Oh, those Martian Women!!! Unveiling a Parallel, by Alice Ilgenfritz Jones and Ella Merchant (1893)

9781409910497
Dodo Press, 2008
[originally published 1893]
133 pp

paperback
(read earlier; still playing catch-up with posting)

A few nights back my friend and I were having a conversation about what we've been reading lately, so I brought out this book to share.   Her first reaction: "there were feminists in Cedar Rapids back then?"

Alice Ilgenfritz Jones and Ella Merchant actually published this novel under the pseudonym of "Two Women From the West." The first publication of this book was by Arena Publishing Company, an outfit that published "books on political and economic reform," as well as a number of Utopian novels, a genre that was quite popular at the time. Arena also published speculative and science fiction by authors who have long since faded into obscurity.  The owner and editor of Arena, Benjamin O. Flower, liked Jones & Merchant's book, which saw two editions before going out of print.

As Carol Kolmerten in the introduction to the 1991 edition of this novel (Syracuse University) states, Unveiling a Parallel is

"one of over two hundred utopian novels published from 1888 through 1918 that envisions a better world -- the largest single body of utopian writing in history." (xxiv)

Perhaps that time frame can be pushed back a bit.  After a bit of research, I thought that the earliest example of feminist utopian novels in the U.S. came from Mary E. Bradley Lane in 1881, with her Mizora (which I just bought), but there was one that came along even earlier (1870) --  Man's Rights, or How Would You Like It, by Annie Denton Cridge.  Moving forward, perhaps one of the most famous books in this genre of writing is Herland, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, published later in 1915.  The point is that feminist utopian novels were quite popular through the turn of the century, although the utopian novel in general  was largely the provenance of authors, who according to Kolmerten, were "unknown middle-aged, male ... Protestant, middle class, and white."    For further reading on the topic, a good place to start is The Utopian Novel in America, by Jean Pfaelzer; now on to Unveiling a Parallel. 

To keep things short and sweet, the male narrator of this story climbs in his "aeroplane" and takes a nice trip to Mars. He first arrives in Thursia, which surprisingly is very much the same as the 19th-century America our traveler has just left.  He quickly learns the language of his host, so as to better communicate with the woman he's fallen for, Elodia, his host's sister.  Elodia is a highly-successful banker and businesswoman, as well as a natural leader in her own social set.  The narrator is smitten, until sometime later, when certain other things about this woman are revealed, at which point he loses his interest because she's not the woman he thought she was, nor, he realizes,  would she be willing to become so for any man. In fact, Thursia itself holds a number of surprises for this man, including but not limited to, women vaping a potentially-lethal mix of valerian and alcohol, and a place called "Cupid's Gardens," where  powerful women like Elodia go to meet lovers or pick up prostitutes for their sexual pleasure. It seems that there is just too much for him to overlook in terms of the women of Thursia. The narrator moves on to Caskia, where he finds a more enlightened, more utopian society, one where people are able to enjoy some measure of leisure thanks to technology.  This is a place where everyone works for together the greater good, one where the notion of universal love is a true reality,  where material possessions are of no value, and where our narrator meets and falls for a woman as unlike Elodia as possible.

original 1893 cover; from Wikipedia

There is a huge amount of great satire to be found here, most especially in the dialogue between the narrator and the Martian people with whom he speaks.  As he asks a ton of questions about the women there, what ends up happening is that we actually get a great contrast between more enlightened ideas about Martian women and the attitudes toward women back home.  This book seems to reflect more than anything Jones' and Merchant's ideas about who women are and who they could be if equality could be attained.   Sadly, while the narrator in this book can begrudgingly admit to some positives in terms of how women are perceived and treated on Mars, he never fully comes around, noting that his own views are just "too thoroughly ingrained" in his nature.

 I won't really say more about this novel, except that while it is fun to read, it can also become  polemical in nature, and sometimes a definite chore to get through. There are also a number of contradictions spread throughout the story.   But it is also informative and I have to credit the authors with being so futuristic in their thinking. Writing this book in a time where literature pretty much stressed the patriarchal was also gutsy and something different. I'd say that anyone at all interested in American pre-20th century feminist writers will definitely want to pick up a copy of this novel for his/her library.  For me -- while it was a bit tough to get through at times, it is a great find and a wonderful addition to my slowly-growing collection of works by lesser-known American women writers.

just think...all of this for a dime: The Ghost of Hurricane Hills, by Mary E. Bryan

from abaa.org

 The Ghost of Hurricane Hills is yet another book in what started out as my plan to read American literature written since the 18th century.  I figured I'd be reading the greats, but I'm having way more fun following the less-traveled path of little-known, more obscure novels.  Author Mary E. Bryan (1838-1913) evidently killed it as a writer of dime novels; clicking here leads to a list of her work. I don't have the later, softcover edition pictured; mine is a 1933 leather-bound pebbled cover from Economy Book League of Cleveland. 

Just a note about dime novels:  according to this page at the University of South Florida's Special Collections website, 

"From the mid 19th to the early 20th century, the fiction genres known as dime novels, penny dreadfuls, and story papers flourished in England and America. The increasing mechanization of the printing process, more efficient distribution methods, and a rising literacy rate all contributed to this publishing phenomenon. Printed on the cheapest of paper, with lurid cover illustrations, dime novels (which found a name in their ten cent price tag) and story papers were considered ephemeral, to be read, often in secret, passed on to friends, or discarded. These delightful items, ancestors of the ubiquitous mass-market paperbacks of today, reveal the reading tastes of a population often neglected in historical studies.... Dime novels and story papers targeted a youthful working class audience with their thrilling, stereotyped tales of Wild West adventures, master criminals, detective stories, historical romances, and working girls and boys in which virtue was rewarded and preserved."  

I love finding these old books -- as the librarian at the USF page goes on to say, they were  "once the bane of the middle class," and they "were considered the corrupters of youth and stepping stones on the path to perdition."  My book even has a disclaimer in the front that it is "not recommended for children."  Funny how times have changed; reading them now it's often hard not to laugh at what was considered too mature for kids.  These books are also quite tame in comparison with what's out today; however, I love discovering new old books and the dime novel speaks to the  "reading tastes of an increasingly literate working-class audience," so I also get the benefit of immersing myself in what large numbers of people were reading at the time.  I get that not a lot of people likely share my enthusiasm about these old, forgotten and obscure novels,  but well, it is what it is. I love this stuff. 

Mary Edwards Bryan, from Wikipedia. 

