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From perry miller's american language to pamela's plain style
In a posthumously published essay entitled "An American Language," Perry Miller returned to a theme that he had treated with definitive precision earlier: the "plain style."1 Miller was obviously one of our great readers of the Puritan plain style, and his treatment of the subject in The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (1939) is still required reading on the subject. What sets Miller's later essay apart, however, is that rather than just accounting for "the sermon, the treatise on polity, the history, the explanation of political theory" ("American Language" 211-12), Miller attempts to generate out of these forms a full-scale argument about American literary style that he can carry forward into our nineteenth-century great tradition and beyond. This was a radical departure from Miller's earlier insistence that "any criticism which endeavors to discuss Puritan writings as part of literary history" or to "estimate them from any 'aesthetic' point of view" was inappropriate to the object (New England Mind 362).2 In "An American Language," by contrast, Miller tells a story about the cultural career of "the ideal of the plain style as it was brought to New England" (213), where it first became the cornerstone of "the Puritan aesthetic" (214) and then "the presiding rule of American prose" (213). This path takes Miller from the "founders of New England" all the way up to Ernest Hemingway, with stops along the way at Revolutionary political discourse (215), the American Renaissance (Thoreau's Walden and Melville's Moby Dick) (215-28), and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn ("as Mr. Hemingway rightly proposes, the progenitor of modern American literature") (228-240, quotation on 236). Through this remarkably bold act of critical extrapolation, Miller thus traces how the plain style developed from a "colonial dialect" (208) into an "American language," which he can pursue "into the extending vistas of American self-expression" (216).
This essay, too, will argue that plain stylistics acquired an important cultural status in the imaginative literature of the early United States, though I stop short of declaring it the "presiding rule of American prose" (Miller, "American Language" 213). Moreover, I will focus on a subgenre absent from Miller's account, namely, the sentimental novel of seduction. PostRevolutionary seduction fiction, for all its self-conscious...