SOURCE: Kardux, Joke. “The Politics of Genre, Gender, and Canon-Formation: The Early American Bildungsroman and Its Subversions.” In Rewriting the Dream: Reflections on the Changing American Literary Canon, edited by W. M. Verhoeven, pp. 177-201. Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Atlanta, Ga.: Rodopi, 1992.

[In the following essay, Kardux maintains that eighteenth-century social changes that altered family relationships made the nineteenth century uniquely suited for the burgeoning Bildungsroman genre in both Europe and the United States. Kardux also states that Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography is the prototypical American Bildungsroman, and examines how works by Herman Melville and Elizabeth Stoddard adhered to or subverted the genre.]

It is surely no coincidence that the century that gave rise to the first general and literary histories of the United States was also the century in which the Bildungsroman became one of the most popular genres in American literature. Following the organic theory of history, George Bancroft's ten-volume History of the United States (1834-76) and Moses Coit Tyler's four-volume History of American Literature (1878, 1897) trace the inception, development, and coming to maturity of the young American nation and its literary tradition, reconstructing the national and literary past as if they were engaged in writing an (unusually lengthy) Bildungsroman. Taking Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography as a point of departure, I would like to look at the ideological assumptions that inform both the traditional American Bildungsroman invented by Franklin and the projects of nation building and canon-formation to which Bancroft and Tyler made important contributions. I will argue that Herman Melville's minor classic Redburn and Elizabeth Stoddard's neglected novel The Morgesons radically subvert the Franklinian Bildungsroman by exposing the genre's covert political agenda.

I

A historical as well as a literary document, Franklin's Autobiography reflects some of the social, economic, and cultural changes in the eighteenth century that made possible the rise of the Bildungsroman. Young Franklin's dislike of his father's trade as a tallow chandler and soap boiler; his subsequent refusal to submit to the authority of his older brother, to whom he was bound as an apprentice; and his famous decision to run away from his Boston home to eventually set himself up in business in Philadelphia are emblematic of the transformation of family relationships that, as Jay Fliegelman has shown, affected pre-industrial American society in the course of the eighteenth century: the disruption of generational continuity that accompanied the emergence of a new class of propertyless but mobile young men (often, like Franklin, younger sons), who left their homes in search of economic opportunities elsewhere (Fliegelman 10). Had Franklin stayed at home and followed in his father's or older brother's footsteps, the story of his life would have been very different; in an important sense there would have been no story at all. It is precisely the narrative potential of the break between the generations (which, of course, was not uniquely American but occurred simultaneously in Europe as well) that forms one of the foundations of the genre that traces the young person's formation and socialization. As Franco Moretti points out in his recent study of the European Bildungsroman, youth is only recognized as a distinct phase in the individual's life when it becomes “problematic.” As long as each “individual's youth faithfully repeats that of his forebears, introducing him to a role that lives on unchanged,” youth is uneventful and hence “invisible” (4). When, however, the young person's future becomes uncertain and the process of growing up a matter of great expectations and, of course, frequently of disillusion, youth becomes visible because it becomes a “problem.” The discovery of youth as a literary subject not only depends on this gain in drama, in narrativity, but also, as Moretti argues, on the recognition that youth represents the “essence” of modernity. Increasingly characterized by restlessness, mobility, and dissatisfaction, youth becomes the central symbol of the dynamism and instability of a modernizing society, and the Bildungsroman becomes modernity's “symbolic form” (5).

The popularity of Franklin's Autobiography and the American Bildungsroman tradition it helped establish suggests that they met not only the symbolic but also the ideological needs of the nineteenth century. For at the same time that socio-economic changes created the narrative preconditions for the Bildungsroman, the Bildungsroman in turn could serve to control a potentially disruptive social situation. As Moretti suggests, “the experience of reading a Bildungsroman [is] a formative and socializing experience in its own right” (76). The autobiography of a self-consciously exemplary American, a “how-to” book, Franklin's Autobiography evinces an ideological commitment that is usually more submerged, but nonetheless inherent in its fictional descendants. Although Franklin strategically addresses the first part of his autobiography to his son, his intended audience consists of young American men in general. Presenting himself as a model, Franklin aims, in the words of a friend whom he uses as a mouthpiece, “to promote a greater Spirit of Industry and early Attention to Business, Frugality and Temperance with the American Youth” (58). In his own career from rebellious son and anti-social polemicist to successful businessman and responsible citizen, Franklin reconciles the two conflicting impulses that structure the process of growing up: the individual's desire for autonomy and independence, and the need for socialization, integration, and conformity. Although Franklin represents his early rebellion as retrospectively inevitable, in his autobiography he deflates the historical fact of generational discontinuity. He symbolically repairs the break with his family by emphatically inscribing himself into the genealogy of his family, tracing it back to its origins in England,¹ and by admitting that his breaking his contract with his brother was a regrettable erratum for which he later made compensation.

Thus Franklin transformed his potentially revolutionary tale into an ideologically conservative one, teaching the lesson of self-control and social accommodation to the restless and mobile young nation with which he—one of its Founders—came to be identified. In the process he made available to Bancroft and other nineteenth-century American historians a paradigm for reconstructing national history, enabling them to legitimatize the American Revolution by plotting it as a Bildungsroman—as a satisfying story of a young nation's growing up.

II

It was perhaps because the traditional Bildungsroman tells a satisfying tale that Herman Melville turned to this genre when, in writing Redburn (1849) and its follow-up White-Jacket (1850), he tried to regain the sympathy of readers alienated by his previous novel, Mardi (1849)—his most ambitious, but also his most unconventional work so far. Melville's amply documented intellectual investment in Mardi and his disappointment over its negative reception inevitably made his new project an ambivalent one. In his letters, Melville persistently disparaged Redburn and White-Jacket, arguing that he had merely written them to put “money into an empty purse” (Letters 95). Placing Melville's negative comments about Redburn and White-Jacket in the context of his famous review of Hawthorne's tales, Nina Baym too hastily concludes that Melville felt the two novels kept him from his ambitious aim of “Telling the Truth” (1979: 914).² For although Melville writes to his father-in-law that he “felt obliged to refrain from writing the kind of book I would wish to,” he also claims that “in writing these two books, I have not repressed myself much—so far as they are concerned; but have spoken pretty much as I feel” (Letters 91-92). Melville's qualification of his discontent suggests that Redburn and White-Jacket were less a “digression from the important business of truth telling” than Baym supposes (1979: 914). In Redburn, I will argue, Melville tells the “truth” about the Bildungsroman, exposing and criticizing the ideological assumptions of the genre: he deconstructs the Bildungsroman by making the construction of such a novel a central theme in his book.³

