Second Stories offers an innovative reexamination of selected texts by
major figures in American literature: Benjamin Franklin, Hugh Henry
Brackenridge, and Charles Brockden Bown from the early national period,
and James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Alan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and
Herman Melville from the romantic period. Combining close reading with a
powerful ideological argument, Cynthia Jordan demonstrates that a
concern with the patriarchal politics of language informs both the
thematic content and the overall shape of much of the fiction of these
writers. The issue of gender, Jordan shows, is central to these authors'
works, and her study deftly reveals the gender-related value judgments
that their language implies.
Jordan begins by arguing that the American Revolution ushered in a new
type of patriarchy founded on the communally sanctioned authority of a
white male elite educated to provide political guidance and
guardianship. In their narrative fictions, Franklin, Brackenridge, and
Brown promoted the new patriarchal social order by writing in the
language of fathers and father figures. As Jordan shows, however, in
each author's work the surface narrative becomes increasingly threatened
by a second story, introduced to give validity to but also challenging
the paternalisit worldview embraced by the first story and offering a
commpelling alternative to it.
Rejecting the patriachal language and repressive model of masculinity
bequeathed to them by their predecessors, Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, and
Melville validated the second story of American culture, while often
disguising it beneath a conventional fiction. This second story is most
frequently presented as the story of a woman or women representing both
the sociopolitically oppressed "other" in American society and those
aspects of human nature devalued by the male consciousness. Through this
new story, the romantics present an alternative to what they view as
patriarchy's ethically depleted language and a corrective to the false,
androcentric versions of history which, they believe, to have malformed
society and individual lives. Within the works treated there --- among
them The Last of the Mohicans, The Scarlet Letter, and Pierre --
any male character's willingness to recover this story signifies his
psychic liberation and moral growth.
Based on extensive reading in the most recent literary criticism,
Second Stories examines important and previously unstudied thematic
and formal connections between works of first generation of American
authors and those who followed them in the early 19th century. Through
her perspective exploration of language and gender issues in these
works, Jordan makes apparent the deeply ideological nature of much of
the nation's early literature.
Originally published in 1989.
A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the
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