Republicanism and the American Gothic. Marilyn Michaud
did not know themselves to a much greater extent than we have acknowledged.’47
If the contours of American identity remained unfixed in the 1780s and 1790s, the notion that Americans sought to create an independent culture free from colonial imitation of English models is equally problematical. While there was much talk of printing specifically American books, this had less to do with aesthetics than with commercial national rhetoric. As Michael Warner argues,
when advertisements and subscription proposals tell readers than an author is American, they do not necessarily point to a link between traits of nationality and those of aesthetics; they merely solicit patrons’ encouragement of the domestic trade, much as they might for the making of shoes.48
Brockden Brown’s call to excite the passions and sympathy of his readers through the inclusion of ‘new ingredients’ could also be read as the attempt by an author to promote his novel in America’s burgeoning print culture, a culture that identified literature with the public and commercial spheres. As Brown’s friend Samuel Miller declared, ‘In this century, for the first time AUTHORSHIP BECAME A TRADE. Multitudes of writers toiled, not for the promotion of science, nor even with a governing view to advance their own reputation, but for the market.’49 The tendency to privilege authorial or private subjectivity rather than republican didacticism in eighteenth-century American fiction creates what Warner calls ‘a space between the novel and the public sphere’, which, he argues, in the 1790s was not clearly formed. To define cultural goods as indigenous or ‘American’ required a set of cultural assumptions that did not exist before the nineteenth century when ‘a national imaginary and a liberal ideology of literature arose together, because both divorced the public value of printed commodities from the public discourse’.50 That American Gothic is characterized as paradoxical is largely down to the persistence of these assumptions. Influenced by liberal aesthetics and ideology, criticism has largely ignored eighteenth-century discourse in favour of psychological interiority and myth analysis. Therefore, in order to uncover the ideological contours of American Gothic fiction, it is necessary to employ a method of historical inquiry that examines the vocabulary and rhetorical strategies of another generation; to recapture, as much as is possible, the fears of those who participated in events.
To begin historicizing the Gothic through the republican paradigm, this book draws on Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall’s contention that early Gothic fiction is historical at its root; that its vital elements are cultural not psychological, rational not romantic. In ‘Gothic criticism’, Baldick and Mighall claim that the view of Gothic as ‘antirealist fantasy’ or dream writing is a large-scale misconception that reinforces the assumption that the Gothic is to be defined ‘according to the realms of psychological depth from which it is supposed to originate . . . or the psychological responses it is believed to provoke’. The problem with the view of the Gothic as an irrational, nonrealistic literature of nightmare is its ‘prevalent de-historicising of gothic writing and its cultural referents’ in favour of psychological interiority by which history is evoked only to be ‘collapsed into the psychodrama enacted by “each individual”, irrespective of culture, context or period’.51 According to these critics, the cardinal error of Gothic criticism is ‘[t]he assimilation of Gothic fiction into romantic and pre-romantic nostalgia for the Middle Ages’. They cite the fact that very few early Gothic novels are actually situated in the Middle Ages and, more importantly, the contention that the Gothic looks backward to an idealized past displays an ‘irreconcilable opposition between critical illusion and textual evidence’:
Most Gothic novels have little to do with ‘the medieval world’, especially not an idealised one; they represent the past not as paradisal but as ‘nasty’ in its ‘possessive’ curtailing of individual liberties; and they gratefully endorse Protestant bourgeois values as ‘kinder’ than those of feudal barons.
For Baldick and Mighall, this insistence on nostalgic medievalism leads to the assumption that the Gothic embodies an essentially romantic and poetic project and any affiliations with enlightened realism are dispelled in the packaging of the Gothic as a romantic or anti-enlightenment rebellion. Rather, it is ‘Protestant scepticism and enlightened Whiggery’ that are essential to Gothic fiction. Structured thematically around sectarian nightmares, for Baldick and Mighall, the Gothic is a staunchly anti-Catholic, ‘bourgeois genre’.52
While Baldick and Mighall’s work broadens our understanding of the importance of historical context in understanding British Gothic fiction, it is necessary to expand their thesis of ‘aggressive Protestanism’ and ‘enlightened Whiggery’ to a wider intellectual base, one that includes the faction of Whig interests in the eighteenth century. Anti-Catholicism is only one expression of a wider discursive conflict permeating the Gothic, and to restrict depictions of tyranny to monastic institutions negates the Gothic’s engagement with other forms of authoritarianism. Gothic literature has always been concerned with power and the abuse of power. From the eighteenth-century British terrors of Walpole, Lewis, Godwin and Radcliffe, to the American works of Brockden Brown, the Gothic’s function has been to re-enact the struggle between liberty and tyranny, sovereignty and self-government. Whether we read the Gothic as a depiction of patriarchal oppression, Catholic superstition or feudal systems of political representation, we are nonetheless describing forms of tyranny that spring from the Enlightenment debates between aristocratic defenders of constitutional order and radical dissent. The focus on Catholicism as the mainstay of Gothic tyranny ignores the turbulent transition from subject to citizen that defined the revolutionary generation on both sides of the Atlantic. Therefore, any history of the Whigs and their role in the meaning of Gothic fiction must first acknowledge the profound schism in Whig political culture; in other words, we must distinguish the radicals from the orthodox: Milton, Paine and Hollis from Halifax, Walpole and Burke. As Marilyn Butler notes, while we think of the eighteenth-century government as stable and successful, the critique of the ruling Whig oligarchy was strong and so deeply rooted that it merged into an ‘alternative ideology’:
The system’s natural opponents among the politicised classes included . . . elements of the old Tory country gentry, and of the urban Old Whigs, or radicals, all of whom looked back . . . to the fierce doctrinaire disputes of the seventeenth century. By the second half of the eighteenth century, this opposition was generating a powerful rhetoric, heady enough to sustain the American Revolution . . . salient themes include a sense of personal liberty and autonomy, a belief in civic virtue, and a hatred of corruption – all of which can be seen as symptomatic of a ‘republican’ tradition in Western Europe.53
An example of the schism operating in Whig culture appears in the correspondence between two eighteenth-century antiquarians, Horace Walpole and Thomas Hollis. As author of the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764), Walpole’s attempt to ‘blend two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern’, established the aesthetic material of the Gothic. Walpole’s wild tale of usurpation, his animosity toward Voltaire and the ‘illuminated pit of Paris’ situate Walpole in opposition to contemporary radical Whigs such as Hollis.54 For Walpole, Hollis’s emphasis on ‘king killing’ and the legitimacy of resistance to tyrants was an anachronism. From the orthodox Whig view, republicanism ignored a century of achievement by the ruling class that strengthened the structure of the English constitution and slowly formed a balance between the people and the aristocracy, commons and cabinet.55 Walpole’s Whig politics, therefore, suggests that The Castle of Otranto does not represent a fear of ‘the parasitic power of the past’,56 but a celebration of the material and political progress of the Enlightenment. Radical republicans, on the other hand, envisioned a gloomier world. Unlike Walpole, Hollis’s concept of liberty was that of the ancient republics reflected in the minds of thinkers such as Milton, Marvell and Sidney. What these men saw in the new and growing prosperity of England was an ominous parallel to the luxury and corruption that marked the rise of tyranny in the ancient world. Civilization, they believed, was vulnerable and continually besieged by forces threatening its survival. As Gibbon had taught them,
[n]o theory of human progress could be constructed which did not carry the negative implication that progress was at the same time decay, that culture entailed some loss of freedom and virtue, that what multiplied human capacities also fractured