3

THE SENTIMENTAL LIBERTINE

THE SENTIMENTAL tradition is central to American letters. For reasons that should become clear in this chapter, American writers chose, and perhaps still choose, to write either within that tradition or against it. Even when they wrote against it, such writers had to draw on the plots, characters, and language associated with the sentimental tradition in order to take issue with it. Literary criticism has attributed this appeal not only to sentimentalism’s overt political import but also to its ability to divert attention from the public sphere. Critics have both celebrated sentimental literature for demonstrating democratic virtues by creating fellow feeling among its readers and chastized it for debasing democracy by appealing to the lowest common denominator of the readership. It is deemed central in figuring the family as a model for the nation and criticized for titillating the reader with violations of family relations.¹ Indeed, in sifting through the major criticism on sentimental literature, I can find only one point on which most critics agree; namely, that our sentimental literature not only originated in England but also took root in the North American colonies and assumed a shape that changed the British tradition. In this chapter, I will argue that much of what makes sentimentalism at once so central and so difficult to pin down politically derives from the fact that it was reshaped to accommodate what I am calling the “British diaspora.”

It is with the notion of diaspora in mind that I will attend to what certain authors did to British materials to make them address specifically American concerns. Samuel Richardson’s heroines offer an excellent example. The British author sought to make—and to a large extent succeeded—them desirable, when he gave Pamela and Clarissa a form of interiority whose verbal prowess challenged the libertine’s powers of sexual enticement and intellectual mastery. By intercepting her letters and reading her nuanced accounts of the moral dilemmas in which he placed her, Mr. B comes to feel for Pamela much as Lovelace does for Clarissa. Unlike Love-lace, Mr. B renounces his libertinage after a protracted struggle that pits his seductive powers of wealth and position against the authority of her words and the force of tender emotion. Through this struggle, Pamela emerges as the embodiment of a new class ethos that measures an individual on the basis of the ability to express in words the emotions necessary to preserve her purity, thus her eligibility for marriage.² To understand how the American version of these sentimental heroines differed from their European prototype, let me begin by observing that the versions of Pamela and Clarissa printed in the United States in the 1790s were significantly shorter than those printed in Britain.

With the reduction in the number of pages to about one-tenth the length of the British text went the whole activity of writing, intercepting, and reading of letters that comprises the action of these novels. Stripped of their literariness, the American editions induce us to admire neither Pamela’s literacy, nor Clarissa’s fine sense of social decorum, nor either heroine’s exquisite awareness of sexual propriety.With its epistolary dimension gone, the novel leaves us with the impolitic truth that impermissible desire is perfectly natural in a male so long as it is aimed at a woman he can eventually marry. Resembling the redactions of Richardson’s novels in this respect, the overwhelming majority of the seduction stories appearing in American magazines during the 1790s tell us little about the heroine’s unique interiority or why she, above all others, has become the object of libertine desire. Absolutely nothing seems to distinguish her from any other woman. But the minute we take this difference with the British text to heart as central to the American appeal of these stories, the lack of a literary interiority that characterizes the American heroine affords a clear sense of sentimentalism’s appeal in the new United States. With the focus no longer on the exchange of letters and who reads what or by what means, we have to assume that the bare-bones plots dealing only with the vicissitudes of the heroine’s body spoke specifically to the interests of an American readership. Let me suggest how.

The British diaspora in America was made up of a large number of partial families, transplanted second sons, as well as a disproportionately large ratio of single men to unmarried women who immigrated to America under a variety of contracts and conditions.³ As a result, during and immediately following the very substantial emigrations from Britain from the 1750s to the 1770s, and again after 1781, there was a sizable population of fractured and makeshift families. To this should be added the many families who arrived in America intact only to be broken apart by disease, war, or economic deprivations. Nor can we ignore the great number of Africans brought to America as slaves and prohibited from forming families. In this environment, it is hardly surprising that readers of the late colonial period and early republic embraced fiction that dealt with the problem of broken families. Seduction narratives offered the perfect means to convert European sentimentalism into narratives that set up and resolved precisely this problem.

To understand the appeal of American sentimentalism, we must consider why, as Cathy Davidson has noted, the plots and subplots of most sentimental fiction in America—more than half of the novels of the early national period alone—were stories of seduction.⁴ The same readers who embraced boiled-down versions of Richardson’s novels were drawn to such homegrown seduction narratives as The Power of Sympathy, Amelia, and The Coquette. Charlotte Temple, a British transplant, garnered tepid praise when first published in England only to become a best-seller when reprinted in the United States. Such was the American demand for seduction narratives that even the distinguished monthlies of the period printed serial installments of novels and innumerable short stories dealing with seduction. ⁵ One cannot overstate the redundancy of these narratives. Whether British or American in origin, artful or banal, this fiction invariably featured the same array of cruel libertines, foolish coquettes, heartbroken parents, ruined women, stillborn babies, and destinies misshapen by desire. Indeed, the fact that seduction is such an of trepeated story with only minor variations seems to be precisely the point. To explain this virtually limitless tolerance for repetition, I will first look briefly at the seduction stories that appeared in popular magazines published during the early republic. These stories set out to play on the readership’s interest in sex, but that, I believe, was only an enticement, not the chief source of their extraordinary appeal. That appeal is owing to the machinations of the libertine, I will argue, as he disrupts the exchange of women that maintained the integrity of large landholdings and preserved patrilineage.

On this basis, the libertine might have been considered subversive, were it not for the fact that these stories associate the destruction of the patriarch with the wrong kind of emotion. Indeed, a longing for a reconstructed family with a father at its head characterizes American sentimentalism to this day.⁶ No single story adequately explained where, on the one hand, the rules for exchanging women could be safely bent or even broken and where, on the other hand, they had to be obeyed lest the entire system of exchange between men come to an end. Nor did any single seduction story provide adequate compensation for the feeling of loss that attends the rupture of the family line. The characteristic lack of such a resolution tells us that the point is to leave the reader with a keen sense of loss and the desire to see the family remade. Seduction stories thus offered both British and American readerships experiments in imagining who could in fact marry whom. At stake in these experiments was the basis of civil society—the rules for exchanging women—that constituted kinship relations between men. It only makes sense that the longing for such a community should be especially strong in the diaspora, which is arguably held together by precisely such longing.

In England, the disintegration of the family provided grounds for imagining an expanded elite along the lines that Locke spelled out in his Second Treatise of Government. Thus Clarissa made the reader feel poignantly the absence of the kind of man who valued the heroine for her qualities of mind and emotion rather than the property she brought with her to the marriage market. The two male characters who do value her in sentimental terms—Belford and her cousin, ColonelMorden—are powerless to protect her and in this respect give the reader a clear sense of what to yearn for. Locke argued that such an affiliation of paternal men was preferred to the alternative of a patriarchal society, where power and property descended according to the principle of primogeniture.

American seduction stories suggest that what is needed is the person who can perform as the good father, no blood relationship required. The difference may appear slight, but as early as 1680 Locke well understood it when he wrote The Second Treatise of Government. His chapter entitled “Of Paternal Authority” specifies that if the head of an English household does not raise his son to be a citizen like his father, that parent forfeits his right as a parent, and some substitute should be sought. This is the same logic of an expanding ruling class that prompts Richardson to plant the suggestion that Colonel Morden under other circumstances could take the place of Clarissa’s father. It is significant that when Locke comes to imagine what form of paternal power will work as a substitute, he thinks of British North America: “in those parts of America, . . . when the Husband and Wife part, which happens frequently, the Children are all left to the Mother, follow her, and are wholly under her Care and Provision.”⁷ Here, Locke imaginatively abandons lineage and argues that to the person who fills the role of father by nourishing and educating children should go the authority of the father over both them and their property. Sentimental fiction written in the United States used the seduction story not only to produce intense feeling for the family—the conviction that the individual was vulnerable without one—but also to direct that feeling at a new kind of family.

