SOURCE: Young, Philip. “‘First American Novel’: The Power of Sympathy, in Place.” College Literature 11, no. 2 (spring 1984): 115-24.

[In the following essay, Young focuses on the theme of incest in The Power of Sympathy, linking it to European literary tradition and also noting the novel's influence on subsequent American letters.]

It is a coincidence of uncertain import that the American Novel got off to its shaky start in the same year, 1789, as the American Republic. The odd thing about that date for the novel is that the local premiere was such a late opening. Several giants of the English novel had finished their work by then; indeed it was announced the very next year in London that the novel was a “worn out species of composition” (Monthly Review, August, 1790, p. 463), all materials for it having been used up. 1789 is especially late in view of the fact that an appetite for fiction had developed much earlier in this country, largely stimulated by Richardson's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, 1741. This “first modern English novel” was the first novel published in the colonies—in 1744 by Benjamin Franklin, of course, who had noticed it was already selling off ships from the motherland. Most novels published here before 1800 were imports. Not paying writers for their work enhanced profits, which did nothing to promote a domestic product.

Clarissa Harlowe was not printed in this country until 1786, but it greatly intensified a fixation on threatened maidenhood that Pamela had initiated. These books had also a lot to do with the long dominance of the Sentimental Novel in America—dimmed by human tears for abused, manhandled, endlessly persecuted young women. A Sentimental Novel is one in which the course of true love is an obstacle course, eased by an exalted view of human nature and a reckless indulgence in emotion. Both Richardson's works, further, were of course epistolary novels, and so great was their force here and in England that the genre, as oft reported, spread like a pox; the silence of letter-writing quills worn smooth by cliché was ominous. Letting the correspondents unfold the plots in their missives relieved the novelist of various tasks. Characters were drawn from a pool of utterly faceless types who needed no introduction and got, as a rule, predictable development. Energy, where detectable, went into the creation of sticky situations from which to extricate the lovers or heroine: her fervent suitor and lost half-brother are not, after all and for example and as it appeared, the same young man. Corsetting all this were the proprieties which required that seduction, very often the theme, took place if it did far offstage, where the lady surrendered a body that for all the reader could tell she had never possessed.

And so it must seem peculiar that many early American novels faced the most inviolable of all taboos. The claim to “first American novel” begs some questions. How is novel, notoriously of loose character, to be defined? Exactly what, in the eighteenth century, qualifies as American? But by majority vote the distinction, if that is the word, goes to an anonymous epistolary fiction, the work of a young Bostonian who was not established as its author until 1894: William Hill Brown. It is called The Power of Sympathy: or, The Triumph of Nature. It was attractively printed at Boston in two small calf-bound volumes by Isaiah Thomas, an ex-minuteman who became the country's leading publisher and founded the American Antiquarian Society. What it essentially deals with is incest. It is ostensibly addressed to “the fatal Consequences of SEDUCTION,” which were astonishingly fatal. Yet a failure of consummation is equally so: a brother and sister are wrecked by the “natural passion” that draws them together but not all the way. A shorter episode concerns a woman who commits suicide after bearing a child by her sister's husband. (It is not much understood that under Leviticus and Massachusetts' Incest Law this was also actual, not proximate, incest.)

In Brown's second and last novel, Ira and Isabella marry only to discover they are apparently siblings. The theme is prominent in the best known of our early novelists, Susanna Rowson—though not through the fault of individual characters so much as their fluky fates: plot calls the characters black. Sometimes it is incest approached: stepmother competes with heroine for her lover. In three of the four serious fictions of Charles Brockden Brown, Father of the American Novel, incest is a clear and present danger. In rare instances—The History of Albert and Eliza is one—it is a protracted fact.

