SOURCE: “The End of Epistolarity: ‘Letters from an American Farmer,’” in Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters, Stanford University Press, 1996, pp. 140-72.

[In the following excerpt, Cook contends that J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer laments the ending of the epistolary genre as it records life and customs in the newly independent United States.]

What the Lettres persanes has been for scholars of European Enlightenment, [J. Hector St. John de] Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782) has been for American studies: a generic anomaly that generates ongoing intradisciplinary contestation. The terrain of the debate is familiar: while the book deploys some of the narrative techniques of conventional prose fiction, it is composed of a series of letters that provide cultural and natural-historical information about the American setting and events, to which plot and character development are subordinated. As a result, the Letters have often been treated as a collection of loosely related essays. Selections from the work are anthologized according to the ideological currents of the moment, while the rest is dismissed unread. For example, Gary B. Nash has examined how Letter III, “What Is an American?” has been used by American literature and history courses to support a “myth of a classless prerevolutionary American society … a sentimentalized, idealistic vision of a vanished, egalitarian America” (216). As Cathy Davidson points out, “predictably … the later sections of Crèvecoeur's classic are anthologized far less often than the exultant (if unrealistic) Letter III. For most readers of Crèvecoeur (who typically encounter his work in anthologies, if at all), the important analysis of American racism set forth in the latter portions of the book simply does not exist. It is not part of our literary inheritance.”¹ The Letters from an American Farmer is seldom examined as a novel; it is even less often treated as an epistolary narrative. In fact, its epistolarity—its generic context and codes—is almost always ignored.² As a result, no one has put to the Letters the questions that eighteenth-century epistolary narratives consistently raise about the meaning of publication itself. As this study has been concerned to demonstrate, contemporary print artifacts of all sorts existed in dialogue with a liberal ideology that bound together publication, civic identity, and subjectivity, so that this dialogue is formally and thematically implicated in the question of what any eighteenth-century letter-narrative “means.”

In a recent study of eighteenth-century American writing, Michael Warner claims that the concept of a print culture is crucial to all contemporary American literature. Warner shows that the colonies' identity was intimately tied to print, and that print was insistently thematized in all sorts of American publications, from ephemeral pamphlets to conduct books to the U.S. Constitution. American novels in particular differ from the Anglo-European models that literary critics have traditionally used as touchstones: “American novels before Cooper are all anomalous from the perspective of literary criticism.” These novels must be read in the context of American print culture: they are “better accounted for by treating them as features of a republican public sphere rather than a liberal aesthetic.”³ In other words, instead of invoking such literary critical concepts as organic unity, characterization, or narrative voice, we should rather attend to how these works thematize publication, privacy, civic virtue, and the gendered body of the citizen, issues that preoccupy contemporary letter-narratives. Here such attention makes visible a transformation over the course of the century in attitudes toward the Enlightenment ideal of a public sphere. This final chapter examines how an American letter-narrative written in the last decades of the century comments on the political and cultural values implicit in Enlightenment print culture.

In many ways, Crèvecoeur's letter-narrative is even more anomalous than the novels Warner examines, for one could argue that it is neither a novel nor American in any meaningful sense. The Letters was composed (apparently largely in America) by a naturalized British citizen and landowner who used the name J. Hector St. John; it was published first in England (1782) and then in Ireland. Translated, revised, much extended, and rededicated, it came out in France two years later, by which time its author had resumed his original French citizenship and name, Michel Guillaume St. Jean de Crèvecoeur, and was back in the state of New York serving as French consul.⁴ It was not published in the United States until 1793, three years after Crèvecoeur returned to the Continent, but by this time its vogue had passed, and for many years the Letters remained unread by any but a few scholars.

The formal peculiarities and the odd publication history of the Letters from an American Farmer make perfect generic sense when it is read within the Anglo-European tradition of epistolary narrative defined by the thematization of the public sphere. The Letters from an American Farmer appeared as the popularity of the epistolary genre began to decline, and thus it can be read as an elegy for the political and cultural ideologies that had been implicit in the genre through the century. Americanists have long read Crèvecoeur's text primarily as commenting on the future of the American republic; however, returned to its generic context, the Letters is clearly about that republic's past: it mourns the end of the transatlantic Republic of Letters and of the cosmopolitan citizen-critic imagined and constructed in its narratives.

Michael Warner describes postrevolutionary America as a period of transition from an old paradigm of readership to a new one. The earlier paradigm, which he calls “republican,” imagines a reading subject resembling the one that I have argued is produced by the Lettres persanes: the republican text invents a disembodied citizen-critic whose reading is an act of public civic virtue. In contrast, the second paradigm of readership, which he calls “nationalist,” invokes a private subject, embodied in history and therefore necessarily gendered and classed, whose reading is above all sympathetic.⁵ In what follows, we will see that the Letters from an American Farmer stages the cultural transformation from republican to nationalist readership, and in so doing, it stages the eclipse of the Enlightenment ideal of the Republic of Letters and of its cosmopolite, supranational citizen-critic.

Letter III, famously, opens with the question, “What is this new man, this American?” Crèvecoeur shows that as “America” rewrites itself into the United States through a bloody internecine struggle, it distinguishes this “new man” from a figure like the cosmopolitan citizen-critic produced by Montesquieu. The distinction reveals the alienation from Enlightenment values inherent in the new notion of national citizenship. For Montesquieu, the roles of father, husband, political subject, and critic mutually complement one another, and their complementarity regulates both the political and the domestic orders. In contrast, in a country “convulsed” (to use Crèvecoeur's repeated expression) by civil war, private and public aspects of the self are in direct and radical conflict: public and private categories of identity represent mutually exclusive subject-positions. Corporeality can no longer be abstracted or transcended, its politically masculine status guaranteed by participation in the public sphere. Instead, the body in all its vulnerable materiality—resembling in this way the body of the Richardsonian epistolary heroine, ever subject to invasion and violation—returns to center stage as the site of a cultural anxiety about power and authority. The post-Enlightenment subject is definitively embodied, and is thereby consigned to the private sphere of particularity and self-interest. In a period of national revolution, which in Crèvecoeur's depiction closely resembles a Hobbesian state of nature, the ideal of open public exchange between disinterested citizens whose reason qualifies them to debate the actions of the state is necessarily discredited.

