[In the following excerpt, Fiedler explores the plot and authorial intentions of Brown's The Power of Sympathy, characterizing the book as a flawed piece of writing that nonetheless deserves critical attention.]

Advertised as the first American novel, The Power of Sympathy: or, The Triumph of Nature, which appeared in Boston in 1789, represents a serious bid to enter the lists of literature. The strategies (and presumably the motives) of the author are a little confusing: the title page declares his book no mere fiction but an account “founded on truth,” while the pair of couplets immediately below insist that the book's aim is to “win the Mind to Sentiment and Truth”; and the elegant dedication that follows more specifically explains that the author's intent is “to represent the specious Causes, and to expose the fatal Consequence of Seduction” for the benefit of “the young ladies of United Columbia.”

Yet the work was published anonymously, as if the writer were not quite convinced that he was engaged in an honorable enterprise; and the frontispiece has nothing to do with the main story, illustrating neither “the power of sympathy” or “nature” triumphant, but portraying the climax of a rather unconvincingly interpolated episode based on a contemporary scandal involving adultery and suicide. The bow to piety and truth combines oddly with the attempt to cash in on current notoriety afflicting a respectable family; and the sanctimonious dedication turns disturbingly into an appeal to the most light-headed of all novel-readers, though apparently the chief consumers of the form, “the young Ladies,” or, as the author describes them elsewhere, the “tender youth.” The one young lady who appears in the book, however, a “Miss” of fourteen much worried about the dictates of taste “in the centre of politeness and fashion,” affects to despise the kind of sentimental book in which she is a character. “The bettermost genii,” she asserts, “never read any sentimental books—so you see sentiment is out of date.”

The author of The Power of Sympathy, who is believed now to have been William Hill Brown, had a strong sense of writing an old-fashioned book, one without chic or current appeal. “Why my dear …,” the same young lady insists further, “I abominate everything that is sentimental—it is so unfashionable too.” Oppressed, on the one hand, by a feeling that he is out of date in his literary ambitions, Brown is plagued, on the other, by a distrust of the very form of the novel—or at least by a sense that he must pretend to distrust that form. He comments in one place on the “many fine girls ruined by reading novels,” though he hastens to make clear that he means specifically novels “not regulated by the chaste principles of true friendship, rational love and connubial duty.” But there is, alas, little enough of such friendship, love, or duty in his book; only much talk about them.

There is a thick sententiousness about the book, borrowed from Richardson and outdoing the master in this one regard; but Richardson's name is not invoked in defense of sentiment. The much less respectable Sterne is instead called upon to testify and is in return defended. “Alas! poor Yorick,” Brown writes. “May thy pages never be soiled by the fingers of prejudice.” Even the most solid and respectable of his male characters, called with obvious aptness “Worthy,” blasts the “anti-sentimentalists” who object to Sterne. “Eyes have they,” he thunders in Biblical terms, “but they see not—ears have they, but they hear not. …” Brown's own exclamatory style, all dashes, italics, and exclamation marks, is derived from the master invoked—though it has survived to our own day chiefly in the letters of schoolgirls. Brown, indeed, seems convinced that the future of the sentimental literature he loves, a literature which defends the “man of sense” (needless to say, “sense” here means “sensibility” and not reason) against the “Chesterfieldian” coxcomb, depends upon female writers as well as readers; and he issues a plea for more American novels “from the pens of ladies.” In part, perhaps, because of this feminist plea, he was for a long time thought to be a woman, a certain Mrs. Morton, poet and sister to the dying lady in the scandalous frontispiece of his book.

At the heart of Brown's book, there presides the figure of the wise and widowed Mrs. Holmes, a “serious sentimentalist,” flanked by an even more prolix and pious sage, her father-in-law, with whom she dispenses “Mentor-like lessons of instruction” to the novel's other characters. “The idiosyncratic feature of the American conscience,” Geoffrey Gorer aptly remarks, “is that it is predominantly feminine. … Duty and Right Conduct become feminine figures.” Mr. Gorer goes on to note (and it is worth pausing to take account of such future developments at the point where the super-ego in female form first enters our fiction) that “the fact that the rules for moral conduct are felt to emanate from a feminine source is a source of considerable confusion to American men. They tend to resent such interference in their own behavior, and yet are unable to ignore it, since the insistent maternal conscience is a part of their personality. … A second result … is that … modesty, politeness, neatness, cleanliness—come to be regarded as concessions to feminine demands, and … as such they are sloughed off—with relief but not without guilt—whenever a suitable occasion presents itself … the stag poker game, the fishing trip, the convention. …”

