[In the following essay, McDowell contends that one of the main reasons Brown's The Power of Sympathy was suppressed when it was first issued was because the book offended American sensibilities in general and the community of Dorchester, Massachusetts in particular.]

On the 21st day of January in the year 1789, loyal citizens of Massachusetts had unique cause for gratification. At last, they were informed, a novel had been written and published in book form in the United States. Under the challenging heading, FIRST AMERICAN NOVEL, they found in Boston journals this advertisement: “This day published, price 9s. bound and lettered, and 6s. 8d. stitched in blue paper, THE POWER OF SYMPATHY: Or, the TRIUMPH OF NATURE. A NOVEL founded in truth.” Observant Bostonians knew that, during the decades prior to the Revolutionary War, lack of leisure, poverty of invention, and prejudice against fiction had restrained the colonists from any ventures in novel-writing—that, in fact, the American people had achieved a republic before they were able to produce a single indigenous novel. Then, political independence having been declared, fervent patriots had loudly demanded the instant appearance of native manners, native arts, and even native speech, only to discover that a national culture cannot be created by fiat. Thus it happened that not until 1789 was the American novel born; and thus it happened also that its birth was an event calculated to produce national rejoicing.

And yet The Power of Sympathy was met, not with fanfares of patriotic enthusiasm, but with a desperate attempt at suppression. True enough, readers in Boston made no motion to restrict its circulation. Catching their attention merely as a curiosity, the book stimulated them to no published comment save a debate between representatives of the two sexes. First, a bilious gentleman signing himself “Civil Spy” protested in the Massachusetts Centinel that neither title nor subtitle accurately described the contents of the novel. “A young man”, wrote Civil Spy, “and a young woman having mutually become fond, because they cannot gratify their desire, she dies; which is very natural for a woman to do. But unfortunately, he kills himself, which is very unnatural for a man to do.” Where, demanded the critic, is the triumph of nature? Thereupon a certain “Antonia” appeared as public defender of this “elegant composition”, this “chaste and moral performance”, this “delicate and pathetic novel”. To it, she paid her tribute of tears; over it, she rejoiced that the first American attempt in fiction “might vie with the most sentimental and unexceptional British or Hibernian story”. And on its author she heaped “deserved encomiums” as “a champion of feminine innocence, a promoter of religion and chastity, and a pleasing monitor of inexperienced minds”.

It was in the neighbouring town of Dorchester that a remarkable furore promptly arose. There prominent citizens, according to one account of the episode, persuaded the novelist to withdraw the book from circulation and destroy all remaining copies. According to a more probable version of the affair, these same individuals themselves bought and burned all copies of The Power of Sympathy on which they could lay hands. In any case, the novel became notorious; old prejudices against novelists were revived; and a precedent for suppressing their work was established.

Leafing through the pages of this first of American novels, the modern reader speculates as to why any attempt was made to suppress it. To him, The Power of Sympathy is a harmless little tale. But if he will transport himself to eighteenth-century America, the reader at once realizes how sensational a work lies before him. First of all, it is a novel. Like all early novelists, its author is apologetic in admitting that he has written that dangerous thing, a piece of fiction. And such an admission was indeed damaging in an age when sober minds accepted without question the pronouncement of the president of Yale College: “Between novels and the Bible, there is a great gulf fixed.” Not only were novelists themselves convinced of the dangerous effects on all humanity of romance-reading, but they emphasized its peculiarly disastrous influence on young females. That romances are often pernicious is therefore confessed in the preface to The Power of Sympathy and reiterated in the narrative. Therein a devout clergyman protests, in sound eighteenth-century fashion, that a female who imbibes her ideas of the world from fiction will find only disappointment in actual life: “Unsuspicious of deceit, she is easily deceived—from the purity of her thoughts, she trusts the faith of mankind, until experience convinces her of her errour.” To point this sad moral, the distressing case of a daughter of New England is adduced, who, the reader is asked to believe, came to a dishonoured and untimely grave through extensive reading of romances. It was only natural, then, that fathers and husbands particularly frowned upon action as “unfit to form the minds of women, of friends, or of wives”, and that novels were commonly published under the protecting cloak of anonymity. But even the most ardent Puritan-baiter will hardly contend, in the absence of any external evidence to support him, that The Power of Sympathy was put on the bonfire solely because it was a novel.

