SOURCE: Verhoeven, W. M. “‘Persuasive Rhetorick’: Representation and Resistance in Early American Epistolary Fiction.” In Making America/Making American Literature, edited by A. Robert Lee and W. M. Verhoeven, pp. 130-39. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996.

[In the following excerpt, Verhoeven takes issue with several critics who have written about The Power of Sympathy, arguing that Brown's work cannot properly be included in the ranks of epistolary novels, and indeed cannot really be classified as a novel at all.]

America's first epistolary novel may be a direct descendant of Clarissa, but it is a considerably toned down version of Richardson's original. The subtle epistolary techniques that Richardson employs in his magnum opus are seldom displayed in The Power of Sympathy. Thus the use of letters as a method of establishing mood and characterization does not extend much beyond the light-hearted bragging in Harrington's first three letters to his friend Worthy, and some simple typographical touches, mainly breathless dashes and meaningful italics, to increase the dramatic tension—most clearly in Harriet's farewell letter (Letter L) and in Harrington's last letters (notably LVI, LVII, and LXIV). Nowhere do Brown's letters even for a moment suggest that we are dealing with a real correspondence. The letters are without dates, most of them do not have any kind of salutation, and usually they are not signed either. There is no real give and take between the correspondents, and the communication is, to say the least, static. For the most part the letters are written from only two locations, Boston, where Harrington and his sister Myra live, and “Belleview,” Mrs Holmes's estate, also the home of her in-laws, and, between Letters VIII and LXIII, also of Worthy. Except for her first (Letter IV) and her last letter (Letter L) all of Harriet's letters are written in Rhode Island, but then she has a remarkably small stake in the correspondence: despite the fact that she is the novel's tragic heroine, she is the author of only six letters, out of a total sixty-five. What makes this more curious is that we do not get to hear her response to the discovery that she is in love with her brother until her—remarkably erotic—farewell letter (Letter L).

Not only is The Power of Sympathy an epistolary novel in appearance only, the question is even justified whether we are dealing with a novel in the first place. The first thirty letters in particular remind one of a collection of moralistic-didactic tracts, rather than of a novel. The correspondents, especially the ones located at “Belleview,” have a knack of holding forth at length on random subjects—such as the pleasures of life in the country (Letter VII), the dangers of reading novels (Letters XI and XII), the blessings of democracy and the curse of Southern slavery (Letter XVII), female education (Letter XXIX), and serious reading for women (Letter XXX)—but there is very little plot development other than Harrington's overnight reformation from a callous seducer into an ardent lover in Letter VI. It is only in Letter XXXI, in which Mrs Holmes begs Myra Harrington to notify her immediately should the relationship between her brother and Harriet be getting so serious that a marriage is likely, that Brown—rather abruptly—returns to his plot. But it is only when Harriet confesses that she still loves Harrington even though she now knows he is her brother (Letter L), that the tale really comes to life and begins to resemble the kind of sentimental novel Brown apparently set out to write.

The novel's generic indeterminacy led Cathy Davidson to remark that “at times it almost seems as if we have two distinct and even contradictory discourses, a didactic essay and a novel, shuffled together and bound as one book,” and she wonders whether William Hill Brown did not write “two different books that only masqueraded as one?”¹ Surprisingly enough, in her subsequent discussion of the novel Davidson arrives at the conclusion that the novel's formal and programmatic ambivalence are part of a conscious strategy on Brown's part: “William Hill Brown seems to be painfully aware of the implications and isolations of being the first American novelist and tries to compensate by writing virtually a non-novel, which partly explains the eclectic format of the novel itself.”² This is tantamount to saying that Brown consciously wrote in bad novel—a critical position that appears to be the direct result of Davidson's trying to squeeze Brown's book into the tight framework of her overall thesis. A careful reading of The Power of Sympathy will reveal that its generic division emanates from a fundamental resistance against its own rhetorical organization.

