A Companion to the American Novel

Alfred Bendixen, Alfred Bendixen

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118220351
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Featuring 37 essays by distinguished literary scholars, A Companion to the American Novel provides a comprehensive single-volume treatment of the development of the novel in the United States from the late 18th century to the present day.

• Represents the most comprehensive single-volume introduction to this popular literary form currently available
• Features 37 contributions from a wide range of distinguished literary scholars
• Includes essays on topics and genres, historical overviews, and key individual works, including The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, Beloved, and many more.

Part I: Historical Developments

1

The Development of the American Novel: The Transformations of Genre

Alfred Bendixen

The story of the American novel is the history of a genre that has moved from the edges of respectability to a central place in our literary culture, gradually establishing itself as the most popular and most critically acclaimed form of narrative in the United States of America. It is the genre that scholars most often turn to when they try to define the distinctive characteristics of American life and the specific qualities that mark the American imagination. Study of the novel in the United States played a central role in the old emphasis on American exceptionalism, and it continues to play a large part in the current critical focus on the transnational and the global. Although discussions of the “Great American Novel” do not occupy the kind of space in public discourse that they did when eminent critics spent time debating whether that label should be applied to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) or Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), the term still has a kind of resonance, while virtually no one speaks of the “Great American Poem” or the “Great American Play.”¹ During the last 40 years, the novel and prose fiction in general displaced poetry as the genre that dominates classroom discussions and literary explorations in both undergraduate survey courses and graduate seminars. The novel’s place in the literature classroom and in our cultural life now seems so secure that it is hard to remember that it is both a relatively new form and one that resists easy definition.

In fact, it is tempting to think of the novel, particularly in the United States, as an umbrella term that covers an almost limitless number of possibilities within the realm of prose fiction, incorporating genres that may be fundamentally social and political or intensely personal and psychological in their emphases; settings that can embody the specific details of particular times and places or symbolic realms that exist outside of real time and space; characters who may stand for certain social or political ideas or exemplify the rich complexity of the human mind in all of its aspirations, yearnings, fears, and doubts; and plot structures that may ultimately affirm the triumph of reason in an ordered universe or embrace the chaotic nature of much human experience in an uncertain world. The vitality of the American novel and its special place in the cultural life of the nation stem from its rich capacity to embrace multiple values and diverse traditions. Throughout its history, the American novel has continually reinvented itself, drawing on the form’s remarkable ability to establish clear generic formulas for expressing certain values and its equally remarkable capacity to devise compelling ways of transforming, enlarging, or exploding those formulas into new forms of expression. If, as numerous commentators since De Tocqueville have suggested, the nature of a democratic society is continuous change, then it is not surprising that the novel has been the literary form most congenial to this dynamic spirit, the form with sufficient capacity for continual renewal and self-transformation to keep up with the fluidity and diversity of human experience in the United States.

The American novel’s roots lie clearly in early English fiction, particularly in that group of early masterpieces that seemed to define the range of possibilities for the new genre of the novel as it emerged in the eighteenth century. Daniel Defoe showed that a sustained first person narrative, a work of fiction pretending to be an autobiographical recitation of an individual’s personal history, could produce texts as substantial, as powerful, and as diverse as Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722), both of which explicitly deal with the transformative possibilities provided by the discovery of the Americas. Americans could certainly find much that was relevant in Robinson Crusoe, which focuses on the ability of a man to overcome years of isolation in a new world island and end up a triumphant conqueror of both the wilderness and other human beings. Equally relevant in its own way was the picaresque narrative of Moll Flanders, which featured the deceptions, schemes, and sexual misadventures of a female rogue conniving her way through the various levels of society and multiple men until she finally retires, financially successful and nominally repentant. The special kind of vitality and moral ambiguity central to Defoe’s picaresque would eventually find significant counterparts in the American novel, perhaps most notably in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March (1953).

American novelists would also discover that prose fiction based on the first person narrative of a traveling adventurer could provide a very different model in Jonathan Swift’s satiric masterpiece, Gulliver’s Travels (1726), which can be said to mark the beginnings of the genre we now call science fiction. Swift brought a new kind of moral skepticism to fiction, rejecting Defoe’s faith in the capacity of human beings to transform the world and their own lives, and ultimately insisting that fiction had an obligation to vex the reader as well as entertain and instruct.