Against this transformation of the significance of public and private, the Letters defines the American subject at the end of a certain mode of transatlantic correspondence. Crèvecoeur's elegiac project is anchored by three figurations of the body/subject: the colonist's wife in Letter I; the slave in the cage in Letter IX; and George III in Letter XII. The bodies of women, slaves, and the monarch pose specific and intractable challenges to the ideology of anonymity and disinterestedness that sustains the Enlightenment public sphere; these challenges help explain the demise of both the public sphere and the epistolary genre in the new nation.⁶ …

THE WRITING SUBJECT: PUBLICNESS AND REPRESENTATION IN THE NEW NATION

The title of the much-anthologized Letter III of the Letters poses the compelling question “What Is an American?” In 1782, one answer might have been that an American is someone who has successfully negotiated a complicated transition from being a subject in the political sense to being a subject in the modern psychological sense: the movement is simultaneously from subject to citizen and from political subjecthood to psychic subjectivity. The American is someone who has come to live under the linked signs of personal identity and personal property that we now think of as making up possessive individualism.⁷ In Europe, the Letters tells us, immigrants “were not numbered in any civil lists of their country, except in those of the poor; here they rank as citizens. … The laws … protect them as they arrive, stamping on them the symbol of adoption; they receive ample rewards for their labours; these accumulated rewards procure them lands; those lands confer on them the title of freemen, and to that title every benefit is affixed which men can possibly require” (68-69). In colonial and revolutionary America, this transition from statistical cipher to individual freeman takes place through the power of the printed word to create the citizen-critic: “As citizens it is easy to imagine that they will carefully read the newspapers, enter into every political disquisition, freely blame or censure governors and others” (71).⁸ Against a critical tradition that dismisses the Letters as generically anomalous and aesthetically uneven, I argue that a reading focusing on the complicated intersection between (political) citizen and (psychological) subject mediated by writing will reveal the order and clarity—the secret chain, we might say—of Crèvecoeur's rich and peculiar letter-narrative.

The first letter introduces this constellation of issues. Here, James the self-taught colonial must negotiate an epistolary identity for himself between the history, politics, and linguistic conventions he inherits from the Old World and the as-yet untested frontiers of the New. This negotiation is both the subject and the effect of the act of writing that constitutes the Letters from an American Farmer as a whole, for the print artifact we are reading is made up of James's letters describing the natural and civic terrain of America to Mr. F. B., the “enlightened European” gentleman who has solicited this letter-exchange after staying with the family during an American tour (51). The first letter establishes how much is at stake in this proposed epistolary engagement by putting into print the debate about it between James, his wife, and the local minister. Their language frames the correspondence as a kind of dangerous expedition between opposed social and political allegiances. In the eighteenth-century generic context, we could see the eastern trajectory of James's letters as reversing the journey to the West undertaken by Usbek and Rica. The farmer's letters sketch a return to the East, albeit one that will be canceled out by his family's western flight at the close of the narrative. James defines his epistolary offerings as recompense for the discursive tour of the Old World that Mr. F. B. gave him during that gentleman's visit to America: “You conducted me, on the map, from one European country to another; told me many extraordinary things of our famed mother country, of which I knew very little, of its internal navigation, agriculture, arts, manufactures, and trade; you guided me through an extensive maze, and I abundantly profited by the journey” (39).

This model of complementary exchange is challenged by one party to the three-cornered debate staged in Letter I. James's wife insists on Mr. F. B.'s radical difference from James; his extensive travels, she thinks, make it unlikely that he really wants to read James's homely letters.

Only think of a London man going to Rome! Where is it that these English folks won't go? One who hath seen the factory of brimstone at 'Suvius and town of Pompeii underground! Would'st thou pretend to letter it with a person who hath been to Paris, to the Alps, to Petersburg, and who hath seen so many fine things up and down the old countries; who hath come over the great sea unto us and hath journeyed from our New Hampshire in the East to our Charles Town in the South; who hath visited all our great cities?

(40; my emphasis)

The wife's description of Mr. F. B.'s and James's relationship as “letter[ing] it” links cultural capital to correspondence as an index of difference that precludes correspondence between subjects of different nations and classes. In contrast, the minister suggests that for such readers as Mr. F. B., letters work in lieu of actual travel to unite individuals discursively across difference. He assures James that even if his American anecdotes “be not elegant, they will smell of the woods and be a little wild; I know your turn, they will contain some matters which he never knew before. … We are all apt to love and admire exotics, though they may be often inferior to what we possess” (41-42). Mr. F. B. reading James's letters—and by analogy the British readers of Crèvecoeur's Letters—will undertake a discursive voyage to the New World more instructive than any continental tour:

Methinks there would be much more real satisfaction in observing among us the humble rudiments and embryos of societies spreading everywhere. … I am sure that the rapidity of their growth would be more pleasing to behold than the ruins of old towers, useless aqueducts, or impending battlements. … I am sure I cannot be called a partial American when I say that the spectacle afforded by these pleasing scenes must be more entertaining and more philosophical than that which arises from beholding the musty ruins of Rome. … For my part, I had rather admire the ample barn of one of our opulent farmers, who himself felled the first tree in his plantation and was the first founder of his settlement, than study the dimensions of the temple of Ceres.

(42-43)

In short, the ideal enlightened reader is understood to possess a cosmopolitan benevolence that makes the print representation of America a source of pleasure regardless of nationality. Indeed, James later asserts that American identity is effectively transnational: “We know, properly speaking, no strangers; this is every person's country” (80). In this sense, the discursive representation of America would be the natural topos of the Enlightenment Republic of Letters.

This representation of the Republic of Letters as transnational is itself bound to a particular historical moment. Taken as a whole, the Letters invites us to consider what happens to the Enlightenment ideal of the public sphere when political conditions preclude the fulfillment of the citizen-critic's rights and responsibilities. Specifically, the Letters exposes the challenges to the ideology of cosmopolitan citizenship that arise when the meanings of “private” and “public” are rewritten in the political context of the 1770s and 1780s. For instance, James's sharp-witted, cautious wife fears that if the epistolary exchange is publicized, her husband will be persecuted by suspicious neighbors and royal agents as “the scribbling farmer” (49). She urges that the correspondence be kept secret, because, as we gradually learn, the American “public” described in the Letters is not a rational forum of disinterested citizens, but rather a battleground of private interests.⁹ The wife is particularly alert to how self-interestedness may color interpretations of the act of writing.¹⁰ She urges, “For God's sake let [the correspondence] be kept a profound secret among us; if it were once known/abroad that thee writest to a great and rich man over at London, there would be no end of the talk of the people: some would vow that thee art going to turn an author; others would pretend to foresee some great alterations in the welfare of thy family; some would say this; some would say that. Who would wish to become the subject of public talk?” (47-48). Her anxiety about the figure of the writing farmer makes it clear that criticism according to properly literary criteria is impossible in this political context:

Wert thee to write as well as friend Edmund, whose speeches I often see in our papers, it would be the very selfsame thing; thee would'st be equally accused of idleness and vain notions not befitting thy condition. Our colonel would be often coming here to know what it is that thee canst write so much about. Some would imagine that thee wantest to become either an assembly man or a magistrate, which God forbid, and that thee art telling the king's men abundance of things. … Therefore, … let it be as great a secret as if it was some heinous crime.

