Shun’ichi Takayanagi

Orestes Brownson’s Autobiography andAutobiographical Novels : Self-Narrative as
Negotiation between Facts and Fiction（オレスティス・ブラウンソンの自伝と自伝小説:
事実と虚構との間の調停としての自我物語)
Shun’ichi Takayanagi*
SUMMARY IN JAPANESE:自伝はアメリカ文学においては植民時代から盛んであった文学ジャンルである。建国期に書かれたフランクリンの『自伝』は読まれ続け、アメリカ文学の正典の中に位置づけられている。オレスティス・ブラウンソンは自伝と二つの自伝的小説を書いたが、これら3つともアメリカ文学研究者によってほとんど顧みられない作品である。しかし彼の自伝は2つの自伝小説とのかね合いで文学における自我の問
題で興味あるテーマを提供する。ブラウンソンは自伝 Convert『改宗者』()を 2 つの自伝小説 Charles Elwood(『チャールズ・エ
ルウッド』)‚ The Spirit-Rapper(『降霊術者』)の後で書いた。彼の自伝『改宗者』は改宗に至る経過と動機についての弁明が内容であるが、その特徴は主人公が自分自身の生涯の記述についてすべてが事実以外の何ものもないという「事実性」を強調していることである。自伝小説は自伝と小説のハイブリッド・ジャ
ンルである。自伝小説は主人公が自分の生涯を語るという手続きが取られている。2つの自伝小説において主人公＜私＞が物語世界の中で事実を語るという虚構手続きによってストーリーが展開している。
『チャールズ・エルウッド』
は同名の主人公の回心物語がやや平板な対話形式で語られている。
『降霊術者』
は
わざわざ自伝と副題で断って、虚構でないと宣言している。しかし実際は本格的な小説であり、当時のいかがわしい疑似科学の危険性を警告している。ブラウンソンの自伝と自伝小説はア
メリカ文学における本格的な文学意識の目覚めとともに起こった事実と虚構、作品における自我問題を内包している。
* 高柳

俊一 Professor (Emeritus), Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan.

3Orestes Brownson’s Autobiography and Autobiographical Novels

Introduction
Orestes Brownson wrote an autobiography and two autobiographical novels. But it must be said that these have been completely ignored by scholars ofAmerican autobiography. Autobiography was the genre New England Puritans
particularly inculcated to exhibit their lives as exemplary types of religious lives(Bercovitch, Puritan Self 23-24). If this is due to the fact that the field is overshadowed by the fame of Benjamin Franklin’s classic Autobiography, it is nevertheless rather strange that his later sympathetic interpreters (Thomas R. Ryan,
Americo D. Lapati, and Patrick W. Carey) have not especially dealt with Charles
Elwood, or, the Infidel Converted, written in 1834 but published six years later,
and The Spirit-Rapper; An Autobiography has never been the subject of scholarly
investigation, though most of them use The Convert: or, Leaves from My Experience (1857) as their source in reconstructing Brownson’s “passage to Rome.”
Carey is more interested in Brownson’s political philosophy, while Ryan and
Lapati take up only his literary criticism in their respective books, the former
referring to The Convert and Charles Elwood several times, but Lapati almost
never.

