Sherry Chandler

The Emigrants

Our heroine, the freethinking and sublimely beautiful Caroline T——n, has wandered to the wrong side of the Ohio and been taken by the Native Americans. Our hero, the intrepid Kentuckian Captain Arl—ton, has gone in pursuit, lured the natives out of their village by a ruse, and taken two captives:

Accordingly I dispatched my guide, with orders to conduct the mountaineer with his captive, by the shortest route, to the place where we had deposited our baggage; who were to prepare the rafts, and put on board the baggage against our arrival, without any regard to any more of the provisions, than would be necessary to last us for a day or two; and then mounted the prisoners behind the two hunters, who had orders to follow the track of the guide, while my brave servant and friend Andrew, who had led the party in the execution of the strategem, and myself, brought up the rear.

We had travelled in the course of the preceding day upwards of forty miles beyond the Illinois, so that it was nearly 3 P.M. before we regained the bank of the river.

My active guide and mountaineer had embarked the baggage the moment of our arrival, when I first had an opportunity of recognizing our captive.

Ah! Il—ray how did my swelling heart beat with joy, which was instantly succeeded by sorrow, when I first caught a glance from the brilliant eyes of the most divine woman upon earth, torn into shatters by the bushes and briars, with scarcely covering left to hide the transcendency of her beauty, which to be seen by common eyes is a profanation, and it was only by the effulgence of her etherial looks, that I could have known her?

Caroline has fallen into my hands!…She was sitting upon the bank of the river half harassed to death when I arrived, which from the horrors of a wilderness was converted into elysium; when I, regardless of every appearance, fell at her feet, and then embracing her, I felt all the transports that the circumstances of our meeting and the divinity of feminine charms inspire.

— from The Emigrants, &c. or the History of an Expatriated Family, being a Delineation of English Manners, Drawn from Real Characters, written in America, by G. Imlay, Esq. (Dublin. Printed for C. Brown, No. 93, Gafton-Street, 1794)

This is not satire but to our modern sensibilities it reads a bit like parody. The Emigrants, a “purpose” novel, has long been thought to be the first novel written by a Kentuckian, though that is disputed. As indicated by the title page to the facsimile edition from which I copied this passage, the book is often attributed to Mary Wollstonecraft. It certainly contains all the players in Wollstonecraft’s life: the free-thinking heroine, the spendthrift father, the wastrel brother, and the sister in need of rescue from an abusive marriage. But it also contains the cast from Imlay’s Kentucky adventures, the best known of whom is General W———, a scarcely disguised portrait of General James Wilkinson.

The ideas are Wollstonecraft’s: freer divorce laws and the establishment of a utopian society in Kentucky. However, Lyndall Gordon, author of Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (HarperCollins 2005), accepts the novel as Imlay’s work, in part, I think because it’s so badly written:

…Imlay’s is dead on the page with flat characters and inflated emotions; and though the hero’s sexual appetite is unusually blatant for American writing of the period, it comes over as comic — half-reverent, half-gloating voyeurism…Unfortunately, the tosh overshadows the moral debates where Imlay comes into his own…

I think Imlay probably wrote the novel for two reasons. The first is that it came out within the first three months of his “pursuit” of Wollstonecraft. The second that I don’t think any woman in her 30s as smart and independent as Wollstonecraft and brave enough to stay in Paris during the Terror would create a self-portrait as over-the-top as this one is. I think at least one purpose of this “purpose novel” was the courtship of Mary Wollstonecraft and in that purpose it was more successful than in the others.

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