The British novel continued to establish itself as a vibrant form capable of apparently infinite variety. Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748), one of the longest novels in the English language, provided over a million words in epistolary form charting the complex and ultimately destructive relationship of the virtuous heroine and her would-be seducer, Lovelace. As its long subtitle indicated, this “History of a Young Lady” focused on “the most Important Concerns of Private Life” as well as “the Distresses that may attend the Misconduct Both of Parents and Children, in Relation to Marriage.” Richardson’s fictional letters provide incredibly detailed portrayals of the inner lives of its central figures, demonstrating the novel’s potential for the kind of psychological exploration of character that ultimately results in the finest works of Henry James. Richardson also made the seduction of innocent women into a major topic of popular fiction in both Great Britain and the United States and paved the way for a greater emphasis on sensibility – on the emotional lives of characters and the emotional responses of readers – that established the sentimental novel as an enduring and immensely popular mode. After beginning his career as a novelist by parodying Richardson’s early work, Henry Fielding went on to provide a more fully developed alternative vision of what the novel could be in Tom Jones (1749), a comic epic with a bolder, lustier treatment of human sexuality and a greater focus on the social and economic realities of the external world. If Clarissa offers the tragic story of a woman who loses her place in the world, Tom Jones presents a comic panorama of English society in which the protagonist ultimately discovers his true identity and finds a secure place in a world whose uncertainties and deceptions he has learned to comprehend. And then the comic possibilities of the novel were further extended by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67), which provides a self-referential parody of almost everything in a book that rejects even the basic idea of plot in favor of a delightfully rambling voice reveling in its own inability to finish a story.

The novel in England continued to flourish and produce new varieties. The Gothic novel got off to a weak start with Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764), but proved itself to be a more significant form for the exploration of physical and psychological terror in the hands of authors like Ann Radcliffe, whose The Mysteries of Udolfo (1794) exemplifies the basic trappings of the form: a virtuous heroine as victim, a decadent nobleman as scheming villain, and an ancient castle as setting for a plot that relies heavily on entrapment and escape. In the early nineteenth century, Jane Austen secured the place of the novel of manners with a series of brilliant books marked by a subtle wit and graceful style, and Sir Walter Scott added the historical novel to the repertoire of modes with Waverley (1814), the first of a series of immensely popular works that made the past into a vital realm for fiction. The rise of the novel, as Ian Watt (1957) and others have noted, mirrored and supported the advancement of the middle class and the development of values congenial to the eventual emergence of both capitalism and democracy as dominant ideologies.

Unfortunately, aspiring American novelists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century faced some problems that never troubled their British counterparts. First of all, there was no centralized publishing industry in the United States. British authors who wished to publish would take their manuscripts to Fleet Street in London, where they could attempt to sell their wares to a professional who knew how to print and market books. American writers could find local printers scattered throughout the states but not a centralized publishing industry with well developed modes of production and distribution; these kinds of publishers would not become established in the United States until the middle of the nineteenth century with the rise of Ticknor and Fields in Boston and Harper and Brothers in New York. Furthermore, those printers who were interested in making and selling books already had a reliable and much cheaper source of supply. An international copyright law was not recognized by the American government until 1899, which meant that English best sellers could be printed and sold without the payment of any royalties. In addition to competing with these pirated editions, American authors were often expected to underwrite at least part of the cost of publication. On the other hand, American writers had one advantage over their British rivals, who could not secure American copyright protection and the accompanying royalties. British copyright could be attained by having one’s book published first in the United Kingdom, which explains why most of the major American novels throughout the nineteenth century were published first in Great Britain. For the most part, however, both legal requirements and business matters did not favor the financial interests of aspiring novelists in the new republic.