Melville's inscription of Redburn in the Bildungsroman tradition is not simply “clear,” as Baym argues (1979: 914), it is in fact overdetermined. Redburn combines two traditional Bildungsroman plots: the journey from the country to the city and the first sea voyage. At times the two plots even intermingle, for instance when the young protagonist, Wellingborough Redburn, encounters at sea the sort of confidence men that conventionally belongs to the country-bumpkin-goes-to-the-city variety of the genre.⁴ Each of the two initiation plots is doubled or even tripled, for there are actually two voyages—from New York to Liverpool and back again—(three if one includes remaking the voyage in narrating it) and encounters with three different cities: New York, Liverpool, and London. On the level of discourse, moreover, the novel grounds itself in yet another variety of the American Bildungsroman, that of the Christian confession and its subgenre the conversion narrative. Although the novel's lengthy title—“Redburn: His First Voyage: Being the Sailorboy Confessions and Reminiscences of the Son-of-a-Gentleman, in the Merchant Service”—suggests that the levels of story and discourse and their corresponding Bildungsroman patterns are integrated, they turn out to be radically disjointed. And it is precisely where the two levels come apart that Melville locates his critique of the Bildungsroman and its ideological underpinnings.

On the level of story, the narrative of Redburn's first voyage is more a picaresque tale than a Bildungsroman. Robbed of his secure social status by the death as a bankrupt of his merchant father, young Redburn sets out into the world in a mood that alternates between self-pitying anger against the “hardhearted world” (10) and romantic dreams of retrieving the poverty of his family (86) and thus re-establishing himself into genteel circles. His attempt to follow literally and symbolically in his father's footsteps by making a “filial pilgrimage” (154) through Liverpool with the aid of his father's old guidebook to the city predictably fails. Despite a plethora of potentially educational experiences, centering on his confrontations with poverty and misery in the slums of Liverpool and among the Irish immigrants in the Highlander's storage on the return voyage, there is no sign that Redburn has “grown up” at the end of the voyage. He may have acquired a few professional and social skills, but on the whole he seems “little the wiser” (235). The structure of his journey is not the linear one of Franklin's autobiography, but circular. Abandoning his friend Harry to an uncertain fate by leaving him “a friendless and penniless foreigner in New York” (311), Redburn returns to his mother's house even poorer than he was before he left it.

On the level of discourse, however, the older Redburn tries to rescue the story of his first voyage from its picaresque tendencies by falling back on two earlier, religious genres that inform the secular, Franklinian Bildungsroman: the Christian confession and the conversion narrative. The word “Confessions” in the title of his narrative emphasizes that Redburn has sins to confess, the worst of which is his Cain-like desertion of his “brother” Harry, who subsequently died in a whaling accident. The confessional motif enables the adult Redburn not only to conceive of himself as an ancient mariner figure, but also roots his narrative in the oldest precursor of the American Bildungsroman, the Puritan conversion narrative. Like the narrator of the Puritan conversion narrative, Redburn confesses not only past sins but also present faith, a belief in a kind of humanitarian Christianity that colors many of the older narrator's comments on the social inequities he observed during his first voyage. Retrospectively depicting life as a series of meaningful events causally connected in a developmental scheme, the confession and the conversion narrative provide Redburn with an interpretive framework enabling him to make sense of and come to terms with the fragmented, chaotic experiences of his first voyage. Borrowing the two genres' teleological conception of time and narrative, the adult Redburn attempts to transform the story of his social fall into one of moral redemption.

Redburn suggests that the process of writing is itself to complete the growth whose beginning he retrospectively traces to his first voyage to Liverpool. Before embarking on his narrative project, he emphasizes the “secret sympathy” between himself and the figurehead of the ornamental glass ship in his mother's sitting-room, “a gallant warrior in a cocked-hat” which “fell from his perch the very day I left home to go to sea on this my first voyage.” Like the glass ship still “sadly shattered and broken,” the older Redburn refuses to have the fallen figurehead “put on his legs again, till I get on my own” (9). He tries to get on his own legs again by “bringing in [his] report” (200), to pick up the pieces of his life and reintegrate them into a meaningful whole. In reconstructing the story of his first voyage as a religious or semi-religious Bildungsroman, he obviously aims not only to piece together the dispersed fragments of self, but also to reintegrate himself into society. Redburn's motivation for construing his tale as a conversion to humanitarian Christianity corresponds with the Puritan's formal objective in presenting an account of his or her conversion: just as the Puritan attempts to gain church membership (in theocratic New England, of course, a matter of social and political integration as much as of religious identification), so Redburn attempts to regain “access to respectable and improving society” (138). If Benjamin Franklin invented the tale of the material rise from rags to riches, Melville's narrator construes a tale of spiritual growth from “misanthropic” (23) youth to Christian humanitarian maturity. Despite its privileging of religious ethics, however, Redburn's tale caters as much to the ideological needs of the age as does Franklin's.

While Redburn tries to integrate story and discourse, Melville calls attention to the holes in the fabric of Redburn's narrative design. That the religious Bildungsroman pattern of confession and conversion is artificially superimposed to counteract and overcome the picaresque tendencies of Redburn's adventures is first suggested in a passage in which Redburn discusses reform efforts aimed at sailors. Arguing that reform efforts have not significantly improved the condition of sailors, Redburn lectures:

It is too much the custom, perhaps, to regard as a special advance, that unavoidable, and merely participative progress, which any one class makes in sharing the general movement of the race. Thus, because the [modern] sailor … is a somewhat different man from the exaggerated sailors of Smollett … therefore, in the estimation of some observers, he has begun to see the evils of his condition, and has voluntarily improved. But upon a closer scrutiny, it will be seen that he has but drifted along with that great tide, which, perhaps, has two flows for one ebb; he has made no individual advance of his own.

