Gothic Subjects. Sian Silyn Roberts
Indeed, Locke obliquely acknowledges the exclusive nature of his model by adopting this characteristically defensive stance against any mode of thinking that undermines the principles of self-enclosure and internal coherency. This is much the same tactic of defensive individualism adopted by the late eighteenth-century British gothic. The self-evident absurdity of body swapping allows Locke to reaffirm his own model of the autonomous and self-enclosed individual (whose mind is housed strictly within a single body).
Locke’s defensive position masks a latent tautology in his concept of sensory encounter. On one hand, the autonomy of the individual mind as mapped out in the Essay is guaranteed by the operations of reflection and understanding that are internal to that mind. These faculties shape sensory information from the external world (“Experience”) into a reflection or idea within the mind.36 The subject’s judgment maintains the distance between its ideas and the external objects they represent, thus ensuring the strict separation of subject and object. Yet the materials it receives as sensations enter the mind from external sources, and Locke is far less willing to entertain the possibility that empirical information may come already infused with affect or meaning. Rather than confront this issue directly, Locke simply insists that reason protects the mind from influences outside its control, and strictly internal causes account for individual action: “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 places considerable stress on the internality and autonomy of the individual mind (“in himself”) to preserve the absolute separation between subject and surrounding objects.38
Once Locke had opened the mind to its surroundings through the portal of the senses, however, neither he nor his philosophical successors were ever completely successful in closing it off again. Almost despite his explicit philosophical intentions, this body-swapping scenario confuses the very distinction between psychology and physiology on which his dualistic notion of mind-body relations rests. In that sense, it has more in common with early modern ontologies of self, which construe the body as a fungible container. A porous body that allows the mind to travel beyond its physical receptacle is much like the Galenic body in which, as seventeenth-century anatomist Helkiah Crooke writes, “the motion of the spirits is perpetuall” and “substances can passe suddenly through all parts.”39 To preserve the integrity of his argument against such atavistic notions, Locke dismisses the case of the wandering mind as “a contradiction” and defines the characteristics of humanity in even more rigid terms: “The Identity of Persons,” he insists, “consist[s] in the Soul’s being united to the very same numerical Particles of matter.”40 Yet the very fact that Locke needs to prove that a man’s mind is bound to its physical being shows just how hard he must work to keep the contradictions in his model at bay. He relies on the self-evident absurdity of this example to negate the unsettling prospect that a single mind can exist in two or more bodies.
Even as Locke relegates this negated form of consciousness to the realm of the preposterous (much as Reid does with Hume’s magical thinking), it nonetheless makes its way directly from the Essay into the gothic through the trope of metempsychosis, where one mind controls a number of different bodies. A mind thus constituted has to lack the self-control, not to mention bodily control, that the British subject possesses in spades. In Sheppard Lee (1836), for example, Robert Montgomery Bird uses this trope to shift the terms of subjectivity from an elite ontological state of being to a model of the self that can only be described as an incessant state of “becoming.” Bird’s body-snatching protagonist is less a continuous coherent self than a Humean series of mental associations that turn the mind into a by-product of the body’s physical and repeatable habits. Bird challenges the normativity and naturalness of the individualistic model by allowing his protagonist to proliferate exponentially beyond restrictions of geographical place, point of origin, or blood. As I show at greater length in Chapter 3, this feat successfully reconfigures the human mind for a national imaginary that conceives itself as a cluster of disparate and discrete parts. Indeed, one simply cannot imagine Sheppard Lee producing a territorially bounded community calculated as the sum of its individual members. What we have instead is a body politic characterized by the infinite potentiality—indeed, personality—of its constituents.
Gothic Subjects therefore begins with Charles Brockden Brown because I believe he was the first American novelist to put flesh on a latent problem in Locke’s model—namely, that the human mind is permeable and that emotions can travel unimpeded between people. I then show how the American gothic breathes life into other negated forms of Lockean consciousness to test them as viable (noncontractual) forms of collectivity. Such negations include, for example, two minds in one body, which Brown stages as sleepwalking in Edgar Huntly. One mind is housed in two or more bodies in the preternaturally connected twins of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), Bird’s Sheppard Lee, or Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Alice Doane’s Appeal” (1835). In the latter tale, “the similarity of [the] dispositions” between Leonard Doane and Walter Brome “made them seem like joint possessors of an individual nature.”41 Objects that fall outside the generalized categories of experience known as “common sense” disrupt the physical world in “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), and so Poe creates in Dupin a model of perception that does not rely on universal categories of thought. Objects that act like subjects come to us as the return of the dead in Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820), while a world in which the subject cannot control the information entering his mind takes the form of ventriloquism in Wieland; Or, The Transformation (1798). The ability to turn such gothic scenarios into workable models of social unity, I argue, is the extraordinary rhetorical feat that sets the American gothic decisively apart from its British counterpart. By modifying the conceptual cornerstones of Enlightenment thought, the American gothic tradition validates precisely those idiosyncratic, fantastic notions of the individual that the British tradition goes out of its way to render phobic and transforms them into the basis of political membership.
To perform this sleight of hand, the gothic had to take for granted the eighteenth-century proposition that structures of political association proceed from the mind’s cognitive processes. This cultural logic entered the gothic by means of the Lockean common and moral sense tradition that traveled from Scotland to the United States to inflect nearly every aspect of American intellectual life from the mid-1700s onward.42 Early Americans trained in this branch of philosophy assumed that communal associations such as sympathy, contractualism, or common sense confirm psychological faculties such as reason and judgment. Mutual participation in those communal associations makes it possible to imagine a unified, democratic nation as the sum of its rational, self-sovereign individuals. In her definitive study on Lockean liberalism and early American literary culture, Gillian Brown puts it in these terms: “The citizen of the liberal state emerges in the processes of thought, which, in Locke’s view, distinguish humans from other animals. Hence, the psychology and pedagogy of human understanding help delineate the state … [Locke’s model of psychology] defines all activities of human understanding as social conduct.”43 When Benjamin Rush, for example, remarks in 1792 that “the dimensions of the human mind are apt to be regulated by the extent and objects of the government under which it is formed,” he thinks in terms of the eighteenth-century relationship between mental and political constitution.44 Indeed, ever since John Locke transformed the individual’s capacity for reason into “the common bond whereby human kind is united in one fellowship and society,” many early Americans tended to see a sustained connection between the human mind and the social formations that naturalize and guarantee its operations.45
My purpose is to establish a historical link between the gothic novel and this political philosophical tradition to pose the following question: given that the gothic is preoccupied with unconventional psychologies, what social formations does it thereby create and authorize? In seeking an answer to this question, I aim to contribute to our understanding of early U.S. political culture and the conventions of the novel form. I therefore ask that we think of the American gothic as taking part in an unresolved literary debate over political and psychological constitution in the post-Revolutionary decades. I am, in a sense, returning to the notion