Women writers and the early US novel

Abstract

Recovery efforts Not too long ago, the early American novel was one of the most maligned genres in US literary history. Regardless of the author's gender, the novel was viewed as unstructured and stylistically flawed, overloaded with silly plot contrivances, and hopelessly didactic and sentimental. In The Columbia History of the American Novel (1991), Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky went so far as to insist that the genre did not really exist. Impeded by political duties and uncertainties, an overweening sense of propriety, and scarce cultural resources, the post-revolutionary generation failed to develop an “authentic American language” for “literary purposes” (Elliott et al ., The Columbia History , 11). As such, the novels of Charles Brockden Brown, William Hill Brown, Royall Tyler, and Hugh Henry Brackenridge apparently lacked the telling signs of a distinctive national voice. “While America may have proclaimed its political independence from Britain,” Rubin-Dorsky concluded, “it nevertheless remained culturally subservient well into the nineteenth century” (11). In US literary history, women novelists were even further marginalized than their neglected and misunderstood male counterparts. Their novels were viewed as inferior copies of English and European models. Relegated to the domestic sphere in the prevailing critical paradigm, women novelists were not taken seriously. They were widely assumed to be disengaged from the public endeavor of constructing national identity.