Gothic Subjects. Sian Silyn Roberts
reaffirm or reinvigorate an originary, ordered, proprietary self.63 Indeed, the American gothic often thinks of subjectivity less as an ontological status and more as a mode of relation among reciprocally implicated social entities. The members of a social body thus constituted are not individuated, property-owning subjects but porous, fluid singularities that circulate through wider networks of information and feeling. These are entities, in other words, that exist in and through their relation to others rather than as ontologically ordered beings that exist prior to social relationships.64 In making this case, I see myself contributing to a recent body of revisionist scholarship that has beneficially shown the concept of American subjectivity to be a historically contingent, malleable construct. By drawing attention to the variety of physiological, affective, and political discourses that were central to the rhetorical construction of private character in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, work by critics such as Christopher Castiglia, Justine Murison, Christopher Lukasik, Nancy Ruttenburg, and Stacey Margolis has convincingly demonstrated that early American literary culture did not regard liberal versions of human ontology as either axiomatic or necessarily teleological.
Thus my most concrete intervention into criticism of American gothic fiction is to consider how it contributed to the period’s conceptualization of self and social membership. To be able to pursue this inquiry, I am indebted to those critics who placed the gothic mode squarely at the center of American literary history, from Leslie Fiedler, Philip Fisher, and Donald Ringe to more recent work by Teresa Goddu, Eric Savoy, or Allan Lloyd-Smith.65 In several important respects, however, my own project is distinct from this body of scholarship. In particular, I depart from conventional accounts that tend to read the gothic in psychoanalytic terms or historicist terms that reinscribe a psychoanalytic framework. That critical methodology has its origins in Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), which famously pathologized the American gothic as a distinctly guilty form. By this account, the gothic sublimates the repressed anxieties of a nation traumatized by its historical crimes.66 More recent criticism tends to repeat Fiedler’s claim or at least adopt its central psychological thematic as a starting point: the American gothic is “intensely preoccupied with the pathology of guilt”; it signals “the inescapability of the past”; it encodes “history’s horrors” and exposes slavery as “America’s greatest guilt”; it expresses “a profound anxiety about historical crimes and perverse human desires”; it is “intimately tied to the history of racial conflict”; it is “simply, the imaginative expression of the fears and forbidden desires of Americans.”67 In these accounts, to dig through the works of Poe, Melville, or Hawthorne is to unveil the ugly truths of America’s liberal promise, chief among them “the frontier experience, with its inherent solitude and potential violence; the Puritan inheritance; fear of European subversion and anxieties about popular democracy which was then a new experiment; the relative absence of developed ‘society’; and very significantly, racial issues concerning both slavery and the Native Americans.”68 We might think of this as the “anxiety model” of reading, whereby the critic decodes the gothic as a coy repository of shameful historical truths and cultural guilt. From here it is a short step to the suggestion that the critic, with the inexplicable privilege of modern insight, directly confronts histories of injustice that nineteenth-century readers could themselves only articulate obliquely.69
Thus what might be termed the guilt thesis characterizes much of the significant work produced on the American gothic after Fiedler. This body of criticism was written at the height of the cultural studies movement of the 1990s, when literary scholars tended to mine American novels for evidence of their political or historical engagements. The success of this critical paradigm may be attributed to its ability, on the one hand, to redress the ahistoricism of the postwar mythopoetic school of criticism (which sidelined social context in favor of ideological ambiguity) and, on the other, to counter poststructuralism’s attack on the integrity of language by turning to extra-literary sources of meaning. For all its advantages, however, this approach has pitfalls—specifically, a tendency to naturalize a “realistic” or “referential” reading practice that reduces literary texts to “bundles of historical or cultural content.”70 Put another way, the guilt thesis has contributed to the tendency among critics of the novel to rewrite American literary production always as the symptomatic (or sublimated) expression of American history.71
A growing number of critics agree that this conventional approach to the American gothic tradition is due for reappraisal, in no small part because the anxiety model rests on a tautology that goes something like this: early Americans were fearful of their social, political, and racial Others, so if these Others appear encoded in gothic form, those forms reflect early Americans’ fears.72 This tendency toward allegorization or symptomatic reading in turn obscures an important discursive principle: gothic horror fiction “has a generic obligation to evoke or produce fear.”73 In other words, the gothic defines rather than reflects the object of fear. Indeed, one of the gothic’s most distinctive formal features is its self-referentiality, or a conscious awareness and theorization of the form’s aesthetic obligations and effects. As Clara Reeve puts it in her preface to The Old English Baron (1778), “The business of Romance is, first, to excite the attention; and secondly, to direct it to some useful, or at least innocent, end.”74 This metaliterary dimension makes the gothic, in principle, “the least reliable index of supposedly widespread anxieties” insofar as it generates the very thing it is supposed to reflect.75 As I see, this simple principle changes the way we are meant to read American gothic fiction.
Let us assume that the gothic produces its objects of phobia (which include, but are not limited to, Indian violence, race, expansionism, etc.). I am therefore reluctant to treat these objects as reflective of historically grounded anxieties because to do so risks overlooking the fact that they are, first and foremost, figures of speech. If I am correct that the gothic was an important cultural site for the formation rather than merely the reflection of phobic categories, then it serves as such in order to normalize or update existing categories that stand in opposition to those phobic constructs. That is to say, the gothic recruits its readers into the ideological defense of the threatened category, presumably to render any alternative abhorrent or create a discursive space in which existing categories of thought are loosened or reconfigured. For an example of this way of thinking, we need look no further than Washington Irving’s famous mock-horror tale, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”
In this familiar story, America’s benign national landscape is literally haunted by a spectral icon of the country’s violent Revolutionary past. The horseman, we recall, is the ghost of a German mercenary killed “in some nameless battle during the revolutionary war.”76 In this regard, “Sleepy Hollow” would seem to confirm the more conventional guilt thesis—namely, that the American gothic is about “the inescapability of the past” and its traumatic interruption into the present.77 To my mind, however, the most striking feature of this story is not the headless specter of Revolutionary violence that disturbs the Catskills’ byways but the rigorously defensive manner in which this drowsy little town wards off any potential threat to its autonomy. Sleepy Hollow, we are told, is a wholly static community where “population, manners, and customs, remain fixed,” putting it at odds with the “great torrent of migration and improvement” characteristic of the rest of the nation.78 We might think of Sleepy Hollow, then, as an anachronism that nonetheless persists and flourishes by tenaciously resisting the larger social organism. The town preserves its sovereignty by expelling any force that threatens to dissolve the enduring ties of family and property on which this community is founded. Put another way, Sleepy Hollow seeks to protect a recognizably British notion of property, where women—like Katrina van Tassel—are transferred between families for the purposes of preserving an estate across generations. Pitted against this model is the “half itinerant” Ichabod, the agent of the “great torrent of migration,” who plans to convert the Van Tassel farm into cash and transport Katrina to “the wilderness.”79 Should this fantasy be allowed to play out, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” would transform into something closely resembling a captivity narrative, in which a rapacious man removes a woman from her paternal home and threatens her cultural value, hence the grounds on