inculcate the proper values and provide an atmosphere that would encourage the development of a leadership class (in some versions) or a more egalitarian population (in others). Thus, although Republican Motherhood fit into older patriarchal models that confined women to specific private, domestic tasks, its advocates also called for women to be provided with the opportunities and skills that would allow them to secure the future of the state.19
That was the theory, anyway. In practice, the constrictions on women were still considerable—women did not approach equity with men as readers or as teachers of readers until the second quarter of the nineteenth century—and U.S. education remained unequal in class and gender, not to mention racial, terms, a situation that still holds true today.20 Yet while it would be a mistake to overestimate the possibilities afforded by these developments, it would also be a mistake to minimize their potential. “I thank God there are no free schools or printing, and I hope we shall not have these [for a] hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best government,” said Virginia governor William Berkeley in 1619.21 A century and a half later, many colonists no doubt found such sentiments unrealistic, but the anxieties they reflected had by no means disappeared. Once people could read, there was no telling what they might think—or do. And while elites wanted women and working people to read and write so that they could contribute to the national economy, it was difficult to control the uses to which people would put these skills. This was particularly the case for a new kind of culture that was beginning to generate both attention and condemnation: the novel.
OPENING CHAPTERS: THE RISE OF THE NOVEL
As its name implies, the novel is a relatively new form. Its roots can be traced back to Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, published in 1605. It arrived in English in the work of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Laurence Sterne. The developments that have been described in this chapter—urbanization, cultural mixing across national/class/racial lines, technological innovation, and rising literacy—were preconditions for the novel, and all were at least to some degree present in imperial Spain in the seventeenth century and industrializing England in the eighteenth. In our own day, the works of these men are seen as elite culture that reached high levels of artistry. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, virtually all novels were dismissed as trivial and/or looked upon with suspicion. How and why this came about reveals a good deal about the ways that, at its best, popular culture offers expressive and ideological opportunities to people shunted to society’s margins.
One of the most thoughtful and provocative thinkers on this development was the Soviet literary theorist M.M. Bakhtin. According to Bakhtin, the novel was heir to the epic—grand oral or written narratives such as the Iliad or the Assyrian legend of Gilgamesh. Such stories usually articulated a national tradition; they described collective social experiences and were set in a distant past peopled with heroic characters. The novel, by contrast, explores ordinary life, plumbs a character’s personal and even psychological dimensions, and has a strong sense of contingency: unlike epics, novels posit a world where events can unfold any number of ways, and derive interest from the very uncertainty as to how they will turn out. This sense of contingency, and the presence of a particular writer looming over the proceedings, makes novels, in Bakhtin’s terms, “dialogic.”22
Some important consequences resulted from this cultural matrix. First, unlike mature forms such as the epic, the early novel had no fixed aesthetic, no hardened hierarchic sense of what an ideal version should be like. It invigorated older forms, creating new possibilities even as it borrowed motifs and themes. Novels endowed poetry and drama with a new sense of realism, for example, even as they took old plots and rearranged them to tell different stories. A similar process appeared again later, when novels did begin to formalize and develop hierarchial values, and upstart forms like film began the process all over again.
In early modern Europe and colonial America, the novel had tremendous subversive potential. Like folklore and satire (two cultural streams Bakhtin argues contributed to its formation), novels often critiqued the social order, but their widespread availability, coupled with the privacy in which they could be read, made their reach unprecedented.
English imports exercised an exclusive monopoly before the Revolution and continued to dominate the scene for decades afterward. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1760-1767), were early favorites. With their realistic descriptions, and their occasional bawdiness, these books offended some but enthralled many.
Perhaps the most popular novelist in the colonies was Samuel Richardson. His Pamela (1740-1741), an upward mobility tale about a servant girl who becomes a lady, and Clarissa Harlowe (1747-1748), the story of a woman who falls from grace for having sex with her fiancé, affirmed traditional pieties. Indeed, Clarissa became a prototype for a series of seduction tales that littered the U.S. literary landscape through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Read today, these stories seem humorously, even an-noyingly, quaint. Their dogged insistence on the necessity of female virginity testifies to powerful constraints on womens’ lives at the time and reveal patterns of patriarchy that continue today, from warnings about promiscuity to the economic and sexual double standards that remain facts of life for billions of women around the world.
Yet this does not fully explain the extraordinary power of these stories for their readers—many if not most of them women, and many if not most of them working women who shared the dilemmas of the novels’ heroines with the emerging bourgeoisie. In an analysis of such recent horror movies as Jaws and such gangster movies as the Godfather series, one theorist noted the “utopian” undercurrents that exist alongside deeply conservative messages. In the end, such stories seem to say that you should not transgress conventional mores or that you can’t fight city hall; but in the process they offer intriguing glimpses of just how to do precisely those things.23 We can apply this insight to seduction novels as well: they may say that good girls don’t, but in case you wondered, here’s how.
Maybe that’s why novels quickly attracted the attention of elites. From the very moment the colonists arrived on the continent, even the most egalitarian settlements sought to regulate private as well as public behavior. Exhortations against dancing and drinking were among the most obvious examples. So were invectives against drama. As early as 1716, Williamsburg, Virginia, had acquired a theater that mounted classical productions, but the Southern colonies were generally more tolerant of such diversions. Timothy Dwight, the minister, poet, and eventual president of Yale, spoke for many respectable New Englanders in the late eighteenth century when he asserted that “to indulge a taste for play-going means nothing more or less than the loss of that most invaluable pleasure, the immortal soul.”24
Novel reading soon joined the list of activities that warranted condemnation. Late-eighteenth-century critics complained that they gave young people “false ideas of life” and rendered the “ordinary affairs of life insipid.” They also led women to waste time that could be put to more practical ends. Worst of all, “a ‘novel-reading female’ expects attention from her husband, which the cares of business will not permit him to pay.” An English article entitled “Novel Reading a Cause of Female Depravity,” initially published in 1797, was reprinted in the United States several times, and Harvard decided to focus its principal commencement address in 1803 on the dangers of fiction.25 Such criticism proved amazingly persistent. A half century later, the Ladies’ Repository, a middle-class women’s magazine from Cincinnati, was still sounding similar themes: novels “destroy the power of severe mental application,” made young readers unfit for “the arduous duties and stern realities of life,” and, worst of all, had a tendency to “weaken the barriers of virtue” by “introducing impure scenes and ideas into pure minds.”26 As we will see, this strategy of focusing on threats to womanhood and youth