(48)

In the crippled society of colonial America, with its divided proto-public of individuals who are not yet fully citizens, publicity is symptomatic of political transgression rather than of republican transparency, as it was for Montesquieu's limping woman. In such a culture it is assumed that one writes to promote one's private interests, rather than the public good; on these grounds James's wife recommends that he retain the private status (and, implicitly, the political gender) of that female figure crippled by publicity.

Unlike the Lettres persanes, however, Crèvecoeur's Letters does not propose a utopian restoration of the proper body through the public exercise of critical reason. Indeed, for James's wife, writing belongs to a world to which Americans have no access.¹¹ “Great people over sea may write to our townsfolk because they have nothing else to do. These Englishmen are strange people; because they can live upon what they call bank notes, without working, they think that all the world can do the same. This goodly country never would have been tilled and cleared with these notes” (48). In contrast to America, England operates on a strange hybrid economy of paper money standing in for gold: “if they have no trees to cut down, they have gold in abundance, they say; for I have often heard my grandfather tell how they live there by writing. By writing they send this cargo unto us, that to the West, and the other to the East Indies.” This magic circulation of paper is utterly foreign to the American economy: “But, James, thee knowest that it is not by writing that we shall pay the blacksmith, the minister, the weaver, the tailor, and the English shop” (49). According to the wife, America is still a precapitalist agrarian economy in which value is generated by labor, not paper. Her description sounds very much like Locke's explanation of how property rights precede money: when the laborer mixes his body's labor capacity with the earth, the resulting product (say, the tilled field) belongs to him.¹² The wife insists, “I am sure when Mr. F. B. was here, he saw thee sweat and take abundance of pains; he often told me how the Americans worked a great deal harder than the home Englishmen; for there, he told us, that they have no trees to cut down, no fences to make, no Negroes to buy and to clothe” (48-49).¹³ In the context of the politically and economically self-regulating and self-sufficient society she describes, writing, linked to an illusory paper economy, is inherently anomalous and even scandalous: “How would'st thee bear to be called at our country meetings the man of the pen? If this scheme of thine was once known, travellers as they go along would point out to our house, saying, ‘Here liveth the scribbling farmer’” (49).

Larzer Ziff emphasizes that the wife's position is complicit with the dominant political powers: “From the authorities' viewpoint, a writing farmer indicates a disordering of the hierarchy on which political stability rests.”¹⁴ But the wife seems even more concerned about the opinions of her neighbors than she is about those of the authorities. Ziff may be correct in reading these passages as evidence of the wife's understanding of writing as linked to society's secular fall, but we need not also infer a rejection of writing on Crèvecoeur's part. Read in relation to the Enlightenment ideal of the public sphere, it becomes clear that the Letters here draws attention to the dangerous absence of the civic conditions enabling publication to be part of a transparent order where citizens, divested of personalities and private interests, discuss public affairs.¹⁵

According to the ideal of the public sphere, to write is to participate in a public debate. Mr. F. B. invokes the epistolary trope that “writing letters is nothing more than talking on paper,” and the minister significantly develops the comparison into a kind of public performance. “Imagine, then, that Mr. F. B. is still here and simply write down what you would say to him. Suppose the questions he will put to you in his future letters to be asked by his viva-voce, as we used to call it at the college; then let your answers be conceived and expressed exactly in the same language as if he was present” (41). Here the domain of writing is constituted neither as a corrupter of idealized pure presence nor as its successful reconstitution, but rather as a formal technology of exchange.¹⁶ This epistolary exchange does not testify to a nostalgia for “immanence,” to use Ziff's word, but rather to a republican paradigm of writing as the forum of objective, disinterested debate and discussion under the supervision of the public. If the wife describes a society in which writing is a sign of divisive self-interest, then in contrast, the epistolary project envisioned by James, the minister, and Mr. F. B. would allow citizen-critics to shape and affirm a Republic of Letters through writing. This vision stands at the head of the text, but as we will see, it cannot be sustained in the warring state of nature to which we see America reduced in Letter XII, in which self-interest has become fatally paramount.

The wife's doubts articulate, in displaced and domesticated disguise, Crèvecoeur's own fears about how public authorial status can be established in the context of a literary and political culture in the throes of “convulsion”—a word he returns to again and again. Can one be a citizen of a transatlantic Republic of Letters when one's own society is in political turmoil? And if this ideal is no longer possible, how can authorship be imagined differently? We will return to these questions, but first let us consider the final disposition of Mr. F. B.'s proposal.

The three readers in this opening scene are preoccupied by the question of whether language is transparent: that is, does Mr. F. B. mean what he writes? The text for this exercise in group reading is a handwritten, private letter from an acquaintance and potential patron, but it nonetheless calls on its readers' highest exegetical skills, as though it were Holy Scripture. The wife exclaims, “James, thee must read this letter over again, paragraph by paragraph, and warily observe whether thee canst perceive some words of jesting, something that hath more than one meaning” (41). She then, as James tells Mr. F. B., “read it herself very attentively; our minister was present, we listened to and weighed every syllable; we all unanimously concluded that you must have been in a sober earnest intention, as my wife calls it, and your request appeared to be candid and sincere. … Our minister took the letter from my wife and read it to himself; he made us observe the two last phrases, and we weighed the contents to the best of our abilities. The conclusion we all drew made me resolve to write” (41). This community debate mirrors a miniaturized public sphere reinforced by public reading, a publicness that, James vows to the minister, will continue: “my letters shall not be sent, nor will I receive any, without reading them to you and my wife; … it will not be the first thing which I have submitted to your joint opinions. Whenever you come to dine with us, these shall be the last dish on the table” (45-46). With this guarantee, the epistolary engagement is accepted: James will represent America for Mr. F. B. In the process, Crèvecoeur seems to suggest, he will also write himself into being, as a subject of Enlightenment print culture and as a citizen of the Republic of Letters.

