Republicanism and the American Gothic. Marilyn Michaud
other words, was inevitably a movement toward decline. This ‘quarrel with modernity’ reveals the complex dialectic operating at the heart of Whig culture. As Pocock notes, in the eighteenth century there existed a natural antithesis between republicanism and liberalism, classicism and progressivism: ‘The Old Whigs identified freedom with virtue and located it in a past; the Modern Whigs identified it with wealth, enlightenment, and progress towards a future. Around this antithesis . . . nearly all eighteenth-century philosophy of history can be organized.’58 This Enlightenment contradiction arose out of an acute awareness of the fragility of classical republics:
The republic was vulnerable to corruption, to political, moral, or economic changes which destroyed the equality on which it rested, and these changes might occur not accidentally, but in consequence of the republic’s own virtue. Because it was virtuous it defeated its enemies; because it defeated its enemies it acquired empire; but empire brought to some citizens . . . the opportunity to acquire power incompatible with equality and uncontrollable by law, and so the republic was destroyed by success and excess.59
The cause of liberty and equality that many radical or ‘Old’ Whigs promoted evoked not a superstitious medieval past returning to haunt the present, but a classical view of liberty and democracy perpetually under threat by corruption and power. Protestant scepticism, then, also encompassed a pessimistic world-view that saw the inevitable rise of tyranny and the fall of empire. Moreover, it was this ‘republican tradition’, so prominent in British and European Enlightenment thought, that when transmitted to the colonies, provided an explanatory structure for independence and revolution. Republicanism, therefore, was more than a form of rhetoric as Butler suggests, but a prominent discourse in Enlightenment culture, spoken everywhere in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe and America. Whether Whig or Tory, the discourse of republicanism formed an essential discursive element regarding the problem of resistance within the civil order. Variously conceived of as democracy, liberty or equality, republicanism constituted an alternative world view that looked to the classical past for lessons on political theory and national identity. In the Old Whig view, there exists an overt pessimism and fear surrounding the ability of civilization to uphold the tenets of republicanism. Republicanism, therefore, is also a panicridden ideology animated by fears of tyranny, decay, conspiracy and corruption and it is with these ideological fears that the Gothic is deeply entangled.
The antithesis between Walpole and Hollis’s world view also parallels the debates surrounding ‘the myth of the Goth’ that arose in the revolutionary period. Before being employed as a descriptive term for Walpole’s novel, the term ‘Gothic’ possessed controversial political, ideological and cultural meanings. Historically, it describes the ancient Teutonic races that subverted the Roman Empire; however, in the seventeenth century, British defenders of parliamentary prerogative developed a new, politically contentious conception of the Goths, which as the various shades of Whiggery reveal, was eventually used either as a justification for resistance to tyrants or as an argument for the continuation of an organic constitutional order. For Whigs such as Robert Walpole, the ancient Gothic constitution represented a dark period of feudal slavery: ‘The primitive purity of our constitution was that the people had no share in government, but were the villains, vessels, or bondsmen of the lords.’60 Only with the advent of the Glorious Revolution was the British government free from tyranny. The orthodox Whig view of history, by contrast, advanced the theory that the Goths were morally pure, brave and humane, and, politically, the original democrats of the world. Britain’s Gothic heritage signalled not only an inherent freedom lost in 1066 and regained in 1688, it reinforced a view of the British constitution’s organic perfection, a return to order and continuity. For Edmund Burke, tradition, or what he saw as the natural historical and political order, was essential to freedom. It was the French revolutionaries and Enlightenment philosophers, prostrating themselves to the gods of reason and democracy, who sought to undermine freedom and re-introduce tyranny and barbarity:
The usurpation which, in order to subvert ancient institutions, has destroyed ancient principles, will hold power by arts similar to those by which it has acquired it. When the old feudal and chivalrous spirit of Fealty, which, by freeing kings from fear, freed both kings and subjects from the precautions of tyranny, shall be extinct in the minds of men, plots and assassinations will be anticipated by preventive murder and preventive confiscation, and that long roll of grim and bloody maxims, which form the political code of all power, not standing on its own honour, and the honour of those who are to obey it. Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle.61
Yet for radical, or ‘Old’ Whigs, Burke’s fusion of tradition and freedom, his ‘superstitious respect for kings, and the spirit of chivalry’, transmogrified the Gothic past into a regressive feudal idolatry.62 As Clery and Miles point out, ‘what was at stake in these discussions was the elaboration of persuasive myths of the nation’s past as a means of influencing its present and future course. In general terms, the myth of Gothic origins was fundamental to an emergent sense of British national distinctiveness’.63 In The Rise of the Gothic Novel, Maggie Kilgour argues that the contrasting of Anglo-Saxon political freedom with classical tyranny, especially Roman and later French neoclassicism, is a ‘peculiarly British characteristic, a sign of a national inherent love of freedom [and] liberty’.64 Moreover, it is the political and ideological contours of this characterization that determine Gothic literature’s themes of historical tyranny and usurpation, of Norman oppression and lost liberty. Yet, however fruitful the history of the Goths has been in untangling the politics of eighteenth-century British Gothic fiction, a similar influence is undeveloped in the scholarship devoted to American Gothic. Not only was this ‘peculiarly British characteristic’ shared by the American revolutionary generation who adopted and shaped Anglo-Saxon history for their own use, they also symbolically identified with Gothic customs and institutions. As Samuel Kliger argues, the colonists’ retreat from England was the first attempt to recreate an idealized Gothic society in the New World:
In the same sense that Americans are ‘Goths’, so were their Anglo- Saxon forbears who received the ‘Gothic’ gift of democracy as a result of the Germanic invasion of England . . . Unfortunately, however, a lingering ‘Roman’ element in England tended at times to come to the surface of English political life. Therefore, in order to realize their ‘Gothic’ destiny unhampered, a band of hardy Anglo-Saxons migrated to America. The ‘Gothic’ pattern of life which England succeeded in establishing only in part would thus be completely realized in America.65
In colonial America, the term Gothic retained its Old Whig connotations of Anglo-Saxon liberty and equality, and this myth of alienation from and return to an original state of harmony and innocence would eventually provide the political mooring for American republicanism. Much of the intellectual coherence of the colonists’ political arguments rested on their views of the past and the goal of revolution was in part the realization of those original Gothic ideals, unhampered by the corruption and tyranny of the present system. One of the greatest American scholars of Anglo- Saxon history was Thomas Jefferson who invoked the Saxon constitution for the American cause. Jefferson’s interpretation of the Gothic past reveals much about the revolutionary generation’s approach to questions of political heritage and national identity. From his readings of Rapin’s History of England and Gordon’s translation of Tacitus, Jefferson conceived of an Anglo-Saxon past in terms of a useable political heritage:‘as we have employed some of the best materials of the British constitution in the construction of our own government, a knowledge of British history becomes useful to the American politician’.66 In A Summary View of the Rights of British America, he affirms the values and traditions of the Whig interpretation of history as an argument for the right to be free from the country ‘which chance, not choice has placed them’, and believing that Saxon rights were being abused by parliamentary exercises of tyranny, despotism and usurped power, turned the British government’s own Saxon history against them as an argument for American independence. For the majority of Americans, the most characteristic view of their Gothic history was of an ideal constitution complete with an elected House of Commons in Saxon England, destroyed by the Norman Conquest, regained with modifications in the Glorious Revolution and once again challenged by the festering corruption of British politics. English history was portrayed