Scholars have spent an inordinate amount of time arguing that "American" really refers to "Americanness": national characteristics shape and mirror the form of a literary work. Some idea of America animates the narrative, controls and orders the very pattern of words upon the page. A variant on this idea of "Americanness" would be that recognizable issues, concerns, preoccupations appear again and again in books that are supposedly representative of American experience. Thus, Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain are the most American of nineteenth-century novelists, and Whitman is our true American poet, since something like an American identity can be discerned from reading their works. Ultimately, Spengemann has said, "America must make a difference in the way literature is written."
I have in the past believed this to be so (the force of Spengemann's arguments to the contrary notwithstanding), and to some extent still do, though I am deeply troubled by the implications of extracting some notion of identity, some sense of representativeness, from a canonized literature written almost exclusively by white men. The newest anthologies of our national literature have attempted to correct for this imbalance, and we now have access to the voices and visions of so many previously excluded "others." Perhaps, generally speaking, our literature will finally deserve to be called American, but can we say the same in particular for the novel, especially the so-8- called early novel, where the practitioners are exclusively white, though some indeed are female?
To be sure, the America in the term "the American novel" is a place, with hard outlines and a traceable landscape, but it is also, as it has been from the outset, an idea — often an ideal — imagined first in the minds of enlightened European thinkers, reimagined, and then shaped and configured, in the consciousness of Thomas Jefferson and the other founders of the Republic. That America may indeed never have existed in fact, but it always exists in mythic memory, and it is first and foremost a vision of inclusiveness: it deplores restriction and derogation. Can it not be said that to the extent that the nation embodies this vision it is that much closer to becoming America? How, then, can the "early American novel" possibly be American when it lacks any kind of minority and ethnic representation? Without there being a free assemblage of different peoples and an open forum for their genuinely differing points of view, there is no America; without a confluence of voices, expressing a myriad range of experience, there is no American novel. The American novel is, in the best sense of the term, multicultural; it may only recently have come into being.
This brings us to the third of our slippery terms: the literary designation "novel." If a novel is, in the simplest possible definition, a "sustained fictional narrative in prose," as the modern editor of The Power of Sympathy contends, then it appears as if Brown's, as well as every other book to be discussed here, qualifies as a novel. In fact, almost any form of fiction does, for what does "sustained" mean but that a plan or design has been executed or upheld? Even some autobiographies might fit under this rubric, which is how some contemporary critics view them anyway. A more problematic term, however, is "fiction," which had low status in eighteenth-century America and was often shunned by those who wrote it. Often, too, readers believed they were devouring "true" stories, that is, narratives based on fact — incidents that were historically verifiable (which is the case not only with Brown's Sympathy but also with Foster's Coquette and Rowson's Charlotte). Cathy N. Davidson points out that Rowson promised her readers "A Tale of Truth," and that is exactly how her story was read and appreciated. Some writers, like Washington Irving, went to elaborate steps to deny the fictionality of their work; his -9- assuming the mask of Diedrich Knickerbocker is only one of the ways by which he tried to convince the public he was offering it either history or "true" story.
If today's readers were asked to decide what element of a novel most mattered to them, they would probably emphasize either character or plot development. In other words, for most consumers of fiction, the novel signifies "realism," and this is indeed the distinction M. H. Abrams draws between the novel proper and the "romance": "The novel," Abrams writes, "is characterized as the fictional attempt to give the effect of realism, by representing complex characters with mixed motives who are rooted in a social class, operate in a highly developed social structure, interact with many other characters, and undergo plausible and everyday modes of experience." The niceties of generic distinction are not the point; rather, the works usually labeled as early American novels do not look anything like the conception most people have of the novel. Their characters are abstractions, hardly ever realized in any complex psychological way; their plots are mechanical, often clumsy and ill contrived; their "modes of experience" are anything but "everyday." In the modern sense of the term, the one we live with experientially, none of these books are novels at all but perhaps more like sermons or fables.
I must add a note here about what I personally look for in American novels, that is, what makes novel reading a vital experience for me. In each new book I am interested in discovering what I call "cultural voice," the process or the means by which an author with a social conscience and a rich and liberating language, though usually speaking through a persona, presents us with a unified moral vision of American society. "Voice" in this sense is the sound that results when fear is overcome so that truth can be asserted. It is the refusal to internalize, and thus be tamed by, the forces and agents of cultural repression. It is the cry of unsuppressed rage, the explosion of unchecked anxiety, the release of unmitigated anger, the expression of (as much as possible) unmediated passion or desire. A genuine voice can never be truly imitated, duplicated, or reproduced.