Gothic Subjects: The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 179-1861 9780812209839

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Gothic Subjects

Gothic Subjects The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 1790–1861

Siân Silyn Roberts

universit y of pennsylvania press phil adelphia

Copyright © 2014 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Silyn Roberts, Siân. Gothic subjects: the transformation of individualism in American fiction, 1790–1861 / Siân Silyn Roberts. — 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8122-4613-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Gothic fiction (Literary genre), American—History and criticism. 2. American fiction—19th century— History and criticism. 3. Individualism in literature. 4. Enlightenment—Influence. 5. National characteristics, American, in literature. I. Title. PS374.G68S57 2014 813'.0872909—dc23 2013044476

To Matthew and my family, with love

contents

Introduction: The Gothic Enlightenment

1

Chapter 1. The American Transformation of the British Individual

28

Chapter 2. Captivity, Incorporation, and the Politics of Going Native

59

Chapter 3. A Mind for the Gothic: Common Sense and the Problem of Local Culture

86

Chapter 4. Population and the Limits of Civil Society in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter

115

Chapter 5. Slavery and Gothic Form: Writing Race as the Bio-Novel

140

Epilogue

165

Notes

173

Bibliography

211

Index

231

Acknowledgments

237

introduction

The Gothic Enlightenment

In order to make a concrete analysis of power relations, we must abandon the juridical model of sovereignty. That model in effect presupposes that the individual is a subject with natural rights or primitive powers; it sets itself the task of accounting for the ideal genesis of the State; and finally, it makes the law the basic manifestation of power. We should be trying to study power not on the basis of the primitive terms of the relationship, but on the basis of the relationship itself, to the extent that it is the relationship itself that determines the elements on which it bears: rather than asking ideal subjects what part of themselves or their powers they have surrendered in order to let themselves become subjects, we have to look at how relations of subjugation can manufacture subjects. Similarly, rather than looking for the single form or the central point from which all forms of power derive, either by way of consequence or development, we must begin by letting them operate in their multiplicity, their differences, their specificity, and their reversibility; we must therefore study them as relations of force that intersect, refer to one another, converge, or, on the contrary, come into conflict and strive to negate one another. —Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended (1976) Say something about objectivity and subjectivity. Be sure and abuse a man called Locke. —Edgar Allan Poe, “How to Write a Blackwood Article” (1838)

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In the introduction to An Inquiry into the Human Mind (1762), noted Scottish Common Sense philosopher Thomas Reid unleashes an animated assault on his intellectual predecessor, David Hume. Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), he says, is an “abyss of skepticism,” a “ridiculous” work of “philosophical subtlety” that, like the ignis fatuus, “contradicts herself, befools her votaries, and deprives them of every object worthy to be pursued.” Deeply wary of Hume’s skeptical method and intentions—“he must either be a fool, or want to make a fool of me”—Reid draws little distinction between the Treatise and a common romance: “If [the mind] is indeed what the Treatise of Human Nature makes it,” he warns, “I find I have been only in an enchanted castle, imposed upon by spectres and apparitions. I blush inwardly to think how I have been deluded.”  Like many of Hume’s detractors, Reid takes particular issue with the heretical implications of the Treatise. Hume had famously disavowed any causal connection between ideas derived from sensation and empirical proof of an objective reality, leaving his successors with the unpalatable proposition that the material world exists only as the changing impressions of a discontinuous mind and not as a stable sensory truth logically inferred from the existence of the Deity. Rejecting this challenge to rational religion and morality, Reid proposes common sense as the antidote to Hume’s pyrrhonism. Common sense (a popular metaphysic that set the standard for U.S. college curricula well into the nineteenth century) is a model of perception that assumes universal standards and thus testifies to a shared material reality on the basis of direct, intuitive conviction. As Reid sees it, Hume creates nothing but a misleading fiction when he severs the mind’s epistemic access to the external world. To drive this case home, Reid introduces the trope of the castle, and the contest over competing models of subjectivity takes a decidedly gothic turn. Conventional scholarship tells us that the metaphor of the castle—the stock-in-trade of gothic fiction—betokens everything from political tyranny to gendered oppression, ancien regime decadence to psychological trauma. Its appearance in the Inquiry tells a somewhat different story. As Reid imagines it, Hume has challenged the normative epistemological “reality” of common sense by suggesting that the continuous existence of a material world is a fiction of the imagination, not an a priori rational truth confirmed by the operations of the understanding. According to the laws of common sense, knowledge must be anchored to some empirical referent lest we invest meaning in objects that mediates between perception and reality. Reid rewrites this scenario as a gothic melodrama in which Hume temporarily introduces

Introduction

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spectral phenomena and aberrant behavior into a realist world in order to test the category of rational individualism. Persecuted by this haunting prospect that sensible objects exist only as ideas inside the mind, Reid finds himself in the position conventionally reserved for the gothic heroines of Walpole or Radcliffe: he is trapped inside the castle and subject to hostile imperatives and emotions not his own (“I blush inwardly to think how I have been deluded”). Much like the model of the individual proposed by his predecessor John Locke, Reid’s perceiving subject preserves its autonomy by observing and carefully maintaining the distinction between subjects and objects. The gothic tropes of imprisonment and persecution take over the narrative when that distinction breaks down. To reassert common sense as the dominant, normative metaphysics, Reid casts Hume’s skeptical alternative in phobic terms— renders it, that is, a spectacular object of fear— and banishes its brand of magical thinking to the realm of fiction. In this example from Reid’s Inquiry, there is a mutually constitutive relationship between gothic strategies of representation, modern theories of individual consciousness, and a realist epistemological order. Recent scholarship has convincingly argued that eighteenth-century British literary culture transformed this relationship into the form of the gothic novel itself. According to this line of thought, early popular romances assert a self-affirming realism by demystifying sources of terror that override personal judgment. Reid adopts a fiercely defensive position against any perceived threat to a stable sense of reality and the continuous subject that inhabits such a world. In much the same way, the eighteenth-century British gothic novel banishes atavistic energies associated with a corrupt aristocracy, distant medieval past, or supernatural agency to leave the world inhabited by characters whose desires and motivations arise solely within themselves— characters, in other words, that closely resemble the modern self. By adjudicating emotion and the operations of desire, the gothic authorizes a distinctly modern prototype of personhood defi ned by what Adela Pinch calls “standards of suitable emotional response.”  Thus novels by Radcliffe, Walpole, Reeve, and others subordinate anti-individualistic elements to an all-encompassing narrative of progression and improvement for the purposes of naturalizing the self-governing individual and, by extension, the household and civil society as its basic units of aggregation. By reproducing individuals as containers of “cultivated sensibility,” the gothic distinguishes a literate middle class from other ethnicities, races, and social groups with divergent cultural practices. The early British gothic normalizes and naturalizes a modern subject defined by its autonomy

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and interiority and so works hand-in-glove with the sentimental tradition to modernize kinship relations at the level of the individuated subject and the contractual household. By this line of argument, nothing less than the definition of the individual and its claims to moral authority are at stake in the early British gothic novel. Now let us now imagine the gothic traveling across the Atlantic in the 1790s to take root in the United States as a popu lar cultural form. Indeed, it is a well-established fact of American publication history that a wide body of imported and reprinted gothic novels became available to readers up and down the Eastern seaboard at the end of the eighteenth century. Literary evidence tells us that early American novelists such as Charles Brockden Brown, Isaac Mitchell, and Sally Sayward Barrell Keating Wood were familiar with and drew upon the narrative materials of the British novel. For the sake of argument, then, let us assume that the generic relationship between the gothic mode and the discursive reproduction of the modern individual was transplanted through the conventions of the novel into the homegrown literary productions of these authors. But it seems equally likely that the particular historical, political, and social exigencies of the new United States altered the conditions under which early Americans could imagine themselves achieving individualism or entering into contractual relations. If I am right in this assumption, then early American authors had to confront a disconnect between transmitted cultural forms and the new social setting in which they took root. This book is about how the American gothic addressed this problem and the ways it shaped late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury U.S. literary culture. It is no coincidence that the American gothic first rose to popularity in a period defined by misrepresentation, internal unrest, and an influx of foreign immigrants whose origins and political intentions were all too uncertain. In the last decades of the eighteenth century, the United States witnessed an unprecedented increase in immigration and social mobility; far-reaching changes in property, proprietary wealth, and taxation laws; crises in federal and state representation; and a mounting sense of the country’s irrelevance in an international trade market. Ominous forecasts abound in the era’s writings: J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur calls the post-Revolutionary years “calamitous times”; Benjamin Rush, with characteristic energy, issues a dire warning about North Americans “degenerating into savages or devouring each other like beasts of prey”; and Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly; Or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799) dwells on the dangers of the nation’s “mys-

Introduction

5

terious and obscure” characters. North America’s population, expanding from 2.8 million in 1780 to 9.6 million in 1820, largely comprised displaced young men and makeshift families that, as one cultural historian puts it, “moved and moved again.”  In his essay “Information to Those Who Would Remove to America” (1782), Benjamin Franklin addresses the numerous problems posed by “the quick Increase of Inhabitants” on the continent. As Franklin’s essay suggests, the unprecedented population growth and restlessness that followed the Revolution was accelerated in no small part by what he calls the “Accession of Strangers” from Europe. In Kelroy (1812), Rebecca Rush’s novel of pecuniary ambition and parental contrivance, the narrator captures this zeitgeist when she cautions her readers against “those beings who may be said to spring from nobody knows where; and rise in the world nobody can tell how.”  Rush’s comment about the opacity of human origin and motive is as much product of this era as the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts, which sought to locate and discipline precisely such foreign or indeterminate elements. The body of literary evidence assembled in this book suggests that British ideals of self-governance and contractualism came under assault in this climate of ontological uncertainty and rapid demographic change. By the end of the eighteenth century, global and local forces had moved people far beyond the traditional blood-based, ecclesiastical, and economic kinship structures that were traditionally relied upon to establish and corroborate identities in Europe and Britain. Disparate and clashing ideological regimes—including industrialization, urbanization, territorial expansion, imperialism, market capitalism, slavery, federalism, and revolution—multiplied the ways in which early Americans interpreted the concept of personal sovereignty. Under unforeseen conditions of social, geographic, and economic mobility, it fell to U.S. fiction writers to imagine ways of making this ambiguous and globally dispersed social body cohere as a political entity. The gothic provided the means to do so. For the gothic to accomplish such a task, however, the unique generic relationship between the cultural form of the early British novel and the discursive reproduction of the modern individual had to undergo a significant transformation on this side of the Atlantic. Gothic Subjects argues that the American gothic tradition came about as authors sought to formulate in literary terms the kind of subject capable of negotiating the political, social, and demographic exigencies of the new United States. To do so, U.S. authors from the 1790s to the 1860s reshaped the cultural prototypes of eighteenth- century En glish modernity— chief ly the

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autonomous subject, contractual domestic relations, and the operations of sympathy—to account for a heterogeneous, fluid milieu of competing populations, rival territorial claims, and altogether different notions of political autonomy. To put this another way, a transformation in the cultural logic of British individualism took place over the course of the late eighteenth to midnineteenth centuries as U.S. fiction writers adapted the rhetorical figure of the modern subject to an Atlantic, Anglophone world. In doing so, authors such as Charles Brockden Brown, Sally Sayward Barrell Keating Wood, Royall Tyler, Leonora Sansay, Washington Irving, Robert Montgomery Bird, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and William Wells Brown helped post-Revolutionary and antebellum Americans think of themselves as political subjects. To make this case, I read the American gothic’s literary history as a series of successive displacements in transatlantic novel convention and modern theories of self and government. The gothic therefore participates in the rhetorical practice Leonard Tennenhouse identifies with “the cultural logic of diaspora.”  According to Tennenhouse’s model, English colonists’ efforts to reproduce a cultural homeland through the repetition of British narrative materials yields an altogether distinct Anglo-American literary tradition that both reproduces and transforms the notion of cultural Englishness. This critical approach resists the kind of nationalist literary history that locates “American difference” in autochthonous themes, settings, characters, or authorial biography. To the contrary, the culturalist notion of diaspora asks that we think of American letters as an ongoing appropriation and negotiation of literary practices that originate elsewhere. Accordingly, I regard the American gothic as a transformation in the cultural logic of British individualism that produces a complex and wholly distinct theory of the political subject in a diasporic setting. This line of reasoning assumes that novels on both sides of the Atlantic were attempting to work out problems in theories of the subject and government, but this cultural work arrived at a fundamentally different conceptual result in America than in the British literary culture in which those theories originated. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the British gothic continued the work of the eighteenth-century romance by updating the category of the individual against a backdrop of urban growth, colonial expansion and rebellion, and a burgeoning print market. English novels went to work defending the modern subject against forms of collectivity that might obliterate individual difference. In that tradition, we see the eighteenth-century poetics

Introduction

7

of sensibility continually reworked as the dangers of alien desires and psychic energies that are channeled through the figure of the cannibal, the foreigner, the vampire, or the monster to overwhelm any aggregate conceived as a collection of individuals. The American gothic novel, on the other hand, takes the individual in a rather different direction by questioning its field of application in a diasporic setting. By detaching identity from geographic origin, consanguinity, or exemplary political status, works of gothic fiction imagine Americanness as an ability to change, adapt, travel, and even subsume individual difference and cultural particularity beneath forms of mass collectivity. In response to any number of social, economic, and historical circumstances that gravely challenged the fantasy of political and individual cohesion, the British subject takes on radically new forms in American fiction. The result of this literary experiment is a slew of rhetorical figures I heuristically call “gothic subjects.” By this I mean a constellation of different narrative personas whose mutability and adaptability make them ideally suited to a fluctuating Atlantic world. At a time when both British and American intellectuals were preoccupied with the psychology of the political individual— critics have called this “the spirit of the citizen-subject” and “the formation of civic character”—works of psychological fiction offered a testing ground for competing and often contradictory forms of human consciousness and collectivity. Th is notion of “psychology” denotes a specifically eighteenthcentury hermeneutics of mental interpretation, where the study of the mind is inextricably tied to epistemological inquiry, moral authority, and the principles of government. To arrive at a historically informed, transatlantic understanding of the gothic’s generic qualities, I recuperate eighteenth-century epistemological traditions to argue that gothic conventions yield forms of political membership better suited to an early Atlantic world bound by the fluctuations of the market, immigration, accident, chance, circumstance, and opportunity.

* * * To put flesh on this argument, let me begin with a more detailed account of that peculiar rhetorical figure known as the modern “individual” and the means by which it achieved its ideological dominance and cultural prestige over the course of the eighteenth century. Here I distinguish between individualism as a modern discourse of liberal humanism animating any number

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of market forces and political ideologies—perhaps most famously analyzed as the basis of modern liberal-democratic theory in C. B. MacPherson’s The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (1962)— and the individual as an epistemological division of human subjectivity conceived in abstract terms. Originating in the eighteenth-century discourse of sensory perception known as faculty psychology, the kind of rhetorical formation I have in mind is the self-enclosed, autonomous, unitary, property-owning subject of the Lockean tradition, where “property” includes one’s mental attributes and capabilities. This subject obeys a strict one-mind-per-body principle and matures over time and with experience in the world into a more intellectually complex and socially estimable being. Most scholars are willing to credit John Locke with the creation of the individual because he was the first to transfer social value from historically older notions of bloodline and estate to the interior qualities of the mind. As early as 1748, Benjamin Franklin remarked in Poor Richard Improved that Locke “made the whole internal world his own.”  Writing nearly 250 years later, social theorist Charles Taylor agrees: the “inescapable contemporary sense of inwardness” we associate with the modern sovereign subject has its origins in Locke’s notion of the individual. This distinctly modern form of subjectivity achieved its extraordinary ubiquity in the eighteenth century not only because works of political philosophy took it as their primary unit of analysis but also because the British novel adopted it as a model for character. Recent critics of the British tradition such as Wendy Jones, Adela Pinch, Pam Morris, Nancy Armstrong, and Deirdre Lynch have shown how the novel helped naturalize the Lockean individual as the modern standard of selfhood. The novel, Armstrong writes, took up “the project of universalizing the individual subject” by “transforming the body from an indicator of rank to the container of a unique subjectivity.”  The success of this narrative model of the individual, Armstrong suggests, lay in its unique capacity to reproduce itself in readers and novels alike. Beginning with the works of Defoe, Austen, and Richardson, the early British novel allows its protagonists to move outside a socially stratified system of kinship relations to expose the limitations of defining social value purely in economic or blood-based terms. By tipping its protagonists out of their assigned social positions, the novel transposes social value to unique interior qualities, or what in Jane Eyre (1847) Brontë calls the subject’s “inward treasure.”  This narrative feat transforms a Crusoe, a Pamela, or an Elizabeth Bennett into the exemplary yet natural standard of the self-

Introduction

9

governing citizen. In Deirdre Lynch’s terms, “At the turn of the nineteenth century characters became the imaginative resources on which readers drew to make themselves into individuals, to expand their own interior resources of sensibility.”  As I suggested earlier (and explain in greater detail in Chapter 1), the early British gothic participates in this modernizing process by amplifying the authority of the individual in a world where ontological order has been upset. Unlike early modern ontologies of self that locate identity firmly in Galenic physiology, place of origin, or birthright, the “individual” offers a model of modern humanity that can thrive in different cultural milieus because it presents itself as normative even as it changes and adapts to each new setting. Daniel Defoe makes this case in literary terms when he strands Crusoe on a castaway island far removed from Britain. There, Crusoe’s qualities of mind and contractual imagination matter far more than any notion of a fi xed social origin. It therefore makes sense that such a versatile, mobile model of British identity would make its way across the Atlantic in the years preceding the Revolution to reproduce itself discursively in political philosophy, law, medicine, autobiography, history, and fiction— any form of writing, that is, that takes the principles of autonomous individualism as its foundation. At a moment when matters of political authority, self-determination, and autonomy took on particular urgency in the post-Revolutionary United States, it seems entirely plausible that North American intellectuals should have gravitated toward a model of human character that locates social value in a capacity for self-government and emotional control. This is, after all, one of the fundamental principles underpinning the sentimental novel, which hinges on the struggle to determine what makes a woman desirable. The woman’s personal authority and interior qualities define the social rules by which a community reproduces itself. To achieve this end, sentimental novels grant their female characters a unique interiority—we might say, they are individuated—that transforms them into legitimate bearers of cultural value. Thus two people of matching interiority and equal merit—Lucy Freeman and Mr. Sumner, say, in The Coquette (1797) or Myra and Worthy in The Power of Sympathy (1789)— achieve individual perfection through marriage as each augments the other with something he or she lacked prior to the exchange. This is essentially the erotic counterpart to a political model of contractual community; in both instances, the good is constituted through shared standards of taste and judgment rather than subordination and coercion. Thus the marriage contract maintains the integrity of self-sovereign authority by

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regulating and enforcing the social and cognitive distinctions on which the institutional norms of individualism rest. But as recent cultural historians have argued, from its earliest moments, American literary culture found itself at odds with the kind of “exemplary and progressive spirits” unilaterally identified with unitary, disciplined subjecthood. As David Kazanjian explains, for such a formulation to work, it had “to ignore all the myriad, particularistic differences among subjects— trade, heritage, wealth, race, gender, religion, the list is supposedly infinite—in order to apprehend each subject equally.” Insofar as it measures human sovereignty strictly as the unproblematic unfolding of mental and political complexity along developmental lines, the “individual” is an elite cultural formulation. As Judith Butler succinctly puts it, “liberal versions of human ontology” have a tendency to think in the exclusive terms of “bounded beings—distinct, recognizable, delineated, subjects.” Enlightenment epistemologies of the modern subject restrict civic membership to only those figures of self-sovereign authority who fit the Enlightenment definition of the individual in the first place. In Locke’s original formulation, these were men who belonged to an English land-owning elite arranged within a traditional hierarchy of kinship relations. But the moment the individual enters a cultural milieu in which people have circulated far beyond that system of social stratification and share altogether different notions of self-fulfi llment and political authority— a place, arguably, much like the post-Revolutionary United States—the limitations of this model become strikingly clear. It is for this reason, I suspect, that the authors included in this study repeatedly take the individual to task as both a fiction and a fragile, defensive construct perilously vulnerable to competing measures of human life. Beginning in the 1790s, American authors started to use gothic tropes to represent the individual as an impossible fantasy wholly unsuited to an urban, cosmopolitan community of competing interests, heterogeneous cultures, and different notions of political and personal authority. As I see it, post-Revolutionary and antebellum U.S. fiction comes fully freighted with characters bearing little resemblance to the kind of internally coherent, developmental subject of the British sentimental tradition with whom Ian Watt enjoins us to identify “the rise of the novel.”  Arthur Mervyn, C. Auguste Dupin, Updike Underhill, Sheppard Lee, and Hester Prynne are obvious cases in point. It is fair to say that none of these characters qualifies as an “individual” as modern political theory understood that term, namely, as the ordered, continuous, autonomous self whose social value resides in its unique interiority, developmental

Introduction

11

progress, moral discipline, and capacity for critical reflection. To the contrary, the narrative personas of the American novel— especially where it appears “gothic” in character— are more often restless, indeterminate social forces inimical to Enlightenment rules of behavior but who nonetheless thrive in conditions of ontological mobility. A literary example from Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn (1799– 1800) will serve to clarify this point. This is the novel’s description of Philadelphia in the grip of the yellow fever: “Terror had exterminated all the sentiments of nature. Wives were deserted by husbands, and children by parents. . . . Men were seized by this disease in the streets; passengers fled from them; entrance into their own dwellings was denied to them; they perished in the public ways.”  The novel’s horrific account of the household’s disintegration effectively questions the Enlightenment assumption that family feeling is an unbreakable bond and the basis for the kind of fellow feeling— among independent householders—that would create a community recognizable to Adam Smith as “sympathetic.” That the family falls apart so readily here should tell us that Brown is questioning its conventional application as a model for the nation at large. Indeed, Brown suggests, the affective model of social relations is particularly ill-suited to the kind of heterogeneous community one encounters in a city. Let me suggest why. Brown’s Philadelphia is an urban space in which all manner of people are forced into close proximity with others (like the conman Welbeck) whose origins and intentions are, at best, unknowable or, at worst, outright hostile. The case can be made that, in such an environment, any assumption of fellowfeeling—that people have common ideas and emotions capable of uniting them in a single interest— can be downright dangerous. To think his way through this problem (I elaborate on this in Chapter 1), Brown uses the device of the plague to displace the self-enclosed household as the basic unit and model of society with a totally inimical model in which feeling flows unimpeded between people and even between objects and people. As the agent and representative of a society thus constituted, Mervyn refuses to observe the boundaries separating subject from object and allows feeling to pass between himself and those with whom he comes into contact. In refusing to observe the separation between himself and others, Mervyn assumes that everyone is just like him. Any domain where the logic of individualism prevails (the idyllic Hadwin household, for example) depends on unbreachable individual boundaries for its health and cohesion. Thus Mervyn’s invasions prove utterly disastrous in such spaces.

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In the city, by contrast, this form of human interaction comes to us as Mervyn’s strikingly advantageous ability to ingratiate himself with practically anyone. His indiscriminate affability gets him out of danger, grants him access to Philadelphia’s elite, and even secures him a wealthy wife. Indeed, what might be seen as a lack of discrimination in British terms might well earn the descriptor “democratic” in the new United States. By and large, criticism has tended to read the novel’s notorious ambiguities as evidence of Mervyn’s divided moral, economic, or political consciousness. I would simply prefer to say that the different and conflicting accounts we receive of Mervyn’s actions and motives tell us that he is all things to all people. He has the potential, in short, to be anyone. To imagine such an adaptable subject, however, Brown must redefine autonomy, self-enclosure, and fi xed social position—whether in a body, a household, or a civil state—as prohibitive and static formulations that trap people and things in one place. In Lockean terms, this is both paradoxical and counterintuitive: Locke’s civil society takes property ownership as the original condition of self-government, and the categories of self and contract exist to protect that property against encroachment. These are the very structures that are supposed to guarantee freedom, property rights, and independence— at least as defined by the contractual state, whose constituents meet the exemplary yet entirely arbitrary political status of the individual subject. To take this altogether restrictive notion of social relations to task, Brown reduces the sentimental household to rubble and in its place offers something to the order of a network or circuit through which information in the form of emotions can travel freely. In assuming that one mind can be any number of people, Brown builds a model of subjectivity out of the gothic energies that are absolutely antithetical to the British novel’s notion of community.

* * * To arrive at this idea, Brown exploits a loophole in the logic of personal sovereignty as mapped out in Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Consider this remarkable passage, in which a single mind wanders between two sleeping bodies: “Let us then . . . suppose the Soul of Castor separated, during his Sleep, from his Body, to think apart. Let us then suppose too, that it chuses for its Scene of Thinking, the Body of another Man, v.g. Pollux, who is sleeping without a Soul: For if Castor’s Soul can think whilst Castor is asleep, what Castor is never conscious of, ’tis no matter what

Introduction

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Place it chuses to think in. We have here then the Bodies of two Men with only one Soul between them.”  Significantly, Locke brings up this imaginary case of body swapping purely for the purpose of dismissing it as an “absurdity.” As far as he is concerned, knowledge comes from sensory experience to produce an internally coherent archive of knowledge, or “mind,” and to think otherwise is “utterly inconsistent and impossible.”  Indeed, Locke obliquely acknowledges the exclusive nature of his model by adopting this characteristically defensive stance against any mode of thinking that undermines the principles of self-enclosure and internal coherency. This is much the same tactic of defensive individualism adopted by the late eighteenthcentury British gothic. The self-evident absurdity of body swapping allows Locke to reaffirm his own model of the autonomous and self-enclosed individual (whose mind is housed strictly within a single body). Locke’s defensive position masks a latent tautology in his concept of sensory encounter. On one hand, the autonomy of the individual mind as mapped out in the Essay is guaranteed by the operations of reflection and understanding that are internal to that mind. These faculties shape sensory information from the external world (“Experience”) into a reflection or idea within the mind. The subject’s judgment maintains the distance between its ideas and the external objects they represent, thus ensuring the strict separation of subject and object. Yet the materials it receives as sensations enter the mind from external sources, and Locke is far less willing to entertain the possibility that empirical information may come already infused with affect or meaning. Rather than confront this issue directly, Locke simply insists that reason protects the mind from influences outside its control, and strictly internal causes account for individual action: “Every one, I think, finds in himself, a Power to begin or forbear, continue or put an end to several Actions in himself.”  Here Locke places considerable stress on the internality and autonomy of the individual mind (“in himself ”) to preserve the absolute separation between subject and surrounding objects. Once Locke had opened the mind to its surroundings through the portal of the senses, however, neither he nor his philosophical successors were ever completely successful in closing it off again. Almost despite his explicit philosophical intentions, this body-swapping scenario confuses the very distinction between psychology and physiology on which his dualistic notion of mind-body relations rests. In that sense, it has more in common with early modern ontologies of self, which construe the body as a fungible container. A porous body that allows the mind to travel beyond its physical receptacle is

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much like the Galenic body in which, as seventeenth-century anatomist Helkiah Crooke writes, “the motion of the spirits is perpetuall” and “substances can passe suddenly through all parts.”  To preserve the integrity of his argument against such atavistic notions, Locke dismisses the case of the wandering mind as “a contradiction” and defines the characteristics of humanity in even more rigid terms: “The Identity of Persons,” he insists, “consist[s] in the Soul’s being united to the very same numerical Particles of matter.”  Yet the very fact that Locke needs to prove that a man’s mind is bound to its physical being shows just how hard he must work to keep the contradictions in his model at bay. He relies on the self-evident absurdity of this example to negate the unsettling prospect that a single mind can exist in two or more bodies. Even as Locke relegates this negated form of consciousness to the realm of the preposterous (much as Reid does with Hume’s magical thinking), it nonetheless makes its way directly from the Essay into the gothic through the trope of metempsychosis, where one mind controls a number of different bodies. A mind thus constituted has to lack the self-control, not to mention bodily control, that the British subject possesses in spades. In Sheppard Lee (1836), for example, Robert Montgomery Bird uses this trope to shift the terms of subjectivity from an elite ontological state of being to a model of the self that can only be described as an incessant state of “becoming.” Bird’s body-snatching protagonist is less a continuous coherent self than a Humean series of mental associations that turn the mind into a by-product of the body’s physical and repeatable habits. Bird challenges the normativity and naturalness of the individualistic model by allowing his protagonist to proliferate exponentially beyond restrictions of geographical place, point of origin, or blood. As I show at greater length in Chapter 3, this feat successfully reconfigures the human mind for a national imaginary that conceives itself as a cluster of disparate and discrete parts. Indeed, one simply cannot imagine Sheppard Lee producing a territorially bounded community calculated as the sum of its individual members. What we have instead is a body politic characterized by the infi nite potentiality—indeed, personality— of its constituents. Gothic Subjects therefore begins with Charles Brockden Brown because I believe he was the first American novelist to put flesh on a latent problem in Locke’s model—namely, that the human mind is permeable and that emotions can travel unimpeded between people. I then show how the American gothic breathes life into other negated forms of Lockean consciousness to test them as viable (noncontractual) forms of collectivity. Such negations include,

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for example, two minds in one body, which Brown stages as sleepwalking in Edgar Huntly. One mind is housed in two or more bodies in the preternaturally connected twins of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), Bird’s Sheppard Lee, or Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Alice Doane’s Appeal” (1835). In the latter tale, “the similarity of [the] dispositions” between Leonard Doane and Walter Brome “made them seem like joint possessors of an individual nature.”  Objects that fall outside the generalized categories of experience known as “common sense” disrupt the physical world in “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), and so Poe creates in Dupin a model of perception that does not rely on universal categories of thought. Objects that act like subjects come to us as the return of the dead in Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820), while a world in which the subject cannot control the information entering his mind takes the form of ventriloquism in Wieland; Or, The Transformation (1798). The ability to turn such gothic scenarios into workable models of social unity, I argue, is the extraordinary rhetorical feat that sets the American gothic decisively apart from its British counterpart. By modifying the conceptual cornerstones of Enlightenment thought, the American gothic tradition validates precisely those idiosyncratic, fantastic notions of the individual that the British tradition goes out of its way to render phobic and transforms them into the basis of political membership. To perform this sleight of hand, the gothic had to take for granted the eighteenth-century proposition that structures of political association proceed from the mind’s cognitive processes. This cultural logic entered the gothic by means of the Lockean common and moral sense tradition that traveled from Scotland to the United States to inflect nearly every aspect of American intellectual life from the mid-1700s onward. Early Americans trained in this branch of philosophy assumed that communal associations such as sympathy, contractualism, or common sense confirm psychological faculties such as reason and judgment. Mutual participation in those communal associations makes it possible to imagine a unified, democratic nation as the sum of its rational, self-sovereign individuals. In her definitive study on Lockean liberalism and early American literary culture, Gillian Brown puts it in these terms: “The citizen of the liberal state emerges in the processes of thought, which, in Locke’s view, distinguish humans from other animals. Hence, the psychology and pedagogy of human understanding help delineate the state . . . [Locke’s model of psychology] defi nes all activities of human understanding as social conduct.”  When Benjamin Rush, for

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example, remarks in 1792 that “the dimensions of the human mind are apt to be regulated by the extent and objects of the government under which it is formed,” he thinks in terms of the eighteenth-century relationship between mental and political constitution. Indeed, ever since John Locke transformed the individual’s capacity for reason into “the common bond whereby human kind is united in one fellowship and society,” many early Americans tended to see a sustained connection between the human mind and the social formations that naturalize and guarantee its operations. My purpose is to establish a historical link between the gothic novel and this political philosophical tradition to pose the following question: given that the gothic is preoccupied with unconventional psychologies, what social formations does it thereby create and authorize? In seeking an answer to this question, I aim to contribute to our understanding of early U.S. political culture and the conventions of the novel form. I therefore ask that we think of the American gothic as taking part in an unresolved literary debate over political and psychological constitution in the post-Revolutionary decades. I am, in a sense, returning to the notion of the “American Mind”—not, however, from the transcendental perspective of F. O. Matthiessen or Perry Miller, but by exhuming the psychological and epistemological standards of the period and putting them back into ser vice as guiding narrative structures. I thus share with Christopher Castiglia’s remarkable Interior States (2008) an interest in the counterintuitive phenomenon by which the arena of subjectivity in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries became “a site for negotiating the contradictions and conflicts of the state’s myriad ideologies—as well as models of association and social interaction beyond the interests of the state—in ways that belied the coherence of national or market interests.”  In Gothic Subjects, the Lockean individual is a crucial actor in this history: transplanted into early U.S. literary culture as a British fictional convention, it offered novelists the means to explore problematics of freedom, experience, interiority, community, and government even as they rewrote its conceptual foundations for a circum-Atlantic world. In reading the American gothic novel from the perspective of British theories of the individual, I must be clear on one point: it is not my intention to reestablish an originary account of American culture that takes as its starting point Locke’s liberal subject. It is a well-known fact of U.S. political history that Locke’s works on selfhood and government were essential to the Revolutionary writings of the 1760s and 1770s, even though the connection between his political writings and a national liberalist ideology has been sub-

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ject to very different, often conflicting, emphases and interpretations in the last forty years. Few scholars of the Revolutionary era now dispute the pervasiveness of Lockean ideas— even though, as Jerome Huyler notes, we have “only rarely and recently begun paying adequate attention to the strikingly complex body of thought that Locke left behind.”  Nor do historians of eighteenth-century U.S. culture dispute the important influence exerted by Scottish political philosophy over American college curricula and ecclesiastical training. As Eric Slauter reminds us, this was an age “obsessed with the social contract,” so there is every reason to take seriously Perry Miller’s contention that Scottish Lockean philosophy achieved “absolute domination of academic curricula by about 1820” to become “the official metaphysic of America.”  The evidence compiled by political historians therefore gives us ample reason to assess early U.S. literary culture in terms of transatlantic political philosophy, but it would be a mistake to read one tradition against the other by analogy or homology. Rather than impose British categories of thought on American literary culture, I want to consider the mutually constitutive relationship between literary form and modern epistemologies of selfhood and political association that took shape as these discursive materials were transmitted through the Atlantic world. To do so, I take my cue from current revisionist historians such as Samuel Fleischacker, Mark Hulliung, T. H. Breen, and Mark E. Button, who have made us increasingly attentive to the complex transformations—through time, displacement, and repetition—that Lockean epistemologies underwent on U.S. soil. As I see it, fiction had an important role to play in these transformations. Simply put, I do not read the American novel as the symptomatic expression of, or reaction against, Enlightenment categories of thought. Rather, I regard the fictional works in this study as continuous with— as opposed to reflections of—eighteenth- and nineteenth-century epistemological speculation. Like Huyler, I am interested in “the strikingly complex body of thought Locke left behind,” but I assume that the genre of the novel engages specific categories of political selfhood associated with British notions of individualism, and the representation of “gothic subjects” therefore relies on conventions of the novel form. American authors found themselves working with the cultural materials of individualism and contractualism because the form of the novel demanded it. I am therefore convinced that authors’ “awareness” of these philosophical materials is most satisfactorily grasped as the rewriting of transatlantic literary convention, not some a priori familiarity with the principal tenets of Enlightenment philosophy that was intentionally reproduced,

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whole and entire, in novel form. Context, as Fredric Jameson puts it, is “not some common-sense external reality” but “the rewriting or restructuration of a prior historical or ideological subtext.”  By emphasizing the continuity between the American gothic and British categories of thought, I am following the lead of a growing number of scholars, including Theo Davis, Ezra Tawil, Ed Cahill, Gretchen Woertendyke, Laura Doyle, and Gillian Brown, who identify the emergence of a national literary tradition as part of a transatlantic transmission of ideas that appropriates and reinterprets British cultural forms. Mark Hulliung and Leonard Tennenhouse have called this process the “Americanization” of British letters. Rather than project back onto the Revolutionary period a decisive break with English culture, these scholars and others have argued that America’s republic of letters took shape as part of “an international movement that transcended all national boundaries.”  As the contributors to a recent special issue of Novel: A Forum on Fiction have argued, the disciplinary field of the early American novel is necessarily bound by this principle: “No author writing fiction in English from North America could write outside a transatlantic system of exchange, even if he or she wanted to.”  To make my own contribution to this body of work, I question the longheld critical assumption that early Americans conceived civil society almost exclusively in terms of the sovereign individual. This assumption has shaped much of the scholarship produced on American literary culture since the 1980s that configured early literature in terms of nationalism and familialism. That work has vitally enriched our understanding of the importance of race and gender for American selfhood, but it has nonetheless inherited from the deeply influential republican-synthesis school of thought an underexamined and overemphasized faith in the progressive logic of developmental cultural systems. There has been a tendency to assume, for instance, that the constructive project beginning with the 1776 Revolution reaches its apotheosis in the “nation” and its idealized synecdoche, the “citizen-individual.”  We should, as Louis Althusser cautions, treat “the concepts of origin” with circumspection “because they always more or less induce the ideology which has produced them.”  In other words, this approach to American cultural history naturalizes the romance plot of the nation’s progressive self-making by drawing a straight line from the Founders’ vision of a democratic political collective to a fully realized national body united by its constituents’ mutual commitment to Whiggish values and virtues. The same progressive logic recuperated the sentimental novel as a nationalist endeavor. In the work of Jane

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Tompkins, Julia Stern, Richard Brodhead, and others, the sentimental novel reproduces citizen subjects as carriers of democratic Republican ideology by miniaturizing the nation-state in the paradigm of the family. Gothic Subjects seeks to revise the familial-nationalist accounts of American cultural history by questioning their chief underlying assumption, namely, that subjects are disciplined ontological totalities and political community proceeds from and reaffirms the attributes— or “properties”— of those constituents. Indeed, our critical commitment to nationalist interpretative structures grows out of modern political philosophy’s largely unquestioned assumption that “property” is the originary matrix within which social relationships are cast. Liberal ontologies of selfhood and collective identity take for granted the proprietary basis of human subjectivity, where “ownership [is] the governing term in the constitution of personhood.” As Roberto Esposito explains it, this proprietary paradigm forces community into “a conceptual language that radically alters it.” When we think in terms of the individualist paradigm, that is, we are compelled to imagine community as a “ ‘property’ belonging to subjects that join them together [accomuna]: an attribute, a definition, a predicate that qualifies them as belonging to the same totality [insieme], or as a ‘substance’ that is produced by their union. In each case community is conceived of as a quality that is added to their nature as subjects.” This assumption in turn reproduces the “hypertrophic figure” of the self as the axiomatic component of a national body. As Esposito argues, any model of community that takes the individualist paradigm as its basis is held in thrall to the correlative principles of unity and totality. To think in such terms is, by implication, to reaffirm what Fredric Jameson calls the “vast interpretative allegory”— or “master narrative”— of the “nation” as literature’s referent and primary unit of analysis. Taking a contrary view, the authors included in this study question what recent political theories have called “the theoretical privilege of sovereignty” by repeatedly refusing to reaffirm or reinvigorate an originary, ordered, proprietary self. 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. In making this case, I see myself contributing to a recent body of revisionist

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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. 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. 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.”  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.”  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.

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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. 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.”  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. 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. 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.” 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.” 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. 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

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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 refl ection 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.”  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. 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. 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.” 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 which her community of origin reproduces itself. Instead, the unwitting

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Crane finds himself quickly driven out of town, disappearing back into the modernizing world—presumably to acquire social capital as a lawyer and a judge. Thus Irving preserves this vital local culture by proposing that one’s membership in such a community depends on the degree to which one learns and adopts the rules governing social behavior there. As I see it, the “Americanness” of this quintessentially “American” story lies in its attempt to reconcile a clash between heterogeneous cultures, one of which is modeled according to an English understanding of community. In “Sleepy Hollow,” British notions of property relations and individual sovereignty are presented as incompatible but nonetheless conterminous and coexistent with a larger, more diverse population that thinks in terms of movement and exchange. A British cultural logic, Irving suggests, can only work under conditions of ontological and social mobility by maintaining itself as sequestered, anachronistic, and wholly cut off from the rest of the nation. This suggests a national imaginary that, by the 1820s, has come to think of America as a cluster of discrete local cultures with competing rules of behavior (I discuss this at greater length in Chapter 3). Thus the cultural work of the American gothic is indicated less by its themes, characters, settings, or authorial biography—and still less by sources of historical guilt—than by its attempt to work out a complex problem of how the subject is conceived and what forms of social collectivity that conception implies. I therefore resist reading the gothic as the disruption or destruction of some continuous narrative, whether self, history, or the nation. As I see it, this approach succumbs to the mimetic fallacy that the gothic reflects deeply embedded social and political anxieties that precede their articulation in writing. Rather, my interest in the formal proximity between literature and epistemology brings questions of historical formalism back into our discussion about gothic fiction. In the last decade, critics have reinvigorated the study of aesthetics by considering how literary forms are shaped by historical circumstance to perform specific ideological functions—to consider a text’s formal qualities, in other words, “not simply as containers for extrinsic ideological content, but as practices with an ideological significance of their own.”  The field of early American literature—which has long been dominated by a “politically engaged historicism” that has largely divorced questions of social relations from aesthetic forms—is currently recalibrating around this revitalized interest in aesthetics. Ed Cahill’s Liberty of the Imagination (2012), for example, participates in this recent revisionist turn by adroitly demonstrating that complex debates about political collectivity inhere in the

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eighteenth-century language of aesthetic theory. Similarly, I read the American gothic’s decision to blend, reconfigure, rearrange, and reject British categories of thought as an indication of the social function of form, namely, to produce narrative innovations in subjectivity and collective association. Through this kind of emphasis, I aim to contribute to our understanding of antebellum literary production by revising the conventional division of cultural labor that grants sentimental fiction and the frontier romance a monopoly on nation making. Rather than view the gothic as interrupting, subverting, or otherwise inhibiting such a nationalizing project, my reading places the gothic squarely at the center of a larger literary debate over political psychology and social relations.

* * * Those familiar with Cathy Davidson’s argument in Revolution and the Word (1986) may see some affinity between my proposed line of inquiry and her chapter on the gothic, which she aptly subtitles “the limits of individualism”— a phrase I have taken the liberty of reworking somewhat in the subtitle of Gothic Subjects. Davidson argues that the gothic critiques “the inherent problems of so-called modern society, especially progressive philosophical or economic theories (liberalism, deism, rationalism) based on a notion of human perfectibility.” For Davidson, the gothic collapses “the liberal ideology of individualism and the Smithian ideal of personal freedom” into “perversions of the self and corruption of the society.” I agree with her proposition that the gothic challenges the American fantasy of self-determination by taking aim at “the interpretative propensities and ideological premises of the individual,” but as I see it, this only tells half the story. To take Davidson’s idea one step further, I argue that the gothic exposes “the limits of individualism” in order to put ideologies of the citizen subject and society up for grabs, thereby creating a space of potential in which other models can take shape. In Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial of American Authorship (1998), Nancy Ruttenburg asks that we conceive such a space as “a dynamic symbolic system or theater” in which different notions of sovereignty and government compete but do not necessarily cancel one another out. Drawing on early Puritan conversion narratives and accounts of the Great Awakening of the 1730s, Ruttenburg explains that public performance reconstituted “the conditions of personal autonomy granted a priori to the liberal subject” as the nonliberal, “supraindividual authority” that she calls

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“democratic personality.” This radical form of democratic subjectivity granted disparate and politically disqualified people the means to constitute themselves as a community: it was, as Ruttenburg puts it, “conspicuously transferrable; it individuated without necessarily individuating those who appropriated it.”  Important to my purposes, Ruttenburg regards competing forms of popular sovereignty as contradictory but not incompatible, coexisting not despite but by virtue of their contradictions. Democratic personality and liberal individualism do not invalidate one another; rather, they coexist in a mutually defining relationship that distinguishes the ideological complexity, even incoherence, of early American political culture. Ruttenburg makes it possible to imagine contradictory models of personhood and sovereignty coexisting in the United States by separating them into different cultural arenas. In much the same way, I assume that different generic modes propose related but often incongruous models of subjectivity that participate equally in a “dynamic symbolic system” of early American political culture. Thus my readings of gothic literature explore the tensions between the popular and enduring ideal of the sovereign individual and the speculative alternatives worked out in literary form without granting hegemonic status to any single unencumbered, dominant political formation. Ruttenburg’s methodology also yields in nineteenth-century literary works a politics more nuanced than the terms conventionally invoked to express such concepts: liberal, conservative, democratic, elitist, consensual, radical, normative, and so on. I find this approach compelling because the competing forms of selfhood and community I explore in this book do not fit neatly into preexisting categories of U.S. political experience. For example, the metaphor of contagion in Arthur Mervyn imagines a fundamentally continuous social body ideally suited to conditions of ontological uncertainty and urban proximity (Chapter 1). I read the act of “going native” in the captivity narrative less as an atavistic regression from culture to nature than as an incorporation of the self into a cosmopolitan circuit of information and feeling (Chapter 2). A circuit connects disparate people and even people and things and transforms them into a single heterogeneous organism with the capacity to circulate freely through a circum-Atlantic world. In the Jacksonian era, a gathering sense of national identity conflicts with increased political sectionalism, so the gothic shifts its attention from the challenges of cosmopolitan circulation to the problem of regional difference in a nation comprising discrete local groups whose cultural norms are entirely relative and impenetrable to outsiders (Chapter 3). As we see in Sheppard Lee and Poe’s short stories, this problem

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poses a challenge to the influential Scottish American metaphysic known as “common sense,” which popularized the democratic and nationalizing fantasy that all men share a common set of convictions about material and moral reality. In the years immediately preceding the Civil War, American authors confront the increasingly urgent task of reconciling a contractual model of society with large, displaced, migratory groups of people that arguably seemed on the verge of overwhelming the civil state (Chapter 4). A novel such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) registers a tension between civil society and this larger form of unprotected life that exists both figuratively and literally beyond the pale of the state. This is the measure of humanity that Foucault and others have called the “population.” This biopolitical formulation also allows us to revisit the grounds on which we have conventionally assumed that race and slavery are central to the gothic tradition (Chapter 5). William Wells Brown’s Clotel; Or, The President’s Daughter (1853) revises the conventional binaries of racialized American (white supremacist) culture in the figure of the white slave population to reconstitute antebellum American community as a single biological mass. I call Clotel a “bio-novel” for its theorization of the “population” as the novel’s effect as well as its object.

