4
THE HEART OF MASCULINITY
ON THE WAY to fulfilling the expectations of his European forebears, something happened to the libertine. While assaulting the marriage practices imported from Europe, the libertine set the stage for a new kind of masculinity. He did so by creating the need for a character to step forth as a father substitute. When the seduction narrative in which he figured so largely converged with sentimental literature in the new United States, the libertine himself could either assume such a position by renouncing his wicked ways or else cede that position to someone capable of heading up a reformed and revitalized English household. The libertine is, in this respect, simply the other side and facilitator of what might be called “true manhood.” Worthy in The Power of Sympathy exemplifies the kind of man capable of rescuing the family. As such, he is the reason why William Hill Brown’s novel should claim pride of place as the first American novel. But we have yet to establish what makes Worthy so worthy. The present chapter establishes the link between his brand of literacy—as displayed in the letters he writes to Myra Harrington—and the sentimental heroine of British fiction and her masculine counterpart, the man of feeling. Making this connection allows us to discern the all-important difference that converted the tremulous feelings of the prototype into the kind of masculinity for which the libertine created a need: in Worthy’s hands, writing comes to serve as the means of containing and mediating, rather than inflating and spreading, emotion. Emotion consequently works within, and on behalf of, contractual exchange.
By 1800, feeling in a man had acquired the cultural capital with the United States readership that it had sought but never achieved in Europe, despite the popularity of novels like Sir Charles Grandison, The Man of Feeling, The Fool of Quality, and The Sorrows of Young Werther.1 To assign the “man of feeling” its rightful role in the formation of a specifically American masculinity, one must understand how this figure maintained its traditional tie to British literacy, even as it produced the much-vaunted rugged individual who pushed the frontier westward across an entire continent. 2 Its dual capacity to be both British and American is the reason why the man of feeling succeeded in America where it initially failed to catchhold in England. But that is only half the story. To understand the full literary and cultural importance of the man of feeling is to follow its return to Europe in the fiction of Austen and Godwin; it was only after it was revised in North America that the man of feeling acquired a kind of symbolic currency in English fiction. No longer simply a foil to the “man of reason,” the man of feeling came to be a necessary component of a new form of ruling-class masculinity. My point in this chapter is therefore to uncover the transatlantic crossings in which each nation put its mark on the masculinity of the other. If the publishing history of any single novel is capable of making this point, then that novel has to be Charles Brockden Brown’s Clara Howard. Following its peculiar trajectory across two developing national cultures gives us a sense of what a literary history might look like were its goal to reveal how the two different national traditions developed in relation to each other rather than each in its own terms from different points of origin.
Initially entitled Clara Howard in a Series of Letters, Brockden Brown’s epistolary novel of 1801 makes rather unsubtle reference to HenryMackenzie’s Man of Feeling, a novel belonging to a subgenre of fiction that flourished only briefly in the 1770s and fell out of favor in England around 1780. The fact that Brockden Brown names his protagonist Edward Hartley could not help but call to mind Mackenzie’s Harley, the British prototype of the man of feeling.3 True to the prototype, Brockden Brown’s protagonist authors a protracted sequence of letters in which personal feelings and social obligations prove mutually paralyzing. But in marked contrast to the outcomes of either Mackenzie’s novel or Goethe’s rendition of the man of feeling in The Sorrows of Young Werther, each of which fails to unite the protagonist with the woman he loves, this form of frustration eventually leads to the marriage between the American Hartley and the British Clara Howard. This initial phase of the novel’s publishing history raises two questions: 1) how did American culture manage to marry off the man of feeling where his European forebears did not find him marriageable?; and 2) Why did American readers continue to respond to this figure decades after the English apparently failed to find him interesting?
Six years after the American publication of Clara Howard, the Minerva Press, a press well known in England for publishing popular fiction written by women, published Brockden Brown’s novel.4 We might find it odd that a novel featuring a man of feeling should come out in America under the title Clara Howard, a name that would surely have resonated for readers with that of Clarissa Harlowe and so call attention to the female protagonist. It must seem even more peculiar that given its reputation as a press that published popular entertainment appealing in large measure to a female readership, the Minerva Press would change the hero’s name to Philip Stanley and retitle the American novel Philip Stanley: or the Enthusiasm ofLove. Although the Minerva Press had published Brockden Brown’s earlier Ormond (1800), Arthur Mervyn (1803), Edgar Huntley (1803), and Jane Talbot (1804), Clara Howard was the only novel by Brockden Brown that the Press retitled for publication in England.5 Rather than preserve Brockden Brown’s echo of the Richardson title, the British edition called attention to the importance of the hero and not the English woman he desires, while the subtitle “or the Enthusiasm of Love” identified this hero as a man of feeling. With the historical peregrination of this novel as my guide, I want to explain what had to happen to the man of feeling before the figure could be well received on both sides of the Atlantic.
The British Man of Feeling
While a great deal has been written about the eighteenth-century vogue for sensibility and the rise in the number of male characters who displayed its features, his capacity to feel strongly was not the only quality that made the man of feeling politically important. From the early modern period onward, literature routinely endowed aristocratic males with a depth of feeling that other characters lacked. A well-born character could experience grand feelings of sympathy or passion and still act heroically on the battle-field and wisely at court. In marked contrast to Renaissance or Baroque literature, however, eighteenth-century fiction provides male protagonists the majority of whom do not express their feelings in politically charged forms. Often cited as an eighteenth-century figure of male sensibility is Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison. Described by one critic as a man of “softened manhood,” Grandison can, in Richardson’s words, “weep for the distress of others.”6 While he rescues people in need of help, it is not his actions in the world that make him desirable, but his sensibility, a combination of his ability to appreciate art and literature, his polite and moral conversation, and, perhaps most important of all, his compassion. In addition to his tendency to weep, Richardson has given Grandison considerable wealth, which makes him eminently marriageable, where the stubborn fact about Mackenzie’s or Goethe’s man of feeling is that neither has anything like rank, property, or money. Neither is consequently allowed to marry. During the initial vogue for this character-type in the 1770s, it set a man’s feelings and the forms of gratification available to him completely at odds. In theory, his inability to marry prevents the man of feeling from becoming a fully enfranchised individual.