I. Myself and Nothing But Facts
The last of these three works is an autobiography, though the author nevermentions the word “autobiography” but insists it contains no fiction—nothing
but truth. Published thirteen years after Brownson’s conversion—he must havefelt a need to stress this point after having written two autobiographical novels—
it is an account of his life presented to Bishop John Bernard Fitzpatrick of
Boston, who accepted him into the Catholic Church. Brownson remarks at theoutset of his “Preface”:
The volume here offered to the reading public is no work of fiction, andthe person who gives an account is no imaginary person around whom I
have chosen to weave passages from my own experience. The person who
tells his story is myself, and I have aimed to tell my story, so far as it bears
on my religious convictions and experience, with simplicity, frankness, andtruthfulness. (5: 1)
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In a short space of three pages, Brownson speaks of “my book” and “thebook,” and declares: “Though I am the hero of my book, and speak in the first
person, I trust the reader will not find me immoderately egoistic. Nearly all thatis contained in the volume derives whatever value or importance it may have fromsources of my personality” (5: 1). He sets up “truth” as an objective criterion
independent of errors deriving from the limitations of his own cognition andjudgment: “Truth is not mine, nor my reader’s, and is the same whatever may be
his or my opinions. It is above us both, and independent of us, and all that eitherof us should aim at is to conform to it” (5: 2). Truth is thus a common value
Brownson and his readers Catholic or Protestant share, and he tries to show
through his account some “connecting link” between his past and present life,
which he enlarges to the connecting link between nature and grace, the natural andthe supernatural, so that the reader may see “that, in becoming a Catholic, a man
has no occasion to divest himself of his nature, or to forego the exercise of his
reason” (5: 1).

II. Grace and the Elevation of Freedom—Church as Intercommunion
Although in his account he is deeply concerned with his personhood and his
own experience, Brownson’s characteristic as an American Catholic lies in hisemphatic allusion to the elevation of his freedom by God’s grace:
My book, however, is the free production of my own mind, the free
expression of my own honest convictions as formed by my experience, theinspiration of grace and the teachings of Catholic faith and theology, andmay be taken by the readers as the specimen of that freedom which Catholicity secures to all her children. (5: 2)
In his autobiography, Brownson develops in a sense his own theory of
autobiography, and it is an apology of his life consciously gathered in a meaningful framework of a unique individual as the persona through reflection; rather it
may be said that through the book the persona emerges to himself as well as to the
public readership. The core of the author’s inner life is consciously formed inconscious reflection on his part, mediated through the epistemological recovery
5Orestes Brownson’s Autobiography and Autobiographical Novelsof past events in collusion with his emerging persona as past experiences presented to be fashioned into a narrative of the author’s life. By reliving this life of
his own, formed by seeking a meaning all the way through by reflective concentration on his past, the author gives an “account” of his life and its meaningfulness.
An autobiography is no private act of textual inscribing and framing of one’s self
in a book, like memoirs, which are originally for private use, although the authorof an autobiography may publish it as “memoirs” or they may become an autobiography. An autobiography always presupposes a public readership.
The nineteenth century still largely retained the idea of literature as something that instructs and entertains. Brownson’s idea of autobiography as far as
we can gather from his “Preface” is to be instructive: “I have little interest for
those who read only for amusement. I have aimed to write an instructive, not anamusing, book” (5: 3). Brownson adumbrates:[The book] embodies no small portion of fifty years of an active, perhaps
feverish, intellectual life, devoted to serious and earnest purposes; withwhat obstacles and with what results, it tells in a plain, unpretending style.
In writing it, I have occasion to review my whole past life, and renew mythanks to Him who died that we might live, for having conducted me, after
so many wanderings, from the abyss of doubt and infidelity to the light andtruth of his Gospel, in the bosom of his church, where I find the peace andrepose so long denied me. (5: 3)
Since his autobiography is a narrative of a life that was brought to Brownson,
he goes on to narrate his turbulent process—well-known to us by now—from his
New England background and family circumstances through several unstable,
violent changes of religious affiliation from Congregationalism, Presbyterianism,
Unitarianism, Universalism, his independent ministry, engagement with the laboring class and young workers, and growing skepticism to the final embracing of
Catholicism. Sectarian division and bitter animosity generated Brownson’s deepseated skepticism. It is certain that the impact of growing scientific thought on
New England intellectual society had effectuated his view, although it had not yet
let him disengage from Christian faith. But with the flowing-in of contemporary
currents of scientific thought from Europe such as biblical criticism and SaintSimonism, he started to loosen ties with traditional Congregationalist tenets.
Brownson was closely connected with Ripley’s utopian project of the Brook
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Shun’ichi Takayanagi