Tolerance of a daring subject can be partly explained by a loosening of eighteenth-century America's sense of what was acceptable to a polite society of readers. Beginning about 1770 and continuing to 1810 or so, the long arm of Puritanism bent. Revolution and rationalism, plus scepticism, deism, and rebellious republicanism, produced what some historians of our own day have quaintly called a period of “low moral standards.” These were reflected in the private lives—or public reputations—of prominent leaders (Franklin, Hamilton, Burr, Jefferson, and others), probably influenced by the dissolute behavior of British officers here during the Revolution, with a subsequent contribution from the French. But, chiefly because of the overwhelming dominance of the middle class in America, attitudes tightened. Surviving Puritanism merged with something to be called Victorianism, so that Romanticism, when it finally arrived in America, turned out to be a lot more respectable than it had been abroad.

One reason for the prominence of incest in our early writers was simple ineptitude. The sensational, shocking, or morbid took the place of attractions they could not offer. As an obstacle to true love, moreover, incest was insuperable; the formula for its removal at the end was the revelation that the lovers are not at all consanguinous. “Careless nurses, gypsies, unacknowledged marriages, changes of name” are devices, as observed of The Popular Novel in England, 1770-1800 (by J. M. S. Tompkins, 1932), whereby blood ties prove delusory: happy ending. And this generalization leads to the chief reason why a sick subject should have been popular in the healthy youth of the American republic. It had less to do with the national character than with the “extraordinary pervasiveness” of the topic in English fiction. Culturally we remained colonial. Besides, as Shelley would famously remark, “Incest is, like many other incorrect things, a very poetical circumstance.”

Oddly missing from the English survey is a different brand of popular fiction: late-century Gothic, with which the “American Gothic” of Charles Brockden Brown was surprisingly contemporary. Among many other things, Matthew G. Lewis's The Monk (1796) tells how an Abbot, out to violate a girl and his vows, is interrupted by her mother, murders the woman, drugs and rapes the daughter, kills her too when she screams, then learns that her mother was also his and she his sister. (This was published here too, and scrubbed up made its way to the New York stage.) But even this monastic has to make room for a plantation owner in The Adventures of Jonathan Corncob, Loyal American Refugee (London, 1787), encountered by the narrator in Barbados. The planter had intercourse with his daughter by his black mistress, then with his granddaughter by her, then his great granddaughter by her, and ended “washing himself white” by fathering a great great grandchild who is fair.

However tasteless this pre-Faulknerian nightmare, England had come honorably by the subject America imported. Incest was a feature of Elizabethan drama, to go back no farther: Fords' 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, Beaumont and Fletcher's A King and No King, Shakespeare's Pericles, and so on. The U.S. Customs raised a ban on Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722) in 1930—which was not alert, the book having been published in Boston in 1780. This “archetypal English novelist” has Moll tell how she committed incest with her husband the sea captain after learning that her mother was his as well—and this when “I had now two Children, and was big with another by my own Brother, and lay with him still every Night.” In Tom Jones (1749) it is striking how many women “old enough to be his mother” lust after the hero. Foremost is the insistently bare-breasted Mrs. Waters, who finally enjoys with him “the usual fruits of her victory.” “Good heavens!” he cries when told who she is. “Incest—with a mother?” Her reaction is different: “Oh, Mr. Jones,” she remarks; “little did I think … who it was to whom I owed such perfect happiness.” She turns out, of course, not to be his mother. Fielding had used the situation for comic effect before. Joseph Andrews (1742), which had begun as a spoof of Pamela, ends well when it emerges that the hero and his sweetheart are not relatives, gypsies having done a little shuffling when he was an infant—a device at least as old as 1611 (A King and No King).

But England had come by this subject—as well as its pornography—partly from France. The Benedictine Abbé Prévost, translator of Clarissa, has been credited with the popularity of incest as a theme in that country, his Cleveland having “enobled” the relationship between father and daughter as early as 1732. The great Diderot defended it between brother and sister. Chateaubriand is praised for investing such a passion with “poetic charm and sentimental dignity” in his immensely admired René (1802). (To escape desire for her brother the girl enters a convent to live in “burning chastity.” He takes off for the American wilderness, as his creator did, to find the Northwest Passage by foot, which he did not.) With Goethe's Wilhem Meisters Lehrjahre (1796) and his friend Schiller's Die Braut Von Messina (1803), Germany had a substantial part of the action. In Ludwig Tieck's very popular Der Blonde Eckbert (1797) the hero discovers after his wife's death that she was his sister.

