Social Equality and the Novel

In my more ambitious daydreams, I envision posting a thought-provoking portion of each reading from St. John's and a question or reflection on it. In reality, this blog has stagnated in a time warp, perhaps suggesting a life devoted to decorating wedding cakes. With no further preamble, and no piddling excuses for my ten-month silence, here's a bit from Tocqueville, from the chapter of Democracy in America titled, "Equality of Social Conditions Helps Morals."

After describing the differences between a European aristocracy that requires arranged marriages and American freedom of marital choice, he asserts, "Nothing better serves to justify an illicit passion in the eyes of those experiencing it or of the watching crowd than a forced marriages or ones embarked upon by chance."

The footnote elaborates: "The study of the various European literatures will easily convince us of this truth.

"When a European want to portray in his fiction some of those great catastrophes in marriage which are so common amongst us, he is careful first to arouse the compassion of the reader by depicting marriages which are either ill-matched or forced. Although a prolonged tolerance has, for some time, relaxed our customs, it would be difficult for the author to interest us in the misfortunes of these characters if he did not begin by finding an excuse for their faults. This device seldom fails. Our daily experiences prepare us in advance to be indulgent.

"American authors would not be able to make these same excuses credible to their readers; their customs and laws are opposed to doing so and, finding the task of depicting disharmony as attractive a hopeless one, they do not depict it at all. In part, it is because of this that there are so few novels published in the United States."

(I've heard a few arguments for arranged marriages; no one has ever said they might result in a more interesting national literature.)

Tocqueville toured America in 1831. Charles Brockden Brown had published Wieland in 1798, and James Fenimore Cooper had published Last of the Mohicans in 1826, among some others. (Not quite Jane Austen or Les Liaisons Dangereuse, hmm?) Besides a short supply of novelists, we'd also had founding fathers saying things like,

"A great obstacle to good education is the inordinate passion prevalent for novels, and the time lost in that reading which should be instructively employed. When this poison infects the mind, it destroys its tone and revolts it against wholesome reading. Reason and fact, plain and unadorned, are rejected. Nothing can engage attention unless dressed in all the figments of fancy, and nothing so bedecked comes amiss. [Don't you just love intricate clothing metaphors as support for "reason and fact, plain and unadorned?"] The result is a bloated imagination, sickly judgment, and disgust towards all the real businesses of life. This mass of trash, however, is not without some distinction; some few modeling their narratives, although fictitious, on the incidents of real life, have been able to make them interesting and useful vehicles of a sound morality." -- Thomas Jefferson

So, what happened? Did American novelists find a way to depict disharmony as attractive, or did something entirely different happen to the novel as a form? How do American democracy and the equality of social condition shape American literature?