(139)

Echoing Emerson's critique of progressivist reform theories in “Self-Reliance,”⁵ Redburn here challenges antebellum reformers' optimistic belief that change automatically means improvement. Although modern sailors may have changed, they have not been reformed; instead of having made progress, they merely drift on the tide. Redburn compares the sailor class to a revolving wheel on which the coach of society is “bottomed,” ensuring the progress of the species while remaining itself caught in “muddy revolutions.” As Redburn's metaphor suggests, revolutions do not mark a break with the past, but merely give another turn to the wheel of time. It is unlikely, Redburn skeptically concludes, that the sailor class can ever be “wholly lifted from the mire,” make any real progress (139); reform efforts, he would seem to suggest, are doomed to fail.

Because his skeptical view of history as being cyclical rather than linear undermines his own autobiographical project, however, Redburn almost immediately negates it, ending the chapter unexpectedly on a note of hope: “But we must not altogether despair for the sailor; nor need those who toil for his good be at bottom disheartened. For Time must prove his friend in the end; … we feel and we know that God is the true Father of all, and that none of his children are without the pale of his care” (140). Thus, Redburn overrides his first, logical conclusion—denial of progress and skepticism about the effectiveness of reform efforts—by invoking the transcendent, teleological perspective of time. Attempting to resolve the contradictions in his narrative by presenting them as Christian paradoxes, Redburn here sets a pattern for other chapter endings in the Liverpool section (chs. 33, 35, 37) as well as for the novel's ending. While, on the level of story, the text digressively tends to an anti-progressive, anti-humanitarian conclusion, these chapters and the narrative as a whole end, on the level of discourse, with a second, revisionary conclusion, which reinstates the narrative's teleological Bildungsroman plot and reasserts the values of humanitarian Christianity.⁶

As John Samson has argued, Redburn's glib conclusion that God will take care of the sailors suspiciously resembles Adam Smith's laissez-faire doctrine (98-103). Calling attention to the contradictions and gaps in Redburn's reasoning, Melville exposes the capitalist ideology that informs both Redburn's humanitarian Christianity and the Franklinian Bildungsroman. Propagating the notion of universal brotherhood, humanitarian Christianity not only sets an ideal for social behavior (for instance, Redburn's belated acceptance of responsibility for his “brother” Harry), but also aids capitalist society in perceiving itself ideally as an organic whole, in which all parts are interdependent in a mutually beneficial way. Ignoring his earlier insight into the connection between England's commerce and the exploitation of African slaves, Redburn describes, for example, how in Liverpool's docks, “under the beneficent sway of the Genius of Commerce, all climes and countries embrace; and yard-arm touches yard-arm in brotherly love” (165). To uphold his contention that, in the docks, ships are “sheltered from all weathers and secured from all calamities,” however, Redburn has to dismiss contradictory evidence: “… I can hardly credit a story I have heard, that sometimes, in heavy gales, ships lying in the very middle of the docks have lost their top-gallant masts” (165-66). To maintain his notion that the world is an organic whole, Redburn further has to ignore the divisive forces inherent in Western capitalism, such as the colonial exploitation symbolized by Nelson's statue and the inter- and even intra-class rivalry he witnesses aboard the Highlander. In the context of the “endless vistas” of poverty he encounters in Liverpool, Redburn's view of the docks as the epitome of a brotherly world is less convincing than his earlier, almost Marxist perception that in capitalist society social interdependence often means exploitation, working classes providing the muddy wheels on which rides the glossy coach of the leisure classes (139). Far from signifying his maturity, Redburn's humanitarian Christianity is a substitute for his juvenile allegiance to the Temperance Society: both are exposed as sentimental fictions used by those in power to exert social, political, and economic control.

As Redburn's attempt to gain a secure sense of self is continually frustrated in the narrative, his Christian humanitarian stance becomes increasingly nationalistic, a search for national identity displacing the search for personal identity. Projecting the Bildungsroman's romantic notion of unitary selfhood onto the whole nation, Redburn envisions America as uniting “all tribes and people into one federated whole”:

We are not a narrow tribe of men, with a bigoted Hebrew nationality—whose blood has been debased in the attempt to ennoble it, by maintaining an exclusive succession among ourselves. No: our blood is as the flood of the Amazon, made up of a thousand noble currents all pouring into one. We are not a nation, so much as a world; for unless we may claim all the world for our sire, like Melchisedec, we are without father or mother.

(169)

However, the holistic conception of national identity, like that of personal identity, at once relies on and is undermined by the mechanism of repression. To present America as the Edenic seat of reunion for “the estranged children of Adam” (169), Redburn has to suspend temporarily his awareness of the disruptive presence in America of slavery, racism, and nativism—key issues in the 1840s, which Redburn broaches in his discussion of the statue of Nelson and in his descriptions of the conditions of the emigrants on the homebound voyage, without appearing to realize that they contradict his millennialist vision of America.⁷

As Sacvan Bercovitch has pointed out, like many a Puritan conversion narrator, Redburn fuses personal with national history (217-20), applying the model of the child's inevitable and necessary rejection of the parent to the genealogy of the American nation: “… like Melchisedec, we are without father or mother. … Our ancestry is lost in the universal paternity” (169). At the structural center of his narrative, Redburn reveals his tragi-comic insight that, to find his own way in the world, he has to give up his father's antiquated guidebooks: “It was a sad, a solemn, and a most melancholy thought. … the thing that had guided the father, could not guide the son” (157). Most critics approve of Redburn's symbolic rejection of his father, seeing it as an inevitable—because “natural”—stage in his maturation, whereas some take issue with Redburn only because he ultimately refuses to give up the Liverpool guidebook. But however necessary and inevitable repression may be psychologically, Melville shows that it fosters dangerous tendencies when used for nationalist purposes. His French-speaking father representing the Old World, Redburn depicts his experience of growing up in terms of rejecting his former, Irvingesque Anglophilia; at the end of his first voyage, he literally and symbolically comes home to (Young) America. If growth inevitably involves repression, “Young” America, perceiving itself as an adolescent nation, can justify its political separation from England in 1776,⁸ as well as its search for cultural independence and its expansionist politics of the 1840s, constructing its national history as a Bildungsroman.