In The Ghost of Hurricane Hills, we have a story that  just oozes Gothic; there's no castle here to speak of, but there is a "haunted house," a lost treasure, a journey to the underground and definitely a heroine.  It begins with the dying wishes of an elderly man named Colonel Charnley.  Evidently, he had built his fortune "on the ruins" of another man who had married the only woman Charnley ever loved.  Now that Charnley is at his end, he has left his vast fortune to the daughter of that woman, who is now an orphan living in Florida.  He plans to send her to school, and not reveal that she is worth a fortune until her education is finished.  This doesn't make his protégé very happy at all; young Frank Norman had banked on having that money all to himself.  Charnley, though, realizes that making Norman his heir would have made him "indolent and purse-proud," and leaves him only five grand.  As Charnley draws his last  breath, he calls for his lawyer, Barclay Hampden,  telling him quietly that Norman is not to marry the girl, ever.   Eventually, Charnley and Norman find young Amy, share the plans to get her set up in school, and she's thrilled at the prospect.  On the way home, the trio makes a brief stop for Norman's benefit, as he wants to visit his boyhood home. It seems that he has some sort of "possible wealth" hidden there, and intends to search for it.  This detour is the start of a terrifying adventure for young Amy, who while visiting the run-down house that has a reputation for being haunted by a ghostly "woman in gray," is visited by an apparition that she follows into the woods.  Her pursuit ends up with her being lost; although a major search effort is made, Norman and a heartbroken Hampden have to eventually admit that she has simply vanished.  So pretty much right away the reader is presented with several mysteries, which only deepen as years go by.   

While I won't give away what actually happens in this book, the subtexts run on several different levels. Justice for wronged women is one biggie, while another line explores how women had to be hidden away rather than be out in the world because of some past misdeed.  Then there's the question of marriage for love or for suitability among the upper classes which also comes into play, as does good old upper-class materialism and greed.   In telling her story, it also seems to me that the author also makes great use of the Eurydice myth here, especially in having her Eurydice emerge as is explained here, "as a shadow, waiting to come to light to become a full woman again."   Sadly, I can't divulge exactly how or why this comes about, but it is about as obvious to me as the steam rising off of my coffee at the moment.  There is much, much more, but it's time to move on.

For me, these books are fun, and I love knowing what the working classes of the time were reading, especially women. This sort of gothic-ish, romance-ish dime novel was likely the choice of "young working-class women in particular," even though these women were sometimes encouraged to read better books.  Just as an interesting aside,  Felicia Carr, who runs the American Women's Dime Novel Project (1870-1920) website notes that 

"Dorothy Richardson, a middle-class reformer and journalist who wrote about the working women's experiences in the factories in 1905 also provides a valuable clue about readership. In her book The Long Day she chronicled occupations open to young working-class women. She herself held various jobs around New York City, partaking in the work and meeting the young women who held these jobs.  She often asked them what their tastes were in reading and when she learned they read Laura Jean Libbey, Charlotte Brame, and Effie Rowlands she called it 'trashy fiction' and encouraged them to read middle-class favorites such as Little Women or works by Charles Dickens. Readers apparently did not take kindly to her efforts to improve their taste. She reported that they rebuffed her attempts to 'elevate' their reading habits and told her not to put on airs with them."

For me, it's kind of cool to be off track and to be bypassing what's generally considered the best American novels;  this book may not be great literature but it and others like it are definitely part of American literary/reading heritage and history. It is also a part of American women's history, and just because it will probably never end up on a course syllabus somewhere doesn't mean it's not worth reading.  It is. 

back in time we go again to the 1880s: The Truth About Tristrem Varick & Mr. Incoul's Misadventure, by Edgar Saltus

9780983031413
Underworld Amusements, 2015
294 pp

paperback

Before I even turned the first page, I knew what I was in for just by reading the quotation on the cover:

"Truth is not always in white satin like a girl on her wedding-day. And when it is of mud and of blood, when it offends the nostrils, so much the worse; I, for one, will not sprinkle it with ottar of rose. Besides, I am not here to tell fairy tales and pastorals." 

Somehow I just knew that things weren't going to be rosy here, and I was definitely right. These are two novels focused on corruption and pessimism, and they're dark. Very, very dark.

Beginning with The Truth About Tristrem Varick (1888)  Saltus describes this story as an "attempt in ornamental disenchantment" in his dedication.  And indeed, that is what we get here time and time again.  Tristrem Varick is the ultimate poster boy for disenchantment, and Saltus sets up his character quite nicely -- he makes Varick the ultimate idealist who  fails to see what the reader knows right away,  and takes a big fall because of it.  His main failings here are that he truly believes that life carries with it some sort of meaning and value, but  he has ultimately placed his trust in the wrong people. His sentiments are noble, but at the same time unrealistic, especially in regard to the woman he loves, but the poor dupe just doesn't get it.   In that sense, with Saltus bringing Tristrem to an otherwise less than perfect ending, the reader can't help but feel sorry for this poor guy who is about as delusional as they come -- the saddest sort of "hero" one can possibly imagine. It's just painful to watch.

On the other hand, Mr. Incoul's Misadventure (1887)  makes Tristrem seem  tame, and the titular character is as opposite of Tristrem Varick as any two men can be.   Mr. Incoul is a very wealthy (think millionaire)  widower, who, unlike Tristrem Varick, holds very little in the way of ideals. He believes in "refinement," since he disavows any connection with being a "Puritan," but on the other hand, he doesn't hold with "immorality," since according to him, "refinement and immorality are incompatible." He is also a man of action when he thinks he's been wronged, and has been since childhood, whereas Varick was often seen as an "umpire," whose ability to judge a situation fairly gained him respect from his peers.   Incoul is in love with his much-younger second wife Maida, who had once been the lover of a Mr. Lenox Leigh, and who agreed to marry Incoul because her mother forced her to accept his proposal owing to their financial situation. Maida puts a condition on this union, though:  he must accept her terms of a platonic sort of relationship, to change only when she is ready to move to the next level.  Things begin to come to a head while the two are on a trip to Europe, where Incoul discovers the disenchanting  truth behind the woman he married, leading him to manipulate things so that he becomes the one in control.

If someone reads these two books as a commentary on both European and American societies of the time, I think that would be an incredibly accurate judgment. They also, at least to me, come across as a misogynist commentary on the folly of placing faith in a woman's virtue --   the deceptions of the two main women characters here are at the root of  the men's problems in both stories. On the other hand, this misogyny as well as the sheer narcissism  I see here isn't far off the mark from some of the European writers of the same era (a really good example is found in Lorrain's Monsieur de Phocas, which I've recently read) revealing Saltus' flair for and appreciation of  European decadence, highlighted in Mr. Incoul's Misadventure.  For example, in that book,  Incoul and Maida take up residence in rented villa belonging to a French nobleman, whose library is just chock full of works by such decadent writers as Verlaine, Beaudelaire, The Marquis de Sade, Mirabeau; even the paintings reek of decadent strangeness.  It's all over Maida's head, though, which turns out in a way to provide some of the best irony found in this novel, since it seems that she's not quite finished with her "man of appetites," absinthe-drinking, debauched former lover.

