Gothic Subjects. Sian Silyn Roberts
which established modes of political authority were still very much up for grabs. As Noah Webster puts it, this is a period in which “constitutions of civil government are not yet firmly established [and] national character is not yet formed.”35 The unique brand of interiority with which otherwise defenseless heroines ward off tyrannical oppressors locates political power in the self-authorizing, sovereign category of the individual. Wood’s novel, moreover, locates cultural Englishness in an exemplary domestic arrangement defined by the interior life of its constituents. As a diasporic model of social relations, this family does not require that one be in England to be a member; to the contrary, it simply requires that one meets certain exemplary conditions of personhood.
The Fragile Individual
I have spent some time arguing that the early British gothic tradition opens up its constituents to collective sources of emotion that originate in other people and things to test and reaffirm the boundaries of individual autonomy. In doing so, it defends a realist world in which objects behave like objects and actions are determined by emotions that arise wholly within the mind. It is therefore fair to say that this world closely resembles the one inhabited by John Locke’s rational individual. As I explained in the Introduction, the “individual” is that modern epistemological construct whose social value resides in its interiority, mental qualities, and strict autonomy. This model preserves its self-enclosure by creating an archive of ideas within the mind that mirrors the external world. By processing these ideas through the faculty of reason, the individual ensures the strict separation of subjects and objects. Nonetheless, the mind’s susceptibility to mediated sources of information—misrepresentation, say, or collective emotion—persists as a matter of considerable concern for Locke and his philosophical successors. Indeed, the readiness with which the gothic breaks down the rational distinction between the mind and its world should be enough to suggest that the Lockean individual is, in fact, a profoundly vulnerable formulation. A brief review of Locke’s model of sensory perception will explain why.
In Locke’s original paradigm, as laid out in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, worldly encounter (or “experience”) fills the empty mind with the raw materials of sensation, which are converted into ideas about the world through the operations of reflection. As the mind becomes aware of its own perceptions, it engages the faculty of judgment to sort and classify its ideas, which accrue as an archive of information against which it can measure subsequent encounters. Locke is less clear on whether sensation precedes a capacity for reflection or the other way around; it is simply enough that the mind exerts dominion over a private field of information and emotions—or intellectual “property”—that acquires social value through disciplined mental action. He then transforms this psychological model into a paradigm for political membership when he makes property the original condition of virtue and government in “The Second Treatise of Government” (1690): “Every man has a property in his own person: this nobody has any right to but himself. The labor of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left in it, he hath mixed his labor with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes his property.”36 Locke evokes the logic of terra nullius, or empty territory awaiting the inscription of sovereignty, to transform self-ownership (or property-in-oneself) into self-government, where the subject’s development of the faculty of judgment makes him sovereign over his own cognitive domain. This domain renders him eligible to contract with other subjects thus constituted. In this way, Locke lays the groundwork for a modern political culture that yokes sovereign power to national collectivity.
Important to my purposes, this model rests on a latent tautology with potentially devastating consequences. As Locke would have it, the autonomy of the individual mind is protected by the internal operations of reflection and understanding. The faculty of judgment separates the mind from the objective reality it perceives. But the materials for reflection come from objects that exist outside the mind. In other words, the very concept of autonomy on which the Lockean mind rests is at odds with the external sources from whence ideas arise. Empirical information, far from being an unmediated source of reflection, can enter the mind fully freighted with affect or meaning. Locke gets around this issue by insisting on reason’s ability to protect the mind from influences outside its control: “Every one, I think, finds in himself, a Power to begin or forbear, continue or put an end to several Actions in himself.”37 Here Locke emphasizes the internality and self-enclosure of the individual mind (“in himself”) to preserve the absolute distinction between subject and surrounding objects. In this way, strictly internal causes account for individual action.
While Locke is quick to discount the possibility that our actions and emotions may originate outside the mind, this idea lives on in fiction writing associated with “sensibility.”38 In the 1790s in particular, the controversy over the moral value of novel reading often centered on the reader’s emotional susceptibility, or the mind’s capacity to regulate the source and direction of its feelings. Opponents of the novel contended that fiction takes advantage of the undiscerning mind, which is particularly vulnerable to sources of information outside its control. The impressionable or uninstructed reader—especially one already prone to deep feeling—must remain vigilant against fiction’s assault on her mental faculties.39 This scenario plays out in Tabitha Gilman Tinney’s satirical novel Female Quixotism (1801), for instance, where an external source of emotion—the novel—collapses the rational distinction between subjects and objects, leaving the reader unable to distinguish truth from fiction.
William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy takes up the problem of the mind’s susceptibility in the following scene, where a moralizing Mr. Holmes discusses the civic education of the ideal subject: “I would describe the human mind as an extensive plain, and knowledge as the river that should water it. If the course of the river be properly directed, the plain will be fertilized and cultivated to advantage; but if books, which are the sources that feed this river, rush into it from every quarter, it will overflow its banks, and the plain will become inundated: When, therefore, knowledge flows on in its proper channel, this extensive and valuable field, the mind, instead of being covered with stagnant waters, is cultivated to the utmost advantage.”40 By accounting for the individual’s intellectual maturation in terms of cultivation and property, Mr. Holmes works within a familiar Lockean paradigm recognizable to American readers versed in British letters. Just as Locke describes the mind in the Essay as “white Paper, void of all Characters,” Mr. Holmes imagines the individual’s development as the process by which a “plain” (or Locke’s tabula rasa) is converted into valuable mental property through the addition of knowledge. What is this, if not the process Locke describes in the “Second Treatise” by which the rational individual is transformed into a political subject? This capacity for self-sovereignty, or what Worthy calls the “proper cultivation of [the] intelligent powers,” qualifies Myra and Worthy as a sentimental couple.41 Each recognizes in the other a unique interiority characterized by the mental properties of taste, self-regulation, and literacy Mr. Holmes describes as both exemplary and normative.
To naturalize this model of the developmental sovereign subject, Mr. Holmes takes a defensive stance against any force that might threaten it. The inexperienced mind, he tells us, must guard itself against any source of information that may cause it to “overflow” or stagnate. It is particularly vulnerable to external forces that can “rush into it from every quarter” and so hijack its rational faculties. This is a problem Locke himself obliquely acknowledged when he placed those ostensibly incapable of rational thought—women, children, slaves, and the elderly—under the care of a paternal guardian. Mr. Holmes, whose name stands in homonymic relation to Locke’s rational head of household, takes on the role of the paternal guardian by guiding the understanding of the ladies to whom he addresses this speech. In this way, William Hill Brown defends the British model of modern sovereignty, whereby the rational subject is formed mimetically in relation to a parent or guardian who regulates the readings practices of his subordinates. This figure fulfills his paternalistic function by protecting and regulating the uninstructed minds under his care and by setting certain standards of literacy as the basis of citizenship. In making this case, Brown adopts precisely the kind of rigorous defensive stance Locke himself takes in An