Melville deconstructs this national Bildungsroman by showing how it is fabricated—that is, very much like how “spun-yarn” is made: “For material, they use odds and ends of old rigging called ‘junk,’ the yarns of which are picked to pieces, and then twisted into new combinations, something as most books are manufactured” (114-15). As his letters demonstrate, however, telling the “truth” about the American Bildungsroman does not exempt Melville from the ambivalence inherent in the deconstructive project itself. For deconstructing the American Bildungsroman means constructing one and thereby inviting misconstruction on the part of the reader. As critical a reader as Perry Miller, after all, read Redburn as a manifesto for Young America; and, if it had any political effect, no doubt in Melville's own time Redburn only helped to reinforce the ideologies it subverts.

III

Unlike the canonical giants Franklin and Melville, Elizabeth Drew Stoddard (1823-1902) requires a brief introduction, as her work was largely forgotten until, in 1984, Lawrence Buell and Sandra A. Zagarell published a new edition of The Morgesons, Stoddard's first and best novel, in a volume that also contains samples of her short fiction and prose. Before the recent rediscovery of her work, Stoddard was only remembered, if at all, through her connections with male figures who played a more prominent role in the literary scenes of Boston and New York: her distant cousin Nathaniel Hawthorne, a professed admirer of her work; her husband Richard Henry Stoddard, a minor poet and editor; and other literati such as Edmund Clarence Stedman, Bayard Taylor, and Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Stoddard was even tangentially linked with Melville: Stoddard's father, a Massachusetts shipbuilder, built the whaler on which Melville sailed to the South Pacific in 1841, and her husband landed Melville a job in the New York Custom House in 1866, where he himself had been working since Hawthorne got him the job in 1853 through his political connections (Buell and Zagarell xxi, xiv). Although the three novels she published in the 1860s received a good deal of critical attention, even in her own time Stoddard was not widely read. The aspects of her writing that made Buell and Zagarell hail Stoddard as, “next to Melville and Hawthorne, the most strikingly original voice in the mid-nineteenth-century American novel” (xi; see also Buell, 1986: 354)—that is, its sexual frankness, narrative discontinuities, and skeptical outlook—were, not surprisingly, precisely those that prevented Stoddard's fiction from reaching a popular audience. Even though towards the end of the nineteenth century Stoddard, like Melville and Whitman, had a bit of a cult following, for reasons I will explore in the final section of this essay it took much longer for her work to receive the kind of critical reappraisal that, early in the twentieth century, won Melville and Whitman a secure place in the canon of American literature.

Whereas Melville exposes the capitalist and nationalist ideologies that inform the American Bildungsroman, Stoddard criticizes the genre by calling into question its sexual politics. In The Morgesons (1862), Stoddard responds to and critically revises both the traditionally male Bildungsroman and its female counterpart, the popular “woman's fiction” of the 1850s and 1860s (see Baym, 1978). One reason the Bildungsroman appealed to many mid-nineteenth-century women writers was perhaps that the genre's traditional belief in a coherent self and in the possibility of development enabled them to construct stories about strong female protagonists that had gratifying implications for their own search for social and literary identity in a male-dominated culture.⁹ Yet although in some ways liberating, the genre also poses problems for women writers. As Sybil Weir argues, “The Bildungsroman has traditionally celebrated the coming to manhood of the male: he runs the river, deflowers a virgin, or travels through uncharted waters. In the nineteenth-century American novel particularly, it is the men who embark on voyages of self-discovery. The women, as described by both female and male novelists, stay safely on the shore, content to accept society's definition of themselves” (427). Many of the events that conventionally structure the nineteenth-century male Bildungsroman—the sea voyage, the journey to the city in search of an education or a career—were options unavailable, or available only in highly circumscribed ways, to female protagonists. Therefore, women writers had to accommodate the genre to their needs, often in ways that were subversive of the implied sexual politics of the male generic paradigm (see e.g. Abel et al.).

Like Hawthorne's Hester Prynne, Stoddard's protagonist, Cassandra Morgeson, follows in the footsteps of Anne Hutchinson, the famous seventeenth-century challenger of Puritan patriarchy. “‘That child … is possessed,’” her aunt exclaims in the opening sentence of the novel (5). Even the year Cassandra is made to spend with her maternal grandfather, “a Puritan, without gentleness or tenderness” (28), fails to crush her antinomian spirit: “I was still ‘possessed,’ Aunt Merce said, and mother called me ‘lawless’” (60). Like Hutchinson, Cassandra is a kind of female Bulkington, refusing to adhere to Calvin's admonition to stick to the safe shore of orthodoxy and convention. Living in the seacoast town of Surrey, Cassandra feels the strong pull of the sea, whose “steady, resistless heaving” (63) reflects her own moods and passions: “‘Have then at life!’ [her] senses cried,” as she faces the sea shortly after her mother's death. “‘We will possess its longing silence, rifle its waiting beauty. We will rise up in its light and warmth, and cry, “Come, for we wait.” Its roar, its beauty, its madness—we have—all’” (214-15). Yet while Ishmael's education in Moby-Dick entails discovering the metaphysical limits of this Goethean “‘all’ feeling,” as Melville calls it (Letters 131), Cassandra learns painfully the constraints imposed upon it by her gender. When, after her outing to the sea, she is confronted with the household duties that await her at home, it seems to her “A wall had risen up suddenly before me, which divided me from my dreams; I was inside it, on a prosaic domain I must henceforth be confined to” (216).

Following the pattern of the male Bildungsroman, Cassandra's education is structured by three journeys. But whereas the protagonist of the male Bildungsroman leaves home to venture out into the world of the marketplace, Cassandra moves from one domestic sphere to the other. She makes extended visits first to her grandfather's oppressive house in Barmouth; then to the more worldly household of her distant cousin Charles Morgeson, with whom she has an (unconsummated) affair, in Rosville; and finally to the house of other distant relatives, the wealthy and decadent Pickersgill Somers family of Belem, where she meets her future husband, Desmond Somers. Because she returns home after each journey, however, the traditional linear pattern of the male Bildungsroman is interrupted several times, suggesting that for the female protagonist development has to be worked out largely in terms of family relationships¹⁰ and that those relationships may frustrate, or at least complicate, the process of growth. If to the male protagonist the departure from home dramatizes the break with his father necessary for successful maturation, Cassandra's homecomings demonstrate that the daughter's ties with her parents and siblings, particularly with her mother and sisters, are less easily severed.

