The Novel

by Steven Moore

  There are two things wanted, said a friend to the author: that we write our own books of amusement, and that they exhibit our own manners. Why then do you not write the history of your own life? The first part of it, if not highly interesting, would at least display a portrait of New England manners, hitherto unattempted. (6)

  Deliberately echoing Fielding’s new “species of writing, which I have affirmed to be hitherto unattempted in our language,” The Algerine Captive, like Joseph Andrews, represents a reset of the novel, recalculated for an American setting. When Underhill visits the Harvard Museum, he is disappointed to find “the curiosities of all countries but our own” (1.17); his creator urges his fellow American novelists to start filling the museums of literature with curiosities of their own, for the “homespun habits” of Americans are interesting enough that they need not continue to rely on the parent country for material. The Algerine Captive is a prime exhibit of what an American novel could be.22 Unfortunately, copies were scarce and it rather quickly became something of a museum piece, for in 1822 James Fenimore Cooper wrote, “Any future collector of our national tales would do well to snatch [it] from oblivion, and to give [it] that place among the memorials of other days which is due to the early and authentic historians of a country” (quoted by Davidson, 291). It wasn’t until 2002 that a major U.S. publisher reissued it, right after the 9/11 attacks made The Algerine Captive relevant for laying “bare a culture clash and diplomatic quagmire not unlike the one that obtains between the United States and Muslim nations today,” as the back cover opportunistically but accurately claims.

  Even at this early stage we see American novelists choosing one or the other of the two roads that Western novelists have followed ever since the Greeks and Romans. In France, it was D’Urfé’s Way or Sorel’s Way; in England, Richardson’s Way versus Fielding’s Way – which is essentially Cervantes’ Way, except that the Spaniard traveled both roads: Don Quixote resembles the Roman novels of Petronius and Apuleius, while Persiles and Sigismunda imitates Greek romances. In the United States, the two paths might be called Rowson’s Way and Corncob’s Way – that is, mainstream versus unorthodox fiction – one or the other of which most American novelists travel to this day. By now it should be obvious which of the two roads offers the more unusual sights and attractions, but it’s equally obvious which offers more riches and fame: Charlotte Temple has been recently canonized in a Norton Critical Edition, while Jonathan Corncob has been out of print for years.

  Scant popular success came to the most daring and significant American novelist of this period, Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810). Trained in Philadelphia as an attorney, Brown abandoned the law at age 22 and moved two years later to New York City to become a professional writer, perhaps the first to chase that romantic dream.23 Insanely prolific, working on several books at once, he published seven novels between 1798 and 1801 (along with a lost one intriguingly entitled Sky-Walk and two unfinished novels). Brown was initially inspired by the works of English Jacobin writers, especially Godwin’s Caleb Williams and Bage’s Hermsprong, and his first published novel—a short fictionalized dialogue on women’s rights entitled Alcuin (1798)—shows the influence of Wollstonecraft. He must also have read German Gothic thrillers like Schiller’s Ghost-seer, Tschink’s Victim of Magical Delusion, and Kahlert’s Necromancer, for their influence is palpable in his first major novel, Wieland; or, The Transformation: An American Tale (1798). But Brown transcends his sources in this bizarrely original novel, a study in religious mania and epistemology set in Pennsylvania.

  Everything about this nightmarish novel is odd and unsettling, keeping the reader off-balance and disoriented, beginning with the veracity of the novel. In the preface the author blurs the distinction between truth and fiction by admitting “the incidents related are extraordinary and rare” but insisting in the next paragraph that they are based on a real-life incident (in which a New York man claimed an angel ordered him to murder his wife and four children). As the novel begins, the reader is uncertain who exactly is narrating—someone identified only as a “Lady” in the preface—and proper names are withheld for an unusually long time: not until halfway through the novel do we learn her name is Clara Wieland, and it’s another 50 pages before we learn her brother is named Theodore—either of whom could be the eponym of the title, for it’s her story as much as his. The pacing seems off, disjointed, as Clara admits: “What but ambiguities, abruptness, and dark transitions can be expected from the historian who is, at the same time, the sufferer of these disasters?”24 Parts of the narrative are rushed while others occur in slow-motion, and instead of building to a climax, it delivers a series of electrical shocks, beginning in the first chapter when a character seems to spontaneously combust. The diction is odd – stagy, sometimes biblical – filled with unusual words like “fane” and “flagitious” and obsolete verbs (“he hasted to the city”). At times it scans as Poëtic verse (“Why was my mind absorbed in thoughts ominous and dreary?”). Short, choppy sentences alternate with longer ones whose syntax is gnarled and clotted, with a preponderance of passive constructions (“Of self-defense I was incapable”). Occasionally it reads like a bad translation from the German. Chapters break off unexpectedly in the middle of scenes, or seem misdivided (any other writer would have ended chapter 23 with the sixth or seventh paragraph of chapter 24). All of these strategies brilliantly convey the difficulty Clara is having telling her tale. (The concluding chapter, which she writes three years later in a calmer mood, is stylistically smoother – and duller.)