Again, there's way more in this book than I'm capable of evoking here, and it is my first experience (although likely not my last) with this author.  When Saltus says he is "not here to tell fairy tales and pastorals," he definitely means it in this book.  There is absolutely nothing pretty, nothing redemptive and definitely no happy endings to be found anywhere.  In other words, it's just my kind of book.  It's extremely dark,  pessimistic, and  tough to read at times since Saltus doesn't hold back, but very well worth every second.

first post of the year -- The Dead Letter and the Figure Eight, by Metta Fuller Victor (aka Seeley Register)

0822331659
Duke University Press, 2003
388 pp

paperback

Two very obscure American novels are to be found here together in one volume: The Dead Letter (1866) and The Figure Eight (1869).  What's culturally and historically significant about this volume is that The Dead Letter is actually, according to Catherine Ross Nickerson in her work The Web of Iniquity: Early Detective Fiction by American Women, "the first American detective novel." (29).  Both books are also, as she notes,

"documents of a moment in cultural history when the young professional seemed to hold the promise of mediating between the cloudy-minded nostalgia of the landed class and the unprincipled greed of the merchant and capitalist classes."  (31)

While there's definitely a LOT going on between the lines and a lot going on here that is discussion worthy,  these books are also fun reads for anyone interested in American literature of this period that won't likely be found on any general American Lit course syllabus.  For someone like myself who loves these old books and who tries to read between the lines as to the cultural climate (especially in terms of women and the relationships between the main characters and other ethnic groups) , the politics, and the historical significance of the time in which they were written, it is a goldmine.   On the other hand, they're definitely not for everyone, but if for no other reason, the fact that Metta Fuller Victor made an appearance before Anna Katherine Green (who I've always believed was the first American detective novelist) makes her extremely readworthy. 

 I've posted about these two books at my crime page; more about the author herself can be found at my newest project, Forgotten Females Found.   

(from LibraryThing) 

*and you thought she only wrote battle hymns: Julia Ward Howe -- The Hermaphrodite

9780803218871
University of Nebraska Press, 2004
(note: original is an unpublished manuscript, 1840s)
208 pp

paperback


Writing about this novel is not an easy thing to do, but I'll start by saying this: story very good, writing felt sloggy past the midpoint, difficult to understand sometimes but overall, very much worth the effort.  As a casual sort of reader, it was really all I could do to stay focused on this book at times, and toward the end it became even more difficult for me, even as it gained in intensity.  Now, having said that, I do think that it's an important book on many levels, considering when it was written and what was going on in the life of the author at the time.

The very basic story is this: Laurence, scion of a wealthy and important family of the time,  is sent away to school for his childhood and teen years, so that he "might become robust and manly, and haply learn to seem that which I could never be."  He had been born an intersexed person (hence the title), then  "baptized...with a masculine name" since his parents had decided to "invest" him with "the dignity and insignia of manhood..."  Throughout his school years, he rarely saw his parents; when he did, they were "cold and reserved" so that unlike most kids, he would rather have been at school than at home.  Laurence was a model student, well respected and "scrutinized" with interest by both sexes. As he notes, though,

"For man or woman, as such, I felt an entire indifference -- when I wished to trifle, I preferred the latter, when I wished to reason gravely, I chose the former. I sought sympathy from women, advice from men, but love from neither." 

It is during his later school years that an older woman, Emma P., decides that Laurence will be her conquest, but when she discovers the truth about him, she  succumbs to apoplexy (I love that word)  and becomes, in Laurence's words, "a maniac" who "lay foaming and writhing on the floor" at his feet. This only increases Laurence's own alienation and his fears of intimacy, and things get even worse for the poor guy when he returns home at the close of his school career. There, his father makes him sign over his birthright to Laurence's younger brother, who would most likely produce an heir and continue the family line.  Fleeing from home, he comes across a hermitage where he takes up residence until he's at the point of both madness and death; he is then taken to live with adolescent Ronald (who discovers him in this condition) at Ronald's family home for a while. There, he serves as Ronald's tutor.  Ronald falls in love with Laurence; then after an encounter between the two, Laurence takes off for Rome, where he comes under the tutelage of Berto.  After some trouble arises, his friend Berto convinces him that he should disguise himself as a woman and stay with Berto's sisters at the family estate. I'm not giving away either the ending or any of the high points of this story here;  anyone interested should really read it without already knowing everything.

Now, very briefly, as to its importance, there is so much going on in this book that I can't begin to cover it all.   I'll start with Gary Williams and Renee Bergland, who  note in their introduction to Philosophies of Sex: Critical Essays on The Hermaphrodite (Ohio State Press, 2012) that Howe's book

"contributes to a seismic shift in how we understand nineteenth-century gender awareness and sexuality in antebellum America."  

If I went into detail as to how this is so, I'd be writing for days, but Bethany Schneider in her contribution to this work briefly notes that Howe uses

"her ambiguously sexed character to interrogate desire and the acts that constitute sex,"

and asks

"how gender informs acts of sex and how gender is transformed through sex." (139)

In short, here Howe envisions gender as something constructed -- nowadays this isn't such an unusual idea and is covered widely in literature,  but in 1840s America, it was something very rare. The reverse was true in Europe: as noted in the novel's introduction, Gautier was writing along these lines in his Mademoiselle de Maupin (definitely NOT an American favorite of the time, an outrage to the "common sentiment of the American mind")  as was George Sand, whose Gabriel featured an intersexed character, and whose work Howe admired.

In the introduction to The Hermaphrodite, Gary Williams, who has painstakingly reconstructed the fragments of this work from Howe's originals,  notes that "Howe saved herself with this history of a strange being," which he claims is a "projection of both her husband and herself;" he also notes that "the narrative...is solidly rooted in the psychological terrain" of Howe's life at the time.  Her marriage to Samuel Gridley Howe was problematic from the beginning.  According to Michael Bronski,

"When Howe was on his honeymoon with Julia Ward Howe, he received word that Charles Sumner was very upset and wrote him a passionate note saying that he wished that he was there with them. Interestingly, Sumner himself married later. They have complicated relationships. Julia Ward Howe ... wrote a novel about a hermaphrodite--a man/woman who loves both men and women--that most critics now think was her own meditation on her husband's bisexuality."

Williams notes that "the trope of the hermaphrodite seems to have offered a scaffold for trying to understand in corporeal terms why a man (or an apparent man) might wish to deflect the attentions of a beautiful and devoted woman."  (xxv)  Later he notes that

"the hermaphrodite was arguably as useful as a screen on which to project certain other aspects of her situation. Laurence may be Samuel Howe, yes, but "he" is also Julia, a being fusing culturally ascribed impulses of both genders and thereby consigned, according to the logic of American domestic ideology, to a loveless and sexless ambition."  (xxvii)

She also, according to Williams in his Hungry Heart, The Literary Emergence of Julia Ward Howe, felt constrained by "claustrophobic conditions" (marriage, motherhood, male society's expectations of women in those roles)  that hindered her desire to fulfill her intellectual ambitions. her frustrations are also explored in The Hermaphrodite, most notably in the scenes where Laurence, now Cecilia, engages with Berto's sisters, watching them move freely in their relationships and in their own intellectual pursuits.

There is so much more to talk about -- art, the spirit of true and nonsexual friendship between men and women, alienation and so on. However, there have been a large number of scholarly treatises on this book which anyone interested can find online, so there's no way I can give The Hermaphrodite its due. Suffice it to say that if you can get through the often boggy prose, it is well worth exploring, and I'm extremely happy to have read it.  Truthfully, though, it was one of the most difficult books I've ever read.