In his Second Treatise of Government, Locke argued that among the many reasons patriarchalism was not a suitable model for British political or social practice was that it prevented young men from achieving full citizenship in a zero-sum game. They had to wait until their fathers relinquishedthat position to them at death. Under British law, Locke reminded his readers, sons should not have to wait for their fathers to die in order to become heads of household.7 Specifically directed against Filmer’s treatise on patriarchalism, Locke’s argument draws on an operative assumption about masculinity to launch its attack: a male was fully a man only when he was no longer a dependent. One should not have to inherit manhood, Locke implies. To achieve it, he should only be twenty-one, know the law, and have the economic capacity to reproduce and maintain a household. Mackenzie’s hero of sensibility poses a dilemma for this definition of masculinity; if one has the interiority reserved for a historically earlier elite, without the accoutrements of power, that individual is simply out of luck in eighteenth-century England. Unsubstantiated by wealth or position, his feelings alone cannot make Harley a citizen in Lockean terms.
I find it particularly interesting that in this respect the man of feeling resembles Richardson’s Clarissa more than his Sir Charles Grandison. Both Clarissa and Harley are victims of a heartless masculinity in the form of fathers who will not give their daughters to men capable of intense feeling. As a result, both protagonists waste away from an unnamed disorder of mind that afflicts the body. The novels that Ian Watt canonized in his accounting of the so called rise of the novel invariably assign men to a life in the world and allow women to enjoy a compensatory interior life with its own form of authority.8 Thus when Mackenzie proposed to give his masculine protagonist a form of agency based on feeling alone, he was implicitly putting that protagonist in the position reserved for the heroines of eighteenth-century novels. Why do such a thing?
Throughout the eighteenth century, the novel, in contradistinction to the relatively fixed social relations implied by neoclassical tradition, offered stories that imagined loosening ever so slightly the rigid social hierarchy identified with the ancien re´gime and expanding its upper-middle levels to include individuals of energy, desire, and moral virtue. Characters un-willing to settle for their place among the middle ranks or a life destined for service could find a place above the one to which they were destined at birth. Henry Fielding has it both ways. He creates heroes who had been stolen as babies or misplaced at birth, but they are unable to adjust to social life at the lower levels. Although he restores them to their rightful places without changing the status quo, he makes the social order appear to relax just a bit. Tom Jones, though a bastard, does get his Sophia. In that these examples of the new masculinity possess an energy that will not allow them to stay in their place, they appear to contest the very system of rank, station, and blood at whose head stood the monarch. In the end, as his central placement in the editions of English fiction edited by Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Sir Walter Scott suggests, Fielding contributed to the formation of a national masculinity that argued for a more inclusive, flexible,and less hierarchical society.9 Although, one might expect it to be more politically loaded for women to achieve this same effect solely by means of the Austen feelings, quite the reverse was the case. During the period encompassing the work of Richardson and Austen, we find numerous cases of women marrying above their social level. Richardson’s Pamela marries up into the gentry when Mr. B finds her intrinsic qualities of mind coupled with her literacy equivalent to property. Once his wife, of course, Pamela never presumes to put herself on a par with her husband. That eighteenth-century readers found such upwardly mobile marriages relatively easy to imagine was surely because the woman was already subordinated by gender to the man whom she married.
By creating the man of feeling, Mackenzie asks the eighteenth-century reader to imagine a similar fate for a male protagonist, specifically a gentle-man, whose chief assets are his sensibility and literacy. He is introduced to us as “bashful,” with a sensibility “which the most delicate feelings produce, and the most extensive knowledge cannot always remove”(4). So tenuous is his grip on these feelings that his characteristic response to tales of human suffering is to lose any capacity for action and burst into tears. As prone to sensibility as a woman, Mackenzie’s man of feeling is endowed with a verbal agency equal to women of a superior rank precisely because he is a man. Mackenzie tries, in other words, to make the gender asymmetry that Richardson used to perfection work on behalf of a man of no means but great sensibility. When Harley reluctantly visits Bedlam, he grows distraught at the first clanking of chains and cries of the inmates, and wants to leave even before the ladies of the group beg the guide to remove them from such scenes of anguish (19).We also discover that when Harley offers his benevolence and delicacy of feeling in exchange for the hand of Miss Waltham, her father rejects the exchange out of hand.
Mackenzie sets up various conditions, all the stock and trade of domestic fiction and any one of which could resolve the conflict between Harley’s desire and his lack of means. If, for example, he could simply inherit from a distant relation he would have sufficient money and land to negotiate with Mr.Waltham for his daughter’s hand. But from early on he never had the disposition to cultivate the rich relation’s affections and thereby work himself into her favor. “In short,” Mackenzie tells us, “he accommodated himself so ill to her humour, that she died, and did not leave him a farthing” (7). Having failed to win an inheritance, he might secure a lease for “some crown-lands which lay contiguous to his little paternal estate” (7), but to do so would require patronage “with the great, which Harley or his father never possessed” (7). Alternatively he could rent the land abutting the Waltham estate and turn it to a profit, but he fails to secure the necessary loan. With money to rent property, he could marry Miss Waltham and through her acquire her father’s property. Had he inherited rank fromhis father but little money, on the other hand, he could marry her and through her gain an inheritance. Were he merely an ordinary man by birth but one who enjoyed substantial means, he could acquire social prestige through marriage to a woman of superior rank. A summary of the circles within circles of frustration around which Mackenzie unwinds his hero’s tale shows the lengths to which the author goes in order demonstrate that no man can acquire a social position by what domestic fiction had classified as “feminine” means. Only men who can exchange property for the daughters of other men can become fully men, according to this tradition. Mackenzie overturns no ideological apple carts in asking his reader to sympathize with a man who embodies the combined excess of feelings and lack of independent means characterizing a sentimental heroine. In doing so, that reader must simply acknowledge that the man of feeling lacks precisely the masculine qualities required of Locke’s new man.10 The reader must also accept the fact that real capital and not symbolic capital is the precondition for living a life of sensibility.