Farm movement, and associated himself with the Transcendentalists around
Emerson. American Transcendentalism was inspired by German Idealist philosophy. From Brownson’s writings we note that he read many of the German
and French books that had flowed into the East Coast of America like other New
England intellectuals, as Philip F. Gura shows in his recent monograph on
Transcendentalism.
Brownson’s break from Transcendentalism is signaled by his Mediatorial
Life of Jesus (1842) two years before his conversion. The following year he wrote
a series on the “Mission of Jesus.” These pieces are Brownson’s critique of theTranscendentalists’ and Unitarians’ understanding of Jesus that denies the Divinity of Jesus, ultimately reached by his reading of German biblical criticism.
Brownson’s search for a broader Christian church that guarantees the worldwide
dimension of its justifiable function as God’s instrument of salvation seems tohave been seldom mentioned by the authors of his life. This is connected with his
rejection of Protestantism, which is divided into sects and cannot guarantee ultimate truth. Ultimately his concern is with ecclesiology. And notable in thisconnection is Brownson’s interest in the Oxford movement. But he never broaches
the name of John Henry Newman in his autobiography. Brownson’s ecclesiology
before his conversion is centered on the church as communion. He had the idea ofintercommunion:
I have long been convinced that the church in communion with the see ofRome had been the true body of Christ down to the age of Leo X, and I
regarded the apostolic see as the central source of Christian life; but the
body seemed to me to have been broken into fragments, and exists no longer
in its integrity. The Roman Catholic Church was undoubtedly the largest
fragment, the one through which the main current of divine-human life
continued to flow; but no man would dare say that nothing of that life is or
can be lived outside of her communion, and I had found no Catholic that held
there could be absolutely no salvation outside of it. The several sects, whenbroken off, retained a certain amount of Christian life—that amount which
Christendom had already assimilated. (5: 159)
Brownson continues and asserts the centrality of communion. In the spiritof ecumenism he was far more advanced than the Catholic hierarchy and population:
7

Orestes Brownson’s Autobiography and Autobiographical Novels

Moreover, all communion of the sects with one another, and even with the
Roman Church, has not been absolutely interrupted. There is more or lesseven of personal intercourse between them, and besides, there isintercommunion through similar laws and institutions, and through common literature and science. They all belong, in some sort, to one and thesame family, and all, in a measure, live the one life of Christ. (5: 160)
Thus when still a “Congregational Unitarian” (5: 161), he came to know the
Oxford movement mainly represented by Pusey known as Puseyism. Nevertheless, he reminisces:
I never for a moment seriously contemplated joining the Anglican communion, and regarded in itself, Puseyism had no attraction for me. It was far
better to go at once to Rome than to Oxford. But I looked upon the
movement as one of great importance. It was a promising sign of the times,
as indicating a tendency on the part of a large portion of the Protestantworld to return to church principles. It would be a great mistake to supposethat the Oxford movement was confined to the bosom of the Anglican
communion. An analogous movement was perceptible in the bosom of
every sect. Even in the Roman Catholic Communion, there was a returntowards higher and more living church principles than those contended in
the eighteenth century. . . . In every Protestant sect there was in 1842 amovement party, at war with the fundamental principle of Protestantism,and demanding church union and church authority. It seemed that Protestantism had culminated, that the work of disintegration and destruction had
gone so far that it could go no further, and that a reaction in earnest, and not
likely to be suspended, had commenced through the whole Christian world
against the Protestant reformation. . . . The secret history of my own
country for several years prior to 1844 would reveal a Catholic reaction in
the more serious portion of the Protestant sects, that would surprise those
who look only on the surface of the things. The thing to be done was toencourage this reaction, to strengthen it, and by bringing out, each one fromhis own stand-point, true church principles for reunion with the Catholic
Church in a body. (5: 160-61)