Seduce and Reform

We can see the American family emerge in and through the small differences among the body of seduction narratives published during the early republic. Between 1789 and 1796, the Massachusetts Magazine alone published well over one hundred stories, letters, and poems dealing with seduction. The formal variations are as few and predictable as the stories are diverse in topical material and uneven in literary quality. I want to consider briefly a pair of seduction stories that appeared in two successive issues of the Massachusetts Magazine, each of which leads us to expect that virtue will triumph over the lustful machinations of the libertine only to disappoint those expectations. In “Lothario: or, the Accomplished Villain,” a libertine entices his victim to flee her father’s home for London. For attempting to rescue her, the heroine’s father is put to death with a handkerchief that his daughter’s seducer has infected with smallpox.⁸ The heroine and her mother soon follow the father to the grave, her brothers are thrown into jail, and “in less than six months the whole family were no more” (445). In stories written in the United States, the daughter’s seduction often brings ruin to her entire family.

In the other stories imported from England, however, the daughter’s seduction does not invite such dire consequences. While such stories were relatively rare in England, they loom large in American magazines, indicating an American appetite for this variant. In the very popular “Innocent Simplicity Betrayed,” published in the same magazine the month after “Lo-thario” appeared and subsequently reprinted by two other American magazines, the virtuous daughter of Venoni flees her father’s home in Italy for England with Sir Edward, who is cast in the role of the libertine.⁹ Like the father of “Lothario,” Venoni pursues his daughter to London, where he supports himself as a street musician. In failing health, the heroine hears his melodies, summons him to her rooms, and reunites with her father. Caught in the act, her seducer not only asks the father for the hand of the woman betrayed, but also follows through on the marriage, which miraculously mends her health and brings prosperity to an entire valley of Italian farms and villages. In contrast to what might be considered the prototype of this kind of narrative, Richardson’s Clarissa, these heroines display little of the sensibility that might challenge a libertine’s desire for mastery and provoke a reader’s admiration. The daughter of Venoni may appreciate music and dislike the idea of an arranged marriage to the churlish man her father originally selected for her, but the story does not explain why she should be rewarded for succumbing to her desires; the same act on the part of the heroine in “Lothario” and indeed in many other stories would have spelled the ruin of her entire family. That the girl who runs off with the libertine may bring prosperity rather than misery to herself and her family indicates that something beside her lack of sexual restraint determines the outcome of this kind of narrative.

Some stories in both categories suggest that a girl’s lack of education made her vulnerable to the libertine’s wiles. In these, the daughter of a tenant farmer or a girl of simple tastes fails to understand the ways of the world.¹⁰ But those who might rush to the conclusion that literacy emerges as a virtue in and of itself, as it does in the English tradition, must confront the fact that for all the stories in which the lack of a proper education delivers the heroine over to a libertine, there are a nearly equal number in which an education provides no protection from seduction at all.¹¹ Sincethere is in fact no rule of sexual conduct in one story that is not overturned by that of another, I want to turn our attention to what—if neither her virtue nor her education—is the basis of the appeal that draws the libertine to his victim.

American seduction stories are not as concerned as their British counter-parts to stage class conflict as a battle of the sexes, a battle that appears to vanish with each successful marriage. Novels by Richardson or Austen suggest that whether or not a woman might achieve for her family the benefits usually reserved for those of lineage, property, and rank depends entirely on her self-control, but American seduction stories do not share this preoccupation. These stories are primarily concerned with how a man acquires a woman, from whom, and under what conditions, far more than they care about how a woman captures the heart and estate of a well-born man. Women in these American stories are the unvarnished medium for carrying on a relationship among men. A review of the stories reprinted from British sources and selected for republication in American magazines suggests that they were chosen precisely because they do not feature a feisty heroine in the Richardsonian mold but instead focus on the kinds of deals fathers might cut with their daughters’ seducers. One such story, “The Duellist and the Libertine Reclaimed,” has a libertine seduce the daughter of a man who is not his equal economically but just someone “whose fortune raised him above dependence.”¹² The heroine’s brother, a soldier, challenges the libertine only to have the duel quashed by a wise old officer, whose speech inspires the would-be duelists to break into tears and embrace. As if in recognition of their common manhood, the libertine asks the father for the hand of his daughter. Another story finds the libertine simply overcome by “shame and remorse” when caught in bed with his tenant’s daughter.¹³ He, too, promptly asks the girl’s father for the hand of the daughter and proceeds to marry the woman in an act that flies in the face of the rules of kinship governed by blood and rank. That these British stories were printed and reprinted in America in the late 1780s and 1790s alongside those homegrown seduction stories in which the daughter’s ruin spelled that of her family tells me that together the two kinds of narrative identify precisely what was at stake in refiguring the libertine in America.

I would like to consider what single statement the two narratives make as they combine in William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy, one of the first novels to be both written and published in America.¹⁴ One can describe this novel as a seduction story with two interpolated tales of seduction, all three plots of which combine to dramatize how the machinery of libertinage transformed kinship relations. The main plot of Brown’s novel features a confessed libertine, young Harrington, as he sets about to seduce the orphaned heroine, Harriot. The fact that she lacks a father means that Harriot has no one to give her in marriage, which in turndenies Harrington someone with whom to make the exchange. Under the prevailing system of British marriage rules, only the father or his surrogate can give the woman away. “I suppose you will be ready to ask, why, if I love Harriot, I do not marry her,” her would-be seducer asks of his confidant, “But who shall I marry? That is the question. Harriot has no father—no mother—neither is there aunt, cousin, or kindred of any degree who claim any kind of relationship to her.” Harrington goes on to answer his own question: “I am not so much of a republican as formally to wed any person of this class.”¹⁵ Had Harrington’s son carried out the seduction, the novel might have turned out to be more like a Richardsonian novel focusing on the private thoughts of the libertine and an unfortunate woman. But this early American novel ultimately refuses to resolve the conflict between men of different ranks by translating that conflict into one between seducer and his steadfastly virtuous victim. Young Harrington decides to forgo seducing the woman and proposes marriage instead, only to have his father prohibit the union. He does so on grounds that Harriot happens to be the illicit daughter of a woman whom the elder Harrington had seduced many years earlier. Thus her father is perhaps the only man with whom the younger Harrington cannot enter into the kind of exchange that would expand the kin group, because that man is none other than his own father as well. Young Harrington’s father cannot make a deal with himself. Having set up rank, property, and lineage as the basis for establishing kinship relations, the tale proceeds to reject each.

Two interpolated seduction stories reinforce in revealing ways the cultural logic of the main Harrington plot. As self-contained stories nestled within The Power of Sympathy, they tell readers how to read the novel in relation to the short stories they encountered in the popular magazines of the period. In a story whose incest plot echoes the main narrative, a seduced Ophelia delivers a child whom the narrator describes as “a child, at once the son and nephew of Martin” (38). This plot condemns that act of incest, not because incest is a crime in and of itself, but because it constitutes “a severe mortification to the proud spirit of Shepherd, the father of Ophelia” (38). So, too, in the case of the second interpolated tale the heroine’s father is the real victim of her seduction. With his daughter seduced and her betrothed having committed suicide, thereby causing the woman herself to go mad, her father declares, “Is not [the libertine] cause of my woe, a melancholy instance of the baleful art of the SEDUCER? . . . They have taken away my staff in my old age” (52). By giving the father this opportunity to lament his own emasculation, Brown makes the point that seduction is first and foremost a disruption of relations of exchange between men. Though the senior Harrington is himself a libertine, the inference is that Brown’s readers would have considered him the major victim of libertinage. His son’s suicide upon discovering his blood ties to Harriot spells the doom of the Harrington name.

Despite the extinction of the male line, however, The Power of Sympathy eventually reconstitutes the Harrington family through the daughter’s marriage to her brother’s confidant and counselor. In sharp contrast to the three seduction tales comprising the body of the novel, Worthy conducts his courtship of Myra through letters. While obviously a man with considerable leisure time on his hands, his taste in literature distinguishes Worthy from the other men in the story. This taste manifests itself in a capacity to feel. It also allows him to recognize in Myra’s fine embroidery the taste of a woman who is his feminine counterpart. As he explains in a letter to her, “Removed as I am, from the amiable object of my tenderest affection, I have nothing to do but to admire this offspring of industry and art” (31). It is in and through their mutual taste as conveyed through their exchange of letters that a new and more worthy family subsumes and transforms an earlier basis for family relations. Indeed, the reader is offered the exchange of letters between Worthy and Myra as something on the order of a written contract that puts an end to the repetition of seduction that all but wiped out the Harrington line. This resolution seems to indicate that the unregulated desire of the libertine poses a threat to patrilineage in the new United States.