In exposing the inadequacy of Harley’s sensibility in the face of the masculine prerogatives of wealth and status, however, Mackenzie also suggests an alternative masculinity residual in eighteenth-century masculinity and comparable to the feminine power of feeling. If he does not succeed in persuading her father to give Miss Waltham to him in marriage, Harley does manage to make her desire him—indeed, desire him to the extent that she, like Clarissa, refuses the marriage that her father arranges. The net effect is that the man of feeling succeeds in throwing a monkey wrench into the traditional exchange of women, which limits the power of the hereditary landowner. By way of comparison, much as Goethe’s Werther adores the fair Lotte, she is engaged and then married to the solidly bourgeois Albert. No feelings on Werther’s or even Lotte’s part—however intense and all-consuming—alter this outcome. Thus I find it significant that Harley’s expressions of feeling succeed in removing Miss Waltham from the prevailing economy of exchange. By his very failure to marry, Harley achieves much the same political result that Clarissa did.
The American Man of Feeling
Whether one wants to claim that Clara Howard represents an entirely new departure for Brockden Brown or simply a variation of the sort of novel he had written several times before, the fact is that he was well aware Clara Howard was going to elicit a different response from those his previously published novels had produced.11 As he indicated in a letter to his brother James, this novel was “dropping the doleful tone [of his earlier works] and assuming a cheerful one, or, at least substituting moral causes and daily incidents in place of the prodigious or the singular” (433). And so it does. To accomplish that end, Brockden Brown organized his novel around the figure of the man of feeling, a figure he adapted to his precise moment in American history. The European prototype was of questionable masculinity, burdened with a sensibility that rendered him incapable of action in the world and doomed him to meet a tragic end. Brockden Brown empowers his man of feeling to act on behalf of “moral causes.” His capacity for action made this protagonist eligible to marry a woman of superior birth. Let us consider what Brockden Brown does to constitute an American brand of masculinity out of this highly unpromising material.
First, he reverses the traditional relation between sensibility and literacy. In contrast to his British counterpart, Edward Hartley does not come into the world with an exquisitely full-blown sensibility. Brockden Brown takes care to establish that the protagonist acquires his sensibility from literature belonging to and read under the tutelage of a transplanted Englishman, Mr. Howard. Hartley not only lacks economic means in that he has “no father” and “no property” (38), he also lacks the attributes of sensibility that Mackenzie’s hero seemed to possess as a fluke of nature. “My temper was artless and impetuous” (38), Hartley explains, “I was a mere country lad, with little education but what was gained by myself; diffident and bashful as the rawest inexperience could make me” (37). (“Bashful” is the term that Mackenzie used to describe Harley.) Mr. Howard is willing to give Hartley a taste of British culture but nothing more; as Hartley tells us, “He never gave me money, nor ever suffered the slightest hint to escape him that he designed to carry his munificence any farther than to lend me his company, his conversation and his books” (38). Nor did Hartley in turn seek any material advantage from the relationship: “in my attachment to [Mr. Howard] there was nothing sordid or mercenary” (38). Indeed, we may attribute Mr. Howard’s mentorship to his belief that a little British learning will teach this uncouth young American to stay in his place. “He was anxious to persuade me,” Hartley writes, “that the farmer’s life was the life of true dignity, and that, however desirable to me property might be, [I] would not strive to change it” (38). Will cultural capital operate as real capital and allow Hartley to move up socially? This is the question the novel addresses.
As if to answer in the affirmative, Hartley uses the language of debt to explain the education that he acquired under Mr. Howard’s tutelage, an education that succeeded in changing the young man’s status from the inside out. “To him I am indebted for whatever distinguishes me from the stone which I turned up with my plough, of the stock which I dissevered with my axe” (39). As a result of his education, Hartley suggests, he has ceased to be an object and become instead an Enlightenment subject: “My understanding was awakened, disciplined, informed; my affections were cherished, exercised and regulated by him” (39–40). With the emergence of his sensibility comes none of the sense of entitlement that we find in Mackenzie’s man of feeling, who lacks any inclination to work for the money he needs. To the American man of feeling, cultural and economic capital are two sides of the same coin. Just as he enhanced his knowledge through the labor of reading, so Hartley plans to increase his property through the labor of his body. The objective is to achieve economic autonomy and acquire the status of head of household, much as Franklin had spelled out in his model of the economic possibility in America.12 As he explains, “I had sisters who needed my protection, and for whose destiny I ought to labour to attain independence” (40). By way of contrast to his European predecessor, the American man of feeling is cast from a Lockean mold.
Thus it comes as something of a jolt when this same man of feeling suddenly disavows the British component of his acquired sensibility. Having labored as an apprentice to a watchmaker, he determines that he must continue to labor until he rids himself of the values acquired with a knowledge of British literature, which instills a prejudice against those who labor. As he explains: “The ideas annexed to the term peasant, are wholly inapplicable to the tillers of ground in America; but our notions are the offspring, more of the books we read, than of any other of our external circumstances. Our books are almost wholly the productions of Europe and the prejudices, which infect us, are derived chiefly from this source. (53)” Hartley clearly considers it anachronistic for citizens of the new republic to hang onto European notions of rank. Yet, he is still subject to this reverence for inherited position. Indeed, it is awareness of his own position, as seen from the British point of view, that fuels his aspirations to rise in American society: “My ambition of dignity and fortune grew of this supposed inferiority of rank” (53). In this respect, Hartley resembles those British protagonists who are unwilling or unable to accept the social position into which they have been born.
The American protagonist must labor in the best Lockean tradition to plant what begins as British sensibility—a sign of leisure more than labor—in newly cultivated American soil. American soil purifies, cures, and restores masculinity to the English man of feeling much as it restores family feeling to the European libertine. When he first lived in England, Hartley’s mentor, Mr. Howard, resembled more a libertine in the mold of the elder Harrington in The Power of Sympathy than a man of reason. By the time he meets up with Hartley, Howard’s life was singularly marred by an inability to remain faithful to any woman, inspiring the woman he loved most in the world to marry his less profligate cousin. After immigrating to America with his private library, however, Howard underwent a salutary transformation. As Hartley tells it, Howard’s “residence here, at a distance from ancient companions, and from all the usual incitements to extravagance, completed a thorough change in his character. He became . . . temperate, studious, gentle, and sedate” (49). Howard brings what is best about British culture in the form of his library and returns with it to England when he is purged of the bad features of British culture. Only then is he qualified to marry his newly widowed beloved, Clara’s mother. By repeating this same course of reading, Hartley’s character undergoes a similar transformation. Through a British education, his Pygmalion-like patron shapes Hartley’s character around the very qualities that Howard him-self had come to possess in America. Thus it is telling that Howard describes the transformation of his client as the extension of qualities usu-ally located in opposing British types: “You are the son,” he tells Hartley,” of my affections and my reason” (51).