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Brownson moved the quarters of his journalistic activities from Boston to
New York two years before the publication of his autobiography, and to New
Jersey one year before. He became estranged from the Catholic clergy, who had
welcomed him and had a high regard for a new significant recruitment, as they felt
less sympathetic to his advanced ideas. As for Brownson himself, it was not theidea of the church as communion alone that made him decide to receive Catholic
baptism. Above all, as he emphasizes, it is the work of grace that brought him tohis decision, but it is grace elevating human nature. The communion is testified toby historical facts which have brought him to “the recognition of the church as
authoritative, by virtue of the divine-human life it lived” (5: 163).
Brownson candidly describes his intellectual difficulties and hesitancies inmaking the final step for a natural reason. He needed “a philosophy which
conforms the order of knowledge to the order of being, the logical order to theorder of reality, and gives the first principles of things as the first principles ofsciences” (5: 173). Such a philosophy would not substitute for faith.
The concluding chapter of Brownson’s autobiography contains a highly
elaborate discussion on how the internal epistemological working of the mind led
to the act of faith and the significant role of authority as stated in Newman’s
Grammar of Assent, as he surveys both the external as well as the internal aspectsof analysis of faith. He brings in here the history of the church’s failures andbetrayals of the populace by those in authority, secular as well as ecclesiastical, inthe old world, and admits the sociological frictions of the beliefs of Catholic
immigrants with existing American mores. But he draws an optimistic vision for
the future of the immigrants’ integration: “In a few years they will be the Americans of the Americans, and on them will rest the performance of the glorious workof sustaining American civilization, and realizing the hopes of the founders of ourgreat and glorious republic” (5: 109). Why does one have to continue to be or
become a Catholic? “[B]ecause she (America) is the new creation, regenerated
humanity, and without communion with her, we can never see God as he is, or
become united to him as our supreme good in the supernatural order” (5: 200).
Brownson’s autobiography thus expands into an intellectual treatise.

III. Charles Elwood —Autobiographical Novel as Hybrid Fiction
Brownson wrote two works of fiction, each of which claims to be an auto9

