The Problem of Population and the Form of the American Novel

Novels do not respect national boundaries but spread from many points across borders to form something less like a tree and more like a network connecting dispersed points of exchange. In mounting this argument in his The Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900 (1998), Franco Moretti calls attention to the relationship between the map within the text (its fictional geography) and the map of its distribution. Moretti observes in passing that exchanges within gothic fiction cover a much wider geographical territory than the exchanges that produce social relationships in the domestic fiction of someone like Jane Austen. But when we try to use a similar historiographical model to formulate a history of the American novel, we encounter few examples before the fiction of James Fenimore Cooper that respect our national geography. Indeed, we have to wait for Nathaniel Hawthorne's House of Seven Gables (1851–52) or Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) to find American fiction that seems to strive for a coherent, auto-generative account of the national community. On the other hand, when we look for novels that map the New World in a manner resembling the European gothic novel—a form that transports bodies and information across regional and national borders—there are plenty of examples to be found. What follows is an argument to the effect that the early American novel was indeed such a cosmopolitan form, and that, moreover, our great nineteenth-century novels had to grapple with this earlier form in order to imagine a coherent national community.

In our 1992 American Literary History article, we saw this narrative form as the precursor of the domestic novel in both Great Britain and the US. Our aim was to reverse the transatlantic trade winds that brought government and literature to North America and sent raw materials and popular culture back to Europe. In our current work, we have other fish to fry. The first section of this paper challenges that earlier argument by folding the Barbary captivity narrative into the mix. Although later novels by Stowe and Hawthorne appear to draw on the indigenous variety, or puritan narrative, as exemplified by Mary Rowlandson, the second section of our paper contends that, in formal terms, novels written during the period of the early republic come closer to Barbary narratives in that they imagine a community in cosmopolitan terms. In our third section, we show how the legacy of the Barbary narrative, or what we call the problem of population, makes it difficult if not impossible for the antebellum novel to imagine anything like the national community that emerges in British domestic fiction over the course of the eighteenth century. During the nineteenth century, paradoxically, British fiction also turned its attention to the problem of population, bringing it significantly closer in strictly formal terms to the American novel than to those authors Ian Watt credits with the rise of the English novel.

1. The Importance of the Barbary Captivity Narrative

The conventional genealogy of the American captivity narrative bears uncanny resemblance to the now discredited historical argument that our nation went from puritan settlements in New England to a secular culture of artisans, merchants, planters, and slaves. Having settled along the Atlantic seaboard, these enlightened people brought us out of theological absolutism and into a contractual (liberal) government that promoted assimilation.¹ While there is much to recommend an account that takes us from ethnic purity to assimilation and a unified national culture, the history of American publishing in the 1780s and 1790s will not confirm this just-so story. For one thing, Mary Rowlandson's narrative of captivity and redemption in the seventeenth-century wilderness, first published in 1682, enjoyed its peak popularity a full century later, marked by at least 12 reprintings in the last three decades of the eighteenth century. Of the 155 Indian captivity narratives published between 1682 and 1800, 115 appeared between 1780 and 1800, the same period when Mary Rowlandson's narrative was repeatedly republished.² In other words, reprintings of the...