By thus defining and staging the literary construction of the private subject at this early moment of national history, Crèvecoeur distances the anxiety he himself shares with his readers about the definition and status of American authority in the 1780s. By the end of the letter-narrative we will see James not as the contemptible “scribbling farmer” his wife imagines, but instead as the full-blown “farmer of feelings,” Mr. F. B.'s “refined” denomination for his correspondent (53). Despite this apparently successful negotiation of the boundary between public and private at the level of individual subjectivity, the strategies that allowed earlier epistolary authors to employ the paradigms of the Republic of Letters in the construction of their authorial identities no longer serve James or Crèvecoeur himself in the same way. The “farmer of feelings” is not the citizen-critic: the image appeals to a very different paradigm of reading and interpretation, one that problematizes correspondence instead of idealizing it.

This problematization becomes evident in the imbalances of the epistolary exchange charted here. Although James and the minister suggest in Letter I that correspondence can circumvent class and national differences, it does not necessarily produce egalitarian relations or a true public sphere. Particularly where the American is anxious to prove himself on the European's intellectual terrain, his correspondence becomes vulnerable to charges of self-interest. This may be the case even when the American's own landscape is the basis of the epistolary exchange, as it so often is in the Letters. Laura Rigal has described how eighteenth-century American natural historians depended on a European “network of men of letters” who provided letters of introduction and recommendation, as La Rochefoucauld did for Crèvecoeur. On her account, Crèvecoeur's Letters illustrates how the claim to properly “American” independence and thus to an idealized republican moral purity is actually undermined by the workings of correspondence:

In Crèvecoeur's fiction, the letters themselves come to be objectified properties, serving, in effect, as heraldic devices which legitimate, and even prove the virtuous existence of the Pennsylvania yeoman. However, legitimation by letters to and from Europe is accomplished only at the expense of continuity with the Old World civilization in respect to which the Pennsylvanian hopes to distinguish himself. While serving as evidence of his virtuous character, therefore, the farmer's letters also serve to document the corruption and “interestedness” which are implicit in his trans-Atlantic social connections, and which reflect his own social origin.¹⁷

Rigal examines this collapse of a crucial distance between Old and New World in Letter XI, which recounts the visit to John Bartram of a Russian traveler named Iwan. Bartram is not ashamed to be found working beside his laborers, thus demonstrating his unpretentious, democratic “American” values, but he proudly cites his epistolary links with European aristocrats and royalty. He has corresponded with the British king about Florida; with Queen Ulrica of Sweden, whose “kind epistle” in Latin he displays to Iwan; and with various distinguished Europeans, exchanging seeds and specimens. The coat of arms of his French father's family, a token of his continued engagement with the values of the Old World, hangs in his study.

The idea of correspondence resonates throughout Letter XI in various ways. Iwan's desire to meet Bartram was stimulated by “the extensive correspondence which I knew he held with the most eminent Scotch and French botanists” as well as with Queen Ulrica (188), and Bartram was not surprised by Iwan's visit because he had received advance notice of his arrival from another correspondent. Bartram's transformation from a colonial farmer to a world-famous botanist who “walk[s] in the garden of Linnaeus” (194) with princesses and nobles is due to his knowledge of Latin, which permits him not only to grasp the “universal grammar of plants through the Linnaean system” but to correspond with a queen. Latin makes him a cosmopolitan citizen of the Republic of Letters; it also makes him botanically at home not only “all over [his] farm” but throughout North America, until by now, he says modestly, “I have acquired a pretty general knowledge of every plant and tree to be found in our continent” (195). This knowledge anchors a self-perpetuating chain of correspondence: Bartram's autobiographical account ends triumphantly, “In process of time I was applied to from the old countries, whither I every year send many collections,” and he offers to add Iwan to his list of natural-historical correspondents.

While Iwan's account emphasizes the reciprocality of Bartram's epistolary exchanges, the underlying hierarchialism implicit in them becomes clear when the epistolary metaphor is extended to Bartram's household economy, which Iwan describes as “the mutual correspondence between the master and the inferior members of his family” (195). Bartram's household is represented as an ideal patriarchy. Assembled around the dining table, its members exemplify the orderly Great Chain of Being, rising from “Negroes” and “hired men” to family and guests up to “the head, [where] the venerable father and his wife presided” (189). Here, the idea of correspondence accommodates a highly stratified social model, rather than that of an egalitarian exchange between citizens of the Republic of Letters.

Iwan ends the letter about his visit to Bartram by thanking his own correspondent for a letter of introduction: “It was to the letter you gave me that I am indebted for the extensive acquaintance I now have throughout Pennsylvania” (199). Rigal's reading asks us to de-figure this economic metaphor, in the sense of returning it to its literal meaning: such letters are indeed debts, for they entangle the American naturalist in the social hierarchies of the Old World and carry its corrupt values into the ostensibly objective, scientific study of the New World. As a result, the ideal of the disinterested citizen-critic is undermined. In this sense, Letter IX raises questions about correspondence between the New World and the Old that prepare us for the disastrous epistolary rupture that concludes Letter XII.

THE AMERICAN EMBODIED

The fantasy of benevolent paternalism suggested in Iwan's image of the Bartram dinner table is crystallized in the figure of Mr. F. B., who authorizes, though he does not author, the correspondence that becomes the Letters from an American Farmer. As the narrative develops, however, this fantasy is disrupted by a series of challenges to the crucial guarantee represented by the father's body. In Montesquieu's work, the Persians' letters repeatedly invoke a real paternal body as the anchor of language and of narrative, but the Lettres persanes itself seeks to eliminate the connection between discourse and (gendered) body so as to open up a space for the disembodied citizen-critic. In the Letters from an American Farmer, the narrator's attempts to locate and affirm the inherency of meaning in the father's body are also exposed as fruitless. James's anxious discourse seeks the origin of language and property, and ultimately of the new nation itself, in corporeality. The anomalous body of the slave, however, calls into question the Lockean connections between body, property, and society.