Orestes Brownson’s Autobiography and Autobiographical Novels

biography. These two pieces are his only works of creative imagination. The restof his vast writings are all journalism. His autobiography The Convert is a recordof his life up to his conversion in the flow of a narrative. We tend to think that the
autobiographical novel has derived from the amalgamation of autobiography andnovel (Frye, Baker, and Perkins 55-56). Hence our tendency is to give a chronological precedence to the autobiography over the autobiographical novel.
Brownson’s two autobiographical novels Charles Elwood, or the Infidel Converted and The Spirit-Rapper; An Autobiography were written and published
before The Convert—the former before his conversion, in 1844, and the latter
after it. In the case of Brownson’s works, it is otherwise. Charles Elwood waswritten and published before The Convert, and his son Henry F. Brownson, whocollected and arranged Volume IV, suggests this novel’s relevance to understanding
Brownson’s conversion narrative better in his “Editor’s Preface” (v). It seems,
however, that the autobiography sheds light on these autobiographical novels
from a different angle.
Charles Elwood was written in 1834 but offered to the reading public in
1840. Brownson was a Unitarian preacher at Canton, Massachusetts before hecame up to Boston and began to hold independent services for the Society for
Christian Union and Progress, engaging in journalism to improve the lot of workers, and joined Ripley’s Brook Farm. The novel is in fact a treatise in the form ofa series of dialogical discussions on the problem of God’s existence to overcome
skepticism. Brownson’s mind had already been overshadowed by the problem ofGod’s existence and validity of Christian faith both historical and theological, andthe skepticism is not his own, but it had deepened in nineteenth-century American society. New England Brahmins started to disengage from traditional Christianity in America’s expanding economy, and they reflected the trends of theEuropean continent that had largely impacted on their world through the inflow
of French and German books, which they read avidly. Charles Elwood is what we
may call a “tract” novel, in and through which the author tries to overcome his
own and fellow New Englanders’ problems and to affirm the verity of traditional
Christian tenets. Perhaps Brownson felt a keen need for such a novel.
The novel is a frame for discussions between Charles Elwood, the “unbeliever” protagonist, and the zealous revivalist preacher Mr. Smith, who tries
aggressively to convert him through proselytizing, until he finds spiritual calm
when he meets a gentle clergyman Mr. Wilson. His other encounters include
those with Elizabeth, his fiancée, whom he eventually marries, Mr. Howard, a
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gentle Christian knowledgeable about the history of Christianity, and Mr. Morton
who leads him back to the Christian faith while staying at Mr. Howard’s estate toconvalesce from a nervous breakdown. Charles and Mr. Smith are Brownson’s
two selves within his mind, like Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In one
sense this novel’s structure and the writer’s technique in drawing the two figuresand situational backgrounds are rather flat and one-dimensional, as Brownson
himself grants. Interestingly he emphasizes in his “Preface” added in 1840 on theoccasion of publication that his book is a fiction:
I do not send it forth as a work of art. I have not studied to conform to theestablished laws of the species of composition to which it may belong. It
has the air of being a work of fiction; but it has been written in an earnest
spirit for a serious purpose.
The form in which I have chosen to send out the ideas and discussions
embodied in this work, has been adopted to please myself, and because it
was the most convenient form I could adopt for presenting my ideas clearly
and in a moderate space. A regular treatise on the subject here discussed, I
have not the patience, if the ability, to prepare, and nobody would read it if
I had. (4: 172)
Brownson answers the reader’s possible charge that he used the novelistic
form for a serious topic as well as that he merely used the novelistic form forexpressing his religious views:
It may be objected that I have introduced too much fiction for a serious
work: and too little, if I intended a regular-built novel. All I must say is the
public must take the work as they find it. In order to have introduced agreater variety of characters and events, I wanted a fertility of imagination
to which I lay no claim, and a different purpose in writing from the one I
really had. I have introduced as much variety of character and action, as my
imagination furnished, or my judgment approved. (4: 173)
“The characters introduced,” Brownson remarks, are “fictitious,” but hedefends himself: “I have myself had an intellectual experience similar to thatwhich Mr. Elwood records, and what he has said of himself would perhaps apply

11Orestes Brownson’s Autobiography and Autobiographical Novels

in some degree to me” (4: 173). He defends his novel in “Charles Elwood Reviewed,” written two years later for the Boston Quarterly Review for April 1842,
in which he says that his fiction is written in the form of an autobiography of a
figure of his creation. Nevertheless, the hero’s spiritual experience is genuine:
The book is written in the form of an autobiography, and this has led
some to infer that the author is the hero of his story. This, except so far as
the purely spiritual experience detailed is concerned, is not true. The author
has merely transferred to Charles Elwood his own experience as an unbeliever, the efforts he made to get the better of his doubts, his repeated
failures, and ultimate success. Beyond this he has nothing in common withhim. The characters introduced are fancy sketches, though perhaps notunlike some frequently met in actual life. (4: 317)
Already at the point of the novel’s publication Brownson indicates that hehas taken a model from the contemporary French philosophical novels (4: 174).
His novel, he says, though not as elaborate as a purely imaginative creation, ismeant to collate all the intricate workings of the mind of a contemporary intellectual (in that sense realistic):
As a literary production, the work has been objected to, that its story is
meager, and its plot without interest. The aim of the author was not to write
a story that should posses an independent interest, nor to show his skill in
weaving and unraveling an intricate plot. The narratives and incidents introduced are integral parts of the work, essential elements of its discussions,and necessary to its main argument, to which they are designedly subordinated, but to which they contribute, perhaps, more than our readers ingeneral suspect. (4: 317)
The hero, Brownson’s creation, is fictional, but he says: “I am willing thatwhat is recorded should have the authority of my own experience” (4: 173). The
fictional hero is Brownson’s alter ego, Charles Elwood, who has probably reached
old age and is looking back on the course of the life he has led. He receives arequest from his friend K to write and deliver him “the history of his life” (4: 174).
Through Elwood’s rumination of what the hero should or could gather fromphenomenological fragments of one’s life, Brownson the author indirectly inti12

