Gothic Subjects. Sian Silyn Roberts
standards of the period and putting them back into service as guiding narrative structures. I thus share with Christopher Castiglia’s remarkable Interior States (2008) an interest in the counterintuitive phenomenon by which the arena of subjectivity in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries became “a site for negotiating the contradictions and conflicts of the state’s myriad ideologies—as well as models of association and social interaction beyond the interests of the state—in ways that belied the coherence of national or market interests.”46 In Gothic Subjects, the Lockean individual is a crucial actor in this history: transplanted into early U.S. literary culture as a British fictional convention, it offered novelists the means to explore problematics of freedom, experience, interiority, community, and government even as they rewrote its conceptual foundations for a circum-Atlantic world.
In reading the American gothic novel from the perspective of British theories of the individual, I must be clear on one point: it is not my intention to reestablish an originary account of American culture that takes as its starting point Locke’s liberal subject. It is a well-known fact of U.S. political history that Locke’s works on selfhood and government were essential to the Revolutionary writings of the 1760s and 1770s, even though the connection between his political writings and a national liberalist ideology has been subject to very different, often conflicting, emphases and interpretations in the last forty years.47 Few scholars of the Revolutionary era now dispute the pervasiveness of Lockean ideas—even though, as Jerome Huyler notes, we have “only rarely and recently begun paying adequate attention to the strikingly complex body of thought that Locke left behind.”48 Nor do historians of eighteenth-century U.S. culture dispute the important influence exerted by Scottish political philosophy over American college curricula and ecclesiastical training. As Eric Slauter reminds us, this was an age “obsessed with the social contract,” so there is every reason to take seriously Perry Miller’s contention that Scottish Lockean philosophy achieved “absolute domination of academic curricula by about 1820” to become “the official metaphysic of America.”49 The evidence compiled by political historians therefore gives us ample reason to assess early U.S. literary culture in terms of transatlantic political philosophy, but it would be a mistake to read one tradition against the other by analogy or homology. Rather than impose British categories of thought on American literary culture, I want to consider the mutually constitutive relationship between literary form and modern epistemologies of selfhood and political association that took shape as these discursive materials were transmitted through the Atlantic world. To do so, I take my cue from current revisionist historians such as Samuel Fleischacker, Mark Hulliung, T. H. Breen, and Mark E. Button, who have made us increasingly attentive to the complex transformations—through time, displacement, and repetition—that Lockean epistemologies underwent on U.S. soil.50 As I see it, fiction had an important role to play in these transformations.
Simply put, I do not read the American novel as the symptomatic expression of, or reaction against, Enlightenment categories of thought. Rather, I regard the fictional works in this study as continuous with—as opposed to reflections of—eighteenth-and nineteenth-century epistemological speculation. Like Huyler, I am interested in “the strikingly complex body of thought Locke left behind,” but I assume that the genre of the novel engages specific categories of political selfhood associated with British notions of individualism, and the representation of “gothic subjects” therefore relies on conventions of the novel form. American authors found themselves working with the cultural materials of individualism and contractualism because the form of the novel demanded it. I am therefore convinced that authors’ “awareness” of these philosophical materials is most satisfactorily grasped as the rewriting of transatlantic literary convention, not some a priori familiarity with the principal tenets of Enlightenment philosophy that was intentionally reproduced, whole and entire, in novel form.51 Context, as Fredric Jameson puts it, is “not some common-sense external reality” but “the rewriting or restructuration of a prior historical or ideological subtext.”52 By emphasizing the continuity between the American gothic and British categories of thought, I am following the lead of a growing number of scholars, including Theo Davis, Ezra Tawil, Ed Cahill, Gretchen Woertendyke, Laura Doyle, and Gillian Brown, who identify the emergence of a national literary tradition as part of a transatlantic transmission of ideas that appropriates and reinterprets British cultural forms. Mark Hulliung and Leonard Tennenhouse have called this process the “Americanization” of British letters.53 Rather than project back onto the Revolutionary period a decisive break with English culture, these scholars and others have argued that America’s republic of letters took shape as part of “an international movement that transcended all national boundaries.”54 As the contributors to a recent special issue of Novel: A Forum on Fiction have argued, the disciplinary field of the early American novel is necessarily bound by this principle: “No author writing fiction in English from North America could write outside a transatlantic system of exchange, even if he or she wanted to.”55
To make my own contribution to this body of work, I question the long-held critical assumption that early Americans conceived civil society almost exclusively in terms of the sovereign individual. This assumption has shaped much of the scholarship produced on American literary culture since the 1980s that configured early literature in terms of nationalism and familialism. That work has vitally enriched our understanding of the importance of race and gender for American selfhood, but it has nonetheless inherited from the deeply influential republican-synthesis school of thought an underexamined and overemphasized faith in the progressive logic of developmental cultural systems. There has been a tendency to assume, for instance, that the constructive project beginning with the 1776 Revolution reaches its apotheosis in the “nation” and its idealized synecdoche, the “citizen-individual.”56 We should, as Louis Althusser cautions, treat “the concepts of origin” with circumspection “because they always more or less induce the ideology which has produced them.”57 In other words, this approach to American cultural history naturalizes the romance plot of the nation’s progressive self-making by drawing a straight line from the Founders’ vision of a democratic political collective to a fully realized national body united by its constituents’ mutual commitment to Whiggish values and virtues. The same progressive logic recuperated the sentimental novel as a nationalist endeavor. In the work of Jane Tompkins, Julia Stern, Richard Brodhead, and others, the sentimental novel reproduces citizen subjects as carriers of democratic Republican ideology by miniaturizing the nation-state in the paradigm of the family.58
Gothic Subjects seeks to revise the familial-nationalist accounts of American cultural history by questioning their chief underlying assumption, namely, that subjects are disciplined ontological totalities and political community proceeds from and reaffirms the attributes—or “properties”—of those constituents. Indeed, our critical commitment to nationalist interpretative structures grows out of modern political philosophy’s largely unquestioned assumption that “property” is the originary matrix within which social relationships are cast. Liberal ontologies of selfhood and collective identity take for granted the proprietary basis of human subjectivity, where “ownership [is] the governing term in the constitution of personhood.”59 As Roberto Esposito explains it, this proprietary paradigm forces community into “a conceptual language that radically alters it.”60 When we think in terms of the individualist paradigm, that is, we are compelled to imagine community as a “‘property’ belonging to subjects that join them together [accomuna]: an attribute, a definition, a predicate that qualifies them as belonging to the same totality [insieme], or as a ‘substance’ that is produced by their union. In each case community is conceived of as a quality that is added to their nature as subjects.” This assumption in turn reproduces the “hypertrophic figure” of the self as the axiomatic component of a national body.61 As Esposito argues, any model of community that takes the individualist paradigm as its basis is held in thrall to the correlative principles of unity and totality. To think in such terms is, by implication, to reaffirm what Fredric Jameson calls the “vast interpretative allegory”—or “master narrative”—of the “nation” as literature’s referent and primary unit of analysis.62
Taking a contrary view, the authors included