As most of us learn in high school and introductory college literature courses, the central drama of early American fiction involves a resourceful man confronting head-on the wonder, dangers, and vastness of America. Natty Bumppo, the Deerslayer, roams the wilderness of central New York; Ishmael ponders the frightening endlessness of the sea; Huck Finn “lights out” for the territories. We are told that such men—and they all are men—represent the American quest for independence, space, and novelty. With a whole continent before them, these characters act on an insatiable desire, as Emerson put it, to build their own worlds.
Yet most early- and mid-19th century Americans did not experience their country as some trackless wilderness awaiting their footprints and plows but as a complex social landscape marked by continuous and profound transformations. Consider that the national population grew from four million in 1790 to 31.5 million in 1850, even as the nation embarked on imperialist adventures in Central America and the Caribbean, and roads, canals, and railways linked producers and consumers separated by great distances. Steam power, telegraphy, and photography altered people’s perceptions of time and space, and religious upheavals fractured the once-solid foundation of Christianity. Meanwhile, the growth of cities—vast, crowded, impersonal—challenged traditional arrangements of family life. This is the reality most people knew, and they wanted the fiction they read to reflect, and reflect on, it.
In his remarkable novel The Confidence Man (1857), Herman Melville put it best. “In books of fiction,” he wrote, readers “look not only for more entertainment, but, at bottom, even for more reality, than real life itself can show.” As a reviewer for Graham’s Magazine noted at the time, the result was fiction on a surprising array of topics. There were “political novels—representing every variety of political opinion—religious novels, to push the doctrine of every religious sect—philanthropic novels, devoted to the championship of every reform—socialist novels … philosophical novels [and] metaphysical novels.” Contemporary fiction thus remains an essential key to understanding the nation’s evolution in these years, and the exploits of the lone man journeying outward, his back to civilization, constitute only a small part of this body of work.
Our national identity relies on the assumption that America was once a more moral and just place than it is today, a fact everywhere evident in early American fiction. But the novels show us something we have avoided uncovering: characters that confront unhappiness, selfishness, and depravity, and thus unsettle the reader about the American past.
We have, in short, canonized certain 19th-century novels because they show us not who we were but because they show who we want to be. “We cannot see what we canonize,” for “the citizen secures himself against genius by icon worship,” wrote the cultural critic Edward Dahlberg.
This has occurred with many of our better-known novelists. Even Melville has the power to disabuse us of our rosy understanding of his time, but too many readers treat him as a beloved American archetype: the iconoclast who went against the American grain. Is Hawthorne’s troubling ambivalence about human agency diluted because he is forced on unwilling high-school juniors as a purveyor of the Puritan past? And what of the seriousness of Twain’s social critique, often mitigated by a reader’s embrace of the sheer comedy of his narratives? We need to understand these novelists not as cultural icons but as citizens deeply engaged in questions of their fellow citizens’ sincerity and their culture’s authenticity.
We also need to hear the voices of their contemporaries—often those less remembered by history—who crafted characters in response to the complexities of the day. In Catharine Sedgwick’s Clarence (1830), one city businessman loses his fortune and is forced to adjust to drudgery while another, a compulsive gambler caught cheating at cards, is asked to pay his debt with his beautiful daughter. Sedgwick’s narrative provides a twist to the Horatio Alger rags-to-riches stories that were yet to come. In Sarah Willis Parton’s Ruth Hall (1854), a recently widowed woman with two young children struggles to make ends meet in an urban environment defined by the impersonal boarding house and the asylum. Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig (1859) revolves around a free African-American woman in New England, the product of an interracial marriage, who is the target of the prejudice and cruelty of those who have hired her as a domestic.
In Caroline Chesebro’s Isa, a Pilgrimage (1852), a free-thinking woman who writes for a philosophical magazine rejects conventional marriage and moves with her lover to Europe to escape Americans’ small-mindedness, her trials as a female intellectual comparable to the Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller’s. George Lippard’s The Quaker City (1844) depicts in graphic detail the transgressions, sexual and otherwise, of wealthy Philadelphia gentlemen who meet secretly to indulge their perverse fantasies, even as their daylight hours are given to the accumulation of more wealth. In Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1857), a Southern, mixed race family tries to make a new life in a Northern city, only to confront prejudice and outright physical violence. Finally, consider Rebecca Harding Davis’s Margret Howth (1862), in which an idealistic socialist’s plans to create a utopia in a mill town comes to naught when the factory he is about to purchase as part of his community is torched by a worker disgruntled at its original owner.
No pastoral idylls on the Western frontier or the wave-capped seas here, or easily achieved dreams of rejuvenation in this brave new world. But 19th-century readers were more likely to see themselves in these characters than in Natty Bumppo, Hester Prynne, or Captain Ahab. Moreover, many of these novels show the dominant tension on these shores since the Puritans’ arrival: that between the rights of the individual and the demands of the community. The country’s deification of the individual, epitomized in texts like Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography and Emerson’s essay, “Self-Reliance,” did not go unchallenged, for many novelists criticized the persistence of slavery and racism, the denial of equal rights to women, the exploitation of the laboring classes, and the hypocrisy and tribalism of religion.
We might have a similar reaction, for the characters in many early American novels are remarkably like us. They are inward-looking urbanites concerned with moral survival in a seemingly immoral capitalist society. They are modern people with no choice but to wrestle with the complexities of their civilization, people who cannot turn their backs and escape into the west. Read Sedgwick, Fanny Fern, Wilson, Webb, and Lippard, and you’ll see America afresh, not filtered through reading lists or through a century and a half of literary criticism. You’ll see early America in its true glory: a society thrown continuously into turmoil by new technologies, new ideas, and new peoples arriving from across the Atlantic; a citizenry obsessed with the free market and accepting of brutal working conditions; and a nation divided by class, race, gender, politics, religion, and philosophy.
Philip F. Gura is a professor of American literature and culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Truth’s Ragged Edge: The Rise of the American Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