* * * In many ways, the argument I have outlined so far may seem somewhat unfashionable insofar as I am interested in what makes American gothic fiction distinctly “American.” Indeed, the prevailing critical impulse of the last several decades has been to displace national distinction from its customary central place in literary study. It is not my intention, however, to assume that a drive toward literary autonomy produced an indigenous body of works in response to exceptional forms of national experience. I think of the U.S. gothic tradition less as a coherent body of autochthonous works and more as a triangulated relationship between intellectual history, the transatlantic circulation of ideas, and literary form. The “American” gothic novel emerges out of this relationship as a complex, changing theory of political subjecthood. I therefore imagine this book as a response to a question first posed by Leslie Fiedler that directed the course of scholarship on the gothic novel in America. Why, he asked in Love and Death in the American Novel, “has the tale of terror so special an appeal for Americans?”  As I have already indicated, Fiedler famously accounted for the gothic’s appeal on the grounds that it encodes, in narrative form, the “special guilts” of American experience,

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chiefly slavery, land dispossession, and revolutionary patricide. From a purely commonsensical perspective, I find it hard to believe that American readers flocked to this cultural form out of a compulsive urge to revisit the sublimated activities of a guilt-ridden national conscience. That seems like the very antithesis of an appealing pastime. Nonetheless, Fiedler’s query remains vitally suggestive, as generations of critics—myself included—have taken seriously his contention that the American novel is “almost essentially a gothic one.” In devising my own response to Fiedler’s enormously generative question, I find it plausible that the gothic form thrived in the decades following the Revolution because it offered new narrative possibilities at the level of social relations and psychological life. From this perspective, the continuous, Enlightenment subject of the American liberal tradition emerges as just one epistemological formulation among many contending models in a theater of possibility.

chapter 1

The American Transformation of the British Individual

Beginning in the 1790s, North American readers evidently developed an appetite for British and European romances alongside the homegrown publications of Charles Brockden Brown, Isaac Mitchell, and Sally Sayward Barrell Keating Wood. Although Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland; Or, The Transformation (published in September 1798) is widely regarded as the first “American” gothic novel, imported and reprinted editions of Britain and the continent’s most popu lar gothic novelists— Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, Clara Reeve, Monk Lewis, and Carl Grosse, to name just a few—were available several years before Brown’s novel made its debut. In Philadelphia in 1795, for instance, Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest and A Sicilian Romance appeared alongside Charlotte Smith’s Montalbert, which was reprinted again in 1800 along with The Mysteries of Udolpho. Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest and The Mysteries of Udolpho were reprinted in the same year in Boston, while The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne; a Highland Story appeared in Philadelphia in 1796; The Italian came out in Philadelphia and New York in 1797. Smith’s D’Arcy was reprinted in Philadelphia in 1796 and Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle in 1802. Also available were complete and expurgated versions of M. G. Lewis’s Ambrosio; Or, The Monk (Boston, 1799) and Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (New York, 1801). Anonymous novels such as Count Roderick’s Castle; Or, Gothic Times, a Tale (Baltimore, 1795), The Cavern of Death; a Moral Tale (Philadelphia, 1795), and The Horrors of Oakendale Abbey; a Romance (New York, 1799) vied with reprinted German romances like Friedrich von Schiller’s The Ghost Seer (New York, 1796). Critically neglected British gothic novels like Stephen Cullen’s The Haunted Priory (Phila-

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delphia, 1794), George Moore’s Grasville Abbey: A Romance (Salem, Mass., 1799), and Regina Maria Roche’s The Children of the Abbey (Philadelphia, 1800) also seemed to have enjoyed a welcome reception in the United States. Nor was the vogue for the gothic restricted to the novel. In American periodicals, there appeared reviews, poems, excerpts, and even parodies of British and German gothic works, all testifying to the enduring popularity of this form. Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest and The Italian, Lewis’s The Monk, and a version of William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) called The Iron Chest were adapted as stage plays in Britain and exported to the United States. The gothic mode evidently provided a staple for theatergoers well into the nineteenth century, as productions of gothic plays appeared frequently in all major American theatrical centers between 1794 and 1830. Such was the public’s appetite for gothic romances that Royall Tyler made it a topic of satire in the preface to The Algerine Captive (1797), in which he relates the tale of “Dolly, the dairy maid, and Jonathan, the hired man . . . [who] amused themselves into so agreeable a terrour with the haunted houses and hobgobblins of Mrs. Ratcliffe that they were both afraid to sleep alone.”  As Donald Ringe puts it, Wieland may have “marked the beginning of American Gothic fiction,” but it “did not mark the beginning of Gothic fiction in America.”  Clearly, any account of the gothic romance in post-Revolutionary literary history must first come to terms with this proliferation of imported and reprinted editions of British and European texts. By and large, however, we have tended to overlook or underemphasize this complex publication history. More conventionally, the story of the gothic in America tends to go like this: the gothic novel took root here first and foremost as an “indigenous” literary form by responding to specifically “American” forms of experience, such as slavery, frontier expansion, industrialization, and revolution. The cultural anxieties wrought by America’s rapid social, political, and economic changes produced a body of work that diverged from its British counterpart along the lines of historical experience. To this end, gothic writers here rejected the traditional trappings of European romance (castles, monasteries, lascivious monks, etc.) as “ludicrous,” “unconvincing,” or simply downright “meaningless” for a nation born of the principles of reason and independence. To make this case, criticism routinely invokes Charles Brockden Brown’s famous preface to Edgar Huntly; Or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker, in which he famously vows to replace the “puerile superstitions and exploded manners” of the European gothic with “incidents of Indian hostility and the perils of the western wilderness.”  Brown claims to liberate the American gothic from the burden of British history to

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give it an eschatological narrative of cultural origins; scholarship that takes this preface at face value therefore tends to reproduce the powerful foundation myth of America’s self-fashioning. By this line of reasoning, American writers and readers eschewed the atavistic materials of the European romance to produce unique and unanticipated innovations in form and ideology from indigenous materials. As I see it, the publication history of the gothic in America tells a slightly different story. The trade in imported novels suggests that something about the gothic spoke to American interests that goes well beyond its repudiation of British themes or its ability to articulate an indigenous national culture. Even the abbreviated list of titles I offered above tells us that American readers were equally—if not more—devoted to the figurative restoration of disrupted aristocratic bloodlines and the persecution of trapped women as they were to the kind of indigenous concerns Brown placed center stage in Edgar Huntly. Far from rejecting European tropes, moreover, the texts produced on American soil remain indebted to the narrative materials of the British gothic. I have in mind, for instance, the incest motif in William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy or Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839); the castle in Isaac Mitchell’s The Asylum; Or, Alonzo and Melissa (1811); Leonora Sansay’s confinement and persecution of her female protagonists at the hands of tyrannical males in The Secret History; Or, the Horrors of St Domingo (1808); the veiled woman in William Wells Brown’s Clotel; Or, The President’s Daughter or Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852); Herman Melville’s crenellated ship in Benito Cereno (1855); siblings separated at birth in Mark Twain’s Puddn’ head Wilson (1894); Shirley Jackson’s castle-like house in The Haunting of Hill House (1959); or the return of the dead in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). These are just a few examples where the text’s organizing metaphors are taken directly from the pages of Radcliffe or Lewis. Without a doubt, Brown and many of his contemporaries were committed to producing a national literary tradition but we cannot present the period’s acts of self-description as evidence of that tradition without accounting for the large body of literature that engages the formal conventions of the British mode. To agree, then, with Donald Ringe’s assessment that “it is idle to speak of American Gothic . . . as if it were something completely distinct from its European counterpart,” we evidently need an explanatory model that can navigate the complex and changing relationship between this transatlantic entanglement of forms and an emergent national literary culture. Published in New Hampshire in 1800, Maine author Sally Sayward Barrell Keating

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Wood’s Julia and the Illuminated Baron offers a convenient means to a possible explanation. Set primarily in late Revolutionary France, Wood’s novel relates the trials of the virtuous and well-born Julia at the hands of the Count de Launa, a member of the Illuminati, and her noble family’s subsequent flight to England after the events of the Revolution turn them into refugees. Second only to Charles Brockden Brown and Susanna Rowson in terms of novelistic output, Wood nonetheless remains largely excluded from the most influential accounts of the early American novel. Fiedler calls Julia and the Illuminated Baron “a gothic-sentimental farrago,” Cathy Davidson describes it as “inconsistent” and “muddled,” and most book-length studies of the American gothic do not mention it at all. With its spectral hauntings, secret histories, impregnable castles, and innocence persecuted, Julia and the Illuminated Baron uses every Radcliffean signature in the book while refusing to conform to a strictly American nationalist framework. This is just one reason, I suspect, that it remains so neglected: Wood’s tale of l’ancienne noblesse and Old World degeneracy appears far removed from the “specifically American concerns”—namely, race, gender, frontier expansion, the failure of America’s liberal promise, and so forth—that have long given the American gothic its generic coordinates. To be sure, Julia is a thinly veiled conservative allegory about the evils of philosophical radicalism on social and political stability that echoes contemporary conspiracy theories regarding the Illuminati’s plans for global domination. It would be a mistake, however, to read this novel as merely symptomatic of an anxious political climate or heavy-handedly didactic about the triumph of feminine virtue (although it is certainly both). To understand why Wood’s decision to write something so closely resembling a British gothic romance might have made perfect sense to an American readership, let us first consider how she engages in the literary debate of her period over what constitutes an “American” book. Taking her cue from the gothic novels of Walpole, Reeve, and Brockden Brown, Wood announces her aesthetic aims in the novel’s preface. These aims, however, appear to contradict the burgeoning project of literary independence championed by many of her contemporaries: “It may perhaps be objected, that the annals of our own country display a vast field for the imagination, and that we need not cross the atlantic [sic] in search of materials to found the moral tale or amusing story upon . . . But an aversion to introduce living characters, or those recently dead, rendered Europe a safer, though not more agreeable theatre.” This comment is a striking contrast to Brown’s opening to Edgar Huntly, published just one year earlier. For the reasons I outlined above, Justine

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Murison calls Huntly’s preface “a talisman of American studies scholarship” because it offers a descriptive theory of American cultural nationalism: set adrift from Old World antiquity and its archive of narrative materials— Catholicism, medievalism, and aristocratic despotism—the American gothic turns to its own indigenous horrors for inspiration. Wood’s preface complicates that theory. The United States does indeed offer “a vast field for the imagination”; that is, Wood acknowledges the conventional British representation, exploited by Brown, of the New World as a place of compelling aesthetic power. As Wood is well aware, her kinship with European forms and settings opens her to the kind of critique implicit in Royall Tyler’s rhetorical question at the beginning of The Contrast (1787): “Why should our thoughts to distant countries roam, / When each refinement may be found at home?”  Europe, on the other hand, allows her to place her novel’s object lessons at a “safer” moral distance, suggesting the kind of removed spectacle with which Adam Smith enjoins us to feel measured compassion. Internal evidence contradicts Wood’s professed reluctance to include “living characters, or those recently dead”: the novel contains references to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Judith Sargent Murray, Sarah Wentworth Morton, and Louis XVI. Thus her decision to set Julia in France obviously stems from reasons other than a stated refusal to implicate historical figures in political scandal. That she clearly expects her readers to find meaning in a story about radical endogamy and restored French bloodlines tells us that this gothic tale locates its “Americanness” in something other than a New World setting or some deeply buried source of guilt or anxiety. In drawing on the British gothic romance tradition, I argue, Wood does not distance herself from the task of literary autochthony; rather, she shifts its terms to include a reconfiguration of British cultural materials for an American audience. Let me suggest how. The convoluted kinship structures underwriting the plot of Julia and the Illuminated Baron are crucial to understanding this neglected novel’s politics. Julia Vallace is the daughter of the Marquis Alvada and his second wife, who is poisoned in childbirth by the Marquis’s son from his first marriage, the Count de Launa. The Alvada family believes that Julia died as a baby, but she was in fact rescued by a faithful servant determined to protect her from the vengeance of the Count. Raised in ignorance of her noble blood, Julia eventually falls under the protection her aunt, the Countess de Launa, although neither is aware of the blood relationship subsisting between them. She falls in love with Francis Colwort, the putative nephew of an English merchant but in reality the Countess’s long-lost son from her first marriage to the English Earl

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of Ormond. Unaware that they are cousins, Julia and Colwort become engaged before Colwort is compelled to visit the United States to rescue his other “cousin” (the merchant’s biological daughter) from a failed marriage. While Colwort is away, Julia is abducted and imprisoned by the Count, who—unaware that they are half-brother and sister—proposes marriage on the condition that she convert to the libertine principles of the Illuminati. Through a series of altogether redundant plot devices, Julia escapes the Count, and the close blood ties between the novel’s characters are revealed. Julia and Colwort wed, and the newly reunited Alvada and de Launa clans escape the persecutions of the French Revolution by fleeing to England. It should be clear from this brief summary that there are few characters in this novel who are not related by birth to every other. They share a common—albeit secret—history that reverberates in the spontaneous attractions of blood. As the Countess tells Julia, “I am draw to you by cords I do not perfectly understand”; the Marquis, encountering Julia for the first time, “felt his whole soul drawn toward her.”  When the Count turns his attentions to Julia, however, the threat of incest turns this endogamous social unit into an autophagous and phobic social organism that preys on its own members. The Count’s libertine principles and political deviancy have corrupted the bloodline: “How little value,” Julia moralizes, are “titles, and estates [when] possessed by one who disgraces the one, and dishonors the other; and their virtues are only owned by distant branches of their family; no trace is to be found in their immediate successor, of one virtue.”  When the Count dies—wounded, poisoned, and repentant—the family is purified and reborn in the union between Julia and Colwort. This exemplary couple, cut from the cloth of the British sentimental tradition, restores the original family and guarantees its perpetuity through a modern companionate marriage. Up to this point in the novel, it is fair to say that Julia reproduces the cultural logic of the British gothic. As critics of the English novel have argued, the British tradition labors in defense of a realist world of stable meaning against forces that assail the self-enclosure and self-government of its constituents. These novels introduce atavistic energies and marvelous occurrences into a closed domain—typically a castle, dungeon, or monastery—that animate the object world and challenge the protagonist’s ability to think and feel for herself. On discovering what she believes to be a mutilated and decaying corpse in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), for example, Emily St. Aubert is seized by “fits of abstraction” and “shuddering emotion” that spread between bodies to her terrified servants. The same kind of intrusive objects

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animate the psychic landscape in The Castle of Otranto (1764). An oversized helmet, a bleeding statue, and a sighing portrait challenge the ontological order of a world that rests on the strict separation of subjects from objects. When, under such circumstances, “resolution . . . give[s] way to terror,” Walpole challenges the autonomy of his characters by subjecting them to emotion that enters the individual directly from the outside. Working within this tradition, Wood likewise challenges her protagonist’s status as an autonomous subject when she introduces the gothic trope of the return of the dead. On a visit to the family’s crypt, Julia is startled by her mother’s miraculously lifelike corpse before, “to her horror, it sunk into ashes, and mouldered into dust.”  This temporarily reanimated object provides a convenient way to talk about the mobile relationship between subject and object positions when the individual’s liberty is constrained in the space of the gothic castle. In much the same way that Wood reassigns subjectivity to an object that was itself once a subject, Julia becomes an object in the Count’s self-interested narrative when her property and agency are withheld. In what Sir Walter Scott identified as the signature move of the “Radcliffe school” of writing, such anti-individualistic phenomena are ultimately explained away as the fevered hallucinations of an overwrought imagination or the magical events of a remote past at odds with modernity. Emily discovers that the corpse is actually a memento mori carved from wax, while Walpole consciously locates his tale of superstitious frenzy “in the darkest ages of Christianity.”  Julia finds out that her mother’s corpse was merely extremely well preserved by “rich spices and aromatics,” and the “ghost” she sees on the castle grounds is Colwort come to rescue her. By warding off these supernatural phenomena as singular, excessive, or phobic, novels such as The Castle of Otranto, The Mysteries of Udolpho, and Julia and the Illuminated Baron ultimately reassert what Horkheimer and Adorno call “a disenchanted nature,” namely, a modern world evacuated of all superstition and subordinated to the sovereignty of the human mind. Recent scholarship has suggested that the gothic mode takes up these cultural materials to reconcile early modern kinship structures (which oversee the transfer of property and bloodline along male lines) to modern, consensual social relations. The kind of aristocratic despots populating the British gothic represent older forms of traditional hierarchy primarily concerned with the perpetuation of a family or estate. Such tyrannical power is at odds with the distinctly modern forms of individuated desire represented by the persecuted women under their control. In contrast to the phobic feelings that

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originate in spectral objects and spread between the castle’s inhabitants, this kind of desire originates wholly within the subject and is directed toward socially acceptable forms of masculinity. The Italian’s (1797) Vivaldi, Udolpho’s Valancourt, and Julia’s Colwort represent a new kind of paternal authority— distinct from the patriarchal imperatives of blood-based power relations—that qualifies them as heads of English households. When these novels unite such individuated subjects in a contractual marriage, the home emerges as a site of modern authority represented by a set of domestic practices that reproduce and guarantee self-government and civic virtue within the family and across generations. Yet Julia’s resemblance to a British gothic romance obscures the fact that the social problem of the novel is actually more American than British. As I see it, Wood’s novel does not simply set out to modernize aristocratic kinship structures at the level of the household. Wood also wants to take this model of social relations on the road, so to speak. By relocating Colwort and Julia to England at the novel’s end, she imagines a more expansive social unit that can claim the distinctive moral qualities associated with established gentry but whose constituents are far removed from a fixed estate or point of origin. To understand why Julia performs such a move—and why Wood appropriates the representational strategies of the British gothic to make it—Leonard Tennenhouse’s work on “the cultural logic of diaspora” offers a helpful interpretative tool. As Tennenhouse explains it, a displaced colonial population—such as the English in pre-Revolutionary America—maintains its ties to its nation of origin by reproducing within the colonies a set of cultural practices associated with the homeland. American literature, Tennenhouse argues, insists “on reproducing those aspects of Englishness that do not require one to be in England so much as among English people.” Characterized by “detours, disruptions, circularity, and exchanges,” this model of cultural transmission reformulates British ideas and forms to reproduce a kind of Englishness that can travel beyond set geopolitical limits. It is for this reason, I am convinced, that Wood restores the original Alvada family by means of a purified bloodline only to transplant it to England at the novel’s end. Let me explain further. Julia may begin the novel separated from her original bloodline but she nonetheless preserves her eligibility as a member of that group through her exemplary personal qualities. Her virtue, autonomy, and capacity for selfgovernment qualify her as a match for Colwort, who likewise possesses “the best of minds, and a counterpart of her own.”  Their unique brand of interiority and moral worthiness authorizes them as modern couple in the tradition

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of British sentimentalism. Their union rescues the original bloodline from the impurities of the Count’s deviant social practices and resanctifies it as a new form of exemplary cultural Englishness at the level of the household, which comes to include a large extended family of unrelated dependents, servants, and friends. Put differently, the novel ends by naturalizing a much more inclusive version of the family than that defined purely by blood relation and estate. In a move that fosters what Tennenhouse identifies as the peculiarly American diasporic fantasy of a return to a cultural home, the family that “returns” to England is characterized primarily by the personal qualities of its constituents. This is an altogether different formation from the predatory, overly endogamous social organism championed by the Count or the closely related kinship group of the Alvadas. When the old Marquis rejoices that, in his daughter Julia he has found “the exact resemblance of her mother,” the novel ends on a note strikingly similar to that of Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1791). There, we recall, Mr. Temple returns to England with the daughter of the deceased Charlotte, and with time Mrs. Temple “began to fancy she again possessed her Charlotte.”  In both novels, the structure of the original family is restored, but its domestic habits and the quality of its affective ties ultimately matter more than the blood and origin of the people in it. Thus the British gothic tradition works hand-in-glove with the sentimental novel to legitimate individuated sources of authority, which are guaranteed by and reproduced in the home. This account gives us new grounds on which to evaluate the extraordinary appeal of early British gothic novels in post-Revolutionary North America. The Radcliffe school of British gothic ultimately resolves ontological uncertainties by means of a common, rational interpretation of the world of objects. In this sense, it works in the ser vice of a realist literary form that deals with life as it exists prior to language. That a wide range of Americans would find this narrative logic appealing for its ability to cut through problems posed by mediation and misrepresentation seems entirely plausible, especially considering that the historical events of the period conspired to foster such apprehensions. Th is is the same logic underwriting the popu lar Common Sense school of thought, which provides an immediate conviction of the reality of the external world. It makes sense that a form of writing committed to authorizing the individual as the modern prototype for self-sovereign power would have held considerable appeal for a nation in which established modes of political authority were still very much up for grabs. As Noah Webster puts it, this is a period in which “constitutions of civil government are not yet firmly established [and] national character is not

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yet formed.”  The unique brand of interiority with which otherwise defenseless heroines ward off tyrannical oppressors locates political power in the self-authorizing, sovereign category of the individual. Wood’s novel, moreover, locates cultural Englishness in an exemplary domestic arrangement defined by the interior life of its constituents. As a diasporic model of social relations, this family does not require that one be in England to be a member; to the contrary, it simply requires that one meets certain exemplary conditions of personhood.

The Fragile Individual I have spent some time arguing that the early British gothic tradition opens up its constituents to collective sources of emotion that originate in other people and things to test and reaffirm the boundaries of individual autonomy. In doing so, it defends a realist world in which objects behave like objects and actions are determined by emotions that arise wholly within the mind. It is therefore fair to say that this world closely resembles the one inhabited by John Locke’s rational individual. As I explained in the Introduction, the “individual” is that modern epistemological construct whose social value resides in its interiority, mental qualities, and strict autonomy. Th is model preserves its self-enclosure by creating an archive of ideas within the mind that mirrors the external world. By processing these ideas through the faculty of reason, the individual ensures the strict separation of subjects and objects. Nonetheless, the mind’s susceptibility to mediated sources of information—misrepresentation, say, or collective emotion—persists as a matter of considerable concern for Locke and his philosophical successors. Indeed, the readiness with which the gothic breaks down the rational distinction between the mind and its world should be enough to suggest that the Lockean individual is, in fact, a profoundly vulnerable formulation. A brief review of Locke’s model of sensory perception will explain why. In Locke’s original paradigm, as laid out in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, worldly encounter (or “experience”) fills the empty mind with the raw materials of sensation, which are converted into ideas about the world through the operations of reflection. As the mind becomes aware of its own perceptions, it engages the faculty of judgment to sort and classify its ideas, which accrue as an archive of information against which it can measure subsequent encounters. Locke is less clear on whether sensation precedes a capacity

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for reflection or the other way around; it is simply enough that the mind exerts dominion over a private field of information and emotions— or intellectual “property”—that acquires social value through disciplined mental action. He then transforms this psychological model into a paradigm for political membership when he makes property the original condition of virtue and government in “The Second Treatise of Government” (1690): “Every man has a property in his own person: this nobody has any right to but himself. The labor of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left in it, he hath mixed his labor with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes his property.”  Locke evokes the logic of terra nullius, or empty territory awaiting the inscription of sovereignty, to transform self-ownership (or property-in-oneself) into self-government, where the subject’s development of the faculty of judgment makes him sovereign over his own cognitive domain. This domain renders him eligible to contract with other subjects thus constituted. In this way, Locke lays the groundwork for a modern political culture that yokes sovereign power to national collectivity. Important to my purposes, this model rests on a latent tautology with potentially devastating consequences. As Locke would have it, the autonomy of the individual mind is protected by the internal operations of reflection and understanding. The faculty of judgment separates the mind from the objective reality it perceives. But the materials for reflection come from objects that exist outside the mind. In other words, the very concept of autonomy on which the Lockean mind rests is at odds with the external sources from whence ideas arise. Empirical information, far from being an unmediated source of reflection, can enter the mind fully freighted with affect or meaning. Locke gets around this issue by insisting on reason’s ability to protect the mind from influences outside its control: “Every one, I think, finds in himself, a Power to begin or forbear, continue or put an end to several Actions in himself.” Here Locke emphasizes the internality and self-enclosure of the individual mind (“in himself ”) to preserve the absolute distinction between subject and surrounding objects. In this way, strictly internal causes account for individual action. While Locke is quick to discount the possibility that our actions and emotions may originate outside the mind, this idea lives on in fiction writing associated with “sensibility.”  In the 1790s in particular, the controversy over the moral value of novel reading often centered on the reader’s emotional susceptibility, or the mind’s capacity to regulate the source and direction of its feelings. Opponents of the novel contended that fiction takes advantage of

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the undiscerning mind, which is particularly vulnerable to sources of information outside its control. The impressionable or uninstructed reader— especially one already prone to deep feeling—must remain vigilant against fiction’s assault on her mental faculties. This scenario plays out in Tabitha Gilman Tinney’s satirical novel Female Quixotism (1801), for instance, where an external source of emotion—the novel— collapses the rational distinction between subjects and objects, leaving the reader unable to distinguish truth from fiction. William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy takes up the problem of the mind’s susceptibility in the following scene, where a moralizing Mr. Holmes discusses the civic education of the ideal subject: “I would describe the human mind as an extensive plain, and knowledge as the river that should water it. If the course of the river be properly directed, the plain will be fertilized and cultivated to advantage; but if books, which are the sources that feed this river, rush into it from every quarter, it will overflow its banks, and the plain will become inundated: When, therefore, knowledge flows on in its proper channel, this extensive and valuable field, the mind, instead of being covered with stagnant waters, is cultivated to the utmost advantage.”  By accounting for the individual’s intellectual maturation in terms of cultivation and property, Mr. Holmes works within a familiar Lockean paradigm recognizable to American readers versed in British letters. Just as Locke describes the mind in the Essay as “white Paper, void of all Characters,” Mr. Holmes imagines the individual’s development as the process by which a “plain” (or Locke’s tabula rasa) is converted into valuable mental property through the addition of knowledge. What is this, if not the process Locke describes in the “Second Treatise” by which the rational individual is transformed into a political subject? This capacity for self-sovereignty, or what Worthy calls the “proper cultivation of [the] intelligent powers,” qualifies Myra and Worthy as a sentimental couple. Each recognizes in the other a unique interiority characterized by the mental properties of taste, self-regulation, and literacy Mr. Holmes describes as both exemplary and normative. To naturalize this model of the developmental sovereign subject, Mr. Holmes takes a defensive stance against any force that might threaten it. The inexperienced mind, he tells us, must guard itself against any source of information that may cause it to “overflow” or stagnate. It is particularly vulnerable to external forces that can “rush into it from every quarter” and so hijack its rational faculties. This is a problem Locke himself obliquely acknowledged when he placed those ostensibly incapable of rational thought—women, children, slaves, and the elderly—under the care of a paternal guardian. Mr. Holmes, whose

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name stands in homonymic relation to Locke’s rational head of household, takes on the role of the paternal guardian by guiding the understanding of the ladies to whom he addresses this speech. In this way, William Hill Brown defends the British model of modern sovereignty, whereby the rational subject is formed mimetically in relation to a parent or guardian who regulates the readings practices of his subordinates. This figure fulfills his paternalistic function by protecting and regulating the uninstructed minds under his care and by setting certain standards of literacy as the basis of citizenship. In making this case, Brown adopts precisely the kind of rigorous defensive stance Locke himself takes in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which repeatedly dismisses any alternative to its autonomous, self-enclosed subject as, variously, “ridiculous,” “impossible,” “inconsistent,” “confused,” or “a plain contradiction.”  In short, William Hill Brown adopts Locke’s enterprise and rhetorical method as his own when he normalizes and defends the propertyowning, cultivated subject of the Enlightenment tradition. Nonetheless, Mr. Holmes’s phobic stance exposes the individual as a remarkably fragile, defensive construct all too vulnerable to sources of emotion outside its control. As we shall see, this latent contradiction has far-reaching epistemological and literary consequences. In his attempt to naturalize the Lockean mind, Mr. Holmes briefly evokes an alternative form of consciousness— one that is permeable, open to its environment, and directed by forces outside its control. He quickly wards off such a possibility as singular and dysfunctional, but the cat is out of the bag, so to speak. For the remainder of this chapter, I want to discuss how Charles Brockden Brown takes this idea of the permeable subject in a wholly different direction when he explores its potential as a plausible alternative for American subjectivity. Let us now consider how Arthur Mervyn; Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 puts flesh on the very model of anti-individualism discounted by Locke and William Hill Brown and—perhaps more important—why Charles Brockden Brown might present such a model to readers as a viable constituent for an American republic. As Charles Brockden Brown seems well aware, the kind of sentimental, literate collective imagined by Sally Sayward Barrell Keating Wood or William Hill Brown presupposes a society of self-governing individuals who all meet the criteria of sovereign individualism as laid out in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. By the same rationale, the kind of sympathetic exchange imagined by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) can only take place between individuals who are likely to respond to emotional

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display in approximately the same way— a community, in short, based on resemblance rather than on difference. These assumptions turn both sympathy and the contract into exclusive forms of community. Arthur Mervyn, I argue, recognizes the limitations of Enlightenment models for a country built from diverse cultural, religious, and social traditions and sets about reconfiguring these models to suit the interests of an American readership. Written in the eighteenth-century language of empiricism and faculty psychology, this novel performs a series of revisions on Enlightenment models of the individual, sympathy, and contractualism to yield a citizen who can enter into contractual relations in a setting where disparate people of radically diverse backgrounds and interests—including the American Mervyn and the Portuguese-Jewish-British Achsa Fielding—seek to unite as a social body. Gothic tropes effectively displace the Enlightenment individual with one that is porous, fluid, and projected beyond the metaphysical boundaries of the body. The yellow fever, operating according to the principles of circulation and convergence, proves an apt metaphor for this alternative social organism. Just as the disease invades people and changes the way they are constituted, so this social body invades and transforms other models of community. In Arthur Mervyn, the plague spreads from Philadelphia to the homogeneous country household of the Hadwin family, exposing sympathy as an absolute basis of collectivity that collapses when called upon to incorporate radical difference and diversity. Indeed, the ghastly fate of the sentimental Hadwins indicates Brown’s deep skepticism about the sentimental household, especially when it offers itself as a model of the community at large. Rather than pathologize the yellow fever for its ability to destroy this domestic space—and thereby reproduce the more conventional critical tendency to read the fever as a toxic or damaging agent of change—I want to consider its potential as an alternative model of social relations precisely because it allows feeling to pass unimpeded between subjects.

Adam Smith Goes to the City With limited “experience” and only a belated capacity for reflection, the eponymous protagonist of Arthur Mervyn initially comes to us as the very personification of Locke’s famous blank slate. Yet unlike those novels with which Ian Watt identifies a distinctly British tradition—whereby the inexperienced individual achieves personal and propertied enfranchisement through

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experience—this protagonist is no less vacuous at the novel’s end than at its start. Despite his considerable exposure to the world, Mervyn still describes himself in the novel’s penultimate chapter as “a boy in age; bred in clownish ignorance; scarcely ushered into the world; more than childishly unlearned and raw; a barn-door simpleton; a plow-tail, kitchen-hearth, turnip-hoeing novice.”  Whether we take this statement as truthful or disingenuous, clearly the novel does not take the Lockean developmental trajectory (inexperience to experience) as the basis for subjectivity. Rather than read Mervyn as somehow deficient for his apparent failure to meet the conditions of exemplary citizenship, I contend that his “failure” to develop as an individual can be read as an adaptation of Enlightenment individualism to the American experience. In Mervyn, Brown crafts a cosmopolitan city dweller whose mind cannot maintain the absolute categorical distinction between subject and object presupposed by Lockean epistemology. By habitually prying into “other people’s concerns, [making] their sorrow and joys [his],” Mervyn appropriates his associates’ mental property as if it were his own. That Mervyn’s violation of individual boundaries gets him into trouble at certain points in the novel and proves beneficial at others tells us exactly where Brown asserts another model of the subject and the terms on which its porousness proves a genuine and viable alternative to rational individualism. This model necessarily changes the form of community proposed by the novel in that it exposes the limits of the family and the contract as the more conventional modes of social relation. If Locke mapped out the modern individual, then Adam Smith provided a model of community that held such individuals together as an internally cohesive society and hence a model for the nation itself. For Smith, sympathy is a strictly imaginative process that begins and ends within the individual. To experience a sympathetic connection with another individual, the spectator must take an imaginative leap, as it were, putting oneself in the position of the individual or “agent” whose emotions are on display. Or so Smith argues: “By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations.” As Smith’s qualifications (“as it were,” “in some measure,” “some idea”) make clear, sympathy does not transmit emotion directly from one individual to another. The spectator never shares the emotions of the “agent” of emotion, for to do so would endanger the autonomy of each.

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Instead, he (and Smith’s spectator, like Locke’s subject, is always implicitly “he”) experiences a compatible though lesser degree of feeling that is strictly imaginative: “These two sentiments, however, may, it is evident, have such a correspondence with one another, as is sufficient for the harmony of society. Though they will never be unisons, they may be concords, and this is all that is wanted or required.” Smith’s debt to Locke becomes especially clear at this point: reason ensures that “concord” does not capitulate to “unison,” much less the spontaneous and direct transfusion of emotion that Smith labels “contagion.”  In this way, Smith’s model defends the concept of the individual against the possibility that emotions enter the body directly from an outside source. We can see at this point that Smith tries to guard against the same contradiction that threatened to destabilize Locke’s model—namely, that the subject’s mind must be self-enclosed in order to be its own emotional property and yet requires an external source from which to derive sensations of pleasure and pain. To keep such a contradiction at bay, Smith creates the “internal spectator.” This monitor forms within each individual as he turns his gaze upon himself and makes sure his own display of emotions measures up to the standard he brings to bear on others—to make sure, that is, he is deserving of sympathy. From histrionics to boorish insensibility, Smith insists, the unregulated display of emotion will not be dignified with a sympathetic response. In controlling the emotions to suit standards of “propriety,” the internal spectator ultimately ensures a normative response. Two years after its publication in 1759, Smith’s friend and colleague Adam Ferguson denounced The Theory of Moral Sentiments as “a Heap of absolute Nonsense,” taking particular issue with Smith’s claim that men want to be admired for their emotional control. Sympathy, Ferguson countered, is merely another term for social approbation. When this approbation greets a well-regulated display of emotion, it merely gratifies the agent’s “vanity” and self-regard. Thus he finds Smith guilty of promoting not only the selfish passions but also the abuse of words. A dyed-in-the-wool civic republican, Ferguson regards the specter of self-interest as anathema. He locates civil society in an active and closely knit community of politically minded citizens on guard against private, selfish desires. Ferguson’s ideal polity is grounded in such classic moral virtues as benevolence, charity, and martial valor— virtues he found wanting in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Ferguson’s reservations arguably come to life in the conman Welbeck, whose self-expression is shrewdly calculated to manipulate the spectator’s

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feelings. His performative skill is so striking in this respect that, as witness to one of these displays, Mervyn is confounded: “I could hardly persuade myself that it was the same person.”  Welbeck contrives his emotional spectacles to elicit feelings that serve his particular interest, and the threat he poses to republic notions of civic virtue has been thoroughly documented. But Brown’s critique of Smith goes well beyond its threat to civic virtue. While Ferguson took issue with sympathy on the grounds that it undermined the political and moral health of the nation, favoring instead the more organic affections of “generosity” and “friendship” consolidated through “acquaintance and habitude,” Brown challenges Smith’s use of spectacle on the grounds that we cannot trust what we see. Smith’s notion of “propriety” requires the agent to regulate his emotional display in such a way that it never exceeds or falls short of the social norm. A sense of propriety, that is, detaches the expression of feeling from the emotion that arises strictly within the agent. As Welbeck clearly demonstrates, the social expression of feeling is always performative. Sympathetic exchange is therefore possible only in a community where everyone’s internal spectator is likely to respond in approximately the same way, where both spectator and agent observe interpretative rules common to that community. This kind of sameness structures the household in domestic fiction, where people can trust each other’s emotions because there is not all that much difference between them to overcome. In Arthur Mervyn, this kind of community is exemplified in the sentimental Hadwin household. As Mervyn observes, the two Hadwin sisters Eliza and Susan “smiled and wept in unison. They thought and acted in different but not discordant keys . . . this diversity was productive, not of jarring, but of harmony.”  Bonds of feeling unite the group in “harmony” while maintaining the individuality of its “different but not discordant” members. That is to say, the Hadwin household represents a community of likeminded but autonomous agents. In a culture of diversity, on the other hand, multiple interpretative standards expose the arbitrariness of a term like propriety. In such an environment, it is impossible—if not downright dangerous—to take any expression of emotion as a sign of authentic feeling. We enter a domain where expression is only arbitrarily yoked to actual emotion—where, moreover, the “internal spectator” regulating emotion is not one we necessarily share. For the sake of argument, then, let us assume that cultural differences in Brown’s Philadelphia displace the similarity between spectator and agent necessary for sympathetic exchange. The diverse inhabitants of a city must be able

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to relate to one another, tolerate diversity, and cohere as a group on a basis other than the organic sameness that characterizes a Smithian community. In such an environment, Brown tells us, the sentimental conventions of domestic fiction will need to undergo radical reconfiguration. The gothic proves capable of performing such a task, as Brown sets about modifying sympathy to form a community where different interpretative strategies are in play. Brown takes it for granted that one’s social performance of suffering or joy is no reliable index to internal feeling. On the basis of a thoroughly superficial spectacle alone, a spectator can read people wholly unconnected with himself without making any claim to know, feel responsible for, or otherwise care about the agent involved. There is no intimate commonality between spectator and agent based on an ability to feel the same way about things. They agree to tolerate differences because neither assumes that any common ground actually exists. This is an expedient form of sympathy. A superficial cohesion bridges cultural difference while preventing difference from disrupting the social body.

The Contagion Model Brown’s first step toward making a case for expedient sympathy is to imagine a scenario in which the spectacle of suffering is detached from its source. He does so by creating a rumor of the yellow fever and allowing that rumor to act instead of the disease itself as it spreads beyond Philadelphia and enters the country household of the Hadwins. Rumor acts as the plague’s equivalent and extension in that it spreads from person to person and changes how each sees the world. Bryan Waterman calls this Brown’s “materialist theory of language,” where “words matter because they act like and even affect matter.”  With rumor, emotion no longer originates within an individual or individuals but comes from an external source—language—that, like an infection, enters the subject from without. Its potency lies less in its putative truth than in its ability to grow and transform itself as it gains momentum by circulating through many different people. This exponential expansion creates an excess of meaning that allows for altogether different responses to the imagined spectacle. Emotion spreads as rumor repeats itself, and in the country domain outside Philadelphia, “[its auditors] were very different affected. As often as the tale was embellished with new incidents, or inforced [sic] by new testimony, the hearer grew pale, his breath was stifled by inquietudes, his

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blood was chilled and his stomach bereaved of its usual energies. . . . Some were haunted by a melancholy bordering upon madness, and some, in consequence of sleepless panics . . . were attacked by lingering or mortal diseases.”  Here we see rumor introduce diversity into a sentimental domain that has hitherto been characterized by its constituents’ ability to think the same way about things. The operations of fiction (“as often as the tale was embellished”) are held directly responsible for these varied reactions. To show that sympathy is no more normative or natural a response than any other, Brown includes an auditor who grows pale and breathes with difficulty— one, in other words, who experiences a lesser form of the disease itself. There are, on the other hand, those who take the news too personally (“some were haunted by a melancholy bordering upon madness”). If these people are badly affected by the rumor, then those who experience sleepless panic experience the account of the disease-ridden city as if it were the city itself. They fail to distinguish fact from fiction, which, in Brown’s view, amounts to contracting the disease. When Mervyn responds to the news of the plague as pure spectacle, he, by contrast, displays the expedient form of sympathetic identification I have described: “This rumor was of a nature to absorb and suspend the whole soul. A certain sublimity is connected with enormous dangers, that imparts to our consternation or our pity, a tincture of the pleasing. . . . My own person was exposed to no hazard. I had leisure to conjure up terrific images and to personate the witnesses and sufferers of this calamity. This employment . . . was ardently pursued, and must therefore have been recommended by some nameless charm.” Unlike those who react to the rumor as if it were the plague itself, Mervyn treats it as a fiction that allows him to aestheticize the sufferings of the plague victims without actually feeling them. According to Smith, anyone far removed from a spectacle of suffering—anyone like Mervyn and the other auditors who are “exposed to no hazard”— should either react to the spectacle of suffering with sympathetic distance or not react at all. As he puts it, “Whatever interest we take in the fortunes of those with whom we have no acquaintance or connexion [sic], and who are placed altogether outside our sphere of activity, can only produce anxiety to ourselves, without any manner of advantage to them.”  But in a devastating critique of the Enlightenment model, Mervyn’s distance from the spectacle of suffering produces an avid sense of aesthetic “charm,” as opposed to the moderated suffering that supposedly accompanies disinterest. This in itself would invalidate Smith’s notion of sympathy, which depends on proximity to the spectacle, but

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Mervyn’s ability to take pleasure in others’ pain marks him as lacking any form of internal spectator, at least any form that Smith would recognize. Rather than rush to condemn Mervyn as somehow deficient, though, let us pause to consider the implications of his response at the level of community. Insofar as he responds only to pure spectacle, Mervyn becomes the agent of disease that destroys the sentimental household. As the city extends its network of communication through rumor to incorporate the domestic domain, contagion and the gathering dysfunction of community itself erodes the boundaries of the sympathetic community. Once this happens, the sympathetic operations of the sentimental community likewise change. Like all the other country auditors, each Hadwin family member reacts to the same rumor in different ways, the most extreme form of which is Susan Hadwin’s “paroxysms of a furious insanity.”  When, driven frantic with worry for her absent fiancé, she tries to kill herself, her feelings step out of line with the rest of her family. As the country becomes an extension of the city through the operations of the rumor, the natural bonds of sympathy are severed. Susan’s exaggerated reaction and eventual demise snap the fragile bonds of the Smithian community. Mervyn, on the other hand, proves adaptable in the face of this paradigm shift. For all his nostalgic, unfounded longing that his sojourn with the Hadwins would prove “the return to a long-lost and much-loved home,” he cannot return to a community to which he never belonged. He remains a cultural outsider throughout the Hadwin episode, his full integration inhibited by such “obstacle[s]” as religion and economic status. Indeed, his own version of sympathy—performative, superficial, expedient—destroys this community. Consider his response to Susan’s suffering in the face of her fiancé’s absence. Susan’s hyperbolic dismay already disqualifies her as the object of sympathy, so rather than engage in such an exchange by experiencing a lesser degree of the emotion, Mervyn reacts by imagining a purely fictional scenario in which he brings back the truant fiancé safe and sound from the city: “With what transports will his arrival be hailed? How amply will their impatience and their sorrow be compensated by his return! In the spectacle of their joys, how rapturous will be my delight!”  Like so many of Mervyn’s reflections, this series of purely conjectural statements has no foundation in anyone’s emotions but his own. There is no such spectacle to read, only his urge to produce one. He projects what his own reaction to such a scenario would be—transport and rapture— onto other members of this community. Mervyn has not responded with sympathy to

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their distress; rather, he has mistaken his own emotions for those of his friends. As a fictional construct, this fantasy nevertheless has the power to change the world because it turns sympathy into a destructive force. Its artificial allure and the approval he stands to gain prompt Mervyn, in search of the fiancé, to disappear without telling anyone of his intentions. This decision precipitates a disastrous chain of events: Hadwin follows Mervyn to the city and is fatally exposed to the yellow fever, a raving Susan dies of consumption, and the family farm falls to a brutish uncle who shares none of the Hadwin family feeling. In making his plans, Mervyn never considers that his actions may have dire consequences because he assumes that, were their situations reversed, the Hadwins would think and act the same way that he does. Once difference has intruded into the sentimental domain, those responses become unpredictable. What can really destroy a community, Brown suggests, is the assumption of sameness among its members. On the other hand, Mervyn’s obtrusiveness proves socially advantageous when we assume that community is made of different people, all of whom will respond in different ways to any given scenario. Mervyn treats everyone, from loved ones to enemies to mere acquaintances, with the same common geniality. This democratic approach to sociability may operate destructively in those sentimental spaces that presuppose intimacy at a deeper level, but it serves Mervyn extremely well in situations where cultural difference prevails. In his encounter with Hadwin’s brother Philip, for example, the violent anger of this self-interested bully is kept at bay only by Mervyn’s unshakeable yet entirely staged affability. The apparently irreconcilable differences between Mervyn and Philip are suspended by a performative stance that Mervyn quite consciously adopts for the purpose of self-preservation. As he acknowledges, “I was indebted for my safety to an inflexible adherence to this medium.” His performance of congeniality—that is, his “medium”—allows their differences to provide the basis for a functional unity. Mervyn’s superficiality works well in this scenario because he accepts the fundamental difference between two potential combatants and decides to leave those differences alone. This kind of performativity adapts and responds to an altogether different model of subjectivity. With rumor, the source of emotion is not a single individual but an entire collective. To put it another way, feeling courses through the social body without apparent origin or destination. By generating different responses to a purely fictional spectacle, rumor undermines the notion that one can both have one’s own feelings and still share the feelings

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of others; those exposed to the rumor catch emotion as if it were the plague itself. With this in mind, consider Brown’s description of Philadelphia in the grip of the yellow fever: “Terror had exterminated all the sentiments of nature. Wives were deserted by husbands, and children by parents. . . . Men were seized by this disease in the streets; passengers fled from them; entrance into their own dwellings was denied to them; they perished in the public ways.”  Here Brown draws on an older literary tradition that associates descriptions of plague with disintegration and the inversion of social norms. In A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), for example, Daniel Defoe cites several instances in which conventional familial and labor relations have become monstrous: “Mothers murder[ ] their own children in their lunacy [or] hired nurses who attended infected people, us[e] them barbarously, starving them, smothering them, or by other wicked means hastening their end.”  In Defoe’s London, officials respond to the plague by removing many middle-class families to the country and quarantining the remaining populace by locking people in their homes. At pains to preserve the institution of the family through removal or vaccination, Defoe therefore treats these barbarous inversions of familial love as exceptional and offers many more instances in which families stick together despite the plague’s incursions. Brown’s yellow fever, by contrast, constitutes a full-blown assault on Smith’s model, where panic in the City of Brotherly Love destroys every emotional attachment and with it the sentimental family. In the place of a sympathetic community, Brown substitutes a social model whose dynamics resemble the contagion, using the passive voice (“men were seized”) to describe the plague as an entity that enters directly into the subject’s body and assumes control. Mervyn’s emotional expediency qualifies him as a member of such a network. His superficiality may have destroyed the sentimental model of social relations, but it proves ideally suited to his life in the city, where he is thoroughly indiscriminate in his attachments, paying no heed to either difference or commonality: “I was formed on purpose for the gratification of social intercourse. To love and to be loved; to exchange hearts and mingle sentiments with all the virtuous and amiable . . . I felt no scruple on any occasion, to disclose every feeling and every event. Any one who could listen, found me willing to talk. Every talker found me willing to listen. Every one had my sympathy and kindness, without claiming it, but I claimed the kindness and sympathy of every one.”  Mervyn’s emotional bonds are characterized by immediacy, spontaneity, and transfusion—he wants to “exchange” and “mingle” with others rather than preserve and distance himself. He may regard the be

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all and end all of social attachment as “to love and be loved,” but he repeatedly violates the foundational distinctions between subject and object implicit in that formula—namely, to love as a subject and to be loved as an object. For him, there is no difference at all. Brown dramatizes this principle by having Mervyn habitually invade people’s houses, bedrooms, parlors, even prison cells. This intrusion into private interiors reflects and produces a lack of social separation, analogous to his unwillingness to observe the imaginative boundaries that separate people’s emotions. By refusing to observe these boundaries, Mervyn breaks the Lockean rule of one-mind-per-body and introduces the possibility that one mind may exist across two bodies. The logic of individualism demands that such a possibility be foreclosed, and Mervyn consequently encounters violent reactions against his intrusions whenever he enters a domain in which that logic prevails. Whether he is shot by a prostitute or denounced as a thief, Mervyn is excluded because he represents a force that would destroy individualism. However, to grasp this notion of invasion—by Mervyn, rumor, or the plague itself— as another model of humanity altogether rather than as a disruption of Enlightenment categories, we should imagine Mervyn’s model of social relations as something on the order of a network or circuit through which information, in the shape of emotions, can travel freely.

The Gothic Contract Mervyn’s intrusions come to us as violations of the contractual obligation to respect individual autonomy. Under the terms of the social contract, as spelled out by both Locke and Rousseau, subjects agree not to encroach upon the rights and bodies of other members. As we have seen, this is not a novel in which the logic of individualism is allowed to go uncontested. Brown’s version of porous subjectivity obviously wreaks havoc with this idea of contractualism, which is predicated on the notion of self-enclosure and personal sovereignty. Like sympathy, then, the contract must be reconfigured to take into account that those with whom one is contracting may be fundamentally different from oneself. Accordingly, Brown puts the marriage contract to work in the final chapters of the novel when he unites Mervyn with the wealthy, widowed, and experienced immigrant Achsa Fielding. Like the social contract, the marriage contract can only perform its rhetorical operations if it unites two people whose individualism, in the Enlightenment sense of the term, is

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extended and completed by those operations—two parties, in other words, who share a notion of what an individual should be. According to the logic of the social contract, the individual voluntarily gives up his antisocial tendencies and enters into a mutually beneficial agreement with other individuals who likewise relinquish their disruptive qualities. The individual forfeits his acquisitive impulses in exchange for the protection and guarantee of his political and personal rights under the state’s authority. In submitting to the authority of a group composed of individuals just like himself, the subject has, in effect, submitted only to his own authority. As an alternative to a government based on force, the civil state thus becomes an extension of the individual himself. As Locke argues elsewhere in the “Second Treatise,” the individual acquires the rights of a citizen as he learns the laws that govern the rational subject. While the logic of the exchange suggests that those rights are prerequisite, the rhetoric of the contract suggests that they are produced by it. The capacity for self-government that earns him protection is not only something he brings to the exchange. In entering the exchange (by which he agrees not to encroach upon others to earn some protection for his own person and property), the individual also acquires knowledge of those laws. At this point, the rhetorical behavior of the contract parts ways with its logic. The contract is not so much an originary moment as an ex post facto fiction of origin, creating rather than regulating the constituent parties involved. The sentimental novel attests to the powerful afterlife of this paradoxical construction during the very period in which it fell out of favor in political and philosophical thought. Like the social contract, the marriage contract proceeds on assumptions of lack (where each constitutive party is fulfilled by the acquisition of some component in the other) and emotional equality (where each reciprocates the other’s compassion and understanding). It is an exchange based on merit rather than status, where the woman’s sympathy, sensibility, and innocence are regulated by the man’s experience, reason, and judgment, and vice versa. The marriage contract therefore extends and perfects the individualism of the constituent parties by giving each something he or she did not have prior to the exchange that makes them, together, add up to a complete individual at the level of the household. Thus the developmental trajectory of the individual reaches its apotheosis in the contract, which transforms the inchoate subject into a citizen with all the accoutrements of self-government. Brown demonstrates clear awareness of the sentimental promise of individual fulfillment through marriage when he refuses to allow the union of Mervyn and Eliza Hadwin.