As Richardson had made abundantly clear, for a novel to be successful with a large, popular audience, its rhetoric has to seduce the reader to temporarily suspend his rationality and to adopt the reality that it represents. Yet in the moral and intellectual climate of Puritan, post-Revolutionary America, when novels were generally considered to be useless and trifling, if not downright pernicious, such a seduction-through-rhetoric was deeply distrusted. It is Mrs Holmes who reflects the common view on the respective qualities of didactic prose and prose fiction:

Didactick essays are not always capable of engaging the attention of young ladies. We fly from the laboured precepts of the essayist, to the sprightly narrative of the novelist. Habituate your mind to remark the difference between truth and fiction. You will then always be enabled to judge of the propriety and justness of a thought; and never be misled to form wrong opinions, by the meretricious dress of a pleasing tale. You will then be capable of deducing the most profitable lessons of instruction, and design of your reading will be fully accomplished.³

In attempting to write a story from the same moralistic-didactic premises, Brown effectively “nailed his story down” (to borrow D.H. Lawrence's phrase) before it even had a chance to develop; it is only towards the end, when Brown introduces his incest-theme, that the book partially recovers from the onslaught. The Power of Sympathy being a novel that resists being a novel, it is not surprising that neither the rhetoric of epistolarity, nor the ideology of seduction that it is supposed to contain and represent, carry any power of persuasion. Far from being a self-authenticating epistolary novel like Clarissa or Les Liaisons, The Power of Sympathy is a novel with a serious identity problem.

One of the ways in which The Power of Sympathy tries to compensate for this lack of authentication and to pass itself off as a mature novel is by establishing an intertextual relationship with its earlier authors and texts. Thus through repeated references to Laurence Sterne's Sentimental Journey (cf. Letter XII in particular) the novel tries to set itself up as a text belonging to the same Sentimental tradition—and of course the very title of the novel bears the mark of the cult of Sentimentality. Similarly, the copy of The Sorrows of Werter which is found next to Harrington's body is supposed to add to the drama of his suicide by associating him with a more illustrious predecessor (cf. Letter LXIII). Numerous echoes to Shakespeare, Joel Barlow, Timothy Dwight, Noah Webster, Lord Chesterfield, La Rochefoucault, St. Evremond, Swift, Gay, and Addison resound throughout the text.

It is unlikely, however, that this spurious literary genealogy impressed any of Brown's readers. The reader that hoped to find in the novel the kind of tale that would confirm his moralistic predilections, is not likely to have been fooled by Brown's name-dropping, while the reader, coming to the novel with the expectation of finding there a thrilling and sentimental seduction-plot, will have had little patience with it.

Similarly, the opposition between town and country, which figures prominently in the early part of the novel, reveals that Brown was employing conventional frames of reference which he suspected his readers would catch up on. The moral center of the book is represented by “Belleview,” Mrs Holmes's estate. Belleview and its surrounding gardens are obviously meant to reflect what is sometimes referred to as the country-house ideal, which is perhaps best described in John Pomfret's well-known poem “The Choice.” According to Mrs Holmes a “great portion of our happiness depends on our own choice” (19), and in Letter VII she explains why she chosen to retreat to Belleview: “We have little concerts, we walk, we ride, we read, we have good company: this is Belleview in all its glory” (96). The gardens Mr Holmes has laid out before he died are exactly what they should be, “elegent, but simple,” and Worthy, who, in contrast to his friend Harrington, prefers the company of Mrs Holmes at Belleview (“the virtuous and the good”) to the hustle and bustle of Boston (“the giddy and the futile”; 21) is very much at home in “this delightful retreat,” because it allows him to indulge in “solitary reflections in contemplating the sublimity of the scenes” (24). While the more conservative readers will have appreciated the kind of moral value system reflected in the emblematic country-town opposition, it is unlikely that Brown's more readerly audience will have been bowled over by his use of such formulaic markers of (im)moral behavior.

However, the main reason why The Power of Sympathy fails as an epistolary novel is that it does not even begin to deal with the seduction theme in a way that Richardson or Laclos did, both of whom have shown that seduction represents the essence of what epistolarity is all about.

