In Respect to Egotism: Studies in American Romantic Writing by Joel Porte (review)

BookReviews 237 Joel Porte. In Respectto Egotism:Studies inAmerican Romantic Writing.New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.Pp. 316. In fact a collection of separable essays, In Respectto Egotismmakes many critically sensible points about a familiar set of nineteenth-century American writers, includingthe not quite contemporary Charles Brockden Brown and two other writers who, until recently, were marginalized in the American literary canon: Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Porte would link the works of these writers, not to mention his own various essay chapters, on the grounds that "American writing became a community project because the artists involved tended to think of themselves as pioneers engaged in clearing a common provincial imaginative space" (xi).He wants, in other words, to justify the ways of an American Romantic "egotism ," so oft expressed in the literature of Brown, Cooper, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau (from whose opening remarks in WaldenPorte gets the title of his collection ), as well as Poe, Melville, Whitman, and Emily Dickinson, to "a community project." One might suppose that Porte would find such a project most explicitlyexpressed in Douglass's slave story, Narrative,and Stowe's UncleTom's Cabin. But his is no "new Americanist" perspective, which might instead regard his position throughout his essays as a kind ofliberal-ideological fudging of more intractable social issuesin American history. Douglass's slave narrative, for example, is said to have Jeffersonian yearnings, being "not only a jeremiad ... but also a reenactment of that sacred political document [the Declaration of Independence] that is the proof-text of America's secular mission" (218). Porte further suggests that Douglass's text effectively expresses an Emersonian self-reliance in its demonstration "that the greatest force for manumission lies squarely in one's own hands" (228). And, while he acknowledges Emily Dickinson's apparent "singularity'' within the nineteenthcentury American literary canon-feminist critics have regarded Dickinson's unorthodoxies as signs of her resistance to patriarchal values of all kinds, including such canonicity-Porte ultimately finds her "always and inescapably the poetic child of Emerson," hence a fully participating member of a mostly male tradition of American writing (266, 250). · Porte, in short, wants to argue that these writers wrought literary and social selfdefinition , undoubtedly a more ideologicallypalatable versionof"egotism," primarily "in respect to" various but ultimately analogous forms of external oppression: the hegemony of British writing, the lack of clear strategies for exploiting native language and materials, the absence of a profession of letters in America, the 238 Canadian Review of American Studies stranglehold exercised by religious orthodoxy on the mind of the nation, and the inability to assimilate quickly enough the modem spirit in literature as exemplified by and embodied in European Romanticism. (17) One way or another, all of Porte's American writers work to imagine a distinctive American nationhood over and against a social opponent defined from above (British cultural imperialism, for example) rather than from below. fu Edgar Huntley, Brockden Browninscribesa dialectical attempt to shed "Euro-Enlightenment" values (a social explanation for his mechanico-Gothic turns), and through the novel's eponyinous character thereby conceive of (himself as) a truly first pioneer (and by extension , writer) in the New World. Or, in The Pioneers (Porte also discusses Francis Parkman's narratives in this context), Cooper wants to imagine a kind of unique, third-worldish cultural hybrid, a new American socius, in which the America Indian's sacred sense of the land exposes "the prodigality of white civilization and the pretensions of Christianity to superior ethical standards" (73). Still, as with the thematic connections between chapters in Respect to Egotism, Porte's sense of these works as expressing an American nationalist project sometimes comes across as only tenuously related to an essay chapter's main concern. What is"American" about the fact that in both A Week and Walden, Thoreau writes so as to approach "the eternal present," or to ensure that "his beginning would never end"; or that in his prefaces, Hawthorne's "language is indeed preliminary in that it stands only upon the doorstep of his inner sanctum, as all language necessarily does" (187, 138)? Without any framing of their potential social ramifications, such observations hardly revise older critical interpretations of...