Literature, American Style. Ezra Tawil
Webster’s linguistic project was entirely of its political and cultural time and place. The 1780s was the decade in which “American English” first emerged as a cultural question that demanded some accounting and theorization.13 In 1781, the Scottish American educator John Witherspoon first coined the term “Americanism”—by analogy to the existing term “Scotticism”—to refer to the linguistic departures from the British standard that were starting to proliferate in North America.14 In 1782, Robert Ross produced an American Grammar, followed in 1785 by his New American Spelling Book.15 The timing of all this is surely no coincidence. The ongoing military conflict with Britain at the turn of the decade had lent the matter of American English cultural and political charge; after the formal declaration of peace in 1783 it came to seem even more urgent; and the question was simply unavoidable after the establishment of the federal government of the United States in 1787. In 1788, Benjamin Rush laid out a “Plan for a Federal University” in which he emphasized the central importance of “philology” as a subject for the new nation: “our intercourse must soon cease with the bar, the stage, and the pulpits of Great-Britain, from whence we received our knowledge of the pronunciation of the English language. Even modern English books should cease to be the models of stile in the United States.”16 That same year, the Philological Society of New York was formed “for the purpose of ascertaining and improving the American Tongue.”17 From the federal to the local, then, this question seemed to be everywhere at the end of the 1780s. Webster’s own work was thus perfectly suited to, and clearly shaped by, this milieu. In 1787, Webster tellingly renamed part one of his earlier Grammatical Institute of the English Language from its former title, An Accurate Standard of Pronunciation (as he had called it in 1783), to the American Spelling Book, thus rebranding it along the lines of the nationalist spellers of Ross and others.18 And while (as I will emphasize in this chapter) his proposed linguistic reforms were guided by a coherent linguistic philosophy, at times his rhetoric suggested that it was merely the production of “difference”—perhaps any difference at all—that was paramount: “As a nation, we have a very great interest in opposing the introduction of any plan of uniformity with the British language, even were the plan proposed perfectly unexceptionable.”19
What else would we want to call this, then, if not a linguistic declaration of independence? It is an understandable temptation, but as I shall insist in the pages that follow, a more careful consideration of Webster’s plan, its fuller contemporary context, and its historical predecessors tells a rather different story. Certainly his writing is full of highly quotable nationalist slogans, but the arguments in which these declarations are embedded are far less Anglophobic and far more deferential to transatlantic cultural authority than is commonly acknowledged. The trick is not to mistake slogans for theses. Particularly in the 1780s, the young Webster was not at all shy about cranking up the rhetorical winch when he wanted a point to hold maximum tension. Rhetorical bravado aside, however, Webster’s project for linguistic reform was ultimately animated not by static nationalist oppositions but by a deeply dialectical understanding of transatlantic cultural relations, the balance between tradition and innovation, and the interplay of cultural adoption and adaptation. Webster’s invectives against “our rage for imitating the errors of foreigners,”20 for example, may appear to be motivated by a revolutionary animus against British models as a bar to national originality—and it may even be fair to say that Webster himself was invoking and manipulating that animus for rhetorical purposes—but as I will demonstrate, he understood transatlantic emulation as such to be a neutral and inevitable fact of American life. Anglo-Americans simply needed to ensure that they imitated the proper models, and imitated those models properly. Once we begin to take account of these complexities, Webster’s linguistic project begins to look less like post-Revolutionary cultural nationalism par excellence and more like a layering of post-Revolutionary rhetoric atop a much older problem of standardizing English spelling. By returning Webster’s argument to the context of transatlantic debates about language and grammar in the second half of the eighteenth century, and by reconnecting that modern debate to a much older British conversation about the English language stretching back to the Renaissance, this chapter views Webster’s linguistic nationalism against a richer and more multidimensional background, and by doing so recovers some of its lost nuances.
To begin with, while Webster may have been the most important of the American language reformers, he was by no means the most radical. This much-vaunted linguistic pioneer was in fact rather conservative in his approach to the question of what American language could look like. What first bears remarking upon is a fact so obvious it may almost be neglected: Webster determined that, in order to form a distinctly “American” language, he would have to begin with English in the first place. Though, to be more precise about it, Webster didn’t really make the case for American English so much as he made the case appear to make itself: English, he tells us early in Dissertations, was “the inheritance which the Americans have received from their British parents.”21 Webster thus treated it as a foregone conclusion that “English is the common root or stock from which our national language will be derived.”22 Yet by referencing, with equal matter-of-factness, the “predilection the Americans may have for their native European tongues,”23 he also acknowledged the fact that “the Americans” in 1789 were a polyglot population with multiple national origins. I will have more to say later about this cultural situation and what Webster did to address it. For the moment, my point is simply that it was not inconceivable to him that the national language might end up being built on a basis other than English; it was just highly undesirable.
This is the side of the story that Leonard Tennenhouse will not allow us to forget in his discussion of the post-Revolutionary language debates in The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750-1850.24 Anglo-American language reformers like Webster were not attempting to cut the American language off from English, Tennenhouse emphasizes. In a sense, Webster’s goal was the same as that of late eighteenth-century British language reformers like Samuel Johnson: to “stabilize English usage.”25 This approach to the question of American language thus illustrates Tennenhouse’s “diaspora” argument in miniature: Anglo-American culture before and after the very moment of political independence conceived of itself as a branch of a British diaspora, which is to say, it was intent on reproducing the characteristic elements of English culture outside of England. Webster’s project of perfecting American English would certainly seem to be a clear case in point. Yet, as I will argue here, his dream of a distinctly American English also indulged a cultural fantasy of autochthony, despite a cultural reality that looks more like diaspora. As Webster saw it, the English “root or stock,”26 once transplanted to American soil, would reach downward and tap somehow into the primitive Saxon past of the English people, their culture, and its language. According to this strange, seemingly illogical, and yet culturally powerful argument (which I will explore in detail later in this chapter), American English would thus replicate a more original and primordial form of the language than currently existed in Britain itself. Naturally, none of this could occur if Americans rejected English outright; instead they ought to seek to perfect it.
This was by no means a universal presumption. While Webster was focusing his efforts on reconfiguring the system of English spelling, others among his contemporaries proposed building the American language on a basis other than English. One curious notion in circulation at the time, and often mentioned ever since, was the possibility of establishing Greek or Hebrew as the national language.27 It is doubtful that the idea was actually ever seriously considered for adoption, but we can understand why it made for such a good story: such a move would have ensured maximum separation from English, yet without sacrificing the undeniable prestige of an established language. On the other hand, the often-referenced proposal to adopt an indigenous North American language such as Iroquois or Algonquian was almost certainly apocryphal,28 but here again, that only makes its logic more telling: in one stroke, it would have achieved linguistic distance from the metropole, which in itself was merely a negative distinction, while also grounding a positive claim of American autochthony or indigeneity. Webster, as we shall see, would cut his own peculiar path to that claim, even though his starting point was the “inherited” English language.
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