by Steven Moore
The family and all its concerns were under very exact regulations: not one of them was suffered to peep out of doors after the sun was set. It was never allowed to brew on Saturday, lest the beer should break the Fourth Commandment by working on Sunday; and once it is said the stallion was impounded a whole week for having held crim. con. with the mare while the Old Gentleman was at his devotions. (2; crim. con.=criminal conversation=coitus)
As things get more complicated, Belknap brings back from Arbuthnot’s novel characters like Lewis (France), Nic Frog (Holland), and Lord Strut (Spain) to allegorize the colonies’ relations with Europe, and then retells the War of Independence as a protracted lawsuit—prosecuted more vigorously by Bull’s wife (Parliament) than by Bull himself (the English people). Despite the cartoonish conflicts, the new republic is off to a good start by the end of the novel, though the narrator foresees further problems with the “bears and wolves” and expresses disgust at the rats (financial speculators) that are already gnawing away at the country’s foundations.
The second half of The Foresters is less novelistic than the first half—largely because groups replace colorful individuals, and because historical events are less imaginatively allegorized—but it is obvious that Belknap felt the novel format licensed a freedom of expression not allowed in his straight history books; if he refers to a Dutchman in one of them, I’m sure it’s not as “a sly, evasive whoreson” (4). Belknap published it anonymously, he confided to a friend, for “I shall take great liberty, and tell some sad truths, in pretty coarse language” (Eitner, 157). In addition to Arbuthnot’s John Bull, The Foresters looks back to British allegorical novels like Swift’s Tale of a Tub and Smollett’s Adventures of an Atom, and forward to American political satires as diverse as James Fenimore Cooper’s Monikins, Robert Coover’s Political Fable, and Philip Roth’s Our Gang.
In 1791, Susanna Rowson (1762–1824) published a short novel that flopped in England but soared into best-sellerdom when republished in Philadelphia in 1794, Charlotte Temple.17 Like Lennox, Rowson was an Anglo-American: she was born in England, came to America as a child, left as a teenager, then returned in 1793 as a married woman, and (again like Lennox) was an actress as well as a prolific writer. Like The Power of Sympathy (but worse), Charlotte Temple is a novel about seduction: our naïve heroine is a 15-year-old boarding-school girl who first caught the roving eye of an army lieutenant named Montraville at age 13; now considering her ripe for plucking, he enlists the help of Charlotte’s French teacher to seduce her and take her away to New York. There he abandons the British schoolgirl for a rich, independent American woman; Charlotte follows the standard seduced-woman trajectory—pregnancy, madness, death—and her abductors are punished with remorse (Montraville) and death (the female French teacher). It’s basically a YA novel—the Library of Congress categorizes it under “Teenage runaways—Fiction”—and of interest only as a pop-cultural phenomenon, not as a work of literature, for Charlotte Temple doesn’t do anything that wasn’t done better by earlier British sentimental novelists. (The New York setting is merely a novelty—it’s not described in any way—though it undoubtedly added to its popularity in America.) Charlotte herself is a bore: a passive, easily manipulated naïf who speaks in clichés, a sad paper doll rather than an interesting character.
There’s one near-artistic moment in the novel: still virginal in England, Charlotte receives a letter from Montraville on which the sealing wax is still malleable. Propriety tells her she shouldn’t open it, but her teacher encourages her to do so, and Charlotte figures she can read it, reseal it, and return it as though unread. “ ‘At any rate I am determined not to answer it,’ continued Charlotte, as she opened the letter” (7). Perfect. But Rowson can’t leave that alone: “Here let me stop to make one remark,” she intrudes (as she often does) to moralize for a paragraph, not trusting the reader to apprehend the moral of the moment, which Marian Rush smartly explicates in her introduction to the recent Norton Critical Edition: “As it turns out, such resealing is not as easy as it looks: of a letter, of the virginal body it metonymizes, or of past mistakes that continually intrude themselves upon one’s present in the form of misfortune and sorrowful memory” (xiv). Rowson’s heavy-handed treatment is didactic, not artistic.
