Republicanism and the American Gothic. Marilyn Michaud
the odd centrality of Gothic cultural production in the United States is that ‘the past constantly inhabits the present, [and] progress generates an almost unbearable anxiety about its cost’.36
Approaching American Gothic from a republican perspective also requires an examination of the central themes and assumptions pervading contemporary criticism. The first is the belief that America has no past or history therefore its literature is free of ancestral ghosts. It was Fielder who first posited the view that in the ‘sunlit, neoclassical world’ of Thomas Jefferson, the Gothic was improbable and unconvincing. While writers may have borrowed elements from British tales of terror, the nation’s possession of neither a past nor a history made it difficult to adapt.37 Fiedler’s characterization of the early republic as bathed in Jeffersonian optimism functions to collapse eighteenth-century American culture into an all-pervading consensus devoid of political conflict and dissension. Such analysis is in itself an act of containment, an example of the liberal project of turning history into myth. Undoubtedly, for many republicans, a period of giddy exhilaration followed independence, but this was by no means consensual and more importantly, its moment of optimism was short lived. As a culture on the cusp of industrialization, post-revolutionary America experienced wide-scale political and social unrest, and therefore is more accurately characterized by both promise and peril. Fiedler’s related observation that the nation has no past or history has also proven remarkably tenacious in the criticism of American Gothic fiction. David Punter, for example, claims that where British Gothic has a past to deal with, America’s conception is represented only by ‘a vague historical “Europe”’. Generally defined against, or as a mere refraction of the British form, early American Gothic is thought to draw upon European examples while ultimately failing to replicate the Gothic’s basic impulse of historical tyranny.38 The tendency to bifurcate British and American historical traditions can be traced, in part, to the ideological manipulation of history by post-war academics who largely ignored eighteenth-century culture in their revision of the American renaissance. In 1948, The Literary History of the United States proposed ‘to draw a new and truer picture’ of American literature. In contrast to Moses Coit Tyler’s nineteenth-century concept of joint ownership of America’s literary tradition, the post-war editors of the Literary History rejected a European influence on American writing and instead presented their readers with a vastly different image:
The literary history of this nation began when the first settler from abroad of sensitive mind paused in his adventure long enough to feel that he was under a different sky, breathing new air, and that a New World was all before him with only his strength and Providence for guides. With him began a different emphasis upon an old theme in literature, the theme of cutting loose and faring forth, renewed under the powerful influence of a fresh continent for civilized man. It has provided, ever since those first days, an element in our native literature, whose other theme has come from a nostalgia for the rich culture of Europe, so much of which was perforce left behind.39
Invoking Henry James’s famous list of the ‘absent things in American life’, the new approach abandoned references to the Old World in favour of a wholly American environment: the new frontier. Like Fiedler’s analysis, the liberal contention that Old World social tensions did not exist in the new republic performs two functions: it brackets ideology out of the frame and once again substitutes history for myth.‘It is notorious’, wrote J.G.A. Pocock, ‘that American culture is haunted by myths, many of which arise out of the attempt to escape history and then regenerate it.’40 Examining eighteenth-century culture from a republican paradigm allows for a reassessment of this interpretation. It reveals that early Americans’ sense of history was in many ways indistinguishable from the British Whig interpretation, particularly one that advanced an anti-authoritarian or republican tradition in Europe. Republican historiography argues that American history, through the colonial and revolutionary periods, is an episode in British history, ‘the history of one of those cultures carried to the point where it left the British orbit and began to shape a history of its own’.41 Moreover, while the best of Britain’s constitution with its themes of liberty and equality provided the model for American republicanism, British history’s darker themes of tyranny, corruption and degeneration also reached across the Atlantic to haunt Americans within their own borders.
The second, closely related, assumption is that because revolutionary America had no past or concept of historical tyranny, traditional Gothic figures had no place in American culture.‘With what native classes or groups’, Fiedler asks, ‘could [hero-villains] be identified? Traditionally aristocrats, monks, servants of the Inquisition, members of secret societies like the Illuminati, how could they be convincingly introduced on the American scene?’42 Contemporary critics echo this view:‘the malevolent aristocrats, ruined castles and abbeys and chivalric codes dominating a gloomy and Gothic European tradition were highly inappropriate to the new world of North America. They were too far removed to have the same significance or effects of terror.’43 Yet, the writings of the revolutionary generation reveal that Americans possessed a profound understanding and fear of aristocratic tyranny. Nourished by the anti-establishment tradition that helped define British consciousness, early Americans viewed the rise of power and corruption as the predominant threat to republican institutions and manners. The profusion of sermons, speeches and orations on the rising influence of the aristocratic class, on the canker of corruption, the spectre of treason and the insidious infiltration of America by the Illuminati, all expose the generation’s fear of tyranny, degeneracy and conspiracy. Not only did staunch monarchists, fledgling aristocrats and radical subversives stalk the American scene, each functioned as the republic’s first gothicized villains. Therefore, while the physical manifestations of crumbling castles and abbeys may have been absent, the ideas inherent in these conventions, transmitted through the flow of expatriates to America and from the revolutionaries’ own experiences and readings of history provided a wellspring of terror deep enough to support an American Gothic tradition.
The third assumption is that as the revolutionary generation forged a new national identity, the Gothic departed from its initial impulse of terror and took on uniquely American characteristics. It is now axiomatic to cite Brockden Brown’s preface to Edgar Huntly (1799) as the principal example of how early American authors were abandoning the traditions of the Old World to initiate a literary aesthetic of their own. Brown’s repudiation of the ‘puerile superstition and exploded manners; Gothic castles and chimeras’ of European authors in favour of writing that is ‘peculiar to ourselves’ is repeatedly offered as evidence of the uniqueness of American Gothic writing.44 Undoubtedly, many young republicans were keen to establish their nation’s literary fame: it was, after all, an age of experiments and authors understood that new initiatives applied not only to politics or culture generally, but to the shaping of imaginative works. However, to accept an a priori national distinctiveness in the reading of early American Gothic is to ignore one of the fundamental concerns of the age. As Clinton Rossiter observes, from Washington onwards, ‘the American people were engaged in an industrious search for self-identity’ and in the late eighteenth century, they were only beginning to establish what form this identity would assume:
[w]hile Americans saw and identified themselves as a new people on the face of the earth, two fateful questions remained to be answered: First, were they different and better enough to rejoice confidently in the fact and, if they were, in what ways? Second, was the fate of America to be a country, that is, one sovereign nation like Britain and France, or a ‘country’, that is, a parcel of related yet basically sovereign half-nations, city-states, and provinces like Germany and Italy?45
It was a French national who posed the all important question: ‘[w]hat then is the American, this new man?’ For Crèvecoeur, the American is a man who ‘acts upon new principles’, entertains ‘new ideas’, and forms ‘new opinions’.46 Yet, exactly what these new principles, ideas and opinions actually were was only in the process of being clarified. Phrases such as ‘the condition of our country’, ‘American character’ and ‘American peculiarities’ in revolutionary writing do not point to a fully formulated national identity; rather they were exercises in the creation of a national discourse voiced everywhere by Americans, English expatriates, French émigrés and anyone else who supported the republican