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It is a commonplace to read Mervyn’s rejection of Eliza in favor of Achsa Fielding as Brown’s symbolic denunciation of his youthful Godwinian radicalism in favor of a more conservative politics or, alternatively, as evidence of an emerging market capitalism to which Mervyn responds with what appears to be flagrant self-interest. I would prefer to see what Mervyn’s choice of a marriage partner can tell us about the principle of social cohesion in a cosmopolitan setting. Let us assume that Mervyn’s prospective union with Eliza operates within a sentimental paradigm. As he puts it, “My thoughts have ever hovered over the images of wife and children with more delight than over any other images. My fancy was always active on this theme, and its reveries sufficiently extatic [sic] and glowing; but since my intercourse with this girl, my scattered visions were collected and concentrated. I had now a form and features before me, a sweet and melodious voice vibrated in my ear, my soul was filled, as it were, with her lineaments and gestures, actions, and looks.” A true man of feeling in this regard, Mervyn’s Rousseauean visions of domesticity are wholly confined to a blooming young wife, offspring, and “an hundred acres of plough-land and meadow.” Eliza appears to be Mervyn’s social equal and sentimental counterpart, but he changes his mind upon contemplating the mental qualities of his prospective bride. Although Eliza possesses the “thrilling sensibility and artless graces” that would tempt most men into marriage, she also possesses a degree of inexperience that “gave her sometimes the appearance of folly,” prompting Mervyn to question the suitability of this match: “I considered my youth, my defective education and my limited views. I had passed from my cottage into the world. I had acquired even in my transient sojourn among the busy haunts of men, more knowledge than the lucubrations and employments of all my previous years had conferred. Hence I might infer the childlike immaturity of my understanding, and the rapid progress I was still capable of making. Was this the age to form an irrevocable contract; to chuse the companion of my future life, the associate of my schemes of intellectual and benevolent activity?” According to his own self-assessment, Mervyn himself is still in the state of “immaturity” that makes him less than an individual. On the other side of the exchange, Eliza lacks the literacy that would allow her to complement her husband’s position and power with taste and affection. Mervyn’s reluctance to contract with Eliza therefore stems from the logic of the contract itself, which would see the union of the constituent parties as supplying what is lacking in each. As Mervyn is well aware, neither of them has much of anything to exchange, as both are inexperienced, destitute, and

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uneducated. Their union augments neither one. Mervyn rejects Eliza—wisely, one could argue—because the product of their combined deficiencies would only result in something less than a complete individual at the level of the household. By refusing their union on the grounds of deficiency in the constituent parties, Brown would seem to endorse the rhetoric of the contract. On the other hand, Mervyn’s rejection of Eliza draws attention to the logic of exclusion upon which the contract rests. Only individuals who meet certain exclusive standards of personal sovereignty are eligible to contract. Thus, when Mervyn turns from Eliza to Achsa, Brown suggests that sentimental standards are not the only standards that qualify contracting parties to make a household. Insofar as the contract determines who can marry whom, nothing short of the principles of civil society are at stake in its operations. Having demolished the sentimental kinship unit as the basis for civil society, what does Brown propose as a substitute? Brown initially presents Mervyn’s union to a racialized heiress as the realization of a national fantasy. Fleeing a disastrous marriage in Britain, Achsa comes to America for a chance at rewriting her history. Although Mervyn falls well short of masculine norms of selfhood and affect, he is also, by the novel’s end, something of a proto-citizen in that he comes to possess many of the external attributes of American masculinity. Outwardly, he is autochthonous and has transcended the position assigned to him by birth. He is also a young man of remarkable good looks who has been acquiring cultural capital as an apprentice doctor welcome in the polite circles of Philadelphia. Thus he embodies the masculine qualities that can make Achsa an American through marriage. But if we turn this relationship on its head, so to speak, it becomes the mirror image of the sentimental exchange whose constituent parties are inversely gendered. Mervyn is also presented in feminized terms, possessing all the affective qualities of sensibility traditionally found in a sentimental heroine. He gets weepy when he confesses to being “a mere woman.”  He may strike his contemporaries as an American man-on-the-make, but the internal deficiencies of inexperience and a limited understanding that stood in the way of his marriage to Eliza are still very much part of his character. By way of contrast, Achsa is, figuratively speaking, a man by Enlightenment standards. As Mervyn notes, she has “experience” in the world and is “abundant in that very knowledge in which [he] was most deficient.” She is also wealthy, literate, and independent; is considerably older than Mervyn; and acquires dependents who rely on her for patronage. Mervyn may like to call her

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“mamma,” but she is hardly a maternal woman, having abandoned her eightyear-old son from her previous marriage. Moreover, she lacks the physiognomy of a traditional love object; she is as “unsightly as a night-hag, tawney as a moor, the eye of a gypsey, low in stature, contemptibly diminutive.”  In terms of their emotional property, Mervyn brings to the contract the feelings and dependency of a female, while she brings the experience and property of a male. This rather neat inversion at the level of gender cannot produce a sentimental couple. The split in Mervyn—presented along gendered lines as autochthonous American masculinity and vacuous British femininity—prohibits a sentimental union because Mervyn brings more than just inexperience and dependency to the contract. He also brings indigenous manhood. He has, in other words, a kind of excessive individualism that upsets the sentimental rhetoric of contractualism regardless of who actually gets to wear the pants in this relationship. Likewise, Achsa brings something to the union beyond her masculine attributes. When her unfavorable appearance is likened to that of a “night-hag,” a “moor,” and a “gypsey,” we are clearly in the presence of something in excess of both masculinity and femininity. This excess is presented in racialized terms; resembling both a moor and a gypsy, Achsa is a British Jewess of Portuguese descent who tries, unsuccessfully, to hide her mixed origins from Mervyn. It is important to my argument that Mervyn spontaneously guess the secret of her essential difference without the aid of sensory clues. There is just something about her that tips him off, prompting him to interrupt one of their conversations: As I live, my good mamma, those eyes of yours have told me a secret. I almost think they spoke to me; and I am not less amazed at the strangeness than at the distinctness of their story. And pry’thee what have they said? Perhaps I was mistaken. I might have been deceived by a fancied voice; or have confounded one word with another near akin to it; but let me die, if I did not think they said that you were—a Jew. At this sound, her features were instantly veiled with the deepest sorrow and confusion. She put her hand to her eyes, the tears started and she sobbed.

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Achsa’s reaction to Mervyn’s conjecture suggests that her Jewishness is a mark of exclusion. She had hoped, she tells Mervyn, “that [he] should know nothing of [her] but what [he] see[s].”  That Mervyn simply guesses her origins suggests that her secret history continues to govern her social performance even after she left her original identity behind in Europe. There is an excess to Achsa’s character, something “outside” her position within the contractual exchange, that forces her out of sentimental discourse and into the register of the gothic. Achsa’s excessive— even monstrous—individualism meets its match in Mervyn, who likewise enters the gothic register as he manifests a sharp division within himself— something like two minds in one body: “When with [Achsa], I was not of myself. I had scarcely a separate or independent existence, since my senses were occupied by her . . . the being called Mervyn is not the same in her company and in that of another.”  In Achsa’s company, “the being called Mervyn” divides in two. What is this if not the very case of anti-individualism that John Locke went out of his way to invalidate? Here is his well-known example of the sleeping man who thinks while asleep and is not aware of doing so: “If it is possible, that the Soul can, whilst the body is sleeping, have its Thinking, Enjoyments, and Concerns, its Pleasures and Pain apart, which the Man is not conscious of, nor partakes in: It is certain, that Socrates asleep, and Socrates awake, is not the same Person; but his Soul when he sleeps, and Socrates the Man consisting of Body and Soul when he is waking, are Two Persons.”  Locke relies on the self-evident absurdity of this example to dispel the uncomfortable prospect of two minds cohabiting the same body. But even as he relegates this aberration to the realm of impossibility, such double-mindedness finds a gothic afterlife in the trope of sleepwalking, where the subject does indeed find himself split in two when his nocturnal activities are not even recalled by his waking self (a mode of anti-individualism that Brown exploits more fully in Edgar Huntly). As if to demonstrate that he is not fulfilling his desires himself but is rendered another person by his prospective marriage, Mervyn takes to sleepwalking on learning that Achsa loves him. His somnambulism shows us that two minds have indeed come to occupy his body. In what might be viewed as another case of excessive individualism, Mervyn reacts to Achsa with equal parts horror and joy organized along the same line that divides the two minds of “the being called Mervyn”: “I was half-delirious, and my delirium was strangely compounded by fear and hope, of delight and of terror.”  Responding in the language of the sublime, the

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masculine part of Mervyn wants nothing to do with the equally masculinized Achsa. This half of Mervyn is still governed by the sentimental logic of the marriage contract, which recognizes Achsa as a monstrously inappropriate choice. In a sentimental register, Achsa’s masculinity, elevated social status, racial identity, and lack of personal beauty disqualify her several times over as a match for the newly minted American citizen. Indeed, the novel insists upon presenting Mervyn’s reaction to their union in gothic terms. On recognizing that he is on the verge of marriage, Mervyn is “lunatic” and “possess[ed]” by “a nameless sort of terror”; his “unhallowed” ideas leave him with “a mind lost to itself; bewildered; unhinged; plunged into a drear insanity.” He experiences “a temporary loss of reason”; is overcome with “madness,” “confusion and horror”; and is seized by a sense of “infamy” and “guilt.” He is, moreover, haunted by the prospect of Achsa’s deceased former husband returning from the dead for the sole purpose of murdering his rival. This phobic reaction hardly constitutes the raptures of a man caught up in adoration for his future wife. Here, gothic tropes are the aesthetic by-products of a contractual alliance between two individuals whose excesses render them less than human in the Enlightenment sense. The gothic union of such excesses displaces the sentimental version of the social contract represented by the idyll of domesticity. The novel takes a gothic turn, so to speak, when the sentimental rhetoric of the contract conflicts with the excesses, represented in terms of gender and race, of its constituent parties. The novel ends with Mervyn laying up his pen in anticipation of becoming “the happiest of men”—an appropriation of sentimental language that shifts the terms of contractual relations in the new United States. As we have seen, Mervyn cannot fit into a sentimental community because his porousness endangers the affective bonds that govern such an environment. Achsa’s excess, presented in racialized and masculinized terms, likewise disqualifies her as a participant in the sentimental community. To imagine a contract capable of uniting disparate people of uncertain origins and profound cultural differences, the novel challenges the preconditions for contractual relations. The gothic contract neither continues a lineage (both Achsa and Mervyn are detached from their familial origins) nor authorizes the politics of paternalism (both parties trade themselves in the absence of male kin). Rather, the new logic replaces the static sentimental model with a civil society predicated on the mutually constitutive potential of radical difference. By authorizing this contractual model over sentimental union, Brown suggests that an alternative political fantasy capable of incorporating

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difference is far more suitable to a cosmopolitan setting than one that labors under the Smithian assumption of essential sameness.

The Gothic Offensive In Love and Death in the American Novel, Leslie Fiedler famously claimed that the American novel “is most essentially a gothic one.”  Both Sally Wood and Charles Brockden Brown’s use of the gothic form calls for reconsideration of the psychoanalytic grounds on which Fiedler made this claim. As a national literary style, the gothic form has less to do with repression and return, according to my reading of these authors, than with imagining ways of making a nation out of disparate and diverse parts. As Philip Gould suggests in Barbaric Traffic, the operations of commerce in the post-Revolutionary period dissolved nations and individuals alike into nodes on an international network of exchange. It seems entirely plausible, according to Gould, that the static model of the nation-state came to be replaced by the fluid, mobile circulations and exchanges of a transatlantic commercial culture founded on the slave trade. Brown, I argue, participates in this process by reimagining the conditions of subjectivity and citizenship for a population that was just beginning to think of itself in urban, commercial terms. If late eighteenthcentury British gothic worked hand-in-glove with the British sentimental tradition to modernize kinship relations at the level of the household, then something rather different happened to novels written and read in the new United States. To agree with Fiedler that the American novel is “most essentially” gothic, then, we must qualify the claim that the gothic form flourished here by suggesting that it imagined alternative ways of making a nation out of disparate and diverse parts. To authorize alternative forms of modern subjectivity, Brown’s version of American gothic puts the Enlightenment individual on the defensive. John Locke himself put the individual on constant guard against all alternative manifestations of its humanity. Those passages when The Essay Concerning Human Understanding seems to take a gothic turn—talking parrots, perpetually dancing men, convulsive arms—are all attempts to represent viable alternatives to his formula of one mind enclosed in a single body as monstrous, fantastic, absurd, or otherwise phobic. The gothic goes on the offensive when it brings these negated forms of consciousness back to life in fiction. Rather than render these forms strictly phobic, Arthur Mervyn explores

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the social potential suppressed by European models, while still acknowledging the hostility of these new forms to norms of reason and sympathy based on self-enclosure at the level of the individual or community. Smith’s internal spectator is flawed, Brown insists, because that concept assumes that every individual interprets feelings in approximately the same way. There can, Brown demonstrates, be no shared emotional ground when individuals bring different interpretative codes or notions of “propriety” to the exchange. With the Smithian community exposed as a radically exceptional rather than a natural form of community, the traditional social contract loses ground because it too functions only when its constituent parties already share cultural notions, for example, of masculinity or femininity. There is simply no room in the social contract for foreign or excessive elements. As an alternative, the union between Achsa and Mervyn proposes a variation on the traditional contract that has the power to incorporate the foreign and strange in the absence of traditional rules of kinship and exchange. The novel’s pedagogical imperative therefore insists on the need to read people and things as if they possess a secret history or hidden meaning—that is, as if ontological mobility is the only sure ground on which a culture of diversity might imagine a social body. In his effort to build this social body from the literary materials of the gothic, Brown’s revision to Enlightenment theories of affect updates the form of the novel in new, arguably American, terms.

chapter 2

Captivity, Incorporation, and the Politics of Going Native

It is a generally accepted premise among scholars of the early American novel that the sentimental novel authorizes and naturalizes the bourgeois subject and the contractual state at the level of the family. The marriage contract operates in a manner analogous to the social contract: two differentiated but compatible parties of equal merit—Myra and Worthy in The Power of Sympathy, for example— are fully individuated through marriage when each supplements the other with something he or she lacked prior to the exchange. The woman brings her sympathy, refinement, and emotional sensitivity to the union in exchange for the man’s reason and guardianship, and vice versa. Between them, the married couple creates a fully perfected subject defined by its emotional property, self-discipline, and morality. As I suggested in Chapter 1, this idea has its origins in a traditional Lockean epistemology, where the paradigm of individual maturation rests on a model of the mind that is closed off and wholly separated from its environment. By many accounts, this kind of subject is the constitutive component of the democratic state. Yet our tendency to measure an autogenerative national culture in terms of the individuated subject and civil state assumes that the selective and exclusionary criteria of self-government are the exclusive grounds on which early democratic culture was conceived. In this chapter, I question what Michel Foucault identifies as “the theoretical privilege of . . . sovereignty” when I argue that early American literary culture often calculated human life in terms other than the elite ontological relationship of individual to contractual state. To make this case, let me begin by proposing an alternative or residual model of humanity that I see at work in Charles Brockden Brown’s major

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works— and, arguably, in the early American gothic tradition in general. To grasp this alternative as another model of humanity altogether rather than as a disruption of Enlightenment categories or a dehumanization of human beings, let us imagine a mind that is part of a larger circuit of information and feeling that connects disparate people and even people and things and transforms them into a single heterogeneous organism. In this system, the mind is a point of intensification through which formative energies and forces circulate and gather. The “individual” in such an account is less important than the lines connecting its various components. To be in this system is to be at once partial and multiple, a fluid singularity that reconstitutes itself in converging with other people and things. Together, these smaller circuits expand outward from multiple centers to form a network without boundaries or limits. This notion of community observes many if not all the principles of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s rhizome, a multidirectional network, or weave, that changes in nature according to the circuits it incorporates and abandons. The rhizome cannot be broken down into its constituent parts because it has none; as Deleuze and Guattari put it, “there are only lines.”  This social body is not defined by its vertices, or the points where individual connections converge, but by the connections themselves that flow as multidirectional rays. The problem with the traditional genealogical—or “arboreal”—mode of thinking, as Deleuze and Guattari identify it, is that “making a clean slate, starting or beginning again from ground zero, seeking a beginning or foundation— all imply a false conception of voyage and movement.” Locke’s metaphor of white paper—or the “clean slate”—invokes just such a misleading notion of “voyage and movement.” In the terms of the master narrative of Western culture, this is what we call “development” or “progression.” The rhizome, by way of contrast, allows us to think in terms of people much as we think of ants, crabgrass, or an epidemic—that is, a heterogeneous organism that spreads opportunistically until it runs out of territory to appropriate. As such, the rhizome offers a much older model of collectivity than the elite household of individuals imagined first by Locke and adapted to the British novel by authors such as Richardson or Austen. As a system where the collective as a whole matters more than the individual, this model has the important qualities of clan or tribal affiliations. Indeed, a glance at James E. Seaver’s “A Narrative Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison” (1824) confirms that American letters were testing its persuasiveness and adaptability as a form of sociability during the early nineteenth century,

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suggesting that the Lockean model of a contractual state was still competing for dominance after the Revolution. Consider the terms in which Jemison accounts for her adoption into a Seneca family: “It is a custom of the Indians, when one of their number is slain or taken prisoner in battle, to give the nearest relative to the dead or absent, a prisoner, if they have chanced to take one, and if not, to give him the scalp of an enemy. . . . It was my happy lot to be accepted for adoption; and at the time of the ceremony I was received by the two squaws, to supply the place of their brother in the family; and I was ever considered and treated by them as a real sister, the same as though I had been born of their mother.”  The perpetuity of the Senecan community is maintained by an economy of retribution and reparation. Here, a captive either supplies the vacated place of the deceased through adoption or functions as a symbolic substitute upon which vengeance is enacted. In either case, the individual herself is merely a relay in a network of exchange geared toward the preservation of the community at large. In this system, only the British Jemison herself attaches any significance to the fact that she was not “born of [the same] mother” because she understands kinship in terms of familial blood ties rather than collective equilibrium.

Into the Wilderness This early nineteenth-century example of a rhizomatic community located in the wilderness asks us to revisit an old assumption about what it means to “go native” in American fiction. Such a change has conventionally been read as a degeneration from culture to nature (or a retrograde version of the “development” narrative), where “atavistic descents into the primitive” are viewed as “allegories of the larger regressive movement of civilization.”  Taking a contrary view, I suggest that it is historically more accurate to see the Indian social structure in light of an earlier modern European concept of community, thus a genuine alternative to the contractual model. In Jemison’s case, going native describes her integration into a community that does not think in terms of individual difference; the family or tribe is a single organism. As the first chapter suggested, the yellow fever epidemic in Arthur Mervyn likewise reveals the extent to which this collective is a single social body whose members share a common fate. In this sense, “going native” amounts to assimilation to a system that privileges connection over autonomy and so maintains

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the lineaments of a single corporate body often at the expense of any single member. If I am correct that the logic of the rhizome changes the way we understand the concept of “going native,” then it should likewise challenge our perception of the “wilderness” as the site where going native is an ever-present possibility. In the Calvinist theological imagination of Mary Rowlandson, for example, faith is tested (or lost) in the wilderness, and apostasy is tantamount to cultural annihilation. In “The Second Treatise of Government,” we recall, Locke turns the wilderness into empty territory ripe for appropriation. In so doing, he transforms property into the basis for culture. The trial in the wilderness is no longer a feat of faith so much as a test of cultural identity. In this sense, “going native” means passing over the line from culture to nature, which amounts to a loss of identity that forfeits the subject’s place in that culture. By way of contrast, Mary Jemison’s narrative suggests that the American wilderness represents a different cultural space that supports tribal or clan-like forms of sociability. What is so often represented as a difference between nature and culture is actually a difference between competing cultures. To pursue this line of thought, let us review Charles Brockden Brown’s decision to situate Edgar Huntly; Or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker among the “incidents of Indian hostility, and the perils of the western wilderness.”  His famous rejection of European gothic conventions in favor of an essentially American setting is conventionally interpreted as a call for an internally coherent, indigenous literary culture. This reading, however, cannot account for those moments where Brown resorts to tropes traditionally associated with the British gothic novel (live burial, sleepwalking, abduction, murder, insanity, and so forth). To understand why the cultural materials of the British gothic persist in a novel so often cited as a wholly “American tale,” let me begin by suggesting that, in the Delaware wilderness, heterogeneous cultures with multiple interpretative paradigms overlap and vie with one another for dominance. Brown, I argue, brings gothic conventions to bear on this setting in order to propose a subject who can negotiate such cultural interpenetration. In Huntly, Brown imagines a subject that changes in nature according to the needs of the larger social organism. This subject relates to its environment through a fundamental continuity of culture and nature, not by a contiguity that presupposes his difference from nature. In Edgar Huntly, the blueprint for this kind of organism originates in Ireland. Brown uses Clithero Edny’s family to imagine a social unit whose

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constituent parts are not individuals so much as copies of one another. This version of the household differs radically from the reproductive model naturalized by sentimental fiction. Euphemia Lorimer’s illegitimate niece Clarice, whom Mrs. Lorimer raises as her daughter, is the spitting image of Mrs. Lorimer herself: “Nature seemed to have precluded every difference between them but that of age.”  Mrs. Lorimer also has an adopted son Clithero, and together Clithero and Clarice—whose fungibility is implied through the alliteration in their names—replace her real son in her affections. Nameless, this son disappears from the novel once Clithero assumes his place as Clarice’s fiancé (and thereby figuratively marries his patroness as well by affiancing her identical niece). Indeed, Mrs. Lorimer’s biological son remains nameless, I suspect, because this is a family in which blood-based relations are less important than repeatable patterns of exchange and replacement. In a situation where one character fuses into another, it makes perfect sense for Mrs. Lorimer to feel preternaturally connected to her evil twin brother, also Clarice’s father. Convinced that they share an “extraordinary co-partnership[ ] in being,” Mrs. Lorimer believes that the death of one will spontaneously precipitate the death of the other. Brown calls this didymous relationship “a sympathy whose influence [is] independent of sensible communication.”  I suspect, however, that Adam Smith would argue with this particular formulation on the grounds that “sympathy” can never be “independent of sensible communication.” It is the spectacle of emotion that produces within the mind of the observer a like, albeit lesser, degree of the same feeling. Brown’s “instantaneous” sympathy, we must therefore conclude, describes an altogether different affect from conventional sympathetic social relations. To think through this problem, I find Giorgio Agamben’s tick in The Open: Man and Animal (2004) to be a helpful paradigm. The tick, Agamben argues, is not an ontological unity that occupies its environment in a relationship between organism and surroundings. Rather, the tick defines a mode of being that is best conceived as a relation with its environment. The tick is only a tick, in other words, when it makes an ecological connection with its life source, or “disinhibitor.” Similarly, Brown’s twins not only operate as one mind in two bodies (pace Locke), but the existence of each body depends exclusively on its relation with the other. If the connection is severed, there is no social organism left to preserve. By this logic, Mrs. Lorimer becomes an obsolete component of a community that no longer exists when Clithero accidentally kills her brother. When Clithero subsequently tries to kill her

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too, we can see that the logical imperative of such a social organism demands her death, for she exists only as a relation with her brother. It should be clear at this point that there are no individuals in this family who are not, in some way, replicas of other members. When Mrs. Lorimer’s natural son disappears from the novel, the genealogical line of descent gives way to a social body organized by the principles I have identified as a network or rhizome. This body regenerates by copying itself along lines of relation rather than reproducing new individuals, and the normative units of familial organization (mother, brother, son, etc.) are simply positions that virtually anyone can fill. In situating this family in Ireland, moreover, Brown draws on the well-known British tendency to view the Irish as barbaric and, as such, practicing social relations by which they can be called wholly different from those characterizing the English. This social structure, I want to suggest, provides the conceptual materials in Edgar Huntly for Brown’s model of the American wilderness, which converts the territory of the new United States into a metaphoric testing ground for competing models of the individual. As a geographic metaphor, “wilderness” revisits the conceptual terrain of Lockean property and challenges its ability to serve as a cognitive foundation. In Locke’s system, we recall, the subject mixes his labor with nature to produce property that belongs to him alone. So too he mixes his intellectual faculties with sensations gleaned from the external world to produce propertyin-himself, or “mind.” The subject’s uncontested ownership of property thereby serves as the basis for citizenship and hence self-ownership. To imagine a world based on labor, Locke turns to the American wilderness, which he imagines as a blank space that, like the human mind, lacks any prior cultural inscription. To claim that “in the beginning all the World was America,” he draws on the language of Genesis and the logic of the terra nullius because both offer models of the world as it was prior to human history. This move forges an enduring division between nature and culture, as Locke establishes progress from one state to the other as the basis for both individual and national development. In Edgar Huntly, Brown offers us a different cultural geography. Unlike the terra nullius of Locke’s system, Brown’s American wilderness is already occupied and inscribed by Native Americans, for whom possession of the land is a function of movement and strategic advantage. This cultural geography is radically at odds with the British settlers’ understanding of “property” and “ownership.” Brown stages these competing notions of land by drawing

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a distinction between the cultivated Solebury farmsteads and the “sterile region” of Norwalk, the sprawling Delaware wasteland inhabited only by panthers and roving bands of displaced Indians. The Huntly farm is one of those homes built on appropriated Indian land, a territorial claim that prompts Queen Mab, the Delaware Indian matriarch, to denounce the resident colonists as merely “aliens and sojourners.” Mab’s comments raise the question of who can be said to “possess” property when there are multiple claims to that terrain, all of which respect different definitions of “ownership.”  The nomadic Delawares organize geography by traversing nature or covering it with patterns of human movement. For them, there is no distinction between Solebury and the wilderness; according to Mab, the colonists are merely interlopers. For the colonists, on the other hand, geography is produced by Western notions of cultivation, which separates nature and culture and authorizes the laborer as an individuated subject. Seeing the settlers’ claims against the background of the Delawares’ cultural geography reminds us that land is never encountered as a terra nullius; rather, it is always already inscribed by competing social groups. In Edgar Huntly, “property” and “wilderness” are fluid concepts that overlap one another as seemingly contradictory ways of understanding one’s environment. Just as Huntly and Clithero can wander, unbeknownst to themselves, into the wilderness, so the Delaware Indians make regular bloody incursions into the cultivated space of Solebury. The violence of such interpenetrability suggests that these two spaces are not in fact opposed but part and parcel of one another as negative components in the definition of each. Arthur Mervyn showed us how Brown uses gothic language to challenge property as the foundation of reason and citizenship. In Huntly, he uses this language to turn the wilderness into the alternative cultural geography I have been describing. Having fallen into a cavern after a bout of sleepwalking dumps him in the heart of Norwalk, Edgar talks about it in these terms: “Methought I was the victim of some tyrant who had thrust me into a dungeon of his fortress, and left me no power to determine whether he intended I should perish with famine, or linger out a long life in hopeless imprisonment. . . . Sometimes I imagined myself buried alive. Methought I had fallen into seeming death and my friends had consigned me to the tomb, from which a resurrection was impossible.”  Gothic tropes describe a space that obeys the same epistemological principles as the castle insofar as the category of rational individualism comes under assault in its domain and nothing is as

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it appears. Like the castle of the Eu ropean gothic, then, it contests “reality”— or a world organized according to Lockean empiricism and the ideal internal spectator— as the normative or dominant interpretation. There is a difference, however, between the phobic space of the castle and the space of possibility that is the wilderness. As I explained at greater length in Chapter 1, the European castle only temporarily introduces apparently inexplicable spectral phenomena and aberrant behavior in order to explain them away at the end of the narrative. Th is move reaffirms a normative reading of nature and society and the distinction between them by rendering phobic any such alternative to the modern social body as was proposed in the castle. In this sense, the castle is nested within the dominant notion of the real as a contained space within which reality can be put to the test. The wilderness, by way of contrast, is without boundaries, proposing an open environment in which the ontological mobility associated with the castle appears unlimited. Huntly may leave his cave, but as he then admits, “I scarcely knew in what region of the globe I was placed.”  He may as well be anywhere, suggesting that the wilderness is a potentially limitless terrain over which a person cannot achieve strategic control because its internal signposts are absent or hidden. To borrow a phrase from Deleuze and Guattari, this is “the rhizomatic West, with its Indians without ancestry, its ever-receding limit, its shifting and displaced frontiers.” 

The Incorporated Social Body In such a version of the wilderness, “property” takes on conflicting definitions that undermine the contractual basis for community. Recall that the subject of the contractual model acquires value apart from wealth and social position by owning the rights to his own labor and body. Th is exceptional interpretation of property also exists in the wilderness but in competition with other interpretations that do not understand community in such terms. To see how the wilderness stages this competition in a way that displaces the contractual social body, let us return to Mary Jemison’s captivity narrative. As both a woman and an abducted body in the eighteenth century, Jemison cannot lay claim to either her body or her labor. Her Indian adoption likewise deprives her of marriageability—that is, the kind of property that comes from her claim to incorporate Englishness

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within herself and thus to reproduce English culture at the level of the family. Jemison therefore never owns property in the Lockean sense. Even the piece of land over which she is granted proprietorship is subject to competing legal and social claims from the Senecan Council of Chiefs, the United States Senate, conmen, and her extended family. Her status as a woman, a captive, and as someone who has gone native therefore disqualifies her several times over as a rights-bearing individual. As she loses value in a contractual system, however, she gains it in the eyes of the Senecans when she proves adept at preserving their corporate body. When the needs of this body outweigh those of the individual, Jemison’s status as such disappears and she instead acquires value for her adaptability, instinct for survival, and the care with which she contributes to the well-being of the larger organism. She stipulates, for example, that the proceeds from her land, whenever it should be sold, be distributed evenly throughout the Seneca tribe. Th is is not so much altruism or philanthropy as a social act that preserves the resources of the group and hence the group itself. In this way, Jemison’s understanding of property underwrites a community that values incorporation over personal sovereignty. She cannot be regarded as an individual when she is not part of a group composed of individuals. Even though the story of her captivity presupposes an individual with a story to tell, the narrative of her incorporation dissolves the distinction between the individual and the community to which she belongs (indeed, the notion that an individual authorizes this narrative retreats yet further when we recall that it is a transcribed account by James Seaver). In Edgar Huntly, Brown takes this notion of incorporation one step further. Locke’s profoundly dualistic theory of personal identity alienates mind from the body, so Brown seeks to reunite them. Consider the terms in which Huntly battles impending starvation by imaginatively taking on the characteristics of an animal: “I felt a strong propensity to bite the flesh from my arm. My heart overflowed with cruelty, and I pondered on the delight I should experience in rending some living animal to pieces, and drinking its blood and grinding its quivering fibers between my teeth.” Two versions of the subject are at odds in this description. On the one hand, Huntly still owns himself (“my arm”) as an object to which he alone is entitled. This is the Lockean notion of the self that is literally coming under assault in the wilderness. The process of incorporation, however, requires that this body lose its objective status. Put another way, Huntly’s autophagous desire figuratively reincorporates the body into the subject. In this way, Huntly’s model of the social body

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breaks down the distinction between subject and object at the level of the individual. In this example, “going native” reveals a relationship to the older, humoral model of the human, which does not distinguish between body and mind or the body and its surroundings. Brown’s language invokes this residual theory of the body (“my heart overflowed”) to suggest that knowledge in the wilderness is a function of physiology and the environmental conditions to which is it subject. In trapping Huntly within the cave, then, Brown contests the logic of the contract by replacing it with an earlier concept of the social body. Rather than a confrontation between mind and material object, Huntly’s savagery sets the stage for the individual to encounter the world somatically. When he actually kills and eats a panther, we are tempted to see this event from a Lockean perspective, as a degeneration of mind into body and human into animal. According to the logic of the wilderness, however, this grisly meal represents a kind of vitalism that allows Huntly to know the wilderness by literally taking it in. When Huntly expresses a desire to dismember other creatures (“I pondered on the delight I should experience in rending some living animal to pieces”), the process conventionally known as “going native” describes not only his self-incorporation but the opportunistic appropriation of other bodies as well. In this model of community, the metaphor of dismemberment sees individual bodies broken down and ecologically integrated into their environment. Huntly’s survival in this system depends on seizing its advantages, and he indeed proves a successful scavenger in the wilderness. Such opportunism violates the negative rights of the social contact, where subjects agree not to encroach upon the rights and bodies of other members. In a community that does not maintain difference at the level of the individual, anything remotely like a sympathetic exchange likewise becomes impossible. As if to signal that his incorporated model will demolish this notion, Brown’s description of Huntly’s transformation into a panther evokes Rousseau’s manin-a-cage model of sympathy. In this well-known argument for the innate social feeling of the individual, Rousseau offers “the pathetic picture of a man locked up, who outside sees a ferocious Beast tearing a Child from his Mother’s breast, breaking his limbs with its murderous fangs, and tearing the Child’s throbbing entrails with its claws. What a dreadful agitation must not this witness to an event in which he takes no personal interest whatsoever experience? What anguish must he not suffer at this sight, for not being able to give any help to the fainted Mother or the dying Child?”  The similarity

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between Rousseau’s beast “breaking [the child’s] limbs with its murderous fangs, and tearing the Child’s throbbing entrails with its claws” and Huntly’s animalistic desire to “grind[ ] the quivering fibers” of a living animal “between [his] teeth” is striking. Rousseau insists— as Smith does—that sympathy is a mental experience, where the spectator feels what he feels from witnessing another’s anguish. Importantly, he remains absolutely separate and unable to participate; he feels what he feels vicariously (this is why Rousseau locks him in a cage). He only “knows” what the mother and child must feel from a distance. Indeed, his are the feelings we care about. For Rousseau’s reader, the object of sympathy in this deliberately overblown scenario is meant to be the man in the cage himself more than the woman whose anguish he witnesses and still less the child whom the beast is attacking. Huntly’s delight in the cruelty of the panther, on the other hand, asks us to identify with the beast. In revising this well-known model, Brown suggests that the kind of community represented by Huntly’s bestial appetites is predicated on the very violations of the body, the family, and the sympathetic community proposed by contractual thinking. Huntly later confesses that he “had imbibed from the unparalleled events which had lately happened a spirit vengeful, unrelenting, and ferocious.”  In literally “imbibing” the “ferocious” qualities of the panther, Huntly becomes one with his environment. In doing so, Brown’s protagonist comes to resemble the nomadic Delaware Indians, who are likewise described in terms of the panther. As Huntly puts it, the “savages” possess “appetites that longed to feast upon my bowels and to quaff my heart’s-blood.”  Brown describes the Delawares in the same language as Huntly to indicate that the Indians are part an identical incorporated social body that privileges the group over the individual. Dispersed across Norwalk, this community has no discernible origin or end point but rather spreads where there are resources. Attacking the settlers in retribution for the appropriation of their lands, the Indians’ two most prominent victims in the novel are both young girls, one a captive and the other “mangled by a hatchet,” whose scalped head is “gory and deprived of its looks.”  Rather than read these instances as unintelligible acts of savagery (and thereby reinscribe the very division between Indian nature and American culture that the novel wishes to dismantle), we can regard them as sophisticated ritualistic procedures designed to preserve the corporate body. As with the Seneca Indians in Mary Jemison’s account, the equilibrium and perpetuity of the collective is protected by an economy of revenge, where the Delawares redress the damage inflicted on the larger social organism by capturing, mutilating, or

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slaughtering settlers. In these two cases, the Indians take aim at young girls and thus at the reproductive potential of the European family. This latter social structure, which the novel identifies with the “patriarchal” farmsteads of Solebury, damages the Indians’ ability to proliferate when it appropriates their resources and thus threatens the perpetuity of their own model of community.

The Politics of Captivity I have focused thus far on Edgar Huntly to demonstrate how Brown uses the principles of the captivity narrative to transform the wilderness into a site of social and somatic incorporation. To think of Ormond; Or, The Secret Witness (1799) and Wieland; Or, The Transformation (1798) as captivity narratives, we need only imagine Philadelphia (in Ormond) or Mettingen (in Wieland) opposing the sentimental household in much the same way that the wilderness does. Here, too, savage men (Ormond, Carwin, and Wieland) subject isolated and vulnerable females (Constantia and Clara) to despotic forms of power. I now want to consider how Brown uses captivity narrative conventions to explore the question of sovereignty in incorporated social bodies. To put it another way, what kind of government should regulate a political model where subjects such as Huntly think of themselves as conduits within a larger network rather than self-governing individuals brought together in a contractual state? Indeed, when we consider that 75 percent of all captivity narratives published in the eighteenth century were published in the last two decades of the century, it makes sense to situate Brown’s novels within this debate over the nature of political authority in the post-Revolutionary period. Conventional literary histories of the captivity narrative repeat a familiar genealogical story—namely, that the first generation of Puritan theological captivity narratives gave way in the eighteenth century to “bigoted indictments” of minority cultures, before the nineteenth century evacuated all “factual” content from the genre in favor of sensationalism and sentiment. The publication history of the captivity narrative tells another story altogether. Reprinted editions of hagiographic narratives by Mary Rowlandson (first published in 1682) and John Williams (1707), for example, were more popular during the early republic than at any prior historical moment, vying with both Indian and Barbary captivity narratives for attention among American readers. That earlier theological narratives rivaled their later secular coun-

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terparts in popularity during this period suggests that the genre’s very heterogeneity spoke to the interests of this readership. Whether the origin of tyrannical power in these narratives is Native American, North African, French, British, or even Anglo-American, the question of where tyranny comes from and what form it takes is ultimately far less important than the alternative and contending forms of political authority such narratives allowed readers to imagine during the fraught political period in which Brown wrote his major novels. Let us assume that tyrannical power (which invalidates the social contract) exists in these narratives to define good government inversely. That is to say, good government is that which protects and guarantees the very rights that have been assaulted under conditions of captivity. The captive comes to recognize legitimate authority by being deprived of its protection; freedom is therefore the state of not being captive. In Williams’s or Rowlandson’s accounts of captivity, for example, the captive secures a place in his or her cultural home by deferring to God as the higher authority who determines who shall be included in the Christian community. Rowlandson turns physical privation into a test of faith that testifies to her eligibility for membership among those favored in the eyes of God. This elite group is made imaginable through the exclusion and stigmatization of her Indian captors, by definition lawbreakers and heathens and hence representative of bad government. In returning to a reconstituted English household, isolated from intrusive alien elements, Rowlandson makes this social formation the seat of good sovereignty and hence the basis for American identity. That Rowlandson’s narrative experienced such a surge in popularity at the end of the eighteenth century suggests to us that her static, exclusionary model of the nation held considerable appeal for a post-Revolutionary readership. Yet the coincidental vogue for other variations of the captivity narratives likewise tells us that Rowlandson’s was simply one of several competing notions for the composition of the new United States. Mary Jemison’s narrative, for example, rewrites American identity from the periphery by proposing a model of community based on incorporation and assimilation. The very Indian practices that Rowlandson had to expel from her version of the nation become the basis of inclusion in Jemison’s. In adopting native customs and abiding by their laws, Jemison converts cultural differences into new protocols for American identity. By reproducing an English household in the wilderness, she reconfigures the elite and exclusionary social formation of Rowlandson’s narrative into one that can tolerate diversity. In doing so,

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however, she comes to resemble Rowlandson by imagining American identity in terms of stasis. Her narrative may be structured according to a series of removes west, but she continues to seek a place of permanent settlement. This goal is realized in her parting words: “I live in my own house, and on my own land.”  The composition of their respective households may differ, as may their understanding of the term property, but both Jemison and Rowlandson ultimately install some form of stationary, geopolitically circumscribed domain as a metonym for the new United States. It is fair to say that Brown’s protagonists all share the same quality of cultural adaptability we see at work in a figure like Mary Jemison. Just as Huntly participates in a body of information that he can ingest and know somatically, so Ormond or Welbeck can adopt different cultural guises at will, and Mervyn’s superficial affability allows him to pass between different social spheres. Unlike Jemison or Rowlandson, however, these characters are conspicuously situated in a transatlantic world of cultural interpenetration and exchange. Welbeck, for example, is kept financially solvent by money from the West Indies (indicted in the novel as the source of the yellow fever that devastates Philadelphia); Carwin travels the world before coming to the United States, as does Huntly’s mentor Sarsefield; and Ormond, himself of uncertain Baltic origin, is engaged in shadowy political schemes that cross international borders. This restless, porous model of community is evidently opposed to the exceptionalism of Rowlandson. For this reason, I believe, Brown’s gothic novels are indebted to the more dynamic model of the nation that we can see at work in the equally popular Barbary narratives of the period. Whereas Jemison and Rowlandson locate freedom in the ability to settle, these narratives imagine freedom as the unimpeded and continual movement through different cultural spheres. They accordingly endorse the form of government that enables the circulation of goods and people. Drawing explicitly on the conventions of the Barbary narrative to write his novel The Algerine Captive (1797), Royall Tyler defines Europeans, Americans, and North Africans by their ability to exchange goods, ser vices, and information in the larger Atlantic world. In the first half of Tyler’s novel, Updike Underhill, like so many of Brown’s protagonists, searches in vain for “a place of settlement”; regional differences within the United States make it impossible for people to circulate. Underhill’s skills, interests, morals, and manners as a New Englander do not translate well across cultural divides: “Every attempt at familiarity,” as he puts it, “cus-

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tomary in the northern states, excited alarm [in the South].” With Underhill’s “New England ideas” always at odds with those with whom he seeks to be at home, Tyler makes it clear that different regional groups within the United States will not tolerate outsiders, even if they do observe laws of universal hospitality. To imagine a model of government capable of negotiating such divides, Tyler relocates his protagonist to North Africa. Once Underhill becomes a captive in Algiers, he comes to recognize good government as that which ensures the free circulation of people across international borders. By contrast, tyrannical rule, which enforces his captivity, impedes his movement and limits his opportunities for observation. He can accrue the archive of information that provides the substance of his narrative only to the degree that his various masters permit him free reign through Algiers. The logic of circulation draws together two halves of an ostensibly disjunctive novel, as the reader comes to see Underhill’s ethnographic descriptions of Africa as mirroring his more picaresque accounts of local American cultures. Although, in behavior and appearance, the places themselves contrast completely, what is more important is the mobility each allows. Both halves of the novel privilege movement and contact between populations and ethnic groups over individual experience. As his refusal to convert to Islam demonstrates, the captive does not need to go native to be part of this international network. Underhill must adapt by learning the language and respecting Algerine customs, but he can remain part of his own ethnic group and still participate in a transatlantic system of exchange. As he describes his relationship with the Mollah, “I was charmed with the man, though I abominated his faith.”  He may separate himself decisively from Islam, but Underhill can nonetheless imagine sharing a common humanity with his religious adversary. In turning next to Rev. Aldridge’s A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black (1795), I want to suggest that Aldridge domesticates the circulatory model of social relations that Tyler’s Algerine Captive puts to work in a cosmopolitan, transatlantic context. Marrant may be transculturated but, unlike Jemison, he regards freedom in terms of mobility and exchange rather than settlement and property. In this respect, he has more in common with Tyler’s Underhill. Just as Underhill takes his medical practice to new places and thereby acquires new techniques before moving on, Marrant takes his evangelism to different cultures in an endless pattern of conversion and remove. A black preacher, Marrant is nonetheless

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defined primarily by his capacity to travel unimpeded between different places and ethnic groups rather than by his race. His cultural identity, in other words, is a function of his mobility. In contrast to Rowlandson’s tendency to think of every “remove” as a potentially irreparable separation from her point of origin, Marrant’s narrative is a long succession of removes. “Unstable as water,” Marrant compulsively follows his “inclination . . . to go further on” as his travels take him from New York to Georgia to South Carolina to the Tennessee Indian nations to the Atlantic Ocean to Britain before the narrative ends with his imminent departure for Nova Scotia. Even his syntax is transitive—“as I passed along” and “as I was going on”— suggesting not so much a journey between two points but a perpetual movement that keeps his body in constant circulation. When he declares that he “would rather die than return home,” Marrant issues a sharp critique of the Rowlandson model of community that defines identity in relation to a fi xed home. With this declaration, he redefines captivity as the forced return to a point of origin. If, as Marrant indicates, “liberty” is nothing else but the ability to “continue[ ] moving,” then captivity is an impediment only when it takes bodies out of circulation. Thus the measure of the man in this text is his mobility and not his undisputed ownership of himself. Indeed, by questioning property as the basis of humanity, Marrant successfully imagines an inclusionary, mobile version of American identity. Arguably, his status as a free black makes him ideally suited to make this point. Coming from a free family of considerable means, Marrant is anything but a slave and, as such, not to be regarded as a piece of property. Important to my purposes, Marrant’s ability to circulate is a function of his cultural plasticity. His religious conversion to evangelism is doubled in his cultural conversion among the Cherokee when he adopts “the habit of the country.”  His familiarity with Indian customs and language, in addition to his evangelism, becomes cultural capital that can travel, securing him entry into yet more cultures and communities. Indeed, he is only permitted to return to his original community once he has undergone this transculturation. Expelled from Charleston because of his evangelism, he returns as a “wild man” whose preaching is now acceptable. His return transforms a prescriptive community— one built to the older, Rowlandson model of cultural exclusion—into one that can incorporate diversity through transculturation. In effect, he brings the wilderness back with him when he transforms this community into one without culturally circumscribed limits. Thus Marrant makes it possible to imagine a transculturated captive who has gone

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native and yet returned to a reconstituted home. This suggests a diasporic logic that, in the post-Revolutionary period, doubtless had considerable appeal for a readership that thought of itself as culturally, if not politically, connected to Britain.

Brown’s “Transformation” of the Nation The kind of community Brown proposes in Huntly and Wieland, I suggest, has much in common with the one that Marrant’s Narrative asks us to imagine. In these novels, Brown draws on the tropes of the captivity narrative to imagine a nation whose constituents are united through the circulation and transmission of information, while the subject best suited to thrive in such an environment is one characterized by the same cultural plasticity as Marrant. This imaginative community is hardly pure. Nor is membership reserved for the elite few who enjoy the privilege and meet the standard of self-regulation. As a network of continual movement and exchange, this model of community can travel across spatial boundaries and thereby unite disparate people whose imaginative ties to a culture of origin have long since been displaced by space and time. In Brown, this notion of community displaces the sentimental household as a paradigm for the nation. That his gothic novels resolutely refuse to end with the easy reconstruction of such a household— even Arthur Mervyn could only offer a vexed and self-critiquing version of one— suggests that we need to read his perplexed endings in terms of this diasporic model instead. Huntly’s trial in the wilderness ends with his apparent escape and subsequent integration into the Lorimer household. Mrs. Lorimer’s marriage to Sarsefield reconstitutes that household by installing a paternal figure at its head, and Huntly replaces Clithero as its adopted son. At this point, it would appear that Brown has retreated from the dynamic model of collectivity he proposed in Delaware in favor of a sentimental resolution that seals off the family from alienating forms of cultural difference, were it not for the fact that an epistolary turn perplexes this model. In the hands of sentimental novelists such as Samuel Richardson or William Hill Brown, letters work in the ser vice of a British model of individual autonomy by proposing and reinscribing an authorial consciousness whose literacy qualifies her to tell her own story. In Huntly, by way of contrast, letters break down the boundaries between individuals on which the sentimental household is predicated. These

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letters undergo unintended detours and digressions, allowing information to circulate through the entire social body, much like the yellow fever in Arthur Mervyn. As Sarsefield explains in his letter to Huntly regarding Clithero’s escape from custody, “I designed that all these proceedings [to capture Clithero] should be concealed from the women, but unfortunately neglected to take suitable measures for hindering the letter which you gave me reason to expect on the ensuing day, from coming into their hands. It was delivered to my wife in my absence and opened immediately by her.”  We can see here that any attempt to shut down the flow of information is futile, as it transcends individual intention and travels wherever its current takes it. In this case, Mrs. Lorimer miscarries from the shock of the information thus relayed. In Ireland, we recall, Brown made Mrs. Lorimer’s natural son disappear in order to propose a social formation that replenished itself through substitution rather than reproduction. With the death of Mrs. Lorimer’s unborn child at the novel’s end, the genealogical line of descent is once again displaced, this time by a weave of knowledge that spreads wherever there is opportunity. In this system, Huntly is not so much an individual as a relay through which information passes. Like Marrant, Huntly brings the principles of the wilderness “home” and thereby transforms the community from an end point to something like a relay station or conduit through which the world circulates. In turning next to Wieland, I want to consider how the novel’s subtitle, The Transformation, operates as a sustained metaphor and draws together the concept of the individual’s incorporation in a larger social body with the concept of “going native” (as we encountered it in Edgar Huntly) and cultural adaptability (as imagined by John Marrant). With Clara Wieland, Brown solves a problem that male captives such as Marrant, Underhill, or Huntly could not address head on: namely, the problem of cultural reproduction, or how to perpetuate a community organized by the principles of transculturation and circulation. Let us first think of Carwin’s ventriloquism as the transmission of ideas that do not originate in the sensation of actual things or people. With no discernible origin or destination, these ideas enter the Wielands directly, uniting them in one heterogeneous organism. These specious representations produce Wieland’s “transformation” from devoted father to murderous fanatic in terms taken straight from the captivity narrative. When he thinks his god speaks directly to him, for example, Wieland turns into a man “rapacious of blood,” who behaves just like a “savage.”  Indeed, under the influence of Carwin’s ventriloquism, both Wieland and Pleyel “go native” in that they come to

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resemble the tyrants of a disintegrating sentimental idyll, preying on women who are represented as the victims of savagery. The novel darkly hints that Catherine Wieland is raped by her husband before he strangles her, and Louisa Conway, the Wielands’ adopted sister, is killed after her head is mutilated— a death evidently intended to evoke the Indian practice of scalping. As Clara notes, her family’s brutal death “was worthy of savages trained to murder, and exulting in agonies.” Pleyel may not assault Clara’s body, but he does cast doubt on her virtue, which makes him, in Clara’s estimation, no different from “the traitor who assailed [her] life.”  These descriptions make it clear that the male protagonists have been figuratively transformed into Indian captors. Whereas Rowlandson renders the Indian phobic as the representative of a despotic form of authority, however, this novel uses the same figure for its rhetorical possibilities. Here, one’s “transformation” into an Indian is the trope Brown uses to propose a model of community based on the free circulation of information. In Clara’s description of Carwin, this concept of “transformation” becomes a uniquely American brand of cosmopolitanism: “His garb, aspect, and deportment, were wholly Spanish. A residence of three years in the country, indefatigable attention to the language, and a studious conformity with the customs of the people, had made him indistinguishable from a native, when he chose to assume that character. . . . He had embraced the catholic religion, and adopted a Spanish name instead of his own. . . . On topics of religion and of his own history, previous to his transformation into a Spaniard, he was invariably silent.”  Carwin’s conversion evokes the conventional association in the European gothic between Catholicism and Old World degeneracy. He therefore enters the novel—much like the Irish immigrant Clithero—already furnished with an objectified brand of barbaric difference, underscored by the fact that he has clearly “gone native” in converting to the Roman faith (he is “indistinguishable from a native”). Importantly, this description makes it clear that Carwin’s conversion, like Marrant’s, is as much cultural as religious. Indeed, Brown suggests that Carwin is peculiarly adept at appropriating other cultures at will “when he chose to assume that character.” By turning Mettingen into a wilderness, Brown tethers the concept of “going native” as incorporation to the kind of cultural adaptation and appropriation that allows the subject to travel freely, like Marrant, between places and cultures. Thus Carwin not only thrives in Catholic Spain by taking on the appearance and manners of a Spaniard, but he can also appear as a peasant and parrot the kind of rational humanism so appealing to the Wielands. His specious representations

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permit him to slip between cultural and social spheres; as he puts it, “I scrutinized everything and pried everywhere.” He exploits this elusiveness to make Clara an object of study. From seducing her maid to reading her private journal, Carwin displays a notable degree of ingenuity and adaptability to achieve this end. By refusing to observe individual boundaries, he “transforms” everything into a source of potentially useful information.