Depicting kinship in terms of bondage, Stoddard shows that the process of individuation is more problematic for women than for men. For most nineteenth-century women, generational continuity is not, as with Franklin, a myth cherished for ideological purposes to disguise the actual break between the generations, but a potentially disturbing historical reality. At her grandfather's house Cassandra refuses to submit to the Puritan method of making children grow up faster by trampling on them (31), a method that had transformed her mother from a high-spirited child into a subdued woman whose preoccupation with religion makes her indifferent to “much of the business of ordinary life” (23). Yet although Cassandra learns to value her passions rather than to repress them and is highly skeptical of her mother's evangelical faith, her adult life is not so different from her mother's as, on the basis of her earlier rebellion, we might have expected it to be. Economic and emotional dependence tying her to her home, Cassandra has no other option than to take over her mother's role as homemaker after her mother's death. Although some critics read Cassandra's assumption of adult responsibilities as a sign of maturity (Matlack 229; Harris 16), the recurrent imagery of entrapment in the last part of the novel emphasizes the severe restrictions that assumption imposes on her liberty. At the funeral, Cassandra feels “imprisoned in the cage of Life” (211); preferring to “imprison the splendid day” inside and gaze over the sea at the beginning of the last chapter, she reenacts her mother's domestic confinement (249). As Lawrence Buell points out, Cassandra's taking possession of the Morgeson house after her father's remarriage “at the price of accepting confinement” within it inaugurates “what would seem to be a new cycle—not a new era” (358).

The male Bildungsheld's growth is traditionally measured by his ability to cast out alter egoes; Franklin, for instance, breaks with friends, such as the satirist James Ralph, who represent aspects of his own personality that he perceives as an obstacle on his course to economic prosperity and moral perfection. Cassandra, however, cannot so easily disown her doubles, the most important of whom is her sister, Veronica. Veronica is a living example of how social pressures on women arrest their growth. As a child even more aggressively antinomian than Cassandra and gifted with an extraordinary musical talent, Veronica opts for the Victorian solution of projecting her rebellion against conventional expectations of feminine conduct inward. Suffering mysterious illnesses and anorexia, she finally becomes a kind of domestic saint.¹¹ “We did not perceive the process,” Cassandra writes, “but Verry was educated by sickness; her mind fed and grew on pain, and at last mastered it. The darkness in her nature broke; by slow degrees she gained health, though never much strength. Upon each recovery a change was visible; a spiritual dawn had risen in her soul” (59). Veronica becomes “a help to both sick and well”; “Home … was her sphere” (60). While most members of the Morgeson household regard this development as a decided improvement, Stoddard stresses the regressive nature of Veronica's spiritual education: as Cassandra's friend Helen says and as the novel demonstrates, Veronica “will be a child always,” having “stopped in the process of maturity long ago” (150). Relieving her of adult responsibilities, however, Veronica's compliance with conventional expectations ironically allows her to lead her own life. As the Morgesons' former servant Temperance says towards the end of the novel, Veronica is “a bigger child than ever … and must have her way” (210). Veronica's “course was taken for granted; mine was imposed upon me,” Cassandra complains (209). Although Cassandra has “no sympathy” with Veronica (136), she is tied to her as by “a cord of steel” (128). The farewell Veronica plays for herself on the piano on her wedding night, Cassandra thinks, “freed me from my bond to her” (242); yet the epilogue finds Cassandra taking care of a widowed Veronica and Veronica's retarded child.

While Stoddard thus criticizes the conventions of the male Bildungsroman as being largely inapplicable to the female protagonist's situation, she is also critical of the conventions contemporary women's fiction offers as an alternative to the male tradition. She refuses to idealize the institution of motherhood and the “bonds of womanhood,” which are central to the cult of domesticity that informs the nineteenth-century female Bildungsroman. Mary Morgeson is neither the nurturing mother celebrated by Harriet Beecher Stowe nor the efficient household manager Stowe's sister Catharine Beecher envisaged. Although, in accordance with domestic ideology, she “influenced all who were near her” (17), the power she exerts is not unequivocally positive. When Veronica is ill, for instance, her mother “watched her day and night, but rarely caressed her” (13). Unable to love the eccentric Veronica as she loves her other two children, Mrs. Morgeson seems at least partly responsible for her daughter's illnesses, causing Veronica to turn to Temperance as a surrogate mother. Furthermore, domestic culture's injunction that women set an example to their daughters is here shown to impede a meaningful relationship between them. Because, as Cassandra says, her mother “wished me to believe she could have no infirmity in common with me,” repressing “all the doubts and longings of her heart for example's sake,” their relationship is unsatisfactory: “What could we be to each other?” (64).

Most of the relationships among the women in the novel are as marked by reserve, ambivalence, or even antagonism as are those between the men and women. Stoddard dismisses the sentimental belief that, as Ben Somers writes to his fiancée Veronica, “there should be the greatest sympathy between sisters” (218) as irrelevant to women's actual experiences: Cassandra and Veronica “grew up ignorant of each other's character” (13), Veronica's “fierce harshness” keeping them “apart for long years” (59). Moreover, by having Ben ventilate this domestic commonplace, Stoddard suggests that female fellowship is a male myth, designed to keep women in their place and to facilitate their exploitation. For Ben's advocacy of the bonds of sisterhood is entirely self-centered. It is only because he needs Cassandra's support in his erratic efforts to solve his drinking problem that Ben tries to convince Veronica that she and Cassandra “need each other” and must “try to establish an equality of tastes and habits” between them (223). Wishing the three of them to remain together, Ben opposes Cassandra's marriage to his brother Desmond. Although Cassandra realizes that Ben would “control me without pity or compassion, thinking, probably, that I needed none,” she also knows that the “end of it all must be for me to assimilate with [Ben and Veronica's] happiness” (226-27), at least until Desmond's return from Europe, where he has gone to cure himself of his own drinking habit. In response to Ben's assurance that she and Veronica need each other, Cassandra may feel “like blind Sampson [sic],” but she cannot lay her “hands on the pillars which supported the temple [Ben] has built” (223). Idealized by domestic novelists and their feminist critics, the myth of female fellowship, Stoddard suggests, in fact forms one of the buttresses of the house of patriarchy.

