Indeed, no difference here is finally more instructive than the major one between Elizabeth and Eliza: Austen's heroine combats her situation through brilliant and witty language, a play of sensibility that enables her to triumph over unfortunate, occasionally menacing circumstance, whereas all that Foste r can imagine for her protagonist is silence. Her letters ironically demonstrate a lack of creative choice. Eliza Wharton loses her voice or, perhaps more to the point, relinquishes it, but in either case circumstance and event triumph over her. Silence, as critics of the novel have argued, is an appropriate metaphor for a woman's lack of independent legal status in American -17- society; since she has no agency, why pretend that her words mean anything? But to yield the struggle, to accept powerlessness, is to permit the dominant culture not only to go unchallenged but also to take refuge once again in its supercilious moral standards. Eliza passively giving herself to her seducer, falling into sin and, inevitably, death, only reinforces the codes that Foster has in other ways tried to subvert. The novel itself sacrifices the cultural ground it might otherwise have claimed.
If Susanna Rowson was more successful in her social commentary — a point of some debate — it may very well have been because in Charlotte Temple (published in America in 1794) she abandoned the Richardsonian form (mercifully, only a few letters appear in the text) in favor of a third-person narrative, though one that she occasionally interrupts to speak in her own voice. It is that voice, however constrained it may be by her culture's suspicion of novel writing (she indicates in the preface her awareness of the novel's suspect nature), and bound though it still is to conventional morality (she advises her young readers to implore "heaven" to "keep [them] free from temptation"), that gives the novel its real interest, for we can hear, underneath the rather formal and even stilted language, her desire to break the bonds of women's cultural subservience, an inherited sphere of expectation that makes Charlotte Temple a prey to male predators like her seducer Montraville and his adviser Belcour. Addressing young women explicitly (perhaps the first time an American novel does so), Rowson warns against listening to the "voice of love" — the very voice women were culturally conditioned to await eagerly — since men, too, are products of their culture. Occasionally tempered by sympathy during the act, perhaps mitigated by remorse afterward, seduction is nevertheless a scenario of the empowered versus the marginalized, the sanctioned versus the disenfranchised, and women will inevitably suffer victimization until the social structure is reformed.
Rowson counsels resistance: men are "vile betrayer[s]," "monsters of seduction," and if they know the meaning of the word "honour" are undoubtedly too swayed by modern fashion and "refinement" to practice it. Forget "romance," she tells her readers (almost as if they were her charges), "no woman can be run away with contrary to her own inclination." But even though she expresses these feminist sen-18- timents and aligns herself with her audience, as if to say we must nurture each other rather than look toward a man for support, Rowson still cannot produce a text that itself resists the pieties and homilies of the culture it has been vilifying (the book actually concludes with the utterly banal biblical platitude that vice eventually leads to "misery and shame"). In the end it winds up promoting the values that cloak forms of (male) oppression; it authorizes the very authorities it has previously sought to displace. The "precepts of religion and virtue" vanish from the novel (if they were present in the first place) as quickly as Montraville when he has the opportunity to make an advantageous match, yet these become the tired ideals to which young women should aspire. If, after everything Montraville has done to disgrace and humiliate Charlotte, she can still declare her love for him, what kind of model has Rowson provided those readers whom she had previously roused to anger and indignation? Moreover, what kind of stability does the sentimental novel offer, when it itself is marked by such prevarication?
If the sentimental novel often failed because it could not sustain a coherent critique of American society, the picaresque often succeeded for the very same reason. This loose, baggy, disjointed narrative form, usually containing several different kinds of discourse, including philosophical reflection, travel essay, and political disquisition, was also perfectly suited for commentary on the politics of republicanism, which in the years following the Revolution, and especially in the time of Constitutional debates, could be highly factious. Cathy N. Davidson has convincingly argued this point, showing how the various and divergent voices of the American polis were sounded out by characters who traveled through cities, towns, and villages, engaging those whom they encountered in argument and debate. What often emerged was a tension — sometimes outright hostility — between Federalist and Anti-Federalist, privileged and common, those who supported the entrenched power and those who demanded its redistribution. The vociferous, highly charged (but implicit) arguments centered, above all, on the meaning of America and who were its rightful inheritors.
But the picaresque also had inherent weaknesses, the most glaring being an inconsistency in its point of view. It was often difficult, sometimes impossible, to tell where its author stood on the vital po-19- litical issues he (and it almost always was "he") was discussing. It was not until Mark Twain transformed the picaresque with the publication of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1884-85 that any kind of stability in tone and vision entered the form. If the journey down the Mississippi seemed random and unplotted, Twain's purposes were nevertheless highly focused. Moreover, with the dual portrait of Huck and Jim, Twain achieved a clarity and depth in character that no other picaresque novel had previously managed. Earlier versions of the genre may also have highlighted socially marginal figures, pitting them against representatives of mainstream society, yet none could maintain the satiric perspective while at the same time realizing the emotional depths of, and eliciting compassion for, their wandering protagonists. The potential for greatness had always been there; it took a great writer, of course, to realize it.
The most successful of the early picaresque novels, Hugh Henry Brackenridge's Modern Chivalry (published in irregular installments from 1792 to 1815) combines the best and the worst aspects of the genre. Concerning the latter, the narrative rambles incessantly, digresses willfully, pontificates frequently; moreover, the author interrupts, directly or in postscripts, to discuss both his career and his book (the very one we are reading), even quoting critical reviews of the first two volumes at the outset of the third (the advantage, perhaps, of publishing parts of a work at widely separate intervals). While these practices may seem like contemporary self-reflexiveness by our postmodern standards, they are merely distracting, since they apparently partake of no larger metafictional strategy; nothing, that is, holds the book together as a coherent whole. Concerning the best, however, Brackenridge creates two characters with charged comic energy, the educated and sophisticated Captain Farrago and his ignorant and coarse servant Teague O'Regan. The two have been compared to the classic fictional travelers Don Quixote and Sancho Panza (the novel itself suggests the likeness), but a more illuminating analogy would be the stage and television performers Abbott and Costello; like Abbott, Farrago relies on his superior reasoning ability, constantly offers advice and guidance, and is invariably ignored or, worse, foiled in his attempts to impose order on a chaotic scene. Like Costello, O'Regan depends on Farrago for assistance in difficult situations, always disregards his plea for moderation, and, though he is -20- the butt of the humor, winds up triumphing over the man of reason by becoming the choice of the common people. Had Brackenridge been a greater novelist (had he been Twain), he could have written a comic masterpiece.