Ouixotic Fictions of the USA 1792-1815 by Sarah F. Wood

Abstract

842 Reviews Quixotic Fictions of theUSA 1792-I8I5. By SARAH F. WOOD. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2005. XVii+295 pp. C55. ISBN 978-o-ig-9273I5-7. On I7 September I787, thevery afternoon on which delegates signed theUS Consti tution,General George Washington bought his firstcopy ofDon Quixote. This event, as recounted in Wood's study, isnot only intriguing (where did he find the time?, one wonders) but it is also a sobering reminder of the literacy standards of the founding fathers. Wood's intriguing examination of the influence ofCervantes's text illustrates thecontradictory appropriations of the figureof theDon in earlyAmerican 'Quixotic Fictions', while also recounting the value that itspatriarchs placed on thewritten word. Whether itbe Jeffersoncommenting on his faith in his fellowAmericans ('I agree to be stoned as a false prophet ifall does not end well with this country') or hismisanthropic friend and rival JohnAdams bemoaning the 'Rascality', 'Venality', and 'Corruption' of the same countrymen (p. 53)-Wood's study charts a remarkable episode in the language of politics and the politics of language: words and narra tivesmattered greatly to the fragile unity of the newly United States. While such reflections are not theovert context for Wood's comparisons ofworks bywriters such as Thomas Brackenridge, Royall Tyler, Charles Brockden Brown, Tabitha Gilman Tenny, andWashington Irving, theprivileged status of certain kinds of discourse in theNew World, particularly published, European, discourses, is thebook's informing framework. Then, as now, Americans were not linguists, and George Washington's 'well-thumbed Smollett translation [ofDon Quixote] shamed the opulent but un read Spanish edition he also possessed', Wood notes (p. 6). Like their leader,most earlyAmerican readers knew the text only in translation. An examination of other British interpretations of the Don by Fielding, Goldsmith, Sterne, and Charlotte Lennox forms the study's early pages. As Wood contends, the laterAmerican writers inherited the polysemic readings of Quixote afforded by these eighteenth-century authors, thereby producing another generation of Quixotic, American, narratives. Wood's readings of these comprise most of this impressive study, but her reliance on the trope of Don Quixote as an open, contradictory figure, able to be variously interpreted, isboth a source of interest and frustration: asWood clearly illustrates, Quixote has been read as self-serving and self-sacrificing, and such oppositions make it impossible to trace his literarydescendants definitively. Wood argues, for instance, thatBrockden Brown's character Arthur Mervyn (ArthurMervyn; or, Memoirs of theYear 1793 (I799-I800)) is 'a republican Quixote forwhom disinterestedness and self-sacrifice form thebasis of hismoral centre and public identity' (p. I63). Mervyn, however, could equally be read as 'a Scheming Sancho, an opportunist, and ama terialist' (ibid.). The result,Wood claims, is that Mervyn reveals a 'breach between the rhetoric of republican virtue and thepractices of republican America' (ibid.). For Wood, Mervyn's confusing nature reflectsa contradiction inherent inearlyAmerican ideologies. This very contradiction, however, makes any claims ofCervantes's influ ence necessarily tentative-far more suggestive thandecisive. The strengthof Wood's study, therefore,liesnot in itsattempt todemand thecentrality ofDon Quixote toearly America, but in its revisitations of thewonderful figures created by earlyAmerican writers. AsWood examines characters such asUpdike Underhill inTyler's The Alger ineCaptive (I797), Brackenridge's Captain Farrago (Modern Chivalry, I792-I8I5), Tenney's Dorcasina (Female Quixotism, i8oi), and Washington Irving's Diedrich Knickerbocker inA History ofNew York (I 809), shemay not convince readers that all are descendants of theDon, but that hardly matters: what one takes away here is not onlyWood's infectious enthusiasm, but also the extraordinary multiplicity of writing in the early republic. Even JohnAdams might have been proud. KINGSTON UNIVERSITY MEG JENSEN ...