To Stoddard, “woman's sphere” is not the utopian alternative to the marketplace that it is in the conventional female Bildungsroman in nineteenth-century America (see Kornfeld and Jackson 70). As Zagarell points out, the matriarchy Cassandra encounters at the Pickersgill Somers estate on her last journey turns out to be “a devil's household” (191; “Repossession” 51-52). Neither is the domestic sphere uncorrupted by a marketplace devoted to acquisition. Anticipating Thorstein Veblen's economic theory, Stoddard shows women's complicity in the economic system in that they accept the role of conspicuous consumers men assign to them. The “handsome shawls, bonnets, and dresses” Cassandra's father brings home from his business trips may be “wholly unsuited in general to the style and taste of each of us” and “much handsomer than were needful for Surrey,” but the Morgeson women evidently wear them conspicuously; for their clothes “answered … as patterns for the plainer materials of our neighbors” (23). Although Cassandra and her sister “never saw money” (23), they play a vital role in the money economy.

Stoddard further undermines domestic ideology's polarization of male and female spheres by emphasizing that both spheres are characterized by dulling routines and meaningless repetition. To Cassandra, who for a while accompanies her father on his business trips, her father and the men he bargains with “appeared … as if pursuing something beyond Gain, which should narcotize or stimulate them to forget that man's life was a vain going to and fro” (142). Similarly, “woman's sphere” is a social space associated with “an eternal smell of cookery, a perpetual changing of beds, and the small talk of vacant minds” (23). Deprived of meaningful tasks because servants run the household, bourgeois women form habits and are engaged in occupations that are compulsively repetitive. Cassandra's Aunt Mercy, for instance, is continually chewing cloves, flagroot, or assorted other articles that come to hand. Mercy's knitting is a “mania,” which in time gives way to one “she called transferring”—recycling old needlework by sewing it on new muslin, not for conservationist or practical purposes but simply to keep busy: “She looked at embroidery with an eye merely to its capacity for being transferred” (126). Because it is referred to at the end of the paragraph in which her aunt's compulsive transferring is described, Cassandra's self-doubt and sense of “drifting to nothingness in thought and purpose” (126) seem as much caused by the prospect of “days filled with the busy nothings of prosperity” (58) as by Charles Morgeson's death, the more obvious source of her depression.

Present throughout subtextually, the thematics of repetition are foregrounded at the end of the novel. Turning abruptly to the narrative present in the epilogue, Cassandra relates how, after a two-year stay in Europe, she and her husband, Desmond, have returned to the Morgeson house in Surrey to witness Ben's death in a delirium tremens and to look after his widow and child. As always registering her emotions, the sea “wears a relentless aspect to [Cassandra] now; its eternal monotone expresses no pity, no compassion.” While completing the story of her youth, Cassandra watches Veronica and Veronica's year-old baby, who “smiles continually, but never cries, never moves, except when it is moved” (252). The presence of repetition and stagnation as symbolic and discursive modes in the novel indicates that, beyond revising the gender-specific features of the Bildungsroman, The Morgesons renders problematic the two central assumptions that underlie both the male and female traditions of the genre: the belief in a coherent self and the possibility of development.

Invested as they are in drawing modern readers' attention to this long neglected novel and giving it the “secure place in the American literary canon” they feel it deserves (Buell and Zagarell xxiii), The Morgesons' recent critics have almost unanimously concluded that, in the words of one of them, the novel is about “the development of a rebellious, ignorant New England girl into a mature, passionate woman” (Weir 428). The difficulties many critics encounter in interpreting the novel's ending suggest, however, that the novel resists such a reading, even while appearing to invite it superficially. Several critics express their dissatisfaction with Cassandra's marriage to the darkly romantic and improbably reformed Desmond Somers because it seems to them to contradict the feminist thrust of the rest of novel. Other critics try to reconcile the marriage and the imagery of immobility at the end with what most explicitly or implicitly see as Cassandra's “true” development.¹² To deny the novel's resistance to the developmental scheme or to locate this resistance in the novel's ending alone, however, is to ignore that discontinuity is an important symbolic, discursive, and stylistic issue throughout the novel.

Ridiculing the persistent efforts of one of Cassandra's teachers to “explain and reconcile the discrepancies in the history of the royal Son of Israel [David]” (35), Stoddard refuses to cover up the discontinuities in the history of Cassandra, latter-day daughter of the American Israel. Looking back on her childhood, Cassandra writes, for instance, that “There was no development of the sentiments, no betrayal of the fluctuations of the passions which must have existed. … Instead of the impression which my after-experience suggests me to seek, I recall arrivals and departures, an eternal smell of cookery, a perpetual changing of beds, and the small talk of vacant minds” (23; my italics). Retrospection reveals only meaningless repetition, not the beginnings of development the older Cassandra expects to find. Further, as I have suggested earlier, her homecomings interrupt the linearity of the process of change Cassandra undergoes during her three journeys. In the interval between her first and second journey, for instance, “the days flew by,” but “bore no meaning. I shifted the hours, as one shifts a kaleidoscope, with an eye only to their movement” (58). Similarly, after returning from Rosville, Cassandra “was eager for employment, … but the attempt killed my purpose and interest. My will was nerveless, when I contemplated Time, which stretched before me—a vague, limitless sea; and I only kept Endeavor in view, near enough to be tormented” (136). Finally, despite her earlier claim that women “are capable of growth, beyond the period when men cease to grow or change” (237), Cassandra reports towards the end of the novel: “I remain this year the same. No change, no growth or development! The fulfillment of duty avails me nothing; and self-discipline has passed the necessary point” (243).

