The Sketch, the Tale, and the Beginnings of American Literature by Lydia G. Fash

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Sketch, the Tale, and the Beginnings of American Literature by Lydia G. Fash Desirée Henderson The Sketch, the Tale, and the Beginnings of American Literature. By Lydia G. Fash. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020. x + 316 pp. $65.00 cloth/$37.50 paper/$37.50 e-book. Lydia G. Fash’s The Sketch, the Tale, and the Beginnings of American Literature is defined by substantial claims about three main topics, two of which are highlighted in the book’s title. First, Fash presents an argument about genre, challenging the predominance of the novel in nineteenth-century America and instead proposing that two short prose forms, the tale and the sketch, deserve recognition for their foundational role in literary history. Fash states that the tale and the sketch have their own defining genre characteristics that should not be subsumed under the umbrella category of the short story, because doing so obscures the particular contribution that tales and sketches have made to American literary nationalism. In addition, Fash brings a critical eye to the generic containers through which these short texts were published, circulated, and collected (the miscellany, the periodical, the literary annual or gift book) or into which they were incorporated as supporting structures (the novel). Second, her book follows the temporal turn in literary studies by examining how the tale and the sketch were employed to represent a specific moment in time: the origins of the American nation. Her focus on what she terms “the culture of beginnings” enables Fash to track how the unique temporal orientations of the tale and the sketch made them ideal vehicles for authors concerned with [End Page 165] imagining national origins, sometimes as grandiose myths but more often as complicated timescapes that put different experiences and identities in conflict (8). Third, Fash explores how tales and sketches recounting America’s beginnings contributed to a national narrative of “white fictive ethnicity” (142). Although, according to Fash, stories about American history could be adapted to accommodate women’s voices and thereby critique the phallocentrism of national origin stories, such flexibility did not extend to race or ethnicity. For the most part, nineteenth-century tales and sketches promoted a vision of America as ideally white, employing Native Americans as mere props and eliding the role of slavery and white supremacy in nation formation and expansion. If a critique can be offered of Fash’s book, it would be that these three large and worthy arguments jostle for attention. At times, certain topics rise in prominence while the others recede into the background. For example, sometimes when discussing the representation of time within certain texts, the question of whether those texts are tales or sketches drops out. Of the three topics, it is the last—the role of race and, specifically, whiteness—that most consistently disappears from view. When it surfaces, it brings valuable dimensions to Fash’s analysis, but it does not always stay in focus. Fash’s book addresses a range of literary figures, some long associated with tales and sketches (Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe) and others whose relationship to short prose might not be as well known (Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Wells Brown). It is in her chapters on Sarah Josepha Hale and Catharine Maria Sedgwick that Fash most clearly indicates what a focus on the tale and sketch has to contribute to the study of American women writers. That Hale and Sedgwick—and most other women writers of the nineteenth century—were prolific authors of short fiction and narrative is a recognized fact, but one frequently passed over in accounts of their literary careers in favor of other achievements (most commonly, the publication of novels). Fash is correct that centering tales, sketches, and other short forms has the potential to render a more accurate understanding of how the conventions and demands of nineteenth-century publishing shaped how—and in what form—women writers could express their relationship to the nation-state. Hale offers an interesting case study because she was the author of numerous sketches and, as editor of Ladies’ Magazine (the focus of Fash’s analysis) and later Godey’s Lady’s Book, was also...