Such an explanation of the fate of the book becomes even more improbable when the reader observes the skill with which the contemporary passion for didacticism is here gratified. First, an eloquent dedication to “the Young Ladies of Columbia” announces that the novel is “intended to represent the specious CAUSES, and to expose the fatal CONSEQUENCES of SEDUCTION; to inspire the FEMALE MIND with a principle of SELF-COMPLACENCY and to promote the ECONOMY OF HUMAN LIFE”. Then, to attain these admirable ends, the novelist methodically recounts the tragedies of numerous unwary females betrayed by perfidious lovers, and aims sober exhortations at susceptible feminine readers. The gist of these harangues appears in ten painful lines:

With thee, SEDUCTION! are ally'd
HORROUR, DESPAIR and SUICIDE.
You wound—but the DEVOTED heart
Feels not alone—the poignant smart:
You wound—th' electrick pain extends
To fathers, mothers, sisters, friends.
MURDER may yet delight in blood,
And deluge round the crimson flood;
But sure his merits rank above
Who murders in the mask of love.

If ever a novel bid for the approval of the didactically minded in eighteenth-century America, that novel was The Power of Sympathy.

Its suppression, then, must have been occasioned by some extreme offence against decorum. May it have been the distressing frequency with which “moving histories of female frailty” are narrated in its pages, and the melodramatic fashion in which such tragedies conclude? Martin seduces Ophelia—she commits suicide. Williams abducts Fidelia—she, her mother, her lover, and her kidnapper are united in death. A mysterious villain betrays Elizabeth—she and her infant lie side by side in the churchyard. The elder Harrington in his rash youth seduces Maria. Long years thereafter, he meets Harriott, the blushing female whom his son is about to marry. She, alas, is the image of the wronged Maria; young Harrington has all but married his half-sister! Acutely disappointed to find a brother where she looked for a husband, the amorous Harriott exclaims: “O! I sink, I die, when I reflect—when I find in my Harrington a brother—I am penetrated with inexpressible grief—I experience uncommon sensations—I start with horrour at the idea of incest—of ruin—of perdition.” And yet she ambiguously adds: “How I do lament this fatal discovery!” At length, she goes mad and dies of grief. Thereupon young Harrington, equally disappointed, reads The Sorrows of Werther and meditates suicide. “I must go,” he cries. “Yet the idea chills me—I am frozen with horrours—cold damps hang on my trembling body—My soul is filled with a thousand troubled sensations—I must depart—It must be so—My love for thee, O Harriott! is dearer than life—Thou hast first set out—and I am to follow.” At last he shoots himself in the head, not pausing to explain whether he pursues Harriott as lover or as brother. Might not these vivid episodes of sin and sorrow have been too hardy a diet for pious readers in Dorchester? But no—the prudery of the nineteenth century had not yet replaced the frankness of the eighteenth; and no novel was then denied an audience because it demonstrated, with appalling adequacy, the “fatal consequences of seduction”.

Another dangerous aspect of The Power of Sympathy was its advocacy of that much-debated doctrine, the gospel of sensibility. Fathers and husbands could not be expected to agree with the novelist that the chief end of existence lies in the cultivation of extreme delicacy of emotion. And yet The Power of Sympathy repeatedly champions sensibility and encourages its readers to enjoy “the real deliciousness of tears”. Thus its pages are flooded with “large drops of sorrow” and “dews of sympathy”, with “glittering globes of chrystal” and “pellucid drops of humanity”. In such a humid atmosphere, the emotions of its characters are continually agitated and its unhappy females are repeatedly deprived of speech and even of recollection, their “mental progress is stopped”, and their “seats of reason become vacant”. (No cast of characters, it should be observed, was then complete without its “fair maniac”.) Nor is it surprising that accumulated sorrows should at last drive both hero and heroine to escape the operations of their heated emotions in the cool serenity of the grave. Frowned upon by the rational, this same sensibility was to linger on for generations in American literature, weakening the romances of Cooper and watering the poems of Bryant, of Longfellow, and even of Poe.