**********

And thus ends 2015's little mini-project of looking for the Great American Novel. For the rest of this year, I'll be reading more contemporary novels, but I will pick up the Great American Novel project (post-Civil War) once the new year starts. I'm really enjoying finding these really off-the-beaten-path books and I've had a great time with them.  

*Blake, or the Huts of America, by Martin R. Delany

9780807064191
Beacon Press, 1971
originally published in serialized form 1861-1862
321 pp

paperback

"Stand still and see the salvation." 

Chances are highly likely that on considering African-American anti-slavery novels from the antebellum period, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, of 1852 would be the first one to pop into someone's head.  I almost decided to reread Uncle Tom's Cabin or one I haven't yet read -- her Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (which I'm still  planning to read sometime down the road) for this project --  but the more I researched, the more Delany's Blake or The Huts of America appealed, and despite some flaws in the actual writing, I was absolutely floored by this book. No Uncle Tom philosophy here -- this book is radical and deserves a much wider readership.

But why this book?  First of all, it's not hugely popular -- it seems that with a couple of exceptions, my little survey of  American literature has led me down my usual path of books that not a whole lot of people have read (which is okay by me, Joe)  and Delany's novel sort of  keeps that momentum going.  The second reason I decided on this rather obscure title is that while researching which book to read, I came across an article by Theodore Draper (March 12, 1970) about Delany called "The Father of American Black Nationalism"   in the New York Review of Books. I was wowed -- I had no idea Delany (1812 - 1885) even existed. Let's just say that in all of my American history classes (and I majored in the field of history 3 times so I have done a LOT of reading), the name of Martin Delany never once appeared. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the man was actually a sort of predecessor to Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X.   Furthermore, as I continued my search to find more about this man, I again turned to  the New York Review of Books  issue of May 21, 1970, where I discovered letters in response to Draper's article. [ Just as an aside, apologies if you can't get to the NYRB through my links -- I have a subscription that allows access to archives.]  One of the letters is from Floyd J. Miller, who wrote the introduction to my edition of  Delany's novel -- and this is the part that sold me:

"To an extent greater than perhaps any significant black leader, Delany combined a wide variety of responses to the racism of the white majority. Thus, he serves as a “father” of several black nationalisms—not merely emigrationism. In his novel, Blake, for example, he conceived of unified slave rebellions and spoke as a revolutionary nationalist. "

then later,

"Delany’s realization of the intensity and persistence of white racism and his call for racial unity are as relevant today as they were during his own time. This, then, was his legacy to such men as Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X."

That part cinched the deal -- I bought this book immediately after reading those articles -- I absolutely had to know more about this rather obscure figure who was actually quite important to African-American history but who seems to have been forgotten in the American mainstream.

Just a wee bit about plot here -- not much, just enough perhaps to whet someone's appetite enough to make them want to explore either Blake or Delany himself.   The main character of the novel is Henry Holland, a slave in Louisiana.  His real name is Henrico Blacus, and he was "decoyed" into slavery while he was serving on a ship in the West Indies.  Henry, who was very well educated before he was sold into slavery and ended up at the plantation of Colonel Franks, is married to Maggie, a slave who was a product of the union of Franks and another slave serving at his home.   Franks sells Maggie who, with her new mistress, ends up in Cuba, and Henry vows that he will do what it takes to find her.  But before that can happen, Henry decides to escape Franks and sojourn through the American South and hold "seclusions," secret meetings with plantation slaves, to convince them to participate in a "unified rebellion" against their masters.  Part Two finds Henry in Cuba, where he continues to stir seeds of rebellion against Americans and Cubans who wanted the US to annex Cuba, among other things.

Floyd J. Miller in the intro (1971)  notes that Blake is in part a "socio-historical account of Southern slavery and Cuban society in the 1850s," but even moreso, it

"serves...as the vehicle for the expression of a a racial philosophy as radical today as it was when originally conceived. Central to the novel is a racial consciousness which is expressed in a variety of ways."

So while the book may not be the best ever written, and while it may be perceived as being didactic in nature,  there is so much going on in here that any serious student or reader of African-American history or literature should definitely not miss it.  I plan to spend some time in further research of Delany; luckily there are a few academic treatments of this man and his work out there to afford a starting place. If you're at all interested, here's one from African Diaspora Archaeology Newletter 10:1, 2007 by Traore Mussa, which is quite good.

I will just add that sometimes there is great merit in stepping off of the beaten path in terms of reading ... and this book is just one incredible find I've made as I've been going through American literature so far this year.  Definitely recommended.

* The Quaker City or, The Monks of Monk Hall: A Romance of Philadelphia Life, Mystery and Crime by George Lippard

9780870239717
University of Massachusetts Press, 1995
originally published 1845
582 pp

paperback

"I Vonders how that’ll work"

I've been nibbling away at this novel for a while now and finished it just late last night. The Quaker City follows on the reading heels of Thompson's Venus in Boston of my reading lineup because I wanted to read another example of "city mysteries" that were so popular in their day.  Lippard's novel (according to David S. Reynolds in his Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the age of Emerson and Melville) sold

 "60,000 copies in its first year and an average of 30,000 a year for the next five years, becoming the best-selling novel written by an American before Uncle Tom's Cabin." (207)

Reynolds also calls it the "quintessential American Subversive text," and I'd add that it's probably the funniest work of early American fiction I've read so far this year.  It's also a twisted, sordid novel filled with debauchery, corruption,  sensationalism and some of the most vile characters you'd never want to meet. It is rather a mishmash of genres, and ranks high in the melodrama department.  Lippard got a chance to have his novel presented on the stage, but his hopes were quashed when, as Jamie Bridges notes in the Victorians Institute Journal Annex, the advertising started raising complaints:

"members of the public, some of whom were featured in the play, began to protest against its performance. It was one thing to read an exposé in the privacy of one’s home and something altogether different to have the characters brought to live (sic) in a public forum such as the Chestnut Street Theatre."

Evidently art too closely imitated life here -- parts of the story were based on a real-life case of 1843 in which a man seduced a sixteen year-old girl,"under false pretenses and allegedly lured her into a brothel and raped her." The girl's brother then killed him, went to court, and was acquitted due to reasons of insanity.  When the advertisements for the play based on The Quaker City went out, the brother (Singleton Mercer)  tried to buy two hundred tickets and threatened a riot if the show went on. According to Reynolds in the introduction to this novel, "threats were heard that the theater would be sacked or burned." (xiii).   The protest went as far as the mayor, who refused to let the play happen.

But enough of all that. Monk's Hall is a

"queer old house down town, kept by a reputable old lady, and supported by the purses of goodly citizens, whose names you never hear without the addition of 'respectable,' 'celebrated' or--ha--ha--'pious'..."

These are not the "outcasts of society," but rather "Here were lawyers from the court, doctors from the school and judges from the bench," one of the "vilest rookeries in the world."  It is run by a deformed pimp  who goes by the moniker of Devil-Bug, and to get into this hidden/secret establishment, you either have to come with a friend or know the secret password, which changes every day. It's sort of reminiscent of the old Hellfire clubs, but here there are trap doors in the floors, bodies in the cellar, and all sorts of devilment going on in the rooms upstairs.  The titular "monks" are made up of the above-mentioned pillars of society and while some are busy satisfying their physical lusts, gambling, or taking opium,  others spend their time drinking, "flinging their glasses on high, while the room echoed with their oaths and drunken shouts."