But if this is so, why do we encounter crueler and more abusive libertines as well as reformed and more penitent libertines in the fiction of the period than perhaps any other character type? Given that seduction stories were not only printed in magazines of the early republic but embedded in the novels of that period as well, it does not require a great leap of imagination to understand how seduction stories worked to displace a British ideal of the family.¹⁶ In serving this purpose, the libertine underwent important changes as well.

Let us next consider what happened to this stock figure as British seduction stories were combined with American authored stories published side by side in such popular magazines as the Massachusetts Review, the Philadelphia Minerva, the New York Magazine or Literary Repository, and the Columbian Magazine and incorporated as well into the novels of the early republic.¹⁷ Where Richardson situated Mr. B and Lovelace within a finely calibrated social and economic grid, the origins of the American libertines are characteristically obscured. We know exactly where Mr. B’s money comes from, and we meet his sister who has married well in terms of rank. By contrast, the American libertine tends to be a man of some breeding who comes from a family of some property. In the manner characteristic of a second son, he is sometimes forced to take a commission in the army. Most often he has leisure time in which to pursue his sexual inclinations, but his lack of income invariably prevents him from translating those inclinations into marriage. Major Sanford in The Coquette sums up the situation nicely. Although he has taken a fancy to Eliza, he is “much courted and caressed” by Mr. Lawrence, “a man of large property,” who, Sanford reports, “intend[s] to shackle me in the bonds of matrimony.”¹⁸ Does this not sound as if Sanford were in danger of being trapped into marriage with Lawrence? The fact that the woman in the scenario is less than interesting only reinforces the distinct impression that marriage is primarily a relationship between men. Sanford admits that while his bride has “no soul,” those concerns are overridden by the fact that she is “heiress . . . to a great fortune; and that is all the soul I wish for in a wife” (131). Once his economic needs have been met by a well-made marriage, Sanford is free to pursue his sexual desires elsewhere.

In contrast with British domestic fiction, American seduction stories condemn neither the seducer nor the woman seduced so much as the underlying cause of seduction, which it attributes to the disparity between desire and economic necessity. The American libertine finds himself trapped by the prevailing system of exchange, which neither provides a solid economic foundation for a family nor gratifies his sexual desire.¹⁹ Charlotte Temple, Maria Fawcett, Amelia, even the notorious Coquette, Eliza, are all worthy objects of that desire. Indeed, the object of libertine desire is generally virtuous (the coquette being the exception that proves the rule), and she arouses something like natural desire in him. But marrying any one of these women would fail to bring the money he needs to maintain a gentry way of life. Richardson’s Mr. B, by way of contrast, has already come into his inheritance before he attempts to seduce his servant, Pamela. It is as if American fiction incorporates the libertine in order to have him act on natural desires forbidden by an older system for exchanging women.

What end does such behavior serve? The omnipresence of the libertine as the embodiment of masculinity creates a situation hostile to an earlier system of arranged marriages implicitly, if not explicitly, attributed to the British. In The Power of Sympathy, the destruction of the Harrington line on account of libertine practices represents the withering away of the socio-economic features binding the libertine to an earlier set of marriage rules that in turn bind property to blood. If we consider the prototypical British seduction story from this perspective, we are sure to notice that Richard-son’s Mr. B was made to feel shame, suffer remorse, and undergo a moral transformation as a result of reading Pamela’s letters. In Clarissa, the rake is broken in two. Lovelace must die for his unrepentant libertinage, but his companion and confidant, Belford, suffers remorse and undergoes a transformation comparable to Mr. B’s. While Worthy is a man of no clear rank, his sexual behavior distinguishes him from both of the Harrington men, for he observes only the rules of taste and sensibility—the rules governing the novel itself—in selecting a marriage partner. Through their written intercourse, Worthy emerges as the man of sensibility who will care for Myra. Such a quality of the heart has become the basis for marriage—neither bloodline nor property, but his capacity to care. The object of his desire undergoes a corresponding transformation that makes her his feminine counterpart, a writing subject, whose embroidery proves her capable of turning money into her own brand of domestic elegance. To put it as reductively as possible, their exchange of letters not only constitutes the marriage contract, but also constitutes the pair, male and female, as individuals capable of entering into such a contract of their own volition.

The Libertine Difference

Clearly the sheer number of late eighteenth-century stories, novels, and moral essays featuring the libertine begs the question of what kind of cultural work such a figure accomplished. At the very least, if the seduction narrative is part and parcel of a tradition of sentimental fiction in America, then the assumption that such fiction appealed primarily to women seems off the mark: as I have tried to suggest, the omnipresence of the libertine has chiefly to do with altering relations between men. We know that his presence almost guarantees that the story will challenge prevailing norms of class privilege that put some men at a distinct disadvantage in relation to others when it came to founding and perpetuating a household, but why did this challenge have such appeal in America in the 1790s? We need to consider what it was about the libertine that resonated with the American readership?

Some elements of the figure clearly engage the foundational myths of the new United States. To begin with, the libertine was associated with antitheological, critical, even speculative thinking. In the French tradition, the libertine was often an instructor and not necessarily only an instructor of erotic pleasure.²⁰ Because he was considered free from ordinary moral constraints, his habit of mind and his distinctive practices set him in opposition to established belief, and in the Sadean tradition, he performed as a parodic inversion of religion. But the kind of cultural authority arising out of wit and parody was not the material out of which good husbands are made.²¹ More appealing to an American readership was the English meaning of the “libertine,” which Johnson’s Dictionary specified as “One unconfined, one at liberty.”²² Surely an individual who rejects moral orthodoxy, someone of a speculative disposition, a person with antireligious beliefs, one who appeared to be “at liberty,” must have held special meaning for a class of people for whom religious freedom was the exalted rationale for the economic motives propelling emigration. The only difference between the American and European libertine was that rather than seek religious freedom in America, the libertine sought freedom from religion there. If a man’s most important moral gesture were his choice of, and fidelity to, a recognized set of religious practices, the libertine was the very antithesis of such an embodiment of morals because he was obedient to none. Indeed, the libertines that populate the seduction stories of the 1790s cannot be considered moral in even the loosest sense. They bring with them the cultural baggage of immoral practices from European fiction. Through their machinations—detached from any moral purpose—an American family came to be defined as separate and apart from the family organized around British models of household and kinship. If there is a moral to the story of seduction featuring the elder Harrington in The Power of Sympathy, then it is that the older, more traditional British notion of kinship as defined by established rank is far too limited for the new United States.

In American culture more so than British, class affiliation was based on literacy, diversity of views religious and political, and more expansive—that is to say, more exogamous—marriage practices. Gordon Wood summarizes the situation in these terms: “If England had thirty different religions, then America had hundreds,” and few were “traditionally organized.” While it was theologically varied and sophisticated, Wood contends, “American society remained remarkably shallow and stunted by contemporary English standards.”²³ My take on this paradox is that the fine gradations of social stratification that English marriage practices maintained were not and could not be guiding marriage choices in America. Why, if not because men refuse to adhere to rank in the new United States, does the male Harrington line die out and the female line prevail? Moreover, Worthy is no less worthy a member of the gentry because he does not seek Harrington senior’s approval to marry Myra. We can extend this alternative to those stories in which the libertine is over-come with remorse and allowed to marry the object of his desire. Once married, these couples are just as important as anyone else. To show how the seduction story favored by American readers broke up the family only to bring disparate people together in a new contractual relationship, let me turn to what I call the “American Richardson.”

The American Richardson

While William Bradford advertised an edition of Pamela in New York, September 1742, Benjamin Franklin is credited with printing the first American edition of Richardson’s novel in 1742–43 and the following year was advertising his own edition. Advertisements for the novel appeared in Boston and New York as well as Philadelphia. Despite this demonstrable interest in Richardson’s novel, 1744 was also the year in which the printing of Richardson’s texts all but ceased in British America. The sheer number of sheets that were required for an edition of the full text probably made the cost of its publication too risky a venture; given that for those booksellers who could afford them, copies were readily available from British booksellers as were pirated Irish editions, there was probably not sufficient demand for full editions. That demand diminished in the decades before the Revolution makes it all the more puzzling that the novel became so popular immediately after. The fact remains that after a forty-year period, editions of novels printed in America whose author was identified as Samuel Richardson suddenly appeared in the United States.