Reproducing the Wilderness Now let us shift our focus back to the female captive, whose refusal to take on “other” cultural practices that might help her adapt to the wilderness determines whether she can remain the bearer of her original cultural value. Her actions dictate the terms on which a community, united under the principles of good government defined by what she lacks in captivity, can be reproduced. By placing Clara Wieland in the position of the female captive, Brown suggests how to reproduce a community whose predominant characteristic is the unimpeded transmission of information through a single heterogeneous social body. To qualify Clara for the task of transmission, Brown follows the logic of “going native” and incorporates her into the informational network, where she acquires the qualities of cultural mobility and adaptability. Let me suggest how. First, Brown turns Clara into a captive and takes away any hope of a return to a home to her original community: “I live not in a community of savages; yet whether I sit or walk, go into crouds [sic], or hide myself in solitude, my life is marked for a pray to inhuman violence; I am in perpetual danger or perishing.”  As Clara observes, she may not live in a wilderness, but she is being assaulted as if she were. Put differently, there is no discernible difference between nature and culture in Mettingen. Clara can no more escape the wilderness than Huntly can. In this sense, she is eternally “severed” from “the house and name of Wieland” once Mettingen has taken on the characteristics of a wilderness. Because there is no escape, Clara must adapt to survive. Brown gives her ample opportunity to kill herself and thereby escape defilement, but the fact that she refuses to die tells us Clara’s sexual— hence cultural—purity is not at stake in this narrative. Instead, she becomes part of the same community of shared knowledge with the rest of her family: “I reflected that this madness, if madness it were, had affected Pleyel and myself as well as Wieland. . . . I wondered at the change which a moment had af-

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fected in my brother’s condition. Now I was stupified [sic] with ten-fold wonder in contemplating myself. Was I not likewise transformed from rational and human into a creature of nameless and fearful attributes?”  Clara’s introspection (“contemplating myself”) presupposes that there is a self to contemplate, or a singular identity that exists as a world unto itself. Her incorporation, however, effaces this subjective status. Through the process of “transformation,” this “rational” model of the human gives way to something in the order of the panther (“a creature of nameless and fearful attributes”). Indeed, faced with Carwin’s apparent culpability in the destruction of her family, Clara confesses: “I thirsted for his blood . . . and was tormented with an insatiable appetite for his destruction.”  It is worth noting that, at the point where Clara enters the same network of collective “madness” that gripped the rest of her family, she is also described in the same terms as the Delaware Indians that populate Edgar Huntly. By becoming like the panther, Clara demonstrates a capacity for hybridization that translates into an ability to absorb information and enter into a system of cultural circulation. It makes sense that, once part of such a system, Clara would, like Underhill or Marrant, be damaged by stasis or a forced return to a point of origin. To make this point, Brown nearly kills her off by rendering her immobile at the end of the novel. Long after her family has perished, Clara retains an obsolete attachment to Mettingen, which confines her to her bed and endangers her life. By subjecting her to ennui, a fever, and even a house fire, Brown makes it clear that Clara cannot live while retaining a chimerical belief in origins. In such a case, good government is that which enables— even forces— her continued circulation. Such a model of authority comes to the rescue in the shape of Clara’s uncle, who saves her life by taking her to Europe. Here, Clara’s ennui gives way to “curiosity” in the face of “living manners and the monuments of past ages.” In other words, new information in the form of sightseeing becomes a source of vitality, much like Huntly’s meal of raw panther. Clara may be severed from her original “house and name,” but she is part of a new community constituted through the international exchange of knowledge. The novel therefore ends with a return to a different cultural home, one that Clara has reconstituted by proving intellectually mobile. Importantly, Brown rewards her cultural receptivity and continued circulation with a household of her own. In remaining eligible to marry a white man—Pleyel, with whom she is reconciled—it is evident that Clara’s reproductive value

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was not compromised by her going native. Indeed, it is fair to say that her very ability to adapt entitles her to this household in the first place. This sentimental unit, conspicuously, can only form in Europe once Clara has gone native and thereby proven herself capable of remaining mobile. In this way, Brown fulfills the diasporic fantasy of a daughter’s return to and reproduction of a cultural home even after she has compromised her cultural purity.

Cosmopolitan Sociability In Brown’s hands, the language of the gothic translates the captivity narrative convention of a trial in the wilderness into a testing ground for competing forms of social relations. In Huntly’s case, his trial proposes a model of group identity in which the survival and proliferation of the social body as a whole takes precedence over individual experience. In Clara’s case, Brown suggests that creolization, or the ability to go native, is the first precondition of social reproduction in the United States. In Wieland and Edgar Huntly, then, it appears that Brown not only wanted to enter into the debate carried on in the captivity narratives of the period— a debate over freedom and the form of government that best ensures it—but also decided to use those narratives to revise the English novel based on the self-determining individual and sympathetic community. So successful did this narrative strategy prove, I think, that subsequent writers also adopted it as a means of rewriting the conditions of political subjectivity in an Atlantic world. As an example, let me turn briefly to Leonora Sansay’s epistolary novel of colonial and domestic warfare, Secret History; Or, the Horrors of St. Domingo, to show how Sansay places her female protagonists in the position of the captive to remake circum-Atlantic social relations as a transcultural system of cosmopolitan exchange. In Wieland, Brown turns the modern family into a phobic social organism to expose the potential of a transatlantic system of social reproduction that inserts people into chains of transmission and exchange. Leonora Sansay’s Secret History performs much the same rhetorical feat when it disperses its two female protagonists throughout multiple geographic locations in the West Indies, defining Mary and Clara less by nation, origin, or household and more by the cultural information to which they are granted access. Sansay does so, I argue, to take into account the vast and heterogeneous groups of people who ostensibly lack the qualities of autonomy and self-ownership

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and whose national affiliations and personal status have long since been eroded or creolized by distance, cultural acclimatization, or the forced extraction of labor. In Secret History, this body of people is represented by the slaves, dispossessed Creoles, and the massive number of refugees that the novel repeatedly disperses and relocates. From this diverse population, Sansay builds a model of social relations that we might call “cosmopolitan sociability.” To achieve such an end, Sansay takes her cue from Brown’s gothic households by first transforming the British model of domesticity into a phobic domain. She subjects Clara to the vicious, irrational, and violent abuses of her paternal protector, her husband St. Louis, who acts more like a monster than a man when he imprisons Clara and threatens her with disfigurement and rape. By turning the household into a wilderness, Sansay challenges both models of captivity we encountered in Rowlandson and Jemison by suggesting that permanent settlement is impossible in a cosmopolitan domain defined by the circulation of its people. It is for this reason, I suspect, that her novel is so resistant to national boundaries and preoccupied with the perpetual motions of human displacement. The letters comprising Secret History circumnavigate Europe, America, Saint Domingue, Jamaica, and Cuba, and movement between these points frames the action; the novel begins with Mary and Clara’s transatlantic crossing and ends in anticipation of their return to Philadelphia. That the novel concludes with the sisters once more poised for flight suggests a system that keeps bodies in constant motion between international nodes rather than a pattern of removal and return. According to the logic of captivity, then, bad government in the West Indies emerges as any force that impedes the flow of people by restricting them to a single place or function: St. Louis imprisons Clara in their home, for example, and General Rochambeau refuses to issue the passports that would allow the island’s inhabitants to escape. Where Rowlandson obeys a strict cultural imperative to return to her point of origin unchanged, that same imperative proves downright hazardous in this domain. Madame G–, for example, is one of those Creole refugees who returns to Saint Domingue “lured by the hope of reinstating her children in their paternal inheritance.”  In a remarkable reversal of the Rowlandson model, Sansay transforms this very homecoming into a captivity narrative: stranded on the island with no means of escape, Madam G–— and her daughters are enslaved and executed by the revolutionaries. This vignette tells the same story as Clara’s captivity narrative: to pursue the protection and privilege supposedly guaranteed by paternalism is chimerical, even dangerous, and stasis is tantamount to slavery

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and death. Both women clearly have everything to lose by being trapped in one place. It therefore makes sense that, in contrast with Rowlandson, “removal” in Secret History does not threaten cultural identity but rather proves a source of vitality. Trapped with St. Louis, Clara is mentally stultified and physically tortured. Once she escapes her home and husband, however, she emerges with each successive step as a figure of remarkable cultural adaptability, effortlessly suturing herself into every new community to which she flees. It is for this reason, I am convinced, that Clara is only permitted a narrative voice of her own once she escapes her home in Saint Domingue and dives into the human current of refugees en route to Cuba. No longer merely the object of her sister’s letters, she becomes a subject with a story to tell; she sends her own correspondence into circulation at the very moment she enters the flow of people circumnavigating the Atlantic, as if to signal that one’s membership in a mass body need not be a threat to one’s own culture but indeed a genuine and viable alternative to contractual forms of life. Once her dispossession is complete (“deprived of everything we possessed, in a strange country, of whose language we are ignorant . . . with [no] money”), Clara transforms into the kind of subject ideally suited to a system that favors movement over stasis and transfusion over autonomy: “Whatever subject may engage her attention, she seizes intuitively on what is true, and by a sort of mental magic, arrives instantaneously at the point where, even very good heads, only meet her after a tedious process of reasoning and reflection. Her memory, surer than records, perpetuates every occurrence. She accumulates knowledge while she laughs and plays: she steals from her friends the fruits of their application, and thus becoming possessed of their intellectual treasure, without the fatigue of study, she surprises them with ingenious combinations of their own materials, and with results of which they did not dream. Her heart keeps a faithful account, not only of every word but of every look, of every movement of her friends.”  Insofar as it abandons the processes of “reasoning and reflection”—language taken directly from Lockean faculty psychology and empiricism— Clara’s method of collating information clearly opposes the Enlightenment model of the rational and autonomous subject. Rather, her knowledge is a function of spontaneity and immediacy as she absorbs and fuses ideas (“ingenious combinations”) before sending them back into circulation, which suggests a fundamental continuity rather than contiguity with other minds. Accordingly, she opposes the principles of the

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social contract—whereby subjects agree not to encroach on the property of other constituents—when she “steals” the “intellectual treasure” of her associates. She comes to resemble the figure of the colonial plunderer we earlier encountered in the French soldiers, who intend “to make a fortune, and return to France with all possible speed.” It seems plausible that Sansay recuperates this figure here for its rhetorical possibilities: Clara offers us a measure of humanity defined by its ability to mine information rather than illegitimate colonial spoils. Indeed, Clara’s mind is singularly adept at recording and transmitting vast amounts of information (she can monitor every “word,” “look,” and “movement” of her personal encounters), making her the perfect constituent of a single, integrated social organism promoting the unimpeded circulation of people and ideas around the Atlantic circumference.

The Price of Purity Much like Carwin, Clara St. Louis proves particularly adept at appropriating other cultures, learning languages, and adopting local fashions with “the facility of a native.”  Indeed, one might say that her success as a protagonist depends on her ability, like Brown’s Clara, to go native. In this last section, I want to consider the consequences of trying to remain culturally pure in America— something that Clara Wieland, Edgar Huntly, and Clara St. Louis conspicuously refuse to do. Brown turns his sights on exactly this problem at the end of Ormond. In notable contrast to Clara Wieland, Constantia Dudley emerges at the end of this novel clearly compromised by her association with a barbaric masculine figure distinguished by his “intercourse with savages” and Old World gothic menace. Even though her trials have been largely similar to Clara’s, Constantia is conspicuously denied the same sentimental sanctuary of marriage and lives out the brief remainder of the novel in a state of disconsolate half-life. Held captive in the final chapters by Ormond in an isolated country estate and threatened with rape, she emerges from his (ostensibly) unsuccessful assault as if he had succeeded in damaging her: “Her hands were clasped on her breast, her eyes fi xed upon the ceiling and streaming with tears, and her hair unbound and falling confusedly over her bosom and neck.” Whether Ormond actually succeeded in raping her or not is beside the point: this description clearly puts Constantia in the rhetorical position of a polluted

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daughter taken straight from the pages of a seduction novel. To understand what Brown accomplishes by drawing on this figure, we need to consider the polluted daughter in a transatlantic context. In the British tradition, a polluted daughter is no longer qualified to reproduce the culture of her origins because she has entered a system of exchange outside paternal control and therefore cannot reproduce a bloodline. In Clarissa (1747–48), Richardson subjects his heroine to the violent ordeal of rape to prove a point about the restrictiveness of such authority. While her body may have been appropriated by Lovelace, Clarissa’s mental property (or property-in-herself) remains inviolable. She neither consents to Lovelace’s demands nor stops writing letters. She is not a piece of property in a system of exchange between men— Clarissa belongs to herself alone. Clarissa’s demise underscores the inadequacy of existing forms of masculine authority, thereby updating the norms to include men who would prove capable of recognizing, appreciating, and protecting Clarissa’s interiority. Patriarchal authority replaces a politics of paternalism. In transforming Constantia into a polluted daughter, Brown is doing something rather different. If the British tradition was invested in updating masculine norms, Brown wants to imagine a polluted daughter as the cultural bearer of reproductive value in the colonies. In Wieland, he gave us a heroine who could perform such a task. By comparison, Constantia is disqualified because, unlike Clara Wieland or Clara St. Louis, she refuses to hybridize. To make this case, Brown represents her rejection of a union with the racially indeterminate Ormond as a narrowly avoided creolization. It should come as no surprise to learn that such a process is described in terms that evoke the wilderness. Ormond plans to take her “beyond the precincts of civilized existence”—to take her, in other words, into the wilderness by “traversing inhospitable countries, and extinguishing what remained of clemency and justice by intercourse with savagery.”  In refusing this alliance, Constantia evidently has more in common with Mary Rowlandson in that she refuses to admit intrusive forces of cultural difference. Indeed, the Dudleys go to considerable lengths to seclude themselves—unsuccessfully—from invasive elements such as the plague and nosy neighbors. It is for this reason, we must assume, that Constantia remains a strict adherent to the principles of contractualism throughout the novel, imagining herself united to one who can extend and perfect her own individualism. She can only imagine marrying someone much like herself, so Ormond is, indeed, a poor choice of partner in a contractual system.

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To account for the novel’s paradoxical ending, in which the heroine appears polluted yet is actually (or claims to be) culturally and physically intact, I argue that two competing models of national sovereignty are at odds in the rape scene. On the one hand, Constantia’s literal struggle for sexual purity suggests a British notion of contractualism that requires the contracting parties to share the same cultural notions. This kind of contract abhors a mixture. Arthur Mervyn, we should recall, had to work very hard to imagine a contract that could account for cross-cultural alliance. On the other hand, her appearance as the apparent victim of force suggests that to be in America is to be creolized. When Ormond describes her impending rape as “an inexorable and immutable decree,” we can see a de facto logic of hybridization at work. As the penalty for refusing this fate, Constantia must sacrifice Ormond’s life, her mental fortitude, and her reproductive future. Constantia, in short, has attempted the impossible in trying to remain true to her origins in America. In terms of a diasporic logic, she cannot return to a home that never existed for her in the first place. Indeed, when she returns to Britain only to live out a life of “eternal anguish,” we can see that even to try such a feat is to experience social annihilation. In this novel, a polluted daughter is better than one who remains culturally pure, and Clara Wieland is thus a much more successful heroine than Constantia. Clara succeeds where Constantia fails through her willingness to go native, that is, to circulate in a wider system of cultural exchange. This, I believe, constitutes the novel’s American difference.

chapter 3

A Mind for the Gothic: Common Sense and the Problem of Local Culture

Perhaps the most striking feature of Washington Irving’s iconic mock-horror tale “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is not the headless specter of Revolutionary violence that haunts the Catskill’s byways but the rigorously defensive manner in which this drowsy little town wards off any potential threat to its autonomy. On guard against forces that threaten to disrupt its vital local culture, Sleepy Hollow is hospitable only to the point that a visitor threatening to undo the enduring ties of family and property that bind this community together finds himself quickly ridden out of town. As the tale’s narrator informs us, Sleepy Hollow thrives as a static model of community in which “population, manners, and customs, remain fi xed,” placing it at odds with the “great torrent of migration and improvement” characteristic of the rest of the nation. The simultaneity of temporal experience Benedict Anderson called “imagined community” is here challenged by a paradigm in which time moves at different speeds in different parts of the country. Much like the heterogeneous network of affiliation we encountered in Brown’s gothic fiction, Irving’s larger America is characterized by unfixed borders, fluid populations, and “incessant change.” Irving challenges Brown’s model of community, however, by pitting it against Sleepy Hollow: an anachronism that nonetheless persists and flourishes by tenaciously resisting the larger organism. One of those fluid, migratory forces of change against which the town defines and defends itself enters Sleepy Hollow in the gawky frame of Ichabod Crane. Leading a “half itinerant life,” Ichabod has no fi xed abode or social function, decamping from home to home and exchanging his labor as schoolteacher, singing master, babysitter, farmhand, and “travelling gazette”

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for large quantities of food and stories. Ichabod’s massive capacity for consumption indicates a mind and body—much like Edgar Huntly or Clara St. Louis—in fundamental continuity with its surroundings. His variable social functions suggest that, like Mervyn or Carwin, he can be all things to all people. That is to say, he has many characteristics of the mobile, adaptive figure characteristic of Brown’s earlier gothic fiction. Indeed, his understanding of social relations rests on opportunism, exchange, and mobility: he wants to strap Katrina and other “household trumpery” to a wagon, sell the Van Tassel farm, and use the proceeds to purchase “immense tracts of wild land, and shingle palaces in the wilderness.”  Should this fantasy be allowed to play out, however, the tale would transform into something resembling a captivity narrative, in which a rapacious outsider threatens to sever the ties of paternal relation from which a female derives her cultural value by dragging her into the “wilderness.” Why, we might reasonably ask, has the kind of novelistic protagonist that thrived in Brown’s fiction become a ridiculous, even phobic force in Irving’s hands? Let us think of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” in much the same terms as Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” (1831) or “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844), or Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee (1836), to name just a few prominent examples. Each offers a literary landscape populated by small social units whose cultural practices are inscrutable to the uninitiated. Viewed from this perspective, these fictional works address the challenge of cross-cultural understanding for a national community that thinks of itself as a cluster of disparate and discrete parts, or what in 1822 James Fennimore Cooper called a “multitude of local peculiarities.”  A collection of different local cultures is evidently an altogether different political formation from Brown’s transatlantic community or Locke’s contractual state. Thus “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” issues a challenge to Brown’s model of circulation on the grounds that it cannot account for competing interpretative strategies among local and culturally distinct communities. To fathom the implications of this difference for the American political imagination, let me begin by positing that each discrete community has its own set of cultural practices and interpretative strategies. Each community, moreover, regards its own distinctive cultural codes as normative in relation to other groups. Irving’s mock-gothic tale demonstrates these principles by staging a collision between two such communities. In this milieu, the same object means different things to different people: fed by an appetite for ghost

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stories, Ichabod sees a headless horseman, whereas the local townspeople, accustomed to the antics of Brom Bones, see a prankster wielding a pumpkin. Each local group, Irving suggests, has its own predefined interpretative system, which renders the visible world legible in terms largely specific to that system. Ichabod cannot penetrate the cultural codes of Sleepy Hollow because he brings his own interpretative strategies to bear on that community, unaware of the discrepancy between theirs and his own. His inflated confidence in his own erudition leads him to overestimate his eligibility as a husband, discounting the possibility that Katrina’s understanding of local courtship customs—which she exploits to negotiate her own match—might have any bearing on his success as a suitor. Yet for Ichabod to marry Katrina would, in effect, destroy the marriage rules that keep this community intact. A closed local group, then, preserves its culture by refusing admission to those uninitiated into the rules governing the community. Irving, like Poe and Hawthorne, renders such an opaque local world in terms of the gothic: much like the heroine of a gothic romance, Ichabod is flooded with information and emotions that destroy his ability to distinguish fact from fiction because they originate in stories and objects. The rules organizing this sphere therefore appear as the malevolent manifestations of an invisible, hence supernatural, power. As I see it, a tale like “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” poses a challenge to the popular metaphysic known as “common sense,” which, by the 1820s, had come to dominate American educational and ecclesiastical institutions. As intellectual and philosophical historians have established, common sense achieved its “tenacious hold” on American intellectual life because it popularized the democratic and nationalizing fantasy that all men share a common set of convictions about material and moral reality. It produced, in other words, what I. Woodbridge Riley calls “many men of one mind.”  Yet the very model of perception that assumes universal standards— a sense in common— assumes that one way of making sense of the world can account for all human experience. As we have seen, such an assumption fails spectacularly in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Indeed, Ichabod’s experiences beg the following question: how can cultures negotiate their differences when each group can only account for those differences in its own terms? By way of an answer, this chapter turns to the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Montgomery Bird’s novel of metempsychosis, Sheppard Lee, to argue that gothic works of the 1830s and 1840s resolve this problem by radically reconfiguring the relationship between the perceiving mind and the

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sensory world of objects. Enlightenment models of humanity continue to shape the contours of this contested psychological terrain. I show how Poe draws on Lockean reason to fashion a new form of common sense that accounts for information otherwise hidden to those uninitiated into the cultural practices at its source. Coming at the same problem from a different perspective, Bird draws on Hume to imagine the mind as a bundle of contiguous ideas that form and abandon conjunctions in constantly shifting patterns. These ideas account for Lee’s ability to move between different cultural milieus, as he acquires and relinquishes the traits characteristic of that group. In this way, Bird and Poe imagine contradictory models of the human mind that are nonetheless equally capable of negotiating cultural difference. To make this case, let me begin by rehearsing some of the components of “common sense.” As Locke originally imagined it, the empirical subject acquires knowledge of the world through repeated sensory encounters that he calls “experience.” Processed through the faculty of reflection, these sensations accrue as an archive of ideas that mirrors the order of the external world. As sensory information accumulates, the individual not only comes to know the world of objects but also builds a more extensive and reliable classification system that he brings to new experiences. In An Inquiry into the Human Mind (1762), Thomas Reid calls this classification system the “general rules” of common sense. Following Locke, Reid tells us that “sensation” and “reflection” provide “all the materials about which the human understanding is, or can be, employed.” Such materials provide the indisputable “maxims of common sense”: “Every human creature,” Reid argues, will “trace particular facts and observations to general rules, and to apply such general rules to account for other effects.”  Reid counters the skeptical assertion that reason cannot definitively prove the existence of an external world by arguing that common sense provides an intuitive conviction of the connection between our sensations and a material reality. It does so by positing a stable set of normative responses to objective phenomena; as Princeton president and Common Sense philosopher James McCosh rephrases it in 1887, “Our intuitive convictions carry with them their own evidence and authority. . . . By the help of these fundamental laws of belief, with their criteria of self-evidence, necessity, and universality, we can stand up for the trustworthiness of the senses.”  Reid draws explicitly on Locke’s notion of “an unextended and indivisible subject” to argue that “men of all nations, and in all ages of the world” who fit the definition of such an individual will adhere to “the testimony of common sense.”  To think otherwise is “metaphysical lunacy.” 

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As long as we assume that all men in possession of common sense will interpret objective phenomena in roughly the same way, this model of the mind holds up. But the minute a fictional work relocates an individual into a milieu comprising different communities, each with its own cultural practices, the limitations of the British model become quite apparent. As American fiction writers were quick to recognize, the proposition that reason applied to the objective world can produce a presumptively common set of ideas rests on the assumption that common sense can provide a universally accurate description of the physical world in the first place. What works in a system of Old World social hierarchies—that all rational men, by definition landowners, are constituted in roughly the same way and see roughly the same reality through a sense they share in common—becomes a highly contested fantasy on American soil. There can be no “common” sense when men of varying cultures share little in common in the first place and will necessarily see different realities mediated by their own distinct cultural practices.

The Crime of Common Sense In “The Purloined Letter” (1844), Dupin offers a critique of “mathematical reason” to make precisely this point: “The great error lies in supposing that even the truths of what is called pure algebra, are abstract or general truths. And this error is so egregious that I am confounded at the universality with which it has been received. Mathematical axioms are not axioms of general truth. . . . There are numerous other mathematical truths which are truths only within the limits of relation.”  Using the language of mathematics, Poe exposes a fundamental problem in any empirical system based on “observation upon form and quantity” that claims to produce “abstract or general truths.”  Such truths, Poe points out, only hold “within the limits of relation”; that is, they offer conclusions that only hold true within a delimited and closed set of terms. The notion of “abstract or general truth” is always and entirely dependent on the set of assumptions that one brings to the primary act of observation. This is, as Dupin well knows, the Prefect’s mistake. The Prefect assumes that his own system of interpretation—that is, what it means for an object to be “hidden”—is universally applicable, without realizing that his sense of the typical or normal is simply one cultural code in a diversified world. To assume that one’s own system of interpretation is universally

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applicable, in other words, inevitably leads to a dangerous misreading of the true situation. In “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), Poe exposes the limits of a conventional reason that assumes it can account for the whole world. Observing a crowd of people flowing past his window, the narrator divides its members into generic categories based on their social function: merchants, noblemen, pickpockets, prostitutes, and so on. Preestablished ideas determine how he classifies these sensations. He recognizes the “tribe of clerks,” as he puts it, because “the manner of these persons seemed to me an exact facsimile of what had been the perfection of bon ton about twelve or eighteen months before.”  Until the illegible stranger appears in its midst, the crowd can be read as the sum of its discrete parts. There is nothing to challenge the narrator’s categories. The appearance of the stranger who defies such classification stages a problem latent in Locke’s model of reason. When an individual draws ideas from sensations, his faculty of reflection abstracts an essence from sensations, and that abstraction stands for the properties of the thing itself. Put another way, reflection converts material phenomena into generalized types. Gillian Brown explains this particular aspect of Locke’s model: “As persons live, they regularly refer their experience to known standards. They relate their actions or the phenomena that they encounter to familiar rules of order, such as time, space, causality, and proportion. By reference to these rules, people identify and name objects and experiences.”  Put differently, we infer types from the phenomena we encounter and bring those types to bear on new experiences. By these means, however, we are unlikely to notice information that lies outside that system of classification. Either the entire universe must fall within these categories or we have mistaken our cultural classification system for the entire world. In either event, we come to view the world much as we expect to see it because sensory information enters the mind in the shape of received notions. These notions, then, and not the world itself, constitute everyday experience. The tale’s narrator dramatizes the risks and potential advantages of breaking one’s reliance on the already seen. This narrator does not view the crowd in an everyday, commonsense state of mind: “I found myself in one of those happy moods . . . of the keenest appetency, when the film from the mental vision departs . . . and the intellect, electrified, surpasses greatly its every-day condition.”  With heightened sensibility comes recognition of the limits of

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habitual perception; he is keen for an epistemological adventure. Where common sense wants to reduce the crowd to familiar types, this unusual state of mind renders him keenly sensitive to anything that resists those categories, anything that is out of place. Embodying nothing if not such out-ofplaceness, a stranger in the crowd supplies an additional element that cannot be incorporated into the world according to common sense: “[I viewed] a countenance which at once arrested and absorbed my whole attention, on account of the absolute idiosyncracy of its expression. Any thing remotely resembling that expression I had never seen before . . . there arose confusedly and paradoxically within my mind, the ideas of vast mental power, of caution, of penuriousness, of avarice, of coolness, of malice, of blood-thirstiness, of triumph, of merriment, of excessive terror, of intense— of supreme despair.”  As a piece of information that fits into none of the narrator’s functional categories, the stranger is a form of excess for which no preexisting “idea” can account. Unable to convert sensory information into everyday experience, the narrator can only respond with a string of contradictory signifiers that flail for a referent. He ends with the language of the gothic—that of “excessive terror” and “supreme despair”—to signal that this excess has shattered the mimetic illusion, as it dislodges the set of ideas conventionally equated with reason from the world those ideas are designed to mirror. The stranger’s meaning, quite literally, keeps retreating from the narrator, who pursues the stranger around the streets of London in a vain attempt to patch the hole in his classification system. For lack of a function, the narrator assigns a dysfunction to the one thing that cannot be explained by a system that thinks only in terms of types. To preserve his “reason,” he translates the stranger’s illegibility into a negative category when he calls him “the type and genius of deep crime.” We do catch a glimpse of “a diamond and of a dagger” in the stranger’s cloak by way of clues to some malevolent act, but neither the origin nor the function of these objects is ever explained; they are legible only as signs of the stranger’s illegibility. His crime, we must conclude, is not an assault on the mores of respectability so much as a refusal to fit into normative categories that would allow us to judge him. In “The Man of the Crowd,” we might think of “crime” as a metaphor for categories of thought that exceed the limits of conventional reason. Indeed, a brief look at the Memoirs of the Notorious Stephen Burroughs of New Hampshire (1798, 1804) confirms that earlier American authors had likewise used “crime” as a means of testing a model of perception that assumes every-

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day experience can account for the whole world. On trial for his impersonation of a minister, New England’s most infamous career criminal puts the problem in these terms: “I know [people are] not capable of judging upon the matter, with any propriety, because they ever will and ever must remain ignorant of the particular causes which brought these events into existence. They understand the matter in the gross, that I have preached under a fictitious name and character, and consequently have aroused many ideas in the minds of the people not founded in fact. Therefore, they conclude from this general view, the whole to be grounded in wrong. The name imposter, is therefore easily attached to my character.”  In this instance, Burroughs describes a process of thought that, much like Poe’s narrator, only thinks in terms of types. He complains that the jury has allowed preconceived and generalized categories of thought—the “matter in the gross” or the “general view”—to stand for reality. Arguing in his own defense, Burroughs ironically insists that he performed the offices of a minister extremely well, despite his lack of formal qualifications, and that in doing so he did not break any statute under the law. Thus he claims that the category of “imposter” does not describe Burroughs himself but the type of wicked man who would imitate a minister for self-serving ends. We might think of Burroughs’s bad reputation as a metonym that mirrors the operations of Reid’s common sense: the people have formed an idea associated with Burroughs, extrapolated from his crimes, that both stands for and exceeds its object. Accused of having “aroused many ideas in the minds of the people not founded in fact,” Burroughs is guilty of much the same “crime” as the man of the crowd, namely, having destroyed the realist fantasy that an external world exists prior and in mimetic relation to language. He is, in short, a social element that cannot fit into normative constructed categories (such as “imposter”) on which common sense relies. His crime, as he presents the case, is not so much the fraudulent impersonation of a religious leader as the “violations of all rules of order”—that is, for being a form of excess that lies beyond ordinary experience.

Uncommon Sense In both Burroughs’s Memoirs and Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd,” crime is the term given to sensory information that exposes the limits of a rationality that rests on traditional categories of everyday life and the causes that observe certain norms for interaction among those categories. Crime pitches an object or

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a person out of its assigned place in a classificatory system so that we cannot identify it for what it is, infer a cause, or anticipate a result. To understand such information, we need an interpretative strategy that can see objects independent of the categories of everyday life—a strategy, in other words, that can go one step further than the narrator’s ability in “The Man of the Crowd” to simply identify that which lies outside his field of knowledge. Such a way of reading would open up a space in which new information can emerge. It should come as no surprise that Poe describes such a space as “[lying] frequently among recesses of thought altogether inaccessible to the ordinary understanding.”  Poe lays the groundwork for this way of reading in the anecdote of “odds and evens” in “The Purloined Letter.” As Dupin tells it, a schoolboy unfailingly wins his friends’ marbles through “mere observation and admeasurement of the astuteness of his opponents.”  The boy, that is to say, does not assume that his opponents think as he does. Knowing that each player may, in all probability, begin from a different set of assumptions about the game of marbles, he knows that different interpretative strategies rather than varying skills at marbles are in play. The logic organizing the game of marbles operates on a larger narrative scale in the triangular collision between the competing epistemologies of the Prefect, the Minister, and Dupin. As Dupin observes, the Parisian police fail to find the letter, purloined by the Minister, because “they have no variation of principle in their investigations. . . . they extend or exaggerate their old modes of practice without touching on their principles. . . . [The Prefect of Police] has taken it for granted that all men proceed to conceal a letter,—not exactly in a gimlet-hole bored in a chair-leg—but, at least, in some out-of-theway hole or corner suggested by the same tenor of thought which would urge a man to secrete a letter in a gimlet-hole bored in a chair-leg.” Poe clearly identifies the police with a form of reason that never questions whether ideas based on past sensory encounters can explain a situation explicitly designed to exploit those expectations. This failure to locate the letter is the result of having “one set of notions regarding human ingenuity” based on the “presumable and presumed.” Like the narrator of “The Man of the Crowd” or the jury in the Memoirs of Stephen Burroughs, the Prefect sees what he expects to see. He expects the letter to be hidden, so he searches for a hiding place where such an object might be concealed. In his “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’ ” Lacan describes the Prefect’s way of thinking as “the realist’s imbecility, which does not pause to observe that nothing, however deep in the bowels of

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the earth a hand may seek to ensconce it, will ever be hidden there, since another hand can always retrieve it, and that what is hidden is never but what is missing from its place.”  As Lacan reminds us at another point in the “Seminar,” purloined does not mean stolen so much as the deviation of an object from its intended course. In this sense, the term purloined has much in common with the definition of crime we encountered in “The Man of the Crowd” and the Memoirs, where crime was a metaphor for information that, in Lacan’s words, goes “missing from its place.” Dupin’s intellectual mastery over both the Prefect and the Minister stages, in narrative form, Poe’s appropriation of Lockean common sense. Like the narrator of “The Man of the Crowd,” Dupin recognizes that crime recodes sensory information in a way that makes it inaccessible to interpretative strategies that rely on a sense of the ordinary. In contrast to that narrator, however, he also knows how to make sense of that information: “It is by these deviations from the plane of the ordinary, that reason feels its way, if at all, in the search for the true. In investigations such as we are now pursuing, it should not be so much asked ‘what has occurred,’ as ‘what has occurred that has never occurred before.’ ”  The power of this statement (which Poe repeats almost verbatim in his 1842 tale “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt”) lies in the way it deftly revises the Enlightenment model of reason. For Dupin, reason is only rational when it confronts and deals with what lies beyond ordinary experience or that which “has never occurred before.” Poe does not dispute that experience provides the means of measuring future encounters. Dupin admits that he knows the Minister well—they have tangled before— and this knowledge proves crucial in solving the case because it tells him precisely what expectations others will bring to the game, expectations corresponding to what we mean by common sense. By taking the intellectual measure of both the police and the Minister, Dupin assesses not only what they consider “ordinary” (a word Poe uses nine times over the course of the tale) but also what exceeds it. In contrast to the boy who wins at marbles, the Minister knows but one way of defeating the Prefect’s expectations, and that is to invert those expectations by hiding the letter in plain sight. Where the Prefect looks for resemblance between the original letter and the purloined letter, Dupin seizes on differences between the two as the important information— differences that announce themselves as the properties of a letter in disguise: “It was, to all appearance, radically different from the one of which the Prefect had read us so minute a description . . . the radicalness of these differences; the dirt; the

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soiled and torn condition of the paper, so inconsistent with the true methodical habits of [the Minister].”  Understanding both the ordinary and then its inversion, Dupin sees the situation from outside the black box of everyday reason with the uncommon sense of the victorious marble player. To use Lacan’s phrase, Dupin looks for that which is “missing from its place”— a letter that, by its very deviation in appearance from what one would expect of the Prefect and the Minister, sticks out like a sore thumb. It is from such a vantage point that readers can see otherwise inexplicable phenomena—a missing letter or a headless horseman, for example—as the products, not of magical thinking, but of competing cultural logics. By divorcing sensory phenomena from their preconceived categories, Dupin’s uncommon sense offers a way of acquiring information under conditions of cultural relativism. This reading, I believe, accounts for the peculiar status of objects in the Dupin tales, where Poe removes all abstract qualities from things and designates them as wholly substantive. The purloined letter, for example, begins its itinerary as something much like a gothic object— similar to the stranger in the crowd or the headless horseman—in that its excessive meaning always exceeds its materiality. As an object, the letter itself may have no intrinsic value, but its never-revealed content always retains the power to overturn the established order of things by toppling the government. Poe inverts this relationship at the end of the tale by having Dupin substitute his own facsimile letter to decoy the unsuspecting Minister. The original now safely retrieved, the forgery spells the Minister’s downfall because it is not the object it appears (to him) to be: “Being unaware that the letter is not in his possession, he will proceed with his exactions as if it was. Thus he will inevitably commit himself, at once, to his political destruction.” Unlike the original, the facsimile’s power resides wholly in its materiality; its content has no power to change the physical world because it merely reveals to the Minister the identity of his nemesis. By evacuating all intrinsic meaning from the letter, Poe shifts our focus to the object’s surface— a reversal that Dupin anticipates at the beginning of “The Purloined Letter” when he announces that the mystery’s solution will be altogether “plain” and “self-evident.”  This surface announces an object out of place, put there by the Minister and thus indicative of his crime. The same principle is at work in “The Murders of the Rue Morgue” (1841), where Dupin solves the murders on the basis of their “outré” character, a word whose etymology points us toward outer or external qualities. The very absence of any identifiable cultural pattern tells Dupin that the culprit must be an

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animal: “In regard to the shrill voice, the peculiarity is . . . each [witness] spoke of it as that of a foreigner. . . . No words—no sounds resembling words—were by any witness mentioned as distinguishable.”  By casting the unidentified culprit as a “foreigner,” Poe evokes a figure that eludes cultural codification because it is always and already at odds with— or outside—the cultural milieu it enters. He draws on the racist tropes of slavery to underscore the objective status of the orangutan: stolen from its native country and disciplined by whipping, it merely “mimics” civilized human behavior—in this case, shaving—before being sold as a commodity. Poe’s insistence on the ape’s out-of-placeness and strict materiality in the absence of any cultural codification makes it, like Dupin’s facsimile, an object whose meaning is entirely extrinsic. It therefore makes sense that Dupin is skeptical of any interpretative strategy that relies on “undue profundity”: “There is such a thing as being too profound. Truth is not always in a well. In fact, as regards the more important knowledge, I do believe that she is invariably superficial.”  The facsimile letter and the orangutan are both “superficial” objects because their materiality outstrips the idea previously attached to them. Indeed, the “undue profundity” of the police leads to disastrous consequences: they arrest the wrong man for the Rue Morgue murders, the letter nearly brings down the monarchy, and Marie Rogêt’s killer almost gets away scot-free. In the case of the Rue Morgue murders, their “apparent insolubility” presents a troubling breach in the Parisian police’s understanding of crime, and they try to fill that breach by creating a “motive” and a human culprit when neither exist. To put it another way, the police exhibit a tendency to assign a deeper meaning where none is called for, a tendency that Poe literalizes in “The Purloined Letter” as the Prefect’s microscopic probing of chair legs and book covers. That the police repeatedly fail where Dupin succeeds shows us that reading “superficially” is no easy matter when one is habitually bound by one’s own assumptions.

The Gothic as Hyperrationality From Dupin to the hyperacute narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), or Roderick Usher to the morbidly obsessed Egaeus in “Berenice” (1835), Poe’s protagonists succeed in becoming protagonists to the extent that they can move beyond common sense to seize on the differences that are the signs of the new or the not-yet-coded. While it is more conventional to read the detective

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and gothic stories as two distinct if not wholly separate narrative genres, I believe they belong to the same cultural field because both forms adapt “ordinary” reason for a culture of discrete localities. In doing so, Poe does not abandon but appropriates Locke. Indeed, I want to argue next that uncommon sense maintains the self-enclosed individual— even more so than conventional Lockean reason—in the face of new circumstances that defy everyday expectations. In turning to “The Fall of the House of Usher,” I show how Poe defends the category of the individual against an altogether different model of cognition deeply hostile to Enlightenment notions of autonomy, continuity, and reason. This other model of humanity has much in common with the porous social body we encountered in Brockden Brown’s novels: this individual is one, according to Christopher Looby, of “extreme personal discontinuity and plurality,” where “one fiction of identity disassembles or decomposes and a new set of habits, propensities, sensations, and so forth is reassembled, by virtue of a new fiction or imaginary principle of union, into a person.”  Counterintuitively, it is the narrator rather than the doomed protagonist, Roderick Usher, who embodies this anti-Lockean epistemology. The house of Usher is precisely the kind of closed, local domain that defies what elsewhere passes as common sense. A mysterious principle has apparently robbed objects—both natural and cultural— of their conventional meanings: “What was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back on the unsatisfactory conclusion, that . . . there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us.”  In this environment, everyday objects have formed new “combinations” that bear no resemblance to the narrator’s own categories of knowledge, and this mobility has created a breach, or “mystery,” that defies his interpretative ability. Like the narrator of “The Man of the Crowd,” he is “forced to fall back” on “unsatisfactory”—that is, preestablished— categories of thought to account for that which lies outside his understanding. By implicitly including the reader in his incomprehension (“this power lies in among considerations beyond our depth”), the narrator normalizes his own interpretative strategy by making us partners in his bafflement. In that the narrator personifies common sense as the Lockean tradition would have it, it should come as no surprise that his experience does not provide a reliable guide to understanding the place. This is crucial to Poe’s creation of a gothic effect: “While the objects

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around me . . . were but matters to which . . . I had been accustomed to from my infancy—while I hesitated not to acknowledge how familiar was all this—I still wondered to find how unfamiliar were the fancies which ordinary images were stirring up.”  Through time and repetition, the narrator has come to attach certain “accustomed” ideas to such everyday, “familiar” objects. To put this in strictly Lockean terms, this individual has compiled an archive of ideas from sensory phenomena, and this archive has evidently served him well. In both examples cited above, once familiar surroundings now inspire “fancies,” implying that things here are ideas that spring from ideas (as opposed to material objects) and invoke traditional categories. We might say they are ghosts of themselves. To expose the limits of a mind that relies on everyday expectations, Poe chooses what Dupin would call the most “outré” of scenarios: the live burial of a friend’s sister. By putting Madeline into the grave prematurely, Roderick removes her from her assigned place in the household. Thus out of place, she assumes the power of a purloined letter to overturn the established order of things. Important here is the contrast between the reactions of Usher and his narrator-friend to barely perceptible changes that follow Madeline’s funeral. The narrator observes that “[Roderick’s] ordinary manner had vanished. His ordinary occupations were neglected or forgotten . . . a tremulous quaver, as if of extreme terror, habitually characterized his utterance. There were times, indeed, when I thought his unceasingly agitated mind was laboring with some oppressive secret, to divulge which he struggled for the necessary courage. At times, again, I was obliged to resolve all into the mere inexplicable vagaries of madness, for I beheld him gazing upon vacancy for long hours, in an attitude of the profoundest attention, as if listening to some inexplicable sound.”  As the conventional way of putting the dead to rest, the funeral assures the narrator that Madeline Usher is indeed an inert object devoid of volition. As the repeated use of the term ordinary indicates, the narrator continues to measure Usher’s increased agitation against his own normative perception. In this case, his sense of the “ordinary” only perceives a change in Roderick’s everyday occupations or function in the world. Rather than doubt the evidence of his common sense, which assures him that Madeline was indeed laid to rest, the narrator deems Roderick’s extreme anxiety groundless and classifies his friend “mad” for believing in things with no apparent material origin and cause. In this case, “madness” serves the same purpose as “crime” in the stories previously discussed— as a placeholder for categorical dysfunction that preserves the everyday order of things and behavior.

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While the irony of this scene lies in the fact that Roderick has realized his mistake long before the narrator catches on, its importance lies in the way it introduces something much like Dupin’s hyperrationality into the language of the gothic. What the narrator diagnoses as “madness” is actually Usher’s attempt to reconcile cause and effect; he suspects he has made a disastrous mistake and listens intently for sounds from the crypt of his still-living sister. Thus the narrator’s commonsense explanation of “madness” is itself a fiction without material grounding. Roderick hears the sounds of a sister sealed prematurely in the tomb, a truth well beyond the narrator’s experience. In this respect, the narrator fulfills his own definition of madness by preferring groundless fiction to material phenomena that simply defy common sense. This is nowhere more obvious than in the climactic scene of the tale. Hearing the sound of Madeline clawing her way out of the crypt, the narrator encrypts those sounds in the medieval romance he is reading and uses fiction to displace the truth closing in on his friend: “There could be no doubt whatever that, in this instance, I did actually hear . . . a low and apparently distant, but harsh, and protracted, and most unusual screaming or grating sound—the exact counterpart of what my fancy had already conjured up for the dragon’s unnatural shriek as described by the romancer.”  So dependent is he for his very being— or mind— on his commonsensical categories that he would rather take refuge in the fanciful world of romance than adapt common sense to unexpected forms of experience. Roderick, on the other hand, attends closely to the sensations—in this case, audible information—that do derive from the object world yet defy the strictures of everyday expectation. His response to the return of the dead is to emphasize the material nature of these events: “Not hear it?—yes, I hear it, and have heard it. Long—long—long—many minutes, many hours, many days, have I heard it. . . . We have put her living in the tomb! Said I not that my senses were acute? I now tell you that I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin. I heard them—many, many days ago.”  Everyday expectations tell us that a body that has been ceremonially laid to rest should not be making such a racket. But Roderick knows from experience that Madeline suffers from a wasting illness, the chief symptoms of which are the death-like seizures of catalepsy. The heir to the decrepit house of Usher may seem as mad as a hatter—Poe certainly invites us to see him that way—but rather than inhabit a delusion, he can, like Poe’s hyperrational detective hero, make sense of the excessive information that renders his world fundamentally unintelligible to the outsider. Indeed, the similarity between Poe’s descriptions

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of the two men is striking. Dupin combines a “wild fervor” and “vivid freshness of the imagination” with a “frigid and abstract manner,” the result, we are told, of “an excited or perhaps diseased imagination.” Similarly, Usher is both “vivid and sullen,” “vary[ing] rapidly from tremulous indecision . . . to the energetic concision . . . of intense excitement.” Dupin’s hyperrationality comes to us as more than a little mad, his “diseased intelligence” resembling Usher’s “excessive ner vous agitation.”  Poe presents both men in the language of madness, in other words, because their form of reason contests the common definition. While Usher remains, for all intents and purposes, the same continuous self from the beginning of the story to its end, the narrator of “Usher” undergoes a significant change in constitution to account for the same events. If to abandon the archive of everyday experience we call common sense is to abandon one’s reason, then in Lockean terms, abandoning common sense amounts to abandoning one’s self. On this basis, we can say that the narrator becomes someone else entirely when he ceases to believe that his sensations originate in material things and instead embraces as truth what he knows to be a fiction. Lest we miss the point, the narrator admits to have been “infected” by Usher’s terror, which is the same as relinquishing self-enclosure for the discontinuous, porous form of subjectivity that we encountered in Chapters 1 and 2. In exposing Roderick and the narrator to the same set of extraordinary events, Poe defends the category of the individual against that altogether different model of cognition deeply hostile to Enlightenment notions of autonomy, continuity, and reason. With the narrator’s flight from the house of Usher, this tale suggests that common sense not only must but will survive what has become the doomed model of social relations authorized by Old World bloodline and inheritance. Leaving the House of Usher restores the narrator to himself: “From that chamber, and from that mansion, I fled aghast.” In the detective stories, Poe appears to question whether common sense is indeed feasible in a nation of discrete kingroups whose cultural norms— of reason versus madness, even life as opposed to death—are entirely relative. In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” by contrast, Poe suggests that common sense is absolutely necessary for the inhabitants of such a world, because the alternative threatens individual autonomy. To make this point, Poe renders Roderick susceptible to the very permeability that temporarily robbed the narrator of his reason. With his literal collapse under the weight of Madeline, who, teetering at the door of his chamber, “fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother,” we also witness the figurative collapse

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of Roderick’s autonomy. Thus Poe’s gothic tale challenges the practicality of Dupin’s uncommon sense outside a closed local system and confines that model of mind to an aesthetic framework. The price of a higher form of reason under conditions of cultural diversity appears to be a specific form of alienation— an inability to feel at home in a nation of many different local or regional cultures.

