text’s genre (“romance”) less as a categorical, text-­internal attribute than as something that inheres in the reader’s approach to the fiction. Hawthorne seeks to establish his text’s genre by urging readers to judge it in a specific way. Asking readers to read Seven Gables “as a romance,” Hawthorne invites them to approach it as an aesthetically oriented “work of art” answerable to “the truth of the ­human heart,” even as it also undertakes the more mundane proj­ect of representing modern social life. To establish generic difference, then, Hawthorne subordinates narrative content to the framework of judgment through which a fiction is approached: this means that “novels,” no less than his own “romance,” can be approached on t­ hese terms (as “works of art” answerable to “the truth of the ­human heart”). Seven Gables thus sets up a generic opposition only to provide a synthesis, establishing a conception of fictional value that encompasses both sides. In this synthesis, Hawthorne embraces an understanding of fiction that would become ascendant in the late nineteenth and early twentieth c­ entury: fiction should be approached as an aesthetically oriented work of art that nonetheless reveals something about the real world. What this synthesis obscures, however, is how the initial opposition encompasses only two theories among the wide range of understandings of fictional value circulating in the 1850s (including t­ hose associated with the other genres on which Seven Gables draws). This can be easy for modern readers to overlook exactly b ­ ecause we are so comfortable with the conception of

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fiction that Hawthorne advocates. But while Hawthorne might ignore other forms of fiction, this does not remove his work from this wider competition among fictionalities. Rather, his silence is best understood as a strategic part of this strug­gle. By not explic­itly engaging with them, Hawthorne refuses to mark t­ hese other va­ri­e­ties of fiction as legitimate objects of competition, elevating the Novel and the Romance—­and the Novel-­Romance—­over them. Hawthorne’s romances are ultimately exemplary early American fictions less b ­ ecause “romance” is a distinctly American genre than b ­ ecause his romances explic­itly advocate for a specific conception of fiction’s value and purpose. Romance might be only one among a host of understandings of fiction, but Hawthorne’s effort to delineate a clear fictional logic that would govern readers’ encounters with the text was shared by almost all of his contemporaries and pre­de­ces­sors. Hawthorne’s romances are an especially instructive hinge in the history of fictionality, ­because they explic­itly argue for a conception of fictionality that we have come to take for granted when it was not yet taken for granted. Their prefaces reveal that fiction’s “constitutive literariness” is not a timeless meaning of fictionality, but only one of an array of dif­fer­ent understandings of fictionality that vied for ascendancy in antebellum print culture. In the 1980s and 1990s, feminist critics, championing ­women writers of sentimental fiction, challenged the long-­standing primacy of “the Romance tradition” in the study of American fiction.32 In ­these “canon wars,” the social and po­liti­cal engagement of writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe came to be set against the Romantic detachment of writers like Hawthorne.33 Yet beneath the apparent opposition between Stowe’s engaged sentimentalism and Hawthorne’s detached aestheticism, t­ here is a deeper, under­lying unity. For both writers, fiction is a vehicle for individual self-­culture and aesthetic appreciation. Stowe’s abolitionist fictions strain against this conception, using fiction for social advocacy, but, as I ­will show in chapter 6, they also insist on fiction’s cultural coding as a genre of private, moral self-­fashioning, making it a key part of their appeal. Beneath the substantial differences between Hawthorne and Stowe’s fiction is a kind of consensus: both writers seek to neutralize the prob­lem of fictionality by naturalizing the value of fiction. They insist that fiction’s legitimacy as a vehicle for self-­cultivation, private leisure, and aesthetic appreciation is self-­evident (even as they continue to argue for it). This understanding of fiction would be consolidated only in the late nineteenth ­century, but it begins to gain prominence in the 1840s and 1850s. In this moment, ­there is a gradual displacement of a multiplicity of va­ri­e­ties and theories of fiction by a narrowed range of alternatives. The 1850s have long been regarded as an origin point—­a de­cade defined by the emergence of “mature” American literary “art and expression” and thus, the beginning of “major” American lit­er­a­ture.34 But they are also an end point: in this moment, we begin to see the foreclosure of the myriad possibilities for fiction opened up by the sustained interrogation of fictionality’s purpose that defined the first eight de­cades of US fiction.

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Over the past thirty years, the major accounts of American fiction have left the question of romance ­behind—­and with it, the question of fictionality. In the wake of influential studies by Jane Tompkins, Nancy Armstrong, and Cathy Davidson, scholars have studied a more expansive body of fiction, with a focus on t­ hese fictions’ po­liti­cal and social implications.35 This scholarship has remade our understanding of early US fiction and greatly expanded our sense of its significance by highlighting fiction’s central role in educating ­women, imagining the nation, practicing democracy, advocating social reform, and justifying American empire and its colonial vio­lence.36 The romance critics’ seemingly old-­fashioned questions about competing forms of fictional “truth,” however, have stakes for understanding both the vast archive of fiction they neglected and the sociopo­liti­cal issues they largely ignored.37 This is ­because a fiction’s distinctive suppositional logic mediates readers’ encounters with its narrative, structuring how a fiction persuades, moves, and educates. Early US fictionists often sought to influence readers not only through a fiction’s interpretable message, but also through readers’ participation in the speculative and evaluative exercises associated with dif­fer­ent fictionalities.38 If focusing on fictionality returns us to what might seem like antiquated questions about fictional truth, the following chapters ­will argue that recovering ­these varied fictionalities has stakes for some of the most per­sis­tent concerns of recent Americanist literary criticism and American studies: theories of the public sphere and po­liti­cal deliberation, structures of nationalist feeling, the mechanics of normativity, the gendered imperatives of social life, histories of enchantment and disenchantment, the politics of sentiment, and the racialization of inner life. Uncovering the array of fictionalities that s­ haped social life and po­liti­cal strug­gle in the early United States, however, requires first reconsidering the rise of the novel paradigm that has predominated in histories of American fiction.

The Limitations of Novel History Fictionality is pervasive in modern society. It serves a communicative function that extends far beyond the prose genres that we usually group together as “fiction.”39 Fictionality’s unique mode of suppositional reference plays a central role in advertising, po­liti­cal discourse, stand-up comedy, and even the natu­ral sciences (among countless other social arenas). This book, however, focuses specifically on the fictionality of extended prose fiction. T ­ here are two reasons for this delimited scope. First, early US writers theorized and debated the question of fictionality principally in relation to prose fiction in general and the novel in par­tic­u­lar. Second, even within our histories of fiction in the United States, scholars have largely overlooked the question of fictionality. For twentieth-­century literary historians, fictionality was a constitutive but unremarked upon aspect of the novel genre. As Gallagher succinctly puts it,

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“No feature of the novel seems to be more obvious and yet more easily ignored than its fictionality.”40 But even as Gallagher’s work has recovered fictionality as an object of analy­sis for literary history (as opposed to narratology and analytic philosophy), her foundational “The Rise of Fictionality” also suggests why fictionality has been overlooked: it has been subsumed u ­ nder the novel as our privileged category of analy­sis. The terms “fiction” and “novel” have largely functioned as synonyms in both popu­lar discourse and much literary history.41 Our commonsense conflation of the category of fiction with the novel genre has both led us to ignore novelistic fictionality and obscured other, self-­consciously nonnovelistic va­ri­e­ties of fictionality. For Gallagher, “the novel discovered fiction,” this new kind of narrative about “nobody” that emerged in the eigh­teenth ­century, and her account focuses exclusively on what she calls “novelistic fictionality.”42 In arguing for why novelistic fictionality arose when it did, Gallagher treats fiction as a uniform category, more or less continuous with the novel. Srinivas Aravamudan has critiqued this delimited account, drawing attention to the host of fictional forms circulating in eighteenth-­century ­England, such as the Oriental Tale and the beast fable, that Gallagher’s account—­like Watt’s The Rise of the Novel before her—­obscures.43 I would add that this critique of a novel-­centric approach to fictionality could extend even to a host of fictions that we have tended to read as novels. Within the body of eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­ century texts that literary histories of the United States have brought together ­under the extensive canopy of “the novel,” we find hoaxes, scandalous chronicles, sketchbooks, moral tales, romances, and social movement fiction, many of which defined themselves in explicit contradistinction to the novel genre. The “rise of the novel” paradigm invoked by Gallagher’s title has profoundly ­shaped the study of early US fiction, largely due to the continuing influence of Davidson’s field-­defining Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in Amer­i­ca (1986; 2004). This study, more than any other work, overturned the per­sis­tent twentieth-­century narrative about the poverty of early US fiction by shifting attention from what had been regarded as the early novel’s literary deficiencies to the genre’s ideological force in the republic. By focusing on the “rise of the novel” as a social phenomenon and exploring the genre’s po­liti­cal meaning in the United States, Davidson sparked a wider reevaluation of a body of fiction that, at the time, lacked recognized classics or major works and established a framework for studying early American fiction that continues to shape the field ­today.44 (The ongoing influence of Davidson’s “rise of the novel” paradigm is evident in the frequent recurrence of her Wattian subtitle in subsequent studies of US fiction.45) But while Davidson’s account of the novel’s “rise” helped to refocus the study of early US fiction around questions of the genre’s po­liti­cal meaning and ideological implications, the enduring prominence of “rise of the novel” narratives has obscured how many early US fictions actually used claims of distinction from the novel to structure their

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attempts to persuade and influence readers. Faced with a widespread suspicion of novel-­reading as a frivolous indulgence and a threat to civic virtue, early writers developed alternative, self-­consciously extra-­novelistic va­ri­e­ties of fiction for their varied social and po­liti­cal proj­ects. Our histories of the American novel, then, often include books that insisted they w ­ ere not novels. One reason for this disconnection is a subtle but significant distinction between how modern scholars and many early US writers use the term “novel.” Where modern scholarship tends to categorize most extended prose fictions as novels, antebellum periodical reviewers, as Nina Baym has shown, w ­ ere preoccupied with distinguishing “the novel proper” from other va­ri­e­ties of prose fiction.46 Treating generic designation as one of the reviewer’s chief tasks, ­these writers dedicated significant space to adjudicating ­whether a given work should be considered a novel: in general, they regarded a unified plot as defining the “novel proper” and they often categorized fictions that did not foreground the “interest” of their plot as falling outside the genre. “A string of events, connected by no other tie, than the mere fact, that they happened to the same individual, or within a given period of years,” wrote the North American Review in 1838, “may constitute a fictitious history or memoir, but it does not make a novel.”47 Such judgments had a markedly dif­fer­ent force in dif­fer­ent reviews: sometimes, reviewers would identify a work as extra-­novelistic in order to highlight that it had a moral proj­ect that transcended entertainment; in other cases, reviewers used this categorization as an aesthetic judgment that suggested the writer’s failure to produce a unified plot. (In general, the former meaning predominated in the early national period when, as we w ­ ill see in chapter 1, novels w ­ ere widely regarded as pernicious; the latter became more common in the l­ater antebellum period when, as we w ­ ill see in chapter 4, the genre gained widespread, though not universal, ac­cep­tance.) But often, a reviewer’s designation of a fiction as extra-­novelistic implied neither praise nor disapprobation, but simply a recognition that the fiction deemphasized the “interest” of its plot in ­favor of ends other than entertaining readers. Fictionists seized upon this narrow definition of the novel and often used claims to generic distinction from the “novel proper” to orient their narratives to goals other than ­those usually associated with novels. To understand the stakes of t­ hese metageneric gestures, the study of early US fiction needs to rely less on strictly taxonomic approaches to genre or teleological “rise” narratives and instead focus on genre as a mode of address—­a means of engaging readers on specific terms and eliciting certain reading practices. While critics have tended to treat claims of distinction from the novel as disingenuous disavowals of a suspicious genre, early writers used such claims to encourage readers to approach their narratives in specific ways. In William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy (1789), for example, Mrs. Holmes gives a young ­woman a work of fiction with an impor­tant qualification: “I do not recommend it to you as a

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Novel, but as a work that speaks the language of the heart and that inculcates the duty that we owe to ourselves, to society and the Deity.” While admitting that novels are more engaging than “didactick essays,” Holmes encourages her young friend to approach this narrative as she would a “didactick essay,” so as to be “capable of deducing the most profitable lessons” from it.48 By insisting that she does not recommend the narrative “as a novel,” Holmes approaches genre not as a text internal characteristic but as something that is determined by the reader’s approach to the narrative. I would suggest that the claims to generic difference that pervade early US fiction often serve a parallel function: they are attempts to elicit specific reading practices.49 The relation between genre and reading practice in the early United States is perhaps best illustrated by the widespread concern that readers might transform any text into a “novel.” Washington Irving’s History of New York (1809) pokes fun at this anxiety when Diedrich Knickerbocker, the ostensible author, complains about readers who misread his history by “skim[ming] over the rec­ords of past times, as they do over the edifying pages of a novel, merely for relaxation and innocent amusement.”50 The joke is, as usual, on Knickerbocker, who seems unaware that he writes a most amusing variety of history. But Irving’s joke captures a common concern among early writers that readers would approach their narratives (­whether fictional or nonfictional) as novels—­that is, as occasions for frivolous entertainment. The corollary of this anxiety, however, is the idea that a dif­f er­ent form of generic address might transform readers’ approach to a text, even one that seems novelistic. Writers used claims to distinction from the novel to appeal to certain reading practices and orient their fictions to ends other than t­ hose usually associated with the novel (the “relaxation” and “amusement” mentioned by Knickerbocker). Robert Pendleton Kennedy’s Swallow Barn, or a Sojourn in the Old Dominion (1832) provides a concrete example. Swallow Barn is a fictional sketchbook, which details a Northern traveler’s stay on an idealized ­Virginia plantation and his conversion to a proslavery position. Kennedy insistently comments on his narrative’s resemblance to novels only to disavow the resemblance on the grounds of Swallow Barn’s discontinuous nature. When he republished the fiction in 1851 as an “antidote to the abolitionist mischief,” Kennedy added a preface that underscored this generic distinction: “Swallow Barn is not a novel. It was begun on the plan of a series of detached sketches . . . ​it has still preserved its desultory, sketchy character.”51 Issued with the po­liti­cally motivated republication, this preface clarifies what has been at stake in Kennedy’s metageneric proj­ect all along: Kennedy encourages readers to approach Swallow Barn as a “history,” “collection of letters,” or “book of travels” rather than a novel to establish its reliability as a source of information about Southern life in general and slavery in par­tic­u­lar. The specter of novelism haunts Swallow Barn, threatening to undermine its claim to mimetic accuracy. But his fiction’s resemblance to novels also

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gives Kennedy an opportunity to underscore its difference from them: “I, who originally began to write only a few desultory sketches of the Old Dominion, have unawares, and without any premeditated purpose, absolutely fallen into a regular jog-­trot, novel-­like narrative,—at least, for several consecutive chapters” (374). Kennedy underscores the normative force of generic conventions: once his “desultory sketches” have begun to resemble the unified plotting that defined the “novel proper,” he feels “the weight of the obligation” to provide a satisfying conclusion. Kennedy, however, insists that he has stumbled into such generic imperatives unwittingly: he is “unaware,” he has “fallen” into a “novel-­like narrative,” and he has done so without any “premeditation.” This differentiates Swallow Barn from novels, which Kennedy pre­sents as highly artificial, inorganic texts. By marking the moment when the narrator moves from inartistic reporting to the planned unfolding of a plot, Kennedy suggests that the narrative has, up to this point, not been governed by such imperatives. And when, in f­ uture chapters, he interrupts his novelistic love story with digressions on local history, traditions, and especially plantation life, he stages his deviation from novelistic convention in f­ avor of an alternative organ­izing princi­ple—­the traveler’s experience. Swallow Barn’s divergence from the novel genre attests to its reflective—as opposed to artfully constructed—­nature and by extension, its mimetic accuracy. Chapters 6 and 7 ­will take up how epistemological anx­ie­ ties about fictionality impacted debates about slavery more generally. I invoke Swallow ­ ecause it exemplifies the prevailing move of metaficBarn ­here, however, b tional distinction in early US fiction. Staging his fiction’s divergence from the novel genre, Kennedy seeks to both establish the grounds of its difference (an organic rather than artificial form that enables it to accurately reflect the world) and orient it t­ oward alternative ends (the dissemination of ethnographic information as opposed to entertainment). Parallel claims of distinction from the novel structure the varied proj­ects of an array of fictions—­from Judith Sargent Murray’s Story of Margaretta (1792–94) to Walt Whitman’s Franklin Evans (1842) to Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall (1854) to Orestes Brownson’s The Spirit-­Rapper (1854)—­that other­wise share l­ittle with Kennedy’s plantation narrative. While literary historians have generally treated Swallow Barn as a novel, it defines its proj­ect in contradistinction to the genre, revealing the inadequacy of history of the novel approaches for capturing the dynamics of generic address in early US fiction. Yet, even as it exposes the limitations of novel history for understanding early American fiction, Swallow Barn’s use of the novel as a constitutive generic other also reveals the novel’s centrality to the history of fictionality in the United States. Early critics of fiction ­were especially preoccupied with the novel’s fictionality, and the republic’s virulent antifictional discourse was, in fact, a response to the novel’s exploding popularity. So while many early fictions explic­itly defined their proj­ects in contradistinction to novels, critics

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often lumped all fiction together ­under the pejorative labels of “novels” or “romances.” (Early writers w ­ ere well aware of this dynamic: even as Frederick Jackson insists that his The Victim of Chancery [1841] should be read as a “story of facts” or a “narrative,” he anticipates that “grave men” might “call it a novel” as a means of discrediting his critique of “the pre­sent condition of ­things.”52) In this sense, the antifictional discourse mirrors twentieth-­and twenty-­first-­century novel history, consolidating a variety of prose fictions ­under the capacious category of “the novel.” This produced a strange generic dialectic in the early United States: while fiction’s critics tended to group all fictions together as “novels and romances” in their condemnations of the mode, many writers insisted that their fictions ­were not novels in an attempt to rescue the fictional mode from its association with the corrupt genre. To fully capture this complex generic negotiation, Founded in Fiction attends to the centrality of the idea of “the novel” in the history of fiction without allowing a retrospectively consolidated understanding of the novel genre to obscure the generic diversity of early US fiction. It offers a history of fictionality in the United States that encompasses both t­ hose fictions that claimed the label of novel and ­those that disavowed it. In part, this book traces—in the spirit of ­Virginia Jackson’s work on the lyricization of Emily Dickinson’s poems—­the novelization of American fiction: the normalizing pro­cess by which a host of eighteenth-­and early nineteenth-­century book-­length prose fictions that figured their proj­ects in contradistinction to novels would come to be grouped together ­under the generic umbrella of “the novel.”53 In other words, an array of explic­itly extra-­novelistic early fictions have been subsumed ­under our expansive definition of the novel as meaning almost any extended prose fiction. This understanding of the novel genre is evident in some antebellum writing, but it is not yet assumed or taken for granted. Rather, it remained contested and controversial throughout the antebellum period. The American Review in 1850, for instance, set out a “scheme of criticism” dedicated to “correcting a prevailing error of the day”—­the tendency “to call ­every fiction a novel.”54 But even as many antebellum reviewers sought to adjudicate the boundary between “the novel proper” and other va­ri­e­ties of fiction, their reviews also reveal a proliferation of dif­fer­ent kinds of novels, oriented t­ oward a variety of ends, that exploded such clear generic bound­aries: “Do you wish to instruct, to convince, to please? Write a novel!” wrote Putnam’s in 1854, “Have you a system of religion or politics or manners or social life to inculcate? Write a novel!”55 Although t­ hese reviewers often objected to such attempts to expand the scope of the novel’s form and mission, their reviews also reveal the gradual, uneven emergence of a more capacious sense of the genre. By the end of the antebellum period, reviewers increasingly regarded the novel as defined only by three very general characteristics—­length, prose, and fictionality.56 My argument, then, is not that the novel did not “rise” in the early United States—it most certainly did. But what also arose during this period was a

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more capacious conception of the novel genre as encompassing almost any book-­length prose fiction that many fictionists of this era would have rejected. While this more capacious sense of the novel would remain contested throughout the antebellum period, it has been assumed in modern narratives of the novel’s “rise.” B ­ ecause scholars have taken this expansive definition of the novel for granted, they have tended to treat early fiction’s claims to generic distinction from the novel as evasive, disingenuous, and confused. This, in turn, has allowed for t­ hese vari­ous fictions to be consolidated into teleological histories of the novel. Such histories subsume u ­ nder the label of “the novel” a variety of fictions that explic­itly disavowed the novel genre as a fundamental part of their proj­ects (such as Swallow Barn), fictions that ­were not regarded as novelistic by many antebellum readers and reviewers (such as Moby-­Dick), and narratives that did not employ the fictional address that we now consider constitutive of the novel genre (such as The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym). My point is neither that our current, more expansive definitions of the novel are wrong per se nor that Moby-­Dick, for example, has no place in histories of the novel’s development in the United States.57 Rather, it is that the ascendance of this more expansive sense of the novel—­the pro­cess by which books like Ruth Hall, Moby-­Dick, Pym, and Swallow Barn come to be regarded as self-­evidently novelistic—is itself a crucial development in the history of fiction in the United States and that we should not take this understanding of the novel for granted nor back-­project it onto the early republic, as this obscures the complex metageneric negotiations that structured how ­earlier fictions sought to educate, persuade, and move readers. This, then, is this book’s two-­part argument about fictionality and novel in the early United States. On one hand, it argues that fully understanding the diverse fictionalities circulating in the early United States requires extending our attention beyond the novel genre. By tracing out the logic through which vari­ous fictions claimed distinction from the novel, Founded in Fiction embraces the American Review’s 1850 call to resist the “prevailing error of the day . . . ​to call ­every fiction a novel” in order to uncover the republic’s many va­ri­e­ties of extra-­novelistic fiction. On the other hand, it also argues that fictionality was a defining preoccupation of the US novel through the ­middle of the nineteenth ­century. The novel was fundamental to the republic’s contentious debates about fictionality and t­ hese debates, in turn, profoundly ­shaped the development of the novel in the United States. Approaching the history of fictionality in the United States as a complex pro­cess of generic normalization and diversification, Founded in Fiction is both a piece and a critique of novel history: it looks back from our consolidated, more capacious understanding of the novel, but it seeks to recover the variety of fictionalities within this body of fiction that w ­ ill l­ater be categorized as novels. In d ­ oing so, it resists the tendency to collapse “fiction” and “the novel” as categories of analy­sis. This is necessary for understanding writers’ divergent responses

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to the republic’s intertwined anx­i­eties about fiction and novels. In the early United States, some writers sought to legitimate their novels by disavowing the genre’s suspicious fictionality. ­Others insisted their fictions ­were not novels in order to reclaim fictionality from the pernicious novel genre. Still ­others rejected critiques of both the novel genre and the fictional mode and argued for the value of fictional novels. In considering both avowedly novelistic and explic­itly extra-­novelistic fictions, this book takes seriously the generic categories and distinctions set forth in the subtitles and prefaces of early US fiction in order to explore how writers used genre as means of engaging readers and establishing a text’s logic of fictionality—­the terms on which a text addresses readers, to use Brockden Brown’s phrase, “as a fiction.”58

Logics of Fictionality Founded in Fiction begins with the 1780s and 1790s, when the increasing popularity of fiction led to an intensification of the antifictional discourse. It ends with the 1860s, when fictionality had largely ceased to be controversial. By the late nineteenth ­century, readers had become so comfortable with the concept of fiction that any discomfort with fictionality began to seem strange. William Dean Howells played this for laughs in The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), where the vulgar, nouveau riche Mrs. Lapham discusses her d ­ aughter’s reading with the educated, aristocratic, Mr. Corey: “I used to like to get hold of a good book when I was a girl; but we ­weren’t allowed to read many novels in ­those days. My ­mother called them all LIES. And I guess she ­wasn’t so very far wrong about some of them.” “­They’re certainly fictions,” said Corey, smiling.59 Howells invites readers to smile with the urbane Corey at what he regards as Mrs. Lapham’s antiquated category error: the conflation of fiction and lies. By 1885, the antifictional stance could be regarded as a relic of a provincial and unsophisticated past. Fully understanding early US fiction, however, requires taking such antifictional critiques seriously, rather than, like Corey, dismissing them as a sign of naïveté and unsophistication. Almost ­every early US fictionist took up, in some way, the epistemological anxiety about fictionality—­the idea that narratives without a basis in fact ­were lies that would mislead readers about real­ity—­ underpinning Mrs. Lapham’s m ­ other’s interdiction against novels. Early US fiction, in fact, provides an especially rich archive of theories about fiction, exactly ­because ­these writers w ­ ere endlessly confronted with such critiques. Forced to justify their use of this suspicious mode, early fictionists insistently reflected on the specific terms of their texts’ fictionality, seeking to legitimate their fictions discursively in paratexts and formally in narrative. Isaac Mitchell’s preface to his 1811 novel The Asylum exemplifies the proj­ect, undertaken

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by almost e­ very early US fictionist, of delineating exactly what separates his book from the mass of pernicious fictions and novels: “let not the moralist or the Divine turn fastidiously from our pages before he has given them a perusal. Let not prejudice condemn the book merely ­because it may be considered as coming ­under the class of Novel. Permit it to speak for itself; let it be its own advocate.”60 Founded in Fiction lets early American fiction “speak for itself,” tracing the varied terms on which t­ hese writers advocated and theorized the value of their fiction. My goal, in ­doing so, is to reconstruct the varied logics of fictionality found in early US fiction. A text’s logic of fictionality encompasses the framework of value to which it appeals, the standards through which it seeks judgment, the speculative exercises it invites, the structures of supposition on which it relies, and the reading practices it encourages. While claims to generic distinction, such as disavowals of the novel genre, often play a central role in establishing a text’s logic of fictionality, ­these fictional logics are not reducible to generic classifications. (Texts within the same genre or subgenre, as we ­will see, exhibit widely varying logics of fictionality.) ­These varied logics of fictionality are also not strictly text-­internal: they emerge in the interplay between the fictional logic established in a text and the assumptions governing fiction-­reading in the social world in which that text circulates. The desire to reconstruct ­these historically specific logics of fictionality underlies this book’s methodological eclecticism. It draws variously on the history of reading (examining the theories of reading and descriptions of reading practices found in fiction and writing about fiction), book history (tracing publication histories and paratextual packaging), reception studies (surveying reviews of fiction), intellectual history (exploring changes in concepts such as truth and probability), and readings of specific texts (reconstructing a text’s account and deployment of its own fictionality) in order to more fully historicize ­these logics of fictionality.61 Founded in Fiction, then, takes as its subject the evolving, often contentious, discussions about the value and purpose of fiction-­reading that played out in American periodicals, conduct lit­er­a­ture, and fiction itself over the eight de­cades following in­de­pen­dence.62 My ambition is to describe the text-­ internal logics of fictionality found in specific fictions, the conceptions of fiction-­reading that circulated in US print culture more generally, and how they intersected in an attempt to reconstruct how fictions engaged readers in the early United States. This endeavor is broadly historicist, but also necessarily speculative: this book focuses on the elusive, ever-­receding relation between cultural practices and the text-­artifacts on which we rely for their reconstruction. It does not offer a history of reading practices so much as it offers a history of appeals to dif­fer­ent reading practices in American fiction and a history of how fictionists sought to intervene in the republic’s sustained, spirited debates about fiction-­reading: in the reflections on fictionality that permeate their writings, early fictionists commented on the social meaning of

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fiction-­reading in the United States and engaged the prevailing assumptions about how and why ­people read fiction, often urging readers to approach their own fictions in very par­tic­u­lar ways.63 Historicizing the development of fictionality in the United States, however, also requires grappling with how transatlantic influence, circulation, and reprinting s­ haped fiction-­reading in the republic. Much recent scholarship has shown the limitations of narrowly national frameworks for understanding US literary history by highlighting the transatlantic networks of exchange that influenced both what p ­ eople read and the development of literary culture in the new nation. For the half c­ entury following in­de­pen­dence, En­glish books dominated the US literary marketplace and many Americans would have chiefly read En­glish fiction. In the nation’s earliest years, most fictions circulating in the republic ­were imported from ­England, but over time, ­these imported books ­were increasingly displaced by American reprints of En­glish fiction. Such reprints would remain a defining feature of the US literary landscape throughout the antebellum era.64 Drawing on recent transatlantic approaches, Founded in Fiction explores how US writers’ interrogation of questions of fictionality developed in relation to both transatlantic conversations about fiction and the prevalence of En­glish fiction in the republic.65 It charts how early American conceptions of fictionality ­were ­shaped by the republic’s uniquely virulent antifictional discourse within a context of transatlantic circulation and influence. Founded in Fiction is divided into two parts. The three chapters in part I focus on the epistemological prob­lem of fictionality—­the question of ­whether fiction could produce true knowledge of the world—­that framed both critiques and defenses of fiction in the early republic. Chapter 1 offers an overview of the antifictional discourse of the 1780s and 1790s and reconsiders the “Founded on Fact” novels prevalent in this era, tracing the dif­fer­ent terms on which writers sought to decouple the popu­lar novel genre from its suspicious fictionality. Chapter 2 focuses on writers from the 1790s who argued against the po­liti­ cal anxiety that fiction-­reading would separate citizens from civic life, instead positing fictionality’s suppositional reference as peculiarly suited to addressing the challenges of modern republicanism. Chapter 3 explores the rapidly evolving debates about the effects of fiction-­reading on female conduct, especially as they played out in the neglected fictions published between 1800 and 1820. The four chapters in part II tell the twofold story of fictionality in the antebellum United States. On one hand, this is the story of prose fiction’s gradual and widespread—­though far from universal—­acceptance as both respectable reading material and an impor­tant branch of American letters. Chapter 4 traces a dramatic shift in justifications for historical fiction across the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, as historical fictionists more and more disavowed the arguments for fiction’s value as a tool for speculative historiography that had predominated in the 1820s and instead argued that their texts’ fictionality

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signals an orientation to ends specific to fiction, such as aesthetic appreciation and moral self-­cultivation. The chapter argues that t­ hese changing logics of historical fictionality both reflect and exemplify a broad transformation in discussions of fiction across the antebellum period: this era sees the rise of an understanding of fiction-­reading as a private leisure activity oriented ­toward aesthetic appreciation and personal self-­culture that shifted emphasis from epistemological questions to moral and aesthetic ones in both discussions of fiction and fictions themselves. On the other hand, the story of fictionality in the antebellum United States is also the story of the per­sis­tent strug­gles over the acceptable forms and uses of fictionality that continued over ­these same years. Where chapter 4 charts the increasing ascendance of a conception of fiction-­reading that largely foreclosed the epistemological questions about fiction’s status as a source of knowledge that had preoccupied ­earlier fictionists, chapters 5, 6, and 7 show how such epistemological anx­i­eties resurfaced intermittently across the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, especially when fictionists broke with the understanding of fiction-­ reading as a vehicle for aesthetic and moral self-­culture. Chapter 5 turns to two literary hoaxes of the 1830s to explore the relationship between fictionality and the Jacksonian public’s fascination with “humbug.” It considers how ­these literary hoaxes eschewed conventional fictionality to raise anew the questions about belief, credulity, and fraud that ­were becoming increasingly marginal in discussions of fiction. Chapter 6 explores how certain fictionists of the 1840s and 1850s did not just resist the newly ascendant conception of fiction-­reading as a private leisure activity, divorced from po­liti­cal controversy, but actually made this generic coding a key part of their proj­ects of social criticism: ­because fiction was consistently figured as outside of politics, it was, they argued, ideally suited to expose the limitations of politics as usual. Chapter 7 argues that fiction came to play such a central role in the strug­gle to define the “true” nature of the slave experience in the 1850s ­because its distinctive mode of transparent psychonarration made it an especially potent genre for giving Northern white audiences the sense that they ­were accessing the hidden inner lives of enslaved persons. The chapter traces the incisive metacriticisms of fiction’s role in this repre­sen­ta­tional strug­gle that formerly enslaved writers developed, as they explored both the persuasive power of fiction’s revelatory access to inner life and the epistemological pitfalls of using fiction to probe slave interiority. Taken together, the two parts of this book chart a series of dramatic transformations—in the publishing and distribution of fiction, the prevailing attitudes ­toward fiction, and the ascendant theories of fiction’s purpose—­that reshaped the production and reception of fiction across the early national and antebellum periods. But they also reveal a surprising continuity across the first eighty years of US literary history: throughout this era, fictionists remained preoccupied with the fictionality of fiction. Founded in Fiction traces the gradual ac­cep­tance of fiction in the United States, but it is especially interested

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in the enduring contestations over fictionality that ­shaped American fiction through the ­middle of the nineteenth ­century. The per­sis­tence and pervasiveness of questions of fictionality in American fiction pre­sent the historian of fictionality with a challenge, as ­there are far more innovative theories and deployments of fictionality from this period than could be covered in a single book. The chapters that follow spotlight some of the most significant controversies over the acceptable uses of fiction in the early United States, with each chapter taking up a dif­f er­ent anxiety about fictionality and considering how a dif­fer­ent set of novels or fictions emerged in dialectical relation to this anxiety. In tracing ­these controversies over fiction’s value and purpose, I have tried to feature both texts that exemplify impor­tant diachronic shifts in discussions of fiction and texts that emphasize the synchronic variety of theories and uses of fictionality. In many places, I have highlighted texts, such as Leonora Sansay’s Laura, Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee, and Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave, that self-­consciously engage and comment on such shifts and developments. In other places, I have featured texts, such as Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry and Tabitha Tenney’s Female Quixotism, for the novelty, even idiosyncrasy, of their fictional logics in order to more fully capture the array of fictionalities circulating in the republic. In d ­ oing so, my hope is to restore to our current discussions of American fiction the hyper-­awareness of fictionality that characterized early US debates about fiction. A focus on fictionality uncovers the interest of less familiar works, such as S.S.B.K. Wood’s Dorval, or the Speculator and John Neal’s Rachel Dyer, but it also gives fresh interest to canonical works, such as Brown’s Wieland or Edgar Allan Poe’s Pym, by restoring to view key aspects of their proj­ects that have been overlooked in our inattention to fictionality. I am especially interested in recovering theories and uses of fictionality from which we have become historically estranged. Founded in Fiction often dwells on ­those conceptions of fictionality—­such ­those found in Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive, Rebecca Rush’s Kelroy, or Samuel Woodworth’s The Champions of Freedom—­that trou­ble or defamiliarize our commonsense notions of what fiction is and does. For this reason, I offer only brief accounts of the understandings of fictionality advocated by ­those canonical heavyweights, Hawthorne and Melville. This is not only b ­ ecause previous scholars have offered robust accounts of their theories of fiction, but ­because Hawthorne and Melville, as Jonathan Arac has documented, embraced an understanding of fiction as a distinctly literary art that both anticipates and profoundly s­ haped l­ater conceptions of fiction’s value and purpose.66 While chapter 4 and the coda track the historical development of this conception of fiction, they do so in order to resist the tendency to take this understanding of fictionality for granted or back-­project it onto e­ arlier fictions. It is only by recognizing the historical contingency of our sense of fictionality’s “constitutive literariness,” to use Genette’s phrase, that we can uncover the alternative logics

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of fictionality that early US writers developed as they grappled with both epistemological critiques of fiction and anx­i­eties about its inutility. Before turning to ­these fictionalities, however, I want to distinguish this history of competing fictionalities from the related histories of fabrication and fraudulence that have been incisively examined by scholars such as Lara Langer Cohen and Emily Ogden.67 Fictionality as a mode of address is defined by its explicit or tacit acknowledgement of its fabricated nature. This is what differentiates it from fraud and lies. ­Because Founded in Fiction seeks to recover how writers used dif­fer­ent va­ri­e­ties of fictionality as rhetorical tools for influence and persuasion, it—­with the notable exception of chapter 5—­focuses on texts that addressed readers as fiction rather than ­those texts that, from our con­temporary perspective, are fictional simply in the sense of being made up. At the same time, American fiction developed in conversation with accusations that fiction was nothing but a form of lying, from periodical condemnations of fiction in the 1790s to critiques of abolitionist fiction in the 1850s. In laying out the terms on which their fictions ­were not lies, fictionists offered some of the era’s most elaborate reflections on the va­ri­e­ties of fraud that many saw as rampant in American social life. The histories of fictionality and fraud are thus distinct but intimately intertwined strands of a much wider history of veridiction or truth-­telling.68 In the following chapters, we ­will see how many American fictionists—­writers as dif­fer­ent as Brackenridge, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, George Lippard, and Stowe—­shared a preoccupation with the question of how a writer could establish herself as a speaker of truth. The history of fictionality in the United States is the history of the cultural, institutional, and intellectual developments that would allow ­these writers to claim that fictionality could enhance their credibility as speakers of “truth”—an idea that would have seemed contradictory, even absurd, to many in the early national period. While some writers would claim fiction was capable of conveying a kind of truth as early as the 1790s, theirs was a controversial, minority position—­one that had to be defended at ­great length. By the late nineteenth ­century, the possibility of a true fiction would be taken for granted. Over the intervening years, the question of fictional truth—­a truth that did not depend on factuality—­would be among the most per­sis­tent and vexing in American letters. Founded in Fiction tells only a small part of this expansive, multifaceted story. This book is not an exhaustive history of fictionality in the United States, but an argument for the value of such an undertaking and a preliminary exploration of it within one delimited area—­extended prose fiction. Resisting the normalizing impulse of much novel history, it hopes to further what Duncan Faherty has called the “decentering of the novel” in early American studies.69 Yet in focusing on novels and fictions that have been read as novels, it largely neglects the short periodical fictions that often had a greater circulation than all but a few book-­length fictions. It does not take up the va­ri­e­ties

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of fictionality found in poetry and drama. Nor does it consider the role suppositional reference played in a range of nonfictional discourses, from po­liti­cal oratory to natu­ral philosophy. But by exploring the diverse fictionalities found in prose fiction, Founded in Fiction hopes to draw attention to fictionality’s communicative power, opening up new lines of inquiry into the many genres that it does not consider.70 In the early United States, fictionality was a contested site at which writers and movements ­imagined and re­imagined how texts could affect, persuade, educate, and move readers. By reframing the history of the novel in the United States as a history of competing va­ri­e­ties of novelistic and extra-­novelistic fictionality, this book seeks to recover what one anxious early critic referred to as “the ingenious diversity of fiction.”71 Founded in Fiction is an anatomy of the theories and forms of fiction circulating in the republic and a literary history that resists teleological genre history, so as to do justice to the remarkable variety of early American fiction. Moving beyond unitary “rise” narratives, it seeks to offer a new way of understanding the rich and strange archive of fiction produced in the era before the novel’s dominance. But more than a reconsideration of fiction’s place in American lit­er­a­ture, it is a history of the ways in which ­these diverse fictionalities s­ haped how early Americans thought and argued about some of the most pressing social and po­liti­cal issues of their era.

ch a p t er on e

The Prob­lem of Fictionality and the Nonfictional Novel

the or igins of the american novel do not correspond to the emergence of fiction in the United States. The book that has often been regarded as the first American novel, William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy (1789), claims on its title page to be a novel, but not a fiction: unlike fictional novels, this book is “Founded in Truth.”1 Many early novelists eschewed fictionality, insisting on their novel’s factual basis or real-­world referents. Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte ­Temple (1791) was “A Tale of Truth” and Gilbert Imlay’s The Emigrants (1793) was “Drawn from Real Characters.” Hannah Foster’s The Coquette (1797) was subtitled “A Novel, Founded on Fact” and the anonymous The Hapless Orphan (1793) was “A Novel, Founded on Incidents in Real Life.” In Fortune’s Football (1797), James Butler assured readers that he could “with confidence vouch for the authenticity of the narrative.”2 Seeking to divest the novel genre of what was regarded by many—­both in the 1790s and t­ oday—as one of its constitutive characteristics, t­ hese novelists sought to reform the genre from within: by rooting their novels in “Truth” and “Fact,” they sought to avoid the prob­lem of fictionality.3 In the early republic, fictionality was very much considered a prob­lem. Pedagogues, politicians, and preachers insisted that narratives without a firm basis in “Truth” and “Fact” would mislead and corrupt readers with false pictures of the world. Fiction was widely regarded, as the Philadelphia Minerva put it in 1798, as “one of the most fruitful sources of ignorance and one of the most common vices.”4 Both this suspicion of fiction and the novelistic truth claims it provoked have been regarded as evidence of the republic’s cultural belatedness.5 The widespread anx­i­eties about fiction in the new nation have been understood as a remnant of an antiquated Puritan worldview and a sign of conservative re­sis­tance to a changing social order.6 Such accounts dovetail with the influential theories of the “rise of the novel” that have linked the novel, and more recently fictionality, with the emergence of modern social life, from the [ 27 ]

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growth of the ­middle class to the ascendance of empirical science, from changing norms of courtship to the rise of the credit economy.7 This establishes an opposition in which a premodern, even antimodern, suspicion of fiction is set against the rise of realist fiction as one of the defining genres of modernity. Within this teleological opposition of modern novel and antimodern antifictional discourse, the republic’s “Founded on Fact” novels are difficult to explain. They are si­mul­ta­neously novels and part of this antifictional discourse. For this reason, critics have tended to read their truth claims as ­either disingenuous attempts to avoid censure or evidence that Americans did not fully grasp the conceptual category of fiction.8 To see ­these claims as evidence of misunderstanding or evasion, however, overlooks a key aspect of early theories of novelistic instruction. Defining their didactic proj­ects in contradistinction to fiction, ­these novels use nonfictionality as a mode of address, to encourage reading for edification rather than entertainment. Produced at a moment when American writers ­were preoccupied with the boundary between fact and fiction, their truth claims are not the kind of ambiguous, pseudofactual invocations of fictional truth prevalent in ­earlier En­glish novels, but self-­conscious rejections of fictionality as a communicative framework. Counterintuitively, understanding the early American novel requires recovering the meaning of nonfictionality in the republic. This introductory chapter revisits the intellectual under­pinnings of the American suspicion of fiction in order to reconsider the relationship between the republic’s antifictional discourse and its first novels and fictions. When we closely examine the arguments against fiction, the teleological opposition of modern fiction and antimodern anx­i­eties about fiction ceases to hold. While critics railed against “modern fiction” and “modern novels,” their concerns about fiction ­were also bound up with the new ways of understanding ­human knowledge that had emerged across the eigh­teenth ­century, especially ­those of Locke. The overlapping concerns of Enlightenment epistemology and the antifictional discourse reveal critiques of fiction to be less antiquated anx­ i­eties indicative of an obsolete worldview than a response to an increasing uncertainty about the reliability of h ­ uman knowledge about the world. No less than the fictionists they condemned, t­ hese critics ­were grappling with the knowledge prob­lems we have long associated with “modernity.” This chapter argues, then, that the prob­lem of fictionality was a profoundly modern one. It contends that the pervasive anxiety about fiction during the 1780s and 1790s was not an outdated concern that would inevitably dissipate with the modern novel’s rise, but a serious intellectual prob­lem with which almost e­ very early novelist and fictionist would grapple. Early national writers—­both fiction’s advocates and its opponents—­regarded this prob­lem as especially urgent for a new republic wrestling with the question of how best to educate its citizenry for the challenges of self-­governance. Understanding the history of fiction in the United States requires first understanding the prob­lem of fictionality.

The Prob­l em of Fictiona lit y [ 29 ]

The Prob­lem of Fictionality In the early United States, t­ here was a pervasive anxiety about the pernicious effects of fiction-­reading on republican society. While ­England’s North American colonies had hardly been a hospitable environment for fiction, colonial Amer­i­ca—­with a few prominent exceptions—­was largely characterized by its indifference, rather than hostility, t­ oward fiction.9 This reflected fiction’s relatively modest role in colonial reading.10 In the 1780s and 1790s, however, fiction exploded in popularity, as the resumption of the imported book trade ­after the Treaty of Paris and the rise of circulating libraries suddenly made an unpre­ce­dented variety of fiction available to American readers, at least in the republic’s urban centers.11 Faced with the increasing prevalence of fiction, Americans produced a voluminous lit­er­a­ture detailing the personal and societal risks of fiction-­reading. They wrote about the dangers of fiction and novels in letters, diaries, sermons, memoirs, conduct manuals, histories, travel narratives, po­liti­cal orations, poems, philosophical treatises, sketches, tales, and even novels themselves. ­There ­were even monographs, such as John Shippen’s Observations on Novel-­Reading (1792), dedicated to the subject.12 Some of ­these condemnations focused on specific genres, most notably the “romance” or “the modern novel,” but many o ­ thers offered more encompassing critiques of all fictional narratives from the ancient writers on. While it varied in its logic and intensity, the suspicion of fiction was widespread in the republic. As has been well documented, Protestant ministers ­were especially vocal critics of fiction, with Presbyterian and Congregationalist leaders offering some of the most influential arguments against the mode.13 Condemnations of fiction and novel-­reading, however, also flowed from the pens of secular and deistical writers. Many of fiction’s prominent critics ­were ministers and theologians, but many o ­ thers w ­ ere statesmen, pedagogues, doctors, editors, and printers. And while ­there is evidence that the prejudice against fiction was less strident in the South than in the Northeast or Mid-­ Atlantic, condemnations of fiction ­were published in Mary­land, ­Virginia, and South Carolina as well as Mas­sa­chu­setts, New York, and Pennsylvania.14 No region, profession, or sect had a mono­poly on anx­i­eties about fiction. Reflections on fiction surfaced intermittently in nearly e­ very genre circulating in the republic, but the most robust discussions of both the dangers and pos­si­ble value of fiction-­reading occurred in periodicals. In the 1780s and 1790s, the burgeoning periodical press offered constant reminders of the threat that fiction posed to the country’s youth. This periodical commentary had a generic variety that mirrored the antifictional discourse more generally: it included essays, reviews, letters, sketches, poems, historical narratives, reprinted orations, and yes, fictional tales. Participating in a much wider debate about how to best educate the republic, periodicals presented themselves as guides for what the nation’s youth should be reading and how they

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should be reading it: “I wish you to be careful in your choice of books,” cautioned the editor of the New York Magazine in 1790. For this editor, as for many o ­ thers, such counsel consisted largely of warnings against fiction: “never [read] Novels and Romances, as t­ here is seldom any good to be derived from them, and they often produce bad effects on the minds of young p ­ eople.”15 Editors claimed to offer the guidance that parents ­were expected, but sometimes failed, to provide: in 1792, the Universal Asylum and Columbian Magazine lamented the “remissness of t­ hose parents who suffer their wards and ­daughters to read, indiscriminately, the multiplicity of novels which are daily published.”16 The vast majority of the “multiplicity of novels” that so worried the Universal Asylum ­were En­glish. Throughout the colonial period, most novels and fictions circulating in the colonies had been En­glish imports, and the trade in imported fictions quickly resumed, and even increased, ­after the Revolutionary War ended. In the late eigh­teenth ­century, book importers also faced new competition as US printers began to issue cheap reprints of British (and to a lesser extent, other Eu­ro­pean) novels. ­Because of the United States’ lack of any international copyright agreement, US printers often preferred reprinting British novels of established popularity to taking risks on unproven American fictions. While American printers still published many fictions by American writers, t­ hese British reprints would dominate the marketplace for fiction in the United States throughout the early nineteenth c­ entury. Moreover, the circulating libraries that w ­ ere many readers’ chief source for fiction stocked mostly En­glish titles.17 The prevalence of foreign fiction in the early United States played into the wider antifictional discourse, as educators, periodical commentators, and even fictionists themselves worried about the effect of such foreign productions on the nation’s youth. Yet, early American anx­ie­ ties about fiction ­were also an En­glish inheritance. The republic’s antifictional critics drew on a robust tradition of En­glish antifictional and antinovel writing.18 And as Jordan Stein has recently shown, the late eighteenth-­century flourishing of antinovel sentiment, in par­tic­u­lar, was a transatlantic phenomenon driven, at least in part, by changes in the London print market: as Protestant organ­izations began to control their own printing presses, they came to recognize pious texts and novels as competitors in a new way, leading to an intensification of Protestant attacks on novel-­reading throughout the Anglophone world.19 Some of the warnings against novel-­reading that circulated most widely in the republic ­were, in fact, reprints of En­glish critiques. Nonetheless, the two histories also diverge in significant ways. While the En­glish antinovel discourse endured throughout the eigh­teenth ­century, En­glish audiences displayed their most virulent re­sis­tance to fiction as a mode between the 1740s and 1760s; in the United States, t­ hese anx­ie­ ties reached their highest pitch in the 1780s and 1790s, when many En­glish writers w ­ ere comfortable with the category of

The Prob­l em of Fictiona lit y [ 31 ]

fiction if not all fictional texts. En­glish writers had worried about the delusions inculcated by fiction—­captured most famously in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752)—­but ­these anx­i­eties had waned by the ­century’s end. Or rather, they had shifted from fiction as a ­whole to specific novels and threatening subgenres, such as the gothic novel and the continental romance. In 1780s and 1790s E ­ ngland, critiques focused not on fiction as a mode, but on the content of fantastical and licentious novels: Jane Austen’s Catharine Morland would replace Lennox’s Arabella. Over t­ hese same years, fiction’s American critics did not generally identify a select subset of dangerous fictions, but tended to condemn the fictional mode itself. The reverend James Gray’s 1810 address on “Female Education” encapsulates the prevailing argument: “To supplant a real­ity by a fiction is a preposterous method of diffusing truth.”20 Even the many critiques that focused on a specific genre—­such as the “romance” or “the modern novel”—­ usually condemned ­these texts on the grounds of their fictionality. That is, even as many American critics w ­ ere especially worried about the dangers of novel-­reading, they argued that novels ­were dangerous, less ­because of any specific content, than ­because they w ­ ere fictional. Early US writers ­were especially preoccupied with the kind of knowledge produced by fiction-­reading. Or more accurately, they ­were preoccupied with ­whether fiction-­reading could produce knowledge at all. Some contended that fiction could not impart knowledge, b ­ ecause it lacked the necessary “real­ity” to impact readers’ minds: “­unless we are convinced of the real­ity of what we read,” warned the Columbian Magazine in 1788, “the impression it makes is not sufficiently profound to be lasting.”21 For t­ hese critics, fiction was pernicious b ­ ecause it distracted from more substantial reading: “your early studies are not always well directed” lamented the American Magazine that same year, “you are permitted to devour a thousand volumes of fictitious nonsense, when a smaller number of books . . . ​would furnish you with a more valuable knowledge.”22 But most critics ­were, on the contrary, very concerned about the lasting impact of the false knowledge produced by fiction: “Novels and romances are very pernicious to youth,” argued the United States Magazine in 1794, “­because they have a direct tendency to give them erroneous ideas of mankind . . . ​[and] h ­ uman nature as exhibited on the real theater of life . . . ​ the influence of which w ­ ill . . . ​remain, through their existence in this world.”23 More than a sign of mere provincial belatedness, the divergence in timing and emphasis between the En­glish and US antifictional discourses reflected the distinctive mix of intellectual and po­liti­cal influences shaping early American culture. The anxiety about the false knowledge produced by fiction was, in part, an extension of a long-­standing Puritan, and more generally Protestant, suspicion of the imagination. Protestant theologians had long regarded the imagination as a source of delusion and associated it with ­either ­human fallibility or the deceptions of Satan. Eighteenth-­century ministers had been

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preoccupied with the challenge of distinguishing the operations of the imagination from the workings of God’s grace. Anx­i­eties about such delusive imaginings received their fullest articulation during the ­Great Awakening, when Jonathan Edwards, Charles Chauncy, and ­others produced a remarkable number of pages delineating how to sort au­then­tic from ­imagined or false conversion. Edwards’s and Chauncy’s opposed accounts of the wave of conversions sweeping New ­England reveal a shared anxiety about the possibility that “the effect of a deluded Imagination” may be mistaken for evidence of grace.24 For such writers, the imagination was not only a frivolous distraction from religious duties, but a means through which Satan led men to perdition by giving them false “knowledge” of their election. While t­ hese colonial ministers gave relatively ­little thought to prose fiction—­especially in comparison to their early national inheritors—­they sometimes invoked fictitious lit­er­a­ture as a foil to “the truth and real­ity” of the “Word of God.”25 This opposition of imaginative works to God’s sacred truth would be formulated more starkly in the early republic: “Between the Bible and novels,” Timothy Dwight declared in 1796, “­there is a gulph fixed which few readers are willing to pass.”26 While early national concerns about fiction w ­ ere influenced by this enduring Protestant suspicion of the imagination, they ­were also ­shaped by new ways of thinking about knowledge that had emerged over the preceding ­century, most notably the philosophy of Descartes and especially Locke and his inheritors.27 Like ­these phi­los­o­phers, fiction’s critics took up the question of how a reflective h ­ uman mind could know the “truth” about an external world. Locke had famously framed questions about h ­ uman knowledge in terms of the degree of “agreement” between ideas in the mind and the external world. Early Americans saw fiction as dangerous exactly ­because it would implant ideas in readers’ minds that did not “agree” or correspond to the “world as it is.” For early Americans, then, the prob­lem of fictionality was an epistemological one. Or more accurately, it was an epistemologizing one: the debates about fiction worked within—­and implanted—an ideology of epistemology, posing the question of knowledge in terms of how an internalized subject could know the truth about an externalized “nature” or “world.”28 Critics w ­ ere especially concerned with how fiction often claimed to offer young readers a kind of substitute experience—­a crucial category for Lockean pedagogy, which advocated learning through example rather than precept. If ­these narratives are not based in fact, critics worried, what guarantee does the inexperienced reader have that they are true to life? Her lack of worldly experience—­the very ­thing she turns to fiction to gain—­renders her unqualified to judge a narrative’s accuracy as a repre­sen­ta­tion of the “world as it is.” “Permit me to caution you against ever making the characters of romance a standard by which to judge character in real life,” warned Gray in the Port-­Folio, “For be assured that the sir Guys and madam Bridgets . . . ​of the novelists are very dif­f er­ent personages from the men and w ­ omen with whom it has pleased God to populate the

The Prob­l em of Fictiona lit y [ 33 ]

world.” The plausibility of many modern fictions only heightened the panic over the mode’s deceptiveness. The misleading pictures of fiction ­were seen as particularly dangerous when they had the specious appearance of truth: “[N]o persons are more apt to err and blunder, when introduced on the stage of real life than ­those whose imaginations have been deeply impressed with the characters of fictitious composition.”29 My point is not that most critics of fiction ­were e­ ither directly influenced by or would have ­wholeheartedly endorsed skeptical or empiricist Enlightenment epistemology. On the contrary, many of them emphatically rejected such doctrines. But in eliciting ­these very objections, such epistemology ­shaped American antifiction. Drawing attention to the limits of h ­ uman perception, Locke and o ­ thers had argued that h ­ umans could never know the external world with certainty: our “knowledge” of even what we regard as “par­tic­u­lar ­matters of fact,” Locke suggested, entails only a greater degree of probability rather than absolute certainty about their truth.30 This increased uncertainty about how one can know the world spurred many writers to insist that factuality was necessary for a text to give readers true knowledge of the world. The early American emphasis on “fact” and “truth” was one response to the uncertainty that had been introduced into questions of knowledge over the course of the eigh­teenth c­ entury. This is most evident in the influence of Scottish Common Sense philosophy on US intellectual life. A self-­conscious response to the arguments of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, Common Sense emphasized the reliability of ­human perception and offered assurance of the validity of conventional Christian morality. Tracing its centrality to early college curriculums, Terence Martin has shown how Common Sense ­shaped American attitudes ­toward the imagination in general and fiction in par­tic­u­lar.31 Drawing a metaphysical distinction between the categories of the pos­si­ble and the ­actual, Common Sense regarded repre­sen­ta­tions of a­ ctual persons and events as possessing a higher degree of real­ity and by extension, having an inherent superiority as vehicles for imparting knowledge. Invoking this “metaphysics of actuality,” pedagogues attacked fiction as a “realm of distortion” that failed to prepare its citizens for lived experience: “romance and fabulous narrative are a species of composition,” wrote John Witherspoon, president of the College of New Jersey and an influential Common Sense advocate, “from which the world hath received as ­little benefit, and as much hurt as any.”32 Common Sense thus provided a power­ful new philosophical justification to the enduring Protestant suspicion of fiction and the imagination at the very moment that fiction became popu­lar in the United States. The Common Sense “metaphysics of actuality” reinforced the opposition between the suspect creations of man’s imagination and God’s perfect, infallible word and creation. But where Edwards and his contemporaries had focused on the challenge of sorting the inward workings of true grace from ­imagined grace,

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post-­revolutionary critics ­were preoccupied with the temerity of writers who usurped God’s providential prerogative by writing fiction: in a 1807 address to “Phi Beta Kappa” (reprinted in the Port-­Folio), Samuel Jarvis declared that fictionists, ­because their narratives have no basis in truth, “are continually liable to give false notions of t­ hings, to pervert the consequences of h ­ uman action, and to misrepresent the ways of divine providence.”33 In their claims to represent “nature,” fictionists ­were, as the Philadelphia Minerva warned in 1798, “weak pretenders” who distorted “divine intention.”34 In this context, fiction was not just a frivolous indulgence, but a blasphemous perversion of God’s creation! For ­these commentators, fiction’s metaphysical inferiority to God’s real­ity had epistemological consequences: “Novel reading I have . . . ​considered as hurtful to the growth and cultivation of the mind b ­ ecause it necessarily excludes or prevents the acquirement of real knowledge, which is nature, the only true and proper revelation of the creator.”35 ­These critics sought to underscore the moral consequences of fiction’s epistemological pitfalls: “Go on therefore, you who write vile novels! croud absurdity upon absurdity; patch deformity with deformity; caricature the works of providence,” wrote the Ladies Magazine and Musical Repository in 1801, “. . . ​twist the paths of Virtue till their end and object are lost: strew t­ hose of vice so thick with flowers, that their characteristics may become equivocal, and their waymarks uncertain.”36 For ­these critics, it was a universally acknowledged truth that fiction’s untruths led directly to immoral be­hav­ior: “­every one knows the effect the general style of novels has on untutored minds,” asserted the Mas­sa­chu­setts Magazine in 1791, “. . . [novels] lead many on the path of vice.”37 To protect readers from such intertwined epistemological and moral pitfalls, fiction’s opponents—­whether pedagogues, ministers, or periodical writers—­set themselves up as the arbiters of the “true” and the “real”: they spilled a remarkable amount of ink demystifying fiction’s “false pictures” in order to protect inexperienced readers. In d ­ oing so, t­ hese critics ­were, in a sense, responsive to an insight of the very Enlightenment epistemology that they often rejected. By arguing for the uncertainty inherent even in our knowledge of facts, Locke had underscored the degree to which our knowledge of the world must be “designated socially,” requiring a form of social consensus mea­sured by “degrees of assent”: the probability of a given fact can be mea­sured only by “the concurrence of individual and communal experience, in which this concurrence can be manifested discursively.”38 In a qualified way, antifictional writers engaged in this very endeavor: in endlessly critiquing the distortions of fiction, they sought to produce a consensus vision of the “world as it is.” They positioned themselves as the voices of a communal understanding of real­ity that the individual, even idiosyncratic, visions of novelists undermined: “novels would seem to have the tendency of obliging us to view nature, not as she is or as she o ­ ught to be, but rather, as novel writers would have her to be.”39

The Prob­l em of Fictiona lit y [ 35 ]

The prevailing assumption that fiction was opposed to the “world of the ­actual” also led to condemnations of the mode on po­liti­cal grounds. As Michael Warner puts it, “Americans endlessly avowed a fear that fiction would detach readers’ sentiments from the social world of the polity, substituting a private drama of fancy.”40 For early Americans, the fairyland of fiction represented a retreat from the duties of civic life. Fiction became associated with t­ hose anathemas to virtue—­luxury, self-­interest, decadence—­that Americans regarded as the downfall of E ­ ngland’s formerly virtuous republic.41 On one hand, such critiques w ­ ere part of a more general suspicion of the arts as an aristocratic frivolity that is also evident in republican attitudes ­toward the visual arts and the theater.42 On the other hand, many republican thinkers believed that prose fiction’s tendency to create delusions and false knowledge made it a unique threat to the nation. The explosion of the antifictional discourse in the 1780s and 1790s suggests how intimately such epistemological anx­i­eties ­were bound up with more general anx­i­eties about the ability of the citizenry to govern itself. Habitual exposure to the distortions of fiction, critics worried, would render the citizenry unfit for participation in a republic. Of the passion for novels, Thomas Jefferson wrote: “When this poison infects the mind . . . ​the result is a bloated imagination, a sickly judgment, and a disgust ­toward all the real businesses of life.”43 A nation raised on the fantasies of fiction would be unfit to confront the realities of politics and assume the responsibilities of self-­government. Republicanism also gave a po­liti­cal valence to worries about fiction-­reading as a gateway to licentiousness, especially for young w ­ omen. A hysteric thread runs through the antifictional discourse that figures fiction-­reading as both a form of and a stepping-­stone to seduction: “Novels, are the favorite and the most dangerous kind of reading, now a­ dopted by the generality of young ladies,” wrote Foster in The Boarding School (1798), “­because the influence, which . . . ​ they must have upon the passions of youth, bears an unfavorable aspect on their purity and virtue. . . . ​Their romantic pictures of love . . . ​fill the imagination with ideas that lead to impure desires.”44 In the countless periodical sketches of female novel-­readers, critics drew a causal link between fiction’s epistemological unreliability and sexual transgression. Fiction’s specious repre­sen­ta­tions of romance, they claimed, inculcated unrealistic expectations for courtship: “Novels not only pollute the imagination of young w ­ omen,” argued the Weekly Magazine in 1798, “but likewise give them false ideas of life, which too often make them act improperly; owing to the romantic turn of thinking they imbibe from their favorite studies.”45 Having gained their knowledge of the world only from fiction, ­these ­women would be vulnerable to rakes: as the Mas­sa­chu­setts Magazine warns its “female readers,” “fatal consequences . . . ​result from reading such chimerical works.”46 While similar concerns circulated in eighteenth-­ century E ­ ngland, they took on a po­liti­cal resonance in the United States, where the republic was often figured as the young w ­ oman Columbia.47 Fiction was regarded as a dual threat to the nation’s intertwined civic and sexual virtue.

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Somewhat paradoxically, fiction also threatened to render ­women old maids. Fiction-­reading was thought to give ­women unrealistic expectations that would lead them to reject v­ iable suitors in the quixotic hope that they might find the idealized hero of fiction.48 Critics thus produced a Janus-­ faced image of the fiction-­reader as both fallen ­woman and spinster. In both cases, the critique of fiction’s epistemological unreliability took on a decidedly moral significance: “A want of knowledge in nature, derived from novels, books which know it not, ­will unavoidably render a female unfit for social life. . . . ​Ignorance intails [sic] upon her a vast number of both physical and moral evils.”49 The policing of such repre­sen­ta­tions of “nature” was, of course, bound up with issues of normative morality and patriarchal social discipline. While framed as questions of knowledge, critiques of fiction ­were often less concerned with questions of empirical accuracy than on ensuring ­women would gain an understanding of “the world as it is” that would produce obedient ­daughters and wives. The divergent portraits of the fiction-­ reader as wanton victim of seduction and delusional old maid ­were linked by an anxiety that fiction would lead to a dissatisfaction with “real life” and a refusal of the prosaic duties of republican wifedom: “Instead of ­houses, inhabited by mere men and ­women, and ­children, [the fiction-­reader] is presented with a succession of splendid palaces and gloomy c­ astles inhabited by tenants, half h ­ uman and half angelic. . . . ​­After a succession of tales . . . ​ she loses contact with real­ity; ­because her taste for living has become too refined, too dainty, for anything found in real life.”50 In this way, fictionality itself became associated with gendered failings, from licentiousness to neglecting domestic duties. The Lockean educational paradigm, the Common Sense suspicion of fiction, and anx­i­eties about young w ­ omen’s reading converge in a 1787 vignette by “Alphonzo” from the influential American Magazine. Maria, who had read “a thousand novels” by age ten, is so taken with “fictitious descriptions of life” that she covertly books passage to Eu­rope in the hopes of becoming “an eye witness of the scenes which are described in novels and romances.” Disappointed by t­ hese “adventures,” Maria loses her “relish” for novels. She ends up scolding the romantic hero (and the sketch’s putative author) for his fictionality and embarking on a new kind of education: “She wishes for instruction,” the dejected hero laments, “Instead of fiction, she wishes to find truth and conform to it.” Recognizing that she is “young, unsuspecting, and susceptible,” Maria turns to real p ­ eople rather than fiction as a guide for her be­hav­ior: “she begs her friends to point out her faults, and she listens to advice with a lively expression of plea­sure.”51 The best antidote to the false impressions and behavioral vagaries produced by fiction-­reading, “Alphonzo” suggests, is submission to the guidance and surveillance of more experienced persons. For a young w ­ oman, “conform[ing] to truth” means conforming to the social consensus represented by her “friends.”

The Prob­l em of Fictiona lit y [ 37 ]

The vari­ous influences—­from Puritan theology to republican po­liti­cal ideology—­that dovetailed to produce the republic’s uniquely virulent suspicion of fiction w ­ ere sometimes in tension with each other, but American antifictional writers almost all shared a concern about the social effects of the false knowledge produced by fiction. They agreed that fiction’s epistemological unreliability threatened to destabilize the communal vision of “truth” that undergirded republican society. Nearly e­ very American fiction and novel written during the half ­century following in­de­pen­dence grappled with ­these anx­ i­eties about the moral and epistemological pitfalls of fiction-­reading and they often closely echoed antifictional critiques. Critics have often seen this as evidence that the antifictional prejudice produced fiction and novels defined by ­either their defensive duplicity or their distorted understanding of the mode. Such narratives of repression overlook how early US fictionists, in fact, developed new theories of fiction’s value within the terms set by ­these epistemological critiques. Unlike fiction’s critics, t­ hese writers believed that fiction could serve as a valuable source of knowledge. But they shared with fiction’s most strident opponents a preoccupation with determining exactly what kind of knowledge could be gained by reading narratives without a basis in fact. While this moment’s epistemological uncertainty led many writers to place a greater emphasis on “fact” and “truth,” it spurred o ­ thers to embrace the speculative, probabilistic knowledge produced by fiction. Before turning to the often-­unfamiliar arguments that early US writers mounted for fiction’s value as a source of knowledge, I first want to consider one other genre of the antifictional discourse: the novel. Founded in Fiction traces two divergent responses to the intertwined antinovel and antifictional discourses. Much of it focuses on writers who disavowed the novel genre in an attempt to salvage fictionality from a genre associated with frivolity, privacy, and licentiousness. But the following section takes up writers who sought to sever the novel from its suspicious fictionality as a means of harnessing the popu­lar genre for educative ends. The early republic’s preachers, pedagogues, and politicians ­were preoccupied with the epistemological dangers of fiction, but so too ­were its novelists.

Founded on Fact The earliest—­and best-­selling—­American novels insisted that they ­were not fictional. For twenty-­first-­century readers, this is a difficult idea to grasp. While we recognize a variety of fictional genres, “fiction” and “novel” often function as synonyms in our literary histories. As the very idea of a “Founded on Fact” novel can seem paradoxical to modern critics, they have often treated ­these truth claims as disingenuous, evasive responses to the ascendant antifictional culture: “In such duplicity,” writes Davidson of The Power of Sympathy’s truth claims, “begins Amer­i­ca’s first novel and American fiction.”52 This is not

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wrong exactly—­these writers ­were responding to the suspicion of fiction—­but it does not fully capture how nonfictional address is an essential part of their novelistic proj­ects. As long as we assume that the origins of the American novel neatly correspond to the origins of American fiction, the text’s insistence on its nonfictionality cannot be integrated into our understanding of it as a novel. While I am referring to t­ hese “Founded on Fact” novels as nonfictional, I do not mean to suggest that they are strictly factual. Rather, I use this term in order to capture how they define their proj­ects in explicit contradistinction to fiction. For this reason, t­ hese novels resist easy integration into the two ascendant paradigms for understanding the ambiguously fictional novels of the eigh­teenth ­century: Lennard Davis’s “factual fictions” and Nicholas Paige’s “pseudofactual novels.”53 Davis influentially traced the origins of the En­glish novel to early modern news ballads—­a genre that included both topical news and ambiguously fictional narratives—­charting the gradual emergence of the novel from this undifferentiated “news-­novel matrix.” Responding to Gallagher, Paige has more recently argued that most eighteenth-­century novels ­were not truly fictional, but represented a liminal stage of novelistic development, which he refers to as “pseudofactual.” For Paige, the distinction between pseudofactual novels and fiction proper (which he sees as arising in the nineteenth ­century) inheres in their paratextual truth claims: he argues that for eighteenth-­century novelists, such as Richardson and Rousseau, even patently fictional truth claims w ­ ere understood as enhancing a work’s “truth.” Early US “Founded on Fact” novels, however, do not fit comfortably into e­ ither paradigm. Unlike Davis’s “factual fictions,” ­these novels ­were written during a period in which the conceptual and generic lines dividing “truth” from “fiction” had been firmly established, and, in fact, t­ hese novels are preoccupied with the difference between t­ hese categories. Unlike Paige’s “pseudofactual novels,” ­these novels are committed not to an alternative theory of fictional truth but to a rejection of fictionality as a communicative framework. Their proj­ects of novelistic education depend on their nonfictional address. William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy, for example, stages a disavowal of fictionality to signal its educative ambitions and testify to its pedagogical potential. Its preface notes that “Novels have ever met with a ready reception into the Libraries of Ladies, but this species of writing hath not been received with universal approbation.” Brown sets out to reform this popu­ lar but suspicious genre: The Power of Sympathy is an “attempt . . . ​to make ­these studies more advantageous” by exposing “the dangerous consequences of SEDUCTION” and recommending “the Advantages of FEMALE EDUCATION” (7). The novel’s paratexts make a double move of distinction, differentiating it from other novels on the grounds of both its proj­ect (education rather than entertainment) and its mode (“Truth” rather than fiction).54 The narrative that follows reveals the close interrelation of ­these claims to distinction. The Power of Sympathy is an epistolary seduction narrative, which mixes

The Prob­l em of Fictiona lit y [ 39 ]

prophetic dreams, incest, and intergenerational curses with the prosaic concerns of conduct manuals. Before its gothic climax, the novel consists largely of discussions of female education and reading that recall the essays filling con­temporary periodicals. Brown’s novel offers a dialogic encapsulation of the antinovel discourse, with an old patriarch, Mr. Holmes, voicing common critiques of novels (“Most novels with which our female libraries are overrun . . . ​ appear to me totally unfit to form the minds of ­women, of friends, or of wives”) and a “young miss” embodying antifiction’s fears about the mode’s frivolity (“I read as much as any body, and though it may afford amusement . . . ​I do not remember a single word”). Brown’s avatar, the rather wooden Mr. Worthy, agrees that the typical fiction-­reader has formed a naïve view of the world: “she finds, when, perhaps, it is too late, that she has entertained wrong notions of ­human nature . . . ​she falls a sacrifice to her credulity.” But Worthy also qualifies this criticism: “I am far from condemning ­every production. . . . ​If ­there are corrupt or mortified members, it is hardly fair to destroy the w ­ hole body.” Embracing a belief that would become common in the early nineteenth ­century, Worthy insists that novels cannot be treated as a class and turns the discussion to the question of what characterizes useful novels. Worthy and Holmes ultimately agree that “­those books which teach us a knowledge of the world are useful to form the minds of females, and o ­ ught therefore to be studied” (21–23). A novel can only educate, Brown suggests, if it provides “a knowledge of the world” that is both accurate and reliable. At this moment in which Brown closely echoes the antifictional discourse, he also establishes the “truth” of his own novel by authenticating its claims with reference to known facts. In warning against the dangers of unreliable fictions, Worthy invokes the case of Elizabeth Whitman, a young ­woman from Connecticut: “The story of Miss Whitman is an emphatical illustration of the truth of ­these observations.” Brown even provides an extended footnote recounting Whitman’s story: “She was a ­great reader of novels and romances, and having imbibed her ideas of the characters of men, from t­ hose fallacious sources, became vain and coquettish,” leading her to turn down many worthy suitors and eventually run off with an unworthy one (23). In the interplay between Worthy’s statement and the attached note, Brown not only substantiates the “truth” of Whitman’s well-­known story, but also, by staging such authentication, distinguishes his own “Novel, Founded in Truth,” from the deceptive, fictional novels that doomed Whitman. This novel, Brown implicitly suggests, fulfills Worthy’s criteria for an instructional book: it offers accurate “knowledge of the world.” Invoking the same incident, Foster’s The Coquette; or the History of Eliza Wharton; A Novel; Founded on Fact (1797) offers an even more dramatic instance of this kind of intrageneric distinction. In Whitman’s story—­even fictionalized as the History of Eliza Wharton—­The Coquette finds a cautionary

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tale about the profound effect that novels can have on female conduct. In a crucial moment, Foster has Eliza’s friend respond to her in revealing fashion: “Your truly romantic letter . . . ​would make a pretty figure in a novel. A bleeding heart, slighted love, and all the et ceteras of romance, enter into the composition!” (190). The coy humor of this comment, of course, lies in the fact that it appears in a novel, as The Coquette is explic­itly designated in its subtitle. But this nonetheless serves as a move of intrageneric differentiation, highlighting that Foster’s “Founded on Fact” novel represents a profoundly dif­fer­ent kind of novel from ­those read by Eliza. Foster suggests that her novel has a repre­sen­ta­tional accuracy that t­ hose novels do not, rendering The Coquette capable of demystifying this exact romantic worldview. (Eliza’s friends consistently deploy the language of antifiction—­“ignus fatuus,” “delusions of fancy,” “strangely infatuated” [149]—in describing her seduction.) Again, the superiority of factual narratives to fictional ones—­their greater reliability as a source of knowledge about “­things as they are”—­represents a means of legitimating Foster’s educative proj­ect: The Coquette’s ability to serve as a novelistic antidote to novel-­reading depends on its foundation in “Fact.”55 While Whitman’s story authenticates the overarching narrative of The Coquette, it serves as a more l­ imited form of evidence in The Power of Sympathy, verifying Worthy’s local claim about novel-­reading. But while this footnote is anomalous in Brown’s novel, it is part of a network of claims that establish the novel’s basis in ­actual events. Most famously, the novel’s inset narrative “The Story of Ophelia” is a tale of seduction and incest that corresponded to recent events in Boston. Unlike l­ ater novelists who would argue for the genre’s unique potential for moral exemplification on the grounds of fiction’s malleability, Brown stakes his novel’s claim to instructional value on its “observations” about “facts”: “It is the duty of the moralist . . . ​to deduce his observations from preceding facts in such a manner as may directly improve the mind” (42). Brown’s ideal didactic novelist is no fabulist, but a kind of moral historian, who offers educative interpretations of recent events. Moments such as the Whitman footnote or the “Ophelia” narrative, however, underscore that not all incidents in Brown’s novel receive this kind of authentication. The conflation of “truth” with fact—­explicit in the Whitman note; implicit in the “Story of Ophelia”—­does not extend to the entire narrative. On one hand, ­these moments of factuality testify to the novel’s “truth” as a w ­ hole, providing a kind of suggestive authentication for the entire narrative. On the other, the con­ spic­u­ous limits of this factual authentication as the basis of the novel’s “truth” point to other standards of “truth,” such as repre­sen­ta­tional accuracy, which are not necessarily continuous with strict factuality. “The Story of Ophelia,” for example, is itself factual, but it also authenticates the narrative’s primary story of seduction: it suggests that similar events occur in real life, even as this main narrative does not have corresponding real-­world referents. In this slippage, Brown gestures ­toward the educative value not only of the factual novel—­the

The Prob­l em of Fictiona lit y [ 41 ]

case he makes explic­itly—­but for a more capacious understanding of novelistic “truth”: the ability to impart “knowledge of the world.” This brings us to the other side of Brown’s argument about reading: even more than selecting the correct works, young w ­ omen must read correctly if they are to learn from it. Worthy repeatedly responds to questions about what young ­women should be reading, with comments on how they should be reading: “If you read with any design to improve your mind in virtue . . . ​you should be careful to read methodically.” For Brown, this methodical reading requires working to “discern . . . ​what may be merely amusing and what may be useful.” This ­will prevent “the imagination [from becoming] heated”—­a common worry about fiction—­and allow w ­ omen to learn from t­ hose books that do accurately reflect real­ity. “General reading” or unmethodical reading “­will not teach her a true knowledge of the world” (22–23). Brown makes this point even more emphatically when, in a passage discussed in my introduction, he has Mrs. Holmes pre­sent Myra with a text as a “didactick essay” rather than “as a novel,” suggesting the importance of genre as a means of eliciting reading practices: approaching the text “as a novel” would mean treating it as a “sprightly narrative” or “pleasing tale” rather than a work “that inculcates the duty we owe to ourselves, to society, and the Deity” (53). ­Here, Brown acknowledges that the designation “novel”—­with its connotations of unreality, escapism, and unthinking consumption—­usually encourages reading for plot and amusement, rather than for morality and edification. The same text can be read e­ ither as a “didactick essay” or as a “novel,” and the reader’s generic approach determines its educational efficacy. This theory of genre clarifies the function of The Power of Sympathy’s subtitular truth claims. “Habituate your mind to remark the difference between truth and fiction,” Mrs. Holmes tells Myra in this same letter, “You ­will then be capable of deducing the most profitable lessons of instruction, and the design of your reading ­will be fully accomplished.” The association of “truth” and reading for “instruction” h ­ ere crystallizes the theory of didactic reading underpinning the novel’s claim to be “Founded in Truth”: even if Brown’s assertion of “truth” does not represent a claim for the narrative’s strict factuality, it seeks to remove the novel from the dubious realm of the fictional as a means of signaling its didactic ambitions and encouraging readers to approach it as a source of education. In other words, this truth claim is a means of orienting readers ­toward the kind of “methodical reading” that Brown believes is necessary for readers to learn from the narrative. The novel’s argument thus involves less a categorical rejection of fiction’s educative potential than an argument for fiction’s ability to instruct if it is read in a “methodical” way. Yet even this must be qualified: for if The Power of Sympathy suggests that its “truth” might extend beyond its authenticated facts, its intrageneric argument also depends on the suggestive authentication of select facts in the narrative. This is what allows Brown to set up his novelistic proj­ect in contradistinction to fiction. In the

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early republic, nonfictionality—in this capacious sense—­establishes a communicative framework associated with education rather mere entertainment and it is used to urge readers to read for the work’s “most profitable lessons” as well as its “sprightly narrative.” The pervasiveness of such truth claims in early novels can give them an air of mere conventionality. Yet, taken on their own terms, it is striking just how consistently early writers pre­sent their didactic proj­ects as hinging on readers not approaching their novels as fictions. Rowson, for instance, distinguishes Charlotte ­Temple, A Tale of Truth (1791) from fictional novels by insisting that she has learned Charlotte’s story from someone who knew her personally. According to Rowson, this factual basis is what legitimates her “Tale of Truth” as a vehicle for instruction: “For the perusal of the young and thoughtless of the fair sex, this Tale of Truth is designed; and I could wish my readers to consider it as not merely the effusion of fancy, but as a real­ity.”56 Charlotte ­Temple’s status as a “real­ity” rather than “an effusion of fancy” is a guarantor of its reliability as a source of knowledge about the world and its ability to provide a substitute experience for readers. But like Brown’s ambiguous deployment of “Truth,” Rowson’s preface hints at the possibility of authorial invention—­“designed” in what way?—­suggesting that her truth claims serve not just to legitimate the work’s pedagogical potential, but to establish a pedagogical framework for reading in the first place. Rowson’s preface suggests that fictionality signals an orientation ­toward mere entertainment. To learn from a text, readers must “consider it . . . ​as a real­ity.” Rowson emphasizes her heroine’s real­ity in order to ratify the readerly emotional investment—­“I am writing a Tale of Truth; I mean to write it to the heart”—on which her sentimental pedagogy depends.57 Young ­women, argued critics such as the physician and educational theorist Benjamin Rush, often wasted their sympathy on imaginary beings, while ignoring real suffering: “The abortive sympathy which is excited by the recital of imaginary distress, blunts the heart to that which is real; and, hence, we sometimes see instances of young ladies, who weep away a w ­ hole forenoon over the criminal sorrows of a fictitious Charlotte or Werter, turning with disdain at two ­o’clock from the sight of a beggar.”58 Some writers even claimed fiction could never truly engage readers’ sympathy: “However fond of novels and romances you may be, the unfortunate adventures of my neighbours, who died yesterday, w ­ ill make you despise fiction, in which, knowing the subject to be fabulous, we can never be truly interested.”59 It is only by “consider[ing]” Charlotte a “real­ity,” Rowson suggests, that readers can truly feel for her and it is only by feeling for Charlotte that they can learn from her errors. In spite of divergences in how they understand their text’s nonfictionality to underpin its educative proj­ect, ­there is a remarkable consistency to how ­these dif­fer­ent “Tales of Truth” use nonfictionality to urge their readers to learn from their narratives. ­Whether they sought to affirm a narrative’s epistemological

The Prob­l em of Fictiona lit y [ 43 ]

reliability, ratify emotional investment in it, or both, t­ hese writers disavowed fictionality as a means of eliciting a didactic reading practice. This is the metageneric ur-­gesture of the nonfictional novel. Unlike Davis’s “factual fictions,” ­these narratives’ educative proj­ects invoke, even depend upon, a clear conceptual opposition between their own narratives and fiction. Unlike Paige’s “pseudofactual novels,” their truth claims are ­either verifiable or seem to have been taken seriously by many con­temporary readers.60 Modern scholars might dismiss t­ hese truth claims as duplicitous or merely conventional, but it is on such claims that t­ hese narratives staked their educational legitimacy. Yet while t­ hese novels defined their proj­ects in contradistinction to fiction, their capacious understanding of what counts as nonfictional was often challenged. In 1807, P. D. Manvill published Lucinda, or the Mountain Mourner, an epistolary narrative recounting her stepdaughter’s seduction and death.61 Lucinda opens with claims to “Truth” and factuality that recall Charlotte ­Temple and The Coquette: it “depend[s] for its recommendation, on the sacred truths it contains . . . ​­shall we . . . ​while the tears of sensibility flow in torrents, at the doubtful sufferings of fictitious greatness, refuse the gentle tribute to the suffering d ­ aughter of humility” (11). Unlike in Charlotte ­Temple, however, authorial testimony does not suffice as evidence of factuality. Lucinda has been ratified by ten prominent local citizens, including two ministers and a l­ awyer: We the undernamed, having perused the Book . . . ​recommend it to . . . ​ the American public, and particularly to the young and inexperienced, as possessing, from its being founded on realities, superior merit to most publications of a similar nature. It contains, according to the best information (and some of us are thoroughly acquainted with many of the circumstances therein recorded) a narrative statement of the most incontestable facts; and is well calculated to afford not only amusement, but useful instruction. (1) Lucinda’s claim to educative usefulness is not simply its factuality, but its claim to be more factual—­that is, more verifiably factual—­than other “Founded on Fact” narratives. Bringing such public, masculine authority to bear on its narrative’s facts, Lucinda implicitly challenges the terms on which many ­earlier “Tales of Truth” had claimed to be nonfictional. Factuality is not just about what happened, but about who ratifies a given account. In the early United States, not every­one’s truths ­were regarded as self-­evident. Born of a deeply antifictional culture, ­these “Founded on Fact” novels are not a transitional form of fiction, but texts that define their proj­ects in self-­ conscious contradistinction to fiction. Varying in their strategies of authentication, t­ hese narratives are ultimately linked less by any shared understanding of what counts as “truth,” “real­ity,” or even “fact,” than by their shared rejection of fiction as a vehicle for education. In their repetitive insistence on their difference from fiction, they produce a remarkably coherent sense of fiction’s

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meaning in the republic: associated with fantasy and entertainment rather than real­ity and education, the mode signaled frivolity, immorality, and especially, unreliability. The ensuing half ­century would see both the emergence of an array of narratives that sought to disentangle “truth” from factuality and a widespread ac­cep­tance of the possibility of fictional “truth” in periodical discussions of fiction that would have been unimaginable in the 1790s. But while “Founded on Fact” novels would never again be as prevalent as they ­were in the 1790s, they would continue to be published through the m ­ iddle of the nineteenth ­century. Vari­ous events and controversies, such as the financial crash of 1837 or the intensifying strug­gle over slavery in the 1850s, would intermittently heighten anx­i­eties about fictionality and provoke a new wave of “Founded on Fact” narratives. Writers and movements that sought to harness the novel genre for new purposes, such as advocating temperance, would often return to the kinds of claim to factual basis that had prevailed in the 1790s.62 Such “Founded on Fact” narratives, however, would increasingly enter a literary field characterized by a host of competing conceptions of “truth,” many of which resisted the narrow equation of “truth” with factuality or a basis in ­actual events that had often been assumed in the early republic. In general, early fictionists did not simply dismiss the intertwined epistemological and moralistic worries about fiction as naïve or misguided, but developed and articulated their theories of fiction’s value in conversation with t­ hese concerns. What certain writers recognized is that, no less than nonfictionality, fictionality could be used to encourage a specific readerly approach to a narrative. But where the “Founded on Fact” novels invoked fictionality’s implicit cultural meaning, fictionists often had to explic­itly argue against the widely accepted meaning of fictionality as a sign of a text’s unreliability and frivolity. In the early United States, the meaning of fictionality as mode of address was continuously contested and endlessly re­imagined.

Founded in Fiction Seeking to untether the popu­lar novel genre from its suspicious fictionality, nonfictional novels would provide the modal other against which early fictionists would define their works’ logics of fictionality. This is most evident in William Hill Brown’s own changing understanding of novelistic didacticism. Eigh­teen years ­after The Power of Sympathy broke ground for the novel in the United States, Brown’s Ira and Isabella was published posthumously. Brown’s second novel rewrites his first, reproducing The Power of Sympathy’s plot only to reverse it in its final pages: seduction perpetrated by an older generation again leads to an incestuous love among a younger one, but this time, a second revelation discloses that two seductions have been concealed! Ira and Isabella are not, in fact, related. Instead of death by grief and suicide, as in The Power of Sympathy, Ira and Isabella closes with a virtuous marriage. Ira and Isabella,

The Prob­l em of Fictiona lit y [ 45 ]

however, not only revises the plot of Brown’s first novel, but also reverses its subtitle: Ira and Isabella is unapologetically “A Novel, Founded in Fiction.” Brown remains committed to novelistic instruction, but he no longer tethers the novel’s didactic efficacy to its nonfictionality. Or even more than this, Brown suggests that Ira and Isabella’s fictionality makes it a more effective vehicle for instruction. This change in Brown’s theory of novelistic didacticism reflects a wider shift in the discourse about fiction between the 1780s and the early 1800s that I explore in chapter 3. H ­ ere, I only want to take up Ira and Isabella’s fictional logic to show how harnessing fictionality for education required recoding the meaning of fictionality as a communicative framework. Where The Power of Sympathy sought to associate the nonfictional novel with history, Ira and Isabella’s preface situates the novel in a very dif­fer­ent generic lineage—­a tradition of imaginative lit­er­a­ture, encompassing Homer, Shakespeare, Spenser, French “Fairyism,” and Oriental Tales.63 While regarding the novel in this “literary” tradition is commonsensical for modern readers, it was a minority position in the republic, where novels ­were often critiqued and defended as a form of history. Brown’s innovative—­though not completely original—­move is to reframe novelistic fiction as a constrained form of e­ arlier fantastical genres, rather than a debased form of history. Brown laments “the want of machinery in modern novels”: “I am unwarrantably forbidden, by the corrupt minds of idle readers, to introduce fairies and enchanters as a help to enable me—to make a book” (viii–­x). In an unusual move for an early novelist, Brown highlights the artificiality of the “modern novel.” The rules governing fictional stories may have changed, but this has not, Brown argues, changed the shaping role of the author’s imaginative fancy: the conclusion of a novel—­say a virtue rewarding marriage—­differs from a super­natural deus ex machina in degree rather than kind. Situating the modern novel in this lineage of fantastical narratives allows Brown to reframe the prob­lem of fictionality in three distinct but related ways. First, it emphasizes the quotidian nature of modern fiction rather than its nonfactuality—­its resemblance to everyday life rather than its lack of basis in a­ ctual events: whereas Spenser and the “divine Shakespeare” could soar on the “pinions of invention” and undertake “a new creation of super­natural agents,” the modern novelist must be content with the more “moderate” proj­ect of moral didacticism—­“to allure the untutored mind to the practice of virtue by an example which is rewarded, and to deter it from vice by the repre­sen­ta­tion of misery” (xii). Second, this generic lineage denies novelistic fiction’s novelty, both associating modern novels with the more prestigious works of Spenser and especially Shakespeare and pushing back against the tendency to regard the novel’s popularity as a sign of modern society’s degeneracy.64 Countering complaints about, in Noah Webster’s words, the “new-­fangled taste for fiction,” Brown insists on the nonspecificity of novelistic fictionality at a moment in

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which the novel’s fictionality was identified as a new threat to society.65 Last, and most importantly, this lineage shifts the framework for evaluating novels: no less than fantastical tales, Brown argues, “modern novels” should not be judged on their correspondence to the “world as it is.” Where The Power of Sympathy had presented the novelist as a kind of moral historian, Ira and Isabella insists that the standards of history, such as factuality and strict mimetic accuracy, are inappropriate standards for judging novels. In the narrative itself, Brown appropriates and transforms the contention that fiction-­reading separates readers from social life and the world. Ira’s rakish friends decry his substitution of book-­learning for experience: “Learn, my friend, a l­ittle self-­knowledge of the world, and unlearn a ­great deal of your book-­knowledge. For books only instruct us in the interests of ­human nature, the duties of philanthropy, or, in other words, to regard o ­ thers, and forget ourselves” (25). Brown has his rakes echo critiques of credulous fiction-­readers, who are unprepared for social life ­because they have immersed themselves in books; but he voices such critiques in order to question them, valorizing credulity as a sign of virtue. This dramatically reframes the intertwined epistemological and moral questions about fiction’s reliability. Where most critics argued that fiction’s failure to provide accurate “knowledge of the world” leads to readers’ corruption, Brown suggests that it is exactly such worldly knowledge that represents the greatest threat to virtue. Setting selfish “knowledge of the world” against the decidedly moral “book-­knowledge,” Brown establishes a framework in which fiction can serve as a superior vehicle for knowledge and by extension, moral edification, ­because it does not reproduce the “world as it is.” “Knowledge” of this debased social world only produces corruption. In positing “book-­knowledge” as more edifying than worldly experience, Brown rejects the ascendant theory of novelistic instruction: instead of a substitute for worldly experience, Brown’s novel offers an alternative to it. Where many early novels, including The Power of Sympathy, sought to establish their ability to provide readers with an accurate substitute experience of the “world as it is” by asserting their basis in “Truth” and “Fact,” Ira and Isabella seizes upon another resonance of “the world”—­the beau monde or the urban world of stylish gentility.66 This allows Brown to appropriate the anxiety that fiction separates readers from the “world” as a virtue and posit his own novel—­the lone early American novel that claims to be “Founded in Fiction”—as an alternative to the corrupting influences of fash­ion­able urban society. In opposing Ira’s retired rural reading to urban dissipation, Brown realigns the novel—­ usually associated with this very urban dissipation—­with the otium ideal of literary retirement and pastoral retreat, setting up the genre as a means of cultivating the natu­ral sensibility, morality, and modesty that fash­ion­able city life corrupts.67 ­Here, the shift from “Founded in Truth” to “Founded in Fiction” represents not merely the falling away of an outdated generic convention, but a change in how Brown understands novels to educate. The Power of

The Prob­l em of Fictiona lit y [ 47 ]

Sympathy’s claim to provide both an accurate “knowledge of the world” and a substitute for experience—­a claim legitimated by its basis in a­ ctual events—­ has been displaced by a fictional logic that valorizes the novel’s content as opposed to worldly experience. Rejecting epistemological critiques of fiction, Brown embraces fictionality’s perceived separation from the “world as it is” as a sign of his novel’s purity and its potential to offer a moral “knowledge” that w ­ ill teach readers to serve “the interests of h ­ uman nature” and fulfill “the duties of philanthropy.” The novel’s ending, however, complicates this argument by returning to questions about the narrative’s relation to “­things as they are.” Having learned that they are siblings, Ira and Isabella decide to live out their lives in chaste companionship. Their plan is interrupted by the return of Ira’s guardian, Mr. Savage, who had been absent when their kinship was revealed. Savage relates a tale right out of a seduction novel: in his youth, he had seduced a ­woman named Lucinda and convinced the doctor (Isabella’s f­ ather and anonymous benefactor) to tell his nurse that Ira was his bastard as well. In addition to reversing the tragic ending of The Power of Sympathy, this tale revises the logic of most seduction novels. As Savage puts it: [G]entlemen who edify the world by writing novels . . . ​presume it for the interest of morality to represent misfortune and death as the consequence of indiscretion. The vivacity of Lucinda could by no means coalesce in the moral opinions of t­ hose novelists. She did not . . . ​die out of complaisance to ­these rulers of nature. But notwithstanding her slip found means to secure an honest, industrious husband. I would not willingly make one remark inimical to good morals, but as I am not a professed dealer in lit­er­a­ture, I may be allowed to speak the truth. (115) This seems to reassert the claim on which The Power of Sympathy had staked its didactic proj­ect by setting Ira and Isabella against overdetermined, moralistic seduction novels on the grounds of its superior “truth.” Yet the modal frame within which this claim occurs—­a novel “Founded in Fiction”—­means that this metageneric move does not reproduce The Power of Sympathy’s nonfictional logic. Strikingly, this commentary on novels comes from the character who provides a happy ending through an unexpected revelation: Savage is the “natu­ral” means of producing a stunning “conclusion”—­a modern deus ex machina. Brown thus gives this truth claim to the very character who serves as a reminder of the text’s constructedness and fictionality. Savage might reject the moralism of novel plots in f­ avor of “truth,” but Brown’s use of him as a piece of narrative “machinery” resists the equation of Ira and Isabella with ­either factuality or a strict mirroring of the world “as it is.” Framed by the text’s explicit artifice, Savage’s “Truth” claim resonates as a rejection of both an easy equivalence of fact and truth and a narrow plot-­determining moralism. That is, the novel suggests the inadequacy of merely reflecting the world as a means

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of inculcating virtue, but it also rejects morally driven plots that punish seduction with death as inadequate to lived experience. Ira and Isabella suggests that nonfictional novels, in their narrow use of certain “facts,” have produced a vision of “real­ity” does not reflect the complexity of life “as it is.” While t­ here is undeniably tension between the terms on which Brown advocates fiction’s moral usefulness and his critique of the plot-­driving moralism of seduction novels, Ira and Isabella is nonetheless a sophisticated engagement with the prevailing assumptions about fictionality in the republic. In an eerie echo of Lucinda—­published the same year—­Brown rewrites the archetypal seduction tale, offering a narrative in which seduction is condemned but the fallen ­woman redeemed in the name of “Truth.” Yet this “Truth” does not simply represent a claim to factuality or even repre­sen­ta­tional accuracy. Emphasizing the shaping power of the fictionist, Brown posits fiction not as a means of reflecting the world, but of reshaping it—of providing a moral vision that w ­ ill inculcate virtue in its readers. The artificiality of this vision does not preclude its usefulness; rather, it serves as a condemnation of real­ity’s failure to correspond to it. The fictionist has appropriated critiques of fiction’s false pictures of the world as a means of staging his narrative’s distance from worldly corruption. If Ira and Isabella’s moral vision is rather conventional—­ emphasizing natu­ral sentiment and chaste virtue—­its embrace of fiction’s potential to posit an alternative vision of society is a profoundly unconventional argument for this moment. Ira and Isabella’s didactic proj­ect thus depends upon what Richard Walsh calls a rhetorical use of fictionality: Brown uses fictional address to encourage readers to approach the narrative as a source of moral edification that is opposed to the corrupt social world of the early republic. Just as The Power of Sympathy used nonfictional address to urge readers to approach its narrative as a source of “knowledge of the world” and “profitable lessons of instruction” rather than mere entertainment, Ira and Isabella uses fictionality to urge readers to read for a par­tic­ul­ ar kind of instruction: it establishes a communicative framework that encourages them to focus on the idealized virtues of its protagonists rather than what the narrative can teach them about the fallen “world as it is.” Fictionality, for Brown, is a signal to readers that this text offers a distinctive kind of moral “book-­knowledge” rather than merely “knowledge of the world.” Brown’s (contested) status as the first American novelist has long made him a popu­lar starting point for histories of the American novel. Neatly encapsulating the debates about novel-­reading, The Power of Sympathy reveals the conditions ­under which the novel emerged in the United States. But it is Brown’s lesser-­known, second novel—­his first fiction—­that crystallizes this book’s ambition to recover the varied reasons that certain writers chose to embrace fiction in such a stridently antifictional culture. Such a proj­ect requires shifting our focus from the rise of the novel to the myriad logics of fictionality circulating in the early republic.

ch a p t er t wo

Republican Fictions

w h e n ch a r l e s brock de n brow n sent Thomas Jefferson a copy of Wieland (1798) accompanied by a defense of his book “as a fiction,” he directed his “American Tale” ­toward the world of politics. Addressing the vice president with this defense, Brown insisted on his fiction’s public relevance, but he also demonstrated his awareness that it occupied a fraught position in the republic, where many pedagogues and politicians, including Jefferson himself, argued that fiction distracted readers from civic affairs and “the business of real life.” By orienting his book to the po­liti­cal sphere Jefferson embodied, Brown rejected the republican association of fiction with isolated imaginative indulgence rather than po­liti­cal engagement. He was not alone. This chapter considers three writers—­Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Royall Tyler, and Brown—­who argued that fiction could be a vehicle for, rather than a threat to, civic virtue. Where many Americans regarded fiction as both a source and sign of po­liti­cal corruption, ­these writers saw fictionality as an invaluable tool for negotiating the partisan and sectarian crises that w ­ ere transforming republican politics in the late 1790s. Working in the wake of Davidson’s field-­defining study, Americanists have long debated the po­liti­cal implications of the novel’s rise in the republic.1 This sustained focus on the novel, however, has obscured how many of this era’s best-­known texts made the fictional mode, rather than the novel genre, central to their po­liti­cal proj­ects. Tyler, Brackenridge, and Brown each believed that fiction’s unique form of suppositional reference made it peculiarly suited for confronting the challenges of modern republicanism, from fostering impersonal po­liti­cal discourse to training shrewd citizens. Shifting our focus from the novel genre to the structures of supposition associated with fictionality allows for a reconsideration of some the most enduringly influential frameworks for understanding early US fiction, from our models of the public sphere to our accounts of fiction’s role in imagining the nation to our ascendant methods for recovering a fiction’s politics or, in Tompkins’s influential phrase, the “cultural work” it performs. [ 49 ]

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This chapter brings together three roughly contemporaneous but very dif­ fer­ent fictions—­Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry (1792–1815) is a multivolume picaresque satire; Tyler’s The Algerine Captive (1797) is a captivity narrative set on the Barbary Coast; Brown’s Wieland (1798) is a tale of gothic horror—­that sought to intervene in distinct controversies in republican po­liti­cal culture: debates about the norms of po­liti­cal discourse, about national unity, and about educating the citizenry, respectively. In spite of their divergent po­liti­cal commitments, party affiliations, and regional perspectives, ­these writers shared a belief in the po­liti­cal utility of fiction’s distinctive modes of supposition. Working within a framework of value—­civic virtue—­that they shared with fiction’s critics, Brackenridge, Tyler, and Brown developed highly instrumental conceptions of fiction’s purpose largely unfamiliar to twenty-­first-­century readers: they embraced fictionality not only out of an investment in aesthetic plea­sure and imaginative play for their own sake, but also as a means of training readers in the modes of speculative thought necessary for the ongoing proj­ect of shaping the republic. In order to suggest fictionality’s value for republican politics, however, ­these writers had to first resist the prevailing association of fiction with privacy and demonstrate that fictionality does not entail a disconnection from civic life. Taken as a group, their fictions complicate our ascendant narratives of fictionality’s development, which have linked fictionality’s “rise” to its depoliticization. Responsive to the exigencies of republican culture, ­these writers sought to reverse this depoliticization, arguing for fiction’s value within the very realm of public strug­gle to which it was generally regarded as opposed. Their fictions reveal that by the turn of the nineteenth c­ entury, fictionality’s “rise” extended far beyond the ­limited cultural arena in which it had first emerged.

Fiction and the Public Sphere The 1780s and 1790s produced a well-­documented crisis for US republicanism, as the new nation faced increasing conflicts between antagonistic social classes, regional and po­liti­cal factions, and private and commercial interests. A series of po­liti­cal crises revealed the fractures in republican ideology, as competing factions with monarchic and demo­cratic sympathies both claimed to represent “true” republicanism.2 Writers and politicians continued to invoke civic virtue as the highest ideal, but they also betrayed an increasing anxiety about the role par­tic­u­lar and private interests played in the polity. With the rise of po­liti­cal parties and professional politicians, classical republicanism ­either no longer provided an adequate explanatory paradigm for US politics or had failed as a normative program. Concerned citizens worried that the emergence of the partisan press, and with it more vitriolic po­liti­cal discourse, had compromised the ideal of “disinterested” po­liti­cal debate and allowed demagoguery to flourish.3

R epublica n Fictions [ 51 ]

Many Americans saw fiction’s popularity as a sign of modern degeneration and even a source of po­liti­cal corruption. Gallagher has traced fictionality’s evolution in E ­ ngland, from its origins in chroniques scandaleuses, where it served as a screen for po­liti­cal reference, and she has demonstrated how novelistic fictionality developed as a marker of po­liti­cal irrelevance and therefore, private respectability.4 Transplanted to republican Amer­i­ca, however, fictionality’s association with politeness and privacy signaled not respectability but frivolity and a retreat from public responsibilities. Gray’s 1810 address is exemplary: “To study ­human nature you must mix with mankind: it is in the drawing room, not in the library, in the forum, not in the cloister, that the nature of man can be learned, ­because it is in the former places, not in the latter, that it is displayed in its true colours and proportions . . . ​to supplant a real­ity by a fiction is a preposterous method of diffusing truth.”5 ­Here, fiction’s crime is twofold—it separates readers from real­ity and it separates them from civic life. ­These critiques are intimately interrelated: unable to provide reliable knowledge of “­human nature” and society, fiction can be regarded only as a private indulgence with no relation to the social world of “the forum.” For such critics, fiction’s rise reflected the new nation’s distance from the virtuous republics of the past and served as a harbinger of its failure. But where many Americans saw fiction’s popularity as a sign of corruption, ­others recognized an opportunity. Hugh Henry Brackenridge, for example, saw fiction as neither a sign nor a cause of the crisis confronting republicanism but as a means of confronting it. Grappling with the increased prevalence of “faction” in the republic, his Modern Chivalry posits fiction as an alternative means of carry­ing on po­liti­cal discussion and debate to the fractious periodical attacks of the partisan press. However, the very terms on which Brackenridge valorized fiction—­its lack of reference to a­ ctual persons—­rendered it suspicious to his contemporaries. To argue for fictionality’s value as a vehicle for po­liti­cal debate, he had to first establish his fiction’s relation to the world of the polity. Published in seven volumes over twenty-­three years, Modern Chivalry is the picaresque tale of Captain John Farrago and his Irish servant, Teague O’Regan. It recounts their misadventures in vari­ous arenas of American social and po­liti­cal life, with Farrago struggling to keep his servant from being elevated above his station. In rapid succession, Farrago convinces Teague to bypass opportunities to serve in the legislature, join a philosophical society, stand in as a fraudulent Indian chief, and become a professor of classics; in ­later volumes, Teague becomes an excise officer, an editor, and eventually a judge. As many have noted, it is a satire that “cuts both ways,” ridiculing the pretensions of the unqualified and the aristocratic stance of their betters.6 ­These episodes are interspersed with the commentary of the narrator, who often (but not always) serves as Brackenridge’s mouthpiece. His observations vary from playful reflections on the narrative to earnest discussions of

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education, politics, and the law. The narrator owes much to Cervantes, Sterne, and Fielding, but he is also a figure from con­temporary periodicals, a participant in the contentious debates of republican politics. Modern Chivalry’s early volumes reveal Brackenridge’s anxiety about writing fiction. In the first volume’s postscript, he addresses his audience without the screen of his narratorial persona, as Hugh Henry Brackenridge, the highly vis­i­ble citizen. He insists that writing fiction does not separate him from public life; rather, he is an active civic participant whose isolation on the Pennsylvania frontier has led him to “fill his f­ ree hours” with fiction-­writing. Only this contingent separation from a “city or the seat of the federal government” justifies such writing. He then pushes this defense further by staging the displacement of Hugh Henry Brackenridge public citizen but fiction-­writer in the “interstices of business” by Hugh Henry Brackenridge public citizen for whom fiction-­writing is no longer acceptable: I am this moment come from being admitted a Counsellor in the supreme court of the United States; having written the preceding part of this postscript just before the court sat. In consequence of my admission in this honourable court, I feel myself inspired with a consciousness of new dignity, and am determined to relinquish the indulgence of all t­ hese light amusements[.]7 Disavowing fiction, Brackenridge establishes a clear hierarchy of public duty over “the indulgence of all ­these light amusements.” While ­there is irony in the suddenness of this change and his overstated “new dignity,” this does not mitigate his genuine ambivalence. This postscript does not challenge the antifictional discourse—it only rehearses its assumptions (with some ironic deflation) and notes the mitigating ­factors in his par­tic­u­lar case. Brackenridge, however, does not abandon his proj­ect. Instead, over the following volumes, he constructs an elaborate metafictional apparatus to show that his text’s fictionality does not entail its disconnection from civic life. In volume III, the narrator discovers a lost poem in the apartment of a recently deceased poet and takes it as an opportunity to reflect on the conventionality of the found manuscript topos: it ­will be immediately be surmised . . . ​that the ­whole is fiction, and that I myself have written this poem, and that the story of my author is an invention . . . ​to keep myself out of sight b ­ ehind the curtain . . . ​as many writers of fictitious works [do] in order to give them an air of truth and real­ity. (113) Inviting readers to see through such flimsy truth claims, Brackenridge resists the transparency of the author that would permit readers to lose sight of the author’s shaping presence: “Sancho Panza made some shrewd decisions; or rather Cervantes made them for him; for, I doubt much w ­ hether Sancho ever

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made one of them” (273). But this is less a response to the “Founded on Fact” novels that staked their value on such truth claims than to the antifictional discourse that elicited t­ hese claims. Against the narrow equation of factuality and “truth,” Brackenridge emphasizes the creative presence ­behind the fiction—­exemplified by Cervantes’s “shrewd decisions.” Fiction, he suggests, should be judged on the author’s ideas rather than dismissed for not having a concrete relation to ­actual persons or events.8 As tenuous as this author-­based defense of fictionality might seem in the abstract, Brackenridge’s position as statesman, judge, and of course, man, has a par­tic­u­lar force in establishing this fiction’s legitimacy. If Brackenridge is anxious about how t­ hese “light amusements” w ­ ill reflect on his public role as judge, his avowed authorship also legitimates his fiction in a way that other names would not. His recognizable name on the title page resists the assumption that fiction disconnects readers from public life, serving as a sign of Modern Chivalry’s publicity. But Brackenridge’s name, with its public recognition (especially in Pennsylvania), not only highlights its relation to con­temporary politics; it also provides a key to Modern Chivalry’s concretely referential satire. Many of the narrative’s events correspond closely to the events of Brackenridge’s ­career and would have been recognizable to local (and in some cases national) audiences. Brackenridge’s po­liti­cal strug­gle with William Findley, for example, is immortalized in volume I’s exchange with Traddle the weaver, while volume IV portrays events based on the Whiskey Rebellion.9 But ­these connections to con­temporary politics introduce a tension into Modern Chivalry: the terms on which Brackenridge legitimates his fiction threaten to compromise the very fictionality that he seeks to legitimate. Brackenridge’s staging of his fiction’s basis in republican politics raises the question of w ­ hether Modern Chivalry is a fiction at all. Traddle, ­after all, is not a fictional “nobody” but Findley. Does Modern Chivalry not represent an e­ arlier po­liti­cal genre, the referential satire that only masquerades as fiction? In a qualified sense, the answer must be yes. But this is an inadequate account of Modern Chivalry’s fictional logic. While Brackenridge invokes the shadow of referential satire to establish his fiction’s public relevance, he also seeks to disallow the readerly decoding elicited by such satires. If he occasionally claims specific referents for his repre­sen­ta­tions, he also frequently claims exactly the opposite: t­ hese repre­sen­ta­tions are not pictures of individuals but generalized, abstract portraits. His characters, he insists, are fictions. ­These contradictory claims reflect neither incoherence nor attempts to avoid responsibility: they are a complex navigation of the relationship between fiction and fact, between supposition and concrete reference. Modern Chivalry’s fictional logic is neither strictly suppositional nor concretely referential, but emerges from the interplay between the two modes. It is an argument that insists si­mul­ta­neously on the fiction’s concrete relation to the world and its noncorrespondence to specific individuals.

