Gothic Subjects. Sian Silyn Roberts
invest meaning in objects that mediates between perception and reality. Reid rewrites this scenario as a gothic melodrama in which Hume temporarily introduces spectral phenomena and aberrant behavior into a realist world in order to test the category of rational individualism. Persecuted by this haunting prospect that sensible objects exist only as ideas inside the mind, Reid finds himself in the position conventionally reserved for the gothic heroines of Walpole or Radcliffe: he is trapped inside the castle and subject to hostile imperatives and emotions not his own (“I blush inwardly to think how I have been deluded”). Much like the model of the individual proposed by his predecessor John Locke, Reid’s perceiving subject preserves its autonomy by observing and carefully maintaining the distinction between subjects and objects. The gothic tropes of imprisonment and persecution take over the narrative when that distinction breaks down. To reassert common sense as the dominant, normative metaphysics, Reid casts Hume’s skeptical alternative in phobic terms—renders it, that is, a spectacular object of fear—and banishes its brand of magical thinking to the realm of fiction.
In this example from Reid’s Inquiry, there is a mutually constitutive relationship between gothic strategies of representation, modern theories of individual consciousness, and a realist epistemological order. Recent scholarship has convincingly argued that eighteenth-century British literary culture transformed this relationship into the form of the gothic novel itself. According to this line of thought, early popular romances assert a self-affirming realism by demystifying sources of terror that override personal judgment. Reid adopts a fiercely defensive position against any perceived threat to a stable sense of reality and the continuous subject that inhabits such a world. In much the same way, the eighteenth-century British gothic novel banishes atavistic energies associated with a corrupt aristocracy, distant medieval past, or supernatural agency to leave the world inhabited by characters whose desires and motivations arise solely within themselves—characters, in other words, that closely resemble the modern self. By adjudicating emotion and the operations of desire, the gothic authorizes a distinctly modern prototype of personhood defined by what Adela Pinch calls “standards of suitable emotional response.”6 Thus novels by Radcliffe, Walpole, Reeve, and others subordinate anti-individualistic elements to an all-encompassing narrative of progression and improvement for the purposes of naturalizing the self-governing individual and, by extension, the household and civil society as its basic units of aggregation. By reproducing individuals as containers of “cultivated sensibility,” the gothic distinguishes a literate middle class from other ethnicities, races, and social groups with divergent cultural practices.7 The early British gothic normalizes and naturalizes a modern subject defined by its autonomy and interiority and so works hand-in-glove with the sentimental tradition to modernize kinship relations at the level of the individuated subject and the contractual household. By this line of argument, nothing less than the definition of the individual and its claims to moral authority are at stake in the early British gothic novel.8
Now let us now imagine the gothic traveling across the Atlantic in the 1790s to take root in the United States as a popular cultural form. Indeed, it is a well-established fact of American publication history that a wide body of imported and reprinted gothic novels became available to readers up and down the Eastern seaboard at the end of the eighteenth century.9 Literary evidence tells us that early American novelists such as Charles Brockden Brown, Isaac Mitchell, and Sally Sayward Barrell Keating Wood were familiar with and drew upon the narrative materials of the British novel. For the sake of argument, then, let us assume that the generic relationship between the gothic mode and the discursive reproduction of the modern individual was transplanted through the conventions of the novel into the homegrown literary productions of these authors. But it seems equally likely that the particular historical, political, and social exigencies of the new United States altered the conditions under which early Americans could imagine themselves achieving individualism or entering into contractual relations. If I am right in this assumption, then early American authors had to confront a disconnect between transmitted cultural forms and the new social setting in which they took root. This book is about how the American gothic addressed this problem and the ways it shaped late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century U.S. literary culture.
It is no coincidence that the American gothic first rose to popularity in a period defined by misrepresentation, internal unrest, and an influx of foreign immigrants whose origins and political intentions were all too uncertain. In the last decades of the eighteenth century, the United States witnessed an unprecedented increase in immigration and social mobility; far-reaching changes in property, proprietary wealth, and taxation laws; crises in federal and state representation; and a mounting sense of the country’s irrelevance in an international trade market. Ominous forecasts abound in the era’s writings: J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur calls the post-Revolutionary years “calamitous times”; Benjamin Rush, with characteristic energy, issues a dire warning about North Americans “degenerating into savages or devouring each other like beasts of prey”; and Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly; Or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799) dwells on the dangers of the nation’s “mysterious and obscure” characters.10 North America’s population, expanding from 2.8 million in 1780 to 9.6 million in 1820, largely comprised displaced young men and makeshift families that, as one cultural historian puts it, “moved and moved again.”11 In his essay “Information to Those Who Would Remove to America” (1782), Benjamin Franklin addresses the numerous problems posed by “the quick Increase of Inhabitants” on the continent.12 As Franklin’s essay suggests, the unprecedented population growth and restlessness that followed the Revolution was accelerated in no small part by what he calls the “Accession of Strangers” from Europe.13 In Kelroy (1812), Rebecca Rush’s novel of pecuniary ambition and parental contrivance, the narrator captures this zeitgeist when she cautions her readers against “those beings who may be said to spring from nobody knows where; and rise in the world nobody can tell how.”14 Rush’s comment about the opacity of human origin and motive is as much product of this era as the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts, which sought to locate and discipline precisely such foreign or indeterminate elements.15
The body of literary evidence assembled in this book suggests that British ideals of self-governance and contractualism came under assault in this climate of ontological uncertainty and rapid demographic change. By the end of the eighteenth century, global and local forces had moved people far beyond the traditional blood-based, ecclesiastical, and economic kinship structures that were traditionally relied upon to establish and corroborate identities in Europe and Britain.16 Disparate and clashing ideological regimes—including industrialization, urbanization, territorial expansion, imperialism, market capitalism, slavery, federalism, and revolution—multiplied the ways in which early Americans interpreted the concept of personal sovereignty. Under unforeseen conditions of social, geographic, and economic mobility, it fell to U.S. fiction writers to imagine ways of making this ambiguous and globally dispersed social body cohere as a political entity. The gothic provided the means to do so. For the gothic to accomplish such a task, however, the unique generic relationship between the cultural form of the early British novel and the discursive reproduction of the modern individual had to undergo a significant transformation on this side of the Atlantic.
Gothic Subjects argues that the American gothic tradition came about as authors sought to formulate in literary terms the kind of subject capable of negotiating the political, social, and demographic exigencies of the new United States. To do so, U.S. authors from the 1790s to the 1860s reshaped the cultural prototypes of eighteenth-century English modernity—chiefly the autonomous subject, contractual domestic relations, and the operations of sympathy—to account for a heterogeneous, fluid milieu of competing populations, rival territorial claims, and altogether different notions of political autonomy. To put this another way, a transformation in the cultural logic of British individualism took place over the course of the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries as U.S. fiction writers adapted the rhetorical figure of the modern subject to an Atlantic, Anglophone world. In doing so, authors such as Charles Brockden Brown, Sally Sayward Barrell Keating Wood, Royall Tyler, Leonora Sansay, Washington Irving, Robert Montgomery Bird, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and William Wells Brown helped post-Revolutionary and antebellum Americans think of themselves as political subjects.
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