Dispossessed as he thought he was from America, Cooper nevertheless writes from within a comfortable position in the cultural hierarchy, and his novel is, not surprisingly, a conservative one about preserving a sense of original virtue, located in the social structure as Cooper perceives it. That structure is in tatters, an idea suggested both by the "divided house" motif and the "neutral ground," the territory that, as it becomes the novel's dominant setting, represents post-Revolutionary America, with its bifurcated loyalties and shifting values. In its essence, it is a wilderness; it is fraught with conflicting passions and points of view, violence and disorder. "The law," Cooper writes, "was momentarily extinct in that particular district, and justice was administered subject to the bias of personal interests and the passions of the strongest." In addition to lawlessness, moral indifference defines the terrain. Thus, the land can only be set in order through the restoration of moral authority.
The problem with the novel — perhaps a mirror of the problem in American society as Cooper saw it — was to find a locus of that authority, and the best that Cooper can do is to invoke the archetypal father — the father of Founding Fathers — George Washington. Possessing both virtue and authority, Washington accomplishes the greater task of setting his lands in order by healing the divisions that have threatened their internal security. As the only legitimate paternal figure in the novel, he projects a sense of control that the other characters find reassuring. And when he is unable to act owing to military circumstance, he does not retreat from his sense of public duty but entrusts the task to his spy, Harvey Birch, who, by his disinterested deeds, extends the Father's virtue to the neutral ground. If Washington is Virtue incarnate, Birch is Selfless Action come to life, since his motives are clear: patriotism, not profit, has led him to sacrifice comfort, reputation, and future prospects of happiness for his country. In short, he is a saint, and when Washington smiles upon him he is beatified.
For Cooper, in a time of growing materialism, which would soon run rampant with the coming of industrialization, Harvey's selfless devotion was the single most important virtue Americans needed to practice if the Republic was to survive. But of course that was an -24- impossibility, since it had already vanished into myth and legend, signaled, though Cooper hardly means it that way, by Washington's very presence in the book. Cooper tells a great story, but unfortunately it is an irrelevant one. Whether America had ever enjoyed the golden moment of Revolutionary self-sacrifice and transcendent devotion to the ideals of the Fathers has been long debated by historians, and there will probably never be a definitive view on the subject. But again, it matters little in terms of Cooper's nostalgic vision, since in any case it would never come again. Ironically, Cooper moves the American novel forward by looking backward, for if he had one thing that all the others lacked, it was a consistent, fully realized, forcefully articulated vision of a reconstituted American society. If only all its citizens could be gods like George Washington, or even just angels like Harvey Birch.
To conclude, then, by returning to the beginning: as it turns out, an argument can be made for the existence of an "early American novel," though unless it accounts for the contradictions, inconsistencies, and instabilities in the genre as American writers adapted it, it is falsifying the achievement. Originality of design and form would only arrive with great romantic writers of the nineteenth century; an authentic American idiom and a genuine "cultural voice" would have to await Mark Twain's arrival on the novelistic scene. And the American novel would not truly become "American" until the politically disenfranchised and culturally dispossessed of American society were finally heard in the pages of our literature.
Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky
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Autobiography and the Early Novel
Concepts of social value in autobiography existed for many centuries before the word was coined. In the Western tradition, the earliest known text in this genre, The Confessions of St. Augustine, written at the turn of the fourth to the fifth century, is only one of many that were accommodated under a variety of other names. These include Plato's seventh epistle in the fourth century B.C., the Essays of Michel de Montaigne in the latter half of the sixteenth century, and the Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 1760s. As legend has it, credit for the initial appearance of "autobiography" in the English language goes to Robert Southey, under whose name it made its debut in The Quarterly Review in 1809. In America, The Autobiography of Thomas Sheperd, the Celebrated Minister of Cambridge, New England (1830) was the first book to use the term in its title.
In contemporary studies of characterizations of autobiographical narrative, scholars like G. Thomas Couser (Altered Egos: Authority in American Autobiography [1989]) have noted the singular aspects of the word used to describe the self: its number, capitalization, and position as the only single-letter pronoun in the language. Moreover, there is its typographical likeness to the Roman numeral I, its phonemic identity with "eye," and its punning on the idea of a single point of view. Although its implied dominance, usually claimed by privileged racial and cultural groups, is now widely challenged by people outside of those groups, these singular qualities of the "I" -26- suggest its elevated status — an acknowledgment of the uniqueness and independent social standing of the first person.
In addition, many Americanists have observed a particular relationship between the nature of autobiographical discourse and texts like The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin that traditionally define the dominant American identity. Almost all such critics (including voices from the margins) agree that while autobiography is not unique to this country, the form embodies peculiar American characteristics. This idea finds reinforcement in the fact that, subsuming boundaries of race and sex, the genre has become the country's preeminent form of writing. Nor is this a recent phenomenon. As early as the October 1909 issue of Harper's Monthly Magazine, William Dean Howells, an autobiographer himself, and one of America's foremost novelists and literary critics of that age, spoke of autobiography as a "new form of literature," calling it the most "democratic province in the republic of letters." Of course, literary theories of democratic equality do not mitigate the disadvantages and sufferings of the daily lives of large numbers of Americans, but judging from the quantity of documents identified as autobiographies, it is not difficult to conclude that Howells's judgment was correct. For autobiography, in its valorization of individualism and its focus on the success story, has always been eminently suited to the dominant American temperament.
One of the attractions of autobiography for readers of popular literature is that, generally, Americans presume the absolute truthvalue of these texts and an authentic and direct contact with the authors through the written word. Such beliefs grant the form what Elizabeth Bruss described as "empirical first-person" authority, and set the genre of autobiography hierarchically apart from other forms of narrative discourse.
Perhaps for this reason as well as for our innate curiosity about the lives of the famous and the successful, from its beginnings narrative autobiography flourished in America. Euro-Americans began recording their experiences in the new land in the early seventeenth century, and in the closing years of the twentieth century they continue to do so in unprecedented numbers, as ethnic and other minority groups, formerly excluded from recognition in letters, make their voices heard through this medium. But even excluding these aggressive newcom-27- ers, by 1961, Louis Kaplan's A Bibliography of American Autobiographies listed more than 6000 titles recorded prior to 1945, and Mary Briscoe's American Autobiography, 1945–1980, adds 5000 titles to that list. In addition to the sheer numbers of individual selfwritten lives, these bibliographies demonstrate that the American autobiographical narrative accommodates itself to wide varieties of selfrepresentations — the conversion, captivity, criminal, slave, and travel narratives, ethnic, immigrant, colonial, and transcendental autobiographies, to name a small number of easily recognizable categories.