Contesting the American Mind This problematic places Poe’s fiction squarely at the center of a much larger antebellum literary debate over the model of psychology best suited to a nation of culturally discrete regions and populations. Poe’s solution to this challenge is to reinvent and defend the one-mind-per-body rule of modern subjectivity against an individual who, like Arthur Mervyn, adapts to radically new cultural environments by becoming what amounts to another person. In his 1836 review in the Southern Literary Messenger of Robert Montgomery Bird’s novel Sheppard Lee, Poe transforms the contest over the definition of human character into the basis of a national literary tradition. Poe must have considered himself peculiarly qualified to review Bird’s social and metaphysical satire, which draws on the same metaphor of metempsychosis that he put to work in “Metzengerstein” (1832), “Morella” (1835), and, most famously, “Ligeia” (1838). Sheppard Lee, Poe tells his readers, is “an original in American Belles Lettres” and therefore augurs well for “our future literary prospects.” Otherwise laudatory in his praise for the novel, Poe nonetheless takes issue with Bird’s discontinuous protagonist, who “very awkwardly, partially loses, and partially does not lose, his identity at each transmigration.”  Unlike Poe’s reanimated characters, Sheppard Lee retains very little of his original or stolen identities whenever he adopts a new avatar. Until recently, Poe’s review of Sheppard Lee has most often been cited as evidence of Poe’s pro-slavery sentiments or as an insight into his theory of the novel. I would prefer to consider how this contest over metempsychosis tells us exactly where Poe and Bird diverge in their notions of the mind and the grounds on which character rests. Sheppard Lee would have been of greater “interest,” Poe argues, had Bird chosen “a character unchanging,” that is, a bounded consciousness with a continuous and secure sense of self that is transferred, whole and entire, into another body. This is clearly the model of character that Poe had in mind for “Morella,” in which the spirit of the narrator’s dead wife infuses

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the body of his daughter: “That identity which is termed personal, Mr. Locke, I think, truly defines to consist in the sameness of a rational being. And since by person we understand an intelligent essence having reason, and since there is a consciousness which always accompanies thinking, it is this which makes us all too be that which we call ourselves—thereby distinguishing us from other beings that think, and giving us our personal identity.”  Much like “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Morella” is indebted to the idea of a self-enclosed, autonomous rational subject—that is to say, a “character unchanging” or “the sameness of a rational being.” Indeed, from “Ligeia” to “The Gold Bug” (1843) and “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846), the gothic tropes we encounter in Poe’s fiction—metempsychosis, madness, live burial, and so forth— are the aesthetic by-products of a model of psychology in which the mind is wholly enclosed within a body that separates it from the physical world. Bird, by way of contrast, has more in common with Charles Brockden Brown in that he construes the mind as culturally adaptive, free to move between different environments, and biologically continuous with other bodies. To show how Poe’s Enlightenment model of identity is an exception among antebellum gothic works, let us consider Bird’s Sheppard Lee more closely. Set in Jacksonian America against the backdrop of rampant political factionalism, abolition debates, class warfare, and scientific and medical quackery, Sheppard Lee is a social satire in which the eponymous protagonist and narrator discovers in himself the ability to transfer his spirit in the bodies of the recently deceased, reanimating their frames and assuming their identities. For a novel clearly preoccupied with literalizing the idea of social mobility and entrapment, it is striking that Sheppard Lee opens with the kind of admission that characteristically sets the events of a slave narrative in motion: “I was born somewhere toward the close of the last century,—but, the registerleaf having been torn from the family Bible, and no one remaining can give me information on the point, I am not certain of the exact year,—in the state of New Jersey, in one of the oldest counties that border upon the Delaware river.” Conventionally, the kind of existential claim asserted in the phrase “I was born” legitimates the slave as the narrative’s source of truth and meaning (Saidiya Hartman calls it the “original generative act” in the life of the slave). Much like Frederick Douglass, who also begins his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) lamenting the lack of “any authentic record” testifying to his origin, Lee knows the location but not the year of his birth.

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Bird is clearly making an ironic claim for the autobiographical authenticity of his novel; this is confirmed by Sheppard Lee’s subtitle, Written by Himself (a phrase frequently appended to the titles of slave narratives). More generally, his decision to draw a rhetorical connection between his novel and the slave narrative places center stage the problems of property, self-ownership, and origin. It is for this reason, I suspect, that Bird begins Sheppard Lee by systemically stripping his protagonist—who possesses little capacity for either physical or mental labor— of all material property. Following abortive ventures in horticulture, horseracing, politicking, and marriage, Lee loses his father’s farm and all of his family’s fortune. Like Charles Brockden Brown, who begins Arthur Mervyn by stripping his protagonist of all possessions, right down to his shoes, Bird deprives Lee of the very foundations on which the development of rational consciousness depends. As in Brown’s novel, this opens up a space of possibility in which an alternative model of the mind, built in terms other than property-in-oneself, can emerge. Whereas Charles Brockden Brown imagined human character as a function of external forces (contagion, ventriloquism, etc.) acting on the body to change the constitution of the individual in accordance with the needs of the larger social group, Bird’s model of consciousness is shaped by physiology, so that the body constitutes and controls the mind: “I do verily believe that much of the evil and good of man’s nature arises from causes and influences purely physical. . . . Strong minds may be indeed operated upon without regard to bodily bias, and rendered independent of it; but ordinary spirits lie in their bodies like water in sponges, diff used through every part, affected by the part’s affections, changed with its changes, and so intimately united with the fleshy matrix, that the mere cutting off of a leg, as I believe, will, in some cases, leave the spirit limping for life.”  Lee’s acknowledgment that “strong minds” can ignore somatic imperatives suggests something like the individual imagined by Locke and defended by Poe, insofar as the “strong” mind controls the body and not the other way around. For Bird, this is nonetheless an exceptional mind-body relationship in comparison to that enjoyed by “ordinary spirits.” In this alternative formulation, the seat of consciousness is located in the body, which exerts its influence over a passive mind. Each new incarnation, Lee tells us, “takes its shape from the mould it occupie[s].” As a “mould” or “sponge,” the body is imagined as absorbent—an open form that gives shape to the energies poured into it. As a “host” or “tenement,” moreover, it is also imagined as a strictly temporary dwelling, able to relinquish the very energies it shapes. Accordingly, the mind becomes an itinerant tenant

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capable of projecting beyond the confines of its body to take on an entirely new self: “The spirit of Sheppard Lee was widely different from those of John H. Higginson and I.D. Dawkins, as, I think, the reader must have already seen; and yet, no sooner had it entered the bodies of these two individuals, than the distinction was almost altogether lost. Certain it is, that in stepping into each, I found myself invested with new feelings, passions, and propensities—as it were, with a new mind—and retaining so little of my original character, that I was perhaps only a little better able to judge and reason on the actions performed in my new body, without being able to avoid them, even when sensible of their absurdity.”  It is striking that the ability to “judge and reason” does not make the man; rather, Lee’s new “character” is constituted by unique and innate “propensities” that reveal themselves as unavoidable “actions” of the body. The rational faculties do not transfer whole and entire with each transformation, nor does experience acquired in one body inform the mind in the next. Poe’s dissatisfaction with Bird’s version of metempsychosis therefore makes perfect sense because his ideal rational individual depends on exactly the kind of continuous, simple identity that Bird throws into doubt. Bird’s theory of physiological determinism is arguably part of a larger sea change in antebellum American thought yielding what Ezra Tawil identifies as the new discourse of “racial biology,” where the “biological inheritance of somatic traits” accounts for difference between types of bodies. The episode in which Lee comes to occupy the body of Tom, a contented slave, undoubtedly draws on the racist stereotype of the black man lacking in temporal consciousness: I forgot that I had once been a freeman, or, to speak more strictly, I did not remember it, the act of remembering involving an effort of mind which it did not comport with my new habits of laziness and indifference to make, though perhaps I might have done so, had I chosen. . . . Perhaps this defect of memory will account for my being satisfied with my new condition. I had no recollection of the sweets of liberty to compare and contrast with the disgusts of servitude. Perhaps my mind was stupefied— sunk beneath the ordinary level of the human understanding, and therefore incapable of realizing the evils of my condition. . . . The reader may settle the difficulty for himself. The fact that Bird consciously shies away from accounting for Tom’s complacency wholly in terms of race— slavery could just as equally have ruined

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Tom’s mind—tells us that something more is at stake in his model than making personal identity a simple matter of biology. Indeed, the “sponge”like porousness of Bird’s model suggests that the body is still subject to external, environment influences—the very source of difference that racial biology sought to dispel in favor of intrinsic, biological qualities. Christopher Looby accounts for Tom’s ambivalence about the cause of his memory loss as Bird’s impatience with “moralistic complacency” in the face of a “national struggle over slavery.” There might be another explanation, however, if we simply imagine that Bird’s theory of physiology places him in much the same camp as Brown, Irving, and Poe, insofar as it allows him to imagine a way of encountering and negotiating cultural difference. Let me elaborate. Having taken aim at reason and property-in-oneself as the basis of consciousness, Bird draws on David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature and the metaphor of metempsychosis to imagine an individual that opportunistically disinhabits one identity and reassembles itself in another. Hume’s theory of self begins by questioning Locke’s assumption that objects and people are continuous across time and space. That coherence, Hume argues, is nothing but a fiction created by the imagination: “There are some philosophers, who imagine we are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our SELF. . . . I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.” Working with the organizing principles of “association”—resemblance, contiguity, and causality—the imagination combines this loose assemblage of ideas into an illusion of “perfect identity and simplicity.” Where Locke imagines experience as an archive of information produced by sensory encounter, Hume views experience as a set of customary patterns into which impressions and ideas can be arranged. By following these patterns, the imagination runs along a set course, so the fiction of a stable identity becomes the by-product of “habit” or “custom.” We come to associate “flame,” for example, with that “species of sensation we call heat,” for example, only through their “constant conjunction.”  Over time, observing “frequent instances” of this conjunction, we infer flame’s existence from heat and vice versa. We get into the habit, so to speak, of associating one object (or idea) with another, and it is on this basis alone that we accrue a sense of identity of the self or of objects in the world. Bird’s debt to Hume is perhaps most obvious when, after each transformation, Lee’s new avatar gradually regains his mental coherence by reassembling

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his thoughts and recollections according to the “processes of association.”  The language of “association” does indeed invoke a model of consciousness that has no origin or core; rather, it is made up of contiguous ideas that form and abandon conjunctions in constantly shifting patterns. Association creates a fiction that betrays, in Looby’s words, “our natural propensity to posit identity or sameness where it does not truly exist.”  Just as Hume argued that “habit” accounts for our associative processes of thought, so Bird suggests that “habit” (a term he uses more times over the course of the novel than any other in reference to his model of consciousness) determines each of Lee’s characters. Consider, for example, Lee’s first transition from disenfranchised farmer to gentrified merchant: “Although I had acquired along with his body all the peculiarities of feeling, propensity, conversation, and conduct of Squire Higginson, I had not entirely lost those that belonged to Sheppard Lee. In fact, I may be said to have possessed, at that time, two different characters, one of which now governed me, and now the other; though the squire’s, it must be confessed, was greatly predominant. . . . The difficulty was, that I could not immediately shake off my old Sheppard Lee habits, and the influences of these . . . more than the absolute retention of any other native peculiarities, drive me into the inconsistencies of which I was for a short time guilty.”  Bird begins the process of metempsychosis with exactly the case of anti-individualism—two minds in one body—that Locke went out of his way to invalidate in Book II of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. He evokes this gothic scenario, I believe, to draw our attention to Lee’s “habits” as the point of connection between his two identities. Even after making the transition into Higginson’s body, Lee’s original identity continues to run on its rails, so to speak, following a course determined by the established pattern of behavior Bird calls “habit.” Lee’s continued, albeit faint, existence in Higginson’s body is not the continuity of a unified, Lockean self whose “native peculiarities” transfer from one mind to the next; rather, it is a set of customary ideas associated with the being called Lee that continue to reverberate in its new tenement. This term, I am convinced, allows Bird to turn his model of mutable identity into a political model of social relations. Habit accounts for Lee’s ability to move between different cultural milieus, as he acquires and shakes off the traits associated with that group. For instance, this is how Lee (briefly appearing as an omniscient narrator) relates his encounter (as Dawkins) with Dawkins’s attractive and intimidating cousin: “While recording my adventures in the body of Mr. I.D. Dawkins, I feel my old Dawkins habits revived

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so strongly in my feelings, that I cannot avoid giving some of the coloring of his character to the history of his body. I do not presume to say what women should be, or what they should not: in confessing a fear that my cousin Pattie was witty, I only record the horror with which I, while a dandy, in common with all others of the class, regarded any of the sex who were smarter or more sensible than myself.”  We are invited to see Dawkins, like all of Lee’s avatars, as the satirical representative of a certain “class” or cultural type—in this case, the impoverished fop. One of the habits associated with this type, Lee informs us, is the feeling of “horror” on encountering a smart woman. That Lee can still experience this horror long after he has vacated Dawkins’s body is possible because Lee absorbed this particular “coloring of [Dawkins’s] character” when he became part of “the history of his body.” Biological continuity between bodies— a shared “history”— allows the assemblage of associated ideas Bird calls “character,” itself a function of habit, to move between radically different local groups. This model of the mind helps us make sense of Tom’s complacency in the face of enslavement. The key term in his account is “habit”: “laziness and indifference” are the traits Lee has acquired along with Tom’s body, and changing those habits would be tantamount to becoming a new person. Habitual laziness explains Tom’s lack of temporality more than biological determinism or mental stultification by the institution of slavery. Important to my purposes, Tom’s mental inertia bears a strong resemblance to Lee’s description of himself at the beginning of the novel: “My natural disposition was placid and easy,—I believe I may say sluggish. I was not wanting in parts, but had as little energy or activity of mind as ever fell to the share of a Jerseyman.” Despite attending Princeton and inheriting his father’s farm, Lee possesses none of the mental attributes that, according to Enlightenment thought, should accompany landownership and education. His own slave, Jim Jumble, has greater proprietorship over the estate than Lee himself, “planting and harvesting, and even selling what he raised, as if he were the master and owner of all things.”  By figuratively placing Lee in the position of a slave on his own estate (and in the novel’s opening line), Bird makes it clear that Lee lacks anything resembling property-in-himself, despite possessing all the external accoutrements of the Enlightenment subject. With no mind to speak of, Lee cannot claim ownership of his own body as something to which he alone is entitled. Bird literalizes this principle by subjecting Lee’s corpse to competing claims of proprietorship: an itinerant German doctor opportunistically snatches it, embalms it, takes it on a profitable scientific tour around the

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country, then stridently challenges Lee’s reappropriation of it at the novel’s end on the grounds that Lee has stolen the doctor’s own property. Much like a slave, Lee is robbed of his intrinsic property when his body is appropriated for another’s profit. In the slave narrative tradition, this appropriation means social death for the slave; in staging Lee’s actual death, Bird takes that convention and turns it into his foundation for a new form of subjectivity. If we have no property-in-ourselves, Bird seems to asks, on what grounds can we constitute the individual mind? In this novel, property— down to and including the body— avoids any orientation toward a fi xed or culminating end. With bodies quite literally up for grabs (body snatching is a recurring trope), we are invited to think of the body less as a piece of property subject to a single person’s ownership and more like a commons. For this reason, we can assume, the novel punishes any force that tries to arrest the circulation of property. The foppish Dawkins, who only spends money, is no different from the moneylender Skinner, who only hoards it, insofar as both interfere with the rules governing the exchange and conversion of money into property and vice versa. Accordingly, the novel makes sure they meet suitably dire fates: the former ends his existence at the hands of a mob of angry creditors, while the latter dies (for the second time) miserable and alone in a snowdrift. By way of contrast, Bird offers us the notably successful businessman Mr. Periwinkle Smith, who takes money otherwise lying “idle” and converts it into profitable mortgages. If we think of mortgages as deeds or promissory notes that stand for physical property in the abstract—that is, always in a state of potential and easily transferable—then Periwinkle Smith’s way of managing property is entirely compatible with Bird’s theory of American personhood. Indeed, Bird uses much the same economic lexicon to describe Lee’s multiple metamorphoses: like Smith’s “idle” money, the initially “sluggish” Lee finds himself “invested . . . with a new mind” each time he appropriates a new body. Bird plays on the double sense of “invested,” meaning both “to dress” (Lee’s avatars are as easily discarded or assumed as a suit of clothing) and a form of investment, or a conversion of one species of property into another on the expectation of future dividends. In imagining Lee’s identity as an investment, Bird keeps his protagonist in much the same continued state of potential. That Lee only acquires a “new mind” after taking possession of another body suggests that property in the world precedes property-in-oneself. This reverses the order of conventional Enlightenment thought, which gives primacy to property-in-oneself as the individual’s original possession. A quick

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glance at Locke will remind us of this point: “Every man has a property in his own person: this nobody has any right to but himself. The labor of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left in it, he hath mixed his labor with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes his property.”  In its original British formulation, the capacity for rational thought determines, hence precedes, the individual’s entitlement to landownership. In Bird’s novel, by contrast, this material property determines the character of the individual who possesses it— as if to say that one is possessed by material circumstances. This reversal of Lockean logic tells us that Lee’s state of vegetative inertia at the novel’s start must be a by-product of the property he owns, namely, an extensive farm he inherits after his father’s death. Yet Lee’s reacquisition of this same farm at the novel’s end converts him into something like an exemplary citizen. If the quality of one’s property determines the quality of one’s mind, then logically something happens to Lee’s property over the course of the novel that eventually permits his final transformation. The difference rests on the way Lee acquires the farm in each case. That this property must disappear entirely before Lee can begin the process of metempsychosis tells us that Bird sets out to dispense with such anachronistic notions that attach social being to geographic place or consanguinity. As the sole male heir, Lee is initially shaped by a system of transmission associated with Old World patrilineal relations that oversees the transfer of property whole and entire within a closed kinship group. For this reason, I suspect, “inheritance” is a particularly vexed notion throughout the novel. Consider, for instance, the episode in which Lee (now as Squire Higginson) learns that, “along with the wealth of John H. Higginson,” he has also been saddled with the gout: “[The doctor] left me to endure my pangs, and to curse Squire Higginson’s father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and, in general, all his forefathers, who had entailed such susceptible big toes upon the family.”  As a hereditary disease that afflicts male subjects, gout conveniently stands in for a piece of “entailed” property that each successive generation passes to the next. As both a physical disease and as a rhetorical device, moreover, gout inhibits circulation at both a physiological and literal level: forced into “confinement” by sluggish circulation, Higginson finds himself claustrophobically incarcerated with his tyrannical wife. An unwelcome legacy in the form of a hereditary disease transforms Hig-

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ginson’s body and house into a prison, from which he seeks escape through suicide. That Bird transforms the domestic circle into a gothic castle (albeit a funny one) suggests that the gothic trope of entrapment here takes aim at any system of social relations, like the family unit, that removes property and bodies from circulation and exchange. In this way, Bird establishes a distinction between two forms of identity. At the novel’s start, it comes from Lee’s attachment to physical place or dwelling, from which one draws a stable identity. We might think of this as what Judith Butler calls “a static cultural marker,” or a substantializing restriction placed on the notion of identity. Against this, Bird proposes a sense of self that can only be described— again, in Butler’s terms— as an incessant state of “becoming.” This is a set of “associations” without beginning or end that proliferates beyond the restrictions of geographical place or blood as “an incessant and repeated action.”  It therefore makes sense that Lee’s return to his farmstead at the novel’s end, hence the new and exemplary identity he assumes by reacquiring his property, is accompanied by a radical change in the nature of that property. To make this clear, Bird converts the farm from a hereditary entailment at the novel’s start to something at the novel’s end that resembles a commons, or the kind of pre-capitalist shared space to which every member in a municipality is entitled a share. Before his adventures in metempsychosis took off, Lee frittered much of his father’s estate away on doomed financial ventures before his overseer, Aikin Jones, embezzled the remainder. By defrauding Lee of the family farm, Jones not only forces Lee out of a system of fi xed positions but also converts the property itself into a movable that can circulate outside the family unit. Aikin Jones, Lee’s brother-in-law, informs him, “finding himself dying, and being seized perhaps with compunction for the wrongs he had done you, he left you a legacy,—no great matter, indeed, considering how much of your estate he died possessed of.”  Lee is bequeathed a “legacy” by one whose claim to that property was entirely spurious and independent of the bonds of kinship. This endowment, moreover, bears little resemblance to the original property Jones defrauded as it has been substantially reduced through its keeper’s extravagances. Once in possession of this reduced estate, Lee relinquishes his old “habits of idleness” to be “confirmed . . . in new habits of industrious and active application.”  In assuming the “habits” conventionally associated with a diligent farmer, Lee performs yet another role—and is, in the terms of this novel, quite another person. Bird invites us to

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view this exemplary, landowning subject as simply one more iteration of the being known as Sheppard Lee. It is striking that, to all outward appearances, this new version of Lee has all the accoutrements of a novelistic protagonist in the British tradition: he achieves individual fulfillment through worldly travail before being justly rewarded with property and social position. Bird revives the tradition of development and telos, I believe, in order to subordinate it to his competing theory of social being. Lee never marries, hence never reproduces the household that would reinstate the kind of identity that locates self in place or family. Instead, his society consists of his slave Jim Jumble and his wife Dinah—who use the farm just like a commons when they plant and harvest their own crops— and a nephew named Sheppard Lee Alderwood, named after his uncle, to whom Lee Sr. imagines bequeathing the farm. By forecasting Lee’s future in terms of what, for all practical purposes, is a copy of Lee himself, Bird consolidates his model of the self as a series of performative, nonfinite actions without dispensing with the American fantasy of the selfmade man.

Conclusion From almost the moment Edgar Allan Poe first put pen to paper, critics have struggled to account for his place in a national literary canon. Long before the 1988 anthology The Purloined Poe adopted Poe as a case study in French psycholinguistic and deconstructionist methodologies, Poe’s “American” qualifications were a matter of considerable debate. From the nineteenth century until, arguably, the present, Poe’s commentators have responded in contrasting ways to a charge first laid out in an 1857 issue of Scribner’s— namely, that Poe, for all his brilliance, “has no traits that we can call American.”  For most of the twentieth century, he was excluded from nationalizing narratives like the American Renaissance or the jeremiad on the grounds that he evinced no engagement with indigenous preoccupations like colonial Puritan heritage, the frontier, revolution, or democratic experience. This distance from native scenes and interests made Poe seem “in many ways the most un-American of our early writers.”  Thus recent collections such as The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe (1995), Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race (2001), and Edgar Allan Poe: Beyond Gothicism (2011) have done much to re-

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store Poe to a national literary tradition by situating him squarely at the heart of dominant aesthetic, intellectual, and historical concerns of the nineteenth century. At the risk, then, of making a somewhat regressive critical move, I want to suggest that Poe does indeed belong at the margins of American literature, although not for the reasons we have suspected. Poe stands out as an oddity among American writers for his defense of an enduring, autogenerative Enlightenment self. From Franklin’s Autobiography (the first part appearing in 1771) to Melville’s The Confidence Man (1857), what Looby calls “the radical possibilities of self-metamorphosis” is arguably a staple of American literature. Indeed, it is fair to say that, more often than not, early national fiction follows the same cultural logic that informs Charles Brockden Brown’s gothic novels by privileging a transitive, mutable model of the subject. As we have seen, Bird is deeply indebted to this model for his construction of Sheppard Lee. Poe’s fiction is therefore formally anomalous because it strives to preserve “the sameness of a rational being” against the very gothic energies that give shape to the discontinuous protagonists of other American gothic works. Nonetheless, Poe shares a common preoccupation with Bird over which model of the American mind is best suited to negotiate cultural difference. This debate is waged in terms of competing notions of property. In defending an autonomous self, Poe reinscribes property-in-oneself as the first condition of American identity. By presenting Dupin and Usher, his hyperrational protagonists, as relics of a faded aristocratic world, Poe associates his version of the rational mind with Old World aristocracy—the original landowners Locke had in mind when he described property in individualistic terms. This model runs into problems, however, at the level of the local; although both of Poe’s hyperrational heroes can make sense of information ordinarily hidden from cultural outsiders, neither can participate in a world outside his own restricted milieu. When Bird suggests that property in the world determines the characteristics of one’s mind, he contradicts Poe’s understanding of character. In Sheppard Lee, the world of substances continues to constitute the American character from the outside-in, much as it did in Brown’s fiction. Whereas Brown’s model absorbed its components into a transatlantic network of circulating information, Bird’s version does something rather different. By having the body constitute and direct the mind, Bird makes the American self a byproduct of its physical and repeatable actions. Unlike Usher or Dupin, whose

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enclosed minds are outwardly represented as an inextricable attachment to place in the form of decrepit mansions, Lee is detached from any fixed position. Always on his way to another identity, never taking full possession of any one of his multiple incarnations, Lee presents a model of the American mind that is not so much an entity as an infinite potentiality. In Bird’s model, there is no such thing as a single coherent self so much as several potential selves held together by the most tenuous set of actions or habits, which are built into a body multiply inhabited.

chapter 4

Population and the Limits of Civil Society in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter

In the preceding chapter, I suggested that Jacksonian-era gothic fiction addresses the problems posed by common sense for a nation made from closed and isolated cultural groups. In doing so, I charted a shift in the cultural logic of the gothic from the early republic to the early decades of the nineteenth century. What began as a form that allowed early U.S. writers such as Brown or Sansay to imagine the cosmopolitan nation as a vigorous, transatlantic flow of people and goods had, by the 1830s, transferred its attention to the problem of local culture. As the previous chapter argued, writers such as Irving, Poe, and Bird use the cultural materials of the gothic to imagine a collective social body built from discrete and autonomous parts. In this chapter, I want to show how the national imaginary undergoes yet another shift in the middle of the nineteenth century to focus on what, after Foucault, I call the “population.”  The gothic, as might be expected, has an important role to play in the discursive production of this emergent social paradigm. This chapter argues that, in the years immediately preceding the Civil War, the nineteenth-century American novel comes to register a tension between the earlier contractual model of the state and a much larger measure of humanity conceptually hostile to the restrictive categories of individual, household, or nation. Foucault calls this the population; Giorgio Agamben and others call it “bare” or “mass” life. These are the human beings who are part of a nation but are excluded from membership within it on the grounds that they lack the requisite properties of self-sovereignty. As the bare life

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excluded by civil society, this measure of the human conventionally finds expression as slaves (Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852), children (The Wide Wide World, 1850), women (The Scarlet Letter, 1850), and even political prisoners (Israel Potter, 1855). These characters represent just those forms of life that the paternal household is supposed to protect, or so Locke would have it: “Let us therefore consider a master of a family with all these subordinate relations of wife, children, servants, and slaves, united under the domestic rule of a family; which [resembles] a little common-wealth.”  As Charles Brockden Brown argued in his gothic novels, the limitations of Locke’s “little common-wealth” are all too clear for a country that is not made up of land-owning, elite, autonomous, and self-governing individuals organized hierarchically. Indeed, Brown’s legacy to American letters is arguably an enduring skepticism about the British household as a tenable paradigm for the American nation. As cultural historians have noted, the years prior to the Civil War were marked by increasing threats to regional and national cohesion and the rapid expansion of a market economy. Those eighteenth-century mechanisms for social good— sympathy, the contract, compassion, and so on— seemed less likely to succeed as models for social cohesion as the traditional structures of American life underwent profound upheaval. As I see it, fiction writers continued to critique the family through the 1840s and 1850s as a model for the nation in the face of vast groups of people ostensibly lacking property-in-themselves. Since mass life is not an aggregate of individuals, life thus constituted is disqualified from membership in both civil state and the domestic haven of the British tradition. It makes sense, therefore, that novelists such as Stowe, Melville, Hawthorne, and Warner might all address the question of the population—namely, its logical relationship to the contractual model of political relationships underwriting the U.S. Constitution. In this chapter, I plan to test this theory on Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. While not conventionally regarded as a gothic novel, The Scarlet Letter nonetheless draws on gothic conventions, I argue, to cancel out the mutually dependent categories of the self-enclosed individual and the social contract to make room for an alternative political formation, embodied in Hester and Pearl, that comes to us as something to the order of a population. In making this claim, I aim to complement scholarship that places The Scarlet Letter firmly at the center of an antebellum debate over “personhood” and the problem of social cohesion. That body of work has conventionally construed Hester as a powerful, dissenting individual consciousness, a template for middle-class interiority, or a paradigm for liberal consensus. I take a somewhat different

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tack, however, when I argue that Hawthorne makes Hester the agent of mass life. Hester and Pearl have many of the characteristics usually associated with the gothic, including exclusion from society, loss of property in one’s person, and absorption in and by a fluid and heterogeneous group— qualities also associated with the idea of “bare life.” Paradoxically, Hawthorne turns these same gothic conventions against the world produced by contractual relations in order to render that world phobic, yet in so doing arguably exposes the potential of that heterogeneous group I identify as the “population.” As we shall see in the next chapter, the population acquires a somewhat more portentous presence once mass life comes to be formulated as the problem of slavery. For now, however, I am interested in the way Hawthorne investigates its possibilities as a vigorous political paradigm that has much in common with the earlier cosmopolitan model of social relations we encountered in Brown’s major novels. One cannot say that the excluded life designated by The Scarlet Letter is utopian by any stretch of the imagination. It is simply there, as the larger and paradoxically more modern—more American in this respect— context against which Hawthorne allows the contractual relations defined by Dimmesdale and Chillingworth to fulfill their logical implications. To pursue this line of argument, let us consider how gothic conventions reconfigure the kind of community we encounter in the opening scaffold scene.

A Is for Antipathy The novel’s opening scene mobilizes all the conventions of an Enlightenment model of sympathy. Using the very terms found in Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, Hawthorne refers to Hester as a “spectacle” standing before a crowd of “spectators,” whose emotional responses are monitored to meet normative Puritan standards of severity under the regulatory gaze of the town elders. To all outward appearances, Hester is an object worthy of sympathetic identification, as the narrator carefully fosters the reader’s pity and admiration for a woman whose “serene deportment” in the face of such public ignominy appears a mastery of self-command. This scene, with its obvious debt to the triangulated Smithian structure of spectacle (Hester), spectator (the Puritans), and internal spectator (the town elders), nonetheless conspicuously fails to produce a sympathetic community, at least any kind that Smith would recognize. The spectacle on the scaffold positioned smack in the center

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of town consolidates a community not through fellow-feeling but through a shared antagonism to an “object” of “common infamy.”  The foundational assumption behind Smith’s model of sympathy is the principle of recognition, which allows the spectator to see and imaginatively respond to some element of him- or herself in the spectacle. No such recognition takes place here. Taking Hester “out of the ordinary relations with humanity,” the scarlet letter so “transfigure[s] the wearer” that Hester is unrecognizable. Those “who had been familiarly acquainted with Hester Prynne, were now impressed as if they beheld her for the first time.”  Were this a domestic novel, we might expect the sight of an anguished mother holding a distressed child to produce collective commiseration, but something has obviously gone horribly wrong. Indeed, with this tableau as the novel’s centerpiece, the educated reader would in all likelihood have associated the Puritan view with Rousseau’s man-in-a-cage, the figure he uses to depict his own version of sympathetic identification. In that scenario, we are invited to the “dreadful agitation” of a helpless spectator witnessing a mother’s torment at the violent death of her child, the attachment to which both Smith and Rousseau declare universal. Such an allusion sets up the expectation of sympathy from the crowd. Yet when we turn our attention away from Hester to the people surrounding her— as the allusion to the manin-a-cage metaphor would have us do—we see only antipathy. Why should a major novel— a classic of American literature—use a sympathetic model to stage a scene of collective antagonism? The man-in-the-cage metaphor features two spectators. The caged man watches the mother’s anguish as her child is attacked by a wild beast and Rousseau’s reader watches the “pathetic picture” of the man’s own “anguish.”  Crucially, the woman is central to this scenario only to the extent that she is a catalyst for the caged man’s emotions; she is entirely peripheral as a feeling subject in her own right because Rousseau never invites his reader to imagine her pain. The emotional focus of this triad is the man in the cage, and his are the emotions we are supposed to care about. This tripartite structure organizes the scaffold scene that opens The Scarlet Letter, with Hawthorne’s readers placed in the position of Rousseau’s second spectator by the narrator, who implicates us as witnesses to the Puritans’ spectatorship. Given that the language, spatial configuration, and mother-and-child centerpiece of this scene all seem to conform to the triangulated sympathetic structure famously spelled out by Rousseau, we must now consider what induces us to care about the Puritans’ reaction to Hester.

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As other critics have noted, the scaffold scene stages much the same power relation that Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish, where the public punishment by which the state visibly renews its authority always implicates its spectators as agents in the spectacle, ideally as passive “guarantors” to the state’s judgment. Civil unrest becomes part of the spectacle only when the crowd enters into sympathetic identification with the victim. The temptation is to read Hester’s humiliation in terms of Foucault’s spectacle on the scaffold in that both kinds of spectator described by Foucault are present in the crowd as Hawthorne depicts it. Most spectators, like this Puritan matriarch, take the side of the town fathers against Hester: “They should have put a brand of hot iron on Hester Prynne’s forehead. Madam Hester would have winced at that, I warrant me. But she,—naughty baggage,—little will she care what they put upon the bodice of her gown! Why, look, you, she may cover it with a brooch, or such like heathenish adornment, and so walk the streets as brave as ever!” Another spectator is even more vehement in expressing her disaffiliation. Social death is too light a punishment for one who has disgraced the entire community: “ ‘What do we talk of marks and brands, whether on the bodice of her gown, or the flesh of her forehead?’ cried another female, the ugliest as well as the most pitiless of these self-constituted judges. ‘This woman has brought shame upon us all, and ought to die.’ ” Wedged between and drowned out by two disciples of the state is the voice of traditional sympathy: “ ‘Ah, but,’ interposed, more softly, a young wife, holding a child by the hand, ‘let her cover the mark as she will, the pang of it will be always in her heart.’ ” By doubling Hester in the young mother clutching a child, Hawthorne gives us the figure of imaginative fellow-feeling and Rousseau’s ideal spectator. But this voice barely reaches above a “soft” whisper in this scene and in the novel at large; entirely alone in her compassion, this anonymous younger woman disappears from the novel until the final scaffold scene, where Hawthorne resuscitates her only as a townsperson that has long since died. In so pointedly killing off an otherwise minor character, Hawthorne as good as kills off the domestic brand of sympathy she embodies. With conventional sympathy figuratively buried at the novel’s start and literally by its end, one cannot help but have reservations about the young woman’s sympathetic identification with Hester’s heartache. But neither will Hawthorne allow us to feel as the heartless Puritans do. Indeed, that we are not meant to identify with either kind of spectator is, I believe, entirely the point. A closer look at his description of Hester reveals that Hawthorne’s narrator keeps us deliberately in the dark as to how much we can infer from this

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woman as a spectacle, hence what kind of response Hawthorne would elicit from readers. Equal parts “dignity” and “disdain[ ],” she is habitually presented to us in the speculative mode: “Haughty as her demeanour was, she perchance underwent an agony from every footstep of those who thronged to see her, as if her heart had been flung into the street for them all to spurn and trample upon.”  This passage showcases its own ambiguity, as the narrator makes it hard for us to feel either sympathy or antipathy in response to a spectacle that is simultaneously pitiable and alienating. We simply cannot tell whether she is disdainful of Puritan norms—as both her sin and her ostentatious embroidery certainly seem to suggest— or whether she is marshaling a degree of stoicism worthy of a martyr. Given that the narrator refuses to grant us the kind of access to her interior life that would allow us to feel some measure of what she feels and, at the same time, refuses to objectify Hester as wholly despicable, we must conclude that the kind of community Hawthorne has in mind for this scene has nothing to do with the subjective recognition of sameness or the abjection of difference. Simply put, Hester is neither like the Puritans nor unlike them. Hence she can be neither assimilated nor cast out. With the evident collapse of sympathy (into antipathy) and antipathy (into indecision), we must ask ourselves what social dynamic organizes a community that assembles in the hope of seeing the vicious brutalization of a woman variously described as “saint-like,” “a martyr,” even “the image of Divine Maternity . . . whose infant was to redeem the world”? Given that Hawthorne clearly does not have Adam Smith’s urbane, lettered, and disinterested spectator in mind for his community of the righteous, I find it helpful to think of the Puritans in terms of an early Christian hagiographic tradition of spectatorship. Religious historian Elizabeth A. Castelli has shown how early Christian polemic, speaking out against the torture of Christians for entertainment in the Roman arena, denounced popular spectacle as spiritually enervating even as that same tradition appropriated the spectacle of martyred suffering as a source of spiritual revelation. To manage the double potential inherent in the scene of suffering, Christian liturgy relocated the spectacle of martyrdom from the world of objects to the imagination, where it can be invoked through the words of a sermon. This move calls into being what Castelli identifies as a “spiritual” spectator. While a materially minded observer, such as the Roman onlooker, sees the martyr’s persecution purely as a matter of somatic torture, the spiritually minded spectator “will see past the surface of violent display to the truer, more spiritually uplifting narrative that underlies the blood spectacle.”  Importantly, the spiritual event conjured through the

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words of the liturgy does double ser vice: it distinguishes and preserves the Christian spectacle from the idolatrous representations of popular display, and it works as a social adhesive, binding the Christian community together in shared bonds of spiritual revelation. In Hawthorne’s hands, this hagiographic tradition produces an altogether different kind of community. When Hawthorne puts a “saint-like” woman on display before a crowd that longs to see her branded, if not executed, the disturbing irony of this scene becomes all too clear: the Puritans bear closer resemblance to Romans at the arena than to spiritually minded Christians. To use Castelli’s term for the Romans, these are, indeed, “materially minded” spectators, chiefly concerned with the visual markers on the surface of Hester’s body; the matriarch would prefer to see Hester branded because it would permanently distinguish her as an object of shame. This strictly antagonistic response to spectacle also changes the way they respond to the liturgy, hence how they coalesce as a religious community. Hester may be a “living sermon against sin,” but the “spiritually uplifting” meaning derived from that sermon is the negative reaction of fear: when a clergyman delivers a “discourse on sin, in all its branches,” the assembled crowd experiences “new terrors” as “the ignominious letter . . . seem[s] to derive its scarlet hue from the flames of the infernal pit.”  Hawthorne cancels out the possibility of spiritual revelation by making the letter an object of social and material antagonism. Held up as a visual deterrent and object lesson on the dangers of social transgression, Hester is punished as a criminal rather than a sinner. Her pain is not that of a martyr but that of one stripped of social identity— one who, like Agamben’s homo sacer, cannot be sacrificed but is allowed to die. We are now prepared to revisit the question I posed at the beginning of this section—namely, why use the inclusive language of sympathy to describe a unity based on a wholly antagonistic response? As I see it, this rhetorical ploy creates a formal paradox transforming a Smithian model of community based on sympathy into one based on what Amanda Emerson describes as “negative affiliation.”  When the Puritans come together to reject Hester, it is fair to say that they experience positive social cohesion through negative bonds of antipathy, or what Hawthorne aptly calls “the centrifugal force of . . . repugnance.”  Given that this social model rests on the idea that conflict can also make communities, Georg Simmel’s Conflict and the Web of Group-Affiliations (1908) offers a set of sociological principles that will help us put flesh on this thesis. According to Simmel—writing a mere sixty years after Hawthorne published his novel— sympathy naturally capitulates to antipathy because these

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two social “motivations” are in fact deeply implicated: “Natural hostility as a form or basis of human relations appears at least side by side with their other basis, sympathy. The strange lively interest, for instance, which people usually show in the suffering of others, can only be explained on the basis of a mixture of the two motivations. This [is] a deep-lying antipathy.”  For Simmel, the relationship between sympathy and antipathy is a priori: the sympathetic interest one takes in another’s pain “can only be explained” on the grounds that sympathy is, at its heart, a “deep-lying antipathy.” While Simmel never develops this intriguing connection further, we can fill in the logical steps by turning briefly back to Adam Smith, who reveals that Hawthorne exploits an assumption at the heart of the Enlightenment model of community. According to this model, the degree of sympathy felt for another’s expression of emotion depends on the character of the spectacle, that is, whether it is deficient or excessive in relation to its cause. The norms that regulate sympathetic response come from the social milieu shared by spectator and spectacle. Ideally, then, sympathy occurs when the display of feeling measures up to preestablished social standards. This is a model of social relations that requires types of emotional display, a script before the performance one might say, much as common sense, as Poe’s Dupin explains it, requires us to know what we are going to see before we see it. It follows that when the agent’s expression of pain or pleasure exceeds or falls short of expectation, that individual forfeits his or her place in the sympathetic community, as does, for example, the man in The Theory of Moral Sentiments whose reaction to “any little piece of good fortune” is to be “too happy or too much elated.”  This discrepancy between cause and emotional display leaves us feeling “disobliged,” Smith tells us, and “because we cannot go along with [the man’s joy], [we] call it levity and folly.”  Thus the positive, inclusive embrace of the sympathetic community relies on a latent logic of exclusion or disaffiliation. This is the operation of objectification of cultural difference, to which Simmel attributes “the consensus and concord of interacting individuals, as against their discords, separations, and disharmonies.”  That sympathy capitulates all too easily to antipathy is, I think, the formal principle on which Hawthorne builds the scaffold scene. Yet as he clearly understands, both sympathy (“you are inside the community because you are like me”) and disaffiliation (“you are outside the community because you are unlike me”) quite obviously depend on a strict binary logic of inside and outside. Negative affiliation, by contrast, collapses that separation by weaving the community’s discords into its constitutive parts. Emerson puts it well

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when she identifies this model as “the elicitation of positive identities out of specific conflicts, incongruities, and instabilities in a society . . . that endeavors to ‘resolve’ divisive conflicts of value and definition not by eliminating those conflicts, but by making the tension between them official and binding.”  When the Puritan crowd experiences a collective sense of “terror” at the letter, this conflict-based form of social cohesion comes into play, in which the inner divergences and antagonisms actually cultivate the conditions of coexistence, or positive social relations, between inassimilable elements. In Simmel’s terms, this kind of “unity” is “the total group-synthesis of persons, energies, and forms, that is, the ultimate wholeness of the group, a wholeness which covers both strictly-speaking unitary relations and dualistic relations.”  A community thus constituted does not strive for “exhaustive harmonization”; rather, it revitalizes itself around irreconcilable antagonisms that are an integral part of the group dynamic. From this perspective, Hester occupies a unique social position that Agamben identifies as “inclusive exclusion”— she is cast out of the community but nonetheless remains at its heart because her very exclusion makes the Puritan community coherent, as she seems to realize: “With her native energy of character, and rare capacity, [the world] could not cast her off, although it had set a mark upon her, more intolerable to a woman’s heart than that which branded the brow of Cain. In all her intercourse with society, however, there was nothing that made her feel as if she belonged to it . . . [she was] as much alone as if she inhabited another sphere, or communicated with the common nature by other organs and senses than the rest of human kind. She stood apart from mortal interests, yet close beside them.”  The politics of negative affiliation are hard at work here: as the antisocial element that the world cannot “cast-off,” Hester is included in the everyday interests of society as that which must be emotionally excluded, thereby ensuring the cohesion of a society made up of those that do belong. Let us now probe the double enigma of how such a unique and paradoxical social position appealed to a nineteenthcentury readership and why Hawthorne chose a Puritan setting to make it flesh.

Civil Subjects and Mass Life As the opening scene makes clear, the purity of the Puritans, so to speak, is preserved through a strict obedience to penal laws in the form of prohibitions

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and restraints. Put in slightly different terms, this political body regulates and maintains its health by issuing commands in the rhetorical mode of the Decalogue (“thou shall not . . .”). This religious community resembles the secular contractual state in that both obey a logic of negative rights: the constituents of the social contract agree not to encroach on one another’s property, mental or material, in exchange for the protection of the state, which guarantees the right to property, labor, self-autonomy, and so forth. The similarity between the religious community and a civil society turns Hester’s moral drama into a political one. She is not only branded a sinner in accordance with Puritan doctrine, but she has also forfeited her right to protection under the social contract, which dictates that a woman’s social position is confined to the domestic household and acquired only through her alliance to a male citizen. Hester’s entitlement to the civil body’s protection was only ever contingent on her marriage to Chillingworth. Having violated the integrity of that marriage, she loses her status as a wife, hence the protection afforded her under the cultural logic of liberal paternalism. It makes sense that, having committed what in contractual terms constitutes a crime against property— that is, Chillingworth’s household— Hester is treated more as a criminal than a sinner when placed in symbolic proximity to the pillory, “a penal machine [and] as effectual an agent in the promotion of good citizenship, as ever was the guillotine among the terrorists of France.”  Just as the social contract produces citizens by dictating what they cannot do, the Puritans produce “good citizen[s]” by negatively enforcing that category with the visible threat of punishment. Figuratively allied with revolutionaries, moreover, Hester is tarred by same the brush of factionalism, or what Madison famously defined in Federalist No. 10 as any force, “united and actuated by some common impulse of passion or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens.”  Not simply a religious apostate, she is also a threat to the civil state. Accordingly, Hester’s political status changes when the letter is attached to her bodice. As she comes to represent life that has no claims to membership in the civic body but is nonetheless included in it, she loses the social position—in this case, that of a wife—that is otherwise created by and protected under the terms of the contract. When the Puritans affi x the letter to her chest, her identity comes from an externally allocated source and not from some intrinsic quality housed within her mind and body. To my mind, this marks Hester’s transition from a politically inflected, institutionalized form of life (wife, mother, citizen, etc.) to a physical entity that is measured

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quantitatively as an object. The scarlet letter figuratively maps this transformation: made into a letter of the alphabet, Hester loses her status as an individual and becomes known for small deviances from abstract norms. Indeed, she becomes the very type of deviance itself and in so being exists only by virtue of a negative relation to the body of citizens. Were Hawthorne invested in championing the civil state as a model of social relations, we would expect to see Hester’s loss of individuality rendered in the phobic terms of a degenerative form of social life. Instead, she becomes a redemptive force and a positive form of social being. As far as the state is concerned, Hester matters not at all as an individual but exists only as an abstraction; as one towns-member puts it, “I know thee Hester, for I behold the token.”  The narrator as good as announces this transformation from autonomous subject to object of classification when he tells us that, in “giving up her individuality, [Hester] would become the general symbol at which the preacher and the moralist might point, and in which they might vivify and embody their images of women’s frailty and sinful passion.”  I see Hester’s change in status as Hawthorne’s way of producing a difference between humanity in a contractual state and humanity as a population. I hope, in previous chapters, to have made it evident that American novelists were quick to recognize the civil state as an exclusionary political formation on the grounds that it defines human life in the highly restrictive terms of the individual— a fantasy combination of reason, autonomy, selfgovernment, and property ownership in an exclusively masculine body. Membership in the civic body is only guaranteed by each individual’s submission to the social contract, which binds individuals to respect the property and rights of other individuals. All other forms of life—women, children, servants, slaves, and so forth— are ostensibly incorporated into the civil body by the logic of the marriage contract. Under the supervision of a male citizen, the domestic household grants social position and protection to its subordinates even as it confines them to that sphere. Thus contractual logic is deceptive in that it appears to grant the rights of protection to all forms of human life, but human life as defined by the contract is restricted only to those who meet its elite criteria of personal sovereignty. We have seen contractual logic strained to its breaking point in the hands of a novelist like Charles Brockden Brown, who reinvents the very categories of individual and contract to expose profound cultural difference between contracting parties. By the midnineteenth century, I believe, a novelist like Hawthorne takes the contract to task on the grounds that the civil state excludes too much of humanity: a vast

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quantity of people who have property neither in themselves nor in the material sense. The state— and, by extension, the household— cannot claim to protect all people, nor is it separate from those it excludes. Those people called citizens constitute a small subset of the much larger human mass of men we call a population. Where the civil state can be understood as the sum of its individuals, the population organizes people as a single mass that is more than the sum of its parts because it cannot be reduced to individuals. In his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population, Thomas Malthus confronted this concept of mass life as a social body that reproduces according to the operations of human desire— an irrefutable and “fi xed” law of nature— and the consumption of available resources. Without external checks, each human being carried within it the potential to become exponentially more. Rearticulating this model for the late twentieth century, Foucault saw the population as a way of classifying “man-as-species” as “a multiplicity of men, not to the extent that they are nothing more than their individual bodies, but to the extent that they form, on the contrary, a global mass that is affected by overall processes characteristic of birth, death, production, illness, and so on.”  The population, then, is a mass rather than an aggregate of individuals. Thus defined, human life conceptually contradicts the concept of the individual and the contractual state, as Foucault goes on to explain: “The theory of right basically knew only the individual and the social body constituted by the voluntary or implicit contract among individuals . . . [by contrast,] what we are dealing with in this new technology of power is not exactly society (or at least not the social body as defined by the jurists), nor is it the individual-as-body. It is a new body, a multiple body, a body with so many heads that, while they might not be infinite in number, cannot necessarily be counted.”  The series of qualifications Foucault makes in claiming that the population is neither society nor a collection of biological bodies carefully extracts any residue of the individual from this new, “multiple body.” When it comes to “man-asspecies,” there is “absolutely no question relating to an individual body.”  As the representative of such a body, Hester is no saint. That Hester’s transformation from individual citizen to abstraction takes place on a platform in the middle of a market square could hardly fail to resonate with a readership familiar with the conventions of the slave narrative, where the market turns people into objects and tears families apart. What Hester experiences on the scaffold, in other words, is nothing less than the social death of the slave, a category of nonbeing to which Hawthorne

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metaphorically alludes each time he likens Hester to a dead woman, a corpse, or a ghost. Indeed, important to my purposes, he draws a connection between Hester’s socially dead condition and her new position as an outsider on the inside: “She stood apart from mortal interests, yet close beside them, like a ghost that revisits the familiar fireside, and can no longer make itself seen or felt.”  Like the slave on the block, the martyr in the arena, or the Indian in the forest, Hester represents those whom civil society has set outside the pale but who nonetheless remain included within its everyday operations as the threat to its cohesion. The scaffold scene places center stage a form of human life that is part of but unprotected by the state. Indeed, there is a huge cast of nameless characters that reside outside “the little metropolis of the colony” not as individuals but as mass life: sailors, paupers, the sick, Indians, children, isolated women, and so forth. In contrast to the “politically qualified life” of the citizen, this is the “bare life” of humanity that the contractual state disavows. It is therefore vital to Hawthorne’s purpose, I would argue, that Hester remain a social nonbeing on the grounds that she represents that segment of the population that cannot be incorporated into a society of individual citizens. It is for this reason, I am convinced, that Hester never regains her property-in-herself, the letter remaining affi xed to her breast for the rest of her life. Even though the meaning of the letter may change (“Able,” “Angel,” etc.), hers remains the extrinsic mode of identity of one paradoxically pushed to the margins of the community and yet absolutely central to its self-definition. Much like the anguished mother in Rousseau’s scenario, she is both catalyst and absence, center and periphery, of the community that forms around her: “While Hester never put forward even the humblest title to share in the world’s privileges . . . she was quick to acknowledge her sisterhood with the race of man, whenever benefits were to be conferred. None so ready as she to give of her little substance to every demand of poverty; even though the bitter-hearted pauper threw back a gibe in requital. . . . None so self-devoted as Hester, when pestilence stalked through the town. In all seasons of calamity, indeed, whether general or of individuals, the outcast of society at once found her place.” As a “self-ordained . . . Sister of Mercy,” Hester attends to an anonymous, undifferentiated mass body (“the race of man”) that presents not as individuals but as generalities (“the bitter-hearted pauper”) subject to the processes of death, illness, poverty, and so on. Insofar as she takes care of those in the same paradoxical state of inclusive exclusion, she offers the kind of protection conspicuously denied her by

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the Puritan civil state. In this way, Hawthorne poses a question that would have acquired considerable urgency in the years leading up to the Civil War: how do we imagine a government that extends its protection to all those people who fall outside the contractual relation of citizen to community? Indeed, this appears as a recurring preoccupation of mid-nineteenth-century American fiction. Susan Warner’s The Wide Wide World (1850), Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), and Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall (1854) are just a few of the novels that take up the fate of women and children who fall into this category by virtue of their lack of a household. From Clithero Edny’s Irish family in Edgar Huntly to the charivari swarming the streets of “My Kinsman Major Molineux,” the kind of mass life we have encountered in previous works is usually presented as a gothic loss of individuality. In Hester, and especially as Hester reproduces herself in the figure of Pearl, Hawthorne inverts this convention by giving mass life a positive valence as the alternative to citizenship. Unlike her mother, who belonged to civil society before losing the status accorded her as part of Chillingworth’s household, Pearl starts life as something else entirely— an expansive, adaptable, vibrant entity, incapable of sin, virtue, or obedience to the law: “Pearl’s aspect was imbued with a spell of infinite variety; in this one child there were many children. . . . This outward mutability indicated, and did not more than fairly express, the various properties of her inner life. Her nature appeared to possess depth, too, as well as variety; but— or else Hester’s fears deceived her—it lacked reference and adaptation to the world into which she was born. The child could not be made amenable to rules.”  Much like Foucault’s multiheaded social body, Pearl is legion, encompassing “many children.” She is also, as the narrator makes clear at several points in the novel, impossible to discipline. Born outside the institutions of civil society (she is raised in neither household nor church), she cannot be trained as an individual. This puts her permanently at odds with the religious and civil body of the Puritans: little fists raised in “puny wrath,” she casts “a witch’s anathemas” at anyone who would treat her with antipathy. Not just a witch but a “sprite,” an “elf,” an “imp,” and a “demon offspring,” Pearl’s atavistic nature makes her asocial and areligious. Her emotions, which encompass the whole spectrum of human feeling, are always expressed in their full extremity, suggesting a lack of the emotional regulation required by the Enlightenment definition of the civil self. She has no place in society to which she is attached. Indeed, Pearl’s chief characteristic is her “mutability,” or her capacity to be an

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altogether different entity depending on place, occupation, or circumstance. Much like Sheppard Lee, she is always moving or on the point of flight, thus bearing a nomadic affinity to the sailors and Indians that occupy the periphery of the novel. From this perspective, she resembles Beecher Stowe’s Topsy, a similarly animating presence who cannot be disciplined without first undergoing a sentimental transformation at the hands of Little Eva. Given that Hawthorne places Pearl at the center of “an absolute circle of radiance,” it is fair to say that she is also the novel’s vital center. Insofar as Pearl enacts, in miniature, the principle of the population, she extends outward into both people and objects: “The spell of life went forth from her ever creative spirit, and communicated itself to a thousand objects, as a torch kindles a flame wherever it may be applied. . . . It was wonderful, the vast variety of forms into which she threw her intellect, with no continuity, indeed, but darting up and dancing, always in a state of preternatural activity.”  With her transfigurations guided by the principle of contiguity rather than “continuity,” Pearl animates her surroundings with the stochastic, oscillatory motion of Brownian movement. Like Hester, who wears her heart on her sleeve in the form of a highly embroidered letter A, Pearl is never wholly contained within her mind and body but expands psychologically wherever she happens to make contact. In this respect, Pearl dramatizes the logic of being that her mother practices by extending herself through charity to those in need.