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The most concrete example of Modern Chivalry’s negotiation of suppositional versus concrete reference follows its portrait of a “mountain candidate.” Having held forth on the subterfuges of frontier politics, Brackenridge disavows any par­tic­ul­ar referent for his sketch: “malevolent persons . . . ​­will alledge . . . ​I have had some prototype in view, and hence intended a satire upon individuals. It ­will not be a fair deduction ­unless it is restrained simply to this, that something like it has occurred in the course of my observation, which has given rise to my idea of the picture” (208). Brackenridge invokes referential satire only to disavow it. This, he insists, is a general portrait, a satire of a type rather than any par­tic­u­lar “prototype.” But even as he disavows concrete reference, Brackenridge cryptically reinserts it, suggesting “something like it has occurred in his observation.” This evasive phrase obscures the exact nature of the sketch’s factual basis—it is based on “something” he has encountered but does not constitute satire upon a specific person. Fictional abstraction based on “observation”—­Brackenridge has created a suppositional candidate from his own experience, but it does not refer to any par­tic­u­lar person—is the passage’s explicit logic, but this fictional character is still colored by the lingering specter of referential satire. Crucially, Modern Chivalry does not only navigate the dif­fer­ent modes of fictionality and referential satire but also sets this pro­cess before readers. Its metafictive reflections do not just make explicit the narrative’s relation to current events; they create the text’s liminal form of fictionality in which referential satire and fictional abstraction are layered onto each other, impossible to separate out. This layering is most obvious in Brackenridge’s satire of the American press. In one episode, a printer named Peter Porcupine has been engaging in dubious journalistic practices. A “college-­man,” disgusted with Porcupine, begins his own paper named the “Pole-­Cat” (or the skunk). This enterprise, however, does not involve any printing. Its “editor” captures a pole-­cat and suspends it from a pole in the town, where it serves as a pungent lampoon of the partisan press. Brackenridge then reveals the sketch’s referent: “The preceding chapters ­were written some years ago, while an editor of the name of Cobbet [sic], published a paper u ­ nder the title of ‘Porcupine.’ But the breaking up of that paper . . . ​prevented the g ­ oing on with the allegory, or the handing to the public by the way of the press . . . ​the pamphlet begun” (245). Porcupine is not a suppositional person but the editor William Cobbett. The sketch was originally intended not for fiction, but for a more recognizable genre of the po­liti­cal public sphere—­the pamphlet. Yet, as Brackenridge relates, he ultimately de­cided against publishing it: the “breaking up of that paper” rendered it irrelevant, so Brackenridge shelved it. Or rather, he shelves it u ­ ntil a new printer appears, who, while not the original basis of the sketch, reproduces Cobbett’s faults: “the appearance of a certain Callendar [sic] . . . ​induced me to look at what I had intended for Porcupine, and to think of continuing it . . . ​but the man . . . ​being drowned . . . ​

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s­ topped me in my intention, as it would be like throwing ­water on . . . ​a drowned rat.” ­Here, the sketch’s significance no longer depends on the existence of the specific man upon whom it was based; it requires only resemblance to justify reapplication. Importantly, when Brackenridge again chooses not to publish it, he does so not out of a sense of its irrelevance but from a (reluctant) re­spect for the deceased. The sketch’s logic still involves its relation to a specific referent, but it is no longer the original referent nor does the demise of the second referent imply the repre­sen­ta­tion’s uselessness: Nor, ­will the publication of the foregoing hints on the illiberality of the press, be thought, even now altogether useless . . . ​the American press, has not been wholly ­free from the stain of the like paragraphs. The application therefore may not be wholly without an object . . . ​in the painting ­there may be seen some existing resemblances. (245) Brackenridge no longer claims any concrete referent for his sketch. Beyond the enduring flaws of the “American Press,” he offers no par­tic­u­lar topicality for his repre­sen­ta­tion. Yet it is not “even now altogether useless,” its use inhering in its potential for reapplication. Displacing the initial logic by which only its concrete reference to Cobbett guarantees its use, this new logic values the sketch for its very lack of specific reference, its ability to be applied beyond the initial referent. Its placement in Modern Chivalry (and the printers’ demise) has transformed a referential satire into an abstract fiction. But again, this logic of fictionality does not emerge simply from its recontextualization; it is created by the metafictive reflections that trace its progressively general reference. Modern Chivalry shows its orientation ­toward abstraction and supposition, but by staging this very pro­cess, it maintains a connection to concrete application and par­tic­u­lar reference. H ­ ere, it is crucial that Brackenridge situates his discussion of par­tic­ul­ ar satire versus fictional abstraction in a critique of the press, setting up an implicit contrast between his fiction and the opprobrious journalism of Cobbett and Callender. For it is in Brackenridge’s dissatisfaction with both how republican po­liti­cal discourse is conducted and the ideology underpinning it that we find the motivation for his argument for fictionality’s value. The de­cades over which Brackenridge published Modern Chivalry saw an explosion of partisan printing, with newspapers becoming one of the primary institutions of the new parties and editors, including Cobbett and Callender, becoming central figures in partisan politics. ­These editors used newspapers as tools of po­liti­cal strug­gle, causing unease for men like Brackenridge, who ­were dedicated to republican disinterestedness and suspicious of “faction.”10 Brackenridge’s lampoon of Callender and Cobbett targets what he sees as specifically journalistic crimes, such as ad hominem attacks, but it also reflects his more general concern with the role specific interests—­the interests of parties and private individuals—­play in po­liti­cal life. This anxiety drives Modern

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Chivalry’s plot, with Brackenridge satirizing Teague’s ambition for po­liti­cal advancement despite his utter lack of qualification. The classical republican, Farrago, consistently tries to prevent his advancement, reasoning with Teague about the importance of putting the commonwealth’s interests above one’s own. Yet Teague fails or refuses to understand Farrago’s arguments, leading Farrago to resort to lies and threats to prevent Teague from accepting a given position. In spite of Farrago’s insistence that he does so to protect the republic, his real motivation is clearly keeping his servant.11 Farrago’s republicanism is a source of satire, not ­because Brackenridge does not share his values, but ­because his republicanism serves primarily to conceal his own aristocratic interests.12 Brackenridge’s suspicion of hidden interests in both politics (exemplified by the Teague-­Farrago exchanges) and public discourse (exemplified by Cobbett) was widely shared. He diverges, however, from many contemporaries by arguing that the norms of republican print culture enabled, rather than prevented, private interests from influencing po­liti­cal discourse. Take, for instance, his repeated critiques of anonymous publication: “An honest man w ­ ill avow himself and his opinions” (247). Brackenridge rejects the republican preference for pseudonyms, a preference that, as Michael Warner has shown, signaled the “difference between the private, interested person and the citizen of the public sphere.” Rather than a sign of disinterestedness, Brackenridge regards anonymity as concealing interests and motivations. In this, he resists one of the key components of republican print ideology, what Warner designates “the princi­ ple of negativity”—­“the negation of persons in public discourse.” This negation acts as a guarantee of civic virtue and, indeed, its defining sign: “virtue comes to be defined by the negation of other traits of personhood, in par­tic­ul­ar as rational and disinterested concern for the public good.”13 My point is not that the republican public sphere was ever fully anonymous or impersonal in practice.14 Modern Chivalry, in fact, consistently draws attention to the prevalence of personal attacks in republican po­liti­cal discourse. But as Warner has demonstrated, the republican public sphere was governed by an ideology of personal negation that emphasized the disembodied operation of rational-­critical debate in print: he has traced how republican writers strategically argued that “persons are irrelevant in the discourse of the public sphere where . . . ​assertions are assessed by readers for just reasoning.”15 Within this normative framework, reason is disembodied and could be—­indeed, should be—­evaluated without knowledge of the personal origin of the reasoning. Brackenridge, however, is deeply suspicious of the supposed disinterestedness of “reasoning”: Farrago’s exchanges with Teague, a­ fter all, expose how Farrago’s rational arguments about the common good often conceal his private interest in a par­tic­u­lar outcome. Embodying in Farrago the “reasoning” that is disembodied in public discourse, Brackenridge exposes the social strug­gle that underlies the rationalist utopia of the public sphere. The apparent absence of par­tic­u­lar persons in print, Brackenridge suggests, is a

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dangerous fiction. It is only by drawing back the curtain on t­ hese authors, shielded by the norms of republican print culture, that citizens ­will be able to sort the disinterested from the interested in po­liti­cal debate. So as he critiques the prevailing “scurillity” and anonymity in the American press, Brackenridge also pushes back against the norms of deliberation governing the republican public sphere more generally—­norms that, as Warner puts it, “silently transform[] the ideal of a social order f­ ree from conflictual debate into an ideal debate ­f ree of social conflict.”16 In Modern Chivalry, social conflict always remains clearly in view. Reason never seems disembodied in Modern Chivalry; it is always attached to a specific textual persona—­character, narrator, or often, the biographical Brackenridge, such as when he admits that a series of impeachments in Pennsylvania ­shaped volume VI: “It may be thought that I allude to my own case, and that of the impeached judges. . . . ​It is pos­si­ble I may have been led to this train of thinking . . . ​from what has happened” (321). Showing how his experience s­ haped the book, Brackenridge resists the public sphere norms of impersonal reason but not the republican value system in which they operate. The best guarantee of disinterest, he suggests, is acknowledging personal particularity and the interests that shape deliberative discourse in order to prevent their hidden operation. Yet Brackenridge’s condemnation of anonymity is only one part of his critique of con­temporary public sphere discourse. He also critiques the press’s tendency to focus on private persons. The ­great sin of both Cobbett and Callender is their “publishing m ­ atters of individuals.” For Brackenridge, what ­matters about such “­matters” is not w ­ hether they are “true or false,” but that ­these editors publish ­matters “with which . . . ​the public had nothing to do” (235). This is not about libel but the norms of publication—­what is appropriate to circulate in the public sphere. The publication of “­matters of individuals”—­ importantly, Brackenridge excepts public officials from this category—­cannot be a manifestation of civic virtue, b ­ ecause it does not concern the public. His critique of journalism thus involves a complex double argument about the role of par­tic­ul­ar persons in the public sphere. On one hand, he believes that ­matters of individuals have no role as content in the public sphere—­ publications that deal in ­these ­matters are necessarily interested and do not serve the public good. This critique does not challenge the ideology of republican print culture; it only highlights the distance between practice and ideal. On the other hand, Brackenridge critiques anonymous publication as hiding par­tic­u­lar interests, allowing the public sphere’s impersonal rational-­critical discourse to seem to function as a realm of debate ­free of personal interests or social conflicts. This is a republican demystification of republican print ideology: personal interests and social conflict can never be removed from public discourse, so the understanding that anonymous print signifies virtue and disinterested reason is a dangerous assumption. For Brackenridge, the republican

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public sphere is both too impersonal—­its anonymity—­and not impersonal enough—­its treatment of private persons. It is to address this double inadequacy of con­temporary public sphere discourse that Brackenridge turns to fictionality. Fiction depersonalizes public discourse, but it does so in a very dif­fer­ent way than anonymity: according to Brackenridge, Modern Chivalry abstracts general traits from concrete individuals and redeploys them as fiction. The abstraction implicit in Brackenridge’s fictionalizing pro­cess means that ­these suppositional individuals do interest the public. Fictionality serves as a sign of abstraction in Modern Chivalry and by extension, a sign of publicity. It allows Modern Chivalry to deal with individuals—­the role that par­tic­u­lar persons and their interests play in society—­without dealing in “­matters of individuals.” This is fiction’s potential for disinterestedness: the negative relation of its characters to a­ ctual persons means that Brackenridge can dramatize conflict without entering into it; can represent how interest drives individuals without dealing with par­tic­u­lar persons and reproducing the errors he seeks to amend. Explicit fictionality, like acknowledged authorship, serves as a guarantor of civic virtue. “We have often been asked,” writes Brackenridge, “for a key to this work.” He has, in fact, repeatedly invited this very response by suggesting that his fictions have concrete referents. But he stages this desire only to redirect it. A true key, the kind that enabled the decoding of e­ arlier satires, would compromise the fictionality that is fundamental to his proj­ect: ­ very man of sense has the key in his own pocket. His own feelings; E his own experience is the key. It is astonishing, with what avidity, we look for the application of satire which is general . . . ​in this work, the picture is taken from ­human nature, generally, and has no individual view. It was never meant as a satire upon men; but upon t­ hings. (288) His repre­sen­ta­tions might be based on specific persons, such as Cobbett, but Brackenridge insists that their legitimate “application” is not l­imited to t­ hese persons; or rather, such an “application” would violate the abstracting logic of fictionality that raises ­these repre­sen­ta­tions to the level of ­human nature. Fiction represents a superior strategy for depersonalizing discourse than anonymity b ­ ecause fiction’s suppositional persons are abstractions from h ­ uman nature rather than mere screens, which obscure the role played by par­tic­u­lar persons in po­liti­cal discourse. As Brackenridge puts it in his final discussion of the book’s “key”: “A Key to the preceding: This ­will be found in the history of the times. . . . ​I have individuals in my eye, in all t­ hese ­matters, no doubt; but I do not name them. . . . ​General strictures of h ­ uman nature, is all that can be expected” (534). This fiction deals with con­temporary politics, Brackenridge insists, but its repre­sen­ta­tions cannot be read as referring to specific persons. He has his eye on individuals, but the reader must look only for “general

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strictures.” Modern Chivalry is tethered to real­ity, but, unlike the periodicals it condemns, it deals not in “­matters of individuals.” “The Eastern nations in their tales, pretend to nothing but fiction,” writes Brackenridge, “Nor is the story . . . ​the less amusing ­because it is not true. Nor is the moral of it less impressive b ­ ecause the actors never had existence” (285). In one sense, Modern Chivalry only “pretend[s] to nothing but fiction,” as it represents and comments on con­temporary politics. However, to “pretend to nothing but fiction” suggests a disingenuous disavowal of reference, pretending to fiction as a screen for referential satire. Modern Chivalry does more than just “pretend to nothing but fiction;” it pre­sents characters that can never be read as one-­for-­one repre­sen­ta­tions of individuals. The moral of Modern Chivalry is more impressive ­because its actors never had any existence, reflecting both its generality and its disinterest. “­There are individuals in society,” Brackenridge writes, “who prefer honour to wealth; or cultivate po­liti­cal studies as a branch of literary pursuits” (13). He uses “literary pursuits” ­here to distinguish this realm of po­liti­cal study from interested, partisan po­liti­cal strug­gle. In Modern Chivalry, fictionality—­which ­will ­later become a sign of the aesthetic orientation of “literariness” in its late nineteenth-­century sense—­ marks an ­earlier kind of literariness as “letters,” a literariness that Brackenridge claims differentiates his po­liti­cal commentaries from ­those of the new professional politicians.17 Brackenridge’s ideal of “po­liti­cal studies as a branch of literary pursuits” conforms neither to what Paul Gilmore has characterized as Brackenridge’s retreat into aesthetics nor to Habermas’s account of the literary public sphere. In fact, Modern Chivalry’s metafictional argument reveals the inadequacy of Habermas’s enduringly influential structural model of the public sphere for understanding early US fiction. In recent years, t­ here has been renewed interest in Habermas’s account, as both historians and literary critics have sought to restore theoretical specificity to what has become a pervasive concept in early American studies.18 Dissatisfied with what they see as the attenuation of the meaning of “the public sphere”—as Ruth Bloch provocatively puts it, this “once specific theoretical concept has come perilously close to dissolving into mush”—­Bloch and other historians have called for a clearer emphasis on Habermas’s structural division between literary and po­liti­cal public spheres, while literary scholars, such as Christopher Looby, have urged more attention to the historical interconnection between them in Habermas’s account.19 Yet neither of t­ hese approaches can fully account for Brackenridge’s fiction. The clear structural division between literary and po­liti­cal public spheres that Habermas abstracts from eighteenth-­century ­England has no place for a book like Modern Chivalry: it might be a fiction—­the defining genre of Habermas’s literary public sphere—­but it neither adheres to the functions nor evidences the values that Habermas assigns to the literary public sphere, ­whether self-­formation, sentimental cultivation, or bourgeois intimacy. Instead, it is

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oriented t­ oward the rational-­critical discourse of his po­liti­cal public sphere, intervening in an ongoing pro­cess of po­liti­cal debate: Modern Chivalry includes extensive commentary on issues ranging from naval policy to state debts to the banking program. Brackenridge’s fiction does not aspire to shape a private or intimate subjectivity, but to remove politics from the realm of personal reflections. But more than just troubling this structural division, Modern Chivalry cannot be accounted for through Habermas’s historical account, ­because Habermas gives no attention to the ongoing relation between literary and po­liti­cal public spheres. Once the literary public sphere has served as a “training ground” for participatory democracy, Habermas jettisons it.20 Brackenridge, however, does not approach fiction as a precondition for deliberative politics or even useful training for po­liti­cal participation, but posits fiction as an alternative means of conducting po­liti­cal deliberation. In this, Modern Chivalry exemplifies a significant strand of early US fiction that sought to intervene in specifically po­liti­cal debates and strug­gles, from Peter Markoe’s The Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania (1787) to the anonymous Equality, A Po­liti­cal Romance (1802), from Jeremy Belknap’s The Foresters (1787) to the pseudonymous Frederick Augustus Fidfaddy’s The Adventures of ­Uncle Sam, in Search ­after His Lost Honor (1816) among countless ­others. But even within the republic’s extensive and diverse body of po­liti­cal fiction, Modern Chivalry stands out for how it does not only participate in republican po­liti­cal discourse, but also seeks to reform it. Modern Chivalry is both a commentary on the republican public sphere and an attempt to imagine alternatives to its ascendant genres. The depersonalizing effect of fictionality allows Brackenridge to set Modern Chivalry forth as both antidote and alternative to what he regards as the era’s degenerating po­liti­cal discourse. This is politics “as a branch of lit­er­a­ture.” In advancing this argument for fiction’s value, Brackenridge is not simply seeking to ensure the virtuous impersonality and disinterest of his own po­liti­cal commentary. He is positing fictionality as a characteristic capable of transforming the republic’s po­liti­cal discourse more generally and offering his own fiction as model. ­There is a core of earnestness in his claim that the book is all “stile” and no “substance” as what his book offers is, first and foremost, a mode of writing: “If . . . ​any author of supereminent abilities should chuse to give this stile a body, and make it the covering to some work of sense, as you would wrap a fine silk round a beautiful form . . . ​I . . . ​­shall . . . ​be satisfied with having it put to so good a use” (3). Brackenridge figures his text’s value or “use” as inhering in how it offers a “stile” of writing—to which fictionality is fundamental—­for ­others to “wrap” their ideas in. “Even where the object is a public good,” he writes of con­temporary po­liti­cal periodicals, “the manner may excite contempt” (288). Confronting what he regarded as the degeneration of po­liti­cal discourse in the republic, Brackenridge subordinates his specific po­liti­cal contentions to an argument for the way in which he unfolds them.

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Modern Chivalry is dedicated to showing the virtues of its “manner,” positing fictionality as capable of reforming, even transforming, how Americans conduct politics.

Reimagining the Republic Modern Chivalry’s multivolume argument for fictionality’s value in republican po­liti­cal discourse exemplifies a proj­ect shared by many early US fictionists: the repoliticitization of fictionality and its unique modes of supposition. Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive (1797), to take another example, actually stages, across its two very dif­fer­ent volumes, fiction’s transformation from a vehicle of private amusement to a tool for grappling with the po­liti­cal concerns of its moment. But unlike Brackenridge, Tyler sees in fiction less a way to reform po­liti­cal discourse than a way to prepare individuals to participate in this discourse. The Algerine Captive seeks to harness fictionality for po­liti­cal didacticism, positing the suppositional reasoning encouraged by fictionality as a necessary skill for the “worthy FEDERAL citizen[s]” seeking to guide the nation through the partisan and sectarian crises of the late 1790s.21 Raised and educated in Boston, Tyler came of age in the center of both republican po­liti­cal thought and Amer­i­ca’s antifictional culture. In fact, his literary interests ­were seen by one of the ­giants of republicanism as indicating a lack of virtue: John Adams rejected Tyler as a suitor for his ­daughter, in part, ­because he wanted a man of business and a contributor to society for a son-­ in-­law, rather than “a professor of belles-­lettres.”22 In spite of this, Tyler would continue his literary pursuits—­alongside more respectable work as a l­awyer and judge—­remaining dedicated to the idea that imaginative writings ­were not incompatible with civic virtue. In The Algerine Captive’s playful interrogation of the antifictional discourse, Tyler cautions American elites against allowing an unexamined suspicion of fiction to obscure a valuable tool for shaping the republic. The Algerine Captive opens with a preface by Updike Underhill, the book’s putative author, that describes the spread of “Novels, and modern Romances” using a language of contagion drawn from antifictional critiques. Tyler’s narrator is especially concerned about the prevalence of En­glish novels in the republic, linking the foreignness of such fictions with more general anx­i­eties about fiction’s tendency to mislead readers: “If the En­glish novel does not inculcate vice, it at least impresses upon a young mind an erroneous idea of the world in which she lives.” Underhill offers his own story as an alternative to such En­glish fiction on grounds of both its reliability and its factuality. Quoting a friend, Underhill writes: I see no advantage the Novel writer can have over you, ­unless your readers should be of the sentiment of the young lady . . . ​who borrowed

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Plutarch’s lives; and a­ fter reading the first volume, with infinite delight, supposing it to be a Novel, threw aside the o ­ thers with disgust, b ­ ecause a man of letters had inadvertently told her, the work was founded on FACT. (5–7) Updike pre­sents fiction not only as a frivolous, feminine indulgence dissociated from the world of facts but as a willfully frivolous indulgence. This overwrought insistence on his tale’s factuality, however, invites skepticism and hints at its own fictionality. Hyperbolically aping both the antifictional discourse and the truth claims it elicited, Tyler encourages republican readers to reconsider what is at stake in the divide between fact and fiction and urges them to reflect on the role that American fiction might play in the new nation.23 Tyler’s engagement with the antifictional discourse is one of the few concerns that endures across the book’s two very dif­fer­ent volumes. Volume I is a satire of American manners that follows the bumbling Updike through a series of professions, satirizing classical learning, teaching, and medicine. The tone shifts when Updike takes his medical practice to the South. Although horrified by slavery, Updike serves as a physician on a slave ship ­until he is taken captive by Algerians. Volume II recounts Updike’s captivity in Algiers, with digressions on Algerian history, religion, politics, and culture frequently interrupting the narrative.24 Eventually, Updike becomes a medical assistant and nearly purchases his freedom. While a series of disasters foil his plan, he is ultimately rescued by a Portuguese ship and returns home determined to be “a worthy FEDERAL citizen.” Where volume I had focused on regional difference, volume II ends with calls for national unity. While The Algerine Captive resembles a bildungsroman, it does not deliver the psychological development usually associated with the genre.25 It recounts Updike’s maturation from a self-­interested quack to a competent doctor and engaged citizen, but this personal transformation appears under-­motivated, ­because it corresponds to the book’s increasing impersonality. In volume II, Updike’s personal experience recedes, replaced by reflections on Algerian culture, politics, and history. The generic shift across the volumes—­the displacement of a picaresque romp by an ethnographic travel narrative—­ obscures the pro­cess of psychological growth that modern readers expect of a bildungsroman. Insofar as it charts personal growth, The Algerine Captive centers on Updike’s education as a reader. Updike is marked as a quixotic fiction-­reader early in the narrative.26 In a scene straight out of antifiction, his m ­ other proudly announces that he has read Robinson Crusoe and The Pilgrim’s Pro­ gress, which he has “read . . . ​through e­ very bit; ay, and understands it too. Why, he stuck a skewer through Apollyon’s eye in the picture, to help Christian beat him” (25). Even Updike’s expectations for his captivity in Algiers have been ­shaped by fiction: “I fancied my master’s cook an En­glish lord; his valet

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an Italian duke; his groom a knight of Malta; and even his foot boy some ­little lively French marquis.” With the shift to volume II, the text’s jocular tone dis­ appears but Updike’s quixotism endures. Or at least, it endures for a while. Experience ultimately ends Updike’s illusions: “so sweet ­were the delusions of my own fancy, I am loth to destroy the innocent gratification, which the readers of novels and plays enjoy . . . ​but the sober character of the historian compels me to assure my readers that . . . ​I never saw . . . ​a man of any rank, ­family, or fortune among the menial slaves” (119). Satire at Updike’s expense has given way to his own didactic reflections on the dangers of mistaking fiction for real­ity. In his words, we hear echoes of Gray’s antifictional address: history, not fiction, Updike insists, is the source of true knowledge. But unlike Gray, Updike is a fictional character, a textual construction. He insists on his tale’s factuality, but readers who believe him reproduce his quixotic error. The Algerine Captive, importantly, is no hoax. In volume I, Updike’s unreliability serves as a sign of its fictionality, exposing the gap between an author and his unaware protagonist and establishing a fictional communicative framework. In this volume, Updike’s truth claims are ironic: his hyperbolic insistence on his “impartiality as a historian” both marks his narrative as fiction and satirizes the anx­i­eties about fictionality. This does not mean, however, that his readerly education is strictly satirical. With Updike’s recognition of his quixotism, his truth claims are no longer ironized even if they are still not factual. “I had rather disappoint the curiosity of my readers,” he writes in volume II, “than disgust them with untruths” (173). As Updike’s delusions dissipate, his claims to accuracy take on a new earnestness. This shift reveals both the impetus for and inadequacy of Thomas Tanselle’s claim that “The divergence between the two volumes is too ­great to be accommodated . . . ​[they] must be considered separately, for they constitute essentially two books.”27 It seems impossible to reconcile the volumes’ truth claims, but Tyler chooses to link them. Ultimately, we might call volume II’s truth claims semi-­earnest. Within the frame of the fiction, Updike has become a more reliable narrator, so while he remains fictional and his truth claims cannot extend to the factuality of his travels, they do suggest that his text represents the world with an accuracy that most novels do not. Such truth claims do not solicit belief in their factuality but they do insist on the fiction’s ability to represent the world accurately and thus, instruct readers rather than merely entertain: “I ­shall therefore endeavour rather to improve the understanding of my reader, with what I ­really know, than amuse him with stories, of which my circumscribed situation rendered me necessarily ignorant. I was never at an Algerine marriage; but obtained some au­then­tic information on the subject” (173). Counterintuitively, Tyler uses Updike’s transformation from a quixote to a believer in true history to reject critiques of fiction’s unreliability. Far from deluding readers, a disciplined variety of fiction, Tyler insists, can serve as a vehicle for “au­then­tic information.” The exact source of this information is crucial for

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Tyler’s metageneric argument. In volume II, Updike repeatedly draws attention to his own limits as an observer: “A poor slave . . . ​would obtain only general information from a residence in the midst of them” (163). Coupled with Updike’s observations about the tendency of travel writers to “exaggerate,” this suggests that such “factual” writings are not necessarily epistemologically superior to fiction. When Updike claims “I have delineated a sketch of Algerine history from a­ ctual information, obtained upon the spot, and the best Eu­ro­pean authorities” (161), Tyler coyly elides two very dif­fer­ent kinds of authorizing claim: b ­ ecause Updike’s “information obtained upon the spot” is supported by “the best Eu­ro­pean authorities,” this “au­then­tic information” could be integrated into pos­si­ble narratives as well as factual ones. In Updike’s readerly education, then, The Algerine Captive stages the possibility that certain, disciplined fictions might serve as reliable sources of knowledge about the “world as it is.” This is a fairly conventional move of intramodal distinction. Its interest lies in how Tyler layers it onto a second shift across the two volumes—­the shift from Updike’s private concerns and personal life to po­liti­cal issues. Updike connects the reliability of his book’s “au­then­tic information” to its ability to provide a very dif­fer­ent kind of instruction than was usually associated with fiction: This dry detail of facts ­will prob­ably be passed over by ­those, who read for mere amusement, but the intelligent reader w ­ ill . . . ​trace the leading princi­ples of this despotic government . . . ​perceive whence it is that they are thus suffered to injure commerce and outrage humanity; and justify our executive in concluding, what some uninformed men may esteem, a humiliating, and too dearly purchased peace with t­ hese ­free booters. (161–62) Tyler explic­itly associates “facts” with the ability of his fiction, if read by “intelligent” readers with an eye on instruction rather than amusement, to inform not only their private opinions, but also their po­liti­cal beliefs. In this sense, Updike’s readerly bildung—­his maturation from quixotic fiction-­reader to advocate of true history—is part of what we might call the narrative’s generic bildung. The Algerine Captive stages fiction’s maturation from a frivolous indulgence to a genre capable of playing a role in republican po­liti­cal life. This shift corresponds to Updike’s maturation, establishing a teleology in which fiction is associated with youth, privacy, and delusional naïveté and factual writing with maturity, politics, and publicity: “The history of nations, like the biography of man,” writes Updike, “only assumes an in­ter­est­ing importance, when it is matured into vigour” (155). While he is discussing national history h ­ ere, by comparing it to the “biography of man,” Updike implicitly reflects on his own memoir: the interest of his book lies in its second half, which, now that Updike has matured, addresses substantial subjects such as history and politics, leaving ­behind the “childish prattle” of picaresque fiction. The fiction’s generic

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bildung, however, charts the displacement of fiction not by fact but by a dif­ fer­ent kind of fiction—­a disciplined fiction that is both reliable and focused on po­liti­cal issues. In this context, the displacement of Updike’s individual psychological experience—­the shift from personal to po­liti­cal concerns—­ reflects not the abortive nature of his bildung, but its highest expression. It is the best indication that he is prepared to be “a worthy FEDERAL citizen.” But more than just indexing Underhill’s po­liti­cal maturity, this generic shift, much like Modern Chivalry’s metafictive reflections, serves to repoliticize fictionality, suggesting the mode’s potential value in republican po­liti­cal culture. But where Brackenridge argued for fictionality’s ability to transform po­liti­cal discourse, Tyler, in reimagining the narrative of education, focuses on how it might transform the participants in that discourse. “It was the error of the times of monkish ignorance to believe every­thing;” Updike claims early in the narrative, “it may possibly be the error of the pre­ sent day to credit nothing” (27). If volume I shows the dangers of “believing every­thing,” volume II implicitly warns against “crediting nothing”—of dismissing a text’s instructional potential based purely on its fictionality. In a narrative preoccupied with its own truth status, ­these lines resonate as a critique of a narrow equation of epistemological reliability with factuality, giving an additional resonance to the prefatory anecdote about Plutarch’s Lives: while this moment distances Updike’s narrative from the frivolous world of female fiction-­reading, it also warns republican readers against making the opposite ­mistake with Tyler’s text—­throwing it away ­because it is not strictly factual. Tyler encourages his readers to resist both “believing every­thing” and “crediting nothing,” to neither accept every­thing one reads as accurate—­ quixotism—­nor dismiss the possibility that fiction can provide knowledge and instruction—­the m ­ istake of fiction’s critics. Even more than this, the substitution of “credit” for “belief ” in this parallel construction invites readers to consider va­ri­e­ties of “credit” other than strict belief, such as the “ironic credulity” encouraged by fictionality. In reading fiction, as Gallagher puts it, “one is dissuaded from believing the literal truth of a repre­sen­ta­tion so that one can instead admire its likelihood and extend enough credit to buy into the game.”28 Faced with a republic in crisis, The Algerine Captive posits this kind of cognitive flexibility—­the ability to credit an idea without believing in its existence—as a necessary skill for the “worthy FEDERAL citizen[s]” who would undertake the challenge of refashioning the nation. This is the key to understanding the book’s peculiar form of po­liti­cal didacticism. For if The Algerine Captive stages fiction’s ability to address po­liti­cal issues, the text’s politics have proved notoriously difficult to describe. Critics have strug­gled with how Tyler’s regionalist critique of slavery is lost in its paeans to the United States’ “­free government” and its closing calls for federal unity.29 I am not interested in explaining away the tensions between Updike’s nationalistic pride and his antislavery

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stance. Rather, I want to suggest that such tensions are central to the book’s instructional proj­ect. While The Algerine Captive repeatedly asserts its didactic ambitions—­ playfully at first and then with increasing earnestness—­Tyler theorized fictional instruction most fully in his 1887 drama, The Contrast. Like The Algerine Captive, The Contrast ventriloquizes the antifictional discourse in order to debunk it. The play’s heroine, Maria, is chided by her f­ ather for “reading your story-­books, your Charles Grandisons, your Sentimental Journals, and your Robinson Crusoe.”30 Maria’s reading, however, produces not quixotism but an ability to penetrate deceptive appearances, such as when she breaks off her engagement with the rogue, Billy Dimple: “she read Sir Charles Grandison, Cla­ris­sa Harlow . . . ​and between whiles . . . ​Billy’s letters. But, as her taste improved, her love declined. The contrast was so striking betwixt the good sense of her books and the flimsiness of her love-­letters, that she discovered she had unthinkingly engaged her hand without her heart.” Tyler sets forth a model of didactic reading that uses the “good sense” and sentiments expressed in fiction as touchstones against which the reader mea­sures both her own sentiments and t­ hose of ­others. The recognition of disjunction—­“the contrast”—is both a means of self-­fashioning and a tool for navigating social life. Maria not only recognizes that the textualized self in her letters falls short of ­these novelistic ideals, but also that Dimple compares unfavorably with the characters she admires. While o ­ thers mock Maria for her opinion that Dimple had “acquired the wickedness of a Lovelace without his wit, and the politeness of Sir Charles Grandison without his generosity,” Maria uses the “good sense” of ­these books to avoid a disastrous marriage.31 Fiction provides touchstones for contrast that can be turned both inward and outward. Volume II of The Algerine Captive translates this kind of fictional pedagogy into the realm of politics. It is permeated by a series of almost excerptible po­liti­cal statements and sentiments: policy recommendations, endorsements of American freedom, and expressions of civic virtue. Some of ­these statements serve as normative sentiments for readers to mea­sure their own actions and feelings against, just as Maria compared her own letters to the “good sense of her books.” Other statements, however, function by revealing “the contrast” between stated ideals and a­ ctual conditions. Like Maria recognizing the disjunction between Dimple and the admirable characters from her novels, The Algerine Captive confronts readers with the gap between theoretical values and real practices, ­whether it is the slave ship named Sympathy or the country that holds itself up as a beacon of freedom while maintaining slavery. If we apply Tyler’s method of fictional instruction to his own fiction, Updike’s admirable sentiments and his lofty ideals provide a marker against which readers can mea­sure their own po­liti­cal sentiments. But such sentiments also expose the contrast between the republic’s praiseworthy princi­ples and its deeply unjust practices.32

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­ ecause of the nonidentity of author and narrator, first-­person fiction B provides an especially power­ful means of exposing the gap—­“ the contrast”—­ between stated values and a­ ctual be­hav­ior. Volume I’s self-­evident fictionality establishes a communicative framework in which readers interrogate Updike’s claims and motivations in order to enjoy the author’s satire of the fictional protagonist. As the narrative moves from personal to po­liti­cal affairs, the reader’s relationship to Updike changes but it does not fully stabilize. Volume I’s explicit satire primes readers to recognize the irony of Updike’s ­later paeans to American freedom given his own participation in the slave trade. The satirical distance (largely) collapses in volume II, but a residual distance remains: trained by volume I to interrogate the relationship between Updike’s sentiments and motivations, readers are encouraged to continue ­these evaluations in the second volume. Fictional address, then, provides a means of training readers in a mode of skeptical reading that resists “believing every­thing.” But if the text encourages readers to attend to the “contrast” between Updike’s sentiments and his be­hav­ior, it does not ironize his “good sense”—­the values and sentiments he expresses. The Algerine Captive, ­after all, also warns against “crediting nothing.” ­Here, the suppositional logic of fictionality is crucial, ­because fictionality substitutes questions of plausibility for questions of belief and authenticity. Encouraging a stance of “ironic credulity,” fictions do not ask readers to “believe” in their factuality, but only ask them to “credit” their possibility. The Algerine Captive cautions readers against believing nationalistic cele­brations of American freedom, but it also encourages readers to “credit” them—to consider them as descriptions of a pos­si­ble republic rather than realized actualities. In this sense, the nationalist Tyler and the antislavery Tyler are not discontinuous: the disjunction between national ideals and practices encourages readers to regard ­these statements as possibilistic horizons rather than descriptions of real­ity. For Tyler, volume II’s specific mode of fictionality, with its orientation ­toward probability or disciplined possibility, rather than e­ ither factuality or fantasy, offers an ideal way of training citizens in the kind of speculative reasoning needed for shaping the republic. In the gap between volume II’s thundering assertions of federal unity and volume I’s portrait of a nation defined by competing regional and sectarian factions, The Algerine Captive exposes the degree to which the United States is itself a kind of precarious fiction. Tyler’s generation of ­lawyers and statesmen was acutely aware that the United States was a nation that had been written into existence and continued to be remade through language: it was, as Irving would famously put it, a “logocracy”—­a nation both made out of and governed by words.33 For Tyler, the malleability of such a government entailed both possibility and precariousness. In a fiction set in the era when the republic lingered between the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution, Tyler reminds readers that the United States is an ongoing pro­cess, a continual remaking and reimagining. Staging the disjunction between an idealized

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i­magined ­union and the ­actual po­liti­cal condition of the states, The Algerine Captive anticipates Alexander de Tocqueville’s insight that “The government of the Union depends almost entirely upon ­legal fictions; the Union is an ideal nation, which exists, so to speak, only in the mind” of its citizens.34 While many of Tyler’s contemporaries shared his insight that the United States was, in a qualified sense, fictive in its nature, The Algerine Captive stands out for its accompanying argument that this made fiction an impor­tant means of training its citizenry: according to Tyler, the modes of speculation encouraged by fictionality are crucial skills for participation in the fashioning of a republic that is continually being remade. The Algerine Captive ends with a dramatic statement of the republic’s dif­fer­ent pos­si­ble ­futures: “BY UNITING WE STAND, DIVIDING WE FALL.” Fiction, Tyler suggests, is uniquely suited for teaching readers exactly the kind of speculative thought needed in considering the divergent paths facing the nation at this moment of crisis. To “believe every­thing” in this country is to miss its flaws, to fall prey to po­liti­cal quixotism; to “credit nothing” represents a failure to believe in the ongoing proj­ect of the republic—to accept this status quo of corruption as the only possibility. For Tyler, the suppositional nature of fictionality—­its emphasis on plausibility rather than e­ ither factuality or fantasy—­trains readers in exactly the flexible cognitive states needed to imagine alternative possibilities for this self-­consciously young republic. At moments, Updike displays an imaginative identification with his fellow Americans characteristic of liberal nationalism. In this sense, we might be tempted to read The Algerine Captive as fitting into Benedict Anderson’s account of the novel’s central role in establishing the “­imagined community” of modern nationalism.35 But if Updike seems a paradigmatic participant in such an i­magined community, Tyler stands b ­ ehind, encouraging readers to recognize the extent to which a unified United States is purely imaginary. Volume II’s claims about national unity and i­magined kinship with fellow Americans have been belied by volume I’s drama of regional conflict. The Algerine Captive pre­sents feeling for one’s nation as involving not a stable, naturalized emotional relation of individual to country, but the dynamic feelings produced by the ongoing actions of the nation. While modeled at moments by Updike—­“I was so abashed for my country” (135)—­embarrassment for the nation, the dominant emotion of volume II, emerges principally through the “contrast” between Updike’s ­imagined United States and its actuality: The Algerine Captive produces readerly feeling not through sympathetic identification—­Updike underscores readers’ inability to imagine his feelings in captivity—­but through readers’ reflection on the gap between his nationalistic claims and real­ity. Yet, this is not simply a demystification of American nationalism. Tyler’s proj­ect does not fit Anderson’s paradigm, but it is a nationalist proj­ect nonetheless. It is a republican nationalist proj­ect, which posits active participation, rather than imaginative identification, as its defining characteristic. The

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Algerine Captive, ­after all, is a bildungsroman insofar as it charts Updike’s conversion from an imaginative investment in his nation to his resolution to actively participate in the shaping of the republic. The Algerine Captive’s nationalism involves not imagining one’s naturalized relationship to a nation and its other members, but imagining the community to which one would want to belong and taking an active role in producing it. This republican nationalism entails a very dif­fer­ent use of fiction. For Tyler, fiction is not a vehicle for fantasies of belonging, but a goad to po­liti­cal participation and a means of training skeptical citizens, who can be invested in national ideals without quixotically mistaking them for realities.

Fictionality and Po­liti­cal Didacticism Few fictions capture their moment’s po­liti­cal mood more vividly than Wieland. Brown’s “American Tale” of uncertainty and paranoia provides a dramatic encapsulation of the sense of crisis pervading republican politics in the late 1790s. Brown’s letter to Jefferson has long been seen as evidence of Wieland ’s po­liti­cal ambitions. But while sending Wieland to the vice president is clearly a po­liti­cal gesture, it is difficult to specify the politics of that gesture. Wieland ’s infamously ambiguous narrative has provoked a legion of competing, often contradictory accounts of the book’s politics: in the wake of Tompkins’s groundbreaking reading of it as an anti-­Jeffersonian “po­liti­cal tract,” critics have produced a Wieland that varies from radically demo­cratic to conservative, even reactionary.36 Wieland ’s politics are so slippery in part ­because, unlike Modern Chivalry and The Algerine Captive, it includes no explicit commentary on con­temporary politics. This explains why, in spite of their varied conclusions, readings of Wieland ’s politics have operated u ­ nder a remarkably consistent logic: following Tompkins’s account in method, if not in content, they approach Wieland as a po­liti­cal allegory, usually centered on Carwin’s ventriloquism, in order to recover ­either its politics or the “cultural work” it performs.37 Wieland seems to require this kind of interpretation, ­because Brown insists on his fiction’s po­liti­cal relevance while leaving its po­liti­cal goals unstated. While Wieland ’s po­liti­cal proj­ect remains implicit, Brown is explicit about its didactic ambitions: he insists on his fiction’s “usefulness,” claiming he pre­ sents his subject in “its most instructive . . . ​form.”38 This didactic proj­ect has also tended to baffle critics, who see Wieland ’s insistent indeterminacy as troubling any educational mission.39 The fiction’s stance on education does appear to be something of a paradox, as Wieland consistently calls into question the efficacy—­and even possibility—of education. This insistent skepticism has even provoked claims that Wieland ultimately demonstrates that “no education can r­ eally prepare one for the horrors of the world.”40 I want to suggest, however, that understanding Wieland ’s enigmatic didactic proj­ect requires recognizing an intimately related second proj­ect—­its metadidactic

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critique of the republic’s ascendant educational paradigm, education by exemplum. Brown’s skepticism of this pedagogy does not, however, indicate a nihilistic stance ­toward education: Wieland creates a reading experience that ­will educate readers not by example, but through their participation in the suppositional exercises inherent in reading fiction. Like The Algerine Captive, Wieland posits that the educational value of fiction lies, at least in part, in the speculative modes of thinking encouraged by fictionality.41 Taken together, Wieland ’s preface and narrative suggest that the didactic “merit” of Brown’s fiction inheres in how it teaches readers a mode of skeptical, possibilistic reasoning that w ­ ill allow them to interrogate specious appearances and easy explanations. While this pedagogy’s value is not ­limited to po­liti­cal life—­ Wieland shows how it could prepare readers for widely varying social arenas, from law to courtship—it is nonetheless crucial for understanding Wieland ’s po­liti­cal proj­ect, as Brown’s narrative subtly suggests that such suppositional reasoning is an essential skill for negotiating the epistemological challenges of republican politics, from evaluating the promises of a po­liti­cal movement to resisting the impassioned appeals of a demagogue. But to posit fiction as a means of training readers in such skeptical reasoning, Brown first had to show the limitations of this moment’s dominant theory of novelistic didacticism—­education by exemplum. This was a didactic method derived primarily from Lockean psy­chol­ogy. In Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), Locke had outlined a pedagogy that was the extension of his theory of the mind. Believing that the mind w ­ ill inevitably be formed by experience, he argued that education should focus less on doctrine than on shaping the mind’s ability to reason and he advocated teaching through example rather than precept. For Locke, ­there was no more effective means of educating a child than for a parent to provide a model for imitation. This paradigm, with its emphasis on the child’s mind as a malleable tabula rasa, intensified debates over the burgeoning novel in the eighteenth-­century Atlantic world: while the genre’s opponents drew on Lockean psy­chol­ogy to highlight its potential to corrupt, novelists—­most influentially Samuel Richardson—­set forth their novels as fulfilling the “exemplary role parents w ­ ere obliged, but often failed, to fill”: “The principal of ­these two young ladies,” Richardson writes in the preface to Cla­ris­sa, “is proposed as an Exemplar to her sex.”42 Both exemplary education and the Richardsonian novel that embraced it flourished in the republic. Richardson’s hugely popu­lar Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded—­a book that not only offered readers a model for imitation, but also dedicated “over a hundred pages to a discussion and endorsement of Lockean Pedagogy”—­was the first novel printed in the American colonies and Richardson’s works ­were the most frequently reprinted and widely read fictions in the early United States.43 Cla­ris­sa is, in many ways, a more complicated exemplar than Pamela, but American pedagogues and publishers emphasized Cla­ris­sa’s suitability as model for imitation rather than the ambiguities of the original

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text. Enos Hitchcock’s 1790s conduct manual, Memoirs of the Bloomsgrove ­Family, offers a representative view: “AMONG all the writings, which unite sentiment with character, and pre­sent images of life, Richardson’s, perhaps, may be placed at the head of the list. . . . ​His Cla­ris­sa has been considered, by good judges, as the most finished model of female excellence which has ever been offered for their imitation.”44 The popu­lar American abridgement of Cla­ris­sa, which converted the massive, epistolary original to a much shorter third-­person narrative, downplayed Cla­ris­sa’s transgressions while emphasizing the crimes against her, rendering her a less ambiguous model for imitation.45 Many of the educators and periodical commentators that condemned fiction in general made an exception for Richardson’s works on the grounds of their pedagogical efficacy. Brown went so far as to describe them as being “universally acknowledged to be the most power­ful teachers of virtue . . . ​ extant.”46 This assertion of universal approbation, however, overstates the case in a surprising way, as Brown himself had once published an essay, “Objections to Richardson’s Cla­ris­sa,” that criticized Cla­ris­sa’s shortcomings as “a pattern for our imitation.” Brown argued that Cla­ris­sa is a “defective” model, as she places an “unreasonable value” on her f­amily’s unjust judgment and thus dies “not a martyr to any duty, but a victim of grief ” even as “moral or religious duty enjoins her to live.”47 Setting Wieland alongside Brown’s “Objections” highlights how his fiction represents not merely an adjustment of the Richardsonian seduction plot for the American context—as it has long been regarded—­but a revision of what Brown regards as the didactic shortcomings of Richardson’s fiction. Wieland consists of letters by Clara Wieland, who recounts her ­father’s immigration to Pennsylvania and his mysterious death by spontaneous combustion. She then describes the idyllic life that she had led at the estate Mettingen with her b ­ rother Theodore, his wife Catherine, and Catherine’s b ­ rother Pleyel. Their peaceful life is interrupted by the appearance of mysterious voices—­heard first by Theodore and then Pleyel—­and the arrival of Carwin, a poor, eloquent stranger. The voices proliferate, leading Pleyel to break off his courtship of Clara. She returns to her home one night to find Catherine’s dead body. Her ­brother arrives and threatens her ­until he hears a voice and flees. She l­ater learns that he has killed Catherine and his c­ hildren, believing he acted on divine ­orders. Carwin reveals to Clara that he is a ventriloquist, admitting that he was responsible for most of the voices but insisting that he did not order Theodore’s murders. Theodore arrives and attempts to kill Clara. Carwin uses his ventriloquism to save Clara’s life, convincing Theodore of his error. Theodore kills himself in remorse. As many have noted, Clara clearly recalls Cla­ris­sa, reproducing both her character—­virtuous, intelligent, proud—­and her actions—­fainting, writing letters, holding a penknife to her bosom to preserve her chastity. Strikingly, Clara responds to her very dif­fer­ent tragedy in a remarkably similar way to Cla­ris­sa:

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ostensibly finishing her narrative, Clara claims she ­will “lay down . . . ​in the lap of death” and her worries ­will be “Hushed . . . ​in the sleep of the grave” (252). Clara, like Cla­ris­sa, seeks death, “not [as] a martyr to any duty, but a victim of grief ”—if anything, Clara shows less awareness than Cla­ris­sa that “moral or religious duty enjoins her to live.” But Clara does not die, does not become a second Cla­ris­sa. Instead, she lives to recognize “the infatuation and injustice of [her] conduct,” acknowledging that she “overlook[ed] . . . ​ duty” in her desire to die (268). Brown’s rewriting of Richardson repeats Cla­ris­sa’s errors in order to revise them, erasing the most significant “defects in . . . ​a pattern for our imitation.” Or this would be the case except that Brown enacts his revision of Cla­r is­sa so as to foreclose the possibility of reading Clara as a new exemplar, a replacement Cla­ris­sa. He emphasizes that only the contingency of a fire prevents Clara from repeating Cla­ris­sa’s error, denying her any agency in avoiding her pre­de­ces­sor’s ­mistake: “It is true I am now changed,” she writes, “but I have not the consolation to reflect that my change was owing to my fortitude or to my capacity for instruction” (269). Clara proves no worthier of imitation than Cla­ris­sa. Wieland, I want to suggest, advances two interrelated but distinct revisions of Cla­ris­sa. First, it offers a didactic, moral revision that uses Clara’s story to both highlight and correct Cla­ris­sa’s failure to recognize that “duty enjoins her to live.” Second, and more interestingly, Brown’s refusal to provide his own alternative exemplar suggests a revision not only of Richardson’s didactic message but also his didactic method. Wieland ’s narrative extends this intertextual rejection of exemplary education. The failures of education in Wieland—­and they are legion—­are nearly all linked to the exemplary paradigm. In the isolated Mettingen, the elder Wieland provides the only model for Clara and Theodore. Their education “had been modeled by no religious standard”; it is Lockean pedagogy pushed to its extreme, removing precept all together and leaving only example (24). The results are disastrous: the religious understanding Theodore patterns ­after his f­ ather leads directly to the fiction’s central calamity. The book’s closing sentence posits that “If Wieland had framed juster notions of moral duty, and of the divine attributes,” the tragedy would never have occurred (298). But Wieland’s education, with only his ­father’s example and no recourse to precepts—­what Brown elsewhere refers to as “abstract systems, and theoretical reasonings” of moral duty—­precludes this possibility.48 Although by demonstrating how Theodore’s education reproduces his ­father’s shortcomings, Wieland seems merely to echo the Lockean tradition— an inadequate example leads to inadequate education—­Brown suggests that emphasizing imitation can actually inhibit rational education. Clara is such a committed devotee of exemplary education that she believes that no education could have prepared her for what she has experienced, b ­ ecause no one could have provided her an appropriate model to imitate. Her insistence that

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she “was not qualified, by education or experience, to encounter perils like this” (171) follows from the singularity of her situation: “The experience of no ­human being can furnish a parallel,” she laments, “That I should be . . . ​ without example!” (6). This total investment in exemplary education prevents her from taking advantage of alternative modes of instruction. She provides a telling response to Carwin’s stories about situations in which terrestrial means had been found to explain ostensibly miraculous phenomena: “his narratives . . . ​contained no instance sufficiently parallel to t­ hose that had befallen ourselves” (85). Clara approaches ­these stories through a ­limited conception of how they educate, not considering how they might teach a system of reasoning that could be applied to her own mystery. She simply rejects them as not being “sufficiently parallel” and thus, inapplicable. Clara’s commitment to the Lockean exemplary paradigm prevents her from achieving the Lockean goal of learning a new mode of reasoning. In another essay, Brown cautions against this kind of narrow focus on finding the perfect model to guide conduct: “­Human affairs are infinitely complicated. The condition of no two beings is alike. No model can be conceived, to which our situation enables us exactly to conform. . . . ​The usefulness . . . ​ consists in suggesting a mode of reasoning and acting somewhat similar to that which is ascribed to a feigned person.”49 Clara’s devotion to a narrowly conceived exemplary paradigm adds another resonance to Wieland ’s intertextual revision of Cla­ris­sa. For while we cannot say Clara models herself on Cla­ris­sa, she certainly resembles a reader who has modeled herself on Cla­ ris­sa. Or even more than this, she evokes a reader who has imitated Cla­ris­sa in exactly the l­ imited way Brown warns against, merely aping be­hav­ior rather than learning a “mode of reasoning.” In t­ hose moments in which Clara most closely recalls Richardson’s heroine, she reproduces Cla­ris­sa’s be­hav­ior in inappropriate circumstances. She lifts a knife to her breast, for example, not when Carwin approaches, but when Pleyel climbs the stairs. Even in wishing for death, Clara repeats Cla­ris­sa’s be­hav­ior, but not her mode of thinking, as Cla­ris­sa’s death depends on the specific logic that her chastity is more valuable than her life, a belief Clara repeatedly expresses (107). Alternatively, Clara does not take from Cla­ris­sa’s story a mode of thinking—­such as her increasing skepticism of appearances that allows her to escape Lovelace—­that might have been applicable to her own case. This is the other side of her inability to learn from Carwin’s tales. In the former, the narrative points to the educational limitations of clinging exclusively to the exemplary model; in the latter, intertextual resonances suggest the educational ­mistakes that result from an overly narrow conception of this paradigm. If, by having Clara recognize and condemn Cla­ris­sa’s faults in herself, Brown rewrites Cla­ris­sa, by demonstrating the limits of exemplary education narrowly construed, he also rereads Cla­ ris­sa against the pedagogues and publishers who sought to make its heroine an uncomplicated model for imitation.

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Wieland ’s engagement with exemplary pedagogy culminates with Pleyel’s revelation that he has been at work upon an exemplary didactic text of his own. He has recorded e­ very aspect of Clara’s life, “desirous that ­others should profit by an example so rare.” His proj­ect reveals an understanding of both education and fiction shared by many of Brown’s contemporaries: [M]ankind are more easily enticed to virtue by example than by precept. I know that the absoluteness of a model, when supplied by invention, diminishes its salutary influence, since it is useless . . . ​to strive ­after that which we know to be beyond our reach. But the picture which I drew was not a phantom; as a model, it was devoid of imperfection; and to aspire to that height which had been ­really attained, was by no means unreasonable. . . . ​­Here . . . ​was a model worthy of assiduous study, and indefatigable imitation. (139–40) Pleyel not only echoes almost verbatim the central tenants of Lockean pedagogy, but suggests that this pedagogy’s efficacy depends on the model’s “actuality.” In this, Pleyel is in lockstep with the republic’s educational theorists and didactic writers: from biographies and conduct manuals to “Founded on Fact” novels, the disentangling of the exemplary paradigm from the novel’s suspicious fictionality was the defining gesture of early American didactic writing. Pleyel, like many republican pedagogues, seeks to translate the exemplary model from the metaphysically inferior category of the in­ven­ted to the a­ ctual. But even at the moment that Pleyel’s exemplary proj­ect is introduced, it has already been abandoned, undermined not by any a­ ctual change in his model, but by the fallibility of his senses. The irony of Pleyel’s comments on the superiority of a­ ctual lives for educative purposes is that they are contained within an explic­itly fictional and avowedly didactic narrative. Whereas Pleyel seeks to remove exemplary education from the epistemologically suspect realm of the fictional, Brown rejects exemplarity in ­favor of a didactic mode that depends on the nonactuality of its referents.50 In good Lockean fashion, Wieland is less interested in delivering a clear moral than offering “a mode of reasoning”—to use a phrase of Brown’s—­and inviting readers to apply it to the text: the narrative ends with Clara’s cryptic, “I leave you to moralize on this tale” (278). What “mode of reasoning” then does Wieland inculcate? Brown’s opening advertisement offers a useful starting point. The advertisement utilizes the rhe­toric of neither truth nor of the Romantic imagination, but the language of verifiable possibility. “The power which the principal person is said to possess can scarcely be denied to be real,” Brown writes of Carwin’s ventriloquism, “no fact, equally uncommon, is supported by the same strength of historical evidence.” Brown anticipates that “some readers may think the conduct of the younger Wieland impossible,” and thus, “In support of its possibility the Writer must appeal to Physicians and to men conversant with the latent springs and occasional perversions of the

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­ uman mind. . . . ​If history furnishes one parallel fact, it is a sufficient vindicah tion of the writer” (3–4). Brown invokes a category of the pos­si­ble—­verifiable by scientific expertise or the historical rec­ord—­distinct from both strict factuality and pure “fancy.” This emphasis on verifiable possibility takes on significance as the narrative progresses and characters consistently fail to confine their judgments to the verifiable. Clara and Theodore, in assuming super­natural intervention, do not restrict their speculations to the pos­si­ble and tragedy results. Early in the narrative, however, Theodore articulates a “mode of reasoning” that is startlingly consistent with the evaluative method Brown advocated in his essays. First, Brown: We can only make approaches to the truth. The more attentively we observe mankind . . . ​the greater w ­ ill this uncertainty appear, and the farther s­ hall we find ourselves from truth. This uncertainty, however, has some bounds. Some circumstances of events, and some events are more capable of evidence than ­others. The same may be said of motives. Our guesses as to the motives of some actions are more probable than the guesses that relate to other actions. Though no one can state the motives from which any action has flowed, he may enumerate motives from which it is quite certain, that the action did not flow.51 For Brown, skepticism of our ability to know anything with certainty is necessary. This uncertainty should not deter our quest for truth, but it should be kept constantly in view, so that we aspire to as get as close to certainty as pos­ si­ble. Strikingly, Theodore rejects Pleyel’s theory that the voice he heard was an “auricular deception” in terms that closely echo Brown: “­There is no determinate way in which the subject can be viewed. ­Here is an effect, but the cause is utterly inscrutable. To suppose a deception ­will not do. Such is pos­si­ble, but ­there are twenty other suppositions more probable. They must all be set aside before we reach that point.” “What are ­these twenty suppositions?” [Clara asked] “It is ­needless to mention them. They are only less improbable than Pleyel’s. Time may convert one of them into certainty. Till then it is useless to expatiate.” (41) The retrospective tragedy is that Theodore’s logic is, according to Brown, nearly perfect at this moment. He acknowledges the situation’s indeterminacy and forms vari­ous hypotheses, holding several possibilities in suspension u ­ ntil more information is revealed. Of course, for Theodore to reason correctly h ­ ere, Brown must suppress the content of his speculations. Unlike readers, who know that the solution “is not truly miraculous,” Theodore, hampered by his education, forms a faulty idea of both the pos­si­ble and the probable. Although his general approach is correct, he fails to think possibilistically and is misled:

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his faulty understanding of the pos­si­ble leads to a faulty understanding of the probable, and fi­nally, to the mistaken certainty that God has asked him to sacrifice his f­ amily.52 If, then, Wieland seeks to suggest a possibilistic “mode of reasoning” as its didactic content, how can we describe its didactic method? H ­ ere, we must return to the characteristic that distinguishes Wieland from many early US novels—­its fictionality. The preface’s possibilistic logic fits neatly with Gallagher’s account of fictionality’s eighteenth-­century emergence: Modernity is fiction-­friendly ­because it encourages disbelief, speculation, and credit . . . ​readers of ­these early novels ­were encouraged to anticipate prob­lems, make suppositional predictions, and see pos­si­ble outcomes. . . . ​­These thematically triggered reactions . . . ​magnify the more abstract formal demand that early fiction writers placed on their readers: asking them to take the real­ity of the story itself as a kind of suppositional speculation. . . . ​Disbelief is thus the condition of fictionality, prompting judgments, not about the story’s real­ity, but about its believability, its plausibility.53 By insisting that his fiction ­will conform to verifiable possibility at its outset, Brown reinforces the separation between reader and character and sets up his readers to “occup[y] the lofty position of one who speculates on the action, entertaining vari­ous hypotheses about it.”54 Readers know that Wieland ­will conform to verifiable possibility, and therefore, they know that the Wielands draw wrong conclusions in assuming super­natural agency—­Brown has already revealed that the denouement “is not truly miraculous.” But it is not as ­simple as readers knowing every­thing while characters grope superstitiously for the answer: readers, aware of what cannot be the explanation but not privy to the ­actual explanation, must suspend multiple pos­si­ble explanations u ­ ntil more information is revealed. Brown’s preface thus sets up readers to perform correctly exactly the kind of m ­ ental pro­cess that Theodore advocates but fails at. Moreover, the fundamental “conditions” of reading fiction, the very terms on which it must be evaluated—­its “plausibility” or possibility—­require Wieland ’s readers to practice the very “mode of reasoning” Brown hopes to inculcate. Read in relation to its repre­sen­ta­tion of epistemological error, Wieland ’s specific logic of fictionality is crucial. For while the prefatory advertisement precludes recourse to super­natural explanations, it also eschews the logic of fictional probabilism that runs from Aristotle through Fielding, setting up possibility rather than probability as the standard for fiction. Brown’s emphasis on singular possibility—­“If history furnishes one parallel fact”—­represents such a departure from standard probabilistic fictional logics that William Charvat claims that Brown’s preface is a “­mistake.”55 In attributing a failed Aristotelian probabilism to Brown, however, Charvat misses the crucial stakes of this distinction for Wieland ’s repre­sen­ta­tion of error: it is epistemology

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rather than aesthetics that motivates this fictional logic. Brown’s justification of his plot in terms of its possibility does not reflect his failure to understand con­temporary literary standards, but is bound up with the specific mode of reasoning he advocates. For Brown, probabilism, no less than superstition, leads to error. Again and again in Wieland, characters move rashly from probability to certainty, most notably when Pleyel decides that Clara is Carwin’s lover. Pleyel’s m ­ istake both anticipates Theodore’s error and differs from it. Like Theodore, Pleyel does not recognize indeterminacy and suspend vari­ous pos­ si­ble hypotheses about the event, instead jumping from probability to certainty.56 “You ­were precipitate and prone to condemn,” Clara tells him: where are the proofs that must justify so foul and so improbable an accusation? You have overheard a midnight conference. Voices have saluted your ear, in which you imagine yourself to have recognized mine, and that of a detected villain. The sentiments expressed w ­ ere not allowed to outweigh the casual or concerted resemblance of the voice. . . . ​The nature of ­these sentiments did not enable you to detect the cheat, did not suggest to you the possibility that my voice had been counterfeited by another. (134, emphasis added) This exchange sets conflicting views of the probability of a given explanation against each other, revealing the danger of moving rashly from probability to certainty. ­Here, Wieland demonstrates how a person’s sense of probability, far from being objective, is ­shaped by prejudice, passion, and manipulation. Brown places Pleyel’s failure alongside Theodore’s to emphasize that the system of thought he advocates involves more than eschewing impossible explanations; it also involves not equating the probable with the ­actual but continuing to consider other possibilities, suspending numerous hypotheses ­until all but one can be set aside. Pleyel’s probabilistic thought fails for the same reason as Theodore’s belief in super­natural intervention: it fails to re­spect the uncertainty inherent in the mystery of the voices. The rationalist no less than the mystic is susceptible to epistemological overconfidence. Wieland ’s unusual logic of possibilistic fictionality is not a “­mistake,” but a means of training readers to resist two distinct, but parallel, epistemological errors. For Brown, possibilistic reasoning involves recognizing the indeterminacy of motivations and ­causes. Fiction allows Brown to highlight this indeterminacy in a particularly compelling way, ­because fictional characters are “at once utterly finished and utterly incomplete. . . . ​By definition . . . ​we have no recourse to sources outside the fiction for supplementary information on characters.”57 Denying readers access to Carwin’s ultimate motivations, Brown highlights this incompleteness and the irresolvable indeterminacy it creates: readers have nowhere to turn for this information ­because it does not exist.

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Likewise, readers must face Wieland ’s final question, ­whether Carwin told Theodore to kill his ­family, as inherently unknowable. At the narrative’s close, readers are set up so that they cannot repeat the characters’ errors, moving from possibility to certainty without sufficient evidence, but must regard the fiction’s central event possibilistically, suspending multiple hypotheses, which ­will never be confirmed. Having seen how Wieland ’s didactic proj­ect depends on its fictionality, we can situate it in relation to its metadidactic critique of exemplary education. To return to Carwin’s narratives of mysterious voices: ­ hose that ­were most coherent and most minute, and, of consequence, T least entitled to credit, w ­ ere yet rendered probable by the exquisite art of this rhetorician. For e­ very difficulty that was suggested, a ready and plausible solution was furnished. Mysterious voices had always a share in producing the catastrophe, but they w ­ ere always explained by some known princi­ples, e­ ither as reflected into a focus, or communicated through a tube. I could not but remark that his narratives, however complex or marvellous, contained no instance sufficiently parallel to ­those that had befallen ourselves, and in which the solution was applicable to our own case. (85) Clara’s description of Carwin’s stories as “always explained by some known princi­ple” unmistakably echoes Brown’s claim that his “solution ­will . . . ​correspond to the known princi­ples of ­human nature.” Many critics have noted how Carwin serves as Brown’s double, but what makes this scene particularly significant is the way it allegorizes two competing modes of using narrative as an educational tool.58 Carwin, if not as forthrightly as Brown, lays out a method of possibilistic thinking that Clara could apply to her mystery. Although it would not provide the answer, it would prevent her from assuming super­ natural agency—­Theodore’s error writ small. Clara’s investment in a narrow exemplary pedagogy, believing that only “narratives . . . ​sufficiently parallel to ­those [events] that had befallen ourselves” would be “applicable” to the case, precludes her learning from ­these tales. ­There is, of course, a crucial difference between Carwin’s tales and Wieland itself: one acknowledges its fictionality at the outset, while the other retains referential truth claims. Whereas Clara evaluates the truth of Carwin’s tales, rather than focusing on the method of thought that they might teach, the same ­mistake could not be made with Brown’s fiction. Possibility is the only basis on which its events can be judged, and thus, it invites only the kind of evaluation that Clara should be performing with regard to the mysterious voices. Fiction, read correctly, is uniquely situated to teach possibilistic thought.59 ­Here, Brown highlights Wieland ’s related didactic and metadidactic proj­ects. Wieland seeks to teach a possibilistic system of thought that resists rash determination of certainty, but the dominant cultural understanding of novelistic

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instruction was inadequate for this task. Rejecting the exemplary model, Brown reimagines how fiction might educate: he encourages readers to engage in what Gallagher has called a “suppositional exercise,” considering vari­ous explanations for events and motivations for actions, while restricting their hypotheses to verifiable possibility. This mode of thought would be applicable to readers’ lives not merely in t­ hose situations “sufficiently parallel” to the narrative, but in all situations involving uncertainty. Tompkins has argued that understanding Wieland ’s didacticism requires recovering the “meaning” of the fiction, “since the usefulness of his book would naturally depend upon [the meaning] being understood.”60 But its “meaning,” or what Tompkins refers to elsewhere as Brown’s “message,” represents only part of Wieland ’s instructional proj­ect. Responding to Tompkins, Warner suggests that Brown “imagines a much more direct translation of reading his novels into public virtue,” not predicating their “usefulness” on readers abstracting their “message.”61 Wieland ’s interrelated didactic and metadidactic proj­ects show how its instructional program employs both methods. On one hand, its metadidactic critique of exemplarity allegorizes vari­ous methods of reading and depends on readers’ ability to abstract meaning from the text. On the other, Brown’s didactic proj­ect, his attempt to train readers in possibilistic reasoning, requires no such interpretation—­the pro­cess of reading Wieland itself, ­whether or not readers abstract a meaning, teaches this mode of thought. Wieland seeks to influence readers not only through their interpretation of its narrative, but through their participation in the skeptical, suppositional reasoning elicited by its possibilistic fictionality. Given that Wieland ’s didactic proj­ect hinges on such suppositional exercises, we cannot fully understand its po­liti­cal implications by interpreting it as an allegory of con­temporary politics. This is b ­ ecause Wieland ’s instructional program is fundamental to its po­liti­cal ambitions: its didactic and metadidactic proj­ects represent an intervention into a wider 1790s debate about how best to prepare a republican citizenry for po­liti­cal participation. The logic of Lockean education proved easily applicable to the nation writ large, as pedagogues searched for exemplars who could serve as models for the citizenry as a ­whole.62 This emphasis would be augmented at the turn of the ­century, when politicians and pedagogues increasingly posited the recently deceased Washington as a model to be imitated by the nation’s youth: What m ­ atter of thankful joy, that . . . ​Providence has opened to our ­children a volume so . . . ​instructive, as THE LIFE OF WASHINGTON! Ye American PARENTS, and TEACHERS of youth! Study this volume; master . . . ​its impor­tant contents; transcribe them into your own . . . ​lives; and thus convey them with happiest effect to your ­children and pupils.63

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In an 1800 essay on such funeral orations for Washington, Brown was, unsurprisingly, skeptical of setting up the dead president as a mythologized ­father figure: You must so conduct yourself that it ­shall not appear that any one besides Washington possessed an intelligence or moral character during or since the revolution. You must hang . . . ​the safety of our pre­sent po­liti­cal system upon his single life.64 Pushing the logic of exemplarity to absurdity, Brown exposes how this pedagogy replaces an abstract “po­liti­cal system” with a single model for imitation. When Pleyel, discussing Cicero’s Pro Cluentius, remarks that it is “absurd . . . ​ to make the picture of a single ­family a model to sketch the condition of a nation,” it resonates with Brown’s suspicion of the narrowness of this model of national education, which blindly seeks to reproduce itself without reference to abstract princi­ples, supplanting precept wholly with example (34). Brown’s suspicion of ­these orations for Washington reflects his wider discomfort with the dominant mode of po­liti­cal rhe­toric in this moment. Relying on the language of sentiment, rather than reason, t­ hese orations encapsulate a newly ascendant theory of rhe­toric and oratory in republican politics—­one that “elevated the performative aspect of speech over the argumentative” and saw eloquence as not only the power to persuade “but to excite, animate, motivate, and impress.” Taking Cicero as their primary model, ­these orators sought to “empower language such that it could, communicate pure emotion from one heart to another unmediated by the head.”65 ­Here, Theodore and Pleyel’s discussion of Pro Cluentius is significant: one of Cicero’s most virtuosic murder defenses, Pro Cluentius argues that Cluentius was not responsible for the murder, but it hardly refutes the charges at all. Instead, Cicero focuses on exposing how public opinion had been turned against Cluentius by demagogues, who have worked the public into a frenzy. He even reveals how, when employed by the opposite side in an ­earlier trial, he had contributed to this movement. In Wieland, Cicero’s text exposes how public opinion can be manipulated; how a possibility can be made to seem probable and the probable seem certain; how emotion can obscure reason. Brown sees in this mode of oratory a dangerous tool through which demagogues can bend an unthinking populace to their w ­ ill. Many critics have noted how oratory serves as a double for Carwin’s deceptive ventriloquism, but, more generally, Wieland pre­sents Carwin’s rhetorical excellence as endowing him with a remarkable ability to affect his auditors’ feelings: “The voice was only mellifluent and clear, but the emphasis was so just, and the modulation so impassioned, that it . . . ​imparted to me an emotion altogether involuntary and incontroulable” (59).66 Wieland seeks to train readers to resist exactly this kind of subordination of understanding to sensibility. By juxtaposing Pleyel’s remarks about the ­family model of national education against Cicero’s text, Brown suggests that

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the rhe­toric of con­temporary politics, which pre­sents the nation as a ­family and embraces exemplarity as the national pedagogy, neither appeals to nor shapes the reasonable faculties. He warns that encouraging citizens to relate to the government through naturalized sentiment rather than reason ­will render them vulnerable to emotional manipulation and less capable of skeptical evaluation. Just as in individual education, then, national exemplary pedagogy results in a failure to practice the kind of skeptical reasoning Brown advocates. ­Here, Gallagher’s account can again help us understand fiction’s appeal for Brown. Claiming that the “flexible m ­ ental states” associated with fictionality are “the sine qua non of modern subjectivity,” Gallagher lists a number of suppositional thought experiments—­what she terms “expedient fictionality”—­that would become impor­tant across the eigh­teenth ­century in areas ranging from commerce to courtship: “almost all of the developments we associate with modernity . . . ​required the kind of cognitive provisionality one practices in reading fiction, a competence in investing contingent and temporary credit.”67 But Gallagher does not mention another set of suppositional exercises that would have interested Brown: the modes of speculative reasoning involved in evaluating the promises of a po­liti­cal movement or imagining how a candidate might perform in office. “A suspicion was . . . ​admitted,” Pleyel says of Carwin, “that he counterfeited his belief for po­liti­cal purposes” (78). The ability to keep such possibilities in mind, to probe politicians’ motives skeptically without being able to arrive at certainty about them, to practice the expedient fictionality that allows one to speculate on what might result from a given election, movement, or legislative decision, this is what Wieland seeks to teach. The m ­ ental pro­cesses involved in reading fiction, especially fiction like Wieland—­maintaining vari­ous hypotheses about the action, anticipating ­future events, speculating about characters’ motivations—­would be supremely exportable to the challenges of republican po­liti­cal life. For Brown, the ideal participant in the public arena ­will not be someone who has unreflectively imitated the virtues of Washington or Franklin, but someone trained in the kind of suppositional thought that fiction-­reading cultivates. Wieland ’s emphasis on possibilistic reasoning and our inability to determine motives or c­ auses with certainty encourages deliberation and skepticism in the face of oratorical appeals to passion. Thus, at this uncertain moment for republicanism, the “po­liti­cal system” is dependent not on a single man, but on a “mode of reasoning.” To return, then, to Pleyel’s exchange with Wieland over Cicero: the disagreement that leads them to appeal to the volume is over the tense of the third-­person, subjunctive singular form of the Latin verb pollicere, to promise.68 This verb, especially in its subjunctive form—­the grammatical mood of both uncertainty and possibility—­suggests the uncertainty and possibility that inhere in the promises of orators, politicians, and po­liti­cal movements. By training readers to approach such uncertainties possibilistically, Wieland prepares them to evaluate t­ hese promises in a skeptical way that w ­ ill help

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them reach a more considered, reasoned decision. H ­ ere, we find a response to contentions such as Gray’s derisive claim that “when we s­ hall see g ­ reat orators formed by ­silent meditation . . . ​then . . . ​­shall we behold judges of ­human life and character produced by novel reading.” Gray insists that Americans should learn of h ­ uman nature “in the forum . . . ​not in the library,” but the thought pro­cesses that Brown’s fiction requires render it a power­ful instrument for preparing readers for the forum. Orators might not be formed by s­ ilent meditation, but during an era distinguished by widespread anx­ie­ ties about the rise of demagoguery, Wieland sought to train evaluators of t­ hese orators, citizens who would skeptically assess their claims, motivations, and promises. Wieland ’s intertwined didactic and metadidactic proj­ects reveal, in an especially clear way, how attention to dif­fer­ent fictionalities can help us begin to reconstruct the appeals to ­mental pro­cesses and reading practices besides interpretation that structured the po­liti­cal proj­ects of many early US fictions. In this context, I want to return for a final time to Tompkins’s Sensational Designs, a book that helped catalyze the historical-­political turn in Americanist literary studies that, in many ways, endures to our current moment. While subsequent scholars have revised Tompkins’s reading of Wieland ’s politics, her method of interpreting Wieland ’s events in terms of con­temporary po­liti­cal issues—of reading its bewildering plot as an allegory of historical phenomena—­has proved both enduringly and widely influential in the study of early US fiction. This is most evident in the ongoing tendency to read Wieland, in Eric Wolfe’s succinct formulation, “as an allegory of the nation in 1798.”69 But, as Elizabeth Maddock Dillon has incisively shown, ­there is an “allegorical premise” that has prevailed in the study of early US fiction more generally, with scholars often approaching t­ hese fictions as allegories of nation formation and its attendant anx­i­eties.70 This approach has transformed our understanding of American fiction—­and produced revelatory readings of specific texts—by both recovering the po­liti­cal significance of neglected works and uncovering the po­liti­cal implications of canonical works that w ­ ere once seen as exemplifying a Romantic isolation from the social and po­liti­cal concerns of their day. But when we attend to fictionality, we can see how the po­liti­cal proj­ ects of many early fictions, including Wieland itself, also encourage and even depend upon eliciting a range of reading practices other than interpretation. The po­liti­cal proj­ects of ­these republican fictions ultimately hinge less on readers interpreting a concrete po­liti­cal “meaning” or “message,” to use Tompkins’s terms, than on their practicing the suppositional thought—­between “believing every­thing” and “crediting nothing”—­that t­ hese fictions posit as a crucial skill for civic participation. ­Because ­these writers understood fiction’s po­liti­cal value to inhere not only in its ability to deliver an interpretable message but also in the speculative thinking it encouraged, their po­liti­cal proj­ects reveal the need to expand our methods for recovering a fiction’s politics or the “cultural work” it performs. ­Later chapters ­will furnish further examples, such

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as Poe’s Pym, a book that pre­sents readers not only with a series of symbols to interpret—­though it, of course, does do this—­but also with a paratextual apparatus that tests their ability to detect fraud. But ­because its politics have been approached as an interpretive puzzle for so long, Wieland ’s instructional fictionality reveals, in a particularly dramatic way, how our understanding of the politics of American fiction can be supplemented and enriched by attending to the host of historically specific reading practices beyond interpretation that mediated readers’ encounters with ­these narratives and ­shaped how ­these fictions ­shaped social and po­liti­cal life. In the ­later nineteenth ­century, Americans would come to value fiction-­ reading on the very terms that early Americans ­were suspicious of it: as an aesthetically oriented leisure activity that offers an occasion for private self-­ cultivation. As this conception of fiction-­reading became ascendant, it often obscured ­earlier, and to us less familiar, arguments for fiction’s value, such as Brackenridge’s or Tyler’s. Or, as happened with Wieland, it led to teleological readings that sought to recuperate early fictions in terms of ­later literary values. Read as a precursor of Hawthorne and Poe, Brown appears primarily as a misunderstood writer, the originator of a distinctively American “romance” tradition and a Romantic champion of the imagination before his time—­a “serious literary artist” writing before the United States appreciated serious literary art.71 But seeing Brown as out of step with his moment’s values—­civic virtue, didactic efficacy, po­liti­cal utility—­requires interpretive gymnastics that read his fiction against his explicit claims for its value. Brown’s instrumental theory of fiction’s value remains closer to Brackenridge’s or Tyler’s than Poe’s or Hawthorne’s (and certainly than James’s or Faulkner’s). In Wieland, Brown breaks the taboo against fictionality not b ­ ecause he was out of sync with his country’s conception of lit­er­a­ture’s purpose, but b ­ ecause he believes fiction can serve ­these values particularly well. When we get b ­ ehind ­these back-­projected conceptions of fiction’s value, we are confronted with a largely unfamiliar history of fictionality, one that complicates our current narratives of fictionality’s “rise.” ­These republican fictions remind us that even as fictionality’s emergence was bound up with the development of a reading culture that emphasized private respectability, t­ here w ­ ere writers who resisted this understanding of the mode, harnessing it for explic­ itly po­liti­cal ends. Once fictionality and its associated modes of supposition had been developed in this context, they could be appropriated for other, even opposed, uses, such as po­liti­cal debate or training citizens. While early US writers produced fiction that adheres to neither our conception of fiction’s value nor that of their En­glish contemporaries, this reflects not their failure to understand fictionality, but rather, their attempt to reimagine the value of fictionality in a context very dif­fer­ent than the one in which it had first been developed. To see this endeavor as reflecting a failure of understanding is to reveal the narrowness of our own conception of fictionality’s value and purpose.

ch a p t er t hr ee

Fictionality and Female Conduct

histor ies of f ic t ion i n t he United States have largely ignored the first two de­cades of the nineteenth c­ entury. In a period of literary history best known for a man who falls asleep for twenty years, critics have attributed the same feat to American fiction.1 At the same time, scholars have shown that between the 1790s and the 1820s—­a period that Duncan Faherty has aptly referred to as the “canonical interregnum”—­American attitudes ­toward fiction underwent a “revolution.”2 Even as critiques of fiction continued to appear in the 1820s and beyond, periodical essayists would increasingly refer to the suspicion of fiction as a relic of the past.3 But the conditions that allowed for fiction’s flourishing—­and the terms on which it would do so—­did not appear spontaneously in the 1820s. They had been worked out over the previous twenty years of neglected literary history in a dynamic contest over how fiction might best shape the lives of young w ­ omen. In what has long been considered a black hole in the history of American fiction, we find a rich archive for exploring the rarely considered relation between fictionality and normativity—­ specifically the relation between fictionality and the gender norms governing feminine conduct in the early republic.4 Early national periodical essayists and pedagogues ­were preoccupied with the effect of fiction-­reading on young w ­ omen’s be­hav­ior. They worried that the epistemological unreliability of fiction would lead directly to transgressive conduct: “Novels not only pollute the imaginations of young w ­ omen,” wrote the Weekly Magazine in 1798, “but likewise give them false ideas of life, which too often make them act improperly.”5 Critics argued that fiction’s unrealistic repre­sen­ta­tions would lead young w ­ omen to, as Timothy Dwight put it, “lose contact with real­ity” and refuse the imperatives of republican femininity, most notably respectable marriages, in the hope of achieving the kind of life and

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Fictiona lit y a nd Fem a le Conduct [ 85 ]

love they had read about in novels. Fiction’s advocates, however, insisted that if fiction had such a profound effect on be­hav­ior, it could be harnessed for edifying purposes. Faced with this controversy, nearly ­every fiction of this era—­ whether avowedly didactic or not—­took up the question of what constitutes appropriate female conduct. Focusing primarily on the novels of the 1790s, feminist criticism has found this fiction’s mix of conventional and unconventional heroines rich ground for exploring the possibilities and limits of what was an imaginable life for a w ­ oman in the republic.6 This chapter seeks to expand our analy­sis of ­these fictions to encompass the diverse logics of fictionality that mediated readers’ encounters with ­these narratives and structured their attempts to influence be­hav­ior. The chapter’s first two sections focus on turn-­of-­the-­century attempts to reform the “practice” of fiction-­reading: many writers believed that creating instructive fiction required first changing how young w ­ omen read fiction. T ­ hese writers developed varied fictional logics in an attempt to manage how young w ­ omen used their narratives in forming expectations for their own lives. ­These sections argue that ­these narratives’ distinct modes of fictional address—no less than their thematic content and form—­shaped their normative force. At a time when educators ­were preoccupied with delineating clear expectations for w ­ omen’s lives, ­these diverse fictional logics—­each encouraging dif­fer­ent reading practices, modes of speculation, and va­ri­e­ties of suppositional thought—­offered a way of shaping not just what ­these young ­women envisioned their f­ utures to hold, but also how they ­imagined ­these ­futures. Where the chapter’s first half explores the synchronic variety of fictional logics in the early United States, its second half traces a diachronic shift in the ascendant theory of fictional instruction, as fictionists repositioned their works in relation to the evolving periodical debates about fiction. Across the early 1800s, t­ here is a subtle but crucial shift in discussions of fiction and novels: periodicals continued to warn against “the danger of par­tic­u­lar works,” but they increasingly regarded the condemnation of “the ­whole class” of fiction as not “founded on reason.”7 As the possibility of an educative fiction became generally accepted—­that is, as instructive potential was disentangled from a text’s basis in ­actual events—­commentators and fictionists turned to the question of what made a fiction instructive. Two competing standards for fiction emerged. The first was a moral imperative that held that fiction should pre­sent a strictly virtuous vision of society. The other emphasized fidelity to real­ity, claiming that fiction could only impart true knowledge by accurately reflecting “the world as it is.” Over the first two de­cades of the nineteenth c­ entury, the moral imperative would slowly displace the mimetic imperative, reflecting the gradual disentanglement of moral from epistemological concerns in discussions of fiction. As we w ­ ill see, this change corresponds to a wider shift in the prevailing

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conception of morality, as an understanding of morality as obedience to external law and authority is slowly and unevenly supplanted by an understanding of morality as obedience to an internalized moral sense and the dictates of one’s own sentiment—­a shift that indexes the increasing ascendance of a domestic disciplinary regime that emphasized inward-­facing self-­regulation in US middle-­class culture.8 ­These changes ­shaped new conceptions of fictional value: conduct writers increasingly emphasized their fictions’ moral idealism, rather than their repre­sen­ta­tional accuracy, as didactic fiction gradually abandons the claim that it offers readers a kind of worldly experience and instead positions itself as an alternative to such experience. The rise of this theory of fictional instruction was bound up with the emergence of an ideal of domestic femininity that opposed cloistered virtue to the sordidness of “the world.”9 The ascendance of this understanding of femininity might not solve the epistemological prob­lem of fictionality, but within a delimited social arena, it rendered it moot. Yet, this was an uneven, contested pro­cess. ­Because this period lacked any consensus about how fiction should influence readers, it offers a fertile field for exploring the varied ways in which fictionality could be used in convincing w ­ omen to change their be­hav­ior. In the early 1800s, new liminal forms of fiction emerged as writers grappled with the unreconciled, perhaps irreconcilable, imperatives for fiction. Some fictions maintained partial claims to factuality to affirm their reliability as a source of knowledge about the world, even as they also emphasized fiction’s potential to improve on real­ity—to offer a purer vision than the world “as it is.” O ­ thers seized upon the ambiguities that inhered in multivalent, shifting concepts like “truth” and “probability” in order to claim adherence to both strict morality and mimetic accuracy. Blurring the line between prescription and description, ­these mixed fictional logics provided a compelling means of projecting a normative moral vision onto the world. In turning to ­these unfamiliar fictions, we confront fictionality’s potency as a rhetorical tool for urging readers to conform to—­even internalize—­ normative models of be­hav­ior. But we also encounter fictional logics that encourage readers to scrutinize and resist t­ hese very tools of persuasion and influence. Writers such as Rebecca Rush and Leonora Sansay examined the risks and limitations of the prevailing ways of using fiction to shape young ­women’s conduct. Sansay’s works, in par­tic­u­lar, urged readers to question not only specific gender norms, but also the wider structures of normativity, such as a moral absolutism that could not account for the vagaries of circumstance, that s­ haped judgments of w ­ omen’s conduct, especially sexual conduct. Questioning the causal logic underpinning con­temporary seduction tales, Sansay’s semifictional narratives skeptically interrogated the ambiguous, shifting truth claims through which the novelists of her era projected their moral vision onto the world they claimed merely to reflect.

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The Practice of Reading Fiction In the 1780s and 1790s, fiction’s unreliability as a source of knowledge was seen as leading directly to deviant be­hav­ior by young ­women. Believed to be physiologically more susceptible to passion, emotion, and sensibility, w ­ omen ­were considered uniquely vulnerable to the intertwined epistemological and moral pitfalls of fiction-­reading.10 In 1794, the United States Magazine published a six-­letter critique of “The Practice of Reading Novels and Romances” by the pseudonymous Philalethes. He encouraged young ­women to scrutinize the effect fiction has had on their acquaintances, “who have made it their practice to read novels and romances”: “Converse with ­these females, and observe their conduct . . . ​you w ­ ill find that their notions of h ­ uman life are romantic, and extravagant indeed.”11 For Philalethes, as for many early Americans, t­ here was a direct link between fiction’s suspect epistemology and transgressive female be­hav­ior: the “extravagant . . . ​notions” inculcated by fiction produce observable deviations in “conduct.” T ­ hese critics w ­ ere less worried about the effects of any single fiction or novel than about the dangers of making this kind of reading a habitual “practice.” “[I]t is the practice of reading novels and romances, not a par­tic­u­lar novel or romance,” Philalethes insists, “which is the object of my animadversions.”12 As a recurring “practice,” novel-­reading was seen as both especially frivolous and especially dangerous, ­because it indicated that a reader preferred fiction’s fairylands to “real life” and it increased the likelihood that she would “lose contact with real­ity.” Moreover, the “practice of reading novels and romances” was associated with a set of reading practices—­ sympathetic identification, voracious consumption, reading for plot—­that critics saw as especially likely to lead to the improper conduct that so worried Philalethes. While nearly all early conduct writers lamented the effect of fiction on young w ­ omen’s be­hav­ior, they did not all see this as sufficient reason to dismiss fiction altogether. If fictions and novels had such a profound effect on be­hav­ior, some reasoned, could they not be used to educate rather than corrupt? But faced with anx­i­eties about fiction’s epistemological under­pinnings, ­those writers who sought to turn the mode to pedagogical ends had to first establish the conditions ­under which fiction might be read without risking delusion. To make fiction a reliable source of knowledge and harness it for edification, ­these writers had to first transform how fiction was read. Judith Sargent Murray’s periodical narrative the Story of Margaretta offers the clearest example of this endeavor. Across Margaretta’s narrative and many paratexts, Murray constructs an elaborate defense of fiction’s educative value if it is read in the proper way and ­under the proper guidance. In this, Margaretta offers an especially explicit version of an argument found in nearly e­ very early US fiction: if young ­women ­were to learn from fiction, they first had to learn a safe way of reading it. For Murray, this means learning how to resist the

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unthinking absorption and reading for plot that she, like many of her contemporaries, associated with “the practice of reading novels.” Murray first published Margaretta serially as part of “The Gleaner” (1792–94), a series of Spectator-­style moral essays ostensibly written by a Mr. Vigillius.13 ­These essays are interwoven with tales from Vigillius’s domestic life, which trace the education, courtship, and marriage of his ­adopted ­daughter, Margaretta Melworth. Margaretta appeared during the age of The Power of Sympathy and Charlotte ­Temple, when periodicals ­were full of “Tales of Truth,” such as 1789’s “Almira and Alonzo,” an “Affecting Story, Founded on Fact.” Published in the very Mas­sa­chu­setts Magazine where “The Gleaner” would soon appear, “Almira and Alonzo” promised to “convey a good moral” through “REAL­ITY, without the help of FICTION” as “TRUTH should always have the preference.”14 But while Vigillius’s first-­person account of Margaretta’s education seems to reproduce the didactic logic underpinning such tales, Margaretta endlessly hints at its own fictionality and Murray made it explicit in the story’s augmented republication in The Gleaner (1798), a three-­volume miscellany, published u ­ nder the pseudonym Constantia. Margaretta might resemble the “Founded on Fact” tales it appeared alongside, but it ultimately rejects their pedagogical logic and mounts a qualified argument for fiction’s instructional potential. Murray lays out the terms of fiction’s didactic value most explic­itly in the essayistic interchapters that interrupt Margaretta’s narrative. Anx­i­eties about fictionality haunt t­ hese episodes. In one, the Gleaner overhears readers expressing skepticism that the Gleaner is who he says he is. Accusations of fictionality quickly follow: “if the scoundrel has imposed upon the public by a fictitious tale, he ­ought surely to be tossed in a blanket.” Consistent with the norms of republican print, Murray condemns this “hunting ­after names,” but she breaks with many of her contemporaries by linking her defense of anonymity to a qualified defense of fiction—­“instruction not seldom arrays itself in the decent and alluring veil of allegory.” The Gleaner then delineates the correct grounds for judging any text: “the reader is to scan the intrinsic value and general tendency of the composition” (215–16). Addressing both content and authorship, Murray advocates evaluation that focuses not on a text’s factuality or fictionality but on its “intrinsic value” or “general tendency” in determining w ­ hether it is “laudable.” In fact, fiction, b ­ ecause it refers to suppositional persons and events rather than a­ ctual ones, is especially well-­suited to encouraging readers to focus on its “intrinsic value”—­its self-­contained lessons rather than its connection to real persons and events. Even as she advocates fiction’s educational value, however, Murray also differentiates her fiction from the suspicious novel genre by staging her refusal to conform to its conventions. Murray consistently interrupts her narrative with readerly complaints about such interruptions, underscoring how Margaretta’s serialized mix of fictional narrative and moral essays distinguishes it from

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plot-­driven novels. In one interchapter, the Gleaner is gratified to overhear a gentleman defend the narrative’s lack of recent additions on exactly t­ hese terms: “it is my opinion that the Gleaner withholds [Margaretta] now . . . ​ from fear of giving his productions the air of a novel.” For, as the gentleman puts it: “You know . . . ​what a frivolous point of view, the novelist at this pre­ sent stands . . . ​who would wish to debase the essayist . . . ​into a mere annalist of brilliant fictions.”15 This gentleman, however, follows this seeming denigration of fiction as such with a defense of virtuous fictions, even invoking biblical parables as a pre­ce­dent for fictions that “promote morality.” By associating her fiction with moral essays and biblical parables rather than novels, Murray is not only legitimating her educational proj­ect, but also eliciting the reading practices on which this proj­ect depends. In one of the fictional “letters to the Gleaner” that Murray interpolates into the narrative, a young ­woman chastises the Gleaner for suspending his story, admitting that she eagerly awaits new installments as her f­ ather has forbidden novels but approves of periodicals. Staging this disappointment, Murray shows how her serialized mix of essays and narrative prevents the absorptive, thoughtless reading for plot associated with novels: the fiction’s generic heterogeneity and serial temporality disrupt the consumptive reading that republican critics saw as a defining feature of the “practice” of novel-­reading. Murray cultivates such disappointment to urge readers to focus not on Margaretta’s plot, but on the “general tendency” of its moral. Readers should read fiction, or at least, fiction like Margaretta, as they would a parable or essay, concentrating on abstracting a moral lesson.16 Such claims to generic distinction are part of Murray’s wider proj­ect of protecting readers from fiction’s epistemological pitfalls by reforming the “practice” of fiction-­reading. This proj­ect is central to the narrative itself, which describes Margaretta’s training in conversation, etiquette, and, of course, reading. Unlike many of their contemporaries, the Vigilliuses believe that it is “impracticable” to ban novel-­reading. Novels are simply too popu­lar: “Mrs. Vigillius, therefore, thought it best to permit the use of ­every decent work, causing them to be read in her presence, hoping that she might, by her suggestions and observations, pre­sent an antidote to the poison, with which the pen of the novelist is too often fraught” (165). Murray pre­sents a program of educational oversight that resists fiction’s pernicious effects by reforming not the fictions themselves, but the conditions ­under which they are read. Mrs. Vigillius selects appropriate novels and then monitors Margaretta’s reading in order to combat the delusive beliefs and immoral feelings that novels ­were thought to provoke. This program of carefully supervised reading seems to preclude the worst effects of the “practice”: Margaretta’s novel-­reading results in neither quixotism nor depravity. ­There are, however, subtle effects that Mrs. Vigillius must continue to combat, extending her educational oversight far past the moment of reading. Torn between the suspicious but comely Courtland and

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her neighbor Hamilton, Margaretta ­faces a choice between romantic love and filial obedience: her parents urge Hamilton even as her heart draws her t­ oward Courtland. Margaretta’s courtship thus reproduces the crisis of much sentimental fiction, requiring Mrs. Vigillius’s further mediation of her novel-­reading: would ­these over nice distinctions . . . ​ever have found entrance into the bosom of a virtuous girl, ­were it not for that false taste which is formed by novel reading? What is this something which you feel for Courtland, and which you cannot feel for Hamilton? . . . ​it is . . . ​but the fever of the imagination, the delirium of fancy; and e­ very experienced votary of this ignis fatuus, if ­under the direction of truth, ­will tell you . . . ​that the sober and healthy age of reason awaits, when love and friendship wear the same face. (184) Mrs. Vigillius deploys the language of antifiction—­“imagination,” “delirium,” “fancy,” “ignus fatuus”—­against the false ideas of novels, opposing t­ hese terms to the knowledge of “truth” gained through lived experience. It is an exemplary moment of the kind of supervisory control described ­earlier: Mrs. Vigillius dispels the false impressions inculcated by fiction, altering her ­daughter’s conduct. Margaretta marries Hamilton. Elizabeth Whitman’s fate has been averted. While a good parental monitor might render novels safe and even instructive, Murray is aware that not all young ­women ­will have a Mrs. Vigillius. Even more than training virtuous young w ­ omen, Margaretta trains the guardians who ­will train ­these virtuous young ­women: “The Gleaner” includes a number of letters from purported readers, seeking guidance on how to raise their own ­daughters. ­There is even a letter from a motherless young ­woman who has been reading Margaretta ­under the guidance of her guardian. This guardian has shown her charge how this story might “teach demeanours, and proprieties,” even though this young reader has realized that Margaretta is not a “real lady.”17 Murray seeks to create the Mrs. Vigilliuses who w ­ ill oversee the young republic’s young fiction-­readers and guide them through the mode’s epistemological pitfalls, allowing them to learn from virtuous fictions, such as Margaretta. Murray’s narrative thus offers a model for the kind of monitorial reading guide who was quickly becoming a ubiquitous figure in American conduct lit­er­a­ture. (The “preceptress” in Foster’s The Boarding School [1798] is exemplary.) The idea that a young w ­ oman’s reading, especially her novel-­reading, needed to be carefully monitored became so well established that John Davis could poke fun at it in the “Dedication to Flavia” that opens his 1801 novel, The Wanderings of William: “Avail yourself of the moment that offers to indulge in the perusal of this book. Take it, read it, ­there is nothing to fear. Your governess is gone out, and the f­ amily are not yet risen.”18 But where Davis made

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light of such oversight, most fictionists took it very seriously, often presenting themselves as filling the monitorial role advocated by Vigillius. The narrator of Henry Sherburne’s The Oriental Philanthropist, or the True Republican (1800), for example, argues that “Since the tales of fiction are so greatly multiplied, so entertaining, and with such avidity perused, I would render them as harmless and useful as pos­si­ble.” By “presenting . . . ​the moral” of each of his tales in its “most engaging view,” Sherburne’s narrator w ­ ill “guard the mind of the reader, while he is travelling through the regions of fancy, into the world of realities. In this escorted, he ­will attend me through the ensuing pages.”19 This narratorial “escort” seeks to guide how readers understand the relationship between “the regions of fancy” and “the world of realities,” neatly fulfilling the monitorial role advocated by Vigillius. Although few fictions show Murray’s influence as clearly as The Oriental Philanthropist—­Sherburne’s preface invokes Constantia as his model—­ Margaretta’s preoccupation with guiding how readers approached fiction resurfaces in almost ­every didactic fiction of this era. To realize its educative potential, Murray insists, fiction must be read in a certain way and u ­ nder very specific conditions. This is the ur-­gesture of early US didactic fiction. Margaretta stands out for the elaborateness of its metafictional apparatus, but its under­lying proj­ect was shared by nearly all of Murray’s contemporaries: to address the epistemological prob­lem of fictionality, early American fictionists sought to reimagine “the practice” of fiction reading.

