The Empowerment of Fiction: Simms’s Concept of “Romance”

In 1842 Caruthers, aged only thirty-nine, used the startling title "Excerpts from the Portfolio of an Old Novelist" for a series of brief essays in which he sketched his opinions on literature and its relation to life. "As the civilized world departs from nature and becomes more enslaved to the conventional laws of society," Caruthers wrote,

"just in the same proportion will the choicest spirits of that world become slaves to the ideal ; and this is the true reason why ours is such a novel-reading age."¹ At points, the novelist was even more emphatic, exalting the "romantic disposition" as a "passion for the Ideal" and claiming that "a great writer of Romance is communicating in spirit with a whole world of ideal personages, and rousing up, like an enchanter, the dead heroes of a thousand Romances in real life."² These pronouncements exceed metaphorical praise of a good novelist's lively powers of description. They claim that fiction can make the ideal factually present "in real life." It is suggested that the process of translating reality into the sphere of literary conventionality may be inverted, that the ideality of literary conventions can also be transferred into actuality.

It was in William Gilmore Simms's literary theory and fiction that such a concept of "romance" received its most emphatic codification. In the same year in which Caruthers' "Excerpts from the Portfolio of an Old Novelist" appeared, Simms delivered a series of lectures on "The Epochs and Events of American History, as Suited to the Purposes of Art in Fiction." Parts from these lectures were immediately published in the Magnolia. The full text was eventually incorporated in Views and Reviews in American Literature, History and Fiction, published in 1845. These lectures, particularly the introduction on the "True Uses of History," offer the best introduction to Simms's rhetorical and pragmatic concept of "romance."³

The essay begins with an anecdote of the dying Robert Walpole, who is said to have refused his son's offer to read from a work of historiography by remarking: "I have long since done with fiction" (30). Simms inverts the thrust of Walpole's polemic by observing that the old statesman was right in pointing out the ubiquity of fiction.

Historiography, Simms suggests, simply cannot do without fiction. If the “golden

1 The series ran from April to June 1843: Caruthers, "Excerpts from the Portfolio of an Old Novelist," Family Companion and Ladies' Mirror 2 (1842): 56–57; 79–80; 173; quotes: 79.

2 Caruthers, "Excerpts from the Portfolio of an Old Novelist" 57.

3 Simms, "The Epochs and Events of American History, as Suited to the Purposes of Art in Fiction," Views and Reviews. The introductory section (30–55) is headed: "True Uses of Literature. Objects of Art. Its Ductility and Universality." Page references will occur parenthetically in the text.

ornaments of rhetoric and passion” are taken away, history is only a meaningless tale from which even “the most hearty lover of the truth may well recoil in disrelish or disgust" (32). While the labor of scholarly inquiry alone is usually disingenuous, it is

“the genius of romance and poetry” who is able to solve the mysteries of history (40).

His "perfect history" may claim truth even if it should be found to deviate from ascertained facts (40-42).

Simms is not quite consistent in equating historiography and fiction. The author of "romances" is relegated to the "dominions of the obscure and the impalpable" (43) and it is pointed out his "privileges . . . only begin where those of the historian cease"

(56). However, this is not a disparagement of “romance.” Simms’s proposition might be read either as a limitation or as an affirmation of the "romancer's" freedom. Moreover, the restriction of the proper realm of (historical) “romance” is for pragmatic rather than for epistemological reasons. Claiming that "truth" is a functional rather than an ontological category, Simms regards historiography and "romance" fiction simply as different strategies of participating in the social construction of reality. The proper realms of the two disciplines are primarily defined not according to the nature of the

"truth" that is to be discovered but rather according to the chances of achieving its social acceptance. In his view, both the historical novel and historiography proper are fictions designed to establish truth; but they are still different forms of fiction in that they depend on different conventions of plausibility.

