A “Wild and Ambiguous Medium”: Democracy, Interiority, and the Early American Epistolary Novel

Abstract

AbstractThis essay argues that early American novelists’ sustained commitment to epistolary fiction reflects their recognition that the mediated access it offered to inner life made it a potent vehicle for highlighting the limits of our ability to decipher the concealed interiorities of other people. Faced with the question of how novels might best prepare readers for republican social and political life, novelists such as Charles Brockden Brown and Susanna Rowson turned to this increasingly outmoded form because it foregrounded the uncertainties inherent in reading inner life. Eschewing third-person fiction’s fantasy of direct access to another mind, these novels foster an epistemological humility regarding other interiorities that would be valuable in negotiating civic life in the early republic. While early American novels have long been regarded as encouraging sympathetic identification as a means of establishing political union, novels such as Brown’s Clara Howard and Rowson’s Sincerity instead harness the epistolary novel’s partial, uncertain revelations of interiority to highlight our inability to access fully someone else’s thoughts or feelings. These novels warn readers that successfully navigating the epistemological challenges of this new democratic social order requires resisting the fantasy that another person’s true feelings can ever be fully known.Rowson and Brown saw epistolary novels as a means of not just teaching Americans how to read inner life, but also of cautioning them that they could never do so with certainty.