Fiction: The First American Novel

Sources

Background. During the 1780s Americans developed a growing interest in the relatively new literary form of the novel, reading books by British novelists such as Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding, as well as European authors. One particular favorite was German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), the story of a sensitive, alienated young romantic who commits suicide. The novel became especially popular after an American edition was published in Philadelphia in 1784. Yet despite the rise of novel reading, Americans in general remained highly ambivalent about the novel.

The Question of Morality. Some critics called novels frivolous and immoral diversions and expressed the fear that fiction would lure popular attention away from serious and edifying works such as history or religion. They also distrusted novels because of their imaginative quality, a deeply rooted prejudice with origins in the Puritan

view that works of fiction were essentially lies. A more immediate source of this distrust was Scottish common-sense philosophy, which had an immense influence in early-national American thought and culture. Common-sense philosophers such as Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, and Henry Home, Lord Karnes, gave primacy to actual experience over the realm of the possible or the ideal as the embodiment of reality. As a result, they were skeptical about the realm of the imagination, which dealt only with possible experience. In their view, then, novels were dangerous because they lacked any grounding in reality and truth.

The Power of Sympathy. In January 1789 a twenty-four-year-old Bostonian, William Hill Brown, a younger half brother of composer Mather Brown, sought to capitalize on the popularity of the novel—in particular The Sorrows of Young Werther —by publishing The Power of Sympathy, a tale of seduction generally considered the first American novel. Written in the epistolary, or novel-in-letters, form employed by Richardson in his widely read seduction novels Pamela (1740–1742) and Clarissa (1747–1748), Brown’s book received little attention. Aware of the deeply rooted social and philosophical misgivings about novels, Brown had tried to address concerns about the morality of fiction by giving his novel a didactic purpose: “to represent the specious causes, and to expose the fatal consequences, of seduction; to inspire the female mind with a principle of self complacency, and to promote the economy of human life.” Brown used the main plot—the story of Harriot and Harrington—to convey this lesson. Harrington is a rake who plots to seduce the beautiful Harriot, an orphan without wealth or social connections. Although Harrington repents of this scheme and decides to marry Harriot, the news that they are half brother and half sister results in the death of both characters: Harrington commits suicide with a copy of The Sorrows of Young Werther by his side, and Harriot dies from shock. While Brown expressed the hope that the tragic consequences of Harrington’s plans to seduce Harriot would serve as a warning against such immoral behavior, the sensationalistic appeal of his novel undermined his stated moral objectives.

Imagination and Reality. Brown also sought to legitimize his work by emphasizing its basis in fact, highlighting this quality with his subtitle, “The Triumph of Nature. Founded in Truth.” One of the subplots in his novel was based on a true story—the local scandal caused by the affair between Perez Morton, husband of poet Sarah Wentworth Morton, and the poet’s sister, Fanny Apthorp, who gave birth to her brother-in-law’s child. Brown drew directly on this series of events, which led to Fanny Apthorp’s suicide, in his story of Ophelia’s seduction by her brother-in-law Mr. Martin and her eventual suicide.

The Rise of the Novel. Brown’s novel went largely unnoticed—owing at least in part to attempts by the Apthorps and Mortons to suppress its publication. Yet, as Kenneth Silverman has pointed out, the publication of The Power of Sympathy marks the beginning of a huge upswing in Americans’ novel reading. Between 1744, when Benjamin Franklin published an American edition of Pamela, and 1789, fifty-six foreign novels were reprinted in America. Between the appearance of The Power of Sympathy and 1800 there were some 350 American editions of such works.

Sources

Alexander Cowie, The Rise of the American Novel (New York: American Book Company, 1948);

Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986);

Emory Elliott, ed., American Writers of the Early Republic, Dictionary of Literary Biography, volume 37 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1985);

Terence Martin, The Instructed Vision: Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and the Origins of American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961);

Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural History of the American Revolution (New York: Crowell, 1976).