  And what a tale the lady tells. Her unintellectual German father—related to Christoph Martin Wieland, whose early narrative poem The Trial of Abraham was one of Brown’s sources—becomes entranced by a book about an obscure Huguenot sect, convinces himself “that it was his duty to disseminate the truths of the gospel among the unbelieving nations” (1), and emigrates to Pennsylvania in the 1760s to pester the Native Americans. Instead, he buys a farm, works it with slaves, and builds an open-air temple (“fane”) on a hill to commune with his god. When Clara is six, her father goes up there one night at midnight and is mugged and set afire amidst “a cloud impregnated with light”—a weird incident never fully explained. After his death, Clara’s older brother Theodore takes over the farm, raises a family, and reconsecrates the temple to Reason. (He installs a bust of Cicero on a pedestal.) But he seems to have inherited his father’s religious mania, and in an imagined deal with his god to gain more immediate access to the divine presence, he fulfills his god’s demand for an Abrahamic sacrifice by strangling his wife and slaughtering his children (and an abandoned teenage girl staying with them). The maniac is captured and imprisoned, but he escapes with the intent to kill his sister (per further divine orders), but is prevented by a . . . uhm . . . traveling ventriloquist named Francis Carvin, who has been spooking the others for months with mysterious voices.25 Impersonating Theodore’s god, Carvin tells him the whole sacrifice thing was a mistake, whereupon Theodore commits suicide, and Clara collapses into existential despair. “I leave you to moralize on this tale,” Clara writes in the novel’s final paragraph.

  One inescapable moral is that religious belief is a form of mental illness; its symptoms are a desire to be closer to a deity and to accept any orders, as crazy as they may sound: “O! that I might be admitted to thy presence,” Theodore gushes to his god; “that mine were the supreme delight of knowing thy will, and of performing it! The blissful privilege of direct communication with thee, and of listening to the audible enunciation of thy pleasure! [¶] What task would I not undertake, what privation would I not cheerfully endure, to testify my love of thee?” (19). Theodore’s courtroom confession echoes the standard religious vocabulary of the time when he goes on to claim “my deed was enjoined by heaven; that obedience was the test of perfect virtue” (20). The parallel to Abraham’s willingness to murder his son because a voice told him to would have been obvious to any 18th-century reader, who would have been shocked whe
n Clara later compares her insane brother to Christ: “Wieland was transformed at once into into the man of sorrows!” (26), italicizing the phrase traditionally associated with Jesus (via Isaiah 53:3) to point the moral. When we hear today of someone who kills others because his god instructed him to do so, we automatically assume he’s insane, and Brown implies that’s how we should regard everyone in the Bible who claimed to hear the voice of their god. (Most of the “divine” instructions Theodore receives originate from inside his head, but one comes from Carvin, whose ventriloquist act recalls Unca Eliza’s in The Female American, suggesting that prophets and priests are little better than hucksters, if not deluded themselves.) In a lengthy letter on religion, Brown told a friend, “I really think Christianity, that is, belief of the divinity of Christ and future retribution, have been pernicious to mankind,”26 and Wieland is one one of the most forceful dramatizations of that view in 18th-century literature. But unlike Voltaire, who felt the same way, Brown doesn’t recommend Enlightenment thinking as a substitute: all the major characters come to distrust rational thinking and even the evidence of their senses when they realize how wrongly they have misinterpreted everything. For Brown, the world is inexplicable, and any belief system that tries to explain the world, rationally or supernaturally, is merely a comfortable lie.