Shun’ichi Takayanagi

mates to us what a human as the persona is and his almost lack of significance forothers: “Biography is too often the fruit of vanity, is of small value; it for the mostpart passes away with the individual, and leaves no trace; what there is in an
individual. . . . The memory of the good man lives in the virtue which went forthfrom him, that of the great man in the results humanity obtains from the victories
he has helped her achieve” (4: 175). The story of one’s outward life tells little ofa person. The real (auto)biography is the history of one’s soul, which makes us
familiar with a person’s spiritual experience, inward struggles, defeats, victories,
doubts, convictions, ends, and aims. Elwood says: “These constitute the realman, and you become acquainted with him only in proportion as you become
familiar with them” (4: 174).
When Charles Elwood finishes the nonetheless internally turbulent historyof his life, he finds himself an old man—all his friends and acquaintances are gone.
Even Elizabeth, his wife, passed away years ago. His life, as he concludes, issomething like having “planted wild flowers on her grave and watered them with[his] tears” (4: 316).
Charles Elwood concludes the account of his life: “I have now gone throughwith what I had to say respecting my intellectual struggles, in passing from
infidelity to an unwavering belief in God and the supernatural origin of Christianity. I have detailed with some minuteness and with as much accuracy as I could,
the various arguments and views by which my recovery was effected” (4: 313).
His recovery is from the sickness of what the hero describes as “infidelity.” Ten
years before his conversion, Brownson has integrated a wide-perspective
apologetics in a narrative frame. He lets Charles Elwood say: “The Christianity
here set forth is the Christianity of the universal church” (4: 315). Brownson’sembryonic ecclesiology already has at this stage what we nowadays commonly
meet with in ecumenical dialogues; it is meant to overcome the sectarian narrowness of the historical reality of Christian churches.

IV. Spirit-Rapper—Neither Novel Nor Romance —Amalgamation into Self-Narrative
Brownson brought out what we may call his second autobiographical novel,
The Spirit-Rapper; An Autobigraphy, in 1854, ten years after his conversion andthree years before his autobiography The Convert. Curiously, although subtitled13