In Locke's Second Treatise of Government, America as a concept is a sort of thought-laboratory in which the origin of society can be worked out: “in the beginning all the world was America.”¹⁸ In this Edenic New World, the individual exists very precisely as a body/subject: subjectivity and corporeality are coextensive and indivisible. This is clear in the famous passage on the origin of property:

every man has a property in his own person; this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.¹⁹

Locke asserts that the body's physical limitations ensure the essential fairness of the property system established by God. So long as there is no waste, defined by the limits of the capacity of the body to consume, the concept of property is unproblematic:

The same law of nature, that does by this means give us property, does also bound that property too. God has given us all things richly, 1 Tim. VI. 12 is the voice of reason confirmed by inspiration. But how far has he given it us? To enjoy. As much as any one can make use of to any advantage of life before it spoils, so much he may by his labour fix a property in: whatever is beyond this, is more than his share, and belongs to others. Nothing was made by God for man to spoil or destroy.²⁰

When this law is observed, property is justified by nature itself:

The measure of property nature has well set by the extent of men's labour and the conveniencies of life: no man's labour could subdue, or appropriate all; nor could his enjoyment consume more than a small part; so that it was impossible for any man, this way, to intrench upon the right of another, or acquire to himself a property to the prejudice of his neighbour, who would still have room for as good, and as large a possession (after the other had taken out his) as before it was appropriated. This measure did confine every man's possession to a very moderate proportion.²¹

These passages justify property as a by-product of the body/subject. However, a categorical difficulty arises when another kind of body is considered: that of the servant. Initially, Locke presents the servant's body as simply a kind of prosthesis. In a passage summarizing how labor makes property out of nonproperty, he writes, “Thus the grass my horse has bit; the turfs my servant has cut; and the ore I have digged in any place, where I have a right to them in common with others, become my property without the assignation or consent of anybody.”²² The parallelism finesses a troubling question about the extension of agency through servitude, for the service of another, whether wage laborer, indenturee, or slave, is not the same as the pure effects of one's own bodily labor that provide an inalienable right to property. Such service must instead be a result of the invention of money, which replaces the natural corporeal index of legitimate consumption and waste by an artificial measure that allows the unjust distribution of goods: “this I dare boldly affirm, that the same rule of propriety, (viz.) that every man should have as much as he could make use of, would hold still in the world, without straitening any body; … had not the invention of money, and the tacit agreement of men to put a value on it, introduced (by consent) larger possessions, and a right to them.”²³ The category of the servant's labor represents a point of entanglement in Locke's argument about the origins of property; it also underlines a confusion about the concept of the body in eighteenth-century Enlightenment culture.

The problem of the servant's labor, unresolved in Locke, becomes urgent in Letter IX, for what ultimately undermines the optimistic representation of America in James's early letters is the paradoxical body of the slave. In the New World, which Locke represents as the scene of property's legitimate birth, the slave's body stands as an emblem of the ethical, even the ontological, dubiety of property. It is also an emblem of the loss of civic values that leads to the despairing conclusion of the Letters. The themes of Letter IX echo the reflections of Montesquieu's Usbek on the rise of despotism, for both emphasize the cyclic decay of civic values and link bodily and economic health. James begins his description of Charles Town by referring to the “valetudinarians from the West Indies” he sees there, “at thirty, loaded with the infirmities of old age” (167), their health destroyed by the luxuriousness of their climate and the ease of their life. The idyllic climate of Charles Town encourages the excesses of its citizens, who resemble West Indian planters, notorious for dissipation and cruelty, in their moral and physical debility: “The rays of their sun seem to urge them irresistibly to dissipation and pleasure” (167). Land values there are very high, because of the “narrowness of the neck on which it stands”; nonetheless, this value does not remain in the land, but is progressively drained off into the hands of lawyers, a class that figures parasitical nonproductivity to James. “In another century, the law will possess in the north what now the church possesses in Peru and Mexico” (168).

These comparisons between the West Indies, Mexico, and Peru, all Enlightenment tropes for colonial despotism, set in play the question of slavery that dominates the rest of this letter. In Charles Town, James observes, slaves' bodies are invisible to their owners: “Their ears by habit are become deaf, their hearts are hardened; they neither see, hear, nor feel, for the woes of their poor slaves, from whose painful labours all their wealth proceeds. Here the horrors of slavery, the hardship of incessant toils, are unseen, and no one thinks with compassion of those showers of sweat and of tears which from the bodies of Africans daily drop and moisten the ground they till” (168). The passage invokes obliquely, in relation to the slaves, the Lockean image of the mixture of the body's labor with the earth that constitutes and legitimates property; at the same time, it emphasizes how the invention of money makes that justification of property irrelevant. Because of the rise of a market in human bodies as slave labor made possible by money, the mixing of the human body with the earth, by its emissions of sweat and tears as well as by its labor capacity, no longer performs its proprietary magic. The wealth of Charles Town's planters derives less from agricultural productivity than from the gold-driven triangle trade that circulates from Peru to Guinea to North America, bringing captured Africans “to toil, to starve, and to languish for a few years on the different plantations of these citizens” (169). The slaves are not subjects in a money economy but objects of it, laboring for people “who have no other power over them than that of violence, no other right than what this accursed metal has given them!” (169).

In such a context, even paternity, that basic bodily function that anchors and stabilizes society for James and for Usbek, becomes an index of dehumanization. That the slave's body is not that of a body/subject is clearest when it is considered against contemporary models of fatherhood. By definition, the slave can never fully participate in the Enlightenment triad of masculine identity-categories celebrated by Usbek, that of husband, father, and citizen. James notes:

If Negroes are permitted to become fathers, this fatal indulgence only tends to increase their misery; the poor companions of their scanty pleasures are likewise the companions of their labours; and when at some critical seasons they could wish to see them relieved, with tears in their eyes they behold them perhaps doubly oppressed, obliged to bear the burden of Nature—a fatal present—as well as that of unabated tasks. How many have I seen cursing the irresistible propensity and regretting that by having tasted of those harmless joys they had become the authors of double misery to their wives … they are not permitted to partake of those ineffable sensations with which Nature inspires the hearts of fathers and mothers; they must repel them all and become callous and passive. … Their paternal fondness is embittered by considering that if their children live, they must live to be slaves like themselves. … The very instinct of the brute, so laudable, so irresistible, runs counter here to their master's interest; and to that god, all the laws of Nature must give way. Thus planters get rich.

(169-71)

The bodily paradoxes of slavery counter the Lockean representation of the New World as the space in which liberal humanism, founded on democratic capitalism, can freely unfold.