Forming Expectations In overseeing a young ­woman’s reading, the monitor’s most impor­tant task was managing how her charge understood fiction to relate to her life and particularly her prospects for marriage. Mrs. Vigillius’s most crucial monitorial intervention, ­after all, comes not at the moment of reading, but when Margaretta must choose between two suitors. In this, Murray was in lockstep with the wider discourse: periodical and conduct writers worried endlessly about ­women using fiction’s unrealistic narratives to form expectations for their own lives and especially their own loves. ­These writers believed that such unreliable tales would lead young ­women to neglect—or worse reject—­the less romantic duties of wifedom and motherhood. As we saw in chapter 1, early commentators saw fiction-­reading as a twofold threat to the institution of marriage: the false expectations learned from fiction would ­either make ­women easy targets for seduction or lead them to reject worthy suitors who fell short of fictional ideals. In both cases, t­ hese writers drew a causal link between, to use the words of the Weekly Maga­ oman’s decision to “act zine, “the false ideas of life” found in fiction and a w improperly”—­her refusal of the requirements of virtuous femininity. Even if the fiction-­reader did ultimately marry, the Weekly Magazine argued, her

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expectations for marriage would be so warped by “characters which never existed” that she ­will be “out of humour with the piece of plain mortality” that she married and her subsequent life ­will be defined by “disappointment” and “mortification.”20 ­These periodical writers had a remarkable faith in fiction’s ability to mold how young w ­ omen envisioned their f­ utures. Romances and novels, wrote The Mirror of Taste in 1811, impart “false and exaggerated notions” and “fill young minds with fancies and expectations which can never, in the natu­ral course of t­ hings, be gratified or accomplished.”21 Faced with ­these anx­i­eties, almost ­every fiction from this era sought to clarify how readers should relate its narrative to their own prospects for life and marriage. Turn-­of-­the-­century periodicals singled out one variety of fiction as particularly likely to mislead young readers: fictions that recounted pos­si­ble but unlikely events. In an 1801 Philadelphia Repository essay, the aptly named Commentator argued that no fictions ­were more dangerous for the republic’s youth than ­those that “exceed[ed] probability,” but remained within the “extensive limits of possibility.” Critics such as the Commentator believed that ­these possibilistic fictions ­were especially liable to produce false expectations—­ and by extension, deviant be­hav­ior and “a pernicious effect” on “the peace and happiness of society”—­because they encouraged readers’ minds to roam beyond the likely, and yet they could not be dismissed as pure fantasy.22 In one sense, the Commentator’s fears w ­ ere justified. In this moment, American writers and printers produced a host of fictions that featured pos­si­ble, but highly unlikely, narratives. Many of t­ hese texts—­what Davidson has dubbed “the female picaresque”—­centered on unconventional female be­hav­ior, with their heroines consistently violating, even flouting, standard gender roles. Texts as dif­fer­ent as Tabitha Tenney’s Female Quixotism (1801), Herman Mann’s The Female Review (1797), and The History of Constantius and Pulchera (republished eight times between 1794 and 1802) all fit the Commentator’s description of “exceeding probability” without violating the “extensive limits of possibility.” T ­ hese narratives, however, vary widely in how they encourage readers to connect such remarkable, yet not fantastic, stories to their own lives. B ­ ecause of their shared emphasis on ­women’s unconventional conduct, ­these narratives reveal with par­tic­ul­ ar clarity how their dif­fer­ent fictional logics shape their normative force. The Commentator’s worries about the fiction favored by the republic’s youth, of course, encompassed not only such American works, but also the Eu­ro­pean fiction that continued to dominate the US marketplace. For this reason, I want to take as a starting point a reprinted En­glish fiction, the anonymously written The Female American. When printer Angier March de­cided to issue a second edition of The Female American in Newburyport, Mas­sa­chu­setts, in 1800—it had first been published in London in 1767—he both added to this wave of fiction about unconventional feminine be­hav­ior and put into circulation exactly the kind of possibilistic fiction that so worried

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the Commentator. March was also reprinting a fiction that engaged a set of interrelated questions about fictionality, education, and appropriate female be­hav­ior that preoccupied US writers at this moment. B ­ ecause The Female American was never reprinted in ­England, critics have tended to attribute its American republication to its American content, but the book’s playful interrogation of fictional truth—an increasingly antiquated concern in En­glish fiction of this moment—­would also have given The Female American fresh relevance in the turn-­of-­the-­century United States, where this had become an increasingly contested issue. The Female American is notable for both its unconventional heroine—­ Unca Eliza Winkfield, the ­daughter of a ­Virginia settler and a Native American princess, who resists all marriage proposals, instead dedicating herself to woodcraft—­and its remarkable events—­Unca Eliza is marooned on a desert island, where she takes refuge in a ­giant idol.23 She soon discovers that the idol amplifies her voice and she uses it to convert the island’s natives to Chris­ tian­ity. This remarkable narrative, however, insists on its reliability as a source of knowledge and its ability to instruct young readers. It includes an elaborate pseudofactual apparatus, with an “editor” who recounts the manuscript’s discovery, notes its superiority to fiction, and claims it is the factual source-­text for some sea-­fiction called Robinson Crusoe. Playfully ventriloquizing a variety of conventional truth claims, The Female American urges readers to reflect on the grounds on which factual genres, such as history, claim didactic superiority to fiction.24 The Female American justifies the “truth” of its story on the very terms that the Commentator found so worrisome. While Unca Eliza refuses to provide the standard “solemn professions of veracity,” she insists that her narrative does not “exceed the bounds of probability” (35). H ­ ere, Unca Eliza invokes probability not in the sense of statistical likelihood but in the sense of plausibility, as she repeatedly refers to specific parts of her adventures as “improbable” in the sense of unlikely. She thus offers readers an improbable, probable tale. Rather than incoherence, the narrative’s simultaneous improbability and probability reflects the duality inherent in the concept: the tale is probable (plausible) in the epistemological register and improbable in terms of the mea­sure­ment of chance. Claiming that the “greatest sceptic w ­ ill allow that uncommon as [her adventures] are, they do not exceed the bounds of probability,” The Female American invites readers to use the edge of the plausible as the standard by which to judge her narrative’s “truth.” It asks readers to consider Unca Eliza’s story in terms of its improbable plausibility or possibility. This possibilistic fictional logic fits with the book’s theory of pedagogy. In both secular and religious ­matters, Unca Eliza pre­sents won­der as the key to successful instruction. This underscores the educative value of her own narrative, which contains events “so wonderful, strange, and uncommon . . . ​ that true history, perhaps, never recorded any that w ­ ere more so” (35). Such a

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“wonderful, strange” narrative might seem especially susceptible to the epistemological critiques of fictionality, but The Female American affirms its rationalist credentials by offering its own repre­sen­ta­tion of epistemological error—­ one that reverses the gendered anx­ie­ ties surrounding fiction. When a group of sailors arrive on the island, they hear Unca Eliza’s amplified voice and harp coming from within the idol. The sailors assume demonic activity, refusing to believe that Unca Eliza is ­human even a­ fter she has revealed the natu­ral means of creating the ostensibly super­natural effect. “This can be no h ­ uman artifice,” says one, “. . . ​I never was credulous; but henceforth I s­ hall believe e­ very fairy tale” (125). This credulity—­believing ­every fairy tale—is, of course, exactly what fiction’s critics feared. But by giving this statement to a male sailor rather than a female reader, The Female American invites readers to examine more closely the nature of each epistemological error. Crucially, the sailor’s superstitious assumption fails to conform to the very evaluative standard that Unca Eliza invokes throughout her narrative—­plausibility. The Female American’s possibilistic logic of fictionality, in fact, trains readers to resist this exact error.25 The Female American, then, might encourage exactly the kind of possibilistic speculation that worried the Commentator, but it maintains that such imaginings are not inherently delusive. It insists that Unca Eliza’s narrative is no “fairy tale,” no mere fantasy. This possibilistic logic of fictionality has crucial stakes for how The Female American positions Unca Eliza’s adventures in relation to the experiences of most ­women: The lives of w ­ omen being commonly domestick, the occurrences of them are generally pretty nearly of the same kind; whilst ­those of men, frequently more vagrant, subject them often to experience greater vicissitudes, many times wonderful and strange. Though a ­woman, it has been my lot to have experienced much of the latter. (35) Unca Eliza is not offered as a model for readers, and she certainly highlights the gap between her experience and the likely experience of her readers—­their expectations—­but her life is held forth as an instructive won­der in itself: she is a pos­si­ble but extraordinary female. Asking readers to judge her narrative’s plausibility, The Female American invites them to reflect on the possibilities of female experience removed from its normal, domestic circumstances.26 The social implications of The Female American’s fictional logic become clearer when we juxtapose it with some of the other narratives of unconventional feminine be­hav­ior, such as Mann’s The Female Review, that circulated alongside it in the turn-­of-­the-­century United States. The Female Review recounts the martial ­career of Deborah Sampson, an ­actual ­woman, who, disguised as a man, fought in the Revolutionary War. Featuring crossdressing, combat, and her near seduction of a young w ­ oman, The Female Review stands out in early US lit­er­a­ture for its lenient attitude ­toward a ­woman’s disregard for the norms of domestic femininity: Mann resists the conflation of

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convention with morality, lamenting the “stigma” that is attached to ­women who violate “custom” but not “virtue.”27 The Female Review and The Female American, then, both challenge the norms of eighteenth-­century femininity, but their divergent fictional logics shape their very dif­fer­ent antinormative proj­ects. While it has long been considered among the novels of the early republic, The Female Review’s factual basis freed it from the imperatives governing fiction: working outside the malleable fictional mode, Mann shows ­little concern about providing e­ ither a prescriptive portrait for imitation or a “probable” narrative. This allows him to emphasize both the singularity of Deborah’s conduct and her qualified “virtue” given her circumstances and motivations: while Mann w ­ ill not endorse her unwomanly be­hav­ior, he insists that “we may excuse even a female, for taking arms.”28 ­Here, we can see how ­these two va­ri­e­ties of fictionality and nonfictionality encourage divergent forms of readerly judgment. In The Female Review, readers are asked to accept the facts of Sampson’s be­hav­ior and use them to exonerate her singular conduct. In The Female American, readers are asked to judge the possibility of Unca Eliza’s singular life and adventures. Whereas The Female Review’s nonfictionality allows Mann to foreground the pro­cess of how to judge nonnormative female be­hav­ior, The Female American’s fictionality encourages readers to dwell on the plausibility of alternatives to standard female conduct. The former is ideal for exposing the unjust application of certain normative standards for be­hav­ior; the latter for inviting speculation on the “strange” and “wonderful” possibilities for a ­woman’s life beyond such normative models. The “lives of w ­ omen” might be “commonly domestick” and “nearly of the same kind,” as Unca Eliza puts it, but The Female American’s fictional logic encourages readers to grapple with pos­si­ble horizons beyond this standard domestic femininity. Even if t­ hese speculations do not correspond to probable expectations for readers’ lives, this does not, The Female American insists, make them delusions. Tabitha Tenney disagreed. Her Female Quixotism seeks to foreclose exactly the kind of possibilistic speculation encouraged by The Female American and other “female picaresque” fictions circulating in the republic at this moment. At first blush, Female Quixotism’s plot—­full of crossdressing and cross-­class romance—­seems to align it with other turn-­of-­the-­century repre­sen­ta­tions of unconventional female conduct. But while modern critics have celebrated its raucous repre­sen­ta­tion of transgressive female be­hav­ior, Female Quixotism actually echoes the Commentator’s view that it is exactly this kind of plausible but unlikely fiction that represents the greatest threat to both young ­women and “society” at large.29 Tenney, however, sought to contain this threat not by condemning such fictions, but by changing how readers connected them to their own lives. Female Quixotism is the story of Dorcas Sheldon, a young ­woman who is so taken with novels that she changes her name to Dorcasina to more closely

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resemble the heroines of fiction. Having lost her m ­ other, she is raised by a ­father with “a singular taste for a man”: “he delighted in novels.” Bereft of a ­mother’s guidance—­she has no Mrs. Vigillius to monitor her reading—­ Dorcasina becomes a novel-­reader without her ­father’s understanding of how dif­fer­ent classes of books should be regarded: “novels w ­ ere her study, and history only her amusement” (6). “Unacquainted with the ways of the world,” Dorcasina reads novels as reflections of real­ity, b ­ ecause her own experience is so narrowly confined that she cannot see that ­these fictions are full of “false ideas.” Even traumatic experiences cannot correct the epistemological error at the heart of her adventures: fiction has provided her with a series of touchstones, norms, and especially expectations with which to navigate experience, and this social schema proves remarkably resistant to her friends’ attempts to break it. It is only once she has been imprisoned (by a stratagem of her neighbors, the Stanly f­ amily) away from her precious novels and has been verbally abused for her illusions by an exposed rogue that she abandons her novelistic fantasies and laments her past conduct. The book ends with Dorcasina becoming Dorcas at last and encouraging her friend Harriet Stanly to forbid her d ­ aughters novels. Female Quixotism, then, is an antinovel novel—an antifictional fiction. Many of Female Quixotism’s most influential commentators have resolved this contradiction by reading Tenney’s proj­ect as one of intrageneric distinction, approaching Female Quixotism as, in Davidson’s words, “an allegory of reading” meant to redirect ­women to the “right kinds of books, the right kind of novels even, not the novels Dorcasina reads but the novel in which she reads them.”30 This dovetails with Cynthia Miecznikowski’s claim that Tenney works “within a form that is not highly regarded to re-­form it.”31 For t­ hese critics, Female Quixotism, like its pre­de­ces­sor Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752), critiques not fictionality as such, but the extravagance of most fiction.32 But Female Quixotism, I want to insist, does not simply advocate replacing bad fictions with good ones, but instead seeks to transform the role that fiction plays in readers’ lives. The distinction becomes clear when we contrast Female Quixotism’s ending with that of its En­glish precursor. In The Female Quixote, a good doctor teaches the quixotic Arabella the difference between true and deceptive fictions and encourages her to read only fictions that accurately represent the world. But where The Female Quixote closes by changing what fiction Arabella reads, Female Quixotism closes by changing how Dorcasina reads it. Female Quixotism ends with a letter from the aged Dorcasina to Harriet Barry (née Stanly) in which she condemns novel-­reading in no uncertain terms, blaming both her past conduct and her inability to enjoy more substantial reading on the practice. Yet, in spite of this, Dorcasina does not give up novels: without a taste for other reading, she is “obliged . . . ​to take [plea­ sure] in ­those very books, which by perverting [her] judgment, and filling

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[her] fancy with visionary expectations, have occasioned most of the serious evils of a very eventful life.” Dorcasina, a quixote no more, still reads novels “with the same relish, the same enthusiasm” as before, “but, instead of expecting to realize scenes and situations so charmingly pourtrayed, [she] only regret[s] that such unalloyed felicity is, in this life, unattainable.” As Dorcasina no longer regards them as reflections of her likely experience, novels “now amuse” her “without the power of injuring” (234). She fi­nally becomes the kind of novel-­reader that her ­father was: fiction now serves as her “amusement” rather than her “study.” Female Quixotism thus cordons off fiction as mere entertainment, underscoring its separation from lived experience and ­those fact-­based books that have implications for lived experience. Through Dorcasina’s very specific mode of credulity, which eschews the vulgar errors of superstition—­unlike other characters, Dorcasina never believes super­natural or fantastical stories—­ Tenney demonstrates the danger of fictions that resemble, but do not accurately reproduce “life as it is.” Female Quixotism takes as its principal targets fictions, such as Roderick Random and Charles Grandison, that represent pos­si­ble experiences, but nevertheless fall well outside the likely experiences of its readers. Where The Female Quixote advocates realistic fiction, Female Quixotism advocates a realistic understanding of what fiction is. Tenney recognizes, indeed sensationalizes, fiction’s ability to shape conduct and she seeks to contain this dangerous potentiality by advocating a conception of fiction’s value that does not posit it as a model for be­hav­ior. In this, Tenney breaks with the antifictional discourse that she other­wise echoes: for her, fiction’s frivolity—­its ability to merely amuse—is not a reason to dismiss it, but the only terms on which it can be read safely. This is most evident in the Sheldons’ divergent ways of reading: “Mr. Sheldon . . . ​retired to his study, to relieve his mind of the anx­i­eties he had felt during the day, by in­ter­est­ing himself in some entertaining and elegant author. . . . ​How often is the keenest sorrow suspended or forgotten, while one is perusing the entertaining . . . ​page” (85). For Sheldon, novel-­reading involves an evacuation of self, as his “anx­i­eties” are lost in the “interest” of the text. Fiction’s ­great virtue for Sheldon (and for Tenney)—­its disconnection from readers’ real­ity—is the very characteristic that produces Dorcasina’s quixotism. ­Because she uses fiction to form her expectations for her own life, novels offer her no respite when she is distressed: [novels] cannot now give me plea­sure. My sorrow is too deep . . . ​a perusal of the happiness painted by some of t­ hose authors . . . ​would only be an aggravation; and pictures of distressed lovers would heighten my pre­sent suffering. (93) Treated as touchstones to mea­sure her life against, rather than a means of escaping it, t­ hese fictions aggravate where they might other­wise have soothed.

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For Tenney, then, fiction’s value lies in its ability to amuse rather than instruct. Once fiction has been untethered from any relation to “life . . . ​as it is,” it can fill a dif­fer­ent role: introducing romance into readers’ prosaic lives. At the end of Dorcasina’s life, novels offer compensatory fantasies that supplement her dreary existence. Female Quixotism itself may not offer the happy ending—­the “unalloyed felicity”—of Dorcasina’s novels, but it does offer the vicarious experience of a series of “singular” events denied to readers by the norms governing female be­hav­ior—­norms that, as vari­ous critics have noted, seem increasingly burdensome as the narrative draws to a close.33 Read only as “amusement,” the pleasures of such simulated transgressions are carefully cordoned off from readers’ a­ ctual lives.34 Tenney thus offers a qualified solution to the epistemological prob­lem of fictionality by dismissing fiction as a vehicle for knowledge altogether. In this, Female Quixotism resists not only t­ hose “marvellous” yet plausible fictions of female adventure, such as The Female American, but also more quotidian fictions, such as Murray’s Margaretta, that sought to turn a disciplined form of fictionality to educative ends. For Tenney, making this unreliable mode an object of “study” represents too ­great a risk. Female Quixotism is thus a most remarkable kind of self-­consuming artifact: it is a didactic fiction that teaches readers that fiction should not be used for education. Yet even as Female Quixotism implicitly rejects the didactic proj­ect, and even premise, of Murray’s fiction, ­there is a deeper under­lying unity between them: they are linked by their attempts to manage how young ­women understand the relationship between their lived experience and the narrative at hand. In spite of their divergent conceptions of fiction’s purpose, the fictions this chapter has considered thus far all share a commitment to changing the practice of fiction-­reading as a means of confronting the epistemological prob­ lem of fictionality. ­These texts’ logics of fictionality—­the generic associations a text claims; the standards of evaluation it invokes; the speculative exercises it invites; the reading practices it encourages or discourages—­function like the monitorial educators who appear throughout their narratives, urging w ­ omen to read in a certain way. T ­ hese fictional logics prescribe an approach to the narrative. This is as true for a text that explic­itly includes a monitorial figure, such as Margaretta, as for one that only sets forth a standard of evaluation, such as The Female American. This is not, of course, to dismiss the possibility of readers resisting a text’s fictional logic. (Certainly, one might read a seduction tale for titillation rather than edification!) The history of t­ hese fictional logics is not a history of reading per se. But it is a history of appeals to par­ tic­u­lar ways of reading—­appeals that mediate readers’ encounters with ­these narratives and structure ­these texts’ attempts to influence conduct. When we grapple with the divergent ways in which t­hese turn-­of-­the-­ century writers understood the “practice” of fiction-­reading, we confront a challenge. On one hand, we see how their competing logics of fictionality ­shaped the ideological implications and gender politics of ­these texts. On the

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other, we face the impossibility of describing an ideology of fictionality. Fictionality, ­after all, could be used to encourage young w ­ omen to consider the possibilities for life beyond normative domestic femininity, but it could also be used to urge them to accept this very delimited set of expectations for their lives. Fictionality, then, might not have a stable politics or ideology, but the contests over fictionality nevertheless profoundly s­ haped attempts to mold young ­women’s be­hav­ior in the republic. Across the early 1800s, US attitudes ­toward fiction would evolve considerably, but fictionality would continue to be a contested site at which the question of what constituted acceptable feminine be­hav­ior was endlessly negotiated.

Competing Imperatives and Mixed Modes in the Early 1800s The first de­cade of the nineteenth ­century brought two subtle but significant developments in US discussions about fiction. The first was the increasing ac­cep­tance of the idea of instructive novels and fictions. This possibility is, of course, assumed by e­ arlier didactic novels and fictions, but across the early 1800s, it became common in periodical writing about fiction. Periodicals gradually moved away from categorical condemnations of the genre and mode and instead lamented the pernicious influence of most novels and fictions: as the Boston Weekly Magazine put it in 1803, “I would not condemn all NOVELS indiscriminately . . . ​I have read novels . . . ​from which both plea­sure and instruction might be gleaned; but of the multitudinous throng which crowds the libraries, perhaps not one in twenty could be ranked in this class.”35 Over the first de­cade of the nineteenth c­ entury, even opponents of novel-­reading increasingly accepted the argument that the Weekly Magazine had articulated in 1798: “Many persons are wholly adverse to novel reading. If this sentiment ­were produced by a fear of the danger of par­tic­u­lar works . . . ​their motives could not be disapproved; but when it extends to the exclusion of the ­whole class, it does not appear to be founded on reason.”36 Often, the acknowl­edgment of the possibility of an instructive (or at least harmless) novel or fiction would only serve to retrench a blanket dismissal of the genre. Take, for example, this 1802 sketch from the Philadelphia Repository: “Amanda did not positively give it as her opinion, that no novels should be read in this society; yet as she implied that they ­were pernicious to the female sex in general, and as ­there ­were many young ladies pre­sent, the assembly agreed to reject that species of reading.”37 But increasingly, periodicals claimed that ­there ­were good novels and bad novels, good fictions and bad fictions, and that it was impor­tant to distinguish between them: “Many [novels] in our language, may be read with innocence and safety” allowed the Weekly Visitor in 1804; “a novel is a very dangerous poison in the hand of a libertine; it may be a salutary medicine in that of a virtuous writer,”

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suggested the Baltimore Weekly Magazine in 1801.38 Across the early 1800s, more and more periodicals espoused the Literary Magazine’s 1804 stance that “­Those who condemn novels, or fiction, in the abstract, are guilty of shameful inconsistency.”39 This shift in attitude was driven, in part, by a recognition of fiction’s popularity: “To the writer of fiction alone,” wrote the Port-­Folio in 1803, “is e­ very ear open.” Like Murray’s Vigilliuses, periodicals came to regard banning fiction as impracticable and they began to see better fictions as the best antidote to the genre’s insidious influence. The Boston Weekly Magazine’s 1804 comments are representative: That by far the greater part of this species of fictitious history, now in circulation, is injurious to manners, and subversive of the morals of youth, is a truth which many lament, and which none ­will deny. But the plea­sure with which they are read, and the eagerness with which they are sought a­ fter, ­will ever baffle the most sedulous attempts of parents and instructors, to keep them out of the hands of ­those, who are placed ­under their care. The best, and indeed only remedy for this growing evil, is, the introduction of publications, of the novel class, which are unexceptionable in their moral tendency, and calculated to impress, on the young and tender mind, sentiments of honor, of virtue, and of religion.40 The New-­England Quarterly had put it more simply in 1802: “I declare it as my opinion that some novels ­ought to be read. . . . ​But I should be careful in selecting the novels which I put into a young lady’s hands.”41 Such arguments gave the monitorial role that Murray advocated a new centrality in discussions of fiction: the nation’s youth needed guides to select appropriately instructive novels for them. This is crystallized in an 1804 Literary Magazine sketch in which a male student debates the value of novel-­reading with his ­sister. Although he believes that his ­sister defends fiction with “more eloquence than truth,” their collective commentary provides a response to categorical condemnations of fiction. The s­ ister argues that critics “evince nothing but an early prejudice” in refusing to distinguish between good and bad fictions: their starting assumption that fiction is not useful reading “­will not permit to them to examine before they judge.” In an increasingly representative stance, the student agrees that young ­women might indeed learn from fictions if they read the right fictions—­meaning ­those approved by an appropriate monitor, such as the student himself: “guides to a right choice,” he insists, “are always to be found.”42 Periodical editors seized upon this monitorial role and presented themselves as so many Mrs. Vigilliuses, promising to point Amer­i­ca’s youth ­toward appropriately edifying fictions. The Juvenile Magazine (1802), for example, opens with a lament over the popularity of fiction and offers itself as a guide

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for making a more “judicious choice of books.” This conventional antifictional stance, however, is immediately qualified: “we wish to avoid the opposite extreme. . . . ​We do not propose to exclude e­ very kind of fiction: agreeable tales, inculcating some moral precept . . . ​­will always find a place in our miscellany.”43 Introducing its “department of fiction” in 1801, the Lady’s Monitor acknowledged the “objections which some have to novels and romances,” but insisted that it would only publish instructive fictions: “Pieces of a moral tendency, what­ever can amend and humanize the heart, inform the understanding, and correct the judgment; what­ever can awaken attention to obvious and impor­tant truths.”44 The ac­cep­tance of the possibility of instructive fiction transformed a debate over fictionality as such into a contest over which fictions and novels should be selected. Periodicals more and more focused on the question posed in the 1810 didactic fiction, Rosa; or American Genius and Education—­“What constitutes a meritorious novel?”45 Novelists, unsurprisingly, ­were ­eager participants in this debate. Many seized upon this discussion as an opportunity to articulate why their novels ­were exceptions to the genre’s pernicious tendencies: “Novel reading,” Sukey Vickery admits in Emily Hamilton, A Novel Founded on Fact (1803), “is frequently mentioned as being in the highest degree prejudicial to young minds, by giving them wrong ideas of the world.” But “Novels,” she argues, “­ought not to be indiscriminately condemned, since many of them afford an innocent and instructive amusement.” For Vickery, a novel’s potential for moral instruction depends on its factual basis: novels “founded on in­ter­est­ing scenes in real life, may be calculated to afford moral instruction to the youthful mind.”46 This theory of novelistic instruction is developed at ­great length in Meredith Martha Read’s Monima, or the Beggar Girl: A Novel Founded on Fact (1802): To exhibit mankind in their true colours, to display characters as they are, to unfold the pernicious tendency of ignorance, prejudices, and immorality, is the undisputed privilege of the Novel-­writer, this, however, cannot be done but by a strict adherence to truth and nature; to deviate from this, the mind must become enveloped in mystery and darkness. ­Those among the honorable tribe of “Novel-­Tinkers” who [infringe] on the limits of nature by conjuring up scenes, images, and actions which nature cannot boast . . . ​such writings . . . ​upon the minds of the uninformed, the weak, or the youthful, they ingraft unwholesome prejudices.47 Read and Vickery articulate with exceptional clarity the (by now familiar) logic underpinning both “Founded on Fact” novels and categorical condemnations of fictionality: for t­ hese writers, a novel’s potential for moral instruction depends on its foundation in “scenes of real life.” Their more extended prefatory defenses of this logic, however, reveal that this theory of novelistic instruction cannot be taken for granted in the early nineteenth c­ entury: for as

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discussions of fiction shifted from ­whether an instructive novel was pos­si­ble to what made a novel instructive, commentators began to won­der if a “truth” based on “scenes from real life” and “moral instruction” ­were as neatly aligned as Monima and Emily Hamilton assumed. This brings us to the second significant development in discussions of fiction in the early 1800s: as the possibility of an educative fiction became widely acknowledged, a new debate emerged over w ­ hether fiction’s ability to educate depended on its “strict adherence to truth and nature” or on its moral tendency. While Vickery and Read saw ­these two aspects of novelistic instruction as intimately related, many periodical writers began to regard them as potentially in tension with each other. Given the prevalence of En­glish fiction in the republic, it is unsurprising that this contest often played out in debates over the relative merit of t­ hose two behemoths of En­glish fiction, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding. T ­ hese discussions often hinged on the comparative didactic efficacy of Charles Grandison versus Tom Jones. Even as Richardson’s American advocates admitted that Tom Jones was “a more exact description of life” and Grandison’s character was “more perfect than to be found amongst men,” they insisted that Richardson’s strictly virtuous fictions would be more edifying for young readers, who “cannot easily discern the finer shades of morality” and ­will be “dazzled by the splendor of vice.”48 Fielding’s supporters held that it was more instructive for youth to read his “more exact description of life,” worrying inexperienced readers would be misled by Richardson’s “faultless monster, which the world ne’er saw.”49 An 1802 exchange in the Port-­Folio reveals how t­ hese two En­glish books came to serve as metonyms for competing systems of valuing fiction in the early United States. Acknowledging that Jones is “a faithful copy of nature,” a Mr. Griffin celebrated Richardson for the very disconnection between his novels and lived experience, arguing that it is only by imitating Grandison’s perfect virtue that one might become a Jones in real­ity.50 A few weeks l­ ater, a certain J.D. would take up Fielding’s banner by positing a very dif­fer­ent theory of didactic fiction: for J.D., fiction’s instructive potential inheres in its ability to provide readers with a kind of worldly experience—­encounters with p ­ eople and events “as may actually occur in real life”—­rather than its ability to offer a picture of absolute virtue.51 ­These two books posed, in dramatic terms, the question that preoccupied writers at this moment: should fiction pre­sent the “world as it” or as it should be? J.D., however, did not have the last word. A writer styled H.E. took up the Richardsonian mantle. But H.E. did not reproduce Griffin’s argument. Rather, he advocated Richardson on the very grounds that J.D. defended Fielding: his accurate depiction of “life as it is.” H.E. insists on the “probability” of Richardson’s repre­sen­ta­tions of “­human nature.” While he acknowledges that probability is a slippery standard of judgment—­“for where is the standard of probability?”—­H.E. judges by “his own experience” and claims he has found

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no author truer to life. Having posited his own experience as a standard for probability, he then gives this judgment moral force: “But what ­shall we say to ­those, who . . . ​infer, from their own feelings, that the transcendent virtue of Grandison is impossible, or . . . ​out of nature? Unhappy it is, that so many ­people should consider any ­great effort of disinterestedness and magnanimity, as unnatural and superhuman.”52 Unlike Griffin, who celebrated Grandison’s virtue as admirably beyond nature, H.E. pre­sents readers’ belief in Grandison’s probability as indicative of their morality. He collapses the clear distinction between the standards for fiction that emerged in the ­earlier debate: rather than choosing between strict morality and repre­sen­ta­tional accuracy, H.E. holds up Richardson as exemplary of both. In the first de­cade of the nineteenth ­century, then, American writers confronted an evolving discussion of what constitutes an educative novel or fiction. As the possibility of instructive fiction came to be accepted in periodicals, novels moved slowly and unevenly away from the claims to factual basis that had prevailed in the 1790s. The gradual weakening of what we might call the factual imperative for the novel—­the idea that a novel’s potential for moral instruction depended on its basis in a­ ctual p ­ eople and events—­led many novelists to grapple with the questions raised in the Port-­Folio debates: should fiction prioritize moral purity or repre­sen­ta­tional accuracy? Does reflecting the “world as it is” compromise fiction’s moral influence? But in responding to ­these two emergent, often competing, standards for fiction—­moral tendency and mimetic accuracy—­these fictions did not necessarily endorse one standard over the other. Mirroring H.E.’s defense of Grandison, fictionists aspired to conform to both imperatives. To do this, they developed paratexts that invoked multiple standards of judgment—­truth, fact, morality, probability, virtue—­for their narratives. And as in H.E.’s essay, conforming to both imperatives often involved obscuring the complicated, sometimes contradictory, relation between them. This elision, which might seem to compromise a fiction’s claim to instructional legitimacy, proves to be one of conduct fiction’s most power­ful rhetorical tools. Take, for instance, Caroline Matilda Warren Thayer’s The Gamesters, or the Ruins of Innocence, An Original Novel, Founded in Truth (1805). The exact grounds of this “Truth” are markedly less clear than in Charlotte ­Temple or The Coquette. Thayer does not reproduce the authenticating apparatus found in t­ hese e­ arlier “Tales of Truth,” neither offering evidence of factual basis nor insisting much on it. Although she gestures to epistemological concerns, admitting that many novels have “exhibited too highly coloured portraits of life; and have, like an ignis fatuus, too frequently led the young mind astray,” she posits moral content as the key to novelistic instruction, claiming that if “novels [­were] devoted to the cause of moral virtue, they might become as useful, as they are thought to be pernicious.”53 The Gamesters’s claim to be “Founded in Truth,” in fact, obscures the novel’s relation

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to ­actual events by invoking a term that can signal e­ ither factuality or morality (as in a “moral truth”). Morality certainly guides the plot of The Gamesters. The protagonist’s descent into gaming leads to indigence and his suicide. A ­woman allows too many freedoms to a seducer, becomes distracted, and ends her own life. A poor but virtuous man raises a newspaper to hide a tear and sees that he has inherited a fortune from an unknown relative. If Thayer’s preface suggests that the novel’s “Truth” inheres in its moral vision, the subtitle also suggests that this vision governs real­ity. Setting this moral “Truth” against the “ignis fatuus” of fiction’s misrepre­sen­ta­tions, Thayer offers a shifting ground of “Truth” that elides the distinction between “Truth” as morality and “Truth” as repre­sen­ta­tional accuracy. Although emphasizing the former, her coy use of “Truth” allows The Gamesters to claim adherence not only to the e­ arlier factual imperative, but also to the two dif­fer­ent imperatives for fiction emerging at this moment. The Gamesters does not stake its instructional potential on its intrinsic moral tendency alone, but uses an ambiguous claim to “truth” to proj­ect that moral vision onto “the world” it claims to reflect. A comparison with The Coquette’s repre­sen­ta­tion of seduction illuminates how The Gamesters’s mixed mode of “Truth” shapes its address to readers. On one hand, both novels represent a seduction that leads to a ­woman’s misery and death. In both cases, punishment is delivered for the violation of a norm; both times it serves as a cautionary warning; and both times it is offered as an occasion for readers to cultivate sensibility. Yet, in moving from a factual tale, the retelling of which does not violate morality, to a tale that justifies itself through its “moral virtue,” we move from a narrative dealing with historical circumstance and contingency to a morally ordered world constructed by the author. The claim to factuality in The Coquette opens up the possibility of critiquing the norms governing female sexuality, whereas the authoritative morality justifying The Gamesters pre­sents no similar possibility. Where The Coquette represents the operation of disciplinary norms, The Gamesters ratifies them. Although it has been largely overlooked by literary historians, The Gamesters crystallizes the paratextual gymnastics that many early nineteenth-­ century novelists undertook in an attempt to adhere to both the moral and the mimetic imperative. Another neglected novel, S.S.B.K. Wood’s Dorval, or the Speculator, A Novel Founded on Recent Facts (1801), performed an even more spectacular and revealing set of contortions.54 While Dorval’s subtitle emphasizes its factual basis, Wood’s preface defends “the well-­meant fiction.” She then follows with an assertion of her own narrative’s strict morality—­“it is hoped no one w ­ ill find, upon perusal, a lesson, or even a sentence, that could authorize vice or sanction immorality.” Unlike in Thayer’s preface, however, Wood does not rest with an assertion of moral purity, but then addresses the epistemological anx­i­eties about fiction by insisting on her villain’s factual

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basis: “in her vindication . . . ​the most vicious character is not the creature of imagination, ‘the vagrant fancy of a ­woman’s brain.’ ”55 Wood ­later buttresses this claim with a footnote that insists: “The character and history of Dorval are not a fiction. What is related in the subsequent sheets, however, romantic and melancholy, it may appear, is well known by many to be strictly agreeable to truth” (62). Dorval’s claim to be “Founded on Recent Events” extends beyond such general events as the Yazoo controversy to a basis in par­tic­u­lar persons. In spite of its defense of “well-­meant fiction,” then, Dorval seems to reproduce the logic of e­ arlier nonfictional novels. Wood’s insistence on Dorval’s factuality, however, does not necessarily encompass her more admirable characters, including her hero and heroine, Aurelia and Burlington.56 Drawing attention to this distinction, Wood coyly leaves it to “the world to determine if they are visionary beings, or copied from real life.” Wood places the epistemological burden on readers, expressing a hope that they “­will believe it more than probable that an Aurelia, a Burlington, and many o ­ thers, are still inhabitants of the world.” This subtle shift from factuality to probability as the narrative’s governing standard has considerable stakes given Dorval’s repre­ sen­ta­tion of epistemological error. In the story of Miss Woodly, Aurelia’s real ­mother—­Dorval’s labyrinthine plot is summary-­proof—­Wood offers a portrait of a quixote whose head has been turned not by fiction, but by the Revolution: This was the age of romance . . . ​my imagination [was] filled with events which could never happen. . . . ​The news of Arnold’s treachery, the execution of Major Andre, and the murder of Miss McCray . . . ​had so filled my head with a mixture of truth and falsehood, and both in the romantic way, that I had no relish for the business and enjoyments of common life. (193) ­ ere, a young w H ­ oman evidences all the effects commonly associated with fiction-­reading—­a head filled “with a mixture of truth and falsehood,” a romantic worldview, and a distaste for “the business and enjoyments of common life”—­but they have been caused by historical events rather than fiction. The era’s mix of legend and fact have given Woodly a desire for t­ hings that “could never happen”: much like Dorcasina, Woodly fails to grasp the relation of what she has heard to her own life, forming unrealistic “expectations” for how her life w ­ ill unfold. By presenting an instance of “romance” unrelated to fiction, Dorval suggests that factual basis does not guarantee epistemological reliability, opening up space for “well-­meant fictions.” But Dorval, with its mix of factual and fictional characters, would seem to risk creating exactly this kind of delusion. The novel’s fictional logic, however, preempts this charge: for its fictional heroes and heroines, Wood invokes not just possibility but probability as the standard to which they must adhere. Setting Woodly’s romantic notions against Dorval’s probabilistic fictionality, Wood reverses the standard antifictional

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argument: probable fictions are actually more reliable than a­ ctual events. The improbabilities of history, she underscores, do not have to adhere to the epistemological standards set out in her preface.57 Dorval’s mixed fictional logic, then, allows it to adhere si­mul­ta­neously—­albeit partially—to the gradually weakening factual imperative for the novel, while also arguing for the instructional value, and even epistemological superiority, of the “well-­meant fiction.” Significantly, even Wood’s assertion of Dorval’s factuality functions not as a dismissal of fictionality as such, but as a means of establishing her villain’s “possibility.” Rather than discrediting fiction, factuality legitimates Dorval in terms of one standard for judging fiction. Insisting that her novel, insofar as it is fictional, conforms to the probable, Wood attests not only to its believability, but also to its value as a source of knowledge about the world and a means of forming expectations about it. Wood’s alternating claims for possibility and probability, however, introduce another tension into the novel, b ­ ecause, as we have seen, the distinction between probabilistic and possibilistic fictions had significant social stakes in this era. Wood uses this distinction between pos­si­ble and probable characters to set up the dif­fer­ent pedagogical work they perform. Dorval, a­ fter all, serves as a limit case of depravity that warns against corrupt predators. Aurelia and Burlington, alternatively, are exemplars of virtuous be­hav­ior. For this, mere possibility is not an adequate standard. If ­these characters are to serve as models, their be­hav­ior must be reproducible: this is far easier if their character is restricted by probability—­that is, if it is likely—­rather than only “comprehended within the extensive limits of possibility.” Faced with anx­i­eties about Grandison and other fictional paragons misleading readers with their unachievable virtue, Wood hints that her two protagonists are not “visionary beings” but probable “inhabitants of the world.” ­Here, the duality inherent in the concept of probability is ­doing impor­tant work for Wood: “With regard to the other characters, it is left to the world to determine w ­ hether they are visionary beings, or copied from real life. It is hoped, however, while they acknowledge the possibility of such a being as DORVAL, they believe it more than probable that an Aurelia, a Burlington, and many ­others, are still inhabitants of the world.” Explic­itly, Wood invokes probability in its epistemological register, with “more probable” registering degrees of belief: even if Dorval is based in fact, Aurelia and Burlington are “more probable” in the sense of more believable.58 Yet, Wood’s distinction is also colored by the thinking about statistical probability, expectations, and chance that had emerged over the preceding c­ entury.59 This is not to say that Wood’s distinction between pos­si­ble and probable characters draws on statistical means—it does not—­but it participates in the era’s general interest in describing probable persons and distinguishing exceptions. Dorval posits a description of the “world” in which its “inhabitants” can be sorted into the probable and the merely pos­si­ble, the likely and the exceptional—­a distinction

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not captured by ­either epistemological or aesthetic frameworks of probability. Mirroring a newly emergent tendency to use probability to describe p ­ eople as part of populations, Wood’s fictional logic singles out Dorval not only for his evil, but also for his improbability.60 He is deviant in a double sense. The probability Wood invokes, however, is not strictly descriptive. Rather, probability is something that is “left to the world to determine.” Like H.E.’s defense of Grandison, Wood’s appeal emphasizes the moral force of recognizing a character as probable: “It is hoped . . . ​while they acknowledge the possibility of the existence of such a being as DORVAL, they ­will believe it more than probable that an Aurelia, a Burlington . . . ​are still inhabitants of the world.” ­Here, determining probability hinges less on evaluating plausibility or likelihood than on making a moral judgment. The novel asks for “the world”— an implied social consensus—to “believe” in the novel’s exemplary characters and endorse them as accurate repre­sen­ta­tions of “the world” the novel claims to represent. A failure to “believe” in Aurelia’s probability represents not only a fallen vision of “the world,” but also a moral failure on the part of “the world.” Giving probability a moral force, Dorval blurs the line between its descriptive and prescriptive proj­ects, a power­ful move in a genre suspected of both immorality and unreliability. Dorval claims to represent the world as it is—­Wood sets forth ­these characters as “probable . . . ​inhabitants of the world”—­but, in ­these characters, it also claims to represent the world as it should be. In Dorval’s unusual probabilism, ­there is an elision between two kinds of normativity—­normalization and normation. Normalization is the form of normativity that extends from probability: it describes the normal in terms of what empirically exists, usually mea­sured in terms of statistics, and posits norms from this vantage. Alternatively, normation—an older form of normativity—­takes a law or standard as its starting point.61 Wood’s preface obscures this distinction by asking “the world” to endorse a moral standard as a probable description of “the world.” It is a misrecognition of normation for normalization; or rather, it uses the terms of normalization to describe a pro­ cess of normation. Dorval sets forth its heroes as exemplary in two senses. In one sense, they are clearly offered as exemplars of virtuous be­hav­ior, worthy of imitation. But in Wood’s distinction between probable and pos­si­ble characters, Aurelia and Burlington—­lumped in with “many o ­ thers”—­are also exemplary in that they are, unlike Dorval, not marked as exceptional. The prescriptive model is presented as descriptively representative. In the early 1800s, US novelists w ­ ere faced with an enduring, if weakening, factual imperative that held a novel’s morality and instructive efficacy proceeded from its factual basis. They also confronted the emergent, competing standards for fiction of repre­sen­ta­tional accuracy and strict morality. The Gamesters and Dorval exemplify early nineteenth-­century’s novelists’ negotiations of the contradictory demands being made of the genre and mode. Undaunted, t­ hese writers developed new liminal forms of fiction, which

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sought to adhere to all of them. When we approach t­ hese novels as part of a longer history of fictionality, their paradoxical truth claims suddenly seem to be less a sign of incoherence or confusion than a strategic means of obscuring the distinction between description and prescription in their narratives—­a power­ful sleight of hand for texts seeking to shape the be­hav­ior of readers. In their paratexts, t­ hese novelists constructed mixed fictional logics that w ­ ere potent tools not just for positing normative standards of conduct, but for projecting ­these norms onto the social world they claimed to reflect. Such novelistic elisions of prescription and description did not go unnoticed. If novels such as Dorval and The Gamesters exemplify the shifting ground of fictional instruction in the early 1800s, Leonora Sansay’s hybrid narratives exposed the contradictions under­lying t­ hese instructional proj­ ects. In The Secret History (1808) and Laura (1809), Sansay constructed liminal, semifictional narratives that both diagnosed the pressures shaping early nineteenth-­century didactic fiction and interrogated the nature of “truth” found in the many novels that passed severe judgments on ­women’s sexual transgressions. Within the history of fictionality in the early United States, Sansay’s works stand out b ­ ecause they are less interested in using fiction to shape conduct than in probing the narrative logic through which novelists urged ­women to conform to certain moral standards. Taken together, The Secret History and Laura mount an incisive critique not of the specific lessons inculcated by seduction fiction, but of the moral absolutism required of such narratives. Put another way, Sansay’s works are interested less in specific norms than in the broader structures of normativity that ­shaped fictional repre­sen­ta­tions of female conduct. This is somewhat counterintuitive, as Sansay insisted that she did not write fiction at all. Like ­earlier “Founded on Fact” novels, The Secret History and Laura disavow fictionality. But with the evolution of discussions of fiction across the early 1800s, ­these truth claims take on a new force. Turning to factuality to circumvent the imperatives governing fiction, Sansay exposed the fissures ­running through the discourse about fiction and re­imagined the terms on which fiction might represent ­women’s transgressive be­hav­ior. The Secret History, or the Horrors of St. Domingo is an epistolary account of the adventures of two s­ isters, Clara and Mary. Although it draws on her own marriage and features historical persons—­the narrative consists largely of Mary’s letters to Aaron Burr!—­Sansay divides her experience between the two fictional ­sisters.62 Recounting the exploits of French officers in San Domingo, Mary relates her s­ ister’s hardships and improprieties, focusing on the strug­ gles between Clara and her tyrannical husband, St. Louis, and Clara’s public flirtations. As the romantic affair reaches a crisis, the slave uprising forces St. Louis, Mary, and Clara to abandon the island, dividing the party. F ­ ree from St. Louis, the ­sisters take refuge in Cuba. While a refugee, Clara meets a nobleman, Don Carlos, who falls in love with her. With St. Louis’s impending

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arrival, the ­sisters flee and are separated. Clara throws herself ­under Don Carlos’s protection, violating the bounds of propriety for a married w ­ oman. Once re­united, Mary offers a qualified defense of Clara’s be­hav­ior.63 The Secret History is, as Gretchen Woertendyke has shown, a generic hybrid: Sansay blends the venerable genre of the secret history with the conventions of the modern novel.64 As a recorder of “domestic life,” Mary admits that her observations do not fall within the compass of the “historian,” but would provide excellent material for the “pen of the novelist” (95). Sansay, however, underscores her narrative’s difference from fiction: “Clara related to me occurrences which seem like scenes of romance,” writes Mary, “but I am convinced of their real­ity” (88). The interrelation between public history and private romance—­the staged correspondence between public men and fictional private w ­ omen—­testifies to the factuality of her unverifiable narrative, “the secret history.” The relation between politics and the private sphere of domesticity and sex is both more and less direct than in ­earlier secret histories: more direct ­because Sansay stages the continuity between private lives and the public actions of recognizable figures; less direct ­because the private lives of her characters do not correspond allegorically to con­temporary politics as in texts such as Aphra Behn’s Love Letters between a Nobleman and His ­Sister. ­Because it cannot be decoded as a po­liti­cal allegory, the secret history of private travails is significant in and of itself.65 The Secret History’s generic hybridity has a profound effect on its repre­sen­ ta­tion of Clara’s unconventional conduct—­her decision to leave her marriage. The narrative’s second half centers on the psychic drama of Mary grappling with her ­sister’s transgression: “I have always expressed . . . ​my disapprobation of . . . ​­women who have abandoned their husbands. But ­there are circumstances which palliate error. Many of ­those which led to Clara’s elopement plead for her” (128). Sansay traces Mary’s movement from moral condemnation to a belief that circumstance and contingency change the moral calculus. Sansay, however, does not extend this to a general defense of w ­ omen who leave their husbands, underscoring the exceptional nature of Clara’s circumstance. While the Secret History critiques the power that marriage grants husbands over wives, its more emphatic appeal is against a totalizing moral system that cannot adjust to the contingencies of a par­tic­u­lar situation: “If Clara’s husband had been in ­every re­spect worthy of her she would have been one of the best . . . ​­human beings . . . ​and, though he might have made a very good husband to a w ­ oman of ordinary capacity, to Clara he became a tyrant” (153). This final counterfactual is Mary’s appeal on her ­sister’s behalf, but it is also a critique of moral frameworks that do not account for the particularities of circumstance. This critique depends on the text’s claim to factuality. As the moral imperative displaced strict factuality as the grounds of the novel’s educative potential— or rather, as the moral imperative was gradually being disentangled from the

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factual imperative—­novels ­were increasingly expected to provide the kind of prescriptive morality found in The Gamesters. The Secret History stages the inadequacy of exactly this kind of totalizing morality: Sansay refuses to generalize about marital be­hav­ior, insisting that the same acts do not have the same moral force across dif­fer­ent situations. She eschews explicit fictionality not only ­because her unconventional moral stance (with regard to marriage) violates the exacting moral standards for virtuous fictions—­though a factual Clara is easier to excuse than a fictional one for this reason—­but b ­ ecause she objects to the kind of prescriptive moral reasoning increasingly required of fiction. But even as the Secret History eschews explicit fictionality, its re­sis­tance to this narrow variety of moral judgment also depends on formal features that resemble fiction. Like avowedly fictional characters, Clara and Mary lack discoverable real-­world referents—­their existence is l­ imited to their textual construction. By titling her narrative the Secret History, Sansay invites a pro­cess of decoding that her characters’ fictionality disallows: she provides an ostensibly factual narrative whose real-­world referents can never be discovered ­because they do not exist. Readers thus have no recourse to text-­external information in judging Clara. No less than its factuality, this re­sis­tance to scandalous decoding is central to Sansay’s call for more flexible moral paradigms. The Secret History offers a specific situation in which a ­woman is justified in leaving her husband, but its fictional delimitedness shifts focus from the particularities of the case (for example, the p ­ eople involved) to the fact that t­ here exist circumstances that justify it. This allows the Secret History to be more than an exposé of a specific tyrannical marriage: it is an exposé of the power structures of marriage or, more accurately, a condemnation of the inflexible moral system that uniformly upholds the sanctity of such bonds. The Secret History, then, disallows both standard fictional reading practices and the scandalous decoding of secret histories. It draws attention to the narrative’s par­tic­u­lar circumstances and asks readers to judge Clara’s be­hav­ior based on only ­these text-­internal particulars. This is its orientation to fictional delimitedness. The Secret History, however, resists the standards to which fictional characters ­were held, w ­ hether prescriptive morality or probability. The narrative, ­after all, deals with improbable circumstances that call into question dominant moral norms. In disavowing its fictionality, Sansay urges readers to regard ­these persons not as they would fictional characters, but as they would ­actual p ­ eople: the s­ isters are not, Sansay insists, embodiments of ­either virtue or vice and she pre­sents them neither as models to imitate nor as cautionary warnings. Navigating between the Scylla of mere scandal and the Charybdis of fiction’s moral imperative, Sansay appropriates and transforms the liminally fictional secret history to voice an appeal for more flexible moral frameworks for judging w ­ omen’s conduct. While the Secret History’s unusual fictional logic allows Sansay to negotiate and critique the imperatives that ­were shaping American fiction, Laura,

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published a year l­ ater, exposes their incommensurability. Laura is a seemingly conventional seduction tale with a third-­person narrator, who warns readers against the twinned dangers of fiction-­reading and seduction. It also asserts its strict factual basis: “the following narrative is a faithful account of real occurrences” (156). Laura’s narrative, however, belies its ostensible conventionality. Rather than an ideal synthesis of the vari­ous competing standards for judging novels, it stages the tangled relationship between them, revealing the contradictions that arise in claiming adherence to all of them. Reviewers accepted Sansay’s truth claims, celebrating Laura’s basis in fact: “The author declares it to be founded on fact, and the scenes she describes so closely resemble ­those which too frequently occur in real life, that her assertion is entitled to the most perfect credit.”66 Further, reviewers linked the novel’s repre­sen­ta­tional accuracy to its morality: “Pressed by cold relatives to a marriage at which her feelings revolt, she prefers putting herself . . . ​­under the protection of her lover. From this first false step, further imprudencies arise, and misery and destruction, as usual, are the consequences.”67 This latter review, however, obscures as much as it reveals about Laura. The reviewer does provide a succinct description of the logic of most seduction novels, where ­there is a causal link between seduction, the loss of the love object, and the death of the seduced. But this is exactly the way in which Laura is not a conventional seduction novel: unlike most seduced heroines, Laura regains her beloved ­after her abandonment and survives childbirth. Even more than this, Sansay complicates the causal relation between tragedy and seduction: a duel, not seduction, is the proximate cause of Laura’s tragic ending. If “misery and destruction . . . ​are the consequences” of Laura’s improprieties, it is only in a most oblique way. In Laura, ­there is a fraying of the chain of moral causation found in most seduction novels that encourages readers to reconsider the relation between the varied, but oft-­elided, standards of novelistic “Truth” circulating in the early United States. Even a­ fter the narrative proper has closed, the “facts” of Laura’s life continue to resist the moral imperative governing the novel genre. In the epilogue, Laura not only escapes death, but finds a reasonably comfortable situation: “She found protection from the gentleman whom [her lover] had recommended. . . . ​Her beauty continued unimpaired; her mind acquired new brilliancy.” Yet even as ­these facts threaten to undermine Laura’s moral tendency, Sansay offers a closing lesson: “her life was an exemplification of this truth:—­‘that perpetual uneasiness, disquietude, and irreversible misery, are the certain consequences of fatal misconduct in a w ­ oman; however gifted, or however reclaimed’ ” (221). This “truth” reinserts Laura’s unruly narrative into a didactic framework. The facts have exemplified a moral truth. Yet, this brief epilogue—­typographically cordoned off—­highlights its own disconnection from the narrative. Laura’s life may “exemplify” this “truth,” but Laura emphasizes the chance of the intervening duel. Sansay’s epilogue provides a

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moral, but rather than highlight the narrative’s moral force, its brevity and lack of relation to the narrative underscore its inadequacy. This is not to mitigate Laura’s unhappiness, living with the stigma of seduction—­the Secret History reveals Sansay’s sensitivity to the discipline faced by w ­ omen who violate such norms—­but it is to highlight the disjunction between the narrative and this brief closing moral. Rather than containing and controlling the narrative, this tacked-on moral underscores its own lack of explanatory force. Her lover’s ­dying declaration that Laura is “all goodness”—­echoing Mary’s final defense of Clara—­opens up the possibility of an alternative moral economy, one in which chastity is not the all-­encompassing virtue. In this moral economy, Laura’s courage during a yellow fever outbreak, her disinterested care for o ­ thers, and her faithfulness outweigh her seduction. It is a power­ful counter-­possibility—­a recognition, as in the Secret History, of the inadequacy of blanket moral judgments. Yet while Laura’s final chapters do exhibit its heroine’s “goodness,” this goodness does her ­little good. Perhaps this reflects the pressures against redeeming a fallen ­woman—­the impossibility of an unchaste Pamela having her virtue rewarded. But given Sansay’s willingness to resist conventional morality, it seems more likely that she refused to provide a narrative that conforms to any moral economy, choosing instead to emphasize chance and contingency. Facts, Laura insists, are unruly t­ hings: w ­ hether you believe Laura deserves punishment or reward, Laura rejects any strict causal relation between morality and its events. Laura thus exposes the incoherence produced by the competing imperatives for novels in the early 1800s. In reproducing the truth claims of “Founded on Fact” novels, it actually questions their neat correspondence of facts and morality. Laura, however, even more pointedly questions the logics of moral “truth” and moral probabilism found in such ambiguously fictional novels as The Gamesters and Dorval. The staged divergence between Laura’s facts and its moral gives a very specific metafictional resonance to its warnings against relying on fiction’s “enchanting illusions” for a knowledge of the world (171): it suggests that the elisions performed by such novels as they negotiated the imperatives for mimetic accuracy and strict morality heighten the epistemological dangers of fiction-­reading for inexperienced readers by obscuring the nature of their “truth.” Setting Laura’s nonfictional narrative that resists moral causality against the “improbability” of fiction, Sansay implicitly critiques ­those fictions that claimed both to reflect the world and to provide a morally ordered vision of that world. Yet even as a claim to factuality is crucial to Laura’s proj­ect, its preface hints at the possibility of authorial alterations: “With the exception of a few slight deviations, which ­were thought indispensable, the following narrative is a faithful account of real occurrences” (156). This coy claim reveals ­little. ­Because of its passive construction—­“­were thought indispensable” by whom?—­and its vagueness—­“ thought indispensable” on what terms?—it does not provide an

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alternative way of reading the narrative’s “facts.” But it does reinsert the possibility of authorial shaping into a “true” narrative. It introduces the muted suggestion of Laura’s partial fictionality. This suggestion, disavowed even as it is posited, is significant ­because of Laura’s violation of the standards governing fiction. In the malleable fictional mode, the discrepancy between moral judgment and plot would be regarded as undermining the very “virtuous tendencies” that Laura seeks to inculcate. Laura’s unruly facts would be unacceptable as fiction. Ultimately, the suggestiveness of this brief phrase has less to do with any specific pos­si­ble changes than with the alternative possibilities for fiction that it hints at. In the shadow possibility of Laura’s fictionality, Sansay gestures ­toward a dif­fer­ent type of fiction—­one that does not represent “the world” as conforming neatly to a writer’s prescriptive moral vision. This implicit metafictional argument could be read as a justification for exactly the kind of fiction that Sansay had already written, but could not avow, in the Secret History: fiction that neither provides normative models nor proj­ects a moral vision onto real­ity, but offers a repre­sen­ta­tion of the world that is sensitive to life’s contingencies. At a moment in which the novel was moving away from a basis in facts, Sansay claimed factuality as way of opening up new possibilities for fiction. Taken together, the Secret History and Laura advocate narratives that capture the vagaries of lived experience and encourage nuanced moral judgments attentive to circumstance. From our con­temporary vantage, we can see that Sansay does not reject fiction—­The Secret History, ­after all, creates fictional characters—­but she rejects fictionality as a communicative framework. Sansay is suspicious less of the unreliability of fiction, than of the rhetorical power of fictionality in this era. B ­ ecause of the ambiguity surrounding what constituted fictional “truth” at this moment, fictionality as a mode of address could be used to signal si­mul­ta­neously a narrative’s commitment to strict morality and its dedication to repre­sen­ta­tional accuracy. Where novels such as The Gamesters and Dorval seized on this ambiguity for their intertwined proj­ects of individual reform and social transformation, Sansay exposed the sleight of hand by which such novelists projected their moral visions onto the “world as it is,” resisting the conflation of prescription and description through which t­ hese novels sought to influence readers.

Against Experience: Changing Theories of Didactic Fiction Across the first two de­cades of the nineteenth c­ entury, subtle changes in the packaging of fiction reveal a consistent, though gradual and uneven, weakening of the republic’s antifictional prejudice. Although many writers continued to warn against fiction-­reading, the shift across William Hill Brown’s two novels—in 1789, The Power of Sympathy is “Founded in Truth”; in 1807, Ira and Isabella is “Founded in Fiction”—­neatly encapsulates an increasing

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willingness of fictionists and publishers to avow the fictionality of their narratives over ­these years. When, to take one other example, a second American edition of The Female American was issued in Vermont in 1814, its printer explic­itly acknowledged its fictionality by relabeling the pseudofactual editor’s notes as author’s notes, transforming the found manuscript from an ambiguous truth claim to a literary convention. The evolution of circulating libraries over this period also suggests a weakening of antifictional norms. In 1803, Hocquet Caritat, who ran what was then the largest circulating library in the country, felt the need to include “A General Defense of Modern Novels” with his cata­logue to resist what he referred to as the “prejudices long entertained against” fiction.68 By 1820, more than half of this library’s massive holdings ­were fiction—an increase from fiction’s roughly one-­fourth share before the Revolution.69 The growing comfort with fictionality across this period corresponds to a greater emphasis on moral rather than epistemological concerns in both fiction and periodical discussions of fiction. This shift, in turn, indexes a more general change in how many fictionists sought to shape the conduct of young readers. Lydia Maria Child’s reflections on ­earlier didactic tales in The ­Mother’s Book (1831) reveal, with par­tic­ul­ ar clarity, the terms of this transformation: morality should be in the books, not tacked upon the end of it. Vices the juvenile reader never have heard of, are introduced, dressed up in alluring characters, which excite their admiration, their love, their deepest pity; and they are told that t­ hese heroes and heroines w ­ ere very naughty. . . . ​Charlotte T ­ emple has a nice good moral at the end . . . ​yet I believe few works do so much harm to girls. . . . ​It is better to paint virtue to be imitated than vice to be shunned.70 The difference between early national and antebellum didactic fiction has long been understood in terms of changing subgenres, with domestic fiction displacing seduction fiction.71 But when we focus on fictionality, we can see how this generic shift reflects a more profound transformation in fiction’s claim to pedagogical legitimacy. For Rowson, Charlotte’s sheltered inexperience leads to her downfall and the substitute experience provided by her story w ­ ill allow readers to escape the same fate. Child, however, regards this substitute experience as too dangerous for girls, preferring strictly virtuous book that ­will preserve their purity: “Familiarity with evil is a disadvantage even when pointed out as an object of disgust.” Put another way, Child rejects the idea that books should offer readers a kind of experience. She insists, instead, that only ­those readers who already have a g ­ reat deal of “experience” can safely read novels, such as Charlotte ­Temple, that depict the world’s evils. Whereas in 1802, the New-­England Quarterly had advocated only allowing young ­women ­those select novels that “paint life as it is” b ­ ecause ­these novels “give that kind of knowledge of the world in early life which only a round of dissipation and

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considerable experience can produce,” Child warns against such books on the very same grounds.72 As judgments about a narrative’s morality are disentangled from its factual basis, questions about how accurately it represents the world are increasingly subordinated to questions about its moral purity. Child shows no interest in ­whether Charlotte ­Temple accurately depicts the world’s dangers—­she is unconcerned with the “Truth” of Rowson’s “Tale of Truth”—­because she sees fiction not as a substitute for worldly experience, but as an alternative to it: girls, she insists, should read only works “pure in language and spirit.” Many conduct fictions of the 1810s and 1820s emphasized their moral purity rather than their mimetic accuracy. Certain didactic fictions even presented their moral vision as being opposed to a proj­ect of accurately reflecting the “world as it is.” In fictions such as Rebecca Rush’s Kelroy (1812) and Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s A New E ­ ngland Tale (1822), we can trace the emergence of a model of moral, domestic fiction that would rise to ascendance in the 1830s and 1840s and remain hugely influential throughout the antebellum period.73 But ­these early-­nineteenth-­century fictions also reveal the anx­i­eties that attended the emergence of this model of didactic fiction. Rush’s Kelroy, A Novel, stands out in our history for its lack of paratextual packaging. Implicitly declaring its fictionality in its genre, Kelroy includes no truth claims, defenses of its reliability, or extended instructional justifications. It does, however, include a portrait of a fiction-­reader, who is disconnected from real­ity. But unlike her pre­de­ces­sors, Rush valorizes this disconnection, radically recoding the figure of the female quixote. Kelroy is the story of the sinister Mrs. Hammond and her two ­daughters, whom she sees as a means of restoring her lost fortune. Worldly Lucy, the elder ­daughter, ensnares a wealthy En­glish nobleman. The younger Emily, however, ­settles her affections on the poor poet Kelroy. Mrs. Hammond eventually consents to their marriage on the condition that Kelroy first rebuilds his f­ amily’s fortune. But once he has departed for the East Indies, Mrs. Hammond intercepts the lovers’ letters and forges new ones. Kelroy becomes convinced of Emily’s faithlessness and decides to remain abroad. Devastated, Emily is pressured by her m ­ other into another marriage. Mrs. Hammond dies unexpectedly, unable to destroy the evidence of her plot. Emily discovers her lover’s faithfulness and her ­mother’s treachery. She dies shortly thereafter.74 Kelroy thus recounts a fall from innocence, tracing Emily’s disillusionment as she becomes acquainted with the world. As she has been marked as a fiction-­reader, preferring books and her “fancy” to the social world, Kelroy seems to offer a standard disciplining of a quixote: it shows that the world does not correspond to the visions of girls who spend their days locked up with books. This reading is complicated, however, by how Emily’s innocence is also Kelroy’s center of moral value. Her inexperience and innocent lack of “practice” serve as valorized marks of distinction from worldlier characters: the

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narrator notes how sleep comes slowly to Mrs. Hammond and Lucy, “whilst Emily enjoyed . . . ​the calm repose of juvenile virtue, which . . . ​finds in its own trusting visions a balm which practised hearts ­shall seek in vain.”75 Reversing fiction’s conventional coding, Kelroy opposes fiction-­reading to the fash­ion­ able vanities of social life: “whilst Emily [was] busied in works of fancy or turning over . . . ​the pages of a favorite author, Lucy was shut up in her chamber, practicing cotillions, and admiring herself in the glass; or studying some mode of dress by which she hoped to exhibit herself to the utmost advantage” (11). This is the tension that makes Kelroy such a fascinating intervention in the debates about fiction: how do we square this elevation of fiction-­reading and innocent inexperience with Emily’s ultimate disillusionment? This tension is foreshadowed in an extended exchange between Emily and Walsingham, her unworthy s­ ister’s worthy husband, in which Emily’s innocent worldview is both challenged and valorized: “It would be happy for you,” says Walsingham, “if you could be translated to a world filled with creatures as innocent, and undesigning as yourself; for I fear ­there is many a hard lesson awaiting you in this rough, and crooked one of ours. . . . ​Experience ­will teach you the real characters of beings who chiefly compose your species” (86). Emily is horrified (“You have drawn a frightful picture”), but Walshingham, using an idiom that recalls the antifictional discourse, repeatedly insists on his accuracy (it is “nevertheless a true one”). Walsingham recognizes that Emily’s view of the world is unrealistic, but this naïve vision nonetheless functions as a moral critique, exposing the fallen nature of the world “as it is.” In this context, fiction’s failure to reflect the world is not only an epistemological threat, but also a moral virtue. Reversing critiques of fiction, Kelroy argues that mixing with the phantoms of fiction, rather than the less admirable creatures of the world, preserves readers’ purity. Kelroy thus offers a power­ful rereading of the quixote, a rehabilitation of Dorcasina Sheldon a de­cade ­later: fiction-­readers may have a warped sense of real­ity, but the corollary of such delusiveness is moral purity. In Kelroy, fiction’s separation from the world suddenly does not seem so bad. Yet Rush also betrays a deep anxiety about this valorization of book learning. Unlike ­earlier critics, she is not worried that fiction is immoral ­because it distorts the world as it is. Rather, her concern is that this form of moral cultivation ­will render readers unfit for interactions with a corrupt world. In Kelroy, this is fiction’s ­great risk and its greatest virtue. How then does Rush invite readers to approach her fiction? On one hand, she associates fiction with innocent moral refinement, opposes it to worldly experience, and values it on exactly ­these terms. On the other, she pre­sents this worldview as inaccurate and stages its demystification. No less than Laura, Kelroy exposes the tension between the moral and mimetic imperatives governing fictionality. But where Sansay staged their ultimate incommensurability, Rush’s narrative seeks to harness the force of each. Kelroy offers readers both a vision of the world as it is and a moral exemplar. Through Emily, Kelroy

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offers the kind of innocent, moral vision that Emily herself has taken from books; through Emily’s fate, it shows that the world does not correspond to this moral vision. Emily is both exemplary paragon and cautionary figure. In Kelroy, experience, at least for ­women, is consistently associated with a fallen worldliness. H ­ ere, the mediation of fictionality becomes crucial. For Rush, fiction-­reading is associated with naïve innocence and moral purity; as such, it is both admirable and risky. In contradistinction to such fictions, Kelroy offers readers knowledge of the fallen world “as it is,” and in ­doing so, provides the kind of substitute experience that novels often claimed to offer. Yet Kelroy itself associates fiction with exactly the opposite of experience—it provides Emily with the means of cultivating a moral purity that none of the “experienced” characters exhibit. Even as it claims to offer readers an accurate “experience” of the world, Kelroy does not disavow this other conception of fiction’s value; rather, Kelroy’s innovation is how it combines t­ hese two potential uses of fiction. Fiction, Rush suggests, can provide a substitute for experience that is importantly not experience—it offers readers an acquaintance with the world without them having to descend into it. Fiction, in other words, traffics in a virtual experience that does not compromise innocence. Kelroy thus elevates the moral role of fiction, associating it with purity, innocence, and virtue, even as it also provides readers with a pseudo-­ experience of a corrupt world that prepares them for it. The epistemological anx­i­eties surrounding fiction endure in Kelroy, but in a minor key—­fiction’s moral work is emphasized. Written at a moment of ideological transition, Kelroy’s shifting emphasis corresponds to a series of interrelated social and cultural changes that would remake American conceptions of womanhood, especially an understanding of the “world” and the “home” as opposed realms defined by selfish materialism and moral disinterestedness respectively. Both Emily’s cloistered purity and Rush’s emphasis on fiction as a tool for moral refinement anticipate ideologies of femininity and fiction-­reading that would become ascendant in the 1830s and 1840s.76 But even as it serves as their precursor, Rush’s novel draws attention to the potential dangers of t­ hese emergent ideologies. Kelroy reveals lingering anx­i­eties about the risks of withdrawing from society, about the inadequacy of mere innocence and purity, about the limitations of a moral vision that does not accurately reflect the world, and about the dangers of substituting fiction for lived experience. No such anx­i­eties trou­ble the text that best exemplifies the emergent model of didactic fiction: Sedgwick’s A New-­England Tale (1822), a foundational text of both antebellum domestic fiction and liberal religious fiction.77 Sedgwick began A New-­England Tale as an anti-­Calvinist tract, l­ater expanding it into her first extended fiction. The narrative famously reads like a domestic fairy tale: through her virtue, the pious orphan Jane Elton attracts and ultimately marries the wealthy Mr. Lloyd. Sedgwick’s preface offers no defense of its epistemological under­pinnings: her goal “was simply to produce a very short

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and ­simple moral tale.” Instead of claims to factuality, truth, or probability, she insists that the tale has no basis in real p ­ eople and events: “It can scarcely be necessary to assure the reader, that no personal allusions, however remote, ­were intended to be made to any individual.”78 Whereas in the 1790s, exactly this kind of reference was necessary to legitimate a novel, in 1822, this fiction does not only insist that it intends no “personal allusion,” but it flags this disavowal as “scarcely . . . ​necessary.” A New-­England Tale’s status as a “moral tale” fully justifies its fictionality. In calling her fiction a “moral tale,” Sedgwick implicitly invokes Maria Edgeworth’s prefatory distinction between “moral tales” and “novels” from Belinda (1801)—­a generic lineage that she makes explicit by dedicating A New-­England Tale to Edgeworth. By ­doing so, Sedgwick both positions her fiction within a transatlantic tradition of extra-­novelistic didactic fiction and associates it with one of the few fictionists whose works ­were both popu­lar and widely regarded as edifying in the early United States. Sedgwick displays—­even flaunts—­her comfort with fictionality by closing A New-­England Tale with a comparison between a poet’s work and God’s providence. Jane and her soon-­to-be husband are discussing the happy fate of a virtuous el­derly ­couple, whose long-­lost son has suddenly returned: “Oh, it is as beautiful a conclusion to their lives, as if it had been conjured up by a poet.” “Ah, Jane,” replied Mr. Lloyd, “­there are realities in the kind dispositions of Providence more blessed than a poet can dream of; and ­there are virtues in real life . . . ​that might lend a persuasive grace to the page of a moralist . . .” (170). Lloyd closely echoes ­earlier critiques of fiction-­writing as a blasphemous usurpation of God’s creative prerogative. For t­ hese critics, as we saw in chapter 1, fiction’s basis in ­human creativity produced its epistemological unreliability: “Novel reading I have . . . ​considered as hurtful to the growth and cultivation of the mind ­because it necessarily excludes . . . ​the acquirement of real knowledge, which is nature, the only true and proper revelation of the creator.”79 ­ ecause t­ hese fictions do not This unreliability leads directly to moral failure b offer external, providential visions by which readers can regulate themselves, but only reflect the fallen desires of a h ­ uman author. But while Lloyd’s comments might recall such critiques, they appear in an avowedly, even insistently, fictional “moral tale.” The “realities” to which Lloyd refers are, in fact, suppositional events conjured up by a par­tic­ul­ ar kind of moral “poet.” On one hand, this exchange suggests that Sedgwick’s fiction does not exceed “real life.” More strikingly, however, it analogizes the fictionist’s work to God’s Providence: the neat moral ordering of A New-­England Tale, Lloyd’s comments suggest, mirrors divine dispensations. Sedgwick embraces a once blasphemous stance, making the fictionist’s ability to provide a morally ordered world that mirrors “divine intention” the basis of her instructional proj­ect.

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This assured reversal of Protestant critiques of fictionality is part of A New-­ England Tale’s wider rejection of what Sedgwick sees as the repressiveness of the New En­glish Calvinism that had produced some of fiction’s most strident detractors. But even more than this, Sedgwick’s confident recoding of her fiction as paralleling—­rather than distorting—­providence is rooted in her understanding of Christian morality. For Sedgwick, true morality involves not obedience to an externalized law or authority but responsiveness to the dictates of an internalized moral sentiment. She offers the most explicit articulation of this distinction in Hope Leslie (1827) when one character laments another’s narrow conception of moral duty: “the sternest conscience in the world would permit you to obey the generous impulses of nature, rather than to render this slavish obedience to the letter of the law.”80 Sedgwick can pre­sent such a rejection even of scriptural decree as a higher form of Christian morality, b ­ ecause it is rooted in obedience to the higher law that God has imprinted on the h ­ uman soul: “Man cannot live in tranquil disobedience to the law of virtue inscribed in his soul by the fin­ger of God.”81 This understanding of morality is fundamental to Sedgwick’s implicit claim that her “moral tale” parallels, in a minor key, God’s providential vision: by defining morality as responsiveness to an innate moral sense rather than obedience to external decree, Sedgwick can pre­sent the fictionist’s creative act as reflecting an internalized God-­given morality rather than usurping his providential prerogative. This upending of Protestant anx­i­eties about fictionality depends, in part, on how A New-­England Tale elevates practical morality and benevolent feeling above concerns about predestination.82 Sedgwick encourages readers to turn inward for the guidance of a divinely inscribed moral sentiment, rather than in search of evidence of election. This shift allows Sedgwick to reclaim the imagination as serving, rather than undermining, her book’s Christian proj­ect: where eighteenth-­century ministers had associated the imagination with ­human fallibility, satanic deception, and a delusive belief in one’s own salvation, Sedgwick’s emphasis on moral feeling enables her to pre­sent imaginative writing as a means of expressing the moral vision instilled in ­humans by God. Sedgwick can thus recode the moral fictionist’s vision as responding to a divinely given internalized moral sentiment, rather than distorting “nature, the only true and proper revelation of the creator.”83 As fiction’s morality gradually ceases to be seen as depending on its relation to the “world as it is,” writers such as Sedgwick could develop fictional logics that emphasized their narratives’ moral idealism rather than their repre­sen­ ta­tional accuracy. A New-­England Tale stands out in our history thus far for its relative unconcern about the epistemological prob­lem of fictionality. Sedgwick pre­sents her almost angelic protagonist—­Jane is repeatedly compared to angels—as a model for imitation without any sign of the anx­ie­ ties that had haunted e­ arlier fictional exemplars: Jane is a fiction—­a “visionary being”—­but Sedgwick shows no concern about this disqualifying her as a model.84 Instead

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of worrying that such an idealized heroine might mislead readers with her unattainable virtue, Sedgwick encourages readers to internalize Jane’s angelic morality as a means of guiding their own conduct: “We think,” Sedgwick writes of her readers, “they w ­ ill be persuaded to be like our heroine” (72). Readers are urged to use the fiction’s idealized moral vision to cultivate their own innate moral sense—­which has been distorted by worldly custom—­bringing their desires, sentiments, and thoughts into conformity with this vision. Sedgwick deemphasizes fiction’s ability to reflect the world and instead positions fiction as something external to this world and therefore, capable of reforming it. A New-­England Tale’s confident prefatory declaration of its fictionality and its assured reversal of many antifictional tropes reflect an increased tolerance for fiction in the United States. But Sedgwick’s “moral tale” also exposes the ­limited terms on which fiction has gained this ac­cep­tance. It underscores what has become inassimilable into fiction. Immediately ­after announcing that it can “scarcely be necessary” to declare her characters’ fictionality, Sedgwick admits that ­there is “one exception”: “the writer has attempted a sketch of a real character ­under the fictitious appellation of ‘Crazy Bet.’ ” Bet provides a dramatic counterpoint to the other inhabitants of Sedgwick’s “sober, sedate” New ­England town: she dresses unconventionally, declaims on the hy­poc­ risy of her neighbors, and breaks out in prophecies and chants. With her wild imagination, intense sensibility, and refusal to integrate into the town’s social structures, Bet serves as a repository for a variety of past fears about fiction’s effect on readers. By drawing attention to Bet’s factual basis, Sedgwick distances her fiction from such excesses. But as the tale’s preface emphasizes its didactic moralism rather than its mimetic accuracy, Bet’s singular position in its moral economy is equally significant. A New-­England Tale’s characters can be easily sorted into moral and immoral characters, with the good characters each serving as an ideal model for their age, class, and social position. Bet alone stands outside this clear dichotomy: in spite of her moral sensitivity and courageous truth-­speaking, she clearly does not function as anything like a model. As such, she cannot be assimilated into a fictional mode that has staked its claim to social legitimacy largely on its ability to provide models for shaping be­hav­ior. Staging Bet’s exclusion from the realm of the fictional, Sedgwick consolidates this understanding of fiction’s purpose. Bet stands out in A New-­England Tale as what cannot be comfortably integrated into fiction: a morally valorized character who does not function within societal norms. Fiction can include a Jane Elton but not a Crazy Bet. One incident exemplifies what we might call Bet’s moral antiexemplarity. John, a “kind-­hearted” man, asks Jane to come to his h ­ ouse one night, insisting that she might “save life” (87). When Jane protests that she does not know the way, John replies, “You ­shall have a guide.” He refers to Bet. Wearing a headdress of wild­flowers, Bet leads Jane “through a pass . . . ​that none knows but the wild bird and a wild ­woman.” Jane, “though a ­woman naturally born to fears,”

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follows Bet over glaciers and through rocky apertures. They are well into this journey before Bet recalls that she has a “companion.” She leaves Jane in safety on a ledge and mounts to a summit: she is “in spirit” and chants a wild prayer while Jane looks on. This scene represents the only time Jane acts outside the limits prescribed by pious, domestic femininity. Following her “guide,” Jane leaves the circumscribed social space of the village and with it, conventional feminine be­hav­ior and religion, accompanying her “conductor” into a sublime wilderness where enthusiastic worship displaces traditional piety.85 For Jane, the journey is exhilarating but terrifying. When John l­ater shows Jane the “path this crazy creature should have led you,” he underscores the risks of following a “guide” who lives outside the norms governing society. Bet, with her sensibility and religious enthusiasm, is morally praiseworthy, but Sedgwick pre­sents the traits that make her so as both dangerous and inaccessible: “You cannot bear the revelation now, child,” Bet tells Jane on the mountain, “Come on and do your earthly work” (95–96). Pious yet earthly Jane cannot follow Bet but must return to the path by which she “should” have been led. This scene strains against the imperatives governing fictionality. It is a scene outside probable, daily life that is devoid of accessible moral content and lacks—or rather, is explic­itly distanced from—­imitable be­hav­ior. ­Here, A New-­England Tale seems to be a typical Romantic fiction, offering a scene of spiritual experience in nature beyond the mediation of churches and the restrictions of social convention. Although the narrative ­will play out along very dif­fer­ent coordinates, highlighting Jane’s incorporation into village society, this scene stands out as a liberatory moment from intertwined social and narrative imperatives. Readers, following Jane as she follows Bet, glimpse a sublime alternative to this circumscribed world. Fiction provides an imaginative escape from mundane experience and social pressures, its malleability allowing it to open up new imaginative horizons for readers. Yet this is not quite the case. The narrative’s fictional logic complicates our usual association of fiction with imaginative liberation. While this scene does pre­sent a moment in which social convention and traditional religion are bracketed, it does not do so u ­ nder the sign of the fictional. Although it is a fictional scene, it crucially follows the tale’s one nonfictional character. This remarkable deviation from the narrative’s stated proj­ect represents not the liberatory potential of fiction, but a liberation that cannot be legitimated in the realm of fiction. On the path on which readers “should” be led, fictional Jane serves as a guide; but when leaving social convention, normative femininity, and institutional religion ­behind, based-­in-­fact Bet must lead the way. Like Bet herself, this scene remains inassimilable into the fictional proj­ect of A New-­England Tale.86 Just as Bet resists integration into the logic that justifies Sedgwick’s fiction, she resists integration into the tale’s neat narrative closure. A ­ fter marrying Jane, Lloyd tries to bring Bet into the structures of New En­glish society through confinement and “the sedative influence of gentle manners.” But he

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relinquishes this proj­ect when it becomes clear that a thunderstorm or moonlit night ­will “throw her back into her wild ways” (184). Bet cannot be assimilated into conventional social life, just as she cannot be integrated into the tale’s fictional logic. While A New-­England Tale announces, by its assured declaration of its fictionality, fiction’s widespread ac­cep­tance in the United States, it also draws attention to what must be disavowed to enable this legitimation. Bet lingers on as both a remainder—­what cannot be integrated into this mode—­ and a reminder—of what fiction has sacrificed to establish the grounds of its ac­cep­tance. Whereas a few de­cades ­earlier, factuality served to ratify models for imitation—­think of Pleyel’s rec­ord of Clara’s life in Wieland—in A New-­ England Tale, this claim signals the exact opposite: Jane is marked as a moral exemplar by her fictionality, while the admirable but inimitable Bet must be marked off from the realm of the fictional. Even as A New-­England Tale highlights the degree to which the attitudes governing fictionality have shifted across the early 1800s, it also recalls the proj­ect laid out thirty years ­earlier in Murray’s Margaretta. Both fictions provide an exemplary heroine and ask readers to judge them not on their relation to a­ ctual p ­ eople or events but on their “intrinsic value.” A New-­England Tale, however, jettisons Margaretta’s elaborate metafictive and metadidactic apparatus: it includes no extended digressions on how fiction can educate, no paratextual attempts (beyond its preface) to delineate the proper grounds for evaluating fiction, no reflections on fiction-­reading as a practice, and no staging of monitorial oversight. As the anx­i­eties about fiction’s instructional efficacy have become less acute, Murray’s protracted arguments have fallen away. Or more accurately, Murray’s conception of how fiction educates has become a backgrounded assumption: her elaborate paratextual argument about reading for moral “intrinsic value” has been transformed into Sedgwick’s brief claim that her fiction is a “moral tale.” Sedgwick provides a useful hinge in the history of American fiction. She is a key figure in the rise of historical fiction in the 1820s and evangelical fiction shortly thereafter. Even more than this, A New-­England Tale is the archetype, according to Baym, of the most popu­lar subgenre of antebellum fiction, what she calls “­women’s fiction.”87 But when we approach A New-­England Tale not only as a progenitor of ­later fiction but also as the culmination of debates about fiction that played out across the early 1800s, we can see how antebellum fiction arose out of this ­earlier contest over how fiction should shape the lives of young ­women. This belies a venerable, but surprisingly resilient, gendering of fiction’s ac­cep­tance: fiction, this account contends, “cannot be said to have gained widespread approbation” in the United States ­until the 1820s when “manly genius lifted it to the plane of the historical” in the works of Scott and Cooper.88 As we ­will see, the popularity of Scott’s fiction would indeed have a profound effect on attitudes ­toward fiction in the United States and Cooper did, in fact, position his own historical fictions within the literary field

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by distinguishing them from fiction addressed to young w ­ omen. But t­ hese very fictions had also laid the groundwork for Cooper’s historical fiction: it is in such domestic tales, rather than in historical romances, that fiction first gained “widespread approbation” in the United States. If fiction’s association with private, even cloistered, femininity made it an anathema in the 1790s, this same association would help it gain ac­cep­ tance in the 1820s and beyond. As Child’s comments about Charlotte ­Temple make clear, this change can occur, b ­ ecause domestic fiction’s opposition of the virtuous “home” and the sordid “world” provided a means of reframing and thus mitigating the epistemological prob­lem of fictionality. The shift from seduction to domestic fiction—­significantly, A New-­England Tale includes a seduction narrative only as an inset tale subordinated to its main narrative—­ crystallizes the more general retheorizing of conduct fiction for young w ­ omen as an alternative to worldly experience rather than a substitute for it. This retheorization allowed for fictionists such as Sedgwick to emphasize the moral idealism of their narratives and protagonists rather than their basis in ­actual events or their accuracy as reflections of the world “as it is.” Such a shift, as we ­will see in ­later chapters, does not end the tensions created by the competing mimetic and moral imperatives for fiction. Many l­ater writers, too, would continue to justify their fictions as offering an experience of the world “as it is.” Nonetheless, the following de­cades would often see both fictionists and reviewers argue that fiction could best edify when it did not strictly reproduce the sordidness of the world: “The rule, that fiction must always copy nature must, obviously, be a­ dopted with some ­little restriction,” the Southern Literary Messenger would write in 1849, “To represent man as he is with perfect fidelity would not . . . ​be desirable. . . . ​Would the . . . ​utility of fiction be increased by such grotesque portraitures?”89 In the case of young ­women, most reviewers answered emphatically in the negative: “would it be safe for a prudent m ­ other . . . ​in order to impress upon the still pure heart of her d ­ aughter a warmer regard for the beauty and dignity of virtue,” asked Godey’s Lady’s Book in 1854, “to introduce her to the companionship of the vulgar, the obscene, and vicious, even admitting that she kept her guarded by the pre­sen­ta­tion of the most vivid contrasts? Would not the experiment be dangerous, we ask, the end and good effect doubtful to say the least?”90 In the antebellum period, the very characteristic of fiction—­its idealizing tendency—­ that early national critics believed made it a unique threat to feminine virtue was reconceived as a means of preserving the innocent virtue of young ­women. A narrow focus on this overarching transformation, however, risks reproducing the familiar gap in our literary histories and obscuring the hybrid fictions of the early nineteenth ­century. Faced with the opposition between Charlotte ­Temple and A New-­England Tale, it makes sense to approach ­these fictions teleologically, as transitional steps between t­ hese two regimes of didactic fiction. This is not wrong, but it overlooks how the liminal va­ri­e­ties of

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fictional address developed in early nineteenth-­century works w ­ ere, in their own right, potent rhetorical tools for persuading readers to behave. Fictionality’s unstable—­and often uncertain—­relation to description and prescription made it a power­ful and enduringly controversial vehicle for urging readers to remake themselves. As the anx­i­eties haunting Kelroy make clear, fiction’s legitimation as a vehicle for moral edification does not solve the epistemological prob­lem of fictionality so much as it brackets it within a specific context. It is only within the delimited social arena of domestic morality that fiction’s uncertain relation to the “world as it is” largely ceases to be regarded as a prob­lem. Notably, even as the periodicals of the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s increasingly regarded the suspicion of fiction as a relic of the past, American fiction continued to traffic in the paratexts—­truth claims, authenticating footnotes, elaborate prefaces—­ characteristic of this ­earlier strug­gle. ­These paratextual devices might no longer have been necessary to legitimate any use of fiction, but they also did not linger on merely as residual effects of e­ arlier contestations. Rather, they served as the ground for an ongoing strug­gle to define the meaning and determine the acceptable uses of fictionality in the antebellum United States.

ch a p t er fou r

The Shifting Logics of Historical Fiction

from the e a r ly 1820s through the e a r ly 1860s, American writers produced a dizzying amount of lit­er­a­ture about the national past.1 Seeking to recover and invent a coherent history that could justify their sense of national destiny and its accompanying colonial vio­lence, Americans published a remarkable variety of narratives set in the preceding centuries—­tales, dramas, verse epics, and especially novels, romances, and other extended prose fictions. Historical fiction’s meteoric rise in the 1820s was both part of a wider American interest in national history and a distinct phenomenon catalyzed by the unpre­ce­dented popularity of Walter Scott’s Waverley novels. The success of Scott’s historical fictions transformed how American publishers thought about the market for fiction and helped establish new routes for the printing and distribution of fiction, and the praise Scott received from reviewers, conduct writers, and educators gave fiction a new respectability in the United States.2 Scott’s success also spurred a wave of American historical fiction: from the publication of Cooper’s The Spy in 1821 through the historical romances of Hawthorne and Stowe in the 1850s, historical fiction was among the most popu­lar va­ri­e­ties of fiction in the United States. Historical fiction’s enduring centrality to antebellum lit­er­a­ture, however, has obscured its dynamic evolution across this period.3 Over ­these years, the meaning and purpose of historical fictionality changed fundamentally, as fictionists retheorized the value of their works in relation to the shifting categories of history and fiction. Responsive to an attenuated, but still vital, antifictional discourse, the historical fictionists of the 1820s contended that their books ­were a more reliable source of knowledge than other fiction: based on historical events and rec­ords, their narratives, they insisted, would not deceive readers with false pictures of the world. According to ­these writers, this mixed mode disciplined fiction’s romantic excesses, producing fiction that, as Cooper put it an 1822 preface, [ 131 ]

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was uniquely suited to “this land of facts.”4 Cooper’s preface to The Last of the Mohicans (1826), for example, insists that its basis in “well authenticated history” differentiates it from the unrealistic fictions favored by “the more imaginative sex”: “The reader, who takes up ­these volumes, in expectation of finding an imaginary and romantic picture of ­things, ­will . . . ​lay them aside, disappointed.”5 By the 1840s and 1850s, writers w ­ ere arguing for historical fiction’s value on dif­fer­ent, indeed nearly opposite, terms. Historical fictions came to be regarded as offering unique opportunities for imaginative extravagance and poetical associations. In his 1850 preface to The Deerslayer, Cooper evinces no ambivalence about its fictionality: “The legend is purely fiction, no authority existing for any of its facts, characters, or other peculiarities.”6 Across the Leatherstocking tales, Cooper increasingly avows and even insists on their strict fictionality as he abandons his epistemological defense of historical fiction—­the argument for its reliability as a source of knowledge—­instead emphasizing the moral and aesthetic idealism of his “legends.” What might strike us as a trivial shift in rhe­toric—­after all, Natty Bumppo is just as fictional in Mohicans as in The Deerslayer—­actually represents a significant change in Cooper’s understanding of fiction’s value. He makes this clear when he responds to an ­earlier controversy over the accuracy of Mohicans in the preface to The Leather-­Stocking Tales (1850) by insisting that “It is the privilege of all writers of fiction, more particularly when their works aspire to the elevation of romances, to pre­sent the beau-­ideal of their characters to the reader.”7 Cooper contends that his critics have misrecognized the standards governing fiction, failing to understand how “romance” licenses, even requires, repre­sen­ta­tions that are not strictly accurate. He complains, in short, that critics have judged his narratives by the very standard—­historical fidelity—­that he had set forth in e­ arlier prefaces. Cooper thus retrospectively ushers the early Leatherstocking tales—­his “Descriptive Tale” and “Narrative”—­under the generic umbrella of “romance,” obscuring the terms on which he first offered The Pioneers and Mohicans to the public. His changing arguments, this chapter contends, encapsulate a wider transformation in how US writers defended historical fiction. Over this period, historical content comes to be seen as licensing the very “romantic picture of ­things” that it had once been seen as precluding.8 It was in ­these ­later historical fictions that US fictionists would first embrace what had long been regarded as one of fiction’s most dangerous characteristics—­its ability to enchant readers. Focusing on the evolving paratexts of antebellum historical fiction, this chapter argues that t­ hese writers’ embrace of historical fiction as a vehicle for enchantment was bound up with a more general reimagining of historical fiction’s purpose over ­these years. In order to capture this broad shift in logics of historical fictionality, it considers a wide range of historical fictions from across four de­cades, but it gives par­tic­ul­ ar attention to Cooper’s evolving paratextual arguments for his historical fiction’s value, both b ­ ecause he was

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widely considered the genre’s preeminent American practitioner and ­because his continual repackaging of his famous Leatherstocking tales crystallizes the period’s evolving understanding of historical fiction’s purpose in especially clear terms. In the 1820s, historical fictionists distinguished their works from other fictions by claiming a generic association, and even identity, with history. Faced with ­great gaps in the historical archives, ­these writers presented fiction’s suppositional logic as a valuable tool for reconstructing the national past. The following de­cades, however, brought significant changes to both the practice of historiography and discussions of fiction in the United States. The 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s saw the proliferation of antiquarian historical socie­ties that advocated the examination of primary materials rather than conjectural reconstruction. ­These socie­ties helped to institutionalize an understanding of history that, unlike ­earlier conceptions, defined it in contradistinction to fiction. ­These de­cades also witnessed a substantial shift in discussions of fiction, as periodical reviewers increasingly emphasized intertwined aesthetic and moral standards for fiction that reflected the emergence of an ideal of reading for self-­culture and the development of a more robust aesthetic culture in the United States more generally. Faced with t­ hese evolving discussions, l­ ater historical fictions often renounced any sense of a shared proj­ect with factual historiography, instead arguing that their fictionality signaled an orientation ­toward ends other than historical knowledge, such as moral self-­cultivation, aesthetic beauty, or virtuous entertainment. Historical fiction’s modal liminality rendered it a dramatic site for discursive differentiation.9 With this shift, historical fiction could be re­imagined as an instrument for enchantment rather than a means of disciplining fiction’s dangerous enchanting power. ­Later historical fiction claimed to render this enchantment safe by renouncing the proj­ect of historical knowledge production that the genre had once embraced. Historical fiction thus positioned itself as a vehicle for what Michael Saler has dubbed “modern enchantment,” a form of enchantment that enchants and disenchants si­mul­ta­neously by foregrounding its own artifice.10 But historical fiction can only fill this enchanting role by renouncing its epistemological argument with factual history—­what Cooper called “the ­great strug­ gle for veracity . . . ​between history and fiction.”11 Modern scholarship has been able to overlook this shift in the prevailing justifications for historical fictionality, b ­ ecause ­these ­later historical fictions embrace a conception of fiction that is deeply familiar to twentieth-­and twenty-­first-­century readers: they explic­itly advocate for an understanding of fiction’s value and purpose—it is a work of art oriented t­ oward moral self-­ cultivation, leisured entertainment, and aesthetic appreciation—­that would increasingly become a tacit assumption governing the reading and writing of fiction from the late antebellum period to our pre­sent moment. Many early national justifications for fictionality, as we have seen, hinged less on fiction’s status as an art form than on its ability to create unique kinds of speculative

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knowledge. This remains true of much historical fiction of the 1820s. But in ­later antebellum historical fiction, we can trace the development of the idea that fictionality signals a narrative’s orientation ­toward aesthetics first and foremost. It is only by tracing the historical emergence of this ­later conception of fictionality—­what Genette would call fictionality’s “constitutive literariness”—­ that we can resist the tendency to back-­project it onto ­earlier fictions, including the historical fictions of the 1820s. To understand t­ hose fictions on their own terms, we must reconstruct this “­great strug­gle for veracity . . . ​between history and fiction”—­the contest over what counted as knowing the past in antebellum Amer­i­ca.

From Historian to Romancer Instead of proceeding chronologically, this chapter begins by juxtaposing prefatory justifications for historical fictionality from the 1810s and 1820s against ­those from the l­ater antebellum period in order to crystallize, at the outset, the broad shift in logics of fictionality that occurred over ­these de­cades. ­After establishing the general contours of this shift, I ­will explore, in greater depth, the 1820s historical fictions that argued for fictionality’s value as a tool for speculative historiography in an era increasingly dominated by antiquarian historiography. I ­will then situate ­later historical fictions’ disavowals of such historiographical justifications for historical fiction in relation to the changing conceptions of fiction-­reading evident in periodical reviews from the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. By proceeding in this way, I hope to spotlight an overlooked transformation in conceptions of historical fiction and show how this transformation encapsulates a more general shift in the history of fictionality in the antebellum United States—­the increasing prioritization of aesthetic questions over epistemological ones in discussions of fiction’s value and purpose. Historical fiction’s rapid rise to prominence in the 1820s can obscure its contested origins. Before the 1820s, historical fiction had generally been regarded as a particularly pernicious genre, ­because it presented the epistemological prob­lem of fictionality in an especially acute form. Critics contended that historical fiction’s undifferentiated blend of the real and the i­magined would be uniquely likely to mislead readers with false ideas: “the class of historical novels,” wrote the American Monthly Review in 1795, is “a species of writing against which we have repeatedly stated our objections that appear to us unsurmountable, arising from its tendency to lodge in the memory of the young reader a confused mass of facts and fictions.”12 For early critics, this promiscuous mixing of fact and fiction made historical fiction an unnatural literary monster: “the most monstrous [productions],” wrote the Port-­Folio in 1813, “are ­those in which fiction is engrafted onto history. Let me have fact or fable, but not a preposterous mix of both.”13 Fictionists ­were well aware that its “mixed” nature made historical fiction an object of suspicion. Samuel

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Woodworth, for example, opens his 1816 historical novel The Champions of Freedom with a prefatory dialogue in which he defends his novel against accusations that he has produced exactly the kind of “monstrous” blend that so worried the Port-­Folio: “the mixture of truth and fiction,” insists his interlocutor, “is the very ­thing that constitutes a literary monster.”14 Woodworth shrugs off such generic policing as narrow-­minded and declares that “this work w ­ ill be found equally in­ter­est­ing, as a history or a novel.”15 The Champions of Freedom does, in fact, weave together a fictional—­indeed fantastical—­novelistic love story with an incredibly detailed recounting of the major campaigns and ­battles of the War of 1812. Woodworth even includes an array of authenticating footnotes that attest to the factuality of his account of the war, often citing specific periodicals, historical sketches, public documents, and even private letters to corroborate its accuracy. Such a combination of fact and fiction does not, Woodworth argues, compromise a narrative’s status as history: “Although termed a Romance, and embellished with a few fictitious scenes, incidents, and characters, it ­will, nevertheless, be the most correct and complete History of the recent War, that has yet appeared.”16 But most early national reviewers disagreed with this capacious conception of history: “As to the events of real history,” wrote one periodical reviewer in 1810, “to seek them in works of imagination is illusory, and generally dangerous.”17 Given this long-­standing suspicion of historical fiction in the United States, it is unsurprising that historical fictionists of the 1820s endlessly engaged such epistemological concerns, insisting their narratives would not delude readers. Cooper’s early paratexts are exemplary. In his early prefaces to The Spy (1821–22), Cooper recodes historical material as a guarantor of—­rather than threat to—­his book’s reliability as a source of knowledge, reversing standard critiques of the genre.18 The preface to the first edition, for instance, differentiates his book from both gothic fiction and the fash­ion­able novels popu­lar with the quixotic “American fair” by insisting that its historical basis ensures that it ­will not mislead readers with scenes that “never did, nor ever ­will occur.”19 The preface to the third edition extends this appropriation of antifictional rhe­toric by explaining why Amer­i­ca is uniquely ill-­suited to fiction: “Common sense is the characteristic of the American p ­ eople . . . ​it ruins the beau-­ideal.”20 Disavowing the exact term that he ­will ­later use to defend his romances—­“ the beau-­ideal”—­Cooper argues that Americans are inappropriate objects for the idealizing work of fiction. This is, he suggests, especially the case for American historical fiction: “all that glow, which can be given to a tale, through the aid of obscure legends . . . ​is not attainable in this land of facts.” While scholars have long associated historical fiction with legend, romance, and myth, historical fiction first emerged in the United States claiming distinction from exactly ­these kinds of epistemologically suspect narratives. Instead of the imaginative interest of the Eu­ro­pean past, American history offers, in Cooper’s account, relatively recent events that require accurate (and decidedly non-­“romantic”)

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fiction. He thus uses The Spy’s failure to achieve e­ ither ideality or exoticism as a means of recoding historical fiction’s “mixed” nature as a virtue: his book’s historical content, he suggests, constrains the excesses of fictionality, distinguishing it from the romantic repre­sen­ta­tions found in other fiction. Cooper thus answers condemnations of historical fiction with a defense of historical fiction. This is the defining gesture of 1820s historical fiction: historical content, their paratexts contend, disciplines fiction’s unruly flights of fancy, rendering it a reliable source of knowledge. Approaching historical fiction primarily as part of a longer history of the novel, literary historians have tended to regard such prefaces as signaling the infusion of the novel genre with historical content. This is not wrong, but it does not fully capture Cooper’s metageneric argument: he sought to associate his narratives with history rather than fiction. This becomes explicit in his prefaces of the mid-1820s. In the 1826 preface to Mohicans—­one of his most thoroughly researched fictions—­Cooper pre­sents himself as a “student of Indian history” intent on explaining “the obscurities of the historical allusions” for t­ hose readers who have mistakenly begun the book “­under the impression it is a fiction.”21 Lionel Lincoln (1825) both parodies and distances itself from conventional romance truth claims: “no dark-­looking stranger . . . ​has ever transmitted [to Cooper] a single page of illegible manuscript”; “he is indebted to no garrulous tale-­teller for beguiling long winter eve­nings”; “he sleeps too soundly to dream.” But Cooper nonetheless asserts that “the leading events are true” and that this should be so self-­evident as to be “unnecessary to assert.” His sources are more prosaic: he has interviewed participants and has scoured the “local publications” to confirm “historical facts.”22 The archival researcher has replaced the dreamer as the model for the fictionist. Cooper’s preface to The Pi­lot (1824) unfolds an even more schematic distinction between “the Historian” and “the writer of Romances”—­“ The latter is permitted to garnish a probable fiction, while he is sternly prohibited from dwelling on improbable truths; but it is the duty of the former to rec­ord facts as they have occurred, without reference to consequences, resting his reputation on a firm foundation of realities, and vindicating his integrity by authorities”—in order to identify his proj­ect with the historian’s. Cooper even encourages doubting readers to have recourse to his “authorit[ies] for e­ very material incident” in the narrative.23 The historical fictionist is figured as a historian rather than a novelist or romancer. In seeking to associate their works with history rather than fiction, Cooper and his contemporaries aligned their books with ­earlier literary forms of historiography that, though dealing with a­ ctual p ­ eople and events, did not restrict their repre­sen­ta­tions to recoverable facts.24 For much of the eigh­teenth ­century, fictive ele­ments, such as i­ magined speeches, ­were widely accepted in history. This is the understanding of history that underpinned Woodworth’s claim that his novel, even though it includes “fictitious scenes, incidents, and

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characters,” is the “most complete History” of the War of 1812 yet published. It was only slowly and unevenly across the eigh­teenth ­century that “Truth” in historical discourse shifted from a combination of fact and speculative re-­ creation to strictly the facts.25 But while ­these 1810s and 1820s historical fictions appealed to an ­earlier conception of historiography that used fictional reconstruction for historical narration, their insistence on their continuity with the genre of history reveals an anxiety about their status as history. This anxiety arises b ­ ecause Woodworth, Cooper, and their contemporaries w ­ ere writing in the early 1800s, not the mid-1700s, and the association of history with factuality had become prevalent by this point. As Hayden White notes, “In the early nineteenth ­century . . . ​it became conventional . . . ​ to identify truth with fact and to regard fiction as the opposite of truth . . . ​ as a hindrance to the understanding of real­ity rather than as a way of apprehending it.” The conceptual opposition between history and fiction was firmly entrenched in the early United States, and history had come “to be set over against fiction . . . ​as the repre­sen­ta­tion of the ‘­actual’ to the repre­sen­ta­tion of the ‘pos­si­ble’ or only ‘imaginable.’ ”26 In the late eigh­teenth and early nineteenth c­ entury, this conceptual shift was further consolidated through the founding of American historical socie­ties modeled on En­glish antiquarian socie­ties. ­These socie­ties relied on amateur historians, who sought to preserve local, state, and national history from patriotic motives. While the late nineteenth-­century academic historians, who would institutionalize history as a scientific discipline, would ridicule antiquaries for their sentimental attachment to artifacts, they w ­ ere nonetheless integral to the development of modern history: the antiquarian emphasis on primary materials—­both written rec­ords and artifacts—­gave a new importance to empirical evidence in the study of the past, rejecting a reliance on tradition and conjecture.27 Cooper and his contemporaries thus invoked an antiquated conception of what counts as history. Nonetheless, their claims continued to have purchase ­because the conceptual opposition between history and fiction had outrun the practice of national historiography in the 1820s. In the early 1800s, few rec­ords of American history, even of the revolutionary period, existed. T ­ hose that had survived w ­ ere not easily accessible, as the US lacked the institutional support for historical inquiry found in many Eu­ro­pean nations. In 1826, the editor of the North American Review lamented “the scattered and loose condition” of materials available to ­those interested in American history.28 In this sense, the United States was absolutely not “a land of facts.” Si­mul­ta­neously rising to a new prominence in the 1820s, historical socie­ties and historical fiction both sought to address the same prob­lem: the im­mense gaps in knowledge that riddled American history. Where historical socie­ties sought to address t­ hese gaps by collecting primary materials, historical fictionists sought to address them through the kind of conjectural reconstruction that had predominated in ­earlier historiography.29

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Yet, even as historical fictionists of the 1820s trafficked in this e­ arlier mode of speculative historiography, they also increasingly sought to associate their works rhetorically with antiquarian historiography’s emphasis on primary sources. (The prefatory researcher of Lionel Lincoln would have fit right into one of ­these burgeoning antiquarian socie­ties.) In some cases, historical fictionists even presented their conjectural reconstructions as a necessary supplement to an antiquarian reliance on primary sources. Take, for example, Lydia Maria Child’s use of the found manuscript in her fiction of Puritan New ­England, Hobomok, a Tale of Early Times (1824). Within the narrative frame, Child’s narrator bases his tale on an “old worn out manuscript . . . ​written by one of [his] ancestors,” quoting from it at length. In the preface, however, the tale’s (putative) author confesses that ­there is, in fact, no specific source text: he simply owes many a “quaint expression . . . ​to the old and forgotten manuscripts of ­those times.”30 Instead of a claim to factual basis, Child uses the found manuscript to figure a more general research into the character of the past. In this unusual deployment of the topos, Child pre­sents her explic­itly fictional reconstruction as a kind of antiquarian historiography.31 For Child, this kind of conjecture is rendered necessary by the inadequacies of the historical rec­ord. She consistently underscores the imperfections of her i­ magined source text: “­These [are] brief scattered hints” and “they are almost illegible from their age” (15–16). Child stages the obscurity of such historical materials to suggest the need for exactly the kind of fictional reconstruction she has undertaken. By figuring her proj­ect as archival research based on a fictional manuscript, Child suggests the necessity of conjecture in recovering this history. Hobomok thus claims to offer a qualified form of historical knowledge licensed by factual history’s limits. Child’s figuration of American history reveals the tension between the two dif­fer­ent metageneric arguments advanced by 1820s historical fictionists. On one hand, Child pre­sents American history as uniquely recent and verifiable: “In most nations the path of antiquity is shrouded in darkness, rendered more vis­i­ble by the wild, fantastic light of fable; but with us, the vista of time is luminous to its remotest point” (5). This figuration is central to Child’s argument: ­because American history is verifiable, it can discipline fictionality, preventing the “fantastic light of fable” from making her book as unreliable as most fiction. Yet, Child’s other argument—­the justification of fictional conjecture—­ requires her to pre­sent American history as obscure and the historical rec­ord as incomplete: only this lack ratifies fictional reconstruction as a means of creating a supplementary form of historical knowledge. In t­ hese twinned metageneric proj­ects—­the disciplining of fiction; the supplementing of historical knowledge—­Hobomok pre­sents American history as si­mul­ta­neously luminous and obscure, exposing the tensions, even contradictions, between the dif­fer­ ent defenses and justifications of historical fictionality being advanced in the 1820s.