The American may have acquired reason and sensibility, but to marry advantageously, he still needs some sort of magic to translate his judgments and feelings into something of tangible value. This magic resides in Clara Howard. It is for good reason that the title of the American edition calls attention to the central importance of the love object in a novel that focuses obsessively on Edward Hartley, his education in reason and sensibility, and his single-minded pursuit of that object. Clara is British-born, yet she is the only one in the novel who “estimates the characters of others,” not by birth or fortune, “but by the intrinsic qualities of heart and head” (51). The reformed Howard—having inherited his late cousin’s property and married his cousin’s widow—must now act as paterfamilias and arrange an exchange of his wife’s daughter Clara with someone who in some sense is his equal. Under these circumstances, he views Hartley’s reason and sensibility as equivalent to Clara’s rank, property, and income. “I mean to admit you,” he tells Hartley, “as an inseparable member of my family, and to place you, in every respect, on the footing of my son” (51). Here, Brock-den Brown deliberately removes what British fiction had seen as the major obstacle to the successful courtship of a man of feeling and a daughter of the landed gentry. He solves that problem, however, in order to place what seems to be a new and more troubling obstacle in the path of an ideal union of American masculinity and British feminity. Clara withholds her consent until Hartley meets her terms for marriage.13
This has to be an important moment in American fiction, where a British woman both embodies the British standard and changes that standard. She will not marry according to her stepfather’s will any more than she would have married on the basis of rank. Indeed, Clara refuses to consider Hartley unless and until he fulfills his prior contractual obligations to another woman. The novel invites us to entertain the fantasy that having met a British woman who does not evaluate a man’s worth according to his rank, Edward could simply marry her. But nothing could be farther fromBrockden Brown’s purpose. Having created a feminine embodiment of British values free of the taint of British prejudice, the novel labors for another hundred pages to put a new cultural ideal in its place.
Before meeting Clara, Hartley had agreed to wed Mary Wilmot chiefly because she had five thousand dollars, which he would use to support his two sisters. The marriage was an honorable agreement, free of deceit, but still one of pure convenience. As Hartley explains, “I never loved Mary Wilmot. Disparity of age, the dignity and sedateness of her carriage, and perhaps the want of personal attractions, inspired me with a sentiment, very different from love” (43). On discovering that the money was not coming to her after all, Mary vanishes for all practical purposes. Hartley assumes, reasonably enough, that because she can no longer honor her side of the bargain, she will not insist that he carry through on his. But Clara Howard holds Edward Hartley to a strict notion of the contractual obligation to marry—the spirit, we might say, rather than the letter of the law. She insists paradoxically that for Hartley to be the kind of man that she would marry, he must faithfully carry out his obligation to his former fiance´e. Where Goethe’s Werther was perfectly willing to seize another man’s intended, Hartley’s education gives him the capacity both to feel, and to constrain his feelings and defer gratification for a very long time. In what feels like a version of the cycles of frustration organizing Mackenzie’s novel, the lion’s share of Clara Howard consists of a protracted quest for Mary Wilmot.
In order for the American man of feeling to marry, his feeling for the woman of his choice has to be transmuted into one compatible with the love of the law. “So far from wishing to rule others,” Hartley writes in a letter, “it is my glory and my boast to submit to one whom I deem unerring and divine. Clara’s will is my law” (90). In this way, Brockden Brown subordinates both individual desire and traditional class affiliations to alliances based on consensual agreement. He belabors this point by having Hartley track down his former fiance´e in a fruitless quest that explores American geography through a network of rivers from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back again. Only after his protagonist has crisscrossed the entire continent—suggesting that is where Hartley’s responsibility begins and ends—does Brockden Brown conjure up a man of means, the benefactor Sedley, as a preferable partner for Mary, freeing Hartley to marry Clara.
Mackenzie’s man of feeling had timely appeal as a witness to injustice and suffering in a world undergoing rapid change. Traditional lines of clientage and patronage were disappearing—the story of Old Edwards and his family retells this all-too-familiar tale—and traditional relations between squire and tenant farmer were giving way to ruthlessly mercenary relations. Money in the hands of a new breed of landlords, coupled with nascent forms of capitalist acquisitiveness, severed the bonds organizingrural England. Against this historical background,Mackenzie’s protagonist is singularly impotent. He neither can correct injustice nor advance any political change. It remains for Brockden Brown’s man of feeling to solve the problem that Mackenzie’s Harley exposes. By submitting to the contract that separates him from the object of his desire, Brockden Brown’s Hartley miraculously acquires that object as his reward. Observing this tenet of democratic culture, Clara Howard registers moral feeling and contractualism as two sides of the same coin of masculinity. An Englishwoman dictates and sanctions the new society. Indeed, his fidelity to contractualism creates a world at the end of the novel where everyone is not only equal but equally cared for as well. Like Clara and Edward, Sedley and Mary Wilmot will marry. Because Mary turns out to be Clara’s British relation, both will see to it that their men head English households. At the same time, because British distinctions of rank have given way to the American ideal of contractualism, those households will be socially and politically American.
The Man of Feeling Returns to England after a Turn in America
The revolutions in America, France, the Caribbean, and, later, Latin America no doubt made it seem as if the world suffered from an excess rather than a deficiency of sensibility. Rather than captive to a rigidly hierarchized social order, one’s position appeared to be up for grabs. While such historians as E. P. Thompson and John Barrell have argued that these changes were indeed more apparent than substantive, the fiction of the period nevertheless cast everything readers took for granted in a destabilizing light and then came up with new ways of assuaging the anxiety so generated. A product of the 1770s, Mackenzie’s man of feeling was cursed with a sensibility that might have imperiled the old order had he not died of frustration. In the decades following the French Revolution, readers seemed to want more than that, and the hero of Brockden Brown’s Clara Howard combines the excessive subjectivity required of a compassionate man with the education necessary to convert that excess into self-government. British novels written after the turn of the century adopt the formal strategies by which Brockden Brown converted the one into the other—individual sensibility into citizenship.