Dedicating the novel to “the young Ladies of United Columbia,” Brown announces that The Power of Sympathy will be an attempt to “represent the specious Causes, and to expose the fatal Consequences, of Seduction,” as well as “to inspire the Female Mind with a Principle of Self Complacency” (3). And sure enough, the novel begins as a conventional seduction narrative, with young Harrington reporting in a letter to his friend Worthy that he has succeeded in tracking down the whereabouts of his “charmer” and is getting ready for the kill (8). In his first two letters to Worthy, Harrington behaves like the stereotypical upper-class male, who, convinced of the sexual prerogatives of his class, has no intention whatever of marrying Harriet, whom he derides as a penniless orphan. In Letter VI, however, Harrington has transformed all of a sudden into an honorable lover who longs to marry Harriet more than anything else in life. At this point, however, the novel suspends the pursuit of the conventional seduction theme, although it continues to examine the sad consequences of seduction in a number of digressions. The long footnote in Letter XI, in which we hear of the sad history of Eliza Whitman; the notorious Ophelia episode (Letters XXI-XXIII); the story of Fidelia (Letters XXVII and XXVIII); and the “History of Maria” (Letter XXXIX): they all illustrate that “Seduction opens the door to a dismal train of unnumerable miseries” (66).

According to Cathy Davidson, The Power of Sympathy is not only a “surprisingly subtle anatomy of seduction,” it also “attests that the very mechanism of seduction signifies a grossly inequal distribution of social power and social worth, imbalances that should be corrected in a country purporting to be a republic.”⁴ In the main and subsidiary seduction stories, says Davidson, “seduction depends upon the superior social status, education, and economic prospects of the man as well as upon a legal substructure which, essentially, makes the seduction a female not a male crime. The novel underscores the double jeopardy into which women are placed by misogyny in both its individual and its cultural manifestations.”⁵ Davidson concludes that Brown's handling of the seduction theme in The Power of Sympathy not only subverts contemporary “socialized, legalized, and fictionalized” views of seduction, he even becomes a champion of women's rights: “The Power of Sympathy advocates improved female education and condemns any who would condemn women for aspiring above their place. Improved education should allow a woman self-confidence (so she need no longer depend upon a man for her knowledge of the world); social status and mobility (thus obviating the need to trade her body for a higher position in the world); and, above all, a realistic (so says William Hill Brown) suspicion of men.” In thus awarding The Power of Sympathy the status of a sociopolitical text, Davidson puts the novel in the forefront of late-eighteenth-century revolutionary writing. However, as before, Davidson tends to get carried away a bit by her overriding theme, as a more detailed reading of, for instance, the Ophelia episode will reveal.

The episode relates the tragic story of the seduction and consequent suicide of the beautiful Ophelia. Her seducer is her sister's husband, a Mr Martin, who breaks off the relationship after she has given birth to their child. This is when the whole affair becomes public. The girl's father, Mr Shepherd, is determined that the culprits are publicly confronted with their sin, but just before the various parties are scheduled to meet, Ophelia poisons herself and dies.

The story of Ophelia is a thinly disguised fictionalization of a similar drama that took place in Boston in 1788, a year before the novel was published. The original of Ophelia was a Francis Apthorp, who had an affair with a Mr Morton, a prominent politician, not long after he had married her sister, Sarah. Francis Apthorp committed suicide on August 28, 1788, after having written emotional letters of farewell to Mr Morton, her family, and two supposed enemies. The case attracted considerable attention at the time; Francis's letters appeared in two local newspapers, followed by a string of elegies and prose pieces more or less related to the case. According to Richard Walser the Apthorp-Morton scandal caused an almost neurotic interest among Boston's writers, editors and readers in themes of adultery, suicide and seduction. Brown, who knew the Apthorps and the Mortons personally, apparently could not resist jumping on the bandwagon.⁶

Although both the Ophelia and the Francis Apthorp story are commonly referred to as cases of “seduction,” it is doubtful whether this is the best label for it. There is no evidence that Francis Apthorp was seduced by Morton, at least not against her will; the affair between them was an open affair, and it was resumed after Francis had temporarily left Boston to give birth to Morton's child.⁷ And Francis hardly qualifies as the socially inferior female of the stereotypical seduction case, either.

The Ophelia story does not in any significant way differ from its original. Although Brown employs the usual seduction rhetoric and informs us that Martin used “the most artful attentions” and was inspired by “a diabolic appetite” when he “prevailed upon the heart of the unsuspicious Ophelia, and triumphed over her innocence and virtue” (60), the wording sounds particularly trite and gratuitous. On the whole he tends to play down Martin's guilt in the affair, and he holds Ophelia at least in part responsible for what happened: “Whether from the promises of Martin, or the flattery of her own fancy, is unknown, but it is said she expected to become his wife, and made use of many expedients to obtain a divorcement of Martin from her sister: But this is the breath of rumour” (62).