She wrote the novel quickly for money, and at certain metafictional points is self-defensive about its weaknesses. Chapter 28 begins, “ ‘Bless my heart,’ cries my young, volatile reader, ‘I shall never have patience to get through these volumes, there are so many ahs! and ohs! so much fainting, tears, and distress, I am sick to death of the subject.’ ” (You and me both, girlfriend.) Deservedly worried about what male book reviewers who “love to cavil at every trifling omission” will say, Rowson halts her sob story in chapter 30 to explain why Charlotte didn’t have anything to sell during her final period of poverty, then sniffs, “I hope, Sir, your prejudices are now removed in regard to the probability of my story? Oh they are. Well then, with your leave, I will proceed.” She proceeds to have Charlotte’s father improbably appear with no explanation of how he could have located her, and Rowson’s cardboard characters continue to speak in an improbable manner: misled into thinking that Charlotte has become a prostitute, Montraville cannot believe “that a mind once so pure as Charlotte Temple’s should so suddenly become the mansion of vice” (chap. 34). The “mansion of vice”?! The hack author may have thought it would be “literary” to oppose the religious-sounding “Temple” with the big-city “mansion,” but didn’t realize how ludicrous that would sound in the mouth of a skirt-chasing soldier. But this is like shooting fish in a barrel. As Leslie Fiedler noted years ago, Charlotte Rowson is a novel that “barely climbs above the lower limits of literacy” (68), one that was intended, the author tells us in her preface, not for adults but “for the perusal of the young and thoughtless of the fair sex.” Unless that describes you, it should be ignored.18
Marginally better though equally didactic is another best-selling tale of seduction addressed to “the American fair,” The Coquette (1797) by Massachusetts-born Hannah Foster (1758–1840). Like The Power of Sympathy, it is an epistolary novel in rather stilted language, based on a real-life scandal, which likewise names its primary literary inspiration. “I do not think you seducible,” a friend taunts the coquette of the title, warning her about the rake she’s seeing; “nor was Richardson’s Clarissa, till she made herself the victim, by her own indiscretion. Pardon me, Eliza, this is a second Lovelace.”19 The Lovelace of this purse-size Clarissa is a Connecticut dandy named Peter Sanford, one of two men who take a sexual interest in 30-something Eliza Wharton after the man she had been dutifully, reluctantly engaged to dies. One is a boring clergyman named Boyer, whom Eliza strings along while she parties with the more entertaining Sanford. Rev. Boyer knows she’s not right for him, but he’s under her spell: “With all the boasted fortitude and resolution of our sex,” he confesses to a friend, “we are mere machines. Let love once pervade our breasts, and its object may mould us into any form that pleases her fancy, or even caprice” (39). For “love” read “lust,” the same magnet that attracts Eliza to Sanford against her better judgment. You can guess the rest: she loses the clergyman, is seduced by the rake, goes through pregnancy/madness/death, and afterwards the rake feels remorse. Near the end, Eliza summarizes her problem in the manner of a critic reviewing her “sad story”: “But the cause may be found in that unrestrained levity of disposition, that fondness for dissipation and coquetry which alienated the affections of Mr. Boyer from me. This event fatally depressed and enfeebled my mind. I embraced with avidity the consoling power of friendship ensnaringly offered by my seducer” (67). She admits “sensual gratification” was involved. Like Clarissa, she leaves behind explanatory letters, and broadcasts the moral of the novel when she tells off her seducer: “May my unhappy story serve as a beacon to warn the American fair of the dangerous tendency and destructive consequences of associating with men of your character, of destroying their time, and r
isking their reputation by the practice of coquetry and its attendant follies” (70).
It comes as a surprise to learn on the final page—which transcribes Eliza’s tombstone—that she is 37; the novel spans four or five years (the letters aren’t dated), but during that time Eliza acts more like an irresponsible teenager than a woman in her thirties. She describes herself as “naturally cheerful, volatile, and unreflecting” (2), but later we learn she’s well read and takes an interest in politics; she’s smart enough to know she shouldn’t associate with Sanford—as everyone tells her, repeatedly, in their letters—but dumb enough to let herself get knocked up. Still a virgin in her thirties, she’s a complicated mess, stuck between a rake and a hard place (she’ll die of boredom if she marries the clergyman), all of which makes her more interesting than the average seduced heroine. Though the letters are postmarked from towns in Connecticut and Massachusetts, there’s no local color, only a specimen of slang (“the show is over, as we Yankees say”) and a self-referential remark by Sanford about “the aborigines of the country, which are said to worship the devil with fear” (70), which recalls Lovelace’s demonic nature. Like Rowson, Foster doesn’t trust her readers to grasp the obvious message about avoiding bad boys, harping upon it so loudly and so often that it drowns out the novel’s few points of interest, as when one of Eliza’s correspondents metafictionally assesses The Coquette: “Your truly romantic letter came safe to hand. Indeed, my dear, it would make a very pretty figure in a novel. A bleeding heart, slighted love, and all the et ceteras of romance enter into the composition” (48).
While female American novelists embroidered the predictable et ceteras of romance, their male counterparts pursued the less predictable et ceteras of adventure. Royall Tyler (1757–1826), a Boston playwright and jurist—said to be the model for Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon in Hawthorne’s House of Seven Gables—takes on adventure novels and idealism in The Algerine Captive; or, The Life and Adventures of Doctor Updike Underhill (1797). This inventive novel is America’s first Menippean satire, the genre that includes Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, Butler’s Hudibras, and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy—all cited in the novel’s chapter epigraphs. Like them, it contrasts the world of learning with the real world and exposes the impracticality of intellectual structures when interacting with those whose claims to intellect are weak, which describes most of the characters in Tyler’s novel. Playing along with his fellow American novelists in claiming that his novel is based on fact (to give greater legitimacy to a genre people still distrusted for being imaginative), Tyler has narrator Underhill begin with a defense of his 17th-century ancestor, John Underhill—a real person (1597–1672) whom Jeremy Belknap writes about in his History of New Hampshire. He was a refractory Indian-killer who came afoul of the Puritans, whose original ideals about religious toleration quickly deteriorated into theocratic intolerance once they attained power. John Underhill, his fictional descendant tells us, was accused of adultery: not the real thing but “adultery of the heart” (see Matt. 5:28) for gazing at a woman wearing “a pair of wanton open workt gloves, slit at the thumbs,” which are regarded by his accusers as “Satan’s port holes of firy temptations.”20 These Puritan mullahs prepare Underhill (and the reader) for the authentic Islamic ones he’ll meet later.