Brockden Brown was not the only writer to renew public interest in the man of feeling. William Godwin followed his lead in this respect, and I find the contrast between the two instructive. In 1805 Godwin acknowledged his debt to Mackenzie by subtitling his novel Fleetwood: Or, the New Man of Feeling. Initially a misanthrope, Godwin’s man of feeling is someone of a “poetical and contemplative character” (73) until he goes off to14 After a period of sensual indulgence and dissipation, he comes Oxford.to resemble nothing so much as what one reviewer called “a prosaic Othello” (537) beguiled into jealous suspicion about his wife by an avaricious malcontent who wants to be Fleetwood’s heir. In a harshly critical account of Fleetwood in the Edinburgh Review (April 1805), SirWalter Scott objects to this misappropriation of Mackenzie’s protagonist with these words: “We have been accustomed to associate with our ideas of this character the amiable virtues of a Harley, feeling deeply the distresses of others, and patient though not insensible of his own. But Fleetwood, through his whole three volumes which bear his name, feels absolutely exclusively for one individual, and that individual is Fleetwood himself” (521–22). Objecting to the title of Godwin’s novel, another reviewer declares, “By ‘A Man of Feeling,’ is generally understood a man of warm and active benevolence whose heart is exquisitely sensible to the distresses of every being around him, and whose hand is ever ready, as far as his influence extends, to alleviate or relieve them . . . if the reader expects to find any resemblance between Fleetwood and Harley, he will soon discover his mistake” (525). These two reviewers are not alone in expressing their dismay with Godwin for linking his violent protagonist to Mackenzie’s gentle Harley. To a man, these reviewers denounce Godwin for having violated the prototype when he failed to temper his hero’s egotistical passions with socially oriented compassion. Such moderation was essential to permissible forms of sensibility by 1805. 15
When in 1807 the Minerva Press reprinted Brockden Brown’s Clara Howard in England, under the title Philip Stanley: or, the Enthusiasm of Love, it introduced England to the American alternative to Godwin’s revision of Mackenzie’s Harley—an alternative that soon took hold, I will argue, and flourished in Jane Austen’s fiction. William Lane not only built his press to considerable importance over a period of thirty years, but, according to one historian of the Minerva, “also established circulating libraries in all parts of the kingdom for the sale of his novels.”16 Authors and readers alike knew the press as a major publisher of just the sort of novels that the heroine of Austen’s Northanger Abbey has a taste for.17 But what Austen herself does to the man of feeling is historically light years beyond both Mackenzie’s example and anything Godwin produced. I believe Brockden Brown, or if not he, then some unknown English forebear resembling the American Hartley, enabled this quantum leap. We know that Austen drafted “Elinor and Marianne” in the 1790s and revised it extensively between 1805–10 before first publishing it in 1811 as Sense and Sensibility. Her “First Impressions” was on the table in 1797, only to be significantly rewritten and published in 1813 as Pride and Prejudice. Whether she actually read Philip Stanley during this period—and the likelihood is that she did, given that a Minerva lending library was within fivemiles of the Austen home—is less important than the fact of a fundamental shift in the kind of masculinity English readers and reviewers were prepared to receive. As I hope to demonstrate, Jane Austen’s ideal heroes are cut to the pattern of Brockden Brown’s man of feeling.
To succeed as a male in an Austen novel, one must have deep and intense feelings but subject them to rigorous forms of discipline. Before a man can be considered worthy of her heroines, he must wait, much as Edward Hartley had to wait, without any hope of gratification. Austen has little interest in appealing to American readers and even less interest in contract law. But she nevertheless borrows the principle from Brockden Brown that true masculinity expresses itself through a protracted delay, redirection, and sublimation of desire for an original love object. In Sense and Sensibility, Austen not only binds Edward Ferrars to a secret pledge of marriage, but also inflicts on Colonel Brandon the loss of his youthful lover. In Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, Austen’s heroines reject the first offers of marriage from Mr. Darcy and CaptainWentworth, respectively. All of these men appear to grow in sensibility as they suppress their feelings and turn their attention elsewhere—to acts of kindness that do nothing to assuage their profound sense of loss. As a result of the delay or rebuff, furthermore, Austen’s man of feeling is given a chance to show compassion and act in some completely selfless way to correct an injustice. The men who finally win the hands of Marianne Dashwood, Eleanor Dashwood, Elizabeth Bennet, and Anne Elliot are men who demonstrate that intense feelings unknown to the heroine lurk behind an exterior of parental concern, extreme reserve, lukewarm affection, and even dislike.18
Colonel Brandon is first described as “silent and grave.”19 When Marianne Dashwood performs for guests at Barton Park, he “alone, of all the party, heard her without being in raptures” (28). Lest the reader construe this reticence as a lack of appreciation for Marianne herself, Austen lets it be known what depth of emotion is implied by his self-containment: “He paid her only the compliment of attention; and she felt a respect for him on the occasion, which the others had reasonably for-feited by their shameless want of taste” (28). Not to be outdone in this respect, Edward Ferrars, the secret suitor of Marianne’s sister, appears “too diffident to do justice to himself; but when his natural shyness was overcome,” Austen assures us, “his behaviour gave every indication of an open affectionate heart” (14).
Mr. Darcy of Pride and Prejudice violates the prototype of the man of feeling in a very different way.When the reader first encounters him, Darcy radiates the very opposite of admiration and receives less than his share of that feeling to which rank ordinarily entitles him: “The gentlemen pronounced him to be a fine figure of a man, the ladies declared he was much handsomer than Mr. Bingley, and he was looked at with great admirationfor about half the evening, till his manners gave a disgust which turned the tide of his popularity.”20 Add to the fact that he rates very low on an emotional register that Darcy—and Brandon, for that matter—is extremely wealthy and therefore a complete inversion of Harley. Austen as much as dispenses with Harley’s coupling of excess emotion with insufficient wealth in order to move on to what she obviously regarded as the more salient feature of the man of feeling—the protracted period of frustration, which in Mackenzie’s novel led only to death. Darcy’s ability to marry the woman he truly desires has little to do with wealth or position. Austen would convince us that when Elizabeth Bennet agrees to marry him and Marianne Dashwood accepts Brandon’s proposal, it is on the basis of emotional compatibility alone. Austen manages to hand over to her heroines the prerogative to decide whether to accept the offers of marriage, and she has these women sound the depth and try the endurance of their partners’ feelings before they come to a decision.
