The 18th Century American Novel: Part Two

In 18th Century England, a new form of literature was evolving:  the novel.  Epistolary novels like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela: or Virtue Rewarded portrayed women as virtuous creatures whose sexuality was bartered like a commodity. An epistolary novel was a novel told through a series of letters usually written by the primary character. This permitted feelings and reactions to be presented without authorial intrusion, gave a sense of immediacy because the letters were written at the heart of the action, and allowed the writer to present various points of view.  There were three primary types of novels:  sentimental, picaresque and gothic.

Pamela was one of the first of the sentimental style, although Henry Fielding's more realistic Tom Jones was one of his many books written in protest to Pamela. The term “sensibility” meant a reliance on feelings as a guide to truth, neglecting reason and law. The great emphasis that the 18th century put on sensibility was a reaction against the Puritanism of the 17th Century.

A couple of examples of the American versions of the sentimental novel are:  The Power of Sympathy by William Hill Brown and The Coquette by Hannah Foster.  Sympathy was based on the tale of Perez Morton’s seduction of his wife’s sister, Fanny Apthorp, an act that was simultaneously incestuous and adulterous by 18th century standards. The novel promotes education for women as an alternative to this kind of fate.  The Coquette is an epistolary novel that features a woman, Eliza Wharton, who’s seduced, abandoned and impregnated.  She gives birth in a hotel. The baby is born dead, though.  Eliza is found to be arrogant because she refused to marry anyone until she found her intellectual match. The story is told from Eliza’s perspective so the reader can empathize for a character that might not otherwise be so appealing. The sentimental novel, on the whole, failed in America because it could not sustain a lucid critique of American society.

Common features of the 18th century novel – “feminocentric” plots involving love and sex, seduction and betrayal were gender-inflected.  Men and women writers responded quite differently to the formal and aesthetic questions raised by the novel as a genre just coming into its own. They voiced, often in opposing ways, the social and political concerns of their time.