Freedom's Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940 (review)

One cannot help but admire the bravado of Laura Doyle's enormous book: to chart a history of the novel from its origins in the seventeenth century through the twentieth century, striving to locate a cornerstone structure she sees incorporated in works by many of the canonical authors in the Anglo-Atlantic and African-Atlantic traditions from this expansive period. Even a brief glimpse at the table of contents is rather awe-inspiring, as it surveys a range of authors, including Samuel Richardson, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Herman Melville, Horace Walpole, Pauline Hopkins, Catherine Maria Sedg-wick, George Eliot, Nella Larsen, and Virginia Woolf. Doyle argues that all these writers (and by implication any novelist) developed their fiction around a basic narrative that she terms a "freedom plot" or "freedom story." This story is one that celebrates freedom—political, economic, and religious—as natural liberty and attaches this liberty to a racial origin. For Doyle, this origin is necessarily racialized because it depends on an appeal to Anglo-Saxon identity: hence, her claim that "in Atlantic modernity, freedom is a race myth" (3). In this way, we see that the vastness of her argument is not located only in the range of her primary texts but in the book's thesis, which states that the Anglo-Saxon freedom story is responsible not just for the novel but for all modern history—the sublime, Calvinism, and psychological interiority, to name a few.

She begins by describing in some detail the "origin" of her freedom story, which she locates in the years leading up to the British Civil War and Parliamentarian disputes with the Stuart kings. Doyle says that in the political rhetoric of the early seventeenth century we see explicit invocation of Anglo-Saxon racialism as the means to make arguments against monarchical power, associating James I and his legacy with Norman invaders. She does a nice job sketching out this significant history, but I found myself nonetheless resistant to some of the claims from the start—and such resistance proved troublesome since, in many ways, this first section of the book is the foundation for all that follows. While she disavows historicism as her methodology (choosing, for example, to position texts from different historical eras so as to reveal the essential atempo-ral structures of their freedom plots), this choice causes some problems with an argument that ultimately is necessarily historical, insofar as it strives for a sweeping literary history of a form and identifies an origin to a structure that extends over four centuries.

A key term in Doyle's book, "race" seems to be used somewhat anachronistically. While she never really identifies or defines what she means by the term, she seems to use it in a modern (later-nineteenth-century) sense and then reads this definition back into the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century appeals to the Anglo-Saxon. While she says that early fashioning of Anglo-Saxonism is the "'ancient' ballad structure" for the "full orchestral and eugenist racist symphonies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries" (5), in many ways her book instead proposes that the music of modern racism is the basic structure for an earlier system. To extend her music metaphor, it is as if she were to argue that contemporary polytonality was the basis for baroque counterpoint. Second, while she makes a good case for the association between Anglo-Saxonism and early modern rhetoric of political liberty, she also allows the concept of Anglo-Saxonism to substitute for myriad other terms that are not necessarily synonymous. Thus, for example, because some authors explicitly attach Saxonism to claims about native and natural liberty or to the "pure Church," Doyle then presumes that any subsequent invocation of "native" or "pure" is inherently an invocation of Saxonism. This substitutive logic continues throughout the book, in which any use of "liberty language" (68) becomes synonymous...