I'm not going to go into plot -- there are three major ones, a number of smaller ones and some subplots stemming from the three big ones so it would be nearly impossible in the amount of space & time that I have.  Suffice it to say that the book takes on several segments of Philadelphia society to expose the city's hidden hypocrisies, and Lippard really outdoes himself in lambasting Philadelphia's religious leaders as well as its media institutions,  financial institutions and wealthy merchants.

I said earlier that the book is also funny in parts -- and despite the sort of sleazy, gothic and often bewildering melodrama that's going on here, there are moments where I found myself actually giggling.  Just as one example, there is a wonderful little set piece that takes place in the lecture room of the True Believers and True Repenters, where the corpulent Parson F.A.T. Pyne (who to me has the distinction of being the most hypocritical person in this novel and who will later become the ultimate sleaziest, most disgusting and grossest  character therein) stands in his pulpit.  The subject is the True Believers' anti-Papist stance and old Syllaybub Scissors is recounting a story about the 10 crew members and twenty passengers of an American ship who'd decided to go and visit the pope after a visit to Naples.  All of them had tracts from the Patent-Gospellers association in their pockets. At their papal visit, they were "called upon to kiss the Pope's toe," refused, and were never heard of again, that is until some time later, an American stopped at the Bologna sausage factory that just happens to be next door to the Vatican.  There, upon ordering a large amount of sausage to be sent back home, he had one cut open and discovered "fragments" of Patent-Gospeller tracts within.  Then later, as a committee of Missionaries is selected to "go abroad to the Pope of Rome," to "allow the Pagan no peace," they are asked as a group

"Are you willing to defy the Inquisition in such a cause?  Are you willing to defy death -- are you willing to be made up in sausages, in such in a cause?" 

It's one of those things where you probably had to have been there, but it is actually laughworthy in its context, as are a number of different little episodes in this novel.  At the same time, there are scenes that are particularly loathsome, and none so more than Pyne's lusting after a woman raised as a child by Pyne and his wife.  Egad. Even there, once he's drugged her and is waiting for time to elapse while the drug has its effect, he's planning his next sermon.

The Quaker City is difficult to get into at first, but once I was past the first couple of chapters and caught on to how to read this book, it's actually quite fun. It's a dark novel filled with gothic elements including the secret mansion where members dress up in monk's cowls, take on different names,  and convene for debauchery. It is filled with secret rooms, trap doors, secret burial vaults, fallen women and those brought there to face ruination.   My guess is that this is another one that doesn't make it onto a majority of course syllabi for studying American writers, and that's a shame. For one thing, it is interesting that it was such a bestseller, offering a glimpse into what people were reading at the time; for another, it's Lippard's examination of a corrupt society and what makes it thus.  A lot of the issues he uncovers -- the buying of justice in the courts, the double standard between men and women, the hypocrisy of religion and religious leaders, and the corrupt power of financial institutions to name just a few, are still with us today. Funny how some things don't change over time, while others make leaps and bounds -- i.e., the roles and status of women, to be specific here.

I certainly wouldn't recommend this novel to everyone -- I read a LOT of weird stuff and this is among the strangest -- but for those who are at all interested in rather off the beaten path antebellum fiction, it just might provide a few hours of entertainment.  It will also provide an eye-opening look at what lies under the surface of the pillars of Philadelphia pre-Civil War society as seen through the eyes of this author, "an espouser of radical causes"  who "waged holy war against all kinds of social oppressors."  I will say, if you're in it solely for the sleaze value you'd be better off with Thompson's "City Crimes" in my edition of his Venus in Boston. Otherwise, it's another very welcome addition to my growing library of early American fiction.

*Venus in Boston and Other Tales of Nineteenth-Century Life, by George Thompson

978155849321

University of Massachusetts Press, 2002

391 pp

paperback

Now here's a book you probably won't find on your American literature course syllabus, which in my opinion, is just a shame.  Stick with your Melville; I love this stuff. Then again, I love pretty much anything off the beaten path.

This particular edition is actually three books in one volume: Venus in Boston: A Romance of City Life (1849), City Crimes: or Life in New York and Boston (1849) and My Life: or The Adventures of Geo. Thompson, Being the Auto-Biography of an Author, Written by Himself (1854).  As a whole I'd call it a mix of contemporary soft porn and sensation fiction; it also adds several elements of  gothic and of extremely lurid crime writing.  City Crimes, for example, takes its readers into secret tunnels under the streets of New York, into an entire world that is more or less what I think of when I hear the phrase "the bowels of hell."

Author George Thompson (1823-73)  among his other talents, was a writer of explicit  "pamphlet novels;" according to David Reynolds in his Beneath the American Renaissance, he "is reported to have written nearly a hundred novels, which enjoyed a lively sale in their day."  (219)  He also contributed titillating tales to a weekly newspaper of the 1850s called Venus' Miscellany, a page of which can be found here, discovered while looking at a page from the Princeton Library Website.  His books, termed "city mysteries"  were largely directed at the working class, and as Reynolds notes in the introduction to Venus in Boston, Thompson

 "catered to the antebellum public's thirst for sex and violence while exposing hypocrisy and corruption of the part of the nation's ruling class." 

After reading two of them, I'm not surprised that they "enjoyed a lively sale" ... sheesh!

 The first of these, Venus in Boston,  starts out with sweet, beautiful little orphan Fanny Aubrey selling fruit on the streets to support her younger brother and ailing grandfather who makes a small living as a basket maker.  On a slow day, she is found weeping by an older gent who takes pity on her and ultimately becomes acquainted with her family. This is Grimsby, who will also play a huge role in Fanny's life down the road.  On another day, Fanny becomes the object of pity of a young woman, who hands her "a bright gold coin." Sadly for our heroine, on her way home she has an encounter with a group of "apple girls," "usually from ten to fifteen years of age...proverbial for their vicious propensities and dishonesty."  They are also generally "brought up in vice from their infancy."  The worst of these girls is Sow Nance, a fifteen year old who pretends to feel badly for Fanny, and offers to take her to a "nice gentleman" who will buy all of the fruit in her basket.  Luckily, Fanny's virtue remains intact despite the nefarious plans of this "nice gentleman," but she becomes from then on the object of his lust.  But the real story begins after the death of Fanny's grandfather when she is sort of adopted into the family of the young girl who had earlier given her the gold coin.  That's when the reader begins to encounter one of the main themes that run throughout this book and the two others in this edition, as Thompson sets out to reveal what lies beneath the surface of both the ladies and gentlemen in his tales.  As he says in his City Crimes, 

"...we prefer to depict human nature as it is not as it should be..." 