Slavery's corrosive effects on liberal idealism are most memorably presented in Letter IX's appalling spectacle of the slaves in the cage. This scene is traditionally read as an allegory of the excesses of revolution, but the suicide of Montesquieu's Roxane has taught us not to move too quickly from the body to its exegesis. The passage opens with a familiar Enlightenment evocation of the benign relations between humans and the natural world. On his way to a friendly dinner with a plantation owner, our narrator rambles through a pleasant pastoral landscape. However, this landscape is abruptly invaded by the tropes of despotism. The image of the caged and dying slave enacts the reversals of value that despotism sets into motion: in this terrible image of a World Upside Down, a man is trapped in a cage, while birds outside struggle to get in to feed on him. The caged slave's body is written over by wounds; since despotic power always leaves its signature on the eyes, the narrator observes that “the birds had already picked out his eyes; his cheek-bones were bare” (178). The birds have torn the slave's face so that he is literally “disfigured.”²⁴

The effect of this spectacle on the beholder is just what the despot would desire: in the presence of these signs of absolute power, the narrator experiences a sublime disruption of apprehension and expression. The body/subject is disarticulated: “I found myself suddenly arrested by the power of affright and terror; my nerves were convulsed; I trembled; I stood motionless, involuntarily contemplating the fate of this Negro in all its dismal latitude.” In a pidgin English that signals his marginality to humanity itself, the caged slave utters “a few inarticulate monosyllables” (177). When he begs for a sip of water and then for the greater kindness of death, the goal of despotism—to display its absolute authority over the bodies of its miserable subjects—has been accomplished. That Crèvecoeur's slave must beg for his death marks how much greater is his abjection than that of Montesquieu's Roxane, who is able, at least, to end her own life. Even his death is not at the slave's disposal.²⁵

Facing this spectacle, the narrator realizes that the ideals of Enlightenment are not sustainable in the face of human greed and cruelty. So-called Oriental tyranny exists even in the New World, and there is no escape from it: “History perpetually tells us of millions of people abandoned to the caprice of the maddest princes, and of whole nations devoted to the blind fury of tyrants. Countries destroyed, nations alternately buried in ruins by other nations, some parts of the world beautifully cultivated, returned again into their pristine state, the fruits of ages of industry, the toil of thousands in a short time destroyed by few” (173). Human societies are always in a state of nature: “Everything is submitted to the power of the strongest; men, like the elements, are always at war; the weakest yield to the most potent; force, subtlety, and malice always triumph over unguarded honesty and simplicity” (174). As Usbek's Troglodyte fable suggested, every political order eventually degenerates back into despotism: “Republics, kingdoms, monarchies, founded either on fraud or successful violence, increase by pursuing the steps of the same policy until they are destroyed in their turn, either by the influence of their own crimes or by more successful but equally criminal enemies” (177). While civilized society at its best may allow a degree of political stability, perhaps even temporary felicity, nonetheless human society “is a strange heterogeneous assemblage of vices and virtues and of a variety of other principles forever at war, forever jarring, forever producing some dangerous, some distressing extreme” (177). With this realization, the Enlightenment vision of an emancipatory public sphere of reasoning, disinterested citizens is exposed as an empty ideal. What follows is a depiction of the end of the Republic of Letters and of the correspondence that symbolized it.

FROM CRITICAL ACTION TO SYMPATHETIC IDENTIFICATION: THE END OF EPISTOLARITY

The visit to Charles Town described in Letter IX offers a counter-Enlightenment narrative about the corrupting effects of the despotic tendency in human society. This narrative prepares us for the final phase of James's story: a vivid depiction of the actual “convulsion” of American society. If the ideal society is that in which the roles of husband, father, and citizen are mutually self-reinforcing, so that self-interest and public interest are the same, in a society in “convulsion” these roles become radically incompatible. In his last letter, James describes the anguish of this experience, which threatens the dissolution of the body/subject:

Never was a situation so singularly terrible as mine, in every possible respect, as a member of an extensive society, as a citizen of an inferior division of the same society, as a husband, as a father, as a man who exquisitely feels for the miseries of others as well as for his own! … When I consider myself as connected in all these characters, as bound by so many cords, all uniting in my heart, I am seized with a fear of the mind, I am transported beyond that degree of calmness which is necessary to delineate our thoughts. I feel as if my reason wanted to leave me, as if it would burst its poor weak tenement.

(201)

What is lost in the storm of revolution is the quintessentially human desire for sociability, for “of all animals that live on the surface of this planet, what is man when no longer connected with society, or when he finds himself surrounded by a convulsed and a half-dissolved one? He cannot live in solitude; he must belong to some community bound by some ties, however imperfect” (201). Now, however, “every one feels … for himself alone”; no man is truly a citizen in the Enlightenment's fullest sense of the word. Symptomatically, the gendered identity that underpins citizenship now becomes unstable: James's response to the dangers of attack is a kind of lability of gender. “Sometimes feeling the spontaneous courage of a man, I seem to wish for the decisive minute; the next instant a message from my wife, sent by one of the children, … unmans me; away goes my courage, and I descend again into the deepest despondency” (202). In the context of revolution, the roles of husband, father, and citizen clash and undermine one another. The Republic of Letters, grounded on that complementary trilogy, collapses in its absence.

At the end of the Letters, then, we return to the question raised in the first letter by the wife's anxiety about writing. How can a public authorial status be established in a society in the throes of “convulsion”? In this study's terms, the question can be framed even more specifically: how can one be a citizen of a transatlantic Republic of Letters when one's own nation is in political turmoil, so that local and larger identities clash? And if this ideal is no longer possible, how can authorship be imagined otherwise? James's reference to the conflict he experiences between being “a member of a large society which extends to many parts of the world” and “a citizen of a smaller society” (203) describes the author's dilemma as well as that of the colonial.

Letter XII describes life in America during this civil conflict as essentially unrepresentable. The loss of representability threatens the existing relation between author and reader, grounded in a model of readership that appeals above all to the exercise of reason. Up till now, a reading model based on sympathy and identification has been only implicit in the text, but here the interpellation of the disinterested, disembodied citizen is replaced by an interpellation that demands embodied identification.²⁶ Since the representation of the distresses of civil war strains rational language past its limits, the Letters at last turns to the language and paradigms of sympathy and identification that Warner sees as characteristic of a nationalist model of readership: “men secure and out of danger are soon fatigued with mournful details: can you enter with me into fellowship with all these afflictive sensations; have you a tear ready to shed over the approaching ruin of a once opulent and substantial family? Read this, I pray with the eyes of sympathy” (203).

