Gothic Subjects. Sian Silyn Roberts
Thus two people of matching interiority and equal merit—Lucy Freeman and Mr. Sumner, say, in The Coquette (1797) or Myra and Worthy in The Power of Sympathy (1789)—achieve individual perfection through marriage as each augments the other with something he or she lacked prior to the exchange. This is essentially the erotic counterpart to a political model of contractual community; in both instances, the good is constituted through shared standards of taste and judgment rather than subordination and coercion. Thus the marriage contract maintains the integrity of self-sovereign authority by regulating and enforcing the social and cognitive distinctions on which the institutional norms of individualism rest.
But as recent cultural historians have argued, from its earliest moments, American literary culture found itself at odds with the kind of “exemplary and progressive spirits” unilaterally identified with unitary, disciplined subjecthood.28 As David Kazanjian explains, for such a formulation to work, it had “to ignore all the myriad, particularistic differences among subjects—trade, heritage, wealth, race, gender, religion, the list is supposedly infinite—in order to apprehend each subject equally.”29 Insofar as it measures human sovereignty strictly as the unproblematic unfolding of mental and political complexity along developmental lines, the “individual” is an elite cultural formulation. As Judith Butler succinctly puts it, “liberal versions of human ontology” have a tendency to think in the exclusive terms of “bounded beings—distinct, recognizable, delineated, subjects.”30 Enlightenment epistemologies of the modern subject restrict civic membership to only those figures of self-sovereign authority who fit the Enlightenment definition of the individual in the first place. In Locke’s original formulation, these were men who belonged to an English land-owning elite arranged within a traditional hierarchy of kinship relations. But the moment the individual enters a cultural milieu in which people have circulated far beyond that system of social stratification and share altogether different notions of self-fulfillment and political authority—a place, arguably, much like the post-Revolutionary United States—the limitations of this model become strikingly clear.
It is for this reason, I suspect, that the authors included in this study repeatedly take the individual to task as both a fiction and a fragile, defensive construct perilously vulnerable to competing measures of human life. Beginning in the 1790s, American authors started to use gothic tropes to represent the individual as an impossible fantasy wholly unsuited to an urban, cosmopolitan community of competing interests, heterogeneous cultures, and different notions of political and personal authority. As I see it, post-Revolutionary and antebellum U.S. fiction comes fully freighted with characters bearing little resemblance to the kind of internally coherent, developmental subject of the British sentimental tradition with whom Ian Watt enjoins us to identify “the rise of the novel.”31 Arthur Mervyn, C. Auguste Dupin, Updike Underhill, Sheppard Lee, and Hester Prynne are obvious cases in point. It is fair to say that none of these characters qualifies as an “individual” as modern political theory understood that term, namely, as the ordered, continuous, autonomous self whose social value resides in its unique interiority, developmental progress, moral discipline, and capacity for critical reflection. To the contrary, the narrative personas of the American novel—especially where it appears “gothic” in character—are more often restless, indeterminate social forces inimical to Enlightenment rules of behavior but who nonetheless thrive in conditions of ontological mobility.
A literary example from Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn (1799–1800) will serve to clarify this point. This is the novel’s description of Philadelphia in the grip of the yellow fever: “Terror had exterminated all the sentiments of nature. Wives were deserted by husbands, and children by parents.… Men were seized by this disease in the streets; passengers fled from them; entrance into their own dwellings was denied to them; they perished in the public ways.”32 The novel’s horrific account of the household’s disintegration effectively questions the Enlightenment assumption that family feeling is an unbreakable bond and the basis for the kind of fellow feeling—among independent householders—that would create a community recognizable to Adam Smith as “sympathetic.” That the family falls apart so readily here should tell us that Brown is questioning its conventional application as a model for the nation at large. Indeed, Brown suggests, the affective model of social relations is particularly ill-suited to the kind of heterogeneous community one encounters in a city. Let me suggest why.
Brown’s Philadelphia is an urban space in which all manner of people are forced into close proximity with others (like the conman Welbeck) whose origins and intentions are, at best, unknowable or, at worst, outright hostile. The case can be made that, in such an environment, any assumption of fellow-feeling—that people have common ideas and emotions capable of uniting them in a single interest—can be downright dangerous. To think his way through this problem (I elaborate on this in Chapter 1), Brown uses the device of the plague to displace the self-enclosed household as the basic unit and model of society with a totally inimical model in which feeling flows unimpeded between people and even between objects and people. As the agent and representative of a society thus constituted, Mervyn refuses to observe the boundaries separating subject from object and allows feeling to pass between himself and those with whom he comes into contact. In refusing to observe the separation between himself and others, Mervyn assumes that everyone is just like him. Any domain where the logic of individualism prevails (the idyllic Hadwin household, for example) depends on unbreachable individual boundaries for its health and cohesion. Thus Mervyn’s invasions prove utterly disastrous in such spaces.
In the city, by contrast, this form of human interaction comes to us as Mervyn’s strikingly advantageous ability to ingratiate himself with practically anyone. His indiscriminate affability gets him out of danger, grants him access to Philadelphia’s elite, and even secures him a wealthy wife. Indeed, what might be seen as a lack of discrimination in British terms might well earn the descriptor “democratic” in the new United States. By and large, criticism has tended to read the novel’s notorious ambiguities as evidence of Mervyn’s divided moral, economic, or political consciousness.33 I would simply prefer to say that the different and conflicting accounts we receive of Mervyn’s actions and motives tell us that he is all things to all people. He has the potential, in short, to be anyone.
To imagine such an adaptable subject, however, Brown must redefine autonomy, self-enclosure, and fixed social position—whether in a body, a household, or a civil state—as prohibitive and static formulations that trap people and things in one place. In Lockean terms, this is both paradoxical and counterintuitive: Locke’s civil society takes property ownership as the original condition of self-government, and the categories of self and contract exist to protect that property against encroachment. These are the very structures that are supposed to guarantee freedom, property rights, and independence—at least as defined by the contractual state, whose constituents meet the exemplary yet entirely arbitrary political status of the individual subject. To take this altogether restrictive notion of social relations to task, Brown reduces the sentimental household to rubble and in its place offers something to the order of a network or circuit through which information in the form of emotions can travel freely. In assuming that one mind can be any number of people, Brown builds a model of subjectivity out of the gothic energies that are absolutely antithetical to the British novel’s notion of community.
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To arrive at this idea, Brown exploits a loophole in the logic of personal sovereignty as mapped out in Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Consider this remarkable passage, in which a single mind wanders between two sleeping bodies: “Let us then … suppose the Soul of Castor separated, during his Sleep, from his Body, to think apart. Let us then suppose too, that it chuses for its Scene of Thinking, the Body of another Man, v.g. Pollux, who is sleeping without a Soul: For if Castor’s Soul can think whilst Castor is asleep, what Castor is never conscious of, ’tis no matter what Place it chuses to think in. We have here then the Bodies of two Men with only one Soul between them.”34 Significantly, Locke brings up this imaginary case of body swapping purely for the purpose of dismissing it as an “absurdity.” As far as he is concerned, knowledge comes from sensory experience to produce an internally