Indeed, if Simms defines "romance" as a genre, he does so in contradistinction to historiography rather than to the novel. According to his definition, the legitimate realm of the "romancer" as novelist is where pure imagination can be successfully transformed into accepted fact. Simms makes it clear that the standard for the value of the productions of both the "romancer" and the historian is effect rather than correctness; both "romance" fiction and historiography are didactic forms of “art,” which employ rhetoric for "the benefit and the blessing of the races which they severally represent":

[W]hen they have warmed our curiosity in what concerns the great family to which we belong––strengthened our faith in what are its true virtues, and what, under proper cultivation, it may become––excited our sympathies in the cause of its leading minds––filled our hearts with gentle hopes, and stimulated our souls to ardency in the grand and unceasing struggle after perfection which is the great business of the ages––then have they severally executed the holy trusts of art which have been committed to their hands. (44)

Such ideas are strongly reminiscent of Shelley's romantic idealism in the "Defence of Poetry" (written in 1821 but published only in 1840, two years before Simms originally presented his lecture). However, Simms's moral is more immediately political than Shelley's. In fact, there is a significant contradiction between Simms's uncompromising

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idealism, on the one hand, and his polemical emphasis on the social and political relativity of truth, on the other. It is an epistemological contradiction that is caused by Simms's striving to define literature both as a realm of ideality that is above politics and as an efficient tool for national and sectional political action.

This ambition is evident from the "Dedicatory Epistle" that in 1853 Simms added to Guy Rivers, the first of his full-length novels. Here Simms relates the story of how he settled on a career as a professional fictionist when, in consequence of his opposition against Nullification as editor of the Charleston Gazette, he found himself "cut off from politics" and "equally cut off from law." In this situation, he explains, "[l]iterature was my only refuge, as it had been my first love, and, as I fancied, my proper vocation . . . "⁴ From the beginnings of his career, Simms summoned up all his characteristic vigor in order to make his "proper vocation" into a regular and socially accepted profession. In some respect, he was hoping to preside over the field of literature in the way in which a planter presided over his plantation.⁵

It may be argued that it was this striving to transform authorship into a profession equal to, or even above, the triad of planting, politics and the law which motivated the polemical and paradoxical character of Simms’s literary theory and practice. He was not content with symbolic action but wanted the writing of literature to be a higher and more immediately effective form of politics. Thus, Simms’s idealism was the basis of a pragmatic aesthetics that exalted the transformative power of fiction.

As used by Simms, "romance" primarily denotes not a specific form of narrative in contradistinction to the "novel" but the event-producing use of that power. As a bold fantasy of the power of literature, Simms's concept of "romance" refers to function rather than form.

4 Simms, "Dedicatory Epistle" (1853), Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia, rev. ed. (1885); facsimile rpt (New York: AMS, 1970) 9–10.

5 On Simms's striving for social acceptance as a writer see esp. Rubin "The Dream of the Plantation: Simms, Hammond, Charleston," The Edge of the Swamp 54–102. See Faust's classic study A Sacred Circle for an analysis of the attempts of Simms and his compeers to organize as a clerisy of discontents, who would reform their society and force it to recognize

"a social role for knowledge and for the intellectual" (17). As to Simms's continuing yearning for political office and political impact, cf. John Caldwell Guilds, Simms: A Literary Life (Fayetteville: U of Arkansas P. 1992), esp. 111–129, and Jon L. Wakelyn, The Politics of a Literary Man: William Gilmore Simms (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1973). Wakelyn even claimed that "[p]olitics was Simms's career" rather than literature (82). A more recent study of Simms's politics is Charles S. Watson, From Nationalism to Secessionism: The Changing Fiction of William Gilmore Simms, Contributions in American History 151 (Westport, CT:

Greenwood, 1993). Like Wakelyn, Watson reads Simms's writings from a traditional historiographical perspective, concentrating on manifest content and explicit political statements rather than on the ideological implications of form and aesthetics. For an interesting treatment of Simms by a modern historian (within a comprehensive history of the South's way into secession), see Freehling 236–245.