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If historical fiction and historical socie­ties arose at the same moment, the expansion of historical socie­ties across the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s also suggests one reason why writers retheorized historical fiction’s purpose over ­these same years. Although the earliest American historical socie­ties ­were founded in the late eigh­teenth ­century, the 1820s saw an explosion of them, with their rapid multiplication continuing over the next three de­cades. New state, county, and even town historical socie­ties appeared yearly. ­These socie­ties and their accompanying publications transformed American historiography: they allowed history to conform to the emergent value of historiography—­“facts not theory”32—to a degree not pos­si­ble before. This shift brought with it more rigorous standards for historical research and writing, especially an increased emphasis on fidelity to primary sources. The Romantic historians, such as Bancroft and Parkman, w ­ ere influenced by Scott and Cooper and employed novelistic narrative techniques, but their accounts also placed an emphasis on archival research and strict adherence to primary sources that differentiated their works from the conjectural historiography of both past eras and much 1820s historical fiction.33 ­L ater antebellum historical fictions thus entered a very dif­fer­ent literary marketplace from t­ hose of the 1820s, as the gaps in historical knowledge that 1820s historical fiction had sought to address had been considerably reduced by the 1840s and 1850s. Faced with a discourse of history that was increasingly differentiated from other forms of lit­er­a­ture (in the eighteenth-­century sense) and was undergoing a gradual pro­cess of institutionalization, historical fiction ceased to justify its value in terms of historical knowledge production. The changing state of national history provided an impetus for historical fictionists to reimagine the purpose of their fictions. Hawthorne’s preface to The Scarlet Letter (1850) crystallizes, better than any other text, how such changes provoked historical fiction to reposition itself within the literary field. Like ­earlier historical fictionists, Hawthorne pre­sents himself as a researcher, sifting through forgotten documents that could serve as “materials of local history.” Like Child in Hobomok or Cooper in The Spy, he notes that “­there is a dearth of rec­ords” of colonial times, setting up his own discovery of a manuscript as addressing a significant lacuna in the historical rec­ord. Hawthorne even suggests that the papers he has discovered “may be worked up . . . ​into a regular history of Salem,” praising the manuscript’s author for his “researches as a local antiquarian.”34 This use of the found manuscript seems to reproduce Hobomok’s proj­ect, in which historical fiction supplements gaps in the archive. But Hawthorne uses the found manuscript topos for other, even opposite, metageneric ends. ­These papers, he admits, might serve as the basis for a “regular history,” but that is emphatically not what he is offering. In fact, he stages the obsolescence of this ­earlier justification for historical fiction by pointing readers who are interested in facts to the local antiquarian society: ­those readers, Hawthorne suggests, can consult the manuscript itself, which he plans on “depositing . . . ​with the Essex historical

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society.” The existence of the manuscript, he argues, ­frees him from any imperative to historical fidelity: I must not be understood as affirming, that, in the dressing up of the tale, and imagining the motives and modes of passion that influenced the characters who figure in it, I have invariably confined myself within the limits of the old Surveyor’s half a dozen sheets of foolscap. On the contrary, I have allowed myself, as to such points, nearly as much license as if the facts had been entirely my own invention. In a striking reversal, Hawthorne deploys the found manuscript to stress the fictionist’s privilege to depart from what actually happened. He then goes even further, making his simultaneous reliance on and deviation from the manuscript the basis for theorizing historical fiction’s value on the very terms that e­ arlier critics had been suspicious of it—as a mixed mode. In his famous description of the ideal circumstances for romance-­writing, Hawthorne implicitly celebrates the very feature of historical fiction—­its mingling of the ­Actual and the Imaginary—­that had once been regarded as making it a uniquely unreliable, even “monstrous,” genre: it is “somewhere between the real world and the fairy-­land, where the ­Actual and the Imaginary may meet and each imbue itself with the nature of the other” (29–31). In brazenly embracing this epistemologically blurry “neutral territory,” Hawthorne shifts the justification of historical fiction from the creation and dissemination of knowledge to what he refers to as lit­er­a­ture’s “imaginative delight.”35 The anxiety that permeates “The Custom House” is not that his fiction might not reflect real­ity, but that the romancer’s encounters with the banal realities of business might have compromised his ability to access the fairy-­world of fiction: “The ­little power you might once have possessed over the tribe of unrealities is gone!” This is a dramatic divergence from the anxious prefaces of 1820s historical fiction in which writers such as Cooper tried to banish any association with “unrealities.” Reversing t­ hese e­ arlier claims, Hawthorne insists that too much contact with real­ity ­will compromise his fiction’s aesthetic effect and destroy the “impalpable beauty of [his] soap ­bubble” (32). Hawthorne might turn researcher for a moment, but to produce the fiction The Scarlet Letter, he must regain access not to any archive of facts but to a perception of real­ity as otherworldly. With its disavowal of historical fidelity, its emphasis on historical fiction’s unique “license,” and its cele­bration of fiction’s enchanting powers—to which I ­will return—­The Scarlet Letter neatly encapsulates the wider transformation in historical fictionality’s meaning across the antebellum period. Just as Hobomok (1824) does not reproduce the metafictional arguments of Lionel Lincoln (1825) or Mohicans (1826), The Scarlet Letter (1850) does not exactly echo the claims of The Deerslayer (1841) or The Leather-­Stocking Tales (1850). But in each case, historical materials shift from disciplining fictionality to licensing it

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and justifications centered on historical knowledge are displaced by prefaces that foreground historical fiction’s “imaginative delight.” We w ­ ill encounter many additional instances of this shift when, ­later in this chapter, we consider the stakes of this change in justifications of historical fiction for the wider history of fictionality in the United States. Such a clearly laid out opposition, of course, risks over-­schematizing a gradual, sporadic transition.36 The value of such a schematic approach, however, is that it reveals an overlooked transformation in how historical fictionists positioned their narratives within an evolving literary field. In the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, historical fiction comes to gain an approbation and even prestige, that Woodworth could ­little have ­imagined in 1816, but the terms on which he presented The Champions of Freedom to the public—as equally pleasing “as history or as a novel”—­have become increasingly obsolete. As we ­will see, this reflects not only the changing conceptions and institutions of historiography in the United States, but also a more general shift in how Americans writers and reviewers valued fiction. This was, however, an uneven transformation. Historical fictionists do not suddenly abandon the proj­ect of historical knowledge production. Rather, their paratexts reveal an ongoing contest over both what counts as historical knowledge and ­whether fiction can serve as a vehicle for it. As factuality gains ascendancy in historiography, historical fictionists argue for other ways of knowing the past than through recoverable facts. Rather than compromising their narrative’s ability to serve as a source of historical knowledge, fictionality, t­ hese writers contend, has the potential to offer readers a unique knowledge of the past. Counterintuitively, the increasingly tight association of history with factuality opens up a space for fiction to offer alternative ways of knowing the past.

Alternative Ways of Knowing the Past in 1820s Historical Fiction Clustered in the l­ater 1820s, we find a number of historical fictions that emphasize their distinction from history as a genre, even as they claim to produce and disseminate knowledge about the past. Rather than claiming an identity or even an association with factual historiography, they argue for fiction’s ability to offer a kind of knowledge about the past that factual historiography cannot. Take, for instance, Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie; or Early Times in Mas­sa­chu­setts (1827), a fiction that attempts to navigate, and even resolve, the contradictory impulses under­lying 1820s historical fiction.37 In lockstep with her moment, Sedgwick insists that her fiction’s historical content differentiates it from other fiction: The mighty master of fiction has but to wave the wand of his office, to pre­sent the past to his readers, with all the vividness and distinctness of the pre­sent; but we, who follow him at an immea­sur­able distance—we

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have no magician’s enchantments . . . ​we must betake ourselves to the compass and the rule, and set forth our description . . . ​minutely and exactly. . . . ​In obedience to this necessity, we offer the following detailed description of the internal economy of a pilgrim mansion, not on any apocryphal authority, but quoted from an au­then­tic rec­ord of the times.38 Like the early Cooper, Sedgwick aligns her narrative with the historian’s “compass and rule” rather than the novelist’s “enchantments” and magic “wand,” insisting that historical content constrains fiction’s romantic excesses. She legitimates this historical basis by quoting from Puritan primary sources and constructing a narrative replete with historical persons. Yet where the early Cooper and Child figured their fictions as a kind of historical research, Sedgwick’s preface emphasizes her text’s distinction from factual historiography. She assures the “antiquarian reader” that “The following volumes are not offered to the public as being in any degree an historical narrative, or a relation of real events”: “Real characters and real events are . . . ​alluded to . . . ​which was to illustrate not the history, but the character of the times” (3–4). Hope Leslie seeks to allay anx­i­eties about fiction’s suitability as a way of learning about the past by underscoring that it falls outside the realm of historical investigation. Both of t­ hese metageneric arguments respond to antifictional suspicions—­ the former to a general suspicion of fiction’s epistemological under­pinnings; the latter to anx­i­eties about historical fiction’s mixing of fact and fiction—­but ­there is tension between them. The claim that historical content disciplines historical fiction by guaranteeing its reliability orients the fiction ­toward a standard of historical accuracy and complicates the claim that historical fiction does not impinge upon history’s domain. To clarify the exact standards to which Hope Leslie appeals, Sedgwick provides eleven endnotes (and one footnote) that cite specific historical facts, quote primary sources, and suggest further reading. In one sense, such notes merely document historical content’s disciplining function by showing how Hope Leslie’s plot is not purely fanciful but is supported by historical authorities. Yet unlike Woodworth’s footnotes that attested to the factuality of his account of the War of 1812, Sedgwick’s notes do not legitimate Hope Leslie as history, but, consistent with its preface, authenticate its narrative on terms specific to fiction, such as defending the probability that a Pequod chief would be accompanied by a maiden interpreter. Sedgwick uses historical materials to assure readers that her fiction adheres to certain epistemological standards, but this does not remove it from frameworks of evaluation specific to fiction: “The writer is aware that it may be thought that the character of Magawisca has not prototype among the aborigines of this country . . . ​in such delineations, we are confined not to the ­actual, but the pos­si­ble” (4). In Sedgwick’s justification of Magawisca’s possibility, however, we can also recognize another metageneric proj­ect—­a cautionary warning about the

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limitations of antiquarian historiography. For Sedgwick, Magawisca has value as pos­si­ble history, b ­ ecause of the absence of Magawiscas in the historical rec­ord. A person like Magawisca may have existed, Sedgwick suggests, but if she did, she would not appear in the archive: the interested perspective of the Puritan primary sources—­Sedgwick refers to William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation and William Hubbard’s A Narrative of the Indian Wars in New ­England as “relations of their enemies” that “distorted” Pequod character—­ would have ­either misrepresented Magawisca’s virtues or obscured her existence entirely. For this reason, the specific standard of evaluation Sedgwick invokes—­possibility—­provides a potent means of negotiating the limitations of her Puritan sources. Implicitly critiquing the archival fetishism of the “antiquarian readers” whom she addresses, Sedgwick exposes how a reliance on primary materials can limit, even distort, our understanding of the past.39 Herein lies the value of historical fiction for Sedgwick: it may not be history, but it allows us to imagine what has been elided from history. This does not license unbounded imaginative creation: Hope Leslie, as its notes make clear, does not contradict known facts and it adheres to possibility and probability. But when held to ­these standards, historical fiction represents not an epistemological danger, but a means of addressing the shortcomings of an antiquarian historiography dependent on primary sources. For Sedgwick, then, historical fiction is neither a form of history nor a replacement for it, but a qualifying supplement to it. Shifting emphasis from the knowledge a text contains—­specific facts about the past—to the way of knowing the past it offers, Sedgwick posits historical fiction as a mode of critical historiography: historical fiction does not produce knowledge that is continuous with history proper, but it does produce a conjectural knowledge by inviting readers to dwell on what has been omitted from or obscured by the historical rec­ord. Hope Leslie, thus, does more than embrace an antiquated form of historiography that included conjectural reconstruction; it shows how the ascendancy of the antiquarian regime of historiography has made this kind of suppositional investigation newly urgent for understanding history. For Sedgwick, fiction’s basis in possibility rather than fact does not disqualify it as a vehicle for historical knowledge, but actually constitutes its value as a source of knowledge about the past. Hope Leslie underscores what recoverable facts cannot reveal about the past. Even as it distinguishes itself from factual historiography, Hope Leslie is a typical historical fiction of the 1820s in its insistence that historical content constrains fiction’s repre­sen­ta­tional excesses. Sedgwick’s con­temporary John Neal vigorously objected to this argument. Reviewing Harriet Cheney’s A Peep at the Pilgrims (1825), Neal lamented that it was “surcharged with historical truth, which nobody cares for . . . ​the insupportable accuracy of which ­were enough to damp the poetical ardor of a w ­ hole nation. All the dates are true—­ true as death; true to an hour; all the names, all the chief incidents true to a

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letter.”40 Rejecting fidelity as a virtue in historical fiction, Neal held that the best parts of Waverley “affect us” not ­because they are “historically true” or “natu­ral,” but ­because they are romantic, “unnatural,” “exaggerated”—­utterly beyond the “nature of our experience”: “the best parts of the ­whole, are the most exaggerated. . . . ​Nor are they historically true in a single case.”41 For Neal, historical content distances fiction from everyday experience, licensing it to operate without restraint. In this, Neal anticipates the ­later historical fictions that would emphasize the romantic interest of the distant past. In other ways, however, Neal’s fiction is perfectly representative of its moment, as it remains preoccupied with the epistemological status of historical fiction. Even as Neal would object to Sedgwick’s use of historical content to constrain fiction’s extravagances, he shares her belief that fiction is uniquely suited for grappling with the limitations of factual history as a way of knowing the past.42 Neal pre­sents Rachel Dyer, A North American Story (1828) as a departure from his ­earlier, “extravagan[t]” fictions: he insists that it serves “a healthy good purpose” and warns that it is “more serious in parts, and rather more argumentative in parts, than stories, novels, and romances generally are.”43 Rachel Dyer lacks extravagance only if compared with Neal’s ­earlier fiction—it is permeated by melodrama, gothic conventions, and uncanny coincidences—­ but it is undeniably “more argumentative” than most fiction, with extended disquisitions on ­legal theory frequently interrupting the narrative. A courtroom drama set during the Salem witch t­ rials, Rachel Dyer traces the conviction of Mary Cory, John Burroughs (both historical persons), and Elizabeth and Rachel Dyer (the fictional d ­ aughters of Mary Dyer, a historical person who had no c­ hildren). Although the t­ rials of Burroughs and Cory do not overlap historically, Neal has Burroughs (who had already been executed at the time of Cory’s trial) volunteer to serve as the defense for Cory and the Dyer ­sisters, leading to his own trial for witchcraft. The narrative consists largely of Burroughs’s exchanges with the Puritan elders about dif­fer­ent va­ri­e­ties of evidence and the intricacies of the judgment pro­cess.44 Rachel Dyer’s preoccupation with questions of evidence in l­ egal settings—­ and the inability of the Puritan elders to recognize the uncertainty that inheres therein—is part of its more general interrogation of the roots of credulity. In personal, religious, and l­ egal m ­ atters, Rachel Dyer offers warning ­after warning about the danger of believing too easily. T ­ here is nothing remarkable in this: an understanding of Puritans as credulous was familiar in the 1820s, and nineteenth-­century fiction, as we have seen, often warned against credulity. Yet Neal complicates the conventional, rationalistic critique of credulity by including a prefatory chapter that argues for the value of credulity. Rarely commented on, this defense of credulity is neither strictly ironic nor undoes the story’s critique of credulity; rather, it uses questions of belief to interrogate how readers relate to the past.45

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Neal begins this chapter by underscoring how the epistemic divide separating the nineteenth from the seventeenth ­century—­belief in super­natural events—­shapes con­temporary understandings of the past: “We may turn away with a sneer now from the devout believer in witches, wondering at the folly of them that have such faith, and quite persuading ourselves in our g ­ reat wisdom, that all who have had it heretofore, however they may have been regarded by ages that have gone by, ­were not of a truth wise and ­great men.” While Rachel Dyer ­will show that the Puritan ­fathers ­were hardly “wise and ­great men,” the opening chapter questions the confidence with which modern skeptics of supernaturalism judge the credulity of ­earlier generations. Neal, then, explic­itly sets aside his own views and argues “as one of the true faith [in witchcraft]”: he mounts an elaborate epistemological argument about the value of positive, eye-­witness testimony and the limitations of modern skepticism in order to suggest that ­there w ­ ere, in fact, witches in Salem. Neal then moves from t­ hese arguments about the existence of witchcraft to an argument for the value of credulity more generally: “Why would we not think as well of him who believes too much, as of him who believes too ­little?” Having elevated credulity over skepticism, Neal unfolds a long list of instances in which credulity is admirable that ends with an example that bears directly on his own text: “Why would we not think as well. . . . ​Of the believer in Crusoe, who sits poring over the story ­under the hedge, as of the unbeliever in Bruce?” (22–27). Celebrating this quixotic novel-­reader, Neal flouts anx­i­eties about fiction in general, and historical fiction in par­tic­ul­ar, laying the foundation for a very dif­fer­ent metafictional argument than t­ hose found in most 1820s historical fiction. Following his extended epistemological defense of the Puritans’ supernaturalism, Neal insists that Rachel Dyer does not require this kind of defense, as its truth is uncontested: “I have put a much stronger case than that on which the truth of the following story is made to depend” (30). ­Here, a remarkable slippage occurs: Neal, in referring to the “truth of the following story,” which in no way endorses such supernaturalism, shifts the question of truth from the existence of witchcraft to a repre­sen­ta­tion of the mania surrounding witchcraft. Yet Neal continues to use the terms he had established e­ arlier, leading to an ambiguous claim to factual accuracy, which hovers between a defense of his historical description—­a proj­ect consistent with con­temporary rationalism—­and a defense of the Puritans’ belief. This conflation shifts questions of knowledge—­How do we know if witchcraft existed?—­into a question about attitudes t­ oward historical beliefs: “Now, if oaths are to be answered by conjecture, bloodshed by a sneer, absolute martyrdom by hypothesis, much grave testimony of the ­great and the pious, by a speculative argument, a brief syllogism, or a joke—of what use are the rules by which our trust in what we hear is regulated?” (30). Although referring to the existence of witchcraft, ­these claims resonate as a description of con­temporary attitudes t­ oward the

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t­ rials—­the confidence with which nineteenth-­century Americans dismiss such events as a product of a distant, credulous time. This sets up the passage’s final paragraphs, where, once again, epistemological questions—­“What is the groundwork of true knowledge?”—­morph into questions of historical belief: “Earthquake, war, and revolution—­the overthrow of States and of empires, are they to be repeated forever, lest men should not believe the stories that are told of them?” (31). By slipping from questions of belief in witchcraft to the issue of nineteenth-­century attitudes t­ oward t­ hose whom believed in witchcraft, Neal suggests that belief in history involves not only knowing its facts, but also taking seriously the “testimony” of its “witnesses.” Even if one does not believe in the strict truth of this “testimony,” one should not simply discount it, b ­ ecause it seems naïve when viewed through a l­ater epistemic framework: historical “belief,” Neal suggests, requires not dismissing the “testimony” of historical persons “by a speculative argument, a brief syllogism, or a joke.” It is only by taking such past attitudes seriously that we can “believe the stories” of history in such a way as to not endlessly repeat them. In the slippages in this passage, we find the seriousness under­lying Neal’s playful defense of credulity. In his absorptive “belief,” Neal’s quixotic novel-­reader models the engaged, attentive relation—­the “poring over the story”—­that Neal hopes Rachel Dyer ­will create to the Puritan past. A degree of credulity w ­ ill allow readers to experience history in a way that surpasses mere knowledge of the facts. What emerges, then, from Neal’s opening chapter and his narrative proper is both an extended defense and a withering critique of credulity. Counterintuitively, the Puritan ­fathers and the “Modern philosophy” that dismisses their beliefs are linked in their epistemological security, their shared confidence in the explanatory power of their respective frameworks of knowledge. For Neal, the partial credulity of fiction provides an alternative. Neal does not ask readers to believe all his novel’s “facts”—­more on this in a moment—­and thus, they ­will not reproduce his quixotic novel-­reader’s credulity. But this reader, utterly absorbed in his belief, provides an alternative to the modern skeptics who easily dismiss the Salem ­trials even as they “believe” in their historical facts. For Neal, historical fiction can bridge the gap between mere belief in the facts and the more encompassing, ambiguous meaning of belief that he invokes in the opening chapter. It is this form of belief that is necessary for nineteenth-­century readers to find in the Puritans a warning not only about credulity, but about the roots of credulity—­epistemological overconfidence, trust in authority, faith in the multitude—­that have relevance in a c­ entury that does not believe in witches. Neal’s complaints about historical fictions that aspire to “historical truth” and the sensational liberties Rachel Dyer takes with the historical rec­ord make it all the more surprising that it closes with an appendix of “Historical Facts” that includes lengthy primary source quotations on issues like “Of the confessions,” “Of the character of Burroughs,” and “Recantation of the Chief Judge and the Jurors.” ­These “historical facts,” however, also note some alterations.

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Neal, for example, admits that contrary to his narrative, “The true name of Mr. Parris was Samuel, instead of Matthew, and he spelt it with two r’s” (265). Although Neal seems to appease historical fiction’s critics by drawing distinctions between his facts and fictions, t­ hese notes also stake a claim to fictional license by underscoring the arbitrariness of Neal’s alterations. Not acknowledging substantial historical changes while highlighting a name change, Neal both satirizes the stuffing of fiction with “historical truth” and reminds readers that Rachel Dyer does not aspire to factual accuracy. Historical belief, for Neal, is not a ­matter of facts. Rachel Dyer is riddled by contradictions, with its gothic conventions often ­running ­counter to its rationalistic demystification of superstition. Yet Neal’s opening chapter is not merely contradictory, but rather, sets up a tension between skepticism and credulity to argue for the value of both in historical inquiry. While within the l­egal framework of the t­ rials, Neal argues for the ultimate value of skepticism—of interrogating evidence, examining motives, questioning authority—­this approach has its limits in historical inquiry: a combination of credulity and skepticism is needed to move beyond a mere grasp of historical facts and understand the past’s relevance for con­temporary life. Herein lies historical fiction’s value for Neal: it brings us into contact with history in such a way as, to quote Neal on Waverley, “to affect us.” It offers a way of relating to history’s “facts” other than as an object of rational knowledge. This is crucial for Neal, ­because such rationalist approaches to history preclude taking the “testimony” of historical “witnesses” seriously. Far from compromising it as a source of historical knowledge, then, fiction’s “exaggerated,” “unnatural” romance allows readers to know the past in a more meaningful, engaged way, ­because it offers a means of moving beyond the rationalist framework that Neal believes prevents readers from accessing historically distant worldviews and truly learning from the m ­ istakes of the past. Hope Leslie and Rachel Dyer crystallize the divergent, even opposed, conceptions of historical fictionality circulating in the antebellum United States: in roughly contemporaneous fictions, we encounter both the argument that historical fiction disciplines fiction’s romantic excesses and the argument for the mixed mode’s unique romantic license that would largely displace it over the following de­cades. But in spite of this opposition, ­there is an under­lying unity to their proj­ects. From the long view of literary history, they are transitional fictions. Unlike many 1820s historical fictions, they do not claim identity with—­even insist upon their difference from—­history proper. But unlike many l­ater historical fictions, they do not renounce the proj­ect of historical knowledge production. Rather, they participate in what Cooper calls “the ­great strug­gle for veracity . . . ​between history and fiction,” championing the unique kinds of historical knowledge that fiction can produce. In dif­f er­ent ways, Sedgwick and Neal both use historical fiction to confront the limitations of fact-­ based antiquarian historiography. Hope Leslie uses fictionality for a proj­ect

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of possibilistic historiography that exposes the shortcomings of any “factual” history that is uncritically reliant on primary sources. In Rachel Dyer, Neal resists the idea that the past could be fully known through “The Historical Facts” and posits the partial credulity of fiction as an alternative to the epistemological confidence with which his skeptical, rationalist contemporaries approached history. ­Shaped by the long-­standing epistemological framework for thinking about fiction in the United States, Hope Leslie and Rachel Dyer both insist that fiction enables readers to know the past in a way that factual historiography cannot. From our con­temporary vantage, this “­great strug­gle for veracity” in historical inquiry can be easy to overlook, in part ­because of our own assumptions about what counts as “veracity” in historiography: the rise of antiquarianism (and the academic history that would l­ ater displace it) consolidated an understanding of history as a genre defined by factuality rather than speculation. In the face of this consolidation, ­later antebellum historical fictionists would increasingly renounce this proj­ect of historical inquiry, arguing that the fictionality of their works was a sign of their orientation to frameworks of value distinct from history as a genre: that is, they emphasized fictionality not as an alternative way of knowing the past, but as a way of bracketing questions of historical knowledge. Indeed, at the very moment that Neal and Sedgwick ­were advocating fiction’s value as a vehicle for historical inquiry, other historical fictionists w ­ ere emphasizing their fiction’s distinction from history not as a way of taking up this “­great strug­gle for veracity”—as Sedgwick and Neal had done—­but as a means of disavowing it. This shift is most evident in the changing ways in which writers positioned their historical fictions in relation to the gaps in known, recoverable history. Whereas many 1820s historical fictions, such as Hope Leslie and Hobomok, presented such gaps in the historical rec­ord as ratifying fiction’s conjectural historiography, l­ ater historical fictionists would pre­sent such gaps as an occasion for urging readers to approach their narratives as fiction rather than as a form of history. Take, for instance, Cooper’s 1831 repackaging of The Spy. The Spy’s ­earlier prefaces, as we have seen, exemplified the stance of 1820s historical fiction: they mounted an argument for historical fiction’s epistemological superiority to other fiction and claimed an association with historiography rather than other fiction. At first blush, the 1831 preface seems to extend ­these arguments: it recounts the specific anecdote on which Cooper based The Spy, assuring readers that the fiction is based on an ­actual occurrence. This anecdotal logic of fictionality, however, actually serves as a means of si­mul­ta­ neously insisting on its factual basis and its fictionality: it reasserts The Spy’s distinction from most fiction while also orienting it t­ oward standards and reading practices associated with fiction.46 “The author has often been asked if ­there w ­ ere any foundation in real life,” Cooper writes in the 1831 preface, “for the delineation of the principal character

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in the book.”47 Following The Spy’s initial publication, numerous texts had claimed to uncover the real identity of Cooper’s spy, most notably H. L. Barnum’s The Spy Unmasked, or Memoirs of Enoch Crosby, alias Harvey Birch, the Hero of Mr. Cooper’s Tale of the Neutral Ground (1828).48 Barnum purported to offer the facts b ­ ehind the fiction, showing the seriousness with which Cooper’s ­earlier claims to historical fidelity and factuality w ­ ere regarded: “It seemed to be generally admitted,” writes Barnum, “that the Spy was not a fictitious personage, but a real character, drawn from life; and the author himself intimates as much in his preface, where he admits that ‘a good portion of the tale is true.’ ”49 Given Cooper’s attempts throughout the 1820s to associate his texts with history rather than “romances” or “modern novels,” we might expect such suspicions to please him. Yet Cooper consistently denied Barnum’s claims and insisted that he knew nothing of Crosby.50 The 1831 preface clearly lays out why his fiction cannot be read as referring to Crosby. It describes a gathering, where an anonymous “illustrious man”—in fact, the late John Jay—­related “an anecdote, the truth of which he could attest as a personal witness.” “[S]uppressing the name of his agent,” Jay described the exploits of a brave revolutionary spy, including the spy’s refusal of any reward, ­because his “country has need of all its means” (5). This anecdote, Cooper claims, “induced the writer” to begin The Spy. By invoking Jay’s tale, he establishes an anecdotal logic of fictionality that allows him to continue to claim historical fidelity—­even factuality—­for his tale, while also disavowing concrete reference to any specific historical actors. Cooper uses the 1831 preface to suggest how to read—­and how not to read—­his fiction. He encourages readers to focus on what he calls the book’s “theme”—­patriotism—­rather than seeking to uncover particulars about a­ ctual revolutionary spies. The new preface, in short, seeks to disallow the pro­cess of historical decoding undertaken by Barnum and o ­ thers. (This is a reading practice that The Spy’s narrative seems to encourage through its delayed revelation that the seemingly fictional Mr. Harper is, in fact, George Washington in disguise!) Its anecdotal logic of fictionality offers a way of addressing epistemological anx­i­eties about fiction, but it does so without asserting its value as a vehicle for historical knowledge or inquiry. Put another way, the 1831 The Spy remains preoccupied with establishing the reliability of its repre­sen­ta­tions even as it seeks to bracket questions of historical knowledge. Paradoxically, by asserting that his fiction is based on a deceased man’s anecdote of an anonymous spy, Cooper moves his fiction into the gaps of recoverable history, even as he also asserts its factuality. In Hobomok and Hope Leslie, the gaps in the historical rec­ord are both the motivation and jumping off point for a form of conjectural historiography that ­these fictions pre­sent as a kind of historical knowledge. In the 1831 The Spy, alternatively, Cooper uses Jay’s anecdote to foreclose further inquiry into the details of the historical rec­ord. While this is a response to Barnum, it is also a metageneric move that anticipates many ­later historical fictions, including the ­later Leatherstocking

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tales. When Cooper declares, in the preface to The Deerslayer (1841), that its characters are “fictitious as a m ­ atter of course,” he seeks to preclude exactly the kind of historical decoding readers had performed on The Spy. Where Cooper had formerly sought to associate his works with history to legitimize them as serious works, he now sees this association as threatening their fictionality: The Deerslayer’s preface laments that the most difficult readers to please are ­those who read “works of the imagination as if they w ­ ere intended for ­matters of fact.” The writer who had once insisted that his historical fictions would not mislead readers with scenes that “never did . . . ​occur,” now asks readers “to believe in the possibility of fiction.” Urging readers to approach his historical romances as fictions, Cooper disavows any factual basis for them, claiming only that they do not violate the known historical rec­ord: Should . . . ​any professed historian, the public documents, or even the local traditions, contradict the statements of this book, the writer is ready to admit that the circumstance has entirely escaped his observation. . . . ​On the other hand, should it be found that the annals of Amer­ i­ca do not contain a syllable in opposition to what has been now laid before the world . . . ​he ­shall claim for his legend just as much authority as it deserves.51 Whereas Cooper had once figured the historical fictionist as an antiquarian historian (Lionel Lincoln) who supported his tales with factual “authorities” (The Pi­lot), he now imagines an antiquarian reader in order to differentiate his fiction from such endeavors: Cooper insists that ­because he has written a “legend,” rather than a history, the only “authority” it requires is that it does not contradict the historical rec­ord. While this preface continues to engage the concern that historical fiction might confuse readers with a mix of fact and fiction, Cooper no longer addresses ­these anx­i­eties by identifying his fictions with antiquarian history, but seeks to allay them by underscoring his fiction’s difference from the accounts of the “professed historian.” Cooper thus shifts his historical fictions from their firm basis in historical events and primary sources into the gaps of known history in order to make their fictionality unmistakable. This would be the defining metageneric move of much ­later antebellum historical fiction. In the lacunae of the historical rec­ord, ­these fictions see not a chance for fiction to supplement historical knowledge, but an opportunity for fiction to pursue ends specific to fiction. It is in the gaps of known history that antebellum fictionists locate their arguments for fiction’s autonomy.

Retheorizing Historical Fictionality Across the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, US writers retheorized the value of historical fiction with reference to ends and standards specific to fiction rather than ­those shared with history. This reimagining was motivated, as we have

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seen, by the rise of the antiquarian historiography that increasingly displaced the conjectural historiography advocated by many historical fictionists in the 1820s. This retheorization, however, also reflects the development of a set of standards specifically for judging prose fiction that emerged in both antebellum fiction and the era’s robust periodical discussions of fiction. The popularity of historical fiction in general, and Scott’s fiction in par­tic­ul­ ar, contributed to fiction’s newfound respectability in this period, but this was not the end of the story, as the increasingly widespread ac­cep­tance of fiction provoked new discussions about the terms on which fiction should be valued. ­Later historical fictions both participated in and ­were s­ haped by ­these discussions, as fictionists sought to articulate their fictions’ distinctive value in relation to shifting attitudes ­toward fiction and changes in the social meaning of fiction-­reading. ­Because of its generic liminality, historical fiction served as an especially fruitful ground for emerging arguments about fiction’s unique value and purpose. In an attempt to address the enduring epistemological questions about fictionality, ­these ­later historical fictionists cordoned off historical fiction from the factual genres with which it had once sought affiliation. Take, for instance, William Gilmore Simms’s The Yemassee (1835), which emphatically rejected the mimetic imperative through which critics had long judged fiction. In its preface, Simms laments that reviewers had judged one of his e­ arlier fictions, Atalantis, in terms of its relation to the world, even though “the author set out to make a tale of the super­natural, and never contemplated . . . ​the deception of any good citizen!” Simms urges readers to judge The Yemassee only by t­ hose “standards which have governed me in its composition”—­the aesthetic standards of “romance.”52 To distance his fiction from imperatives for accuracy, Simms stages a clear division between fiction and history within his narrative: Our tale becomes history. The web of fiction is woven—­the romance is nigh over. The old wizard may not trench upon the territories of truth. . . . ​The fancy may play capriciously only with the unknown. Where history dare not go, it is then for poetry . . . ​with her own wings of imagination [to] overleap the bound­aries of the definite and the certain. We have done this in our written pages. We may do this no longer. The old chronicle is before us, and the sedate muse of history, from her graven tablets dictates the f­ uture. We write at her bidding now. (429) As a corollary to the fictional license he claims, Simms disavows any proj­ect of historical knowledge production. He cordons off fiction from history as a way of arguing for fiction’s qualified autonomy: fiction appeals to dif­fer­ent standards than history and is governed by a discrete set of generic norms, so it must be confined to t­ hose areas “where history dare not go.” Unlike for Child or Sedgwick, history’s gaps provide the occasion, but not the impetus, for Simms’s historical fiction: The Yemassee does not supplement history’s gaps with an alternative kind of knowledge about the past; rather, it uses factual

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history’s limits to justify a mode of repre­sen­ta­tion that brackets questions of knowledge altogether. More than just calling for romance to give way before history proper, Simms stages this pro­cess formally within his narrative: in a doubled transformation, he links the revelation that his hero, Gabriel Harrison, is a historical person in disguise—­Governor Charles Craven the Palatine—to stylistic changes that mark a shift in discursive mode. Immediately, the narrative shifts from an intimate third-­person narration—­often focalized through Harrison— to the distanced narration of history. As Harrison becomes Craven—­“Harrison, or, as we should call him, the Palatine, reached Charleston”—­the narrative is transformed from a story focused on the hero’s romantic interests to a historical narrative that traces the fate of a colony: “The arrival of the Palatine gave a new life and fresh confidence to the ­people. . . . ​He at once proclaimed martial law—­laid an embargo, preventing the departure of any male citizens, and . . . ​proceeded to draught, levy, and impressments, to raise an army of eleven hundred men” (430). By staging the narrative’s movement across the boundary dividing fiction from history, Simms—­himself an antiquarian historian and collector—­figures history and fiction as distinct discourses, oriented ­toward dif­f er­ent ends. The Yemassee’s metageneric argument crystallizes both the increasing opposition between fictional conjecture and history as a genre and the emergent sense that fiction had its own unique standards by which it should be judged. And Simms, like many historical fictionists, developed his arguments for fiction’s value in (sometimes disgruntled) conversation with both specific reviews and the standards for judging fiction that ­were emerging in periodicals more generally. From the 1820s through the 1860s, the rapidly expanding periodical press continued to be the most impor­tant arena for discussions of fiction.53 ­These antebellum discussions, however, differed from early national ones in three significant ways. First, antebellum periodicals ­were more accepting of fiction than their early national pre­de­ces­sors, routinely declaring arguments against fiction to be outdated: “The day has passed,” wrote the Southern Literary Messenger in 1842, “when works of fiction would be dismissed with a contemptuous sneer.”54 Or, as DeBow’s put it in 1860, “most objections to novel-­reading . . . ​have become obsolete and inapplicable. The most judicious and discerning minds, among the leaders of ­people’s thought, not only read but write novels.”55 Second, and related to this, antebellum periodicals often rejected the categorical judgments of the novel genre and fictional mode that had prevailed ­earlier. In 1860, the Christian Examiner declared that “novel-­ reading may be misused, but argument for or against it is quite worn-­out and superfluous”: the enduring popularity of fiction, this writer insists, has “eaten up and ended the palaver of fine objections to it and of fine defences of it.”56 Periodicals instead turned their attention to defining, to use the title of an 1854 Putnam’s Monthly Magazine essay, the “Meaning and the Mission” of novels

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and fiction: “In the name of truth and commonsense, let us . . . ​cry ‘Halt!’ to sneers . . . ​at novels. Rather would we endeavor to investigate the nature and legitimate field of novel writing, and point out the meaning and the mission of such works.”57 What, then, did t­ hese antebellum periodicals see as the “meaning and the mission” of fiction? What w ­ ere the standards by which it was to be judged? This brings us to the third significant shift in t­ hese discussions: where early national periodicals had focused on what they saw as the intertwined epistemological and moral dangers of fiction-­reading, antebellum periodicals increasingly focused on what they saw as fiction’s inseparable moral and aesthetic proj­ects. While reviewers differed in emphasis, the North American Review, in 1856, offered a succinct encapsulation of the era’s prevailing standards for fiction: ­unless the author sets out a specific goal, “the book can only be judged by the general impression it produces, its obvious moral tendency, and the skill it shows in its construction as a work of art.”58 In order to fully understand the conception of fiction’s “mission” under­lying t­ hese standards, we need to consider two more general (and interrelated) cultural developments that undergirded the broad shift in how fiction was discussed over ­these de­cades. The first was the rise of an ideal of reading for “self-­culture.” The second was the emergence of a more robust aesthetic culture in the United States, a shift exemplified by changing attitudes ­toward the visual arts. Emphasizing man’s power to shape himself, “self-­culture” was a theoretically demo­cratic educational model that elevated moral, po­liti­cal, aesthetic, and even scientific self-­education over formal schooling. Replacing schools and pedagogues with books, what Ronald Zboray has called the antebellum “campaign for self-­culture” endowed private reading with a new significance: “The ­great design of reading,” wrote the True Flag in 1854, “is—or should be—­self-­ culture.”59 This ideal received its most influential theorization in William Ellery Channing’s Self-­Culture (1838). The prominent Unitarian minister’s address was an attempt to incite “the mass of p ­ eople” to seize what he saw as the nation’s widely available “means of improvement.” Describing the “two powers of the h ­ uman which make self-­culture pos­si­ble”—­“ the self-­searching and the self-­forming power”—­Channing advocated a program of inward-­looking self-­ fashioning focused on developing one’s innate conscience or moral sense: it is only through “turning the mind on itself,” he argued, that “we are able to discern not only what we are, but what we may become, to see in ourselves germs and promises of a growth to which no bounds can be set, to dart beyond what we have actually gained to the idea of Perfection at the end of our being.”60 For Channing—as for many self-­culture advocates—­reading was the most impor­tant and widely available means of self-­culture: “It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds, and t­ hese invaluable means of communication are in the reach of all. In the best books, g ­ reat men . . . ​give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into

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ours.”61 In stark contrast to the Congregationalist and Presbyterian ministers of the preceding c­ entury, Channing saw secular as well as sacred texts as vehicles for moral self-­reformation: Self-­Culture reclaimed the plays, poems, and romances that many ­earlier ministers had condemned as sinful distractions from sacred texts, as a means of developing the moral virtues instilled in all men by God.62 While Channing singles out the more prestigious literary works of Shakespeare and Milton as uniquely valuable sources of moral and aesthetic education, Self-­Culture also drew on and provided theoretical justification for the didactic fiction of the preceding de­cades. Consider, for example, how a “moral tale,” such as Sedgwick’s A New-­England Tale, with its emphasis on its self-­contained moral vision and the cultivation of an internalized moral sense exemplifies Channing’s ideals. This is no coincidence. In a letter written the year before his address, Channing praised Sedgwick’s domestic fictions as forming “an era in our lit­er­a­ture”: “Thousands ­will be better for it; thousands, as they read it, w ­ ill feel their deficiencies and resolve to do better.”63 Channing praises Sedgwick’s fiction in terms that closely anticipate Self-­Culture: her fiction w ­ ill stimulate the “self-­searching power” (they “­will feel their deficiencies”) of “the mass of p ­ eople” (“thousands”) moving them to use their “self-­ forming power” to “do better.” More than just affirming extant fictions, the emergence of self-­c ulture as an ideal offered writers fresh terms for articulating the value of their fictions. The rhe­toric of self-­c ulture pervades much American fiction of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. The most dramatic example might be David Ellington (1846), a collection of short fictions by the Unitarian minister Henry Ware Jr. that had been published serially between 1838 and 1840. Its opening story, “How to Spend a Day,” is both a manifesto and exemplification of Channingesque “self-­culture”: it follows a day in the life of the laborer David Ellington, tracing his didactic conversations with his less-­motivated neighbor, his virtuous domestic habits, and his improvement-­oriented program of reading. Ware makes it impossible to overlook his fiction’s participation in a program of self-­culture when he has Ellington send his neighbor a copy of Channing’s Self-­Culture!64 While Ware’s didactic fictions crystallize, in an unusually explicit way, the entrance of Channing’s conception of self-­culture into US fiction, this ideal exerted a profound, if subtler, influence on antebellum conceptions of fiction-­ reading more generally. Most importantly, theories of self-­culture troubled the long-­standing association of reading for amusement with frivolity. Significantly, in both Channing’s address and Ware’s David Ellington, the central examples of edifying fiction are not didactic, domestic tales à la Ware, but the thrilling historical romances of Walter Scott. Emily Todd has shown how Scott’s popularity transformed the “status of the novel” in the United States, as periodical reviewers singled out his works for their morals: “The most innocent girl may read them from beginning to end without feeling a tinge

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of shame mantle her forehead,” wrote the Philadelphia A ­ lbum and Ladies’ Literary Portfolio in 1833, “the most rigid moralist cannot pore over them but with admiration for the ­wholesome truths and pure ethics they inculcate.” One periodical writer even argued that Scott’s example had ushered in a new era of fiction characterized by the “extensive supply of works of fiction, in which amusement and instruction are so admirably blended that the most fastidious moralist can urge no reasonable objection to their perusal.”65 I would add that the terms on which t­ hese reviews celebrated Scott also reveal a subtle but significant shift in how reviewers understood the morality of fiction, as they praised Scott’s fictions less for any specific lessons they taught than for their lack of objectionable—­that is, titillating—­content. Strikingly, in the ­Mother’s Book, Child sets forth Scott’s romances as valuable reading for c­ hildren ­because they provide “abundant food for reflection” and “an inexhaustible fund of amusement,” even as she admits that his fictions are “not professedly moral or religious.”66 This idea that a fiction that was not avowedly didactic could nonetheless be a valuable source of innocent amusement and even edification reflects an impor­tant change in the social meaning of fiction-­reading during this period. In this era, writers increasingly opposed fiction-­reading—or at least, the reading of certain fictions—to the frivolous forms of amusement with which it had long been associated: the author of Letters on Female Character admitted to reading Scott with “­great plea­sure by way of recreation” and she argued that such reading “would fill up a leisure hour more profitably than chess, or cards, or riddles, not to mention the senseless games in vogue among the young and the thoughtless.”67 Notably, Channing turns to Scott’s fiction in order to demonstrate that self-­culture is not opposed to plea­sure and leisure, but an idealized version of it: it “increases . . . ​plea­sure” and “saves . . . ​leisure from being, what it too often is, dull and wearisome.”68 Channing celebrates Scott’s romances first and foremost as “entertaining works”: “Millions have been chained to the pages” of t­ hese “sportive” and “thrilling” fictions. Such readerly bondage recalls anx­i­eties about fiction’s addictiveness, but Channing revalues this absorption as a sign of the pleasures of ­mental stimulation. Where critics had long compared absorptive fiction-­reading to the intoxicating pleasures of alcohol and sex, Channing posits reading Scott as an alternative to such merely bodily pleasures that are “destructive to body and soul.”69 While this reimagining of leisure was part of Channing’s general argument against the American tendency to reduce self-­improvement to ­labor and money-­making, it had impor­tant implications for the cultural meaning of fiction-­reading specifically, as it offered a theory of edification in which reading for plea­sure and self-­improvement w ­ ere allied rather than opposed. Within such a framework, even conduct writers, who ­were often fiction’s most strident critics, could set forth select fictions as a vehicle for self-­cultivation, such as when George Burnap’s Lectures to Young Men, on the Cultivation of Mind, the Formation of

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Character, and the Conduct of Life (1840) celebrated Scott’s romances for combining “the highest intellectual and moral instruction with the most exquisite plea­sure.”70 The consistency with which antebellum reviewers, educators, and conduct writers set forth Scott’s fictions as ideal vehicles for self-­culture is striking given the anx­i­eties about historical fiction, including Scott’s early fiction, evident in early national periodicals.71 ­These changing attitudes w ­ ere bound up with both Scott’s singular popularity and the wider emergence of an antebellum middle-­ class culture that placed new emphasis on private, domestic leisure. But what I especially want to underscore ­here is how this revaluing of entertaining fictions reflects a significant shift in theories of how fiction edifies. Instead of e­ ither a source of knowledge about the world or even a vehicle for specific moral lessons, self-­culture advocates tended to view fiction as an occasion for cultivating one’s interdependent moral sense and powers of aesthetic appreciation. Channing’s address had argued that developing a sensitivity to beauty is not a distraction from moral duties and religious devotions, but a crucial part of cultivating the virtues of the soul: “outward beauty is akin to something deeper and unseen, is the reflection of spiritual attributes; and of consequence the way to see and feel it more and more keenly is to cultivate t­ hose moral, religious, intellectual, and social princi­ples . . . ​which are the glory of the spiritual nature.” Channing was, of course, not the first writer to connect aesthetic taste to morality; this idea pervades the works of the Common Sense phi­los­o­phers who had such a profound influence on intellectual life in the early republic. But unlike many who had been steeped in the Common Sense suspicion of the imagination, Channing saw lit­er­a­ture, including prose fiction, as a vehicle for spiritual and moral self-­cultivation: “I have spoken only of the beauty of nature, but how much of this mysterious charm is found in the elegant arts, especially in lit­er­a­ture. The best books have the most beauty. The greatest truths are wronged if not linked with beauty.”72 Rejecting the Common Sense “metaphysics of actuality,” Channing understood “truth” as depending upon beauty rather than factuality or actuality. This conception of aesthetic self-­cultivation as continuous with moral self-­cultivation recoded reading an artful fiction—­even an artful fiction that does not explic­itly teach a moral lesson—as an act of recreational edification rather than idle amusement.73 Channing’s advocacy of this intertwined pro­cess of moral and aesthetic self-­education was part of a more general sea change in attitudes t­ oward the arts in the United States. As Neil Harris has shown, the 1830s saw the emergence of a new re­spect for the visual arts in US culture, as Americans gradually ceased to regard the arts as frivolous, aristocratic distractions from the solid republican pursuits of politics and business. Instead, consistent with the ideals of Self-­Culture, they increasingly saw viewing art as a means cultivating one’s moral and spiritual virtues: “God,” more Americans came to believe, “revealed his true greatness not through his own works, but through

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the manmade objects he inspired.”74 In an 1839 article titled “The Reciprocal Influence of Piety and Taste,” Reverend John Chickering even claimed that the fine arts ­were the “handmaids of piety.”75 Such changing attitudes ­were ­shaped, in part, by increased Eu­ro­pean travel, as more and more Americans, including many influential Protestant clergymen, traveled through Eu­rope, viewing art in galleries, palaces, and churches. As Harris notes, such tours contributed not only to an increased re­spect for artistic creativity, an interest in artistic idealism, and a tolerance for artistic license, but also to a widespread belief that art’s beauty could serve as a means of social and religious influence.76 ­These interrelated developments had a profound effect on periodical discussions of fiction, as reviewers increasingly approached fiction as a vehicle for an intertwined pro­cess of moral and aesthetic self-­cultivation: “The Muse of fiction . . . ​is to appear in the character of the honored servant of Humanity,” wrote the influential Unitarian periodical the Christian Examiner in 1847, “A new vocation opens up for the imagination,—­God-­given but abused faculty. She is to instruct men in their social and spiritual relations . . . ​is to lift them up, prompting them to all good deeds, awakening their aspirations for a higher social state, making them wiser, purer, nobler.”77 In their more optimistic moments, periodicals saw the rise of self-­culture as having had a significant influence on how readers selected and read fiction: “We doubt if readers now-­ a-­days could be content with fiction which serves merely an idle hour’s amusement. . . . ​It is gratifying to find the class of readers on the increase, who, while seeking genial entertainment and recreation from the novelist, ­will make still larger demands for ­wholesome sentiment, ­free and foodful thought, and good impulse to believe the good and d ­ oing the right.”78 The ideal of reading for personal self-­cultivation thus allowed for a reimagining of fiction as a purifying rather than corrupting force in US society: “the influence of t­ hese fictitious histories,” wrote The Southern Literary Messenger in 1835, “has been . . . ​the most humanizing effect upon society.”79 In line with the more general embrace of the arts during this period, reviewers also increasingly advocated regarding prose fiction as belonging to, in Channing’s phrase, “the elegant arts”: “fiction,” wrote the North American Review in 1859, “has become more and more an art.” Or as the same periodical had put it a few years ­earlier, “The successful novel of the pre­sent day is strictly a work of art.”80 In a marked departure from early national discussions, t­ hese reviews often regarded fiction not only as a work of art, but as an especially distinguished one: “considered merely as artist productions,” wrote Harper’s in 1853, “we are disposed to place the ablest and finest works of fiction in a very high rank among the achievements of ­human intellect.”81 Antebellum reviews both created and reflected fiction’s new artistic prestige, as they more and more linked prose fiction with both more respected literary arts, such as poetry and drama, and the visual arts. Fiction’s elevation to a “work of art” is

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especially evident in reviewers’ consistent recourse to the language of painting. The development of a robust aesthetic culture around the visual arts lent a rich vocabulary to discussions of fiction’s aesthetic virtues: a fiction might be described as a “canvas” or as a “painting” complete with “a foreground” and “proportions”; it might include “portraits very skillfully drawn”; the fictionist might hold “a magic pencil” and the novelist must, as a review of Cooper suggested, “paint at full length,” ­because “novels are pictures of life.”82 For ­these reviewers, fiction’s aesthetic and moral qualities ­were intimately intertwined: in 1854, Putnam’s declared that “novels are judged as art products,” b ­ ecause many of them are “the productions of men of the highest intellectual and moral worth, and are at pre­sent more generally read, and prob­ably exercise a greater influence than . . . ​all other forms of lit­er­a­ture together.”83 This was no modernist idea of art as an amoral pursuit serving its own ends. Antebellum judgments about a fiction’s artistic merit—­even about its status as art—­were bound up with judgments about its moral influence. In an 1850 essay titled “Is Fiction Always Sinful?” Reverend James Watson defended the moral value of fiction through a comparison to the fine arts: “Fiction is word painting: and is good, bad, or indifferent, according to its object or tendencies, just like a poem or picture.”84 Such moral judgments ­were not confined to “moral tales” or didactic fictions, with reviewers often passing judgment on a fiction’s “moral tendency” regardless of its subgenre.85 Reviewers vigorously argued that such judgments lay within their purview: “in criticizing a novel, it becomes impor­tant to examine the tendency of the work,” wrote Graham’s in 1848, “We utterly repudiate the idea that a reviewer has nothing to do with the morality of the book. . . . ​A fiction which does not do good does harm.”86 But if fiction’s status as a work of art depended on its “moral tendency,” its moral influence also depended on its artful construction. As the period progressed, reviewers more and more argued that fictions would teach most effectively when their morals w ­ ere subtle: “When we speak of a distinct moral aim,” wrote the Christian Examiner in 1847, “we do not mean that [the writer] should be constantly thrusting his moral into the reader’s face.”87 For a fiction to be truly edifying, it needed to both have a laudatory “moral tendency” and be artfully constructed. In 1848, a reviewer for Graham’s offered an especially succinct statement of the prevailing standards for judging fiction: “let us now write works of artistic and moral fiction.”88 Stepping back, we can see how the rise of an ideal of reading for moral and aesthetic self-­cultivation ratified the very fictional idealism that ­earlier commentators had regarded as such a epistemological threat: “Art, w ­ hether literary or pictorial, must ­either instruct, please, or elevate, or it transcends its province . . . ​to refresh the senses with beauty, the heart with love, and the imagination with ­grand, heroic, tender, and venerable images.”89 Channing and other advocates of self-­culture had reframed reading as, in Barbara Sicherman’s useful formulation, a “­matter of cultivating character, rather than

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accumulating information.”90 Within this framework of reading, the epistemological prob­lem of fictionality was not such a pressing concern. Antebellum reviewers increasingly rejected the idea that fiction’s edifying potential was bound up with its ability to give readers an accurate knowledge of the world and instead emphasized its ability to provide an idealized, purified vision of it: “It is not healthful, then, to dwell upon and fraternize with even the truest pictures of life, if they exclusively tend keep in view its mechanical level, and to strip it of heaven-­born illusions.”91 This conception of reading for a purifying aesthetic and moral self-­education transformed what had once been regarded as one of fiction’s chief dangers—­its ability to create idealized “illusions”—­into its ­great virtue. In reconceptualizing historical fiction’s value, ­later antebellum fictionists seized upon ­these new standards by emphasizing the intertwined moral and aesthetic idealism of their fictions. Cooper’s prefaces to the 1850 edition of The Leather-­Stocking Tales are exemplary. In the long arc of the Leatherstocking paratexts, ­these prefaces stand out for their paired emphasis on the tales’ fictionality and moral ambitions. His new preface to The Deerslayer, for example, emphasizes both its fictionality—­“ The legend is purely fiction, no authority existing for any of its fact, characters, or other peculiarities”—­and its artful, moral design: Cooper declares that Natty’s preference for “sincerity,” “modesty,” and “unerring truth and probity” over “beauty, delirious passion, and sin . . . ​­will offer a lesson that ­will injure none.” Although Cooper was famously contemptuous of reviewers, this preface articulates his fiction’s value in the very terms that had become prevalent in the reviews of the preceding de­cades: he claims that the tale’s didactic moralism has been “intentionally kept down” to preserve the fiction’s artful effect, but insists that it is nonetheless “sufficiently distinct to convey its moral” (xi). ­These prefaces also reveal the degree to which Cooper sees ­these tales’ idealized moral vision as bound up with their fictionality. In the book’s general preface, for example, Cooper admits that he modeled Natty Bumppo’s physical appearance a­ fter “individuals known to the writer in early life,” but he insists that “in a moral sense this man of the forest is a pure creation.” Establishing Natty’s fictionality is impor­tant for Cooper’s proj­ect, b ­ ecause this is what ratifies his avowedly idealized portrait of the frontiersman: “A leading character in a fictitious work,” he declares, “has a fair right to the aid that can be obtained from a poetical view of the subject. It is [from] this view . . . ​that the Leather-­Stocking has been drawn” (vii–­iii). Although he insists that Natty has enough “weaknesses” to preserve “vrai-­semblable,” Cooper shows no ambivalence about presenting Natty as an idealized imaginative creation who embodies a unique moral and spiritual purity. Where Cooper’s early paratexts urged readers to approach his fictions as a source of historical knowledge, t­ hese ­later prefaces emphasized that t­ hese works are historical fictions and encouraged readers to focus instead on their morally edifying “poetical view.”

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This transformation in Cooper’s conception of historical fiction’s purpose is most evident in The Leather-­Stocking Tales’ reflections, briefly mentioned ­earlier, on the reception of Mohicans. Cooper, as we have seen, had made some of his most forceful claims to historical accuracy in the 1826 paratexts to Mohicans. Some reviewers seized upon such claims, criticizing Mohicans’ shortcomings as history.92 Setting aside the specifics of this well-­known argument, I want to highlight how Cooper, when he returns to this controversy in 1850, frames such criticisms as failures to recognize the appropriate standards for judging fiction: It is the privilege of all writers of fiction, more particularly when their works aspire to the elevation of romances, to pre­sent the beau-­ideal of their characters to the reader. This it is which constitutes poetry, and to suppose that the red man is to be represented only in the squalid misery or in the degraded moral state that certainly more or less belong to his condition, is, we apprehend taking a very narrow view of an author’s privileges. (ix–­x) Dramatically disavowing the terms on which he first offered Mohicans to the public, Cooper emphasizes the fictionist’s “privilege” to improve upon real­ity and pre­sent his characters in an aestheticized, idealized form—­their “beau-­ideal.” Whereas Cooper had once downplayed the fictionality of his fictions, ­here he insists upon it, invoking it as a sign of the moral and aesthetic idealism that w ­ ill allow them to edify “cultivated” readers. D. H. Lawrence famously argued that, across Cooper’s fiction, ­there is a “decrescendo of real­ity” and an accompanying “crescendo of beauty.” What I want to highlight ­here is the decrescendo in the rhe­toric of real­ity and a crescendo in the rhe­toric of beauty in Cooper’s paratexts, as he revalues the very texts that he had once valorized for their real­ity in terms of their beauty. Where the idiom of antiquarian historiography dominates Cooper’s early prefaces, the idiom of the visual arts dominates his l­ater ones, with The Leather-­Stocking Tales consistently referring to the “picture[s]” that Cooper has “drawn” or “illustrate[d].” Lawrence understood this shift in terms of Cooper’s biography, but when we widen our scope to encompass antebellum historical fiction more generally, it becomes clear that this crescendo of beauty— or rather, this crescendo in the rhe­toric of beauty—­reflects a more widespread reconceptualization of historical fiction’s purpose.93 When the Knickerbocker declared, in 1858, that “the historical value of all historical novels is slight,” this claim was unaccompanied by the epistemological anx­i­eties about misleading readers with a mix of fact and fiction that had pervaded early national writing on historical fiction. Rather, it simply served to focus a review of a historical novel on its aesthetic interest and moral tendency.94 Cooper’s reliance on the language of painting is especially representative: meta­phors and figures drawn from the visual arts permeate the paratexts of l­ater historical fiction. One final example nicely encapsulates how t­ hese

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fictionists used such language specifically to articulate the value of their narratives as fiction. While Robert Montgomery Bird’s The Hawks of Hawk Hollow, a Tradition of Pennsylvania (1835) has not received the same attention as the other fictions considered in this chapter, it offers an especially explicit example of the metageneric logic under­lying much ­later antebellum historical fiction. Its protagonist, Herman Hunter, is a painter who has come to the Delaware River valley in search of picturesque landscapes that ­will allow him to “improve himself in his art.” He soon becomes fascinated with the poetic blend of fact and fiction that makes up the local “traditions” about the valley’s past. Bird’s painter encapsulates this period’s shifting attitudes t­ oward the “elegant arts,” as he both laments his country’s “utilitarian” indifference to beauty and seeks to remedy it through his landscapes.95 Hunter applies this aestheticized view not only to the region’s natu­ral scenery, but also to its past: the narrative closes with Hunter presenting another character with a “­grand picture of the B ­ attle of Brandywine” that features an embellished repre­sen­ta­ tion of this character’s son’s heroic death. Hawks evinces no anxiety about the epistemological pitfalls of such artful blending of fact and fiction, focusing instead on the “rapture” produced by this personalized, aestheticized repre­ sen­ta­tion of history (256). For our purposes, what is even more noteworthy is how Bird deploys the language of visual arts in his prefatory discussion of his own mixing of fact and fiction: “We could not declare . . . ​that the following narrative is a mere fabrication, for such it is not; while to let the reader into the secret, and point out the dif­fer­ent facts (for facts ­there are) that are interwoven with the long gossamer web of fiction, would be a work of both time and ­labour” (iii). Unlike ­those fictionists who carefully documented the relation of their fictions to historical facts, Bird refuses to distinguish between factual and fictional ele­ ments, lamenting the “tediousness” of policing the boundary between fact and fiction. Instead, Bird appropriates and aestheticizes ­earlier concerns about the “monstrous” mixing of fact and fiction, refiguring this pro­cess not as random mixing, but as the artful weaving of “facts” into “the gossamer web of fiction.” This is the first of several instances in which Hawks reframes an epistemological concern centered on readers as an opportunity for the writer to demonstrate his artistic craft: A novel is . . . ​a piece of Mosaic-­work, of which the materials have been scraped up ­here and ­there, sometimes in an unchronicled corner of the world itself, sometimes from the forgotten tablets of a pre­de­ces­ sor, sometimes from the decaying pillars of history, sometimes from the ­little mine of precious stones that is found in the h ­ uman brain. . . . ​ Of some of the pebbles that we have picked up along the banks of the Delaware, the following story has been constructed; but at what precise place that they ­were gathered we do not think it needful to say. (iv)

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Bird transforms an anxiety about historical fiction’s suspect status as a mixed mode into a figure for his fiction’s artfulness: this historical novel is not an undifferentiated mass of fact and fancy, but a “Mosaic-­work” that draws its “materials” from history, lit­er­a­ture, and the writer’s own mind. What ­matters, Bird insists, is not the origin or status of the individual pieces, but the aesthetic effect of the ­whole. Insisting that they should be evaluated on terms specific to fiction, ­these ­later historical fictions—­because of their generic liminality—­reveal the terms of fiction’s discursive differentiation in an especially clear way. The writers of both republican po­liti­cal fiction and conduct fiction (chapters 2 and 3) asserted the modal specificity of fiction, suggesting that it provided specific advantages for their proj­ects, but ­these proj­ects remained oriented ­toward frameworks of value not specific to fiction, such as civic virtue and instructional efficacy. This continued to be the case with many historical fictions of the 1820s, which appealed to the standards and ends of historiography. But across the historical fictions of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, t­ here emerges an insistence that fiction must be understood and evaluated on its own terms: its writers argue not just that fictionality has value within a broader discourse—­ such as republican politics, female education, or national history—­but that ­there exists a specific set of standards and purposes by which fiction should be judged. In spite of its status as historical fiction, Hawks—­unlike Hobomok, Hope Leslie or Rachel Dyer—­has ­little to say about history as a genre. Collectively, ­these ­later historical fictions crystallize the transformation of US print culture from a body of “letters” or “lit­er­a­ture”—in the eighteenth-­century sense—­made up of diverse genres governed by shared standards, to a diffuse, multifaceted print marketplace made up of discrete discourses and defined by its heterogeneity. My point is not to suggest that ­these ­later historical fictions do not have anything to say about the national past or historiography.96 Nor is it to suggest that their emphasis on imaginative delight, aesthetic effect, and moral self-­cultivation renders t­ hese l­ater historical fictions apo­liti­cal.97 Nor is it to suggest that ­these ­later historical fictions come to a consensus about historical fiction’s purpose and value. But it is to note a broad shift in how writers positioned historical fiction within the literary field, as they increasingly emphasized its distinction from history in order to claim the fictionist’s “license” (Hawthorne’s term) or “privilege” (Cooper’s term) to depart from a strict reflection of the world as it was. Their paratexts urge readers to recognize how fictionality mediates their repre­sen­ta­tions of the past, orienting them to reading practices and judgments specific to fiction. Approached alongside contemporaneous periodical reviews, they crystallize a turn away from the mimetic imperative and its associated epistemological questions in discussions of fiction in the United States. Nothing underscores this shift more clearly than ­these fictions’ embrace of the rhe­toric of enchantment.

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Historical Fiction and Modern Enchantment In the early national period, fiction’s ability to enchant readers had been regarded chiefly as an epistemological threat. The language of enchantment pervaded republican condemnations of fiction. Critics argued that fiction’s “sorcery,” “magic,” “charms,” and “enchanted ­castles,” would lead readers to “lose contact with real­ity.” Fiction might compensate for the disenchantment of modernity, but in d ­ oing so, it misled readers about the nature of the world. Faced with this long-­standing association of enchantment with fiction’s epistemological unreliability, historical fictionists of the 1820s sought to associate their works rhetorically with disenchantment. Recall how Sedgwick distinguishes Hope Leslie’s narrative (which relies on “compass and rule”) from the visionary repre­sen­ta­tions (the “magician’s enchantments”) of fiction. She argues that when it is based on historical material, fiction should be regarded not as a vehicle for enchantment, but as a source of knowledge about a disenchanted world.98 Alternatively, the rhe­toric of “charm” and “enchantment,” such as Simms’s “old wizard” of fiction, runs throughout the paratexts and narratives of l­ater historical fiction, from George Lippard’s claim in Blanche of the Brandywine (1846) that t­ here never was a place “so rich in legend, so rife with incidents of super­natural lore as the valley of the Brandywine” to Stowe’s preface to Agnes of Sorrento (1862) that declares “Sorrento, Salerno, Pæstum, Pompeii, are names of enchantment.”99 The disavowal of strict historical fidelity in ­later historical fiction allows t­ hese fictions to embrace fiction’s dubious association with enchantment. This shift is neatly encapsulated in The Yemassee’s footnotes, which diverge dramatically from ­those found in much ­earlier historical fiction. Both The Champions of Freedom and Hope Leslie, for instance, include notes that attest to their historical accuracy, albeit in dif­fer­ent ways: Woodworth’s notes offer specific sources to authenticate the factuality of his account of the war, while Sedgwick’s notes cite historical facts to establish her narrative’s probability and possibility. Simms, justifying a remarkable moment in which his heroine has been hypnotized by a rattlesnake, includes a note with a very dif­fer­ent logic: The power of the rattlesnake to fascinate, is a frequent faith among the superstitious. . . . ​Its power over persons is not . . . ​well authenticated, although numberless instances of this sort are given by persons of excellent veracity. The above is almost literally worded a­ fter a verbal narrative furnished by an old lady, who never dreamed, herself, of doubting the narration. (165–66) Simms’s note appeals not to history proper, but to local, folk knowledge, and moreover, invokes this anecdote not for its factuality, but only b ­ ecause it is believed. Simms argues that even this qualified authentication is not

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necessary: “The authorities for this superstition are . . . ​quite sufficient for the romancer.” ­Because The Yemassee is a romance and oriented ­toward aesthetic appreciation rather than knowledge production, Simms suggests, the mere existence of a superstition—as opposed to its accuracy—­ratifies its inclusion. Simms’s rattlesnake, which literally “enchants” his heroine, putting her into a trance, provides a compelling figuration of his artistic proj­ect, encapsulating ­later historical fictionists’ turn to nonverifiable, even super­natural, phenomena as a means of counteracting their country’s predilection for the prosaic, the profitable, and the factual. “[T]he fairy and the wood-­nymph are alike unknown in Amer­i­ca,” writes Bird in Hawks, “poetic illusion has not yet consecrated her glens and fountains. . . . ​A Greek would have in­ven­ted a god, to dwell ­under the watery arch of Niagara; an American is satisfied with a paper-­mill, clapped just above it” (34). Bird reproduces Cooper’s argument from the 1822 preface to The Spy: the United States is a “land of facts” devoid of legends, myths, and romantic associations. It is all paper-­mills and no wood-­ nymphs. But where the early Cooper saw this as an indication of historical fiction’s suitedness to the country, Bird turns to historical fiction—­specifically, to local legends—as a means of addressing what he perceives as a lack. And where ­earlier historical fictionists had sought to align their work with document-­ focused antiquarian historiography, Bird explic­itly turns to the very “traditions” that antiquarians rejected in his attempt to enchant the landscape and instill romance into Americans’ instrumental relationship to the land. As fiction is cordoned off from knowledge production, it can be revalued as a vehicle for reenchantment. Bird, Simms, Hawthorne, and the late Cooper all suggested that historical fiction, with its distance from the mundane pre­sent, could offer readers the enchantment missing from their lived experience. Such changing attitudes are also evident in the periodical reviews of the 1840s and 1850s, which increasingly celebrated fiction’s enchanting powers: fiction’s creation of “illusion” slowly morphed from an epistemological threat into a sign of artistry. The novelist, wrote one reviewer in 1850, “is the invisible agent that moves the magic machinery by which you are transported into a region of illusory enchantments.”100 This reviewer even lauds the artful fiction as a “fond deception,” praising fiction on the very terms that many ­earlier critics had condemned it. This legitimation of fiction as a delimited, cordoned off arena for experiencing enchantment, however, does not represent a reversal of disenchantment, but an extension of it. As fiction comes to be valued as a vehicle for leisured entertainment and aesthetic appreciation, it promises readers a space in which the experience of an enchanted world can be temporarily indulged. Encountering this worldview through fiction, t­ hese l­ater historical fictionists insist, does not involve actually entering into it, b ­ ecause fictionality itself has come to signal a text’s orientation ­toward moral and aesthetic self-­cultivation rather than knowledge production: “The author begs to say that this story is a mere dreamland, that it neither assumes nor ­will

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have responsibility for historical accuracy,” writes Stowe in Agnes of Sorrento, “It merely reproduces to the reader the visionary region that appeared to the writer.”101 Fiction gains legitimacy as a vehicle of enchantment only once the purview of fiction has been delimited. Simms must relegate the “old wizard” of fiction to the gaps of history in order to celebrate his powers. ­L ater antebellum historical fiction, thus, positions itself as a vehicle for what Michael Saler has dubbed “disenchanted enchantment,” a “specifically modern enchantment . . . ​that enchants and disenchants si­mul­ta­neously.” For Saler, this form of enchantment is a late nineteenth-­century phenomenon, which he links to the emergence of fully realized virtual worlds that hinge on a logic of “as if ” or what he refers to as “fictionalism”: “This self-­conscious strategy of embracing illusions while acknowledging their artificial status . . . ​has been integral to modern enchantment . . . ​modernity remains enchanted in this disenchanted way, rendering the imagination compatible with reason . . . ​ such a self-­reflexive form delights without deluding.”102 Historical fictions, of course, rely on a logic of “what once was” or “what might have been,” rather than the “as if ” of l­ater virtual worlds, to distance their enchanting narratives from the disenchanted world readers inhabit. But no less than ­these late Victorian texts, antebellum historical fictions claim to offer readers an enchanted space that is marked off from their everyday lives and thus capable of “delight[ing] without deluding.” John Modern, however, reminds us that “the distinction between enchantment and disenchantment” is not “a natu­ral difference between two modes of consciousness,” but an “integral part” of the modern, secular imaginary. As Modern notes, the spread of instrumental reason that we have, since Weber, associated with the disenchantment of modern life does not necessarily “make disenchantment an affective norm.”103 If fiction’s ability to enchant readers had once been regarded as a threat to this modern worldview, ­these historical fictions reveal how fictionality, as a communicative framework, offered a potent means of accommodating the thirst for enchantment—­a desire that is itself a product of modern disenchantment—­within this disenchanted worldview. Scholars have long associated the novel, and more recently novelistic fictionality, with modernity, b ­ ecause of the genre’s emphasis on rationality, empiricism, and evidence. But antebellum historical fiction suggests that what might be most distinctly modern about fictionality is how it reconciles enchantment and disenchantment—­those integral aspects of the modern imaginary—by signaling a delimited arena within which readers can give themselves over to enchantment. This is not to suggest that all va­ri­e­ties of fictionality mediated this relationship in the same way or with the same effectiveness. (We ­will see, in ­later chapters, how fictionists such as Melville w ­ ere attuned to the tensions produced by readers’ paradoxical desire that fiction offer both an enchanting experience and an accurate reflection of the world “as it is.”) It is also not to suggest

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that antebellum Americans ­were fully comfortable with fiction’s enchanting powers. If early national periodicals evidenced a pervasive anxiety about fiction’s powers of enchantment, antebellum periodicals reveal a deep ambivalence about ­these powers. Reviewers wrote, as the North American Review did in 1836, of fiction-­readers as being “­under the spell of a ­great master”; they praised, as the Ladies’ Repository did in 1848, Walter Scott as an “enchanter whose spell has entranced thousands”; but they also worried, as the Ladies’ Repository did in 1844, about how such enchanting spells might transform the “novel reader” into “­little better than a lunatic” who “passes his hours in dreams of rapture and anguish.”104 Antebellum reviewers might celebrate fictional enchantment as a mark of a writer’s skill, but they remained troubled by the potential dangers—­both moral and epistemological—­that such enchantment posed for readers: “The object of novelists,” wrote the Knickerbocker in 1838, “appears to be to seize the public mind, and hold it with a sort of enchantment; a fascination which arises from the power which a master w ­ ill exercises over the volition of inferior spirits, leading them captive, and exciting them with the stimulus they love most.”105 In the context of this wider ambivalence, ­these l­ater historical fictions stand out for their consistent and explicit cele­bration of fiction’s enchanting powers. Historical fiction was uniquely positioned to embrace such powers, in part, b ­ ecause the genre’s former commitment to a proj­ect of historical knowledge production allowed it to stage, in an unusually clear way, its disavowal of any pretension of offering readers knowledge of the world. Stowe’s defense of the “fairy-­land” of Agnes of Sorrento against quibbles about historical accuracy is exemplary: “if some critic says this date be wrong, or that incident be out of place, let us answer, ‘Who criticises perspective and distances, that looks down into a purple lake at eventide?’ All dates s­ hall give way to the fortunes of our story, and our lovers ­shall have the benefit of fairy-­land; and whoso wants history ­will not find it ­here, except to our making, and as it suits our purpose.”106 Historical fiction’s generic liminality enabled writers to stage its distinction from history as a means of bracketing epistemological questions and emphasizing aesthetic ones in such a way as to make reenchantment seem less likely to deceive readers. This allowed historical fictionists to embrace the rhe­toric of enchantment while distancing their works from the delusions often associated with enchantment—­a power­ful authorizing move in an era in which critics used the language of enchantment to both celebrate and lament fiction’s power to captivate readers. ­Shaped by the rise of an ideal of reading for self-­culture and the development of a more robust aesthetic culture, the shifting logics of historical fictionality from the 1820s through the 1860s reflect—­and participated in—­wider changes in how fiction was discussed across this era: over ­these years, fictions ­were increasingly regarded as works of art oriented ­toward virtuous recreation, aesthetic appreciation, and moral self-­cultivation. What becomes clear

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when we focus on ­these changing logics of historical fictionality is how this more general shift in how fiction was valued produced a decreased emphasis on the epistemological questions that had dominated early national discussions of fiction. As focus shifts ­toward judgments about the beauty, interest, and moral tendency of fiction, fictionists and reviewers alike give less attention to delineating the exact kind of knowledge a given fiction offers about the world as it is or was. In l­ater antebellum discussions about fiction, to use the terms of Bird’s meta­phor, ­there is an increased attention to the overall effect of “the mosaic” rather than to the source of the mosaic’s materials in the world. This, of course, does not mean such epistemological questions dis­appear from the discussions of fiction. On the contrary, the amount of space that ­these ­later historical fictionists dedicated to insisting that their works should not be regarded chiefly as sources of historical knowledge underscores the endurance of such concerns. (Even as ­these writers insist on the fictionist’s “license” and “privilege,” they almost all also continue to assert that their fictions have some basis in historical fact.) While, in a qualified sense, t­ hese ­later antebellum historical fictions mount an argument for what Genette calls fiction’s “constitutive literariness”—­the idea that fictionality inherently signals a text’s orientation t­ oward aesthetic judgments first and foremost—­the very fact that they must explic­itly argue for this conception of fictionality reveals that this is not yet, as it w ­ ill be for Genette, an implicit meaning of the mode. Or even more than this, their elaborate arguments for this conception of fictionality reveal that it remained a contested one throughout the antebellum period. The shifting logics of historical fictionality in the antebellum United States, however, are valuable for the historian of fictionality, ­because they reveal the historical emergence of an understanding of fiction that is too often assumed as a transhistorical meaning of the mode: ­these ­later historical fictions explic­itly argue for a conception of fictionality that, as Genette’s account reveals, ­will ­later come to be taken for granted. It is only by tracing the historical development of this more familiar understanding that we can avoid back-­projecting it onto e­ arlier periods, obscuring less familiar conceptions of fictionality, including ­those of e­ arlier historical fiction. When Terence Martin, for instance, reads Woodworth’s claim that The Champions of Freedom can be approached ­either “as a history or a novel” as evidence that early US writers had “no v­ iable concept of fiction,” it reveals instead the narrowed conception of fiction’s purpose through which ­later criticism has approached ­these works. Martin’s assumption that fiction is “an in­de­pen­dent, autonomous kind of expression”—­a conception of fiction developed, in part, in l­ ater antebellum historical fiction—­obscures how e­ arlier writers had sought to harness fictionality less as its own “autonomous” mode of expression than as an alternative variety of historiography.107 While the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s saw the rise of the conception of fiction as a work of art oriented t­ oward moral and aesthetic self-­culture, this ideal

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did not immediately supplant all other understandings of fiction and fictionality. On the contrary, the increased prominence of the conception of fiction as a vehicle for private self-­cultivation and aesthetic appreciation was accompanied by the development of many fictions that defined their proj­ects in explicit contradistinction to it. The rise of a more delimited conception of fiction’s purpose actually provoked a host of fresh theories and uses of fictionality, as writers and social movements sought to harness the mode for an incredible range of advocacy proj­ects. And when fictionists broke with the increasingly dominant conception of fiction-­reading as a means of moral and aesthetic self-­ culture, the epistemological anx­ie­ ties about fictionality returned with a new urgency. Taken together, the next three chapters trace the contestations over the terms on which fiction might serve as a source of knowledge about the world as it was, is, or might be that persisted throughout the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s.

ch a p t er f i v e

Hoaxing in an Age of Novels

ov er the sa me y e a r s th at American writers ­were theorizing the line dividing fact from fiction with a new explicitness and clarity in historical fiction, they w ­ ere also producing narratives that blurred this very line. The 1830s saw the publication of a number of literary hoaxes that obscured the bound­ aries between fact and fiction. Eschewing fictional address, writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Montgomery Bird self-­consciously cultivated an ambiguity and uncertainty around their narratives’ truth claims. T ­ hese hoaxes ­were not merely holdovers from an e­ arlier era in which ambiguously fictional and pseudofactual texts predominated. Rather, t­ hese writers sought to produce the very confusion between fact and fiction that had long worried fictionists and fiction’s critics alike as a means of grappling with what they regarded as the rampant fraudulence of Jacksonian print culture. In ­doing so, ­these writers ­were engaging the era’s more general preoccupation with deceit. The social, po­liti­cal, and financial upheavals of the 1830s and 1840s—­from increased urbanization to the emergence of mass party politics to the Panic of 1837—­contributed to a widespread anxiety among middle-­ class Americans that deception, inauthenticity, and fraud had come to permeate US society. Jacksonian writers produced a voluminous conduct lit­er­a­ture that warned about the financial and social cheats being perpetrated daily in the nation’s cities.1 Such anx­i­eties w ­ ere accompanied by a popu­lar fascination with “humbug”—­a term often used to describe the era’s popu­lar exhibitions of “won­ders” of dubious authenticity. While spectators ­were often skeptical of the genuineness of such “curiosities,” they flocked to ­these shows in order to have a chance to scrutinize them for themselves and participate in the public debates about their authenticity. ­These exhibitions offered audiences an opportunity to test their powers of perception and reasoning.2 Similarly, hoaxing offered writers such as Bird and Poe an opportunity to explore the roots of the readerly credulity that they saw as enabling the era’s pervasive fraudulence. They saw hoaxing as a means of training readers in the modes of [ 169 ]

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skeptical reading necessary for navigating the myriad humbugs of Jacksonian print culture. As part of this wider interrogation of fraud and credulity, ­these hoaxes ­were also grappling with fiction’s role in US society. For much of its early history, as we have seen, US fiction had been engaged in an extended conversation about its own potential deceptiveness. With the increasingly widespread ac­cep­tance of fiction in the 1830s and 1840s, however, many writers actually embraced fictionality as a mean of distancing their narratives from fraud and lies, arguing that fiction’s avowed fabrication distinguished it from such deceptions. This authorizing move both reflected and contributed to the more general bracketing of epistemological questions about fictionality that we traced in chapter 4. Simms’s 1835 preface for The Yemassee is again exemplary. Recall: in asserting his romance’s claim to fictional license, Simms defended an ­earlier tale not on the grounds of its factuality, but b ­ ecause “the author set out to make a tale of the super­natural, and never contemplated . . . ​the deception of any good citizen!” Simms, like many of his contemporaries, figured fiction in explicit contradistinction to deception or fraud on the grounds that fiction, by its very nature, announced its fabrication. By the 1830s and 1840s, fictionality came to be regarded—­with some impor­tant exceptions that we w ­ ill explore in chapter 6—as a signal that deceit or fraud was not an appropriate framework for judging that narrative. In general, then, ­there is a much clearer conceptual opposition between fiction and fraud in antebellum discussions about fiction than in early national ones. In this chapter, however, my focus is not on this general trend, but on two ambiguously hoaxical narratives—­Bird’s Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself (1836) and Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838)—­that sought to trou­ble this increasingly clear division between fraud and fiction by cultivating an association with deceit, humbug, and fraudulence. ­These literary hoaxes are constitutively double-­voiced. They eschew fictional address, soliciting readers’ belief within the truth-­lie binary that fictionality brackets. If this belief is not granted, however, ­these truth claims take on another force, that of fictional satire.3 I have two reasons for zeroing in on ­these two par­tic­ul­ar hoaxes within the wider history of fictionality in the United States. First, Poe and Bird used hoaxing to probe the questions about readerly delusion and credulity that ­were becoming more marginal to discussions of fiction at this very moment. Playfully engaging the enduring worries about fiction’s potential to deceive, their hoaxes offer some of the most incisive explorations of the epistemological status of fiction from a period increasingly characterized by its indifference to such issues. Second, I have focused on ­these two narratives, ­because their hoaxical address exposes, in an especially vivid way, the limitations of our tendency to treat a wide range of fabricated or imaginary narratives as fiction. Our con­ temporary comfort with fiction in general and the novel in par­tic­u­lar can

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obscure the terms on which historically distant texts addressed readers in their own moment. Approaching t­ hese literary hoaxes as self-­evidently fictional novels, critics have overlooked how antebellum writers deployed liminal modes of fictional and nonfictional address to encourage readers to examine more carefully the tacit assumptions structuring their reading. As we have seen elsewhere, this pro­cess of generic back-­projection—­the novelization of fiction—is not specific to hoaxes. But b ­ ecause they self-­consciously eschew the fictional address conventionally associated with the novel genre, ­these literary hoaxes reveal, with par­tic­u­lar clarity, what we miss when we retrospectively consolidate a host of diverse fictions—­governed by widely varied logics of fictionality—­under the capacious generic umbrella of “the novel.” Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) offers a dramatic case in point. Pym, we have long been told, is Poe’s lone novel.4 With its insistent indeterminacy and emphasis on textual artifice, Pym has been integrated into our histories of the novel as postmodernist fiction avant la lettre, a prophetic precursor of twentieth-­century metafiction. But where modern readers—­ primed by the subsequent two centuries of literary history—­find in Pym a metafictional proj­ect, many nineteenth-­century readers did not recognize a fictional one. As Richard Kopley has shown, many readers did not approach Pym’s first edition as a fictional text, instead evaluating it within the truth-­lie binary that fictional address suspends.5 While scholars have focused on the daunting task of interpreting it as a fiction, Pym presented Jacksonian readers with a more fundamental challenge: recognizing its fictionality in the first place. This chapter argues that Poe employs a distinctive form of hoax that revels in its own exposure to train readers in a pro­cess of skeptical reading that ­will help them to navigate a print culture permeated by fraud. For this educative proj­ect, strictly fictional address was inadequate. In very dif­fer­ent ways, Pym and Sheppard Lee both consider the possibilities and limitations of fiction as an epistemological tool for negotiating the fraudulence that was a defining feature of Jacksonian print culture. Such hoaxical narratives are contrapuntal to the developments considered in the preceding two chapters. They underscore the unevenness of the transitions that we traced in conduct and historical fiction by revealing an enduring engagement with epistemological questions about fictionality over the same years that, in ­these other genres and contexts, such questions ­were deemphasized. ­These hoaxes show that the interrogation of what kind of knowledge fiction can—­and cannot—­produce persisted even as Americans became more comfortable with fiction as a conceptual category and the novel as a genre. Or rather, they show how, for certain writers, the prob­lem of fictionality became more pressing, ­because readers had become more comfortable with fiction. And just as their ambiguous, shifting truth claims challenged Jacksonian readers to reconsider their reading practices, ­these hoaxes challenge our current paradigms for understanding the history of fiction in the United States.

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They stand as reminders of the messiness of early US literary history—­its re­sis­tance to both taxonomical genre history and teleological narratives of the novel’s rise.

Reading for Humbug Few antebellum texts have provoked more varied scholarly conclusions about their meaning than Pym. As Douglas Robinson put it, “If any novel ever was . . . ​Pym is the interpreter’s dream-­text.”6 Its bewildering plot, internal inconsistencies, ambiguous symbols, and mysterious ending have provided material for a remarkable range of interpretations over the past half ­century. Scholars of the 1970s and 1980s found in Pym every­thing from psychoanalytic narratives of self-­exploration to deconstructionist commentaries on writing to self-­referential reflections on its own lack of meaning. Scholars of the 1990s and 2000s, alternatively, focused on the narrative’s repre­sen­ta­tion of race, uncovering complex allegories of race, racialization, and colonialism in its ambiguous final episodes and enigmatic closing note.7 For all their variety, ­these diverse readings share a (usually) tacit premise: “Reading Poe’s Novel,” to borrow the title of Robinson’s article, involves interpreting its meaning as a fictional novel. ­These vari­ous interpretations have deepened and expanded our understanding of Pym “as a fiction” by offering compelling, even revelatory, answers to Pym’s hermeneutic puzzles, but they have largely neglected the prior, more fundamental reading challenge Pym presented to antebellum readers—­identifying it as a fiction or, more accurately, a fabrication. Pym can be integrated so easily into our histories of fiction, b ­ ecause it seems to be such a spectacular failure as a hoax. Scholars have strug­gled to imagine readers crediting the factuality of Pym’s meandering narrative.8 From its opening incident—­a drunken boating accident—­Pym’s tangled plot is a series of remarkable disasters and even more remarkable deliverances: it recounts young Arthur Gordon Pym’s long imprisonment in a ship as a stowaway; the mutiny aboard this ship; the gale that leaves Pym and three other survivors marooned upon the wreck, u ­ ntil they resort to cannibalism; the rescue of Pym and Dirk Peters by the Jane Guy, a sealing ship; their discovery of the island of Tsalal, on which every­thing is black; the massacre of the Jane Guy’s crew by seemingly friendly natives; Pym and Peters’s escape from Tsalal on a canoe; their journey into the warm, open seas of the South Pole; their arrival at a ­giant cataract; and in the final scene, the appearance of an enormous, human-­like figure that is white as snow. At this point, the narrative ends abruptly. This “marvellous story,” as one antebellum reviewer dubbed it, is framed by an equally remarkable set of paratexts.9 In the preface, Pym recounts his reluctance to publish his adventures b ­ ecause their authenticity might be questioned; his initial decision to let a Mr. Poe publish a portion of them as fiction

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in the Southern Literary Messenger; and his ultimate decision to “Trust to the shrewdness and common sense of the public” and publish the full account of his journey in the pre­sent volume. The narrative closes with a note from a mysterious, unnamed editor, who laments both Pym’s unexpected death and the loss of the manuscript’s final chapters. This editor also reports that Poe, the author of the early chapters, has declined to fill in the ending “for satisfactory reasons connected with the general inaccuracy of the details afforded him, and his disbelief in the entire truth of the latter portions of the narrative.”10 While modern scholars have found in t­ hese paratexts coy, metafictional reflections on the text’s fabricated nature, Kopley has shown that some antebellum readers w ­ ere at least partially duped by the preface: in his study of annotations in first editions of Pym, Kopley finds readers expressing their disgust at Mr. Pym’s lack of veracity, failing to recognize Pym as a fictional character and evaluating the narrative within the truth-­lie binary. “I ­don’t believe a damned word of this Yarn,” writes one incredulous annotator, “[Y]ou are a liar.” “It was ­great pity,” writes another in disgust, “that you ever escaped to get back and humbug ­people with so many lies Arthur Gordon Pym, D.L [Damned Liar].”11 Although ­these readers accept Pym’s initial truth claims, they are unwilling to believe the fantastical material found in the final chapters and closing note. This incredulity leads not to considerations of Pym’s novelistic verisimilitude, but to indignation at Pym’s attempted deceptions. In the most colorful of Kopley’s findings, one reader wrote next to Poe’s inconclusive final note, “I d ­ on’t believe all Mr. Pym says, do you.” “[N]o, I’ll be darnd if I do,” replied another reader, “kiss my ass you [illegible] rascal.”12 While we might be tempted to dismiss ­these annotations as idiosyncratically naïve, contemporaneous reviews of Pym had more in common with ­these exasperated annotations than with ­later cele­brations of Pym’s metafictional cleverness. Reviewers, too, w ­ ere preoccupied with questions of belief and veracity. Some reviewers raised questions about Pym’s truthfulness without passing definitive judgment on it: “It is more marvelous than the wildest fiction,” wrote the New Yorker, “yet is presented and supported as sober truth.”13 But most reviewers expressed their incredulity and explained the reasons for their disbelief: “a rapid succession of improbabilities destroys the interest of the reader, and the writer’s evident ignorance in all nautical ­matters forbids the possibility of belief.”14 The Knickerbocker lamented the need to be “so uncourteous as to insinuate a doubt of Mr. Pym’s veracity,” before ­doing exactly that. “When we can find a respectable endorser for Mr. Pym’s statements,” wrote the Saturday Courier, “we ­will think of believing them.”15 While a few reviewers would use their disbelief in Pym’s factuality as a starting point for evaluating it as a fiction, most treated it as an unsuccessful hoax, a weak attempt by e­ ither Pym or Poe to dupe a credulous public. The New York Magazine designated the author “a liar of the first magnitude.”16 The En­glish Metropolitan Magazine formulated this attitude most clearly:

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The marvellous story—as we learn from the preface—­was first published in an American periodical as a work of fiction. It is a pity it was not left as such. As a romance, some portions of it are sufficiently amusing and exciting; but, when palmed upon the public as a true ­thing, it cannot appear in any other light than that of a bungling business—an impudent attempt at imposing on the credulity of the ignorant.17 Uniformly, modern scholarship has treated Pym as a fiction on the grounds that it is not true—it is a fabricated story. But ­these antebellum reviews approach fictionality less as a taxonomic category continuous with “made up” stories, than as a mode of address, a communicative framework that guides readers’ approach to the narrative. U ­ nder this conception of fiction, Pym’s paratextual packaging removes it from the realm of the fictional—­“it is a pity it was not left as . . . ​a work of fiction”—­changing the framework of value through which it must be judged: the same narrative that would have “amus[ed] and excit[ed] . . . ​as a romance” becomes an “attempt at imposing on the credulity of the ignorant.” Even as this review recognizes Pym as a made-up story, it does not consider it a fiction. While Jacksonian readers, then, might not have been believed Pym’s factuality, it does not follow that they regarded it as a fiction. Reviewers and readers alike tended to approach Pym not as a fiction, but as, in the words of Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, an “impudent attempt at humbugging the public.”18 By designating it a piece of “humbug,” Burton’s situates Pym within one of the period’s most capacious categories of imposture: “humbug” was a term that could refer to anything from an amusing trick to criminal fraud. In the 1830s and 1840s, writers spilled a g ­ reat deal of ink taxonomizing the seemingly endless va­ri­e­ties of deceit, chicanery, duplicity, and “diddling,” that they regarded as rampant in US society. They ­were especially anxious about the criminal deceptions made pos­si­ble by the new forms of stranger sociality that had accompanied urbanization: as Karen Halttunen has documented, the 1830s saw the emergence of a robust lit­er­a­ture warning young men from the country about the duplicitous “confidence men,” who would seek to take advantage of them upon their arrival in the city. The insistent recurrence of t­ hese figures across Jacksonian conduct manuals, periodicals, and fictions reveals this period’s deep anxiety about—­and equally deep fascination with—­deceit: t­ here was an im­mense public appetite for narratives of elaborate cons and im­mense naïveté, technical descriptions of vari­ous tricks, and advice on how to penetrate even the most ingenious frauds.19 While Jacksonian periodicals denounced a wide range of frauds as “humbug,” the exact meaning of the term was contested. Noah Webster had defined “humbug” very generally as meaning “an imposture”—or, as a verb, “to deceive”—­but some writers insisted that this capacious definition failed to capture what made “humbug” a distinctive kind of imposture. For David Meredith

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­ eese, author of the formidable Humbugs of New-­York: Being a Remonstrance R against Popu­lar Delusion; ­whether in Science, Philosophy, or Religion (1838), “humbug” particularly meant an imposture in ideas that he associated with fanat­ic­ ism: his list of “humbugs” included animal magnetism, quack medicine, and phrenology, but also “ultra-­abolitionism,” “ultra-­temperance,” “ultra-­ Protestantism,” and “ultra-­Sectarianism.”20 P. T. Barnum, in The Humbugs of the World, An Account of Humbugs, Delusions, Impositions, Quackeries, Deceits, and Deceivers Generally, in All Ages (1865), distinguishes “humbug” from the criminal activities of forgers and confidence men.21 While Barnum’s definition is self-­interested—he spent his entire ­career negotiating the boundary between innocent deception and criminal fraud—it does capture something impor­tant about the connotations of the term: the fact that the era’s most renowned showmen was known as “The Prince of Humbug” suggests that the public not only accepted, but enjoyed amusing deceptions.22 The Jacksonian public’s fascination with both fraud and exposé is especially evident in the infamous exhibitions of dubiously au­then­tic “won­ders” that w ­ ere a defining feature of the era’s popu­lar culture. Audiences turned out in large numbers—­and handed over, in aggregate, a considerable sum of money—to view such “curiosities” as Johann Maelzel’s automaton chess-­player and Barnum’s Feejee Mermaid (a taxidermied specimen made up of a stuffed monkey head that had been sutured to a fish’s tail).23 While spectators w ­ ere often skeptical of t­ hese exhibits, they w ­ ere willing to pay for the opportunity to examine such won­ders themselves and pass their own judgments on their authenticity.24 The public’s appetite for amusing humbug was matched by its appetite for narratives exposing impostures. Faced with what ­Reese called “the reign of humbug,” audiences sought out books that exposed frauds and detailed the mechanics of “diddling” in order to learn how to penetrate deceptive appearances.25 Periodicals published countless essays, such as Poe’s own reflections on Maelzel’s chess-­player, that judged the authenticity of vari­ous “curiosities” and explained what had allowed them to detect the cheat.26 This practice of searching for humbug—of scrutinizing a curiosity and judging its authenticity—is exactly the mode of reading that Jacksonian annotators and reviewers brought to bear on Pym. Instead of approaching it as a fiction and judging it as such, they weighed its truth claims and found them wanting. They declared Pym to be not just an attempted hoax, but, to use the words of one reviewer, a “bungling” one.27 If judged strictly by its success at “humbugging the public”—of convincing readers of its authenticity—­Pym is a failure. Even t­ hose readers who failed to recognize Poe as the true author w ­ ere not convinced of the narrative’s truth. But if Pym fails as a hoax, it fails in a truly remarkable way: Poe meticulously builds a plausible narrative—­complete with authenticating references and factual sources—­only to close with a series of increasingly unbelievable scenes and an editor’s note which draws attention to their implausibility. (Tellingly,

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when Wiley and Putnam published an unauthorized edition of Pym in London in 1838, they dropped both the last paragraph, in which the ­giant white figure appears, and the concluding note in order to increase its credibility as a factual exploration narrative.28) Pym is less a failed hoax than a hoax that invites, even revels in, its own exposure.29 The motivation for this unusual form of self-­exposing hoax is hinted at in Poe’s ­earlier, more conventional hoaxes. His most elaborate early hoax was “The Unparalleled Adventure of one Hans Pfaall” (1835), the tale of a ballooner from Rotterdam, who returns ­there briefly to deliver a report of his journey to the moon. Full of scientific jargon and technical description, “Hans Pfaall” exemplifies what Harris calls the “operational aesthetic” of Jacksonian humbug: priding themselves on their scientific knowledge, American audiences ­were especially e­ ager for—­and especially easily duped by—­descriptions of new won­ders that w ­ ere “couched in the bland neutrality of a technological vocabulary.”30 Much like 1833’s “MS Found in a ­Bottle,” “Hans Pfaall” enjoyed moderate success as a hoax, initially duping some readers and generally being praised for its artistry and rich detail.31 While Poe’s early hoaxes fooled some readers, they w ­ ere, as James Machor has shown, also admired as light, whimsical satires. The Baltimore Republican’s judgment that “Hans Pfaall” was “a capital burlesque on ballooning” neatly captures the general attitude ­toward Poe’s early hoaxes.32 But if “Hans Pfaall” displays Poe’s skill as a satirical hoaxster, his reflections on the aborted tale reveal aspirations for hoaxing that extend beyond satire. Poe originally intended to write four parts of “Hans Pfaall,” but he abandoned the proj­ect ­after the first installment when it was usurped by one of the most incredible instances of Jacksonian “humbug”—­Richard Locke’s “Moon Hoax,” a New York Sun story detailing recent “discoveries” made with a power­ful new telescope. This telescope, according to Locke’s report, revealed the moon’s surface to hold such won­ders as winged men and unicorns. In Humbugs of New-­York, ­Reese cites Locke’s hoax as his chief example of the “philosophical humbug” that proved “the character of our population in regard to their readiness to swallow the sublimated nonsense”: “Hundreds of thousands of copies w ­ ere quickly disposed of in successive editions . . . ​and t­ here are very many in our city, who to the pre­sent hour, regard ­those revelations with more of reverence and confidence than any of the established truths in physics or morals.”33 Poe aggressively refuted accusations that “Hans Pfaall” had been an opportunistic attempt to capitalize on Locke’s success: when it was reprinted in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, Poe added a note that systematically laid out the differences between the hoaxes. But even more than a defense of his own narrative, Poe’s note is an extended reflection on why Locke’s hoax had been able to “gull” so many readers. While Poe complains of the public’s “gross ignorance” in scientific ­matters, he focuses less any specific knowledge readers lacked than on their failure to read skeptically—­their inability to detect cracks in the story’s plausibility: “it may h ­ ere afford some l­ittle amusement to show why no one

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should have been deceived—to point out ­those particulars of the story which should have been sufficient to establish its real character.” Poe pedantically sifts through Locke’s narrative, highlighting the fissures in plausibility that should have tipped readers off. ­These include the telescope’s power (not strong enough); the place where its glass was made (out of business); a description of a man-­bat that resembled another author’s account of “flying islanders” (“this ­simple fact should have induced suspicion”); its resemblance to literary adventures (“much in the manner of Gil Blas”); and especially, what would have struck the “real” as opposed to “fictitious observer”—­the fact that anything seen through the glass would seem to be upside down!34 Poe, anticipating his own Dupin, turns detective and models for readers the kind of skeptical reading necessary to detect a cheat. The note seeks to train readers in the kind of analy­sis that Poe performed in his essay on Maelzel’s chess-­player and ­Reese and ­others undertook in their exposés. It offers a lesson in how to read for humbug. Approached through this note and its program of skeptical reading, Pym’s paratexts seem less like self-­evidently metafictional reflections than coy clues that challenge readers to recognize Pym as a fabrication.35 Wrestling with questions of belief, (in)credulity, and the line dividing fact from fiction, its paratexts consistently, even insistently, hint at Pym’s fabrication. Si­mul­ta­ neously insisting on its strict factuality and its utterly “marvelous” nature, Pym offers the key to its own exposure: as Paul Rosenzweig points out, Poe italicizes “appearance,” “­under the garb of fiction,” “ruse,” and “expose,” highlighting the dubiousness of his claims (1007).36 The narrative that follows is brimming with similar hints: literary allusions; plot inconsistencies; the resemblance of the names Arthur Gordon Pym and Edgar Allan Poe; the fact that Pym hails from Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard; the resemblance of Tsalal’s mysterious caverns to Poe’s initials. Pym, then, is full of gaps, clues, and contradictions that might tip off readers that it is a “ruse.” Poe’s narrative may be a hoax, but it is one that seeks to reveal itself not just in its final super­natural episodes, but from its opening lines. Poe thus structures Pym to allow readers to perform exactly the kind of skeptical reading that he had performed on Locke’s “Moon Hoax.” Kopley describes readers who did just this, making notes about Pym’s most obvious “­mistake”: his claim that he learned a story from Augustus years ­later, when, in fact, Augustus dies shortly thereafter. One reader notes that this is “rather a contradiction, Mr. Pym; Augustus died a few months l­ater.”37 Where this reader believes that Pym is lying, another annotator, L. Kinsey, notices this same prob­lem and designates it “a contradiction in terms.” This leads Kinsey to conclude that both the narrative and its author are a “fabrication”: “It is my firm opinion that the ­whole preceding narrative is a base fabrication, & such a man as Pym never existed, if any one should read this book I think them void of common sense, if they believe it. Upon reading it, the relation of his first adventure satisfied me it was, & having carefully perused it I think myself

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competent to judge as to its veracity.”38 Kinsey practices exactly the kind of skeptical hermeneutics advocated by Poe’s note on Locke: he interrogates the text for implausibilities and contradictions in order to evaluate its veracity. Reviewers described a similar reading pro­cess: “we ­imagined, from vari­ous discrepancies and other errors discovered at a glance . . . ​that we had met with a proper subject for our critical scalping knife—­but a steady perusal of the ­whole book compelled us to throw it away in contempt with an exclamation of . . . ​‘a d—­d lie!’ ”39 As with the “Moon Hoax,” “A steady perusal” of Pym’s “discrepancies and other errors” allows readers to detect the fraud.40 ­These annotators and reviewers do not provide anything like a definitive means of reading Pym or describing its proj­ect.41 But they are invaluable for defamiliarizing the generic frameworks through which modern readers have approached it. Crucially, few antebellum reviewers treated the book as self-­evidently novelistic or even fictional. Even ­those reviews that eventually evaluated Pym as a fiction opened by detailing why they w ­ ere approaching the book as a fiction. W ­ hether reviewers ultimately judged Pym as a fiction or as an “impudent attempt at humbugging the public,” they treated “the belief of readers” as a central issue, alerting readers to both the book’s “appearance of real­ity” and the signs of its fabrication.42 For while Poe hints at the text’s fabricated nature, he also builds an elaborate authenticating apparatus that ensures that the kind of careful, skeptical reading he advocates is necessary to recognize the hoax. Most importantly, Pym lacks the “tone of banter” characteristic of Poe’s ­earlier hoaxes.43 If “Hans Pfaall” ’s playful tone revealed its fictionality even as it aspired to “scientific plausibility,” Pym includes no similar giveaway. In this sense, Pym, which is full of seemingly extraneous (and often inaccurate) nautical details, recalls less satirical hoaxes than Robinson Crusoe—­a resemblance noted by many reviewers. Crusoe’s ­great achievement, Poe argued in a review that he published shortly before Pym, is that readers do not regard it as a “literary per­for­mance” at all, b ­ ecause of its “potent magic of verisimilitude”: “Defoe has none of their thoughts—­Robinson all!”44 But even more than drawing on verisimilar fictions, Poe imitated recent factual exploration narratives, even incorporating entire passages from some into Pym.45 ­These lifted passages perfectly encapsulate Pym’s specific kind of hoaxical ambitions: they lend the narrative an air of plausibility by imbuing it with a­ ctual facts, while they si­mul­ta­neously offer the well-­read reader yet another means of detecting the hoax. Recall: the resemblance of Locke’s “Moon Hoax” to other narratives is one hint that, according to Poe, reveals “its real character.” Poe thus cultivates a strategic ambiguity around Pym’s truth claims by both constructing a detailed apparatus to establish its plausibility and including hints of its fabrication. In this, Pym can be seen as an instance of what has James Cook has dubbed “artful deception,” a distinctive combination of realism and illusionism that “involved a calculated intermixing of the genuine

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and the fake, enchantment and disenchantment, energetic public exposé and momentary suspension of disbelief.”46 Cook argues that what is distinctive about mid-­nineteenth-­century “artful deceptions,” from Barnum’s exhibits to sleight-­of-­hand magic, is the way in which they invited suspicion: ­these showmen offered their exhibits as opportunities for a “more self-­conscious mode of sleuthing,” urging viewers to use their own powers of skeptical observation, discernment, and scientific reason to penetrate the secrets of the object on display.47 ­Whether it was Barnum planting anonymous essays in the press attesting to both the fraudulence and authenticity of his exhibitions or Maelzel’s practiced refusal—­noted by Poe—to answer any questions about ­whether his automaton was purely mechanical, t­ hese artful deceivers recognized that the “specter of fraud” was what drew audiences. Like ­these other artful deceptions, Pym “play[s] both sides of the authenticity question,” offering a narrative of dubious truth for public discussion and interrogation.48 But unlike Maelzel or Barnum, Poe carefully cultivates this ambiguity only to undermine it in spectacular fashion in Pym’s final chapters. As one reviewer put it, Pym is written “­after the manner of Robinson Crusoe, but he d ­ idn’t know where to stop.”49 But it is less that Poe simply d ­ idn’t know where to stop in Pym than that he was committed to si­mul­ta­neously violating possibility and insisting on the narrative’s veraciousness. The question of “veracity” and “truth” in fantastical narratives was on Poe’s mind in the mid-1830s. In 1836, shortly before he published the first two installments of Pym in the Southern Literary Messenger, Poe reviewed the recently (and anonymously) published Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself. This faux-­memoir traces the travels of the soul of Sheppard Lee, a lazy farmer, through a series of dif­fer­ent bodies, before it is fi­nally re­united with its original body. While his brother-­in-­law insists that Lee has been hallucinating in bed, Lee refuses to believe him, clinging to his tale of metempsychosis. Poe praises Sheppard Lee as a “very clever jeu d’esprit,” but he argues that its ending trivializes the preceding narrative: “it is ­little indemnification for our sufferings to learn that, in truth, the ­whole ­matter was a dream, and that we ­were very wrong to be worried about it all.”50 For Poe, Sheppard Lee’s ending unnecessarily undermines its artfulness, as such an epistemological hedge is completely superfluous: “what difficulty, incon­ve­nience, or danger, can t­ here be in leaving us uninformed . . . ​that a certain hero . . . ​was not . . . ​a ghost in good earnest?” This is not a narrative that risks deceiving readers. ­Here, Poe closely echoes t­ hose fictionists, such as Simms, who insisted that their narratives’ obvious fictionality precluded any possibility of deceit. According to Poe, truth claims in such overtly fantastical tales are an aesthetic issue rather than an epistemological one. The tale should be written, he argues, “as if the author ­were firmly impressed with the truth, yet astonished at the immensity of the won­der he relates and for which, professedly, he neither claims nor anticipates credence”: “The attention of the author, who does not insist upon

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explaining away his incredibilities, is directed to giving them the luminousness of truth. . . . ​The reader . . . ​readily perceives and falls in with the writer’s humor, and suffers himself to be borne on thereby.”51 Poe advances a theory of fictional truth that recalls, albeit in a more audacious form, eighteenth-­century pseudofactualism, in which even truth claims that do not solicit belief can enhance a narrative’s “truth.”52 This would seem to suggest the motivation for Pym’s truth claims: they are an aesthetic choice, a means of giving “the luminousness of truth” to a fantastic story that poses no “danger” of belief. But unlike in Sheppard Lee, Pym’s explic­itly fantastical ele­ments are delayed u ­ ntil its final pages. “The early parts of the adventures is not physically impossible,” notes one reviewer, “the l­ater discoveries are clearly fable: but both . . . ​are told with g ­ reat appearance of truth, and with a hearty confidence of the writer’s belief, which gives them the air of real­ity.”53 In Pym, ­there is, in fact, a “danger” that the narrative might be believed, at least temporarily. Having examined the dif­fer­ent modes of establishing plausibility and truth used by Defoe, Locke, Maelzel, and Sheppard Lee, Poe produces a hybrid as remarkable as Barnum’s Feejee Mermaid: a­ fter thoroughly considering readerly (dis)belief in Sheppard Lee and Crusoe, he sutures episodes from a fantastical gothic tale to a plausible, Defoesque sea adventure.54 He then uneasily unifies them through a paratextual apparatus that both insists on and belies the truth of the ­whole. Pym thus cultivates the ambiguity associated with artful deception only to abandon it in its final chapters. As one reviewer notes, “­There are many statements in the book that might be true, and ­others that could not be true, and the result is that we doubt the vraisemblable, ­because our faith is shaken by the impossible.”55 Or as another puts it, Pym begins with a “minuteness of nautical descriptions” that give it Defoe’s “air of real­ity,” but it ultimately compromises this effect by introducing “too many strange horrors” and breaking off in “a mysterious way.”56 The ending, as yet another put it, has “so ridiculously overdone the recital, that the volume cannot impose upon anybody.”57 But rather than a m ­ istake, this is exactly the effect that Pym cultivates. By definitively revealing Pym’s fabrication only in its final pages, Poe creates an opportunity for readerly error and confusion, while also ensuring that readers must ultimately recognize this error. Pym’s ending forces ­those readers who have been duped by its truth claims to grapple with their own credulity. By both cultivating and exposing such gullibility, Pym confronts readers with their failure to practice the kind of suspicious hermeneutics Poe advocates in the note to “Hans Pfaall.” Where that note theorizes this mode of reading, Pym encourages it in practice, training readers to interrogate skeptically the truth of all texts. Pym is thus both a piece of humbug and an exposé of humbug: it solicits a readerly belief that it ultimately undermines to draw readers attention to their own credulity. Pym’s paratextual play with credulity is paralleled by its well-­documented thematic emphasis on deception.58 Again and again, characters fail to

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penetrate specious appearances: Pym ­mistakes Augustus’s drunkenness for sobriety, Pym’s grand­father m ­ istakes Pym for a street urchin, and the Jane Guy’s crew ­mistakes the intentions of the natives of Tsalal. The most dramatic deception occurs aboard the Grampus, when Pym disguises himself as a reanimated corpse in order to prey on the guilty consciences of the mutineers. When the disguised Pym appears suddenly before them, the ringleader immediately dies from fright: Usually . . . ​­there is some glimmering of doubt as to the real­ity of the vision before his eyes; a degree of hope however feeble, that he is the victim of chicanery, and that the apparition is not actually a visitant from the world of shadows . . . ​in the pre­sent instance, t­ here was not even the shadow of a basis on which to rest a doubt . . . (1071) Pym the character doubles Pym the narrative in playing off fantastical fiction as fact. The mutineer’s guilty conscience disables his skepticism and his inability to consider even the possibility of “chicanery” leads to his death. Endlessly representing credulity, Pym hints at its own hoaxical nature while giving this hoaxing a didactic force: deception within the text mirrors the hoax itself, providing both another clue to its fabrication and a gruesome illustration of what happens when one does not interrogate appearances. Pym blurs the line between fact and fiction, but it also polices it: it exposes the need to attend carefully to the thin, difficult-­to-­discern line dividing “truth” from “the appearance of truth.”59 Pym, then, eschews explicit fictionality, ­because fictionality brackets the very questions of belief that it seeks to address. Fiction might be able to thematize deception and lying, but it cannot itself offer an opportunity to test readers’ ability to detect fraud and deceit, b ­ ecause its very mode of address activates a conception of truth in which the issue of authorial deceit is inoperative. Fictionality, that is, suspends the issues of deception and fraud that Poe and his contemporaries saw as pervading US social life. Poe famously rejected didacticism in fiction, but Pym also reveals that he saw fiction as incapable of delivering the lesson that he believed antebellum readers needed most—­only a hoax could adequately underscore the necessity of suspicious reading.60 And while Pym thematically suggests some arenas in which this skeptical reading might be especially urgent, from scientific treatises to repre­sen­ta­tions of slave rebellion, this suspicious hermeneutic could be brought to bear on any of the remarkably diverse forms of “humbug” circulating in the antebellum United States. While Pym rejects conventional fictional address, it also depends on the semiautonomous framework for judging fiction that, as we saw in chapter 4, was emerging at this very moment in periodical reviews of fiction. (Poe himself participated in this pro­cess, as a reviewer and editor at the Messenger and ­later Burton’s.) This framework for valuing fiction is what makes Pym a

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literary hoax rather than a mere fraud. W ­ hether readers recognize Pym’s fabrication at its outset or only in its final chapter, this detection does not exhaust Pym’s interest—it simply shifts the text’s communicative framework, orienting readers to a dif­fer­ent set of reading practices. The final chapters and especially the concluding note, which both underscores the narrative’s implausibility and pre­sents a series of hermeneutic puzzles, seek to shift readerly practice from the detection of a fraud to the interpretation of a fictional narrative and its attendant symbols—­the challenge on which most modern scholarship has focused. A hermeneutic challenge oriented t­ oward questions of meaning displaces a hermeneutic challenge centered on questions of belief. The revelation of Pym’s fabrication, wherever this may occur, encourages readers to “won­der” at its “appearance of truth.” But to experience the aesthetic “won­der” of Pym’s “potent magic of verisimilitude” as a fiction, readers must first detect its fabrication. In its double-­voiced hoaxing and pseudofactualism, Pym shows that the plea­sure of being “borne along” by a narrative’s “luminousness of truth” depends on readers first recognizing that it is not, in fact, “true”—or more accurately, that it is not factual. Pym’s hoaxing thus engages many of the questions that had long preoccupied both fictionists and fiction’s critics in the United States: How w ­ ill readers sort truth from fiction? What are the consequences of being deceived? Are readers capable of discerning a text’s relation to the world “as it is”? But while Pym engages such epistemological questions, it does not raise them in relation to fiction. When we approach Pym in the context of the Jacksonian era’s pervasive anx­i­eties about fraudulence and humbug, we confront the inadequacy of regarding Pym’s hoaxing as metafictional in ­either the way we associate with postmodernism or the way it has been used in this book. Pym’s paratexts do not serve, as in most early US fiction, as a way of advocating the value of a par­tic­u­lar variety, use, or way of reading fiction. The questions raised by Pym’s hoaxing do not, in fact, address fiction at all, but rather, the epistemological challenges presented by Jacksonian print culture more generally. Skeptical reading, Poe suggests, is least crucial when reading fiction. It is e­ very other text that necessitates it.

