Foundational Geographies of Settler Colonialism in the Early American Novel: From Charles Brockden Brown to Nathaniel Hawthorne

According to Henry James, Dillon writes, “it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature,” a history that he and others have seen as largely lacking in the “young” United States. Dillon argues for a... [ view full abstract ]

According to Henry James, Dillon writes, “it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature,” a history that he and others have seen as largely lacking in the “young” United States. Dillon argues for a different understanding of the relation between U.S. history and literary production, turning specifically to the repressed history of settler colonialism in early America—a history that clearly did not count for Henry James. Specifically, she argues that the erased history of settler colonialism—and the act of erasure within the literary form of the novel—exposes and forces upon white colonials and early nationals the presence of anti-Enlightenment thought and alternative epistemologies that disrupt the structure of causality and probability that inform the European novel and its concern with marriage, kinship, property, and social reproduction. Critics such as Michael McKeon and Catherine Gallagher characterize the form of the novel as “probabilistic”: Dillon argues that the early American novel, through its engagement in historical erasure, tends toward the improbable rather than the probable.

Turning first to Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly, she reads the figure of Old Deb as the hidden causal force within the novel; the issue of contested land ownership (the appropriation of land from indigenous peoples) disrupts the marriage plot between Edgar and his fiancé which goes awry over the course of the epistolary novel.  If we recognize that settler colonialism, of the sort that Huntly engages in, is not built on Lockean ownership but on repressed violence and theft, the status of reason and the shape of probability in the early anglo-American novelistic world changes dramatically. Significantly, the narrative of repressed indigenous land ownership informs not only Brown’s Edgar Huntly but also Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables.  It requires an American “romance,” Dillon argues, to eradicate the violent history of theft and dispossession that lies beneath the Pynchon/Maul divide and to sustain a theory of the American novel.