discarding the basic materials of that language. Put simply, he needed to propose a modal change. What Webster thus devises is less an “American language” than “American-style English.” This linguistic solution was thus the perfect analogy for a literary solution, which would use a similarly modal logic to describe the distinction between English literary culture and its Anglo-American rearticulation as a change in style.
Chapter 2 turns to Crèvecoeur’s epistolary narrative Letters from an American Farmer (1782) as one of the most successful attempts to define literary Americanness in stylistic terms. The linchpin of Crèvecoeur’s prose style is the self-deprecating gesture of contrast between the American’s awkward language and the elegance and polish of polite English letters. Thus, while most critics focus on the work’s naïve narrator, Farmer James, I focus on the ontologically prior imaginative act that enables James to show himself: the invention of the farmer’s urbane British correspondent. This correspondent is everywhere and nowhere; we never read his letters, but James everywhere defines his own epistolary voice by contrast with them. Moreover, despite the farmer’s extravagant posture of “American” naïveté, Crèvecoeur cannily fashions this version of an American style out of traditional European literary topoi and theories of the aesthetic. The farmer’s letters recombine these literary materials and then recirculate them for a transatlantic audience fascinated by literary Americanness as an exotic new cultural substance. Ever since, American literary history has had to grapple with the awkward possibility that an Anglophilic French gentleman may have pioneered “our” literary style.
Charles Brockden Brown, the subject of Chapter 3, worked within the gothic novel form to make a different kind of “Americanness” claim supposed to be linked to the unique topographical features of the American landscape. This, too, was a skillful modal revision of a variety of concepts from British literary culture, for he deliberately mapped his American landscapes according to all of the features associated with the natural sublime in British criticism and the stock settings of gothic fiction: high cliffs and deep chasms, cataracts and obscure recesses. What I call Brown’s “aesthetic fallacy”—the deliberately cultivated illusion that the natural world produces particular literary effects—served symbolically to dispel this anxiety of influence by displacing the author function onto the landscape itself and concealing the elaborate labor of adapting British gothic for a putatively new national mode. In so doing, he also linked this set of topographical features to a stylistic gambit, crafting a prose style that flaunted a kind of sublime “irregularity” meant to lift its readers to precipitous and dizzying aesthetic heights. The particular manner in which Brown brought the gothic novel across the Atlantic thus resulted in a curious paradox: if, from a certain perspective, “American gothic” could be nothing but an imitation of the European model, there was nonetheless a powerful illusion that the copy exceeded the originality of the original.
I turn in Chapter 4 to the American seduction plots of the period, in both their theatrical and fictional forms. Works such as Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1791), Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette (1797), and Royall Tyler’s play The Contrast (1787), though known more for their moral and political arguments than for their aesthetic impact, in fact made strong and influential arguments about the unadorned virtues of plain American speech and writing. While these stories posed the same character oppositions as the British seduction plot—between the double-tongued Chesterfieldian seducer and the plainspoken man of feeling, or the parallel opposition between the elegant and artful highborn woman and the artless beauty of the virtuous “fair”—American authors refigured them as the opposition between European and American character and language, marking the latter as a more authentic mode of expression. In doing so, they recruited the “plain style,” which was in fact an expressive mode with a long European genealogy, as the basis of a putatively American way of speaking or writing. In this way, the American seduction story repackaged manifestly borrowed literary materials as unique signs of national originality.
CHAPTER 1
To Form a More Perfect Language
Noah Webster’s American-Style English
Purity of style consists in the use of such words, and such constructions, as belong to the idiom of the language which we speak; in opposition to words and phrases that are taken from other languages, or that are ungrammatical, obsolete, new-coined, or used without proper authority…. The introduction of foreign and learned words, unless where necessity requires them, should never be admitted into our composition. Barren languages may need such assistance, but ours is not one of these. A multitude of Latin words, in particular, have, of late, been poured in upon our language. On some occasions, they give an appearance of elevation and dignity to style; but they often render it stiff and apparently forced. In general, a plain, native style, is more intelligible to all readers; and, by a proper management of words, it can be made as strong and expressive as this Latinised English, or any foreign idioms.
—Lindley Murray, English Grammar
Making a Difference
In the late 1780s, Noah Webster began to represent national linguistic distinction both as an aspirational goal and as an historical inevitability in North America: “Whatever predilection the Americans may have for their native European tongues, and particularly the British descendants for the English, yet several circumstances render a future separation of the American tongue from the English, necessary and unavoidable.”1 On the one hand, “unavoidable”: linguistic differentiation was a future certainty. On the other hand, “necessary”: it was imperative that Americans somehow catalyze that ineluctable process and ensure that it unfolds in a properly regulated fashion. In his seminal treatment of American English, David Simpson identifies Noah Webster as the foremost of the first wave of “linguistic pioneers” of a recognizably American English that would not really exist until around 1850.2 For all of that, Webster did not set out to create a new vernacular or even a distinct dialect of English; his reforms focused on the creation of what Simpson calls a new “linguistic practice, if not quite a language.”3 Webster’s boldest and most counterintuitive idea was that the abstract problem of forming a new national cultural identity might find a strangely concrete and technical solution: this broad social transformation could be accomplished merely by inventing a new system of English spelling. A few simple alterations in orthography would change everything. “This will startle those who have not attended to the subject,” he granted, but the institution of such seemingly humble linguistic reforms was in reality “an object of vast political consequence.”4 Its “capital advantage,” simply put, would be to “make a difference between the English orthography and the American.”5
But why spelling? Of all the ways to approach language reform and all the realms of linguistic practice one could target, why focus on orthography? It was not just that new spellings were a clearly visible and immediately apprehensible way to “make a difference” between American and British English. There was a more fundamental reason that it had to be orthographic reform. Spelling represented change at the right level of the language: it was not merely superficial, and yet it was not deeply substantial. Spelling reform went to work at this middle register between surface and depth, form and content. To change “the mode of spelling”:6 something of this order was literally required by the nature of Webster’s national linguistic project. Once he committed to modifying the existing English language rather than building a new one from the ground up, Webster had to find a way to alter the manner in which the language was used, without discarding the actual materials of that language. What was needed, in short, was a modal change.
This