To emphasize Cassandra's “growth,” as most of the novel's critics do, is to privilege one of at least two contradictory theories of character formation the novel explores: the experiential Lockean model of cognitive development. Though on both sides of the family descendants of Puritan New Englanders, Cassandra and Veronica are born under the auspices not of John Calvin, but of John Locke. The girls are named by their grandfather Locke Morgeson, who, prompted by the “spirit of progress,” charged their father (also named Locke) “not to consult the Morgeson tombstones for names” (9-10). Linking this symbolic rejection of the Puritan past specifically with someone named Locke, Stoddard substitutes John Locke's relatively optimistic theory that the mind is a tabula rasa for the Calvinist doctrine of innate depravity. Early in the novel, she implicitly uses John Locke's theory that all thought derives from sense experience to describe Cassandra's early memories. “I was moved and governed by my sensations, which continually changed and passed away—to come again, and deposit vague ideas which ignorantly haunted me. The literal images of all things which I saw were impressed on my shapeless mind to be reproduced afterward by faculties then latent.” Active in Veronica from childhood, the “ideal faculty … was developed [in Cassandra] by the experience of years. No remembrance of any ideal condition comes with the remembrance of my childish days, and I conclude that my mind, if I had any, existed in so rudimental a state that it had little influence upon my character” (14-15). Encoded into the novel by the naming of Cassandra's great-grandfather and father, the Lockean model (though critics so far have failed to decode it) provides the theoretical framework for interpreting the story as one of a young woman who “advance[s] by experience” (150).

Yet although the optimistic Lockean model of development dominates the novel's surface plot, it is counterpointed by a darker (and older) view of character that works on a more submerged level, being foregrounded only at the end of the novel. Trying to analyze her mother's powerful, though invisible influence on her family, Cassandra wonders: “Would endowment of character explain it—that faculty which we could not change, give, or take? Character was a mysterious and indestructible fact, and a fact that I had had little respect for” (216). The theory that character is innate, unchangeable, and—as with the Pickersgill Somers family—hereditary radically undermines the Lockean theory of development. Modeled on the dark heroes of Gothic romance, both Ben and Desmond Somers suffer from a family curse—in their case alcoholism. Although, unlike Ben, Desmond is able to break with his “cursed habits” (250), Cassandra writes at the end of the novel that his family did not “recognize any change in him. It might be permanent, but it was no less an aberration which they mistrusted. The ground plan of the Bellevue Pickersgill character could not be altered” (252). Whether or not the Somers family is right about Desmond (the novel leaves this question open), heredity painfully manifests itself as a determining force in Veronica's inert baby, reflecting, as Harris points out, contemporary theories that alcoholics engender retarded children (21). Fusing the psychological theories of both Calvinism and the Gothic romance, the view of character as unchangeable and hereditary presages naturalist thought and subverts the Bildungsroman's traditional assumptions about development.

The importance of discontinuity on the symbolic and discursive levels is reflected in and partly accounts for the more conspicuous stylistic discontinuities that baffled Stoddard's early readers and that were presumably as much responsible for the novel's failure to draw a large readership as was the Civil War, which Stoddard herself blamed for the book's unpopularity (see Buell and Zagarell xix). In an unpublished review of Stoddard's second novel, Two Men (1865), Henry James, for instance, describes The Morgesons as “a long tedious record of incoherent dialogue between persons irresponsible in their sayings and doings even to the verge of insanity” (Edel 614). Becoming more pronounced in the second half of the novel, the “elliptical dialogue, abrupt juxtaposition of scenes, [and] lack of narrative explanation”¹³ not only call attention to the discontinuities frustrating Cassandra's development, but also reflect Cassandra's gradual silencing.

Once irrepressibly outspoken, Cassandra learns that the greatest candor is silence: “‘I am more candid than ever,’” she says to her lover's widow, “‘for I am silent’” (153). Named after the Trojan prophetess who was doomed to speak to deaf ears, Cassandra finally refrains from speaking up for herself. The question with which she justifies her (short-lived) resolution to “break the fetters” imposed by her household duties—“had I not endured a ‘mute case’ long enough?” (243)—suggests that her silence reflects the oppression of her “housewifely condition” (226). Undermining the optimistic, feminist reading of Cassandra and Desmond's marriage as a liberating, happy union of equals, Cassandra's silence is also symbolically linked with her relationship with Desmond. On a nightly walk to the sea shore during her visit to Belem, Cassandra projects onto the sea her own ambivalent feelings of attraction to and fear of Desmond, whom she has just called the “Prince of Darkness”: the sea is “hemmed in on all sides. … It looked milky, misty, and uncertain; the predominant shores stifled its voice” (179). Failing to “keep the open independence of her sea” (MD 97), Cassandra is no female Bulkington after all. She is reduced to silence as Desmond desperately clings to conventional faith to overcome the existential anguish which he voices in the last sentence of the novel: “‘God is the Ruler,’ he said at last. ‘Otherwise let this mad world crush us now’” (253). Cassandra's gradual silencing as a narrator is reflected in her implicit view of writing as the art of condensation. She says of the letter in which she tells Desmond about her relationship with Charles Morgeson that she “might have condensed” it to four words: “VESTIGIA RETRORSUM. CHARLES MORGESON” (227). The Morgesons' elliptical, at times even cryptic style and the discontinuities it reflects on the levels of symbolism and discourse signal the novel's resistance to the Bildungsroman's impulse to impose order on a disorderly reality by constructing a coherent, progressive narrative.

IV

My discussion of Melville's and Stoddard's subversions of the American Bildungsroman inevitably raises questions about the two novels' implied and actual audiences. In “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” Melville indirectly reveals his own view of his audience by ascribing it to Hawthorne. He writes that some of Hawthorne's tales are “directly calculated to deceive … the superficial skimmer of pages,” admitting that the titles of two of the tales “dupe[d] no less an eagle-eyed reader than myself”; the “Truth” of the tales is “insinuated” only “to those who may best understand it” (549; 543). As this reader program suggests, Melville aimed at two radically different audiences: a popular audience that would buy his novel, reading it as a confirmation rather than a subversion of the dominant ideologies of ante-bellum America; and another, elect audience of “eagle-eyed” readers that would understand his novel, being able to unravel the strands of his yarn to discover the “truth” that is revealed when they come apart. Reduced to an even more severe kind of genteel poverty than was Melville, Stoddard too initially hoped for a popular audience. But when, despite positive reviews, the novel failed commercially, she set her hopes on a more elite readership. As she wrote to a friend on the eve of the re-publication of The Morgesons in 1889, “It has been a pain to me, that I have not gained the respect of the intellects, whose intellects I respect—common praise I do not care a copper for” (quoted in Matlack 549). Responding to a reviewer's complaint that, in her second novel, she “left analytic gaps not readily filled up,” she wrote that her novel “must be read slowly, to give time … for the intelligence of the reader to fill up the ‘analytic gaps’” (quoted in Matlack 549).