In this new kind of reading, the reader is deliberately invited to import self-interest into the text. Sympathetic reading calls on the reader not in the abstract, as one of the many anonymous and disinterested readers of print artifacts who constitute a public, but as a private person whose body necessarily engages his or her special interests. In short, what we might call the writing of sympathy creates its addressees as those body/subjects that Montesquieu, as I argued in Chapter 2, sought to deconstruct. As a result, the experiences of private subjectivity, not those of public criticism, become predominant. The concept of a disinterested civic debate in a public sphere defined by abstraction and impersonality becomes irrelevant, and the abstract tenets of jurisprudence and political philosophy are brushed aside as citizens are reduced to their bodies. The following passage maps out the transformation from impartial, disinterested, disembodied “spectator” and “citizen” to corporealized colonist:

The cool, the distant spectator, placed in safety, may arraign me for ingratitude, may bring forth the principles of Solon or Montesquieu; he may look on me as wilfully guilty; he may call me by the most opprobrious names. Secure from personal danger, his warm imagination, undisturbed by the least agitation of the heart, will expatiate freely on this grand question. … To him the object becomes abstracted. … But let him come and reside with us one single month; let him pass with us through all the successive hours of necessary toil, terror, and affright; let him watch with us, his musket in his hand, through tedious sleepless nights, his imagination furrowed by the keen chisel of every passion; let his wife and his children become exposed to the most dreadful hazards of death; let the existence of his property depend on a single spark, blown by the breath of the enemy; … let his heart, the seat of the most affecting passions, be powerfully wrung by hearing the melancholy end of his relations and friends; let him trace on the map the progress of these desolations; let his alarmed imagination predict to him the night, the dreadful night when it may be his turn to perish, as so many have perished before. Observe, then, whether the man will not get the better of the citizen, whether his political maxims will not vanish! Yes, he will cease to glow so warmly with the glory of the metropolis: all his wishes will be turned toward the preservation of his family!

(206)

The convulsion that reduces citizens to bodies acts even on monarchy. James assures himself that if George III found himself transported to America at this moment, he too would act as a father rather than as a ruler:

If a poor frontier inhabitant may be allowed to suppose this great personage[,] the first in our system[,] to be exposed but for one hour to the exquisite pangs we so often feel, would not the preservation of so numerous a family engross all his thoughts; would not the ideas of dominion and other felicities attendant on royalty all vanish in the hour of danger? The regal character, however sacred, would be superseded by the stronger, because more natural one of man and father. Oh! Did he but know the circumstances of this horrid war, I am sure he would put a stop to that long destruction of parents and children. I am sure that while he turned his ears to state policy, he would attentively listen also to the dictates of Nature, that great parent; for, as a good king, he no doubt wishes to create, to spare, and to protect, as she does.

(207)

Here the image of the paternal Farmer George meets that of an implicitly maternal Nature to create a natural family out of all the king's subjects, metropolitan as well as colonial.

This powerful invocation of the secular, corporeal, domestic aspect of the king's double body sets up the rhetorical climax of this letter, in which the vulnerable bodies of James's own family clinch the appeal to sympathy. Here again, the destructiveness of civil war is measured by how it opposes the body of the father and husband to the ideal of the disembodied citizen, defining these roles as radically at odds instead of mutually complementary:

Must I then, in order to be called a faithful subject, coolly and philosophically say it is necessary for the good of Britain that my children's brains should be dashed against the walls of the house in which they were reared; that my wife should be stabbed and scalped before my face; that I should be either murthered or captivated; or that for greater expedition we should all be locked up and burnt to ashes as the family of the B———n was?

(207)

These violent images of destruction and dismemberment testify to the end of the idealized disembodiment of the Enlightenment. If in 1721 Montesquieu uncoupled body from subjectivity to create the citizen-critic, 60 years later, in the collapse of the public sphere that is the subtext of the Letters from an American Farmer, Crèvecoeur obsessively returns to the body and mourns the death of the citizen. In a world barely distinguishable from the state of nature, the body becomes the vehicle of sympathy, which is all that is left in a society where citizenship is impossible.

Letter XII charts the destruction of the conditions that sustain the proper citizen-critic, and rematerializes the body as the site of civic anxiety. Symptomatically, unlike the Lettres persanes, Clarissa, or Fanni Butlerd, this letter-narrative does not close with an explanation of its own publication, a self-inscribed textual history. It records instead the rupture of the correspondence between Europe and America, the end of the narrative of epistolarity as well as of this particular epistolary narrative. James at last resolves to flee the war zone, taking his family west to the Indian villages far from the European settlements and their institutionalized connections with the Old World.

His final letter is oddly broken up by dashes standing for the names of the Indian tribes and their villages where his family will soon live. These blanks serve as typographical icons of the end of correspondence: the unmapped new spaces beyond the frontier are not on the embryonic postal routes of the new nation. In despair, James asks Mr. F. B., “Shall we ever meet again? If we should, where will it be? On the wide shores of ———.” The unnamable destination that concludes James's query stands, as it were, for “address unknown.” The elision marks both the expulsion of epistolarity from this troubled Eden and the passing from cultural authority of an entire constellation of images and values bound up with the idea of correspondence.²⁷ With the fall of the Republic of Letters, transatlantic postrevolutionary and post-Enlightenment print culture will have to devise new metaphors of exchange, communication, and authorship, as well as new definitions of citizenship and indeed of subjectivity itself.

Notes

1. Nash, ed., Class and Society in Early America, p. 21, cited in Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word, pp. 216-17. For a discussion of the publication history and critical reception of the Letters, see Thomas Philbrick, St. John de Crèvecoeur, pp. 161-64, and Davidson, p. 257.

2. Among the few exceptions to the suppression of the Letters' epistolarity are Philip D. Beidler's “Franklin's and Crèvecoeur's ‘Literary’ Americans”; Jean F. Beranger's “The Desire of Communication”; and Manfred Putz's “Dramatic Elements and the Problem of Literary Mediation.” These essays do not consider the relation between the epistolary genre and print culture that focuses my study.

3. Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic, pp. 151-52. Warner examines a wide range of print artifacts, including pamphlets on such political matters as the 1765 Stamp Act; an account of a libel trial against a printer; Franklin's epitaph and Poor Richard's Almanac; and Charles Brockden Brown's novel Arthur Mervyn (1799-1800). While his treatment of each of these is valuable, I found particularly useful for my interests here his treatment of Franklin's periodical Silence Dogood letters of 1722.

4. In the French edition, a dedication to Lafayette replaced the original dedication to the Abbé Raynal.

5. See Warner, chap. 5.

6. While the body of the citizen-critic is functionally gendered male, this serves not to particularize the citizen but to link him to the abstract “norm” from which all those who are not literate white male property-holders deviate into particularity. Warner explores the collapse of this model, the undoing of “the citizen's literate transcendence of his unacknowledged male body,” in Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn, another narrative about the crisis of the public sphere (170).

7. C. B. MacPherson's The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism provides an indispensable discussion of the connection between capitalism and liberalism.

8. This sense of Americans' self-definition through print culture has been explored, sometimes brilliantly, in American studies over the last decade. Examples include Davidson's Revolution and the Word, Larzer Ziff's Writing in the New Nation, and Warner's Letters of the Republic.

