Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature, 1787-1845

Abstract

Master Plots: Race and the Founding an American Literature, 1787-- 1845. By Jared Gardner. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Pp. xvii, 238. Illustrations. $45.00.) Nat Turner Before the Bar Judgment. Fictional Treatments the Southampton Slave Insurrection. By Mary Kemp Davis. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999. Pp. xiv, 298. $30.00.) Both Jared Gardner in Master Plots and Mary Kemp Davis in Nat Turner Before the Bar Judgment portray narrative as a crucial site struggle over and representation, a site staging, in Davis's felicitous phrasing, a words and a for the word, and both reach similar conclusions: in American narratives, the battle to define sameness and otherness is never fully won or even concluded (17). Gardner's concern is with the converging discourses on racial science, national identity, and American fiction in the early republic, while Davis's is with a novelistic tradition about the Nat Turner revolt. However, but both insist literature serves as a central arena where the country's most pronounced fears and anxieties about whiteness and blackness are endlessly exposed, debated, half-exorcized, and refought. Both authors make valuable and original contributions to the ongoing study American literature's entanglement with the discourse and racism, but the two studies, Gardner's volume ultimately offers the more disturbing and far-reaching perspective on American literature's capacity to shape our political discourse. With the exception a concluding chapter on Frederick Douglass, Gardner's study focuses primarily on early canonical American texts: Royall Tyler's The Algerine Captive (1797); Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly; or Memoirs a Sleepwalker (1799); James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers (1823) and The Prairie (1827); and Edgar Allan Poe's Narrative Arthur Gordon Pym (1838). These are texts, Gardner argues, outlining master narratives that helped defend and define national identity for white Americans while proscribing those who did not `belong' (xi). Those narratives, in turn, were anchored in racial science as it was emerging first in the writings Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Stanhope Smith and later in the works polygenesis theorists like Charles Caldwell and Samuel George Morton and proslavery apologists like Thomas R. Dew. Accordingly, early novels like Tyler's The Algerine Captive and Brown's Edgar Huntly responded, in part, to contemporary crises like the French Revolution, Santo Domingo, factionalism, and the Alien and Sedition Acts by posing plots attempted to define Americans by what they were not-Native Americans and treacherous European aliens-and writers who followed, like James Fenimore Cooper and Edgar Allan Poe, later evoked fantasies of a nation without racial difference when the controversy over slavery began to dominate political discussion (116). The result is a study covers some the same issues in early American literature and as Dana P. Nelson's groundbreaking 1992 study, The Word in Black and White, but nonetheless offers an original and disturbing argument for the intertwining racial and national discourses with the emergence a national literature acutely absorbed in the task drawing lines between same and other. This was an ongoing task, Gardner implies, requiring the presence others to envision sameness, but it was nonetheless subject to contradictions and failures Frederick Douglass was able to exploit in his struggle to articulate a language for rewriting the founding fictions American race (182). …