Reading Other Minds Even more than Pym, Bird’s Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself (1836) is preoccupied with the fraud and deceit pervading US society in the 1830s. This picaresque tale of body-­hopping recounts a remarkable litany of humbugs, cons, and diddles, from financial fraud and deceitful party politics to sham engagements and a traveling exhibition of a fake ­mummy. Sheppard Lee is the tale of a New Jersey farmer who, ­after an unfortunate accident with a mattock, realizes that he is a ghost. Lee, however, is a ghost with a most remarkable skill: he can throw his soul into any recently deceased body. Lee first reanimates

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Squire Higginson, a wealthy brewer. Much to his surprise, Lee discovers that life as a rich man is not all that it appeared to poor Sheppard Lee: as Higginson, Lee suffers greatly from gout and his wife. Driven to misery as Higginson, Lee abandons his body for that of a recently drowned dandy, the second in a series of remarkable transformations. Across the picaresque narrative, Lee becomes a miserly moneylender, a Quaker philanthropist, a contented slave, and a hypochondriacal gentleman, before fi­nally returning to his own body, which had been mummified and put on display by a mysterious doctor. Imposture, deception, and fraud are among the only ­things that unify ­these episodes. In almost ­every body he occupies, Lee is e­ ither trying to con someone or being conned by someone (or often both): in his own body, he is swindled by his farm man­ag­er and duped by local politicians; as an impoverished dandy, he attempts to clandestinely marry his rich cousin only to be tricked by this cousin and her lover in turn; as a philanthropist, he is fleeced by the conman he is employing as an assistant in do-­gooding (who is exposed when he is conned in turn by the philanthropist’s clever nephew); as a slave, he helps or­ga­nize a revolt ­after reading an abolitionist pamphlet that is insincerely addressed to slave o ­ wners; fi­nally, he encounters his own mummified body in an exhibition of curiosities that resembles the traveling shows of Maelzel and Barnum. Sheppard Lee might document the regional, factional, and sectarian fissures dividing the nation, but it pre­sents the United States as firmly united ­under “the reign of humbug.” But even as deception and humbug are central thematic issues in the narrative, it is counterintuitive to call Sheppard Lee a hoax, literary or other­wise. ­After all, as Poe notes, Lee’s tale of metempsychosis does not solicit belief—it is patently fictional. And unlike Pym, reviewers treated it as a fiction. This is why Poe objected to Sheppard Lee’s ending, in which Lee’s brother-­in-­law tells him that he has, in fact, never left his farm and that he merely ­imagined his entire body-­hopping journey during a sustained fit of madness. Lee refuses to believe this outlandish explanation and publishes his adventures, trusting the public to recognize their truthfulness. Sheppard Lee, then, is a fantastical tale that, in its final pages, reestablishes a degree of plausibility by revealing that its narrator is delusional. Bird saw this pseudofactual logic as crucial to the book’s proj­ect: he went to ­great lengths to conceal his authorship and pre­sent Lee as the author, even bypassing his usual Philadelphia publisher, Carey & Lea, for New York’s Harper & B ­ rothers.61 The ending does not, of course, give credibility to Lee’s body-­hopping travels, but it puts into play a number of possibilities surrounding the tale’s “truth”—is it the raving of a madman, an attempted hoax, or only a playful fiction? Much like Pym, Sheppard Lee’s ending sets up a series of competing truth claims to encourage readers to interrogate their reading practice. But where Pym’s final chapter brings the fictional frame into view, Sheppard Lee’s final pages use the specter of delusion to bring the fictional frame into doubt. And where Pym teaches readers how to detect fraud,

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Sheppard Lee deploys the rhe­toric of humbug to urge readers to consider more self-­consciously what it is that they do when they read fiction. Lee’s insistence on his tale’s factuality is part of the book’s more general lampoon of the chicanery pervading the Jacksonian public sphere. From its opening pages, Sheppard Lee pokes fun at the unreliability of con­temporary print culture, showing how many “factual” genres—­from newspapers to po­liti­ cal pamphlets to medical journals—­distort facts and fabricate stories. Even as Lee admits that “it is impossible that I have laid up proofs to satisfy any one of the truth of my relation who is disposed to be incredulous,” he apes the moves through which Jacksonian writers sought to authenticate their narratives, from prefatory truth claims to footnotes verifying the tale’s plausibility to theoretical arguments against readerly skepticism. Such reflections also resonate as a parody of novelistic truth claims: “I am writing truth and not fiction, and represent ­things as I found, not as I ­imagined them” (141–42). Bringing such truth claims to bear not on a plausible tale, but on a fantastical one, Bird satirizes the rhe­toric of authentication that pervaded early American fiction. On one hand, Sheppard Lee’s comic rehearsal of the strategies through which fictions had long sought to legitimate themselves as sources of knowledge about the world suggests the decreased urgency of such questions in discussions of fiction at this moment. On the other, however, Bird’s rehearsal of such strategies also represents an ongoing engagement with t­ hese very epistemological questions. Through t­ hese comic reflections, Sheppard Lee raises anew questions about what kind of knowledge fiction can offer readers about the world. Some of Sheppard Lee’s best commentators have noted how Lee’s journey mirrors the experience of fiction-­reading: fiction, not unlike metempsychosis, offers readers direct, intimate access to another person’s mind and experience.62 As Dorrit Cohn has influentially shown, fiction is the only genre “in which the unspoken thoughts, feelings, perceptions, of a person other than the speaker can be portrayed”: third-­person fiction, in par­tic­u­lar, has what she calls a “distinctive epistemology” that “allows a narrator to know what cannot be known in the real world and in narratives that target repre­sen­ta­ tions of the real world: the inner life of his figures.”63 Through metempsychosis, then, Lee gains an access to other ­people’s interiorities usually reserved for the disembodied third-­person narrators—­and by extension, readers—of fiction. But Sheppard Lee’s plot does more than provide an outré analog to fiction-­reading. It also exposes the impossibility of fiction’s central promise—­ the ability to enter into another’s consciousness. This metafictional argument is an extension of Bird’s investment in what Justine Murison dubs “a standard theory of the antebellum body”—­the understanding that “the mind was never divorced from ­matter in antebellum Amer­i­ca.”64 According to Bird, an individual’s personality, consciousness, and subjective experience are the product of both the individual’s essential soul and the body that this soul inhabits. This conception of h ­ uman personality and consciousness is apparent from Lee’s

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first transformation, when he throws his soul into Higginson’s body: “although I had acquired along with his body all the peculiarities of feeling, propensity, conversation, and conduct of Squire Higginson, I had not entirely lost ­those that belonged to Sheppard Lee. . . . ​I may be said to have possessed two characters . . . ​though the squire’s . . . ​was greatly predominant” (59). Bird posits that individuals’ distinctive habits, passions, emotions, and even conduct are products not only of their immaterial spirits but also of their unique bodies: “ordinary spirits lie in their bodies like w ­ ater in sponges; diffused through ­every part, affected by the part’s affections, changed with its changes” (140). Beneath the humor of such passages, Bird, himself a physician, mounts an argument about how a person’s mind and personality are s­ haped, even determined, by that individual’s unique body. Strikingly, u ­ nder this theory of consciousness, t­ here is no possibility of accessing or knowing another person’s subjective experience other than through metempsychosis. Sheppard Lee is preoccupied with the epistemological challenge of embodied personhood: we cannot know another’s mind, ­because we are ­limited by our specific, embodied existence and the personality, subjective experience, and ­mental habits that this unique body entails. Such failures of imagination abound in Sheppard Lee, most strikingly when Lee-­ as-­Higginson looks wistfully at the elegant young dandy, Dawkins: harried by creditors, Dawkins is just as miserable as the gouty squire. But it is not just that he is unaware of Dawkins’s financial situation: Lee-­as-­Higginson is unable to imagine the feelings, thoughts, and passions that ­will guide his spirit once it inhabits Dawkins’s body. Bird’s fantastical narrative thus highlights the impossibility of ever realizing the very ­thing that it also provides: an individual’s progressive access to a series of dif­fer­ent embodied perspectives and consciousnesses. What Sheppard Lee highlights is how necessarily specific to fiction this kind of access is. Given Bird’s theory of mind, only a fictional character’s paper mind could be accessible in this way, b ­ ecause it is, by definition, disembodied. It is a textual construction. This kind of access to an ­actual person’s mind or perspective would be impossible, ­because it is a product of their unique physical makeup that we cannot—­barring a miraculous transformation like Lee’s—­ever inhabit. Sheppard Lee underscores, in a memorable way, that it is only in fiction that readers can have this experience.65 Sheppard Lee, ultimately, pre­sents the fantasy of accessing another person’s consciousness as a kind of madness by revealing that Lee has hallucinated his encounters with ­these other minds. In her brilliant reading, Murison links Lee’s madness to the hypochondria he suffers as Arthur Megrim, an aristocrat who ­mistakes himself for other p ­ eople, animals, and even h ­ ouse­hold objects.66 In t­ hese paired figures—­the man who imagines himself in other ­people’s bodies and the man who ­mistakes himself for, among other ­things, a tea ­kettle—­Murison finds a critique of the sympathetic identification encouraged by sentimentalism in general and sentimental fiction in par­tic­u­lar. I

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would suggest it resonates as a cautionary tale about the identification associated with fiction-­reading more generally. While Sheppard Lee seems to be a raucous cele­bration of such identification—­Lee’s body-­hopping literalizes the pro­cess through which a reader imaginatively places herself in the position of a character—­its theory of mind underscores its risks: faced with the limitations placed on our knowledge of ­others by our unique embodiment, identification—­ readerly or other­wise—­becomes not just quixotic but pathological. But if Lee’s identifications resonate as a warning about the delusive ways in which readers identify with the nobodies of fiction, Lee’s madness also changes the book’s metafictional argument by complicating its fictional address. The revelation of Lee’s delusiveness trou­bles what had been the narrative’s self-­ evident fictionality. Whereas Pym reveals its fictionality in its final chapter, Sheppard Lee does the opposite: what had up to this point been understandable only as fiction suddenly also becomes legible as a madman’s visionary journey. This gives a dif­fer­ent resonance to the narrative’s seemingly satirical truth claims: while no reader would believe in the factuality of Lee’s narrative, Bird introduces the possibility of an author who does not believe he is writing fiction. Strikingly, at the very moment at which Bird introduces this ambiguity about the book’s fictional status, he turns to the rhe­toric of humbug. Lee insists that he has corroborating evidence for his story’s authenticity in a newspaper article that mentions his past personas. The article provides a very dif­fer­ent account of the events narrated in the preceding chapter, in which Lee had thrown his soul from Megrim’s body into his own mummified body, which was being displayed in a traveling exhibition: From the article, which . . . ​was headed “Outrageous Humbug and Fatal Consequences thereof,” it seemed to be universally believed that Dr. Feuerteufel’s m ­ ummy was no m ­ ummy at all, but a living man . . . ​ with whom he had leagued in a conspiracy to hoax and swindle the good ­people of the south out of their money; and that the imposture had been detected by Mr. Arthur Megrim, who . . . ​was knocked down by the pretended dead man, and so unfortunately killed, the m ­ ummy and his accomplice, the doctor making their escape in the confusion. The editor of the paper, ­after noticing a second account, by which it was asserted that the unfortunate Megrim . . . ​had received no injury . . . ​ but, on the contrary had died of sheer fright . . . ​and acknowledging that this account was more probable, inveighed warmly against the villany and audacity of the swindlers. (420) The multiplicity of competing truth claims ­here is dizzying. First, Lee invokes the periodical to corroborate his fantastical version of events; second, the article itself includes two dif­fer­ent nonfantastical explanations of ­these same events; and fi­nally, Lee eventually admits that he can no longer locate

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this par­tic­ul­ar article and he suspects that his brother-­in-­law has stolen it to undermine his credibility. Bird situates all of ­these competing claims and interpretations ­under the heading of “Outrageous Humbug and the Fatal Consequences thereof,” linking Lee’s own body-­hopping narrative, with its dubious authenticity, to the sham exhibitions of the ­mummy. The explicit association of the narrative’s dubious truth claims with the humbug found in traveling exhibitions of “curiosities” highlights the degree to which this final section of the book comically echoes the promotional strategies and rhe­toric of showman such as Barnum and Maelzel. Much like t­ hese “arts of deception,” Sheppard Lee’s ending cultivates an ambiguity around its truth status by putting contradictory truth claims into competition with each other and encouraging the public to decide for themselves. Lee’s arguments with his brother-­in-­law about the truth of his adventures resemble, in a sensational register, the periodical debates that Barnum would anonymously stage before exhibiting such “curiosities” as the Feejee Mermaid.67 And like Barnum, Lee ultimately makes the public the arbiters of his narrative’s authenticity, publishing his adventures without his brother-­in-­law’s knowledge. Bird thus draws on the rhe­toric of humbug to set up Lee’s fantastical narrative as an object of public judgment and as an opportunity for the public to test their powers of discernment and reason. But to what end? Lee’s narrative, as Poe so emphatically points out, is completely unbelievable. Lee’s delusiveness would not stop readers from approaching Sheppard Lee as a fiction: the humor of Lee’s debates with his brother-­in-­law about his veracity suggest that this too is part of the wider fictional frame. But this should not trivialize the effect of Lee’s delusions on the narrative’s fictional logic: for by drawing the fictional frame into question—­even for a moment—­Bird draws attention to it. Put another way, the ambiguity introduced by Lee’s delusions does not so much compromise the narrative’s fictional address, so much as it reveals—­ even underscores—­this communicative framework’s existence. This is what Poe misses when he dismisses Lee’s delusions as an aesthetic flaw: in the slide from an ironic pseudofactualism (satirically insisting on the truth of a fantastic story) to an earnest pseudofactualism (providing a plausible explanation for the narrative’s fantastic content within the fictional frame) or an earnest, if untrue, truth claim (the narrative is the product of delusion) or even an outrageous attempt at humbuggery (this is an attempt to pass off an impossible narrative as true), Bird brings into view the communicative framework of fictionality that had been assumed during the preceding narrative, encouraging readers to reflect on how they read fiction. When Bird uses the rhe­toric of humbug to urge readers to interrogate skeptically the truth of a patently fictional narrative, he is urging them to consider consciously what exactly constitutes truth in fiction. On two dif­fer­ent levels, then, Sheppard Lee reactivates—or, like Lee’s roving spirit, reanimates—­the network of questions and anx­i­eties about fiction’s

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epistemological status that ­were at this very moment becoming more marginal in periodical discussions of fiction. First, Lee’s delusive identifications recall, albeit in a more extreme form, the delusions of Dorcasina Sheldon, Updike Underhill, and other ­earlier national quixotes. Second, the narrative’s multivalent claims to factuality trou­ble any easy sense of fictional “truth” and reintroduce questions about fiction’s status as a source of knowledge about the world. This is what we recover when we approach Sheppard Lee not simply as a fictional novel, but as an ambiguously fictional literary hoax: Sheppard Lee urges readers to notice and consider the tacit assumptions and habitual reading practices through which they approach fiction. “This is a strange book,” wrote one baffled reviewer in the National Atlas and Sunday Morning Mail, “We cannot see the aim or object of the writer—­ the book being neither a novel, nor romance, nor, indeed, a story of any kind.”68 For this reviewer, Sheppard Lee’s “strangeness” and its re­sis­tance to generic categorization stem from its lack of a clear “aim or object”—­its failure to conform to the recognizable ends of fiction. With chapter titles such as “Which Is Short and Moral, and Can Therefore Be Skipped,” Sheppard Lee, in fact, stages the disconnection between the commonly stated “aim[s]” and “object[s]” for fiction and why readers actually read it. In such moments, Bird mocks both the conventionality of the ascendant didactic justifications of fiction and the frivolity of readers who turn to fiction solely for entertainment. For Bird, ­these very dif­fer­ent conceptions of fiction’s value are nonetheless linked by their comfortable, unexamined, and narrow sense of fiction’s “aim” and “object.” With the spectral reappearance of the truth-­lie binary in its final pages, Sheppard Lee invites readers to grapple with the assumptions about what fiction is and does that have governed their approach to the narrative to this point. Much like the e­ arlier novels it sometimes lampoons, Sheppard Lee asks readers to consider what exactly one can learn from reading fiction. In raising such epistemological questions, Bird warns readers about the limits of fictional knowledge, reminding them that the kind of access we have to the inner lives of characters is restricted to fiction. This is, however, not only a warning about the delusive nature of identifying with fictional characters, but also an argument that fiction can create a kind of knowledge that is especially urgent for the United States in the 1830s. ­After all, Sheppard Lee might caution readers about the dangers of imagining you know what another person thinks, knows, or feels, but its narrative also encourages exactly this kind of ­mental exercise. This is not simply a contradiction in Bird’s proj­ect. Bird suggests that his narrative—­and implicitly, fiction more generally—­can give readers a unique understanding of US society, b ­ ecause it encourages them to speculate on the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of other p ­ eople. But he also insists that readers recognize that this knowledge is necessarily speculative. This is, of course, exactly what Lee himself fails to do. He consistently assumes that he knows how other ­people think and feel—­shockingly,

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he believes they think and feel exactly like he does!—­and only the subsequent experience of actually inhabiting their bodies reveals his m ­ istake. But if readers recognize the limits of their ability to know other ­people, this imaginative pro­cess ceases to be foolhardy, even becomes laudatory, as the inability to imagine how ­others think and feel lies at the root of many of the prosaic tragedies that Bird pre­sents as ubiquitous in the United States. Sheppard Lee depicts a society plagued by p ­ eople’s inability to conceive of perspectives beyond their own.69 This brings us back to Sheppard Lee’s thematic preoccupation with fraud and deceit: for if Sheppard Lee is full of confidence men, diddlers, and humbuggers, it ultimately focuses less on ­these figures than on the credulous dupes upon whom they prey. In almost ­every instance, the mark’s deception is closely linked to an inability to imagine other perspectives: as a dandy, Lee cannot imagine that his cousin would prefer her country lover and is tricked into concealing their elopement; as a philanthropist, he cannot imagine his associate’s self-­interested motives and nearly loses his fortune; and as himself, his delusive sense of his own importance precludes him from seeing how he is being used by both parties during his foray into politics. Where Poe attributes the credulity of US audiences to their inability to read skeptically, Bird links it to their narcissism. This narcissism involves not just selfishness, but a more specific failure of imagination—­the tendency to proj­ect one’s own subjectivity onto ­others based on the assumption that other p ­ eople think and feel just like you do. Where Poe eschewed fictional address in Pym as inadequate for testing readers’ powers of skeptical reading, Bird sees fiction, with its transparent minds, as a power­ful antidote to the narcissism at the root of the nation’s pervasive credulity. No one is less interested in other p ­ eople’s perspectives than our narrator: “I am writing a history of myself, and not of other p ­ eople” (244). The irony, of course, is that in recounting his own “history,” Lee is, in fact, relating the story of many “other ­people.” It is a moment that underscores Lee’s self-­centeredness—­a trait that, much like Lee’s spirit, pervades Bird’s vision of the United States—­while also highlighting how Lee’s narrative serves as an antidote to this kind of blinkered self-­centeredness by bringing readers into contact with other ­people’s inner lives. In this context, identification ceases to be pathological, as Murison argues, and becomes instead a valuable way of expanding one’s perspective. It is only when one loses sight of the speculative nature of such identification that it becomes pathological. Sari Altschuler has compellingly argued that Bird turned to fiction, ­because he recognized the limitations of con­temporary medical epistemologies. But Bird was no less aware of the limitations of fiction as a tool for creating knowledge. Looby has written of Bird’s “humility . . . ​as novelist,” his willingness to acknowledge, as Bird put it in speaking of medicine, “the mysterious nature of the objects of study.”70 But more than a characteristic of his fiction, Bird used fiction to

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cultivate this humility in readers, urging them to attend to the fundamentally mysterious nature of other persons and the blind spots produced by their inability to inhabit any perspective but their own. Bird insists that readers keep the suppositional nature of fiction firmly in view. But for Bird, this knowledge is no less valuable for being speculative. Or rather, this knowledge is especially valuable, ­because it is marked as speculative: Bird values fiction as a source of knowledge about other ­people for the very reasons that many ­earlier critics w ­ ere suspicious of it—­its explicit constructedness and avowedly suppositional nature. Pym and Sheppard Lee are deeply ambivalent engagements with the humbug permeating US print culture in the 1830s. They mimic and draw on the strategies of the era’s humbuggers, but they also thematize the “fatal consequences” of gullibility and diagnose what makes readers susceptible to fraud. They also, in very dif­fer­ent ways, probe the possibilities and limitations of fiction as a tool for helping readers negotiate the era’s pervasive fraudulence. Pym eschews conventional fictionality, ­because fictional address brackets the very issue of truth versus lying that Poe sees readers as struggling to navigate. Bird, alternatively, uses the rhe­toric of hoaxing to encourage readers to consider more consciously what it means to read fiction in the hope that the avowedly speculative access that fiction offers to other minds can help them resist the blinkered narcissism that he believes underlies such failures of skepticism. Although they arrive at divergent answers, t­ hese ambiguously hoaxical narratives are implicitly grappling with a shared question: what is the role of fiction-­reading in a print culture where readers are endlessly confronted with dubious and ambiguous claims to truth, veracity, and authenticity? ­These 1830s hoaxes, thus, foreground the very epistemological questions about fictionality that ­were being bracketed in historical fiction and conduct fiction over t­ hese same years. In their playful engagement with the blurry line separating “truth” and fiction, ­these narratives might be forerunners of postmodernism, but in their sustained interrogation of what kind of knowledge fiction can produce, they are also the intellectual descendants of the early republic’s antifictional critics. And in their interest in cultivating skeptical reading practices and modes of speculative reasoning necessary to negotiate the “truth” of a wide range of texts, they share a proj­ect with e­ arlier US fictions from Wieland to Kelroy to Hope Leslie. ­These hoaxes, and Sheppard Lee in par­tic­ul­ar, reveal that the controversies over fiction’s status as a source of knowledge endured long ­after many periodicals had declared the era to be, as the North American Review put it, the “age of Novel writing.”71 If ­these years saw periodicals largely embrace the novel as a genre, they also produced, as the National Atlas review of Sheppard Lee reminds us, an incredible variety of fiction that did not conform to ­these reviewers’ understanding of what the novel is and does. In writing a “strange book” that resisted the reviewer’s sense of ­either the “novel” or the “romance,” Bird reminded readers

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of the strangeness of fiction at a time when the “novel” and the “romance” had ceased to seem strange. This bizarre narrative of inhabiting other minds makes it impossible to overlook its own fictionality. But even more than this, its metafictional argument warns readers against overlooking the fictionality of fiction more generally. Sheppard Lee challenged readers’ unthinking ac­cep­tance of fiction at the very moment that such a stance first became pos­ si­ble. According to Sheppard Lee, when readers lose sight of the specificity of fiction—­when they lose sight of its fictionality—­these stories about made-up ­people, complete with transparent minds, no longer serve as an antidote for epistemological overconfidence and instead become a means of feeding it. Our own unthinking ac­cep­tance of fictionality, in turn, is what has allowed ­later scholarship to overlook the dif­fer­ent, liminal modes of fictional address found in texts such as Sheppard Lee or Pym. The ease with which ­later criticism has transformed a liminally fictional hoax, such as Pym, into a novel exposes just how l­ittle questions of fictionality have factored into our histories of fiction. To recover and historicize the diverse modes of fictional address circulating in the early United States, we must resist our own tendency to take fictionality for granted.

ch a p t er si x

Fictionality and Social Criticism

the 1840s a nd 1850s pr e­s en t the historian of fictionality with a contradiction. Over ­these de­cades, fiction ­rose to a new public sphere prominence, as the mode was appropriated by entrepreneurial social advocacy movements, such as Temperance. Yet t­ hese same de­cades also saw the emergence of an understanding of fiction as inherently disconnected from public concerns and po­liti­cal controversy, as reviewers more and more sought to enforce a conception of fiction as a vehicle for moral self-­fashioning and aesthetic appreciation. At the very moment in which fiction became central to the era’s most vis­i­ble public movements, an understanding of fiction-­reading as a private leisure activity oriented t­ oward personal self-­cultivation began to exert a normalizing force on fiction through periodical essays and reviews. But even as this delimited conception of fiction’s purpose r­ ose to ascendance, t­ here w ­ ere writers who resisted it, harnessing fiction for social and po­liti­cal criticism. This chapter explores the controversies that surrounded the use of fiction for po­liti­cal advocacy in the antebellum United States. Such controversies make clear that the contestations over the acceptable uses of fictionality continued even a­ fter fiction had gained widespread approval from periodical reviewers and essayists. ­These controversies, too, reveal the endurance of the epistemological prob­lem of fictionality, as ­those fictionists who sought to use the mode for po­liti­cal ends faced anew concerns about fiction’s ability to serve as a reliable source of knowledge about the world “as it is”—­concerns that had become increasingly marginal in discussions of fiction more generally. This chapter gives par­tic­u­lar attention to how fictionality mediated social and po­liti­cal criticism in the 1840s and 1850s. For in this era, even ­those fictions that engaged in po­liti­cal advocacy, breaking with the understanding of fiction as merely oriented t­ oward private self-­c ultivation or leisured entertainment, ­w ere ­s haped by this [ 192 ]

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narrowed notion of its purpose. In straining against this conception of fiction, some writers actually made fiction’s perceived separation from politics central to their proj­ects of social criticism.1 The rise of a more delimited understanding of fiction’s purpose catalyzed new uses of fictionality and fresh theories of the mode’s value. In this era, reviewers increasingly condemned any activist use of fiction as a deviation from the mode’s true purpose. Critics insisted that when writers strayed from what was more and more regarded as fiction’s inherent disconnection from po­liti­cal controversy, they not only deformed fiction, but also compromised po­liti­cal deliberation by introducing nonfactual information into public sphere debates.2 For this reason, writers who used novels for criticism and reform often made claims to “truth” and factuality characteristic of ­earlier nonfictional novels.3 Stowe’s ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851–52) provides an especially famous case in point. Stowe’s fiction intensified an already lively periodical debate about w ­ hether fiction was a legitimate vehicle for advocacy: when fiction begins “mingling in the fumes and gross odours of po­liti­cal or polemical discussion,” wrote one reviewer of ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it “has . . . ​ assumed . . . ​a more vulgar mission incompatible with its essence and alien to its original designs.”4 Proslavery critics drew on venerable epistemological critiques of fictionality to attack Stowe’s repre­sen­ta­tion of slavery: they wrote of “her too vivid imagination”; described it as a “fairy tale”; and referred it to “the brilliant imaginings of the Arabian Nights or U ­ ncle Tom’s Cabin.”5 ­These reviewers, in short, sought to recode ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s fictionality as a sign of its “fallacy and falsehood”: It is a fiction throughout; a fiction in form; a fiction in its facts; a fiction in its repre­sen­ta­tions and coloring; a fiction in its statements; a fiction in its sentiments; a fiction in its morals; a fiction in its religion; a fiction in its inferences. . . . ​It is a fiction, not for the sake of more effectually communicating truth; but for the purpose of more effectually disseminating a slander.6 For this reviewer, it was ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s advocacy proj­ect that transformed its fictionality from a sign of an alternative conception of truth to a mark of its deceitfulness: “This is a fiction—­professedly a fiction; but, unlike other works of the same type, its purpose is not amusement, but proselytism. The romance was formerly employed to divert the leisure, re­create the fancy, and quicken the sympathies . . . ​never forgetting that its main object was to kindle and purify the imagination, while fanning into a livelier flame the slumbering charities of the h ­ uman heart.” ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s departure from the “main object” of romance—­leisure and sympathetic self-­cultivation—­has transformed fiction into lies. Stowe responded to such criticisms by publishing A Key to ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853), a compendium of factual documents—­slave narratives, court

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cases, newspaper articles—­that testified to her fiction’s accuracy. In the Key, Stowe acknowledges that the need to authenticate her fiction’s “truth” is tied up with its break from the standard uses of fiction: This work, more . . . ​than any other work of fiction that ever was written, has been a collection and arrangement of real incidents—of actions ­really performed and expressions ­really uttered—­grouped together with reference to a general result, in the same manner that the mosaic artist groups his fragments into one general picture. His is a mosaic of gems—­this is a mosaic of facts.7 In authenticating her fiction’s accuracy, Stowe has recourse to the same image—­“ the mosaic”—­invoked by Bird in The Hawks of Hawk-­Hollow to bracket epistemological questions. Recall: Bird rejected the imperative to sort fact from fiction by arguing that his novel was “a mosaic of gems” intended to achieve an aesthetic effect. The reader does not need to know, he argued, which pieces are drawn from history and which from his own imagination. What ­matters is their artistic arrangement. Stowe invokes the same image to distinguish her book from fiction oriented ­toward such aesthetic ends: her narrative is not a “mosaic of gems” but a “mosaic of facts.” ­Because her fiction “had a purpose transcending the artistic one,” she is willing to answer “demands not usually made on fictitious works” and “disentangle the glittering web of fiction” by avowing her sources. The fact that this pro­cess is, as she puts it, “unartistic” only underscores that her fiction’s ambitions extend beyond aesthetics. Stowe’s defense of her fiction “as a real­ity” might be read as resisting fiction’s orientation t­ oward aesthetic and moral self-­culture and instead legitimizing her fiction within the public sphere debates about slavery. This is not wrong, but it is only part of the story. This chapter ­will show how Stowe makes the contradictory meaning of fiction in the antebellum United States—it is a publicly circulating genre associated with private self-­cultivation and regarded as disconnected from politics—­the grounds of her proj­ect of social change: she does not simply resist fiction’s perceived distance from po­liti­cal deliberation and the public sphere, but uses this distance to establish her book’s authority as a vehicle for social criticism.8 This chapter, then, tackles what has been one of the thorniest questions for Americanist literary criticism: how do we understand the po­liti­cal force of ­those fictions that disavow politics?9 Focusing on Stowe and her contemporaries, scholars have approached this question primarily by debating the (a)po­liti­cal force of sentimentalism: ­there have been enduring arguments not only about the politics of sentimental fiction, but also about w ­ hether it is right to describe their proj­ects as po­liti­cal in the first place.10 This controversy had its origins in the Tompkins-­Douglas debates of the 1980s. Where Tompkins argued that Stowe’s sentimentalism is explic­itly and effectively oriented ­toward politics—­she writes that “The specifically po­liti­cal intent of [­Uncle

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Tom’s Cabin] is apparent in its forms of address” and it was “spectacularly persuasive in conventional po­liti­cal terms”—­Ann Douglas saw ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin as exemplifying sentimentalism’s substitution of a privatized, consumer culture of “right feeling” for meaningful po­liti­cal engagement. For Douglas, sentimentalism is “the po­liti­cal sense obfuscated or gone rancid.”11 Subsequent scholarship has both complicated this binary opposition and expanded our sense of sentimentalism’s ideological implications, but the question of how to describe its (a)po­liti­cal force has continued to shape studies of sentimental fiction.12 Most influentially, Lauren Berlant has described the “intimate public sphere” of sentimentalism as “juxtapo­liti­cal”: it is “open t­ oward politics, but abundantly on the outside of it.”13 In t­ hese robust and long-­standing debates about sentimental fiction, however, critics have left underexplored the issue of sentimental fiction: in the scholarship that has descended from the Tompkins-­Douglas debates, the fictionality of sentimental fiction has largely been taken for granted.14 But, as Barbara Hochman recently put it, “Fiction was not an inevitable choice for Stowe.”15 Or even more than this, the prevailing belief that fiction was an inappropriate genre for polemical advocacy would seem to make it an especially improper vehicle for Stowe’s abolitionism. In turning to fiction, Stowe selected a genre that was widely regarded as uniquely ill-­suited to her proj­ect of social transformation. But fiction’s perceived inappropriateness for po­liti­cal advocacy, I want to suggest, actually represents a key aspect of Stowe’s advocacy proj­ect. Stowe, like many of her contemporaries, negotiated the public-­private and political-­apolitical divides as a generic prob­lem, using the contest over her book as a fiction to stage its ambivalent relation to politics. This chapter argues that certain antebellum writers used fictionality to establish the juxtapo­liti­cal stance that Berlant describes: by addressing po­liti­cal issues in fiction, they figured their proj­ects as oriented “­toward politics but . . . ​abundantly on the outside of it.” In an era increasingly pessimistic about politics as a means of addressing the nation’s most pressing issues, fictionality marked a text’s ends as extra-­political, pointing readers to alternative imaginaries for social transformation. This use of fictionality was not confined to sentimental fiction. For a wide range of writers disillusioned with conventional politics—­including writers as dif­fer­ent from Stowe as the penny-­press sensationalist George Lippard—­ fictionality provided a communicative framework that distanced their proj­ects from what they presented as the corrupt institutions of politics and the traditional public sphere. Or even more than this, fictionality’s association with privacy and its marginalization from deliberative politics endowed fiction with a unique rhetorical authority to criticize po­liti­cal institutions and conventional po­liti­cal discourse. Its perceived separation from the po­liti­cal public sphere rendered fiction an ideal vehicle for metadiscursive commentary on how politics ­were conducted in the antebellum United States.

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The Ambivalent Publicity of Temperance Fiction The 1840s and 1850s brought the widespread recognition that fiction had become a defining feature of the era’s lit­er­a­ture. The Ladies’ Repository put it succinctly: “One of the characteristics of the lit­er­a­ture of the pre­sent time is the prominent position occupied by prose fiction.”16 Periodicals presented fiction as having a unique influence over readers: “fiction has become,” declared DeBow’s Review in 1860, “the chosen vehicle of information and instruction for the pre­sent generation of readers.”17 The novel’s popularity, in par­tic­ u­lar, had endowed the genre with a singular potential to persuade readers and shape public opinion: “novels,” wrote Godey’s in 1850, “are now the ­great vehicle for public sentiment, where . . . ​all new ideas . . . ​are promulgated.”18 As the Literary World noted ­later that year, the novel had become one of the principal genres of the US public sphere: “The novel is now almost recognized with the newspaper and the pamphlet as a legitimate mode of influencing public opinion, an indispensable organ in the discussion of any party question or set of opinions.”19 Reviewers marveled at the variety of movements and c­ auses—­from abolitionists to religious sects, from antidueling to financial reform—­that sought to harness the novel for advocacy and reform: “­every sect and ­every cause,” wrote the Literary World in 1853, “must have its novels.”20 While many periodicals noted fiction’s new centrality to public sphere discussions, few shared the Literary World’s sense that novels ­were a “legitimate mode of influencing public opinion.” More often, reviewers regarded such uses of fiction as departures from the “legitimate” uses of the mode: “Modern fictions, we know, are expected to do, their own legitimate work,” wrote the North American Review in 1856, “but also that of the hard, dry, voluminous treatises on philosophy and morals of former times; they are expected to supply the place of legislators and divines, to obviate the necessity for polemical essays and po­liti­cal pamphlets.”21 Reviewers often mocked this expanded sense of fiction’s purpose—­what they regarded as the mission creep of modern novelists: “Novels are one of the features of our age,” observed Putnam’s in 1854, “Do you wish to instruct, to convince, to please? Write a novel! Have a system of religion or politics or manners or social life to inculcate? Write a novel!”22 “We have,” lamented Graham’s in 1856, “po­liti­cal novels, representing ­every variety of po­liti­cal opinion—­religious novels, to push the doctrines of ­every religious sect—­philanthropic novels, devoted to the championship of ­every reform—­socialist novels, philosophic novels, metaphysical novels. . . . ​The opponents of novel writing have turned novelists.”23 Such a complaint indexes the era’s general ac­cep­tance of novels, but it also highlights that not all uses of fiction ­were considered equally acceptable. As we saw in chapter 4, the widespread approbation of fiction in periodicals was bound up with the emergence of a conception of fiction as a work of art oriented ­toward moral self-­culture, aesthetic appreciation, and private entertainment. When writers broke with

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this delimited understanding of the mode, reviewers often condemned their work as betraying fiction’s inherent purpose, what the North American Review called its “legitimate work.” Putnam’s put it more bluntly: “A novel is not an appropriate vehicle for doctrine.”24 Reviewers especially objected to fictions that they saw as encroaching on politics: “it is the unhappiest idea pos­si­ble,” wrote the Knickerbocker, “to suppose that politics can be associated, in any effective way, with romance or fiction.”25 Reviewers usually regarded po­liti­cal uses of fiction as, to use the Southern Literary Messenger’s phrasing, “incompatible with its essence and alien to its original designs.” In departing from the proj­ect through which fiction had gained a new degree of cultural legitimacy, ­these po­liti­cal fictions, reviewers argued, threatened to compromise fiction’s emerging status as a form of art: the “novel has become an essay on morals, on po­liti­cal economy, on the condition of ­women, on the vices and defects of social life,” wrote the North American Review, “The Novel has become a quack advertisement in three volumes. . . . ​Everywhere pure lit­er­a­ture seems defunct.”26 This conception of fiction as inherently disconnected from politics is also evident in a contemporaneous body of writing that was other­wise largely opposed to such periodical reviews—­the critiques of novel-­reading that, as Coleman and Brady have shown, continued to appear in antebellum conduct lit­er­a­ture.27 Such critiques, however, differed in significant ways from ­earlier antifictional arguments: where early national critics ­were especially concerned about how novel-­reading would lead readers to imitate improper be­hav­ior, antebellum critics worried that reading novels would lead to a complete lack of action. In his 1853 “Pernicious Fiction; or the Tendencies of Indiscriminate Novel Reading,” Samuel Harris details what he sees as the ultimate effects of the “violent alternations of feeling” produced by novels: “Nothing is effected by all this commotion—­nothing to be learned, nothing to be purposed, nothing to be done. The excitement has burned itself out, and nothing remains.”28 What makes fiction “pernicious,” according to Harris, is that it “excit[es] the feelings without imposing any obligation to effort.” Brady has shown how ­these antebellum critics condemned fiction-­reading as an individual, even selfish, act that “privatized emotion” and rendered readers solitary and passive by separating them from the public, collective world of politics: “[None] are found so insensible to the real miseries of life as t­ hose who weep over the miseries painted in fiction,” wrote Charles Wesley Andrews in 1856, “None are so shut up in their own indulgence, or lead a life so isolated and selfish as the confirmed novel-­reader.”29 ­These criticisms recall, of course, republican condemnations of fiction from the 1790s and early 1800s. But they also share the conception of fiction-­reading as a vehicle for private self-­culture that underpinned the cele­brations of fiction circulating in contemporaneous periodicals. That is, t­ hese critiques of novel-­reading dovetail with con­temporary reviews in associating fiction with an inward-­looking privacy, a focus on self, and an idealized view of the world. But where one group of

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writers valued fiction for how its idealized repre­sen­ta­tions offered readers a means of developing their moral sense and aesthetic taste, the other saw this mode of reading as self-­indulgent and even solipsistic: “no small portion of the reading community,” wrote one critic of novel-­reading, “continually dwell in an ideal world of their own.”30 Ultimately, ­these groups disagreed less about what it meant to read fiction than about w ­ hether such reading was good for society. The 1840s and 1850s, then, brought an unpre­ce­dented explosion of fiction-­ publishing—­driven by technological advances in printing, the increasingly widespread approbation of fiction, and the mode’s appropriation by vari­ ous social movements—­that made fiction newly central to US print culture, but this era’s discussions of fiction and fiction-­reading ­were riddled by tensions and contradictions. In this era, fiction was both regarded as a “vehicle for public sentiment” and widely associated with an inward-­looking privacy. Reviewers declared fiction to be fundamentally opposed to po­liti­cal polemic and controversy, yet they also noted that ­every cause had its novels and its fictions. Periodicals called on fictionists to exert an edifying influence on society, but they insisted that they do so without engaging in controversy, polemic, or indeed, politics in any form. The popu­lar genre of temperance fiction provides a revealing example of how certain social movements accommodated such tensions in the cultural meaning of fictionality. Or even more than this, temperance fiction illustrates how some movements actually harnessed ­these tensions for their proj­ects of persuasion: temperance writers used the contradictory associations of fictionality to negotiate their movement’s vexed relationship to both conventional politics and its own self-­conscious publicity.31 Following an 1836 vote by the American Temperance Union to approve the use of fiction, temperance tales, sketches, and longer fictions flooded the US print market.32 Most temperance writers sought to distinguish their works from the mass of novels: “The story I am ­going to tell you, reader,” Walt Whitman insists in Franklin Evans, or the Inebriate (1842), “­will be somewhat aside from the ordinary track of the novelist.”33 Like other reform stories, many temperance tales claimed to be extra-­novelistic on grounds of their firm basis in real­ity: “I narrate occurrences,” writes Whitman, “that have had a far more substantial existence than in my fancy.” The hugely popu­lar Timothy Shay Arthur presented his Six Nights with the Washingtonians (1842) and Ten Nights in a Barroom (1854) as “not mere fictions” but as having a “basis in real incidents.”34 Positioning their tales as part of the wider public sphere debates about temperance, ­these writers ­were preoccupied with authenticating their narratives as accurate repre­sen­ta­tions of the world “as it is.” In endlessly claiming distinction from “mere fictions” and the “ordinary track of the novelist,” however, temperance tales also invited comparison and even an association with fiction. In spite of the mode’s suspect status, t­ here ­were clear reasons why a temperance tale—­whether explic­itly fictional, pseudofactual, or nonfictional—­would court this association: fiction’s perceived

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disconnection from the “world” fit nicely with temperance’s master plots. A ­ fter all, as the Knickerbocker noted, fiction and the novel had come to be regarded as the genres of domestic life par excellence: “The novel, at pre­sent, more than any other variety of lit­er­a­ture, becomes a h ­ ouse­hold book, and in some sort a member of the f­amily.”35 Temperance tales rely on a symbolic opposition between the home and the world, in which the former is the site of domestic virtue, piety, and contentment, and the latter is the site of intemperance, blasphemy, and debauchery. Again and again in ­these tales, protagonists confront a choice between returning to the moral space of the home (embodied in a long-­ suffering s­ ister, m ­ other, wife, or ­daughter) or roaming through the urban world of taverns with male companions. ­Because fiction had come to be opposed to “the world” that temperance codes as so dangerous, fictionality—or at very least, an association with fiction—­reinforced a thematic emphasis on the dangers of venturing into this fallen world, even in the name of gaining experience. Metta Victoria Fuller Victor’s The Senator’s Son (1853) provides a paradigmatic example. One of its (many) moments of crisis centers on the titular senator’s son’s dilemma of ­whether he should join some cronies for champagne or return home, where his virtuous ­sister awaits with a book that they had planned to read together. (Its virginal pages remain uncut.) Victor juxtaposes a scene of private, domestic reading against the revels of public drinking ­houses. As an edifying amusement enjoyed within the home, fiction-­reading made for a power­ful symbolic foil to the debauchery of the tavern: as Godey’s observed in 1853, “what vast amount of benefit t­ hese attractive productions induce, by fostering a love of purer recreation than the young would other­wise cultivate, and by withdrawing the mind from habits of questionable or decidedly pernicious influence, to the sacred precincts of domestic affection.”36 Fictionality, as a communicative framework, associates the tale itself with the very acts of private reading and self-­cultivation that temperance fiction’s protagonists eschew on the road to ruin. Temperance fiction often presented one arena of worldly society as especially dangerous: politics. American politics, of course, had long been a rather boozy affair, with liquor playing central role in electioneering. (The Senator’s Son includes an episode in which the senator convinces a reformed drunkard to have one drink in an attempt to win his vote. This leads, of course, to the man’s descent into perpetual inebriation and his eventual murder of his own beloved ­daughter.) In Arthur’s tales, for example, the most debauched characters are prominent politicians and the po­liti­cal pro­cess is driven by corrupt tavern keepers and distillers. Temperance tales often figured even an interest in politics as entailing a fall from moderation. In Arthur’s Washingtonians, it is the desire to “talk politics” as much as alcohol itself, that draws young men to the tavern and leads to their ruin. Temperance fiction, then, sets itself in opposition to both formal politics and the public discourse around politics—­ “talking politics”—­instead associating itself with individual moral reform and

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private, domestic life.37 Yet even as Temperance endlessly disassociated itself from formal politics, it was also engaged in a po­liti­cal proj­ect. This became even clearer in the 1850s when reformers increasingly sought to enact their proj­ect of social transformation through legislation in the wake of 1851’s (in)famous Maine Liquor Law, which prohibited the sale of alcohol in the state. Arthur might pre­sent “Talking politics” as a dangerous pastime in 1842’s Six Nights with the Washingtonians, but this is exactly what the virtuous narrator of his 1854 Ten Nights in a Bar-­Room does for much of the narrative. He even risks entering a tavern to advocate for the Maine Law! Nowhere are ­these tensions more dramatically illustrated than in The Senator’s Son, which is subtitled “the Maine-­Law, a Last Refuge” and “dedicated to Law-­Makers.” In Victor’s fiction, the senator’s po­liti­cal ­career leads directly to his intemperance (and his murder in a drunken po­liti­cal dispute). His son inherits his taste for liquor, but, guided by his virtuous s­ ister and wife, he reforms his wild ways. Or he reforms them ­until he gets involved in politics, leading him back to the ­bottle and away from both his literary pursuits and virtuous domesticity. This condemnation of po­liti­cal life, however, is in tension with the book’s avowedly po­liti­cal proj­ect and plot. Unlike many temperance fictions, The Senator’s Son’s ending hinges not on an individual’s (in)-ability to reform, but on the failure of legislators to vote for the Maine Law in the Western town to which the senator’s son has moved. Better than any other work, The Senator’s Son exemplifies temperance fiction’s vexed relationship to politics: it makes a po­liti­cal appeal even as it disavows and even condemns politics as a practice. Victor’s preface reveals how fictionality structures the narrative’s ambivalently po­liti­cal proj­ect. Victor justifies troubling the public with a “new work of fiction” by invoking the disconnection between the “strong feeling in f­ avor of the general adoption of the Maine Liquor Law” and the inability of politicians “to carry into effect an Act that must so clearly benefit all classes of society.” She voices familiar anx­i­eties about fiction, claiming that “the captivating garb of fiction” should only be “tolerated” when it serves “some effort at ­human improvement.” The interest of this conventional defense of fiction’s edifying effects lies in how it subtly shifts the book’s object from po­liti­cal action—­passing the Maine Law—to individual reform: “if I should ever hear of one soul saved by [my fiction’s] means from the dark and fearful gloom that forever hangs over the end of the drunkard, it would be more than payment for all my l­ abors.” As Victor theorizes her book’s merits “as a fiction,” she shifts focus from po­liti­cal concerns to personal ones, from legislative change to individual reform. This shift, of course, fits with the dominant conception of fiction as an instrument for private, moral reform, and it is on ­these terms, Victor insists, that her book should be evaluated: “­Whether it is ever destined to accomplish even this much remains to be seen; but its failure ­will not alter my faith in the ultimate triumph of the Maine Liquor Law.”38 Regardless of

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her fiction’s success in saving individual drunkards, Victor believes that the Maine Law ­will succeed. This reframes her fiction’s relation to the Maine Law: the law’s enactment is no longer presented as its motivation, but as something in excess of its proj­ect. The mediation of fictionality has shifted the proverbial goalposts: The Senator’s Son addresses legislators and has an explic­itly po­liti­ cal aim, but, as its preface makes clear, its fictionality signals its orientation ­toward individual moral reform. Temperance writers thus used fictionality to code their advocacy proj­ects in terms of personal moral edification rather than po­liti­cal polemic. In 1850, the Sons of Temperance organ­ization honored T. S. Arthur for his ser­vice to “the cause of lit­er­a­ture, temperance, and morals.” The Sons praised both Arthur’s “advocacy of the temperance cause” and “his popu­lar and useful works in the department of moral fiction” and they made clear what linked ­these proj­ects: “His aim is always to elevate the moral sentiments of his countrymen, and furnish new motives and excitements to unswerving moral rectitude in the conduct of life.”39 The tripartite “cause” that Arthur’s work exemplifies—­“ lit­ er­a­ture, temperance, and morals”—is telling: this address reveals how fiction’s association with personal moral self-­cultivation made it an especially potent vehicle for disseminating the ideology of a movement that often defined its increasingly po­liti­cal proj­ect of social transformation in opposition to conventional politics. Fiction’s contradictory coding as a publicly circulating mode associated with domestic privacy thus allowed temperance to associate itself si­mul­ta­neously with mass publicity and private, individual reform. Franklin Evans, for example, hopes his story ­will be “wafted by ­every mail to the vast parts of this republic” influencing “the might and deep public opinion,” while justifying his proj­ect in terms of its impact “on the heart of each person who scans it” (3–4). Fiction’s cultural coding enabled temperance tales to disavow the “talking politics” that is so deadly in Arthur’s works, even as they also participated in the public sphere discourse figured so vividly in Franklin Evans. Fictionality provided a communicative framework in which a po­liti­cal appeal could be presented as outside of politics. While temperance writers used fictionality to position their advocacy texts within the public sphere, t­ hese texts also transformed fiction’s position in US print culture. Just as the cultural coding of fiction as extrapo­liti­cal made it valuable for the temperance movement, the ideology of temperance allowed for the flourishing of advocacy fiction in a way that more explic­itly po­liti­cal movements could not: oriented ­toward social transformation but explic­itly abjuring conventional politics, temperance gave fiction a new public sphere prominence without compromising its association with private morality or its perceived separation from po­liti­cal controversy. Or rather, reinforcing this conception of fiction, temperance tales helped to consolidate an understanding of fictionality as signaling a text’s orientation t­ oward private self-­ cultivation rather than po­liti­cal action.

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Fictionality and Social Criticism in The Quaker City The temperance ideology of personal reform allowed temperance fiction to embrace a proj­ect of po­liti­cal advocacy without violating the ascendant conception of fiction-­reading as a discipline of moral self-­cultivation. More explic­ itly po­liti­cal and polemical fictions, on the other hand, ­were condemned as monstrous bastardizations of both fiction and politics: the “po­liti­cal novel,” wrote Sartain’s in 1850, is “a style of writing to which we bear no partiality. We do not like argument in the shape of a love story. . . . ​When we read politics or metaphysics, or any other ics, let us have it in its own proper shape.”40 Critics insisted that when writers broke with what was regarded as fiction’s inherent disconnection from po­liti­cal controversy, they not only betrayed fiction’s true purpose but also undermined public sphere deliberation. As the Southern Quarterly Review put it, “To make truth depend upon a fiction or to argue a truth by means of a fiction, or to endeavor to inculcate a body of moral opinion through the agency of a tale that requires an invention of facts, is a very . . . ​dangerous practice. Art w ­ ill sway . . . ​and the truth w ­ ill become clay in the hands of the potter.”41 Fictions that engaged in controversial social criticism ­were thus forced to return to epistemological questions about fiction’s reliability as a source of knowledge. In seeking to authenticate their texts as evidence within t­ hese wider public sphere debates, however, fictionists did not always reject assumptions about fiction’s separation from politics and the public sphere. Rather, they used this perceived separation to establish their authority to comment on how po­liti­cal discourse was conducted in the antebellum United States. Lippard’s The Quaker City, or the Monks of Monk Hall (1844–45) offers a dramatic example. Reversing the conventional wisdom about fictionality, Lippard contends that fiction actually represents a more reliable source of knowledge about the world than the factual genres of the public sphere, ­because its status as a vehicle for mere entertainment f­ rees it from the corrupting influences that distort po­liti­cal discourse. The Quaker City is a city mystery full of sensational events, ranging from lurid tales drawn from a­ ctual urban life to super­natural events in the tradition of “Monk” Lewis. Its labyrinthine plot follows a number of intertwined storylines, all involving the titular “Monks of Monk Hall,” a cabal of Philadelphia’s elite—­bankers, clergymen, politicians—­ that gathers each night for secret debauchery, often at the expense of the city’s less fortunate citizens. The gothic mode provides Lippard with a ready-­made set of conventions for exposing the proverbial, and in some cases literal, skele­ tons in the closets of Philadelphia’s most distinguished citizens.42 The Quaker City managed the remarkable feat of being regarded as both too fictional and not fictional enough: it was condemned for distorting “­things as they are” and for attacking specific individuals. Lippard defended himself

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against the former charge in the press, invoking the Public Ledger as evidence of the “suicides, murders, outrages of ­every sort, now ­going on, day ­after day, in this ­great city.”43 He embraced the latter charge by publishing a Key to the Quaker City, which promised to authenticate his fiction’s truth and assign concrete referents to its villains. This Key, however, encourages, but does not allow for scandalous decoding: for some characters, it insists on a real-­life basis, but it does not provide the promised names; for o ­ thers, it reasserts their fictionality.44 Across t­ hese vari­ous paratexts, then, Lippard argued for The Quaker City’s accuracy as a revelatory picture of Philadelphia “as it is,” while also reaffirming the “unreality” of its characters. This playful engagement with fictionality is most evident in The Quaker City’s reflections on the corrupt newspaper editor, Buzby Poodle: “Oh, magnificent Quaker City . . . ​ how delightful to all your denizens, must be the reflection that Buzby Poodle is no living nuisance, but an airy, though loathsome creation of the author’s brain!”45 Lippard ironically rehearses a long-­standing epistemological critique of fictionality, suggesting that ­because Poodle is a fiction, he cannot reflect the real­ity of Philadelphia. Readers can take comfort in the fact that the corrupt editor “has no existence in fact, but is only a fancy of the author, a fiction of [his] brain.” Lippard, of course, is suggesting the exact opposite: Buzby’s lack of a specific referent, in fact, draws attention to the pervasiveness of such corruption and by extension, the self-­evident relationship of Lippard’s fiction to con­temporary Philadelphia. ­These extended reflections on his fiction’s “real­ity” reveal Lippard’s anxiety that The Quaker City’s sensationalism might undermine its credibility as a revelatory exposé. But he insists that gothic fiction can produce a kind of knowledge of the world that more mimetic modes cannot: “We like to look at nature and at the world, not only as they appear, but as they are . . . ​the skele­tons resting in the coffin . . . ​the solitary grave hidden far down in vaults where no mourners ever weep . . . ​­these are subjects and fancies and characters which we delight to picture” (258). In a move that would have been incomprehensible to many critics of fiction, Lippard aligns t­ hings “as they are” with his macabre “fancies”: only such “fancies” can communicate, he argues, the “truth” about “nature and . . . ​the world.” According to Lippard, the Monks’ sensational crimes capture the nature of the more prosaic abuses with which he pairs them—­such as a bank man­ag­er’s refusal to aid men whom he has impoverished—­more vividly than strictly mimetic repre­sen­ta­tions could.46 ­These “fancies” do not represent an epistemological threat, but actually reveal “the world” anew, confronting readers with the true nature of the realities which they have been trained to overlook—­the rich man’s seduction of a servant, the banker’s financial crimes, or the aristocrat’s embezzlement of funds from charitable organ­izations.47 Faced with skepticism of sensational fiction’s “truth” within the wider public sphere, Lippard actually claimed this suspicion as a means of legitimating

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his proj­ect of social commentary. Where many critics worried that fiction’s nonfactuality would compromise public sphere debate, Lippard argued that fiction’s marginalization from politics and public sphere discussion, in fact, endowed it with a unique epistemological reliability. The traditional institutions of both po­liti­cal and literary public spheres are among The Quaker City’s chief villains. Embodied in Poodle and Petriken (a literary periodical editor and minor Monk) respectively, newspapers and literary magazines are depicted as cesspools of libel, deceit, and bribery. For Lippard, the con­ temporary “corruptions of republican princi­ple” are best exemplified by Philadelphia’s sordid politics—­modern statesmen are, he writes in The Key, “A band of professed politicians, who make a traffic in princi­ples, buy votes, control factions, and barter away the honor of their country, for a bribe or an office”48—­and he suggests that it is largely through the press that such po­liti­ cal corruption is perpetrated. In The Quaker City, Poodle’s paper, the Daily Blackmail, serves as one of the primary institutions through which the Monks maintain their sway over Philadelphia: trading po­liti­cal ­favors for Poodle’s aid, they use his paper to further their own interests, maintaining a status quo that profits the club’s members. Alternatively, feminized literary editors such as Petriken—­and the “perfumed” critics Lippard occasionally addresses directly—­dismiss stories such as Lippard’s sensational revelations as offensive violations of “polite lit­er­a­ture,” providing cover for the sordid crimes that pervade the Quaker City.49 Lippard’s narrator imagines hostile critics condemning his book as indecorous and vulgar, b ­ ecause it breaks the taboo against polemic and exposé advocated by respectable literary magazines.50 Through such reflections, Lippard suggests that the prevailing conception of fiction as an inappropriate vehicle for controversy renders such institutions of “polite lit­er­a­ture” complicit in Philadelphia’s rampant abuses of power: by condemning his revelatory gothic tales for violating both good taste and the accepted uses of fiction, such critics, no less than corrupt newspaper editors, enable the crimes perpetrated by the city’s elite. For Lippard, the prob­lem is not simply the asymmetry in capital and power structuring Philadelphia’s public sphere (though this is part of it). Rather, it is that the public discourse ostensibly embodied in newspapers and periodicals is not public in any meaningful sense. It has all been determined beforehand based on the interests of elites. Philadelphia’s politics and public sphere are only a puppet show played out in front of a duped populace: po­liti­cal deliberation has been displaced from the discursive space of print to the enclosed, physical space of Monk Hall. For Lippard, the print public sphere is not a space of rational debate or even po­liti­cal contention, but a shadow projection agreed upon in private by a conspiratorial elite. In The Quaker City, the very publicness of the public sphere is a sham. Lippard’s own authorial persona offers a striking contrast to Philadelphia’s Poodles and Petrikens: in The Quaker City, Lippard pre­sents himself as an

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impoverished artist, who works alone in his garret, isolated from the organs of polite and po­liti­cal culture. This Romantic isolation provides a potent contrast to ­those writers and editors who are enmeshed in the corrupt power structures that undergird Philadelphian po­liti­cal life and elite culture. Yet even as Lippard bases his authority as a social critic on his separation from such influence, he must also imagine a means for this isolated author to reach a wide audience while bypassing the public sphere institutions—­both po­liti­cal and literary—­controlled by t­ hese elites. Mass entertainment provides just such an imaginary. Critics, both in Lippard’s day and our own, have accused Lippard of pandering to popu­lar tastes: as A.J.H. Duganne put it in 1848, The Quaker City “was written to sell.”51 Throughout The Quaker City, Lippard underscores his fiction’s appeal for the “indefatigable novel-­reader”: the “plea­sure in pursuing the thread . . . ​which combined danger, romance, and mystery” (220). And in the preface to an 1845 edition, Lippard crowed about The Quaker City’s unpre­ce­dented circulation—40,000 copies sold!—­“a success almost without parallel in the annals of our lit­er­a­ture.”52 Lippard unabashedly tethers social criticism to mass entertainment. Scholars have long regarded The Quaker City’s aspirations ­toward marketability and social transformation as contradictory impulses.53 But for all the ways in which this market orientation constrains The Quaker City’s po­liti­cal proj­ect—­a question to which I ­will return—it is also central to the book’s po­liti­cal imaginary: fiction’s coding as a consumer item oriented t­ oward entertainment means that it appeals not to an imaginary of the deliberative public sphere, but to a market logic, in which individual consumers seek plea­ sure through purchase. As Lippard sees the public sphere as controlled by a shadowy elite, this alternative imaginary of consumerist pleasure-­seeking represents an impor­tant means of envisioning circulation outside of the venues controlled by such elites. The Quaker City’s po­liti­cal proj­ect is not opposed to its commercial orientation, but dependent on it. Faced with the public sphere’s asymmetries of access and circulation, Lippard turns to fiction as a vehicle of mass entertainment in an attempt to both circumvent ­these institutions and critique them.54 By d ­ oing so, Lippard can both reject the delimited sense of fiction’s purpose associated with “polite lit­er­a­ture” and distance his fiction from the traditional organs of the po­liti­cal public sphere. When we attend to the opposition between Poodle’s entanglement with po­liti­cal power and Lippard’s authorial isolation, we can recognize why Lippard makes Poodle the subject of his most extended reflections on his book’s fictionality: “the Quaker City . . . ​is so pure, so spotless, that an Author in search of a cut-­throat Editor . . . ​must set his wits to work, and invent, a Buzby Poodle!” (140).55 In ironically rehearsing this long-­standing epistemological critique of fictionality in relation to a deceitful editor, Lippard sets up an implicit contrast between his fiction and the city’s newspapers as sources of knowledge about “the world,” insisting that his fiction pre­sents a

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truer picture of Philadelphia “as it is” than the “factual” genres of the public sphere. (The book’s final chapter, notably, features newspaper excerpts, some of which distort the story’s preceding events.) Defending his fiction in a l­ater essay, Lippard lampooned critiques of The Quaker City in terms that underscore this contrast: “He [Lippard] crowds his pages with horrors; skele­tons; corpses; daggers; skulls. . . . ​Why does he not attempt something in a quiet vein—­founded on fact—­touched with unpretending pathos, and pointing to some impressive moral, such as the immaculate purity of our banking institutions . . . ?”56 Setting his revelatory fiction against the purported “factuality” of both newspapers and respectable “founded on fact” novels, Lippard rejects “factuality” as a guarantor of reliability by exposing how “facts” tend to serve the interest of the dominant class. Like ­earlier fictionists, then, Lippard disentangles “truth” from facts, but he bases his fiction’s claim to repre­sen­ta­tional authority not on alternative standards, such as probability or possibility, but on its structural disconnection from the city’s corrupt elite. Unlike writers who sought to authenticate the reliability of their fictions in order to position them within the wider public sphere, Lippard makes this separation the basis of his fiction’s potential for truth. While some of The Quaker City’s events are based on recent incidents, Lippard stakes his fiction’s ability to capture real­ity not on the factuality of any event, but on his isolation from the structures of power that incentivize politicians and editors to distort “­things as they are.” It is in fiction’s perceived marginalization from the po­liti­cal public sphere that Lippard grounds his argument for its public sphere relevance. In its often-­outrageous reflections on its own unreality, The Quaker City makes explicit a usually implicit understanding of fiction that undergirded a wide range of antebellum advocacy fiction: fictionality signaled a text’s separation from the corrupt po­liti­cal public sphere, endowing it with a unique moral authority as an instrument of social criticism.

Fictionality and the Juxtapo­liti­cal Appeal of A Key to ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin Much like Lippard, Stowe rejected the delimited conception of fiction ascendant in the 1840s and 1850s. And as with Lippard, this rejection required Stowe to grapple with the epistemological prob­lem of fictionality. But where Lippard reveled in the inventedness of The Quaker City’s events and characters, Stowe dedicated an entire volume to, as her subtitle puts it, “presenting the original FACTS AND DOCUMENTS upon which the story is founded” and “verifying THE TRUTH OF THE WORK.” And where Lippard embraced fictionality to distance his text from Philadelphia periodicals and the public sphere writ large, Stowe sought to authenticate her work’s factual basis to establish ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s legitimacy as part of the public sphere debates over slavery. ­These divergent metafictional arguments, however, only make

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their dovetailing use of fictionality for a proj­ect of metadiscursive critique more striking. For even as Stowe stages her narrative’s continuity with public sphere discussions of slavery, the mediation of its fictionality sets it apart, allowing Stowe to figure her proj­ect as outside of this po­liti­cal discourse and thus as capable of exposing its limitations.57 Stowe’s Key explic­itly argued for what the fiction’s ­earlier serialization in the National Era had suggested: it staged ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s participation in—­and its ac­cep­tance as evidence in—­the wider debates over slavery that w ­ ere playing out across US periodicals.58 Periodical serialization alone, of course, does not produce this effect: as Hochman has shown, most fiction published in the National Era had no relation to the news whatsoever. It conformed to the understanding of fiction as dealing strictly with private life—­“didactic tales of ­family life”—­and addressed noncontroversial subjects characterized by their moralism.59 Yet, ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s engagement with the controversial issues being addressed in the articles surrounding it in the National Era—­a publication of the po­liti­cal antislavery movement—­signaled that it had ambitions beyond such private moral self-­cultivation.60 Stowe’s Key makes this argument explicit by tracing the pro­cess through which her fiction has arisen out of the factual news only to have a profound impact on this periodical discourse in turn.61 The flood of contradictory evaluations of ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s “truth” that inundated periodicals in the early 1850s crystallized the more general epistemological uncertainty that surrounded repre­sen­ta­tions of slavery in the antebellum print public sphere. Northerners, many of whom had no direct contact with slavery, ­were confronted with irreconcilable depictions of slavery’s cruelty and benevolence, as abolitionists published exposés of slave suffering and proslavery writers denounced such exposés as lies, exaggerations, and fictions. When, in Caroline Lee Hentz’s proslavery response to Stowe, The Planter’s Northern Bride (1854), a Northern ­woman discusses slavery with a visiting Southerner, she offers a tidy encapsulation of the epistemological quagmire produced by ­these competing repre­sen­ta­tions: “One does hear such strange ­things. You ­don’t say [slaves] ever sing and laugh! Why, I thought they did nothing but cry and groan and gnash their teeth, all day long. Well, it ‘is hard to know what to believe.’ ”62 The unpre­ce­dented popularity of ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin added a new question to debates about t­ hese competing repre­sen­ta­tions: can a fiction count as evidence about the nature of slavery? If so, on what terms can a fiction serve as a source of information about “slavery as it is”? Stowe’s A Key to ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin seems to address exactly this question, as it systematically lays out how each aspect of her fiction relates to the realities of slavery. By this point in our history, we are accustomed to fictions seeking to disassociate “truth” and “factuality.” Stowe’s Key, however, ventures a stronger claim: in authenticating “the truth” of ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the Key ­will show it to be a “work of fact.” The Key, however, reveals the complicated

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relation between Stowe’s narrative and “the mosaic of facts” she has collected to corroborate its truth. When the Key is approached as part of a longer history of fictionality, what is most striking about it is the multiplicity of ways in which Stowe describes her narrative’s relation to ­these facts. The Key confronts readers with ever-­proliferating ways in which t­ hese newspaper excerpts, anecdotes, court cases, letters, and personal observations authenticate ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin. For some characters and incidents, Stowe cites only evidence of their possibility; for o ­ thers, she invokes evidence that they are more representative—­ not “purely exceptional case[s]”; for yet ­others, she argues that they are “average specimen[s] of slavery.” Some characters, she insists, are based on specific individuals; for o ­ thers, she offers only evidence that she collected ­after publishing the narrative that supports their probability or likelihood. The list could be continued: ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin might be a “mosaic of facts,” but the vari­ous parts of this mosaic have very dif­fer­ent relations to the facts. The multiplicity of terms on which Stowe authenticates her fiction would seem to render the Key an inadequate answer to the very criticisms that it sought to address. Stowe dedicates an entire chapter of the Key to reproducing responses to ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin from periodical reviews, letters to editors, and private correspondence. Across t­ hese varied forums, one central question emerges: to what standard must fiction adhere to count in the ongoing debate over slavery? Stowe quotes a reviewer from the National Era, for example, who argues that the “position the slave is made to hold” in the book is “just.” This writer insists that ­those reviewers who have responded to Stowe’s fiction by citing examples of kind masters have substituted “exceptions” for the “rules of slavery” (62–63). But Stowe also quotes a review from the Courier and Enquirer that dismisses her fiction on the very terms that the National Era defends it: “The peculiar falsity of this ­whole book consists in making exceptional or impossible cases the representatives of the system” (67). ­These reviews agree on the terms on which a fiction’s accuracy should be judged—it should deal with representative cases—­even as they differ on ­whether ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin meets ­these standards. A third reviewer, however, defends the accuracy of Stowe’s book as a fiction, arguing that the conventions of fiction-­ writing require “rare and striking” rather than representative “incidents.” This reviewer offers a dif­fer­ent logic of fictional truth, in which fiction must illustrate the “prevalent . . . ​character” of institutions through exactly the kind of “exceptional cases” to which the Courier and Enquirer objects (64). In reproducing such competing reviews, Stowe both highlights the questions that w ­ ere the impetus for her Key and underscores its inadequacy as a response to them. On one hand, the Key makes sense as an answer to ­these reviews, as it clearly delineates which characters and “incidents” are representative, which probable, and which exceptional. But on the other hand, Stowe’s proliferating logics of authentication evade the very question her fiction had raised so forcefully: to what standards must fiction adhere to be accepted as

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evidence in the public sphere? Stowe provides such varied answers to this question that it amounts to a nonanswer. This, I want to insist, is neither accident nor merely a strategy for evading her critics’ attacks. It is a nonanswer that suggests that reviewers have fixated on the wrong question. This becomes clear when Stowe articulates why she turned to fiction in the first place: “The atrocious and sacrilegious system . . . ​fails to produce the impression on the mind that it ­ought to produce, ­because it is lost in generalities . . . ​when we read of sixty or eighty thousand ­human beings being raised yearly and sold in the market, it passes through our mind, but leaves no definite trace” (151). Invoking Sterne as a pre­ce­dent, Stowe claims that, in her fiction, a single representation—­a single fact “in detail”—­stands in for a ­whole “class of facts” in order to communicate an “idea of the horribly cruel and demoralizing effect of this trade.” This explanation in no way addresses reviewers’ concerns about the nature of ­these “facts” (that is, ­whether they are representative or exceptional). Rather, it invokes a logic of authentication, in which all that ­matters is that the sentimental appeal has a relation to a “class of facts.” This logic of authentication addresses a very dif­fer­ent anxiety about fiction. Stowe cites another critic who “had been reading ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and spoke of it as a novel, which, like other romances, was well calculated to excite the sympathies, by the recital of heart-­touching incidents which never had existence, except in the imagination of the writer” (48). This criticism focuses not on ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s status as a vehicle for information, but on its appropriateness as an object of “the sympathies”: “The system of the South relies on fact,” wrote the Southern Press Review, “the sentiment of the North flies to fiction.”63 This is the principal criticism that Stowe’s Key answers. ­Whether exceptional or representative, probable or pos­si­ble or based on an a­ ctual event, the narrative has some relation to the “facts” that prevents its characters from being illusory targets for sentimental investment. Entering a public sphere in which competing, contradictory repre­sen­ta­ tions of slavery asserted their truth and factuality, the Key sought to “corroborate the truth” of that most dubious source of knowledge—­fiction. “It is treated as a real­ity—­sifted, tried, and tested, as real­ity,” writes Stowe in the Key’s preface, “therefore as a real­ity it may be proper that it should be defended” (5). But if the Key seems to grapple directly with questions about fiction’s ability to serve as a source of knowledge, it is actually an attempt to shift the grounds of contestation by providing only partial answers to t­ hese epistemological questions. Stowe does not dismiss t­ hese questions, but she reintroduces them in a qualified form. Establishing her narrative as a “real­ity” is central to Stowe’s proj­ect ­because it legitimates her fiction as a vehicle for sentimental investment. For this end, the exact nature of this “real­ity” is not impor­tant; what ­matters is only the fact that such a logic exists. Stowe’s proj­ect of authentication is undertaken less in the ser­vice of clarifying her book’s status as a source of knowledge, than in ratifying her sentimental proj­ect. Or, rather, ­those two

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proj­ects are intertwined in the Key, but the former is subordinated to the latter. The most sustained engagement with the epistemological prob­lem of fictionality in all of American lit­er­a­ture implicitly rejects this framework for evaluating fiction.64 It might seem like we have worked through a series of knotty questions about fictional truth only to arrive at a familiar understanding of Stowe’s fiction as a vehicle for sentimental investment and moral self-­culture. Yet, this emphasis on sympathetic self-­cultivation does not mean that the Key’s attempts to authenticate ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s reliability as evidence within the public sphere debates about the nature of slavery are without force. The complexity of the Key’s argument emerges from the uncomfortable jostling of two dif­fer­ent imaginaries for social transformation: public sphere deliberation and private sentiment. By authenticating her fiction’s “real­ity,” Stowe suggests the legitimacy of ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin as public sphere discourse; but she si­mul­ta­ neously figures this pro­cess of authentication as first and foremost ratifying its sentimental impact, reaffirming the prevailing conception of fiction-­reading as a discipline of moral self-­cultivation. In the Key, Stowe stages ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s engagement with its moment’s most pressing po­liti­cal issue, even as she also insists that her fiction’s ambitions and modes of persuasion lie beyond the purview of conventional, deliberative politics. The Key thus makes clear the metadiscursive argument that underlies ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s call for social transformation through moral feeling. Fiction as the genre of private sentiment par excellence has the potential to reform a corrupted po­liti­cal pro­cess that has failed: “If this fearful prob­lem is left to take its course as a mere po­liti­ cal question to be ground out between the upper and nether millstones of po­liti­cal parties, then what w ­ ill avert agitation, angry collisions, and the desperate rending the Union?” (Key, 251). Po­liti­cal institutions—­driven by factional interests—­are incapable of confronting the moral crisis of slavery.65 Its National Era publication might have positioned ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin alongside specifically po­liti­cal antislavery arguments, but Stowe’s Key disavows its identity with po­liti­cal antislavery’s proj­ect. This ambivalent relation to politics is why Berlant takes ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin as the originary text of the “juxtapo­liti­cal” culture of sentimentalism—­a culture that figures itself as si­mul­ta­neously “open to” and “outside of ” politics. The pervasive influence of ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin on l­ ater American culture, however, can obscure its strangeness in its own moment: in spite of the controversies it sparked, when we gaze back at ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin through its long afterlife, its fictionality can seem conventional or even, as Hochman puts it, “inevitable.”66 This overlooks how Stowe used fictionality to create the book’s juxtapo­liti­ cal appeal. That is, fiction’s complicated status as a publicly circulating genre associated with privacy provided Stowe with a generic means of negotiating an ideological contradiction. For Stowe, the ascendant conception of fiction-­ reading as a practice of moral self-­culture made it ideal for addressing the

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inadequacies of a national public discourse and po­liti­cal culture that lacked a moral rudder. But to reform po­liti­cal discourse, fiction had to first show its relevance to politics.67 By si­mul­ta­neously legitimating her fiction as public sphere discourse and staging her fiction’s discontinuity with this discourse, Stowe used fictionality to create a discursive space in which her fiction could claim to influence politics without compromising its autonomy from it. This is the crucial distinction between Lippard and Stowe and the republican fictionists of chapter 2: when Brackenridge and Tyler, for example, sought to legitimate fiction within the po­liti­cal public sphere, they argued against the prevalent association of fictionality with privacy and leisure; for Stowe and Lippard, alternatively, the way in which this cultural coding mediates their text’s relation to the public sphere constitutes a key part of their proj­ects, rather than something that must be overcome or reversed. They recognized that fiction had developed into—or had come to be understood as—­a discursive outside to po­liti­cal discourse and they turned to it for this very reason. Although Lippard and Stowe positioned their fictions differently in relation to the public sphere—­one is a proj­ect of oppositional exposure; one of supplemental reform—­both claim fiction’s perceived distance from the po­liti­cal public sphere and conventional politics as central to the mode’s ability to serve as a vehicle of social criticism. Taken together, they attest to fictionality’s rhetorical power as a means of appealing to imaginaries for social transformation beyond what was increasingly regarded as the fallen world of politics. Ultimately, however, the very alternative imaginaries through which ­these fictions advance their critiques—­entertainment and moral self-­cultivation, respectively—­limit and even threaten to subsume their po­liti­cal force. In The Quaker City, when Byrnewood, a repentant seducer himself, kills Lorrimer to avenge his s­ ister’s seduction, it provides a satisfying conclusion to a gothic novel. Yet when approached in terms of its proj­ect of social criticism, this ending is deeply inadequate. If, as Lippard has suggested, Lorrimer’s rape of Mary Byrnewood figures the more general social abuses of Philadelphia’s ruling class, his ending provides only a personal response to such abuses. It is a fantasy of justice, but, restricted to Lorrimer, it is nothing more. Readers are offered affective relief without any program for change. ­These fictional individuals give social critique a specificity that increases its affective impact—as Stowe suggests in her invocation of Sterne—­but they also allow personal triumphs to stand in for social ones.68 This is, of course, not a prob­lem unique to fiction. The question of how an example relates to a general social phenomenon can arise across a range of discourses. But b ­ ecause antebellum fiction was understood as a consumer good oriented ­toward self-­culture, entertainment, and aesthetic appreciation this prob­lem was particularly acute for the mode. ­Whether it is the pressure to follow generic convention, to provide a sense of completion, to endow events with significance, or simply to give plea­sure to readers, fiction that aspires to

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social criticism perpetually risks compromising its own proj­ect by endowing its characters’ fates with a social significance they cannot bear. The norms of fiction-­reading as a discipline of self-­culture or aesthetic appreciation encourage readers to find a redemptive significance in the fates of individual characters. Even the understanding of fiction as a means of entertainment invites readers to find relief and closure in t­ hese individual outcomes. (This is clearly the case, as Berlant has shown, in ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin, where Tom’s “sacrifice” or Eliza’s “survival” threaten to become “recoded as the achievement of justice or liberty.”69) While Lippard and Stowe insist on fiction’s orientation t­ oward entertainment and moral self-­culture respectively to mark their works’ distance from the era’s corrupt po­liti­cal discourse and establish the authority of their social commentaries, such metadiscursive positioning also carries the risk that ­these alternative paradigms of reading ­will blunt and even subsume the force of the very social criticism that ­these writers seek to authorize. In an era pervaded by a sense of po­liti­cal failure, fictionality’s rhetorical power was bound up with its coding as extrapo­liti­cal. ­These fictions’ proj­ects of persuasion, and by extension social transformation, hinged on their figuration of the mode itself as disconnected from conventional politics. Fictionality could be used to establish a juxtapo­liti­cal address that might appeal to readers who ­were disillusioned with politics but nonetheless yearned for change. But as we ­will see in the following chapter, the mode’s association with this promise also made fictionality a site at which its limitations could be exposed and its utopic rhe­toric questioned. Once writers had harnessed fiction as a vehicle for extrapo­liti­cal social criticism, fictionality became a site at which the terms of this juxtapo­liti­cal model for social transformation could be challenged and revised.

ch a p t er se v e n

Fictionality, Slavery, and Intersubjective Knowledge

in the 1850s, fiction became newly central to the strug­gle over slavery. As we saw in chapter 6, the unpre­ce­dented popularity of ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the attendant controversy over its accuracy gave fresh urgency to the venerable epistemological questions about fictionality. Proslavery advocates dedicated a remarkable number of pages to debunking what they regarded as Stowe’s exaggerated, even delusional, repre­sen­ta­tions of slavery’s cruelties. But even as t­ hese writers shared an ideological proj­ect, their strategies for demystifying Stowe’s account w ­ ere often in tension with each other. On one hand, t­ here w ­ ere the many proslavery advocates—­discussed in chapter 6—­who condemned ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin for its fictionality. T ­ hese writers argued that Stowe’s use of fiction for abolitionist advocacy had both betrayed fiction’s innate purpose and compromised the reliability of public sphere debate. On the other hand, Stowe’s fiction also provoked a flood of anti–­­Uncle Tom fictions and novels, as proslavery writers sought to harness Stowe’s narrative strategies to ­counter her repre­sen­ta­tion of slavery. The tensions between t­ hese two prominent strands of the proslavery response to ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin confront the historian of fictionality with a question: given the widespread skepticism of fiction’s suitability for po­liti­cal advocacy and its uncertain status as evidence, why did both proslavery advocates and abolitionists turn to fiction so often in the 1850s debates about the “true” nature of slavery? This chapter posits one explanation: fiction’s distinctive mode of psychonarration offered readers a fantasy of direct access to slave interiority that proved an especially power­ful rhetorical tool in this era’s repre­sen­ta­tional strug­gle to define the slave experience. In the 1840s and 1850s, the ascendance of new theories of humanitarianism gave questions about the slave experience an increased prominence in the contestations over slavery, intensifying the desire of white Northerners for knowledge of the inner lives of enslaved persons.1 Frederick Douglass made [ 213 ]

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this white desire for such intersubjective knowledge one of the central themes of his only work of fiction, The Heroic Slave (1853). Its opening scene focuses on two desires. Believing himself alone, Madison Washington, the titular heroic slave, expresses his longing for freedom to the surrounding woods. In voicing this desire, Washington unwittingly fulfills another man’s desire. Hidden among the trees is Mr. Listwell, a white traveler, who “had long desired to sound the mysterious depths of the thoughts and feelings of a slave.”2 Probing Listwell’s desire to probe Washington’s inner life, Douglass confronted readers with a controversy that profoundly s­ haped repre­sen­ta­tions of slavery in the early 1850s: could white audiences ever truly “sound” slave interiority? The Heroic Slave’s preoccupation with this question manifests in its famously oblique approach to its hero: it does not directly represent the central events of Washington’s life—­from his flight from slavery to the rebellion aboard The Creole—­but instead focuses on how a series of white men respond to the recounting of ­these events. This insistent white mediation, I want to suggest, does not reflect, as some critics have argued, Douglass’s failure to imagine a fully realized Black heroic agency, but rather, it reflects his attempt to highlight this moment’s pervasive, but largely tacit, contestations over the accessibility of the inner “depths” of enslaved persons for white audiences.3 While the question of the accessibility of slave interiority was often an implicit one in the antebellum period, it has become an explicit and central one in recent scholarship on slavery.4 Scholars such as Margaret Abruzzo, Ezra Tawil, Justine Murison, Maurice Lee, Christine Levecq, Lauren Berlant, and especially Sadiya Hartman have traced the l­egal, scientific, and philosophical under­pinnings of repre­sen­ta­tions of the inner lives of enslaved persons and charted how such repre­sen­ta­tions s­ haped the strug­gle over slavery.5 Douglass’s engagement with the white desire for access to slave interiority in The Heroic Slave, however, highlights an aspect of ­these controversies over intersubjective knowledge that has been largely overlooked: in the post–­­Uncle Tom’s Cabin era, the question of ­whether white audiences could access the inner lives of enslaved persons became intimately bound up with the conventions for representing interiority in fiction. Fiction’s unique mode of omniscient psychonarration led antebellum reviewers to associate fiction with revelatory access to the hidden recesses of inner life: “Fiction,” wrote Sartain’s in 1850, “has even an advantage over history, since the one gives but the outward and apparent life, while the other enters the secret recesses of the heart, unveils the hidden springs of motive and action, and lays open to our view, what no history and no confessions ever do, the secret workings of the h ­ uman soul.”6 Fiction was thus especially well-­suited to provide the access to the “mysterious depths” of slave interiority that Northerners such as Listwell desperately desired, b ­ ecause third-­person fiction, as we discussed in chapter 5, has a “distinctive epistemology” characterized by the unique access that its narrators, and by extension readers, have to the inner lives of

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its characters.7 At a moment in which the emotional experience of slavery became newly central to debates about the institution’s legitimacy, fiction provided a means of giving readers a sense that they w ­ ere “sound[ing] the mysterious depths” of slave interiority. I want to suggest that this is one reason why, in 1853, Douglass turned to fiction for the first and only time in his long ­career. His counterintuitive insight was that fiction’s association with revelatory access to interiority made it an ideal vehicle for underscoring the limits of our ability to probe the inner “depths” of ­others. The Heroic Slave displays Douglass’s deep thinking about how fiction’s formal and epistemological affordances s­ haped t­ hese controversies over slave interiority: it mounts a metacriticism of fiction’s role in representing slavery that warns against its potential to give readers a false sense of their ability to fully know the inner lives of ­others, even as it also posits fiction’s intimate access to inner life as a valuable tool for resisting racialized conceptions of interiority. Faced with fiction’s new centrality to discussions of slavery, Douglass valued fiction for the very speculative nature that many of his contemporaries argued disqualified it as evidence about slavery. Writing in a post–­­Uncle Tom era when many novels about slavery disavowed fictionality, Douglass emphasized The Heroic Slave’s fictionality, underscoring its suppositional logic at the outset: “Speaking of marks, traces, pos­si­bles, and probabilities, we come before our reader” (150). Critics have approached this emphasis in terms of Douglass’s historiographical proj­ect—­the challenge of writing about a life that has only been recorded in the “chattel rec­ords.”8 This chapter argues that, in addition to this proj­ect, The Heroic Slave’s emphasis on supposition and possibility reflects Douglass’s belief in the value of such avowedly speculative modes in the strug­gle over the legibility of slave interiority. Confronted with a racist reception context that tended to read Black fictionalizing as fraudulent deceit, Douglass nonetheless placed a g ­ reat deal of rhetorical emphasis on The Heroic Slave’s fictionality, as he sought to use fictionality’s suppositional logic as a means of encouraging white audiences to recognize the necessarily speculative nature of their attempts to probe slave interiority. The Heroic Slave’s emphasis on its fictionality might be unusual in antebellum Black lit­er­a­ture, but in urging white audiences to attend to their necessarily speculative knowledge of slave interiority, it shared a proj­ect with the many slave narratives that encouraged white readers to speculate on the slave experience, even as they si­mul­ta­neously underscored that ­these readers could never fully understand such experiences. This proj­ect received its fullest development in Harriet Jacobs’s Linda, or Incidents in the Life of the Slave Girl (1861). No less than The Heroic Slave, Linda implicitly engages fiction’s central role in the repre­sen­ta­tional strug­gle over slave interiority, using a metageneric engagement with fiction to structure its call for a conjectural form of sympathetic identification. Jacobs’s narrative is “no fiction,” but it underscores— as well as any fiction—­how fictionality has structured, even in its absence,

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attempts to address all too real social and po­liti­cal prob­lems, including the intimate vio­lence of slavery. This chapter, then, explores the central role that fiction came to play in the strug­gle over slave interiority in the post–­­Uncle Tom’s Cabin era by tracing the metageneric criticisms of fiction mounted by The Heroic Slave and Linda. Douglass and Jacobs shared an uneasiness that fiction’s promise of revelatory access to inner life, when applied to enslaved characters, might produce an epistemological overconfidence in the white audiences who longed for such access. They both sought to confront such audiences with the fact that they would only ever be able to achieve a partial, speculative knowledge of the slave experience. But in this shared proj­ect, Douglass and Jacobs diverged dramatically in how they positioned their texts in relationship to this era’s fictions about slavery: where Douglass emphasized his fiction’s fictionality to draw readers’ attention to the role of speculation necessarily played in their attempts to probe slave interiority, Jacobs staged her narrative’s difference from fiction in order to resist the appropriative sympathetic identification associated with fictional characters. Taken together, their works capture the ongoing negotiation of the epistemological status of fiction—­the question of what fiction can or cannot teach readers about both the “world as it is” and the p ­ eople who inhabit it—­throughout the antebellum period. Or even more than this, they show how such epistemological questions became fraught with new po­liti­cal and ethical stakes, as writers harnessed the mode for new ends, such as probing “the mysterious depths of the thoughts and feelings of a slave.”

Fictional Transparency and the “Mysterious Depths” of Madison Washington The Heroic Slave is, among many other ­things, an incisive examination of the contestations over the possibilities, limits, and terms of intersubjective knowledge that ­shaped the strug­gle to define the “true” experience of slavery in the antebellum public sphere. “­Whether whites could know the experience of slaves” had become, as Maurice Lee succinctly puts it, “a prob­lem of intersubjectivity.”9 This was an epistemological controversy that encompassed, but also extended beyond the questions of sympathy and sympathetic identification on which much scholarship has focused: as Douglass’s fiction shows, such questions of intersubjective knowledge structured debates on issues ranging from the nature of racial difference to the probability of slave rebellion. A historical fiction based on an 1841 slave uprising aboard The Creole, The Heroic Slave begins with Listwell overhearing Washington’s lament about the burdens of enslavement. Part II picks up five years ­later, when Washington seeks refuge at Listwell’s Ohio home as he flees slavery. Listwell reveals that he had ­earlier overheard Washington and Washington tells him more of his story. Part III recounts Listwell’s encounter with Washington years ­later in V ­ irginia,

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where he has been recaptured while trying to f­ ree his wife. Listwell slips Washington a file that he w ­ ill ­later use to f­ ree himself and lead the revolt aboard The Creole. The final part consists of a coffee­house conversation between The Creole’s first mate and another man about the uprising. Staging a series of white perspectives on the legibility Washington’s inner life, The Heroic Slave encourages readers to confront the divergent assumptions that underpinned even shared answers to questions about the accessibility of slave interiority for white audiences. Listwell’s wish to “sound” slave interiority was widely shared. As Abruzzo has shown, the 1830s and 1840s saw the rise of new conceptions of humanitarianism—­espoused by abolitionists and proslavery advocates alike—­ that gave the inner lives of enslaved persons a new centrality in the contestations over slavery, as the focus of t­ hese debates shifted from the morality of inflicting pain to the experience of suffering. While, in the eigh­teenth ­century, both critics and advocates of slavery had generally taken the suffering of enslaved persons for granted, in the mid-­nineteenth ­century, ­there was an emergent consensus that the suffering of enslaved persons was a moral prob­ lem.10 This, of course, did not end the strug­gle over slavery, but it changed the terms of the debate. More and more, proslavery advocates rejected the long-­standing assumption that slavery entailed suffering, instead insisting that enslaved persons ­were generally contented. This shift was bound up with the increasing ascendance of theories of racial difference that posited immutable differences between races and argued that Black p ­ eople w ­ ere uniquely suited for servitude.11 Disagreements about the morality of inflicting pain on enslaved persons w ­ ere displaced by disagreements about w ­ hether enslaved Blacks suffered at all. In this context, the question of how to uncover the “true” evidence of the inner lives of enslaved persons became both newly urgent and especially thorny. Think back to the scene from Hentz’s proslavery fiction The Planter’s Northern Bride that we considered in chapter 6. When the Northern w ­ oman laments the epistemological quagmire surrounding slavery, she focuses specifically on external manifestations of feeling: “You ­don’t say [slaves] ever sing and laugh! Why, I thought they did nothing but cry and groan and gnash their teeth . . . ​it ‘is hard to know what to believe.’ ” ­Were such external manifestations reliable indexes of inner emotion? Given such contradictory repre­sen­ta­tions of the slave experience, what qualified as reliable evidence of the inner lives of enslaved persons? Many abolitionist texts argued—or more often, assumed—­that the inner lives of enslaved persons ­were manifest on their bodies. Taking for granted the universal translatability of emotions, including pain, sentimental abolitionist texts presented enslaved persons’ “thoughts and feelings” not as “mysterious depths,” but as clearly readable surfaces: they regarded bodies—­whether pained countenances or whipped backs—as legible signs of suffering.12 Counterintuitively, t­ hese abolitionist texts shared a set of epistemological

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assumptions about the legibility of slave interiority with the voluminous body of paternalistic travel narratives and sketches depicting “happy slaves.” Kennedy’s Swallow Barn is typical: “I came h ­ ere a stranger . . . ​to the negro character, knowing but l­ittle of their duties, habits, or temper, and somewhat disposed . . . ​to look upon them as severely dealt with, and expecting to have sympathies excited ­toward them as objects of commiseration. I have had, therefore, a rather special interest in observing them. The contrast between my preconceptions of their condition and the real­ity which I have witnessed, has brought me a most agreeable surprise . . . ​I am quite sure they could never become a happier ­people than they are ­here” (452–53). Even as ­these two bodies of writing offered contradictory accounts of the nature of slavery, they implicitly agreed that Northerners need only to witness slavery “as it is” for themselves to access the “thoughts and feelings” of enslaved persons. Other writers, however, presented such “thoughts and feelings” as fundamentally mysterious to white observers and readers. Increasingly ascendant theories of immutable racial difference contributed to the emergence of what scholars such as Murison and Ezra Tawil have identified as racialized conceptions of interiority. Figuring interiority as a product of physiology in the era of polygenesis, many writers suggested that slave interiority would remain forever inaccessible to white observers, ­because Blacks and whites did not experience the same emotions and sentiments.13 In rejecting the easy accessibility of slave interiority for white readers, t­ hese racist, racialist writers embraced a position that overlapped, counterintuitively, with the stance staked out by the many fugitive slave narratives, including Douglass’s own, that insisted that such readers lacked the requisite experience to understand the emotional experience of slavery. Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) exposes the epistemological limitations of the observational logic under­ lying both abolitionist pleas for sympathy and paternalistic repre­sen­ta­tions of “happy slaves” by showing how observers’ lack of experience—­rather than racial difference—­produces errors in interpreting external manifestations of slave interiority: “I have often been utterly astonished . . . ​to find persons who could speak of singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment. . . . ​It is impossible to conceive a greater ­mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy . . . ​such is my experience.”14 When Douglass took up the white desire to probe slave interiority at length in The Heroic Slave, he showed how this thirst for intersubjective knowledge could not be disentangled from the divergent epistemological assumptions that underpinned even shared stances on the legibility of slave interiority. But before turning to his formal and thematic negotiation of ­these issues in his fiction, I want to consider why Douglass chose fiction to engage ­these questions about intersubjective knowledge in the first place. In his role as editor, essayist, and reviewer for Frederick Douglass’ Paper, Douglass was an active participant in the debates about the accuracy and authority of ­Uncle Tom’s

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Cabin. Douglass’s (and his paper’s) stance on ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin has been thoroughly documented, but what I want to highlight ­here is how Douglass’s participation in the debates over ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin also implicitly involved him in the wider controversies about the appropriate uses of fiction that, as we saw in chapter 6, Stowe’s fiction had intensified.15 Although Douglass left ­behind few abstract reflections on fiction, the reviews in Frederick Douglass’ Paper staked out a consistent a position on such issues: the paper advocated an understanding of fiction as a valuable tool for awakening sympathy, endorsed fiction’s potential for “truthfulness,” and rejected calls for novels to avoid controversial po­liti­cal subjects.16 ­These reviews reveal fiction’s still-­suspect status in the debates about slavery, but they also index fiction’s increasing prominence in ­these very debates, as the paper reviewed a host of new proslavery and abolitionist fictions across the early 1850s. Douglass, in The Heroic Slave’s exploration of the white desire to “sound” slave interiority, suggests one reason why fiction, in spite of all its attendant anx­i­eties, had become such a crucial genre for representing slavery: at a moment in which the emotional experience of slavery had become newly central to debates about the institution’s legitimacy, fiction’s unique mode of pyschonarration—­the distinctive access it offered to, as the 1850s Sartain’s review had put it, the “secret recesses” of its characters’ “hearts”—­provided a means of giving readers a sense that they ­were gaining exactly the kind of intersubjective knowledge that Northerners such as Listwell so ardently desired. Fiction’s fantasy of unmediated access to the “thoughts and feelings” of enslaved persons might have made it a potent ideological tool in the 1850s debates over slavery, but this mode of fictional psychonarration did not have a stable ideology or politics. Abolitionists such as Stowe and William Wells Brown famously used it to reveal the suffering of enslaved persons. Proslavery writers, alternatively, harnessed it in order to stage the contentedness of enslaved persons: Hentz’s The Planter’s Northern Bride used it, for example, to trace the regret of a fugitive who has left a kindly master; Maria McIntosh’s The Lofty and the Lowly (1853) used it to show an enslaved character’s fear that freedom that would separate him his home; and Mary Eastman’s Aunt Phyllis’s Cabin (1852) used it to stage a character’s gratitude for the good life that her master had provided. Even as abolitionist and proslavery fictionists offered contradictory accounts of the slave experience, fiction’s formal characteristics allowed their works to traffic in a revelatory access to inner life, making it a privileged vehicle for negotiating the epistemological challenge presented by slave interiority. Douglass, I want to posit, turned to fiction not only b ­ ecause it had become one of the ascendant genres through which (usually) white writers sought to define the slave experience, but ­because fiction formalized a position in the controversy over ­whether white audiences could ever “sound” slave interiority. For this reason, he did not simply adopt the conventions of fictional transparency, but re­imagined how fiction might

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represent inner life in order to both reveal and navigate the epistemological pitfalls bound up with this mode of direct psychonarration. The Heroic Slave is never told from Washington’s perspective, but his inner life is nonetheless at the center of the narrative. This accounts for The Heroic Slave’s reliance on what Douglass calls Washington’s soliloquies (150). While antebellum fiction occasionally included soliloquies, The Heroic Slave relies on them to an unusual degree, with its first chapter consisting almost entirely of overheard speeches. Robert Stepto, in his groundbreaking essay on The Heroic Slave, singles out t­ hese “florid soliloquies” as artistic flaws that disqualify it from being “a major short fiction of the day.”17 But if such soliloquies violate ­later conventions for fiction, they offer crucial access to Washington’s inner life. Washington’s words seize Listwell’s attention not as an act of communication, but ­because they promise to reveal his hidden depths: “ ‘To whom can he be speaking? . . . ​He seems to be alone’ [thought Listwell]. The circumstances interested him much, and he became intensely curious to know what thoughts and feelings, or, it might be, high aspirations, guided ­those rich and mellow accents” (150). Listwell is not disappointed: Madison pours forth his “thoughts and feelings,” detailing the emotional and psychological experience of slavery. Listwell’s encounter with Madison’s inner life—­“ his pent up feelings” that he utters to the “vacant air”—­leads to an instantaneous conversion: “From this hour,” Listwell resolves, “I am an abolitionist” (154). Listwell’s immediate conversion upon exposure to Washington’s “pent up feelings” provides a neat encapsulation of the tactics of antislavery fiction: a sympathetic response to a revelation of inner life produces a new po­liti­cal and moral commitment. For this reason, scholars have often read Listwell’s sudden abolitionism in relation to ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin.18 But while Listwell’s encounter with Washington recalls the pro­cess of reading abolitionist fiction, it also underscores that The Heroic Slave offers a very dif­fer­ent kind of access to slave interiority. Whereas in Stowe’s novel, the omniscient narrator, and by extension reader, has access to the unspoken thoughts and feelings of many enslaved characters, The Heroic Slave is more narrowly focalized through Listwell, who can only access Washington’s inner life through his words and looks. Even Douglass’s claims that Washington has an “expressive countenance” and that his voice is an “unfailing index” of his “soul” highlight that such exterior manifestations provide Listwell and readers with their only insight into Washington’s interiority (152). Endowing his protagonist with an exterior that reveals glimpses of an interiority that he other­wise withholds, Douglass underscores that Washington’s mind is decidedly not “transparent.” This partial opacity stands out dramatically, ­because Listwell’s mind is conventionally transparent, with Douglass directly narrating his unspoken “thoughts and feelings.” The significance of this mediated access to Washington’s inner life becomes clear in the following chapter. Listwell and his wife are in their Ohio home when they hear a stranger approach. It is Washington: “I have seen your face,

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and heard your voice before . . . ,” exclaims Listwell, “I know all” (156, original emphasis). Douglass pre­sents this greeting as a sympathetic misfiring that pains rather than soothes: Listwell’s assured declaration of his total knowledge leaves Washington “disconcerted and disquieted” (156). Listwell’s confidence in his complete knowledge of Washington, however, is quickly undermined. In the scene that follows, Douglass stages Listwell’s education in the ­limited nature of his e­ arlier access to Washington’s hidden “depths.” Washington recalls “that morning, and the b ­ itter anguish that wrung my heart” and offers an account of the events that had provoked his lamentation (158). By immediately providing new information about Washington’s interiority during this previous encounter, Douglass exposes just how ­limited Listwell’s—­and by extension, readers’—­access to Washington’s inner life was in the preceding scene. Washington’s voice might be an “unfailing index” of his soul, but t­ hese subsequent revelations expose that it is a decidedly partial one; his “expressive countenance” does not express all. And in Washington’s response to Listwell’s declaration that he knows “all” about him—­“you have rightly guessed, I am indeed, a fugitive from slavery” (156, emphasis added)—­Douglass underscores that his knowledge is speculative as well as partial. Confronted with Washington’s fresh revelations about his “thoughts and feelings” on “that morning,” Listwell gradually relinquishes the quixotic fantasy that Washington’s ­earlier words and expressions had somehow revealed his entire inner life. “Assum[ing] a more quiet and inquiring aspect” that “fi­nally succeeded in removing [Washington’s] apprehensions,” he engages Washington in dialogue (156). He still hopes to plumb the “depths” of slave experience, but he goes about fulfilling this desire by asking questions. But if one part of Listwell’s lesson in epistemological humility involves a shift from observation to dialogue, another involves confronting the limits of even dialogue as a means of “sounding” the inner life of another person, especially someone who has suffered the traumas of enslavement. In relating an overheard prayer that deeply moved him, Washington admits that he cannot “give . . . ​an idea of its deep pathos” (164). Describing a reunion with his wife, Washington simply says that “I cannot say we talked; our feelings ­were too ­great for that” (160). Dialogue might be an invaluable tool for communicating experience—­The Heroic Slave itself consists largely of dialogue—­but Douglass underscores that it is a l­imited one, incapable of fully translating inner life, especially the depths of feeling provoked by the horrors of slavery.19 Crucially, Douglass stages Listwell’s lesson in epistemological humility ­after—­five years a­ fter!—­his conversion to abolitionism. In ­doing so, Douglass pries apart t­ hese questions about the limits of intersubjective knowledge, with their attendant ethical implications, from questions of moral persuasion and po­liti­cal position-­taking: the ardent abolitionist no less than the uncommitted bystander can be guilty of this epistemological overconfidence. If part I recalls how abolitionists sought to harness the white desire to “sound” slave

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interiority for po­liti­cal persuasion, part II seeks to alter the terms of this “sounding” pro­cess. This is not a disavowal of the proj­ect of harnessing this desire for abolitionist recruitment, but it is an attempt to qualify how white abolitionists and their audiences understood their relation to the inner lives of enslaved persons. While many formerly enslaved writers rebuked white abolitionists for assuming that they fully understood the experience of enslavement, The Heroic Slave stands out for giving this critique a metafictional force. If, as Robert Levine has suggested, The Heroic Slave is, in part, “an allegory of Douglass’s relationship with Stowe,” in which “Listwell’s overhearing . . . ​and subsequent conversion to antislavery [are] analogous to Stowe’s reading of Douglass’s Narrative and eventual authoring of ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” part II’s revelation that Listwell does not, in fact, “know all” about Washington’s experience encourages readers to recognize that white abolitionist fiction, however directly it may represent slave interiority does not offer a complete knowledge of this inner life.20 Doug­ lass makes this metafictional argument explicit when, near the end of part II, he underscores The Heroic Slave’s divergence from most fiction by staging readers’ lack of access to its hero’s inner life: “We pass over the thoughts and feelings, hopes and fears, the plans and purposes, that revolved in Madison’s mind during the day that he was secreted at the ­house of Mr. Listwell. The reader ­will be content to know that nothing occurred to endanger his liberty” (167). While Douglass has consistently denied readers direct access to Madison’s interiority, h ­ ere he confronts readers with his decision to withhold this information. The contrast between Listwell’s transparent mind and Washington’s opaque one underscores that it is the inner experience of slavery—­rather than inner life in general—­that Douglass withholds. ­Here, we can see how Douglass negotiates white certitude about the knowability of the slave experience as a formal prob­lem, staging his revision of the omniscient third-­person psychonarration employed in much abolitionist fiction and linking this revision to the specific readerly attitude that he hopes to cultivate. In other words, Douglass’s metafictional proj­ect goes beyond suggesting that white authors, such as Stowe, might not “know all” about the inner life of slavery; it actually suggests that any direct fictional narration of slave interiority risks giving readers a false sense that they “know all” about the inner lives of enslaved persons. ­Here, the contrast with Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853) is striking. Published the same year as The Heroic Slave, Clotel offered readers a fictional repre­sen­ta­tion of slave interiority written by someone who had experienced enslavement firsthand: it gives readers the intimate access to hidden “thoughts and feelings”—­narrating, for example, how Clotel’s “heart fainted within her” when she learns of Horatio’s marriage and her inner “imperturbable calm” during her search for her child—­that they had come to expect from fiction.21 Douglass might have, like Brown, used his own well-­documented experience in slavery to authenticate his direct narration

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of fictional slave consciousness, but he chooses not to do so. Or even more than this, he draws attention to this decision, highlighting the gap between his knowledge of “the thoughts and feelings . . . ​that revolved in Madison’s mind” and readers’ lack of access to this mind. By so dramatically eschewing this mode of psychonarration and encouraging readers to “be content” with their inability to “sound” Washington’s interiority, Douglass urges white audiences to recognize and accept the limits of their ability to understand the experience of enslavement. Douglass’s per­sis­tent emphasis on Listwell’s “desire” to know Washington’s inner life diagnoses the appeal of abolitionist fiction: the popularity and persuasive power of a book like ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Douglass suggests, derives from the access it offers to the inner drama of enslavement. This is a proj­ect that The Heroic Slave endorses and participates in, but it does so on qualified terms, emphasizing the partial, mediated access it offers to Washington’s interiority. Highlighting his decision to “pass over” Washington’s “thoughts and feelings”—­the very thoughts and feelings that Listwell was so ­eager to probe in part I—­Douglass draws attention to the formal alternatives to transparent psychonarration that he has developed for revealing such inner depths: in light of Listwell’s overconfidence and the narrator’s withholding of Washington’s interiority in part II, part I’s reliance on soliloquies no longer appears to be an aesthetic flaw, but a power­ful means of offering a mediated access to Washington’s inner life. Warning against the epistemological and ethical pitfalls of rendering slave interiority fictionally transparent, Douglass did not abandon fiction as a tool in the repre­sen­ta­tional strug­gle over slavery, but instead re­imagined how fiction might represent the inner lives of enslaved characters.