The dates and titles of these editions speak for themselves.²⁴ In 1789, Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison were announced for sale in Philadelphia, and two years later an edition of the Clarissa published under the title The Paths of Virtue Delineated; or the History . . . of the Celebrated Clarissa Harlowe. In 1792, Pamela appeared in Philadelphia. In 1793, the same novel was published in Boston and the following year in both Worcester and Philadelphia. An edition of Clarissa appeared in Boston in 1795, and that same year The Paths of Virtue Delineated or . . . Clarissa was reprinted and offered for sale in Cooperstown, New York. In 1796, Clarissa was published in Cooperstown, and Pamela appeared in print, once in Lansingburgh, New York, and twice in New York City. In 1797, Pamela was again published in Boston, and the following year saw printings of Clarissa in Suffield, Connecticut, and Philadelphia, while Pamela was printed four times in New York City. In 1799, Pamela came out in Fairhaven, Vermont, and Norristown, Pennsylvania, and Clarissa was published in New Haven. Publications of both novels became somewhat more sporadic as the nineteenth century got underway, but evidence of a Richardson boom is indisputable: in the last decade of the eighteenth century, after a long hiatus, American printers found it profitable to produce American editions of Richardson’s novels in unprecedented numbers for an American readership.

To begin to distinguish Richardson‘s post–RevolutionaryWar popularity from the more modest success enjoyed by his fiction in pre–Revolutionary War British America, we must add another and perhaps more startling set of facts to these publication data. When Pamela was first published in London in 1740 and then several years later in North America by Franklin, the novel ran to about 250,000 words, and when Clarissa was first published in London in 1747–48, it ran to well over 1,000,000 words. These versions continued to be published in England throughout the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth century. In striking contrast, the Pamela that appeared in Philadelphia in 1792 totaled only about 27,000 words in length, and the Clarissa that appeared in 1795 ran to somewhere around just 41,000 words,or about the same length as Susannah Rowson’s Charlotte Temple. Further-more, every edition of Richardson published in the United States from the late 1780s through the first two decades of the nineteenth century observed pretty much the same model of abridgment.

This model was based on an edition that appeared in London in 1756, reprinted in 1764, and entitled, The Paths of Virtue Delineated; or the History inMiniature of the Celebrated Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe, and Sir Charles Grandison, familiarised and adapted to the Capacities of Youth.²⁵ For obvious reasons, the phrase “youth” should not be taken to mean that these editions, with their accounts of seduction and rape, were necessarily intended for young children.²⁶ From the publication data, two conclusions may be drawn: the late 1780s and 1790s saw a sudden and intense explosion of the shorter Richardson into print, and the enormous popularity of the abridged Richardson was an American phenomenon. Although both the long and short versions were readily available on both sides of the Atlantic, eighteenth-century English readers much preferred their Richardson unabridged. The English market not only consumed the many printings and editions of the unabridged Richardson that issued from the London presses, but snapped up the cheaper Irish editions as well.²⁷ A glance at the colonial book market further testifies to a widening gap in reading tastes. The unabridged, or English, Richardson continued to be available as an imported commodity to American readers throughout the forty-year period when it was out of print in the colonies. Indeed, following the Treaty of Paris (1783), an abundance of inexpensive Irish editions of British books were exported to America, and unabridged editions of Richardson were comparatively cheap. The abridged editions of Richardson nevertheless remained hands-down favorites among American readers.²⁸

Nor, as the next section of this chapter will demonstrate at some length, were the editions of Clarissa and Pamela preferred by American readers simply truncated versions of the originals. The principle of abridgment used in these editions differs significantly from that guiding the more familiar chapbooks, which generally ran from around sixteen pages for something like Robinson Crusoe to about twenty-nine pages for an edition of Tom Jones, while the Richardson editions were invariably three to five times that length.²⁹ Americans expressed a similar inclination for an abridged edition of Robinson Crusoe that went through 125 printings from 1774–1825, ran to 138 pages, and diverged as much in narrative form from its chapbook counterpart as it did from the English original.³⁰ This publication data should prompt us to consider what the two different versions of Richardson can tell us about English and Anglo-American culture, respectively.

The case of Susannah Rowson’s Charlotte Temple affords an instructive parallel. The literary critical tradition has long regarded Charlotte Templeas an inferior version of an English novel, on the grounds that it is a bad version of an English novel in the sentimental mode of Richardson.³¹ And to be sure, Charlotte Temple is not very long, its characters are sketchily drawn, and the plot is everything. The book, in short, has all the marks of formula fiction. When published in England in 1791, Charlotte Temple met with only moderate success, but when it appeared in the United States some three years later this same novel turned out to be one of the nation’s first best-sellers. Given the preference on the part of an American readership for the short, plot-bound Richardson over the more literary English versions of Pamela and Clarissa, Charlotte Temple might well represent a significant improvement on the English Richardson, when measured against the generic expectations of a colonial readership. The fact that readers under British rule preferred the English Richardson over the abridgment indicates, moreover, that sentimental fiction was probably popular in America during the eighteenth century for many of the same reasons it was in vogue back in England, where fiction succeeded in modernizing the kinship rules observed by members of the literate classes without putting their Englishness in jeopardy. After the Revolution, however, narratives of courtship and marriage would have to adapt those same rules for a readership that was no longer English in political terms, one that therefore had good reason to be anxious about its national identity in every other respect.

Clarissa’s Americanness

Having proposed this ideological divergence between the English and American versions of Richardson, let me now consider the formal differences between the two narratives to see if they can tell us how the American Richardson addressed American interests. Since IanWatt’s definitive study, criticism of the English novel tends to assume that Richardson either initiated or helped to establish the predominant form of the English novel.³² Whether one claims, as Watt did, that a certain kind of realism rose to dominance because it addressed the interests of a middle class on the rise or whether one argues, alternatively, that domestic romance helped to bring that class into being, the fact remains that such novels as Pamela and Clarissa established the form of domestic fiction reproduced by the so called great tradition of English fiction. It is now commonplace to say that from its inception, the mainstream novelistic tradition not only counted women among its readership, but also authorized women to articulate the beliefs and values of the readership as a whole. For literate classes composed of both men and women, Richardson made passive aggression—withholding of the self—into a sublime testament to selfhood: a source of self-worth and cultural authority that would go unrecognized were it not for the fact that such interiority expressed itself in written English. It apparently meant a great deal to a polite English readership, I am suggesting, that Richardson demonstrated at such elaborate length the necessity of casting one’s interior life in written form. The publishing history of his novels indicates that a certain kind of verbosity—what might be called a protracted display of personal literariness—was essential to the English Richardson’s success. The putative author—though a woman—was the model for “the individual,” and her discourse presumed that virtually any-one with sufficient literacy could emulate a brand of interiority that denoted a superior quality of Englishness. As I have already suggested, all such signs of literariness and the cultural work that exhaustive letter writing accomplished was removed in the heavily edited versions that distinguished the American Richardson. If we look to what remains in the redacted version of Clarissa, we can see how it reconceptualized cultural reproduction in a way that addressed the needs of a population in diaspora.