The Gothic Citizen I have described the principal characteristics of a population as I see them embodied in Hester and Pearl. In order to authorize this model of the political body, the novel devalues the reigning notion of a civil society—that is, that group of self-governing, autonomous men installed at the head of a household. Having imagined an alternative social body that acquires its vitality from the perpetual outward motion of its constitutive particles, the novel accordingly punishes any force that attempts to constrict that vibration by entrapping people, in the manner of the Enlightenment individual, within a body, house, or social function. Outwardly reputable citizens, Chillingworth and Dimmesdale represent those self-governing, autonomous individuals comprising a civil society. In his depiction of their relationship, however, Hawthorne takes the social contract to task for its power to “contract”—that

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is, to reduce humanity to the smaller and more restrictive compass of the “citizen.” To negate what he has, from the very beginning, depicted as a negative model of social relations, Hawthorne turns to the conventions of the gothic. The spectacular nature of Hester’s punishment effectively suppresses another violation of the contract for which baby Pearl is living proof: an unnamed and absent culprit exists who has likewise broken the social contract by encroaching on another man’s household. Dimmesdale has stolen from Chillingworth, and in refusing to name Pearl’s father, Hester leaves that conflict over property outstanding. In justifying his plan for vengeance for the theft of property he regards as rightfully his, Chillingworth uses the rhetoric of sick and broken contracts to make his case: “I betrayed thy [Hester’s] budding youth into a false and unnatural relation with my decay. Therefore, as a man who has not thought and philosophized in vain, I seek no vengeance, plot no evil against thee. Between thee and me, the scale hangs fairly balanced. But, Hester, the man lives who has wronged us both! . . . I find here a woman, a man, a child, amongst whom and myself exist the closest lineaments. No matter whether of love or hate; no matter whether of right or wrong! Thou and thine, Hester Prynne, belong to me.”  As we saw in Chapter 1, the social contract depends on the fantasy that the individual loses nothing by entering the contractual state; his freedoms and rights are more fully guaranteed by his submission to the authority of the group, because that group is formed only as the individual acquires the same authority to which he submits. The contract, in other words, depends on consent— a perfectly balanced power relation in which each of the participating parties is enhanced. Next to civil society, the family—which Wendy Brown aptly calls one of the “origin myths of liberalism”— emerges from Enlightenment discourse as the contract’s most natural expression, “a field of natural power and natural social relations.”  Here Chillingworth admits his own violation of that “natural” institution when he “betrayed” Hester at a young age into an “unnatural” union with a decrepit old man. Th is puts him in the same tradition of gothic villains as Walpole’s Manfred, Radcliffe’s Montoni, and Eliot’s Edward Casaubon, all equally bad forms of masculinity that entrap vulnerable females to appropriate their mental and physical property. Chillingworth annuls the marriage contract by weighing his imposition of an unequal match against Hester’s violation of the household and finds the scale “fairly balanced.”

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But there nevertheless remains an unresolved power differential created by Dimmesdale, who “wronged” Chillingworth by encroaching on his household. Whereas the marriage contract has a woman acquire social position and domestic authority in return for the economic and political protection of the citizen husband, the social contract constitutes a relationship between men, which for Chillingworth is of greater importance than the “unnatural” marriage he dismantles. He retains the role of the gothic villain when he turns his sights on the feminized Dimmesdale, whose “sympathies,” overly acute “sensibility of nerve,” and “sensitive” nature put him in the position of the entrapped female. Having annulled Hester as a contracting party, hence as someone with a stake in this power differential, Chillingworth reduces the constitutive parties of the unequal social contract from “a woman, a man, a child” to simply “a man” and “a child.” Simply put, the broken contract between the two men is a dispute over a “child,” or one regulating reproduction—Dimmesdale as good as stole “a child” from Chillingworth. This creates a debt at the level of property, which Chillingworth sees himself as entitled to redress by claiming ownership over Hester and everything that relates to her (“thou and thine, Hester Prynne, belong to me”). In reclaiming what he regards as rightfully his, however, Chillingworth inverts the logic of the social contract; no longer a mechanism by which each party gains something through an exchange with the other, the exchange Hawthorne stages between men subtracts something vital from each. Dimmesdale loses his self to the physician’s intrusiveness and Chillingworth loses his self, formerly characterized by a “peaceful and innocent” life, to an obsession that transforms him into a “fiend.” The contract, in short, turns each into something other than himself. This is a recognizably gothic scenario: “[Chillingworth] now dug into the poor clergyman’s heart, like a miner searching for gold; or, rather, like a sexton delving into a grave, possibly in quest of a jewel that had been buried on the dead man’s bosom, but likely to find nothing save mortality and corruption.” Presented in wholly gothic terms, Chillingworth is likened to a grave robber violating a dead body when he preys on Dimmesdale’s emotional property. In the name of redressing the contractual wrongs done to him, Chillingworth becomes guilty of the same crime he sought to expose in Dimmesdale, namely, the violation of another’s autonomy. When Hester asks Chillingworth, “Hast thou not tortured [Dimmesdale] enough? . . . Has he not paid thee all?” he vehemently rejects her suggestion that the contractual imbalance has been settled on the grounds that the

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ghastly transformations mutually wrought at the level of self “ha[ve] but increased the debt!”  This is, in short, a broken contract that Hawthorne never intended to mend, only abrade further by increasing the power differential and thus locking the two men in a paralytic contractual grip. Chillingworth’s compulsive need to uncover another’s emotional life comes to us as a violently invasive version of sympathy: “I shall seek this man, as I have sought truth in books; as I have sought gold in alchemy. There is a sympathy that will make me conscious of him. I shall see him tremble. I shall feel myself shudder, suddenly and unawares. Sooner or later, he must needs be mine!”  A staple of sentimental fiction, quivering bodies united through the secret operations of sympathy conventionally describe the reunion between two long-separated lovers. I want to consider the homoerotic undertow to their relationship as a result of the fact that each man becomes so absorbed in the other that the boundaries between them evaporate. They become, for all practical purposes, one and the same. As we saw in Arthur Mervyn, the consequences of a sympathy that does not respect individual boundaries necessarily wreak havoc in a domain where the logic of individualism prevails. To see how their “bad sympathies” combine both men into a single entity, Eve Sedgwick’s “erotic triangle” is a useful starting point. According to Sedgwick, the exchange between men can be homosocial without endangering heterosexuality because libidinal energy is directed to a woman who acts as a third party in the homosocial scenario. Men can be said to engage in a highly displaced form of fellow-feeling. Once the woman is removed from that triangulated equation, however, the boundaries separating men open to that desire, making their relationship at once gothic and queer. Hawthorne cloisters Chillingworth and Dimmesdale under the same roof and turns the domestic sphere, from which Hester is conspicuously absent, into a gothic castle in which Chillingworth is free to prey on his feminized captive. In a sentimental register, a woman’s presence preserves the coherence of the home and keeps its constituent bodies individuated, hence capable of sympathetic distance. Instead, Dimmesdale and Chillingworth, forced into “a forbidden proximity,” are more like Roderick and Madeline Usher, whose stifling intimacy likewise collapses the boundaries separating them. Under the pressure of such a confined environment, Dimmesdale’s secret becomes his personal life to the point that there is nothing else personal about him. When Chillingworth intrudes into the minister’s private life, it stands to reason that the cuckold should acquire features of Dimmesdale’s

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private devil. He is, the novel tells us, the “secret poison” that keeps “the sufferer’s conscience . . . in an irritated state.”  Thus collapsed into one being, Chillingworth can assume control of the Dimmesdale’s interior life: “The very inmost soul of the latter seemed to be brought out before his eyes, so that he could see and comprehend each movement. He became, thenceforth, not a spectator only, but a chief actor, in the poor minister’s interior world. He could play upon him as he chose. Would he arouse him with a throb of agony? The victim was for ever on the rack.”  One cannot ignore the echo to Smith’s opening to The Theory of Moral Sentiments, where he insists that sympathy preserve the separation between individuals: “Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers.”  Contravening Smith’s cardinal rule—that one must keep one’s mental distance from the object of sympathy— Chillingworth “burrow[s] into the clergyman’s intimacy,” puts him on the “rack,” and dictates rather than imagines the terms on which he suffers. In so doing, he takes on some of the qualities of the vampire in the British tradition—Hawthorne calls him “the Leech”— insofar as he takes over the pastor’s body through his medical ministrations and controls his volition by implanting alien emotions. In Mrs. Lorimer’s “extraordinary co-partnership” with her brother in Edgar Huntly, we encountered the phenomenon where two people exist as a relationship rather than as individuated bodies, and the death of one spells the death of the entire organism. This logic plays out to its (always) fatal conclusion in the scaffold in the final scene. By stealing the priest’s emotional property and figuratively assuming the characteristics of his private guilt, Chillingworth as good as becomes Dimmesdale’s self. As Dimmesdale evidently knows, the only way to rid himself of their parasitic attachment is to confess his secret publicly. “I shall escape thee,” he promises Chillingworth, a phrase that comes to represent their severed attachment: “[Dimmesdale] sank down upon the scaffold! . . . Old Roger Chillingworth knelt down beside him, with a blank, dull countenance, out of which the life seemed to have departed. ‘Thou hast escaped me!’ He repeated more than once. ‘Thou hast escaped me!’ ” The collapse of this corporate being turns Chillingworth into an abandoned husk, endlessly repeating the moment of the relationship’s demise like an automaton. With Dimmesdale dead, the life likewise goes out of Chillingworth: “He positively withered up,” the narrator tells us, “shrivelled away, and almost

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vanished from mortal sight.”  This is the final, fatal contraction of the social contract; rather than grant life and liberty, it shackles each man to the other as a single entity.

Cosmopolitan Rehabilitation Given that Dimmesdale makes his public confession in a chapter entitled “The Revelation of the Scarlet Letter,” it is striking that no revelation actually occurs: “With a convulsive motion he tore away the ministerial band from before his breast. It was revealed! But it were irreverent to describe that revelation. For an instant the gaze of the horror-stricken multitude was concentrated on the ghastly miracle; while the minister stood with a flush of triumph on his face, as one who, in the crisis of acutest pain, had won a victory.” In what may seem a profound anticlimax, the narrator refuses to relate to his readers the spectacle of Dimmesdale’s scarring. When he averts his eyes, however, the narrator exhibits the same reticence about revealing the priest’s private life that he showed toward Hester’s feelings in the opening scene. By refusing to “make manifest” the priest’s secret, that is to say, the narrator formally distances himself from the kind of invasive sympathy that Chillingworth practices. Respecting Dimmesdale’s interior life, he redirects the reader’s eyes to “the gaze of the horror-stricken multitude,” whose “great heart,” we are told, “was thoroughly appalled, yet overflowing with tearful sympathy.” As an object of both “horror” and “sympathy,” Dimmesdale is the same kind of indeterminate spectacle we encountered in the opening scene, where Hester refused to open her heart. Lest we miss the point, Hawthorne’s narrator enumerates the many different accounts that circulate in the days following “what had been witnessed on the scaffold”—was there a mark in the priest’s chest or not?—before inviting the reader to “choose among these [many] theories.”  It is consequently no easier to enter into sympathetic identification with Dimmesdale or abject him as despicable than it is to side for or against Hester in the novel’s opening scene. As I shall explain momentarily, this formal ploy serves to authorize the population as the dominant model of social relations at the novel’s end. Quite obviously alluding to the mechanisms of nation making, the final scene is occasioned by the inauguration of a new governor and the procession of “magistrates,” “citizens,” and “men of civil eminence.” The ending unfolds as a cata logue of those civic members— soldiers, politicians, reli-

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gious emissaries—who exemplify the norms of a community. To all outward appearances, it would seem that the same disciplinary power that consolidated the Puritan community in the opening scene exerts its influence in the closing chapters. Unlike the strictly homogeneous community of citizensubjects present at Hester’s disgrace, however, a vastly more heterogeneous social body observes the civic ceremony: “The picture of human life in the market-place, though its general tint was the sad gray, brown, or black of the English emigrants, was yet enlivened by some diversity of hue. A party of Indians . . . stood apart, with countenances of inflexible gravity, beyond even what the Puritan aspect could attain. Nor, wild as were these painted barbarians, were they the wildest feature of the scene. This distinction could more justly be claimed by some mariners,— a part of a crew from the vessel of the Spanish Main,—who . . . had a kind of animal ferocity [and] transgressed, without fear or scruple, the rules of behavior that were binding on all others.”  The itinerant, cosmopolitan community that mingles in the “marketplace” displays many of Pearl’s qualities. Characterized by its “diversity” and “wild” nature, it is at once impenetrable (Indians have “inflexible gravity”) and lawless (sailors transgress the “rules of behavior”). Indeed, it is a social body with the potential to overwhelm Puritan norms; the Indians are grave “beyond even what the Puritan aspect could attain,” and the sailors break laws that are otherwise “binding on all others.” The contractual state, represented by the procession of its dignitaries, is consequently encircled by a population that is included in the civic celebration as those who are outside and at odds with Puritan orthodoxy. The population of the marketplace is, in other words, in a similar position of inclusive exclusion as Hester. To turn these disparate peoples into a single political body, Hawthorne makes Hester the catalyst around which that body takes shape: There were many people present, from the country roundabout, who had often heard of the scarlet letter . . . but who had never beheld it with their own bodily eyes. These . . . now thronged around Hester Prynne with rude and boorish intrusiveness. Unscrupulous as it was, however, it could not bring them nearer than a circuit of several yards. At that distance they accordingly stood, fi xed there by the centrifugal force of the repugnance which the mystic symbol inspired. The whole gang of sailors, likewise, observing the press of spectators, and learning the purport of the scarlet letter, came and thrust their sunburnt and desperado-looking faces into the ring.

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Even the Indians were aff ected by a sort of cold shadow of the white man’s curiosity, and, gliding through the crowd, fastened their snakelike eyes on Hester’s bosom, conceiving, perhaps, that the wearer of this brilliantly embroidered badge must needs be a personage of high dignity among her people. Lastly, the inhabitants of the town (their own interest in this worn-out subject languidly reviving itself, by sympathy with what they saw others feel ) lounged idly to the same quarter, and tormented Hester Prynne, perhaps more than all the rest, with their cool, well-acquainted gaze. I have quoted this passage at some length to show how the politics of negative affiliation once again assume control of the narrative, as they did in the first scaffolding scene. Hester is the “fi xed” point at the center of a “magic circle of infamy,” arresting the gaze of the townspeople through the “centrifugal force of . . . repugnance.”  By the novel’s end, however, the antipathy that held the Puritan community together in the opening chapters has become “wornout” through time, familiarity, and the changing public perception of Hester herself. What draws them into this circle, then, is not the same feeling of repugnance but “sympathy with what they saw others feel.” Indeed, each group that joins the “magic circle” around Hester is largely drawn by the sight of others looking (“observing the press of spectators”; drawn by “the white man’s curiosity”). This describes something like the kind of group feeling Hawthorne imagines sweeping through the townspeople as “contagion” in “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” the same term Smith uses to describe the direct transmission of emotion between individuals. In that short story, Hawthorne invests mass emotion with the phobic qualities of the gothic; here, by contrast, it is neutrally rendered as simply curiosity, boorishness, or “languid” interest. To my mind, these are altogether human emotions that replace the starkly antagonistic quality of feeling characteristic of the opening scene. Busy looking at each other, the different groups represented here are organized by the same dynamic of spectatorship the narrator enforced when he made us look away from Dimmesdale’s revelation to focus on the gaze of the multitude. In both cases, the spectators’ felt responses (horror, repugnance, sympathy, curiosity, boorishness, etc.) are ultimately unimportant in themselves. What matters is that these responses are profoundly different— Hester is at once a kind of local tourist stop, a high dignitary, a mystic symbol, and old news. A spectacle that produces such varied responses cannot be assimilated or abjected

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because to do so requires a universal set of cultural norms that dictate the terms of inclusion versus exclusion. That binary logic dictated the responses of the three female spectators in the opening scene, but orbiting around Hester here is a diverse community that does not think in such terms. Th is common humanity, as the culturally heterogeneous nature of the onlookers suggests, is the population. Having reconstituted the Puritans as part of a population, Hawthorne leaves us with a more mobile and inclusive community, drawn together on the grounds of shared human experience and over which Hester exerts a positive, protective social influence: “The scarlet letter ceased to be a stigma which attracted the world’s scorn and bitterness, and became a type of something to be sorrowed over, and looked upon with awe, yet with reverence too. And, as Hester Prynne had no selfish ends . . . people brought all their sorrows and perplexities, and besought her counsel, as one who had herself gone through a mighty trouble. Women, more especially,—in the continually recurring trials of wounded, wasted, wronged, misplaced, or erring and sinful passion . . . came to Hester’s cottage, demanding why they were so wretched, and what the remedy. Hester comforted and counselled them, as best she might.”  “Sinful passion,” we should recall, is the same crime for which Hester was accused at the novel’s start (she was “the general symbol . . . of women’s frailty and sinful passion”). Here it has become the common ground on which women experience their status as outcasts or politically disenfranchised life. These women are conspicuously outside the liberal fantasy of comfort and regeneration in a household haven with a paternal figure at its head. Indeed, the novel went to considerable lengths to render such an institution phobic in the domestic entrapment of Chillingworth and Dimmesdale. The very fact that these women are not trapped within a household but are free to visit Hester’s cottage at the edge of the wilderness stages a degree of mobility unimaginable at the novel’s start.

Conclusion In the last several decades, literary criticism has accepted the premise that the insights drawn from Hawthorne’s works are no longer to be regarded as the products of a timeless artistic genius but are firmly embroiled in the conflicts and contradictions of his par ticu lar historical moment. As the cultural studies movement of the 1990s expanded the notion of history to

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include the private sphere, a professionalized literary marketplace, gender roles, and emotional life, a number of scholars sought to steer criticism away from transhistorical claims about “human nature” in Hawthorne’s works to locate his preoccupation of psychology and personality in a history of the liberal subject. For Joel Pfister, for example, Hawthorne contributed to the historical constructions that were “integral to both the formation and the reproduction of the middle class.”  Thus the psychological dimensions of Hawthorne’s novels work in the ser vice of an emergent capitalism to produce middle-class subjects defined by domestic structures of feeling, labor relations, and consumer capitalism. In a similar vein, Alison Easton argues that Hawthorne synthesizes Romantic and Enlightenment ideals of selfhood to produce the subject as a site of “continuing conflict between individual desire and external circumstance.”  These critics and others have sought to historicize the complex interplay of emotion, gender, and class that inform Hawthorne’s conception of human subjecthood. Perhaps the most forceful argument for a connection between The Scarlet Letter’s formal ambiguities and political subjecthood was first made in Sacvan Bercovitch’s The Office of the Scarlet Letter. Bercovitch famously argued that the novel’s ambivalences invite the “liberal exegesis” of interpretation and resolution. He reads the scene in which Hester inexplicably reattaches the A to her body and returns to the Puritan society that ostracized her as a “subtle and devastating critique of radicalism” that is also a formal expression of consensus ideology: Hawthorne’s “purpose is to rechannel indeterminacy into pluralism, conflict into correspondence, and relativism into consensus.”  Thus Hester’s return to Boston and the restoration of the letter indicate her free acceptance of social domination and the paradoxical orientation of consensual relations around both freedom and control. Bercovitch extends a reading of the letter into a far-reaching argument about the politics of critical interpretation and American liberalism, where liberalism as both a political and literary formulation “has been characterized by a constitutive prejudice against specificity.”  I am therefore mindful of Bercovitch’s influential reading practice when I treat the novel’s formal ambivalences as a structural critique of contractualism, namely, its failure to extend its protections to those who lie beyond the limits of elite personhood. The narrator keeps us in the dark about Hester’s emotions and motives, I have suggested, because the kind of community Hawthorne imagines has nothing to do with the subjective recognition of sameness or the abjection of difference. Indeed, as the tortured relationship between

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Chillingworth and Dimmesdale reveals, that brand of cultural thinking can prove utterly disastrous when taken to its logical conclusion under contractual social relations. Instead, the novel’s hermeneutics transform Hester into a social nonbeing. In coming to this conclusion, I depart from the conclusions offered by Bercovitch and the other critics whose work I outlined above on the grounds that Hester is never interpellated as a liberal subject. Rather, Hester’s trial on the scaffold transforms her from a politically qualified, subjective form of life into an abstraction that the liberal contractual state can neither abject nor include. The letter remains permanently affi xed to her breast because her paradoxical position of inclusive exclusion demands that she remain an abstraction, hence the constitutive center of an anonymous, undifferentiated mass body.

chapter 5

Slavery and Gothic Form: Writing Race as the Bio-Novel

For over half a century, literary criticism has taken for granted the idea that race and slavery are central to the American gothic tradition. The reasoning generally goes like this: the gothic trades in the abuse of humans, and so does slavery, making the former uniquely suited to tell the story of the latter. From this, it usually follows that the historical experience of slavery is a kind of gothic romance: imprisoned on the plantation, the slave is brutally subjected to the desires of the slaveholder, who acts much like the tyrant in the castle when he steals a woman’s body and forces it to comply with corrupted interests at odds with her own. Indeed, a work like Harriot Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) self-consciously engages such conventions when it imprisons Linda in a garret and presents Dr. Flint as a “tyrant” who seeks to fill “[Linda’s] young mind with unclean images, such as only a vile monster could think of.”  It was on these grounds that Leslie Fiedler first felt authorized to claim that “the proper subject for the American gothic” is slavery. The American novel, as he famously argued, is “almost essentially a gothic one” because it projects in narrative form the “special guilts” of U.S. experience, chief among them “the abominations of the slave trade.”  Fifty years later, not much has changed: the gothic, as one of the editors of American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative tells us, compulsively seeks quiescence for America’s “national guilt” through an “endless expiation” of slavery’s horrors. In short, most scholarship produced since Fiedler agrees that gothic fiction sublimates the traumas of America’s ugly racial history by encoding them in narrative form.

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This typological reading practice frequently divides the cultural work of the gothic along racial lines or regional lines. For white writers and Southerners, as the story goes, the gothic provided a means for repressing the real terrors of history by sublimating them as just one more horror story. Put differently, the gothic dematerializes black history and buries its injustices by reducing the slave plantation, black rebellion, and sexual torture to gothic tropes. In the hands of escaped slaves like Jacobs or Frederick Douglass, on the other hand, the gothic allowed them to “haunt back” at dominant white culture, “where the voice of the dead slave can act as a means of insisting on the presence of history.”  By such an account, white writers displace history’s crimes by imagining them as a romance while black writers turn to the gothic to insist on the historical reality of slavery’s brutalities. It is not my intention to question the explanatory power of readings that account for the gothic’s relationship to slavery in terms of cultural guilt or a dichotomy between resistance and complicity that is drawn along racial lines. There can be no doubt that the gothic mode empowered black writers to argue against slavery and legitimate themselves as authors. Let me point out, though, that these conventional interpretative paradigms rest on an obvious tautology: since the history of slavery in the United States is itself a gothic romance, then gothic romances that take slavery as their subject must be about history. I do, therefore, question the kind of symptomatic reading practice that treats the gothic slave narrative as a coy form of history. As the previous chapters have attested, my argument about the gothic has nothing to do with repression and return; rather, it is about how this form continually reinvented social membership in terms that revised the static and exclusionary conditions of Enlightenment thought. In this chapter, I want to explore what—if not a sense of national guilt—drew antislavery writers to the gothic mode. This chapter returns to the figure of the “population” to argue that the slave narrative exploits the textual strategies of the gothic to expose the contradictions between contractual society and the institution of slavery. Taking William Wells Brown’s Clotel; Or, The President’s Daughter as my test case, I want to consider how this contradiction registers in the novel’s divergent sentimental and gothic plotlines. In Clotel’s sentimental narrative, Brown rejects the kind of self-sovereignty that authorizes black writers like Douglass or Equiano as the source of their own narrative on the grounds that a contradiction exists between the modern interiority— or property-in-oneself—of the slave girl and her objective status as a socially dead being. Unlike Douglass, Brown presents the slave’s transformation into an individual as an untenable

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fantasy. Having abandoned the sovereign individual as a model for black subjectivity in a slaveholding United States, Brown turns his attention to the figure of the population in the gothic elements of Althesa’s plotline. Here, I show how Brown uses the figure of the yellow fever to eliminate ontological difference as a measure of racial alterity. In a radical departure from earlier representations of the disease and the emergent theory of scientific racism, Brown argues that racial difference breaks down at the level of the biological rather than inheres within it. I want to suggest that Brown structurally recuperates the metaphor of the fever to propose a new model of affiliation based on rupture, decomposition, and formlessness. I plan to show how the novel’s notoriously disjunctive structure, stylistic variances, and extra-literary borrowings theorize the idea of mass life at the level of form to create something that I am heuristically calling a “bio-novel.” In this formulation, the population is both the novel’s object and its effect. Clotel cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be regarded as a “gothic” novel in the same tradition as Charles Brockden Brown or Hawthorne, but like the fictionalized memoirs of Harriot Jacobs or the second half of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it is clearly indebted to some familiar gothic tropes. Thus it neatly demonstrates that the gothic is less a distinct genre or coherent body of works attached to a specific historical period and more a versatile rhetorical mode that can be adapted to a variety of cultural forms. To begin, then, let me briefly review the slave in relation to Enlightenment theories of property. Recall Locke’s original paternal model of the family, which accounts for the ownership of slaves by subjugating them to the head of the household: “Let us therefore consider the master of a family with all these subordinate relations of wife, children, servants, and slaves, united under the domestic rule of a family; which [resembles] a little common-wealth.”  All “subordinate” forms of life—women, children, the elderly, slaves— acquire social status according to their proximity to the paternal head of household, who oversees this miniature version of the state, or “little common-wealth.” As I discussed at length in Chapter 2, Locke stipulates that “labor” transforms the individual into this masculine civil subject. By mixing his labor with nature, the individual acquires property that belongs to him alone. This acquisition turns him into a citizen entitled to the privileges and protections of the state and endowed with the authority to oversee a household. Thus the unconditional ownership of property becomes the basis of self-sovereignty and citizenship. The transformative power of labor to make men into citizens appears to create a contradiction between the objective status of the laboring slave and

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the idea that labor (both mental and physical) serves as the original condition of self-ownership. For Locke, however, there is no such incongruity: the slave’s forcibly extracted labor cannot transform him into a sovereign subject because both he and his labor belong exclusively to the paternal head as property that authorizes him alone as an individual. Nonetheless, the logical and ethical contradictions of such a theory in a slaveholding republic were not lost on late eighteenth-century writers such as Olaudah Equiano and Venture Smith, who co-opted Lockean logic toward abolitionist ends. Smith acquires capital by “cultivating” his own labor and a piece of land, while Equiano’s ability to purchase the property that will secure his freedom depends on his unimpeded circulation through the West Indies and the wider Atlantic world— the kind of circulation, that is to say, imposed upon him by slavery. In taking advantage of this condition, Equiano comes to acknowledge that only the acquisition of property will allow him to alter his own designation as property; capitalist transaction changes the ontology of the slave from property to a free subject. By gaining mastery over their economic growth through the management of their own labor, both Equiano and Smith fulfill the moral and material conditions of self-ownership. Thus these writers and others revise the traditional Enlightenment correlation of property with humanity to validate black labor and undermine racist stereotypes about Africans. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the fantasy of labor’s transformative powers had evidently been soured by the everyday horrors of state-institutionalized slavery and the increasingly exploitative class relationships that sought to distinguish bondage from wage labor. Harriet Jacobs, for instance, uses the sale of Aunt Marthy at the beginning of Incidents to criticize the absurdity of reducing men to chattel and the moral hypocrisy of slave capitalism. Much like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Jacobs appropriates the sentimental language of sympathy to treat the Enlightenment equivalence of property and civic subjecthood as a source of moral outrage rather than grounds for the legitimation of black labor. As Philip Gould puts it, then, early black writing was always “selfconscious about disentangling the terms of Black humanity from traditional property rights,” even as its critiques signify on several different registers. I agree that “the separation of the Lockean integration of property and humanity was a standard convention of antislavery literature,” but I would go one step further to suggest that this separation was also a distinctive feature of the American gothic tradition. As we have seen, the gothic assaults the cultural institution of the individual and the paternal household—both of

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which take property ownership as their first condition— as a paradigm for the nation on the grounds that these Enlightenment categories are exclusive and exclusionary political formulations that restrict civic membership to only those who meet their elite criteria. It therefore seems plausible that midnineteenth-century antislavery writers found the gothic mode appealing for its long-established skepticism about the Enlightenment equivalence of property with humanity. The gothic effectively kills off that brand of cultural thinking, leaving antislavery writers free to imagine black humanity as something other than a restrictive ontological state of being. To see how such a rhetorical enterprise might take shape, let us consider how the slave narrative reconciles the politics of captivity to the gothic mode. It is fair to say that the slave narrative often draws on the rhetorical conventions of the captivity narrative when it forcibly separates the narrator/ protagonist from her original home, disperses her family, and transmits her through many different locations. From Phillis Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa to America” (1773) and Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative (1789) to Jacobs’s Incidents to Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, these accounts of slavery draw on this earlier narrative tradition to present slave experience in the United States as indelibly marked by displacement, dispossession, and circulation far beyond an original cultural homeland. Over the course of the preceding chapters, we have seen how the early American gothic adapted these tropes of captivity to construe social relations less as an elite condition of property ownership and origin and more as a network or circulatory system that relays goods and people through the Atlantic world. Thus antislavery writing arguably updates that earlier cosmopolitan model as the problem of slavery by drawing on the gothic mode. In that earlier model, we recall, good government emerges as that which protects and guarantees its constituents’ movements. What happens, the slave narrative asks, when government fails to recognize the difference between humans and goods and forces its people into circulation far beyond a cultural homeland? To get at an answer, let us think of the body of slaves as the rhetorical figure I identified in the previous chapter as the “population”—namely, that measure of mass life whose constituents are part of the nation but are nonetheless denied membership within it. Indeed, we might think of Orlando Patterson’s famous formulation for the “social death” of the slave as the fact of exposing some people to life within such an aggregate. This body, as we have seen, is at odds with the domestic model of the self-sovereign household, whose exclusionary practices grant the conditions of personhood to an elite

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few. Like slavery, the population does not distinguish between individuals. To imagine a national body capable of accommodating black humanity, the slave narrative must therefore reconcile the population to the liberal domestic tradition that assembles self-sovereign people into a household, one individual at a time. To explain further, let me show how Frederick Douglass addresses just this problem in the first chapter of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Douglass prefaces the horrific scene of Aunt Hester’s whipping by denouncing the compulsory sex that reproduces the laboring pool of slaves in fair-skinned children. Such abusive practices, he argues, result in a form of mass life that comes to his readers in racial terms: “Every year brings with it multitudes of this class of slaves [near-white]. It was doubtless in consequence of a knowledge of their fact, that one great statesman of the south predicted the downfall of slavery by the inevitable laws of population. Whether this prophecy is ever fulfilled or not, it is nevertheless plain that a very different class of people are springing up at the south, and are now held in slavery, from those originally brought to this country from Africa.” The “population,” as I explained in the preceding chapter, is that vast, mobile, quantitative measure of humanity whose constituents, according to the logic of the social contract, possess neither material nor mental property. Here, the figure of the population makes an appearance when Douglass registers the tension between a debased liberal democratic culture and the vast body of slaves whose growing numbers seem on the verge of overwhelming the state. According to Douglass, the inevitable consequence of a system that turns a blind eye to the sexual torture of a black woman at the hands of a white man is a “multitude[ ]” of slaves that look white. Were this a sentimental novel in the British tradition, the kind of individualistic desire that tends to human reproduction would benefit civil society by creating families that mirror the state. Hester’s beating, however, tells us that the paternal model of social relations has irredeemably lost its authority by failing to protect its own constituents. Thus Douglass’s comment is an ominous warning about what happens when individual desire is left unchecked by morality or law. As a result, something like a biological mass—a “multitude[ ]” or “class”—threatens to submerge civil society, whose own constituents have come to lack the rationality and sexual restraint that should make up modern individuals. As a member of the population thus constituted, it makes sense that Douglass cannot define himself in terms of paternal origin: to be a member of a mass group is to be undifferentiated and decentered. By inserting this statement into the opening chapter about genealogy, however, Douglass sets about individuating himself as the literate source of

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his own narrative by granting himself an authorial origin in lieu of a paternal one. The rhetorical sophistication of his narrative contrasts with the blasphemous vitriol Anthony hurls at Hester during the whipping, which in turn exposes the inadequacy of existing forms of masculine authority under slavery. Douglass redresses that lack by composing the Narrative as an expression of his own rhetorical mastery. By transforming literacy into the moral act of abolitionist writing, Douglass qualifies as a true black American man of feeling. Thus individualization in the form of education extracts Douglass from life as a member of the population and inserts him into the contractual social body. The sentimental mode exerts a similar rhetorical power in the scene in which Douglass relates the final moments of his elderly grandmother as she perishes in solitude after a lifetime of slavery: “Her present owners finding she was of but little value, her frame already racked with the pains of old age, and complete helplessness fast stealing over her once active limbs, they took her to the woods, built her a little hut, put up a little mud-chimney, and then made her welcome to the privilege of supporting herself there in perfect loneliness; thus virtually turning her out to die! . . . at this time, this most needful time, the time for the exercise of that tenderness and affection which children only can exercise towards a declining parent—my poor old grandmother, the devoted mother of twelve children, is left all alone.”  As Douglass makes clear, slaveholders measure this woman strictly in terms of her productive capacity. When old age takes her, quite literally, out of the field of production, her owners abandon her body to the natural processes of time and infirmity. She is, Douglass insists, unprotected by a family—unprotected, that is, by the very system of paternalism whose exploitative structures are underwritten by her stolen labor. The sentimental register allows Douglass to reinstate his grandmother as an individual by placing her before the reader as an object of sympathy, but it also calls attention to the degree to which the logic of individualism cannot account for those forms of life that are a part of civil society yet nonetheless remain unprotected by its laws.

The Properties of the Slave As scholars of the slave narrative tradition have argued, the autobiographical mode claims to underwrite the logic of autonomous agency and individuated experience by providing slaves with the means to reclaim a “full self ” through the act of writing. To achieve this promised end, Douglass must

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first subordinate the figure of the population to his own personal narrative of growth and development without dismantling the Enlightenment equivalence of property with humanity. In this way, he resolves the tension between mass life and the sovereign model power through education. In turning next to the 1853 version of William Wells Brown’s Clotel; Or, The President’s Daughter, I want to show that Brown refuses the kind of resolution offered by Douglass on the grounds that the proprietary model of personhood is complicit in enforcing the racialized hierarchies of American slaveholding society. In Clotel, the individuated black slave cannot be extracted from America’s mass life without buttressing the racist distinctions that produce the division between population and contractual society in the first place. That Brown uses gothic tropes to make this case tells us that he joins a long tradition of American letters that draws on the gothic to expose the latent contradictions of the individual in a diasporic context. Let me offer a more detailed account of this complicated work before I make this case. Clotel arranges historical source documents, autobiography, and fiction into a multivocal prose narrative whose action is loosely organized around the sensational nineteenth-century rumor that Thomas Jefferson fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings. In Brown’s version of events, Jefferson’s mistress (renamed Currer) is sold at auction alongside her two children, Clotel and Althesa, and the three women are separated as the plot diverges into several fragmented, disjunctive narrative threads. Much has been written on the remarkable formal complexity of Brown’s novel, which borrows extensively— and often verbatim—from a variety of extra-literary sources, including legal documents, court proceedings, newspapers, abolitionist speeches, advertisements, fiction, and poetry. While earlier scholarship cited this formal cacophony as evidence of the novel’s failed artistic merit or Brown’s insecurity as the first African American novelist, more recent scholarship has argued that Brown is wholly conscious of his external sources, managing them to produce complex theories of black subjectivity, democracy, and the right to revolution. For the purposes of this chapter, I am interested in how Brown presents the story of slavery as two competing narrative traditions when he contrasts the sentimental plotline of Clotel with the gothicized story of Althesa. Let us begin with the sentimental logic at work in the tale of Clotel. It is a generally accepted premise that sentimentalism authorized black writers, from Equiano and Wheatley to Douglass and Jacobs, to argue against slavery by transforming the slave into the object of sympathy. As Brown seems well aware, however, sentimentalism poses a peculiar problem once

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transplanted into the slave narrative. On the one hand, sentimentalism empowered black writers to testify to the full humanity of slaves as legitimate objects of sympathetic identification. On the other, this narrative mode rests on the basic Enlightenment correlation of humanity with property; the modern family grants political status only to those in possession of the requisite properties (both mental and material). This is Brown’s point in the opening chapter, where he protests the exclusionary logic of the marriage contract: [Marriage] is the most intimate covenant of the heart formed among mankind; and for many persons the only relation in which they feel the true sentiments of humanity. It gives scope to every human virtue, since each of these is developed from the love and confidence which here predominate. . . . As husband and wife through each other become conscious of complete humanity, and every human feeling, and every human virtue; so children, at their first awakening in the fond covenant of love between parents, both of whom are tenderly concerned for the same object, find an image of complete humanity leagued in free love. . . . If this be a true picture of the vast influence for good of the institution of marriage, what must be the moral degradation of that people to whom marriage is denied? Brown criticizes the slaveholding laws that refuse to recognize unions between slaves by borrowing directly from the rhetoric of sentimental exchange. Much like Rousseau’s social contract, Brown’s domestic contract creates what it claims to unite: husband and wife are fully individuated when both “become conscious of complete humanity” in the other. This political model is reproduced within the household and across generations. The legal codes upholding this law determine that individualism is a property that each person holds within himself, so slaves are excluded from this model on the tautological grounds that property cannot own property. Nonetheless, to be granted the rights and privileges guaranteed by the contract requires that its constituents meet its criteria of individualism, which is measured in terms of property-in-oneself. As Saidiya Hartman puts it, “The long-standing and intimate affiliation of liberty and bondage made it impossible to envision freedom independent of constraint or personhood and autonomy separate from the sanctity of property and proprietorial notions of the self.”  That is to say, the project of affirming black humanity within a sentimental tradition

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potentially reduces African Americans to the very property they labor to acquire. This paradox organizes the sentimental plotline of Jefferson’s daughter Clotel. Throughout the novel, Clotel demonstrates all the verbal prowess and forceful indignation of a Richardsonian heroine, whose job is to reform men and incorporate them into domestic households. Consider, for example, Clotel’s response to the news that her common-law husband Horatio has secured himself a politically advantageous marriage but nonetheless anticipates an uninterrupted sexual relationship with Clotel. The laws that refuse to recognize slave marriages underwrite Horatio’s specious reasoning: “Trusting to the yielding tenderness of her character, he ventured, in the most soothing accents, to suggest that as he still loved her better than all the world, she would ever be his real wife, and they might see each other frequently. He was not prepared for the storm of indignant emotion his words excited. True, she was his slave; her bones, and sinews had been purchased by his gold, yet she had the heart of a true woman, and hers was a passion too deep and absorbing to admit of partnership, and her spirit was too pure to form a selfi sh league with crime.”  Later in this chapter, I will account for the fact that Brown copies substantial sections of Clotel’s tale—including this one—verbatim from Lydia Maria Child’s short story “The Quadroons” (1842). For now, however, let me simply point out that, in the tradition of Lovelace or Mr. B., Horatio’s powers of sexual persuasion have been trumped by this verbal demonstration of Clotel’s personal authority. Clotel testifies to her eligibility as the bearer of sentimental cultural value by preserving her purity against the enticements of the libertine. Brown pits Clotel’s sense of self-worth against her legal designation as property to authorize her unique interiority as the only legitimate source of her value. Cut from the same cloth as the British sentimental heroine, Clotel matters as an individual. In the sentimental tradition, the exclusive nature of the patriarchal prerogative dictates that the only man eligible to trade Clotel in marriage is her father, Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson, however, is not only absent from the novel (except as the set of abstract and betrayed political ideals Brown invokes in the Declaration of Independence); he is also the owner of her body in the more literal sense that he is her master. As a sentimental heroine and a slave, Clotel is therefore caught between two systems of exchange, both of which treat her body as a medium of trade. This is nowhere more evident than in the auction scene with which the novel opens: “Laughing, joking, swearing, smoking, spitting, and talking kept up a continual hum and noise amongst the crowd;

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while the slave-girl stood with tears in her eyes, at one time looking towards her mother and sister, at one time looking toward the young man whom she hoped would become her purchaser. . . . This was a Southern auction, at which the bones, muscles, sinews, blood, and nerves of a young lady of sixteen were sold for five hundred dollars; her moral character for two hundred; her improved intellect for one hundred; her Christianity for three hundred; and her chastity and virtue for four hundred dollars more.”  Much like the sale of Linda’s grandmother that opens Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, this scene seeks to evoke moral outrage by exposing the gap under slave capitalism between a debased material economy and the moral economy of sympathy and religion that should regulate feeling. The difference, however, lies in the almost exclusively masculine nature of this scene. Unlike Linda’s grandmother, who is placed center stage as an object of sympathy among female and familial onlookers, Clotel is surrounded by spitting, swearing, smoking, and bartering men. Th is grotesque version of the sentimental exchange clearly establishes Clotel as an object of trade in a masculine economy. By so pointedly itemizing Clotel’s sentimental qualities (beauty, morality, Christianity, etc.), Brown tells us that the ownership of property loses its moral authority to make individuals when it reduces the slave girl’s propertyin-herself to a series of commodities. As both the auction scene and the argument with Horatio make clear, neither Clotel’s personal qualities nor the color of her skin significantly distinguish her from the heroine of the British sentimental tradition. Yet the very qualities that, in the British tradition, would authorize Clotel as the bearer of cultural value within a domestic setting are transformed under slave capitalism into the mea sure of her material worth. This creates so clear a contradiction between the institution of slavery and the British model of the property-owning subject that Brown cannot imagine the two coexisting on American soil. To make this point, Brown turns to the language of the gothic in the brief interpolated tale of Althesa’s daughter Jane. After her mother’s death, Jane is sold to “an unprincipled profligate,” who imprisons her in something closely resembling a castle overlooking the Mississippi River. The situation of this castle, the narrator tells us, “was a most singular spot, remote, in a dense forest spreading over the summit of a cliff that rose abruptly to a great height above the sea; but so grand in its situation, in the desolate sublimity which reigned around, in the reverential murmur of the waves that washed its base, that, though picturesque, it was a

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forest prison.”  Much like Isaac Mitchell, who erects a castle in the unlikely location of Connecticut in The Asylum; Or, Alonzo and Melissa (1811), Brown evidently expects his readers to find meaning in the incongruous presence of a “forest prison” on the banks of the Mississippi. Indeed, he is wholly committed to presenting Jane’s tale as a European gothic romance. For instance, the lover who comes to rescue Jane from this “prison” is named Volney— a name, I am convinced, intended to allude alliteratively to such Radcliffean heroes such as Vivaldi or Valencourt. In true romance tradition, Volney arrives by moonlight equipped with a horse, a rope ladder, and a secret system of communication to extract Jane from the clutches of her oppressor. But this is where the tale’s resemblance to the Radcliffean romance ends. That kind of romance conventionally concludes with a happy marriage in a disenchanted world voided of tyrannical injustice and supernatural elements. In a series of events that would be unthinkable in the British tradition, Brown’s slaveholder interrupts the lovers’ escape by murdering Volney and reincarcerating Jane, who is buried unceremoniously in an unmarked grave when she dies of a broken heart. Why would Brown follow the formula for the British gothic to the letter only to veer so far from generic expectation at the tale’s conclusion? In the Radcliffean tradition, the castle tends to entrap young women, withhold their agency, and subject them to group interests associated with a corrupt aristocracy. Such tyrannical forms of power call attention to the lack of legitimate forms of masculine authority capable of recognizing and protecting the female’s property. That authority is then realized in the form of the young man who comes to the girl’s rescue. United at the novel’s end in a modern companionate marriage, these characters are motivated by desires and emotions that—unlike those within the castle— arise strictly within the individual. Such an ending reaffirms the progressive story of individualism, which rests on the fantasy of unique beginnings that lead to an idealized and perfected future. Brown clearly has something else in mind. By so conspicuously killing off the two people who, in the British tradition, would authorize and perpetuate the individuated model of social reproduction, Brown as good as banishes this model from an American slaveholding society. Indeed, Brown transforms the site of U.S. slavery (the American South) into a British landscape as if to signal that two competing cultural logics are at odds in this setting. The British gothic tradition cannot fulfill its generic obligations in Jane’s tale because of the implicit conflict, generated by slavery, between a modern subject defined by his or her desires

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and a social system that subordinates those desires to the group interests of slavery. This contradiction also demands Clotel’s suicide, which comes to us in the language traditionally reserved for the victim of seduction: “Her resolution was taken. She clasped her hands convulsively, and raised them, as she at the same time raised her eyes toward heaven, and begged for that mercy and compassion there, which had been declined her on earth; and then, with a single bound, she vaulted over the railings of the bridge, and sunk for ever beneath the waves of the river!”  What began as a traditional question of how the slave may achieve the kind of individual fulfillment bestowed on the British heroine dissolves in the waters of the Potomac River when Clotel chooses death before dishonor. In the seduction tradition, the libertine’s victim is no longer eligible to reproduce the bloodline of her family once her sexual purity has been compromised by a man who interferes with the transfer of women (which traditionally preserves an estate as whole and entire). We see this cultural logic play out in Eliza Wharton’s death in The Coquette, for example. Clotel, by way of contrast, has no original bloodline to preserve because the blood of her captors already flows in her veins. In this respect, she is a wholly American heroine that, like Mary Jemison or Clara Wieland, has been creolized by the forces that kidnapped her. Her decision to kill herself, then, obviously stems from reasons other than the need to preserve an original family bloodline. Rather, we might argue that her death preserves the cultural purity of her individualism: her personal qualities of refinement and self-worth matter far more than her origin or bloodline. She claims complete ownership of herself at the moment of her suicide when she refutes her status as another’s property: she is neither her father’s to trade nor the slave owner’s to steal. Nonetheless, her death suggests that she is inassimilable to a domestic setting because the British logic of individualism that defines her character also determines her value as a piece of property under American slave capitalism. In other words, the novel translates the implicit contradiction between Enlightenment theories of property and slavery by transplanting it into the body of a woman and having it play out as a conflict between self-expression and personal liberty. I suspect this is why Brown destroys nearly every domestic household in Clotel, as if to say that the paternal model of good government has failed catastrophically under slavery in its obligation to protect its constituents. Indeed, the only successful household in Clotel is assembled in Europe, where Clotel’s daughter Mary is reunited with her lover George. Tellingly, Brown

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hides Mary’s face behind a “black veil” at the moment of their reunion. On the one hand, the veil invites discovery by hiding a secret beneath its exterior. The gothic trope of the veiled lady transforms Mary from an object under slavery into a subject whose interiority lies deep beneath the surface of her body. This makes Mary something like Clotel’s surrogate, but Brown can only imagine this transformation taking place outside America. Assembled from a body of individuated subjects, the domestic model of social relations remains, in Brown’s novel, wholly British. At the same time, the “black” veil also suggests a racialized culture of interiority. The veil may bestow a deep subjectivity, but this metaphor carries suggestions of crafted artifice and illusion. Put another way, Mary’s ontological change in status from slave to free woman comes to us as delusional, deceptive, and reliant on the most tenuous of color identifications. As Laura Doyle and Saidiya Hartman have established so incisively, throughout the nineteenth century, the discourse of personal and national sovereignty was inextricably yoked to racial subjugation, codifying the promises of liberal humanism—life, liberty, autonomy, and so forth— as racial entitlements. In Hartman’s words, “Whiteness was a valuable and exclusive property essential to the integrity of the citizen-subject and the exemplary self-possession of the liberal individual.”  This explanation helps contextualize Brown’s metaphor of the black veil, which suggests that the individuated model of subjectivity is always a racialized formation in an American context.