Fictionality and Racial Interiority in The Heroic Slave While The Heroic Slave has long been celebrated as an origin point for African American fiction, scholars have often downplayed its fictionality in order to highlight its engagement with real historical events and situate it in relation to the slave narrative genre.22 Douglass, of course, had many incentives to emphasize its historical basis rather than its fictionality. As Lara Langer Cohen’s account of the reception of The Narrative of James Williams (1838) has shown in especially dramatic terms, in the antebellum United States, Black creativity and fictionalizing ­were often read as fraud. In 1838, the American Anti-­Slavery Society had published Williams’s Narrative as the “Au­then­ tic Narrative of an American Slave” and antislavery papers from around the country had attested to its truth: the Liberator declared it “incontrovertibly true”; the Pennsylvania Freeman insisted that “It is no fiction”; and ­Human Rights vouched that “we are convinced of its truth or accuracy.” Such testimonials would produce significant embarrassment for the abolitionist movement

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when it became clear that Williams had fabricated significant portions of the narrative. Within a year of its initial publication, the American Anti-­Slavery Society put out a statement discontinuing the Narrative.23 Over the subsequent de­cades, the Narrative became a touchstone of antiabolitionist arguments, as proslavery writers invoked it as evidence of abolitionist mendacity. If the Williams controversy suggests a motivation for the elaborate authenticating paratexts found in l­ ater slave narratives, it also exposes the racial coding of fictionality in the antebellum United States. Cohen has shown how race ­shaped the categorization of The Narrative of James Williams as a fraud by contrasting its reception with that of “pseudo-­slave narratives” by white writers, such as Richard Hildreth’s The Slave, or the Memoirs of Archy Moore (1836). Hildreth went to considerable lengths to pre­sent The Slave as a true account, insisting that it had been authored by the titular Moore and that he was only its editor. Readers, however, saw through this prefatory screen and identified Hildreth as the author.24 In striking contrast to James Williams, this recognition led not to condemnations of The Slave as a fraud, but to considerations—­and often cele­brations—of the merits of Hildreth’s book as a fiction. The Boston Daily Advocate lauded it as “a fiction woven out of terrible truths,” and a review of it in the New York Plaindealer declared that “Fiction never performs a nobler office than when she acts as the handmaid of truth.”25 Williams and Hildreth, then, both fabricated narratives of slavery, but the Black man was denounced as a fraud and the white man celebrated as a fictionist. The reception of The Slave as a fiction depended on its author’s whiteness. The racialization of fictionality, however, is actually best illustrated by defenses of the truth of Williams’s Narrative. Abolitionists argued for the narrative’s authenticity on the grounds that its factuality was more plausible than its fictionality. “He may have fallen into some errors of fact or exaggeration,” admitted the Pennsylvania Freeman, “but that the material portion of the narrative is correct, we must e­ ither believe, or give him credit for inventive powers almost equal to a Cooper or a Brockden Brown.”26 The Liberator argued for the impossibility of the narrative’s fabrication in even starker terms: “Does it not occur to persons that if an unlettered fugitive slave could invent such a narrative the fact would evince a genius of the first order! Why, he would be another Walter Scott! But they ­will be forced to confess that the narrative is au­then­tic, or that American negroes surpass the generality of whites in genius.”27 To defend the Narrative’s truth, the Liberator articulates with an unusual explicitness how fiction—as an index of creativity and imaginative genius—­was seen as the domain of whiteness. The controversy surrounding Williams underscores the competing pressures motivating the insistent assertions of truth and factuality that run through much antebellum African American lit­er­a­ture.28 On one hand, Black writers faced widespread racist beliefs about their inherent mendacity. On the other hand, paradoxically, they faced racist beliefs that they lacked the creative

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powers of invention that characterized white genius. As the Williams incident suggests, t­ hese two contradictory racist assumptions dovetailed to create a reception context in which Black inventiveness would be coded as deceit rather than fiction. This accounts for the prevalence of claims to truth, real­ ity, and factual basis in antebellum novels by Black writers. Clotel is partially based on historical events, and Brown interpolates nonfictional documents, from newspaper excerpts to court cases, into his narrative to authenticate its accuracy. Martin Delany’s Blake, or the Huts of Africa (1859–61) includes a number of footnotes that testify to the factual basis of some of its incidents. Similar truth claims frame Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig, or Sketches from Life of a ­Free Black (1859) and Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative, which declares in its preface, “Being the truth it makes no pretensions to romance, and relating events as they occurred it makes no especial reference to a moral, but to t­ hose who regard truth as stranger than fiction it can be no less in­ter­ est­ing on the former account.”29 My point is not to obscure the remarkable fictionalizing and inventive power evident in ­these narratives, but to note the incentive that Black writers had to distance their novels from fiction in order to avoid being categorized as frauds.30 Many of t­ hese narratives, moreover, undertook an abolitionist advocacy proj­ect that—as we have seen with ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin—­required writers, white as well as Black, to authenticate the “truth” of their repre­sen­ta­tions. The Heroic Slave’s preface, too, establishes its basis in ­actual events and persons, but it also places a rhetorical emphasis on fictionality—on the narrative’s avowedly suppositional logic—­that is singular in both antebellum fiction by Black writers and antebellum fiction about slavery more generally. Setting Washington’s unknown story against the well-­documented lives of the founding ­fathers, Douglass laments the archival gaps that leave Washington’s historian no option other than speculative reconstruction: He is brought to view only by a few transient incidents, and ­these afford but partial satisfaction. Like a guiding star on a stormy night, he is seen through the parted clouds and the howling tempests . . . ​and he again dis­appears covered with mystery. Curiously, earnestly, anxiously we peer into the dark, and wish even for the blinding flash, or the light of northern skies to reveal him. But alas! he is still enveloped in darkness . . . (150) Admitting his inability to fill this informational lacuna, Douglass turns to fiction: “Speaking of marks, traces, pos­si­bles, and probabilities, we come before our reader.” This argument for fiction’s value as a tool for speculative historiography that ­will supplement archival gaps, of course, both recalls and gives fresh relevance to the justifications for historical fictionality that predominated in the 1820s. Douglass’s proj­ect is not simply belated, but rather, it identifies an archival gap that the rise of antiquarian historiography could not

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address, ­because ­there are no rec­ords of Washington’s life beyond the “chattel rec­ords of the state.” While this justification of fiction as a tool for speculative historical inquiry is a distinct metafictional argument from his exploration of the white desire to probe slave interiority, Douglass links them by figuring the two proj­ects in strikingly similar terms. He describes his own speculative reconstruction of Washington in ways—­“covered with mystery,” “enveloped in darkness,” “wish for a blinding flash to reveal him”—­that closely anticipate Listwell’s “desire” to access Washington’s “mysterious depths.” This sets up a surprising parallel between Douglass’s explic­itly fictionalized portrait of Washington and Listwell’s voy­eur­is­tic attempts to “sound” his interiority. But where Douglass foregrounds the speculative, “partial” nature of his account, Listwell’s failure to recognize speculation’s role in his own probing of Washington’s inner life leads to his quixotic belief that he “knows all.” The Heroic Slave’s opening emphasis on its fictionality, in this sense, models exactly the kind of epistemological humility that Listwell fails to practice in his rush to gratify his intense curiosity about Washington’s interiority. But this parallel also clarifies a counterintuitive aspect of Listwell’s education in epistemological humility: The Heroic Slave does not suggest that Listwell should abandon his desire to “sound” Washington’s inner life, but only insists that he recognize, as Douglass does with his own portrait of Washington, that this is a necessarily speculative act. ­After all, Washington’s response to Listwell’s assertion of total knowledge—­“you have rightly guessed”—­does not suggest that Listwell knows nothing about Washington, but rather, it draws attention to the suppositional nature of his knowledge: Listwell’s epistemological overconfidence, this scene suggests, stems not from his desire to probe Washington’s inner life, but from his failure to recognize the role that speculative guessing must necessarily play in this endeavor. This emphasis on speculation does not license a purely imaginative recreation of Washington’s inner life. Both Douglass and Listwell have known information—­for Douglass, facts about Washington; for Listwell, Washington’s soliloquies—­that serves as the basis for their speculations about Washington’s character. The Heroic Slave’s specific logic of historical fictionality thus offers an example of how Listwell might undertake “sounding” the “depths” of someone whose experience he can never fully comprehend: he must re­spect the known facts of what Washington has told him about his experience while also recognizing the role that speculation plays in his attempts to imagine Washington’s “thoughts and feelings.” For Douglass, this knowledge is no less valuable for being speculative, but it can only be valuable if it is recognized as speculative. This suggests why Douglass, confronted with both a racist reception context that coded Black fictionalizing as fraud and a widespread anxiety about fiction’s legitimacy as evidence in the debates about slavery, nonetheless emphasized the fictionality of his historical fiction: taken together, The Heroic Slave’s narrative and preface suggest that

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fiction’s value as a vehicle for learning about other ­people inheres in its explic­ itly suppositional nature. In this use of fictionality’s suppositional logic to cultivate an epistemological humility in readers, The Heroic Slave recalls Bird’s Sheppard Lee—­another text that sought to highlight the fictionality of fiction in order to expose the limits of our ability to ever fully know the inner life of another person. This shared proj­ect, however, reveals the very dif­fer­ent kinds of epistemological humility advocated by ­these two fictions. Sheppard Lee, as we saw, argues that we can never know or access another’s interiority, ­because this interiority is the product of their distinctive physiology. In an era that saw the increasing ascendance of theories of polygenesis, such a physiological conception of inner life led Bird to embrace a racialized conception of interiority: as Murison has shown, the paired chapters in which Lee inhabits the body of a slave and the body of aristocratic hypochondriac who imagines that he is vari­ous objects and animals resonate as a parody of abolitionist appeals for sympathetic identification across racial lines. Sheppard Lee’s fantastical fictionality thus urges white audiences to recognize their attempts to identify with the inner lives of enslaved persons as delusional fantasies. This parallel, but profoundly dif­fer­ent, use of fictionality to highlight the bound­aries of personhood that preclude a full knowledge of other minds crystallizes the complex double-­move at the heart of The Heroic Slave’s metacriticism of fiction: even as Douglass cautions against the epistemological pitfalls of the fantasy of ­mental transparency that underpinned repre­sen­ta­tions of slave interiority in both proslavery and abolitionist fiction, he also posits fiction’s association with revelatory access to inner life as a potent tool for resisting racialized notions of interiority. A ­ fter all, in staging Listwell’s desire to discover the hidden “thoughts and feelings of a slave,” The Heroic Slave not only comments on, but also cultivates such readerly desires. In other words, Douglass does not abandon fiction’s promise of revealing “the secret recesses of the heart,” but rather seeks to qualify the terms on which fiction-­readers i­magined accessing enslaved persons’ “mysterious depths.” To unpack this distinction more fully, I want to turn to The Heroic Slave’s own engagement with racialist conceptions of inner life. Beyond its metafictional implications, Listwell’s lesson in epistemological humility warns against the more general assumptions about the continuity between slave exteriors and interiors that underpinned both abolitionist appeals for sympathy and paternalistic repre­sen­ta­tions of “happy slaves.” Yet, the very passage in which Douglass highlights his decision to “pass over” his hero’s “thoughts and feelings” closes with a moment of continuity between Washington’s exterior and interior that seems to contradict this lesson: “Madison gave ­every sign of sincere gratitude, and bade his kind benefactor farewell, with such a grip of the hand as bespoke a heart full of honest manliness, and a soul that knew how to appreciate kindness” (168). I want to suggest that this

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is not a contradiction, but a key part of Douglass’s wider engagement with the competing logics under­lying repre­sen­ta­tions of slave interiority. In this farewell, Douglass uses Washington’s ­mental legibility to stage a mutual emotional intimacy and a recognition of shared humanity that ­will be the grounds of a cross-­racial alliance against slavery. It is crucial, however, that, even in this moment, Washington does not have the fully transparent mind of many fictional characters. The narrator’s reflections on his inner life are derived from external “signs,” such as the “grip of his hand,” rather than direct narration of his “thoughts and feelings.” Douglass does not so much “sound the mysterious depths” of Washington’s interiority as he offers a scene in which this inner life ceases to be “mysterious,” rendered legible through exterior “signs.” This scene, then, encourages readers in interpreting external “signs” as a means of accessing Washington’s interiority. This is, of course, what Listwell had attempted in part I, and it led directly to his mistaken assumption that he “kn[ew] all” about Washington’s experience. Given that much of part II has underscored the limitations of observation as a mean of understanding slave interiority, why does Douglass close this section by suddenly presenting Washington’s exterior as revealing his inner life? The significance of this anomalous continuity between Washington’s interior and exterior becomes clearer in part III, where Douglass emphasizes t­ hose situations in which such continuity is undesirable. Having providentially reencountered Listwell, Washington describes the abuse he suffered a­ fter his reenslavement: “I was taunted, jeered at, and berated by them, in a manner that pierced my soul. Thank God, I was able to smother my rage, and to bear it all with seeming composure” (179). Surviving slavery, Douglass suggests, depends on keeping one’s “depths” mysterious: it was only the refuge provided by Listwell’s home that allowed for the other­wise dangerous continuity between Washington’s inside and outside. This brief, temporary moment of emotional legibility thus reinforces, rather than compromises, the fiction’s wider argument about observation’s inadequacy as a means of probing slave interiority: the continuity between exterior “signs” and inner life represents a utopic horizon unrealizable u ­ nder slavery. The Heroic Slave’s suggestion that it is slavery that renders Washington’s interiority obscure is a rejection of the racialized conceptions of interiority that become prominent in its final chapter. Part IV consists of a conversation between a sailor named Jack Williams and Tom Grant, The Creole’s first mate, about the rebellion aboard that ship. Scholars have attributed Douglass’s oblique approach to the uprising to his desire to avoid the incendiary act of directly representing a slave revolt as a heroic achievement.31 But this indirect approach also allows Douglass to expand his engagement with how white audiences relate to the inner lives of enslaved persons beyond such sympathetic auditors as Listwell. The sailors’ conversation reinforces Douglass’s ­earlier warning about the epistemological pitfalls of assuming that a white observer could penetrate slave interiority. But Grant’s racialist understanding

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of inner life and intersubjective knowledge also reveals the importance of holding out the possibility of the kind of mutual ­mental transparency evident, albeit briefly, in part II. Part IV begins with Williams questioning the be­hav­ior of the ship’s crew: “the w ­ hole disaster was the result of ignorance of the character of darkies in general.” Williams frames the uprising as a question of knowledge about the inner character of the prisoners—in his argument, the natu­ral cowardice of Blacks—­and he attributes the uprising’s success to the crew’s failure to see through the prisoners’ show of courage and recognize the cowardice concealed in their hidden depths. He insists that his familiarity with enslaved persons— “I know how to manage’em”—­would have allowed him to penetrate such deceptive appearances and put down the rebellion. In basing this argument on his past familiarity with enslaved persons, Williams assumes a continuity of slave interiors and exteriors—of slave be­hav­ior and “the real character of darkies”—­ that Grant emphatically rejects: “for the negro to act cowardly on shore, may be to act wisely.” Grant insists that understanding the uprising requires attending not to inherent racial “character,” but to the dif­fer­ent circumstances of enslaved persons on land and on sea: “you have studied negro character. I do not profess to understand the subject as well as yourself; but it strikes me, you apply the same rule in very dissimilar cases” (182–83). Grant reframes Williams’s claim by insisting that it was not a lack of knowledge about Black p ­ eople, but a failure to recognize what they could not know—­how Black prisoners would behave at sea—­that doomed The Creole. Grant’s ironic comment on Williams having “studied negro character” does not refute the idea of “negro character,” but it does call into question Williams’s ability to “know” it by observing enslaved ­people. What this “study” ­will produce, Grant suggests, is only information about how ­these ­people are strategically responding to their enslavement rather than any insight into a stable, inner “real character.” This lesson in epistemological humility aboard The Creole adds another layer to the well-­documented parallels between Listwell’s and Grant’s encounters with Washington. This shared recognition of their inability to fully probe slave interiority, however, has very dif­fer­ent implications in their respective chapters: ­because part IV focuses on a slave uprising, Grant’s epistemological humility resonates chiefly as a concern about deception. Grant and Williams’s disagreement about the “study” of “negro character,” crucially, is part of a discussion of how the rebellion might have been quashed. In this context, white observers’ recognition of their inability to “sound” slave interiority w ­ ill lead not to a more respectful sympathy, but to a more systematic surveillance. Moreover, while Listwell’s encounter with Washington leads to his abolitionism, Grant’s conversion is more ambivalent: he condemns the slave trade, but bristles at the suggestion that he is an abolitionist. The root of this divergence is clear: Listwell sees Washington as an equal, while Grant clings to a belief in immutable racial difference and Black inferiority. Grant offers the clearest

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expression of this racist, racialist thinking when he admits that he could not consider Washington an inheritor of the American Revolution, not b ­ ecause of any difference in princi­ples, but ­because he does not “recognize their application to one whom I deemed my inferior” (189). Grant’s racialist thinking recurs in the fiction’s final paragraph, where he describes the “black soldiers” who boarded The Creole upon its arrival in Nassau: when I called on them to assist me in keeping the slaves on board, [they] sheltered themselves adroitly ­under their instructions only to protect the property,—­and said they did not recognize persons as property. I told them that . . . ​the slaves . . . ​­were as much property as the barrels of flour in the hold. At this the stupid blockheads showed their ivory, rolled up their white eyes in horror, as if the idea of putting men on a footing with merchandise ­were revolting to their humanity. (190) With this final sentence’s “as if,” Grant’s epistemological humility takes on a new significance, b ­ ecause its object, and by extension its logic, has shifted subtly. This “as if ” qualifies Grant’s interpretation of the soldiers’ eye-­rolling: he does not claim to know what “thoughts and feelings” this expressive gesture reflects, but states that it is “as if ” they felt this way. This is a grammatical encapsulation that he does not presume to “know all” about what ­these soldiers are feeling and thinking. This might recall his argument against Williams, but ­there has been a shift in the under­lying assumptions. Where Grant had ­earlier attributed the inaccessibility of slave interiority to the exigencies of slavery, h ­ ere he extends a similar sense of unknowability to ­free Black soldiers: racial otherness, rather than circumstance, accounts for their inner unknowability. The racialist logic of this “as if ” becomes even clearer when it is juxtaposed against Grant’s other statements about what other ­people are thinking or feeling: “I dare say ­here what many men feel, but dare not speak, that this ­whole slave-­trading business is a disgrace” (185). Grant not only offers no qualification to this claim but even insists on his ability to see through deceptive appearances to the hidden feelings other white men dare not avow. By staging this inconsistency, Douglass exposes a per­sis­tent racialist thinking complicating Grant’s seemingly laudatory epistemological humility: the “as if ” that qualifies his interpretation of the relation between the soldiers’ facial expressions and their inner “thoughts and feelings” suggests that, for Grant, it is racial difference as well as circumstance that renders the “depths” of enslaved persons “mysterious.” The “as if ” that governs Grant’s speculative interpretation of the soldiers’ eye-­rolling, a­ fter all, resonates as both a qualification of his interpretation of their “thoughts and feelings” and a questioning of ­whether “humanity” can truly be extended to t­ hese soldiers (“as if ” they had humanity that could be revolted). The two resonances are clearly intertwined: it is Grant’s uncertainty about the soldiers’ equal humanity that leads to the qualification about how their facial expressions reflect their interiorities.

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Douglass’s rejection of such racialist thinking is, of course, not surprising. What is noteworthy is how it adds a final turn to The Heroic Slave’s multifaceted engagement with how white observers relate to the inner lives of enslaved ­people. While Grant avoids the errors of Williams and Listwell, his inability to recognize the shared humanity of Blacks leads to a dif­fer­ent error: an inability to recognize when such qualification is no longer necessary. If the preceding narrative has taught readers to approach their desire to sound slave interiority with epistemological humility, this scene warns them against misunderstanding the logic of this humility: slave interiority’s obscurity to white audiences, Douglass insists, is produced by the untranslatability of the slave experience and the strategic need for enslaved persons to conceal their feelings rather than by racial difference. Alternately highlighting the opacity and transparency of its hero’s inner life, The Heroic Slave urges readers to re­spect the “mysteriousness” of slave interiority without misdiagnosing its source: it is the experience of enslavement, rather than Blackness, that renders the “depths” of slave interiority “mysterious” to white audiences. This is why part II’s staging of the possibility of ­mental legibility in Listwell and Washington’s part II farewell is so crucial to The Heroic Slave’s proj­ect. Douglass seeks to harness Listwell’s widely shared “desire” for intersubjective knowledge as a goad to social transformation, encouraging readers to create social spaces in which ­human interiorities, regardless of race, can be mutually legible to each other—­a possibility that depends, first and foremost, upon the abolition of slavery. This brings us back to Douglass’s decision to turn to fiction for this proj­ ect: for if Douglass seeks to use fiction’s association with a revelatory access to inner life to resist racialized notions of interiority, he also emphasizes his fiction’s avowedly suppositional nature in order to confront readers with the ongoing experiential barriers to such intersubjective knowledge that continue to render such speculative qualification necessary. The crucial distinction between Grant’s “as if ” and The Heroic Slave’s speculative logic of historical fictionality is that Douglass repeatedly links his narrative’s emphasis on speculation specifically to Washington’s status as a slave, ­whether it is relation to Listwell’s sympathetic “sounding” of Washington or his own historiographical proj­ect. This points to another distinction between Sheppard Lee and The Heroic Slave, one subtler than their divergent stances on racial interiority. Douglass and Bird are both interested in the epistemological precariousness of fictional transparency; writing in an era when readers ­were increasingly comfortable with fiction, Sheppard Lee and The Heroic Slave both underscore the necessarily speculative logic of fictional knowledge in order to caution readers against a misguided confidence in their ability to fully know the inner lives of o ­ thers. The Heroic Slave’s pairing of the historical and opaque Washington with the fictional and conventionally transparent Listwell, however, suggests that Douglass’s anxiety is not about fictional knowledge as such,

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but specifically about the precariousness of this epistemological position in a moment in which white readers eagerly turned to fiction in search of access to slave interiority. Washington’s marked re­sis­tance to the very fictional knowability displayed by Listwell highlights Douglass’s specific concern that even the nonnaïve fantasy of complete knowability encouraged by fictionality—as Gallagher points out, the very knowability of such characters serves as a mark and reminder of their fictionality—­might give readers a false confidence in their knowledge of slave interiority. While, ­after reading The Heroic Slave, we do, in fact, “know all” about Listwell—­not only b ­ ecause of his transparent mind, but also ­because he is a textual construction that exists only within the pages of this fiction—we can never know Washington in this same way. He has an existence beyond this narrative, even if it is absent from the archive. The Heroic Slave’s specific logic of historical fictionality is thus especially well-­suited to unsettle readers’ tendency to finish a fiction with a comfortable sense that they, like Listwell, “know all” about its protagonist. By confronting readers, at the outset, with the clear limits of his account of the titular heroic slave, Douglass distinguishes Washington as an object of knowledge from both fictional characters, such as Listwell, and ­those historical figures, such as the founding ­fathers, whose lives have been documented in the historical rec­ord: Douglass insists that the knowledge his narrative offers about Washington ­will be both partial (­because of his historicity) and speculative (­because of its fictionality). In dif­fer­ent ways, then, both Washington’s historicity and the narrative’s explic­itly speculative nature resist the fantasy of complete knowability associated with fictional characters. By taking up the question of slave interiority in fiction, Douglass can both offer a metafictional argument about the limitations of fiction as a tool for probing slave interiority and harness fictionality’s emphasis on avowed speculation as a means of cultivating the kind of readerly epistemological humility that fictional transparency other­ wise risks compromising. In the introduction, I noted how this book’s attempt to reconstruct the terms on which early American fiction sought to engage readers is, at least in part, a necessarily speculative endeavor. This is especially crucial to keep in view when seeking to reconstruct the fictional logic of a text like The Heroic Slave, with its paired emphasis on speculation and epistemological humility. Without such an awareness, any attempt to reconstruct Douglass’s reasons for turning to fiction risks missing the very lesson in readerly humility that, according to my reading, The Heroic Slave seeks to teach: in the absence of Douglass’s explicit reflections, is this attempt to recover what motivated his one foray in fiction not itself a misguided attempt to probe Douglass’s own inaccessible interiority? Yet insofar as we keep the necessarily speculative nature of this endeavor in view, this is exactly the kind of m ­ ental exercise that Douglass’s fiction encourages. Just as Douglass speculatively reconstructs Washington’s life based on historical “glimpses” of his character, The Heroic

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Slave’s preface and its formal negotiation of its protagonist’s interiority provide the materials through which we might speculatively reconstruct the conception of fiction under­lying such repre­sen­ta­tions. Written at a moment when the US public sphere was inundated with fictions about slavery, The Heroic Slave is, among other ­things, a deeply ambivalent meditation on the possibilities and limitations of fiction as a vehicle for representing the inner lives of enslaved persons for white audiences. Attuned to the fantasies of transparent access and complete knowledge offered by fiction, Douglass stages his refusal to offer readers immediate access to the interiority of his “heroic slave,” revealing a discomfort with the seemingly unmediated access fiction offered to slave interiority. At the same time, he suggests that fiction’s suppositional nature makes it uniquely suited to the challenge of giving white audiences a qualified knowledge of ­these very inner lives. At a moment when many argued that fiction’s basis in “pos­si­bles and probabilities” rather than facts disqualified it as evidence in debates about the nature of slavery, The Heroic Slave suggested that it was, in fact, fiction’s explic­itly suppositional nature that made it a vital genre for representing slavery, as this meant that fiction could si­mul­ta­neously allow white audiences to “sound the mysterious depths” of slave interiority and confront them with their inability to ever fully do so.

Somebody’s Story: Linda and the Limitations of Fictionality The Heroic Slave’s rhetorical emphasis on its own fictionality might be unusual, even singular, in antebellum Black lit­er­a­ture, but fiction’s new centrality to the debates about slavery exerted a subtle influence on a wide range of texts by Black writers. This influence is even, or perhaps especially, evident in t­ hose texts, such as Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of the Slave Girl, that set forth their narratives in explicit contradistinction to fiction. Forty years ­after Jean Fagan Yellin’s groundbreaking recovery of its factual basis, the relation of Incidents to fictionality seems obvious. “Reader,” Jacobs begins, “be assured that this narrative is no fiction.”32 The events it recounts “may seem incredible,” she admits, “but they are, nevertheless strictly true” (3). Jacobs’s editor, Lydia Maria Child, echoes ­these claims: “­those who know her ­will not be disposed to doubt her veracity, though some incidents in her story are more romantic than fiction” (5). The narrative may resemble fiction, but it is not fictional.33 Scholars working in Yellin’s wake have focused on the ethically imperative work of recovering the au­then­tic voice of an enslaved ­woman, distancing themselves from the mistaken assumptions that led e­ arlier critics to classify Incidents as a novel and attribute it to Child.34 This is not to suggest that Incidents’s relation to fiction has not received attention. On the contrary, its engagement with sentimental fiction has been considered by many of its best

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readers: ­these critics have focused on how Jacobs deploys and revises the tropes of sentimental fiction as part of a complex engagement with the ascendant (white) culture of sentimentality.35 Yet Jacobs’s insistence on associating Incidents with fiction more generally, including nonsentimental fiction, has rarely been considered. Put in terms I used in the preceding chapter: Incidents’s relation to sentimental fiction has been thoroughly studied, but its relation to sentimental fiction remains largely unexamined. The necessary and admirable desire of critics to distance Incidents from fictionality has obscured the terms on which Jacobs structures her appeal. Lynn Festa has argued for the importance of genre in the study of sentimentality: “As sentimental tropes migrate across generic bound­aries, they change the structure of sympathetic identification, altering the ways in which humanity can be recognized.”36 Shifting the conventions of sentimental fiction into a nonfictional narrative, Jacobs alters the terms on which her narrative authorizes identification with her protagonist, Linda Brent. But what I particularly want to draw attention to is how Jacobs stages this migration “across generic bound­aries,” this shift from fiction to nonfiction: Incidents’s distinctive sentimental appeal depends on a metageneric gesture, in which Jacobs si­mul­ta­neously invites and precludes the distinctive kind of appropriative sympathetic identification enabled by fictionality.37 Given the racist reception context that both coded Black fictionalizing as deceit and demanded authentication of Black writers’ truthfulness, it is surprising how consistently Jacobs associates her narrative with fiction: “I was as rejoiced as Robinson Crusoe could have been at finding such a trea­sure,” she writes of finding a tool to bore viewing holes into the wall of her “loophole of retreat” (129). Viewed discretely, this line simply uses Defoe’s fiction as a means of communicating Linda’s emotional state. But in a narrative full of novelistic conventions, the association of Linda with Crusoe invites readers to think of Linda alongside the fictional characters with whom they would have been familiar. Even the line “Reader, be assured this narrative is no fiction” underscores Incidents’s resemblance to fiction. Child’s preface might testify to its factuality, but it also links Jacobs’s story to a popu­lar fictionist. Jacobs’s publisher Thayer & Eldridge had sought out Child as an editor, in part, to “effect the sale of the book” by directing it ­toward the Northern, white ­women who read Child’s fiction.38 And while it was republished in the 1980s as Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl to emphasize its place in the history of the slave narrative, this originally served only as a subtitle. First published as Linda, or Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, it recalled less contemporaneous slave narratives than Richardsonian seduction novels, such as Pamela, Cla­ ris­sa, Charlotte, and Laura. Linda entered circulation packaged to resemble sentimental seduction fiction. This resemblance, however, is not merely a marketing strategy layered onto Linda by its publishers: the conventions of seduction fiction recur throughout the narrative. As myriad critics have shown, Jacobs’s repre­sen­ta­tion of

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“seduction” both draws on and exposes the limits of the true womanhood ideology associated with seduction fiction—in which chastity was figured as a self-­ preserving virtue—by highlighting its inapplicability to the lives of enslaved ­women, who could not consent or not as a piece of property.39 Invoking seduction fiction only to disappoint its conventions, Jacobs demystifies Pamela’s “virtue rewarded” structure: chastity cannot always be its own defender and in the case of enslaved persons—­unlike that of fictional En­glish servants—­virtue preserved is an admirable but impossible end. Contrasting her fate with fiction’s many Pamelas, Jacobs stages the failure of fiction’s master plots to reflect her experience: “Reader, my story ends with freedom; not in the usual way with marriage” (224). Jacobs uses such deviations not only to insist on the nonuniversality of ­these narratives, but also to spur her audience to work for a world in which ­these supposedly universal feminine virtues are universally accessible— in which a virtuous Black ­woman, too, can have her virtue rewarded. But ­there is yet another function of such metageneric reflections: by endlessly invoking the conventions of Richardsonian fiction, Jacobs encourages her Northern white audience to approach this “slave girl,” as they would a Pamela or Cla­ris­sa—­that is, as a figure with whom they could si­mul­ta­neously sympathize and identify. Richardsonian seduction fiction had long been associated with sympathetic identification as a reading practice: as John Trumbull put it in a 1773 poem, “For while she reads romance, the Fair one / Fails not think herself the Heroine . . . ​Harriet reads, and reading ­really / Believes herself a young Pamela.”40 Linda invites such identification to discourage audiences from e­ ither overlooking the sufferings of enslaved w ­ omen or, like her callous enslaver Mrs. Flint, failing to recognize that “slaves could have feelings” at all. This invocation of Richardsonian fiction, however, also revises the mode of sentimental fiction that had become central to debates about slavery. ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with its mediating narrator, is an exemplary sentimental abolitionist fiction in that it encourages feeling for its enslaved characters, but it does not invite identification with them: “Sentimental readers [of abolitionist texts],” Festa notes, “do not melt in ecstatic identification with the sentimental object; they bond with each other through the medium of the sentimental object.”41 The sentimental discourse that supposedly produces commonality by recognizing a universal humanity also produces and marks difference between sympathetic viewers and objects of sympathy. The Richardsonian tradition, however, encourages exactly the mode of “ecstatic identification” that ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin does not. The genre itself signals an appeal to sympathetic identification, rather than the mediated feeling for of much abolitionist fiction. Positioning Linda as a Richardsonian heroine—­albeit in a partial way—­Jacobs encourages readers to recognize her as subject and object si­mul­ta­neously, a subject whose feelings can be identified with as well as an object that can be felt for.42 This argument, however, must be carefully qualified: for even as Linda invites readers to identify with its protagonist, it also underscores the impossibility of

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this kind of identification.43 Again and again, Jacobs highlights the impossibility of Northern white readers being able to put themselves into Linda’s position or imagine her experience: “O reader, can you imagine my joy?” Linda asks upon her reunion with her child, “No you cannot, u ­ nless you have been a slave-­mother” (193). Slavery creates a fundamental divide in experience that sympathetic identification cannot transcend. I want to suggest that Jacobs uses Linda’s paired resemblance to fiction and disavowal of fictionality to reinforce the text’s explicit calls for and prohibitions of readerly identification. At the center of this metageneric appeal is Jacobs’s insight that fictional characters are uniquely appealing objects for sympathetic identification. Across the eigh­teenth ­century, as Gallagher has shown, many writers had come to recognize that fictional characters are, in fact, “easier to sympathize or identify with than ­actual p ­ eople.”44 Both sympathizing and identifying with fictional characters, of course, had long been regarded with suspicion in the United States. From Benjamin Rush in the 1780s through critics of ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the 1850s, many writers had worried about readers wasting their sympathy on illusory, imaginary characters while they ignored real p ­ eople in distress. By the 1850s, however, t­ here w ­ ere also many writers who defended and even valorized sympathizing with fictions. Justifying the sentimental impact of its fictional sketches, Ik Marvel’s Reveries of a Bachelor (1850) offered perhaps the boldest example of such arguments: What m ­ atters it . . . ​if literally t­ here was no wife, and no dead child . . . ? Is not feeling, feeling; and heart, heart? Are not t­ hese fancies thronging on my brain, bringing their own sorrows, and their own joys as living as anything ­human can be living? What if they have no material type—no objective form? All that is crude—­a mere reduction of ideality to sense,—­a transformation of the spiritual to the earthly,—­leveling of the soul to m ­ atter?45 To resist accusations of both frivolity and delusiveness, Marvel shifts focus from the object of sympathy to the sympathizer: what ­matters is not the real­ ity of the object of sympathy, but the real­ity of its emotional impact on the sympathizing subject. For Marvel, the fact that t­ here is no “material” object for such sympathy only suggests the “ideality” of readers’ sympathetic feelings. The designation of such feelings as unreal, he suggests, is a blasphemous denial of man’s spiritual capacities. Marvel goes on to reject the argument that sympathizing with fictions leads readers to neglect real suffering by arguing that anyone who “has no sympathy” for fictions w ­ ill prove incapable of sympathizing with real p ­ eople as well: feeling for fictional characters, rather than an illusory waste of sympathy, is a sign of one’s capacity for sympathy. While Marvel’s argument is unusually direct, it crystallizes his era’s increasing tendency to value fiction as a means of cultivating sympathy: the Southern Quarterly Review, in 1854, suggested that the most impor­tant question in

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judging fiction was “Do we sympathize with the actors? Do we enter into their feelings, link ourselves with their destiny[?]”46 Reviewers saw fiction as ideally suited to encourage sympathetic identification: “It is peculiar to this class of books,” wrote the Christian Examiner in 1856, “that they appeal directly to the sympathies.”47 “Works of imagination,” declared the North American Review in 1851, “­will ever find hearts ­eager to be made to throb with sympathy for the joys and the woes, the physical and moral strug­gles, of humanity.”48 Fictional characters have long been seen as especially appealing objects for identification, ­because they are, as Gallagher puts it, “enticingly unoccupied”: “No reader would have to grapple with the knowledge of some real-­world double or contract an accidental feeling about any a­ ctual person by making a temporary identification. . . . ​­Because they ­were haunted by no shadow of another person who might take priority over the reader as a ‘real’ referent, anyone might appropriate them.”49 Antebellum reviewers, too, recognized and indeed celebrated this acquisitive aspect of sympathetic identification: “The ‘Beings of the Mind’ with whom we form associations of sympathy . . . ​are like the gallery of master-­pieces to the young artist’s vision . . . ​[they] become no unimportant part of our trea­sury of knowledge.”50 ­Because of its resemblance to fiction, Linda seems to offer characters whom readers might sympathetically appropriate in exactly this way—­they even come complete with “fictitious names” (3). But Jacobs never allows readers to lose sight of the fact that the proper name “Linda Brent” is not “unoccupied”—it is very much “haunted by the shadow of an ­actual person.” Or rather, it is haunted by the shadow of an a­ ctual person who has under­gone a traumatic experience that remains utterly inaccessible to the implied white audience. Consistently inviting readers to compare Linda with fictional characters, Jacobs underscores that Linda cannot be approached in the same way: in this narrative, she insists, ­there is an a­ ctual person who takes “priority over the reader as a ‘real’ referent.” Linda Brent is not available for readerly appropriation. The comparison of Linda to Crusoe highlights Jacobs’s understanding and strategic deployment of the difference between fictional characters and ­actual persons. Tellingly, Jacobs compares her experience to Crusoe’s in order to communicate emotion: “I was rejoiced as Robinson Crusoe could have been at finding such a trea­sure.” In a moment in which she seeks to make her emotional state available to readers, Jacobs encourages them to speculate on what a fictional character—­rather than any a­ ctual person—­would have felt in this situation. This does not necessarily indicate that Crusoe’s experience is closer to Linda’s than that of Northern white readers, but rather represents a recognition of how fictional characters function. ­Because of the effortlessness with which readers identify and sympathize with fictional characters, Crusoe provides a more potent emotional touchstone than any a­ ctual person. It is not that the content of the comparison is irrelevant—­Crusoe’s experience provides a provocative analogue to Linda’s isolation—­but Defoe’s fictional protagonist

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offers a power­ful means of translating emotion, b ­ ecause of the ease with which readers appropriate and internalize the experiences of fictional characters. Crusoe’s emotions, unlike Linda’s, are ­free for readerly appropriation. But even as Jacobs takes advantage of this readerly relation to Crusoe as a means of communicating her experience, the passage also marks readers’ fundamentally dif­f er­ent relation to Linda: the comparison is necessary as a means of emotional translation precisely ­because Jacobs consistently underscores the impossibility—­ inherent in the mode—of readers identifying with Linda in this way. Harnessing Crusoe as an emotional touchstone, Jacobs uses the fictional character both to mark and bridge the experiential gap between her and her audience.51 This moment is one of several in Linda that highlights how its protagonist’s nonfictionality precludes the easy, appropriative identification associated with fiction. Linda’s actuality changes the terms of sympathetic identification in two distinct but related ways. First, it resists fiction’s prioritization of the sympathizing subject’s emotions over ­those of the object of sympathy. ­Because the objects of sympathy in fiction are imaginary, antebellum discussions of sympathizing with fiction, unsurprisingly, foregrounded the effects of such sympathy on the sympathizer. (Recall Marvel: when readers sympathize with imaginary characters, what is nonetheless real, he argues, is readers’ emotional response.) For this reason, sympathizing with fictional characters was understood largely as an exercise in developing readers’ capacity for sympathetic feeling: the Christian Examiner, for example, values “associations of sympathy” with “Beings of the Mind” for their “vivifying effect upon the sensibilities.”52 Approaching Linda as such an opportunity to cultivate readerly sympathy, however, would subordinate Linda’s very real suffering to readers’ sympathetic responses. This would reproduce, albeit in a minor key, Mrs. Flint’s infamous disregard for Linda’s grand­mother’s feelings as she indulges her own sentimental response to Nancy’s death. Jacobs might align her narrative with fiction to encourage readers to attend to the emotional lives of enslaved persons, but she also urges them to keep the real­ity of ­these persons firmly in view, so as to prevent readers’ sympathetic feelings from overwriting and obscuring the very emotional experiences that Linda seeks to reveal. Second, Linda’s actuality means that her inner life ­will always remain, to a certain degree, unknowable to her audience. In moments such as the Crusoe comparison, Jacobs, like Douglass in The Heroic Slave, juxtaposes a real person against a fictional character in order to confront readers with the comparative inaccessibility of that person’s inner life. Linda’s relative inaccessibility results not only from her lack of a transparent mind, but also b ­ ecause her real­ity precludes the sense of total knowledge created by the textual delimitedness of fictional characters. If fiction’s “peculiar affective force” arises, in part, from the “unreal knowability” of its characters, Jacobs consistently confronts her audience with her own unknowability: “I cannot tell you how much I suffered in the presence of ­these wrongs, nor how I am pained by the retrospect”

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(31). Linda’s unknowability results not from an “ontological lack”—­a textually delimited incompleteness—­but from the unbridgeable difference in experience that separates sympathetic white readers and their “­sisters” in slavery.53 Like Douglass’s Washington, then, Linda resists the transparent knowability typical of fictional characters; and like Douglass, Jacobs stages this difference within her text to suggest the epistemological pitfalls of using such psychonarration for revealing the inner lives of enslaved persons. But where The Heroic Slave probes the implications of such fantasies of transparency in a wide range of contexts, Linda’s metageneric engagement with fiction serves first and foremost as a means of exposing the limitations of the ascendant modes of abolitionist sentimentalism. Fictionality provides Jacobs with an ideal site for revising the terms of sentimentalism, b ­ ecause fiction’s distinctive features crystallize sentimentalism’s fundamental premise: the universal translatability of emotion. Fictional transparency, a­ fter all, contributes to, and even heightens, the generalizing effects of sentimentality: the intimate access to emotional subjectivity enabled by fictionality formalizes sentimentalism’s assumptions about the universality and translatability of feeling, including pain. For Jacobs, it is not fiction’s epistemological unreliability that makes it unfit for representing slavery—­the anxiety manifest in A Key to ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin—­but its epistemological overconfidence, its failure to mark the bound­ aries of personhood and experience that preclude a full knowledge of another’s affective state or emotional subjectivity. For Jacobs, both the transparency of emotion in much fiction and the unique complete “knowability” of fictional characters render the mode inadequate for grappling with slavery. In Linda, the inability to know fully what ­others feel extends not only to the implied audience of Northern, white ­women, but to its protagonist as well. Linda, on a northbound ship, encounters a fellow runaway, Fanny. Linda seizes upon the fellowship that she believes has been forged by the shared trauma of slave motherhood only to be rebuked: “ ‘We have the same sorrows,’ I said. ‘No,’ replied she, ‘you are ­going to see your ­children soon, and ­there is no hope that I ­shall ever even hear from mine’ ” (176). For a moment, Linda reproduces the emotional overwriting that she warns readers against: assuming the identity of their “sorrows,” Linda proj­ects her own emotions onto Fanny, failing to imagine how Fanny’s dif­fer­ent experiences have produced sorrows beyond her own. The episode performs an impor­tant rhetorical function in Linda, reminding readers that Linda has not experienced the worst miseries of slave motherhood. But, even more than this, it underscores how differences in experience preclude the possibility of the kind of emotional transparency assumed in acts of sympathetic identification. Linda’s experience is much closer to Fanny’s than the implied reader’s is to Linda’s, yet her assumptions about Fanny’s experience provide a power­ful reminder of the impossibility of fully realizing the kind of sympathetic identification that the narrative nonetheless encourages.

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If much of Founded in Fiction has focused on the unique kinds of knowledge that fiction can offer readers, Linda strategically highlights its factuality in order to underscore what its readers cannot know about its protagonist. ­Here, we can see how Douglass and Jacobs employ opposed means of enacting a shared proj­ect: where Douglass had emphasized The Heroic Slave’s fictionality to encourage readers to recognize the inherently speculative nature of their attempts to “sound” slave interiority, Jacobs underscores Linda’s actuality as an alternative means of confronting readers with the limits of their ability to understand the inner lives of enslaved persons. Linda invites a sympathetic stance predicated on a recognition of difference that resists the emotional overwriting associated with the kind of reader-­focused sympathetic identification experienced with fictional characters. This allows Jacobs to urge readers to feel for enslaved persons—­sympathize with them in a way that ­will move them to take po­liti­cal action on their behalf—­while avoiding having ­those same readers feel for enslaved persons, in the sense of allowing their own sympathetic emotions to stand in for t­ hose of enslaved persons. Staging its vexed relationship to fictionality, Linda elicits a distinctive mode of conjectural identification. It is in its engagement with fictionality that Linda’s departure from what Berlant calls the “paradigmatic” cases of sentimental politics is especially pronounced. In her metageneric argument with fiction, Jacobs rejects the universality of pain implied by fictional transparency, resisting the way in which, as Berlant puts it, sentimentalism’s “cases of vulnerability and suffering . . . ​ become all jumbled together into a scene of the generally h ­ uman, and the ethical imperative t­ oward social transformation is replaced with a passive . . . ​ideal of compassion.”54 Where Stowe sees the sympathetic identification associated with fiction as offering an alternative means of enacting social transformation to the compromised practice of politics, Jacobs insists that this kind of identification can be realized only as a result of po­liti­cal changes, such as abolition or the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act. (Linda underscores its commitment to a specifically po­liti­cal proj­ect when, in its one explicit reference to Stowe’s fiction, Linda expresses her gratitude to a New En­glish senator who did not only offer her aid as a fugitive, but—­unlike Stowe’s privately virtuous Senator Bird—­also voted against the Fugitive Slave Act. Linda pre­sents private acts of conscience and right feelings as admirable but ultimately inadequate responses to slavery.55) For Jacobs, po­liti­cal change is a precondition for the “affective change” promised in the sympathetic identification that it holds before readers as an ever-­receding affective horizon. Full imaginative identification—­the kind experienced with fictional characters—­functions as an orienting horizon in Linda. Jacobs asks readers both to imagine and to work for a world in which such emotional identification would be pos­si­ble; a world in which the ­great experiential barriers that preclude imaginative identification in Linda—­slavery and racial prejudice—­will

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have been removed. The ability to identify with other ­actual ­people as we do with fictional characters is Linda’s implied utopia. But it is an orienting ideal only—­a forever receding possibility. In Linda, sympathetic identification predicated on the transparency of emotion is a desirable but unrealizable ideal: Jacobs deploys sympathetic identification not in the ser­vice of a naïve, utopic universalism, but as an asymptotic goal, which if pursued ­will produce material improvements even if it is in itself unrealizable. While Linda’s metageneric argument suggests the inadequacy of fiction—­ its plots; its formal conventions; its norms of reading—­for addressing slavery, its appeal also depends on fiction. Fiction is Linda’s constitutive generic other. Jacobs’s narrative thus reveals, in an especially clear way, how attention to fictionality is not only crucial for understanding the history of the novel and fiction but also illuminates the history of nonfiction, ­those texts and genres that defined their proj­ects in contradistinction to fiction: once fiction became a central ele­ment of the literary field—­once it had, to use Gallagher’s Wattian phrase, risen—­fictionality structured, in its absence, the appeals of a wide range of texts. As Linda shows, a disavowal of fictionality does not necessarily involve only a claim to factuality. It can also be a far more dynamic and complex negotiation of the reading practices and ­mental pro­cesses associated with fiction. Linda might be “no fiction,” but no fiction better highlights the centrality of fictionality to American literary history.

Coda

 Romance and ­Real­ity in the 1850s and Beyond

in the l ate nineteen th ­c en tury, the pervasive suspicion of fictionality in the United States would be displaced by a cultivated indifference to it. Paratextual justifications for fictionality gradually vanish. Claims of generic distinction from the novel mostly dis­appear from fiction. Authenticating footnotes become increasingly rare. One of the most enduring debates in American letters has dissolved into an unspoken consensus. This does not mean that the issues that had been bound up with fictionality—­from questions about how fiction could most accurately capture “real life” to questions about fiction’s usefulness as a vehicle for social criticism—­dis­appear. But ­these questions cease to be negotiated as questions of fictionality. Fictionality is no longer a salient issue in American lit­er­a­ture. This shift in attitude, however, does not reflect a solution to the prob­lem of fictionality. L ­ ater nineteenth-­century writers do not answer the epistemological questions raised by the ­earlier antifictional discourse, so much as they disregard them. Focusing first on the romances of the 1850s and then on postbellum realist novels, this coda charts the terms on which fictionists would come to ignore the fictionality of fiction—an oversight unimaginable for writers in the early republic. It shows how, across the second half of the ­century, the issue of fictionality gradually dis­appears from discussions to which it had once been fundamental, such as the long-­standing debates about the relationship between “real­ity” and “romance.” By the turn of the twentieth ­century, fictionality is no longer considered a prob­lem. The late nineteenth c­ entury’s cultivated indifference to fictionality ultimately proves the most influential response to the prob­lem of fictionality. For some postbellum writers, ignoring the question of fictionality was a strategy for establishing the cultural authority of their fictions. But while this strategic inattention to the fictionality of fiction might begin as a self-­conscious means [ 242 ]

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of affirming the seriousness of fiction, it gradually becomes a conventionalized, rarely noticed feature of the novel genre. In examining the terms on which fictionists and critics ceased to worry—or even think—­about fictionality, this coda briefly traces the consolidation of the often-­unspoken assumptions about fiction that continue to govern our approach to the mode.

The Enduring Prob­lem of Fictionality In order to trace the emergence of our modern, tacit assumptions about fictionality, this coda focuses on a narrower, more recognizable “tradition” of fiction than preceding chapters: it offers a whirlwind tour of the attitudes t­ oward fictionality found in some of the best-­known fiction and writing about fiction from the 1850s through the turn of the twentieth ­century. By closing this history with such familiar texts, my aim is neither to retell an old story about American fiction nor to suggest that t­ hese theories of fiction ever achieved complete dominance. Rather, it is an attempt to show how this old story has obscured the e­ arlier, often-­unfamiliar understandings of fictionality that this book has sought to recover. The romances of the 1850s offer a useful starting point. The fictions of Hawthorne, Melville, and, to a lesser extent, Stowe could be comfortably integrated into (and to varying degrees, valorized in) the foundational mid-­twentieth-­century histories of American fiction, ­because, unlike much ­earlier fiction, they embrace an understanding of fiction—it is an aesthetically oriented work of art that reveals the world anew—­that would be assumed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth ­century.1 This is what makes their romances invaluable to the historian of fictionality: t­ hese romances often argue for a conception of fictionality that we have come to take for granted at a moment in which it was not yet taken for granted. But when ­these romances are approached in the context of their own moment—­rather than from the hindsight of literary history—­their approaches to fictionality lose their comfortable intuitiveness and instead appear evasive, strange, and paradoxical. In dif­fer­ent ways, the romances of Hawthorne, Stowe, and Melville resist the long-­standing idea that fictionists should authenticate their fictions as a source of knowledge by clarifying how they relate to the “world as it is.” But faced with the contradictory demands being placed on fiction in the 1850s, ­these romancers also continued to wrestle—­with varying degrees of explicitness—­with the associated epistemological questions about how fiction relates to “real life.” Their romances crystallize both the greater ac­cep­tance of fiction and the endurance of the prob­lem of fictionality. The generic evolution of Melville’s work across the 1840s and 1850s, for example, seems to provide a tidy encapsulation of the increasing tolerance of fiction across the mid-­nineteenth c­ entury, as he moves from writing fact-­ based narratives, such as Typee, to avowed “romances.” But if Melville’s oeuvre reflects fiction’s ac­cep­tance, it also reveals an ongoing, often exasperated

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engagement with the prob­lem of fictionality. Melville would first grapple with such issues when reviewers questioned the factuality of his early, loosely biographical sea narratives. Rather than try to authenticate their basis in real­ity, Melville turned to fiction: “Not long ago,” he writes in the preface to Mardi (1849), “having published two narratives of voyages in the Pacific, which . . . ​ ­were received with incredulity, the thought occurred to me, of indeed writing a romance of Polynesian adventure . . . ​to see w ­ hether, the fiction might not, possibly, be received for a verity.”2 Setting critics’ skepticism of his ­earlier tales against an ideal of fictional “verity,” Melville exposes what a ­limited conception of “truth” underpins this focus on strict factuality. With Mardi, Melville begins a proj­ect of blending fact and fiction in the ser­vice of a more capacious understanding of “truth” that would culminate with what one reviewer called Moby-­Dick’s “ill-­compounded mixture of romance and matter-­of-­fact.”3 The prob­lem with Melville’s books, wrote Evert Duyckinck, is that “In one light they are romantic fictions, in another statements of absolute fact. . . . ​It becomes quite impossible to submit such books to a distinct classification as fact, fiction, or essay.”4 For many critics, this “singular medley” compromised Moby-­Dick as a “narrative fiction.”5 Where Melville’s early narratives had been attacked as too fictional, his ­later fictions would be condemned as too full of facts. Such criticisms made Melville highly attuned not only to the era’s incessant policing of the fact/fiction divide, but also to its competing imperatives for fiction.6 It is “Strange,” he writes in The Confidence Man (1857), “that in a work of amusement . . . ​this severe fidelity to real life should be exacted by any one, who, by taking up such a work, sufficiently shows that he is not unwilling to drop real life, and turn, for a time, to something dif­fer­ent” (217). ­Here, Melville exposes the contradictory demands being made of fiction in the 1850s. This de­cade’s periodicals, as Baym has shown, increasingly argued that fidelity to real­ity was both the central goal and the characteristic feature of the “modern novel.”7 “What is wanted to constitute a good modern novel,” wrote Putnam’s in 1854, is that it offers “veritable and veracious segments of the g ­ reat life-­drama, displaying Nature and Man as they are, sentiments as they are, and deeds as they are done.”8 In advocating for fiction’s fidelity to real­ity, however, ­these reviewers also continued to emphasize the vari­ous—­ often intertwined—­moral and aesthetic criteria for judging fiction that had become central to discussions of fiction. ­There is a tension that runs through ­these reviews that recalls—­even though the terms used to discuss and value fiction have evolved considerably—­the early 1800s debates about w ­ hether fiction should represent the world as it is or the world as it is should be. But whereas in many of ­these e­ arlier discussions, such standards had been placed in opposition to each other—­think of the Port-­Folio debates about Richardson versus Fielding or Child’s discussion of Charlotte ­Temple—­many 1850s reviews implicitly treated strict mimetic accuracy as compatible with aesthetic effect, strict morality, and readerly interest: “Novelists recognize that Nature is a

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better romance-­maker than the fancy,” wrote the Atlantic Monthly in 1858, “and the public is learning that men and w ­ omen are better than heroes and heroines, not only to live with, but also to read of.”9 Some writers, however, recognized the tensions between strict mimetic accuracy and other standards for valuing fiction. Caroline Kirkland, in an 1850 essay for Sartain’s, offered an especially clear articulation of the disconnection between such calls for fidelity to real­ity and what readers actually desire from fiction: “although we profess to relish most t­ hose fictions which are like transcripts of life, we in real­ity covet a certain exaggeration, and an artful veiling of the more vulgar truths. . . . ​It is the repose and refreshment of a ­little illusion that we long for . . . ​Yet we persuade ourselves that we accept fiction only as a substitute for truth.”10 The enduring idea that fiction can be “accept[ed]” only if it provides some “truth” rather than escapist illusion reveals the enduring legacy of moralistic condemnations of fiction’s epistemological unreliability. ­Because antebellum justifications of fiction had developed through a sustained dialogue with such antifictional arguments, the terms on which many ­later antebellum fictionists and reviewers celebrated the modern novel—­its “truth,” its fidelity to nature, its opposition to “illusive pictures of life,” and its distinction from escapist entertainment—­closely echo ­earlier condemnations of fiction. Yet Kirkland’s essay suggests that even if a reader internalizes such an understanding of fiction, it might not, in fact, capture how and why she reads fiction. The terms on which the “modern novel” had gained ac­cep­tance in the era’s literary periodicals, her essay suggests, did not necessarily reflect what readers sought in fiction—­whether readers ­were aware of it or not. Antebellum readers and reviewers might not always have been aware of the contradictory demands they placed on fiction, but Melville certainly was. The Confidence Man’s metafictional digressions often center on the paradoxical demand that fiction be both a source of amusement and an accurate reflection of real­ity: “it is . . . ​strange that any one . . . ​who . . . ​finds real life dull should yet demand of him who is to divert his attention from it, that he should be true to that dullness.” Melville revels in exposing how many antebellum standards for fiction, such as the production of consistent characters, required violating the mimetic imperative: “­there is nothing a sensible reader ­will more carefully look for, than that, in the depiction of any character, its consistency should be preserved. . . . ​But . . . ​is it not a fact, that, in real life, a consistent character is a rara avis?” (84).11 Melville confronts readers with the implicit contradictions produced by the competing, unreconciled—­potentially irreconcilable—­ standards for fiction in the 1850s. Melville was especially troubled by the challenge of judging a fiction’s relation to “real life”: “Experience is the only guide h ­ ere,” he writes, but as no man’s experience is “coextenstive with what is, it may be unwise” to rely upon it. Experience might offer the sole means of judging w ­ hether a fiction reflects real­ity, but fiction had also long been regarded as offering a kind of experience

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itself. Again, The Confidence Man uses the question of consistent characters to probe this contradiction: according to Melville, if a youth has only read books with consistent characters, he ­will be “often at fault upon entering the world;” whereas, if he has read books with inconsistent characters (“a true delineation”), he w ­ ill be like a stranger with a map, “the streets may be crooked [but] he does not hopelessly lose his way” (86). Fiction, Melville argues, has a circular relationship to experience: experience is the only means of judging fiction’s “real­ity,” but fiction’s picture of “real­ity” also offers a substitute for experience. This raises the very prob­lem—­how to ensure (and evaluate) fiction’s reliability as a source of knowledge about the world—­that Rowson and Foster had turned to the nonfictional novel to circumvent. The Confidence Man, then, exposes how the epistemological prob­lem of fictionality endures, even as fiction itself is no longer considered problematic. Readers continue to look to fiction for experience and knowledge of “the world as it is,” but fictionists no longer feel compelled to delineate the exact terms on which their narratives offer this knowledge. This, Melville argues, leads to unrecognized contradictions in what readers want from fiction: “they look for not only for more entertainment, but, at bottom, even for more real­ity, than real life itself can show . . . ​though they want novelty, they want nature, too; but nature unfettered, exhilarated, in effect transformed” (217–18). B ­ ecause the idea that fiction might provide more “real­ity than real life itself ” dramatically inverts the Common Sense assumption of fiction’s metaphysical inferiority that had long permeated US intellectual life, it would have struck many antebellum readers as profoundly paradoxical.12 For twenty-­first-­century readers, however, this conception of fiction does not seem contradictory, ­because we take for granted the idea that fiction reveals the “real­ity” we miss in our everyday interactions with “real life.”13 It is, in fact, on t­ hese very terms that l­ ater critics, such as this 1893 reviewer, would celebrate Melville: Melville is as fantastically poetical as Coleridge . . . ​and yet, while we swim spellbound over the golden rhythms of Coleridge feeling at ­every stroke their beautiful improbability, every­thing in “Moby-­Dick” might have happened . . . ​all the weird scenery . . . ​are so wonderfully fresh in their treatment that they supersede all doubt and impress one as absolutely true to the life.14 The difference from the book’s antebellum reception is instructive: instead of critiquing Melville’s failure to re­spect the boundary between fact and fiction, this critic celebrates Moby-­Dick for the rather paradoxical achievement of making a “fantastically poetical” story “impress one as absolutely true to the life.” The critic lauds Moby-­Dick on exactly the terms set forward in The Confidence Man: it offers “nature unfettered, exhilarated, in effect transformed.” Melville might embrace this paradoxical demand on fiction, but he also insists that readers recognize it as paradoxical. In Mardi, the sage Babbalanja

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delivers a tidy encapsulation of Melville’s stance on fiction: “what are vulgarly called fictions are as much realities as the gross mattock.” But when the sage asks if this idea is clear, the character Mohi replies, “Opaque as this paddle.” Utterly perplexed, Mohi asks a follow-­up: “What is truth?” “The old interrogatory,” Babbalanja responds, “did they not ask it when the world began? But ask it no more . . . ​the question is more final than any answer” (944). Situating the question of fictionality within a long history of truth-­seeking, Melville suggests that the strug­gles over fiction are nothing new but simply the latest episode in an eternal interrogation of what counts as true. Placing the question of fiction’s metaphysical and epistemological status and its attendant paradoxes before readers, Melville refuses to answer it. In fact, he insists we drop the question. Twenty-­first-­century readers are comfortable with this gesture of throwing up one’s hands when confronted with the thorny epistemological question of fictionality. It is a gesture that both anticipates and confirms our sense that early Americans ­were asking the wrong questions of fiction. But where modern readers are content to leave such questions unasked, Melville, in spite of his own advice, returned incessantly to ­these very questions about how a fiction might count as “true.” How, then, do we move from Melville’s desire to no longer ask ­these questions, to the sustained indifference to them evident by the end of the ­century? The romances of Hawthorne and Stowe offer a useful starting point. While Melville’s works expose the contradictions that run through discussions of fiction in the 1850s, the l­ ater works of Hawthorne and Stowe reveal the terms on which writers and readers tacitly agreed to overlook ­these contradictions. Both writers would explic­itly refuse the mimetic imperative associated with the epistemological prob­lem of fictionality, orienting their fictions to ends other than knowledge production. Yet, they also continue to grapple implicitly with questions about how to authenticate their fictions’ reliability as a source of knowledge about the “world” that they reject in their explicit arguments for fiction’s value. T ­ hese fictions do not ignore the prob­lem of fictionality, but they leave their engagement with it—to varying degrees—­tacit. Stowe’s 1859 historical fiction The Minister’s Wooing provides an especially striking illustration. The Minister’s Wooing explic­itly rejects the epistemological framework through which Americans had approached fiction over the preceding ­century, even as it continues to implicitly engage with the very questions of reliability and authentication that had dominated this discourse. This disconnection between the book’s explicit and implicit arguments, however, does not mean that The Minister’s Wooing is ­either confused or disingenuous. Rather, t­ hese seemingly contradictory levels of tacit and explicit metafictional reflection provide Stowe with a means of negotiating the paradoxical ideal for fiction identified by Melville—­that it should offer “more real­ity than real life itself can show.” Set in late eighteenth-­century New E ­ ngland, The Minister’s Wooing consistently pokes fun at early national anx­i­eties about fiction and novels, figuring

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them as a quaint relic of an obsolete Calvinist worldview. Stowe’s playful tone ­toward such attitudes is evident in her description of the books belonging to her heroine, Mary Scudder: “Laid a l­ittle to one side as if of doubtful reputation, was the only novel which the stricter p ­ eople in t­ hose days allowed for the reading of their d ­ aughters: that seven-­volumed, trailing, tedious, delightful old bore, ‘Sir Charles Grandison.’ ”15 Grandison does, in fact, have almost the exact effect on Mary that made some early critics condemn it as an especially dangerous book: Mary, who has “an imagination which sometimes wandered,” fantasizes about this idealized hero, sighing ­because “no such men now walked the earth.” But Stowe quickly deflates this pseudo-­antifictional sketch: neither Mary’s novel-­reading nor her daydreaming produces the delusions that critics feared, and she quickly moves on to her chores and religious devotions. Stowe’s consignment of anx­i­eties about fiction’s epistemological unreliability to an ­earlier era is a rather remarkable act of strategic forgetting for an author who had spent the preceding de­cade authenticating the accuracy of her antislavery fictions. This figuration of such concerns as antiquated and even obsolete, however, sets up the book’s dramatic reframing of the venerable but enduring Protestant arguments against fiction. The Minister’s Wooing’s central metageneric argument is that the age-­ old questions about the epistemological status of “romance” should not be approached as questions of fictionality at all. In other words, Stowe uncouples “romance” from the fictional genres with which it was associated: “All prosaic, and all ­bitter, disenchanted ­people talk as if poets and novelists made romance” she writes, “They do,—­just as much as craters make volcanoes,—no more.” Retheorizing romance as an attitude ­toward the world, Stowe describes ­people who have “turn[ed] away” from their “ideals” in “skepticism and bitterness” for comfort, ease, and money. T ­ hese include a man who has abandoned his first love—­“all that was stuff and romance”—to marry rich and tells his son “not to read poetry or novels, and stick to realities”; and a w ­ oman who once “thought herself capable of being a poor man’s wife,” before she realized that “this was all romance.” Ever since, she has been “busy with the realities of life,” especially “the opera-­box.” ­Here, “romance” is associated not with quixotic delusions, but a commitment to the “ideal” that reflects the “noblest capability” of the “soul” (71–73). For Stowe, the choice between “romance” and “realities” is a choice between dif­fer­ent ways of approaching “real life.” Stowe’s rejection of a generic understanding of “romance” allows her to reimagine even the famously antifictional Calvinists as exemplars of “romance.” Her narrative centers on the i­magined courtship of the historical minister, Samuel Hopkins, an influential disciple of Jonathan Edwards. True to his Edwardseanism, Stowe’s Hopkins is suspicious of the imagination and categorically opposed to such frivolities as poetry and romances. Yet, in spite of such attitudes, Stowe assures readers that, u ­ nder her more capacious conception of romance, “­there is as much romance burning ­under the snow-­banks

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of cold Puritan preciseness as if Dr. Hopkins had been brought up to attend operas instead of metaphysical preaching, and Mary had been nourished on Byron’s poetry instead of ‘Edwards on the Affections’ ” (73). For Stowe, the “romance” burning ­under “Puritan preciseness” is a capacity for idealized love and an aesthetic sensitivity that cuts against the Puritan rejection of art and ornament. In a remarkable revalorization of the orthodox Calvinists, whose theological rationalism she rejects, Stowe pre­sents them as defined by an “artistic sensibility”: “­These hard old New E ­ ngland divines w ­ ere poets of metaphysical philosophy,” building “systems in an artistic fervor” (17). While this description of their theological strivings would have been puzzling, even blasphemous, to Edwards, Hopkins, and their contemporaries, it exemplifies the changing relationship of much of American Protestantism to the arts during the mid-­nineteenth c­ entury. As Harris has shown, this period’s Protestant ministers increasingly regarded art not as a frivolous, idolatrous distraction or a usurpation of God’s creative prerogative, but as another means through which God displayed his greatness.16 Stowe herself insisted that God was “no utilitarian, no despiser of the fine arts, and no condemner of ornament.”17 In The Minister’s Wooing, this conception of divinity underpins Stowe’s elevation of Mary’s aestheticized religious teaching—­she is consistently associated with the visual arts—­over the polemical ministry of the Puritan elders. The Minister’s Wooing ultimately rejects a generic conception of romance, ­because the equation of romance with fiction fails to recognize its divine source: “God,” writes Stowe, “is the g ­ reat maker of romance.” Late eighteenth-­ century critics had condemned fictionists for travestying God’s works, but Stowe makes God the “­great poet of life,” reimagining creation as a ­grand work of romance. In this context, it is suspicion of the idealizing, aestheticizing work of “romance” that suddenly seems blasphemous: “The scoffing spirit that laughs at romance is an apple of the Dev­il’s own handing from the ­bitter tree of knowledge;—it opens the eyes only to see eternal nakedness” (72). This is perhaps the most dramatic inversion of the epistemological critique of fictionality in antebellum lit­er­a­ture. Whereas early national ministers had condemned fiction b ­ ecause its idealizing “romantic” tendencies made it an unreliable source of knowledge about God’s creation, Stowe insists that the rejection of such an idealizing impulse is sinful and the knowledge gained through such a demystification is satanic. As such moments make clear, Stowe might decouple “romance” from fiction and give it a more encompassing significance, but her reflections on romance also reimagine fiction’s value for antebellum Protestantism. In The Minister’s Wooing, fiction’s ability to offer readers access to idealized, aestheticized “romance” renders it an instrument of divine enchantment: “­Every impulse of beauty, of heroism, and ­every craving for purer love, fairer perfection, nobler type and style of being than that which closes like a prison-­house around us in the dim, daily walks of life,” Stowe argues, is “God’s reminder to

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the soul that ­there is something higher, sweeter, purer, yet to be attained” (72). Stowe recodes fiction’s idealism not as an epistemological threat that distorts readers’ understanding of God’s creation, but as a divine mode of perception that allows readers to access his divinity in the world. Significantly, Mary’s fantasies about an idealized Grandison-­figure anticipate her love for James Marvyn, which Stowe pre­sents less as a love for James himself than as a love for “an ideal and noble man . . . ​a perfected manhood at the feet of a Sovereign Lord and Redeemer” (77). Fiction’s romantic ideals do not lead Mary to reject earthly love and duty—as Grandison’s critics feared—­but rather, give an idealism to this earthly love that connects it to divine love. For Stowe, the impor­ tant question is not ­whether a fiction reflects “the dim, daily walk of life,” but ­whether it transforms readers’ relation to it. But in spite of this rejection of the epistemological prob­lem of fictionality and the associated mimetic imperative, Stowe’s reflections on “romance” end with a qualified return to this imperative: “what romances . . . ​lie around us in the daily walk of life . . . ​the real­ity is ­there . . . ​the romancer is the second-­ hand recorder” (73). On one hand, this passage extends Stowe’s argument that romance is not continuous with fiction: it can be found throughout the world. On the other, it also affirms that fiction does, in fact, accurately reflect the world—it too, “sticks to realities.” This ongoing—if muted—­preoccupation with the mimetic imperative becomes clearer when we consider The Minister’s Wooing’s original serial publication in the Atlantic Monthly. As Dorothy Baker has shown, The Minister’s Wooing drew on materials from surrounding articles, from Oliver Wendell Holmes’s column to reviews of a recent biography of Aaron Burr (who appears as a character in Stowe’s fiction). Even as Stowe explic­itly resists the mimetic imperative, The Minister’s Wooing’s “conversation” with this surrounding nonfictional material suggests that her fiction has some factual basis that authenticates its repre­sen­ta­tional accuracy.18 In this, Stowe, much like Melville, is grappling with the contradictory demands being placed on fiction—­the idea that fiction must accurately reflect the world “as it is” and yet also do more than merely reproduce the “dullness” of “real life” (Melville’s phrase) or the “dim, daily walk of life” (Stowe’s formulation). The Minister’s Wooing, in a sense, aspires to fulfill an ideal for fiction articulated by the Christian Examiner in 1847: “It is not enough for an author of fiction to represent society exactly as it is. . . . ​­There is a far loftier art. It is, departing from the general truthfulness of nature and life in no single feature, violating no essential probability, so to collocate the figures and dispose the groups, so to distribute light and shade, as to produce a certain ­whole more richly suggestive than any ser­viceable copy could be. . . . ​Real life is not to be departed from, not contradicted; it is to be idealized.”19 While Stowe’s fiction emphasizes fiction’s idealizing, aesthetic work and the artful arranging of its “figures,” its connection to the surrounding nonfictional material in the Atlantic Monthly testifies that it does not depart from “the general truthfulness of

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nature and life.” But if The Minister’s Wooing’s Atlantic Monthly publication recalls the proj­ects of authentication characteristic of ­earlier novels and fiction, it does not reproduce them, b ­ ecause The Minister’s Wooing leaves this pro­cess of authentication entirely implicit. Unlike The Power of Sympathy and The Coquette, or even Hope Leslie and ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it does not draw attention to its basis in or relation to this wider factual discourse. Stowe’s coy engagement with this material might implicitly suggest a qualified adherence to the mimetic imperative, but her refusal to delineate her fiction’s relation to the world is a rejection of such a narrow framework for evaluating fictional truth. Stowe does not stake The Minister’s Wooing’s legitimacy as a fiction on this pro­cess of authentication. Stowe thus hints that her fiction has some relation to the world as it is and was, but she does not seek to clarify—as she did in A Key to U ­ ncle Tom’s Cabin—­the exact terms of this relation. This offers Stowe a way to negotiate a tension that runs through her theory of “romance.” Stowe both posits fiction as a means of creating “romance” in the world and suggests that fiction merely reflects the “romance” already found in the world. This is a tension that the text never resolves at the level of explicit argument. Instead, it is the backgrounding—­but not complete disavowal—of her fiction’s relation to the world that allows Stowe to pre­sent it as both a reflection of the world and a means of transforming readers’ relation to it: she suggests that her fiction’s enchanting romance has some basis in real­ity, even as she never explic­itly lays out what this basis is and thus, never reduces her narrative to a mere reflection of the “dim, dull world.” This enables Stowe, like Melville, to valorize her fiction not merely b ­ ecause it accurately reflects real­ity, but b ­ ecause it offers real­ity “exhilarated, in effect transformed.” The Minister’s Wooing’s implicit pro­cess of authentication crystallizes both the endurance of epistemological questions about fictionality and their decreasing salience in discussions of fiction. Hawthorne argues explic­itly that such questions about fiction’s relation to the “world as it is” are the wrong questions to ask of fiction. Set alongside Melville and Stowe’s evolving interrogations of the fact-­fiction divide, ­there is a remarkable consistency to his metafictional arguments: Hawthorne’s prefaces discourage scrutinizing a given romance’s relationship to real­ity. He does not, however, completely disavow his fiction’s basis in real­ity—in fact, he repeatedly hints at exactly such a basis—­but he insists that readers who focus on this relationship misunderstand the purpose of fiction. As a means of negotiating the competing imperatives for fiction in the 1850s, this approach allows Hawthorne to si­mul­ ta­neously claim the fictionist’s aestheticizing license and assert his narratives’ firm foundation in real­ity. As we saw in the prefaces to Seven Gables and The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne sought to bracket epistemological questions about fiction by arguing that fictionality signals that a narrative should be judged on its aesthetic

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effect rather than its strict accuracy. For Hawthorne, this conception of fiction extended beyond the subgenres in which such text-­internal standards had been developed, such as historical fiction, encompassing even ­those subgenres that had clung most tenaciously to the mimetic imperative. The Blithedale Romance (1852), for example, draws on social movement fiction, a genre in which a proj­ect of social transformation was often bound up with a claim to pre­sent “­things as they are.” Hawthorne, however, insists that his romance seeks neither to enact such change nor to reflect the world “as it is.” While admitting his romance is based on the Brook Farm socialist community, he claims that this “is incidental to the main purpose of the romance” and that he does not mean to “elicit a conclusion . . . ​in re­spect to socialism.” This disavowal, as disingenuous as it might be, sets up a remarkable recoding—­even inversion—of the usual conception of the subgenre: “the Socialist Community is merely . . . ​a theatre . . . ​removed from the highway of ordinary travel, where the creatures of [the romancer’s] brain may play their phantasmagorical antics, without exposing them to too close a comparison with the a­ ctual events of real lives.”20 This is a complete reversal of the “Founded on Fact” logic of the many social movement tales that claimed basis in ­actual events to establish their real­ity and thus legitimate their advocacy proj­ects. Instead, Hawthorne uses a factual basis to establish his narrative’s disconnection from everyday experience, creating a fairy-­realm where imaginative license trumps the mimetic imperative and the aesthetic “dominating function” signaled by fictionality—­“the main purpose of the romance”—­has f­ ree reign. Approached in isolation, Hawthorne’s invocation of Brook Farm as a fairyland separated from the world “as it is” might seem to reflect his well-­chronicled disillusionment with socialism as a means of transforming the world. But when we situate it in relation to his e­ arlier prefaces, it also resonates as an especially emphatic version of his repeated argument that fiction, given its “status as a work of art,” should not be encumbered by an imperative to reflect “the world as it is.” A brief scene encapsulates this wider argument. The narrator, Miles Coverdale, enters a barroom, and covertly observes the drinkers. The passage is permeated by the idiom and imagery of temperance tales: “death in life”; “the heavy, apoplectic sleep of drunkenness”; “a ragged, bloated New ­England toper.” Associating himself with the temperance perspective—­“we temperance-­ people”—­Coverdale pities the “freakish inebriate[s].” But when he sits down with one of the drinkers, the scene shifts subtly but significantly: “It was wonderful . . . ​what an effect the mild grape-­juice wrought upon him. It was not in the wine, but in the associations which it seemed to bring up. Instead of . . . ​ an old city-­vagabond . . . ​he began to take the aspect of a decayed gentlemen” (176–81). Much like The Scarlet Letter’s “moonlight, in a familiar room,” wine transforms the object of repre­sen­ta­tion by altering the artist’s perception— “I had myself quaffed a glass or two”—of the world: it changes the shabby old man into a picturesque gentleman who has fallen on hard times. In other

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words, the wine transforms the old man into a suitable object for artistic repre­sen­ta­tion, leading Coverdale to take “romantic and legendary license” with his “biograph[y].” Alcohol both aestheticizes and fictionalizes the old man. In staging this pivot away from the conventions of temperance tales, Hawthorne imagines the subgenre’s transformation from a vehicle for moral reform and social change to one for creating aesthetic effects. This is an audacious appropriation of antifictional anx­i­eties, as antebellum conduct writers continued to use meta­phors of intemperance and drunkenness to describe the delusions experienced by habitual fiction readers.21 Hawthorne, however, flouts such epistemological anx­i­eties in order to suggest how misguided it is to judge fiction as, first and foremost, a source of knowledge about the world. He recodes the rose-­tinted lens of mild inebriation as a means of accessing an artistic view of real­ity rather than as an epistemological threat or moral failure, rejecting at once instrumentalist uses of fiction and the accompanying mimetic imperative. Yet, even as Hawthorne’s romances stand out among antebellum fiction for their confident, explicit claims for fiction’s aesthetic license, this does not indicate his unconcern for the epistemological prob­lem of fictionality. While his prefaces consistently reject the mimetic imperative, they are also remarkably consistent in establishing some basis for his romances in real­ity. ­Whether The Scarlet Letter’s found manuscript, Seven Gables’s reference to the local peculiarities of Salem, or Blithedale’s basis in Brook Farm, Hawthorne’s prefaces uniformly assert his fiction’s connection to real­ity, even as they also resist any scrutiny of this relation. In Blithedale, Hawthorne argues that the epistemological imperative that requires fictionists to clarify their fictions’ relation to the world—­the insistence of critics to put fiction “exactly side by side with nature”—­compromises their aesthetic effect by exposing “the paint and pasteboard of their composition” (2). He even makes fiction’s ability to create an illusion—­exactly what worried fiction’s critics—­its constitutive virtue: fiction should not clarify its relation to the world but obscure it, so that the reader “cannot well discern the difference between” the world and this “fairy-­land” of fiction. This sleight of hand is, Hawthorne insists, an issue of artistry rather than e­ ither deception or delusion. But even as he asks readers not to scrutinize his fiction’s relation to the “world as it is,” he nonetheless insists that his romances have a firm basis in real­ity. ­Here, we can see the under­lying similarity between the metafictional arguments of Hawthorne’s prefaces and The Minister’s Wooing: Hawthorne and Stowe pre­sent their fictions as having a connection to a­ ctual p ­ eople and events, but they both insist that fiction need not, even should not, delineate the exact terms of this relation. That is, they both put forth fictions with a basis in real­ity, but they leave unexplained the exact nature of their narratives’ relation to the world as it is or was, ­because this would compromise the romancer’s aestheticizing, idealizing work. For Stowe and Hawthorne,

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this is a strategic response to the enduring suspicion of fiction in the United States—­and especially to the competing demands being placed on fiction in the 1850s—­but it ­will gradually become assumed: fiction, modern readers take for granted, can have a relation to “real­ity” without needing to explicate the terms of that relation. With the widespread ac­cep­tance of fiction in the late antebellum period, then, the prob­lem of fictionality has not been solved, but only driven under­ ground. The romances of the 1850s reveal the terms on which writers would set aside the epistemological questions about fictionality and the accompanying need to authenticate their fiction’s “truth” that had preoccupied ­earlier fictionists, even as they also reveal, albeit more subtly, an enduring preoccupation with ­these very issues. ­These romancers pushed questions about how exactly fiction relates to the “world as it is” into the background. They even insisted that such questions misconstrue the purpose of fiction. But they also continued to engage, however tacitly, t­ hese epistemological questions about fictionality. The contradictions and evasions that run through their fictions reveal that ­these romancers did not solve the prob­lem of fictionality. They simply argued—­a ­little anxiously—­that it was not a prob­lem ­after all. L ­ ater fictionists would show no such anx­i­eties. As fictionality ceases to be considered a prob­lem, the questions that had once been bound up with fictionality both migrate and mutate.

­After the Prob­lem of Fictionality At first blush, ­there is a ­great deal of continuity between the antebellum and late-­nineteenth-­century discussions of fiction and the novel. The old prob­lem of how fiction can accurately reflect the world, for example, seems to receive its fullest development in “realism” and “naturalism.”22 Some of ­these writers even negotiated the enduring mimetic imperative through the same conceptual terms—­such as “romance” and “real­ity”—­used by their antebellum pre­de­ ces­sors. Similarly, the question of how fiction might contribute to a proj­ect of social transformation that preoccupied many antebellum writers does not only endure, but becomes even more pressing in the works of Stephen Crane and Frank Norris, and ­later Upton Sinclair and Richard Wright. But for all ­these continuities, a shift has occurred: in ­these ­later works, ­there is ­little attention to fictionality as such. The heterogeneous set of literary conventions that have been grouped together as “realism” are less an attempt to grapple with the prob­lem of fictionality than an especially influential evasion of it. Across the ­later nineteenth ­century, Americans expressed ­little concern about the prob­lem of fictionality. In Books and Reading: or What Books Should I Read and How Should I Read Them? (1870), Noah Porter, a professor of moral philosophy at Yale, condemned the “cheap lit­er­a­ture” of the day using an idiom that closely recalled the early republic’s antifictional discourse:

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“Much of this sort of lit­er­a­ture . . . ​stimulates and inflames the passions, ignores or misleads the conscience, and studiously pre­sents views of life that are fundamentally false.” Such echoes, however, only underscore Porter’s utter unconcern for fictionality as such: he condemns as narrow-­minded t­ hose critics who “reject every­thing that is fictitious”; declares that it is “obvious” that fiction can “exert an influence that is both healthful and elevating”; and even singles out the imagination as a divine faculty. Porter’s extensive comments crystallize in an especially clear way how the concerns about fiction in general had morphed into concerns about a subset of fiction, specifically t­ hose associated with working class readers.23 Coming from a professor of moral philosophy at Yale—­one of the strongholds of antifictional sentiment in the early republic—­Porter’s comments also crystallize how many of the institutions and movements that had most virulently and categorically condemned fiction came to recognize select fictions as safe and even edifying. Where the evangelical preacher Henry Ward Beecher had condemned fiction in his 1844 Lectures to Young Men, he published a fiction of his own, Norwood, in 1867.24 By the late nineteenth ­century, even the Methodist Book Concern—­the publishing arm of what had long been the most stridently antifictional sect of American Protestantism—­had begun to issue “harmless fiction” and “entertaining and elevating” romances.25 Even as postbellum cultural arbiters continued to worry about the social and moral effects of certain fictions, they showed ­little concern about fictionality as such. In the late nineteenth c­ entury, t­ here was an increasing indifference to fictionality. The ­later nineteenth c­ entury’s unconcern for the fictionality of fiction is perhaps best captured by the fact that the postbellum era’s most sustained engagement with fictionality does not occur in fiction. It occurs in Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872). The questions of credulity and belief familiar from ­earlier debates about fiction permeate Twain’s travel narrative, as he strug­ gles to sort fact from fiction out West. Twain constantly deploys strategies of authentication reminiscent of e­ arlier fiction to establish the “truth” of both his narrative and the stories that he hears along the way. Twain, however, brings this rhe­toric of fact and plausibility to bear on the comically implausible tall tales of frontier life, poking fun at both credulous greenhorns and a discourse about fiction that had centered on authenticating its reliability. Recounting his role in co-­writing a serialized novel for a Western newspaper—­which includes, among countless improbabilities, a sailor’s journey around the world in a ­whale’s belly—­Twain describes the “curious . . . ​explanatory notes” that his coauthor attached to this “extravagant piece of lit­er­a­ture wherein the author endeavored to show that the ­whole ­thing was within the possibilities.”26 Roughing It highlights the obsolescence of such epistemological standards for fiction by ventriloquizing its norms for comic effect: the prob­lem with this serialized novel is not its epistemological credentials, but the fact that it is, as Twain puts it, “artistically absurd.”

[ 256 ] Coda

But Roughing It is itself no fiction. Deploying the idioms of antifiction and fictional authentication in a nonfictional text, Twain brings the standards that had been developed in the discourse about fiction to bear on a much wider range of stories. Relaying one anecdote he has heard, he writes: “what makes that worn anecdote . . . ​aggravating, is, that the adventure it celebrates never occurred. If it w ­ ere a good anecdote, that seeming demerit would be its chiefest virtue, for creative power belongs to greatness; but what ­ought to be done to a man who would wantonly contrive so flat a one as this?” (156). Twain condemns this lie not ­because of its lack of truth, but for its aesthetic failure. Ironically, the long-­standing American suspicion that fiction was, as Howells’s Mrs. Lapham put it, “all lies” supplies Twain with an object of parody as he seeks to recode lying as a creative act—­a kind of fiction-­making—­rather than a means of deceit. Roughing It thus decouples fictionality from the novel and prose fiction, instead associating it with Western social life in general. This reveals just how much the cultural meaning of fictionality had changed by the 1870s. No longer controversial or threatening, fiction offers a model for how readers should appreciate the inventiveness and artistry of both Twain’s tall tales and the lies he relates. Twain uses the historical alignment of fiction and lying in the United States not to condemn fiction, but to valorize lying as an American vernacular art. This cele­bration of vernacular lying, in turn, provided Twain with an influential means of framing his ­later fiction. Take Huck’s famous description of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer from the opening pages of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884): “That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. ­There was ­things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. . . . ​I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the ­widow.”27 While ostensibly a kind of truth claim, this opening could not be more dif­fer­ent than the early national claims to be “Founded in Truth,” as Twain willingly associates his book with exaggerations and “stretchers.” What this invocation of lying does, however, is link Twain’s fiction with the tradition of tall-­tale telling documented in Roughing It. ­There, Twain invoked fiction to recode lying as an art form; h ­ ere, he invokes lying to recode fiction—­ long associated with femininity and increasingly associated with a high-­culture literariness—as masculine and vernacular. To do so, Twain courts the alignment of fictionality with lying that US fictionists had resisted for the past c­ entury.28 Twain’s masculinization of fictionality is one of the foundational gestures for American realism. “Realism,” Michael Davitt Bell has argued, is not r­ eally a literary prob­lem at all, but a social and cultural one, which reflects (at least in its narrowly canonical version) a masculinist anxiety about the status of the artist as a “real man.”29 As Bell notes, the critical writings of Howells—­the closest approximation of a manifesto for American realism—­hinge on a series of conceptual oppositions, per­sis­tently denigrating “art,” “style,” and the “literary” in the interest of “real­ity,” “humanity,” and “the natu­ral.”30 But though Bell links this attitude back to the ­earlier antifictional prejudice, it is striking

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what word is missing from his list: fiction. Howells’s objections to “style” and “literariness” in fiction underscore his lack of concern for fictionality as such. The distinction that ­matters is no longer between “fiction” and “fact,” but between “literary” fictions and “natu­ral” fictions. When Howells calls for “fiction to cease to lie about life,” he takes for granted that fiction can accurately reflect “life.”31 For Howells—­unlike for his own Mrs. Lapham—­the difference between truth and lies is not one of mode, but of “style.” The realists cultivated this indifference to the question of fictionality in order to affirm the seriousness of their fiction. In his 1884 work “The Art of Fiction,” Henry James laments Trollope’s authorial asides, wherein Trollope “admits that the events he narrates have not ­really happened, and that he can give his narrative any turn the reader may like best.” James condemns such avowals of fictionality as a “betrayal” of the novelist’s “sacred office” that trivializes his quest for “truth.” ­Because James is not terribly interested in establishing the exact terms of this “truth”—it is “the truth . . . ​[the writer] assumes . . . ​what­ever [it] may be”—he argues that any explicit reflection on the narrative’s status as “make believe” undermines readers’ ability to “take . . . ​ fiction seriously.”32 Ignoring fictionality, thus, represents a final response to the antifictional discourse and yet another attempt to establish fiction’s cultural authority: the realists sought to dissociate the novel from the frivolity of “make believe” not by insisting on its basis in truth or fact, but by refusing to acknowledge its fictionality at all.33 But while the “realists” w ­ ere all invested in fiction’s seriousness, they had widely divergent ideas of what serious fiction entails. Upon close scrutiny, American realism is a rather incoherent literary movement. In spite of the movement’s label, ­these writers had very dif­fer­ent understandings of how fiction should relate to real­ity and they advocated competing, often contradictory, conceptions of fiction’s value. But even as ­these writers espoused very dif­fer­ent theories of fiction, they ­were unified in their cultivated indifference to fictionality. In fact, one of realism’s most enduring effects on the long arc of American literary history would be its conventionalization of this inattention to the fictionality of fiction. To unpack t­ hese claims, I want to briefly consider the competing understandings of the relationship between “romance” and “real­ity” in Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1901) and James’s 1907 preface to The American. Their opposed theories of “romance” and “real­ity” crystallize ­these writers’ divergent conceptions of how fiction should relate to the “real,” and even more fundamentally, their profoundly dif­fer­ent understandings of fiction’s purpose. But when we juxtapose t­ hese early twentieth-­century texts against antebellum reflections on “romance” and “real­ity,” it reveals a deeper, under­lying unity: neither Norris nor James approaches the relationship between “romance” and “real­ity” as a question of fictionality. The Octopus opens with the poet Presley grappling with his inability to reconcile “real­ity” with his desire for “romance”: “Romance was dead. He had

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lived too late. . . . ​Real­ity was what he longed for, ­things that he had seen. Yet how to make this compatible with romance.”34 Unable to regard the “sordid, deadly commonplace” ­people and events around him as appropriate subjects for “art,” Presley spends the early novel roaming the countryside in search of “romantic” material for his “­great poem.” The Octopus ultimately tells two stories. The first is the story of a collective of wheat farmers and their strug­gle with the railroad. The second is the story of Presley’s development into a poet capable of capturing this first story. It is the story of Presley recognizing the “romance” that has been around him all along. Learning of “the monstrous injustice of the increased tariff,” he flings aside “his ­great Song of the West,” and writes The Toilers, “a comment on the social fabric” (371). With a newfound “sympathy” for “the P ­ eople,” Presley can capture the “True Romance” of “grain rates and unjust freight tariffs”—­the “romance” lurking in the “real­ity” he had once dismissed as “sordid” and “commonplace” (13). For Norris, the writer’s role is to provide a revelatory experience that ­will allow readers to see “through all the shams” and recognize “the Truth” (652). “In this poem . . . ​you have not been trying to make a sounding piece of lit­er­a­ ture,” says the mystic Vanamee about The Toilers: “It is Truth . . . ​you have seen clearly.” Crucially, the opposition h ­ ere is not between “truth” and “fiction,” but between “truth” and “lit­er­a­ture.” Presley ­will show his “sincerity,” Norris’s highest value in art, not by changing the metaphysical status of his materials—­his abandoned “Song of the West” no less than his triumphant “The Toilers” was drawn from “real­ity”—­but by changing his publication venue: he publishes “The Toilers” in “the daily press” rather than a literary magazine. “Your inspiration has come FROM the p ­ eople,” Vanamee tells him, “Then let it go straight TO the P ­ eople—­not the literary readers” (376–77). In Norris’s use of the terms “romance” and “real­ity” to navigate the issue of literariness, the older prob­lem of fictionality dis­appears from view. Questions of style and audience have displaced questions about the epistemological status of fiction and its relation to “real life.” Presley’s poetic development does not involve any change in his dedication to “real­ity”: as both effeminate “literary” aspirant and engaged populist artist, he searches the “real­ity” around him for the materials for his art; the distinction hinges on what aspects of “real­ity” he considers fit subjects for his poetry. In The Octopus, the issue of “romance” and “real­ity” is not a question of dif­fer­ent metaphysical or epistemological ­orders, but a question of judging which aspects of the real world are truly worthy of elevation through art. In his negotiation of the relationship between “romance” and “real­ity,” Norris argues for his fiction’s value in explicit contradistinction to the self-­ consciously literary fiction of writers such as James. For James, as “The Art of Fiction” makes clear, the seriousness of fiction is bound up with neither its pop­u­lism nor its social activism, but with its elevated status as a work of art.35 So it is unsurprising that James takes up the question of “romance” and “real­ ity” in fiction through a comparison with painting: “By what art or mystery,

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what craft,” he won­ders in his preface to The American, “does a given picture of life appear to us to surround its theme, its figures and images, with the air of romance while another picture . . . ​may affect us as to steeping the ­whole ­matter in the ele­ment of real­ity.”36 James is less interested in the authenticity or truth of ­either picture, than in how an artist creates an “air” of ­either romance or real­ity. For James, what ­matters is not a fiction’s metaphysical or epistemological status, but its aesthetic effect. This claim requires some explanation, as James’s discussion of the “real” and the “romantic” in fiction does seem to hinge on the kind of epistemological distinction familiar from the early national period: “The real represents to my perception the ­things we cannot possibly not know. . . . ​The romantic stands . . . ​ for the ­things that, with all the facilities of the world . . . ​we never can directly know” (9). But while James employs an epistemological idiom that recalls ­earlier debates about fiction, he uses this idiom to set aside the central question of ­these debates: James insists that knowledge of “Real­ity”—­a concern for fictionists from Foster and Brackenridge through Stowe and Melville—is a nonissue for fiction, b ­ ecause this knowledge cannot be avoided. Alternatively, “romance” provides an experience that is beyond knowledge—it provides access to t­ hings that can never be known “directly.” James thus uses the language of knowledge to dismiss the very question of what kind of knowledge fiction offers. By rejecting this epistemological framework, James can valorize “romance” on the very terms that early national critics had condemned fiction: romance, he argues, should offer “experience liberated . . . ​exempt from the conditions that we usually know to attach to it” (19). For James, the mea­sure of the artful “romance” is not just ­whether a fiction provides this “experience liberated” from real­ity, but how it liberates this experience: The balloon of experience is . . . ​tied to the earth, and ­under that necessity we swing, thanks to a rope of remarkable length, in the more or less commodious car of the imagination; but it is by the rope we know where we are, and from the moment that cable is cut we are large and unrelated. . . . ​The art of the romancer is, “for the fun of it,” insidiously to cut the cable, to cut it without our detecting him. By emphasizing romance’s disconnection from real­ity, James echoes less antebellum romancers, such as Hawthorne and Stowe, than fiction’s most strident early national critics.37 Only James, having embraced a fundamentally dif­fer­ ent theory of fiction’s purpose, reimagines the greatest fear of ­these critics as a sign of artistry: ­ here is our general sense of the way t­ hings happen—it abides with us T indefeasibly, as readers of fiction, from the moment we demand that our fiction ­shall be intelligible; and t­ here is our par­tic­u­lar sense of the way they ­don’t happen, which is liable to wake up ­unless reflexion and

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criticism, in us, have been skillfully drugged. ­There are drugs enough, clearly—it is all a question of applying with them with tact; in which case the way t­ hings ­don’t happen may be artfully made to pass for the way ­things do. (10–11) In its confident appropriation of one of antifiction’s central figures—­ drugging38—­James’s preface assumes fiction’s “constitutive literariness,” taking for granted that a text’s fictionality implies its orientation t­ oward aesthetic frameworks of judgment. This conception of fictionality transforms the greatest fear of fiction’s early critics—­that fiction might pass off “the ways t­ hings ­don’t happen” for “the way that they do”—­into an artistic achievement. When we juxtapose James’s preface against Norris’s fiction, we are faced with theoretically incompatible understandings of the relation between “real­ity” and “romance.” Where Norris seeks to reveal the “romance” in the “real­ity” of everyday life, James seeks to imperceptibly sever fiction’s tie to “real­ity,” introducing readers into a world of “romance.” But in spite of t­ hese divergences, Norris and James both aspire to offer a version of Melville’s “more real­ity, than real life itself.” For James, this is “experience liberated” from real­ity; for Norris, this is only a changed relation to “real­ity” that allows readers to perceive its “romance.” Both writers, however, pre­sent fiction as offering an intensity of experience missing from the “vulgar” (James’s word) or “commonplace” (Norris’s term) experience of the “dullness” of “real life” invoked in The Confidence Man. B ­ ecause of their aesthetic and ideological differences, Norris and James’s shared belief that fiction should offer a heightened “experience” of “nature exhilarated” underscores, with par­tic­u­lar clarity, how this conception of fiction came to silently underpin a vast array of modern fiction. Unlike Melville himself, however, neither James nor Norris pre­sents this conception of fiction as troublingly paradoxical. The idea that fiction offers “more real­ity than real life” or “nature unfettered, exhilarated, in effect transformed” no longer resonates as a paradox, ­because, by the early twentieth c­ entury, fictionality has ceased to be a salient characteristic of the novel or, indeed, fiction more generally. The strategic refusal to acknowledge fictionality has become conventionalized: fictionality remains a constitutive characteristic of the novel genre, but it is largely unacknowledged and ignored. Debates about fiction’s value and purpose no longer focus on fictionality. Tellingly, neither James nor Norris approaches the distinction between “romance” and “real­ity” as hinging on fictionality, as it would have for almost e­ very early US writer. Norris approaches “romance” and “real­ity” as dif­fer­ent aspects of everyday life; James approaches them as dif­fer­ent aesthetic effects created in fiction. Together, they crystallize the moment’s lack of concern for fictionality as such. ­There ­were, of course, exceptions. By turn of the twentieth ­century, however, even ­those narratives that claimed a firm basis in facts no longer did so

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as a means of differentiating their books from fiction. Take, for instance, Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces: A Romance of Negro Life North and South, which opens with a claim to factual basis: “The incidents portrayed in the early chapters of the book actually occurred. Ample proof of this may be found in the archives of the court­house at Newberne.” In 1900, Hopkins authenticates her “romance” in terms that recall both 1790s “Founded on Fact” novels and 1850s antislavery fictions, not b ­ ecause her work is culturally belated, but ­because she wants to convince her readership of the ongoing real­ity of racist mob vio­lence—­“such ­things are.” But while Contending Forces echoes e­ arlier novelistic truth claims, ­these claims have a dif­fer­ent metageneric force, as Hopkins does not use such claims to remove her narrative from the category of fiction: in fact, her preface declares that “fiction is of g­ reat value to any p ­ eople” and advocates the importance of developing a tradition of Black fiction that “­will faithfully portray the inmost thoughts and feelings of the Negro with all the fire and romance which lie dormant in our history.”39 Even as she claims a factual basis, then, Hopkins insists that her work be categorized as a fiction, reflecting both the cultural prestige fiction had accrued by this time and the general ac­cep­tance of fiction as a vehicle for accurately representing real­ity. This coda has touched briefly on so many texts in order to capture a subtle but extensive sea change in the discourse about fiction: late nineteenth-­century fictionists actualize Melville’s desire to no longer ask questions about fictionality. This silence on questions of fictionality might originate as a self-­conscious strategy for a group of authors who sought to associate their fictions with the “real,” the “natu­ral,” and the “serious,” but by the turn of the twentieth c­ entury, it has become an unspoken, even unconsidered, norm for fiction. In spite of the disproportionate attention it has received in histories of American fiction, James’s specific theory of fiction’s relation to “real­ity” was neither as influential nor as representative of its moment as his insistence that this is not a question that should be worked out explic­itly in a novel. Many fictionists would reject James’s theory of romance and its commitment to “the sacrifice of relation,” but almost ­every fictionist of this era shared a commitment to the “imperceptibly” of his pro­cess. Disavowing the explicit metafictional reflection that characterized the works of Brackenridge and Tenney, Sedgwick and Neal, Lippard and Stowe, James insists that the relation or nonrelation of a fiction to “real­ity” should be left implicit. Both his critical writings and his fiction exemplify this era’s emergent consensus that fiction’s fictionality should remain strictly tacit. The end of the nineteenth ­century, then, brought two interconnected developments that continue to shape our approach to fiction. The first was the disappearance of the question of fictionality from discussions of fiction. The explicit reflection on a text’s logic of fictionality characteristic of US fiction through the m ­ iddle of the nineteenth c­ entury was suddenly regarded as unnecessary and even gauche. The second was the consolidation of the more expansive sense of “the novel” to which the American Review had objected

[ 262 ] Coda

in 1850.40 By the early twentieth ­century, the novel was more than just the ascendant genre of extended prose fiction in the United States: ­there had been a narrowing of the terms in which fiction was discussed such that the term “novel” had more or less become a synonym for extended prose fiction. Fictionality ceased to be a site at which the value and purpose of fiction ­were negotiated and became a conventional and constitutive—­but largely uncommented upon—­feature of the novel genre. ­These paired developments are what undergird the novelization of early US fiction that I discussed in the introduction—­the pro­cess by which a host of early fictions that defined their proj­ects in contradistinction to novels have been unreflectively integrated into our histories of the American novel. The late nineteenth c­ entury bequeathed to ­later readers both a capacious sense of the novel genre and a cultivated indifference to the question of fictionality that have obscured the terms on which texts as varied as Margaretta, Swallow-­Barn, Pym, and Moby-­Dick addressed—­and w ­ ere debated by—­readers. For, once fictionality became an uncontroversial and taken for granted aspect of the novel, the grounds on which many e­ arlier texts had claimed distinction from the novel genre came to seem trivial, evasive, disingenuous, and even confused. By the early twentieth ­century, fictionality had become newly transparent, and it remains so to this day. To use the terms of James’s meta­phor, it is not that the string tethering fiction to real­ity is imperceptibly cut, but rather that this string itself becomes imperceptible. If unified by ­little ­else, the novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth ­century share a lack of concern about fictionality: from The House of Mirth to ­Sister Carrie, Their Eyes ­Were Watching God to The Jungle, The G ­ reat Gatsby to Native Son, As I Lay D ­ ying to Studs Lonigan, O Pioneers! to Invisible Man, we encounter almost no explicit reflections on the question of what it means for a text to be fictional that had preoccupied e­ arlier writers. T ­ here was no longer a need to acknowledge or consider the novel’s fictionality. It had been accepted as a constitutive, conventionalized, and stable characteristic of the genre that requires no attention. By the turn of the twentieth c­ entury, even as fictionality was more ubiquitous than ever in US culture, it had performed a remarkable vanis­hing act. It had dis­appeared from American literary history. This vanis­hing act is, to a certain extent, temporary. A focus on the fictionality of fiction would reemerge in the second half of the twentieth c­ entury, with the rise of postmodern metafiction and certain branches of genre fiction, most notably science fiction. The works of writers such as John Barth and Vladimir Nabokov restored, in some sense, a hyper-­awareness of fiction’s fictionality typical of the early republic. The past seven de­cades have produced an array of works, from Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History to Dave Eggers’s What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak, A Novel, that deliberately blurred generic bound­aries, inviting readers to self-­consciously consider the kinds of truth claims advanced by

Rom a nce a nd ­R e a l­i t y [ 263 ]

dif­fer­ent genres. Yet postmodern metafiction’s ability to surprise depends, of course, on readers’ unthinking comfort with fictionality—­their tendency to take it for granted. The provocative force of its generic transgressions depends on readers’ sense of generic bound­aries. Where early US fiction often sought to make readers comfortable with (at least some variety of ) fictionality, twentieth-­and twenty-­first-­century metafiction assumes readers’ comfort with the fictionality of fiction. The issue of fictionality, then, might recur from time to time in our fiction-­saturated culture, but the prob­lem of fictionality does not. We live in a society that is deeply comfortable with—­but not terribly attentive to—­fictionality. For this reason, t­ oday’s readers might find nothing remarkable in Harper’s 1860 declaration that “Fiction is a final fact of h ­ uman education and is no more to be explained or defended than the sunset or the r­ ose.”41 Such an assertion of fiction’s self-­evident, naturalized value, however, had been largely unimaginable for American writers over the preceding eighty years. From the 1780s through the 1850s, almost ­every fictionist had, to some degree, sought to explain or defend their use of fiction. Although attitudes ­toward fiction evolved considerably over t­ hese de­cades, the contestations over the meaning of fictionality endured. The very fact that Harper’s must assert that fiction requires neither explanation nor defense, of course, suggests that, even at that moment, such a consensus could not yet be assumed. The explanation and defense of fiction, ­after all, had proven to be one of the central and most enduring preoccupations of American lit­er­a­ture. Early US writers had an acute awareness of the fictionality of fiction alien to our own moment. Our long-­standing comfort with fictionality might tempt us to look back on e­ arlier anx­ie­ ties about fiction and, like Howells’s Mr. Corey, smile at the many Mrs. Laphams of American literary history who failed to understand what seems to us a commonsense distinction between fiction and lies. It was, however, ­these very anx­i­eties about fiction’s uncertain epistemological status that made ­earlier writers uniquely attentive to the kinds of knowledge that fiction could produce. Early US fiction—­from The Algerine Captive to Wieland, from Kelroy to Hope Leslie, from The Quaker City to The Heroic Slave—­was preoccupied with fiction’s ability to offer a unique knowledge about the world as it is or was. Or more accurately, ­these fictions ­were preoccupied with fiction’s ability to offer a unique way of knowing this world. Forced to defend the mode, ­these writers did not take the value and purpose of fiction for granted. They developed an incredible array of new va­ri­e­ties of fictionality and novel theories of fictionality’s use that reveal the myriad possibilities of the mode. This book has sought to recover the unfamiliar, even strange—at least to us—­ways in which t­ hese writers understood, as Brockden Brown put it, the “merits” of their books “as fiction.” Their fictions reveal to us the historical contingency—­and in some cases, the impoverished sense of possibility—of our own conceptions of fiction’s purpose and value.

