A "Wild and Ambiguous Medium": Democracy, Interiority, and the Early American Epistolary Novel.

This essay examines early American novelists' sustained use of epistolary fiction as a deliberate strategy to highlight the inherent uncertainties in discerning others' inner lives, a challenge central to republican social and political life. Writers such as Charles Brockden Brown and Susanna Rowson favored the epistolary form because its mediated, partial access to characters' thoughts resisted the third-person novel's illusion of direct interiority, fostering an epistemological humility valuable for navigating early democratic society. Through close readings of Brown's *Clara Howard* and Rowson's *Sincerity*, the essay argues that these novels emphasize the limits of knowing others' true feelings, cautioning readers against overconfidence in interpreting sincerity amid the social complexities of the early republic. Rather than promoting sympathetic identification as a foundation for political unity, these works use the epistolary form to train readers in the interpretative challenges of judging character and motive in a fluid democratic culture.