[In the following excerpt, Wilson argues against critics who have faulted The Power of Sympathy for being too sentimental, claiming that not only is the novel unsentimental, but that it also anticipates thematic concerns that would become central to gothic American literature.]

The first American novel, William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy: or, The Triumph of Nature (1789), appeared in Boston as an anonymous work seemingly cast in a Richardsonian mold; dedicated to “the Young Ladies of United Columbia,” the novel ostensibly was “intended to represent the specious CAUSES, and to Expose the fatal CONSEQUENCES, of SEDUCTION.”¹ The novel's sentimental overtones and obvious indebtedness to the popular Samuel Richardson have led most critics to treat The Power of Sympathy as an historically important but intrinsically wretched example of the sentimental novel in America.² Overly conscious, belabored didacticism and flat, dull characterization do indeed render the novel tedious; but the introduction of the theme of incest contributes an element of irony to the novel which undercuts its sentimentality and foreshadows basic themes in the American gothic novel for the next hundred years.

The novel's notorious subplot—which Brown tells us is “Founded in Truth”—gives a thinly disguised rendition of a local scandal: the illicit affair of Ophelia and her brother-in-law parallels the affair of Frances Apthorp and her brother-in-law, Perez Morton—both from socially prominent Boston families. Like Ophelia, Miss Apthorp committed suicide via poison; and she did so less than five months prior to the publication of the novel. The frontispiece of the novel's first volume, a graphic woodcut depicting the death agony of a young woman and bearing the caption, “O Fatal! Fatal Poison!” alarmed the Apthorp and Morton families and led to an attempt to suppress the novel.³ The subplot serves in the novel as an exemplum designed to point out the fatal consequences of seduction, and as such it fits well into a Richardsonian pattern of titillating readers and placating moralists. While Brown, like Richardson, renders a vivid portrayal of the evil of seduction, the world he pictures is not one to reward an unwavering reliance on natural, heart-felt virtue. Indeed, the central plot of The Power of Sympathy reveals that the resemblances between the The Power of Sympathy and the novels of Richardson are in the last analysis superficial.

The central love affair between Harrington and Harriot, in fact, contrasts with the love liaison portrayed in the subplot in that it is genuine and to a certain extent ethereal. At first Harrington has only improper designs on Harriot; his “scheme of pleasure” includes only seduction. Harrington writes to Worthy that he is “… not so much of a republican as formally to wed any person of this class”; instead he merely plans “to take this beautiful sprig, and transplant it to a more favourable soil, where it shall flourish and blossom under my own auspices. In a word, I mean to remove the fine girl into an elegant apartment, of which she herself is to be the sole mistress” (p. 4). But Harrington's first glimpse of Harriot leads him to the first rung in a Platonic ladder of love. At first driven by a lustful desire for her physical beauty, he gradually ascends to an awareness of her finer qualities and a love for her which is eternal. So powerful is his love, in fact, that Harrington abandons plans to seduce Harriot and intends to marry her; so profound is his remorse over the barriers to their union that he commits suicide at the novel's close, a copy of Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther lying on his bedside table.

And this is where Brown and Richardson part company. Central to Richardson's concept of virtue is the unwavering faith that virtuous abstinence and deepened love will merit a pleasing and prosperous result. Pamela resists Mr. B. because she knows in the end her virtue will meet with tangible reward. Harrington and Harriot, however, do not fare so well. Just as they are set to consummate their patient and virtuous love, they are visited by the sins of their parents; they learn that because of an adulterous affair between the senior Harrington and Harriot's mother, Maria, they are brother and sister. Drawn together by “the power of sympathy,” the pair tragically learn that theirs is not the best of all possible worlds, that the heart is not a valid thermometer of moral behavior. The idealistic dream of “rational love” proves to be an illusion; as the raisonneur Worthy expresses it: “Reason is taken from the helm of life—and Nature—helpless, debilitated Nature … splits upon the rocks …” (p. 109).

In last analysis The Power of Sympathy is an anti-sentimental as New England Puritanism. Set in the idyllic natural environs of Belleview, the novel suggests both the biblical myth of the Garden and the popular eighteenth-century conception of America as the New Eden offering an opportunity for the realization of dreams emerging from the European enlightenment. Belleview resembles Mettingen (Wieland) or Saddle Meadows (Pierre)—a natural paradise seemingly free of the corruption of the outside world; as Mrs. Holmes writes: “Nature is every where liberal in dispensing her beauties and her variety—and I pity those who look round and declare they see neither” (p. 8). From the midst of the Garden, however, comes the news that precipitates the novel's tragedy. Mrs. Holmes reveals the sibling relationship of the lovers, and the two are caught up in and destroyed by the sins of their father. The elder Harrington's adulterous affair with Maria becomes the equivalent of the Puritan concept of original sin; and it is neatly counterpoised by the son's illicit affair with Maria's daughter. As Leslie Fiedler points out: “Seduction for Brown finally becomes the symbol of the uncontrollable demonic element in life, which lays waste the civilized but natural haven of Belleview.”⁴ The “enlightened” Christian theory of forgiveness crumbles before the inscrutable and endless effects of sin.

Incest in The Power of Sympathy thus is employed to reinforce a theme which recurs in Brockden Brown's Wieland, Melville's Pierre, Hawthorne's “Alice Doane's Appeal,” and Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!: the sins of the father return to haunt and eventually to destroy the son. Contrary to the popular myth about America, the “New Adam” can never have a “fresh start”; as Quentin Compson in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! discovers, the past of our fathers is one with our present. The essential premise of sentimental Christianity that love rights the wrongs of this world and makes us better men disintegrates before the puzzle of incest. Harrington, like Goethe's Werther, looks to the afterlife as a means of legitimizing his illicit passion: “Let tears of sorrow blot out my guilt from the book of thy wrath,” he prays, “… In Heaven—there alone is happiness—there shall I meet her—there our love will not be a crime …” (p. 100); but in this life love has little effect when faced with the overwhelming fact of man's innate depravity.

Brown further undermines Richardson's sentimental vision in his implication that nature runs counter to order and morality. A frightening and often overlooked aspect of The Power of Sympathy is that the brother and sister are inevitably drawn together by nature. Harrington tells Worthy that he will plead the “dictates of Nature” in his attempt to seduce Harriot. After she discovers that her love for Harrington is incestuous, Harriot writes: “Allied by birth, and in mind … the sympathy which bound our souls together, at first sight, is less extraordinary. … Shall we strive to oppose the link of nature that draws us to each other?” (p. 98) The natural incestuous union of the two devastates the facile Rousseauistic assumption that nature should provide an intuitive moral conscience; indeed, following the natural impulses of the heart leads one into a morass of sin and moral disorder.

Notes

1. This quotation is from the title page of William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy: or, The Triumph of Nature, ed. Herbert Brown (Boston: New Frontiers Press, 1961). All references to The Power of Sympathy are to this edition and appear parenthetically in the essay.

2. See, for example, Herbert R. Brown, The Sentimental Novel in America, 1789-1860 (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1940), pp. 44-45; Alexander Cowie, The Rise of the American Novel (New York: American Book Co., 1948), pp. 10-12; and William S. Osborne, “Introduction,” The Power of Sympathy and The Coquette (New Haven, Conn.: College and Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 12-14.

3. For a discussion of this aspect of the background of the novel see Herbert Brown, “Introduction,” The Power of Sympathy, xi-xii.

4. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, rev. ed. (New York: Stein and Day, 1966), p. 119.