Ack now l ­e dgm e n ts

i h av e been at work on this book for a long time and I am in the enviable position of having many ­people to thank. This proj­ect began, ages ago, as a dissertation, and I am deeply grateful for the guidance of Michael Warner, Caleb Smith, and Jill Campbell, who profoundly ­shaped both the foundations of this book and the way I think and write more generally. Michael introduced me to the strange world of early American lit­er­a­ture, and his nurturing encouragement and rigorous skepticism ­were both invaluable as I developed the proj­ect’s central claims. I learned more about writing from Jill’s detailed feedback on the earliest versions of this proj­ect than I have from anywhere e­ lse. Caleb has been both an ideal interlocutor and a dedicated mentor. I have always understood my own arguments more fully a­ fter talking through them with him. The proj­ect also benefited from insightful feedback from Inderpal Grewal, Paul Grimstad, Ala Alryyes, Wai Chee Dimock, and the incomparably generous Sam See. During the early stages of this proj­ect, I was lucky enough to enjoy the lively conversation and unmatched camaraderie of Ryan Carr, Maggie Deli, Joe Stadolnik, Glyn Salton-­Cox, Edgar Garcia, Julia Fawcett, Lina Moe, Sam Fallon, Matt Hunter, Justin Sider, Len Gutkin, and Tessie Prakas. The conversations we had in The Anchor still structure how I think about lit­er­a­ture and literary studies. I truly cannot imagine a more supportive and intellectually engaging set of colleagues than I found in the Scripps College En­glish Department. ­Whether in the Miller Wing or at Espiau’s, Aaron Matz, Warren Liu, Marissa Nicosia, Michelle Decker, Tessie Prakas, and Leila Mansouri provided rigorous feedback, sage guidance, and warm friendship. I owe a unique debt to Tessie for both her incisiveness as an interlocutor and her generosity as a friend. Over the past de­cade, she has spent more time with this proj­ect than anyone other than me. At Scripps, I also benefited greatly from the conversation of Rita Roberts, Julie Liss, Andrew Jacobs, Mark Golub, Corey Tazzara, Sumita Pahwa, and Dion Scott-­Kakures. Katie Karaiscos and Christina Ranney provided valuable administrative support and invaluable good cheer. I could not have asked for a more helpful and supportive dean than Amy Marcus-­Newhall. At Honnold Library, Kendra Macomber provided crucial research support during the final stages of writing. I am also im­mensely grateful for the friends and colleagues in the field of early American literary studies who improved this book through both formal feedback and informal conversations. Over the years, I received useful comments on vari­ous pieces of this proj­ect at meetings of the Society of Early Americanists, the Charles Brockden Brown Society, the Society for the Study [ 265 ]

[ 266 ] Ack now l­e dgmen ts

of American W ­ omen Writers, the American Society for Eighteenth-­Century Studies, the Modern Language Association, the American Lit­er­a­ture Association, the American Studies Association, the North American Victorian Studies Association, the Poe Studies Association, the American Comparative Lit­er­a­ture Association, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and the UCLA Americanist Research Colloquium. I particularly benefited from the advice and conversation of Sam Sommers, Molly Farrell, Karen Weyler, Siân Silyn Roberts, Chris Looby, and especially Matthew Pethers. I owe special debts to Melissa Adams-­Campbell and Carrie Hyde, who provided remarkably insightful readings of vari­ous chapters. This proj­ect also benefited im­mensely from the feedback of the Southern California Americanist Group at the Huntington Library, and I’m grateful to Evan Kindley, Sarah Mesle, Christopher Hunter, Shirley Samuels, Mark Eaton, Christian Reed, Sharon Oster, Stefanie Sobelle, Greta LaFleur, and especially Michele Navakas, Leila Mansouri, Michelle Chihara, Bert Emerson, and Aaron DeRosa for their thoughtful readings of much of this manuscript. I owe par­tic­u­lar thanks to Aaron for both his supportive camaraderie and the probing questions he often asked me over beers in Claremont. I want to thank Anne Savarese for her belief in this book and for her thoughtful guidance throughout the review and publication pro­cess. I also want to thank the anonymous readers for Prince­ton University Press. Their careful and insightful readings of the manuscript helped me both better understand my own arguments and better understand how to structure ­those arguments. I’m grateful for the hard work of every­one at Prince­ton University Press who contributed to the book’s production and promotion: Ellen Foos, Jenny Tan, Chris Ferrante, Erin Suydam, Bob Bettendorf, Alyssa Sanford, Amy Stewart, and Dayna Hagewood. I want to give par­tic­ul­ar thanks to Jennifer Harris for her careful copyediting and to Katherine Harper for indexing the book. This proj­ect was supported by a Beinecke Research Fellowship, a Whiting Dissertation Fellowship in the Humanities, Scripps College Faculty Research Funds, and a Scripps College Faculty Sabbatical Fellowship. Vari­ous parts of this book have appeared previously in article form and I am indebted to the editors and anonymous readers for ­these journals for their thoughtful feedback. ­Earlier versions of part of chapter 2 appeared as “What­ever May Be the Merit of My Book as a Fiction: Wieland ’s Instructional Fictionality,” ELH 79, no. 3 (2012): 715–45, and I would like to thank the Johns Hopkins University Press for permission to reprint it ­here. E ­ arlier versions of another part of chapter 2 appeared as “ ‘Nothing but Fiction’: Modern Chivalry, Fictionality, and the Po­liti­cal Public Sphere in the Early Republic” in Early American Lit­ er­a­ture 50, no. 2 (2015): 301–30, and I would like to thank the University of North Carolina Press for permission to reprint it ­here. Another part of chapter 2 also served as the basis for an article that was published in a special issue of American Lit­er­a­ture on “Critical Pedagogies for a Changing World,”

Ack now l­e dgmen ts [ 267 ]

edited by Carol Batker, Eden Osucha, and Augusta Rohrbach, as “Fictionality Risen: Early Amer­i­ca, the Common Core Curriculum, and How We Argue about Fiction ­Today,” American Lit­er­a­ture 89, no. 2 (2017): 225–53, and I want to thank Duke University Press for permission to reprint parts of it h ­ ere. Part of chapter 7 also appeared in an e­ arlier form in J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-­ Century Americanists as “The ‘Mysterious Depths’ of Slave Interiority: Fiction and Intersubjective Knowledge in Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-­Century Americanists 8, no. 2 (2020): 195–220, and I want to thank the University of Pennsylvania Press and the Society of Nineteenth-­Century Americanists for permission to reprint it h ­ ere. Last, my greatest debt is to the friends and ­family whose love and support have buoyed me throughout this pro­cess. My ­sister Maria has been an endless source of encouragement and good cheer. Seth has been an inspiring, if often distracting, writing buddy as I worked on the final set of revisions. I dedicate this book to my parents, for their unwavering love, belief, and support and for their quietly inspiring commitment to grinding away; and to Erica, whose fierce intellect, wry wit, and loving companionship have sustained me during the writing of this book and enriched my life immeasurably.

no t es

Introduction 1. A focus on the “Rise of the Novel” has prevailed in histories of early American fiction ever since Alexander Cowie’s The Rise of the American Novel (New York: American Books, 1948). It was reinforced by Cathy Davidson’s field-­defining Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in Amer­ic­ a (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986; 2004). 2. ­There is perhaps no better evidence of the novel’s enduring centrality to the American cultural imagination than the surprising resilience of the idea of “The ­Great American Novel”; see Lawrence Buell, The Dream of the G ­ reat American Novel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 3. Melville, The Confidence Man, ed. Stephen Matterson (New York: Penguin, 1990), 217. Subsequently cited parenthetically. 4. Williams, Keywords (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 135. 5. See G. Harrison Orians, “Censure of Fiction in American Romances and Magazines, 1789–1810,” PMLA 52, no. 1 (1937): 195–214; Herbert Ross Brown, The Sentimental Novel in Amer­i­ca, 1789–1860 (New York: Pageant, 1959), 3–28; Terence Martin, The Instructed Vision: Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and the Origins of American Fiction (New York: Kraus, 1961); and Davidson, Revolution and the Word, 101–6. On how republican ideology ­shaped the antifictional discourse, see Michael Warner, Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-­Century Amer­i­ca (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 75; David Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British Amer­i­ca (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Christopher Lukasik, Discerning Characters: The Culture of Appearance in Early Amer­i­ca (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 77–83; and Michael Millner, Fever Reading: Affect and Reading Badly in the Early American Public Sphere (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2012). Edward Cahill has recently qualified the long-­standing assumptions about the American suspicion of the imagination by arguing that antifiction advanced not “anti-­ aesthetic attitudes” but “normative theoretical assumptions about aesthetic experience” (Liberty of the Imagination: Aesthetic Theory, Literary Form, and Politics in the Early United States [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012], 169). 6. Brown, “To Thomas Jefferson,” The En­glish Lit­er­a­tures of Amer­i­ca, 1500–1800, ed. Myra Jehlen and Michael Warner (New York: Routledge, 1997), 987. 7. Port-­Folio 4 (1810): 96. 8. An authoritative definition of fictionality is difficult to pin down, b ­ ecause fictionality has been an object of inquiry for a wide range of academic disciplines that have generated multiple, often competing definitions of the term. Sarah Tindal Kareem, however, offers an admirably succinct encapsulation of fictionality’s prevailing meaning within literary studies: “Fictionality refers . . . ​to the conceptual category that classifies imaginary stories as a special discursive mode distinct from ­either referential or fraudulently referential discourse” (Eighteenth-­Century Fiction and the Reinvention of Won­der [New York: Oxford University Press, 2014], 10). 9. While literary historians have only recently taken up fictionality, t­ here is a venerable and extensive scholarly lit­er­a­ture on fictionality in analytic philosophy and narrative theory that draws variously on speech act theory, pos­si­ble worlds theory, narratology, and rhetorical studies. (For an overview of the history of ­these dif­fer­ent approaches to

[ 269 ]

[ 270 ] Notes to In troduction fictionality, their divergent conceptions of what fictionality is, and their dif­fer­ent methods for describing and analyzing it, see Richard Walsh, The Rhe­toric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction [Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007], 1–52; and Monika Fludernik, “The Fiction of the Rise of Fictionality,” Poetics ­Today 39, no. 1 [2018]: 68–92.) Drawing on ­earlier philosophical and narratological accounts of fictionality, Gallagher’s “Rise of Fictionality” advanced a historicist argument about fictionality’s emergence in the eighteenth-­century En­glish novel that sparked a fresh interest in fictionality in literary studies, as literary scholars from a wide range of subfields both built on and challenged her account of fictionality’s eighteenth-­century “rise.” This focus on fictionality has been particularly influential in the study of eighteenth-­century En­glish and French lit­er­a­ture, with a number of impor­tant recent studies centering on questions of fictionality. See, among o ­ thers, Emily Hodgson Anderson, Eighteenth-­Century Authorship and the Play of Fiction: Novels and the Theater, Haywood to Austen (New York: Routledge, 2009); Nicholas Paige, Before Fiction: The Ancien Régime of the Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Kareem, Eighteenth-­Century Fiction and the Reinvention of Won­der; Katherine Ding, “ ‘Searching a­ fter the Splendid Nothing’: Gothic Epistemology and the Rise of Fictionality,” En­glish Literary History 80, no. 2 (2013): 543–73; and S. V. Gjerlevsen, “A Novel History of Fictionality,” Narrative 24, no. 2 (2016): 175–89. In addition to “The Rise of Fictionality,” t­ hese recent studies often draw on the e­ arlier engagements with fictionality and fictional character in Catherine Gallagher’s Nobody’s Story: The Vanis­hing Acts of ­Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Sandra Sherman, Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eigh­ teenth ­Century: Accounting for Defoe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Deidre Lynch’s The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), and on Michael McKeon’s account of the evolving historical relationship between “questions of truth” and “questions of virtue” in The Origins of the En­glish Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). Fictionality has also recently become an object of inquiry for cognitive literary studies, such as in Alan Palmer’s Fictional Minds (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), and for computational literary studies, most notably with Andrew ­Piper’s construction of a predictive model for identifying works of fiction based on their linguistic content (Enumerations: Data and Literary Study [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018], 109-33). 10. Gallagher, “The Rise of Fictionality,” in The Novel, Volume 1, ed. Franco Moretti (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2006), 344–45. 11. Recent scholarship has shown how an enduring tendency to approach early American writing through the cultural nationalism of the 1840s and 1850s has both obscured how most early US writers understood their works as part of a wider En­glish culture (rather than a distinctly American one) and distorted the specific logic through which certain early US writers did pre­sent their works as distinctly American. On how enduring feelings of British affiliation ­shaped early US writing, see Leonard Tennen­house, The Importance of Feeling En­glish: American Lit­er­a­ture and the British Diaspora, 1750–1850 (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2007). For a transatlantic genealogy of the idea of American literary distinctiveness and an account of how this idea influenced early US lit­er­a­ture, see Ezra Tawil, Lit­er­a­ture, American Style: The Originality of Imitation in the Early Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). Tawil recovers the pre-­Romantic conception of originality as repetition with difference that underpinned early national attempts to develop a distinctly American lit­er­a­ture—­a conception of national literary distinctiveness that differs dramatically from the antebellum manifestos of American literary nationalism that have often framed discussions of American lit­er­a­ture.

Notes to In troduction [ 271 ] 12. Philadelphia Minerva 4 (April 21, 1798): 47. 13. Walsh and ­others have advocated a rhetorical understanding of fictionality, focusing on how someone might use fictionality to achieve a purpose in relation to a specific audience. Such an approach treats fictionality not simply as the quality of being fictional, but as a communicative framework and rhetorical strategy that can be employed outside the genre of fiction; Henrik Skov Nielsen, James Phelan, and Richard Walsh, “Ten ­Theses about Fictionality,” Narrative 23, no. 1 (2015). Drawing on pragmatic models of communication, Walsh’s Rhe­toric of Fictionality advanced an especially forceful argument for the need to separate fictionality from fiction and for treating fictionality as a communicative strategy that can be deployed in a wide range of genres and discourses rather than a quality of certain texts. Walsh sought to reframe the study fictionality around questions of communicative intent—­how a sender uses fictionality and how a receiver interprets it—­rather than the search for text-­internal indices or “signposts of fictionality” that had long been the focus of narratological accounts of fictionality, such as Dorrit Cohn’s influential The Distinction of Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). My account draws on ­these rhetorical approaches to fictionality, but it differs from them in focusing on the rhetorical force within—­rather than beyond—­prose fiction. My approach has a par­tic­u­lar affinity with Gjerlevsen’s recent “A Novel History of Fictionality” in that it draws on both rhetorical approaches and the venerable formalistic approaches to fictionality in the ser­vice of a literary historical proj­ect. Although she draws on Walsh’s account, Gjerlevsen argues for the limitations of both the purely formalistic approach and the “radically pragmatic approach” to fictionality for “conduct[ing] a historical investigation of techniques of fictionality.” She advocates instead for a “rhetorical concept of fictionality” that is “(a) thoroughly separated from the genre of fiction; (b) not understood in opposition to but in coexistence with literary techniques and conventions, including the use of formal devices that signal fictionality; and (c) able to acknowledge historical changes in the way dif­fer­ent devices signal fictionality” (“A Novel History,” 179). Gjerlevsen brings this rhetorical approach to bear on the rise of the En­glish novel, showing how “Focusing on fictionality as an act of communication makes vis­i­ble just how impor­tant fictionality was in the negotiation of the novel as a new genre” (184). For an account that argues for the compatibility of a rhetorical approach to fictionality and Gallagher’s historicist approach, see Phelan, “Fictionality, Audiences, and Character: A Rhetorical Alternative to Catherine Gallagher’s ‘Rise of Fictionality,’ ” Poetics ­Today 39, no. 1 (2018): 113–29. 14. ­Here, I am building on Jonathan Arac’s insight that “literary narrative” first emerges in the United States in the 1850s, most notably in the romances of Hawthorne and Melville (The Emergence of American Literary Narrative, 1820–1860 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005], 120–80). Arac argues that this era brings a “more historically ­limited” sense of “lit­er­a­ture”: this is a key moment in moving from an eighteenth-­century conception of “lit­er­a­ture” as a body of letters that encompasses a range of fictional and nonfictional narratives to the twentieth-­century conception of “lit­er­a­ture” as fiction that is not defined by an established marketing genre. According to Arac, this new understanding of what he calls, following Poe, “lit­er­a­ture proper” was defined by its status as art, its association with the romantic imagination, and its separation from the world of “common life” (3–5). Richard Brodhead has also offered an account of the transformation of the idea of the “literary” across the nineteenth ­century: he traces how an understanding of lit­er­a­ture as an autonomous art defined by its internal properties and formal arrangement rather than its ser­vice to an “extra-­literary good” displaced the more capacious conception of the literary during the late nineteenth ­century (Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-­Century Amer­i­ca [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993], 162). In this book, my object is not to offer an account of the emergence of this idea of literariness

[ 272 ] Notes to In troduction in general, but, building on the work of Brodhead, Arac, and ­others, to trace the pro­cess through which fictionality came to be seen as a sign of this kind of artful literariness. 15. Genette, Fiction and Diction, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), vii–­viii; 19. Genette draws this “widely accepted definition” of literariness from the work of Roman Jakobson. 16. Ibid., 18. 17. Ibid., 2–3. 18. Brodhead, Cultures of Letters, 158–62. 19. Genette, Fiction, 24. 20. Martin, Instructed Vision, viii, 135. 21. For an overview of this critical history, see Looby and Weinstein’s introduction to their pathbreaking edited collection, American Lit­er­a­ture’s Aesthetic Dimensions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). On early American lit­er­a­ture’s relationship to aesthetic theory, see Cahill, Liberty of the Imagination; Garrett, Episodic Poetics: Politics and Literary Form ­after the Constitution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Schweighauser, Beautiful Deceptions: Eu­ro­pean Aesthetics, the Early American Novel, and Illusionist Art (Charlottesville: University of V ­ irginia Press, 2017); and Dillon’s “Sentimental Aesthetics,” American Lit­er­a­ture 76, no. 3: 495–523. On the role of aesthetics in early American literary and cultural studies, see the special issue “Aesthetics and the End(s) of American Cultural Studies,” edited by Castiglia and Castronovo, especially their essay, “A ‘Hive of Subtlety’: Aesthetics and the End(s) of Cultural Studies” (American Lit­er­a­ture 76, no. 3 [2004]: 423–34); and the special issue “Aesthetics, Feeling, and Form in Early American Literary Studies,” edited by Cahill and Larkin, especially their introduction (Early American Lit­er­ a­ture 51, no. 2 [2016]: 235–54). 22. Schweighauser, Beautiful Deceptions, 16–17. 23. Ibid., 7. 24. As Schweighauser notes, arguments for fiction’s aesthetic autonomy do not imply that it is apo­liti­cal: rather, it is lit­er­a­ture’s separation from such “extraliterary spheres” as politics, morality, and religion that gives “modern” lit­er­a­ture a unique social and po­liti­cal force (Beautiful Deceptions, 11). Arac similarly sees “literary” narrative’s distance from such realms as politics and the economy as endowing it with the authority to criticize t­ hese other realms, though the corollary of this authority, in his account, is a “diminishment of the scope of the writer’s action” (Literary Narrative, 179). 25. Philadelphia Minerva 4 (May 5, 1798): 55. 26. McGill, American Lit­er­a­ture and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–53 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 218–62. 27. Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables, ed. Milton Stern (New York: Penguin, 1981), 1–2. Subsequently cited parenthetically. 28. In her invaluable survey of antebellum reviews of fiction, Nina Baym shows how in the 1840s and 1850s, reviewers began to object to unartful moralizing, even as they continued to regard judging a fiction’s “moral tendency” as one of their principal tasks; Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum Amer­ic­ a (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 124–28. 29. Focusing specifically on Hawthorne and romance, Carrie Hyde has shown how the romantic reconceptualization of the “literary” as an autonomous sphere distanced from politics made it “an ideal arena for the continued development of the higher law tradition of citizenship” (Civic Longing [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018], 118). 30. Within the venerable and extensive scholarly lit­er­a­ture on the romance/novel distinction, Baym’s Novels, Readers, and Reviewers and Michael Davitt Bell’s The Development of American Romance: The Sacrifice of Relation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

Notes to In troduction [ 273 ] 1980) offered especially influential historicist revisions of Richard Chase’s famous thesis that the (En­glish) novel is defined by its mimesis of everyday social life, while the American romance is defined by its refusal of this mimetic imperative in f­ avor of symbolic and mythic materials (The American Novel and Its Tradition [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957]). Baym argued that Romance and Novel ­were essentially synonyms during this period (Novels, Readers, and Reviewers, 23). Alternatively, Bell insisted that the Romance-­ Novel was, for some writers at least, a historically operative generic distinction. 31. McGill, Culture of Reprinting, 240. 32. See especially Jane Tompkins’s foundational Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 33. This opposition between aestheticism and po­liti­cal engagement has been challenged and nuanced in recent scholarship on the aesthetic aspects of American lit­er­a­ ture; see especially Looby and Weinstein, “Introduction,” American Lit­er­a­ture’s Aesthetic Dimensions. 34. This influential narrative was inaugurated by F. O. Matthiessen’s classic The American Re­nais­sance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941). 35. Though focused on En­glish fiction, Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Po­liti­cal History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) was foundational in turning attention to the po­liti­cal importance of the novel, arguing that the domestic novel was a key genre in the rise of a new m ­ iddle class and the development of the idea of the modern individual. Armstrong, along with Leonard Tennen­house, expanded on the long po­liti­cal history of this modern individual and the transatlantic development of the novel in The Imaginary Puritan: Lit­er­a­ture, Intellectual ­Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), locating the novel’s origins in the North American captivity narrative, rather than an ­earlier Eu­ro­pean genre. 36. The canonical overview of the early US novel remains Davidson’s Revolution and the Word. In the 1990s and early 2000s, major studies of the early American novel focused on the po­liti­cal and cultural work of ­family, sympathy, and sentiment; see especially Shirley Samuels, Romances of the Republic: W ­ omen, the F ­ amily, and Vio­lence in the Lit­er­a­ture of the Early American Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Julia Stern, The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Elizabeth Barnes, States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the Early American Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Michelle Burnham, Captivity and Sentiment: Cultural Exchange in American Lit­er­a­ture, 1682–1861 (Hanover, NH: University of New ­England Press, 1997); Bruce Burgett, Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1998); Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004); Karen Weyler, Intricate Relations: Sexual and Economic Desire in American Fiction, 1789–1814 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004); Marion Rust, Prodigal ­Daughters: Susanna Rowson’s Early American ­Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); and Tennen­house, Feeling En­glish. Recent scholarship has especially focused on the novel’s relationship to democracy; see Sandra Gustafson, Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Stacey Margolis, Fictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-­Century Amer­i­ca (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015); and Dana D. Nelson, Commons Democracy: Reading the Politics of Participation in the Early United States (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). Most recently, Armstrong and Tennen­house’s Novels in the Time of Demo­cratic Writing (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) argues that what is distinctive about the

[ 274 ] Notes to In troduction early American novel—as opposed to both British novels and ­later American novels—­are its formal tropes that create “a decentered and open-­ended social network that cut across and countered point for point the logic of a world of property” that defined the British novel (14). Recent scholarship on the early American novel has also foregrounded issues of race, such as Jared Gardner’s Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Lit­er­ a­ture, 1787–1845 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); and empire, such as Edward Larkin, The American School of Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016); and class, such as Joe Shapiro’s The Illiberal Imagination: Class and the Rise of the U.S. Novel (Charlottesville: University of V ­ irginia Press, 2017). Drawing on book history, recent studies of US fiction and novels have also explored the material conditions of fiction’s circulation, often challenging the prevailing scholarly focus on the codex-­form novel. ­These studies have considered how reprinting and serialization in periodicals ­shaped fiction and how fictions commented on and engaged with evolving venues for publication and circulation; see McGill, Culture of Reprinting; Patricia Okker, Social Stories: The Magazine Novel in Nineteenth-­Century Amer­i­ca (Charlottesville: University of V ­ irginia Press, 2003); Gardner, The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 2012); and Sari Edelstein, Between the Novel and the News: The Emergence of American ­Women’s Writing (Charlottesville: University of ­Virginia Press, 2014). For wide-­ ranging overviews of the early US novel, see Samuels, Reading the American Novel, 1780– 1865 (Malden, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2013); Philip Gura, Truth’s Ragged Edge: The Rise of the American Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013); and The American Novel to 1870, ed. J. Gerald Kennedy and Leland Person (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 37. Subsequent accounts of American romance have revised Chase’s thesis about romance ignoring “man in society” and the associated po­liti­cal questions; see especially Robert Levine, Conspiracy and Romance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and Gretchen Woertendyke, Hemispheric Regionalism: Romance and the Geography of Genre (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 38. Antebellum reviewers rarely approached fictions as objects for interpretation. Baym only slightly overstates the case when she writes: “never—­not in a single instance—­ did they talk about the act of reading novels as one of producing meanings, interpretations, and readings. . . . ​The reader was not . . . ​a construer of meanings” (Novels, Readers, and Reviewers, 61–63). 39. Nielsen et al., “Ten ­Theses.” 40. Gallagher, “Rise,” 336. 41. As Williams notes, the term “Novel” has become “nearly synonymous with fiction” (Keywords, 135). 42. Gallagher, “Rise,” 337. Where Gallagher contends that the conceptual category of fiction did not exist in Eu­ro­pean culture prior to the mid-­eighteenth c­ entury, McKeon (convincingly) argues that the category was operative ­earlier, but it had not been explic­itly theorized; The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 746 n. 159. For a narratological argument against Gallagher’s claim that fictionality first emerged in the novel, see Fludernik, “The Fiction of the Rise of Fictionality.” 43. Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 44. On Revolution and the Word’s ongoing influence, see “21 st ­Century Studies in the Early American Novel: A Roundtable on the Thirtieth Anniversary of Revolution and the Word,” Journal of American Studies 50, no. 3 (2016): 779–824. Ed. Matthew Pethers. 45. See Gura’s The Truth’s Ragged Edge: The Rise of the American Novel; Shapiro’s The Illiberal Imagination: Class and the Rise of the U.S. Novel; and Dawn Coleman’s Preaching and the Rise of the American Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013).

Notes to In troduction [ 275 ] 46. Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers, 45–46; 63–71. As Baym notes, “The first step in assessing any long work of fiction was to ask w ­ hether it was a novel . . . ​genre took priority over all other ways a text might be interrogated” (270–71). 47. North American Review 46 (January 1838): 1. 48. The Power of Sympathy and The Coquette, ed. Carla Mulford (New York: Penguin, 1996), 53. Subsequently cited parenthetically. 49. James Machor has shown how questions of genre w ­ ere bound with questions of reading for antebellum audiences: “­Because correct response depended on knowing the type of fiction being read, poetics in this area dovetailed with hermeneutics” (Reading Fiction in Antebellum Amer­ic­ a: Informed Response and Reception Histories, 1820–1865 [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011], 82). For antebellum fictionists and reviewers, generic categorization was not taxonomy for taxonomy’s sake, but a means of identifying the correct way to approach a given text. 50. Irving, History of New York, ed. Elizabeth Bradley (New York: Penguin, 2008), 100. 51. Kennedy, Swallow Barn (New York: Putnam, 1852), 10. Subsequently cited parenthetically. 52. Jackson, The Victim of Chancery (New York, 1841). 53. Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2005). In its attempt to get ­behind back-­projected generic categories and its interest in scrutinizing how our current assumptions about fiction distort our understanding of historically distant fictions, Founded in Fiction draws on the insights of historical poetics. Historical poetics, as Caleb Smith succinctly puts it, “reconciles historicism and literary theory by reconstructing the va­ri­e­ties of aesthetic thought that w ­ ere available before the imposition of modernist concepts that claimed transhistorical validity” (“From the Critique of Power to the Poetics of Justice,” J19 1, no. 1 [2013]: 165). 54. American Review 6 (September 1850): 313. 55. Putnam’s Monthly Magazine 4 (October 1854): 397. 56. Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers, 201–2. 57. Some degree of generic back-­projection and retrospective consolidation is, of course, necessary to trace the pro­cess by which a genre emerges and comes to be recognized as distinct. As Jordan Stein usefully puts it, “Genres do not emerge well defined or fully formed; rather, they are developed by trial and error, through practices of iteration, citation, and recognition. The meaning of any generic category . . . ​depends on the ­human activities of identifying it, maintaining it, challenging it, circulating it, and other­wise using it” (When Novels ­Were Books [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020], 4). As Stein points out, this is especially dramatic in the case of the novel: though literary historians have traced the emergence of the novel across the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eigh­teenth centuries, in the Anglophone world, the genre only “begins to consolidate u ­ nder the sign of the ‘novel’ much ­later, in the 1790s, from which point it was retroactively projected onto a number of e­ arlier fictional prose narratives,” most of which did not call themselves novels (5). In many ways, early American fiction exemplifies the generic porousness, hybridity, and indeterminacy of much Anglophone prose fiction from before the consolidation of the novel as a category. But what is especially striking in the US context is how explicit claims of generic distinction from the novel genre continue to structure much American prose fiction for many de­cades ­after the consolidation of the novel genre in the 1790s. The retrospective categorization of ­these fictions as self-­evidently novelistic has obscured the metageneric gestures through which this era’s writers positioned their fictions in relation to the more and more recognizable novel genre. 58. For this reason, my use of the term “novel” is narrower and more specific than in most histories of fiction: I refer to texts as novels only when they have been explic­itly designated so in their subtitles or paratexts.

[ 276 ] Notes to In troduction 59. Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham (Cambridge, MA: Riverside, 1912), 123. 60. Mitchell, The Asylum, ed. Richard Pressman (San Antonio, TX: Early American Reprints, 2016), 31. 61. In seeking to reconstruct the modes of suppositional thought associated with dif­ fer­ent logics of fictionality, I eschew the cognitive science and theory of mind-­informed approaches that have become popu­lar in novel studies, as such approaches often posit, ­either explic­itly or implicitly, a transhistorical (or even timeless) conception of fiction’s value and purpose that can obscure the historically specific understandings of fiction that this book seeks to recover. While the coming years w ­ ill reveal what insights such approaches w ­ ill produce about fiction—my suspicion is that they ­will tell us more about fictionality’s cousin, narrativity, with whom it is often confused (see Walsh, Rhe­toric of Fictionality)—­sensitivity to the historical contingency of ­these modes w ­ ill provide an impor­tant qualification to them, a reminder that, what­ever studies of the deeper structures of ­human cognition reveal, ­these fictional forms, the ­mental exercises they elicit, and the role they play in society, have a specific, recoverable history. The most influential cognitive science–­informed accounts of the novel are Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006); and Blakey Vermeule, Why Do We Care about Literary Characters (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). On some of the theoretical prob­lems involved in the “cognitive turn” in literary studies, see Jonathan Kramnick, “Against Literary Darwinism,” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 1 (2011): 315–47. 62. As Machor puts it, periodical “reviews and literary essays served as the primary means of disseminating and assimilating ideas about the relation between fiction and reading practices” (Reading Fiction, 30). In order to describe the evolving periodical discourse about fiction, I have examined hundreds of periodical essays and reviews from the 1780s through the 1860s. In addition to drawing on studies of the antifictional discourse, I have examined ­every entry in ProQuest’s American Periodical Series database that included the terms “novel,” “novels,” “romance,” “romances,” or “fiction” from 1780–1820. I have examined several other archives and databases in less systematic fashion. In exploring the even more voluminous periodical discourse about fiction from 1820 through 1860, I was guided by the invaluable overviews of this discourse in Machor, Reading Fiction; Ronald Zboray, A Fictive P ­ eople: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers. Coleman and Jennifer L. Brady have shown the limitations of relying only on the generally profiction periodicals to describe antebellum attitudes t­ oward fiction. For this reason, I have drawn on the accounts of fiction-­reading in antebellum conduct lit­er­a­ture in Coleman, Preaching; Brady, “Theorizing a Reading Public: Sentimentality and Advice about Novel Reading in Antebellum Amer­ic­ a,” American Lit­er­a­ture 83, no. 4 (2011): 719–46; and María Carla Sánchez, Reforming the World: Social Activism and the Prob­lem of Fiction in Nineteenth-­Century Amer­i­ca (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008). 63. While this book seeks to reconstruct historically situated logics of fictionality, it does not depend on recovering a­ ctual reader responses, treating the historical reader, to borrow Machor’s formulation, “not as a category of personhood but as . . . ​a repertory of strategies enabling a text to become intelligible in a historically specific way” (“Historical Hermeneutics and Antebellum Fiction,” in Readers in History: Nineteenth-­Century American Lit­er­at­ ure and the Contexts of Response, ed. Machor [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993], 78). ­Actual historical readers play a role only insofar as they defamiliarize our assumptions about fiction, offering a starting point rather than an end point for historical reconstruction. When considering the often-­instrumental terms on which early US writers justified their fictions, it is also worth keeping in mind Lara Langer Cohen’s valuable warning against assuming the authority or efficacy of literary texts—in other words, assuming that “cultural work always works” (The Fabrication of American

Notes to In troduction [ 277 ] Lit­er­a­ture: Fraudulence and Antebellum Print Culture [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012], 4). In general, Founded in Fiction focuses on exploring how early US writers developed and used dif­fer­ent va­ri­e­ties of fictionality for educational, po­liti­cal, and reform proj­ects rather than on evaluating the efficacy of ­these proj­ects with regard to specific historical readers—­a valuable but often difficult, even impossible, endeavor—or passing judgment on the ultimate success of such proj­ects. 64. On the prevalence of En­glish fiction in the republic, see Robert Gross, “Introduction: An Extensive Republic,” and Elizabeth Barnes, “Novels,” in A History of the Book in Amer­i­ca, Volume II: An Extensive Republic, ed. Gross and Mary Kelly (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). On the importation of En­glish books in the republic, see James Raven, “The Importation of Books in the Eigh­teenth ­Century,” in A History of the Book in Amer­i­ca, Vol. I: The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, ed. Hugh Amory and David Hall (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 183–98. On how American reprinting of British fiction supplemented and ­later largely supplanted such imports, see James Green, “The Rise of Book Publishing,” in An Extensive Republic, 75–128. 65. Over the past two de­cades, the “transnational turn,” encompassing hemispheric, Atlantic, planetary, and regional paradigms, has reconfigured American literary studies around transnational and subnational networks of exchange, circulation, and influence. Impor­tant studies that brought t­ hese paradigms to bear on the development of US fiction include, among many ­others, Paul Giles, Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Lit­er­a­ture, 1730–1860 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), and Virtual Amer­i­cas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Anna Brick­house, Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-­Century Public Sphere (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Sean Goudie, Creole Amer­i­ca: The West Indies and the Formation of Lit­er­a­ture and Culture in the New Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Laura Doyle, Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Tennen­house, Feeling En­glish; Stephen Shapiro, The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel: Reading the Atlantic World-­System (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009); Eve Tavor Bannet, Transatlantic Stories and the History of Reading, 1720–1810 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Siân Silyn Roberts, Gothic Subjects: The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 1790–1861 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); Joseph Rezek, London and the Making of Provincial Lit­ er­a­ture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); Mapping Region in Early American Writing, ed. Edward Watts, Keri Holt, and John Funchion (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015); Woertendyke, Hemispheric Regionalism; and Aaron Hanlon, A World of Disorderly Notions: Quixote and the Logic of Exceptionalism (Charlottesville: University of ­Virginia Press, 2019). 66. Arac, Literary Narrative, 120–80. On Hawthorne’s centrality to the l­ater institutionalization of American lit­er­a­ture, see Brodhead, The School of Hawthorne (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), esp. 51–58. 67. Cohen, Fabrication; Ogden, Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). 68. Foucault defines veridiction as “the set of rules enabling one to establish which statement in a given discourse can be described as true or false” (The Birth of Biopolitics, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burcell [New York: Picador, 2008], 35). As Ilya Kliger puts it, “the study of veridiction brackets the question of the ­actual truthfulness of a statement or a story and inquires only into the standards . . . ​of truth on which the statement or story relies” (The Narrative Shape of Truth: Veridiction in Modern Eu­ro­pean Lit­er­a­ture

[ 278 ] Notes to Ch a pter one [State College: Pennsylvania State Press, 2011], 34). The history of fictionality is thus part of what Ann Fabian refers to as “a history of truth and true-­story telling,” The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-­Century Amer­i­ca (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). See also Edelstein, who charts how American ­women’s writing, especially fiction, emerged in conversation with evolving journalistic practices, making this tradition especially attentive to “politics of truth discourse” and alternative conceptions of truth (Between, 2); and Peter West’s The Arbiters of Real­ity: Hawthorne, Melville, and the Rise of Mass Information (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008), which explores how Hawthorne and Melville defined their acts of romantic truth-­telling in distinction to the discourses of authenticity associated with modern information culture, from the penny press to the daguerreotype. 69. Faherty, “21 st ­Century Studies in the Early American Novel,” 784–88; see also Gardner, Magazine Culture, 1–31. 70. A forthcoming special issue of Early American Lit­er­a­ture on “Early American Fictionality” ­will take up the issue of fictionality in early American lit­er­a­ture both within and beyond prose fiction and the novel; “Early American Fictionality,” Early American Lit­er­a­ ture 56, no. 3 (2021). Ed. Koenigs and Pethers. 71. Philadelphia Minerva 4 (April 14, 1798): 43.

Part I 1. As Brady puts it, “relatively l­ ittle scholarship has scrutinized what t­ hese opponents of the novel actually say”: “scholars generally see this antinovel discourse as a static feature of the literary landscape—­and one that ultimately did ­little to slow the rise of the novel” (720). For exceptions, see introduction, note 5.

Chapter One: The Prob­lem of Fictionality and the Nonfictional Novel 1. The enduring tendency—­exemplified by Davidson’s Revolution and the Word—to identify The Power of Sympathy as the first American novel has been repeatedly challenged over the past several de­cades as scholars have reconsidered conventional definitions of both “American” and “novel.” ­These scholars have both posited a wide range of alternative candidates for the first American novel—­from Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) to The Female American (1767) to Amelia, or the Faithless Briton (1787)—­and questioned the assumptions underpinning a search for a single origin point for the American novel. See, among many ­others, William Spengemann, “The Earliest American Novel: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko,” Nineteenth-­Century Fiction 38, no. 4 (1984): 384–414; Stephen Carl Arch, “Frances Brooke’s ‘Circle of Friends’: The Limits of Epistolarity in The History of Emily Montague,” Early American Lit­er­a­ture 39, no. 3 (2004): 465–85; Jeffrey Richards, “The Adventures of Emmera, the Transatlantic Novel, and the Fiction of Amer­i­ca,” Early American Lit­er­a­ture 42, no. 3 (2007): 495–527; Melissa Homestead, “The Beginnings of the American Novel,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early American Lit­er­at­ ure, ed. Kevin Hayes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 527–46; and Matthew Pethers, “21 st-­Century Studies in the Early American Novel,” 788–97. 2. Butler, Fortune’s Football (Harrisburg, PA: Wyeth, 1797), i. 3. By the 1780s and 1790s, fictionality had come to be seen as one of the—if not the—­defining characteristic of the novel genre. It was the Anglophone novel’s increasing “embrace of fictionality,” in Stein’s succinct formulation, that had come to distinguish it from other narrative prose genres over the course of the eigh­teenth ­century (When Novels

Notes to Ch a pter one [ 279 ] ­Were Books, 150). Many early US fictions and novels, however, argued against this increasingly tight association of fictionality with the novel in their paratexts and narratives: the prevalent view that fictionality was a distinguishing feature of the novel genre served as the background for early US writers’ metageneric defenses of their narratives, w ­ hether they sought to distance their own novels from the genre’s assumed fictionality or pre­sent their works as extranovelistic or nonnovelistic fictions. 4. Philadelphia Minerva 4 (April 21, 1798): 47. 5. For a paradigmatic example, see Henri Petter, The Early American Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971), 7–16. 6. On the Puritan influence on antifiction, see Lillie Deming Loshe, The Early American Novel, 1789–1830 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1907), 1–2; Cowie, Rise of the American Novel, 5–7; and David Reynolds, Faith in Fiction: The Emergence of Religious Lit­er­a­ture in Amer­i­ca (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 3. On the antifictional discourse’s conservatism, see Davidson, Revolution and the Word, 101–53. 7. See Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); and Gallagher, “Rise.” 8. For the former, see Davidson, Revolution and the Word, 162; for the latter, see Gallagher, “Rise,” 344–45. 9. Orians, “Censure,” 195. 10. Elizabeth Carroll Reilly and David Hall, “Customers and the Market for Book,” in The Colonial Book, 387–98. 11. On the flood of British imports a­ fter the Treaty of Paris, see Gross, “An Extensive Republic”; on circulating libraries and fiction, see Ross Beale and James Greene, “Libraries and Their Uses,” in The Colonial Book, 399–404. 12. Herbert Ross Brown, The Sentimental Novel in Amer­i­ca, 1789–1860 (New York: Pageant, 1959), 7. 13. On the Protestant objections to fiction, see Paul Gutjahr, “No Longer Left B ­ ehind: Amazon​.­com, Reader Response, and the Changing Fortunes of the Christian Novel in Amer­i­ca,” Book History 5 (2002): 209–36; Reynolds, Faith in Fiction, esp. 3–5; David Paul Nord, Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in Amer­i­ca (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 115–18; and Candy Gunther Brown, The Word in the World: Evangelical Reading, Writing, and Publishing in Amer­ic­ a, 1790–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 95–105. 14. Orians and Brown both regard the South as being a more hospitable climate for fiction than New ­England, Pennsylvania, and New York (Brown, Sentimental Novel, 19; Orians, “Censure,” 211). In terms of the periodical discourse, the majority of arguments against fiction ­were published in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, but many ­were also printed in Baltimore and Charleston. Moreover, neither the kind of arguments marshaled against fiction and novels nor the tone of such arguments differed markedly across periodicals published in Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, to take three cities from which I examined multiple examples, during this period. In spite of the fact that, as Trish Loughran’s The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007) has shown, the United States did not have a unified national print culture during this era, my survey of the early national periodical debates about fiction found regional differences to be generally less significant than chronological differences. 15. New York Magazine 1 (January 1790): 16. 16. Universal Asylum and Columbian Magazine (October 1792): 225. 17. See Raven, “Importation of Books”; Green, “Book Publishing,” esp. 102–9; and Beales and Green, “Libraries and Their Uses.”

[ 280 ] Notes to Ch a pter one 18. See John Tinnon Taylor, Early Opposition to the En­glish Novel (New York: Crown, 1943). 19. Stein, When Novels ­Were Books, 9. 20. Port-­Folio 4 (July 1810): 96. 21. Columbian Magazine (August 1788): 423. 22. American Magazine 1 (March 1788): 244. 23. United States Magazine (May 1794): 80. 24. Chauncy, Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New-­England (Boston: Eliot, 1743), 121. On how competing accusations of “invention,” fabrication, and falsehood structured debates between revivalists and antirevivalists, see Frank Lambert, Inventing the “­Great Awakening” (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1999). 25. Edwards, “A Divine and Super­natural Light,” in A Jonathan Edwards Reader, ed. John E. Smith, Harry S. Stout, and Kenneth P. Minkema (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 109–11. Edwards, however, did not categorically reject all fiction, and his library notably included Richardson’s works; as Stein has shown, the generic bound­aries clearly separating novels and fiction from pious works would not become firmly entrenched ­until the 1790s (When Novels W ­ ere Books, 110–64). This opposition, however, does surface in ­earlier writing: Cotton Mather, for instance, warned that “the powers of darkness” had set up a “cursed library” in the colony made up of “romances and novels and fictions” and complained that Harvard students ­were reading fiction instead of studying “books of divinity” (quoted in Reynolds, Faith in Fiction, 3; and David Hall, “Learned Culture in the Eigh­ teenth C ­ entury,” in An Extensive Republic, 430 respectively). 26. Quoted in Henry Seidel Canby, “On a Certain Condescension ­toward Fiction,” ­Century Magazine 95 (February 1918): 550. See also Gutjahr, “Left ­Behind,” 211–12; and Reynolds, Faith in Fiction, 2–5. 27. This is not to suggest a clear or absolute opposition between enlightenment empiricist philosophy and colonial Protestantism, as some of Edwards’s most impor­tant theological arguments, for instance, w ­ ere influenced by his reading of Locke; see, among many ­others, Leon Chai, Jonathan Edwards and the Limits of Enlightenment Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). On the influence of Locke on early US lit­er­a­ture and culture, see Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority 1750–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982) and Gillian Brown, The Consent of the Governed: The Lockean Legacy in Early American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 28. Throughout this book, I use the term “epistemological” to underscore that what was at issue for early Americans was the question of ­whether fiction could produce knowledge and if so, what kind of knowledge it could produce. I am not endorsing epistemology as it has descended to us from this Enlightenment tradition—­and which has been critiqued by thinkers as dif­fer­ent as Foucault and Charles Taylor—as a model for understanding how we know the world. I am only suggesting that, for early Americans, the prob­lem of fictionality was understood as a prob­lem of knowledge acquisition that shared a series of assumptions with epistemology. As I am not intervening in ­these philosophical debates but only exploring how ­these issues have been understood historically, I ­will refer to them as “epistemological questions,” with the quotation marks implied. 29. Port-­Folio 4 (1810): 97. 30. On this aspect of Locke’s argument, see Philip Vogt, John Locke and the Rhe­toric of Modernity (Lanham, UK: Lexington, 2008). 31. Martin, Instructed Vision, 4, 13–39, 84–93. 32. Ibid., vii–­viii. United States Magazine (July 1794): 245. On Witherspoon’s role in the spread of Common Sense, see Martin, Instructed Vision, 5–7. William Charvat has

Notes to Ch a pter one [ 281 ] charted how ­these ideas influenced periodical writers and editors; The Origins of American Critical Thought, 1810–1835 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1936). 33. Port-­Folio 3 (April 11, 1807): 234. 34. Philadelphia Minerva 4 (April 21, 1798): 47. 35. Philadelphia Minerva 4 (June 2, 1798): 71. 36. Lady’s Magazine and Musical Repository (January 1801): 12. 37. Mas­sa­chu­setts Magazine 3 (November 1791): 662. 38. Vogt, Modernity, 43. 39. Philadelphia Minerva 4 (April 21, 1798): 47. 40. Warner, Letters of the Republic, 175. 41. On how the suspicion of fiction fit into republicans’ conflicted attitudes about gentility, see Shields, Civil Tongues, and Richard Bushman, The Refinement of Amer­i­ca: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Knopf, 1992). 42. Neil Harris offers a useful overview: “Like other luxuries, works of art w ­ ere superfluous, for they served no real need” (The Artist in American Society: The Formative Years 1790–1860 [New York: Braziller, 1966], 34). If works of art ­were often considered useless and superfluous, however, they w ­ ere rarely regarded as a threat to the republic’s youth in the same way that fiction and the theater ­were. On Americans’ ambivalent attitude ­toward the visual arts, see also Wendy Bellion, Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National Amer­i­ca (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 10–14. ­There was a significant overlap between the US antifictional and antitheatrical discourses. Critics saw both the theater and the novel as signs of aristocratic corruption; both prose fiction and plays aroused anx­i­eties about sexual propriety, and both ­were ­shaped by the lingering Puritan influence. Yet t­ here are also significant differences between them. First, antitheatrical critiques often focused on the theater as a physical space associated with licentiousness and prostitution. Second, the antifictional discourse foregrounded epistemological concerns to a far greater degree than the antitheatrical discourse. 43. Quoted in Brown, The Sentimental Novel, 4. Like many of his generation, Jefferson had an ambivalent attitude ­toward fiction, alternately praising select fictions and condemning fiction in general; on his praise for some fiction, see Reilly and Hall, “Modalities of Reading,” in The Colonial Book, 408–9. 44. Foster, The Boarding School (Boston, 1798). 45. Weekly Magazine 1 (March 10, 1798): 185. 46. Mas­sa­chu­setts Magazine 3 (1791): 662. 47. On the symbolic function of ­women in republican politics, see Samuels, Romances of the Republic, 3–22. 48. See, for example, “The History of the Old Maid,” Rural Magazine (May 5, 1798): 1. 49. Philadelphia Minerva 4 (April 21, 1798): 51. 50. Dwight, Travels in New-­England and New York; quoted in Orians, “Censure,” 196. 51. American Magazine (April 21, 1787): 333. 52. Davidson, Revolution and the Word, 162. In Americanist literary study, the idea of the nonfiction novel has largely been confined to the line of twentieth-­century true crime writing derived from Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. 53. Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the En­glish Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); Paige, Before Fiction. See also Bannet, who has recently examined the ambiguous “fictional histories” and “lives” circulating in the eighteenth-­century Atlantic world: “early modern readers who w ­ ere not somehow in the know could not be certain that published lives and histories w ­ ere what they claimed to be” (Transatlantic Stories, 16). But where many of Bannet’s lives playfully embraced this ambiguity, early US

[ 282 ] Notes to Ch a pter one “Founded on Fact” novels often insisted on a clear distinction between the modes in order to associate themselves with “truth” and “fact” rather than fiction. 54. The question of the author’s shaping presence in fiction was particularly vexed for seduction fiction, b ­ ecause of its illicit subject m ­ atter. This helps explain why seduction novels w ­ ere especially likely to assert their factual basis as a means of authenticating their didactic proj­ects. On the anx­i­eties about the “negative instruction” associated with seduction narratives, see Hyde, Civic Longing, 167–69. 55. Davidson shows how the transformation of Whitman’s story from tract into novel implicitly critiques newspaper accounts of her death by giving the fictionalized Whitman a voice, but she overstates the case in claiming that “Fiction is valorized” in the novel (Revolution and the Word, 223). The conflation of “fiction” and the “novel” ­here obscures the way in which Foster’s novelistic proj­ect stakes its educative efficacy on its difference from fiction. 56. Rowson, Charlotte ­Temple and Lucy ­Temple, ed. Ann Douglas (New York: Penguin, 1991), xlix. First published in ­England in 1791 as Charlotte, it was reprinted as Charlotte ­Temple in the United States in 1794 and quickly became a perennial bestseller. 57. Ibid., 108. 58. Rush, Thoughts upon Female Education (Philadelphia: Prichard & Hall, 1787), 12. 59. Ann Eliza Bleecker, “History of Maria Kittle,” ­Women’s Early American Historical Narratives, ed. Sharon M. Harris (New York: Penguin, 2003), 3. 60. Take, for instance, the young w ­ oman who wrote “so true a tale” on the final page of her copy of Charlotte ­Temple (Gross, “Reading for an Extensive Republic,” in An Extensive Republic, 521). Other famous examples include readers visiting Charlotte’s purported grave in New York and the scandalous decoding that readers performed on both Charlotte ­Temple and The Power of Sympathy; on the latter’s reception, see Richard Walser, “Boston’s Reception of the First American Novel,” Early American Lit­er­a­ture 17, no. 1 (1982): 65–74. The fact that reviewers often questioned the factuality of novels such as The Power of Sympathy also suggests the seriousness with which such claims ­were regarded; see Barnes, “Novels,” 441–42. 61. Although ­earlier scholars had largely treated Lucinda as a fictional novel, Mischelle Anthony’s recent archival work has confirmed that Lucinda is not a fictional text, but a factual one; “ ‘A Narrative Statement of the Most Incontestable Facts’: History and Fiction”; Lucinda or the Mountain Mourner, ed. Anthony (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009). Subsequently cited parenthetically. 62. On the intertwined anx­i­eties about fiction and finance in the 1830s and how panic narratives sought to differentiate themselves from fiction as a category, see Sánchez, Reforming, 29–88. 63. Brown, Ira and Isabella (Boston: Belcher & Armstrong, 1807), xiii. Subsequently cited parenthetically. 64. In spite of the antitheatrical prejudice, Shakespeare had a unique literary prestige in the republic and was often singled out as a uniquely moral theatrical writer. Shakespearean allusions, epigraphs, and plots are ubiquitous in American fiction, as his prestige made him an impor­tant authorizing figure for fiction from the 1790s through the mid-­nineteenth ­century. On Shakespeare’s reception in the republic, see Alden Vaughan and ­Virginia Mason Vaughan, Shakespeare in Amer­i­ca (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 65. Quoted in Brown, Sentimental Novel, 4. 66. See Shields, Civil Tongues, 11–54. 67. On the importance of otium themes for Federalist writers, see William Dowling, Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson: Joseph Dennie and The Port Folio, 1800–1812 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999).

Notes to Ch a pter t wo [ 283 ]

Chapter Two: Republican Fictions 1. On the debates about the po­liti­cal meaning of the novel in the republic, see Ed White, “Divided We Stand: Emergent Conservatism in Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive,” Studies in American Fiction 37, no. 1 (2010): 5–27. 2. The study of republican ideology and the long-­standing republicanism-­liberalism debates emerged out of the rejection of liberal consensus historiography of the 1950s by Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, and J.G.A. Pocock. For an overview of the ideological crisis for republicanism during this period, see Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 391–615. On how the crises of the early 1790s—­the Jay Treaty, the Whiskey Rebellion, the Citizen Genet affair, Washington’s 1793 proclamation of neutrality, and the rise of democratic-­republican socie­ties—­shaped the cultural politics of the 1790s, see Bellion’s account of the debates surrounding the Columbianum exhibition in Philadelphia (Citizen Spectator, 67–83). 3. See Jeffrey Pasley, “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville: University of V ­ irginia Press, 2001). On how the rise of a partisan press created anx­i­eties about the press’s veracity, see Edelstein, Between, 26–28. 4. Gallagher, Nobody’s Story, 88–115. While this should not obscure the significant body of eighteenth-­century En­glish fiction that engaged po­liti­cal issues, Gallagher’s account accurately describes the pro­cess through which fictionality became associated with privacy and a retreat from politics, public life, and civic affairs. 5. Port-­Folio 4 (1810): 94–96. 6. Looby, Voicing Amer­i­ca: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 243. For readings of Brackenridge’s multivalent deployment of the figure of the quixote, see Sarah Wood, Quixotic Fictions of the USA 1792–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); and Hanlon, Disorderly Notions, 96–105. 7. Brackenridge, Modern Chivalry, ed. Ed White (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2009), 48–49. Subsequently cited parenthetically. 8. As Emory Elliot has argued, “the story of the narrator-­artist-­hero emerges as the most impor­tant” in the narrative. (Revolutionary Writers: Lit­er­a­ture and Authority in the New Republic, 1725–1810 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1982], 84). On Brackenridge’s idea of authorship, see Edward Watts, Writing and Postcolonialism in the Early Republic (Charlottesville: University of V ­ irginia Press, 1998), 28–29; Grantland S. Rice, The Transformation of Authorship in Amer­i­ca (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) 129–41; and Mark R. Patterson, Authority, Autonomy, and Repre­sen­ta­tion in American Lit­er­a­ture, 1776–1865 (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1988), 34–61. 9. On Brackenridge’s role in t­ hese affairs, see Claude Milton Newlin, The Life and Writings of Hugh Henry Brackenridge (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1932), 87–107, 134–76. 10. Brackenridge regarded parties with suspicion, but he was not above partisan politics or the emerging party press, and he even produced referential newspaper satires himself on occasion. As Pasley puts it, Brackenridge’s “attitudes are revealing of the Republican gentry’s contradictory attitude ­toward their own press” (Tyranny, 156). His ambivalence reflects his simultaneous dedication to the ideals of classical republicanism and his engagement in the moment’s partisan strug­gles. On Brackenridge’s newspaper c­ areer, see Newlin, Brackenridge, 44–58. 11. As both Watts and Sarah Wood have demonstrated, Brackenridge shows how “the language of paternal authority” is revealed to serve the interests of a duplicitous elite (Watts, Postcolonialism, 38; see also Wood, Quixotic Fictions, 94). Cynthia Jordan argues

[ 284 ] Notes to Ch a pter t wo that Brackenridge endorses this deceptive reasoning as a way of defending the social order; Second Stories: The Politics of Language, Form, and Gender in Early American Fiction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 67–70. While Lukasik emphasizes how for Brackenridge “dissimulation . . . ​poses a par­tic­u­lar prob­lem for demo­cratic politics,” he contends that Modern Chivalry does not critique Farrago’s lack of disinterest, but suggests that his appeal to disinterest is archaic (Discerning, 143–50). Dana D. Nelson takes up the question of reason’s status, arguing that “the novel expounds reasonableness against rationality”; “ ‘Indication of the Public ­Will’: Modern Chivalry’s Theory of Demo­ cratic Repre­sen­ta­tion,” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews 15, no. 1 (2002): 23–39. 12. T ­ here has been extensive treatment of Brackenridge’s republicanism (or antirepublicanism). Much of it focuses on w ­ hether Brackenridge’s deployment of the truisms of republicanism are earnest, ironic, nostalgic, or a complex mix. For competing accounts of Brackenridge’s republicanism, see Looby, Voicing Amer­i­ca, 243–49; John Engell, “Brackenridge, Modern Chivalry, and American Humor,” Early American Lit­er­a­ture, 22, no. 1 (1987): 43–62; Wendy Martin, “The Rogue and the Rational Man,” Early American Lit­ er­a­ture 8, no. 2 (1973): 179–92; Paul Gilmore, “Republican Machines and Brackenridge’s Caves: Aesthetics and Models of Machinery in the Early Republic,” Early American Lit­ er­a­ture 39, no. 2 (2004): 299–322; Jordan, Second Stories, 58–77; and Michael Gilmore, “Eighteenth-­Century Oppositional Ideology and Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry,” Early American Lit­er­a­ture 13, no. 2 (1978): 181–92. 13. Warner, Letters of the Republic, 42–43. 14. The often personal and even embodied nature of the republican public sphere is evident, to take only one example, in Robert Ferguson’s account of the literary culture of ­lawyers. As Ferguson puts it, “Informal exchanges among members of the bar led naturally to verse and criticism in the newspapers and, ­under certain conditions, to the creation of magazines crucial to the intellectual life of the new nation.” Such face-­to-­face exchanges would have a significant effect on the materials published in periodicals (Law and Letters in American Culture [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984], 71–72). 15. Warner, Letters of the Republic, 42. 16. Ibid., 46. 17. As the volumes pro­gress and fictionality is increasingly valued for its lack of relation to a­ ctual persons and by extension, its disinterest, volume I’s disavowals of reference to Findley seem progressively disingenuous b ­ ecause ­these repre­sen­ta­tions do seem to be motivated by personal po­liti­cal strug­gle. But they also stand out as singular within the growing totality of Modern Chivalry for this reason. 18. See the special issue “Alternative Histories of the Public Sphere,” William and Mary Quarterly 62, no. 1 (2005). On the complex relation between literary and po­liti­cal public spheres in the republic, see Burgett, Sentimental Bodies; and Dillon, Gender of Freedom. Vari­ous critics have sought to qualify and supplement Warner’s focus on print culture in the early US public sphere by emphasizing oratory’s centrality to republican society. In addition to Looby, see Fliegelman, Declaring In­de­pen­dence: Jefferson, Natu­ral Language, and the Culture of Per­for­mance (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), and Gustafson, Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Per­for­mance in Early Amer­i­ca (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). For an account that emphasizes how the material conditions of early US print culture trou­ble the Habermasian model, see Loughran, The Republic in Print. 19. Bloch, “Inside and Outside the Public Sphere,” in “Alternative Histories,” 99. On the disciplinary divide between how literary scholars and historians approach the public sphere, see “Alternative Histories of the Public Sphere,” especially Looby, “Introduction,” 3–8. From opposite sides of this divide, Bloch and Looby both advocate returning to Habermas’s account as a way of moving beyond this impasse. Bloch calls for “literary historians”

Notes to Ch a pter t wo [ 285 ] to take “more seriously the bound­aries Habermas draws between the public sphere and other aspects of society and cultural expression that are not, in his terms, po­liti­cal”: “As much as ­these po­liti­cal readings of the multivalent language of fiction may enrich scholars’ understanding . . . ​they share l­ittle of Habermas’s distinctive interest in the preconditions of deliberative and participatory democracy. Once definitions of the public sphere become this attenuated, virtually all scholarship on the . . . ​early Republic may lay claim to it” (102). While Looby echoes Bloch’s call to attend to the distinction between literary and po­liti­cal public spheres, he also urges attention to their historical interconnection, the “deep, historical inextricability of literary reading [and] self-­formation . . . ​and the world of public affairs” in Habermas’s account (6). 20. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Berger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 28. 21. Tyler, The Algerine Captive, ed. Caleb Crain (New York: Random House, 2002), 225. Subsequently cited parenthetically. 22. Ada Carson and Herbert Carson, Royall Tyler (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979), 18–19. See also G. Thomas Tanselle, Royall Tyler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 13–14. 23. My reading of Tyler’s engagement with antifictional anx­i­eties builds on Davidson’s account of how Tyler questions history’s claims to factuality and impartiality (Revolution and the Word, 285); Larry Dennis’s “Legitimizing the Novel: Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive,” Early American Lit­er­a­ture 9, no. 1 (1974): 71–80; and Watts’s account of the narrative’s “fiction of authorship” (Postcolonialism, 73–95). 24. For an overview of Barbary Captivity narratives, see Paul Baepler’s White Slaves, African Masters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). On how ­these narratives reshape our understanding of American literary history, see Armstrong and Tennen­house, “The Prob­lem of Population and the Form of the American Novel,” American Literary History 20, no. 4 (2008): 667–85. 25. Tanselle claims that while The Algerine Captive “does not show us Updike’s development enough to be considered a bildungsroman,” it contains some ele­ments of the genre (Tyler, 158–59). 26. See Wood, Quixotic Fictions, 115, and Hanlon, Disorderly Notions, 68–85. 27. Tanselle, Tyler, 153. Other critics have given significant attention to the interaction between the fiction’s two volumes; see especially Davidson, Revolution and the Word; Bannet, Transatlantic Stories, 103–5; Hanlon, Disorderly Notions, 70–85; and White, “Divided.” Resisting Davidson, White sees the novel’s two-­part structure as illuminating the fiction’s conservative Federalism. See also Larkin, who argues, “Read as a matching pair, volume 1 depicts the US as an excessively decentralized and therefore incoherent state, and volume 2 pre­sents Algiers as an overly centralized and therefore despotic state . . . ​the novel implies that the ideal state would be one that balanced t­ hese two poles” (American School, 34); Malini Johar Schueller, who argues that the “ideological trajectory of the two sections validates a discourse of empire”; U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation, and Gender in Lit­er­a­ture, 1790–1890 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 50; and Keri Holt, who links the fiction’s generic heterogeneity to Tyler’s Federalism; Reading T ­ hese United States: Federal Literacy in the Early Republic, 1776–1830 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019), 158–73. 28. Gallagher, “Rise,” 346. 29. Almost ­every account of The Algerine Captive touches on ­these po­liti­cal contradictions at least in passing. In addition to White, Davidson, Larkin, Schueller, Watts, Sarah Wood, Gardner, Tennen­house and Armstrong, and Hanlon, see Engell, “Narrative Irony and National Character in Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive,” Studies in American Fiction 17, no. 1 (1989), and Elizabeth Fenton, “Indeliberate Democracy: The Politics of Religious

[ 286 ] Notes to Ch a pter t wo Conversion in Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive,” Early American Lit­er­a­ture 51, no. 1 (2016): 71–100. 30. Tyler, The Contrast (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1920), 35. 31. Ibid., 26–27. 32. See especially Davidson, Revolution and the Word, and Engell, “Narrative Irony.” On the racial politics that underlie the “dramatic contradictions” of Updike’s critique of slavery, see Schueller, U.S. Orientalisms, 50–58. 33. Ferguson, Law and Letters, 10. Irving, Salmagundi (New York, 1807), 80–87. 34. de Tocqueville, Democracy in Amer­i­ca (Boston: Sever, Francis, and Co., 1870), 211. 35. Anderson, ­Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1986; 2006). 36. Po­liti­cal questions have dominated Wieland scholarship over the past four de­cades. In addition to Tompkins’s account, influential readings of Wieland as Federalist include Looby’s argument that Brown is “a complex counter-­revolutionary writer” (Voicing Amer­ i­ca, 158–202) and Jason Frank’s reading of Wieland ’s treatment of the “­imagined authority of unmediated voice” as a warning against the destructive potential of radical demo­crats (Constituent Moments: Enacting the P ­ eople in Postrevolutionary Amer­ic­ a [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010], 37). Alternatively, Eric Wolfe reads Wieland as a radically demo­cratic critique of the Federalist fantasy of national unity (“Ventriloquizing Nation: Voice, Identity, and Radical Democracy in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland,” American Lit­er­a­ture 78, no. 3 [2006]: 431–57). See also Stern’s reading of Wieland ’s “conjunction of incestuous desire with spousal murder” as evidence of Brown’s “deep misgiving about a post-­ Revolutionary vision of communal order” (Plight of Feeling, 29). Scholars have read Wieland as engaging such con­temporary po­liti­cal issues as the Alien and Sedition Acts, the XYZ Affair, and the French Revolution. On Wieland ’s engagement with the Alien and Sedition Acts, see Shirley Samuels’s Romances of the Republic, Wolfe’s “Ventriloquizing Nation,” and Michelle Sizemore, American Enchantment: Rituals of the ­People in the Post-­Revolutionary World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). On its engagement with the French and American Revolutions, see Bill Christophersen, The Apparition in the Glass: Charles Brockden Brown’s American Gothic (Athens: Georgia University Press, 1993), 26–39; and Peter Kaefer, Charles Brockden Brown’s Revolution and the Birth of the American Gothic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), esp. 59–65. White considers Wieland ’s relation to the possibility of subaltern rebellion; “Carwin Peasant Rebel,” in Revising Charles Brockden Brown, ed. Phillip Barnard, Mark Kamrath, and Stephen Shapiro (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004), 41–60. Though far from a comprehensive list, ­these accounts highlight both the per­sis­tent interest in politics in Wieland scholarship and the incredible divergence in critics’ account of its po­liti­cal commitments. 37. Frank’s reading exemplifies this enduringly influential way of approaching Brown’s fiction: “The destruction of the Wieland ­family at the hands of an enthusiast enthralled to the ­imagined authority of divine voice was Brown’s allegorical repre­sen­ta­tion of the looming destruction of Amer­i­ca at the hands of radical demo­crats or ‘Jacobins’ claiming to speak for the majesty of the ­people, enthralled by the imaginary omnipotence of their impossible voice” (Constituent Moments, 172). Christophersen also reads Wieland as a “historical allegory” in which “Clara’s traumas and discoveries reflect the nation’s” (Apparition, 33, 27). Recent readings of the book’s po­liti­cal symbolism have especially focused on how Wieland ’s repre­sen­ta­tion of “voice” bears on questions of demo­cratic theory; in addition to Looby’s landmark reading of voice and authority in Wieland, Wolfe, Frank, and Sizemore have each offered in-­depth accounts of Wieland ’s engagement with the phrase vox populi, vox Dei. 38. Brown, Wieland, ed. Jay Fliegelman (New York: Penguin, 1991), 5. Subsequently cited parenthetically.

Notes to Ch a pter t wo [ 287 ] 39. As Tompkins puts it, “very few modern critics have taken the novel’s claim for usefulness seriously as they cannot abstract a concrete meaning from the text” (Sensational Designs, 41). One exception to this is Jordan’s insightful reading, which demonstrates how Wieland shows “the folly of precipitate conclusions” (Second Stories, 78–98). My reading builds on her insights by showing how Wieland ’s possibilistic fictionality is fundamental to this instructional proj­ect. See also Cahill’s discussion of the relationship between education, imagination, and aesthetic plea­sure in Brown’s fiction (Liberty of the Imagination, 164–200). 40. Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims, 239. 41. On Brown’s conception of conjectural or speculative thought as constitutive of fiction and his sense of such conjectural reasoning’s value in a wide variety of social and intellectual arenas, see his “The Difference between History and Romance,” Monthly Magazine 2 (April 1800): 251–53. 42. Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims, 26. Richardson, Cla­ris­sa (New York: Penguin, 1985), 35–36. 43. Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims, 26. In describing the most popu­lar novels in the United States between 1790 and 1800, Barnes writes that “the winner, by far, was Samuel Richardson whose works went into twenty-­two editions” over t­ hese years (“Novels,” 441). 44. Hitchcock, Memoirs of the Bloomsgrove ­Family (Boston: Thomas and Andrews, 1790), 86. 45. The new subtitle for the American abridgement crystallizes this shift: the original Cla­ris­sa or the History of a Young Lady, comprehending the Most Impor­tant Concerns for Private Life and Particularly shewing, The Distresses that may attend the Misconduct Both of Parents and C ­ hildren in Relation to Marriage has become The Paths of Virtue Delineated or a history in miniature of Cla­r is­sa, comprehending the Most Impor­tant Concerns for Private Life wherein the Arts of a Designing Villain and the Rigours of Parental Authority, conspired to Complete the Ruin of a Virtuous D ­ aughter. See also Tennen­house, who has traced how early American writers “reshaped” Richardsonian plots to emphasize relationships between men (rather than between men and ­women), revealing a “longing for a reconstructed ­family with a ­father at its head”—­part of a more general proj­ect of establishing “unity with En­glish culture . . . ​following the American revolution” (Feeling En­glish, 43–64). 46. “Fielding and Richardson,” Charles Brockden Brown: Literary Essays and Reviews, ed. Wolfgang Schäfer and Alfred Weber Frankfurt (New York: Peter Lang, 1992), 35, 141–42. 47. “Objections to Richardson’s Cla­ris­sa,” Essays and Reviews, 100–102. 48. “Walstein’s School of History,” Essays and Reviews, 35. 49. Ibid., 33. 50. In discussing Brown’s embrace of fictionality, I am building on Amanda Emerson’s “The Early American Novel: Charles Brockden Brown’s Fictitious Historiography,” NOVEL 40, nos. 1–2 (2006): 125–50. On Brown’s conception of the relation between “history” and “fiction,” see Kamrath, The Historicism of Charles Brockden Brown (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2010), 69–109. 51. Brown, “Walstein’s,” 33. 52. On Wieland and ventriloquism’s role in Enlightenment debunking of the super­ natural, see Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing ­Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 135–98. 53. Gallagher, “Rise,” 345–46. 54. Ibid., 346.

[ 288 ] Notes to Ch a pter t wo 55. Charvat argues that early Americans ­were well aware of “the Aristotelian distinction between possibility and probability,” and this “makes it more surprising that C. B. Brown should have the ­mistake of thinking that ‘If history furnishes one parallel, it is sufficient vindication of the writer’ ” (Origins, 144). 56. In using the terms possibilistic and probabilistic, I am drawing on William Galperin’s The Historical Austen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). For a history of probability, including the duality that inheres in the concept—­its relation to questions of belief on one hand and its relation to “devices that produce stable long-­run frequencies” on the other—­see Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 11. On probability in eighteenth-­century British lit­ er­a­ture, see Douglas Patey, Probability and Literary Form: Philosophic Theory and Literary Practice in the Augustan Age (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984). See also Robert Newsom, A Likely Story: Probability and Play in Fiction (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988); Thomas Kavanagh, Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance: The Novel and the Culture of Gambling in Eighteenth-­Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); and Jesse Molesworth, Chance and the Eighteenth-­Century Novel: Realism, Probability, Magic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Critics are divided on the accuracy of Hacking’s thesis about the emergence of a modern concept of probability in the late seventeenth and early eigh­teenth ­century. I would argue, following Molesworth, that statistical thinking about probability already colored the meaning of the term before the calculus of statistical probability was codified as an explicit science in the mid-­nineteenth ­century. On probability in nineteenth-­century American lit­er­a­ture, see Maurice Lee, Uncertain Chances: Science, Skepticism, and Belief in Nineteenth-­Century American Lit­er­a­ture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 57. Gallagher, “Rise,” 358–59. 58. For very dif­fer­ent accounts that both emphasize the competing author figures in Wieland, see Patterson, Authority, 69–76; and Nancy Ruttenburg’s Demo­cratic Personality: Popu­lar Voice and the Trial of American Authorship (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 211–58. 59. In this context, the logic through which Brown’s prefatory advertisement connects his tale to a recent newspaper account of similar events is crucial: Brown appeals to the account not as the basis for his fiction, but only as evidence for its possibility (Wieland, 4). Brown insists that his tale represents not a novelizing of a news report—as Foster did with newspaper accounts of Whitman’s death in The Coquette—­but a fictional story of its own. 60. Tompkins, Sensational Designs, 41. 61. Warner, Letters of the Republic, 198 n. 12. 62. Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims, 203. 63. David Tappan, An Oration (Charlestown, 1800). Quoted in Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims, 203. 64. The Monthly Magazine 2 (1800): 104. 65. Fliegelman, “Introduction,” xxx–­xxxiii. 66. On ventriloquism and oratory in Wieland, see especially Looby, Voicing Amer­i­ca, 158–65. 67. Gallagher, “Rise,” 347. 68. White notes the centrality of the “subjunctive literary form” for Wieland (“Carwin,” 54). Looby observes that much of Wieland ’s plot hinges on the uncertainty of the conditional verb “may” (Voicing Amer­i­ca, 187). 69. Wolfe, “Ventriloquizing Nation,” 447. 70. Dillon has shown how this “allegorical premise”—­especially the tendency to read familial dynamics allegorically—­persists even in revisionary accounts, such as ­those of

Notes to Ch a pter Thr ee [ 289 ] Stern and Barnes, that have transformed our understanding of early fiction (Gender of Freedom, 277n32). 71. Bell, American Romance, 41.

Chapter Three: Fictionality and Female Conduct 1. In the last few years, however, ­there have been a number of impor­tant studies focused on addressing this enduring gap; see especially Duncan Faherty, “Remapping the Canonical Interregnum: Periodization, Canonization, and the American Novel, 1800–1820,” in A Companion to American Lit­er­a­ture, Volume I: Origins to 1820, ed. Susan Belasco, Theresa Strouth Gaul, Linck Johnson, and Michael Soto (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2020), 478–94; Ed White and Michael Drexler’s The Traumatic Col­o­nel: The Founding ­Fathers, Slavery, and the Phantasmatic Aaron Burr (New York: New York University Press, 2014); and White’s “Trends and Pattern in the US Novel, 1800–1820,” (American Novel to 1870, 73–88), which situates this era’s novels in relation to the aftermath of the election of 1800. See also Weyler’s Intricate Relations; and Winfried Fluck’s “Novels of Transition,” which traces the transition from seduction narratives to domestic fiction across this period (in The Construction and Contestation of American Cultures and Identities in the Early National Period [Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Press, 1999], 97–119). 2. Davidson, Revolution and the Word, 118–19; see also Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers, 27–28; Orians, “Censure,” 196–97; and Machor, Reading Fiction, 29. 3. See James McHenry’s oft-­quoted comments: “To us it appears but yesterday, that the grave, the serious, the religious, and the prudent, considered novel-­reading as an employment utterly beneath the dignity of the ­human mind. . . . ​How surprising is the change we now witness,” American Monthly Magazine 2 (July 1824): 1–2. 4. In exploring the relationship between normativity and fictionality in a chapter that focuses on female conduct and deals largely with fictions written by ­women, I do not want to reproduce the pernicious assumption that, as Lora Romero puts it, “normalization is still ­women’s work” (Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997], 50). Rather, this specific set of texts provides such fertile ground for this topic ­because both the work and objects of normalization ­were gendered in this period: as early conduct lit­er­a­ture makes clear, ­women faced uniquely burdensome pressure to normalize both their own be­hav­ior and that of other ­women. While some of the texts discussed in this chapter are not addressed specifically to ­women, most of them are and all of them reflect on what constitutes appropriate feminine be­hav­ior. Throughout, this chapter is indebted to Queer Theory’s long-­standing interrogation of normativity, especially the work of Michael Warner. 5. Weekly Magazine 1 (March 10, 1798): 185. 6. As scholars have long been grappling with the gender politics of early American fiction, studies that touch on issues of female conduct in this fiction are legion. Impor­tant accounts include—­but are not ­limited to—­Davidson, Revolution and the Word; Samuels, Romances of the Republic; Dillon, Gender of Freedom; Stern, Plight of Feeling; Burgett, Sentimental Bodies; Rust, Prodigal ­Daughters; Jordan, Second Stories; Weyler, Intricate Relations; Barnes, States of Sympathy; and Sharon M. Harris, “Introduction,” Redefining the Po­liti­cal Novel: American ­Women Writers, 1797–1901, ed. Harris (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995). 7. Weekly Magazine 1 (April 14, 1798): 331. 8. On the rise of this domestic disciplinary regime in US culture in the 1830s and 1840s and how it differed from e­ arlier forms of discipline, see Brodhead, Cultures of Letters, 13–47. In this disciplinary model, correction becomes interiorized through greater

[ 290 ] Notes to Ch a pter Thr ee emphasis on the “inward regulating moral conscience,” resulting in a “superior introjection of authority” (20–21). This chapter offers a prehistory of ­these developments, tracing the shifts in theories of fictional instruction through which fiction came to be seen as a key vehicle for cultivating domestic virtue. The understanding of morality as obedience to an internalized moral sense had gained influence in Anglo-­American cultures across the eigh­ teenth c­ entury, as it was theorized, in very dif­fer­ent ways, by thinkers such as Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Adam Smith; it would come to underlie what G. J. Barker-­Benfield has called eighteenth-­century Britain’s “culture of sensibility”; The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-­Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Also relevant h ­ ere is the increased emphasis on feeling in American religion that accompanied the Second ­Great Awakening; as Claudia Stokes has shown, while many sentimental writers had an ambivalent relationship to the movement’s camp revivals, their literary proj­ects ­were nonetheless ­shaped by its emotionalism and its weakening of ecclesiastical authority (The Altar at Home: Sentimental Lit­er­a­ture and Nineteenth-­Century Religion [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014]). As Joseph Conforti succinctly puts it, one consequence of the Second ­Great Awakening was the “interiorization of authority” (Jonathan Edwards, Religious Tradition, and American Culture [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995], 26). 9. This period famously saw a major evolution in ideals of femininity, with the rise of a nascent version of the “cult of domesticity” that would become ascendant in the mid-­ nineteenth c­ entury; see Bloch, “American Feminine Ideals in Transition: The Rise of the Moral M ­ other, 1785–1815,” Feminist Studies 4, no. 2 (1978), 100–126; Nancy Cotts, The Bonds of Womanhood: “­Woman’s Sphere in New ­England, 1780-1835 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997); Barbara Harris, Beyond Her Sphere: W ­ omen and the Professions in American History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978), 32–73; and Mary Ryan, Womanhood in Amer­i­ca: From Colonial Times to the Pre­sent (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975), 83–193. For accounts that nuance and qualify ­these foundational arguments, see, among ­others, Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: ­Women, Education, and Public Life in Amer­i­ca’s Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Lucia McMahon, Mere Equals: The Paradox of Educated ­Women in the Early American Republic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012); and Rust, Prodigal ­Daughters. For accounts that challenge the focus on “separate spheres,” see No More Separate Spheres!, ed. Jessamyn Hatcher and Davidson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). This chapter also builds on Scott Ellis’s dissertation, “Fictional Privacy and Private Fictions” (Emory University, 2001), which argues that even as critics worried about the effects of private fiction-­reading, many of this era’s writers sought to associate their fictions with private life as a way of asserting fiction’s discursive specificity. 10. On such physiological assumptions, see Barker-­Benfield, Sensibility. 11. United States Magazine (May 1794): 80. 12. United States Magazine (April 1794): 15. 13. I am referring to this narrative as the Story of Margaretta, ­because this is how the narrative has been canonized and is usually discussed; Selected Writings of Judith Sargent Murray, ed. Sharon M. Harris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Subsequently cited parenthetically. But as I ­will show, its contextualization within “The Gleaner” series is crucial to its fictional logic. 14. Mas­sa­chu­setts Magazine 1 (June 1789): 361. 15. Murray, The Gleaner, volume 1 (Boston: Thomas and Andrews, 1798), 56–57. 16. ­Here, I follow Kirstin Wilcox, who notes how Murray’s “masquerade of genre . . . ​ enacts a literary space between the serial essays and the forms of fiction current at the time” (“The Scribblings of a Plain Man and the Temerity of a W ­ oman: Gender and Genre in

Notes to Ch a pter Thr ee [ 291 ] Judith Sargent Murray’s ‘The Gleaner,’ ” Early American Lit­er­a­ture 30, no. 2 [1995]: 123). Edelstein shows how Murray pre­sents fiction as a truthful alternative to a corrupt public sphere (Between, 22–30). On Margaretta’s relationship to US periodical culture, see also Jennifer Desidereo, “The Periodical as Monitorial and Interactive Space in Judith Sargent Murray’s The Gleaner,” American Periodicals 18, no. 1 (2008): 1–25. 17. Murray, The Gleaner, 61–62. 18. Davis, The Wanderings of William (Philadelphia: R.T., 1801), iii. 19. Sherburne, The Oriental Philanthropist (Portsmouth, NH: Treadwell & Co., 1800), 16–17. 20. Weekly Magazine 1 (March 10, 1798): 185. 21. Mirror of Taste and Dramatic Censor 3 (February 1, 1811): 86–87. 22. Philadelphia Repository and Weekly Register 1 (June 6, 1801): 238. 23. The Female American, ed. Michelle Burnham (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2002). Subsequently cited parenthetically. On the book’s treatment of gender, see Burnham’s “Introduction”; Laura Stevens, “Reading the Hermit’s Manuscript: The Female American and Female Robinsonades,” in Approaches to Teaching Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, ed. Maximillian Novak and Carl Fisher (New York: Modern Language Association of Amer­i­ca, 2005), 141–50; Betty Joseph, “Re(playing) Crusoe/Pocahontas: Circum-­Atlantic Stagings in The Female American,” Criticism 42, no. 3 (2000): 317–35; Kristianne Kalata Vaccaro, “ ‘Recollection . . . ​Sets My Busy Imagination to Work’: Transatlantic Self-­Narration, Per­ for­mance, and Reception in The Female American,” Eighteenth-­Century Fiction 20, no. 2 (2007–8): 127–50. On how it challenges conventional companionate marriage plots, see Melissa Adams-­Campbell, New World Courtships: Transatlantic Alternatives to Companionate Marriage (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2015), 33–41. 24. Unlike chapter 1’s “Founded on Fact” novels, The Female American is an exemplary instance of the ambiguously fictional “lives” that, as Bannet has shown, circulated throughout the eighteenth-­century Atlantic world (Transatlantic Stories, 1–16). It also nicely fits with Paige’s description of pseudofactual novels: the text’s intertextual play suggest that its truth claims represent not an earnest claim to factuality, but reflect an alternative understanding of fictional “truth.” 25. Whereas Mary Helen McMurran reads this improbability as a critique of realism and Enlightenment empiricism, I would suggest that The Female American, like Wieland, stretches the bound­aries of this tradition but does not break with it. McMurran rightly emphasizes how the narrative’s “won­ders” violate traditional novelistic standards of probability, but I would argue that this is done in the interest of emphasizing a no less rational possibilism, “Realism and the Unreal in The Female American,” Eigh­teenth ­Century, 3–4 (2011): 324–41. 26. I am indebted to Galperin’s discussion of the social implications of probability in En­glish novels. He notes how probabilistic reasoning for w ­ omen was associated with the “formation of reasonable expectations,” which increasingly meant “diminished expectations,” the ac­cep­tance of a more ­limited existence (Historical Austen, 94). Galperin’s account, however, focuses solely on plot rather than on the interaction between fictional logic and plot. 27. The Female Review (Boston, Wiggins & Lunt, 1866), 37. 28. Ibid., 141. 29. Tenney, Female Quixotism, ed. Andrea Collins and Jean Nienkamp (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Subsequently cited parenthetically. Critics have offered widely varying accounts of Female Quixotism’s competing progressive and conservative impulses and its complicated repre­sen­ta­tions of gender, class, and race relations. On Female Quixotism as a cele­bration of Dorcasina’s transgressive be­hav­ior, see Sharon M.

[ 292 ] Notes to Ch a pter Thr ee Harris, “Lost Bound­aries: The Use of the Carnivalesque in Tabitha Tenney’s Female Quixotism,” in Speaking the Other Self: American W ­ omen Writers, ed. Jeanne Campell Reesman (Athens: Georgia University Press, 1997); Davidson, Revolution and the Word; Linda Frost, “The Body Politic in Tabitha Tenney’s Female Quixotism,” Early American Lit­er­a­ture 32, no. 2 (1997): 113–34; W. C. Harris, “ ­Women Love to Have Their Own Way’: Delusion, Volition, and ‘Freaks’ of Sight in Tabitha Tenney’s Female Quixotism,” Eighteenth-­Century Fiction 23, no. 3 (2011): 541–68; and, to some extent, Sarah Wood, Quixotic Fictions. While my reading follows ­those critics—­Frost, Stephen Carl Arch (“Falling into Fiction: Reading Female Quixotism,” Eighteenth-­Century Fiction 14, no. 2 [2002]: 177–98), Rachel Carnell and Alison Tracy Hale (“Romantic Transports: Tabitha Tenney’s Female Quixotism in Transatlantic Context,” Early American Lit­er­a­ture 46, no. 3 [2011]: 517–39), and Gillian Brown (“The Quixotic Fallacy,” NOVEL 32, no. 2 [1999]: 250–73)—­who emphasize Female Quixotism’s conservatism, I am chiefly interested in its argument about fiction’s appropriate uses. 30. Davidson, Revolution and the Word, 276. Collins and Nienkamp echo Davidson, noting that the novel’s “central concern” is “what books good citizens ‘should’ read” (“Introduction,” xii). See also Arch, who situates the novel in relation to mid-­eighteenth-­century debates over truth and fiction, arguing that Female Quixotism aligns itself with truth and history rather than imagination or the novel even though it does not deal with facts (“Falling into Fiction,” 184). 31. Miecznikowski, “Parodic Mode and the Patriarchal Imperative,” Early American Lit­er­a­ture 25, no. 1 (1990): 35. 32. As Brown puts it in her reading of Female Quixotism, “complaints about quixotic readers . . . ​bear no animus against fiction per se” (“Quixotic Fallacy,” 256–57). 33. Carnell and Hale have recently pointed out some of the limitations of Paul Scott Gordon’s influential characterization of the female quixote genre as “defensive” or inherently “compensatory” (The Practice of Quixotism: Postmodern Theory and Eighteenth-­ Century ­Women’s Writing [New York: Palgrave, 2006] 24). I am not, however, reading the female quixote genre as inherently “compensatory,” but rather, drawing attention to how Tenney closes her book by positing the function of fiction in general as “compensatory.” 34. W. C. Harris suggestively reads Tenney’s fiction as “deliver[ing] a legitimating fantasy about fantasy” in “anti-­fiction drag compulsory for the time” (“­Women,” 563). This requires some qualification. Female Quixotism might deliver “a legitimating fantasy about fantasy,” but it does so by emphasizing its nature as “fantasy”: the narrative advocates fiction-­reading, but it also seeks to circumscribe fiction’s role in shaping be­hav­ior. 35. Boston Weekly Magazine 1 (January 22, 1803): 55. 36. Weekly Magazine 1 (April 14, 1798): 331. 37. Philadelphia Repository and Weekly Register 2 (October 16, 1802): 332. 38. Weekly Visitor, or the Ladies Miscellany 2 (July 1804): 332. Baltimore Weekly Magazine (January 14, 1801): 178. See also, Port-­Folio 4 (June 1804): 201. 39. Literary Magazine 1 (March 1804): 403. 40. Boston Weekly Magazine 2 (June 16, 1804): 136. 41. New-­England Quarterly Magazine 2 (October–­December 1802): 157. 42. Literary Magazine 1 (March 1804): 403–5. 43. Juvenile Magazine 1 (January 1802): 1–3. On periodical editors setting themselves up as guides for selecting fiction, see also Okker, Social Stories, 35–37. 44. Lady’s Monitor (January 2, 1801). Quoted in Orians, “Censure.” 45. Rosa, or American Genius and Education (New York: Riley, 1810). 46. Vickery, Emily Hamilton, ed. Scott Slawinski (Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 2009), 4. 47. Read, Monima (New York: P. R. Johnson, 1802), v–vi.

Notes to Ch a pter Thr ee [ 293 ] 48. New-­England Quarterly Magazine 2 (October–­December 1802): 157. 49. See, for example, Philadelphia Repository and Weekly Register 2 (October 16, 1802): 332. Such debates often drew on e­ arlier En­glish discussions, such as Samuel Johnson’s Rambler No. 4, about the dangers of too accurately copying real­ity in fiction, especially the virtues and vices of “mixed characters,” but ­these issues ­were debated with a fresh urgency and regularity in US periodicals in the early 1800s. 50. Port-­Folio 2 (May 8, 1802): 141–42. 51. Port-­Folio 2 (June 5, 1802): 69. 52. Port-­Folio 2 (June 19, 1802): 185. 53. Thayer, The Gamesters (Boston: Thomas and Andrews et al., 1805), iv. 54. Dorval has received scant critical attention; see especially Weyler’s compelling account of the relation between sexual and economic seduction in the novel (Intricate Relations, 131–38). 55. Wood, Dorval (Portsmouth, NH: Nutting and Whitlock, 1801), v. Subsequently cited parenthetically. 56. Wood asserts Dorval’s factuality specifically in rehearsing his backstory, allowing her to maintain Dorval’s factual basis without extending this claim to other characters or her entire narrative. 57. This is not to deny that many of Dorval’s events are highly improbable. But interestingly, Dorval’s probabilistic logic and its defense of its epistemological reliability, although implicitly extending to the ­whole book, are explic­itly laid out in relation to characters rather than plot. 58. Hacking, Probability, 11–17. 59. The degree to which the statistically inflected understanding of probability circulated in the early United States is difficult to determine. Although Lee locates its emergence in the 1830s with the formalization of “the calculus of probabilities” as a branch of knowledge, I would follow Kavanagh and Molesworth in suggesting that in the United States— as in Britain (Molesworth) and France (Kavanagh)—­this conception of probability was operative and widespread before its formal consolidation in the mid-­nineteenth ­century. That is, this way of thinking about chance and expectation inflects vari­ous invocations of probability even before the development of a formal theory of the “calculus of probabilities.” In relation to fiction, US critics’ fixation on the false expectations inculcated by fiction—­and the authorial invocations of probability in response—­suggests the degree to which epistemological probability is already tied up with the sense of probability as a way of determining what is likely. 60. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burcell (New York: Palgrave, 2007). On the concept of population in colonial Amer­i­ca, see Molly Farrell, Counting Bodies: Population in Colonial American Writing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 61. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 63. 62. See Drexler’s “Introduction,” The Secret History and Laura, ed. Drexler (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2007). The Secret History and Laura is subsequently cited parenthetically. 63. In addition to Drexler’s, four accounts of Sansay’s fiction are especially impor­ tant for my reading. Dillon shows how inserting Sansay’s “repre­sen­ta­tions of creole social reproduction” into the history of the American novel radically revises this literary history (“The Secret History of the Early American Novel: Leonora Sansay and Revolution in Saint Dominique,” NOVEL 40, nos. 1–2 [2006]: 77–103). Woertendyke situates Sansay’s text in relation to the Secret History genre, pointing out how scholars, in designating the text a “novel” have obscured its explicit generic lineage. She reads it as a “secret-­history-­ as-­novel” (“Romance to Novel: A Secret History,” Narrative 17, no. 3 [2009]: 255–73).

[ 294 ] Notes to Ch a pter Thr ee Adams-­Campbell reads it as reversing the typical courtship plot in order to critique companionate marriage (esp. 70–80). Last, Castiglia has compellingly highlighted The Secret History’s thematic engagement with fictionality, focusing on Clara and Mary’s very dif­fer­ ent relationships to imagination; “Revolution Is a Fiction: The Way We Read (Early American Lit­er­a­ture) Now,” Early American Lit­er­a­ture 51, no. 2 (2016): 397–418. 64. Woertendyke, “Romance to Novel.” As both McKeon and Gallagher note, secret histories played a central role in the emergence of the conceptual categories of fact and fiction. Sansay, however, turns to this liminal form of fictionality at a moment ­after ­these categories have clearly stabilized. 65. I follow Dillon and Woertendyke in not reading the Secret History as a roman à clef. Even if someone w ­ ere to recognize the resemblance to Sansay’s life—­something never commented on in the historical rec­ord (Woertendyke, “Romance to Novel,” 259)—­this does not reduce the narrative to a portrait of Sansay’s own marriage; once her biography has been fictionalized, it exists in excess of its original basis. 66. Port-­Folio (March 1809). Quoted in Secret History and Laura, 240–42. 67. Port-­Folio (January 1809). Quoted in Secret History and Laura, 239–40. 68. Cata­log of H. Caritat’s Circulating Library (New York, 1803). 69. Kenneth Carpenter, “Libraries,” in An Extensive Republic, 280. 70. The ­Mother’s Book (Boston: Carther and Hendez, 1832), 90–91. 71. See Fluck, “Transition.” 72. New-­England Quarterly Magazine 2 (October–­December 1802): 157. 73. On this model of domestic fiction, see Baym, ­Woman’s Fiction (Urbana-­Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1978), and Brodhead, Cultures of Letters. 74. Impor­tant accounts of Kelroy include Davidson’s (Revolution and the Word, 329–34) and Weyler’s (Intricate Relations, 127–33). ­Here, I especially build on Fluck, who regards Kelroy as a key text in the shift from the seduction tale to the domestic novel across the early 1800s (“Transition”). 75. Rush, Kelroy, ed. Dana D. Nelson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 23. Subsequently cited parenthetically. 76. As Cotts argues, the ideology of womanhood that was consolidated in the 1820s and 1830s differed from e­ arlier ideologies of feminine domesticity in its more pronounced opposition between home and world, a shift that was enabled by the increasing prevalence of wage ­labor performed outside the home (Bonds, 64–98). On the consolidation of domestic discourse in the 1830s and how this transformed w ­ omen’s writing in the United States, see Joanne Dobson and Sandra Zagarell, “­Women Writing in the Early Republic,” in An Extensive Republic, 373–81. 77. On A New-­England Tale’s foundational position in t­ hese traditions, see Baym, ­Woman’s Fiction, and Reynolds’s Faith in Fiction, respectively. Of the many studies of A New-­England Tale, my reading is especially indebted to Barnes’s States of Sympathy, 75–85; Victoria Clements’s “ ‘A Power­ful and Thrilling Voice’: The Significance of Crazy Bet,” Catharine Maria Sedgwick: Critical Perspectives, ed. Lucinda Damon-­Bach and Clements (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003); and Susan K. Harris’s 19th-­Century American W ­ omen’s Novels: Interpretative Strategies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), which reads A New-­England Tale alongside Charlotte ­Temple as exemplary early didactic fictions. While Harris compellingly traces the continuity of the instructive framework, I emphasize how much has changed over this period both in theories of instructive fiction and in the “reading pro­cesses they permit” (50–59). 78. Sedgwick, A New-­England Tale, ed. Susan K. Harris (New York: Penguin, 2003), 3. Subsequently cited parenthetically. 79. Philadelphia Minerva 4 (June 2, 1798): 71. 80. Sedgwick, Hope Leslie, ed. Carolyn Karcher (New York: Penguin, 2009), 292.

Notes to Pa rt II [ 295 ] 81. Ibid., 339. 82. Stokes reads the Unitarian Sedgwick’s c­ areer—in spite of her ambivalence about revivals—as exemplifying the Second ­Great Awakening’s effect on sentimental lit­er­a­ture: ­these works deemphasize election in ­favor of practical Chris­tian­ity; they reflect this era’s emphasis on religious feeling over theological argument and its greater comfort with using narrative as a tool for religious instruction; and they decenter religious authority, allowing (white) w ­ omen to claim a new moral and religious authority (Altar, 21–66). 83. Philadelphia Minerva 4 (June 2, 1798): 71. Sedgwick’s fiction crystallizes Common Sense philosophy’s complex position in the history of American fiction, as the same phi­los­ o­phers whose suspicion of the imagination buttressed the early arguments against fiction also made arguments that emphasized a God-­given moral sense that would become central to justifications of liberal religious fiction in the nineteenth ­century. On ­these competing legacies, see Martin, Instructed Vision, and Reynolds, Faith in Fiction, respectively. 84. See Reynolds’s discussion of Sedgwick’s use of what he calls “the visionary mode” (Faith in Fiction, 51–54). 85. Nancy Sweet reads Jane’s impropriety as part of the fiction’s critique of traditional Puritan authority; “Dissent and the ­Daughter in A New-­England Tale and Hobomok,” Legacy 22, no. 2 (2005), 112. 86. Clements argues that Bet’s factual basis allows Sedgwick to stage her power as a “female author-­izing subject” by remaking and controlling even a “real” person: “Even the most ‘real,’ the most overtly object-­identified figure in the book can be destabilized, executed, erased by the novelizing subject” (48). I would add, however, that Bet’s “realness” also evidences the limits of what can be included in the fictional world that Sedgwick creates. 87. Baym, ­Woman’s Fiction, 51–58. 88. Orians, “Censure,” 195. See also Gross, “Reading for an Extensive Republic,” in An Extensive Republic, 548; and Green, “Publishing,” 107–8. 89. Southern Literary Messenger 15 (September 1849): 582. 90. Godey’s 49 (September 1854): 274.