Both Melville and Stoddard finally found their “ideal” readers—or, more accurately, their “ideal” readers found themselves in the two novelists' works. Since the Melville revival of the 1920s, Redburn has had a secure, if minor niche in the canon of American literature, while, more recently, the feminist “revolution” in literary studies has inspired sensitive and appreciative readings of The Morgesons. A clue as to why Redburn has and The Morgesons has not (yet) been canonized is given in an early review of Stoddard's three novels, published shortly after their 1901 reprinting: “To their few ardent admirers the writings of Mrs. Stoddard are an unexplained eddy in the current of literature, a dark and turbid backwater leading nowhere, connecting no two points, neither illustrating a tendency nor exercising an influence” (Moss 260). The Morgesons is deprived of canonical status because it does not fit into any of the evolutionary narratives of literary history. For, as Annette Kolodny points out in “Dancing Through the Minefield,” the “authority of any established canon … is reified by our perception that current work seems to grow almost inevitably out of it (even in opposition or rebellion), and is called into question when what we read appears to have little or no relation to what we recognize as coming before” (152). It should hardly surprise us, then, that one of the most ardent recent advocates for canonizing the novel, Sandra A. Zagarell, focuses on what she calls Stoddard's “Repossession of a Heritage.” Insightful as Zagarell's reevaluation of Stoddard's novel is, The Morgesons' emphasis on discontinuity problematizes the effort to place the novel into a coherent and integrated narrative of the literary tradition. If Redburn and The Morgesons teach us anything, surely it is to be suspicious of a literary or national history which reads like a Bildungsroman.

Notes

1. Looby convincingly argues that Franklin's emphasis on genealogical continuity is motivated by his wish to deflate the political rupture between America and England, a rupture that Franklin, as a diplomat, long tried to prevent (74).

2. In “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” which was published in The Literary World of August 17 and 24, 1850, Melville equates Hawthorne (and implicitly himself) with “Shakespeare and other masters of the great Art of Telling the Truth.” Reprinted in the Norton Critical edition of Moby-Dick (542).

3. The same argument could be made for White-Jacket, which also deconstructs the Bildungsroman. I will limit my discussion to Redburn, however, because the scope of this essay does not allow me to deal with both novels in detail and because, in my view, Redburn is a better novel.

4. For instance the Irish sharper, whose trick of robbing The Highlander of fifteen fathoms of its tow-line “beat all [Redburn] had ever heard about the wooden nutmegs and bass-wood pumpkin seeds of Connecticut” (125).

5. Emerson writes: “Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration.” “Self-Reliance” may have been the source not only of Melville's skeptical view of progress but also of Redburn's metaphor of the tide: “Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal” (Whicher 165, 166).

6. Dimock also notes a conflict between the temporality of Redburn and that of the traditional Bildungsroman: “where the Bildungsroman registers time as accretion, Redburn registers it as deficit.” In Dimock's view Redburn's failure “to achieve a cumulative identity over time” is “altogether consistent with the book's timeless environment” (85). Perhaps because she focuses on what she calls “textual governance” rather than thematics in her study (6), Dimock fails to see that the conflict between teleology and repetition enters the novel's discourse.

7. Pointing out Melville's ironic manipulation of Redburn's nationalist rhetoric, Gerlach was the first critic to refute Perry Miller's identification of Redburn's nationalism with Melville's own (5-11).

8. For my reading of the nationalist implications of the humanist model of growing up, I am indebted to Colacurcio's discussion of that other famous American greenhorn tale, “My Kinsman Major Molineux.” Describing Hawthorne's tale as a “psychopolitical story,” Colacurcio argues that, in the view of the Founding Fathers, “the American Revolution was just like growing up” (151). See also Fliegelman.

9. That these authors often identify with their female protagonists is suggested by the fact that the heroine of the nineteenth-century female Bildungsroman frequently gains (pre-marital) independence by becoming a writer; for instance, Jo March in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868).

10. As the title of the novel indicates, Cassandra's destiny is inextricably linked with the fates of the other Morgesons. Moreover, Cassandra has family ties to almost all the other characters who decisively influence her life, including her lover and her husband-to-be.

11. Her name and the picture of St. Cecilia she puts up in her room underscore Veronica's “sainthood,” and both a Portuguese servant and Desmond Somers, recently returned from Catholic Spain, associate her with the Virgin Mary (242; 252). More subtly, her “sainthood” links Veronica with Cassandra, who during her stay in Barmouth hears an echo of her own yearning in the “complaining voice” of an old Spanish church bell, which “could never forget it had been baptized a Catholic” (32). For despite her reservations about Veronica's spiritual withdrawal, Cassandra is powerfully attracted by the “ideality [which] made [Veronica's] life beautiful” (59).

12. Matlack regrets that the novel moves away from a “splendidly realistic manner” to a contrived, romantic mode at the end (262). Kramer similarly argues that the plot “veers to the melodramatic,” adding that Cassandra's characterization is inconsistent: in Kramer's view, it is unlikely that this proto-feminist would fall for the men she does (162). Although admitting that the novel's final section is “the strangest part of the novel,” Weir duplicates the contradictions in the novel; having first stressed Cassandra's “evolution” to sexual maturity, she ends her reading on a less affirmative note, depicting Cassandra as a “waif” who is “alone on a dangerous voyage in an uncertain world” and whose only hope is in endurance (436; 434; 438-39). Harris argues that the marriage succeeds from a critical perspective because Cassandra and Desmond “summon strength to recognize their own imperatives” and that the ending suggests that “only the woman who [like Cassandra] can cling to her selfhood … will survive the pitiless universe” (21). Finally, suggesting that the ending's emphasis on the grim fates of the other Morgesons is intentionally unsettling, Zagarell reads the ending as Stoddard's reminder to the reader that Cassandra is an “exceptional woman” and that the “storybook finale” of her marriage with Desmond is possible only in fiction (54).

13. I am borrowing Buell and Zagarell's redefinition of what James saw as fatal flaws in the novel (xix).

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