by Steven Moore
Frances Brooke, whom we met in chapter 4, sailed for Quebec in 1763 and there wrote what has been called “the first Canadian novel, and indeed the first American one.”7 The History of Emily Montague (1769) is an above-average epistolary romance novel set in Quebec and Montreal, and is filled with ravishing descriptions of the area in the 1760s, along with reports (sent by one of the characters’ military father to an earl in England) on Canadian habits, politics, religion, agriculture, Indian relations, and the trouble brewing down south in the English colonies. All of this atypical material is grafted onto a rather typical love story: when 27-year-old Edward Rivers sails from England to Canada, his rakish friend envisions him “trying the force of your destructive charms on the savage dames of America, chasing females wild as the winds thro’ woods as wild as themselves” (4), but unfortunately nothing like that happens. Instead, Rivers falls for the engaging but engaged Emily Montague, a beautiful 24-year-old orphan who arrived there from England two years earlier to stay with relatives. Her fiancé is a rich dolt, as she comes to realize after meeting Rivers with his “almost feminine sensibility” (155), so the first part of the novel concerns her weak efforts to break off her engagement (against the wishes of relatives and parents, naturally), and after that there are various complications that prevent her from marrying Rivers until the end. Brooke used the novel not only to report on life in Canada and its natural beauties—which are so appealing one suspects she was angling for a job with the Canadian Tourism Commission—but also to air her views on love, marriage, sensibility, female education, etc. There are some references to the nearby Huron and Iroquois tribes, but most of the novel focuses on the small English colony in Quebec.
The real star of the show is Emily’s witty BFF Arabella Fermor—named after the real-life model for Belinda in Pope’s “Rape of the Lock”—who delivers a number of memorable one-liners. Quoting Pope in fact, Bell dismisses Emily’s first fiancé as “that white curd of ass’s milk ” (155), and mocking French Canadian women for their ignorance, she writes (to Edwards’s sister back in England), “There are two ladies in the province, I am told, who read; but both of them are above fifty, and they are regarded as prodigies of erudition” (16). She resorts to fashion to describe the differences between religions: “the Romish religion is like an overdressed, tawdry, rich citizen’s wife; the Presbyterian like a rude, awkward country girl; the Church of England like an elegant, well-dressed woman of quality, ‘plain in her neatness’ (to quote Horace, who is my favorite author)” (33). The city of Quebec “is like a third- or fourth-rate country town in England” (45), and taking up the Canadian habit of drinking to keep warm in winter, she avers, “Certainly brandy makes a woman talk like an angel” (49). Rivers has some good lines too: noting that Huron women have many more rights than Englishwomen, he admits, “In the truest sense of the word, we are the savages” (11), and even encourages women to revolt: “I don’t think you are obliged in conscience to obey laws you have had no share in making; your plea would certainly be at least as good as that of the Americans, about which we every day hear so much” (11). If Brooke had wedded her Canadian material to a more original story, Emily Montague would be far more interesting. By turns charming and maudlin, though marred by a sentimental subplot near the end, the novel offered English readers their first glimpse of Canada in fiction, and served as a sourcebook for stay-at-home English novelists for decades. But Brooke moved back to England in 1767, so her status as an American novelist, like Lennox’s, is tenuous.
The first American novel, in the opinion of critic Robert H. Elias, is none of the above, but rather the rascally Adventures of Alonso (1775) by Marylander Thomas Atwood Digges (1742–1821).8 Patriotic Americans, however, may not want to salute as their founding fiction a novel that involves adultery, transvestism, smuggling, and homosexuality by a Catholic who was disowned by his family, imprisoned for debt in Dublin, and arrested for shoplifting in Scotland. The short novel concerns a Portuguese merchant’s son who runs away with a married woman named Eugenia (disguised as a man), blows through their money in France, deposits her in a convent to try his fortune in Brazil, is caught smuggling a diamond, escapes and engages in further contraband operations in the Caribbean, attempts to return to Spain but is intercepted by Algerian pirates who sell him to a gay Moor named Aldalid, fends off his advances and manages to return to Portugal, only to find Eugenia has just died, and so returns to the family business, as his father originally intended. What distinguishes it from other routine adventure novels are Alonso’s sharp criticisms of the policies of the Portuguese prime minister, which easily apply to the American policies of the British prime minister, Lord North, in the years leading up to the revolution. So even though the novel doesn’t take place in North America, it is revolutionary-American in spirit as Alonso rails against trade restrictions, unlawful seizure of property, and the lack of personal freedom under a tyrannical government. (Not surprisingly, Digges spied for Benjamin Franklin during the Revolutionary War, delivered secret dispatches to John Adams, and was a personal friend of George Washington, one of the few invited to his funeral.) Nonetheless, because Adventures of Alonso is set outside North America, and because Digges seems to have spent more time in Portugal and England (where the novel was published) than in the U.S., its claim as the first American novel is as compromised as Donna Eugenia’s honor.
