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| ISBN-13: | 9780252093814 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 05/15/2012 |
| Series: | The History of Media and Communication |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture
By JARED GARDNER
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2012 Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-03670-5
Introduction
The Literary Museum and the Unsettling of the Early American Novel
I
In 1799 the Monthly Magazine published a sketch entitled "Portrait of an Emigrant" that recounts a conversation between the author and a Mrs. K, introduced as a woman who "never reads, not even a newspaper." The description continues, "She is equally a stranger to the events that are passing in distant nations, and to those which ingross the attention and shake the passions of the ... politicians of her own country; but her mind ... is far from torpid or inactive. She speculates curiously and even justly on objects that occur within her narrow sphere." Evidence of this mental agility is demonstrated by her account of her new neighbors, a Frenchman and his wife: "he is a man of fair complexion, well formed, and of genteel appearance; and the woman is half negro." Mrs. K gives surprisingly precise descriptions, revealing that though she doesn't read books or newspapers she is indeed a close reader of her foreign neighbors. The man works in a compting-house for a French merchant, and the woman is employed as an actress in "Lailson's pantomimes"—a popular circus of the day. The couple has also taken in a "negro orphan" who is forever begging food and favors from Mrs. K. Prompted by the correspondent, Mrs. K investigates and learns that the lady was formerly heiress of a large estate in Santo Domingo, and that her fortune was destroyed in the recent revolution. They "have since subsisted in various modes and places, frequently pinched by extreme poverty ...; but retaining, in every fortune ... their propensity to talk, laugh and sing—their flute and their guitar." "Let you and I grow wise," the sketch concludes, "by the contemplation of their example."
But what exactly is the lesson to be learned from this story? The most obvious moral would seem to reside in the fact that these people have maintained a song in their hearts despite the revolution in Haiti that has turned their world upside down. But this moral is undercut by the fact that this ambiguous family of immigrants would necessarily invoke in 1799 an array of hysterical alternative lessons. The identification of the couple as French immigrants, the invocation of the black revolution on Santo Domingo, and the ambiguous racial origins of the woman (as well as the fact of the adopted African American child) explicitly references the paranoid fantasies of federalist America.
These racialist fantasies are found in the novels of Charles Brockden Brown, especially Edgar Huntly. "Portrait of an Emigrant" was published in the same magazine in which Brown, then serving as the editor of the Monthly Magazine, published a long excerpt from Edgar Huntly, advertising the novel that he hoped would finally secure his prominence as America's first professional novelist. Juxtaposed with the excerpt advertising Brown's novel of Indians, immigrants, and the making of Americans, the sketch at first glance seems to invoke, like the pages from Huntly, specters of racial and alien enemies preying on vulnerable American women. But its lessons are quite different.
If Brown had come to understand that the national function of the novel lay in scripting the resolution whereby alien and racial others are imaginatively collapsed into one another so that an "American" identity might be defined, he has done so at great cost to his earlier ambitions for both novel and nation, as his letters after the failed reception of Edgar Huntly would seem to suggest. It is this cost that the Monthly Magazine sketch seems to recoup. The "Portrait of an Emigrant" asks us to take seriously the possibility that Huntly could not admit: that the true meaning of the scene resides precisely in the virtue of this unconventional family, in their exemplification of perseverance, racial harmony, and generosity. To read the fragmentary sketch this way is to produce a very different vision of the coming together of alien and racial others than that scripted by the novel Edgar Huntly. This might explain why Mrs. K is defined explicitly as a non-reader: By reading the world around her not through the plots scripted by her factional age but through active and close investigation, she is able to read more "justly" than those whose reading has been schooled by newspaper—or by novels such as Edgar Huntly. The fact that Brown himself almost certainly wrote this "Portrait of an Emigrant" only makes the piece—and the difficulties in trying to reconcile it with Huntly—more interesting. But it is an anonymous "extract" in a literary magazine that, like so many others, was defined by miscellany, un-attributed borrowings, fragmentary sketches, correspondences, transcripts, and opinions on everything from the French Revolution to the ethics of snuff. And it is the motley and cacophonous quality of these magazines that authorized my own privileging in Master Plots of the novel over the contradictory evidence and ambiguous conclusions offered by the anonymous periodical sketch. In doing so, I was risking little. Few critics in the past two centuries have devoted much energy to studying the vast and disparate array of anonymous texts that define periodical production in colonial America and the early national periods—an output many times greater (both in terms of quantity and quality) than that produced by all the novelists of the period.