and he has no qualms in getting right to the point.  There are the usual seducers and wolves in rich men's clothing to be found here, but there are also, as Reynolds notes in his introduction, women who are "unapologetic and open in their declarations of sexual desire."  More than once characters appear who are left sexually unsatisfied by their husbands; there are "fallen" women as well as upper-class, gentile women "whose sexual hunger is virtually insatiable." Here, women's sexuality definitely constitutes both power and danger,  but at least Thompson brings it out into the open. Women's sexual desire and their openness about it runs through both novels, but much more so in City Crimes, where Thompson lets his characters run with it. City Crimes, by the way, is the much racier of the two; Thompson really outdoes himself in that one.  

from gutenborg.org, in Venus in Boston, by George Thompson

Reynolds points out that in these books are to be found

"a wealth of images of women and female sexuality as well as of a variety of ethnic groups, including African Americans, Jews, and Irish and German immigrants,"

which are most definitely "often sexist, racist, and anti-Semitic," but he cautions not to discount these "city mysteries," which are, as he notes, a "witch's brew of crime, eroticism and social protest."  He offers a number of reasons, of which I'll discuss three. First, in terms of scholarship, they are texts that can be viewed as a "valuable source of popular conceptions of class identity and class relations in this period." Second, many well-known authors (citing Melville, Poe and Hawthorne as just three examples) were "influenced" by this sort of thing, and finally, reading these texts reveals that there's another side to the sexism and racism in these tales -- they often add to an "understanding of social injustice" of the time.

 I do see that here, but at the same time, I can see how these books would be tough to read given modern attitudes, so I'd say give them a try and try to look at them as an example of antebellum literature, given the attitudes of the day. There were so many parts that went so over the top in terms of melodrama that you can't help but laugh or at least do the eyeroll, but I will say that I'm happy to have read it, as a) it seems to be a rather obscure book and b) it's always interesting to know what people were reading at the time.

Tread slowly -- and take into consideration the cultural/historical context of this novel if you pick it up.

*The Confidence-Man, by Herman Melville

9780140445473
Penguin, 1990
351 pp
(originally published 1857)

paperback

"Something further may follow of this Masquerade."

Oy.

That nice little word that describes so much in such a short breath  represents the long and short of how I feel about reading The Confidence-Man.  I had such a good time with the first part of this book, but by the time it was over I was ready to be done with it.  My reasoning behind choosing this novel was that it all took place along the Mississippi River, a setting further west than my reading's taken me to this point.

The action in this book takes place in one day, most notably on April 1, so right at the outset you get the idea that some sort of mayhem might be in store. The setting is a journey from St. Louis to New Orleans aboard a riverboat called Fidèle.  As the introduction states, "The Mississipi is the artery of trade and commerce, the symbol of manifest destiny, as well as the division between slave states and free;" the ship itself, with its landings, embarkations and disembarkations, is a great vehicle for bringing all manner of people together, most of whom are likely never to meet again.   But it also calls our attention to the different types of people on board, the "Anacharsis Cloots congress of that multiform pilgrim species, man," which together with the riverboat, signify the

 "dashing and all-fusing spirit of the West, whose type is the Mississippi itself, which, uniting the streams of the most distant and opposite zones, pours them along, helter-skelter, in one cosmopolitan and confident tide." 

 The first part focuses on a series of encounters between various confidence men and the people who ended up as their victims; the second part (chapter 24 onward) dispenses with the ongoing series of scam artists and centers on just one main character, Frank Goodman, aka "The Cosmopolitan."  However, it is pretty easy to figure out that the confidence-men at work aboard the Fidèle just might be the same man, hence one meaning of the subtitle "His Masquerade." He has several incarnations, including a "grotesque negro cripple" named Guinea, the president and transfer-agent for a coal company, a solicitor of donations for the recently-founded Seminole Widows and Orphans society, an herb doctor who pushes his "Omni-Balsamic Reinvigorator;" still another has a grand plan for taxing everyone to support a World Charity as a measure of bringing a "Wall Street spirit" to the act of charity, and the list goes on.  The main thing about this character, despite his many iterations, is that he manages to sucker both trusting and distrusting passengers -- he is saying in effect that if they distrust him, it only goes to prove that they are suspicious toward all other human beings, and that is really no way to exist. Conversely, if they have a trusting nature toward all men, then they must naturally trust him. Distrusters, as Frank Goodman ironically notes, "stab at the very soul of confidence."

A number of contemporary social issues come to the fore in this novel -- slavery, the public's reliance on and confidence placed in patent medicine, man vs. the machine in the growth of industrialization, philanthropic  reforms to help better society's ills, and capitalism, to name a few. The frontier experience is also touched on here, as for example in the story of the "Indian-hater," where it seems that the author expounds on the thin line that separates civilization from "savagery, although I have to say that it's tough to believe any of these stories-within-a-story at face value.  Melville also takes a few digressions away from his story to bring his readers into his thoughts on  fiction writing, most especially about the creation of characters, but perhaps even more important are his ideas regarding truth.     I also get the sense that through the figure of the Confidence-man himself,  the author is trying to show the disconnect between appearance and reality.  Applied to an increasingly-growing nation, this could signify his concerns about the "masquerade" going on in American life.  It might also be that he sees some sort of existential crisis facing the nation as beliefs slip and slide.  The back-cover blurb also gives a clue, saying that The Confidence Man

"finds form for the idea that, if our beliefs are shifting and uncertain, we at least have fiction."

Since I'm not a true Melville aficionado (and to me, that's an okay thing)  I know I didn't even touch the surface of what lays underneath in this novel, so let me point you to a few people who actually know what they're talking about and whose opinions are way better than mine:

"The Grotesque in Melville's Confidence-Man", Dale Jones

Uncredited, "The Confidence-Man" from Columbia University

Lauren Mathews, "The Wild Goose Chase for Consistency in the Confidence Man" 

Zack Friedman, "Prose and Cons" 

Anyway, when all is said and done, I'm glad I read it, but it's definitely not a favorite. Quite frankly, it was exhausting and I'm still not sure that I came away with any sort of deep understanding.  But I finished it, and that's a major achievement when all I really wanted to do was put it down.  I give myself pats on the back. 

*Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself, by Robert Montgomery Bird

9781590172292
NYRB Classics, 2008
originally published 1836
425 pp

paperback

Moving back to the 1830s once again,  this has to be one of the more bizarre novels I've come across from the early 1800s, but well worth it if for nothing else, the picaresque adventures of Sheppard Lee as he moves his soul/spirit/self into body after body.  According to Wikipedia, the term "picaresque" derives from the Spanish term "pícaro," or "rascal' " and there is really no better way to describe the star of this novel.  And before I go any further, a lot has been made about the racism in this novel, but the thing is, I wouldn't have expected anything different, considering the author. Robert Montgomery Bird was an anti-abolitionist, and this fact is reflected in the pro-slavery stance taken in this book.  More later on that; for now I'll just say that in Sheppard Lee, Bird manages to find something to say about people in every section of society of the time.

