Thus, written Indian autobiography comes out of the oral tradition in contact with Europeans. In Indian autobiography, oral narratives are committed to writing through separate processes: the ethnographic and the as-told-to stories. Both share oral origins and presume a non-Indian mediator, but the ethnographer, usually an anthropologist, collects materials for a different purpose than the editor of the as-told-to story. The first collects for the record — for information on customs, mores, practices, and rituals of special groups of people. The as-told-to editor, on the other hand, not only takes information for the record but also works with the subject to produce a full autobiographical narrative. The product of the collaboration is determined by the narrative skill of the subject and the editorial skills of the editor, especially those of literary techniques. Unlike the ethnographic record, in the as-told-to story it is expected that incidents are reordered especially for their telling and do not represent a mirror image of actual experience. Since imagination plays a vastly important role in the final story, the outcome resembles Western autobiography.
Within the constraints of the transformation of oral narratives to written autobiography, governing patterns within Indian narratives fall into three main categories: the captivity narrative of the early white settlers, the memoirs of Franklin, and the African American -44- slave narrative. Indians converted to Christianity were strongly influenced by the captivity narratives with their penchant for a public declaration of faith, spiritual development, and endurance. The memoirs of Franklin, with their emphasis on historic content and public event, were attractive to Indian males but almost unobservable in female narratives. Women tend to turn to day-to-day activities in their life stories, recording family and personal life along with their roles in preserving the traditions of their people. From the slave narrative tradition, another branch of the Indian personal narrative focuses on those experiences in which the subject develops from within a group identity and tells stories otherwise unknown to white readers, but to whom they are directed. From such stories this audience gains insight into the individual as well as into the society of that individual. Indian autobiography, the product of direct bicultural interaction, and autobiographies by Indians, the product of socialization and influence by several streams of American cultures outside of the Indian experience, may very well represent the most profound example of the complexity of narrative at the junction of history and literature, fiction and autobiography.
Clearly, autobiographers of all groups — seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British settlers in the new colonies, black slaves in the nineteenth-century South, Native Americans forced to give up their cultures and to adopt the ways of white men, as well as the twentieth-century American heterogeneous migrants from across the globe — use techniques of fiction to place discernible patterns on their lives in writing. In autobiography, there is always a necessary relationship between the life of the subject and the life in the text, but the separations between fact and fiction are not always clear. Literature is less chaotic and infinitely more manageable than life and so imagination more than absolute historical truth grounds the autobiographical text. Undeniably, autobiography is a fictional form — a realization that need not diminish its social, historical, or literary value. For autobiography and fiction together provide complementary strategies for the art of writing the self.
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The Book Marketplace I
Between 1815 and 1860, Americans lived through a market revolution and saw the novel establish itself as the lucrative art form of middle-class civilization. Lines of force bound these two occurrences together, but the rates of change on both sides were uneven, and writers often had unstable and conflicting relations to the new social universe. Literary patterns, in works and in careers, did not materialize simply as an homologous reinscription of the cultural dominant, in this case the solidifying of market capitalism. Such resemblances certainly existed, and they illuminate the common contours of literature and society. But the novel's flowering represented a multivalent negotiation, involving dissent as well as agreement, with an ideological ascendancy that was itself far from monolithic. Gender complicated integration into historical change and set male and female authors on dissimilar trajectories of development. Women novelists, culturally identified with domesticity, produced functional narratives that evoked an older understanding of the literary, but they far outsold their more experimental male rivals and were paradoxically freed by their prescribed gender roles to accept commercial popularity. The men conceived of themselves as professionals and bequeathed a definition of the aesthetic as the antithesis both of exchange value and of the best-selling women. Male novelists ultimately found acceptance in a space that was neither the market nor the not-market, in the regulated economy of the academy.
A famous quotation and an obscure location: two coordinates -46- from which to map an economics of the antebellum novel. The quotation comes from Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, a book published in the same year as the Declaration of Independence, and occurs in the midst of remarks about the legal and medical professions. Lawyers and physicians, says Smith, enjoy a respectability and decency of recompense altogether foreign to "that unprosperous race of men commonly called men of letters."
The site, an imaginary one, appears in George Lippard's The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall, a Gothic thriller issued in ten pamphletlike installments in 1845, almost exactly seventy years after Smith's bible of free-market capitalism. Lippard is describing the setting of Monk Hall, a mansion originally erected on the outskirts of Philadelphia by "a wealthy foreigner, sometime previous to the Revolution," and long since overtaken in its isolation by the expanding metropolis. The ancient building now stands on a narrow street, "with a printing shop on one side and a stereotype foundry on the other," while rows of stores, offices, factories, and tenements stretch brokenly into the distance.
A cultural upheaval separates Smith's "unprosperous race of men" from Lippard's paperbound best-seller, with its image of a sensationalized house of fiction surrounded by the indices of technological and social change. Smith's phrasing accurately defines the state of authorship and literature in the early Republic. Indeed, his inclusion of writers in the same passage with lawyers and doctors indicates the extent to which the literary culture of Great Britain, however unremunerative, was in advance of that of the United States. The American novelist may have followed a profession, but it wasn't composing fiction: earning a livelihood from literature was an impossibility in this country until the 1820s. Only two novelists in the half-century before Irving and Cooper even aspired to professional status. The rest were men and women for whom novel writing remained, by choice and by necessity, a diversion, an amateur activity carried out in moments stolen from regular duties as jurists, clergymen, or educators. The two exceptions, Susanna Rowson and Charles Brockden Brown, labored valiantly to make letters self-supporting but could not overcome the economic and cultural obstacles. Brown, who was eventually forced by poverty to join his family's import business, found -47- novels so unprofitable that he not only stopped writing them but sought to repudiate his efforts in the genre, while Rowson had to turn to schoolteaching and textbooks to supplement the meager rewards of fiction.