Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel (Criterion, $8.50) is obviously the statement of a theme, and the reader might expect it to be a literary theme. But it is not about fiction or literature as an experience in its own right, although the book promises at first to be a daring exposure of the unconscious, not only of American authors but of the American mind.
The sentimental hovel faltered in its influence upon the growth of American fiction, and Walpole’s gothic emerged as the source of its lasting form. This is the theme; the method of exegesis, Freudian; the controlling image, the phallus. The seduction of Clarissa he assumes to be the archetype of the sentimental novel. Its outward failure was the prudery of the genteel tradition. It actually failed in America, however, because in this country’s unconscious we are a nation of boys running away with the dark companion into the wilderness, or to sea, or down the river upon a raft. We are running away from mama, our domestic White Goddess; because of our incestuous longing, we cannot conceive of her in the role of Protestant virgin being raped by a colonial Lovelace. She remains the blue-eyed, marble-skinned virgin too pure for the bed.
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