The Emigrants (Penguin Classics) - Softcover

Gilroy, Amanda; Imlay, Gilbert; Verhoeven, W.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140436723 ISBN 13: 9780140436723

Verlag: Penguin Classics, 1998

Inhaltsangabe

Published in1793, THE EMIGRANTS was one of the first novels to contrast the rigid political structure and social "depravity" of Europe with the promise of America as a liberal, socially just utopia. Set on the western frontier of the new nation, this epistolary novel deftly combines a love story with rich descriptions of the landscape and of wilderness adventures, including one of the first instances of Indian captivity in American fiction.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Gilbert Imlay (1754-1828), born in New Jersey, is also the author of Topographical Description of the Western Terriotory of North America, and is widely known as Mary Wollstonecraft's reprobate lover.
Amanda Gilroy is Lecturer and W.M. Verhoeven isProfessor of American Literature and American Studies in the Department of English at the University of Groningen in The Netherlands.

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INTRODUCTION

I

The American Gilbert Imlay is best known to readers of British Romanticism as the cad who abandoned Mary Wollstonecraft, the founding mother of modern feminism, and whose philandering drove her to attempt suicide (twice). Wollstonecraft’s Letters to Imlay (first published posthumously in 1798) and her travel book Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) detail the ups and many downs of their affair, while William Godwin, in his Memoirs (1798) of his late wife, set the tone for subsequent criticism in deeming Imlay, after Othello, a man who could, “like the base Indian, throw a pearl away, richer than all his tribe.”1 Scholars of American literature and history, on the other hand, have long been familiar with another side of Imlay, that of the entrepreneurial author of one of the most influential and successful travel books of the late eighteenth century, A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America (first published in London in 1792). Few readers of either British or American literary history, however, are familiar with Imlay’s novel The Emigrants, published in England in July or August 1793, a few months after the start of his affair with Wollstonecraft. This epistolary novel, which combines a sentimental plot of impeded love with episodes of travel and adventure (including a capture by Indians), acts as a type of fictional companion to the travel text: Both books, aimed at a British audience, function as practical guides for emigration to the Ohio Valley and map out a geopolitical future for the New World across the Allegheny Mountains.

In addition, The Emigrants provides a salutary alternative to the distinct absence of feminist ideals in Imlay’s checkered personal life, for it “espouse[s] the cause of oppressed women” (Letter XIII), especially the rights of women in marriage, which it ties to an anticolonial agenda. The novel exposes marriage in England as a type of cultural captivity for women, and makes a plea for more liberal divorce laws. The treatment of women also serves as the most affecting example of the differences between Britain and America, as Imlay uses the issue of domestic politics to construct a utopian vision of American national character. The Emigrants thus makes a claim for consideration as a Jacobin novel—a document of the transatlantic revolutionary movement. However, there are contradictions in the revolutionary rhetoric of personal liberty that support The Emigrants’ valorization of America over England (or Europe), and women continued to be seen as possession or spectacle.

In order to understand the novel’s politics of geography and of gender, we need first to know something about Imlay’s Topographical Description and the revolutionary era in which and of which he wrote, as well as something about the contradictory and charismatic character of the man himself, whom Edith Franklin Wyatt described as “unscrupulous, independent, courageous, a dodger of debts to the poor, a deserter, a protector of the helpless, a revolutionist, a man of enlightenment beyond his age, a greedy and treacherous land booster.”2

II

Very little information is available about the earliest period of Gilbert Imlay’s life or, indeed, about his life after he broke up with Mary Wollstonecraft—the known facts of his life covering roughly the twenty-year period from 1777 to 1797. Imlay was born on 9 February 1754, probably in Upper Freehold, Monmouth County, New Jersey, where the Imlay family had been established since the early decades of the eighteenth century. Apart from a brief reference to a Gilbert Imlay in a will drawn up in 1761, nothing is known about him until his name appears in the military service records of the American Revolutionary army. These records indicate that Imlay served in Forman’s Additional Continental Regiment from 11 January 1777 to July 1778, and that he had enlisted for the duration of the war. Although he commonly styled himself “captain” (as on the title page of A Topographical Description), there is no evidence that Imlay ever rose beyond the rank of first lieutenant.

At the close of the Revolutionary War, Imlay, like so many other decommissioned officers of the American army, set out to try his luck across the Allegheny Mountains in the western territories of the Ohio Valley. The settlements along the shores of the Ohio River, in what is now the state of Kentucky, were at the time the farthest outposts of the westward expansion of America. This was the age of legendary frontiersman Daniel Boone, who first visited the area in 1769 and whose adventurous rambles through the sublime wilderness and constant tussles with the Indians in what the latter called the “dark and bloody ground” later earned him the status of national mythic hero (as well as the honorary title of “colonel”). This was the age, too, of Boone’s first biographer and fellow Pennsylvanian John Filson, who had crossed over into Kentucky in 1783 in search of fame and fortune, and who a year later published The Discovery and Settlement of Kentucke, one of the most influential accounts of what Filson described as “the best tract of land in North America, and probably in the world.”3

According to his own account of the trip in A Topographical Description, which borrows heavily from Filson’s book, Imlay arrived in Kentucky in March 1784. Although as a veteran officer of the Revolutionary War he would have been able to claim automatic land rights in the western territory, in March 1783 he had already bought a tract of land in Fayette, one of the three counties into which the District of Kentucky was divided at the time. Soon after his arrival in Kentucky, Imlay became deeply immersed in land speculation deals, leaving a long and complex trail of legal entanglements, according to Kentucky county court records. In Louisville in April 1784 he was sworn in as a deputy surveyor of Jefferson County, a position which must have been of considerable commercial advantage to him: As “a Commissioner for laying out Land in the Back Settlements” (as he styled himself somewhat inflatedly on the title page of A Topographical Description), he could play a modest role in publicly furthering the cause of the “probable rise and grandeur of the American empire” (Letter III in Description), while lining his pockets on the side.

It is not known how long Imlay retained his surveying job, but there is plenty of evidence to suggest that before long lining his pockets was his main, if not his sole, preoccupation. However, the records of the various county courts also indicate that he was not always very successful in his business deals. Continually incurring debts and breaching contracts, Imlay was soon forced into a life of constant county-hopping in an attempt to elude sheriffs’ summonses and court writs. At one point, in August 1784, a warrant for Imlay’s arrest was issued by the Jefferson County Court, but, of course, he had taken to his heels by then.

Among Imlay’s business associates in Kentucky was the notorious General James Wilkinson. A veteran of the Revolutionary War and a man with a lust for wealth and power, Wilkinson had survived the siege of Boston and was present at the siege of Quebec, after which he served under Washington at the battles of Trenton and Princeton. Wilkinson later showed up in Kentucky, where he was soon involved in large-scale land speculation schemes. What earned Wilkinson the sobriquet “Washington of the West” was his plan to establish relations between the western territories and the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Classics
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1998
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0140436723
• ISBN 13: 9780140436723
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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