A London publication and unidentified author also compromise another short novel that is otherwise as American as corn on the cob: Adventures of Jonathan Corncob, Loyal American Refugee (1787). This is an extraordinary novel, the closest thing in 18th-century English fiction to Voltaire’s Candide because of its lively style, freethinking attitude, and urbane ribaldry. It is so fresh and frank that it reads more like a modern imitation of an 18th-century novel, like The Sot-Weed Factor or Mason & Dixon, than one actually written back then, which is to say it’s far more realistic than other so-called realistic novels of the period. (In his foreword to David Godine’s bicentennial edition, Noel Perrin compares it to Catch-22.) Set during the Revolutionary War, it may have been written (as narrator Corncob relates) years later by an exiled American who had supported the British, for it displays the kind of detailed knowledge of Boston and New York that can’t be worked up from books (as in the case of The Female American); but the few critics who have written about the novel feel that its extensive use of nautical terms and insider knowledge of the corrupt workings of the British Admiralty suggest the author was a British naval officer stationed in America during the war. Although this resembles the argument some used to make that Shakespeare must have been a lawyer because of his familiarity with the law, it’s clear that the author spent at least as much time in America as Lennox or Brooke, so let’s just call him an Anglo-American and move on.
Perrin conveniently summarizes Jonathan Corncob in the raffish tone of its author:
The hero is a Massachusetts farm boy who got mixed up in the American Revolution as a result of making a girl on the next farm pregnant. Given the choice of marrying Miss Desire Slawbunk or paying a fifty-pound fine, he runs away to Boston. (It’s a quick trip, because he gets a ride most of the way on the back of a passing moose.)
Soon he is serving on an American privateer. Soon after that on a British man-o’-war. And presently he winds up in New York City, making cattle raids into New Jersey with a group of Loyalists and personal raids on a New York society girl named Dinah Donewell. . . .
After recovering from the six or eight kinds of venereal disease she gives him, he hurries off to further adventures—with a more common Rhode Island girl named Dolly, with slaves and slave-owners in the Barbadoes, with a Royal Navy officer who is one of the few combatants in the American Revolution even more cowardly than Jonathan himself. When the book rather abruptly ends, he is back in New York. He is reunited with Desire Slawbunk, now the widow of a British company commander and more amorous than ever. He is in several kinds of trouble, as usual.9
It’s stuffed with vi
ntage Americana: backwoods superstition, bundling, tar-and-feathering, a fifer playing “Yankee Doodle,” dialect and obsolete slang, paranoid patriotism, demeaning references to Christopher Columbus, defense-budget scams, depreciating currency, racism—all narrated in offhandedly precise language. Instead of writing that he was “taken into custody by six militiamen,” as most 18th-century novelists would, Corncob adds, “with ragged coats and rusty muskets,” details conveying the straitened state of American troops during the war. When Corncob meets Rhode Island Dolly, the author declares independence from the British novelese of the day:
Any other author who, like me, had been in love with the lady, would tell you that the lily disputed with the rose the empire of her face; that her lips were coral, and her teeth two rows of oriental pearl; that her nose was well formed and inclined to the aquiline; that her large blue eyes were of the sleepy kind “that spoke the melting soul”;10 that her hair was auburn, and that she was above the middle size; but I who, unlike most historians, paint from nature, will candidly confess that she was a smart little brunette with sparkling black eyes, and that if she was not pretty, she was very much to my taste. (9)
She’s certainly an improvement on Desire Slawbunk, who “had lost six of her front teeth above, and six below” due to her fondness for molasses (2). The author brilliantly recreates what it looked, felt, and smelt like to live under wartime conditions in cities, aboard a ship, in prison, and down in Barbados—the scene of some shockingly casual examples of racism and the abuse of slaves (“black cattle”), anticipating Mark Twain in many ways.11