Magazine and novel "rose" together in eighteenth-century America. By the 1820s, the novel would triumph, becoming increasingly central not only to the literary marketplace but also to the national imagination and to the fundamental definition of what it meant to be an American. But in the previous generations, the outcome was by no means certain, and many saw reasons for serious concern in the novel form and the stories it told. It was within the pages of the early American magazine that alternative models would be crafted and to which a different kind of literary citizen would be drafted. Indeed, all the reasons why we have dismissed the difficulties raised by a periodical sketch such as "Portrait of an Emigrant"—because it is anonymous, fragmentary, and willfully obscure as to its larger meanings or narrative or generic principles—are precisely the terms through which Brown and others sought out alternative models to the political and literary choices that were being narrated and naturalized at this time.
The unanswered challenge of early American literature lies in finding ways of reading its ambivalence and contradictions beyond the critical dichotomies insisted on by the logic of national identity and reinscribed by so many of its readers: Either a text speaks for dominant ideology or it "subverts" it by speaking for and from the margins. This Hobson's choice is nowhere more prevalent than in the critical study of the early American novel, which so often seeks to explain away the contradictory positions occupied by many of its central texts. The contradictions that abound in this literature had historically been understood as symptomatic of the insufficiency of the nascent literary culture or of the instability of the individual author. More recently, of course, as this literature has been restored to its rightful place within (and not merely as antiquarian footnote to) the literary culture of the United States, these contradictions have been interpreted somewhat differently: Operating always under the threat of censure, we have been taught to see how these texts mimic the dominant rhetoric of the day while speaking their "true" subversive logic at the margins or in meaningful interstices.
Having effected the rescue of this subversive potential, we can now step back more fully to consider the ways in which some of these texts worked to reject the notion of the "true" voice that would reduce the complex weave of contradictory voices and positions to a monologic discourse. By reading the multivocal argument of these texts more fully in terms of magazine culture, and by recalling, as Jay Fliegelman has suggested, that the colonial and early national period had not yet fully articulated the shift from the belief that the author and editor were essentially synonymous to the notion of literary production as the product of the solitary original genius, we might now consider what remains in excess of the conventional explanation of the contradictory positions these early texts articulate. How could the same man who wrote Edgar Huntly also be responsible for editing and probably authoring the other fragment? In a sense, this book is my long answer to this question—or better put, it is my attempt to listen carefully to Brown and so many others who devoted much of their careers to this cacophonous, largely anonymous form. Like the majority of my colleagues, I had long used the defining features of periodical culture as an excuse to either ignore it or mine it for useful data to support my arguments about the texts I had been trained really mattered: the novels, the books. That Brown's "Portrait of an Emigrant" was a fragment, was possibly not even by Brown, and was contained within a text defined by miscellaneous and often contradictory ideas and arguments made it easy to push it aside when working on my chapter on Edgar Huntly. Like most of my colleagues in early American literary history, I have privileged the novel because ultimately I can read its arguments, and thereby form my own, more clearly. The magazine, by contrast, offers few clear or consistent arguments, plots, or conventions. But being forced finally to listen to the voices and ideals articulated in these texts, I have come to rethink many things I thought I knew about early American literary culture and history. Now, after a decade spent with such anonymous, fragmentary, and discordant voices, I am increasingly convinced it is perhaps time to start marginalizing Edgar Huntly—and the novel form in general—instead. After all, that is what so many of the figures we have identified as our "pioneering" novelists themselves chose to do at the time.
Of the novels of the early national period, those of Charles Brockden Brown have been especially privileged because they provide a vibrant predecessor for the psychological realism of the nineteenth-century novel. Brown's novels, for all their excesses, are recognizable in relation to a more deliberately articulated national literary culture of two generations later. Thus it is not surprising that Brown's last two novels, Clara Howard and Jane Talbot, which privilege moral "lessons" over psychological ambiguities, have been met largely with disdain or dismissal from readers who see in them a retreat from the author's earlier accomplishments. That this turn in Brown's career coincides both with his rejection of his youthful radical republicanism and his disavowal of his earlier literary ambitions has long been used as evidence to support narratives of apostasy or martyrdom. Deeply disappointed by the failure of his country to embrace him, Brown retreats into conservative morality, making one last attempt at success through formulaic sentimental novels. When these too are rejected, he abandons "literature" altogether, save for some tinkering with editorial projects. Shortly after the failure of his last two novels, Brown writes, "I should enjoy a larger share of my own respect, at the present moment, if nothing had ever flowed from my pen, the production of which could be traced to me." This statement, coupled with the abrupt change in direction of his post-novel-writing career, has provided potent evidence for the narrative of Brown's retreat, a narrative that has remained largely intact from the earliest biographies to the most recent. His "failure" has been read variously as telling of the inhospitable climate the early republic provided for original genius or of the inimicability of Brown's newly articulated federalist politics and mercantile career to the imaginative work of the novel. But whether Brown is seen as martyr to the cultural wasteland of his day or traitor to the cause of the novel, his "major" novels are preserved as ore to be mined by the gifted writers of the nineteenth century and the knowing critics of our own, while his nineteenth-century career is marginalized as footnote, coda, or moral lesson.
