Archives of American Time: Literature and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century

2. ‘‘A Magnificent Fragment’’: Dialects of Time and the American Historical Romance

Chapter  ‘‘A Magnificent Fragment’’: Dialects of Time and the American Historical Romance [T]he story has a sort of expansive quality which never wholly fructifies, and as I lately laid it down, after reading it for the third time, I had a sense of having interested myself in a magnificent fragment. —Henry James, Hawthorne The first half of the nineteenth century saw large numbers of Americans begin the task of writing—and reading—new histories of their young nation. Committed to the endurance of the Republic, emboldened by the patriotic aftermath of the century’s first international wars, and troubled by the entropic energies of the market revolution, legions of writers set about filling in the faint lines of descent connecting the modern American nation to its colonial and premodern prototype. They ventured to write narratives of serial continuity linking the not-too-distant origins of their country to a much anticipated future that would feature a settled, secure, and permanent democratic republic.1 The first half of this century saw national historiography take root, the founding of America’s early historical societies, the consolidation of a post-Enlightenment progressive historiography exemplified in the writing and the person of George Bancroft, and the establishment of history as a legitimate subject of study for women as well as men.2 As history writing in all its forms came to embody the hopes and aspirations of America’s most ardent cultural nationalists, its fiction writers succumbed to this national preoccupation. In addition to an explosion of belletristic historical writing, this half-century witnessed the rise to prominence of one of the most enduringly popular of American literary forms:  Chapter  the national historical romance. In ways that have not been fully understood , one of the most consequential contributions of this influential American genre was its attempt to consider—and its magnification of—the idiosyncratic new order of time that had come to distinguish the texture of modernity in America. This literature’s diagnostic interest in preserving the feel of modern time anticipates social theory’s concern for modernity’s restructured time, and it offers a pointed contrast to the progressive historiography that Bancroft personified. Indeed, this interest is what distinguishes this genre (and the two others considered here) from past, future, and different literary forms. This sensitivity to time’s new character was flowering in unlikely ground. The most popular practitioners of the historical romance often appear to have been more interested in facilitating the orderly consolidation of a common national culture than they were in acknowledging impediments to it—which this new order of time most certainly appeared to be. From the standpoint of today (and as others have argued), James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine Sedgwick, and their lesser contemporaries sometimes seem to be struggling (against their own better judgment) to write nationally serviceable ‘‘from-to’’ stories in which the cycle of triumph and decline that classical republicanism feared, the potentially disintegrative forces of the Revolution, and the corrosive tendencies of technological modernization would rise and fall from view in orderly procession as the emergence of a national common time called progress neutralized in turn these threats to national stability.3 As far as these writers let on, they often seem to have understood themselves to be writing nothing more and nothing less than a fictional history of the inevitable progress of progress that cast America as its lucky beneficiary. However, their interest in American history required these writers to engage a vexed conjuncture ill-suited to being depicted as the seedbed of the once and future nation. In recounting the colonization of North America, the Revolution, and more recent events, these authors found themselves compelled to contend with the experience and meaning of a perplexing new order of time that included linear progress as only one of its aspects—and not necessarily the most important one. This experience of modern time—one feature of it, anyway—gets concisely figured in the famed preface to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables.4 In this preface, Hawthorne writes of a present tense that repeats the past while at the same time differing radically from it. He also intimates that the flexibility of the ‘‘romance’’ genre uniquely suits it to the task of chronicling this implausibly insistent feature of modern life—this ‘‘Magnificent Fragment’’  curious bifurcation of time. The text that follows his preface is a ‘‘Romance ,’’ Hawthorne explains, and...