Serious indeed are these blemishes in the unfortunate book: it is, shamefacedly and yet undeniably, a novel; it lays open to youthful eyes shocking scenes of sin and death; it commends to the females of America that pervasive but destructive doctrine, sensibility. Yet, as has been indicated, these deep flaws were not in themselves sufficient to mark The Power of Sympathy for destruction. The author's final and inexcusable offence is his devotion to a theory upon which early novelists clung as their only hope of salvation. This was the belief that the great gulf between a novel and the Bible may be bridged if the former is based, not on fancy, but on fact. Thus early novelists cautiously described their work as “Founded on Incidents in Real Life”, “A Tale of Truth”, and “Founded on Facts”. And disaster overwhelmed The Power of Sympathy because it is all too literally “founded in truth”. The relatives of the historical Elizabeth Whitman of Hartford made no complaint because her fall was here recorded; the citizens of New England whose authentic sorrows were recounted in the tale of Fidelia made no protest; the Massachusetts families on whose indiscretions were based the tale of the Harringtons, Maria, and Harriott made no remonstrance. But the seduction of Ophelia contained too much truth to be palatable.

All Dorchester recognized that Martin, the seducer in The Power of Sympathy, was their townsman, Perez Morton, born in Massachusetts in 1751, graduated from Harvard in 1771, chosen a member of the Committee of Safety in 1775, and later elected speaker of the house and attorney-general in his native state. Mrs. Martin of the novel was obviously Sarah Apthorp Morton, born in Massachusetts in 1759, contributor of verse to the Massachusetts Magazine under the pen name of “Philenia”, and author of two long poems, Ouabi: or the Virtues of Nature (1790) and Beacon Hill (1797). And the fictitious Ophelia was Frances Theodora Apthorp, sister of Sarah. In 1788, not long after the marriage of Sarah Apthorp and Perez Morton at Dorchester, Frances was seduced by her brother-in-law, Perez, as recorded by the novelist. When this event became known, the victim, called to an informal trial before her relatives, committed suicide. The families involved, apparently to forestall public action, then asked John Adams and James Bowdoin to conduct a private investigation; and Morton was cleared of all responsibility for the death of Frances. When this notorious scandal was revived by The Power of Sympathy, these were the families who did their utmost to check its circulation; and it was their activity in 1789 which makes the first American novel an exceedingly rare book today.

With understandable discretion, this provocative work was published anonymously, as from the pen of “A Lady of Massachusetts”. During the last fifty years, historians have most ungallantly, almost libelously, identified the lady as “Philenia”—that is to say, as Mrs. Sarah Morton, unhappy wife of Perez and sister of Frances. Fortunately, Mr. Milton Ellis of the University of Maine has recently cleared Mrs. Morton of this unsavoury imputation, and has demonstrated that she had no part in publicizing her husband's infidelity. In her stead, Mr. Ellis proposes, as author of the first American novel, a neighbour of the Mortons, one William Hill Brown. But the reader is less interested in the validity of Brown's claim to a dubious distinction than in the vindication of “Philenia”.

Stilted, inept, at times absurd, The Power of Sympathy is nevertheless a remarkably accurate prophecy and epitome of early fiction in the United States. Here, in brief, are exemplified the characteristics of the tearful tales which were to charm many generations of sentimental Americans. Apologetic, didactic, emotional, melodramatic—such was to be native fiction for a half-century, and such was this book, its first exemplar. Truly, in The Power of Sympathy the American novel was born.