Paradoxically, the most direct testimony to the fact that Austen was reworking a form of masculinity that flourished in the 1770s appears in her last and most perplexing novel, Persuasion. In the opening pages we learn that the youngWentworth “had no fortune” to back up his initial proposal of marriage to Anne Elliot.21 Succumbing to social codes not all that different from those prohibiting the marriage of Mackenzie’s Harley to the well-born Miss Waltham, Austen’s heroine “was persuaded to believe the engagement a wrong thing—indiscreet, improper, hardly capable of success, and not deserving it” (28). And as in the case of Miss Waltham, it is not for lack of love that Anne turns down Wentworth’s offer: “Had she not imagined herself consulting his good, even more than her own, she could hardly have given him up” (28). When Wentworth returns to Bath and the society of the Elliots eight years later, however, Austen tells us, “He was rich, and being turned on shore, fully intended to settle as soon as he could be properly tempted” (41). Thus it is no longer lack of money that obstructs his marriage with Anne, who never wavered in her desire for him, despite the various men who parade through Pump Room and parlor, at least one of whom with an eye fixed on her inheritance. Having cleared away all material obstacles standing between two individuals who are entirely suited for one another and already know it, Austen begins a singularly gray novel in which each must re-experience the painful possibility of the other’s marriage to someone else. From Anne’s point of view, “They had no conversation together, no intercourse, but what the commonest civility required. Once so much to each other! Now nothing!” (42). Exploiting a protracted and futile quest equal only to that composing the second half of Brockden Brown’s novel, Austen has both her new man and woman sit in no little agony on the sidelines, each wishing only happiness for the other at the cost of great emotional sacrifice each to him or herself. It is precisely by not expressing desire and the large cloud of small disappointments, and even smaller glimpses of possible gratification, that these characters convince us there is so very much feeling there to express.
To drive home her point, Austen populates each of her novels with shallow characters who use the language of emotion too easily and insincerely and employ it to duplicitous ends. The conventions available for direct expression of feeling have been coopted by those who misuse them. Robert Ferrars uses the language of feelings to displace his bashful older brother Edward as his mother’s sole heir. Robert shares the propensity for “assiduous attention and endless flatteries, as soon as the smallest opening was given for their exercise” (266) with the libertine Willoughby, who “read with all the sensibility and spirit which Edward unfortunately wanted” (38). Marianne succumbs to Willoughby’s charm on the assumption “that to the perfect good-breeding of the gentleman, he united frankness and vivacity” (36). But Willoughby’s success actually derives from his ability to mirror Marianne’s own highly emotive language. Even the usually clearsighted Elinor is misled when she overhears him speaking to Marianne, “in the whole of the sentence, in his manner of pronouncing it, and in his addressing her sister by her Christian name alone, she instantly saw an intimacy so decided, a meaning so direct, as marked a perfect agreement between them. From that moment she doubted not of their being engaged to each other” (45).
In Pride and Prejudice, Austen contrasts Darcy’s extraordinary difficulty in expressing his affection for Elizabeth Bennet with his friend Bingley’s easy affability, on the one hand, and Wickham’s insidious glibness, on the other. Persuasion, too, has its linguistically promiscuous types, Captain Benwick and William Walter Elliot. On the one hand, Benwick is so full of the language of Scott and Byron that he strikes Anne Elliot as having “the appearance of feelings glad to burst their usual restraints” (67), while Elliot’s verbal facility makes him the proverbial snake in the garden, eager to ensnare the trusting heroine: “Mr. Elliot was not disappointed in the interest he hoped to raise. No one can withstand the charm of such a mystery. To have been described long ago to a recent acquaintance, by nameless people, is irresistible; and Anne was all curiosity” (124). In contrast to these abusers of language, the true man of feeling has trouble putting his feelings into words.
Unwilling to sound like their glib but heartless counterparts, Brandon, Edward Ferrars, Darcy, and Wentworth suppress their feelings as if that alone were the only guarantee of sincerity. As Elinor Dashwood explains to her sister Marianne, Edward “believes many people pretend to more admiration of the beauties of nature than they really feel, and is disgusted with such pretensions, he affects greater indifference and less discrimination in viewing them himself than he possesses” (71). As a preamble to his second proposal of marriage, Darcy taunts Elizabeth Bennet with her failure to understand his lack of self-expression as testament to his intense feelings, “You thought me then devoid of every proper feeling, I am sure you did” (253). Wentworth has an even more difficult time expressing his feelings for Anne in the conventions available for that purpose. Cut to the quick by her suggestion that his polite restraint indicates faltering devotion, he blurts out the truth in a note: “You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, and that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own, than when you almost broke it eight years and a half ago. . . . I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant.” (158) Doubtful even of language so bluntly rendered, he “placed it before Anne with eyes of glowing entreaty fixed on her for a moment” (157), as if to say that words alone will not quite do the trick.
It is the man of feeling’s difficult task to find just the right form of cultural expression, as that form testifies to what is not only deep but also unique about his feelings. Darcy cannot be the one to reveal how he rescued the Bennet family name. Brandon is under a similar obligation to rescue Eliza from Willoughby and say nothing of it until forced to do so. Ferrars, too, waits until after he has been released from his obligation to Lucy Steele, while Wentworth is subject to public gossip and rumors of courtship that cast him as the object of desire in plots that contradict his enduring affection for Anne. To prove them adequate, Austen subjects each of her men to trials in which they are required to distinguish them-selves by extravagant and prolonged forms of self-containment. By forcing them to wait until they find the right form, the correct setting, and the proper rhetorical moment to give social expression to their deepest desires, Austen creates male protagonists whose depth and consistency of feeling is beyond any doubt.