In addition to Voltaire, Smollett often comes to mind, as does Sterne, whom a character says Corncob physically resembles, especially when it comes to sexual innuendo: “As my youngest sister was extremely pretty, I was soon after this affair appointed acting purser of a frigate going to Barbadoes” (12). More often, the author eschews winking reticence like that for more explicit descriptions of sexual encounters, often spicing them up with blasphemous citations from the Bible. After Corncob has coitus with Dinah Donewell—who suffers from epileptic fits, realistically described—she quotes a verse from the Song of Solomon in postcoital bliss (“Behold thou art fair, my beloved, yea thou art pleasant; also our bed is green” [1.16]), but when Corncob learns that she has given him the clap, he realizes she has been servicing “those British officers who, according to the words of Ezekiel, are ‘captains and rulers, clothed most gorgeously, horsemen riding upon horses, and all of them desirable young men—whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and their issue as the issue of horses’ ” (5; Ezek. 23:20 [“flesh”=penis, “issue”=ejaculation]). Playing “at a kind of religious conundrums,” Dinah’s mother asks him “ ‘what was the candle of the Lord, searching the inward parts of the belly?’ I blushed at the question, and though I thought it not difficult to divine, was silent” (6; see Proverbs 20:27 for the non-phallic answer).
The author reaches the height of blasphemy in the concluding chapter, “In Which It Is Proved, to the Satisfaction of the Most Captious, that the Most Advantageous Kind of Study is Novel Reading.” Corncob is puzzled that nonfiction writers—who, unlike novelists, supposedly deal with facts—often contradict each other, beginning with the New Testament: “In Matthew and Mark we met with some passages, which, if not according exactly, were stumbling-blocks to our weak reason; . . . I read on, and towards the conclusion of Luke, found that this Evangelist counted two young men dressed in white in the holy sepulchre, though St. Mark had said there was only one. [¶] I paused and laid down the book . . .” (19). He then turns to scientific and historical books, only to find the same sorts of contradictions. The novel concludes: “Disappointed everywhere in my search of truth, I determined to give it up, and have since read nothing but novels. As in works of this kind I expect only fiction, whenever I meet with a just observation, or a character drawn after nature, I consider it a clear gain. I advice my reader to follow my example, and assure him that in that part of the adventures of Jonathan Corncob he has already perused, as well as in the sequel I may hereafter offer to the public, there is more truth than is sometimes to be found in books with more promising titles.” To argue that novels are superior to serious nonfiction and even to the Bible itself was a bold, heretical thing to say in 1787, worthy of tar-and-feathering, if not worse. (Perhaps that’s why the author published it anonymously.) He never wrote that sequel, but Adventures of Jonathan Corncob is easily the best novel written about America before the 1790s, and given its breakthrough realism and spunky iconoclasm, it is one of the most daring novels of the entire 18th century.
The winner of the American novel trifecta—the first set in the U.S., published in the U.S., and written by an author born in the U.S.A.—is The Power of Sympathy; or, The Triumph of Nature (1789) by Bostoner William Hill Brown (1765–93). Unfortunately, it’s not very good, merely a derivative, didactic novel of sensibility, a genre that was passé by 1789, as a snarky 14-year-old girl in the novel points out: “I abominate everything that is sentimental—it is so unfashionable too.”12 Like most young authors, Brown wears his influences on his sleeve; the novel is Clarissa meets A Sentimental Journey meets The Sorrows of Young Werther. The latter two are actually named in the novel, and the first is obvious from its form (epistolary) and tragic, moralistic content: a young man named Harrington boasts to his friend Worthy (an ideal man, as his unsubtle name indicates) that he plans to seduce an orphaned 16-year-old named Harriot, but he is so impressed by her virtuous composure that he decides to marry her instead, against his father’s wishes. She falls in love with him as well, but days before their wedding, it is soap-operatically revealed that they are half-brother and -sister. (Harrington’s father had seduced a woman unsubtly named after Sterne’s Maria.) Harriot is so shocked at how close she came to committing incest that she sickens and dies; Harrington is so bereaved that he shoots himself, a copy of Werther next to him.13 This is to warn the “young ladies of United Columbia,” as the author poetically addresses them on the dedication page, “of the fatal consequences of SEDUCTION,” which is often printed in scare caps in the text. Supporting the main story-line are several subsidiary examples of sex outside of marriage, which in this novel (as in modern antisex propaganda) always ends in pregnancy, madness, and/or death for the ladies, and remorse or suicide for the men. (The author of Jonathan Corncob would have added STDs, but sadly The Power of Sympathy is not that kind of novel.)