Beginning in the early seventeenth century and for almost two centuries thereafter, colonial British subjects confronted the dilemma of maintaining their English identity outside of England. Living in North America required members of the English community to formulate new courtship practices and marriage rules that would define their offspring as English. Perhaps the first narrative form to deal with this problem, the captivity narrative, is a good place to look for formal precedents to the seduction novel. Produced in significant quantities and consumed before, as well as after, the Revolution, this narrative characteristically used daughters both to pose the problem of maintaining English identity in British North America and to offer a resolution: either the captive daughter was returned undefiled to her family, or else she died in captivity. In either case, her blood remained pure. In the well-known case of Mary Rowlandson, as Nancy Armstrong explains, “The exclusive nature of the patriarchal prerogative” makes it possible for Englishness to descend from the father to the daughter and through her into the family of another Englishman, “thereby preserving the Englishness of the colonial community.”³³ In the colonies, Armstrong concludes, the daughter of a European serves as the special kind of fetish that Annette Weiner calls “an inalienable possession” in that she can neither be seized nor traded without endangering the group’s identity. ³⁴ Daughters who acquire this iconic status have to die when they leave their father’s family. Identifying this cultural logic in narratives of the late eighteenth century, Armstrong points out that daughters who do leave the community without their father’s blessing can return to that community either through death, as Richardson’s Clarissa did, or “through their daughters, as in the case of Charlotte Temple.”³⁵

Why these narratives must carry out the principle of purity or death so ruthlessly becomes apparent in an alternative narrative tradition exemplified by the story of Mary Jemison, the captive girl who “went native,” married a Native American, and reproduced an English household in captivity. ³⁶ By reversing almost point by point the cultural logic of Rowland-son’s account, Jemison’s narrative indicates that during the eighteenth century accounts of captivity began to offer two competing narratives of national identity. One narrative equated the English family with English culture and unfolded as if perpetuating the Englishness of Anglo-America depended on restricting subsequent marriages to people who come from exactly such a family as their own. The alternative view, as encapsulated in the story of Mary Jemison’s captivity, assumed that English culture is reproduced within and perpetuated by the household. The virtue of this second, and initially residual, model lay in the fact it takes for granted the mixed nature of the domestic unit. As Armstrong explains, “no matter who makes up this household or where they come from, it can incorporate, imitate, reenact . . . or otherwise replicate whatever appears to be most English about the English family. Such a household produces a family peculiar to the settler colonies.”³⁷ When we think of the seduction novel as a later version of the captivity narrative, which was in fact read side by side with indigenous genres of American fiction, it will soon become clear that such novels were also about much more than the unmaking and remaking of a family. Approaching the problem from this perspective, we can see how the difference in length between the two Richardsons might have offered their respective readerships an even more radical difference in the formal means and methods of reproducing English culture.

All novels that take the form of a captivity narrative also put the rules for group identity on the line. As I have already suggested, the American Clarissa may be distinguished from its English counterpart by a minimal expression of emotions, and it pays even less attention to the exchange of personal letters. The narrator simply informs the reader that Clarissa “wrote to Mr. Lovelace, that as she had no other means of escaping her brother’s tyranny, she would meet him the next Monday at the garden gate, and put herself under his protection.” With this statement, letter writing ceases.³⁸ What had merely provided an occasion for the English Clarissa to carry on highly nuanced emotional performances in prose—namely, the seduction plot—takes charge of the American edition. The abridged Richardson dispenses with all but the most necessary verbal displays in order to concentrate on the conduct of the female body. To explain what this shift from the body as the source of emotive language to the body as the source of sexual experience does to the concept and fate of individual identity, let me briefly compare a few key episodes from each of the two versions of Pamela and Clarissa on this basis.

In what is arguably the most erotic moment of the English version of Pamela, we find the heroine’s letters quite literally assuming the position of her body as the object of Mr. B’s desire: “Artful slut,” he calls her, as he gropes about her body in search of letters she has surreptitiously authored: “I never undressed a girl in my life; but I will now begin to strip my pretty Pamela; and I hope I shall not go far before I find [her letters].”³⁹ But when Mr. B tries to undress his reluctant servant in the American edition, as he does without success on quite a few occasions, it is solely for purposes of taking possession of her body; he takes little if any interest in Pamela’s letters. Here, within three sentences, we encounter two such attempts on her virtue:

The squire was dressed in women’s clothes, but no sooner did he come up to Pamela’s bed, than he began to use such indecent freedom, that she soon discovered what he was. The distress in which Pamela was, made her use every expression to induce him to withdraw, upon which he uttered several bitter imprecations upon himself that he had never intended her the least injury. Another attempt was made on her, but she was so much overpowered, that she was obliged to be put to bed.⁴⁰

That the American version makes no effort to transfer value from Pamela’s body to her writing makes most of the prose in the English edition unnecessary to the narratives preferred by American readers.

Like her English counterpart, the American Pamela insists on returning to her father the minute she figures out what lascivious designs her new master has in mind, and like his English counterpart, Mr. B reneges on his promise to comply. He sends her to his remote country seat, the better to seduce her. Once squirreled away in his country house, however, the American pair neglects to carry on the full-fledged letter-writing war that preoccupied them in the English edition. Pamela rejects a bogus marriage offer out of hand and leaves her diary where Mr. B will discover that she indeed means what she says. Writing is just as basic to this heroine’s identity, I am suggesting, but basic in a more protojuridical way. In that it verifies more primary practices of speech and conduct, thus her suitability for marriage as well as the sincerity with which she would enter into it, writing establishes the consensual basis for a successful relationship.⁴¹ To put it another way, Pamela must demonstrate that she can say no before she can be invested with the authority to say yes.

If the American Richardson deletes certain features from the English Richardson and modifies the role they play in determining whether a poor serving girl can marry a member of the gentry, then the American version expands other features out of all proportion to the importance they commanded in the English edition. The episode dealing with Mr. B’s illegitimate daughter, Sally Godfrey, is notable in this respect. The episode takes up a fraction of the longer English edition and seems to exist only for purposes of displaying Pamela’s extraordinary kindness toward those less fortunate than she. Thus we must ask ourselves why this event, of all those comprising the tediously long description of Pamela’s married life, looms proportionately so large in the American edition. A visit to the girl at boarding school in the abridged edition reveals that Miss Godfrey has acquired a quality of deportment and a degree of literacy capable of overriding the unfortunate circumstances of her birth, thus making her eligible for marriage into the respectable classes. Sally Godfrey resembles Charlotte Temple’s illegitimate daughter in that she, too, has been raised in England by a surrogate family, while Sally’s mother, more fortunate than poor Charlotte, is reported to be “doing well” in Jamaica. In both cases, the woman, once ruined, achieves social redemption to the extent that she observes the model of good conduct. That her redemption depends on her literacy as opposed to the purity of her lineage suggests that in the editions preferred in America following the Revolution, cultural reproduction was far more important to national identity than the continuation of a bloodline. Indeed, one American abridgment (Boston, 1793) even questions Pamela’s lineage in celebrating her accomplishments: “Pamela Andrews was the daughter of John and Elizabeth Andrews, (or at least reputed so) who lived in a small village in the West of England, and who, by pinching themselves more than they were already by the narrowness of their circumstances, got her taught to read and write.”⁴² This statement calls attention to the paradox implied by the very existence of an American Richardson.

Even though the abridgment’s rejection of the epistolary mode in favor of third-person narration is the most obvious stylistic difference between the American and English editions, the quote clearly indicates that Pamela’s literacy is the first and most important fact we must know if we are to understand the events that lead to her fortunate marriage. What inferences may be drawn from this paradox? In England, as in the unabridged Richardson, the heroine’s writing points back to a source residing in the body, a source linking her identity with a natural and unspoiled interiority. In a striking challenge to the ontology of British letters, the American version gives us no reason to think her writing either originates in her body or locates value in her origins. Indeed, the opening line of the 1793 Boston edition suggests that just the reverse is true. Rather than point back to qualities inherent in the body, the value of Pamela’s body depends on that body conducting itself according to a written model. Because both Richardsons make the heroine’s status dependent upon her relationship to writing, it behooves us to look more closely at the difference between the two in terms of what happens to writing at the moment of rape.

If Pamela’s seduction provides the stuff of domestic comedy, Clarissa’s rape can only be called a domestic tragedy. Far from overturning the logic of cultural reproduction spelled out in the abbreviated Pamela, however, the American Clarissa actually observes the same logic in a more exaggerated form. In marked contrast with what might be called the “damaged” writing with which the English novel registers the same act of violence in Letter 262, Paper X (893), the absence of her personal record in the abridged Clarissa recasts the heroine’s rape from an assault on her sensibility into a devastating physical experience. As the narrator explains:⁴³

What followed was the most vile and inhuman acts of violence. The distressed lady, roused from the dreadful lethargy into which she was sinking, pleaded for mercy, and cried, I will be yours—, indeed, to obtain mercy, I will be yours! But no mercy could she find. Her strength, her intellects failed her. Fits upon fits followed, which procured her no compassion.⁴⁴

More peculiar than this relatively explicit description of the rape is Clarissa’s consent to the dirty deed—provided of course that Lovelace would first agree to marry her. The option of consent in some form is what must be inferred from her pathetic statement of surrender, “I will be yours.” This description of the sexual encounter and her capitulation does appear in the English version, but the account is buried in one of the letters where Clarissa is trying to report what she remembers after having been drugged. She writes, “I grew worse and worse in my head; now stupid, now raving, now senseless.” She reports the physical threats, her fears, and then in an effort to recall what she said, she writes, “I remember, I pleaded for mercy—I remember that I said I would be his—to obtain his mercy—But no mercy found I!”⁴⁵ The emphasis in the English version over several pages is on her confusion, her subsequent delirium, and the full range of emotions she experienced from drinking the tea that Lovelace had doctored. Given the extraordinary reduction in length of the American narrative, however, the statement “I will be yours” is given considerably more prominence as an offer that holds open the possibility of marriage even under the duress of sexual assault.

