Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature, 1787-1845 (review)

Begun as Gardner’s 1995 dissertation, “Alien Nation: The Literature of American Race, 1787–1845,” Master Plots investigates the complications of racial discourse intersecting with early political and literary notions of national identity. That Gardner’s university quickly published the study is impressive—and the work is both engaging and intriguing—but to note the presence of “race theorizing” does not prove its formative influence. The original title may more appropriately indicate the contents, but the book is important even if race is not the major foundation for American literature—and perhaps a little more analysis would convince us.

Gardner argues that race is fundamental not only for American identity but for writing itself, and certainly for American literature: “When the question of race took its prominent place in the discourse and literature of national identity in 1787, it was . . . an abstract metaphor” (184). However, this literary (and Constitutional) “abstract metaphor” quickly became a political weapon justifying both slavery and “Indian Removal,” and in these conclusions Gardner is most convincing.

Early writers presented “stories of ‘origins’ that imagined white Americans as a race apart, both from the Europeans without and the blacks and Indians within the new nation” (xi). Ironically, “issues of race were repressed even as racial rhetoric was deployed in . . . narrating the nation into existence” (xi). With chapters focused on Royall Tyler, Brockden Brown, Cooper, Poe, and Frederick Douglass, the ample evidence, plus wide and careful reading, makes the study compelling. The last two chapters comprise an intriguing reading of Pym and an always difficult reassessment of the well-known work of an iconic figure. However, Gardner’s evidence documents the complications of these racial, literary, and identity questions rather than untangling them. The omission of influential women writers of the period, including those who dealt with Indian and African “questions,” is especially troubling. Certainly Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Lydia Maria Child, prolific authors of renown (in several genres) played more “formative” roles than Tyler and his Algerine Captive (1797). Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie (1827) with its depiction of interracial marriage is not mentioned; Child’s Hobomok (1824) is noted, but her early Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833), which speaks to these very issues of race and national identity, is not.

Because “the literary history of the intersections between race and nation in antebellum America has important resonances for contemporary debates about national identity” (11) and, as Gardner writes, there is “a complicated set of American fears about the power of narrative prose to effect rather remarkable changes” (22), the study is valuable, especially as a history of—and a reminder to continue debating—these complicated issues of race, literature, nationalism, and identity that were birthed with the nation itself. Discussion of patriarchal influences should be added to the intersections of racial, nationalistic, and political foundations (and concerns) of American literature, but meanwhile, this volume offers a well-documented and lively reassessment of these issues without descending into jargon or repetition.