Theorizing Slave Life I have spent some time arguing that Clotel exposes the latent contradictions in a property-based model of humanity when it is brought to bear on the body of the slave. As Brown seems well aware, these contradictions make the individuated model of personal sovereignty a racial formation from the start. To make this point, he endows Clotel with all the qualities and appearances of a white British sentimental heroine (refinement, beauty, and emotional sensitivity). To do so, however, he must also empty her of Africanness: “There she stood, with a complexion as white as most of those who were waiting with a wish to become her purchasers; her features as finely defined as any of her sex of pure Anglo-Saxon.”  Indeed, Brown’s novel is populated with such visibly white slaves: Clotel’s sister Althesa passes for white, Clotel’s daughter Mary is “white,” and her lover George “was as white as most white persons.” 

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Brown’s white black characters have proved a thorny issue for critics: some have interpreted them as a sign of Brown’s complicity in the racial hierarchies of the period, while others see them as a means of engaging the sympathies of a white British readership. I tend to agree, however, with Robert ReidPharr’s alternative suggestion that Clotel’s lack of “a specifically Black American nobility” indicates a desire to revise the conventional binaries of racialized American (white supremacist) culture to propose new laws of affiliation for a postslavery United States. In turning now to the trope of the yellow fever in Clotel, I want to suggest that Brown returns to the language of the gothic to propose a new aesthetic enterprise, one in which he self-consciously elides the racialism of antebellum American community by reconstituting its members as a single biological mass. Before I can make this case, however, I need to lay down some theoretical groundwork that establishes a connection between racial distinction and the figure of the population. A good place to begin is Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, which has this to say about the nature of modern racism: “European racism as the white man’s claim has never operated by exclusion, or by the designation of someone as Other. . . . From the viewpoint of racism, there is no exterior, there are no people on the outside. The dividing line is not between inside and outside but rather is internal to simultaneous signifying chains and successive subjective choices. Racism never detects the particles of the other; it propagates waves of sameness until those who resist identification have been wiped out (or those who only allow themselves to be identified at a given degree of divergence).”  Here, modern racism has nothing to do with binary divisions or fear and contempt for some ontologically strange and unknown Other. Rather, it identifies alterity as varying degrees of differential deviance from the “White-Man face,” that is, some essential notion of whiteness. But it is not enough to say that Brown’s white slaves challenge ontological racial distinctiveness as the measure of alterity. Rather, Brown remarks on the increasingly obvious fact that the color line can no longer be definitively tested by absolute distinctions of color to suggest that racialism is a system of differential inclusion or different intensities of white personhood: With the growing population of slaves in the Southern States of America, there is a fearful increase of half whites, most of whose fathers are slave owners, and their mothers slaves. . . . John Randolph, a distinguished slaveholder of Virginia, and a prominent statesman, said in a speech in the legislature that ‘the blood of the

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first American statesman coursed through the veins of the slave of the South.’ In all the cities and towns of the slave states, the real negro, or clear black, does not amount to more than one in every four of the slave population. This face is, of itself, the best evidence of the degraded and immoral condition of master and slave in the United States of America. Much like Douglass’s Narrative, Clotel begins by recounting how the practice of state institutionalized rape has eroded the binary divisions between black and white that slavery is ostensibly supposed to preserve. In this account, the figure of the white slave population has replaced the color line with declensions or modalities of whiteness. By this account, slaves like Clotel who have all the properties of the individual but are nonetheless designated as property are what Deleuze and Guattari call “men in the second or third category.”  This opening paints in broad strokes the object of the novel’s critique: slavery steals the reproductive labor of female Africans and by sanctioning— indeed, participating in—this practice, the highest levels of government have betrayed the foundational principles of democratic equality under which the nation was conceived. Much as the black female body has been despoiled by the American statesman, so liberal democratic culture has been despoiled by moral dissolution. Under such conditions, Brown argues, the racist theory of biological essentialism collapses. This theory of race maintains that some fundamental difference in blood and nature accounts for the difference between ethnic groups. The hereditary basis of difference in turn tends toward some essential ontological difference—that is, some necessary, irrevocable rift exists in the order of being that divides people into racial groups. The rise in white slaves such as Clotel challenges this notion on the grounds that the mixture of bloods erases the ontological distinction between blacks and whites, and the racist logic that once functioned primarily on the body of the slave now threatens to spread across the entire social body. This “fearful” population has the potential to undo not only the institution of slavery but also the entire enterprise of racial distinctiveness slavery claims to protect. In short, Brown presents racialism in the United States not as a clash between two essentially different or “alien” races but as a bifurcation within a differential system of whiteness whose site of operation is the population. In the Lectures at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault comes at this idea from a slightly different perspective when he argues that racial distinction is the mechanism by which sovereign power creates and maintains its

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dominance. It does so by regulating the biological processes of human beings: “What in fact is racism? It is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die. The appearance within the biological continuum of the human race of races, the distinction among races, the hierarchy of races, the fact that certain races are described as good and that others, in contrast, are described as inferior: all this is a way of fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls. It is a way of separating out the groups that exist within a population.” According to Foucault, modern racism— or what he calls “biological-type” racism— subdivides a population into those who represent a biological threat to the survival of the species as a whole. Biopower, or the technology of power that claims to regulate the life of the species, introduces “a break into the domain of human life” by dividing the population into who may live and who may die so that the species as a whole may be preserved. For Foucault, this is the “first function” of modern racism: “to fragment, to create caesuras within the biological continuum addressed by biopower.”  This fragmentation takes shape as the hierarchy of races. Thus more conventional ethnic racism (exclusionary practices of segregation, hatred, and exploitation) and scientific racism (which asserts essential hereditary or blood-based differences between races) are both functions of “biological-type” racism, which bifurcates life itself into those who may be sacrificed for the protection of the species. In sum, the operations of biopower maintain civil society’s hegemony by creating divisions within the biological figure of the species that are drawn along racial lines. With Foucault’s theory in mind, we might think of the racist discourse of biological essentialism as the mechanism by which the state creates internal “enemies” against whom society must defend itself. In the cultivation of a bourgeois civil society, the presumed biological difference between races limits the conditions of self-sovereignty to only those within a normalized range of biological (white) life. The domestic model of national sovereignty maintains its dominance by creating “breaks” or “caesura” (to borrow Foucault’s terms) within the population at the level of “race.” To function in this biopolitical mode, the state designates certain categories of people as socially dead to guarantee and protect the health of sovereign life. From a biopolitical perspective, racial distinction is less an ontological or biological category than a juridical one. It is for this reason, I am convinced, that Brown populates his novel with a cast of curiously blanched characters. Clotel’s tale, as I have argued at length, shows that sovereign power under slave capitalism loses the moral

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authority to grant political life to its constituents on the basis of property ownership. Once this happens, the racial distinctions that made such an exercise of power possible likewise collapse. The white slaves in Clotel cannot be fragmented into a traditional hierarchy of races because the system of power that authorizes and maintains the subdivision of the population along racial lines cannot sustain its own contradictions under slavery. In turning now to the chapter in Clotel entitled “Truth Stranger Than Fiction,” I want to show how Brown establishes the population as a universal biological continuum to reverse the racist sovereign logic of ontological difference. He does so in terms taken from the gothic. When Brown introduces the yellow fever to the town of New Orleans, Althesa is one of its victims: “On an average, more than 400 died daily. In the midst of disorder and confusion, death heaped victims on victims. Friend followed friend in quick succession. The sick were avoided from fear of contagion, and for the same reason the dead were left unburied. Nearly 2000 dead bodies lay uncovered in the burial-grounds. . . . The negro, whose home is in a hot climate, was not proof against the disease. Many plantations had to suspend their work for want of slaves to take the places of those carried off by the fever. Henry Morton and wife [Althesa] were among the thirteen thousand swept away by the disease.”  Clotel’s melodramatic death, we recall, left us in no doubt of the unique life lost to slavery, so it is striking that we are not invited to mourn Althesa here. Like her drowned sister, Althesa is also “swept away,” but the morally beatific nature of Clotel’s passing contrasts strongly with the affective gap left by Althesa’s abrupt and aleatory demise. That the death of Jefferson’s other daughter goes all but unremarked is precisely the point: there can be no question of the individual in a scene where Brown refuses the catharsis of sympathy. Indeed, Althesa disappears entirely as an individuated body and the subject of her own narrative. Rather, she becomes a depersonalized relation (“Henry Morton and wife”) and a data point within an irrevocable biological process. Th is process mea sures life in terms of demographic shift (Brown offers us a series of statistics to convey the magnitude of the calamity) and related changes in production (“many plantations had to suspend their work”). In this regard, Althesa is part of the population. In relating this scene, Brown borrows extensively and verbatim from John R. Beard’s abolitionist biography The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the Negro Patriot of Hayti (1853), which recounts how the disease laid waste in 1802 to French forces occupying San Domingue. This intellectual debt obviously

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places Clotel in a larger context of black revolutionary history, but for now I am more interested in the small but significant change he makes to his source material. Much like the racialized accounts of the disease we find in the works of late eighteenth-century commentators such as Matthew Carey, Benjamin Rush, and Charles Brockden Brown, Beard’s biography tells us that blacks were immune to the infection. Tellingly, William Wells Brown alters this one particular detail, informing his readers that “the negro, whose home is in a hot climate, was not proof against the disease” (emphasis mine). This specific change to his source material suggests that Brown consciously sets out to dismiss the racist logic of autochthony and immunity. He does so, I argue, to suggest that differences between races break down at the level of the biological rather than inhere within it. Yet he does more than suggest that all individuals from different races are equally vulnerable to the fever and thus fundamentally “connected” to one another. In Arthur Mervyn, we recall, Charles Brockden Brown used the trope of the yellow fever to redefine Philadelphia’s urban, cosmopolitan constituents in terms of spontaneity, infusion, and adaptability. Thus he seemed less concerned with the provenance and nature of the disease (although these elements are certainly present in the text) than with the unexpected connections it makes visible and the dissoluble boundaries it crosses. By way of contrast, William Wells Brown finds the infected body and its horrific symptoms more compelling: “The disorder began in the brain, by an oppressive pain accompanied or followed by fever. The patient was devoured with burning thirst. The stomach, distracted by pains, in vain sought relief in efforts to disburden itself. Fiery veins streaked the eye; the face was inflamed, and dyed a dark dull red color; the ears from time to time rang painfully. Now mucous secretions surcharged the tongue, and took away the power of speech; now the sick one spoke, but in speaking had a foresight of death. When the violence of the disease approached the heart, the gums were blackened.”  The disease, as Brown makes clear, is first and foremost a biological agent that compromises the corporeal integrity of the healthy organism. In much the same way that the auction block itemizes Clotel’s sentimental qualities, the fever reduces its victims to their compound parts (brain, stomach, eyes, face, etc.). The biological decay of the organism registers in the failing functions of these body parts; stomachs cease to digest, ears no longer hear, voices fall silent. The fever, in other words, enacts a process of decomposition analogous to the commodification of the female body at the auction and the corruption of the body politic under slavery (recall Brown’s description of the

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“degraded” condition of master-slave relations that results in a near-white slave body).

Writing Race as the Bio-Novel We might think of Clotel’s biological life, then, as a curiously decomposed, corrupted, or formless entity of fragmented but proliferating parts among which racial distinction has all but disappeared. This model of social relation is presented as a gothic loss of coherence. In this regard, it has more in common with the figure of the crowd we encounter in, say, Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman Major Molineux.” Nonetheless, I suspect that Brown refuses to extract Althesa from life as a member of this aggregate because he regards the sentimental securities of a domestic haven as one more mechanism of the regulatory power that maintains the racialized divisions of American slaveholding society. But while he may refuse a sentimental resolution at the level of plot, the fever offers a dramatic, visceral way of reordering social connection at the level of form. Indeed, I want to conclude by arguing that Brown’s preoccupation with creating formal correlatives to the biologized figure of the population organizes the novel and assembles its characters into new, nonsentimental social ties. Let me suggest how. In the last several decades, critical theorists of the black literary tradition have largely accepted the premise that the slave narrative is a generically composite form. Robert Stepto, for example, argues that paratextual documents—letters of white sponsorship, personal narratives, emancipation papers, and so forth— serve to authentic the slave’s own historical experience. By this logic, multiple forms can be combined in ways “which far exceeded the advantages offered by one structure.”  Henry Louis Gates takes this idea one step further when he famously argues that the black tradition is “doublevoiced” because “it always entails formal revision and an intertextual relation.”  Thus Brown clearly works within the multivocal tradition of the slave narrative when he draws extensively on extra-literary materials. Somewhat unusually, however, he openly draws attention to his intellectual debts in the novel’s final chapter: Are the various incidents and scenes related founded in truth? I answer, Yes. I have personally participated in many of those scenes. Some of the narratives I have derived from other sources; many

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from the lips of those who, like myself, have run away from the land of bondage. Having been for nearly nine years employed on Lake Erie, I had many opportunities for helping the escape of fugitives, who, in return for the assistance they received, made me the depository of their sufferings and wrongs. Of their relations I have made free use. To Mrs. Child, of New York, I am indebted for part of a short story. American Abolitionist journals are another source from whence some of the characters appearing in my narrative are taken. Brown pitches himself less as the origin and author of his own work than as slave culture’s “depository,” safekeeping slavery’s histories even as he makes “free use” of them. Th is kind of admission, as John Ernest points out, is comparatively rare in the slave narrative tradition: “At a time when it was important for black writers to secure the authority of authorship (‘written by himself ’), Brown’s practice carried risks.”  We might therefore conclude that he fully intended to make visible his novel’s repetition and dubious originality. Cast into this promiscuous mix of genres, readers are meant to be confused about whose authority they accept at any given interlude. For Russ Castronovo, this indicates the novel’s ambitious historiographic enterprise: “These diverse autobiographical accounts do not so much constitute a complete life, inviolable in the authority of its own experiences, as they subtly reconstitute history, implying its mutable and selective aspects.”  I agree that Brown wishes to refute the truth-telling capacity of culture’s “official” stories, but I also want to take the novel’s lack of originality at face value to propose another explanation. Let us assume that none of Brown’s characters qualify as “unique” authorial innovations insofar as they are almost all taken from stock cultural representations of the antebellum period or copied from other sources. For instance, Brown copies Clotel’s story almost word for word from Lydia Maria Child’s “The Quadroons,” the figures of Pompey and Sam are drawn from the minstrelsy tradition, and he reproduces large sections from published accounts of Salome Muller (an enslaved German woman), William and Ellen Craft’s escape from slavery, Beard’s Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture, antislavery sermons, poetry, and even his own personal autobiography. By so copiously borrowing his narrative materials from other authors and sources, Brown makes it clear that there can be no liberal fantasy of unique beginnings in a text that showcases its own repetition. Indeed, the very absence of

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a discernible “plot” rejects the causal logic of development and progress. Brown’s questionable ownership of his own text upsets the relationship between authorial labor and the laboring subject; he has, in effect, rejected the Enlightenment correlation of property with individuated agency at a textual level. Thus Brown does not merely take the model of autonomous selfsovereignty to task in the narrative of Clotel herself; Clotel’s notoriously disjunctive plot and extra-literary materials rebut the liberal narrative of unity, cohesion, and progress in formal terms. Rather, Brown distills the story of slavery into a series of repeated (and repeatable) interpolated tales with wide geographic, social, and racial scope. He deals in cultural phenotypes whose loosely related stories form a tissue that proliferates beyond place, social class, and race. Indeed, I would argue that the novel’s disjunctive form illustrates the impossibility under slavery of the kind of intimate, sustained knowledge required of individuals in the sentimental tradition adapted from Adam Smith. As a case in point, consider the manner in which Brown relays the fate of Currer, Jefferson’s slave mistress: “The death of Currer, from yellow fever, was a great trial to Mrs. Carlton; for she had not only become much attached to her, but had heard with painful interest the story of her wrongs, and would, in all probability, have restored her to her daughter in New Orleans [Althesa].”  This death scene has much in common with Althesa’s insofar as Currer is not memorialized but abruptly swallowed by the yellow fever, the novel’s agent and representative of biologized mass life. Indeed, Brown all but eliminates Currer as a character from the novel when he focuses almost exclusively on the story of her mistress, Georgiana Carlton. Brown contrasts Currer’s hasty removal from the novel with a tantalizing hypothetical alternative— one in which she is emancipated and reunited with Althesa. Yet this alluring promise of a sympathetic spectacle is ushered off the page as unceremoniously as Currer herself. Like many of slavery’s histories, that is simply one more story that will never be told. Like so many of the novel’s interpolated tales, this one is a narrative dead end. These slave histories are never resolved or even revisited, and so the novel’s disjunctive form relays the reader through American slave culture by moving in multiple directions to produce a weave of information that surfaces and submerges without discernible beginning or end. I find it telling that critics have struggled to put a name to Brown’s peculiar authorial strategy; in my survey of the scholarship surrounding this novel, it has been called, variously, “pastiche,” “docufiction” or “narrative journal,”

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“reportage,” “historical romance,” and an extended “anecdote.”  One critic even goes so far as to say that there “is no adequate critical term” for what Brown achieves. This critical confusion suggests to me that Clotel eludes generic classification because this is a novel about formlessness that presents itself as an excess of form. To think through the aesthetic potential of this excess, I find Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s theory of “corruption” to be helpful. In Empire (2000), Hardt and Negri argue that the strategy of modern sovereignty is not “complete cultural assimilation” through negation or attenuation; rather, it arranges “elusive, proliferating, and nonlocalizable” contradictions under “an effective apparatus of command.” They call this process “corruption,” from which they carefully remove all negative moral connotations: “[Corruption] now commonly refers only to the perverted, that which strays from the moral, the good, the pure. We intend the concept rather to refer to a more general process of decomposition or mutation with none of the moral overtones, drawing on an ancient usage that has been largely lost. Aristotle, for example, understands corruption as a becoming of bodies that is a process complementary to generation. We might think of corruption, then, as de-generation—a reverse process of generation and composition, a moment of metamorphosis that potentially frees spaces for change. We have to forget all the commonplace images that come to mind when we refer to imperial decadence, corruption, and degeneration. Such moralism is completely misplaced here.” Constituted as a social phenomenon, “corruption” acquires a more neutral declension when imagined as an act of metamorphosis that accompanies and extends the ideas of generation and formation. This is, as they insist, “a strict argument about form,” where corruption denotes a function of “breaking down” that is not necessarily tied to the deleterious ideas of ruin or flaw. It is, as they put it, “simply the sign of the absence of any ontology.” They use the term decomposition to denote this “fluidity of form”— a term, I think, that can be fruitfully brought to bear on Clotel. I want to suggest that the ruptured body of the population finds its formal correlative in Clotel ’s meandering plot, narrative loose ends, phenotypic characters, unpredictable plot outcomes, chronological adjustments, its global (as opposed to national) imaginary, the redundancy of Brown’s selfventriloquizing, and its paratextual elements. Thus the dubious composition of Clotel from extra-literary sources and plagiarized texts enacts a formal decomposition that corrupts the genre of the novel in constitutively generative ways. The novel encodes this “breaking down” and metamorphosis in its multiplication

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of generic modes and authorial sources. This decomposition at the level of form is analogous to the decomposing body of the biologized yellow fever victim, which dismantles racialized ontological distinction as the basis of personhood. In much the same way that Brown presents the plague victims as a single biological body whose members are undifferentiated at the level of race, Clotel’s cycle of representation presents slavery’s actors as generalizations in a mass body undifferentiated at the level of individual experience. Thus the slave community conjured by the text is both the novel’s object and its effect. As I hope I have demonstrated, Clotel critiques the ontological foundations of proprietary subjecthood on the grounds that its logical contradictions cannot be sustained under slavery. The novel’s “corrupted” form, to borrow once more from Hardt and Negri, therefore points to the “lack of ontological foundation of the biopolitical practices of being.”  For clarity’s sake, I have referred to Clotel in the preceding pages as a “novel” on the grounds that it is an extended, fictionalized prose narrative. As we have seen, however, Brown’s sustained refusal to conform to generic convention and his conscious indebtedness to extra-literary content renders such a term problematic, if not wholly inadequate. At the risk of muddying the waters, then, let me suggest that Clotel might best be termed a “bionovel” insofar as it does not merely use the figure of the population; it theorizes it. In contrast to the sentimental novel, which regulates individuated desire as the means of reproducing the liberal civic subject, the bio-novel is a textual effect that multiplies at the level of mass life. From this perspective, Clotel could not be less concerned with the nineteenth-century Anglophone novel’s humanistic generic imperatives. Rather, its tendency to think in types (stock characters, representative histories, cyclical chronologies, canonical topoi) draws a distinction between man as an individual and life as a social species.

epilogue

Through the narrative extravagances of plague, ventriloquism, metempsychosis, live burial, imprisonment, the return of the dead, and a host of other gothic signatures, early American novels imagine and engage the complex political relations of the post-Revolutionary Atlantic world. These works were all too aware that any number of marginalized people were denied the transformative powers of individualism on the grounds that their minds were too empty or chaotic to engage in the mental labor of rational thought. Gothic tropes expose the limitations and paradoxes inherent in the British model of self-sovereign authority by either doing away with the Lockean model entirely or altering it so radically as to render it unrecognizable. Post-Revolutionary gothic writings continually reconfigure the cultural materials of individualism to imagine a collective character better suited to a culturally diverse, largely mobile population whose allegiances are not necessarily tied to one place or kinship group and that is committed to a circum-Atlantic system of trade that sends goods, information, and people in and out of the country. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the figure of the population relocated the antagonism between contractual society and the much larger group of people denied contractualism’s rights and protections squarely to the center of some of American literature’s best-known novels. In making this argument, I have somewhat closely oriented this book around the twin poles of Lockean individualism and the gothic. My purpose in doing so was twofold. First, I wanted to take up the challenge issued by the editors of the recent collection American Literature’s Aesthetic Dimensions (2012) to “recalibrate the relation between the literary and the social”— to reintroduce, in other words, the aesthetic dimensions of the gothic to matters of social and political relations. The psychohistorical methodology we have conventionally brought to bear on the gothic has yielded invaluable insights into the racial and gendered politics of early American fiction, but it also tended to restrict our discussion of the gothic to

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its historical engagements— specifically the repressed traumas of U.S. imperialism, oppression, and economic expansion—while overlooking questions of form. I agree that the gothic cannot be parted from its cultural dimensions, but I think a somewhat different story emerges if we assume that the political engagements of the early American gothic novel inhere in its language, not in some externally verifiable source of historical guilt. By demonstrating how the gothic addresses transatlantic epistemologies of selfhood and political relations at the level of style and narrative convention, I have tried to move our discussion away from questions of repression and return and toward the inextricable entanglement of formal and ideological matters in the early American novel. Second, I have been principally concerned with uncovering a brand of cultural thinking that I believe has put an indelible stamp on some of early U.S. fiction’s most famous works— specifically, a counternarrative that challenges the naturalness and inevitability of individual sovereignty and the civil subject as a tenable paradigm for American citizenship by everywhere revising the principles of British individualism. I have taken the gothic as my case study, but this is not to say that the gothic was the only game in town. As we have seen, religious conversion narratives, captivity narratives, the literature of slavery, and tales of Indian violence all engaged the principles of selfsovereignty and questioned its narrow field of application in the long eighteenth century. That they have often used gothic language to do so should tell us that the gothic is less a distinct genre or historical body of works and more a versatile rhetorical mode that can be adapted to a variety of cultural forms. Thus the readings offered in Gothic Subjects have proven consistently skeptical about the idea of an autonomous sovereign subject, but I nonetheless accept the well-documented fact that the “individual” has been long been central to America’s collective sense of itself. As one commentator in the New York Times recently put it, “The deeply held fiction of individual autonomy and selfsufficiency . . . are intrinsic parts of Americans’ collective self-understanding.” By all accounts, the strong cultural allegiances between Scotland and the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ensured that the political languages of common and moral sense—which take the rational, self-enclosed individual as their common denominator—became the standard vocabulary of intellectual life. Early childhood educator Elizabeth P. Peabody describes common sense a “wedge of thought” that pushed aside competing metaphysical theories (such as idealism or materialism) like a conquering army. Writing in 1875, James McCosh, eleventh president of Princeton,

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justly claims that Scottish metaphysicians and moralists left an “impress” on the United States “not only on the ministers of religion, and through them upon the body of the people, but also on the whole thinking mind of the country.”  In A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century (1803), America’s first history of ideas, Philadelphia clergyman and educator Samuel Miller, anoints Locke as the progenitor of Scottish metaphysics: “What though a few respectable metaphysicians, since his day, have pointed out some errors in his principles, and suggested some improvements in his philosophy of mind? They were taught by him to think and to reason. They stood on the ground which his wisdom and diligence has gained.”  Miller shrugs at the “errors” in Locke’s philosophy of mind on the grounds that subsequent thought would have been impossible without his groundwork: “The British philosopher explained more distinctly than any one had done before him, the operations of the mind in classing the various objects of thought . . . his investigations concerning the origin and formation of ideas, concerning the use and abuse of terms, and concerning the extent and limits of our intellectual power, are well known to those conversant with the philosophy of mind.”  Among those men “conversant with [Locke’s] philosophy of mind,” we can count founding American intellectuals like John Witherspoon, Benjamin Rush, and James Wilson, for instance, whose writings and lectures modified a Lockean model of faculty psychology to transform eloquence, judgment, and reason into the basis of civic morality. With the widespread transmission of Scottish moral philosophy into American college curricula and ecclesiastical institutions, it makes sense that what Wai-Chee Dimock calls “the poetics of individualism” animated a large body of political writings in the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian eras. Michael Warner has argued that early American print culture formulated a private sphere in which the individual could locate herself as a “private liberal subject.”  In a related study, Gillian Brown has proposed that early childhood and sentimental writings consolidated the notion of individual consent as the basis of government— a rhetorical function she attributes directly to the dissemination of Locke’s writings in early America. Dimock argues that the fantasy of an autonomous agent and its correlative logic of progress proved ameliorative during the profound social upheavals of the 1830s. Tensions over class and labor relations, territorial expansion and settlement, and a burgeoning system of consumer capitalism were harmonized by the idea that personal and national progress was both natural and teleological. The chief actor in that narrative was the individual, in whom “the conjunction of freedom

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and sovereignty” transformed the laborer, the capitalist, or the expansionist into a figure of “agency personified.”  It is therefore fair to say that, from before the Revolution through the Jacksonian era and beyond, the idea of a sovereign agent defined by his capacity for moral judgment and developmental progress remained a compelling paradigm for civic membership. Nonetheless, the gothic built a coherent literary tradition around what Samuel Miller calls the “errors” in Locke’s system to show that an ontological, proprietary, teleological model of humanity is neither natural nor universally applicable. Even the sentimental tradition, which underwrites the logic of the individual by reproducing young women as the containers of a unique subjectivity, had to assume that the constituents of a sympathetic social body meet exemplary and restrictive conditions of personhood. In The Coquette, for example, the republican Mrs. Richman imagines her ideal male counterpart as nothing less than “a second self.”  Likewise, the sentimental couple Roswell and Lucretia in Julia and the Illuminated Baron “loved their own virtues in each other.”  Both cases suggest that domestic social relations demand constituents who are, for all practical purposes, little more than copies of one another. The marriage of Jane and Henry Colden at the end of Charles Brockden Brown’s Jane Talbot (1801)— a marriage strictly contingent on the reformation of Henry’s dissenting principles—is allowed to proceed only on the grounds that Henry learn to “partake with [Jane] in every thought, in every emotion, both here and hereafter.”  As Jane informs Henry, their union would be “very far from completing my felicity, unless our hopes and opinions, as well as our persons and hearts, were united.”  As Brown seems well aware, the sentimental marriage contract demands an extraordinarily prescriptive and exemplary degree of compatibility. It is therefore hardly surprising that early novelists such as Brown and Sansay took the family to task on the grounds that the new American republic— circum-Atlantic in scope—would include people whose origins are hidden, remote, or otherwise unrecoverable. Such constituents cannot be classified in the same terms as a British land-owning elite of autonomous, self-governing individuals organized hierarchically. Indeed, from Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” to Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855), the most gothic scenarios in our best-known literature arguably derive from the catastrophic consequences of mistaking people as such and then attempting through the operations of sympathy to incorporate them into a British domestic arrangement to which they prove invariably hostile. Captain Delano finds it all too easy to imagine himself in Benito Cereno’s shoes because his misguided faith in the

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harmonious relationship between master and slave allows him to ignore the profound differences between black and white, European and American, freed and enslaved, that play out aboard the San Dominick. Like the narrator of the House of Usher, Delano can only reconcile the dissonance between his efforts at sympathetic identification and Cereno’s rejection of those overtures as evidence of the Spanish captain’s disordered mind— an assumption that perpetuates his racist fantasies about slavery even as it nearly gets him killed. Thus the destruction of sentimental social relations that Leslie Fiedler identified as the hallmark of a masculine nineteenth-century American literary culture might be better understood as a tendency to individuate— or “sivilize,” to borrow Huck’s term—that which cannot be individuated to expose the limitations of thinking in terms of sympathy. This profound awareness of the limitations of sympathy may have distinguished some of America’s earliest fictional works, but it arguably did not enter British literary culture until later in the nineteenth century, when English novelists turned their attention to the enormous socioeconomic upheavals that were remaking the English home as a domain whose inhabitants and material goods were in part or wholly foreign in origin. Soaring food prices, an escalating national debt, the mobilization of a large unskilled and unemployed workforce, and the revival of domestic reformist agitation accelerated changes in the domestic material conditions under which readers could imagine the English household maintaining its cultural coherence. To keep the household English while allowing it to take in foreign people and things, it became necessary to place limits on the operations of sympathy—limits that determined the conditions under which Englishmen and -women might allow for a growing cosmopolitan composition while still retaining their cultural purity. Thus a novel like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) begins by imagining the domestic sphere as already cosmopolitan—both the Frankensteins and De Laceys are very good at learning other languages and incorporating people from foreign cultures—in order to test the limits of such tolerance by exposing it to a form of excessive individualism. The monster, much like Brown’s Carwin, embodies a contradiction that cannot be contained within the limits of the nation: he is both an object of sympathetic identification and an abject outsider whose profound difference is fundamentally at odds with the harmonious circle to which he seeks entry. In both Carwin and the monster, this contradiction registers in the dissonance between their ability to talk like “mellifluent” literate subjects and the grotesque nature of their physical appearances. Whereas Wieland imagines a way in which Carwin’s difference

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can be rhetorically transformed into a rhizomatic model of cosmopolitan social relations, Frankenstein exposes the fact that cosmopolitan tolerance, like sympathy, relies on a logic of exclusion. The monster’s own intolerance for those who refuse to sympathize with him embodies a form of intolerable difference that cannot be included into a system of universal citizenship without destroying the basis of that community. Rather than accept the difference encoded on the surface of the monster’s body, the De Laceys and Frankensteins violently abject that with which they cannot sympathize. It may be a leap to say that British authors could imagine placing limits on sympathetic social relations only once the cultural work of the early American novel made it possible to think in such terms. That claim still needs to be investigated more fully, and for feasibility’s sake, I have been compelled to limit my discussion of the British gothic in this book to the moment of its cultural transmission to the United States at the end of the eighteenth century. But there are clearly lines of continued filiation between British and American gothic works that cross and recross the Atlantic over the course of the nineteenth century. Thus we might think of the vampire in Dracula (1897) in terms similar to the “mass life” we encountered in novels like The Scarlet Letter or Clotel. Like the population, the vampire body subsumes individual difference beneath a single mass that multiplies exponentially. It is, as Foucault puts it, a “multiple body” that grows according the rhizomatic principles of repetition rather than reproduction and threatens to overwhelm the rate of food production. As such, it cannot be incorporated into a collection of individuals. Whereas American novels such as Clotel or Uncle Tom’s Cabin turn to the figure of the population to confront the contradiction between contractual social relations and slavery, the vampire addresses the British fin de siècle preoccupation with imperial degeneracy and overpopulation. Dracula shares some of the characteristics of the bio-novel insofar as its formal structure— a compilation of diary entries, letters, newspaper clippings, and phonograph transcripts—theorizes the circulation of information through a social body that must cease to think in terms of the individual to defeat the vampire. We might also consider how changes in the material conditions under which authors presented their works to a transatlantic readership produced allied innovations in form. As Wilkie Collins explains in the preface to the 1860 edition of The Woman in White, “The warm welcome which [the] story has met with, in its periodical form, among English and American readers” convinced him to put out a three-volume edition of the novel. The Woman

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in White is told from the perspective of multiple narrators— a formal “experiment” that presumably leant itself well to the novel’s successful serialization on both sides of the Atlantic and which Collins claims “has not (so far as I know) been hitherto tried in fiction.”  Whereas a writer such as William Wells Brown uses multiple narrative perspectives in Clotel to formalize the dispersed and multivocal nature of the slave population, Collins is clearly committed to preserving the individualist paradigm when he defers to the authority of each narrator’s unique “experience” as the founding principle of his tale’s narrative coherence. As my brief discussion of Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Woman in White suggests, the category of the autonomous individual evidently remained a heavily contested cultural field in nineteenth-century transatlantic literary culture. Clearly, gothic novels on both sides of the Atlantic continued to share narrative materials as they responded to the changing political needs of their readerships. I believe that what distinguishes the American gothic in the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries is its ability to imagine political formations that detach identity from any notion of geographic origin, consanguinity, or exemplary personal status. To return once more to Leslie Fiedler’s hugely generative question in Love and Death in the American Novel—“[why] has the tale of terror so special an appeal for Americans?”—we might accurately account for the gothic’s substantial appeal during the first half of the nineteenth century on the grounds that it prepared a culturally diverse readership to think of itself as very much part of a transatlantic world of exchange.

notes

introduction 1. Reid, Inquiry, 18, 16, 20. 2. Ibid., 20, 17–18. 3. John Witherspoon issues this challenge to the skeptical school of Hume and Berkeley: “That our senses are to be trusted in the information they give us, seems to me a first principle, because they are the foundation of all our after reasoning . . . [whereas] the immaterial system, is a wild and ridiculous attempt to unsettle the principles of common sense by metaphysical reasoning, which can hardly produce any thing but contempt in the generality of persons who hear it.” Lectures, 15. William Charvat points out that one of the principal objectives of the Common Sense school was to combat the skeptical philosophy of Hume and Berkeley. Origins, 33. As I. Woodbridge Riley puts it, common sense offered “an aid to faith, a safeguard against morality against the skepticism of Hume and the atheism of the Voltarians.” American Philosophy, 476. 4. Reid is not the only metaphysician to construe the principles of idealism as a fiction to be banished by common sense. In one of his lectures on law entitled “Of Man, as an Individual,” James Wilson turns his attention briefly to the skeptical proposition that “we perceive not external objects themselves, but only ideas; the necessary consequence must be, that we cannot be certain that anything, except those ideas, exists.” To this proposition he responds, “We shall have occasion to examine these castles, which have not even air to support them. Suffice it, at present, to observe, that the existence of the objects of our external senses, in the way and manner in which we perceive that existence, is a branch of intuitive knowledge, and a matter of absolute certainty.” Works, 1:202. Emphasis mine. Drawing on much the same language as Reid, Poe’s narrator in “MS. Found in a Bottle” (1833) calls philosophical skepticism “the ignes fatui of superstition” and the “common error of this age.” Selected Writings, 107. All subsequent citations to Poe’s works are from the Norton edition unless otherwise stated. 5. See, for example, Anne Williams, Art; Kate Ellis, Contested Castle; and Botting, Gothic. 6. Pinch, Strange Fits, 111. 7. Morris, Imagining, 47.

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8. Nancy Armstrong sums up this cultural work: “If mainstream novels offered readers the fantasy of domestic plentitude or wholeness of being within the household, then popular romances rendered all alternatives to such a household as a monstrous life form capable of transforming the individual from a self-governing citizen into an instrument of group desire.” How Novels Think, 22–25. On the relationship between the English gothic novel and Enlightenment epistemologies of selfhood, see especially Armstrong, How Novels Think; Tennenhouse, Importance; and Pinch, Strange Fits. These critics participate in the recent revisionist turn— spearheaded by critics such as Fred Botting, David Punter, Robert Mighall, and Chris Baldick—that has lately distinguished British gothic studies. 9. See Ringe, American Gothic, 13–35. I discuss this publication history at greater length in Chapter 1. 10. de Crèvecoeur, Letters, 201; Benjamin Rush, Letters, 1:454; Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly, 9. 11. Jean V. Matthews, Toward, 3. On the social and ethnic diversity of the postRevolutionary American population, see Riordan, Many Identities. Leonard Tennenhouse has argued that broken and makeshift families are an indelible fact of the late eighteenthcentury American experience, causally connected to the kind of international migration we see in novels like Sansay’s Secret History (1808) or Tyler’s Algerine Captive (1797): “The British diaspora in America was made up of a large number of partial families, transplanted second sons, as well as a disproportionately large ratio of single men to unmarried women who emigrated to America under a variety of contracts and conditions. As a result, during and immediately following the very substantial emigrations from Britain from the 1750s to the 1770s, and again after 1781, there was a sizeable population of fractured and makeshift families.” Importance, 44. 12. Franklin, Works, 976. 13. Ibid., 978. 14. Rebecca Rush, Kelroy, 67. 15. On the social and political disturbances of the post-Revolutionary era, see Davidson, Revolution, 216–19, and Gordon Wood, Empire, 13–31. 16. Lukasik, Discerning, 12. 17. Tennenhouse, Importance, 3. 18. See Nancy Armstrong, How Novels Think, 20–25 and throughout. 19. Castiglia, Interior, 2; Button, Contract, 6. 20. The individual takes shape across a range of early British and American discourses, including the novel, that mandate the acquisition of property (both intellectual and material) as the basis of citizenship. Howe offers a brief but helpful summary of the political formation known as the “individual” in Making, 3–10. As he puts it, “The prevailing attitude toward self-construction . . . was that individuals are valuable in their own right and that they should develop their full potential while exercising self-control. They postulated not only the existence of a self as the consequence of an individual’s personal and social history, but also the capacity of the individual for critical reflection

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upon that self, with the power to modify it through conscious effort.” Ibid., 4. In historiographic studies of eighteenth-century America, the notion of Lockean “individualism” has acquired a different range of meanings, most of which describe a particular social or economic ethos such as political pragmatism, the unfettered accumulation of wealth, or virtuous industry. Gillian Brown points out that the term individualism did not enter wide use until the 1820s, when “the notion of individual rights promulgated in the political philosophies of Hobbes and Locke comprises an article of cultural faith.” Domestic Individualism, 2. On the different meanings of “Lockean individualism,” see Huyler, Locke in America, 1–10. On the interrelated concepts of “autonomy,” “privacy,” and “individualism,” see Lukes, Individualism. In Precarious Life, Judith Butler draws an important distinction between the “subject” and the “individual”: “When we are speaking about the ‘subject’ we are not always speaking about an individual: we are speaking about a model for agency and intelligibility, one that is very often based on notions of sovereign power.” Precarious, 45. 21. Franklin, Works, 158. 22. Taylor, Sources, 160. 23. Nancy Armstrong, How Novels Think, 10, 4. 24. Brontë, Jane Eyre, 227. 25. Lynch, Economy, 126. 26. On the shift from early modern to modern ontologies of self, see Paster, Humoring, 5– 7. 27. Indeed, this may help account for Robinson Crusoe’s evident popularity in America during the second half of the eighteenth century. As Amory and Hall tell us, thirteen editions of Defoe’s novel appeared in the United States between 1784 and 1790, and a further twenty-nine editions came out between 1790 and 1800. See History of the Book, 251. The fact that Crusoe’s contractual imagination can be taken on the road, so to speak, may have held considerable appeal for a diasporic population that still considered itself culturally but not politically British. 28. Ruttenburg, Democratic Personality, 4. Christopher Castiglia, for example, argues that nineteenth-century U.S. literature construed the antebellum subject “not as a being interpellated or disciplined into unitary subjectivity or a single ‘performative’ but, rather, as overpopulated and— as any large population will be—riven by conflicting demands and aspirations.” Interior, 3. 29. Kazanjian, Colonizing Trick, 2. “The state, which plays the role of presumer, agrees not to value or hierarchically codify such differences in order to see only the citizen, a subject formally abstracted from its particularisms and hence formally and abstractly equal to all its fellow citizens.” Ibid., 2. 30. Butler, Precarious Life, 24. 31. Watt, Rise, 19. 32. Charles Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 99. 33. On the novel’s response to the ambiguous and changing economic conditions of the post-Revolutionary period, see Daniel Cohen, “Arthur Mervyn and His Elders”; Ostrowski,

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“Fated to Perish”; and Baker, Securing. Studies that emphasize the incoherence of republican political culture can be found in Edward Watts, Writing and Postcolonialism, and Levine, “Arthur Mervyn’s Revolutions.” Stephen Watts, Romance; Elliot, “Narrative Unity”; and Michael Davitt Bell, “Double-Tongued Deceiver” discuss the moral divisions in Mervyn’s character. 34. Locke, Essay, 110–11. 35. Ibid., 112, 110. 36. Ibid., 105. 37. Ibid., 237. 38. As Justine Murison points out, there is an “inherent vulnerability” in a model of psychology in which the mind is composed of autonomous functions. “Tyranny,” 247. Murison argues that early American medical discourse perceived the faculties as separate and mobile, thus susceptible to interruption. Benjamin Rush, for example, launches his account of the moral constitution of man with a wholly Lockean paradigm: “By the moral faculty I mean a capacity in the human mind of distinguishing and choosing good and evil, or, in other words, virtue and vice. It is a native principle, and thought it be capable of improvement by experience and reflection, it is not derived from either of them.” “Physical Causes,” 181. Th is mind, however, is subject to “derangement” or “depravity” when the faculty he calls “conscience” is missing or muted. Ibid., 183, 185. To illustrate this point, Rush offers the example of a man with all the outward attributes of education and civic standing but whose sense of moral judgment is entirely absent. Such a scenario potentially destabilizes property as the intellectual foundation of sovereignty because reason, in this case, does not make the man. 39. Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, 30. 40. Locke, Essay, 111. 41. Hawthorne, Tales, 210. 42. W. M. Verhoeven reminds us the Scottish moral sense school had a “common ancestor” in Locke. “This Blissful Period,” 19. In a 1790 lecture discussing man as a subject under the law, for instance, James Wilson borrows directly from Locke’s model to describe how the mind, “like the eye, contemplates, with facility, every object around it,” then turns “inward upon its own operations” and “views and examines them on every side.” Works, 1:202. With “experience,” he informs us, “we find, that when external things are within the sphere of our perceptive powers, they affect our organs of sensation, and are perceived by the mind.” Ibid., 1:202. Noah Webster agrees: “The senses are the avenues of knowledge” and a subject acquires its civic identity by developing “those faculties of mind . . . which depend on the power of comparing and combining ideas.” “Education,” 51. Such a mind, he tells us, is the constitutive component of a democratic republic: “The impressions received in early life usually form the characters of individuals, a union of which forms the general character of a nation.” Ibid., 43. Webster all but reproduces Locke’s model verbatim when he insists that consciousness begins and ends within the individual and that self-enclosure, personal autonomy, and literacy qualify a man as a member of a national collective. Likewise, James Wilson’s empirical theory of perception

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in “Of the Nature and Philosophy of Evidence” is explicitly derived from Locke. See Works 1:369– 98. To be sure, by the middle of the eighteenth century Locke’s intellectual successors—in particular, Hume, Hutcheson, Reid, and Smith—had replaced Lockean reason with aesthetic and moral competency as the basis of individual merit, but none of these Scottish moralists departed from Locke’s basic one-mind-per-body principle nor disputed the absolute self-enclosure and autonomy of the individual subject. In A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century (1803), Pennsylvania theologian Samuel Miller puts it in a nutshell: “What though a few respectable metaphysicians, since [Locke’s] day, have pointed out some errors in his principles, and suggested some improvements to his philosophy of mind? They were taught by him to think and reason.” 1:12–13. As Miller seems well aware, the Scottish tradition may have challenged the primacy of reason in Locke, but only by first appropriating his model of the empty mind to fill it anew with information derived from the human passions. See also Armstrong and Tennenhouse, “A Mind for Passion.” On the cultural and political affiliations between Scotland and the United States, see, for example, Sher and Smitten, Scotland and America; Sloan, Scottish Enlightenment; Fleischacker, “Impact on America”; Terence Martin, Instructed Vision; Charvat, Origins; Horner, Nineteenth- Century Scottish Philosophy; McCosh, Realist Philosophy; and Riley, American Philosophy. 43. Gillian Brown, Consent, 8– 9. 44. Benjamin Rush, “Securities,” 34. 45. Locke, “Second Treatise,” 177. Joseph Alkana notes that nineteenth-century discourses on psychology always took for granted the political and social dimensions of interior life. Social Self, 6–10. For J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, for example, the individual all but ceases to be human in the absence of social structures: “What is a man when no longer connected with society, or when he finds himself surrounded by a convulsed and a half-dissolved one? He cannot live in solitude; he must belong to some community bound by some ties, however imperfect.” Letters, 201. Alkana is concerned with “the way selfhood arises in narrative and the functions that selfhood assumes” rather than “the representation of consciousness or its symbolizations.” Social Self, 4. I find this methodology compelling for the way it refuses to psychologize but rather recovers historicized accounts of psychology and subjectivity in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 46. Castiglia, Interior, 4. 47. The debate over Locke’s influence on early American political thought has its origins in the cold war criticism of the 1950s, which reproduced Locke’s eschatological narrative of improvement by describing the Founding as the inevitable realization of Lockean liberalism. Scholars contested this position during the 1970s by turning to other interpretative paradigms— classical republicanism, for example, or market capitalism—that accounted for the political life of the early republic in terms other than a half-articulated faith in private property, individual freedoms, and government based on popular consent. The most well-known of these are J. G. A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment (1975), Gordon Wood’s The Creation of the American Republic (1969), and Joyce Appleby’s Capitalism

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and a New Social Order (1984) (which challenged Pocock’s vision of disinterested civic humanism on the grounds that a flourishing capitalist mentality motivated the majority of Americans during the early republic). As Jack P. Greene has argued in “The Concept of Virtue,” this body of criticism substituted key ideological terms from the cold war era— rights, consent, liberty—with new ones— chiefly virtue—to focus on republican-era ideologies of civic participation and manly disinterestedness. The task of reconciling civic humanism to liberal individualism fell to syncretic historicists writing in the 1990s, who constructed what Richard C. Sinopoli calls “a modified consensualist thesis.” Foundations, 5. This phrase describes the outpouring of scholarship concerned, on one hand, with the idealized construction of the rights-bearing citizen and the contractual state and, on the other, the limitations and paradoxes underpinning the theoretical universality of human rights. For a review of this “republican synthesis” model, see Richard K. Matthews, Virtue. On the construction of the moral citizen, see Howe, Making; Sinopoli, Foundations; and Button, Contract. Locke certainly fell out of favor with cultural and political historians in the 1990s, but the last decade has seen a resurgence of interest in his place in U.S. politics and culture. This body of criticism is concerned less with imposing European categories of thought on American political experience than with the transformations Lockean epistemologies underwent in response to the social upheavals of the post-Revolutionary era. See, for example, Gillian Brown, Consent; Huyler, Locke in America; Breen, “Subjecthood”; and Hulliung, Social Contract. Whether we argue that educated Americans knew Locke from reading his works or that he entered Revolutionary political culture by means of an unattributed popular faith in natural rights and the consent of the governed, it is fair to say that early Americans encountered his cognitive model in the proliferation of pedagogical and philosophical texts engendered by his thought. T. H. Breen goes so far to say that writers in the decades prior to the Revolution so “repeatedly invoked the authority of John Locke” that “even when the name of the great philosopher did not appear, his ideas still powerfully informed popular public consciousness.” “Ideology,” 37. Clearly, one did not even need to read Locke to know him; Gillian Brown has argued that early Americans’ familiarity with Locke began in early childhood through exposure to his pedagogical models; thus “early Americans assimilated Lockean liberalism as they grew up.” Consent, 4. 48. Huyler, Locke, 1. 49. Slauter, State, 217; Perry Miller, American Thought, ix. For I. Woodbridge Riley, Scottish realism “had the distinction of being considered by many the American philosophy.” American Philosophy, 476. It exerted “an exclusive and preponderant influence” on account of its “rapid growth, its wide spread, and its tenacious hold on the popular mind.” Ibid., 476. Terence Martin ascribes it “the unofficial status of orthodoxy” in American intellectual circles. Instructed Vision, 53. For Henry May, the “long dominance” of Scottish moral philosophy began with Americans’ exposure to Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Enlightenment in America, 33. 50. Recent work has called attention to the many ways in which the Scottish Lockean tradition and Rousseau’s contractual theory in particular were reconfigured to suit

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American interests. Revisionist histories of the social contract in American can be found in Hulliung, Social Contract, 11–42, and Button, Contract. These intellectual historians and others have argued that Locke’s constituent contractualism won out in a heavily contested field of political languages to provide “a standard vocabulary of public aff airs” well into the nineteenth century. Hulliung, Social Contract, 1. During the Federalist debates, Sinopoli says, “The justification for the exercise of political power was developed almost exclusively in terms of the social contract . . . [which] invoked presocial, natural rights and a conception of the state of nature that owed far more to Locke than to Rousseau.” Foundations, 7. Other contractual theories proved less adaptable to American experience. Kant’s theory of the social contract, for example, disallowed the right of revolution, while Pufendorf ’s contract required constituents’ submission to newly constituted government. Thus it makes sense, as Hulliung notes, that Pufendorf ’s model found greater traction during the Revolutionary period with Loyalists and British Whigs. Among these scholars, there is a growing critical consensus that the importance of Scottish Enlightenment thought cannot be overstated, extending as it did “from the realm of ideas (e.g. moral philosophy, political economy, literature, historiography, natural science and medicine) to religion and higher education.” Sher and Smitten, Scotland and America, 7. 51. To be sure, many scholars have argued that American novelists read or were otherwise familiar with Enlightenment works of philosophy and epistemology. Terence Martin’s The Instructed Vision remains one of the few full-length studies to consider the American novel in relation to Enlightenment moral sense thought, although he tends to see a direct line of influence running from Scottish Lockean philosophy into the nineteenthcentury novel because many American authors “came under the influence of Scottish thought at some point in their careers.” Instructed Vision, 32. For Martin, American letters are generically radical, sharing a common resistance to the conservative strictures of Enlightenment realism by means of formal innovation and ideological ambiguity. In this sense, The Instructed Vision anticipates a study like Cathy Davidson’s Revolution and the Word, whose most enduring legacy to the study of American culture and letters is arguably its case that American literature is first and foremost a literature of resistance. On the “radicalism” of American literature, see White, “Divided We Stand.” Charles Brockden Brown’s essays in Th e Rhapsodist (Th e Man at Home series, or “The Difference Between History and Romance”) evince a sustained engagement with Enlightenment theories of the self and consciousness. We can safely assume that Brown, as a member of the New York Friendly Club, came into contact with circulated editions of the political and philosophical works of Locke, Hume, Wollstonecraft, Godwin, and Volney, among others. On this topic, see Barnard and Shapiro, “Introduction,” ix–xlii; Voloshin, “Coherence of the Self ”; Allen, Life; and Dunlap, Life. Voloshin argues that Alcuin provides “conclusive evidence of [Brown’s] mastery of Locke’s epistemology.” “Accounting for Appearances,” 343. To my mind, however, the strongest evidence for Brown’s familiarity with Enlightenment thought comes not from archival or biographical sources but from his novelistic treatment of these epistemologies.

