Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature 1787-1845

Of the three questions that are central to Jared Gardner's Master Plots, Sydney Smith posed the first one, rather famously, in 1820: "In the four corners of the globe, who reads an American book?" While Gardner mentions neither the English critic nor his taunt in the Edinburgh Review, this study does focus on a pair of assumptions that were familiar to late-eighteenth-century Anglo-American readers: that Americans would one day produce writing worthy of the name literature and that it would indeed be distinctive. Historian Michael Kammen traces the development of the latter assumption in "The Problem of American Exceptionalism: A Reconsideration," an essay from his 1997 collection Life in the Past Lane: Historical Perspectives on American Culture. The second question is one posed by the fictional narrator of J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (London, 1782)--"What, then, is the American, this new man?"--and then answered in a famously naïve essay that brings together the truism "Men are like plants" and the trope we have known ever since as America-the-Melting-Pot. Gardner does mention Letters, but when he explicitly uses this central question he does so sans any reference to Crèvecoeur: "The drama that takes place in the neutral ground of the prairie," Gardner writes in his chapter on James Fenimore Cooper's 1827 novel The Prairie, "works to reconstruct the unsettled national identity of post-Revolutionary America in order finally to answer the question: What is an American?" (108).

"This book grew out of my desire," according to Gardner's preface, "to interrogate more closely what looked to be an intriguing coincidence of the third term that grows up alongside literature and nation: race" (xii). These three terms, he claims, came together "around 1787," when "we can locate what is plausibly the simultaneous emergence and codification of these three discourses in the United States: racial science is born with Thomas Jefferson's and Samuel Stanhope Smith's seminal essays; national identity is founded in the debates and pamphlets circulating around the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia; and American fiction is inaugurated with the publication, in 1789, of the 'first' American novel, William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy"(3). While two of the three expressions figure in the title of the book Homi K. Bhabha edited in 1990, Nation and Narration, Bhabha's work on nationalism and colonialism shows up here quite sparingly. Gardner does cite Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, on the spread of nationalism from North American colonies back to the metropole, yet a great deal of what he attributes to Anderson comes through the filter of an essay by Thomas Brennan in Bhabha's 1990 collection. Gardner deserves credit for addressing the question of "whether the term race as it is understood in the eighteenth century does not more often than not refer to the older usage of race as family, clan, or nation" (11). Readers of this review might have read the 1996 article Gardner cites, "From 'Nation' to 'Race': The Origin of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought," which appeared in Eighteenth-Century Studies. He also cites Thomas Gossett's 1963 Race: The History of an Idea in America but does not, however, demonstrate any familiarity with the extensive scholarship that has emerged on racial theory. In his contrasting of monogenism and polygenism and his detailed discussions of the nineteenth-century emergence of the American School of racial origins--Louis Agassiz and company--Gardner cites some texts from the period but also relies on The Mismeasure of Man, one of Stephen Jay Gould's perfectly interesting contributions to popularizing the history of science.

The third central question in Master Plots involves "slippages," as for example in Gardner's discussion of "link[s]," in Cooper's The Pioneers (1823), between "metaphors of race" and "the language of politics and national identity": ". . . Cooper himself is able to use the slippages inherent in such racial language on behalf of the larger project coming into shape as he writes this novel" (91, emphasis added). Question: aside from the occasional glitches that Gardner discusses, might his own book have the problem of slippages between its aims and its achievements? It might, and unfortunately it does. To begin this book is to be aware of a tension between Gardner's stated purpose--tracing the "long history of the 'master plots' that helped defend and define a national identity for white Americans while proscribing those who did not 'belong'" (xi)--and his choices of authors and texts to analyze. Beyond insisting that his examples are central to the development of the novel in America, he is not particularly convincing. Consider the pre-1800 examples: Henry Moss(!), in the chapter "The History of White Negroes"; Updike Underhill, from Royall Tyler's 1797 novel The Algerine Captive; and the title character of Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly. Two of the three chapters that carry the reader to the brink of the so-called American Renaissance focus on texts that Gardner claims, unconvincingly, are central: Cooper's The Prairie, Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and Frederick Douglass's 1845 Narrative. Gardner acknowledges the impact on literary studies of revisionist scholarship, but the focus he describes is less on recovering neglected texts (as with The Prairie, purportedly Cooper's own least favorite among the Leatherstocking Tales) or on celebrating such recovery (as with Poe's Pym and all the attention it has been receiving since the 1970s) than on breaking down barriers between "'black' and 'white' literary traditions" (xiii).

Some of Gardner's blurring involves imprecise diction (e.g., his conflating "antebellum America" and "the early national period in the United States" in less than half a page). He claims, in the reference I cited above to the Eighteenth-Century Studies piece, to be listening to precise examples of "the term race as it is understood in the eighteenth century"(11), yet he seems oblivious to the ways that expression works interchangeably with group or simply people in sentences like "Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men" and "Fate has manifestly decreed, that America must belong to the English name and race" (qtd. on 80). Gardner does not quote the former passage, from Letters from an American Farmer; but he does quote the latter, from an 1803 pamphlet by Charles Brockden Brown titled Monroe's Embassy. Among Gardner's most troubling slippages are the points at which he conflates an author's position with that of a fictional narrator: Brown's, in the pamphlet on President Monroe (80); Crèvecoeur's Farmer James (e.g., "No longer the land of Crèvecoeur in which immigrants come together and are transformed by the magic properties of the land"); a fictional British persona of Cooper's (101); and the "I" of "MS. Found in a Bottle," whom he identifies simply as "one of Poe's narrators" (127).

For a reader who relishes jotting down an Aha! in the margins of a book, this one's often tortuous syntax instead occasionally elicits a question mark, as in "The idea of race and the meanings of racial difference often circulate at this time in excess of the bottom lines of materialist history" (6). Does at this time refer to the "early national period," from two lines earlier--or to the late 1990s? While his reference to "Cooper's 'pioneering efforts'" (95) echoes his earlier description of Cooper as "America's pioneer novelist" (87), this attempt at drollery clashes with his own earlier reference to The Power of Sympathy quoted above as well as with his descriptions of Charles Brockden Brown. His title's play on master narratives, as distinct from slave narratives, is intriguing (and no, the bibliography does not include Frank Magill). But long before Gardner gets around to describing his own race-nation-novel construct as "the larger narrative here" (100), the reader could benefit from the introduction to the 1998 collection Contesting the Master Narrative: Essays on Social History, which distinguishes between several ideas that Gardner's book insists on blurring: master narratives, grand narratives, and the expression that historians Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob use in Telling the Truth About History (1994), meta-narrative.