Even then, there is no adequate medium to reveal the special quality of their affection in a form that is not shot through with conventional phrases available to just about anyone. Consider the case of Captain Wentworth. It would be a mistake to think he is blurting out his feelings when he confesses his love to Anne. The occasion for this revelation is a highly contrived literary topos that under such conditions is not available to most other men. Wentworth drafts the note professing his love to her while listening to Anne debate Captain Harville on the ever-so-familiar literary topos of woman’s constancy. Having rejected the books, songs, and proverbs Harville offers on behalf of man’s constancy, Anne claims only that women love “longest, when existence or when hope is gone” (157). Later, Wentworth confesses that, “[T]hose sentiments and those tones which had reached him while she talked with Captain Harville” vanquished his jealousy of William Elliot. “[U]nder the irresistible governance of which[the debate] he had seized a sheet of paper, and poured out his feelings” (161). It is important to note that the feelings in question are not “poured out” but written in highly formulaic phrases to intervene in the highly conventional debate on constancy: “Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant” (158). By suppressing his jealousy, on the one hand, and his feelings for Anne, on the other, Wentworth finds a vehicle for emotional expression in one of the most conventional of literary formats.
If Wentworth requires classic literary formulae to express his deepest feelings, we should not be surprised to discover that characters like Brandon, Ferrars, and Darcy are similarly unable to express themselves in the vernacular. Elizabeth Bennet’s opinion of Darcy changes when she visits Pemberly with the Gardners and his character is drawn by Mrs. Reynolds, the housekeeper. While gazing at his miniature, the visitors learn from Mrs. Reynolds that rather than a proud and heartless aristocrat, Darcy “was always the sweetest tempered, most generous hearted, boy in the world.” The housekeeper tops off her portrait of Darcy as a man of feeling by describing him as “affable to the poor” (161). This ekphrastic moment transforms him in Elizabeth’s eyes: “This was praise, of all others most extraordinary, most opposite to [Elizabeth’s] ideas. That he was not a good-tempered man, had been her firmest opinion” (162). When her narrator sees little point in repeating the terms of Darcy’s second proposal to Elizabeth, Austen reiterates the point that there is no way for the man of feeling to speak, so hackneyed have the conventions of emotional expression become. She also refuses to provide any dialogue for his response to Elizabeth’s acceptance, noting only that: “he expressed himself on the occasion as sensibly and as warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do” (239). His face having been transformed by his miniature, that face can now individuate and deepen his otherwise less-than-interesting speech: “Had Elizabeth been able to encounter his eye, she might have seen how well the expression of heart-felt delight, diffused over his face, became him” (239).
Brandon, too, submits to rigid standards of self-expression that deprive him of the means of professing love to Marianne Dashwood. He confesses his desire to her mother instead. For fear that these emotions might sound disingenuous coming from the lips of the man of feeling himself, Austen has Mrs. Dashwood report them to Elinor: “He opened his whole heart to me yesterday as we traveled.” She not only reports on the contents of Brandon’s feelings, but she also testifies to its genuineness: “It came out quite unawares, quite undesignedly” (238). Paradoxically, it is also by way of second-hand reports that Marianne learns of Brandon’s “irresistible feelings.” Removed from the heat of the moment, Elinor and Mrs. Dashwood can proceed to analyze his feelings. They observe that their high opinion of Brandon “does not rest on one act of kindness” (239) but on many, and his manners are distinguished by “their gentleness, their genuine attention to other people, and their manly unstudied simplicity” (240). Like Darcy, the most expressive moments of this man of feeling occur when he cannot say anything:
His emotion in entering the room, in seeing her altered looks and in receiving the pale hand which she immediately held out to him, was such, as, in Elinor’s conjecture, must arise from something more than his affection for Marianne, or the consciousness of its being known to others; and she soon discovered in his melancholy eye and varying complexion as he looked at her sister, the probable recurrence of many past scenes of misery to his mind, brought back by that resemblance between Marianne and Eliza (241).
By preventing Brandon from speaking what he feels and, at the same time, making his face speak volumes, Austen creates the effect that he is suppressing feelings that exceed the power of words.
Finally, Edward Ferrars resembles those other men of feeling who can speak only hesitantly and in highly restricted forms. Like Philip Stanley, Ferrars fulfills his contractual obligations at great personal sacrifice without hope of gratifying his most deeply held desire. When he reveals to Elinor he is not married to Lucy Steele after all (his brother has fortuitously relieved him of that obligation), she flees the room and he leaves without saying another word. The novel suggests nothing so much as that extraordinary self-denial is the prerequisite for self-gratification: “he was released without any reproach to himself, from an entanglement which had long formed his misery, from a woman whom he had long ceased to love;—and elevated at once to that security with another, which he must have thought of almost with despair as soon as he had learnt to consider it with desire” (255).
In Clara Howard, Charles Brockden Brown inscribed the man of feeling within the ideology of the social contract. By so doing, he demonstrated that to secure one’s personal interest, one must subordinate his particular interest to that of the community as a whole. Thus we find the form of self-discipline that Clara induces in Hartley transforming those attributes that qualify him for citizenship into the attributes for companionate love. Democracy becomes the natural result of such affection. Where the epistolary novel makes it rather a simple matter for Hartley to express his feelings for Clara, Austen staged an elaborate aesthetic performance to distinguish the revelation of true affection from the abuse of words. Only such self-consciously aesthetic occasions as literary debates, scenes of reading, and discussions about the verisimilitude of a painting provide the terms as well as the rhetoric for true self-expression. Where Mackenzie’s man of feeling could speak easily and Goethe’s Werther was positively verbose, Austen’s men of feeling are placed, as is Brockden Brown’s Hartley, in situations where feelings assume an inverse relation to their verbal expression. The verbal constraints placed upon the protagonist become the means of gauging the depth of his feelings. Thus we might credit Austen for transforming the man of feeling from the source of exalted prose to the strong, silent type, a form of masculinity that we now consider uniquely American.