The classical ideals of Harvard next come under attack as young Updike is given a totally useless education in Greek and Latin, whose literary works fill his head with impractical notions and serve only to alienate him from others. (One young lady is insulted when he applies the classical epithet “ox-eyed” to her.) His lofty dreams of becoming a respected schoolteacher fail when he is assigned to a classroom of rowdy kids who mock him and eventually burn down the schoolhouse. Updike Underhill trains to become a physician (shades of the similarly alliterative Roderick Random here) but has trouble competing with the quacks and incompetents entrenched in New England. The few patients he attracts are comically sad: “It was however four months before I had any practice, except the extracting of a tooth from a corn-fed girl who spun at my lodgings, who used to look wistfully at me and ask, if the doctorer did not think the toothache a sign of love? and say she felt dreadfully all over; and the application of a young virgin in the neighbourhood, who wished to be favoured with a private lecture upon the virtues of the savin bush” (1.19—an abortifacient).
So he travels southward—visiting Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia—only to be appalled by the slavery and antiintellectualism he finds down south. Becoming the first of many American innocents abroad, Underhill then sails to England as a ship’s doctor, and after making some harsh observations about the English people (and Thomas Paine) he reluctantly accepts a berth in a slave ship heading for Africa. The captain of the ironically named Sympathy fears Underhill is “moved by some Yankee nonsense about humanity” (1.31), as indeed he is when he sees how the civilized British and Americans treat their African captives. “I thought of my native land and blushed” (1.30), ashamed that a country that had just fought a revolution in the name of liberty would impose slavery on others. Then Underhill gets a taste of it himself: he is captured by Barbary pirates and sold into slavery. One more romantic veil drops when he realizes that Algerian captivity is not what “the dramatist and the novelist had taught me to expect” (2.3). Instead of sharing a cell with a kidnapped aristocrat and making a dramatic escape with the help of an Muslim princess, he is sentenced to years of hard labor under deplorable conditions. He is offered a reprieve if he’ll convert to Islam, but Christianity is an unrealistic ideal he’s not willing to abandon, even though he fails to defend it very well during a lengthy discussion with a mullah. After a few years Underhill achieves some freedom of movement as a doctor’s assistant, travels to Egypt and sees the sights—the fabled city of Alexandria is not what his classical sources led him to expect—and eventually is ransomed and sent back to America.
The first half of The Algerine Captive is an amusing satire of American types and foibles, but the tone darkens as the tale moves southward and then overseas, a reflection of Underhill’s growing maturity. His impractical readings in Greek and Latin literature give way to hard facts as he delivers numerous lectures to the reader about the Barbary states: its history, politics, economics, customs, and so on, along with overviews of Islam and Muhammad fair-minded enough to earn Tyler charges of apostasy by some book reviewers. Underhill develops a new appreciation of the America that had exasperated him earlier—“A slave myself, I have learned to appreciate the blessings of freedom” (2.11)—and the novel ends with his hope to become “a useful physician, a good father, and worthy FEDERAL citizen” (2.37). He’s free again, but as Cathy Davidson notes, “The burden of this freedom is that he must now devote himself to improving the American society that he earlier saw as meriting only condemnation, derision, and evasion” (284). Like the protagonist of any picaresque bildungsroman, Underhill initially has trouble seeing his country for what it is, brilliantly symbolized in an episode in which he befriends a young man, blind from birth, whose eyesight is restored. “When the operation was completed, and he was permitted to look around him, he was violently agitated,” as is Underhill when he leaves home and encounters the outside world, but the eye patient gradually learns to adjust his preconceived notion of the world to the visible one. “It was an interesting scene,” Underhill comments (1.9).21 The Algerine Captive provides an eye-opening look at America during its first decades of independence as the young country tries, like Underhill (and like the allegorical figures in Belknap’s Foresters), to reconcile the classically inspired ideals of the Founding Fathers with the realities of governing a diverse population of rubes, phonies, and slave-holders.
The Algerine Captive is one of the most important American novels of this early period precisely because it presents itself as an American novel. In the preface, Underhill expresses surprise that novels have become so popular during his absence (1788–95), but is disappointed to learn they are either English (he mentions Radcliffe�
��s Gothics) or English-inspired (he implies those by Brown, Rowson, Foster, and lesser talents):
While this love of literature, however frivolous, is pleasing to the man of letters, there are two things to be deplored. The first is that, while so many novels are vended, they are not of our own manufacture. . . . The second misfortune is that novels, being the picture of the times, the New England reader is insensibly taught to admire the levity, and often the vices, of the parent country. . . . If the English novel does not inculcate vice, it at least impresses on the young mind an erroneous idea of the world in which she is to live. It paints the manners, customs, and habits of a strange country; excites a fondness for false splendour; and renders the homespun habits of her own country disgusting.