I contend, however, that such a glorious scenario never really took place: while this may have been an era in which the unprivileged were beginning to demand a place in the political culture of the nation, and while the novel may have validated the legitimacy of the individual reader's responses, the novelists themselves were too conservative in their relation to the state, too ambivalent about the location of legitimate authority, and too uncertain about where their loyalties ultimately lay to have become genuine "cultural voices" and to have written powerful social critiques. Although they located the inequalities and incongruences in an American society that claimed to be egalitarian, and although they occasionally undermined cherished beliefs about reason and liberty as the girders of that society, these writers remained wedded to the rhetoric of the Revolution, and thus were still intent upon educating an American readership to be good citizens of the Republic. An unsettled and turbulent nation did not lead to bold products of the imagination, but rather to didactic textbooklike texts that tried to freeze values that were even then in flux. Unlike our own era, which has witnessed a revolution in Latin American and Eastern European fiction, corresponding to an upheaval in the political life in these parts of the world, late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America produced no new forms and configura-14- tions of the novel. Rather, we get not the novel as reflection of its society (one standard definition of the term) but a sham sermon to hold change at bay, mere imitations of older British forms. Indeed, the contradictions in the very term "early American novel" that I previously categorized mirror the contradictions in the works of the imagination to which that term applies.
If we examine some of the canonized novels of this period, drawing examples from four subgenres — the sentimental, the picaresque, the gothic, and what might be called the novel of nostalgia or reclamation — we can see the dislocations in the very form, shape, and language of these works. Beginning with the sentimental, and taking the "first" American novel first, we notice immediately that, like Foster's Coquette and Rowson's Charlotte Temple, Brown's The Power of Sympathy defends itself as a novel by claiming "to represent the specious Causes, and to Expose the fatal Consequences of Seduction"; further, it will "set forth and recommend" the "Advantages of Female Education"; but the truth is, as its publisher well knew, and highlighted as part of his advertising campaign, that the book was based on — was in fact an exposé of — the story of Perez Morton's seduction of his wife's sister, Fanny Apthorp, an act at once both adulterous and incestuous according to eighteenth-century law. Politician, statesman, patriot, and Harvard-educated, Morton was a member of the privileged class, a friend to John Adams and other New England elites, who actually defended his honor and reputation after his sister-in-law committed suicide. Clearly, it was this underlying scandal that fueled public interest in Brown's novel, especially since many of his readers believed he would provide them with previously unknown details. Clumsily written, with little attention to the nuances of character, and told through a series of letters that do not even bother to respond to each other, America's first "novel" lacks any memorable novelistic features; furthermore, it owes its enthusiastic reception and recognition not to any realized imaginative conception but rather to the historically verifiable events it purports to illuminate.
Brown certainly leaves no doubt that Morton (changed to Martin in the novel) deserves punishment as well as censure for violating both private vows and civic duty, and in this respect he indirectly challenges men like Adams who blamed the entire episode on Fanny's -15- (called Ophelia in the novel) supposed insanity. Moreover, as it promised, the novel does insist on the importance of education for women; its moralizing, didactic letters are just as often (if not more so) directed toward the audience as to the wayward characters. But as much as Brown may have wanted to defend the victimized, helpless woman, virtually powerless in a society where she was viewed as another form of property, he leaves too many unanswered questions about her possible complicity in the unsavory event of seduction. Ophelia may be innocent, even virtuous, yet she is seduced by her sister's husband and in her sister's house. There are no psychological clues to this puzzle. Furthermore, as for the other pair of male and female protagonists, Harrington and Harriot (who turn out to be brother and sister), they are unable to break free of their desire for each other. Their story is an enticing, sexually charged one, and cannot be canceled out by the author's moral intentions, no matter how often these are sounded. Seduction may well be a subject that points toward the gross abuse of social power by men of privilege and position, but it is also a titillating one, and Brown has not found a way to negotiate this dangerous issue satisfactorily.
Hannah Foster is more successful in The Coquette (1797), though once again we have a work of fiction based on factual incident, one familiar to every reader of the novel since it was a scandal widely publicized in the newspapers of the day. In 1788 Elizabeth Whitman (thinly disguised as Eliza Wharton in the novel), thirty-seven years old, pregnant, and nearly penniless, though from a respected family and well educated for the time, arrived at an inn in Massachusetts and, while supposedly waiting for her husband to arrive, gave birth to a stillborn child and then died shortly after of infection. As it turned out, there was no husband: Whitman was an abandoned woman, a victim of seduction, and in the popular lore of the day she became an example not only of compromised virtue but even more so of unjustified arrogance, since she had rejected what appeared to be two excellent opportunities for marriage in the hope of finding a husband with whom she could share both an intellectual and an emotional life. In other words, she desired compatibility, not merely protection, and for this she was vilified in the press. Foster attempts to retell her story from the victim's point of view, showing how limited were her choices and as a consequence how narrowly cir-16- cumscribed was her life, a life that, given her talents and abilities, should have been fruitful. It is Foster's point, however, that "should have" itself is an impossibility in a society that accords a woman status only as a male appendage.
Like Brown, Foster relies on the epistolary technique, and while she handles it more fluidly than he — the letters are more individuated, the style of each somewhat more appropriate to the particular correspondent — the narrative still remains leaden, often tedious. Looking forward some years to 1813, when Pride and Prejudice was first published, we can see how a master like Jane Austen handles similar materiaclass="underline" the wooing of a bright, interesting woman by a dull, self-important cleric, her recognition that such a marriage would be spiritual death, and yet the consequences of refusing what looks like, socially speaking, the best offer the woman is likely to receive. Where Eliza Wharton's story drags, Elizabeth Bennett's sparkles, but then the Reverend J. Boyer, surely as pompous as Mr. Collins, is far less amusing and far more self-serving in his vanity and righteousness; moreover, Mr. Wharton can provide no ironic observations on his daughter's situation as does Mr. Bennett on his. And of course, there's no rescuer like Mr. Darcy to save the heroine and her family from ruin, only a destroyer like Peter Sanford to cause it. While the differences are, to a large extent, generically necessary (the comic as opposed to the sentimental), they are also motivated by the radically distinct social visions of Foster and Austen; for all its proclamations of openness and opportunity, American society is far more limiting and restrictive for women. It strips them of choice, just as it denies them a meaningful voice in their country's affairs, and even in their own.