Chateaubriand and Tieck were pioneer Romantics, but by the time that movement got to America the country was in its neo-Puritan, pre-Victorian phase. Incest went below, where it exists in Cooper, Poe, and Hawthorne, until Melville, having just finished Moby-Dick, exposed it powerfully, catastrophically, in his novel Pierre. But the distance between René and Eckbert and the late eighteenth-century English novel on one side of the Atlantic and William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy on this side is negotiable. Brown's is a “morbid, nasty book,” according to a modern historian of the American novel (Edward Wagenknecht), and, to cite a twentieth-century editor of it (Herbert Ross Brown), an example of our early fiction at its “worst.” Neither judgment is necessarily valid. In any event its story, related through letters, is quickly told.

The protagonist Harrington writes his friend Worthy that he plans to seduce Harriot, sixteen, an orphan genteely employed. Worthy, about to marry Harrington's sister, tries to dissuade him, but it is Harriot's virtue that prevents the crime, and Harrington falls in love with her. Worthy now visits Belleview, the pretentious estate of Mrs. Holmes. This lady spouts many opinions, and pens her misgivings on a Harriot-Harrington match. Pressed, she reveals that Harriot is Harrington's half sister. One Maria was seduced by Harrington's father, and died after giving birth to Harriot, all of which the hero learns from an anonymous missive. At the bad news, the heroine writes a bitter letter about her situation, falls desperately ill, and dies. Looking toward a Heaven where the frustrated siblings will come together, and “our love will not be a crime,” Harrington shoots himself.

From this short line there are three digressions—that in a better novel would have been subplots—which detail other seductions, real or apparent. Fidelia, in love with Henry, is carried off by one of his friends just before her wedding. Believing she has left him, Henry drowns himself; returned intact to her friends Fidelia goes mad at the news of his demise. In a long footnote to a letter by Mrs. Holmes, the author appends the story of Miss Whitman, who was much influenced by the reading of novels and romances, rejecting suitors in expectation of one who would suit her imaginings. Grown to middle age she was seduced, impregnated, and abandoned. Traveling to another town she took a room in a tavern—awaiting her husband, she said—gave birth to a lifeless child, then died herself she left behind a letter (“I know that you will come, but you will come too late”). Last is Ophelia's tragedy. Seduced by her sister's husband Martin, she entered into a long affair with him in her sister's house, finally giving birth to a child. Faced with a father who wants a confrontation of guilty parties and in bad shape emotionally, she took poison and perished. (She too left behind some writing, in which she forgives and pities her lover, prays for the forgiveness of her sister and the pardon of her parents.) The Power of Sympathy is described as a tale FOUNDED IN TRUTH, and it is a fact that the stories of Ophelia and Miss Whitman were firmly based on events that had taken place just before the novel appeared.¹

But despite its lurid ingredients, Brown's book is dedicated “To the Young Ladies of United Columbia,” and is unexpectedly mindful of the new government under which it was issued. At first Harrington is not so “republican” as to consider marrying a girl of no family, a “daughter of the democratick empire.” But almost at once he is preaching Equality, praising democratical institutions, the less “aristocratick temper” of the North, its abolition of slavery, and hoping for its end everywhere. Of its time in other ways, the novel is entirely so in its honking thesis (“With thee, SEDUCTION! are ally'd / HORROUR, DESPAIR, and SUICIDE”). Also in the cry “HAIL Sensibility!”—though it is obvious that had several characters been more phlegmatic there were fewer corpses.

Sentiment, specifically as descending from Sterne, was nearly inevitable in novels of the day. Readers were accustomed, through Richardson, to a certain amount of moralizing. The absurd picture of Belleview—sublime scenery, elegant garden, the Temple of APOLLO with the figure of CONTENT pointing to it, and the elevated conversation—were scarcely original with this book. (C. B. Brown's first novel would replicate it with Mettingen—temple, bust, salon, and all.) Yet these observations beg another tricky question: to what extent if any is W. H. Brown the Mock Author addressing Mock Readers—a writer simply imitating, perhaps toying with, popular English novels of the time for the limited benefit of an audience quite accustomed to going along with all this? Is no irony in sight? The “rational” Worthy may strike the modern reader, anyway, as something of a jerk; a defender of sensibility, he is himself somewhat unfeeling. Mrs. Holmes may be intelligent but she is a pain. Most sententious of all is her father-in-law, a bore who loses his few listeners while instructing them in, of all things, Satire. It is hard to believe, though most assume it, that Brown was really serious with these people.