But a different narrative emerges when we reconsider this apparent renunciation of his novelistic career in light of its site of publication. After all, this quote is part of an editorial manifesto inaugurating Brown's new venture, the Literary Magazine, in which Brown stakes out the editorial position that will guide his stewardship of this new magazine and his literary career until his death in 1810: "I cannot expatiate on the variety of my knowledge, the brilliancy of my wit, the versatility of my talents. To none of these do I lay any claim.... I trust merely to the zeal and liberality of my friends to supply me with them. I have them not myself, but doubt not of the good offices of those who possess them, and shall think myself entitled to no small praise, if I am able to collect into one focal spot the rays of a great number of luminaries." Here he defines the position of anonymous editor: His job is to collect and reflect the productions of his nation, to give space and voice to the important ideas and productions of his time, to create what Brown terms a "repository" for the wisdom and genius of his nation. Brown goes on to imagine the reader's demand for the anonymous editor's identity: "'This is somewhat more than a point of idle curiosity,' my reader will say, 'for, from my knowledge of the man must I infer how far he will be able and willing to fulfill his promises. Besides, it is great importance to know, whether his sentiments on certain subjects, be agreeable or not to my own.'" This imagined reader will not submit himself to any publication without knowing fully the political, moral, and religious views of the editor: "'I must know your character. By that knowledge, I shall regulate myself with more certainty than by any anonymous declaration you may think proper to make.'" But Brown pointedly refuses to append his name to his declaration of principles, instead expressing regret that his name and his earlier productions might have the effect of giving precisely the "character" the imagined reader is mistakenly looking for. In the context of this editorial manifesto, his previous works, which had brought to their author a certain degree of celebrity (if not fortune), stand as the primary obstacle to his new project of defining a different kind of literary position—not as genius author of a novel but as anonymous editor of a text that is predicated on the disruptions and fragmentation of all the novel would make whole: plotting, characterization, and the authorial function.
Thus we might see the trajectory of Brown's later career in a very different light from that in which it is traditionally painted. Instead of a two-year novel-writing career followed by abandonment and betrayal of the novel, after Brown's last "major" novels of Edgar Huntly and Arthur Mervyn, we see instead a consistent and radical attempt to revise and reimagine the function of literature and the role of the editor in the new republic. This was not an experiment born out of isolation or retreat from a larger scene of literary production. It emerges out of Brown's own fierce engagement with the literature of his time and his deep firsthand experience with the politics of authorship, genre, and reception, a politics that Larzer Ziff has demonstrated was an object of Brown's critique from the very beginnings of his career. Implicit in Brown's late work is an extensive critique of the novel he himself had helped bring to life: the novel of the autonomous individual, the story told through one voice, one psychology, and bound by the expectations of chronology, unity, and the totalizing conclusion. Although Brown's critique of the politics of the American novel emerges out of a commitment to a "literary federalism," to borrow William C. Dowling's useful term, it resonates as well with a contemporary critique of the liberal subject and the role of literature in defining and romanticizing individual desire and ambition. And it resonates strongly and more immediately with the similar experiments articulated in other early texts we have insisted on reading in relationship to the history of the "rise of the novel," texts like Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette, William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy, and Susanna Rowson's Reuben and Rachel—novels whose strange features look less anomalous and "primitive" when read in relation to the periodical culture of the period.
The common point at which to identify the turn in Brown's career is the publication in 1801 of his two epistolary novels, Clara Howard and Jane Talbot. As sentimental tales, focused not on spontaneous combustion and Indian wars but on the niceties of courtship and the ethics of filial obedience, these novels certainly were not likely to appeal to those readers drawn to the excesses and recesses of Brown's earlier gothic tales. If anything, these novels seem deliberately designed to displease, and his readers have historically responded in kind, seeing these novels as a last desperate attempt to play to the crowd by borrowing the moral absolutism of Samuel Richardson and his American imitators. Yet the more relevant and immediate model for Brown's version of the epistolary novel is not Clarissa but The Coquette, a popular novel first published in 1797, and one that Brown, arguably the most devoted student of American literature of his day, most certainly read. In this novel Brown would have found a model not only for his last two novels but also for the editorial function he was working to define in his last fictions and in his periodical work of his final years.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture by JARED GARDNER Copyright © 2012 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois . Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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