The writing is so stylized and over-the-top that one suspects young Goodman Brown intended a parody of sentimental novels, especially when we learn that in company he was not a stern moralist but “a little satyrical at times . . . witty and winning.”14 Although some of the novel’s incidents were based on real scandals of the day, an aura of unreality hangs over it all, especially near the end when Harrington’s father has a vision of hell and other characters wax histrionic. Brown doesn’t make much of the American setting (Boston mostly); near the beginning, when Harrington still plans to seduce rather than marry Harriot, he jokes that “I am not so much a republican as formally to wed any person of this class,” that is, a “daughter of the democratic empire of virtue” – which recalls the aristocratic status of most seducers in British novels – but he changes politics after he falls in love, and begins railing against class distinctions and inequality. “I like a democratical better than any other kind of government,” he announces, and goes on to condemn the “aristocratic temper” of Southerners, insisting that slavery is incompatible with democratic principles (17). Aside from these few remarks and a reference to Noah Webster’s Grammatical Institute, The Power of Sympathy is mostly set in Novelland.
Throughout the first half, there are numerous critifictional discussions about the most suitable kinds of novels for young ladies, and everyone agrees that the best are in essence conduct books in fictional form. A widow who dispenses most of the advice in this novel explains: “Didactic essays are not always capable of engaging the attention of young ladies. We fly
from the laboured precepts of the essayist to the sprightly narrative of the novelist” (29). But 14-year-old Miss Bourn shrugs, “I read as much as anybody, and though it may afford amusement while I am employed, I do not remember a single word when I lay down the book,” which confirms an older male character’s conviction that novels are “just calculated to kill time—to attract the attention of the reader for an hour, but leave not one idea on the mind” (11). Didactic conduct book or idle amusement: the novel as literature is an alien concept to these characters, if not to their author. Brown seems to have written The Power of Sympathy not as a dire warning to young ladies to just say no, but as an opportunity to pay homage to a few of his favorite novels—Worthy praises A Sentimental Journey, and suicidal Harrington writes like Werther—while tattling on some local adulterers. It was a commercial flop. The Power of Sympathy is a young man’s book, written for young ladies, and published in a young republic that didn’t yet know what novels are for.15
For clergyman and historian Jeremy Belknap (1744–98), the novel was the means by which he could have some fun with American history. Written in between his serious nonfiction books, The Foresters: An American Tale (1792) is a sardonic allegory of the history of the United States, from Sir Walter Raleigh’s colonization of Virginia in 1587 to George Washington’s first presidential term, in the form of 16 letters from a man named Amynter to a friend.16 The title page announces itself as a sequel to Arbuthnot’s John Bull: it turns out Bull owns a neglected tract of land called the Forest, though he had no right “to call the land his, for he had no legal title to it” (1). Hearing about the land, a servant named Walter Pipeweed (Raleigh) asks to settle there, as does an apprentice named Cecilius Peterson (the Catholic Lord Baltimore), followed by others like Peregrine Pickle—not Smollett’s guy but a figure for the Pilgrims—until all 13 colonies have been allegorically settled. It’s not a noble endeavor: there are border disputes, doctrinal bickering among the religious nuts, and conflicts with the Native Americans, whom Belknap dehumanizes into bears and wolves to reflect the English invaders’ inhuman attitude toward them. (As in Jonathan Corncob, slaves are called “black cattle.”) Belknap holds his nose at the kinds of people Bull sent to Pipeweed in Virginia: “he made it a practice every year to present him with a wagonload of ordure [“Convicts”—author’s note], the sweepings of his backyard, the scrapings of his dog kennel, and contents of his own water closet” (1). Rev. Belknap also mocks the ridiculously rigid Pilgrims: