Studies in the Novel

Today we are obsessed with the networks electronic media have enabled, and what things like crowdsourcing do for economic innovation and democratic deliberation. In this lively, learned, and engaging book, Stacey Margolis is here to tell us that our interest isn’t new, and that these phenomena have never depended on media technologies.

Margolis notes that writers in the early nation discovered that fiction was an ideal format for exploring and theorizing the new world of democratic public opinion. In that form, they offered a “series of thought experiments on the new democratic reality” (20). In short stories and novels, early national writers could trace “political influence as it moves through invisible networks of friends, acquaintances and strangers” (1). As such, they offer “investigations into the basic principles and mechanisms of mass democracy” (21). They diagram “the complex geometry of social influence,” offering “a more complex picture of the democratic public sphere than we have seen of late, one that provides not a model of political action to which we should aspire, but an analysis of the intricacy and complexity of social change that is surprisingly relevant to the digital age” (21, 2).

What Margolis discovers in the fiction that she studies leads her to contest and refine some of the most durable recent theories of the public sphere and counter-publics, of deliberative and radical democracy. Despite their differences, Margolis argues, these recent theories unite in their shared “conviction that democracy both depends on and fosters the individual voice, the freedom to argue, persuade, and join others in enacting visions of justice” (6). Margolis discovers (a discovery reflected in her cover) something a little darker and less optimistic, leading her to “reject this romance of participation and idealization of the individual voice in favor of a kind of democratic realism” (6). The “central insight” of the fictions she studies teaches that “explicit political expression—moments when ‘the people’ speak (either collectively in crowds and petitions or through debate on matters of public interest)—comprises only a small fraction of democratic practice” (7). Of far greater import are the “less visible, less directed, and far less dramatic modes of politically consequential communication” like gossip, hearsay, and complaint (7). And these far less dramatic modes of communication in essence moot the putative revolutionary impact of new modes of communication. The fictions Margolis examines—by Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Jacobs, Fanny Fern, and James Fenimore Cooper—“attempt to think about the problem of modernity without thinking about the modern technologies that made new forms of connection across time and space possible—such developments as the radical expansion of the national postal service, the railroad, and the telegraph.” Indeed, “if the early nineteenth century witnessed a ‘communications revolution,’ you would never know it from these meditations on the power of everyday speech” (9).

Instead, writers hone in on “the kind of informal, uncoordinated talk that could produce disproportionate social effects”—like financial panics and unfair verdicts: public opinion. As Margolis summarizes:

it is a world in which influence, information and opinion move silently and invisibly through informal channels of communication—intimate conversations, chance encounters with strangers, small talk, gossip. [End Page 137] Democracy works beyond, or perhaps below, its own formal practices: it is less performance than electricity.

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And while such talk could produce unfairnesses, Margolis notes that it also served to mobilize the concerns of the politically underprivileged—women, minorities, and other underclasses. Such putatively “powerless” actors “might single-handedly infiltrate the ‘general public’ by setting off a chain reaction over which no one has control” (21). As she puts the point, “the sense of whispers translated into power…marks an important shift in who counts as a legitimate political actor. It is, one might argue, the necessary precursor to the expansion of political rights” (14).

Margolis takes up Brown first, and archly notes that for all the attention that has been paid to the workings and influence...