9. Obviously, this public resembles the oppressive, tyrannical majorities of ignorant individuals envisioned, in somewhat different ways, by Rousseau, J. S. Mill, and Tocqueville. See Habermas's discussion in Structural Transformation, pp. 98-99, 132-38.

10. In the Sketches, Crèvecoeur portrays such self-interestedness in his Patriot characters, whose desire to appropriate the goods of others is only thinly veiled by their hypocritical republican rhetoric. In the Fifth Landscape, a Patriot official's wife helps herself to the belongings of a Loyalist's widow and children, ostensibly to shield them from accusations of ill-gotten wealth when their household goods are publicly displayed for auction. This satirical depiction of self-interest in a feminized and domesticated mode suggests a powerful if displaced indictment of Patriot motives and actions.

11. Larzer Ziff argues that the wife connects writing with the realm of market values, paper money, credit, and “representation,” as opposed to “immanence”; see Writing in the New Nation, p. xi.

12. Locke's well-known discussion of labor and property is cited and discussed later in this chapter; see note 29.

13. Her rhetoric makes slave-owning a self-justifying institution, analogous to the examples of labor Locke gives as the basis of the division of objects held in common into individual property before the invention of money. Just as the labor of one's body is combined with the tree by the act of cutting it down and with the fence by the act of building it, making the tree and the fence one's property, so slaves, she implies, become one's property through the labor of clothing them. However, the mention of buying Negroes smuggles the concept of money into the wife's precapitalist world somewhat as it is smuggled into Locke's justification of property in the Second Treatise of Government. In both contexts, a money economy complicates the justification of property, as I show below.

14. Ziff, Writing in the New Nation, p. 28.

15. Ziff's conclusion suggests something like a Whig reading of eighteenth-century history: the Letters is positioned at a “turning point” in a cultural teleology, necessarily bearing the traces of a representational economy's corruption but looking ahead to a post-Revolutionary Restoration through nature (33). It is not always clear whether Ziff intends to attribute the vocabulary of progress and nostalgia employed in this discussion to James or Crèvecoeur, or whether it is his own. To anticipate my conclusion, I emphatically disagree with Ziff's idea that James's flight to the Indian villages is simply a relocation of the happy society, which he justifies by asserting that there was no “idea of ruin in the [American] culture” (33). The Letters is itself vivid evidence to the contrary: the public sphere destroyed by “convulsion” won't be reconstructed in the anticivic space beyond the frontier to which James's family eventually flees.

16. In this context the scholarly catechism could be linked to the contemporary use of the natural history questionnaire, which, with its set questions about soils, topography, ad flora ad fauna, was circulated to a range of informants and then collated to avoid the distorting effects of subjective, idiosyncratic observation. Perhaps the first such questionnaire in English was Robert Boyle's “General Heads for a Natural History of a Countrey, Great or Small,” printed in the first volume of the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions (1666). The questionnaire continued to be used in assembling natural histories through the early nineteenth century. Also relevant to the idea of the oral examination is Warner's discussion of the principle of supervision in the republican public sphere (Letters of the Republic, chap. 2) and James's interrogation of Andrew the Hebridean in Letter III.

17. Rigal, “An American Manufactory: Political Economy, Collectivity, and the Arts in Philadelphia, 1790-1810,” pp. 188-89. Rigal discusses this aspect of the letter in a chapter on William Bartram's Travels through North and South Carolina, East and West Florida. I thank her for making available to me an early version of this material, which I cite here. A more prosaic example of potential self-interest in James's correspondence with Mr. F. B. appears in the minister's comment, “You intend one of your children for the gown; who knows but Mr. F. B. may give you some assistance when the lad comes to have concerns with the bishop. It is good for American farmers to have friends even in England” (44).

18. Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. MacPherson, p. 29.

19. Ibid., p. 19. Locke's pronomial use is appropriate: his analysis applies to males only. Here and elsewhere, the italics that signal the key terms suggest the paradoxes of print culture: while the labor of the hand that made the manuscript is effaced by the conventions of typography, the italicization of the word “labor” calls attention to the artificiality of those conventions.

20. Ibid., pp. 20-21.

21. Ibid., p. 22.

22. Ibid., pp. 19-20, emphasis mine.

23. Ibid., p. 23.

24. These references to despotism look back to the work of Alain Grosrichard discussed in connection with the Lettres persanes. The word “disfigured” resonates particularly richly for a native speaker of French like Crèvecoeur, given the range of meaning of the word “figure” in that language. I also recall here de Bolla's attention to “disfiguration” as a strategy that empties the represented body of figural meanings in order to return it to what is held to be its “original” significance. This strategy also militates against an allegorical reading of the disfigured slave.

25. In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry defines slaves in Lockean terms as those who have “ceased to exercise political autonomy over their own most intimate property, the human body” (156).

26. The term “interpellation” is Althusser's, explained in his “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” p. 173-76.

27. What Jay Fliegelman describes as “the sealing of the garden” in late-eighteenth-century America comes about in part as a result of this expulsion of epistolarity. See his Prodigals and Pilgrims, pp. 227-67.

Works Cited

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971.

Beidler, Philip D. “Franklin's and Crèvecoeur's ‘Literary’ Americans.”Early American Literature 13 (1978): 50–63.

Beranger, Jean F. “The Desire of Communication: Narrator and Narratee in Letters from an American Farmer.” Early American Studies 12 (1977): 73–85.

Davidson, Cathy. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. London: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Fliegelman, Jay. Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority 1750–1800. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Grosrichard, Alain. Structure du sérail: La fiction du sepostisme asiatique dans l'Occident classique. Paris:Éditions du Seuil, 1979.

Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989.

Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. Ed. Peter Laslett. Cambridge, 1960; rprt. New York: Mentor-Penguin Books, 1965.

———. Two Treatises of Government. Ed. C. B. MacPherson. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1980.

MacPherson, C. B. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962.

Nash, Gary, ed. Class and Society in Early America. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970.

Philbrick, Thomas. St. John de Crèvecoeur. Boston: Twayne, 1970.

Putz, Manfred. “Dramatic Elements and the Problem of Literary Mediation in the Works of Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur.”Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 3 (1985): 111–30.

Rigal, Laura. “An American Manufactory: Political Economy, Collectivity, and the Arts in Philadelphia, 1790–1810.” PhD. Diss., Stanford University, 1989.

Scarry, Elaine, The Body in Pain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Warner, Michael. The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990.

Ziff, Larzer. Writing in the New Nation: Prose, Print, and Politics in the Early United States. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991.