Intricate Relations: Sexual and Economic Desire in American Fiction, 1789-1814 (review)

We are accustomed to saying that Cathy Davidson's Revolution and the Word (1986) resuscitated the early American novel, dead since Cooper, Sedgwick, Poe, and others wrote past it in the 1820s and 1830s. There were pioneering scholarly efforts to revive it, most notably those of Lillie Deming Loshe (1907), Herbert Ross Brown (1940), and Henri Petter (1971), but the corpus was a corpse until Davidson offered us ways to restore it. Relatively recent books by scholars such as Elizabeth Barnes, Joseph Fichtelberg, and Julia Stern participate in a now-recognizable subfield (the "early American novel") and also symbolize the inclusion in many undergraduate and graduate American literature courses of novels that simply were not in print as recently as 1980, much less taught as "important" or "central" texts in any literary tradition.

Scholars are still in the early stages of pursuing the opportunities presented by a breathing patient: its transatlantic contextualization within the larger world of British and continental fiction of the 1790s and 1800s and 1810s; the connections between the early novel and antebellum fiction by both elite and popular writers; and deeper and more insightful investigations of early novels other than Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette, Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple, and Charles Brockden Brown's four major novels, which are the early American novel's warhorses. For it is clear that, looking back over the last 20 years, other developments in literary and cultural studies, most notably the academy's interests in, first, nationalism and the emergence of the nation-state and, second, the cluster of ideas centered on sympathy, affect, and subjectivity, have in fact directed and dominated our discussions of early American fiction. And that is as it should be. But, in time, I hope, the three areas I sketched out at the beginning of this paragraph will receive fuller investigation.

Indeed, one of the best things Karen Weyler does in her new book, Intricate Relations: Sexual and Economic Desire in American Fiction, 1789–1814, is to try to push our conversation about the early novel beyond Brown, Foster, and Rowson. Weyler shows substantial interest in novels such as Sally SBK Wood's Dorval; or the Speculator (1801), Samuel Relf's Infidelity, or the Victims of Sentiment (1797), and the anonymous Amelia; or, The Faithless Briton (1798), as well as several seldom-discussed novels by better-known authors, such as Foster's The Boarding School (1798) and Judith Sargent Murray's Story of Margaretta (1798). I was prepared to hear even more about those novels. But perhaps because of its origins as a doctoral dissertation, Intricate Relations is compelled at many turns to revert to the safety of Brockden Brown and (to a lesser extent) Foster and Rowson.

Weyler's goal is to decode the "intricate relations among sexual and economic desires" (23) in early sentimental novels. The phrase "intricate relations" is taken from Brockden Brown's "Walstein's School of History," and while he uses it to refer to our "relations" within a social network, Weyler uses it to refer to the discursive networks of power that constitute social reality. She works within a bracketed period, 1789 to 1814, that seems reasonable in its logic (from the Constitution to the Treaty of Ghent, from high republicanism to a partially emerged market economy) and substantial enough for a book-length study. Also, in a move I find more problematic—though perfectly in keeping with the current critical discourse—she sets aside non-novelistic fiction (e.g., Irving's Salmagundi) and the non-sentimental novel (e.g., Tenney's Female Quixotism) to focus solely on the sentimental novel. Countering the trend Davidson initiated to read them as subversive, Weyler finds the resulting set of early American sentimental novels to be generally accommodating to the tenets of an emerging, bourgeois liberalism. The sentimental novel, in her view, helped both author and reader negotiate the uncharted waters of this bourgeois liberalism, urging...