Why the American Novel Refused to Grow Up

It is frustrating—and characteristic of his somewhat monomaniacal approach—that Fiedler does not consider, alongside the seduction plot, its obvious complement, the marriage plot. “Clarissa” follows a nobleman who rapes a virtuous woman, but Richardson’s other seminal contribution to the development of the novel, “Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded,” from 1740, offers a similar narrative with a happier ending: Pamela, a servant, rejects the advances of her wealthy employer and thereby induces him to marry her. Still, Fiedler shows convincingly enough that American writers’ attempts to adapt the seduction narrative to our concerns—to reimagine it so as to preserve our enduring sense of ourselves as innocents—explain our literature’s peculiar aversions and resultant compensations.

In its original form, however, the seduction plot was a European specialty. It flattered its largely bourgeois audience by vilifying the aristocracy and entrenching this new class’s mores—by effectuating what Fiedler characterizes as “the bourgeois redefinition of all morality in terms of sexual purity.” In what Fiedler called the “Sentimental Love Religion,” a doctrine that the seduction plot popularized, women were objects of worship, too immaculate to deflower. Marriage was the ultimate good, akin to a kind of deliverance, but any actual, physical consummation could come only at the cost of violation.

How could a plot so particular to a European context be transposed to ours? In a 1948 essay, Trilling enumerated “the things which are lacking to give the American novel the thick social texture of the English novel—no state; barely a specific national name; no sovereign; no court; no aristocracy; no church; no clergy.” Fiedler is right to note that Richardson’s “class-determined fable had to be adapted to the needs of a society quite different from the one which had bred it.” Similarly, he continues, the gothic confections that flourished in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century made little sense in the brave New World. Books like Ann Radcliffe’s “The Italian,” from 1797, and Matthew Gregory Lewis’s “The Monk,” from 1796, depicted “symbols of authority, secular or ecclesiastic, in ruins—memorials to a decaying past.” They were set in crumbling castles and moldering dungeons—that is, amid the rubble of a collapsing social order.

But America was terra nova, and to write about its literature is “to write about the fate of certain European genres in a world of alien experience,” Fiedler concludes. At the country’s inception, it fancied itself, in Fiedler’s words, “an escape from culture and a renewal of youth,” a “world without a significant history or a substantial past,” a realm that would “play out the imaginary childhood of Europe.”

It is no surprise that an avowedly juvenile country would produce an avowedly juvenile fiction. Many of our classics, like “Huckleberry Finn,” are about children, and many more masquerade as adventures for children: the “Leatherstocking Tales” of James Fenimore Cooper, the haunted offerings of Edgar Allan Poe, even the magisterial “Moby-Dick,” which for stretches presents itself as a jaunt aboard a boat (or so Fiedler argues). All of these works proffer visions of escape from civilization and thereby from maturity. Their protagonists tend to be runaways—men who join whaling expeditions in their haste to dodge the malaise that sets in on shore, boys who board rafts floating down the Mississippi to evade their guardians and their chores. Stylistically, these books are often surreal and oneiric, with the gauzy texture of childhood reverie. “Our fiction is essentially and at its best nonrealistic, even anti-realistic,” Fiedler writes.

A world without a past—a world of eternal infancy—must be a world without sex, and in Fiedler’s eyes no literature is quite as pathologically prudish as ours. Even as European writers were aging out of the Sentimental Love Religion and confronting the dramas of adultery in novels such as “Madame Bovary,” from 1856, and “Effi Briest,” from 1895, their American counterparts remained too squeamish and too genteel to face up to their carnal appetites. Fiedler writes, for instance, that Theodore Dreiser “came of the kind of people who copulate in the dark and live out their lives without ever seeing their sexual partners nude.” Dreiser’s subject was not lust but the “consequences of seduction,” his tone not erotic but didactic. In his work, women were still ethereal innocents who had yet to become believable human beings.