Republicanism and the American Gothic. Marilyn Michaud
it was this struggle, according to John Adams, that had peopled America. Therefore, while the term ‘Gothic’ ‘coexists and overlaps with the more familiar literary and aesthetic material within the semantic constellation of the British “Gothic’”, it also coincides with the American conception of liberty and republican government.67
The ambiguity and shifting about of the term is commonplace in the Gothic tradition, but the debates surrounding Gothic manners and institutions should not be viewed solely as a British phenomenon but enlarged to encompass the republican world of late eighteenth-century America. Early republicans mythologized their own national formations in much the same way as the British Whigs and, like their English counterparts, viewed their Gothic history in binary terms: one of light and liberty, the other dark and barbarous; one an ancient Elysium, the other a feudal nightmare. The recovery of the original force of this myth can also bring something of immediate value to discussions of post-war America. Confronted with the spectre of totalitarianism and the corrupting effects of conformity and mass culture, the myth of the Goth restates for a new generation the legitimacy of resistance to tyrants. The resurgence of biblical and Roman empire film epics in the 1950s and 1960s, for example, attests to the continuing relevance of this narrative. While loosely couched in spiritual themes, films such as Quo Vadis? (1951), Julius Caesar (1953), Ben Hur (1959), Spartacus (1960) and The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) each depict the brutality of tyranny and the corruption of Rome while appealing to the Anglo-Saxon traits of simplicity, bravery and love of liberty. From cold war film to political and social analysis, Anglo-Saxon identity not only underlies the continuity between British and American concepts of political identity, it also supplies the imagery and iconography for contemporary America’s fears of tyranny, corruption and conspiracy.
While this book is grounded in the work of historians, the choice of interpretative method accounts for the second reason for focusing on post-war Gothic fiction. It is precisely in this period that historians began to interpret American history through the paradigm of republicanism. The emphasis on ideas as the animating force of the American Revolution and early national period began in the late 1940s with the work of historians such as Caroline Robbins and Cecilia Kenyon who initiated the move toward understanding English libertarian thought and its transmission to America. Following these efforts, republicanism entered the scholarly lexicon to become ‘the success story of the 1980s’.68 It is not the burden of this book to evaluate the efficacy of the ‘republican synthesis’ or ‘neo-Whig’ framework, rather to suggest that the dominance of the liberal consensus approach on both historical interpretation and literary criticism has impeded a fuller understanding of the nation’s Gothic fiction. An examination of mid twentieth-century Gothic reveals that the language of classical republicanism still had wide currency because, like their eighteenth-century forbears, post-war Americans perceived their liberty to be under threat by external treachery and internal decay. Therefore, classical republicanism’s lexicon of degeneration, corruption, tyranny and conspiracy provided a familiar structure to a generation’s fight against the threats of totalitarianism and mass culture. The discourse of republicanism called for a renewed civic consciousness in a period of conformity and unbridled consumer capitalism, and thereby functioned not only as an articulation or negotiation of contemporary cultural anxieties, but also as a critique of modern liberal culture. Chapter 1 provides a historical framework for discussing and analysing contemporary American Gothic. While it begins by briefly examining the shift from progressive socioeconomic theories of American history to a liberal consensus approach, it is primarily concerned with tracing the development of the ‘republican paradigm’ that arose in the post-war period and which came to challenge the dominant approaches to American revolutionary history. Specifically, this chapter reviews the scholarship devoted to republican historiography through its most influential proponents: Caroline Robbins, Bernard Bailyn, Gordon S. Wood and J. G. A. Pocock. Opposed to the view that ideas played no part in the development of American politics and culture, these historians set out to explore the influence of classical and British libertarian thought and modes of discourse on the colonies and the importance of this transatlantic exchange on the revolution itself and on the creation of an American republic. The chapter briefly outlines some of the central assumptions of the republican tradition as advanced by these so called ‘neo-Whig’ historians. Subsequent chapters will each consist of three parts. The first section examines a specific assumption regarding republican ideology in late eighteenth-century America and how it functioned to refine cultural identity. The second situates the language of classical republicanism in a cold war context, arguing that while the terms may change, republican values and fears are transmitted over time and remain in tension with new liberal ideals. The final section offers a close reading of a mid twentieth-century text exploring how traditional Gothic figures continue to affirm the nation’s historical fears of degeneration, corruption, deception and tyranny. Chapter 2 examines the vampire as a figure of corruption and degeneration. By reviewing the eighteenth-century cyclical theory of history and the fear of national degeneration that emerges from the idea of progress, it reveals how the concepts of corruption and degeneration were commonly expressed in metaphors of barbarity, infection and vampirism. The second part of this chapter reveals how a similar theory of history operates in cold war culture. The conception of the republic as a vulnerable organism perpetually threatened by corruption is reconstructed not as the fear of communist tyranny, but as an internal battle between tradition and progress, nature and culture. The third section offers a close reading of Richard Matheson’s vampire novel I Am Legend (1954), arguing how the text engages with the historical theme of degeneration while articulating the central contradictions of post-war culture. Chapter 3 explores the figure of the double and the eighteenth-century concept of virtue. It argues that the fear of effeminacy, luxury and selfinterest not only disclosed the gender implications of republican identity, but also represented the nation’s first crisis of masculinity. The second section reveals that in the cold war era, the concept of masculine virtue manifests as an effort to shore up a liberal consensus in an age of perceived political impotence and social conformity. The third section explores the figure of the double in David Ely’s novel Seconds (1963). It argues that the double re-emerges as a figure of failed masculinity softened not by the lures of eighteenth-century luxury and effeminacy, but by its modern corollaries: conformity and self-interest. Chapter 4 explores the concepts of conspiracy and hypocrisy in late eighteenth-century Britain and America. It argues that rather than being based in irrationality, the widespread use of conspiratorial modes of interpretation stem from the Enlightenment’s engagement with the new science of causality and the rational concept of free will. In the American revolutionary context, the fear of conspiracy and hypocrisy interacts with the politics of sincerity: the need to decipher the discrepancy between words and deeds, motives and actions. Chapter 4 then explores how a similar discourse of conspiracy and dissimulation fuelled the panic of subversion and cultural decay in the post-war period. In Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967), the Gothic figure of the impostor or deceiver reveals the continuing interaction between motives and intentions, and hypocrisy and sincerity in the modern age. Chapter 5 examines the agrarian model of republican citizenship. It begins with a brief review of the development of a pastoral tradition in American writing and its interdependence with the discourse of republicanism. It discusses how agrarianism functioned as a way of distinguishing the Old World from the New, and the virtuous from the corrupt, and reveals that the essential threat to agrarian virtue was the rise of commerce and industrialization. The chapter then explores the republican dialectic of virtue and corruption in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1965). It argues that while Capote exploits the paraphernalia of the Gothic to explore the invasion and destruction of iconic Americans by monstrous outcasts, the characterization and structure of the narrative exposes the inherent ambiguity surrounding the values of agrarian virtue and progressive individualism in modern America.
Notes
1Joseph Anthony Mazzeo, ‘Some interpretations of the history of ideas’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 33, 3 (1972), 379–94 (389).
2Fred Botting, ‘Preface’, in Fred Botting (ed.), The Gothic, Essays and Studies (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001), pp. 1–6; for discussions on the Gothic’s mutability see Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996);Teresa Goddu, Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (New York: Columbia