One of the most thoughtful and provocative thinkers on this development was the Soviet literary theorist M.M. Bakhtin. According to Bakhtin, the novel was heir to the epic—grand oral or written narratives such as the Iliad or the Assyrian legend of Gilgamesh. Such stories usually articulated a national tradition; they described collective social experiences and were set in a distant past peopled with heroic characters. The novel, by contrast, explores ordinary life, plumbs a character’s personal and even psychological dimensions, and has a strong sense of contingency: unlike epics, novels posit a world where events can unfold any number of ways, and derive interest from the very uncertainty as to how they will turn out. This sense of contingency, and the presence of a particular writer looming over the proceedings, makes novels, in Bakhtin’s terms, “dialogic.”22
Some important consequences resulted from this cultural matrix. First, unlike mature forms such as the epic, the early novel had no fixed aesthetic, no hardened hierarchic sense of what an ideal version should be like. It invigorated older forms, creating new possibilities even as it borrowed motifs and themes. Novels endowed poetry and drama with a new sense of realism, for example, even as they took old plots and rearranged them to tell different stories. A similar process appeared again later, when novels did begin to formalize and develop hierarchial values, and upstart forms like film began the process all over again.
In early modern Europe and colonial America, the novel had tremendous subversive potential. Like folklore and satire (two cultural streams Bakhtin argues contributed to its formation), novels often critiqued the social order, but their widespread availability, coupled with the privacy in which they could be read, made their reach unprecedented.
English imports exercised an exclusive monopoly before the Revolution and continued to dominate the scene for decades afterward. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1760-1767), were early favorites. With their realistic descriptions, and their occasional bawdiness, these books offended some but enthralled many.
Perhaps the most popular novelist in the colonies was Samuel Richardson. His Pamela (1740-1741), an upward mobility tale about a servant girl who becomes a lady, and Clarissa Harlowe (1747-1748), the story of a woman who falls from grace for having sex with her fiancé, affirmed traditional pieties. Indeed, Clarissa became a prototype for a series of seduction tales that littered the U.S. literary landscape through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Read today, these stories seem humorously, even an-noyingly, quaint. Their dogged insistence on the necessity of female virginity testifies to powerful constraints on womens’ lives at the time and reveal patterns of patriarchy that continue today, from warnings about promiscuity to the economic and sexual double standards that remain facts of life for billions of women around the world.
Yet this does not fully explain the extraordinary power of these stories for their readers—many if not most of them women, and many if not most of them working women who shared the dilemmas of the novels’ heroines with the emerging bourgeoisie. In an analysis of such recent horror movies as Jaws and such gangster movies as the Godfather series, one theorist noted the “utopian” undercurrents that exist alongside deeply conservative messages. In the end, such stories seem to say that you should not transgress conventional mores or that you can’t fight city hall; but in the process they offer intriguing glimpses of just how to do precisely those things.23 We can apply this insight to seduction novels as well: they may say that good girls don’t, but in case you wondered, here’s how.
Maybe that’s why novels quickly attracted the attention of elites. From the very moment the colonists arrived on the continent, even the most egalitarian settlements sought to regulate private as well as public behavior. Exhortations against dancing and drinking were among the most obvious examples. So were invectives against drama. As early as 1716, Williamsburg, Virginia, had acquired a theater that mounted classical productions, but the Southern colonies were generally more tolerant of such diversions. Timothy Dwight, the minister, poet, and eventual president of Yale, spoke for many respectable New Englanders in the late eighteenth century when he asserted that “to indulge a taste for play-going means nothing more or less than the loss of that most invaluable pleasure, the immortal soul.”24
Novel reading soon joined the list of activities that warranted condemnation. Late-eighteenth-century critics complained that they gave young people “false ideas of life” and rendered the “ordinary affairs of life insipid.” They also led women to waste time that could be put to more practical ends. Worst of all, “a ‘novel-reading female’ expects attention from her husband, which the cares of business will not permit him to pay.” An English article entitled “Novel Reading a Cause of Female Depravity,” initially published in 1797, was reprinted in the United States several times, and Harvard decided to focus its principal commencement address in 1803 on the dangers of fiction.25 Such criticism proved amazingly persistent. A half century later, the Ladies’ Repository, a middle-class women’s magazine from Cincinnati, was still sounding similar themes: novels “destroy the power of severe mental application,” made young readers unfit for “the arduous duties and stern realities of life,” and, worst of all, had a tendency to “weaken the barriers of virtue” by “introducing impure scenes and ideas into pure minds.”26 As we will see, this strategy of focusing on threats to womanhood and youth would surface again and again as a means of attacking popular culture.
Such attacks led to an equally common response: that contrary to respectable opinion, popular culture was actually good for you. This approach goes back at least to the late seventeenth century, when the Puritan clergyman William Perkins specifically singled out Scoggins Jests, a collection of ballads and jokes, as dangerous to the moral health of his followers. Either anticipating such criticism or directly responding to it, bookseller John Usher included a foreword in the editions he sold in the 1680s, explaining that “there is nothing beside the goodnesse of God, that preserves the health so much as honest mirth.” When a 1761 production of Shakespeare’s Othello came to Rhode Island, the most tolerant of the New England colonies, the manager described it as “a moral dialogue, in five parts, depicting the evil effects of jealousy and other bad passions, and proving that happiness can only spring from the pursuit of virtue.”27 Such sentiments were used by those who sought to defend (or merely sell) novels, often accompanied by an insistence that the events about to be narrated were factual. The dedication page of Charles Brockden Brown’s The Power of Sympathy, published in 1789, is typical in this regard. It reads as follows:
TO THE
YOUNG LADIES
OF
UNITED COLUMBIA
These VOLUMES
Intended to represent the specious CAUSES,
and to Explore the fatal CONSEQUENCES
OF
SEDUCTION;
to inspire the FEMALE MIND
With a principle of SELF COMPLACENCY
AND TO
Promote the economy of HUMAN LIFE
ARE INSCRIBED
With esteem and sincerity
by their
Friend and humble servant
THE AUTHOR
It is possible that many such attempts to uphold the practicality of popular culture in this way were sincere. And there can be little doubt that at least some people accepted these explanations. Yet, as many producers, purveyors, and consumers no doubt realized, suggestive songs, Shakespearian plays, and novels with the word “seduction “printed in bold-faced capital letters on their dedication pages simply could not be reduced to exercises in moral instruction. No one would bother with them if they were.