The semi-mythicized figure of Mrs. Holmes is set, appropriately enough, in a semi-mythicized rococo landscape, the first Great Good Place of our literature: the “dear groves” of Belleview. It is here in the midst of nature, that she conducts her “amiable conversations”—and it is for the natural world as opposed to the heartless social world of the city that Belleview stands. But Brown's is a neo-classical, a sentimental Nature, a world in which the contrary demands of Nature and Reason are served at once—the equivalent in terms of landscape of the concept of “rational love,” or of the blend of “sentiment and truth” invoked in the superscription of the book. The lady of such a place can be neither illiterate or a prude. If, on the one hand, Mrs. Holmes advises her female correspondents to pretend deafness to any remarks directed against the clergy, she advocates the same reception for slurs cast on “Mechanicks.” She is a democrat as well as a convinced churchgoer, and a defender of women's rights as well as a spokesman for their duties. She speaks out in favor of the “learned lady,” and she defends such semi-respectable writers as Sterne and La Rochefoucauld. She even joins boldly in an attack on “poetic justice” in literature, protesting the invariable rewarding of the innocent as a false representation of life—and recommends the cynical maxims of the French philosopher as a proper antidote. She is in no grim sense a Puritan, but subscribes to her father-in-law's advocacy of charity for fallen women and to his belief in a God ever ready to forgive those who weep. Hers is a world not completely set against passion, though aware of its dangers, but rather one committed to the notion that “Love softens and refines the manners—mends the heart—makes us better men—gives the fainthearted strength. …”

Even this sentimental-enlightened view of life, in which Reason and Nature correspond as in an elegant dance, is finally brought into question, for it proves incapable of coming to terms with the revelation of seduction and the threat of incest or with the fact of suicide. Into the very heart of the Garden intrude death and deflowering; and from the Garden itself, from the very hands of Mrs. Holmes, comes the news that precipitates the black climax of the book. Seduction for Brown finally becomes the symbol of the uncontrollable demonic element in life, which lays waste the civilized but natural haven of Belleview. The book opens under the aegis of Mrs. Holmes, but closes under the influence of Werther. In its early pages, the “serious sentimentalist” has quoted the optimistic injunction of Goethe: “Reverence thyself!”; in the final pages, the hero, turning to literature for comfort, opens a book and reads the following words: “the time of my fading is near, and the blast that shall scatter my leaves. Tomorrow shall the traveller come, he that saw me in my beauty shall come; his eyes shall search the field, but they will not find me.” The quotation is from Ossian, but surely the book in which Harrington found it was The Sorrows of Young Werther; for it is while reading these final verses in his own translation, that Werther is overcome by a prescience of his doom and flings himself at the feet of Charlotte, “insensible to everything but mutual love.” Certainly, when Harrington is dead, that dangerous book is found by his side.

Like Werther, too, he condemns society as a conspiracy against the individual. “I despise its opinion—Independency of spirit is my motto—I think for myself.” And he is led to reject its value and codes as entirely conventional. Finally, he consigns to God and the kingdom of Heaven, quite in the manner of Goethe and Rousseau, the task of righting the wrongs perpetrated in their names by society on earth. Suicide itself, Harrington hopes, can be redeemed by the sentimental baptism of tears. “Let tears of sorrow blot out my guilt from the book of thy wrath,” he prays hopefully, and foresees himself not only ultimately forgiven but joined to the woman forbidden him on earth. “In heaven—there alone is happiness—there shall I meet her—there our love will not be a crime. …”

It is not, however, adultery, achieved or unconsummated, which the American writer is justifying in terms so like those of his European forerunners; this time it is unconsummated incest, and the villain is (in good American style) not the husband but the father. The Oedipus triangle based on the family romance may be translated from father-mother-son to husband-wife-lover in its European forms, courtly and anti-bourgeois sentimental; but in America it more dangerously takes the form father-sister-brother—though that form can be connected back through the generations with the familiar seduction theme in its “safe” Richardsonian version. Incest may be the secret horror toward which The Power of Sympathy tends, but seduction is its more openly elaborated motif.

