American Values and Romantic Fiction

AMERICAN VALUES AND ROMANTIC FICTION Milton R. Stem University of Connecticut One generally assumes that the driving impulse of American Romantic literature is the energy of Emersonian miUennialism. In large measure this is true, especially for the earUer productions of Thoreau, Whitman, and Emerson himself. However, by suggesting some relationships between three of the commonplaces of twentieth-century criticism and scholarship, I wish to propose that the center of energy in American Romantic fiction is not so much American miUennialism as it is a creative set of recoils, or antagonisms, or tensions between the radicalism of mülennial assumptions and a conservative, experiential response.1 The first of our commonplaces is the nature of the literary marketplace avaüable to the fiction writer during the Romantic period— let us date that period roughly from William EUery Channing's appointment to the Deanship of Harvard's Divinity School in 1815 to the Civil War. The second commonplace is the complex of definitions that distinguish the romance from thenovel, the tale from the sketch. And the third is the millennialistic separatism of American psychology implicit in the assumptions underlying the Declaration of Independence and the Monroe Doctrine and flowering in the assertion of Transcendentafist principles made by Emerson in his publication of Nature in 1836—a flowering that was to pollinate our great, national, Romantic, literary anthesis. Utilizing these simple materials of what is common ground for all of us, I propose to weave them together in brief outline with familiar patterns in the work of Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville in order to suggest that the concatenation of these elements reveals an unannounced ideological unity among our very disparate major American writers of Romantic fiction, a political substratum of much significance to us in our bicentennial celebration of our nation's fiction. Ever since Frank Luther Mott's History of American Magazines, 1850-1865 (Cambridge, 1938), and especially since Fred Lewis Pattee's The Feminine Fifties (New York, 1940),2 literary scholars have been aware of some of the conditions of the popular literary marketplace that led Hawthorne to observe in his famous 1855 letter to his publisher, William Ticknor, that "America is now whoUy given over to a d—d mob 14Milton R. Stem of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash—and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed." So much attention has been paid to the purple, lush, outrageous, and hilarious sentimentalities ofpublications with such names as Godey's Lady's Book, The Token, Pearls of the West, The Bower of Taste, and Friendship's Offering, so much critical attention has been paid to one satirical representation of popular literature, the rhetoric of Melville's Pierre, wherein the style and substance of the feminine popular market is characterized m that oft-quoted passage as "a volume bound in rose-leaves, clasped with violets, and by the beaks of humming-birds printed with peach-juice on the leaves of lilies," that we may leave this aspect of the subject without further elucidation. Less attention has been paid to the gentlemen's magazines. Theodore Greene's recent study3 indicates that the male side of this sexist literary coin is the perfect obverse of the be-frilled and furbelowed distaff side. The models of success in American magazines up through the early Romantic period all delineate a Ciceronian "Idolof Order," a being, who, though willing to be "elevated" by the fictive, the poetic, and the sentimental, left such higher, "spiritual" stuff to the finer clay of ladyhood, and who dedicated himself to the most noble activities of church and state: theology, ecclesiastical polity, arms, business, education, the law, and politics. One tabulation, skewed somewhat toward the clergy because of the samples used, offers the following statistics for the percent of essays about role-models in the gentlemen's magazines up through 1820: politicians (including soldier-statesmen, professor-statesmen, lawyer-statesmen, and business-statesmen) received 25% of the national attention; the military received 23%; the clergy (including clergymen-professors and clergymen-college presidents) received 22%; professor-scholars received 8%; lawyers 1%; physicians 5%; and businessmen 4%. It is...