  Brown favorably reviewed the second edition of Belknap’s Foresters—note that it and Wieland have the same subtitle: An American Tale—and likewise intended his novel to be read as an allegory of the young republic, which at the time he wrote was embroiled in partisan bickering and a religious revival. (Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.) Early in the novel, Theodore’s rationalist brother-in-law tells him that “to make the picture of a single family a model for which to sketch the condition of a nation was absurd” (4), but Brown does exactly that, as numerous critics have argued. For Bill Christophersen, Clara’s drama “suggests the larger drama of a republic in transition, beset by postrevolutionary conflict and threatened by her own revolutionary heritage,” and Roberta Weldon feels, “in the failure of this family it is possible to see a failure of the national experiment.”27 Reading Wieland leaves us with “a sort of thrilling melancholy” (3), for both America and the human race.

  Those same conclusions are even more applicable to Ormond; or, The Secret Witness (1799), though the mood here is more “a listless melancholy” than a “thrilling” one.28 It too is about the deceptiveness of appearances, and how “our limited perceptions debar us from a thorough knowledge of any actions and motives but our own” (27). While Wieland is set in the years before the American Revolution, Ormond is set mostly between 1793 and 1794, when conservative Americans (Federalists mostly), like their conservative counterparts in England, feared that extreme, revolutionary ideas from France would soon infect the American body politic. Brown’s friend Timothy Dwight published a jeremiad a few months before Brown began writing this novel warning of a French “contagion,” and asked, “Shall our sons become the disciples of Voltaire, and the dragoons of Marat; or our daughters the concubines of the Illuminati?”29 Something like this almost happens in Ormond: after 16-year-old Constantia Dudley’s father is swindled by a trustful-looking man and they move to Philadelphia, she faces a symbolic but also literal “contagion” when a yellow fever epidemic strikes (which did indeed decimate Philadelphia in the autumn of 1793). There she meets a mysterious man named Ormond, a member of the Bavarian Illuminati who would like to make Constantia his concubine. Realizing she’s too virtuous to accept that position—currently held by pretty airhead who commits suicide after Ormond dumps her for Constantia—he suggests marriage, and after she rejects his proposal because of his shady background and outlandish views, he attempts to rape her. Conveniently armed (like Clara in Wieland) with a penknife, she kills her assailant and decides to flee dangerous America and move to England with a childhood friend named Sophia, the narrator of the novel (who is telling Constantia’s story to an unidentified person named I. E. Rosenberg for unknown reasons).

  Less intense and bizarre than Wieland, Ormond is still unlike any other novel published in America before this. At first it seems as though Brown decided to take a detour down Rowson’s Way to portray an admirable virgin in all sorts of distress, “an angelic comforter” as she’s described at one point (6). But Constantia is not your typical romance heroine: most glaringly, “She was unacquainted with religion” (18), which is unthinkable in the genre, and in the end, instead of marrying a worthy man, she goes off to the mother country with a woman who returns her almost lesbian affection. Nor is Ormond a typical Richardsonian villain: he’s not a rake but an idealist who fought in the Russo-Turkish War and is filled with utopian schemes for the betterment of mankind; on the other hand, he raped a woman during that war and he loves to spy on people—he’s the “secret witness” of the subtitle—often resorting to disguises to do so, as in one instance when he dresses up as a Negro chimney-sweep to gain access to Constantia’s house—the first blackface performance in American literature. These unconventional protagonists exchange unconventional ideas about marriage, women’s rights, and morality—specifically whether the ends justify the means, as violent revolutionaries insist—and as with Wieland, it’s easy to read Ormond as a parable of recent American history and the the tensions of the 1790s, with Constantia symbolizing the young republic and Ormond the perceived dangerous designs of foreigners. (In 1798 Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts because of imagined people like him.) But the execution is slapdash. Brown wrote this novel at top speed, and there’s a first-draft quality to the writing and plotting that detracts from its interesting ideas. Christophersen calls Ormond “an experimental novel” (56), but it’s more accurate, as Paul Rodgers demonstrates in an essay, to call it an improvised one. Brown was aware of this, for in the preface (which he probably wrote last), he has his narrator explain, “My narrative will have little of that merit which flows from unity of design. You are desirous of hearing an authentic, and not a fictitious, tale. It will, therefore, be my duty to relate events in no artificial or elaborate order, and without that harmonious congruity and luminous amplification which might justly be displayed in a tale flowing merely from invention.” Pretending this is a true story and denigrating artful, imaginative works only make matters worse.30

