January 21: William Hill Brown's The Power
of Sympathy, or, the Triumph of
Nature, generally accepted as the first American novel, was published on
this day in 1789. Told in epistolary form, it is a cautionary tale of unwitting
incest, at the end of which, wracked by guilt and loss, the sibling-lovers
commit suicide, their gravestone-monument reading, "And Sympathy united,
whom Fate divides." Worried that it would draw fire from the Puritan,
anti-novel lobby, Brown dedicated his novel to "the Young Ladies of United
Columbia," that they might register "the fatal CONSEQUENCES of
SEDUCTION" and be inspired to live according to "a Principle of Self
Complacency." Brown's epigraph continues the authorial self-defense:
Fain would he strew Life's
thorny Way with Flowers,
And open to your View
Elysian Bowers;
Catch the warm Passions of
the tender Youth,
And win the Mind to
Sentiment and Truth.
Additional precautions
included the title-page statement "Founded in Truth," a reference to
a contemporary incest scandal in New England, and a protracted debate in the
novel over the uses and abuses of novel-reading. Even so, not wishing to
destroy his writing career, the twenty-three-year-old Brown published the novel
anonymously.
The following excerpt is
from the story's high point, the sister-lover Harriot pouring out her anguish
to her brother-lover Harrington:
I recollect myself, and
endeavour to rouse my prudence and fortitude; I abhor my conduct, and wish for
obscurity and forgetfulness. Who can bear the torment of fluctuating passion?
How deplorable is the contest? The head and the heart are at variance, but when
Nature pleads how feeble is the voice of Reason? Yet, when Reason is heard in
her turn, how criminal appears every wish of my heart? Will my feeble frame,
already wasted by a lingering decline, support these evils? Will the shattered
frail bark outride the tempest, and will the waves of affliction beat in vain?
Virtue, whose precepts I have not forgotten, will assist me—if not to surmount, at least to suffer with fortitude and patience.
Daybook is contributed by Steve King, who teaches in the English Department of Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland. His literary daybook began as a radio series syndicated nationally in Canada. He can be found online at todayinliterature.com.
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