Literature, American Style. Ezra Tawil
with the natural sublime in British criticism and the stock settings of gothic fiction: high cliffs and deep chasms, cataracts and obscure recesses. What I call Brown’s “aesthetic fallacy”—the deliberately cultivated illusion that the natural world produces particular literary effects—served symbolically to dispel this anxiety of influence by displacing the author function onto the landscape itself and concealing the elaborate labor of adapting British gothic for a putatively new national mode. In so doing, he also linked this set of topographical features to a stylistic gambit, crafting a prose style that flaunted a kind of sublime “irregularity” meant to lift its readers to precipitous and dizzying aesthetic heights. The particular manner in which Brown brought the gothic novel across the Atlantic thus resulted in a curious paradox: if, from a certain perspective, “American gothic” could be nothing but an imitation of the European model, there was nonetheless a powerful illusion that the copy exceeded the originality of the original.
I turn in Chapter 4 to the American seduction plots of the period, in both their theatrical and fictional forms. Works such as Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1791), Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette (1797), and Royall Tyler’s play The Contrast (1787), though known more for their moral and political arguments than for their aesthetic impact, in fact made strong and influential arguments about the unadorned virtues of plain American speech and writing. While these stories posed the same character oppositions as the British seduction plot—between the double-tongued Chesterfieldian seducer and the plainspoken man of feeling, or the parallel opposition between the elegant and artful highborn woman and the artless beauty of the virtuous “fair”—American authors refigured them as the opposition between European and American character and language, marking the latter as a more authentic mode of expression. In doing so, they recruited the “plain style,” which was in fact an expressive mode with a long European genealogy, as the basis of a putatively American way of speaking or writing. In this way, the American seduction story repackaged manifestly borrowed literary materials as unique signs of national originality.
CHAPTER 1
To Form a More Perfect Language
Noah Webster’s American-Style English
Purity of style consists in the use of such words, and such constructions, as belong to the idiom of the language which we speak; in opposition to words and phrases that are taken from other languages, or that are ungrammatical, obsolete, new-coined, or used without proper authority…. The introduction of foreign and learned words, unless where necessity requires them, should never be admitted into our composition. Barren languages may need such assistance, but ours is not one of these. A multitude of Latin words, in particular, have, of late, been poured in upon our language. On some occasions, they give an appearance of elevation and dignity to style; but they often render it stiff and apparently forced. In general, a plain, native style, is more intelligible to all readers; and, by a proper management of words, it can be made as strong and expressive as this Latinised English, or any foreign idioms.
—Lindley Murray, English Grammar
Making a Difference
In the late 1780s, Noah Webster began to represent national linguistic distinction both as an aspirational goal and as an historical inevitability in North America: “Whatever predilection the Americans may have for their native European tongues, and particularly the British descendants for the English, yet several circumstances render a future separation of the American tongue from the English, necessary and unavoidable.”1 On the one hand, “unavoidable”: linguistic differentiation was a future certainty. On the other hand, “necessary”: it was imperative that Americans somehow catalyze that ineluctable process and ensure that it unfolds in a properly regulated fashion. In his seminal treatment of American English, David Simpson identifies Noah Webster as the foremost of the first wave of “linguistic pioneers” of a recognizably American English that would not really exist until around 1850.2 For all of that, Webster did not set out to create a new vernacular or even a distinct dialect of English; his reforms focused on the creation of what Simpson calls a new “linguistic practice, if not quite a language.”3 Webster’s boldest and most counterintuitive idea was that the abstract problem of forming a new national cultural identity might find a strangely concrete and technical solution: this broad social transformation could be accomplished merely by inventing a new system of English spelling. A few simple alterations in orthography would change everything. “This will startle those who have not attended to the subject,” he granted, but the institution of such seemingly humble linguistic reforms was in reality “an object of vast political consequence.”4 Its “capital advantage,” simply put, would be to “make a difference between the English orthography and the American.”5
But why spelling? Of all the ways to approach language reform and all the realms of linguistic practice one could target, why focus on orthography? It was not just that new spellings were a clearly visible and immediately apprehensible way to “make a difference” between American and British English. There was a more fundamental reason that it had to be orthographic reform. Spelling represented change at the right level of the language: it was not merely superficial, and yet it was not deeply substantial. Spelling reform went to work at this middle register between surface and depth, form and content. To change “the mode of spelling”:6 something of this order was literally required by the nature of Webster’s national linguistic project. Once he committed to modifying the existing English language rather than building a new one from the ground up, Webster had to find a way to alter the manner in which the language was used, without discarding the actual materials of that language. What was needed, in short, was a modal change.
This is why a book about “style” as the anchoring concept of American literary exceptionalism might begin with Webster, who was not a literary figure but a language reformer—and not even the most innovative one of his time. For the modal logic at which Webster arrived is the linguistic analogue of the concept of literary style. In each case, something borrowed is said to have been rearticulated as something new. Webster’s technical solution to the problem of American English—though we might do better to call it “American-style English,” by analogy with American-style democracy or Soviet-style socialism—thus put into circulation a set of critical concepts about the nature of transatlantic emulation-cum-innovation that literary producers would need to describe their own sense of the relationship between English literary culture and its American imitations.
* * *
Because Webster called so powerfully for “the Americans” to manufacture linguistic distance from “their parent country,”7 he has long been a symbol of the so-called cultural declaration of independence supposed to have begun around the end of the eighteenth century.8 One quotation from his 1783 letter to John Canfield, for example, has become ubiquitous in scholarly and popular writing about the period: “America must be as independent in literature as she is in politics, as famous for arts as for arms.”9 As for his linguistic works of the late 1780s—most notably Dissertations on the English Language along with its oft-quoted appendix, “An Essay on the Necessity, Advantages, and Practicality of Reforming the Mode of Spelling”—they, too, are easily mined for such stirring cultural-nationalist declarations.10 Webster has thus become a poster boy for the brand of nationalism associated with what I have called the “Anglophobia thesis” in historiography, with all of its oedipal undertones. After all, was not his cry for the “separation of the American tongue from the English” just such a revolt against paternal law at the level of language itself? Did not his system of spelling add up to a declaration of “orthographic independence” (as Jill Lepore calls it)?11 David Simpson, having some fun with this same revolutionary analogy, quips that “it was to prove more difficult to declare independence from Samuel Johnson than it had been to reject George III.”12 Yet we must guard against the presumption, however playfully expressed in these cases, that linguistic