From the dedication “to the young Ladies of United Columbia … to expose the fatal Consequences of Seduction,” through the preface which repeats it almost word for word, to the body of the book, the theme is worked out in an exhausting series of variations. We learn that seduction “opens the door to a train of miseries,” that “there is no human vice of so black a die … or which causes a more general calamity.” It becomes at last the very image of original sin, and each of the two volumes, into which the book was originally divided, contains an allegory in which the terror of seduction is projected in religious terms. Four times the theme of sexual violation is taken up in The Power of Sympathy, first in “the story of Miss Whitman,” a quite factual account of the famous seduction later worked by Hannah Foster into The Coquette. William Hill Brown entrusts to a paragraph spoken by old Mr. Holmes and to a long footnote of his own this tale of a woman betrayed by too much reading and a plausible love. Once pregnant, she tries in vain to buy herself a husband, then produces a dead child and herself dies of puerperal fever. Brown's account is eked out by an extract from one of Miss Whitman's letters and her own verse Elegy, in which, presumably at the point of death, she invokes her faithless lover under the ironic name of Fidelio. That same name in its female form is bestowed on another example of “the fatal Consequences of Seduction.” Fidelia is a mad peasant girl dressed in flowing white, out of Shakespeare by way of Goethe, who had been “carried off by a ruffian” a few days before her intended marriage. Her true lover had committed suicide in despair, leaving her to a life of Ophelia-like insanity. Obviously a European peasant, she wanders quite improbably on the outskirts of Belleview, the sacred domain of Mrs. Holmes, casting a shadow even on that refuge.

The name of Ophelia, denied her closest counterpart in the novel, is reserved for the lady whose death graces the frontispiece, beneath which are inscribed her last words, “O Fatal! Fatal Poison!” Hers is not a conventional seduction story at all, but rather one of adultery. It is with her brother-in-law that Ophelia falls in love, while living in her sister's house; and their affair (“incestuous,” Brown calls it) is revealed by “symptoms which rendered it necessary for Ophelia to remove into the country.” The brother-in-law, who had promised to get a divorce and marry the dishonored Ophelia, is so annoyed by the interference of Ophelia's father that his love turns to hate, and Ophelia in despair drinks poison and dies. The story is awkwardly introduced and remains the only subplot not linked somehow to Belleview, which is the book's real center. It would be possible to believe it quite simply prompted by a desire to boost sales by exploiting fresh gossip, though in actuality it backfired, causing the partial suppression of the book; but it does at least foreshadow the subthemes of incest and suicide, and especially “the severe use of paternal power,” elsewhere so important in the scheme of the novel.

The main plot begins with young Harrington playing the typical role of the seducer. He has seen a girl called Harriot and he desires her; but his father has forbidden an early marriage, and he is, in any case, “not such a Republican,” he confides to his friend Worthy, “as to marry a poor girl. …” He has even prepared arguments to overwhelm her virtue, but never quite gets around to urging her to “obey the dictates of nature,” for he is really more moralist than “amoroso.” With astonishing speed he is converted to more democratic attitudes and to a decision to marry when confronted with “the dignity of conscious virtue” in Harriot, who, though penniless and ignorant of her own origins, is able to reverence herself in precisely the manner recommended by Mrs. Holmes.

There is, however, a second turn in the logic of the plot; for no sooner has Harrington been converted from would-be seducer to conventional suitor than the voice of Mrs. Holmes is raised in warning: “I have a tale to unfold!” Harrington is about to marry his sister! Harriot is the daughter of a certain Marcia Fawcett and Harrington's father, the fruit of her mother's fall from virtue; and it was to Belleview that her mother had come to die, when cast off by the older Harrington for the sake of the woman he married. Though the betrayed woman had won the love and charity of the senior Mr. Holmes, the forgiveness of God was another matter: He had pursued her sin (or was it the sin of her seducer?) even to the second generation, bringing to the verge of an incestuous union two sensitive creatures who could not accept life without each other. Faced with this consequence of the sin of others, Harriot goes into a rapid decline and dies (her passion still alive despite the knowledge that her lover is her brother), while Harrington commits suicide. The more liberal Christian or sentimental theories of forgiveness crumble before the mystery of the endless effects of iniquity; and the happy theory that love “mends the heart and makes us better men” buckles before the puzzle of the incest taboo and the unwillingness of passion to accept its limits.

The Power of Sympathy: or, The Triumph of Nature becomes finally (or rather, wants to, tries to become) what its title declares it: more a psychological, even a metaphysical essay than a lurid story told to shock and amuse. Like Werther itself, Brown's book threatens to turn into a study of the ambiguity of Nature; and like Goethe's later Wahlverwandschaften, whose title almost translates its own, it studies the strange, sometimes fatal attractions which move us beyond the power of will to resist or reason to control. In the first volume of The Power of Sympathy, the term Nature is used quite simply to describe a realm of peace and pleasure, symbolized by Belleview in all its rural charm. “Nature is everywhere liberal in dispensing her beauties and her variety—and I pity those who look round and declare they see neither,” Mrs. Holmes writes.