Because sham marriages were far more common among people lower on the social scale, the kind of ceremony Lovelace proposes was particularly unacceptable to an English readership that was beginning to think of an affective, companionate marriage as the only legitimate one. As the American version of the Sally Godfrey episode suggests, other forms of marriage came to be increasingly associated with a colonial culture where they apparently seemed necessary and more acceptable. In the English novel, down is the only direction in which a woman can go once she has been sexually compromised.⁴⁶ By contrast, an American heroine could be both virtuous and fallen, embodying Pamela and Sally Godfrey at once, the two no longer representing contradictory types. Indeed, the Sally Godfrey episode demonstrates the reversibility of a woman’s sexual downfall in the version of the seduction narrative preferred by an American readership;after her ruin she can even improve her social position. Where Pamela demonstrated the conditions under which one could avoid a fall in status, Clarissa worked in reverse, demonstrating the conditions under which one was destined to fall.

According to this model, the sexual purity of the daughter is much less important than her ability to form a household where the rules of good conduct—hence Englishness itself—can be reproduced in and by subsequent generations. This is not to say that the story of cultural reproduction according to Mary Jemison won out over the kind of captivity narrative exemplified by Mary Rowlandson, much less that the American seduction novel could allow its heroine to “go native.” Not at all. I am simply suggesting that during the early republic sexual impurity does not necessarily cancel out Englishness, for remain English one must. After political separation from England, the popularity of the seduction novel suggests that it was more important than ever to have the kind of cultural identity that once came only from being born of English parents. The conditions under which one could acquire and maintain such an identity had simply changed.

This, I believe, is the reason why Clarissa’s uncle Morden enters so intrusively into the abridged edition as a potential form of agency. The American Richardson assigns this absent relative a role resembling that played by Charlotte Temple’s father. Her active apologist and would-be redeemer, her father arrives at Charlotte’s side just in time for her to beg his pardon, receive it, and expire. Her father then returns to England with Charlotte’s newborn daughter. Of the aftermath of this climactic episode, Rowson’s narrator has this to say: “After the first tumult of grief was subsided, Mrs. Temple gave up the chief of her time to her grand-child, and as she grew up and improved, began to fancy she again possessed her Charlotte.” ⁴⁷ Colonel Morden’s intervention on Clarissa’s behalf increases in importance in the American edition, where his ministrations might have cancelled out the fact of her rape and excommunication from the Harlowe family. The American novel clearly empowers Morden as a father surrogate. Convinced of Clarissa’s innocence, he pleads, we are told, with the girl’s family to send a nurse to care for her. When brother James steps in to prevent his mother from offering any succor, Morden is reported to have declared, “In me shall the dear creature have the father, uncle, and brother she has lost.”⁴⁸ Here, Morden represents himself as nothing so much as one of those surrogates for the father that Locke considered necessary in America. In view of the American adaptation of the Sally Godfrey episode, I am inclined to take this statement literally to mean that had Morden arrived in time, he might have eventually given Clarissa in marriage to another English gentleman, as certain to be smitten as Morden himself by her tragic beauty and genteel deportment. Indeed, it is fair to say that all such departures from the longer version of Clarissa place value on the quality of the copy in contrast to the original. What counts for an American readership, we must conclude, is not so much the loss of purity as one’s fidelity to an idea of a home one imagined to be English. Nor does the heroine’s conduct have to meet the father’s approval any more than she has to marry the man whom he selects for her. In all cases, substitutes will do. Morden can assume the position of the true father simply by be-having like one, and by behaving like one, he might well have legitimated the ravished Clarissa—that is, had she only lasted a little longer.

The Importance of Remaining English

To understand American seduction narratives from this perspective is tan-tamount to thinking of the Clarissa preferred by an early republican readership as a lesser Charlotte Temple instead of assuming that Charlotte Temple was a bad imitation of Clarissa. Charlotte Temple fulfills precisely the cultural logic guiding the abridgments of the versions of Richardson that were preferred in America. What the shorter Clarissa sought and failed to accomplish—the redemption of a heroine who failed in Mary Rowland-son’s terms—is realized in Rowson’s novel, despite the fact that it plays out the English formula for punishing a fallen woman. Charlotte not only dies as the penalty for “going native” (or French, as the case may be), she is also reborn in her daughter.⁴⁹ Thus she combines in a rather literal way the fates respectively assigned to Clarissa Harlowe and Sally Godfrey—or, just as appropriately, Mary Rowlandson and Mary Jemison. Doubled in her daughter, Charlotte embodies the very contradiction that a sentimental British readership absolutely disallowed, no doubt because that duality challenged the model of monogamy on which an emergent middle class in England had based their claims to moral authority.

Charlotte’s father simultaneously reproduces and displaces this model of the family, when he takes his daughter’s daughter back to England, thereby reconstructing the original English household with a father, mother, and granddaughter. Charlotte’s father, of course, is performing the role of a surrogate father in keeping with Locke’s notion of paternalism. Indeed, despite her illegitimate birth in the colonies, the second ending of the novel indicates that Charlotte’s daughter not only provides a perfect copy of her mother, but improves on the rebellious original as well. We are told that the formation of this individual will not be entrusted to the care of others but overseen by an English household that regulates her sexual conduct accordingly. The perfection of the copy in comparison with the original finesses the fundamental question of cultural identity posed by this novel: Are you Anglo-American because you are born of an English family, or are you Anglo-American because you live your life according to an English model?

It should not be all that difficult to imagine why it was necessary for a genre of fiction to raise and suppress this contradiction in familial terms if we take into account how conservative the revolutionary moment actually was. The break with England was a rejection of the monarch’s authority in certain matters of economics and law. But as Gordon Wood has observed, “The revolutionary leaders never intended to make a national revolution in any modern sense.”⁵⁰ Indeed, we have no evidence to suggest that they intended to break away from English letters, English science, English learning, or even English culture at the most common and pragmatic level. If the generation of men and women who detached their colonial government from England did in fact consider themselves English people, then it follows that they should desire to maintain that cultural identity during the same period when they were discussing the political principles constituting a modern, just, and independent state.

Narratives of seduction—or in many cases, rape—are peculiarly good at rationalizing the inherent contradiction between a progressive political agenda and a conservative cultural one. If Anglo-Americans imagined their culture as a woman—that is, as a Mary Rowlandson, a Charlotte Temple, or even a Clarissa Harlowe—then the perpetuity of that identity would depend on her remaining faithful to her origins. Seduction would threaten that bond, and rape would declare it had been forcibly broken. This was an old story, common to Europe and America. In the American Richardson, however, the same event that necessarily spelled the heroine’s doom for English readers was in fact the beginning of an additional chapter for their American counterparts. No longer a question about what the heroine is—Does she embody the purity essential to command the position of an Englishwoman in the exchange of women?—the question turned on what the heroine does—Can she reproduce an English way of life outside of England? The colonial model exemplified by Mary Rowlandson would no longer do, for it refused to acknowledge the difference between an English subject and an Anglo-American one. The American seduction novel, in contrast, produced a break in the heroine’s lineage in order to consider how one could remain English despite that break. Under these circumstances, avoiding seduction, as Pamela does, became just another way of repairing the rupture of lineage that Clarissa promises but fails to achieve by creating an English household away from home. The need to establish continuity with English culture was so overdetermined in the years following the American Revolution, I am suggesting, that it elevated the sentimental fiction imported from England into the fantasy of family reunion.

