Mortal Remains: Death in Early America

6. The Politics of Tears: Death in the Early American Novel

Chapter 6 The Politics ofTears: Death in the Early American Novel Julia Stern Too many tearsfor lovers have been shed, Too many sighs give we to them in fee, Too much of pity after they are dead, Too many doleful stories do we see —John Keats, Isabella (1820) Benjamin Franklin is most often identified as a model of success,whose life was a life well lived. Yet in his Autobiography there is a death to be considered as well: In 1736 I lost one of my Sons, a fine Boy of 4 Years old,by the Small Pox taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly and still regret that I had not given it to him by Inoculation; This I mention for the Sake of Parents, who omit that Operation on the Supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a Child died under it; myExample showing that the Regret maybe the same either way, and that therefore the safer should be chosen.1 This rather laconic passage is an interstice between two long paragraphs in the second section of the Autobiography. The first details the happy resolution of a momentary strife with his brother James, the printer; the second exuberantly testifies to the expansion of his "improvement" club, the Junto, and describes an event that in different literary hands might constitute the central episode around which an entire plot would unfold. By denying the reader the sort of affective detail that was later to be demanded by a reading public intent on dramatically introspective personal memoirs, Franklin delivers an emotionally withholding narrative. What these four brief sentences and the larger surrounding narrative inoculate themselves against isfeeling. And yet, literary critics consider this scene to be the emotional high-water mark of the entire autobiography. The Politics of Tears 109 Given the suffusion of emotion in the earlyAmerican novel, it is striking that the second installment of the Autobiography begun at Passy, France, in 1784, predates William Hill Brown's Power of Sympathy—the so-called first American novel—by only five years. But to measure by emotional impact alone the generic distance spanned by Benjamin Franklin and novelists William Hill Brown, Susanna Rowson, and Hannah Foster is to isolate a paradigm shift of amazing proportions. Franklin's is a tale of politically "enlightened" self-interest that fails to grope with the cultural meanings contained in an emerging genre, highlighting what I call the "politics of tears." Nearly every scholar of American literature writing between 1900 and 1970 ignored the distinctly political character of the fiction of the 1790s. Yet these works certainly were not mindless melodrama meant to opiate an undiscerning reading public desperate for distraction amid the pessimistic projections that punctuated debates over ratification of the Constitution . Popular novels such as The Power of Sympathy (1789), Charlotte Temple (1791/1794), and TheCoquette (1797) dealt equally with politics and death, yet were unacknowledged on both accounts by the literary establishment. These novels of threatened virtue and the human will went virtually unread until their rediscovery by feminist critics in the 1980s. Uniquely hybrid works, novels of the early national period pursued avariety of cultural aims. They were concocted of one part Johann Wolfgang von Goethe—featuring suicidal romantic male protagonists with pistols and copies of Werther in hand; one part Samuel Richardson—starring American Clarissas neither drugged nor raped nor wasting over five hundred pages, but conscious, consenting, and undone in the space of threepage chapters; one part English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft in their subversive briefs for female education; and one part continental melodrama of seduction and abandonment. Readers, it would appear, lusted after death. Conjuring the young and the restless only to dispatch them at their own hands or by childbed fever and, for good measure, blighting their illegitimate offspring in two of every three cases, this literature put morbidity and mortality at the top of its concerns. Between 1789, with the publication of The Power of Sympathy, and 1800, when, ending a bulimic burst of literary production, the socalled "father of American fiction," Charles Brockden Brown, completed his fourth Godwinian gothic, the national novel was steeped in sentimentalization .2 For eleven years, then, dying, death, tombstone inscriptions, mortuary practices, graveyard pilgrimages, and the fetishization of dead heroines constituted the most memorable tableaux within this narrative tradition. Far from exclusively being thanatological, however,these novels' obsession with death wasjoined at the hip, as it were, with tabooed sex, particularly the [3.144.187.103] Project MUSE...