The titular character is a sort of grown-up ne'er do well who is left a prosperous estate upon the death of his father.  Because he is so lazy and doesn't tend to things he needs to do, the long and short of it is that he loses pretty much everything his father had worked so hard for.  Because he wants a quick out, eventually he gets the idea to go and dig up some legendary pirate treasure said to be buried close to his farm. An unfortunate accident while doing so leaves Lee in a sort of a trance; when he awakens, he looks down at

"...that eidolon, or representative, or duplicate of me, that was stretched on the grass" 

and realizes that he's actually looking at his own corpse. Running off in an unsuccessful effort to find help, he returns to the scene and his body has vanished, with only a "torn and bloody" shoe remaining.  As luck would have it, a certain Squire Higginson with whom Lee has had words, has also met his end, setting Lee to thinking:

"Why might I not, that is to say, my spirit, -- deprived by an unhappy accident of its natural dwelling, -- claim, and thus uniting interests together, as two feeble factions unite together in the political world, become a body possessing life, strength and usefulness?"

In short, Lee decides that it would be a good thing to "inhabit" Higginson's body -- and wishes it so. Soon he finds himself in the now-reanimated body of the Squire -- congratulating himself because now he is a "respectable man, with my pockets full of money."  But through a series of adventures, Higginson's body is just the first stop on Lee's soul/self/spirit journey (and I learned a new word to define this concept -- metempsychosis)  -- and along the way he moves into various bodies whose owners all have one big thing in common:  their lives are centered around money, each desiring to improve his own situation either through speculating, credit, expectations of good inheritances, or marrying into a better station.  Lee lives quite a few different lives and in each one, makes a number of discoveries as he seeks out happiness. The novel is a satire and serves to skewer familiar types of the period:  the dandy who plays a great game yet has not even a penny, a moneylender whose miserly qualities are very well known, an abolitionist philanthropist who spends his life trying to help the less fortunate and who does so ultimately at his own expense. What lesson does he ultimately learn? I leave that for the reader to discover.

the author, Robert Montgomery Bird

Now, getting to the modern reader's problematical issue of race in this novel,  here's where knowing even a little about American history can be a good thing. Personally, I look at this section as a sort of reflection of the fears that grabbed hold of many slave owners after the famous Nat Turner's rebellion, and indeed those of Robert Montgomery Bird as well.  Furthermore, as noted above, Bird himself was against abolition, so it's no surprise to me that he wrote this particular section the way he did.  In one book I looked at that made mention of Bird, Gender and Race in Antebellum Popular Culture,  the author notes Bird writing in his diary regarding slave uprisings that

"Someday we shall have it...and future generations will perhaps remember the horrors of Haiti as a farce compared with the tragedies of our own happy land." 

 If you look at the time in which this book was written, it had only been five years since the Nat Turner insurrection, which led to

"tightened restrictions on African Americans. Over the course of two days, dozens of whites were killed as Turner's band of insurrectionists, which eventually numbered over fifty, moved systematically from plantation to plantation in Southampton County. Most of the rebels were executed along with countless other African Americans who were suspected, often without cause, of participating in the conspiracy."  [link here]

It also led to false reporting of other slave insurrections that in reality never occurred, and a growing fear among white people that "slaves all over the state were secretly plotting to rebel and kill them."  When Sheppard Lee leaves the body of the abolitionist, he enters into the body of Tom the slave, who lives on a plantation in Virginia. The owner is shown here to be kindly, but he also takes a rather paternalistic point of view toward his slaves, an attitude in which slavery was not viewed as "an institution of brute force, but of responsible dominion over a less fortunate, less evolved people." Indeed, as Tom, things seem to go well, until an abolitionist pamphlet  falls into the hands of his fellow slaves.  Two of them try to figure out the text, but end up pantomiming a picture of other slaves being whipped by their master; this in turn leads to an uprising against Tom's master.  It's not at all pretty, moving into the downright deplorable zone, but I can get where Bird is coming from, given his pro-slavery stance.

All in all, though, as I said, Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself is a satire that not only takes on various types of people but also takes on the political situation under Jackson.  As was also the case with Hooper's Adventures of Captain Suggs, speculation runs rampant, and this novel reflects nearly each step of  Lee's travels via metempsychosis as a way in which he  plays the speculation game, gambling each time on a better life.

I laughed through a lot of this novel, at least until I reached the part where Lee jumps into Tom's body and things go terribly wrong; the rest of the book is actually quite funny and Sheppard Lee is a character I'll definitely remember.  As I said at the outset, this novel is one of the most bizarre I've read so far as I make my way through early American fiction, and I'd certainly recommend it as one not to miss as yet another  window into America's history via the medium of the novel.

*The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne

0192833715
Oxford World's Classics, 1998
originally published 1850
302 pp

paperback

If you look at a random reader review of this novel, one of the first things you're apt to see is that The Scarlet Letter was assigned in someone's literature class in high school.  I wasn't that lucky (I took a more classical route -- Shakespeare, the Greeks, etc.)  but then again, I may not have appreciated it as much as I do now, having just read it. I can see why a lot of readers might be turned off of this book -- the language is on the archaic side (lots of thees, thys and thous) -- but once you get past that hurdle, there is an excellent story here.  It is a dark tale that kept me mesmerized for four days, once completely through the night until the sun came up.  If you've ever had an empty feeling (meaning you wanted more) upon turning the final page, well, that's exactly how I felt when I'd finished. I LOVED this book.  I LOVED Hester Prynne.

Since this plot is so well known, I won't rehash it here.  Once again I happened to choose a novel that has been very well covered in academia, and one which can be examined from several perspectives, including  themes, characters, and symbolism. Go look it up -- there are a huge number of scholarly works on this novel (as well as some pretty awful high school essays to be avoided at all cost).  If you haven't yet figured out my reading raison d'etre,  I move right into the psychology of the individual, especially the darker side of human nature, and this book is a goldmine.

Hester Prynne on the scaffold facing the townsfolk before going back to prison.

The Scarlet Letter is an example of an American romance.  That does not at all mean the Harlequin variety,  but rather it is a way of writing  that deals more with internal truths rather than recreating external ones.  Here's a very brief description:

The term ‘Romance’ is frequently used to talk about a particular type of prose which has been considered as the distinctive voice of American fiction. As opposed to the realistic English novel of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Trollope, Elliot or Thackeray (or Tolstoi, or Balzac, or Galdós for all that matter) the American Romance is more emotional and symbolic, less realistic and less structured than the novel. The protagonists of the Romance are heroic, mythical figures, typically lonely individuals facing dark forces which in some mysterious ways grow out of their deep unconscious selves. Frequently the hero dies in the end. Setting is not used realistically, but as a space that recreates the psychological world of the characters. Hawthorne defined it as “a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with nature of the other”. Through Romance, a fiction is created to expose the inner truth of a real situation.

In writing this book the way he did, Hawthorne was able to come up with a story set some two centuries in his past, allowing him the freedom to examine how human nature may have functioned under the repressive hand of the Puritans. Here he employs different perspectives to relate his tale; he also, as with other romance writers of his time, uses symbolism in nature to great effect.  His darker thematic concerns include alienation, isolation, and hypocrisy among others, and he does such an excellent job of revealing just how these forces worked on the main characters to make them who they are.

It is truly a shame that so many people dislike this book, because it is seriously one of the best I've had the pleasure to read this year.  If you read it slowly, you will discover that rather than it being "boring" or "a yawn" (as some readers have described it), it  is actually a beautiful and human story that I will never forget as long as I live.  If you read it in high school, you might want to go back and read it again, this time slowly. It is worth every second of time you give to it.  Now I'm hoping I'll find something equally as good from around this time...this book has set the bar.