It is especially hard in view of what can be learned about the author from outside his book, which appeared on the 21st of January in 1789, when he was just 24. It was only the next month that he began publishing what a modern scholar calls “witty and sophisticated” essays—the first two on Scandal—for Thomas' new Massachusetts Magazine.² In 1790, “with a sans souci air” as he put it, Brown wrote another series for the Columbian Sentinel, including one on the Art of Joking. Very much a Bostonian, he was baptized there on December 1, 1765, the son of a highly successful clockmaker from Northumberland and his third wife. Mather Brown, painter of English Princes and American Patriots, was a half brother. The Browns had a first rate address—King Street, later State—and William as a boy was known as fun loving. Informally educated, it is obvious from his writing that he was widely read in English authors. When in his novel he based the incestuous Ophelia episode on a neighborhood scandal there was a fuss. A farce relating to that—called The Better Sort and also published by Thomas—is almost certainly his.

In 1792 he moved to North Carolina, where his sister's husband had a family plantation, and began to study law with William Richardson Davis, “father of the University of North Carolina” and eventually governor of the state. He wrote poems for the North-Carolina Journal, one an elegy on the death of his pregnant sister. Then at 27, in Murfreesborough, he died as well, in some sort of epidemic, and was buried no one knows where. His substantial obituary remarks that his conversation was “witty and winning,” his writing “a little satyrical at times.”

The writing was also, apparently, facile, and there was quite a bit left over. More than fifty pieces of manuscript, including maxims à la Rochefoucauld and humorous beast fables in verse, were printed in Boston magazines a decade after his death. His drama, West Point Preserved, or the Treason of Arnold, played for a while at Boston's Haymarket Theatre in 1797. Finally in 1807 his Ira and Isabella: Or The Natural Children, A Novel Founded in Fiction, was published with his name on the title page. Another tale of incest that turns out not to be, it is more than a little satyrical, and the fun lies in “the fatal Consequences of SEDUCTION” this time around. Isabella, an orphan, is companion to Mrs. Savage. Mr. Savage planned to seduce a simple country girl named Lucinda, as others had done. But before he really got started, Lucinda announced that she intended to make him father of a child. This he became, the child being Ira—who, grown, is bothered not at all by his illegitimacy or mother's track record. She, indeed, kept her reputation and married well. So does Ira, once it's discovered that Isabella, the other Natural Child, is not his sister.

If The Power of Sympathy cannot be fairly accused of unrelieved didacticism, it is also possible that a last objection to it may be turned to its defense. This is the complaint of Henri Petter in his encyclopedic Early American Novel (1971) that Brown's Harriot is “no more than a typical novel heroine, apathetic in her helplessness and dependence … susceptible. …” This is the critic who has just noticed that she and her brother “do not act as if they were relieved at being spared the crime and shame of an incestuous marriage”—an understatement that misses the whole point. Sexually passionate, intellectually bold, desirable but forbidden, Harriot is the very type of what would soon become the deep Dark Lady of our fiction—hence anything but ordinary or apathetic. In an in tensely emotional letter that reads like a final soliloquy, she climaxes the book and makes it radical point, which is expressed in the title. In being spared the crime and shame of an incestuous marriage she is destroyed, but does not curse her fate. She curses the fact that Reason—her word; today it would probably be Society—forbids what the force of Nature compels.