Even into the earlier portions of Part II, the same view persists; Harrington can conceive of no higher name for his God than the good Deist term “Author of Nature.” “Author of Nature!” he cries out in ecstasy. “From thee … floweth this tide of affection and Sympathy!” Here, on the same optimistic note, enters the second key term of the work; yet within three pages, Mrs. Holmes is writing, “Great God! of what materials hast thou compounded the hearts of thy creatures; Admire, o my friend! the operation of Nature—and the power of Sympathy!—” For the lovers, who are brother and sister, have been fatally attracted to each other by the very force that makes their union impossible, by “the link of Nature.” Indeed, the terrible climax of their double death is described as “the triumph of Nature,” and Harrington is called “the dupe of Nature.” But God, after all, is “the Author of Nature”—and the book trembles on the verge of blasphemy.

If Nature has brought Harrington and Harriot to their impasse and Nature is the handmaiden of God, in what sense is it possible to blame them for whatever they may do? The ideal represented by Mrs. Holmes's garden, the utopian dream of “rational love” proves to be an illusion; love and reason only accidentally coincide; the head and the heart are by no means always allies. “The head and the heart are at variance, but when Nature pleads, how feeble is the voice of Reason. …” “Allied by birth, and in mind …,” Harriot writes to her lover-brother, “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?”

With the temerity of passion, she ends using the very argument of Nature to justify incest which Harrington finally had not dared plead to justify simple fornication. The temptation to believe her argument and act on it, Harriot's death conveniently removes from them both; but another peril remains. “Reason is taken from the helm of life—” writes Worthy, Harrington's confidant, “and Nature—helpless, debilitated Nature … splits upon the rocks. …” What, then, is Brown's attitude to the suicide of Harrington, left to the mercy of what his friend calls “helpless, debilitated Nature”? Harrington's father has prophetically beheld him in a vision in hell among the other self-murderers; but Harrington himself foresees an ascension to Heaven as a reward for his long suffering and looks forward to a reunion with Harriot there. “Sympathy unites whom Fate divides,” “in death they sleep undivided,” we are told; but does the common burial signify an eternal union in heaven, where their “love will be no crime”?

The book finally equivocates in a way not untypical of the later American novel, hanging onto not the best but the worst of two possible worlds: the smugness of liberal gentility and the factitious sensationalism of anti-bourgeois sentimentality. When read at all, The Power of Sympathy has seemed to the respectable a suspect work, described, for instance, in a history of the novel published in 1952 as “a morbid, nasty book.” At the same time, it has struck others as merely “a good domestic story calculated to impart unmistakeable impressions to the young.” Its fundamental seriousness is the one quality both descriptions fail to take into account; but that seriousness cannot be ignored without falsifying the book altogether, for it is a literate book according to the standards of its own time, and an ambitious one.

It is, however, marred by an annoying thinness of realization throughout; Brown could not or would not take the pains to specify solidly the reactions of his characters, though he had in the letter form he borrowed from Richardson an admirable instrument for detailed psychological analysis. His people not only float in a scarcely defined space (he is interested in settings only when they are symbolic like the summerhouse of Mrs. Holmes), they act out of scarcely defined personalities. What bulk his novel finally possesses is attained not by working out the implications of action, motive, or theme but by working in extra sub-plots and extended homilies. Our earliest books are astonishingly slim in a time when Europe abounded with examples of the thick book, as if the mere effort of imagining a creative work on this side of the ocean exhausted the energy of the author; and the scant realization of The Power of Sympathy cannot, therefore, have been the cause of its unpopularity. Certainly it attracted little attention. What the partially effective efforts at suppression by the Apthorp family (relatives of “Ophelia”) had begun, public indifference completed. The novel seems to have been mentioned in print only seven times from the date of its publication to 1850; and what recognition it has now is almost completely a function of the impulse toward exhaustive scholarship rather than of renewed critical interest.

Even less well read and remembered is Brown's Ira and Isabella, in which he returned once more to the theme of incest. This time he produced neither a tragedy of incest, like his own The Power of Sympathy, nor a comédie larmoyante, like Mrs. Rowson's Lucy, but a howling travesty—endowed with a “happy ending” capable of dissolving in laughter the whole obsessive concern with “the fatal Consequences of Seduction.” One hopes the burlesque is deliberate, but it is hard to be sure. At any rate, in Ira and Isabella, the protagonists, who learn that their intended marriage cannot take place because Isabella is the illegitimate daughter of Ira's father, then discover that Ira, too, is illegitimate, not the son of that presumed father at all; and bastards both, they are blissfully united.

Though William Hill Brown's second book is an equivocal travesty and his first the mere skeleton of a novel, he remains a considerable figure. The Power of Sympathy may be finally only a sketch, but it is the sketch of a serious book; and it is probable that its failure is more the product of its virtues than of its faults. A mere accident of history determined that the first American novel be (despite its equivocations and uncertainty) fundamentally anti-bourgeois; the necessities of American character, particularly that of the largest reading public, made it impossible that from such a book a successful literature could take its cue.