*in which we move away from New England and head south: Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, Late of the Tallapoosa Volunteers, by Johnson Jones Hooper

0817307060
University of Alabama Press, 1993
(originally published 1844)
201 pp
[paperback]

and speaking of Edgar Allan Poe, he actually read and wrote a brief blurb about The Life and Adventures of Captain Suggs (as it was called in Poe's time) in the journal Aristidean (1845) saying the following:

"We sat down to this book quietly; read, laughed — read, and laughed again. There is more true, indigenous humor in this, than anything we have yet seen, from the American press...Captain SUGGS is a man of metal — "yea! an honest, incorruptible — very jewel of a fellow." 

This "jewel of a fellow" went by the motto of "It is good to be shifty in a  new country," meaning, as the author explains, that "it is right and proper that one should live as merrily and as comfortably as possible at the expense of others."  And this is precisely what Captain Simon Suggs does throughout his life, from his teen years on.  In fact, this con artist pulled his first major scam against his own dad, a Baptist preacher.   Adventures of Captain Suggs is a chronicle of Suggs' adventures along the Tallapoosa in Alabama, and we read along as Suggs gets into predicament after predicament, always getting the better of someone and making a dollar or two in the process.  But we're not here just to see how much trouble Suggs can stir up for himself or others.

 The introduction to this book states that this book "flagrantly satirizes the Democrats, and especially former President Andrew Jackson, a lightning rod for the formation of the Whig party."  The entire collection of Suggs stories in this volume is framed as a "campaign biography," in which the editor appeals to the "Men of Tallapoosa" at the end:

"...we have done! Suggs is before you! We have endeavoured to give the prominent events of his life with accuracy and impartiality. If you deem that he has "done the state some service," remember that he seeks the Sheriffalty of your county. He waxes old. He needs an office, the emoluments of which shall be sufficient to enable him to relax his intellectual exertions. His military services; his numerous family; his long residence among you; his gray hairs -- all plead for him! Remember him at the polls!"

Trust me. After reading this book, Suggs would be the last man on earth to get my vote for the "Sheriffalty" of my county.

 His creator, Jefferson Jones Hooper, started writing his Suggs stories in 1844, publishing them first in the East Alabamian, where he served as editor.  The motto of Jones' newspaper was " We stand upon the broad platform of Whig principles," so with that as a clue, it's not too difficult to figure out as you start to wade into the book that Adventures of Captain Suggs is meant to be a flat-out satire. But even (as in my case)  if you know little to nothing about Jacksonian democracy, you may still find yourself mildly chuckling while reading  these little stories, although quite honestly they were probably much funnier in their day.

*Poe's only novel: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

9781551118383
Broadview Press, 2010
[originally published 1838]
294 pp

paperback

While very  unlike the other American novels I've read so far, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is Poe's only novel, and while I should probably post about it at my oddly weird fiction section of my online journal, it is an example of  a 19th-century  American novel so the post is also appropriate here. The first time through it some years ago, I was downright incensed with the elements of racism that appear here; this time through (while having read a lot of scholarly works about this book in the meantime)  it became a totally different book.

the story:
Disguised as a genuine narrative, the story begins in earnest when young Pym's friend Augustus Barnard urges him to travel on the Grampus, a ship captained by Barnard's father. Pym's mother and grandfather are opposed to him going, with the granddad threatening to cut him off financially if he even brought up the topic again. So, typical teenagers that they are (despite what happens later), Pym and Augustus set up a scheme to fool Pym's parents to explain away his absence -- and Arthur stows away in the ship's hold in a clever set up designed to provide him access to Arthur's cabin once the ship is underway. After quite some time of hiding out alone in the dark, he comes to realize that things have taken an unfortunate turn on the Grampus in the form of a mutiny.  This is when things really get going here.  The mutiny sparks another mutiny, as the crew takes sides and set the captain adrift on the seas; fortunately for our narrator, Augustus is spared and at a timely moment, Pym reveals himself and  things start to settle down. However, the fate of the Grampus and those remaining is far from settled -- starvation, storms, sharks, and even a visit from the Flying Dutchman all help to contribute to the ship's ultimate demise.  The two who remain are picked up join the crew of the Jane Guy, starting another entire series of adventures which take our erstwhile narrator and his companion down into the Antarctic, going further south than any other expedition in history.  There, along with other wonders the crew has never seen, they discover the tropical island (yes, I did say tropical) of Tsalal, along with its very black native population, who have a strange fear of anything white.  

Since the first time I read this book some years ago,  I've done a lot of reading about it and I've discovered that even Poe scholars can't agree on what to make of it. Dana D. Nelson in her The Word in Black and White: Reading "Race" in American Literature, 1638-1867 notes that

"Readings of Pym range widely, from psychoanalytic exploration to social satire, from self-referential commentary on writing (or reading) to a metacritical demonstration of utter absence of meaning. Those commenting on the text apparently cannot reach any consensus or 'thrust toward uniformity,'..."

Depending on which/whose critique/analysis you read, Poe's Pym is either a seagoing take on the American push for frontier expansion, an interior journey into the self, a quest novel (vis-a-vis Harold Bloom's definition, mentioned in this edition's introduction, [27])  a "jeremiad of the evils of slavery" or "covert statement of Southern racist ideology" [29], and it has even been noted as  (in part) a story of thwarted colonialism (from Mat Johnson's hilarious novel Pym ).  Author Toni Morrison  also argues re Poe's work that "no early American writer is more important to the concept of American Africanism than Poe because of the focus on the symbolism of black and white in Poe's novel." 

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is a strange but interesting little book. According to that online font of knowledge called Wikipedia, Poe himself called this "a silly little book," and in some ways he's definitely right. It is way over the top and as one goodreads reviewer puts it, the "elephant in the room" of racism is definitely there. [as an aside, whether Poe was/was not a racist is still a matter of debate in scholarly circles.] After having read it, I can see why there are so many different interpretations of this novel (you can also add in bildungsroman), but in my opinion, no matter how you read it, it is much like many of Poe's other works, largely concerned with confronting the self in terms of other (if nothing else, the scene where he is disguised as a a dead man and can't recognize himself in the mirror is a huge clue), and ultimately destabilization of the self that follows as a result. In the end, though I believe it's a novel best appreciated on an individual basis -- I mean, seriously, if vast numbers of scholars over the last 100-plus years can't agree about the nature of Pym, how can there be any definitive interpretation? 

A brief word about this book: for anyone remotely interested in further studies of Poe's Pym, this particular edition from Broadview Press is a good place to start.  The narrative is extensively footnoted, and there are three appendices -- "Sources for the Novel", "Contemporary Reviews," and "Other Writers' Responses to Pym"  (Melville, Beaudelaire, Jules Verne, and Henry James).  There's even a map of Pym's travels (which is reproduced here in a bit of blur but you get the gist) as well as an extensive research bibliography.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is definitely very different in terms of American novels, but definitely worth a read and then a reread.