Orestes Brownson’s Autobiography and Autobiographical Novels

as an autobiography, the author denies that it is an autobiography at the outset.
Brownson declares that the piece cannot be determined “by any recognized rulesof art” (9: 1). If the critics are unable to tell, he himself does not know: “I am surepuzzled myself to say what it is. It is not a novel; it is not a romance; it is not abiography of a real individual; it is not a dissertation, an essay, or a regular treatise;and yet it perhaps has some elements of them all, thrown together in just such a
way as best suited my convenience, or my purpose” (9: 1).
Brownson denies on the surface that his work is a novel or a romance, but it
is a modern Gothic romance. According to the author, his intention was not tothrow out to the book market a textual jumble. The book is to be a book “on the
new superstition, or old superstition under a new name, exciting just now no little
attention at home” (9: 1). As he claims, “the book, though affecting some degreeof levity, is serious in its aims, and truthful in its statements. There is no fictionin it, save its machinery. What is given is fact, or at least so regarded by the author.
The facts narrated, or strictly analogous facts, I have either seen myself, or given
on what I regard ample evidence” (9: 1). The author thinks that mesmerism,
which he thinks of as a type of spiritualism, has connection with “modern philanthropy, visionary reforms, socialism, and revolutionism” (9: 1). And he says hisview is endorsed by the French sources he has investigated. His intention inwriting a book he claims belongs to no literary genre is to expose the danger ofmesmerism, which was widely disseminated in contemporary society; one famous contemporary author addicted to this pseudo-science was Nathaniel
Hawthorne, who understood himself as a romancer (Coale 1-27).
Like Charles Elwood this story is a story of a skeptic’s conversion to theChristian faith narrated, as in any autobiography, by the fictive “I,” the SpiritRapper. The difference consists in the fact that this time the autobiographicalhero goes through the travail of spiritual doubts in an age of science and scientism.
The climate of this age is dominated by scientism. Darwin’s Evolutionism loomed
large and dominated the spiritual horizons of society. Scientism represented byAuguste Comte, Thomas Huxley, Herbert Spenser, and others created an atmosphere which threatened to push the place of religion to the margins of daily life.
To fill the empty spiritual space all kinds of pseudo-scientific or quasipsychological cults spread among the populace, such as phrenology, mesmerism,
spiritualism and pseudo-religions. In volume IX of Brownson’s Complete Works,
one may find his critical treatments of these tendencies together with the novel weare now considering. Brownson wrote the novel to meet popular skepticism on
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its own ground. The Spirit-Rapper goes through the experience of witnessing
cases of mesmerism and finally regains the Christian faith.
As he says about himself, the narrator has a Puritan immigrant pedigree; his
parents were farmers, and they were “intelligent, moral, industrious, and economical, and as matter of course, soon prospered, and became able to give their
only son the best education the State could furnish, and leave him a competentestate” (9: 3). However, as he says, he grew up “without any decided religious
doctrines” and “a sort of rationalist, accepting Christianity in name” (9: 225). He
reflects on the tendencies of his youth:
My early predilection was mathematical and physical sciences. The
moral and intellectual sciences were not much to my taste. I took no interestin them. They struck me as vague, uncertain, and unprofitable. I preferred
what M. Comte has since called Positive Philosophy. I soon masteredmathematics, mechanics, and physics, as far as they were taught in ourcollege, but I found my greatest delight in chemistry, which, by subtle
analyses, seemed to promise me an approach to the vital principle and to
the essences of things. (9: 3)
In a sense he is a typical educated man in an age of science. Eventually hestudied medicine. After taking a medical degree, he went on to make further
studies in all kinds of fashionable natural “-ologies.” He is acquainted withTranscendentalism in Boston, but is told by the Transcendentalist Brahmins he is
not spiritual enough; he is “too much under the despotism of the understanding to
be able to rise to those empyrean regions where the soul asserts her freedom, andsports with infinite delight in all the luxuries of the unintelligible” (9: 4). He wason his part very little enlightened by “their dark utterances” (9: 4). This hardened
young physician easily believes a mesmerist, Dr. P—who came up “from the
French West Indies, where he was a Saint-Simonian, and a chief of the savants of
the new religion” (9: 4). Soon he is recruited in Philadelphia, the City of Love, tothe mesmeric group composed of Quakers, Unitarian, and Swedenborgians, which
is a new religion of the affluent class who combine it with philanthropy and worldreform. With the reform-minded Madame Priscilla, the patroness of the Mesmerist-Reformist salon, the hero goes on a mission tour for world reform all over
Europe, from England and Scandinavia in the north to Italy in the south. In Italy
they discuss the situation of national unification with Italian leaders. But the15

Orestes Brownson’s Autobiography and Autobiographical Novels

project of reform is not realizable in the near future. Meanwhile he learns about
the Catholic faith and the historical background to the present condition of the
Church. He comes back disappointed but a wise man. As in Charles Elwood Mr.
Morton is the Christian adviser who leads him to recognize a reality wider thanthe hero’s simple, positivist understanding of the world: “An unreasonable scepticism is as far from true wisdom and virtue as an unreasonable belief. Modern
science is sceptical; and it is more important just now to guard against scepticism
and its irreligion than it is to guard against superstition” (9: 191).

