The Sketch, the Tale, and the Beginnings of American Literature

Abstract

What role did short fiction play in crafting stories of US nationhood? This lively question drives Lydia G. Fash's analysis of the sketch, the tale, and what she calls the beginnings of American literature. Fash's term “the culture of beginnings” describes the rewriting of puritan histories, revolutionary narratives, and other national origin stories for a white US reading public in the decades after the War of 1812. Fash argues that short fiction was an essential tool for fashioning US national identity, and her work demonstrates short fiction's influence on the mid-nineteenth century American novel.The term “short story” was not widely used until the late nineteenth century (6). Before then, short fiction circulated in a variety of interrelated genres, including the sketch and the tale. The tale, Fash shows, “evoke[s] temporal distance (a ‘once upon a time’),” focuses on plot, and is characteristically ambiguous (21). By contrast, the sketch “seeks to describe space more than time through the close examination of a single moment, landscape or idea” (21). Both genres make claims to authenticity, even as the tale sometimes includes seemingly supernatural elements. Together, these versatile forms helped construct narratives of American beginnings.Fash utilizes print history and textual analysis to structure her inquiry. Fash's first chapter, for example, contrasts the British and American publications of Washington Irving's The Sketch Book to solidify her argument about the distinctions between the sketch and the tale. Fash examines the relationship between Irving's “staid sketches predominantly about Britain” and his “lively American tales” (37). She argues that shifts in content and differences in the placement of sketches and tales across editions of The Sketch Book augmented its appeal for audiences on opposite sides of the Atlantic.This analysis of Irving hinges in part on the relationship between differing temporalities, juxtaposing the “calm pastness of the British sketches” with “dynamic” American tales devoted to rich plotting and serialization (49). Competing temporalities remain central throughout this study. In short fiction, the “negotiation between … temporal innovation and temporal linearity” demonstrates “calculated attempts to form readerly communities that could lay claim to national status” (10). In chapter two, for example, Fash argues that Sarah Josepha Hale's “Sketches of American Character” genders waiting as female and represents white feminized waiting as an integral act of national participation. Hale thus makes space for white women's patriotism by revaluing virtuous waiting.Fash's attention to another woman writer of short fiction, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, leads to one of her most intriguing material culture arguments, which focuses on the intimate registers of the holiday gift books that became popular in the 1820s. Holiday annuals were often given to female readers by fathers, uncles, husbands, and male lovers, implying tacit male approval for the narratives and ideologies they contained. These annuals were also designed to be personalized with the receiver's name and held close to the body, cradled in a hand or against one's chest. Sedgwick's popular gift book sketches “pulled female martyrs, old maids, and storytelling women into the patriotic mission of constituting the American people,” staging a cross-temporal community of women characters and embodied readers (112). Fash argues that these sketches imagined white women as part of the culture of beginnings through what she terms a “nonsynchronous synchronicity” that connects contemporary readers to historically disparate communities (86).As these chapters examine short fiction, they contribute to the scholarly revision of Benedict Anderson's argument that a shared sense of simultaneous time, facilitated by the novel and the newspaper, made the imagined community of the nation possible (9). Instead, the sketch and the tale show the ways readers negotiated local temporalities even as they invested in national narratives. Fash expands critical vocabularies for understanding national temporality to include Irving's double temporality, Hale's waiting and Sedgwick's nonsynchronous synchronicity. Her later chapters productively analyze the temporal innovations of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, and William Wells Brown.Fash's archive consists almost entirely of white authors, who endeavor to produce a white fictive ethnicity for the United States (7). Brown's Clotel is the only work by a Black writer that gets significant treatment, as Fash explores the ways Brown “adopts the position of a sketch writer” to “expose the falsity of America as a white republic” (183, 186). This archive allows Fash to accomplish the goal of showing the ways prominent mid-nineteenth century American novels are indebted to short fiction and convincingly outlines the role of the sketch and the tale in producing narratives about white national origins. Still, I wonder how these texts interact with nineteenth-century short fiction that has different aims. A more robust conceptual examination of whiteness and genre would complement this volume's emphasis on print history and temporal structure while further clarifying the generic specificity of the sketch and the tale.