The lack of an infrastructure to support literary publishing by homegrown talent did little to prevent the calls for the development of a genuinely American literature that began soon after the revolution and echoed throughout much of the nineteenth century. Americans were conscious that they could not claim to match the cultural achievements of Europe, but took some pleasure in imagining a glorious future for the new republic. In these visions, the new nation was represented by a bright horizon while the old world landscape consisted mostly of decaying ruins. This focus on future development allowed and perhaps even demanded a reduced commitment to the arts. John Adams aptly summed up a common vision of the national priorities:

I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematics and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry, and Porcelaine. (John Adams in letter to Abigail Adams, May 12, 1780, Adams, 2011: 300)

In addition to portraying the arts as a luxury for future investment, some Americans felt a deeper need to explain why their authors had not yet equaled or surpassed the masterpieces of European literature. Somewhat surprisingly, many of these explanations focused on the lack of suitable subject matter for the American novelist. Given the rich diversity of forms the novel had already assumed, the argument that the new world did not provide appropriate material may seem peculiar, but it is important to understand the complex relationship between a genre and the culture that produces it.

Genre entails a series of conventions that either liberate or stifle serious writers, and these conventions both reflect and emerge from the values that define an individual culture. If both the subject matter and the form of a literary genre express the values of the underlying culture, then it seems logical that the authors in a newly formed democratic republic based on principles of equality and endless opportunity would have some problems adapting genres that emerged from older aristocratic societies based on the belief in a settled order in which individuals were expected to find their places in specific hierarchies. Writers of both prose and poetry faced these problems. For example, Dryden and Pope had established the heroic couplet as the most common and most powerful metrical form of the eighteenth century, which made it natural for the Connecticut Wits to employ it as the primary vehicle of their own poetry after the American Revolution. Unfortunately, the kind of order imposed and affirmed by the heroic couplet’s relentless emphasis on rhyme and meter seems more appropriate for defenses of reason and order in Augustan age Britain than for the affirmation of republican principles in postrevolutionary America. In a similar vein, the novel of manners requires and perhaps ultimately validates a highly ordered society in which specific codes of behavior mark both class position and individual worth. The United States of America not only did not have the kind of rigid class distinctions and highly codified rules of social decorum that Great Britain had, but its political system – at least theoretically – disparaged these trappings of privilege. Furthermore, Americans were often reluctant to admit to those class boundaries that did exist. Indeed, one problem behind the call for a national literature is that it was fundamentally patriotic in spirit and thus inclined to favor glowing affirmations of the best qualities of the American experience and not an honest exploration of strength and weaknesses, of successes and failures. To the extent that the novel requires a complex and multivocal examination of human experience, as Bakhtin (1998) and others have suggested it does, the form itself is inherently in conflict with the basic premises of literary nationalism and its tendency towards univocal simplicity.

British literary tradition also depended upon a certain number of elements that were not a part of the American landscape. An English poet who wanted to write about poetry turned out verses about nightingales, a bird that served several metaphorical functions. Like most birds, it both flies and sings, thus demonstrating the power of the poet’s voice to escape the mere earth. It, however, has two qualities that one rarely finds in other birds. First, it sings boldly and beautifully at night, a time when most other birds are silent. Second, it is connected by literary tradition to the myth of Philomela, a woman who is transformed by merciful gods into a nightingale after she is brutally violated by a man who then cuts out her tongue. Thus both ornithological fact and mythological reference provide the British poet with a bird who testifies to the transformative power of poetry, to its ability to confront all forms of darkness and give voice to those who have been silenced, to the capacity of great poetry to, as T. S. Eliot puts it in The Waste Land, fill “all the desert with inviolable voice.” Unfortunately, there were no nightingales in the United States of America, a fact that was pointed out to American poets who tried to write about them. When these poets then tried to write about mockingbirds, they ironically ended up demonstrating the problems of working with a landscape that was devoid of crucial details that had been enriched by a long literary tradition. Novelists who wanted to work in certain genres faced similar problems. Thus aspiring Gothic novelists in the United States had to face up to the basic fact that their country lacked both decaying castles and decadent noblemen, which are among the basic ingredients for this literary form. Historical novelists also complained of being shortchanged by their country’s comparatively short history. Although the early scenes of exploration and colonial settlement and the events leading up to and culminating in the American Revolution certainly seem to offer much dramatic potential, Americans clearly felt that they lacked not only the long history but also the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• A Chronology of the American Novel
• Part I: Historical Developments
• Part II: Genres and Traditions
• Part III: Major Texts
• Selected Readings in the Genres of the American Novel
• Index