The Afterlife of the Libertine

As the novel sought to imagine a nation, it appropriated the European opposition between libertine and legitimate patriarch and put the seduction story to work on regional divisions within the population based on race and class in ways that strove to imagine the nation as a coherent people. By having the reproduction of an American family depend on setting aside British conventions regulating the traditional exchange of women among empowered families, the seduction stories of the late eighteenth century appeared to argue for a more inclusionary nation. That the marriage contract was nonetheless a figurative means of putting limits on the very social contract it appears to universalize becomes particularly apparent in novels that were written during the twenty- to thirty-year period leading up to the American Civil War. The contrast between nineteenth-century Latin American novels and novels by writers in the United States who were heirs of the English diaspora is instructive. In a groundbreaking account of the Latin American novel, Doris Sommer showed that in nineteenth- century Latin American fiction heterosexual desire provides the means of binding together racially differentiated groups as an internally coherent national culture.⁵¹ The great national romances of the preboom period imply that the blood of the European colonizer was not indelibly tainted by cross-racial marriage with Indian heroines. Spanish blood is capable of ennobling those with whom it mixed.

Not so, however, for the strain of English culture transplanted in the new United States. The problem confronting the novelist who wrote for an American readership on the brink of the Civil War was compounded by a peculiarly English spin on the concept of race that found perhaps its most extreme expression in the notorious “one-drop” rule. When race was at issue, American novels could not observe the pattern of seduction stories and still have the libertine marry the woman he had deflowered. The owner of slaves simultaneously assaults the slave’s father and defiles his own blood as he usurps that father’s position. In this respect, his situation resembles that of the elder Harrington in The Power of Sympathy. There can be no recuperation of the family under these circumstances.

To demonstrate its enduring legacy in American fiction, I want to consider briefly how Harriet Beecher Stowe uses the seduction story to address the slavery question. Put in novelistic terms, that question goes something like this: how can an America divided by slavery be represented as one coherent kin group without triggering Anglo-American miscegenation? A single drop of African blood would set one outside the Anglo-identified nation. To imagine a racially divided nation as a single family, the novelist could decide, as Stowe did, that the bond holding the family together was a fragile emotional bond that would be shattered by physical expressions of sexual desire. Indeed, such a physical expression as incest flew directly in the face of family feeling. Stowe accordingly translated what had been the woman as object and property of men into a subject whose body was the vehicle of her own self-expression and could not therefore be used sexually without her consent. This notion of the woman was, of course, the centerpiece of all sentimental literature in the Richardsonian tradition. Literature that authorizes such an affective basis for social affiliation stripped the father of his prerogative for the trading of women. Indeed, such literature equated the father’s right to dispose of the daughter’s body not only with the libertine’s seizure of another man’s rightful property but also with the slave owner’s treatment of women as his property.

Cassy’s story in Uncle Tom’s Cabin is made out of the seduction plots found in the popular magazine stories. She describes herself, for example, as “a woman delicately bred” who has fallen in the world.⁵² Each of her previous owner-lovers resembles nothing so much as the typically faithless lover of the libertine literature. She speaks of her first owner in these terms: “I was his property,—I became his willingly, for I loved him. Loved!”(516). The only difference between this phase of her personal history and that of hundreds of other seduced and abandoned American heroines was the inscription of Cassy’s body within the institution of slavery. She is no mere love slave. Slavery literalizes her bondage and makes her object status a painful legal and economic fact rather than a metaphor for her emotional bondage to the man who stole her from her father. Cassy’s first owner resorts to the seducer’s logic that although marriage was impossible, nevertheless, “he told me that, if we were only faithful to each other, it was a marriage before God” (517). Also true to form, this first lover-owner soon tires of the woman he has seduced and fastens on another.

Standing in opposition to the figure of the faithless lover is the sentimental libertine, whom Stowe uses to rescue George Harris’s sister. As Emily explains, “I was bought by a good and generous man. He took me with him to the West Indies, set me free, and married me” (600). When her former owner returns power over her body to the exslave, he also grants her the means to become the kind of subject who could consent to marry and create a family. In stark contrast to both the faithless libertine and the sentimental libertine of earlier literature, Simon Legree emerges from Stowe’s pen as a hyperbolic version of that relatively rare American phenomenon, the sadistic libertine. As we have seen, this figure is locked in a definitive struggle with those paternal figures who embody the prevailing rules of kinship. The seduced woman figure is simply a mediator through whom the libertine viciously assaults any rules not of his own making as he exercises the patriarchal prerogatives to treat his dependents like objects and dispose of them as he wishes.

To the degree that slavery literalizes the ownership of women, it renders the familial relations that form around the object of libertine desire not only purely figural but also more intense, precisely because those relations are based not on natural kinship but on the commonality of human suffering. Stowe has Cassy call Tom “Father Tom” three times within a mere page and a half (562–63). Because both Tom and Cassy have been denied their biological children, Emmeline easily slides into the position of substitute daughter to these parents. In threatening her, Legree simultaneously conceals this physical lack and reproduces it on the symbolic level as an emotional lack with which any parent or child, male or female, could identify. As she says to Cassy, “If the Lord gives us liberty, perhaps he’ll give you back your daughter; at any rate, I’ll be like a daughter to you” (580). Thus when Cassy and Emmeline succeed in fleeing their libertine oppressor, Legree is only being true to the conventions of the seduction narrative in directing his wrath at Tom. As metaphoric father of the always-absent girl, Tom emerges as the object of Legree’s sadistic desires once the woman mediating the exchange between them vanishes.

By fashioning Legree from the materials of the libertine, Stowe has set up the seduction narrative in such a way that the emotional component of the family, or family feeling, can exist only in the absence of sexual desire that leads to the physical reproduction of the family. Consequently, none of those included in the American family—Eva, Tom, Emmeline, Topsy, or Ophelia—can experience such reproductive desire. In contrast to the elder Harrington of The Power of Sympathy, Legree elicits extraordinary moral outrage simply because he acts out sexually his position of patriarchal dominance over enslaved women. The earlier version of the libertine could convert or eventually reproduce itself as the more modern liberal father who saw his victims not as objects but as subjects possessing subjectivities equivalent to, if different from, his own. By the time we arrive at Uncle Tom’s Cabin, however, the libertine no longer exists along a continuum that includes as its other extreme the worthy father and head of household because each has cancelled out the affect of the other. The desires of the seducer destroy the qualities required of the father who understands his dependents as autonomous subjects rather than as objects to be sexually exploited or sold. So necessary is this opposition between family feeling and sexual desire to the possibility of imagining an American family capable of including black and white, north and south, men and women, that Stowe allows family feeling to reunite with its physical expression only outside the United States—in Canada, the West Indies, France, or Liberia.

Stowe’s novel makes clear that once race is entangled with kinship through the institution of slavery, there seems to be no way to legitimate the family produced by the libertine. Stowe seems to have understood full well that the two modes of the seduction story are ways of negating paternal authority. One version of the seduction tale, when adapted to the story of slavery, makes it impossible for an exchange to take place, because the father is the owner and cannot trade with himself. The second story is a form that negates the father by injuring or killing him. As a result, the only form of family feeling that Stowe can imagine is that embodied in the mother, specifically the Christian mother. By so transforming the terms of the sexual contract into one that focuses on the condition of women under slavery, Stowe does indeed displace the relationship among men that is at stake in the American versions of the seduction story. That is to say, by focusing on maternal feeling she obscures the fact that the seduction story is always a story about the conditions that enable men either to seize or to respect one another’s property.

To conclude, I want to look briefly at The House of the Seven Gables and consider how Nathaniel Hawthorne worked with the same seduction narrative that organizes Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I am especially interested in how he uses that material to differentiate the literature associated with the masculine authors of the American Renaissance from the sentimental tradition. Hawthorne not only uses the seduction narrative to set the autochthonous, if plebeian, claims of the Maules against the more traditional kinship practices of the Pyncheon family; he also makes the reformation of the libertine the means of resolving this opposition with the formation of a coherent family out of contending kin groups. Holgrave tells Phoebe the story of their respective forebears,MatthewMaule and Alice Pyncheon, as a version of the seduction story. Like the traditional libertine, Maule is a free thinker who holds “heretical tenets in matters of religion and polity.” ⁵³ His ability to mesmerize Alice is such that it allows Maule to gain “a subtle influence over the daughter of his enemy’s house” (527). Her seduction leads Pyncheon in turn to claim that he has been “robbed” of his daughter (529).