Part II 1. Emily Todd, “Establishing Routes for Fiction in the United States: Walter Scott’s Novels and the Early Nineteenth-­Century Publishing Industry,” Book History 12 (2009): 100–128; Gross, “An Extensive Republic,” 41–42; Green, “Book Publishing,” 102–9. 2. “­Table 10.2: Publication of Novels in the United States, 1790–1840,” in An Extensive Republic, 442. 3. Brodhead, Cultures of Letters, 44. 4. Knickerbocker 21 (June 1843): 576. 5. Ladies’ Repository (April 1843); North American Review (April 1831); New York Review (July 1840); and Christian Examiner (March 1845). Quoted in Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers, 26–27. 6. Knickerbocker 12 (October 1838): 367. On this era’s technological changes in book printing, see Michael Winship, “Manufacturing and Book Production,” in A History of the Book in Amer­i­ca, Volume III: The Industrial Book, 1840–80, ed. Scott Casper, Jeffrey Groves, Stephen Nissenbaum, and Winship (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 40–70. On the comparatively modest impact of such technological advances on US publishing before 1840, see Green, “Publishing,” 126. 7. See Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers, 26–43; and Machor, Reading Fiction, 29–31. On this era’s explosion of periodical publishing, publishers’ use of magazines to promote their fiction, and the rise of the mammoth weeklies that reprinted popu­lar fictions

[ 296 ] Notes to Ch a pter Four in cheap periodical form, see Eric Lupfer, “The Business of American Magazines,” in The Industrial Book, 248–58. 8. Carpenter, “Libraries,” 28; Dean Grodzins and Leon Jackson, “Colleges and Print Culture,” in An Extensive Republic, 318–32. 9. Brady, “Reading Public”; Sánchez, Reforming, 1–21; Coleman, for this reason, calls for an account of what she refers to as the “slow rise” of the novel in the United States (Preaching, 46–67). 10. On the American Tract Society’s antipathy for fiction, see Nord, Faith in Reading, 115–18, and Zboray, Fictive ­People, 92. 11. Carpenter, “Libraries,” 273–82. 12. Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers, 26–43. 13. On unified plotting as the defining characteristic of the novel in antebellum reviews, see ibid., 44–82, and Machor, Reading Fiction, 36–83.

Chapter Four: The Shifting Logics of Historical Fiction 1. On the dif­fer­ent forms of historical writing in the period, see Buell, New ­England Literary Culture: From Revolution through Re­nais­sance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 194–278; and Baym, American ­Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790–1860 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995). 2. Todd, “Establishing Routes,” 102–4. On how Scott’s works ­shaped US historical fiction, see George Dekker’s foundational The American Historical Romance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), and Fiona Robertson, “Walter Scott and the American Historical Novel,” in American Novel to 1870, 107–23. 3. Critics have treated antebellum historical fiction as a relatively coherent and stable genre: as Dekker puts it, “the history of historical romance is . . . ​long on continuity and short . . . ​on departures from the ­family type” (American Historical Romance, 1). In Americanist criticism, historical fiction has often been the subject of taxonomical genre criticism, ­whether focused on the classical historical novel, the American romance tradition, or the historical romance. This criticism has largely focused on describing the genre’s features, determining its bound­aries, and designating what Philip Gould refers to as the “cultural politics of a literary genre” (Covenant and Republic: Historical Romance and the Politics of Puritanism [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 9). This has produced brilliant accounts of the genre (variously defined) as a ­whole, but comparatively ­little has been said about its evolution across this period. Other impor­tant accounts of the American historical romance include Bell’s Hawthorne and the Historical Romance of New ­England (Prince­ ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1971); Emily Miller Budick, Fiction and Historical Consciousness: The American Romance Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989); and Lloyd Pratt, Archives of American Time: Lit­er­at­ ure and Modernity in the Nineteenth ­Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 4. Cooper, The Spy (New York: Wiley & Halsted, 1822). Third edition. 5. Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (Carey and Lea: Philadelphia, 1826), iii, ix. 6. Cooper, The Leather-­Stocking Tales (New York: Stringer & Townsend, 1954), xiii. Subsequently cited parenthetically. 7. Ibid., ix–­x. On Cooper’s prefaces, see Arvid Shulenberger’s Cooper’s Theory of Fiction: His Prefaces and Their Relation to the Novels (Lawrence: Kansas University Press, 1955); and Matthew Wynn Sivils, “ ‘Yours, Truly, THE AUTHOR’: Cooper’s Leather-­Stocking Prefaces,” in Reading Cooper, Teaching Cooper, ed. Jeffrey Walker (New York: AMS, 2007), 182–200. 8. Walter Scott’s historical romances, of course, both insist on their firm basis in history and suggest the romantic interest of the past. What is striking about US historical fiction

Notes to Ch a pter Four [ 297 ] is how ­these two justifications of the mode get made progressively, with the latter justification gradually displacing the former. 9. In recent years, most scholarship on historical fiction has focused on its ideological implications. Critics have considered its role in justifying imperialist vio­lence, cultivating nationalism, religious controversies, debates about republican politics, constructions of race, repre­sen­ta­tions of Native Americans, contests over the meaning of marriage, and changing conceptions of domesticity. This raises the question of ­whether the changing justifications for historical fiction alter the “cultural work” it performs. Does the disavowal of a generic association with history—­and the accompanying insistence on fictional autonomy—­ change historical fiction as an ideological vehicle? To take only one example, does the genre’s disavowal of historical knowledge production compromise it or make it more effective as a tool for establishing a national my­thol­ogy that can disavow Amer­i­ca’s foundational colonial vio­lence? T ­ hese questions are beyond this chapter’s scope, but I hope that they can be suggestive and generative. Impor­tant accounts of the “cultural work” performed by antebellum historical fiction include, among many ­others, Phillip Fisher, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Buell, New ­England; Gould, Covenant and Republic; Romero, Home Fronts; Gustafson, Imagining Deliberative Democracy; Tawil, The Making of Racial Sentiment: Slavery and the Birth of the Frontier Romance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Robert Clarke, History, Ideology, and Myth in American Fiction, 1823–52 (New York: Palgrave, 1984); Lucy Maddox, Removals: Nineteenth-­Century American Lit­er­a­ture and the Politics of Indian Affairs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); and Samuels, Romances of the Republic and “­Women, Blood, Contract,” American Literary History 20, nos. 1–2 (2008): 57–75. 10. Saler, As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Real­ity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 12. T ­ here is a robust body of recent scholarship on antebellum lit­er­a­ture and culture that challenges conventional narratives about the disenchanted nature of modern life; see especially John Lardas Modern, Secularism in Antebellum Amer­i­ca (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Sizemore, American Enchantment; and Ogden, Credulity. 11. Cooper, The Deerslayer (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1841), ix. 12. American Monthly Review 3 (December 1795): 482. 13. Port-­Folio 2 (July 1813): 62. 14. Woodworth, The Champions of Freedom (New York: Baldwin, 1816), iv. 15. Ibid., v. 16. Ibid., vi. 17. Select Reviews 3 (March 1810): 186. 18. On Cooper’s alterations to The Spy’s prefaces, see Lance Schachterle, “Cooper Revises the First G ­ reat American Novel” (American Lit­er­a­ture Association, 1990); James Fenimore Cooper Society Website. 19. The Spy (New York: Wiley & Halsted, 1821). First edition. Ina Ferris provides an account of a parallel history of generic differentiation, tracing Scott’s consolidation of “Manly” literary authority. The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). 20. The Spy (New York: Wiley & Halsted, 1822). Third edition. 21. Cooper, Last of the Mohicans, iii–iv. As Clarke and o ­ thers have noted, Cooper delved into the historical rec­ord not only for Mohicans’s central events—­such as the Siege of Fort William Henry—­but also for many of its local details (History, Ideology, and Myth, 79–95). 22. Lionel Lincoln (New York: Wiley, 1825), vii–­xii. 23. The Pi­lot (New York: Wiley, 1824) vi–­viii. 24. In underscoring historical fiction’s association with history in the 1820s, I am following Gould, who notes, “History and historical fiction w ­ ere intimately related genres

[ 298 ] Notes to Ch a pter Four during this era” (Covenant and Republic, 9). Gould situates 1820s historical fiction as part of the period’s more general interest in national history, including the expansion of historical socie­ties and the mandated teaching of history in state schools. 25. Hayden White, “Fictions of Factual Repre­sen­ta­tion,” in The Lit­er­a­ture of Fact, ed. Angus Fletcher (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 21–45. 26. Ibid., 25–28. 27. For an overview of the origins and development of the historical society movement, see David Van Tassel, Recording Amer­i­ca’s Past: An Interpretation of the Development of Historical Studies in Amer­i­ca, 1607–1884 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 59–66, 95–103. For an overview of ­these institutions in Britain, see Making History: Antiquaries in Britain, 1707–2007 (London: Royal Acad­emy of the Arts, 2007). 28. “Materials for American History,” North American Review 23 (October 1826), 276. Leslie Whittaker Dunlap, American Historical Socie­t ies, 1790–1860 (Madison, WI: Privately printed by Cantwell Printing Co., 1994), offers an overview of the paucity of American historical materials in this period. 29. The historical-­society movement was ­under way in the Northeast in the 1790s (Buell, New ­England, 195; Van Tassel, Recording, 59–66), but historical socie­ties increased rapidly beginning in the 1820s. On the expansion of historical socie­ties, see especially Van Tassel, Recording, 95–102; Dunlap, Historical Socie­ties, 10–22; and Clifford Lord’s Keepers of the Past (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965). I do not mean to suggest that ­earlier periods produced no factual historiography. Nonetheless, many histories produced in the early republic, such as Parson Weems’s famous Life of Washington, ­were a medley of legend, fact, and fiction. (On the prevailing standards for historical writing in the republic and the predominance of biography in such writing, see Van Tassel, Recording.) The antebellum expansion of antiquarian socie­ties might be an extension of the early national interest in history, but t­ hese socie­ties also transformed the practice of historiography: this period brought both increased resources that enabled more primary research and higher standards for such research, including imperatives for greater adherence to t­ hese primary documents (Buell, New ­England, 209). 30. Child, Hobomok & Other Writings on Indians, ed. Carolyn Karcher (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 4. Subsequently cited parenthetically. 31. On Child’s paratextual strategies, see Molly Vaux, “But Maria, Did You ­Really Write This?: Preface as Cover Story in Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok,” Legacy 17, no. 2 (2000): 127–40. 32. This antiquarian motto came from the influential En­glish antiquarian Richard Colt Hoare’s The Ancient History of Wiltshire (London: W. Miller, 1812), 7. 33. On this era’s more “exacting” standards for historical research and the Romantic historians’ pride in archival research, see Buell, New ­England, 209. Some account of Romantic historiography appears in most studies of American historical fiction; in addition to Buell, Gould, Fisher, Dekker, and Bell, see especially Michael Colacurcio, The Province of Piety: Moral History in Hawthorne’s Early Tales (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), and Gregory Pfitzer, Popu­lar History and the Literary Marketplace, 1840–1920 (Amherst: University of Mas­sa­chu­setts Press, 2008). 34. Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, ed. Nancy Stade (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2003), 25–27. 35. On The Scarlet Letter’s importance to arguments about literary autonomy in the United States, see Arac, Literary Narrative, and Schweighauser, who notes “the relish with which Hawthorne unmoors his romance from any grounding in truth” and “pokes fun at such attempts to authenticate fiction” (Beautiful Deceptions, 194). 36. Both e­ arlier examples of the licensing justification, such as John Neal’s early historical romances, and l­ ater examples of the disciplining justification, such as John Greenleaf

Notes to Ch a pter Four [ 299 ] Whittier’s thoroughly researched Leaves from Margaret Smith’s Journal in the Province of Mas­sa­chu­setts Bay, 1678–79 (1849), might be marshaled against my narrative. T ­ hese examples, nonetheless, capture a broad shift in justifications for historical fictionality across this period. 37. While Hope Leslie has received a g ­ reat deal of critical attention, my reading is especially indebted to Gould’s account of Sedgwick’s engagement with Puritan sources (Covenant and Republic, 61–90); Emerson’s “History, Memory, and the Echoes of Equivalence in Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie,” Legacy 24, no. 1 (2007): 24–49; and Douglas Ford’s “Inscribing the ‘Impartial Observer’ in Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie,” Legacy 14, no. 2 (1997): 81–92. 38. Sedgwick, Hope Leslie, 149. Subsequently cited parenthetically. 39. Sedgwick’s critique of Puritan prejudice, of course, does not mitigate Hope Leslie’s complicity in nineteenth-­century racist and colonialist proj­ects, including its infamous perpetuation of the myth of the “vanis­hing Indian.” On Hope Leslie’s racial politics, see Tawil, Racial Sentiment, and Maddox, Removals. 40. Neal, “Late American Books,” Museum of Foreign Lit­er­a­ture, Science, and Art 7 (November 1, 1825), 428. 41. Neal, Randolph, A Novel (1823), 184. 42. In bringing together Neal and Sedgwick as critics of con­temporary historiography, my account dovetails with Jeffrey Insko’s illuminating reading of their fictions as “unhistorical fictions” committed to “undoing history.” While Insko would likely object to contextualizing ­these fictions’ critiques of history so specifically in relation to antiquarian historiography, I share his sense that ­these writers sought to challenge “normative ideas of what history is or can be”; History, Abolition, and the Ever-­Present Now in Antebellum American Writing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 56–57. 43. Neal, Rachel Dyer (Portland, ME: Shirley and Hyde, 1828), iv–­v. Subsequently cited parenthetically. 44. On the conventional understanding and po­liti­cal meaning of the Salem witch t­ rials in the nineteenth c­ entury—­and Rachel Dyer’s vexed relationship to it—­see Gould, Covenant and Republic, 172–210. 45. T ­ here has been a resurgent interest in Neal exemplified by the recent collection John Neal and Nineteenth-­Century American Lit­er­a­ture and Culture, ed. Watts and David J. Carlson (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2012). My reading especially draws on Pethers’s “ ‘I Must Resemble Nobody’: John Neal, Genre, and the Making of American Literary Nationalism” (1–38), and Carlson’s “Another Declaration of In­de­pen­dence: John Neal’s Assault on Pre­ce­dent” (159–84). See also William Scheick, “Power, Authority, and Revolutionary Impulse in John Neal’s Rachel Dyer,” Studies in American Fiction 4, no. 2 (1976): 143–55. 46. This doubled generic orientation—an emphasis on both the narrative’s factual basis and its distinction from history—is evident across Cooper’s paratexts from the early 1830s, including the new 1832 preface to The Pioneers. 47. Cooper, The Spy (London: Colburn and Bentley, 1831). First included in this En­glish edition, this preface was, in some form, retained in all subsequent editions. The lightly revised 1849 version of this preface is included in The Spy (New York: Penguin, 2003), edited by Wayne Franklin, and is subsequently cited parenthetically. 48. For an account of The Spy’s early reception, see James Wallace, Early Cooper and His Audience (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 49. Barnum, The Spy Unmasked (Cincinnati, 1831), ix. Second edition. 50. See Tremaine McDowell, “The Identity of Harvey Birch,” American Lit­er­a­ture 2, no. 2 (1930): 111–20. 51. Cooper, Deerslayer, ix.

[ 300 ] Notes to Ch a pter Four 52. Simms, The Yemassee, A Romance of Carolina, ed. M. Lyle Spencer (Richmond, VA: Johnson Publishing, 1911), v–vi. Subsequently cited parenthetically. 53. See Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers, 1–15; and Machor, Reading Fiction, 36–86. 54. Southern Literary Messenger 8 (May 1842): 342. As Machor puts it, “The older distrust of novels, which had characterized fiction as lies or simply a waste of time, gave way in the antebellum era to a public recognition—­manifested and conducted most volubly in the periodical press—­that Americans ­were devoting increasing amounts of leisure time to fiction reading” (Reading Fiction, 29–30). Coleman notes that even conduct lit­er­a­ture shows an increasing tolerance of fiction across this period (Preaching, 62–67). 55. DeBow’s Review 4 (December 1860): 795. 56. Christian Examiner 68 (January 1860): 113. 57. Putnam’s 4 (October 1854): 391. 58. North American Review 82 (April 1856): 368. 59. “Useful Reading,” True Flag 3 (1853). Quoted in Zboray, Fictive ­People, 129. 60. Channing, Self-­Culture (Boston: Went­worth and Dutton, 1838), 13. 61. Ibid., 39. 62. Although Unitarians, such as Channing—­and Unitarian publications, such as the Christian Examiner—­were among the denominations to embrace fiction most fully, this period saw the Protestant clergy more generally, including many Calvinists, increasingly tolerate and even embrace fiction (Reynolds, Faith in Fiction, 54–118). Methodists, however, remained steadfast in their suspicion of fiction (Gunther Brown, Word; Nord, Faith in Reading; Reynolds, Faith in Fiction). 63. Sedgwick, Letters of Catharine M. Sedgwick, ed. Mary Dewey (New York: Harper and ­Brothers, 1871), 270. 64. Ware, David Ellington (Boston: Crosby & Nichols, 1846), 17. 65. Quoted in Todd, “Routes,” 120. 66. Child, ­Mother’s Book, 94. 67. ­Virginia Cary, Letters on Female Character (Richmond, VA, 1828). Quoted in Coleman, 64. 68. Channing, Self-­Culture, 74. 69. Ibid., 74. 70. George Burnap, Lectures to Young Men, on the Cultivation of Mind, the Formation of Character, and the Conduct of Life (Baltimore, 1840). Quoted in Coleman, 64. 71. For an example of e­ arlier American reviews hostile to Waverley, see the Christian Observer 16 (July 1817): 425–30. 72. Channing, Self-­Culture, 25. 73. This is not to suggest that the rise of an ideal of reading for self-­culture led to the uniform ac­cep­tance of fiction. As Zboray points out, some self-­culture advocates regarded fiction-­reading as a frivolous distraction from more edifying study, especially for working-­ class readers (Fictive ­People, 124–25). 74. Harris, Artist in American Society, 131. 75. Christian Keepsake and Literary Annual (Philadelphia, 1839), 74. 76. Harris, Artist in American Society, 124–36. 77. Christian Examiner 42 (January 1847): 116. 78. Christian Examiner 68 (January 1860): 124. 79. Southern Literary Messenger 1 (May 1835): 479. 80. North American Review 89 (October 1859): 298; North American Review 83 (October 1856): 342. 81. Harper’s 7 (June 1853): 77.

Notes to Ch a pter Four [ 301 ] 82. Knickerbocker (May 1855); New York Tribune (March 30, 1855); Demo­cratic Review (October 1846); New York Review (April 1839); North American Review (January 1838). Quoted in Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers, 155. On the role of meta­phors of drawing and painting in reviews of this period, see Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers, 155–60. 83. Putnam’s 4 (October 1854): 391. 84. ­Family Favorite and Temperance Journal (February 1850). Quoted in Sánchez, Reforming, 2. 85. See Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers, 173–95. 86. Graham’s American Monthly Magazine 32 (May 1848): 298. 87. Christian Examiner 42 (January 1847): 117. 88. Graham’s 32 (May 1848): 299. 89. Christian Examiner 60 (January 1856): 104. 90. Barbara Sicherman, “Ideologies and Practices of Reading,” in The Industrial Book, 286. 91. Christian Examiner 60 (January 1856): 106. 92. See Fenimore Cooper: The Critical Heritage, ed. George Dekker and John McWilliams (Boston: Routledge, 1973), 89–120. Cooper’s version of Indian history was attacked along with his main source-­text, John Heckewelder’s An Account of the History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations (1819), in The North American Review, first by Lewis Cass and then by W. H. Gardiner. On this affair and Cooper’s use of Heckewelder’s History, see Clarke, History, Ideology, and Myth, 79–95; and Maddox, Removals, 44–45. 93. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Lit­er­a­ture, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 55. 94. Knickerbocker 52 (December 1858): 630. 95. Bird, The Hawks of Hawk Hollow (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea, & Blanchard, 1835), 34. Subsequently cited parenthetically. 96. T ­ here is a voluminous critical lit­er­a­ture on the theories of history found in antebellum historical fiction and in the works of Hawthorne and Cooper in par­tic­u­lar. My point is not that ­these fictions disavowed any interest in the past, but rather that they understood their commentaries on the past as mediated by an understanding of fiction as distinct from history and they appealed to standards of judgment distinct from ­those of factual historiography. 97. As with questions of history, ­there is a robust critical lit­er­a­ture on the po­liti­cal proj­ ects of antebellum historical fiction in general and on Hawthorne and Cooper in par­tic­u­lar. Impor­tant readings of The Scarlet Letter and The Deerslayer have emphasized their po­liti­ cal agendas, from Sacvan Bercovtich’s account of The Scarlet Letter’s commitment to liberalism (The Office of the Scarlet Letter [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991]) to Lauren Berlant’s account of its complex relationship to nationalism (The Anatomy of a National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991]) to Fisher’s reading of The Deerslayer’s Leatherstocking as a means of making ethically tolerable the vio­lence of colonial settlement. But t­ hese fictions are po­liti­cal in a dif­fer­ent way than ­earlier republican fictions: where 1790s writers positioned their fictions as part of the wider po­liti­cal public sphere, t­ hese ­later historical fictions pre­sent their po­liti­cal proj­ects as mediated by a conception fiction-­reading as an exercise of aesthetic appreciation and personal self-­cultivation. On how claims to fictional autonomy endowed fiction with a new authority to comment on politics—­and Hawthorne’s fictions as exemplary of such proj­ects—­see Hyde, Civic Longing, and Arac, Literary Narrative. 98. This is not to suggest that t­ here are no moments of enchantment in 1820s historical fiction; Hope Leslie and especially Hobomok, for example, include many. But ­these fictions still rhetorically associate their proj­ects with disenchantment: the moments of

[ 302 ] Notes to Ch a pter Fi v e enchantment that they do include are often framed as objects of historical knowledge and evidence of a superstitious worldview that the narrative both traffics in and claims to demystify. 99. Lippard, Blanche of the Brandywine (Philadelphia: Peterson and ­Brothers, 1876), 48; Stowe, Agnes of Sorrento (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Co., 1899), ix. Stowe’s rhe­ toric of enchantment also encapsulates the ambivalent attitude of many Protestant writers ­toward Catholicism. Jenny Franchot describes a pro­cess of attraction and aversion whereby Catholicism becomes associated with many aesthetic pleasures, including fiction, that American writers saw Protestantism as repressing (Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994], 201). 100. New York Tribune (November 13, 1850). Quoted in Baym, 149. 101. Stowe, Agnes, ix. 102. Saler, As If, 12–13. Saler’s account of “modern enchantment” has been critiqued for its valorization of a “rational” and “detached” enchantment that reproduces aspects of the secularization narrative that recent studies of enchantment have powerfully questioned (Sizemore, American Enchantment, 9–10; Ogden, Credulity, 10–11). But in spite of its limitations as an account of enchantment in modernity writ-­large, Saler’s description of “modern enchantment” offers a compelling way of understanding the rhe­toric of enchantment in ­these antebellum historical fictions: it captures the promise of a disenchanted enchantment through which ­these historical fictionists sought to legitimate their proj­ects. 103. Modern, Secularism, xvi. 104. My discussion ­here is indebted to Machor’s account of the ambivalent attitude of reviewers ­toward the power of fictionists (Reading Fiction, 36–37). North American Review 43 (July 1836): 136; Ladies’ Repository 8 (September 1848): 265; Ladies’ Repository 4 (September 1844): 288. 105. Knickerbocker 12 (October 1838): 367. 106. Stowe, Agnes, ix. 107. Martin, Instructed Vision, 129–30, viii.

Chapter Five: Hoaxing in an Age of Novels 1. Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted ­Women: A Study of Middle-­Class Culture in Amer­i­ca, 1830–70 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 1–32. 2. See Neil Harris’s Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum (Boston: ­Little, Brown & Co, 1973), and James Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). Both Harris and Cook resist the notion that antebellum audiences ­were merely credulous, attributing the popularity of such exhibitions to the opportunities that they offered to practice detection and skeptical reasoning. 3. I am using a dif­fer­ent definition of literary hoax than G. R. Thompson, who distinguishes hoaxes from literary hoaxes (identifying Poe’s tales with the latter) on ­these terms: “a literary hoax attempts to persuade the reader not merely of the real­ity of false events but of the real­ity of false literary intentions or circumstances” (­Great Short Works of Edgar Allan Poe [New York: Harper Perennial, 2004], 8). Many of the most influential accounts of Poe’s hoaxing have focused on this kind of literary, generic, and tonal instability—­the question of the “reversibility of seriousness and chicanery” in literary conceits (Jonathan Elmer, Reading at the Social Limit: Affect, Mass Culture, and Edgar Allan Poe [Palo Alto. CA: Stanford University Press, 1995], 222)—­rather than questions of fictionality and belief; see especially Elmer, Social Limit, and Kenneth Dauber, The Idea of Authorship in Amer­ i­ca: Demo­cratic Poetics from Franklin to Melville (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1990). One significant exception is Ogden’s recent account of Poe’s hoaxing as a strategy for suspending “disbelief ’s prestige.”

Notes to Ch a pter Fi v e [ 303 ] 4. The tendency to classify Pym as Poe’s lone novel is pervasive. It was ­shaped by twentieth-­century critics who sought to associate Pym with fiction rather than fraud to establish Pym as a serious work of art. See, for example, Burton Pollin’s “Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and the Con­temporary Reviewers,” Studies in American Fiction 2 (1974): 37–38, 54. While scholars routinely acknowledge Pym’s hoaxical ele­ments and sometimes group Pym with Poe’s hoaxes, this has rarely factored in substantial ways into readings of Pym. In general, critics who have taken up hoaxing in Pym have focused on its thematic engagement with hoaxing rather than the idea that the book is itself a hoax. ­There are a few notable exceptions, such as Paul Rosenzweig’s “ ‘Dust within the Rock’: The Phantasm of Meaning in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” Studies in the Novel 14, no. 2 (1982): 137–51. Rosenzweig’s argument, however, ultimately focuses not on questions of belief, but on questions of meaning: he sees the final note as a satire on the urge to find meaning in a text that endlessly proffers the promise of a meaning that it never divulges. See also Terrence Whalen’s Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The Po­liti­cal Economy of Lit­ er­a­ture in Antebellum Amer­i­ca (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1999), which reads Pym as, in part, “a hoax of the useful information” that exploration narratives trafficked in (188). More recently, John C. Havard has argued that Pym’s hoaxing is part of its interrogation of racist thinking: “Poe shows how blackness and whiteness as construed by racism are constructs and proceeds to subject them and the readership that assumes them to biting hoaxical satire” (“Trust to the Shrewdness and Common Sense of the Public: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym as a Hoaxical Satire of Racist Epistemologies,” in Deciphering Poe: Subtexts, Contexts, and Subversive Meanings, ed. Alexandra Urakova [Plymouth, UK: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013], 108). 5. In t­ hese first editions, Kopley finds both readers who approached Pym as a factual tale (and found it wanting) and some who approached it as a fiction. Many of ­these annotators judged Pym within the truth-­lie binary, evaluating it in terms of its referential truth claims rather than its artfulness; “Readers Write: Nineteenth-­Century Annotations in Copies of the First American Edition of Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” Nineteenth-­Century Lit­er­a­ture 55, no. 3 (2000): 399–408. 6. Robinson, “Reading Poe’s Novel: A Speculative Review of Pym Criticism, 1950-1980,” Poe Studies 15, no. 2 (1982): 47. 7. On this shift in Pym scholarship, see John Carlos Rowe, “Poe, Slavery, and Modern Criticism,” in Poe’s Pym Critical Explorations, ed. Richard Kopley (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 117–38; and Whalen, Masses, 147–92. Influential deconstructionist accounts include Jean Ricardou, “The Singular Character of ­Water,” trans. Frank Towne; Poe Studies 9, no. 1 (1976): 1–6; and Rowe, Through the Custom House: Nineteenth-­Century American Fiction and Modern Theory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). For a psychoanalytically inflected reading, see John Irwin’s American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Re­nais­sance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 43–238. Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1992) remains the most influential account of race in Pym. Other impor­tant studies that take up Pym’s racial politics include, among many o ­ thers: Dana D. Nelson, The Word in Black and White: Reading “Race” in American Lit­er­a­ture, 1638-1867 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 91–108; Rowe, Literary Culture and US Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II (New York: Oxford University, 2000); Teresa Goddu, Gothic Amer­i­ca: Narrative, History, and Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 73–93; Whalen, Masses, 147–92; Gardner, Master Plots, 124–59; and Weinstein, Time, Tense, and American Lit­er­a­ture: When Is Now? (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 39–63. 8. See, for instance, Pollin’s “Pym and Con­temporary Reviewers.” Pollin offers a comprehensive overview of reviews of Pym in order to argue, contra previous critical opinion,

[ 304 ] Notes to Ch a pter Fi v e that few reviewers regarded Pym as an au­then­tic sea narrative. (His survey reproduces most reviews of Pym in their entirety.) While ­these reviewers generally deny Pym’s factuality, most of them also do not approach it as self-­evidently fictional, dedicating a ­great deal of space to evaluating its truthfulness and believability. Subsequent studies have often used Pollin’s conclusion that Pym failed to convince reviewers of its factuality as grounds for treating it as self-­evidently fictional, obscuring the centrality of questions of belief and veracity to the very reviews that Pollin examines. 9. Metropolitan Magazine; quoted in Pollin, “Reviewers,” 48. 10. Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, in Poe: Poetry, Tales, & Selected Essays (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1996), 1180. Subsequently cited parenthetically. For a foundational reading of the preface as an ironic commentary on the presumed ignorance of the public and a “clever satire of the popu­lar novel of adventure,” see J. Gerald Kennedy, “The Preface as a Key to the Satire in Pym,” Studies in the Novel 5, no. 2 (1793): 191–96. On the preface’s metafictional play with questions of writing, see Irwin, Hieroglyphics, 117–24. 11. Quoted in Kopley, “Readers Write,” 400. Kopley suggests “Damned Liar” as the most likely meaning of this “DL,” but it could also be the reader’s initials. 12. Kopley, “Readers Write,” 401. 13. Quoted in Pollin, “Reviewers,” 43. 14. Gentleman’s Magazine. Quoted in Pollin, “Reviewers,” 40. 15. Quoted in Pollin, “Reviewers,” 42. 16. Quoted in ibid., 41. 17. Quoted in ibid., 48. 18. Quoted in ibid., 39. 19. Halttunen, Confidence Men, 1–55. 20. ­Reese, Humbugs of New-­York (New York: John S. Taylor, 1838), v–­xii. 21. Barnum, The Humbugs of the World (London: Hotten, 1866), 6–10. 22. Cook, Deception, 22–23. 23. On ­these exhibitions, see Cook, Deception, 1–118; and Harris, Humbug, 81–89. 24. As Cook puts it, “most con­temporary consumers of artful deception entered the exhibition hall looking for fraud” (Deception, 17). Or as Harris puts it, “It was a form of intellectual exercise, stimulating even when literal truth could not be determined” (Humbug, 75). 25. ­Reese, Humbugs, 21. 26. Poe, “Maelzel’s Chess-­Player,” Southern Literary Messenger 2 (April 1836): 318–26. 27. Metropolitan Magazine; quoted in Pollin, “Reviewers,” 48. 28. Pollin, “Reviewers,” 46. 29. ­Here, I am following Rosenzweig’s insight that Pym encourages readers to see through what he calls “the initial hoax”: “The assumption . . . ​that Poe was primarily interested in fooling the public into believing the actuality of Pym’s existence and adventure, ignores the possibility of a deeper level of hoaxing in which the reader’s detection of this initial hoax is not only anticipated but encouraged as part of a self-­referential satire” (“Dust,” 145). While I share Rosenzweig’s sense that Poe invites readers to see through Pym’s truth claims, I ­will contend that Poe deploys this self-­exposing hoax to train readers in skeptical reading rather than as part of a self-­referential satire. 30. Harris, Humbug, 68–79. 31. On the reception of “M.S. Found in a ­Bottle” and “Hans Pfaall,” see Machor, Reading Fiction, 102–3. 32. Quoted in ibid., 96–97. Cohen compellingly reads “Hans Pfaall” as a satirical treatment of antebellum literary culture, with the balloons figuring the artificial inflation of the literary puffing system (Fabrication, 56–64).

Notes to Ch a pter Fi v e [ 305 ] 33. ­Reese, Humbugs, 22. 34. Poe, “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall,” Poetry, Tales, & Selected Essays, 997. 35. On the publication history of Pym and the likelihood it was originally to be published ­under the name of A. G. Pym, see J. V. Ridgely and Iola Haverstick, “Chartless Voyage: The Many Narratives of A. Gordon Pym,” Texas Studies in Lit­er­a­ture and Language 7 (1966): 63–80. 36. Rosenzweig, “Dust,” 145. 37. Kopley, “Readers Write,” 400. 38. Ibid., 402–3. 39. Burton Gentleman’s Magazine; cited in Pollin, “Reviewers,” 39. 40. Poe, “Hans Pfaall,” 997. 41. Kopley gives ­little attention to how ­these annotations might bear on our understanding of Pym, instead emphasizing the “dissonant community” created by Poe’s fiction (Readers Write, 408). 42. The Albion; quoted in Pollin, “Reviewers,” 45. The Spectator; quoted in ibid., 53. 43. “Hans Pfaall,” 996. On the public’s strug­gle to account for Pym’s tone given his ­earlier satirical hoaxes, see Machor, Reading Fiction, 113–14. 44. Southern Literary Messenger (January 1836): 125–27. 45. For an overview of Poe’s sources for this “factual ballast,” see David Ketterer, The Rationale of Deception in Poe (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 132–33. 46. Cook, Deception, 17. 47. Ibid., 14. See also Harris, Humbug, 77. 48. Cook, Deception, 6–8. 49. Quoted in Pollin, “Reviewers,” 51. 50. Southern Literary Messenger 2 (September 1836): 662–63. 51. Ibid., 663. 52. See Paige, Before Fiction. 53. The Spectator; quoted in Pollin, “Reviewers,” 53. 54. The mystical and the scientific ­were not necessarily opposed in nineteenth-­century exploration narratives. As Aaron Sachs has shown, ­these narratives ­were infused with what modern readers see as an eco-­mysticism of an interconnected natu­ral world and Sachs traces how Poe absorbed such ideas from J. N. Reynolds (The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-­Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism [New York: Penguin, 2007]). Pym, however, pushes this mysticism past the point of plausibility, something Poe underscores in its paratexts. 55. The Atlas. Quoted in Pollin, “Reviewers,” 51. 56. New York Review. Quoted in ibid., 44. 57. The Atlas. Quoted in ibid., 50. 58. See, for example, Rosenzweig, “Dust,” and Ketterer, Deception. 59. In emphasizing Pym’s didactic hoaxing, I do not want to revert to the idea that Poe had a strictly oppositional relationship to his audience—an idea that recent scholarship has challenged. Pym’s exposure of readerly credulity, I would argue, is not principally an exercise in readerly humiliation, but, like many of the antebellum “arts of deception,” a potentially pleas­ur­able opportunity for readers to hone their powers of skeptical reading. On the pleasures that accompanies this revelation of deception in Barnum and Poe, see Elmer, Social Limit, 174–223. 60. Ogden has claimed that Poe “theorized literary reading as . . . ​a suspension of the demand to disbelieve,” valorizing readerly credulity rather than demystifying it (Credulity, 129). I find this a convincing description of Poe’s fiction, but I do not think that it accurately

[ 306 ] Notes to Ch a pter Fi v e captures, as Ogden claims, the ambitions of his hoaxes, especially ­those of the 1830s. Poe’s preoccupation with demystifying the hoaxes of ­others—­exemplified by his note to “Hans Pfaall”—­underscores that Poe did not always elevate believing over disbelieving. The juxtaposition of the note to “Hans Pfaall” and the review of Sheppard Lee crystallizes Poe’s investment in both disbelief and the “suspension of the demand to disbelieve” in dif­fer­ent generic contexts. Ogden’s apt description of Poe’s fiction as enacting “a suspension of the demand to disbelieve,” I would suggest, captures why Poe eschewed fiction in Pym: it is exactly readers commitment to this “demand to disbelieve” that he tests with his narrative. 61. Looby, “Introduction,” Sheppard Lee (New York: NYRB Books, 2008), xxi. Sheppard Lee is subsequently cited parenthetically. 62. See especially Looby, “Introduction,” and Justine Murison, “Hypochondria and Racial Interiority in Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee,” Arizona Quarterly 64, no. 1 (2008): 1–25. 63. Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1978), 7; Distinction of Fiction, 16. 64. Murison, “Racial Interiority,” 18–19. Samuel Otter argues that the book’s “materialist account of character stemmed from [Bird’s] medical training” (Philadelphia Stories: Amer­i­ca’s Lit­er­a­ture of Race and Freedom [New York: Oxford University Press, 2010], 95). Matthew Rebhorn contends that Sheppard Lee’s understanding of character constitutes a disagreement with “theories, ideas, and practices” of a medical mainstream that did not “take full account of the materiality of the body” (272); “Ontological Drift: Medical Discourse and Racial Embodiment in Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee,” ESQ 61, no. 2 (2015): 262–96. Sari Altschuler argues that Bird turned to fiction’s “imaginative experiments” ­because he was dissatisfied with medical epistemologies; “From Empathy to Epistemology: Robert Montgomery Bird and the ­Future of Medical Humanities,” American Literary History 27, no. 4 (2015): 1–26. 65. As Gallagher puts it, “The body of the other person, although it conveys the original sense data and serves as the basis for all modes of relationship that supposedly allow for sympathetic identification, is also paradoxically ­imagined to be a barrier. It communicates but it also marks out the sentiments as belonging to somebody ­else and hence being simply objective facts. Our conception of the sentiments as appropriate to that rather than this body must be overcome in the pro­cess of sympathy. This proprietary barrier of the other’s body is what fiction freely dispenses with; by representing feelings that belong to no other body, fiction actually facilitates a pro­cess of sympathy. It bypasses the stage at which the sentiments perceived in other bodies are mere m ­ atters of fact and gives us the illusion of immediately appropriable sentiments, f­ ree sentiments belonging to nobody and therefore identifiable with ourselves” (Nobody’s Story, 171). 66. Murison, “Racial Interiority,” 18–22. 67. See Cook, Deception, 84–104. 68. National Atlas and Sunday Morning Mail 1 (August 28, 1836): 73. 69. The way in which Sheppard Lee foregrounds ­these epistemological questions makes for a striking contrast with Bird’s historical fiction, such as Hawks, which brackets t­ hese very epistemological questions. Their proj­ects, however, are continuous insofar as both texts are concerned with highlighting fiction’s specificity. From this starting point, Hawks argues that questions about knowledge have no place in this aesthetically oriented discourse. From this same starting point, Sheppard Lee insists that fiction is capable of producing its own unique, inherently speculative knowledge about the world. 70. Looby, “Introduction,” xlii–­xliii. 71. North American Review 25 (July 1827): 183.

Notes to Ch a pter Six [ 307 ]

Chapter Six: Fictionality and Social Criticism 1. I have used the term “social criticism” to refer to the trenchant commentary advanced by writers such as Lippard and Stowe, ­because it better captures the controversial, even adversarial, nature of their proj­ects better than reform or advocacy. While ­there is overlap between ­these terms, antebellum reviewers, as Machor has shown, approved of some kinds of advocacy fiction, while condemning ­others: “Subjects such as dueling, intemperance, child l­ abor, and the plight of the working poor ­were acceptable. . . . ​Controversial issues . . . ​ however, ­were viewed as an anathema ­because they threatened dissent and social disharmony” (Reading Fiction, 56). 2. The antebellum public sphere resembled neither the idealized po­liti­cal public sphere Habermas describes in eighteenth-­century E ­ ngland nor the republican print ideology described by Warner, with its emphasis on civic virtue. Yet the ideals of the republican print public sphere exerted an enduring, if sporadic, influence on antebellum debates, occasionally being invoked, as Robert Fanuzzi has shown, around a par­tic­u­lar issue such as abolition; Abolition’s Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 3. Sánchez has shown how the reform movements that sought to harness narrative for activist ends during this period often distanced their works from both fiction and literariness (Reforming, 1–88). 4. Southern Literary Messenger 18 (December 1852): 721. 5. Southern Quarterly Review 7 (January 1853): 83; DeBow’s 4 (December 1860): 796. Elizabeth Fekete Trubey also notes how critics claimed that ­Uncle Tom’s romantic images would fire ­women’s imaginations, leading to seduction; “Success Is Sympathy: ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the W ­ oman Reader,” in Reading W ­ omen: Literary Figures and Cultural Icons from the Victorian Age to the Pre­sent, ed. Janet Badia and Jennifer Phegley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 53–77. 6. Southern Literary Messenger 18 (1852): 721–22. 7. Stowe, A Key to U ­ ncle Tom’s Cabin (Boston: Jewett & Com­pany, 1853), 5. Subsequently cited parenthetically. 8. Recent scholarship has shown the inadequacy of relying on a clear conceptual divide between privacy and publicity for understanding antebellum fiction. For an impor­tant revision of how e­ arlier critics discussed privacy in sentimental fiction, conflating its vari­ ous meanings, see Milette Shamir, Inexpressible Privacy: The Interior Life of Antebellum Lit­er­a­ture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). On the complex, blurry divide between privacy and publicity in the antebellum public sphere, see Dillon, Gender of Freedom, and Glenn Hendler, Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-­ Century American Lit­er­a­ture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). This chapter is less interested in assigning fiction to the realms of e­ ither privacy or publicity than in exploring how fiction’s association with privacy positioned it within the public sphere and mediated its address to readers. See also Brodhead, who has shown how this era’s privatization of domestic life actually produced a new desire for public, mass entertainment, including fiction: “The mass-­market novels of the 1850s address middle-­class domesticity ­because it was above all the institution of this social formation that created for lit­er­a­ture its new mid-­nineteenth-­century place . . . ​the canons of domestic instructions that defined the home as a private, leisured nonmaterialistic, feminine space in the antebellum de­cades also and with almost comparable insistence defined reading as a preferred domestic activity. . . . ​[This had the] effect of enlarging the demand for reading for the home—­and so too of creating public roles for literary producers and public attention for literary works” (Cultures of Letters, 54). 9. In the three de­cades following the Douglas-­Tompkins debates, analyzing the politics of sentimental fiction has been one of the central concerns of Americanist literary

[ 308 ] Notes to Ch a pter Six scholarship. Impor­tant accounts include, among many ­others, Samuels’s edited volume, The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-­Century Amer­i­ca (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Barnes, States of Sympathy; Karen Sánchez-­Eppler, Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Romero, Home Fronts; Sadiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-­Making in Nineteenth-­Century Amer­i­ca (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Burnham, Captivity and Sentiment; Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism: Imagining the Self in Nineteenth-­Century Amer­i­ca (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Dillon, Gender of Freedom; Lori Merish, Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-­Century American Lit­er­a­ture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Tawil, Racial Sentiment; and Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). Much of this recent scholarship has rejected the apparent apoliticism of sentimentalism, connecting it to, as Berlant puts it, “racist, imperial, exploitative alibis for control promoted by the United States and other liberal demo­cratic nations” (282 n. 7). For an account that resists the prevailing tendency to critique the politics of a “monolithic” sentimentalism, see Weinstein, ­Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-­Century American Lit­er­a­ture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 10. Our divergent accounts of the sentimental novel’s relation to politics are rooted in two very dif­fer­ent conceptions of what counts as “politics.” One line of criticism understands t­ hese novels’ politics in terms of discourse politics, performing po­liti­cal readings of lit­er­a­ture to recover a text’s ideological implications. The other line employs a more restrictive sense of politics, treating a text as po­liti­cal only if it is oriented t­ oward deliberative democracy and other arenas explic­itly understood as po­liti­cal in a text’s historical moment. (On this opposition, see Bloch, “Inside and Outside the Public Sphere.”) If approached through discourse politics, Stowe’s novel clearly has a po­liti­cal force to be recovered; if approached in terms of formal politics, deliberative democracy, and the po­liti­cal public sphere, the text’s orientation to private sensibility and right feeling seem to render its appeal ­either faux-­political or simply outside politics. 11. Tompkins, Sensational Designs, 139–41; Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998; originally published 1977), 254. On how the Tompkins-­Douglas debates s­ haped l­ater scholarship on sentimentalism, see Laura Wexler, “Tender Vio­lence: Literary Eavesdropping, Domestic Fiction, and Educational Reform,” in Culture of Sentiment, 9–38; Armstrong, “Why ­Daughters Die: The Racial Logic of American Sentimentalism,” Yale Journal of Criticism 7, no. 2 (1994): 1–24; and Weinstein, ­Family, Kinship, and Sympathy, 1–5. 12. In recent years, scholars have given par­tic­u­lar attention to sentimentalism’s central role in justifying empire and imperialism; see especially Wexler, “Tender Vio­lence”; Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” in No More Separate Spheres!, 183–208; and Burnham, Captivity and Sentiment. While subsequent scholarship has recast the controversies of the Tompkins-­Douglas debates in new theoretical terms, the question of how to describe the (a)po­liti­cal force of sentimental fiction has continued to structure proj­ects as varied as ­those of Brown, Romero, Dillon, Merish, and especially Berlant. 13. Berlant, The Female Complaint, 267. 14. For recent exceptions that do attend to the modal specificity of ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin, see Barbara Hochman, ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Reading Revolution: Race, Literacy, Childhood, and Fiction, 1851–1911 (Amherst: University of Mas­sa­chu­setts Press, 2011); Shamir’s discussion of the domestic novel’s strategy of exposure (Inexpressible Privacy, 113–34); and Sánchez’s discussion of the Key (Reforming, 19–21). 15. Hochman, “­Uncle Tom’s Cabin in The National Era,” Book History 7 (2004): 146–48.

Notes to Ch a pter Six [ 309 ] 16. Ladies’ Repository 20 (February 1860): 125. 17. DeBow’s Review 4 (December 1860): 795. See also Machor, Reading Fiction, 28–30. 18. Godey’s 40 (April 1850): 290. 19. Literary World 7 (November 30, 1850): 429. 20. Literary World 13 (October 29, 1853): 212. For an overview of reform fiction, see Sánchez, Reforming, 1–27. 21. North American Review 82 (April 1856): 373. 22. Putnam’s 4 (October 1854): 397. 23. Graham’s 44 (April 1854): 452. 24. Putnam’s 3 (May 1854): 560. 25. Knickerbocker 6 (August 1835): 153. 26. North American Review 58 (April 1844): 488; and North American Review 65 (July 1847): 216–17. 27. Coleman, Preaching, 44–60, and Brady, “Reading Public.” 28. Harris, “Pernicious Fiction” (New York, 1853). Quoted in Brady, “Reading Public,” 723. 29. Andrews, Religious Novels: An Argument against Their Use (1856). Quoted in Brady, “Reading Public,” 730. 30. Daniel Dana, The Importance of a Purified Lit­er­a­ture (1834). Quoted in Brady, “Reading Public,” 730. 31. On temperance as the first mass public social movement, see Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 269–75; on the relation of sentiment to publicity in temperance fiction, see Hendler, Public Sentiments, 29–53. 32. Hendler, Public Sentiments, 49. See also Sánchez, Reforming, 1–3. 33. Franklin Evans, ed. C. Castiglia and G. Hendler (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 3. 34. Six Nights with the Washingtonians (Philadelpha: Godey and M’Michael, 1843); and Ten Nights in a Bar-­Room (Chicago: David C. Cook, 1898). 35. Knickerbocker 52 (December 1858): 630. 36. Godey’s 46 (June 1853): 559. 37. On temperance’s opposition to politics as traditionally conceived and its emphasis on individual moral reform, see Hendler, Public Sentiments, 49–50. 38. Victor, The Senator’s Son (Cleveland: Tooker and Gatchel, 1853), v–­vii. 39. Sons of Temperance Offering for 1850. Quoted in Sánchez, Reforming, 183. 40. Sartain’s Union Magazine 7 (August 1850): 126. 41. Southern Quarterly Review 23 (January1853): 266. 42. For foundational readings of Lippard, see Reynolds, George Lippard (Boston: Twayne, 1982), and Beneath the American Re­nais­sance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Knopf, 1988); and Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-­Class Culture in Amer­ic­ a (New York: Verso, 1987). See also Dana D. Nelson, National Manhood: Cap­i­tal­ist Citizenship and the ­Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popu­lar Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Otter, Philadelphia Stories; and Stephen Thomas Knight, The Mysteries of the Cities (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012). On sensational lit­er­a­ture and the public sphere, see David Anthony, Paper Money Men: Commerce, Manhood, and the Sensational Public Sphere in Antebellum Amer­i­ca (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009). 43. Saturday Courier (August 29, 1846). Quoted in Reynolds, Lippard, 30. While the central plot of The Quaker City was based on a well-­known incident, the controversies surrounding the narrative’s reference to specific individuals extended far beyond this

[ 310 ] Notes to Ch a pter Six incident; see Winship, “In Search of Monk Hall: A Publishing History of George Lippard’s The Quaker City,” Nineteenth-­Century Lit­er­a­ture 70, no. 1 (2015): 132–49. 44. I have examined a copy of The Key to the Quaker City (Philadelphia, 1845) that was bound with an 1845 edition of The Quaker City held by the American Antiquarian Society. Although the Key’s genre would seem to promise revelations of specific identities, Lippard attaches a proper name to only one character (“Bess, is no fictitious character. . . . ​Her real name was Emily Walraven” [4]). In most other cases, it e­ ither affirms the truth of a character but conceals the character’s identify (“Gabriel Von Gelt.—­A fictitious name for a notorious personage, a pretended Jew, who occupied a large share of the public attention, some years since” [5]) or, more commonly, it asserts a more general basis of his character (“This gentleman has no less than a dozen originals, in the Quaker City” [5]). While the Key promises scandalous revelation, it actually resists the scandalous meanings that it had already been assigned by Philadelphians: “The Byrnewood and Lorrimer Tragedy.—­This has no relation, what­ever, to the melancholy affair, which filled our city with horror, two years ago” (4). In general, the Key functions less as a key for a traditional chronique scandaleuse and more as an interpretive guide for how dif­fer­ent characters embody vari­ous social evils: “Job Joneson, Esq., The Bank President.—­A personification of the evils of the Banking system, yet still, a fact” (4). The Key thus manages the difficult balancing act of authenticating the accuracy of The Quaker City’s repre­sen­ta­tion of Philadelphia while also insisting on its fictionality. Looby has offered one of the few extended readings of the Key. He links The Quaker City’s “form of part publication” to Lippard’s “anti-­secrecy animus,” showing how the Key to the Quaker City “paradoxically preserved in perpetuity the secrecy it ostensibly collapsed” (12); “Lippard in Part(s): Seriality and Secrecy in The Quaker City,” Nineteenth-­Century Lit­er­a­ture 70, no. 1 (2015): 1–35. 45. Lippard, The Quaker City (Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson & ­Brothers, 1845), 140. Subsequently cited parenthetically. 46. In offering such pointed social criticism, The Quaker City departed from most sensation fiction, which, as Streeby has shown, dealt with apo­liti­cal material in order to “reach a mass audience comprised of multiple classes by focusing on stories and minimizing controversial po­liti­cal commentary” (American Sensations, 41). On sensational lit­er­a­ture and leisure reading, see David Stewart, Reading and Disorder in Antebellum Amer­ic­ a (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011), 50. 47. As Heyward Ehrlich puts it, “To Lippard, realism was more a ­matter of depicting a serious but unpleasant subject than a question of mimesis, verisimilitude, or style,” “The ‘Mysteries’ of Philadelphia: Lippard’s Quaker City and ‘Urban’ Gothic,” ESQ 18, no. 1 (1972): 56. 48. Key to the Quaker City, 5. 49. On Lippard’s suspicion of the cliquish literary establishment, see Looby, “Parts,” 27. 50. ­Later, Lippard would explic­itly call for a lit­er­a­ture oriented ­toward criticism and reform: “a lit­er­a­ture which does not work practically for the advancement of social reform, or which is too dignified or too good to picture the wrongs of the ­great mass of humanity, is just good for nothing at all” (quoted in Timothy Helwig, “Denying the Wages of Whiteness: The Racial Politics of George Lippard’s Working-­Class Protest,” American Studies 47, nos. 3–4 [2006]: 92). 51. Holden’s Dollar Magazine (1848): 423. Quoted in Reynolds, Lippard, 108. 52. Lippard likely exaggerated this number; see Winship, “In Search of Monk-­Hall,” 145. 53. Gary Ashwill offers a representative version of this claim: “The tension between the novels as commodities and their aspirations t­ oward reform reproduces, in an intensified manner, the tension between cap­i­tal­ist realities and republican ideals” (“The Mysteries of Capitalism in George Lippard’s City Novels,” ESQ 40, no. 4 [1994], 308).

Notes to Ch a pter Six [ 311 ] 54. This is not to suggest that Lippard abandoned traditional organs of the po­liti­cal public sphere. In fact, The Quaker City’s success allowed him to begin publishing a periodical titled The Quaker City that addressed a working-­class counterpublic. Yet Lippard’s l­ ater commitment to t­ hese po­liti­cal periodicals has obscured how he establishes his authority as a critic of the traditional institutions of the public sphere by harnessing fiction’s perceived separation from them. The Quaker City (the fiction) was not published in a periodical, but was initially issued serially in pamphlet form before appearing as a complete book. On its serial publication, see Looby, “Parts.” 55. Lippard’s Key reaffirms the strict fictionality of both Poodle and Petriken (Key, 4). 56. Quoted in Ehrlich, “Quaker City,” 51. 57. A Key has mostly been treated as a footnote in discussions of ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The notable exception is Weinstein’s ­Family, Kinship, and Sympathy, which argues that the Key is an essential document for understanding Stowe’s evolving thinking on sympathy. 58. McGill and Andrew Parker have traced how Stowe seeks to “manage her novel’s relation to the news,” in both the National Era and in A Key. “The F ­ uture of the Literary Past,” PMLA 125, no. 4 (2010): 963. 59. Hochman, “The National Era,” 146–48. On both how Stowe’s engagement with the enduring anx­i­eties about fiction s­ haped her fiction and how ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin ­shaped antebellum discussions of fiction in turn, see Hochman, ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s and the Reading Revolution. 60. As David Grant puts it, “That Stowe chose to publish ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin in an organ of the po­liti­cal antislavery movement, not in an abolitionist or other­wise moral or religious forum, suggests that ­there are affinities between the discourse of politics and her work” (“­Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Triumph of Republican Rhe­toric,” New ­England Quarterly 71, no. 3 [1998]: 430). 61. Although Stowe was threatened with a lawsuit in the wake of ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin, this does not seem to have been a motivation for A Key. As Ronald Walters puts it, “The material in it was irrelevant for any ­legal action against her. . . . ​She could simply have referred readers to American Slavery as It Is for further documentation” (“Stowe and the American Reform Tradition,” in The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe, ed. Weinstein [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004], 178). 62. Hentz, The Planter’s Northern Bride (Philadelphia: A. Hart, 1854), 52. 63. Southern Press Review (1852); reprinted in Littell’s Living Age 34 (July 10, 1852): 62. 64. While I agree with Weinstein that “one of the most power­ful effects of ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin had been to conjoin the debate about slavery with epistemological questions about the nature of evidence, fact, and truth,” I think she elides an impor­tant aspect of the Key when she claims that it makes sympathy dependent on “hard facts” (­Family, Kinship, and Sympathy, 93). ­Because the Key is less a standalone document than an extended paratext, it does not reimagine sympathy as based on facts so much as it ratifies sentimental fiction as an appropriate vehicle for generating sympathy by citing facts. Rather than displacing fiction as a vehicle for sympathy, the facts legitimate sympathetic investment in fiction. 65. On Stowe’s suspicion of the role self-­interest play in politics, see Gregg Crane, “Dangerous Sentiments: Sympathy, Rights, and Revolution in Stowe’s Antislavery Novels,” Nineteenth-­Century Lit­er­a­ture 51, no. 2 (1996): 176–204. On the politics of Stowe’s antipo­ liti­cal stance, see especially Romero, Home Fronts, 82–86. 66. Hochman, “National Era,” 146. 67. For her second antislavery fiction Dred; A Tale of the ­Great Dismal Swamp (1856), Stowe published fiction and authenticating documents together. Synthesizing the proj­ects of ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin and A Key, Dred formalizes the relation of Stowe’s fiction to the wider public sphere: its proj­ect of social critique is figured as adjacent to this discourse, but as distinct from it.

[ 312 ] Notes to Ch a pter Sev en 68. For other accounts of how Lippard’s sensationalist fictions sometimes undermine their own radical politics, see Streeby, American Sensations, and Reynolds, Beneath the American Re­nais­sance. For an account of the limitations of Stowe’s use of popu­lar fiction for social reform, see Walters, “Reform Tradition”; Carolyn Karcher, “Stowe and the Lit­er­ a­ture of Social Change,” in Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe; and Trubey, “Success.” 69. Berlant, Female Complaint, 42.

Chapter Seven: Fictionality, Slavery, and Intersubjective Knowledge 1. Margaret Abruzzo, Polemical Pain: Slavery, Cruelty, and the Rise of Humanitarianism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). 2. Douglass, “The Heroic Slave,” Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, ed. Ira Dworkin (New York: Penguin, 2014), 152. Subsequently cited parenthetically. 3. As Hyde puts it, “The fact that the pre­sen­ta­tion of Madison’s heroism is never f­ ree from white mediation . . . ​has often been regarded as the novella’s failure to fully imagine black self-­determination” (Civic Longing, 104). Recent readings by Hyde, Ivy Wilson (“On Native Ground: Transnationalism, Frederick Douglass, and ‘The Heroic Slave,’ ” PMLA 121, no. 2 [2006]: 453–68), and Maggie Sale (“To Make the Past Useful,”: Frederick Douglass’ Politics of Solidarity,” Arizona Quarterly 51, no. 3 [1995]: 25–60) have offered alternative understandings of the po­liti­cal implications of this white mediation. 4. Scholars have long recognized the emphasis that nineteenth-­century abolitionist texts placed on the inner lives of enslaved persons. This emphasis on inner life is also evident, more generally, in much Black writing, in and beyond the antebellum period: as Christopher Freeburg notes, “So much of the study of black personhood in art and po­liti­cal expression focuses on how a black subject self-­fashions interiority to seize full citizenship or reclaim humanity” (Black Aesthetics and the Interior Life [Charlottesville: University of ­Virginia Press, 2017], 3). Recent scholarship, however, has complicated our understanding of the politics of representing inner life in this way. Hartman’s powerfully revisionary account shows how the “recognition of humanity and individuality” also “acted to tether, bind, and oppress”: “the barbarism of slavery did not express itself singularly in the constitution of the slave as object but also in the forms of subjectivity and circumscribe humanity imputed to the enslaved” (Subjection, 5–6). Tracing the republican and liberal strands in Black Atlantic antislavery writings, Christine Levecq sets up an opposition between aesthetics and interiority, with the former associated with republicanism, exteriors, and heterogeneous communities and the latter with liberalism, individualism, and the suppression of difference (Slavery and Sentiment: The Politics of Feeling in Black Atlantic Antislavery Writing, 1770–1850 [Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2008]). Focusing on a ­later period, Freeburg’s own account traces how Black writers and artists often resisted the imperative to fashion a legible interiority to claim humanity or citizenship. 5. On the growing focus on the experience of enslavement in debates about slavery, see Abruzzo, Polemical Pain. On how changing scientific and medical theories s­ haped racialized conceptions of interiority, see Tawil, Racial Sentiment, and Murison, “Racial Interiority.” On the philosophical debates surrounding intersubjectivity and slavery, see Lee, Slavery, Philosophy, and American Lit­er­a­ture, 1830–1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). On the role played by the attribution of interiority to enslaved persons in the ­legal system, see Hartman, Subjection. 6. Sartain’s 6 (January–­June 1850): 171. 7. See Cohn, Distinction of Fiction, 16; Transparent Minds, 7.

Notes to Ch a pter Sev en [ 313 ] 8. On this historiographical proj­ect, see Levine, The Lives of Frederick Douglass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 146–48, and Wilson, “Native Ground.” 9. Lee, Slavery, 4. 10. Abruzzo, Polemical Pain, 159–90. 11. Ibid., 174. 12. Abruzzo, Polemical Pain, 66. 13. See Tawil, Racial Sentiment, 10–11, and Murison, “Racial Interiority.” 14. Douglass, Narrative of the Life, 27–28. 15. Levine, “­Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Frederick Douglass’ Paper: An Analy­sis of Reception,” American Lit­er­a­ture 64, no. 1 (1992): 71–93. 16. T ­ hese claims are based on an examination of all articles in Frederick Douglass’ Paper that include the terms “fiction” or “novel.” On the novelist’s mission including po­liti­ cal advocacy, see, among many examples, the reprinted review of Ida May (December 15, 1854). On the possibility of truthfulness in fiction, see, in addition to countless articles on ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Key, the review of Stanhope Burleigh (February 2, 1855). 17. Stepto, “Storytelling in Early Afro-­American Fiction: Frederick Douglass’ ‘The Heroic Slave,’ ” Georgia Review 36, no. 2 (1982): 360. 18. Levine describes Douglass as a “creatively appropriative reader of Stowe’s novel” and even goes so far as to read The Heroic Slave “as an allegory of Douglass’s relationship with Stowe” (“­Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Frederick Douglass’ Paper,” 73, 85). My reading is especially indebted to Marianne Noble’s account of how Douglass revises Stowe’s novel by advocating sympathy based in listening rather than witnessing; “Sympathetic Listening in Frederick Douglass’s ‘The Heroic Slave’ and My Bondage, My Freedom,” Studies in American Fiction 34, no. 1 (2006): 53–68. 19. In confronting Listwell with his inability to probe fully Madison’s interiority, this scene offers readers a beginning lesson in what Pratt has dubbed “stranger humanism”—­a practice in which p ­ eople “discover their differences . . . ​but they are barred from trying to appropriate or penetrate ­those differences” (The Strangers Book: The H ­ uman of African American Lit­er­a­ture [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016], 1–2). 20. Levine, “­Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Frederick Douglass’ Paper,” 85. 21. Brown, Clotel, ed. M. Giulia Fabi (New York: Penguin, 2004), 88–89, 178. 22. Scholars once found The Heroic Slave’s interest to inhere chiefly in its relation to Douglass’s nonfiction. Even as recent scholars have argued for the interest of The Heroic Slave in its own right, they have emphasized its autobiographical resonances and its relationship to the surrounding autobiographies; see, for example, Levine’s Lives of Frederick Douglass (144–58) or Wilson’s claim that “Douglass fashions the novella as an addendum to his autobiographies” (“Native Ground,” 462). Such connections are persuasive, but this focus on such autobiographical connections can obscure The Heroic Slave’s distinctive fictionality. A notable exception to the tendency to ignore its fictionality is William L. Andrews’s foundational account of how Douglass prioritizes “fictive” over “natu­ral” discourse in The Heroic Slave, embracing a mode of discourse “whose authority does not depend on the authentication of what is asserted in that discourse” (“The Novelization of Voice in Early African-­American Narrative,” PMLA 105, no. 1 [1990]: 30). More recent exceptions include Jason De Stefano’s account of Douglass’s interest in the l­ egal conception of fictive personhood (“Persona Ficta: Frederick Douglass,” En­glish Literary History 85, no. 3 [2018]: 775–800), and Karin Hoepker’s account of the fiction’s engagement with the probabilistic thought associated with insurance (“Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave—­ Risk, Fiction, and Insurance in Antebellum Amer­i­ca,” Amerikastudien/American Studies 60, no. 4 [2015]: 441–62). 23. Cohen, Fabrication, 114–17.

[ 314 ] Notes to Ch a pter Sev en 24. Ibid., 111. 25. Quoted in ibid., 111. 26. Quoted in ibid., 132. 27. Quoted in ibid., 132. 28. It should also be noted that many middle-­class, northern African Americans regarded fiction-­reading as “a frivolous diversion from the civic and intellectual purposes of reading.” This position was consistently articulated by the emerging Black press, including the Freedom’s Journal and the Colored American; Jeanine DeLombard, “African American Cultures of Print,” in The Industrial Book, 366. 29. Crafts, The Bondwoman’s Narrative, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Hachette, 2002), 3. 30. In a recent article, Xiomara Santamarina draws on work on fictionality to argue for resituating The Narrative of James Williams within the history of the novel as a probabilistic narrative à la Defoe. This is a compelling use of fictionality for recovering Williams’s often-­overlooked creative authorship. Unlike Douglass, however, Williams does not avow or place any rhetorical emphasis on his narrative’s probabilistic fictionality (“Fugitive Slave, Fugitive Novelist: The Narrative of James Williams,” American Literary History 31, no. 1 [2019]: 24–46). 31. See Sale, “Politics of Solidarity,” 41. ­There are, however, disagreements about the implications of this distanced account. Richard Yarborough’s influential essay (“Race, Vio­ lence, and Manhood: The Masculine Ideal in Frederick Douglass’s ‘The Heroic Slave,’ ” in Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays, ed. Eric Sund­quist [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990], 166–88), for example, argues that this distanced approach undermines the fiction’s potentially radical force, while Sale argues that it resists ste­reo­types about violent Black men and focuses attention on the uprising’s ideological meaning. 32. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Nell Irvin Painter (New York: Penguin, 2000), 3. Subsequently cited parenthetically. 33. Recent scholarship has revealed the complicated nature of “truth” in Incidents, including its vexed relation to strict factuality; see Jacqueline Goldsby, “I Disguised My Hand: Writing Versions of the Truth in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl and John Jacobs’s ‘A True Tale of Slavery,’ ” in Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: New Critical Essays, ed. Deborah Garfield and Rafia Zafar (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 11–44; and Frances Smith Foster, “Manifest in Signs: The Politics of Sex and Repre­sen­ta­tion in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” (ibid., 57–96). 34. On the reception of Incidents, see Stephanie Smith, “Harriet Jacobs: A Case History of Authentication,” in Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative, ed. Audrey Fisch (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 189–200. For a representative attempt to recover Jacobs’s voice from the text, see Albert Tricomi, “Harriet Jacobs’s Autobiography and the Voice of Lydia Maria Child,” ESQ 53, no. 3 (2007): 216–52. 35. Many of Jacobs’s most influential critics—­Hazel Carby, Henry Louis Gates Jr., William L. Andrews, Franny Nudelman, Valerie Smith, Merish—­have taken up her engagement with sentimental fiction. Carby’s foundational account shows how Jacobs challenges antebellum sentimental culture, especially the cult of true womanhood (Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-­American W ­ oman Novelist [New York: Oxford University Press, 1987]). Nudelman, alternatively, emphasizes how Jacobs does not simply break with sentimental culture, but critiques it from within (“Harriet Jacobs and the Sentimental Politics of Female Suffering,” En­glish Literary History 59, no. 4 [1992]: 939–64). In addition to Nudelman and Carby, my reading is especially indebted to Smith’s Self-­ Discovery and Authority in Afro-­American Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).

Notes to Ch a pter Sev en [ 315 ] 36. Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-­Century Britain and France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 153. 37. Incidents’s metageneric engagement with fictionality thus urges a readerly approach consistent with what Nelson describes as its reformulation of sympathy: “the text reformulates sympathy so that it can recognize common bonds of humanity while acknowledging and respecting differences among ­people, and offers this model as a more ­viable means for real social change” (Word, 133). 38. Quoted in Bruce Mills, “Lydia Maria Child and the Endings to Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” American Lit­er­a­ture 64, no. 2 (1992): 263. See also Tricomi, “Harriet Jacobs’s Autobiography,” 220. 39. On Richardsonian fiction’s role in the emergence of this new conception of both desire and virtue, see Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction. For extended comparisons of Linda with Richardsonian fiction, see Smith, Self-­Discovery, 28–43, and Sarah Way Sherman, “Moral Experience in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” National ­Women’s Studies Association Journal 2, no. 2 (1990): 167–85. On Jacobs’s engagement with “true womanhood,” see especially Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, 40–62. For the most influential reading of the racial politics of consent in Linda, see Hartman, Subjection, 103–11. See also Andrea Stone, “Interracial Sexual Abuse and L ­ egal Subjectivity in Antebellum Law and Lit­er­a­ture,” American Lit­er­a­ture 81, no. 1 (2009): 65–92; and Merish, who argues that Jacobs’s narrative “reject[s] . . . ​the forms of sentimental subjectivity and consent mobilized in white w ­ omen’s fiction.” Merish shows how Jacobs’s parodic mimicry of heterosexual white social patterns exposes their constitutive patriarchal under­ pinnings (Sentimental Materialism, 193, 207). 40. Trumbull, Satiric Poems, ed. Edwin T. Bowden (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1962), 88. 41. Festa, Sentimental Figures, 170. 42. On how “Jacobs works to transform herself from the object of knowledge to a subject of mutual understanding,” see John Ernest, “Motherhood beyond the Gate: Jacobs’s Epistemic Challenge in Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl,” in New Critical Perspectives, 179–98. 43. See Robyn Warhol, “ ‘Reader, Can You Imagine? No, You Cannot’: The Narratee as Other in Harriet Jacobs’s Text,” Narrative 3, no. 1 (1995): 57–72. 44. Gallagher, “Rise,” 351. See also Nobody’s Story, 163–74. 45. Marvel (Donald G. Mitchell), “Second Reverie,” Reveries of a Bachelor (New York: R. F. Fenno & Co., 1906), 6. 46. Southern Quarterly Review 9 (January 1854): 19. 47. Christian Examiner 60 (January 1856): 119. 48. North American Review 72 (January 1851): 156. 49. Gallagher, “Rise,” 351. As Gallagher put it e­ arlier, “Fiction . . . ​stimulates sympathy ­because, with very few exceptions, it is easier to identify with nobody’s story and share nobody’s sentiments than it is to identify with anybody ­else’s story and share anybody’s ­else’s sentiments” (Nobody’s Story, 172). 50. Christian Examiner 60 (January 1856): 103. See also, Putnam’s 4 (October 1854): 392–93. 51. As Nelson puts it, “Sympathy ideally should bridge the gap of difference between ­sisters. Yet it neither can nor should collapse the differences it bridges” (Word, 144). 52. Christian Examiner 60 (January 1856): 119. 53. Whereas Gallagher’s Nobody’s Story explored why fictional characters serve as especially appealing sites for sympathetic identification, her “The Rise of Fictionality” ultimately sought to move beyond sympathy and identification as a means of understanding fiction’s “peculiar affective force,” contending that the attraction of fictional characters arises less

[ 316 ] Notes to Coda from identification than from a sense of “ontological contrast” between a character’s often transparent and always textually delimited knowability and our own unbounded unknowability: “What we seek in and through characters, therefore, are not surrogate selves but the contradictory sensations of not being a character” (357, 361). The ­later essay’s account of the “peculiar affective force” generated by the total knowability of fictional characters is nonetheless helpful for understanding how Jacobs uses a metageneric engagement with fiction to foreground Linda’s comparative unknowability as a real person, thus resisting the kind of appropriative sympathy associated with fictional characters. Sympathy and sympathetic identification ­were the dominant ways of understanding fiction’s “affective force” in the early United States. As Barnes puts it, “At its most effective, sentimental fiction . . . ​not only represented but reproduced sentimental attachments between readers and main characters,” with readers “imagining themselves in the place of the main characters” as “exemplified in the reader’s willingness to shed tears on the character’s behalf ” (“Novels,” 444–45). 54. Berlant, Female Complaint, 41. 55. On Jacobs’s famously vexed interactions with Stowe and her refusal to allow Stowe to use Linda as an authenticating document for the Key, see Yellin’s edition of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl written by Herself (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 317.

Coda: Romance and Real­ity in the 1850s and Beyond 1. In a sense, what we see in ­these romances, especially Hawthorne’s, is the emergence of an understanding of fiction as “constitutively literary” in Genette’s sense. This dovetails with Arac’s account of the emergence of American literary narrative in the 1850s. I have, however, eschewed “literary” as a key term in this coda, ­because—as Bell has shown—it ­will become charged in a very specific way in the realist novels considered in the coda’s second half; The Prob­lem of American Realism: Studies in the Cultural History of a Literary Idea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 2. Melville, Mardi, ed. G. Thomas Tanselle (New York: Library of Amer­i­ca, 1982), 661. Subsequently cited parenthetically. On Melville’s increasing re­sis­tance to demands that he authenticate his narratives, see also West, Arbiters, 9–11. 3. Athaenaeum (1851), 1112–13. Reprinted in Moby Dick, ed. Herschel Parker and Harrison Hayford (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002). 4. Evert Duyckinck, Literary World (1851): 403–4. Reprinted in Moby-­Dick, 610. 5. Spectator (1851): 1026–27. Reprinted in Moby-­Dick, 599. 6. Baym compellingly suggests that such reviews are truer to Melville’s ambitions than the twentieth-­century tendency to categorize the book comfortably as a fiction and even a novel (“Melville’s Quarrel with Fiction,” PMLA 94, no. 1 [1979]: 918). 7. Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers, 160–64. As Baym notes, this was an advocacy proj­ect as much as a descriptive proj­ect; many of ­these literary periodicals that emphasized this understanding of fiction, such as Harper’s and the Atlantic, would be key organs for disseminating the understanding of fiction that became ascendant in elite literary circles in the late nineteenth ­century. On the centrality of the “Atlantic Group” to “high realism,” see Nancy Glazener’s Reading for Realism: The History of a U.S. Literary Institution, 1850–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). 8. Putnam’s 4 (October 1854): 391. 9. Atlantic Monthly 1 (May 1858): 891. 10. Sartain’s 6 (March 1850): 193. 11. On the vari­ous aesthetic and moral questions bound up with the issue of consistent characterization in reviews, see Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers, 87–90, and Machor, Reading Fiction, 72–73.

Notes to Coda [ 317 ] 12. This shift can be accounted for, in part, through the emergence of a Romantic conception of the imagination as an organic and creative faculty; on the opposition of this conception to the Common Sense understanding of the imagination, see Martin, Instructed Vision, 116–20. 13. See Williams, “Fiction,” Keywords, 135. 14. Critic (1893); 232. Reprinted in Moby-­Dick, 628. 15. Stowe, The Minister’s Wooing, ed. Susan K. Harris (New York: Penguin, 1999), 19. Subsequently cited parenthetically. 16. Harris, Artist in American Society, 131–35. 17. Stowe, Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, & Co, 1854), 249. 18. Baker, “Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Conversation with the Atlantic Monthly: The Construction of the Minister’s Wooing,” Studies in American Fiction 28, no. 1 (2000): 27–38. 19. Christian Examiner 42 (January 1847): 115. 20. Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance, ed. Tony Tanner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 1. 21. Coleman, Preaching, 55. 22. On the prob­lems posed by the term of “realism” to describe the set of late nineteenth-­century texts to which it usually refers, see Bell, American Realism, and Glazener, Reading for Realism. 23. Porter, Books and Reading: or What Books Should I Read and How Should I Read Them? (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, & Co., 1877), 98–99, 74–77. See also Sicherman’s discussion of Porter, “Ideologies of Reading,” 290–91. 24. See ibid., 287–88. See also Reynolds, Faith in Fiction. 25. Gunther Brown, “Religious Periodicals and Their Textual Communities,” in The Industrial Book, 274. 26. Twain, Roughing It (Hartford, CT: American Publishing, 1872), 364. Subsequently cited parenthetically. 27. Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (New York: Bantam, 2003), 1. 28. On the emergence of the understanding of fiction as an autonomous literary art and its embeddedness in the late nineteenth-­century high culture of letters, see Brodhead, Cultures of Letters, 158–62; on the “sacralization” of culture bound up with this increasingly rarified conception of lit­er­a­ture, see Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in Amer­i­ca (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). 29. Bell, American Realism, 1–38. 30. Ibid., 34. 31. Howells, Criticism and Fiction (New York: Harper & ­Brothers, 1891), 104. 32. James, The ­Future of the Novel, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Vintage, 1956), 5–6. 33. H ­ ere, I am building on Fluck’s argument that American realists “de-­emphasized” fictionality in order to develop the novel into appropriate reading material for adults, resisting an association of fiction with youth; “Fiction and Fictionality in American Realism,” Amerikastudien/American Studies 31, no. 1 (1986): 101–12. 34. Norris, The Octopus (New York: Penguin, 1994), 23. Subsequently cited parenthetically. 35. On James as an exemplar of high-­culture literariness and the autonomization of fiction as a literary art, see Brodhead, Cultures of Letters, 158. On the dynamics of social distinction that both underpin the rise of “art novel” and are evident in such novels, see Mark McGurl, The Novel Art: Elevations of Fiction a ­ fter Henry James (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2001). 36. James, “Preface to the New York Edition,” The American, ed. James Tuttleton (New York: Norton, 1978), 8. Subsequently cited parenthetically.

[ 318 ] Notes to Coda 37. H ­ ere, I follow Bell, American Romance, 8. 38. See, among many countless pos­si­ble examples, Mas­sa­chu­setts Magazine’s reference to novels as “literary opium”; Mas­sa­chu­setts Magazine 3 (November 1791): 663. 39. Hopkins, Contending Forces (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 13–14. 40. American Review 6 (September 1850): 313. 41. Harper’s Monthly Magazine 20 (February 1860): 413.

I n de x

Adams-­Campbell, Melissa, 294n63 aesthetics: Bird on, 194; Cooper on, 160; vs epistemology, 76–77, 127, 133; fictionality and, 4–8, 134, 153; Hawthorne’s use of, 7–10, 140; Poe on, 179–80, 182; self-­cultivation through, 153–59, 164–65, 194; Stowe’s use of, 10, 194 African Americans, as authors, 213–41; as fictional characters, 213–41, 261, 312n4; as readers, 314n28 Algerine Captive, The (Tyler), 61–69, 285nnn25 and 27 Altschuler, Sari, 189, 306n64 Anderson, Benedict, 68 Andrews, William L., 313n22, 314n35 Anthony, Mischelle, 282n61 antifiction movement, 18–19, 27–44, 84–85, 87, 91–92, 113–15, 255, 269n5, 281n42, 300nn54 and 73 Arac, Jonathan, 22, 271n14, 272n24, 298n35, 316n1 Aravamudan, Srinivas, 12 Arch, Stephen Carl, 292n30 Armstrong, Nancy, 11, 273n35, 273n36 Arthur, Timothy Shay, 198, 199–200, 201 Ashwill, Gary, 310n53 Asylum, The (Mitchell), 18–19 Aunt Phyllis’s Cabin (Eastman), 219 Baker, Dorothy, 250 Bannet, Eve Tavor, 281n53, 291n24 Barker-­Benfield, G. J., 290n8 Barnes, Elizabeth, 287n43, 289n70, 316n53 Barnum, H. L., 149–50 Barnum, P. T., 175, 179, 187 Baym, Nina, 13, 122, 127, 244, 272nn28 and 30, 274n38, 275n46, 316nn6–7 Beecher, Henry Ward, 255 Bell, Michael Davitt, 256–57, 273n30, 316n1 Bercovtich, Sacvan, 301n97 Berlant, Lauren, 195, 210, 212, 214, 240, 301n97, 308nn9 and 12

Bird, Robert Montgomery, 22, 128, 169–70, 194, 231; Hawks of Hawk Hollow, The, 161–62, 164; Sheppard Lee, 170–72, 182–91, 227, 231, 306nn64–65 and 69 Blake (Delany), 225 Blithedale Romance, The (Hawthorne), 8–9, 252–53 Bloch, Ruth, 59, 284n19, 290n9, 308n10 Boarding School, The (Foster), 35, 90 Bondwoman’s Narrative, The (Crafts), 225 Brackenridge, Hugh Henry, 49–50, 51–52; authorial role of, 52–53; Modern Chivalry (Brackenridge), 51–61, 283n11, 284n17 Brady, Jennifer L., 126, 197, 276n62, 278n1(1) Brodhead, Richard, 5, 125, 271n14, 289n8, 307n8 Brown, Charles Brockden, 1–2, 49–50, 69–83, 286nn36–37, 288nn55 and 59; on Washington, 80; on politics, 7; Wieland, 71–83, 286nn36–37, 287n39, 288nn59 and 68 Brown, Gillian, 292n32 Brown, Herbert Ross, 279n14 Brown, William Hill: Ira and Isabella, 44–48; The Power of Sympathy, 13–14, 27, 37, 38–42, 278n1(2), 282n60 Brown, William Wells, 222, 225 Butler, James, 27 Cahill, Edward, 5–6, 269n5 Carby, Hazel, 314n35 Carnell, Rachel, 292n33 Castiglia, Christopher, 5–6, 294n63 Castronovo, Russ, 5–6 Catholics, Protestant attitude ­toward, 302n99 Champions of Freedom, The (Woodworth), 135, 141, 163, 167 Channing, William Ellery, 153–56, 158–59, 300n62 Charles Grandison (Richardson), 102–3, 248, 250

[ 319 ]

[ 320 ] index Charlotte ­Temple (Rowson), 42, 114–15, 282nn56 and 60 Charvat, William, 76–77, 280n32, 288n55 Chase, Richard, 273n30 Chauncy, Charles, 32 Child, Lydia Maria: Hobomok, 138; Harriet Jacobs and, 233–34; on morality, 114–15; on Scott, 155 Chris­tian­ity. See Catholics; Protestants Christophersen, Bill, 286n37 Cla­ris­sa (Richardson), 70–73, 287n45 Clements, Victoria, 295n86 Clotel (W.W. Brown), 222, 225 Cohen, Lara Langer, 23, 223–24, 276n63, 304n32 Cohn, Dorrit, 184, 271n13 Coleman, Dawn, 126, 197, 276n62, 296n9, 300n54 Collins, Andrea, 292n30 Common Sense philosophy, 33–34, 37, 156, 246, 295n83 Confidence Man, The (Melville), 1, 244, 245–46 Conforti, Joseph, 290n8 Contending Forces (Hopkins), 261 Cook, James, 178–79, 302n2, 304n24 Cooper, James Fenimore: aesthetics in, 160; The Deerslayer, 132, 150, 159, 301n97; and fictionality, 132, 135, 148, 150, 159–60; and history, 131–33, 135–38, 147, 148–50, 159–60, 297n21; The Last of the Mohicans, 132, 160, 297n21; Lawrence on, 160; The Leather-­Stocking Tales, 132, 159–60; Lionel Lincoln, 136, 138; on morality, 159; The Pi­lot, 136; The Spy, 135–36, 148–50, 299n47 Coquette, The (Foster), 39–40, 104, 282n55 Cotts, Nancy, 294n76 Crafts, Hannah, 225 David Ellington (Ware), 154 Davidson, Cathy, 11, 92; on the novel, 12–13, 37–38, 96, 273n36, 278n1(2), 282n55 Davis, John, 90 Davis, Lennard, 38 Deerslayer, The (Cooper), 132, 150, 159, 301n97 Defoe, Daniel, influence of, 178, 180, 234, 237–38, 314n30 Dekker, George, 296n3

Delany, Martin, 225 De Stefano, Jason, 313n22 didacticism, 45; vs. aesthetics, 4–5, 8; Schweighauser on, 6 Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock, 5–6, 82, 288n70, 293n63, 294n65 Dorval (Wood), 104–8, 293nn54, 56, and 57 Douglas, Ann, 194–95, 308n12 Douglass, Frederick: and fiction, 219–20; The Heroic Slave, 213–23, 225–33, 312n3, 313nn19 and 22; and Stowe, 218–19, 222, 313n18 Duyckinck, Evert, 244 Dwight, Timothy, 32, 84 Eastman, Mary, 219 Edelstein, Sari, 278n68, 291n16 Edgeworth, Maria, 118 education: Locke on, 70; through fiction. See fiction: didactic Edwards, Jonathan, 32, 280nn 25 and 27 Ehrlich, Heyward, 310n47 Elliot, Emory, 283n8 Ellis, Scott, 290n9 Emily Hamilton (Vickery), 101–2 enchantment, 163–66, 301n98, 302nn99 and 102 epistemology: vs aesthetics, 76–77 Fabian, Ann, 278n68 Faherty, Duncan, 23, 84 Fanuzzi, Robert, 307n2 Female American, The, 92–95, 114, 278n1(2), 291nn24–25 Female Quixote, The (Lennox), 31, 96 Female Quixotism (Tenney), 95–98, 292nn30, 33, and 34 Female Review, The (Mann), 94–95 Ferguson, Robert, 284n14 Ferris, Ina, 297n19 Festa, Lynn, 234, 235 fiction: aesthetics of, 4–5, 153, 156–62, 194; African Americans on, 314n28; allegory in, 82; American vs British, 270n11, 273n36; Catholicism on, 302n99; didactic, 8, 39–41, 45, 69–83, 85–124, 131–32, 154–55, 158–59; enchantment in, 163–66, 301n98, 302nn99 and 102; vs fictionality, 271n13; gender normativity and, 84–123; historical, 131–52, 159–67,

index [ 321 ] 216, 296nn3 and 8; vs hoax, 169–91; Melville on, 1; and politics, 193–95, 199–212, 272n24, 273n35, 301n97; Protestantism on, 29, 119, 300n62, 302n99; purposes of, 4–5, 7–11, 59, 97, 133–34, 139–41, 147, 153, 154, 157, 196–97, 214; real­ity and unreality of, 27–28, 31, 32–44, 63–68, 85–98, 101–24, 131–52, 159–66, 169–91, 193–94, 202–11, 243–48, 304n8, 310n47; and social criticism, 206–41, 307n1; temperance, 198–201, 252–53, 307n1; US attitudes t­ oward, 1–2, 27–44, 49, 51, 83–85, 87, 91–92, 99–103, 113–15, 122–23, 125–26, 134–35, 152–53, 156–59, 166, 196–98, 244–46, 250, 269n5, 300nn54 and 73; va­ri­e­ties of, 12, 107–8. See also antifiction; fictionality; novels Fiction and Diction (Genette), 4–5 fictionality: aesthetics and, 8; in analytic philosophy, 269n9; definitions of, 2–3, 4, 19, 127, 269n8; and enchantment, 165–66; vs fiction, 271n13; Gallagher on, 2, 11–12, 51, 65, 76, 79, 81, 232, 236, 237; 270n9, 274n42, 283n4, 294n64; Genette on, 4–5; in narratology, 269n9, 271n13; po­liti­cal role of, 49, 51, 58, 59–61, 65, 83, 195, 206–12, 215; purposes of, 7, 133–34; vs real­ity, 2–3, 27–28, 38–44, 52–55, 94–95, 98, 143–44, 148–49, 151–52, 160–62, 166–67, 169–91, 206–12, 215–16, 233–42; in pos­si­ble worlds theory, 269n9; in rhetorical studies, 48, 80–81, 86, 103–13, 269n9, 271n13; in speech act theory, 269n9; twentieth-­century, 11–12, 242, 262–63. See also fiction; literary, the Fielding, Henry, 102–3 Findley, William, 53, 284n17 Fisher, Phillip, 301n97 Fliegelman, Jay, 69 Fluck, Winfried, 294n74, 317n33 Fortune’s Football (Butler), 27 Foster, Hannah, 35, 39–40, 90, 104, 282n55 Foucault, Michel, 277n68 Franchot, Jenny, 302n99 Frank, Jason, 286nn36–37 Franklin Evans (Whitman), 198, 201 Freeburg, Christopher, 312n4

Gallagher, Catherine: on fictionality, 2, 11–12, 51, 65, 76, 79, 81, 232, 236, 237; 270n9, 274n42, 283n4, 294n64; Nobody’s Story, 270n9, 283n4, 306n65, 315nn49 and 53; vs Paige, 38; “The Rise of Fictionality,” 2, 12, 315n53, 270n9 Galperin, William, 291n26 Gamesters, The (Thayer), 103–4, 107–8 Garrett, Matthew, 5–6 Genette, Gerard, 4–5, 167, 272n15 genre, 275n57; fictionality and, 19, 127–28; interiority and, 184; and reading practice, 9, 14, 41–42, 275nn46 and 49 Gilmore, Paul, 59 Gjerlevsen, S. V., 271n13 Gordon, Paul Scott, 292n33 Gould, Philip, 296n3, 297n24 Grant, David, 311n60 Gray, James, 31, 32–33, 55, 82 ­Great Awakening, the, 32; Second, 290n8, 295n82 Habermas, Jürgen, 59–60, 284n19 Hacking, Ian, 288n56 Hale, Alison Tracy, 292n33 Halttunen, Karen, 174 Harris, Neil, 156–57, 176, 249, 281n42, 302n2, 304n24 Harris, Samuel, 197 Harris, Susan K., 294n77 Harris, W. C., 292n34 Hartman, Sadiya, 214, 312n4 Havard, John C., 303n4 Hawks of Hawk Hollow, The (Bird), 161–62, 164 Hawthorne, Nathaniel: and aesthetics,7–10, 140; The Blithedale Romance, 8–9, 252–53; fictionality and, 251–54; The House of the Seven Gables, 7–8; on romances, 8–10; The Scarlet Letter, 8–9, 139–41, 298n35, 301n97 Hentz, Caroline Lee, 207, 219 Heroic Slave, The (Douglass), 213–23, 225–33, 312n3, 313nn19 and 22; vs Clotel, 222; interiority and, 220–21, 225–33 Hildreth, Richard, 224 historical fiction. See ­under fiction historical socie­ties, 133, 137, 139, 298nn 24 and 29 History of New York (Irving), 14

[ 322 ] index hoaxes, 174–75; literary, 169–91, 302n3 Hobomok (Child), 138 Hochman, Barbara, 195, 207, 210 Hoepker, Karin, 313n22 Hope Leslie (Sedgwick), 119, 141–44, 147–48, 163, 299n39, 301n98 Hopkins, Pauline, 261 House of the Seven Gables, The (Hawthorne), 7–8 Howells, William Dean, 18, 256–57 humbugs. See hoaxes Hyde, Carrie, 272n29, 312n3 identification, sympathetic. See interiority Incidents in the Life of a Slaver Girl. See Linda. Insko, Jeffrey, 299n42 interiority (also sympathetic identification), 184; Bird and, 184–86; Douglass and, 214–23, 225–33; of enslaved persons, 214–41, 312n4; Gallagher on, 306n65, 315n53; Jacobs and, 215–16, 233, 235–41 Ira and Isabella (W. H. Brown), 44–48 Irving, Washington, 14, 67 Jackson, Frederick, 16 Jakobson, Roman, 272n15 James, Henry, 257, 258–61 Jacobs, Harriet: Child and, 233–34; Douglass and, 216; Linda, 215–16, 233–41, 314n35, 315nn37, 39, and 42, 316n53 Jefferson, Thomas, C. B. Brown and, 1, 49; on fiction, 35, 281n43 Jordan, Cynthia, 283n11, 287n39 journalism: fictional portrayals of, 54–57, 203, 204, 205–6 Kareem, Sarah Tindal, 269n8 Kavanagh, Thomas, 293n59 Kelroy (Rush), 115–17 Kennedy, Robert Pendleton, 14–15, 218 Key to the Quaker City (Lippard), 203, 204, 310n44 Key to U ­ ncle Tom’s Cabin, A (Stowe), 193–94, 206–11, 311n57–58, 61, and 64 Kliger, Ilya, 277n68 knowledge: book vs. worldly, 46–47, 51, 209; early US views of, 32; intersubjective. See interiority Kopley, Richard, 171, 173, 177–78, 303n5, 304n11, 305n41

Larkin, Edward, 5–6, 285n27 Last of the Mohicans, The (Cooper), 132, 160 Laura (Sansay), 108, 110–13 Lawrence, D. H., 160 Lennox, Charlotte, 31, 96 Levecq, Christine, 214, 312n4 Levine, Robert, 222, 313n18 Linda (Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl) (Jacobs), 215–16, 233–41, 314n35, 315nn37, 39, and 42, 316n53 Lionel Lincoln (Cooper), 136, 138 Lippard, George, 163, 310nn47 and 50; Quaker City, 202–6, 211, 309n43, 310nn44 and 46, 311n54; vs Stowe, 211 literary, the, 271n14, 272n29; Genette on, 4–5; in early US fiction, 5–6; Schweighauser on, 6. See also fictionality Locke, John, on knowledge and learning, 32, 33, 34, 70; C. B. Brown’s use of, 72–75; influence on Edwards, 280n27 Lofty and the Lowly, The (McIntosh), 219 Looby, Christopher, 5–6, 59, 189, 284n19, 286nn36–37, 288n68, 310n44 Lucinda (Manvill), 43, 48, 282n61 Machor, James, 176, 275n49, 276nn62–63, 300n54, 307n1 Mann, Herman, 94–95 Manvill, P. D., 43, 282n61 Mardi (Melville), 244, 246–47 Martin, Terence, 5, 6–7, 33, 167 Mather, Cotton, 280n25 McGill, Meredith, 7, 9, 311n58 McIntosh, Maria, 219 McKeon, Michael, 270n9, 274n42, 294n64 McMurran, Mary Helen, 291n25 Melville, Herman: The Confidence Man, 1, 244, 245–46; fictionality in, 1, 22, 243–47, 271n14, 278n68, ; Mardi, 244, 246–47; Moby Dick, 244, 246; on real­ ity, 245–46 Merish, Lori, 315n39 Minister’s Wooing, The (Stowe), 247–51, 253–54 Mitchell, Isaac, 18–19 Moby Dick (Melville), 244, 246 Modern, John Lardas, 165, 297n10 Modern Chivalry (Brackenridge), 51–61, 283nn7 and 11, 284n17 Molesworth, Jesse, 288n56, 293n59

index [ 323 ] Monima (Read), 101–2 “Moon Hoax,” 176–77 Murison, Justine, 184–85, 189, 214, 218, 227 Murray, Judith Sargent, 87–91, 122, 290n16 Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, The (Poe), 83, 170–82, 190–91, 303nn4, 5, and 8; 304n29, 305nn54, 59, and 60 Narrative of James Williams, The, 223–25, 314n30 Neal, John, 143–44; Rachel Dyer, 144–48 Nelson, Dana D., 284n11, 315nn37 and 51 New-­England Tale, A (Sedgwick), 117–23, 154, 165, 295n85 Nienkamp, Jean, 292n30 Noble, Marianne, 313n18 normativity: antifiction and, 269n5; print culture and, 56–58; va­ri­e­ties of, 107; ­women’s conduct and, 84–124, 289n4 Norris, Frank, 257–58, 260 novels: abolitionist, 193–95, 210–11, 214–33; ambiguously fictional, 38–44, 223–25; definitions of, 13, 16–17; fictionality of, 11–12, 15–17, 45–46, 278n3; “Founded on Fact,” 26, 27–28, 37–44, 88, 101–2; historical, 14–15, 131–52; identification of works as, 13–19, 27–28, 38, 40, 42–45, 88–90, 132, 141–42, 172–74, 176–79; origins of, 1, 27, 273n35, 275n57; publishing figures, 125; rise of, 11–13, 16–17, 27–28, 127, 269n1; vs romances, 272n30; temperance, 196–201, 252–53, 307n1. See also antifiction; fiction; fictionality Nudelman, Franny, 314n35 Octopus, The (Norris), 257–58, 260 Ogden, Emily, 23, 302n3, 305n60 Orians, G. Harrison, 279n14 Oriental Philanthropist, The (Sherburne), 91 Otter, Samuel, 306n64 Paige, Nicholas, 38, 291n24 Parker, Andrew, 311n58 Pasley, Jeffrey, 283n10 Peep at the Pilgrims, A (Cheney), 143–44 Pi­lot, The (Cooper), 136 Planter’s Northern Bride, The (Hentz), 207, 219

plausibility: fiction and, 76; readers and, 67–68, 93–95, 176–78. See also possibility Poe, Edgar Allan: and Defoe, 178, 179; on the “Moon Hoax,” 176–77; Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, 83, 170–82, 190–91, 303nn4, 5, and 8; 304n29, 305nn54, 59, and 60; on Sheppard Lee, 179; “Unparalleled Adventure of one Hans Pfaall,” 176, 304n32 poetics, historical, 275n53 politics: claims of avoidance in fiction, 194–95, 201, 207, 210–12, 272nn24 and 29, 310n46, 311n60; racial, 312n4, 315n39; use of in fiction, 51–62, 64–69, 79–83, 196–98, 199–201, 202–12, 240, 273n35, 286n36, 301n97, 308n10 Pollin, Burton, 303n8 possibility: Brown on, 75–76, 288n55; Common Sense and, 33; fiction and, 26, 44, 105–7, 142–43, 208; vs probability, 288n55. See also plausibility, probability Power of Sympathy, The (W. H. Brown), 13–14, 27, 37, 38–42, 278n1(2), 282n60 probabilism. See probability probability (also probabilism), 33, 34, 288nn55–56, 293n59; Brown on, 75–78, 80; Defoe and, 314n30; Douglass and, 225; Female American and, 93–94, 291n25; fiction and, 34, 37, 65, 67, 75–78, 86, 92, 93–94, 102–3, 105–7, 112, 142–43, 208–9, 225, 250, 291n25, 314n30; Fielding and, 102–3; Locke on, 33; vs possibility, 288n55; Sansay and, 112; Sedgwick and, 142–43; Stowe and, 208–9, 250; Tyler and, 65, 67; ­women and, 291n26; Wood and, 105–7, 293n57. See also plausibility; possibility Protestants: as authors, 153–54; on Catholics, 32, 302n99; depictions of, 247–50; on fiction, 29, 30, 31–34, 126, 157, 255, 280n27, 295nn82 and 83, 300n62; as publishers, 30, 255, 300n62. See also A Minister’s Wooing; A New-­England Tale; Self-­Culture Quaker City, The (Lippard), 202–6, 211, 309n43, 310nn44 and 46, 311n54

[ 324 ] index Rachel Dyer (Neal), 144–48 Read, Meredith Martha, 101–2 reader responses, 173, 177–78, 282n60, 303n5 reading, methods of, 82–83, 274n38, 275n49 real­ity and unreality: in fiction, 1, 27–28, 31, 32–44, 63–68, 85–98, 101–24, 131–52, 159–66, 169–91, 193–94, 202–11, 243–48, 304n8, 310n47; Melville on, 1. See also fictionality Rebhorn, Matthew, 306n64 Richardson, Samuel, 280n25, 287n43; Charles Grandison, 102–3, 248, 250; Cla­ris­sa, 70–73; Pamela, 70 Rise of Silas Lapham, The (Howells), 18, 256–57 Robinson, Douglas, 172 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), realism of, 178 romances: Hawthorne on, 8–10; vs novels, 272n30 Rosenzweig, Paul, 177, 303n4, 304n29 Roughing It (Twain), 255–56 Rowson, Susanna, 42, 114–15 Rush, Benjamin, 42 Rush, Rebecca, 86, 115–17 Sachs, Aaron, 305n54 Sale, Maggie, 314n31 Saler, Michael, 133, 165, 302n102 Sánchez, María Carla, 126, 307n3 Sansay, Leonora, 86, 293n63; Laura, 108, 110–13; The Secret History, 108–10, 113, 294nn63 and 65 Santamarina, Xiomara, 314n30 Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne), 8–9, 139–41, 298n35, 301n97 Schueller, Malini Johar, 285n27 Schweighauser, Philipp, 5–7, 272n24, 298n35 Scott, Walter, 125, 131, 154–56, 166, 296n8 Secret History, The (Sansay), 108–10, 113, 294nn63 and 65 Sedgwick, Catharine Maria, 295nn82–83 and 86; and historical fiction, 141–44, 147–48, 154; Hope Leslie, 119, 141–44, 147–48, 163, 299n39, 301n98; influence of Edgeworth on, 118; A New-­ England Tale, 117–23, 154, 165, 295n85

self-­culture movement, 40–41, 133, 153–59, 196–98, 200, 211–12; Stowe on, 210–11 Self-­Culture (Channing), 153–56 Senator’s Son, The (Victor), 199, 200–1 sentimentalism, 308n9; and fictionality, 195, 209–10, 239; politics of, 194–95, 209–11, 217–18, 233–34, 240, 308nn10 and 12; and sympathetic identification, 185–86, 235–36, 239–41 Shakespeare, William, 282n64 Sheppard Lee (Bird), 170–72, 182–91, 227, 231, 306nn64–65 and 69 Sherburne, Henry, 91 Sicherman, Barbara, 158–59 Simms, William Gilmore, 151–52, 163–65, 170 Six Nights with the Washingtonians (Arthur), 199–200 Sizemore, Michelle, 286n37, 302n102 Slave, The (Hildreth), 224 slavery, literary treatments of: antislavery responses to, 217–18, 219; documentary evidence in, 206–10; fiction, 14–15, 62–67, 193–94, 213–15, 217–33, 311nn64 and 67, 312n4, 313n22, 314n30; nonfiction, 233–41; proslavery responses to, 213, 217, 219 slavery, memoirs of, 218, 223–25, 233–35, 237–41, 314n30 Smith, Caleb, 275n53 Spy, The (Cooper), 135–36, 148–50, 299n47; origin of, 149 Stein, Jordan, 30, 275n57, 278n3, 280n25 Stepto, Robert, 220 Stern, Julia, 286n36, 289n70 Sterne, Laurence, 209, 211 Stokes, Claudia, 290n8, 295n82 Story of Margaretta, The (Murray), 87–91, 122 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 195, 210–11, 222; Dred, 311n67; A Key to ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 193–94, 206–11, 311n57–58, 61, and 64; vs Lippard, 211; Minister’s Wooing, The, 247–51, 253–54; on romance, 248–51; ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 193–95, 206–11, 212, 213, 218–19, 220, 223, 235, 307n5, 308n10, 311nn60 and 64 Swallow Barn (Kennedy), 14–15, 218 Sweet, Nancy, 295n85 sympathetic identification. See interiority

index [ 325 ] Tanselle, Thomas, 63 Tawil, Ezra, 214, 218, 270n11 temperance fiction. See ­under fiction Tennen­house, Leonard, 273n35–36, 287n45 Tenney, Tabitha, 95–98, 292nn30, 33, and 34 Thayer, Caroline Matilda Warren, 103–4, 107–8 Thompson, G. R., 302n3 Todd, Emily, 154–55 Tom Jones (Fielding), 102–3 Tompkins, Jane, 11, 49; on Brown, 69, 79, 82, 287n39; vs Douglas, 194–95, 308n12; on Stowe, 194–95 Trollope, Anthony, 257 Trubey, Elizabeth Fekete, 307n5 truth: aesthetics and, 156, 179–80; authentication of, 206–11, 234; authorial claims of, 27–28, 37–44, 52–53, 93, 103–5, 111–12, 146–47, 194, 202–4, 206, 233, 257, 258; biblical, 32; C.B. Brown on, 75; W. H. Brown on, 48; as deficit, 143–44; philosophical, 32; vs probability, 33; veridiction, 23, 277n68. See also hoaxes; real­ity and unreality Twain, Mark, 255–56 Tyler, Royall, 49, 50, 61–69, 285nn25 and 27 ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 193–95, 206–11, 212, 213, 218–19, 220, 223, 235, 307n5, 308n10, 311nn60 and 64 unreality. See real­ity and unreality veridiction, 23, 277n68 Vickery, Sukey, 101–2 Victor, Metta Victoria Fuller, 199, 200–1 Walsh, Richard, 48, 270n9, 271n13 Wanderings of William, The (Davis), 90 Ware, Henry Jr., 154 Warner, Michael, 35, 56–57, 79, 284n18, 307n2

Washington, George, as role model, 79–80 Weinstein, Cindy, 5–6, 308n9, 311n57, 311n64 Weyler, Karen, 293n54 Whalen, Terrence, 303n4 White, Ed, 285n27, 286n36, 288n68, 289n1 White, Hayden, 137 Whitman, Walt, 198, 201 Wieland (Brown), 71–83; vs Cla­ris­sa (Richardson), 70–73; on education, 70–71, 72–74, 80–81; as fiction, 1, 49; and politics, 49, 50, 69–70, 80–83, 286nn36–37; real­ity vs fiction in, 74–79, 287n39, 288nn59 and 68 Wilcox, Kirstin, 290n16 Williams, James, 223–25, 314n30 Williams, Raymond, 1, 274n41 Wilson, Ivy, 313n22 witchcraft: depictions of, 144–48; fiction as, 163 Witherspoon, John, 33 Woertendyke, Gretchen, 109, 293n63, 294n65 Wolfe, Eric, 82, 286nn36–37 ­women: conduct and, 84–124, 289nn4, 6, and 8, 290n9; fictional portrayals of, 39–43, 70–73, 93–97, 105, 108–12, 115–17, 120–22, 233–41, 248, 250, 282n60; reading material for, 13–14, 31, 35–36, 38–39, 41, 42, 84–85, 86–88, 90–94, 98–102, 114–15, 122–23 Wood, Sarah, 283n11 Wood, S. S. B. K., 104–8, 293nn54, 56, and 57 Woodworth, Samuel, 135, 141, 163, 167 Yarborough, Richard, 314n31 Yellin, Jean Fagan, 233 Yemassee, The (Simms), 151–52, 163–65, 170 Zboray, Ronald, 153, 300n73