Seduction in The Power of Sympathy is presented not so much as the loss of virtue and innocence on the woman's part, and the aggression of unnatural sexual appetite on the man's part, but rather as a breach of contract: not only by Martin (breaking his marriage vows) and Frances (breaking the bonds of sisterhood), but also by the sisters' father, Mr Shepherd. It is Martin who points out to Shepherd that he is at least partially responsible for his daughter's suicide. It was his “obstinacy in persisting in an explanatory meeting, and refusing to grant Ophelia's request in suffering the affair to subside” that drove Ophelia to take her own life (69); and “thus was a straying but penitent child [was] driven to despair and suicide by a severe use of paternal power, and a vain attempt to resent an injury for which it was impossible the accused party could make compensation” (70). In the same letter (XXIII) Harriot drives the point of parental responsibility further home by remarking: “The duty of a child to her parents will be in proportion to the attention paid to her education” (70). Mr Shepherd—the name is certainly carefully chosen—is basically accused of having broken the social contract that he has with his child by grace of being its parent. He is like a shepherd who has let one of his sheep wander off into the wilderness, and, after she has got into trouble, refuses to let her return to the flock. Shepherd thus fails to offer the moral protection that it is his duty as a parent to give to his children—the kind of protection that Mrs Holmes, significantly, is still receiving from her ancient in-laws at Belleview, after her husband has left her a widow early in life (see 19).

The other subsidiary seduction tales do not vitally change this picture. Thus the story of Fidelia, a tale of abduction rather than seduction, basically plays on the conventional pairing off of the rusticity and “domestick pastimes” of the country-life, represented by Fidelia's lover Henry, and the wordly and treacherous pleasures of city-life, represented by the “gay Williams” (83). In contrast to what Davidson claims about the seduction tales in general, differences in social status or education between Fidelia and her seducer play no part in the story whatsoever. Financial dependence does play a role in the seduction of Maria Fawcet, and hers is in many ways the most typical seduction tale in the novel. However, the “History of Maria” remains a digression, the main purpose of which is to introduce us to the incest theme which will dominate the remainder of the novel. The story of Miss Whitman, finally, is not so much about seduction as about the harmful effect the reading of novels and romances may have on vain, excitable young women. It would seem, then, that The Power of Sympathy is much less prominently concerned with seduction than Davidson tries to make us believe, and I therefore underwrite Henri Petter's conclusion that “in spite of the didactic treatment it is given, the subject of seduction fails to dominate Brown's novel.”⁸

Davidson's claim that Brown's novel champions the cause of the female education aimed at protecting them against the invidious schemes of male seducers also appears to be ill-founded. Admittedly, the novel occasionally echoes the well-known Wollstonecraftian plea for improved female education based on rational principles—mainly through the Reverend Mr and Mrs Holmes (cf. Letters XI and XXXIX)—but these pleas are merely appendices to the subsidiary seduction stories and presented in the same offhand, formulaic manner. What is even more important, however, is that the Wollstonecraftian agenda is completely undermined by Mrs Holmes's moral lecture to Myra in Letter XL. Addressing the issue of how a woman may be “accessary to her own ruin,” Mrs Holmes states: “It is hardly worth while to contend about the difference between the meaning of the terms accessary and principal. The difference, in fact, is small; but when a woman, by her imprudence, exposes herself, she is accessary; for though her heart may be pure, her conduct is a tacit invitation to the Seducer” (126). Pointing out to Myra that it is a thin line that distinguishes the culprit from the victim in a seduction-case, Mrs Holmes advises women to make themselves inconspicuous—in effect, to confine themselves to the domestic sphere, presumably under the protective wings of parents and guardians before marriage, and, after it, under the wings of their husband.

