Critical Fictions: Fanny Fern, Critical Satire, and the Gender Inequities of Antebellum Criticism Adam Gordon (bio) On February 25, 1832, the New-York Mirror published as its feature story an anonymous original piece entitled “The Young Author, or the Effects of Criticism,” which recounts the tale of a young poet whose confrontation with critics ultimately proves fatal. Born rich, Edwin lost his parents at a young age and settled into a solitary, impoverished existence in which poetry became his one solace. Though Edwin’s poems possessed beauty and originality, he was a young and inexperienced author, and so the volume naturally had faults as well, which “the critics attacked as vigorously as if their salvation depended upon prostrating the luckless author.”1 With his hopes dashed and his sense of vocation destroyed, Edwin’s health rapidly deteriorates, already weakened by the physical and emotional strain of authorship. As Edwin hovers on the brink of death, the story’s unnamed narrator learns of his condition, peruses the volume in question, and is immediately struck by the poems’ beauty. Astonished that critics had attacked the collection so viciously, the narrator seeks out the offending reviewers only to learn that “of the two least powerful one was a bigot and the other a voluptuary” and that “the third was a young editor of promise, but still young, very young.”2 When he visits the author of the first review, the meanest of the three, he finds a “sickly, unhappy looking creature,” hunched and dyspeptic.3 “I knew him for a bigot and a wretch,” the narrator observes, “and an involuntary feeling of disgust and hatred crept into my heart as I reflected that a hypochondriac and a bigot stood thus behind an engine of such power as a public press must generally be, controlling its operations and directing its force against the enemies of ignorance, superstition, and [End Page 21] malice.”4 It takes little prodding on the part of the narrator to get the misanthropic critic to admit that he was once slighted by Edwin’s father and so detests both Edwin and his family. As he spitefully remarks, “They who once scorned me, now fear me, and shall feel me.”5 The next reviewer he visits, a young editor, confesses he spurned the volume out of mere carelessness, admitting that short on time he “looked hastily through it, but founded my opinion of it from that of contemporary print.”6 When the narrator has him survey the poems again, the editor, embarrassed by his mistake, immediately issues an apologetic retraction as well as a second positive review in the next issue. And though the narrator rushes to Edwin’s bedside to deliver the commendatory review, he’s too late. Edwin is dead. Beginning in the late 1820s, as a consolidating print-capitalist marketplace began to eclipse the older networks of local artisan printers, works like “The Young Author” began appearing in greater number, setting the standard for a developing genre of fictionalized exposés of the American critical enterprise. In the story of Edwin, the author blends fictional melodrama with firsthand observations regarding the experience of authorship, catering to a public fascination with the inherent drama of the literary industry. For the narrator, the pathos of Edwin’s case is that an author’s livelihood is placed in the hands of critics whose judgment is marred by petty animosities, on the one hand, and irresponsible carelessness, on the other. As the narrator reflects, The public would be shocked if they could behold in palpable form the vast proportion of criticisms appearing in the journals of this country, which are influenced by private feelings. He who from personal friendship praises a book or a composition undeservedly is, in fact, committing a falsehood, and cheating his readers; but what shall we say of him who sits in the obscure safety of his chamber, and gratifies a malignant enmity against an author, by vilifying his works? This course is pursued in the United States to an extent most disgraceful, if not alarming.7 Though such stories were designed to be amusing and are no doubt exaggerated, they provided popular platforms for debates over...
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Jul 15, 2022
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