Books: Handkerchiefly Feelings

THE SENTIMENTAL NOVEL IN AMERICA 1789-1860 — Herbert Ross ]Brown —Duke University Press ($3).

“America is now wholly given over to a d—d mob of scribbling women,” growled staid Nathaniel Hawthorne some years before the Civil War. Many of the novels which they produced, says Bowdoin Professor Herbert Ross Brown, “deserve to appear on any list of the world’s worst fiction.” Yet he feels that these novels of “handkerchiefly” feeling deserve his 400-page study as clues to the early literary aspirations of the U. S., which have something of the charm of Currier & Ives prints.

Throughout the Colonies, flourishing circulating libraries and packhorse booksellers spread novels to eager readers, mostly female. The “inordinate passion prevalent for novels” galled Thomas Jefferson, who thought they bred “a bloated imagination, sickly judgment, and disgust towards all the real businesses of life.” Puritans and preachers classified novel reading with such female indelicacies as leg-crossing and nose-blowing. First U. S. novel appeared in 1789. The native art had three great models:

>Samuel Richardson’s Pamela popularized seduction as theme, letter sequences as form, stuffy moralizing to answer moralists’ cries of frivolity and vice.

>Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy introduced high-strung sensibilities, tears, swoons.

>Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther (eight U. S. editions in 16 years) made fashionable that last, exquisite self-indulgence of the sentimentalist: suicide.

It was a sleeve-hearted age, when even General Washington could shed a distinguished tear over a drizzly romance. Its novels were luridly plotted to make up for the complete lack of individuality in their characters: seduced female, splendid rake, long-suffering wife, noble savage, etc. Popular was the Gothic atmosphere of ruins, nightingales, skeletons, poison vials.

By 1820 the moralists were licked, the novel triumphant. Then it became transfigured with Uplift—Mesmerism, Mormonism, Bloomerism, above all, Teetotalism and Abolitionism. As villain, the boozer rivaled the seducer, now plying his wenches with animal magnetism and transcendentalism, instead of sighs and potions. Among temperance novelists was Walt Whitman, who confided that he wrote the “rot” with the help of several bottles of port. Mrs. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was promptly answered by at least 14 pro-slavery novels, including Aunt Phillis’s Cabin. Deep in their weeping willows and haunted groves, early U. S. novelists did not build better mousetraps, but at least provided them with a remarkable variety of cheese.