If we simply substitute the Pyncheon house for the daughter’s body, this seduction story, like the prototype, reveals itself as little more than a set of negotiations between men to acquire property from one another. Once mesmerized, Alice loses possession of herself and lives only to do Maule’s bidding. Indeed, Hawthorne uses the figure of the slave to explain what is at stake in the subject thus handing over her choice of love object to another: “[W]hile Alice Pyncheon lived, she was Maule’s slave, in a bondage more humiliating, a thousand-fold, than that which binds its chain around the body” (531–32).Much like Cassy, Alice cannot marry because she lacks the power of consent. Finally, like so many of the betrayed women of seduction stories, Alice is humiliated when Maule marries someone of his ownrank—in this case, though, a laborer’s daughter. “Penitent of her one earthly sin,” Alice dies, in Holgrave’s account, of “humiliation” (533).

But as much as Alice Pyncheon may remind us of the heroines of earlier seduction stories, the fate of the Pyncheons neither rises nor falls on her marriageability. Ruining her is Maule’s retribution for a property battle with Pyncheon, a battle that Maule has unquestionably lost. It is none other than Pyncheon himself who allows his daughter to fall prey to his rival in hopes of recovering—through this perverse exchange with Maule—the deed to Indian lands in Maine that would make Pyncheon a wealthy man. Indeed, all the repetitions of this one basic story in The House of the Seven Gables have to do with who has legitimate claims to the Pyncheon property and, by extension, to the Indian lands that may or may not have been deeded to the Pyncheons. Should Maule deliver the deed, Pyncheon’s fortune “would be worth an earldom,” and he could, in the style of earlier libertines, live up to his aristocratic pretensions (523).

Throughout the novel, Hawthorne quite deliberately places Phoebe Pyncheon in a position structurally equivalent to that of her long-dead cousin Alice, where Holgrave “could complete his mastery over Phoebe’s yet free and virgin spirit” (534), much as Matthew Maule had over Alice. Having established the possibility of repeating the tale he has just told, Holgrave chooses to renounce the mysterious power of seduction he appears to have inherited. His doing so differentiates Hawthorne’s use of the family from Stowe’s. To understand the sudden change in the Maule-Pyncheon relations, Hawthorne’s narrator asks us to “concede to the Da-guerreotypist the rare and high quality of reverence for another’s individuality” (535). When Hawthorne inexplicably removes the young Phoebe from the novel for several weeks only to bring her back as if from the dead, she returns as a marriageable woman: “in the few intervening weeks, her experiences had made her graver, more womanly, and deepereyed, in token of a heart that had begun to suspect its depths—still there was the quiet glow of natural sunshine over her” (607). Hawthorne represents as temporary social death the mere threat of losing ownership of her individuated desire that distinguishes the modern individual from the object of another’s desire.

Where Stowe felt compelled to kill off little Eva, Hawthorne returns Phoebe to the novel transformed and marries her off, symbolically healing the class division within his version of the American family. This resolution not only requires that the woman be an autonomous subject capable of genuinely consenting to Holgrave’s offer of marriage, it also requires that Holgrave be in a position to understand the marriage contract as a social contract, and therefore as the means of inserting himself within the elite community of men formed and maintained by the exchange of women. Hawthorne is unusually explicit on this point, for he has Holgrave say to Phoebe, “I have a presentiment, that, hereafter, it will be my lot to set out trees, to make fences . . . in a word, to conform myself to laws, and the peaceful practice of society” (616). These words magically usher in a world where family feeling and sexual desire can intermix without conflict. This world, in the words of the novel, is “Eden again,” and a new generation borne of Maule and Pyncheon provide “the two first dwellers in it” (616).

Both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The House of the Seven Gables draw on the seduction narrative that had been a staple of American reading since the eighteenth century. In marked contrast with his appearance in the American seduction stories of 1785–1818, the libertine provides Stowe with an instrument for arousing moral indignation. Tom’s sacrifice at the hands of the lustful Legree divides the world into good and evil as perhaps no previous American seduction story had and repeats the moment when all those capable of such feeling—even the liminal character of Topsy—unite in a feeling of human loss around the deathbed of little Eva. How can one not abhor the agents and institutions that extinguish such condensed embodiments of humanity as daughters? But if Stowe uses the libertine to produce a sense of moral outrage, our revulsion at the crimes of passion that slavery authorizes fails to herald anything more than an uprising of moral sentiment. The novel envisions not a bit of change in the particular economic institutions that legitimate slavery. Stowe famously rests her case and ends the novel with a revolution of the heart that insists emotion is capable of crossing lines of both race and gender. At best, then, her novel arrives at an emotional resolution to a political problem, or family feeling that cannot translate into a household capable of containing racial difference, at least not within the boundaries of the United States.

By way of contrast, Hawthorne refuses to offer a family detached from economic and social fact as a purely affective model of the nation. Where Stowe’s narrative sought and failed to reconcile racially, regionally, and economically incompatible oppositions dividing the nation as she imagined it, Hawthorne displaces all those divisions onto the difference between two New England families. Despite the narrow polarities in terms of which he chooses to define the problem of national unity, Hawthorne nevertheless requires repeated interventions by the libertine before the two families can exist on a socioeconomic footing that enables intermarriage. Unlike Stowe, Hawthorne will not effect a transformation of the heart without a change in the distribution of power and money; family feelings and family fortunes are mutually contingent. Thanks to his eighteenth-century heritage, in other words, Hawthorne can only countenance a marriage contract that is also a social contract. Despite the care with which he modifies the descendants of Maule and Pyncheon so that Holgrave and Phoebe maycome together as social equals differentiated only by their respective genders, Hawthorne finds it necessary to qualify the optimism suggested by their union in a single family. First by a preface setting romance in opposition to history, then by Phoebe’s figurative death and resurrection as a mature woman, and finally by a union embellished by the language of romance, their marriage is defined as an exception to the rule of history. Given that Hawthorne’s America is nothing if not a family history, there is no way that the couple produced by this history can start anew without a lot of baggage.

I have tried to show that eighteenth-century seduction stories used the European libertine to think about the new nation as an aggregate of individuals capable of resolving differences of rank, status, and region through marriage. When later American novelists like Stowe and Hawthorne took up this same figure, try as they might, they failed to make the nation into anything resembling the large, complex, and coherent family toward which both their novels aspire. While it is true that both Stowe and Hawthorne used the seduction story to imagine the nation as a coherent family, their fiction leaves us with anything but a body of like-minded individuals who could be imagined as members of a single family. The nation was no more a coherent entity to individuals writing then, I am suggesting, than it is now in the age of multiculturalism. For then, as now, any attempt to imagine the nation as an all-inclusive family produces conspicuous acts of exclusion, revealing in turn differences so fundamental that those differences can only be resolved symbolically in the wishful form of romance. Stowe’s Liberia is no different from Hawthorne’s “new Eden” in this respect. The United States may exist as a relatively discrete polity, and even as an independent economy, but its population has never been one that could be successfully represented as a family as the people of Shakespeare’s or even Victoria’s England could. From this perspective, to prefer Hawthorne’s fantasy of an Anglo-America as whole and ontologically consistent is as misguided as the attempt to justify Stowe’s fantasy of a heterogeneous population united by feeling alone.

Because neither Stowe nor Hawthorne was the least bit lacking in literary talent, much less in familiarity with the language and logic of the seduction story that both were manipulating, we must assume that their mutual failure to produce a model of the nation—at once inclusive, autonomous, and internally coherent—was not a failure so much as a mark of their success. As citizens of the United States, they seem to say, we are hardly a family—except under the most attenuated circumstances. We are something else, for which there can be no literary convention, given the demands of domestic romance by means of which fiction reifies the idea of a nation. What we give you instead of a durable synthesis is a sequence of disrupted and failed families remodeled anew, thus more adequate, inclusive, and durable. What if not the most rending internal divisions generate the fiction that there is a common collective body to save and infuses the reader with a desire to do so? The rhetorical disruptions that give rise to this affect are precisely the tropological activity I have ascribed to the American libertine. These disruptions allow seduction to generate sentiment by infusing the reconstructed family with a kind of urgency that lives on in contemporary political rhetoric.