  The most striking scenes in Ormond are those depicting the horrors of the yellow fever epidemic, which recall those in Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. Brown made more extensive use of that material in his longest novel, Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793, the first part of which was published in May of 1799. (The second half appeared a year later.) Essentially this is a coming-of-age story as 18-year-old Mervyn leaves the family farm and travels to nearby Philadelphia, confronts unexpected corruption, and learns to live in a world that is far more complicated than he had imagined. But Brown complicates this young-man-from-the-provinces tale both formally and psychologically. The first three-quarters of the novel is written by a Philadelphia doctor who rescues the yellow-feverish Mervyn, nurses him back to health, and induces him to tell his story, largely because in the meantime Dr. Stevens has heard some damaging things about his patient. Mervyn tells his story in two large chunks that take up the bulk of these pages, and then, surprisingly, takes over as author; he thanks Dr. Stevens for writing down his tale thus far, and proceeds to update his story to within a few days of his wedding. His story is outlandish (and too complex to summarize), a series of unbelievable events that even Mervyn admits “resembled the monstrous creations of delirium” (1.12)—and that refers only to his first three days in Philadelphia! Because he controls the narrative—indirectly during the first three-quarters, directly during the last quarter—there’s no way to know if Mervyn is telling the truth. (There’s no revelation at the end of the true state of things, as in Wieland and Ormond.) He appears to be open and candid, but Dr. Stevens confesses, “Had I heard Mervyn’s story from another, or read it in a book, I might, perhaps, have found it p
ossible to suspect the truth” (2.2, my italics: the author is signaling to us to suspect the truth of this book). Mervyn confidently explains away the various accusations lodged against him, but there are many unverifiable statements and contradictions in his story, not to mention many incredible coincidences. Near the end he describes himself (with self-deprecatory exaggeration) as “bred in clownish ignorance; scarcely ushered into the world; more than childishly unlearned and raw; a barn-door simpleton; a plow-tail, kitchen-hearth, turnip-hoeing novice” (2.24), and yet his first view of Philadelphia prompts him to quote a few lines from Milton’s Paradise Lost, and later he tells us he knows Latin well enough to attempt to translate a Tuscan manuscript into English. At times he speaks like a farmboy, but at other times he speaks with such rhetorical sophistication that a well-educated woman tells him “your language is so singular that I am at a loss how to answer it” (2.12). Mervyn believes he owes his eventual triumph over corruption his virtuous, candid conduct, and even if his story is 100 percent true, there is something calculated and/or delusional about his conduct that compromises his moral victory.31

  There’s a reckless idealism to many of Mervyn’s actions that calls into question both his sanity and the avowed motives for his behavior. Curious as a cat, he’s always poking his nose in other people’s business and taking it upon himself to improve their lives, which often backfires—fatally in the case of a Quaker family that adopts him during one of his respites from the city.32 He is duped into burning $20,000 (nearly half a million today) that doesn’t belong to him. As Sarah Wood argues, Mervyn is a Quixotic figure in both the positive and negative senses: he is “a republican Quixote whose thoroughgoing advocation of waning ideology collides with the materialistic individualism of 1790s Philadelphia,” but “one catastrophic blunder follows the next as Brown’s benevolent Quixote repeatedly misreads situations, mishandles rescues, and leaves a trail of devastation and confusion in his wake.”33 Mervyn also seems to have both a death-wish and mother-complex that complicate what is literally a rags-to-riches story: at the end of the novel, he is engaged to a wealthy, widowed, 25-year-old Jewess (he calls her “mamma”) whom he met in a bordello, though not in a professional capacity – a great how-I-met-your-mother story if he survives to have kids, for the first thing he tells Dr. Stevens at the beginning of the novel is that, because of “some defect in the constitution” of his mother, all of his older siblings “died successively as they attained the age of nineteen or twenty” (1.2). Mervyn is now 19. Understandably, he experiences bad dreams and “a nameless sort of terror,” which cast a pall over his success story.