A central but underappreciated figure in the emergence of American national literature, Royall Tyler (1757–1826) is probably best known for his nationalistic play The Contrast (1787), a fairly conventional comedy of manners distinguishing Yankee virtue from English vice. From a literary standpoint, however, his lone novel, The Algerine Captive, is a much more intriguing work.

Tyler’s apparent intention in writing the book was to warn America’s democratic citizens of their dangerous capacity for ignorance and hypocrisy. In pursuing that goal, he produced an intriguing literary hybrid, blending the genres of picaresque satire, captivity narrative, and philosophical novel.

The Algerine Captive recounts the travels of a fictional, first-person narrator, Doctor Updike Underhill, a well-meaning but naive and provincial Yankee. Tracing his heritage back to the Puritan migration and the founding of the colonies, Underhill stands as an American everyman, and Tyler uses him in the first volume of the novel to satirize both the pretentiousness of the emergent professional classes and the vulnerability and gullibility of the masses.

Eventually, Underhill’s travels in volume 1 bring him into contact with some of the intellectual luminaries of the age. This device allows Tyler to comment, indirectly, on a range of political topics. Benjamin Franklin proves to be an admirable example of Enlightenment rationality and political pragmatism, for example, but the radical Thomas Paine is exposed as a shallow thinker whose ideas are driven as much by drink as by principle.

Through all of these early episodes, Tyler’s humor remains broad and the tone of the book relatively lighthearted. The tone changes abruptly at the end of volume 1, however, when Underhill’s search for a stable living draws him into the trans-Atlantic slave system as physician on a slave ship. Recognizing the massive contradictions inherent in the new American republic’s support of slavery, Tyler places his narrator in an equally compromised position, thus raising the moral stakes of the book.

Charged with keeping as many of the slaves alive as possible during the horrific Middle Passage, Underhill, along with the reader, is forced to confront the hypocrisy of American political idealism. This painful moment of self-recognition sets the stage for the second volume of the novel. In the final chapter of volume 1, Barbary pirates attack Underhill’s vessel, and he finds himself taken to Algeria.

The beginning of the second half of The Algerine Captive is marked by a clear shift in genre; we leave behind the lightly comic world of Underhill’s picaresque wanderings to enter into the stark literary landscape of the Barbary captivity narrative. Written during the 1790s and first decade of the 1800s, the Barbary slave narratives ostensibly deal with the enslavement of Christians by Muslims in North Africa. At the same time, these works (which include texts such as Susanna Rowson’s 1794 opera Slaves in Algiers, or a Struggle for Freedom) provided American writers with a safer, more indirect way of critiquing the slave system at home.

In volume 2 of The Algerine Captive, Tyler fuses this specific form of captivity narrative with another 18th-century literary genre—the philosophical novel—adding yet another layer of critical distance. One of the texts Tyler had in mind as a model was probably the Persian Letters of Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, the French philosopher and jurist. That work centers on two Persian visitors to Europe, whose letters home provide a wide-ranging commentary on Western society, morals, and politics.

In much the same vein, Underhill’s reflections on his captivity in Algeria provide an opportunity for Tyler to reflect on the institution of slavery and to comment on American society. Underhill becomes the centerpiece of such a critique in a series of heavily ironic episodes. Though he is unable to recognize his own intellectual and moral failures, the doctor’s naive sense of cultural supremacy is demolished in a series of debates with an Algerian mullah.

Consequently, his critical commentary on Algerian history comes across to the reader as an implicit critique of European politics. Underhill’s discussion of an Algerian lawsuit can be read as a lamentation about the influence of money and power in the American system of justice. Finally, his acknowledgment of the rapid breaking of his spirit in captivity offers a direct rebuttal to those apologists for American slavery who held up slave docility as evidence of natural subservience.

By displacing some of the most controversial elements of his social commentary to North Africa, Tyler is able to offer a remarkably wide-ranging satire in the second half of The Algerine Captive. Though its lack of formal unity may trouble some contemporary readers, the novel should be understood as a sophisticated piece of comic writing. Clearly the work of an 18th-century mind, The Algerine Captive nevertheless raises issues of great importance both for 19th-century Americans (the problem of slavery) and for contemporary Americans (the dangers of ignorance and self-deception in a democratic society).

Sources
Baepler, Paul. “The Barbary Captivity Narrative in Early America,” Early American Literature 30, no. 2 (1995): 95–120.
———. White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology of American Barbary Captivity Narratives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Dennis, Larry R. “Legitimizing the Novel: Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive,” Early American Literature 9, no. 1 (Spring 1974): 71–80.
Engell, John. “Narrative Irony and National Character in Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive,” Studies in American Fiction 17, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 19–32.
Snader, Joe. “The Oriental Captivity Narrative and Early English Fiction,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 9, no. 3 (April 1997): 267–298.
Tanselle, G. Thomas. Royall Tyler. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967.
Tyler, Royall. The Algerine Captive. New Haven, Conn.: College and University Press, 1970.

Categories: Literature, Novel Analysis

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