Conclusion
The genre of autobiography has a long history starting with Augustine’s
Confessions (Weintraub 48). In modern literature the distinctions between genres
have become flexible; they mix and new hybrids have been born. The novel, thenewest genre, is the most capable of assimilating other genres. Autobiography
precedes the autobiographical novel in the evolution of literary genres as weunderstand them. Autobiographies are “self-narratives.” They start as such in
American Puritan literature (Bercovitch, History 1: 206-11) as accounts of personal religious experiences represented by Cotton Mather and John Woolman. In
Paul John Eakin’s American Autobiography several scholars survey autobiographies from the colonial period to the present time (3-120). American
biography is in a sense personally involved American history, as Alfred Kazin
points out (Stone 32). It would be good to know exactly who it was thatgenerated this kind of American self-consciousness, with its typical anxiety.
Autobiography began to dissociate itself from the delineation of highly
religion-charged experiences in the New World from the time of Franklin’s Autobiography. Autobiographical novels may be regarded as the application of thetechnique of autobiographical writing to fiction. Ignoring the chronology,
Brownson’s novels exemplify how it is applied to fiction. Brownson wrote his
autobiography The Convert as an apology over the suspicion and charges of theCatholic hierarchy as to the sincerity of his allegiance to his Church. If there had
been no need in this direction, he would not have had to write an autobiography.
As he suggests, he had examples in French sources to inspire two autobiographicalnovels both of which are fictive personal conversion narratives. Although in
Brownson’s time the genre of autobiography was moving away from religion, we
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Shun’ichi Takayanagi

surely cannot ignore his own works. They indicate much about the problems,
both epistemological and technical, of inscribing the self on the text and of transferring and transforming facts into fiction.
Works Cited
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Bercovitch, Sacvan, gen. ed., Cyrus R. K. Patell, assoc. ed. The Cambridge History of American Literature. Vol. I. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.
Brownson, Orestes A. The Works of Orestes A. Brownson. Ed. Henry F. Brownson. 20vols. (Heterodox
Writings). New York: AMS P, 1966.
Carey, Patrick W. Orestes A. Brownson: American Religious Weathervane. Grand Rapids: William B.
Eerdmans, 2004.
Carrool, Robert E. Spiritualism in Antebellum America. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1997.
Coale, Samuel Chase. Mesmerism and Hawthorne: Mediums of American Romance. Tiscaloosa: U of
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Eakin, Paul John, ed. Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention. Princeton:
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Eakin, Paul John, ed. American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect. Madison: U of Wisconsin P,
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Frye, Northrop, Sheridan Baker and George Perkins, eds. The Harper Handbook to Literature. New
York: Harper & Row, 1985.
Fuller, Robert C. Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls. Philadelphia: U of Pennsyvania P, 1982.
Gauld, Alan. A History of Hypnotism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.
Gotldfarb, Russell K. Spritualism and Nineteenth-Century Literature. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson
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Kucuch, Jon J. Ghostly Communion: Cross-Cultrual Spritualism in Nineteenth-Century American
Literature. Hanover: Dartmouth College P, 2009.
Lapati, Americo D. Orestes A. Brownson. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1964.
Leibowitz, Herbert. Fabricating Lives: Explorations in American Autobiography. New York: Alfred
Knopf, 1989.
Machann, Clinton. The Genre of Autobigraphy in Victorian Literature. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P,
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Ryan, Thomas R. Orestes A. Brownson: A Definitive Biography. Hungtinton: Our Sunday Visitor,
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Steele, Jeffrey. The Representation of the Self in the American Renaissance. Chapel Hill: U of North
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Stone, Albert E. The American Autobiography: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englecliffe: PrenticeHall, 1981.
Tatar, Maria M. Spellbound: Studies in Mesmerism and Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980.

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Orestes Brownson’s Autobiography and Autobiographical Novels
Weintraub, Karl Joachim. The Value of the Individual: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography. Chicago:
U of Chicago P, 1978.
Winter, Alison. Mesmerized: Power of Mind in Victorian Britain. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998.

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