Mrs Holmes is here implicitly invoking the “power of sympathy,” which binds people together in social structures such as the family and marriage. Brown nowhere really indicates, as Davidson suggests, that these structures should be based on equality and the freedom of the individual; on the contrary, there is more evidence to suggest that existing—hierarchical and patriarchal—social structures are the best guarantee for promoting the general happiness of mankind. Significantly, when he is not exploiting its sentimental potential, Brown tends to treat seduction as a social evil that threatens to disrupt the social framework, rather than a tragedy for the individual woman. It is because of its potentially disruptive effect on the social fabric that seduction is to be condemned, rather than for the pain it causes for individuals or the inherent injustice of the phenomenon. Worthy, one of Brown's main spokesmen, propagates this attitude of social stoicism when he encourages his dejected friend Harrington to transcend the personal grief over having lost his beloved:

Let us watch over all we do with an eye of scrutiny—the world will not examine the causes that give birth to our actions—they do not weigh the motives of them—they do not consider those things which influence our conduct—but as that conduct is more or less advantageous to society, they deem it madness or wisdom, or folly or prudence—Remember this—

(166)

Brown's privileging the importance of preserving the stability of the social structure over a concern for the rights of the individual equally informs his treatment of the incest theme, which all but eclipses the seduction theme towards the end of the novel. The discovery that they are in fact brother and sister comes as a devastating shock to Harriet and Harrington: their incestuous love mocking the “power of sympathy” which had brought them together. Of course Mr Harrington, the “rude spoiler,” as he calls himself, is ultimately responsible for the disaster that blasts the newly-found bliss of Harriet and Harrington, but it is striking that Brown has more eye for the sentimental potential of the double-suicide of the star-crossed lovers than for any preaching on the dire effects of seduction, which the situation seems to call for. Of course the deaths of Harriet and Harrington are to be seen as Mr Harrington's deserved punishment for his illicit sexual activity, but Brown is not at all keen to make this point. Rather than a crime against the rights of woman, Mr Harrington's seduction of Maria is treated as a disruption the power of sympathy, the binding force that guarantees stability in society. It is for the same reason, the protection of the power of sympathy, that Harriet and Harrington have to die. This ties in with what Anne Dalke has found in her analysis of early American incest fiction:

These cautionary tales of parental excess express a decided attitude about the social order: at the same time that they charge fathers with a failure of benevolence, they charge the social structure with a failure to maintain the hierarchy of established distinctions between classes, a distinction that demands of the well-to-do a similar benevolent protectionism. These authors approved established patterns of familial and social deference and responsibility. They did so by inversion, in their display of the dreadful consequences of neglecting such obligations.⁹

In the final analysis, then, The Power of Sympathy offers little support for Davidson's claim that the novel “is not only about a seduction, in narrative method it enacts one, too.”¹⁰ Reducing the epistolary format to a mere formula, Brown at no point exploits the potential of the genre to represent the dynamic process of generating a self by negotiating the other, which is at the heart of any successful novel of seduction. As the example of Richardson has shown, Brown could only have succeeded in writing the kind of subversive novel Davidson is talking about if he had set the seducer and his victim in an ideologically charged, dialogic setting. Even then he would have had to give his epistolary method the sophistication that would have enabled it to support the representation of that ideological conflict in a rhetorical construct that could have opened up existing value systems and possibly have replaced them by others. As it is, The Power of Sympathy is a novel that, rhetorically speaking, is merely cashing in on the contemporary popular demand for sentimental-didactic epistolary fiction of seduction, while, ideologically speaking, it seems only too willing to maintain the existing status quo.

Notes

1. Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986), 99.

2. Davidson, Revolution and the Word, 100.

3. William Hill Brown, The Power of Sympathy, ed. William S. Kable (1789; Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP, 1969), 88. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. To avoid possible confusion I have ignored Kable's decision to retain in his edition two typographical conventions that appear in the 1789 edition of the novel: the convention to put the first word of each paragraph in small capitals, and the convention to italicize proper names.

4. Revolution and the Word, 107, 107-08.

5. Revolution and the Word, 108.

6. For more details pertaining to this incident, see Richard Walser, “Boston's Reception of the First American Novel,” Early American Literature 17 (1982), 65-74. Frances Apthorp's last recorded words are reprinted in Tremaine McDowell, “Last Words of a Sentimental Heroine,” American Literature 4, (1932), 174-77.

7. See Walser, “Boston's Reception of the First American Novel,” 65.

8. Henri Petter, The Early American Novel (Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP, 1971), 244.

9. Anne Dalke, “Original Vice: The Political Implications of Incest in the Early American Novel,” Early American Literature 23 (1988), 200.

10. Davidson, Revolution and the Word, 99-100.