“Brother?” “Is this all that unites us?” On their first meeting “I felt the passion kindle in my breast. … I indulged its increasing violence and delighted in the flame that fired my reason and my senses.” She welcomes the recollection of his caresses: “I see the danger and do not wish to shun it. … How could I call you … brother … ? I sank motionless in your arms.” As for the

sympathy that bound our souls together, at first sight … shall we any longer wonder at its irresistible impulse?—Shall we strive to oppose the link of nature that draws us to each other … ? When Nature pleads, how feeble is the voice of Reason. Yet, when Reason is heard … how criminal appears every wish of my heart?

“Sympathy” translates “like-feeling,” and has special meaning in Brown's title. Harriot explains as well his subtitle, The Triumph of Nature. This is the blood link that attracts the lovers beyond reason or will; what Nature commands Society forbids—as though Brown had been reading Civilization and Its Discontents. Where then the triumph of nature, which is here defeated? In Harriot's defiance of the taboo: in her instinct, which she cannot satisfy, for nature over human law. Society's prohibition kills the lovers. Nature triumphs in that it seemed to them the superior force—which a supernatural state would bless.

Since this line of reasoning is curious, and since Brown's hasty pen was frequently imitative, the question of where he might have come across this idea seems fair. It may perhaps be answered. In his day the Irish writer Henry Brocke was famous for his Fool of Quality (1766-72); his next novel, Juliet Grenville, was published in London in 1774 and in the same year at Philadelphia. It looks very much as if Brown knew it. The book is not epistolary, but its hero writes a fervent letter telling how his passion for Juliet blazes but the hotter at the realization she is his sister: “the chords of nature” draw him “irresistibly” to her. Like Harriot, Juliet in renouncing him feels the pull of death. Exactly like Harrington the hero looks to death, where the lovers will not be separated—“above,” where his trembling lips shall dare to pronounce … MY SISTER!” The difference is that Henry Brooke is a phony in that it turns out his lovers are unrelated. The binding chords of blood and nature never existed. Plot calls the thesis black. Brown's book is sketchy and primitive, but generates a little heat peculiar to itself.

In the ashes of that heat may be uncovered, finally, a completely unnoticed landmark of uncertain significance which has little to do with the novel's claim to having been first of its kind in America's literature. Since its topic became a theme in that literature, it is remarkable that it was not until 1852, when the heroine of Pierre brought the tradition of the Dark Lady to fruition in this country, that siblings were again drawn so closely together that they perish. But what is really distinctive about The Power of Sympathy is that not even in Melville is the attitude toward incest, as expressed by Brown's lovers, so powerfully sympathetic.

Notes

1. Elizabeth Whitman became the subject of a popular novel of her own—by Hannah Webster Foster and called The Coquette (1797). A bit of a poet herself, Miss Whitman was never entirely obscure. Her father was a cousin of Jonathan Edwards; she was first cousin to John Trumbull, author of the famous mock epic M'Fingal, and also a cousin of Charlotte Stanley, subject of Charlotte Temple, one of the best selling novels ever. Around 1780 she conducted a failed love affair with Joel Barlowe, American diplomat and author of The Columbiad (“the great American epic”). Both her relatives Pierpont Edwards, son of Jonathan Edwards, and Aaron Burr, grandson, were rumored to have fathered her child. For a long time her grave was a public shrine, and there were relics. Ophelia in life was Frances Apthorp, who lived in her sister's mansion on the same street as William Hill Brown. Her lover, Martin, was Perez Morton, Harvard '71, prominent Boston orator, Patriot, and for twenty years Attorney General of Massachusetts. Her betrayed sister was Sarah Wentworth (Apthorp) Morton, most celebrated woman poet of her day, and a favorite subject of Gilbert Stuart. Shortly before poisoning herself, Frances wrote a few letters, chiefly to Morton, “the first and last man I ever knew,” telling him not to let “my sweet infant suffer … you are the father of it.” “I have felt from the first,” she observes, “that this matter would go against me, but I have resolved never to live after it has,” and to her last lines appends a boldly embellished “Finis.” (These documents survive, having been found in a book in a second hand New York bookstore 110 years after they were written.) As late as 1894 The Power of Sympathy was attributed, most illogically, to Mrs. Perez Morton.

2. The scholar, Richard Walser, edited a volume of Brown's Selected Poems and Verse Fables in 1982.