52
LESLIE FIEDLER
tion or vice versa? What
is
called "love" in literature
is
a ration–
alization, a way of coming to terms with the relationship
be–
tween man and woman that does justice, on the one hand, to
certain biological drives and, on the other, to certain generally
accepted conventions of tenderness and courtesy; and literature,
expr~ing
and defining those conventions, tends to influence
"real life" more than such life influences it. For better or for
worse and for whatever reasons, the American novel
is
different
from its European prototypes, and one of its essential differences
arises
from its chary treatment of woman and of sex.
To write, then, about the American novel
is
to write about
the fate of certain European genres in a world of alien experi–
ence. It
is
not only a world where courtship and marriage have
suffered a profound change, but
also
one in the process of losing
the traditional distinctions of class; a world without significant
history or a substantial past; a world which had left behind the
terror of Europe not for the innocence it dreamed of, but for
new and special guilts associated with the rape of nature and the
exploitation of dark-skinned people;
3i
world doomed to play
out the imaginary childhood of Europe. The American novel
is
only
finally
American; its appearance
is
an event in the history
of the European spirit-as, indeed,
is
the very invention of
America itself.
II
Though it is necessary, in understanding the fate of ,the
American novel, to understand what European prototypes were
available when American literature began, as well as which ones
flourished and which ones disappeared on our soil, it
is
even
more important to understand the meaning of that moment in
the mid-eighteenth century which gave birth to Jeffersonian
democracy and Richardsonian sentimentality alike: to the myth
of revolution and the myth of seduction. When Charles Brock–
den Brown, the first professional American author, sent a copy