Frontier Feeling
Nowhere is James Fenimore Cooper’s debt to the continental version of the man of feeling more apparent than in Pathfinder, the novel where the taciturn frontiersman, Natty Bumpo, otherwise known as Hawkeye, falls in love and almost marries. Cooper introduces Hawkeye as the embodiment of “simplicity, integrity and sincerity, blended in an air of self reliance.” 22 In this crucial respect, he is the very antithesis of the polygamous conspirator Muir, “whose smooth-tongued courtesy was little in accordance with [Hawkeye’s] own frank and ingenuous nature” (424). As if to establish an inverse relation between fullness of feeling and lack of words, Cooper provides numerous occasions on which Hawkeye’s feelings exceed his powers of self-expression. “Unwilling, if not unable to say any more,” Cooper tells us, “he walked away, and stood leaning on his rifle, and looking up at the stars for quite ten minutes, in profound silence” (190). A hundred pages later, Mabel learns that Hawkeye seeks the companionship of a wife and has her in mind for this role. She refuses his offer on grounds that his age and his familiarity with Indian ways make them too different. This is how Cooper chooses to represent the keen disappointment his protagonist feels: “The pent-up feelings would endure no more, and the tears rolled down the cheeks of the scout, like rain. His fingers again worked convulsively at his throat, and his breast heaved, as if it possessed a tenant of which it would be rid, by any effort, however, desperate” (271). Clearly couched in an exaggerated version of the language of the man of feeling and true to its conventions, this passage shows the taciturn Hawkeye to be capable of extreme emotion—not only unable to free that “tenant” from his heaving breast, but also unfit to be incorporated within a modern household. Unwilling to end their relationship on this note of failure, Cooper spends the second half of Pathfinder moving beyond the stalemate created by Hawkeye’s role as the strong, silent type. Indeed, we might regard the process by which the novel finally succeeds in marrying off Mabel as something on the order of a descriptive theory of the transformation required before the man of feeling can become a nation-maker, recognizably American and yet receivable in Europe as well. Having turned down Hawkeye on grounds of cultural incompatibility, Mabel assumes the role of a Clara Howard and insists on Bumpo’s strict adherence to the very contract she had earlier rejected. Invoking her father’s deal with Hawkeye, she says, “save my father from this dreadful death [at the hands of the Indians] and I can worship you” (376). If Bumpo were to honor the contract with Mabel’s father, it would yield a loveless alliance—as would Hartley’s marriage of convenience to Mary Wilmot and a far cry from the marriage of an American Adam and Eve. To produce what Doris Sommer terms a “foundational fiction,” Cooper has to marry off one English creole to another and to do it while remaining faithful to the contract between Mabel’s father and Pathfinder.23
If we think that Cooper has painted himself into a conceptual corner in this respect by figuring his hero as a man of feeling, then we must think again. In a scene that might have come from a novel by Henry Fielding were it not so saturated with sentiment, Cooper puts young Jasper Western at the deathbed where Mabel’s dying father cements his contract with Haw-keye: “ ‘Pathfinder’—added the serjeant, feeling on the opposite side of the bed, where Jasper still knelt, getting one of the hands of the young man, by mistake—‘Take it—I leave you as her father—as you and she may please—bless you—bless you’ ” (443). The sergeant’s “mistake” is no mistake in terms of the solution Cooper feels compelled to produce and the means available to him for doing so. This “mistake” succeeds in splitting the man of feeling into two component parts—a generous father and an affectionate husband. As surrogate father to Mabel, Hawkeye is in a position to cancel out the first contract based on an outdated patriarchal model and oversee a more American, because consensual, contract. In this regard, he is modeled on the historically earlier man of feeling who was condemned to remain single. At the same time, having this nearly indigenous man as surrogate father makes Mabel something of a Creole who can be at home on the frontier and the perfect mate for Jasper Western. As the new Americans, it is important that neither of them depend on bloodlines or wealth for their value but on something like the cultural capital empowered in Brockden Brown’s man of feeling.
Cooper has carefully set the stage for a match to take place on this basis all along. Having been educated by a widow of an officer, as Cooper explains, Mabel “received much more than the rudiments of plain English instruction.”With such an education, she “acquired some tastes, and many ideas, . . . the results [of which] were quite apparent, in her attire, her language, her sentiments and even in her feelings” (109). Culturally mis-matched with Hawkeye, Mabel finds in Jasper her masculine counterpart. When Jasper speaks his feelings, like Hawkeye, he does so “almost unconsciously, but with a truth and feeling that carried with the instant conviction of their deep sincerity” (446). In contrast to Hawkeye, however, Jasperwas “brought up under a real English seaman; one that had sailed under the King’s Pennant, and may be called a thorough bred: that is to say, a subject born in the colonies” (193). Jasper is Mabel’s equal not only in terms of birth and background, but also on the basis of a shared literacy and taste, which achieve a kind of hybridity in Hawkeye. As he tells Mabel, Jasper “is quite a scholar who—knows the tongue of the Frenchers—reads many books. Some, I know, that you like to read yourself—can understand you at all times, which, perhaps, is more than I can say for myself” (456). If American masculinity finds its ideal embodiment in a silent hero who contains a whole world within him, then surely this ideal is deeply indebted to Brockden Brown’s revision of Mackenzie’s hero.
Brockden Brown transformed the man of feeling into one for whom mere words or the easy expression of feelings were inadequate testimony to his feelings. He made his protagonist delay gratification, journey across the American landscape, and so prove that his depth of feeling for his beloved was evident in his fidelity to a contract. By emphasizing action over words as the best testimony to feelings, Brockden Brown recast as disingenuous any easy expression of masculine sentiment. Taking up the revised type, Jane Austen made it nearly impossible for those males whom she designated as fit mates for her heroines to give voice to their feelings. She made us believe that these men were too full of emotion to do so. The sign of the depth and sincerity of what they felt is expressed, paradoxically, by their near inability to find adequate means of expression except in highly formal and self-consciously artistic settings. Looking at Cooper as the inheritor to Brockden Brown’s and Austen’s revision of the man of feeling, we may begin to account for his popularity on both sides of the Atlantic. As the first American author to enjoy both American and European followings, it is to Cooper that many look when they seek the example for that stereotype of a distinctive brand of American masculinity. The protagonist—whose legacy extends all the way from Cooper to Melville and Twain to Hemingway—can claim Charles Brockden Brown and Jane Austen for his literary parents.