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52. Jameson, Political Unconscious, 81. 53. Hulliung, Social Contract, vii; Tennenhouse, Importance 24. T. H. Breen argues that “we should situate the American experience firmly within a broad comparative framework, within an Atlantic empire that included Scotland.” “Ideology and Nationalism,” 23. Working within such a critical paradigm, Theo Davis suggests that the British Enlightenment category of experience came to mean something very different in the hands of writers like Hawthorne, Emerson, and Stowe. Rather than the personal subjective knowledge of the individual, experience was construed as a generalized set of “presumptively common ideas” about a set of “typical objects and events.” Formalism, 2. Likewise, Ezra Tawil, “New Forms of Sublimity,” and Ed Cahill, Liberty of the Imagination, situate American literary production in a transatlantic discourse of aesthetic theory. 54. Fechner, “Introduction,” ix. 55. Tennenhouse, “Is There An Early American Novel?” 16. The 2006/2007 special issue of Novel rightly insists that early fiction written in North America should not be read as an allegory for historical accounts of nation making but is always “connected to larger circuits of information” that traverse the Atlantic world. Ibid., 15. The contributors therefore account for the early American novel as a distinct critical field by “revers[ing] the relationship between some historical narrative that twentieth-century scholars have retroactively invested with explanatory power and fiction written during the early republic.” Ibid., 7. 56. Warner, Letters, ix. Perhaps the best expressions of the nationalist approach to early American literature can be found in Fliegelman’s Declaring Independence and Warner’s Letters of the Republic. On American cultural history as the incarnation and perfection of liberal individualism, see Jehlen, American Incarnation. 57. Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, 68. 58. The revisionist feminist works of the 1980s and 1990s recuperated sentimental literature as a nationalist endeavor by connecting it to Smith’s concept of sympathy. See, for example, Tompkins, Sensational Designs; Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism; Brodhead, Cultures; Samuels, Romances; Barnes, States; and Stern, Plight. For an excellent discussion of the critical legacy of the republican synthesis school of thought, see White, Backcountry. On the romance plot that structures critical interpretations of the novel, see Homer Brown, “Why the Story.” 59. Dimock, Empire, 31. “To be human at all, in Locke’s terms, is by definition to be a property owner. Proprietorship is not so much an option as a given, not so much an extrinsic venture as a constitutive relation within the self— the relation between its organic components and its corporate identity. If this makes ownership an ontological provision, it also, by the same token, makes ownership the governing term in the constitution of personhood. Human identity emanates from it, revolves around it, and ceaselessly reaffirms it.” Ibid., 31. 60. Esposito, Communitas, 1. 61. Ibid., 2. 62. Jameson, Political Unconscious, 28.

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63. This phrase is translated from Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer, 5, which itself paraphrases Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Vol. 1. Foucault calls for a critical liberation from “the theoretical privilege of law and sovereignty, if we wish to analyze power within the concrete and historical framework of its operation.” History, 90. 64. On subjectivity as a function of reciprocity, see Butler, Precarious Life, 19–49. 65. See also Punter, Literature of Terror; Hogle and Smith, “Revisiting the Gothic”; Crow, American Gothic; and Edwards, Gothic Passages. 66. Fiedler’s definition of the gothic arguably anticipated the works of multiculturalist and historicist revisionists such as Philip Fisher and Toni Morrison. In Hard Facts, Fisher argues that the American novel exhibits a deep obsession with land dispossession, industrialization, and slavery. In Playing in the Dark, Morrison famously argues that a “dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence” has “haunted” mainstream American fiction from the beginning. Playing, 5, 35. Subsequent contributions to the field of gothic criticism largely reproduce modified versions of the Fiedler/Fisher/Morrison argument. 67. Punter, Literature of Terror, 165; Lloyd-Smith, American Gothic, 41; Goddu, Gothic America, 3, 133; Savoy, “The Rise of American Gothic,” 168; Edwards, Gothic Passages, xvii; Crow, American Gothic, 1. 68. Lloyd-Smith, American Gothic, 4. 69. Baldick and Mighall aptly call this function of criticism “Gothicizing” the past, whereby scholarship takes on the narrative structure of a melodrama by liberating a body of fiction from “alleged ideological backwardness” to “congratulate itself, on behalf of progressive modern opinion, upon its liberation from the dungeons of Victorian sexual repression or social hierarchy.” “Gothic Criticism,” 210. Baldick and Mighall are strikingly critical of the anxiety model of reading. 70. Rasmussen, “New Formalisms?” 1. 71. As Ed White and Michael Drexler suggest, this is characteristic of the field of early American studies in general, which tends to have a “profoundly overdetermined (often muted, often repressed) relationship to the field of history.” “The Theory Gap,” 480. 72. Recent revisionist studies include Marilyn Michaud’s study on republicanism, the American gothic, and the origins in Enlightenment revolutionary thought and Justin Edwards’s transnational study of the gothic. Likewise, the May 2009 edition of the journal Gothic Studies was devoted to imagining “a series of all-new arguments” about the transnational relationship between the gothic mode and theory. Hogle and Smith, “Revisiting the Gothic,” 1. See Tennenhouse, “Is There an Early American Novel?” for a useful exposition on the critical tendency to turn early American fiction into historical allegory. 73. Baldick and Mighall, “Gothic Criticism,” 222. 74. Reeve, Old English Baron, 3. 75. Baldick and Mighall, “Gothic Criticism, 222. 76. Irving, Legend, 273. 77. Lloyd-Smith, American Gothic, 41.

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78. Irving, Legend, 274. 79. Ibid., 276, 280. 80. Stephen Cohen, “Between Form,” 32. On the recent turn to historical formalism, see Levinson, “What Is New Formalism?”; Loesberg, Return to Aesthetics; and Isobel Armstrong, Radical Aesthetic. 81. Weinstein and Looby, Aesthetic Dimensions, 1. Their introduction provides a very helpful overview of the recent turn to historical formalism and its implications for early American literary criticism. 82. Davidson, Revolution, 212. 83. Ibid., 215, 217, 253. 84. Ruttenburg, Democratic Personality, 3. 85. Ibid., 25, 16. 86. Fiedler, Love and Death, 143. 87. Ibid., 143. 88. Ibid., 142.

chapter 1 1. For a more comprehensive list of reprinted and imported editions of gothic texts, see Ringe, American Gothic, 13–35, and Tennenhouse, Importance, 95– 96. 2. On staged adaptations of well-known gothic works in the United States, see Anthony, Gothic Plays. 3. Tyler, Algerine Captive, 6. 4. Ringe, American Gothic, 13. 5. Davidson, Revolution, 215; Fiedler, Love and Death, 144. 6. Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly, 3. 7. This critical view is perhaps most clearly elaborated in Savoy, “Rise of American Gothic,” and Lloyd-Smith, American Gothic. 8. Ringe, American Gothic, 10. 9. Fiedler, Love and Death, 92; Davidson, Revolution, 220. For Wood’s literary career and biography, see Weyler, “Sally Sayward Barrell Keating Wood.” 10. Lloyd-Smith, American Gothic, 41. 11. One contemporary commentator, for example, warns against the Illuminati’s plan “to overturn all the civil governments of Europe; after which they will think of further conquests, and extend their operations to the other quarters of the globe, till they have reduced mankind to the state of one undistinguishable chaotic mass.” Robison, “Proofs,” 292. 12. Wood, Julia, v. Ellipses in original. 13. Murison, “Tyranny,” 243. 14. For an excellent argument about the European origins of American national exceptionalism, see Tawil, “New Forms.”

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15. Tyler, Contrast, 38. 16. “Whatever interest we take in the fortune of those with whom we have no acquaintance or connexion [sic], and who are placed altogether outside of the sphere of our activity, can produce only anxiety to ourselves, without any manner of advantage to them. To what purpose should we trouble ourselves about the world in the moon? All men, even those at the greatest distance, are no doubt entitled to our good wishes, and our good wishes we naturally give them. . . . That we should be but little interested, therefore, in the fortune of those whom we can neither serve nor hurt, or who are in every respect so very remote from us, seems wisely ordered by Nature.” Adam Smith, Theory, 161. 17. We have yet to account for the fact that the hero of Wood’s novel shares a name with Brockden Brown’s gothic antihero. I am therefore speculating when I suggest that this may have been the private joke of a literary coterie. Both Wood and Brown shared an association with Judith Sargent Murray, whose pen name was “Constantia.” If Brown decided to name his heroine Constantia in honor of Murray, it seems possible that Wood’s decision to name her hero Ormond was a reciprocal acknowledgment of Brown’s novel. In this matter, and in my reading of Julia in general, I am very grateful to Ed White, who generously shared his sharp insights into the novel with me. On the coterie of female authors that include Wood, Murray, and Sarah Wentworth Morton, see Vietto, Women and Authorship, 19–34. 18. Wood, Julia, 53, 63. 19. Ibid., 189– 90. 20. See especially Nancy Armstrong, How Novels Think; Pinch, Strange Fits; and Lynch, Economy. 21. Radcliffe, Mysteries, 350. 22. Walpole, Castle, 26. 23. Wood, Julia, 192. 24. Scott, “Fatal Revenge,” 168. Scott comments disapprovingly on those novels from the “Radcliffe school” in which events of “the mystic and the marvelous” are, against all probability, “resolved by very simple and natural causes.” Ibid., 166. 25. Walpole, Castle, 5. 26. Wood, Julia, 191. 27. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, 4. 28. See especially Nancy Armstrong, How Novels Think, and Leonard Tennenhouse, Importance, 94–117. 29. Tennenhouse, Importance, 3. 30. Ibid., 9, 6. 31. Wood, Julia, 46. 32. Ibid., 270. 33. Rowson, Charlotte Temple, 131. 34. See Nancy Armstrong, “Daughters,” 8–12. 35. Webster, “Education,” 45.

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36. Locke, “Second Treatise,” 111–12. 37. Locke, Essay, 237. 38. On the aesthetic and moral dimensions of eighteenth-century “sensibility,” see Markman Ellis, Politics, 5–49. 39. On the meta-literary dimensions of early American novels, see Lukasik, Discerning, 76–84. 40. Richard D. Brown, Power, 22. 41. Ibid., 29. 42. Locke, Essay, 329, 61, 110, 187, 214. 43. Consider, for example, the strictly Lockean terms in which Brown accounts for Mervyn’s incomprehension in the face of a conversation he cannot follow: “Much conversation passed between [Clemenza] and Welbeck, but I could comprehend no part of it. I was at liberty to animadvert on the visible part of their intercourse. I diverted some part of my attention from my own embarrassments, and fi xed it on their looks. In this art, as in most others, I was an unpractised simpleton . . . I could not interpret these [appearances].” Arthur Mervyn, 42. Locke’s subject, as mapped out in the Essay, takes in sensory information from the object world, which it turns into ideas through the process of reflection. Through such empirical “experience,” it accrues an archive of thoughts against which it can mea sure subsequent information. Here, Mervyn can receive surface information from the “visible” elements of this conversation, but his inexperience (he is “an unpractised simpleton”) prevents him from turning over these sensations in a way that produces ideas about the world he has entered. 44. Readings that account for the plague’s debilitative effects in terms of postRevolutionary economic upheaval, disintegrating social ties, and turbulent political culture can be found, respectively, in Baker’s Securing, Christophersen’s Apparition, and Samuels’s “Plague and Politics.” See also Daniel Cohen, “Arthur Mervyn and His Elders”; Edward Watts, Writing and Postcolonialism; Robert Levine, “Arthur Mervyn’s Revolutions”; Stephen Watts, Romance; Elliot, “Narrative Unity”; and Michael Davitt Bell, “Double-Tongued Deceiver.” By and large, most criticism tends to pathologize the metaphor of the fever. Two important exceptions are Stacey Margolis’s article “Network Theory Circa 1800,” which argues that the fever makes visible the hidden lines of social connection in a transatlantic network of exchange, and Bryan Waterman’s “Arthur Mervyn’s Medical Repository,” which links the novel’s depiction of fever and rumor to America’s burgeoning print cultures and knowledge industries. 45. Lest we miss the point, Brown repeatedly and insistently draws attention to Mervyn’s “inexperience” in the world. It is therefore something of a critical commonplace to describe Arthur Mervyn as a Bildungsroman. A. Robert Lee, for instance, describes Arthur Mervyn as “a fully-fledged Bildungsroman.” Gothic to Multicultural, 39. Samuels, Waterman, and Robert D. Hume all make similar claims. See Samuels, Romances, 30; Waterman, Republic, 223; and Hume, “Uses of Gothicism,” 16. 46. Charles Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 322.

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47. I draw the term cosmopolitan from its eighteenth-century context to mean a culture of tolerance based on a common humanity, or what Immanuel Kant calls “universal hospitality” in his essay “Perpetual Peace.” Perpetual Peace, 112n. Written only a few years before the publication of Arthur Mervyn, Kant’s essay advocates the toleration of cultural difference in a cosmopolitan context of “close proximity.” Ibid., 118. All humans, according to Kant, are fundamentally the same by nature but potentially different by culture. He therefore imagines a cosmopolitan, transnational system of “communication” that will bring different people into contact with one another. “Visitor[s],” as he puts it, “[have] the right to visit, to associate . . . by virtue of their common ownership of the earth’s surface; for since the earth is a globe, they cannot scatter themselves infinitely, but must, finally, tolerate living in close proximity, because originally no one had a greater right to any region of the earth than anyone else.” Ibid., 118. 48. Charles Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 248. 49. A strictly Smithian concept of sympathy has proven a particularly durable model for the American nation in literary criticism. See, for example, Tompkins, Sensational; Samuels, Romances; Barnes, States; and Stern, Plight. Indeed, criticism’s debt to Adam Smith for this paradigm is arguably nowhere more evident than in Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. Anderson’s model of the nation—where an imagined simultaneity in the act of reading produces a cohesive community— draws on a Smithian model for the way it relies on the cohesive bonds of affect, or shared and imaginative feeling across a group of people. 50. Adam Smith, Theory, 83. “Spectator” and “agent” are the names Smith gives, respectively, to the witness of suffering or joy and the person who experiences those emotions within himself. 51. Ibid., 11–12, 27, 181. 52. Ibid., 11. 53. Adam Ferguson, “Principle,” 228. 54. “Of the Principle of Moral Estimation” is an imaginary dialogue between Hume, Smith, and Ferguson (going by the name “Clerk”). Here Smith defends his model of sympathy on the grounds that “a man who participates in the Passion of another cannot but approve of it.” Ibid., 229. Clerk disagrees: “When we pity a beggar we do not admire him for begging.” Ibid., 229. 55. Adam Ferguson, Essay, 56. 56. The deliberate obfuscation of language was regarded as a cardinal sin in Common Sense circles. The origins of this distrust can be found in Chapter X of Locke’s Essay, entitled “Of the Abuse of Words.” 57. If I am right that Brown is arguing against sympathy as a basis of a cosmopolitan society, it would be tempting to read Ferguson as his chief philosophical animus, given that Ferguson likewise took issue with Smith’s model. As fellow contrarians, they nonetheless argue against Smith on entirely different grounds and to very different ends. I believe there is also some question as to whether Ferguson was as important to an American readership as Smith. While Ferguson’s moral philosophy received a large

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following on the Continent, and especially in Germany, he was better known in America and Britain for his History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic. See Adam Ferguson, Essay, xxiv. Indeed, many studies of the Scottish Enlightenment in America continue to regard Ferguson as a comparatively minor player. See, for example, May, Enlightenment; Robert Ferguson, American Enlightenment; and Fleischacker, “Impact on America.” I think this view is upheld by the bibliographic statistical information gathered by Lundberg and May on the reception of major Enlightenment authors in America. According to Lundberg and May, Smith and Locke stand out as consistently popular among American readers while Ferguson remains less so. As the editor of the Cambridge edition of An Essay on the History of Civil Society points out, Ferguson’s opposition to the Smithian perspective in favor of the strong moral prescriptions of civic republicanism puts him somewhat at odds with the “main current in the Scottish Enlightenment,” a view shared by Lisa Hill, who regards Ferguson’s stance as “eccentric.” Adam Ferguson, Essay, xvii; Hill, Passionate Society, 76. For further reading on the topic of Ferguson’s debate with Smith and also Hume, see King and Devere, Challenge, and Hill, Passionate Society. 58. Charles Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 58. 59. Carol Smith-Rosenberg, for example, reads Welbeck as the locus of “the deepseated fears about the dangers commercial and fiscal capitalism pose to civic virtue” in the new republic. “Black Gothic,” 258. For Cathy Davidson, Welbeck so blatantly threatens the “very essentials of American democracy” that he comes across as little less than a “caricature” of self-interest. Revolution, 237. 60. Adam Ferguson, Essay, 22–23. 61. Charles Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 96. 62. Waterman, “Medical Repository,” 214. 63. Charles Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 101. 64. Ibid., 101. 65. Adam Smith, Theory, 161. 66. Charles Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 103. 67. Ibid., 95, 96, 104. 68. Ibid., 229. 69. Ibid., 99. 70. Defoe, Journal, 99–100. This disintegration begins at the level of the self: “People in the rage of the distemper, or in the torment of their swellings, which was indeed intolerable, run[ ] out of their own government [i.e. lose their capacity for rational selfcontrol].” Ibid., 99. 71. Consider, for example, the case of the man who refuses to occupy the same house as his wife and children, who have been “visited” by the plague. The narrator demands, “How can you abandon your own flesh and blood?” The man’s reply is evidently meant to elicit a sympathetic rather than abject response: “ ‘Oh sir,’ says he, ‘the Lord forbid! I do not abandon them; I work for them as much as I am able; and blessed be the Lord, I keep them from want’; and with that I observed he lifted his eyes to heaven, with

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a countenance that presently told me I had happened on a man that was no hypocrite, but a serious, religious, good man, and his ejaculation was an expression of thankfulness that, in such a condition as he was in, he should be able to say his family did not want.” Defoe, Journal, 122. 72. Charles Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 292. 73. See Locke, “Second Treatise,” 133–41. 74. See ibid., 122–33. 75. On the rhetorical power of the contract, see Nancy Armstrong, Desire; Gillian Brown, Consent; and especially Althusser, Politics and History. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault theorizes “subjection” as a function of power similar to that of the contract, namely, to both produce and regulate subjects so that agency and subordination are two sides of the same coin. For Foucault, the subject is always founded in its submission to the state’s authority. 76. According to Leslie Fiedler, Mervyn’s rejection of Eliza “infuriated” Percy Shelley for what he interpreted as a renunciation of Brown’s earlier political idealism. Fiedler himself regarded Brown’s authorial choice as deeply symbolic: “As surely as the death of Ormond had signified Brown’s rejection of the demonic, his abandonment of Eliza represented his turning away from a Romantic commitment to art to an acceptance of the responsibilities of bourgeois life.” Love and Death, 152. More recently, Ostrowski reads Mervyn as a market speculator who regards Achsa as a more secure “investment” than Eliza. “Fated to Perish.” See also Baker’s account of “the potentially toxic effects of burgeoning commerce [in Arthur Mervyn].” Securing, 120. 77. Ibid., 220, 220, 208, 215, 220. 78. Ibid., 293. 79. Ibid., 317, 320. 80. Ibid., 306. 81. Ibid., 398. 82. Ibid., 318–19. 83. Locke, Essay, 110. 84. Charles Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 322. 85. Ibid., 320, 322, 323, 322, 323, 327. 86. Ibid., 330. 87. Fiedler, Love and Death, 142.

chapter 2 1. In an overview of the critical trends orga nizing the field of early American literature, Stephen Shapiro summarizes the cultural work of sentimental fiction in these terms: “The problematic enshrined at the heart of eighteenth century sentimental tales involves the nexus of new associative relations made possible by the bourgeois subject freed from aristocratic lineage and status hierarchies.” Culture, 21.

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2. As Elizabeth Barnes puts it, “For American authors, a democratic state is a sympathetic state, and a sympathetic state is one that resembles a family.” States, 2. 3. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 90. 4. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 8. 5. Ibid., 25. 6. Seaver, “Narrative,” 143–44. 7. Brantlinger, Rule, 229. Richard Slotkin mythologizes the wilderness as the site of modern America’s inexorable “development,” where the drive toward “progressive improvement” is under a constant threat of cultural regression. Fatal Environment, 51, 36. 8. This version of the development narrative has often been reproduced in the critical discourse surrounding the wilderness as a unique American literary trope; it is “a place beyond language and history [that] offers a return if not to innocence, then to an imagined presocial origin of mankind.” Weissberg, “Black,” 136. 9. Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly, 4. 10. See, for example, Christopherson, Apparition, 153, and Chase, American Novel, 36. As Leslie Fiedler puts it, Brown “solved the key problem of adaptation” by submitting the gothic mode to a “complex metamorphosis” on American soil. Love and Death, 145. 11. Christopherson, Apparition, 153. 12. Philip Fisher explains, “Family life . . . miniaturize[s] the ideal relations of the nation itself, [because] the center of any political representation must include continuity, and therefore reproduction.” Hard Facts, 88. 13. Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly, 35. 14. Ibid., 55. 15. Ibid., 16. “The mode of being that must be grasped is neither disclosed nor closed off, so that being in relation with [its environment] cannot properly be defined as a true relationship, as a having to do with.” Agamben, Open, 54. Here Agamben distinguishes between relationship, which presupposes two or more ontologically coherent entities that precede any connection, and relation, which denotes a line of apprehension and continuity. 17. Ibid., 51. 18. See Locke, Essay, 110–11. 19. “Insofar as it is essentially captivated and wholly absorbed in its own disinhibitor, the animal cannot truly act (handeln) or comport itself (sich verhalten) in relation to it: it can only behave (sich benehmen).” Agamben, Open, 52. 20. From Edmund Spenser’s insistence on the absolute difference between the English and the Irish to Friedrich Engels’s description of the “unnatural” living conditions in which the Irish dwell, Irish barbarity has a long literary history as a dangerously porous geopolitical, cultural, and social boundary against which English notions of civility are mea sured. Engels, Condition, 103. See Edmund Spenser, View; Engels, Condition; and Neill, “Broken English.” 21. See Locke, “Second Treatise,” 121. Espousing the benefits of cultivated land, Locke says this about the American wilderness: “I ask, whether in the wild woods and

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uncultivated waste of America, left to nature, without any improvement, tillage, or husbandry, a thousand acres yield the needy and wretched inhabitants as many conveniences of life as ten acres equally fertile land do in Devonshire, where they are well cultivated?” Ibid., 116. 22. Locke, “Second Treatise,” 121. On the concept of terra nullius, see Armstrong and Tennenhouse, Imaginary, 170– 71. 23. Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly, 67. 24. Ibid., 138. 25. On the troubled relationship between cultivation and imperial claims to land, see Wertheimer, “Commencement.” 26. Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly, 108– 9. 27. Ibid., 122. 28. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 19. 29. Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly, 110. 30. Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin,” 152. Rousseau adapts this metaphor from Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1714). 31. Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly, 128. 32. Ibid., 148. It is likely that Brown draws here from contemporary accounts testifying to the practice of blood drinking among native tribes. Reporting on the massacre at Fort William Henry, for example, Jonathan Carver (1778) notes that “many of the savages drank the blood of their victims, as it flowed warm from the fatal wound.” Quoted in Van der Beets, Held Captive, 256n12. In “A True Narrative of the Sufferings of Mary Kinnan” (1795), Kinnan reports that female Delaware Indians “quaff with extatic pleasure the blood of the innocent prisoner.” “True Narrative,” 326. 33. Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly, 220. 34. Ibid., 14. 35. For the proportion of captivity narratives published after 1780, see Charles Evans’s American Bibliography. 36. Montgomery, “Recapturing,” 159. See also Carroll, “Affecting,” and Logan, “CrossCultural Conversations.” 37. Since first appearing in 1684, Mary Rowlandson’s narrative was republished fifteen times before 1811. Twelve of those were in the last thirty years of the eighteenth century. John Williams’s narrative, first published in 1707, reappears eleven times before 1811. Nine of these editions appeared after 1770. See Charles Evans, American Bibliography. Some critics account for this late eighteenth-century bulge in popularity as evidence of a political atmosphere of “collective captivity,” where an American readership imagined itself subject to and then freed from the tyrannical power of monarchy. See, for example, Sieminski, “Puritan.” It is relatively unproblematic to read Native American, Muslim, or French characters as allegorical extensions of the British, but this explanation cannot account for those narratives that take aim at the British directly. This begs the question, why read Indian captivity narratives as political allegory when captives like Mary Kinnan or Ethan Allen were critiquing the British outright? Nor were the British

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the only objects of critique. William Ray took advantage of his imprisonment in Algiers to openly accuse the American military itself of self-interest and “petty despotism.” Quoted in Baepler, White Slaves, 19. 38. Seaver, “Narrative,” 209. 39. Tyler, Algerine Captive, 62. 40. Ibid., 82–83. 41. Ibid., 83. This has much in common with Kant’s model of universal hospitality in “Perpetual Peace.” Under conditions of universal hospitality, Kant argues, different cultural groups will not assimilate but will retain their unique practices and identities as they come into contact. 42. Tyler, Algerine Captive, 147. 43. Henry Louis Gates Jr. rescued Marrant from nearly two hundred years of critical obscurity when he cited the Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant as inaugurating the tradition of African American literature. See Gates, Signifying, 145. Subsequent criticism has likewise focused on the issue of Marrant’s race, even though Marrant himself rarely refers to it. See, for example, Montgomery, “Recapturing.” Taking a different view, Karen Weyler argues in “Race, Redemption, and Captivity” that narrative conventions of conversion are more important in black spiritual narratives of captivity than the markings of racial difference. 44. Marrant, “Narrative,” 181, 193. 45. Ibid., 184, 187, 187, 193, 186. According to Lockean thought, male captives would be considered less than human because they own neither their bodies nor their labor, much like women, children, or slaves. Th is logic only works, however, if we think of community as a contractual state made of autonomous individuals. 46. Ibid., 193. 47. Ibid., 195. 48. The fact that Mary Jemison cannot imagine returning to the home she has left behind suggests that this logic was waning in the U.S. imagination by the 1820s. Jemison, like Marrant, regards cultural identity as a function of mobility; her narrative is a series of successive movements further west with her family. When her adopted brother declares that he would rather kill Jemison himself than see her forcibly returned to her culture of origins, the narrative literally imagines a return home as social death. 49. Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly, 284. 50. Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland, 215, 263. 51. Ibid., 198, 133. 52. Ibid., 77– 78. 53. In the captivity narrative, moreover, conversion or apostasy repeatedly serves as a trope for going native, equivalent to sexual assault or death. See, for example, John Williams’s account in The Redeemed Captive of the French priests who confiscated the Protestant captives’ bibles or the attempt by Abenaki Indians, related by Cotton Mather in “A Notable Exploit,” to force Hannah Dunstan’s conversion from Protestantism to Catholicism. 54. Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland, 234.

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55. Ibid., 217. 56. Indeed, Mettingen is repeatedly described as a blend of the two: “In this delightful region the luxuriances of natures had been chastened by judicious art.” Ibid., 227. 57. Ibid., 172, 204–5. 58. Ibid., 253. 59. Ibid., 271, 172. 60. Secret History has only recently been recovered and reprinted in Michael Drexler’s Broadview edition. Two important articles insert Sansay’s work into a literary genealogy of the early American novel: Dillon’s “Secret History of the Early American Novel” and Woertendyke’s “Romance to Novel.” 61. Sansay, Secret History, 124. 62. Ibid., 105, 152. 63. “Combination” is the term Hume gives to the mental process by which the mind creates a fiction of continuous individual identity. Treatise, 94. The imagination uses the processes of association (resemblance, contiguity, and causation) to link ideas together— that is, combine them—into an illusion of personal continuity. Th is disjunctive notion of the mind certainly seems at work in Sansay’s description of Clara St. Louis. Notably, Hume also uses the term “combination” later in the Treatise to describe a community of men whose sense of moral judgment approves actions that contribute to the common good. Ibid., 395. 64. Sansay, Secret History, 112. 65. Charles Brockden Brown, Ormond, 210. 66. Ibid., 252. 67. Richardson evidently exerted a literary influence on Brown that goes well beyond the rape scene at the conclusion of Ormond. In a letter to Joseph Bringhurst (5 May 1792), a childhood friend, Brown confesses his admiration for Richardson: “Who is there that can stand in competition with the writer of Clarissa?” Quoted in Herbert R. Brown, “Story of Julius,” 37. For this reading of Clarissa, I am indebted to Nancy Armstrong’s Desire. 68. Charles Brockden Brown, Ormond, 210. 69. Ibid., 248, 274.

chapter 3 1. Irving, “Sleepy Hollow,” 274. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid., 276. 4. Ibid., 280. 5. Cooper, “New-England Tale,” 336. 6. This is a somewhat different formation from the dangerously partisan nation that, in an earlier historical moment, worried the Federalists. As early as 1788, in the

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wake of the controversy surrounding the ratification of the Constitution, James Madison warned against “a spirit of locality,” in which local interests trump “the aggregate interests of the Community.” “Observations,” 409. In the wake of the Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson sought to reassure the nation in his inaugural address against just such a possibility: “The larger our association, the less it will be shaken by local passions.” “Second Inaugural Address,” 1:367. Whereas Madison and others were concerned about the abuses of power among state legislators and the divisive potential of factionalism, the fictional works in this chapter are more concerned with competing cultural codes among different social groups. 7. On the relationship between Scottish philosophy and eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury American pedagogy and curricula, see, for instance, Martin, Instructed Vision; Lundberg and May, “Enlightened Reader”; and Sloan, Scottish Enlightenment. 8. Riley, American Philosophy, 476. 9. Ibid., 478. As Riley puts it, common sense “had the distinction of being considered by many as pre-eminently the American philosophy,” achieving the status of “ecclesiastical and education orthodoxy.” American Philosophy, 476, 478. Subsequent scholars— Gordon Wood, Gillian Brown, T. H. Breen, and Samuel Fleischacker, to name just a few—have repeated much the same claim. Many agree that the Scottish metaphysics of moral and common sense philosophy achieved intellectual dominance in America in the second half of the eighteenth century in no small part to the combined efforts of two men: John Witherspoon and Benjamin Rush. In his 1786 essay “The Influence of Physical Causes upon the Moral Faculty,” for example, Benjamin Rush demonstrates his indebtedness to Witherspoon’s widely received ideas about the empirical foundation of moral understanding (an idea Witherspoon in turn adapts from Frances Hutcheson, who was himself heavily influenced by Locke). According to Rush, the moral faculty is that part of the mind capable “of distinguishing and choosing between good and evil.” Selected Writings, 181. As he puts it, “The moral faculty performs the office of a lawgiver”; that is, it sets a standard by which we judge the actions “that affect the well-being of society.” Ibid., 181, 182. Rush’s comment and the legal language he uses underscore the democratic appeal of this faculty. The proposition that our most basic moral perceptions are fundamentally alike suggests an ideal of political culture that unites people through a single, conformable set of conscionable actions. 10. Reid, Inquiry, 2. 11. Ibid., 266, 4. 12. McCosh, Realist, 8, 10. 13. Reid, Inquiry, 270, 255, 270. 14. Ibid., 268– 69. 15. Poe, Selected Writings, 377. 16. Ibid. 17. The Oxford English Dictionary defines this mathematical sense of the word relation as “an expression which defines the general member of a series in terms of or as a function of preceding members.” See “recurrence,” C2.

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18. Poe’s preoccupation with mathematical and intellectual abstractions led many of his contemporaries to criticize his work as lacking the spontaneous genius of imagination; as Scott Peeples writes, “During Poe’s lifetime, the image of the pedant or the detached intellectual competed with the image of the passionate, out-of-control romantic artist.” Afterlife, 15. 19. Poe, Selected Writings, 233. 20. Gillian Brown, Consent, 5. 21. Poe, Selected Writings, 232. 22. Ibid., 235–36. 23. Ibid., 239, 236. 24. Burroughs, Memoirs, 67. 25. Ibid., 97. 26. Poe, “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Selected Writings, 241. 27. Poe, Selected Writings, 374. 28. Poe makes a similar claim at the beginning of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” when discussing the “higher powers of the reflective intellect” that are called into play in the game of draughts: “Deprived of ordinary resources, the analyst throws himself into the spirit of his opponent, identifies himself therewith, and not unfrequently [sic] sees thus, at a glance, the sole methods (sometimes indeed absurdly simple ones) by which he may seduce into error or hurry into miscalculation.” Ibid., 240, 241. On this doubling of thought processes in the cumulative series of interpretations offered by Lacan, Derrida, and Johnson, see Irwin, Mystery. 29. Poe, Selected Writings, 375– 76, 376. 30. Lacan, “Seminar,” 40. 31. Ibid., 43. 32. Poe, “Murders,” Selected Writings, 253. 33. “I have before observed that it is by prominences above the plane of the ordinary, that reason feels her way, if at all, in her search for the true, and that the proper question in cases such as this is not so much ‘what has occurred?’ as ‘what has occurred that has never occurred before?’ ” Poe, Poetry and Tales, 520. 34. Poe, Selected Writings, 380. 35. Ibid., 381, 368. 36. Ibid., 253, 254–55. 37. Ibid., 252. 38. Ibid., 414, 421. 39. On the generic distinctions between Poe’s gothic and detective tales, see, for example, Kennedy, “Limits,” 172–84. 40. Looby, “Introduction,” xvii, xix. 41. Poe, Selected Writings, 317. 42. Ibid., 320. 43. Ibid., 330.

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44. As I suggested in Chapter 1, the state of being alive yet unconscious troubled Locke as a potential stumbling block to his model of rationality. He tries to put the problem to rest, so to speak, with his example of the sleeping man who thinks while asleep. See Essay, 110–11. What he sees as an affront to common sense lives on in the gothic as two minds inhabiting the same body. 45. Ibid., 333. 46. Ibid., 334. 47. Ibid., 400–402, 322, 321. 48. Ibid., 330. 49. Ibid., 335. Emphasis mine. 50. Ibid., 51. Ibid., 389, 401. 52. In the review, Poe praises a section of Sheppard Lee in which the protagonist inhabits the body of a slave called Tom. Some scholarship has taken this as evidence of his support for slavery. See, for example, Nelson, Word, and Wert, “Early Criticism,” respectively. Taking the opposite view from Nelson, Whalen cites Poe’s review of Sheppard Lee as evidence of Poe’s retreat from controversial topics like slavery and “the risks of political speech.” Poe and the Masses, 27. Jebb and Weissberg have also pointed out the narrative similarities between Bird’s novel and Poe’s short story “The Gold Bug.” See “Race, Pirates, and Intellect” and “Black, White, and Gold,” respectively. 53. Poe, “Bird,” 401. 54. Poe, Selected Writings, 235. 55. Popu lar in his own time as both a novelist and a playwright, Robert Montgomery Bird still remains largely undertheorized in ours. In critical circles, he is better known for his virulently racist frontier romance, Nick of the Woods (1837); see, for example, Slotkin, Regeneration; Ryan, Grammar; and Mielke, Moving. Justine Murison’s important chapter on Sheppard Lee in The Politics of Anxiety remains one of the few sustained scholarly inquiries into this much-neglected novel. She argues that the novel’s repre sentation of slavery connects eighteenth-century medicalized discourses of hypochondria and physiological sympathy to Bird’s construction of racial interiority. See Politics, 17–46. 56. Bird, Sheppard Lee, 8. 57. Hartman, Scenes, 3. 58. Douglass, Narrative, 13. On the politics of authenticity and authority in the slave narrative, see Olney, “ ‘I Was Born,’ ” and Stepto, Behind the Veil, 3–32, which itemizes the generic qualities of Afro-American slave narratives. 59. Bird, Sheppard Lee, 141. 60. Ibid., 200, 51, 52, 140. 61. Lee acquires knowledge of financial speculation and its dangers while embodied as the moneylender Abram Skinner. In his next incarnation as the Quaker Abel Snipe, this knowledge does not transfer in a way that informs the actions of the philanthropist: “This proposal [to engage in financial speculation], strange as it may seem to the reader,

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after the experience Abram Skinner had given me in such matters, I did, after sundry doubts and hesitations, finally agree to.” Ibid., 291. 62. Tawil, Making, 40. 63. Bird, Sheppard Lee, 341–42. 64. Tawil explains this problem in terms of the shift from monogenesis to polygenesis. In the nineteenth century, he says, “a bold line would be drawn between differences resulting from ‘the immutable laws of Nature’ and the relatively insignificant ‘external causes’ of variety.” Making, 44. In the eighteenth century, “human variety had the ontological status of a condition rather than an essence,” whereas the nineteenth century saw the rise of a “racial discourse in the modern sense— a discourse, that is, grounded not in the history of Anglo-Saxon institutions but in a new metaphysics of blood and morphology.” Ibid., 46, 48. 65. Looby, “Introduction,” xxxv. 66. Hume, Treatise, 164– 65, 164, 146, 147, 61. 67. Bird, Sheppard Lee, 69. 68. Looby, “Introduction,” xviii. 69. Bird, Sheppard Lee, 59– 60. 70. “To suppose the Soul to think, and the Man not to perceive it, is . . . to make Two Persons in one Man.” Locke, Essay, 115. 71. There is some similarity here between Bird’s model of identity and another variation of the rhizome that Deleuze and Guattari describe in the chapter of A Thousand Plateaus entitled “1914: One or Several Wolves?” See Thousand Plateaus, 26–38. Bird’s logic is that of the pack, in which “you can’t be one wolf, you’re always eight or nine, six or seven. Not six or seven wolves all by yourself all at once, but one wolf among others, with five and six others.” Ibid., 29. Each member of the pack, in other words, is alone and connected to every other. These multiplicities are “composed of particles that do not divide without changing in nature, and distances that do not vary without entering another multiplicity and that constantly construct and dismantle themselves in the course of their communications, as they cross over into each other at, beyond, or before a certain threshold.” Ibid., 33. 72. Bird, Sheppard Lee, 146. 73. Ibid., 10, 21. 74. By “social death,” I have in mind Orlando Patterson’s influential definition in Slavery and Social Death, whereby natal alienation and social depersonalization strip the slave of any rights and cultural history except that bestowed by his master. Mason provides a helpful analysis of this critical term in Social Death, 7– 9, and I discuss it at greater length in Chapter 5. 75. Bird, Sheppard Lee, 140. 76. Locke, “Second Treatise,” 111–12. 77. I believe this complicates Murison’s claim in The Politics of Anxiety that “Bird’s novel is wholly within the Lockean tradition, in which ownership of the self determines one’s relation to society and property.” Politics, 13. According to my reading, Lee inverts

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the Lockean self ’s relationship to property, whereby material ownership precedes and determines one’s self or mind. 78. Bird, Sheppard Lee, 87, 79. 79. Butler, Gender, 152. 80. Bird, Sheppard Lee, 152. 81. On the “commons,” see Hardt and Negri, Multitude, xv, 186. Pocock argues that older forms of property relations—particularly classical or feudal systems— shaped Revolutionary-era structures of power. Virtue, 103–24. While Pocock’s model of classical republican virtue has been significantly revised in recent decades, it is important to my purposes that the public mind entertained alternatives to centralized commercial systems that linked private interests to stabilized government. 82. Bird, Sheppard Lee, 417. 83. Ibid., 418, 417. 84. The tendency in the nineteenth century toward bibliographic readings and character assessment bequeathed to the twentieth century a dominant critical culture of lionization and psychoanalysis. Since the 1980s, the real challenge to deconstructionist and psychoanalytic readings has come from cultural studies critics who focus on Poe’s representation of race, gender, and regionalism. For a comprehensive overview of the different critical perspectives that have shaped Poe studies in the last 250 years, see Rosenheim and Rachman, “The Problem of Poe,” and especially Peeples, Afterlife. 85. Lathrop, “Poe, Irving, Hawthorne,” 803. 86. Kennedy and Weissberg, Romancing, xiii. 87. Joan Dayan and John Carlos Rowe inaugurated a shift in the 1980s toward the critically controversial topic of Poe’s racial and regional politics. See, for example, Rowe’s chapter on Poe in Through the Custom-House and “Poe, Antebellum Slavery, and Modern Criticism” and Dayan’s “Amorous Bondage.” Such work paved the way for later studies such as Ginsberg’s “Slavery and the Gothic Horror of Poe’s The Black Cat,” Whalen’s “Average Racism,” and Goddu’s chapter on Poe in Gothic America. Dayan’s Fables of Mind is a complex reconsideration of Poe’s aesthetics and philosophy, and this work arguably resonates with the recent shift toward a study of Poe’s literary and critical theory. See, for example, Walters, “Aesthetics,” and Polonsky, “Poe’s Aesthetic Theory.” The rise of history-of-the-book scholarship has also made critics increasingly attentive to Poe’s engagements (and conflicts) with the publishing industry, mass culture, and the economics of literary production. See Hayes, Printed Word; Elmer, Social Limit; McGill, Culture of Reprinting; and Whalen, Poe and the Masses. 88. Looby, “Introduction,” xxxix.

chapter 4 1. Foucault introduces this formulation in The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 137–40, and expands upon it considerably in the March 17, 1976, lecture in Society Must Be Defended, 239– 64.

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2. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 4; Campbell, Improper Life, 122. Butler has something similar in mind when she uses the term “precarious” life. Agamben uses the phrase “politically qualified life” to describe the idea of a subjectivized individual who is included in the realm of the political by virtue of being bound “to his own identity and consciousness, and, at the same time, to an external power.” Homo Sacer, 2, 5. This describes much the same “process[ ] of subjectivization” enacted by Rousseau’s social contract. Ibid., 5. 3. Locke, “Second Treatise,” 126. 4. Those upheavals included the decline of a rural domestic economy and the mobilization of an urban laboring class, the threat of regional conflict, increasing tensions over slavery, and fears about immigration. See Pfister, Personal Life, 2– 6. Helpful historical and political contexts for literary production during the late 1840s and 1850s have been provided by Arac, “Politics”; Reynolds, “Revolutions”; and Bercovitch, Office. 5. On the question of individual consciousness and middle-class interiority in The Scarlet Letter, see, for example, Riis, Race; Pfister, Production; Easton, Making; and Michael Gilmore, “Middle Class.” Bercovitch’s Office of the Scarlet Letter famously reads Hawthorne’s novel for its formal enactment of liberal consensus politics. 6. Hawthorne, Scarlet Letter, 53, 47. 7. Ibid., 52. 8. Ibid., 56, 71. 9. Ibid., 51. 10. Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin,” 152. 11. Ibid. 12. Hawthorne, Scarlet Letter, 58. Richard Brodhead, for example, suggests that The Scarlet Letter replaces an older model of public discipline with its interiorization: “Hawthorne’s whole project in The Scarlet Letter could be thought of as an attempt to weight the methods and powers of a newer against an older disciplinary order, by juxtaposing a world of corporeal correction (embodied in the Puritans’ punishment of Hester) and a world of correction by interiority (embodied in Chillingworth and Dimmesdale).” Cultures, 28–29. 13. Ibid., 59, 49, 49. 14. “Hester saw and recognized the self-same faces of that group of matrons, who had awaited her forthcoming from the prison-door, seven years ago; all save one, the youngest and only compassionate among them, whose burial robe she had since made.” Ibid., 214. 15. Ibid., 49, 54, 52. Emphasis mine. 16. Ibid., 73, 77, 53. 17. In Castelli’s Martyrdom and Memory, see especially 104–33. 18. Ibid., 122. 19. Hawthorne, Scarlet Letter, 58, 63. 20. For a discussion of the novel’s relation to crime, criminal justice, and the application of the law to private individual, see Korobkin, “Criminal Justice,” and Brodhead, Culture of Letters.

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21. See Agamben, Homo Sacer. Hester resembles homo sacer insofar as she stands for all those who are part of a community by virtue of their exclusion from it. 22. Emerson, “Equivalence,” 94. 23. Hawthorne, Scarlet Letter, 213. 24. Simmel, Conflict, 28. It is striking that Simmel uses the term “lively” to describe sympathy; it is also one of Smith’s preferred terms to describe the sensation of fellowfeeling. 25. Adam Smith, Theory, 20. 26. Ibid. 27. Simmel, Conflict, 17. 28. Emerson, “Equivalence,” 81. 29. Simmel, Conflict, 17. 30. Ibid., 15. 31. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 8; Hawthorne, Scarlet Letter, 76. 32. Foucault provides a neat thumbnail sketch of the contract’s negative logic: “When we enter into a contract, what are individuals doing at the level of the social contract, when they come together to constitute a sovereign? They do so because they are forced to by some threat or by need.” Society Must Be Defended, 240. 33. For the woman’s role in the domestic contract, see Wendy Brown’s chapter “Liberalism’s Family Values” in States of Injury, 135– 65. 34. Hawthorne, Scarlet Letter, 52. 35. Madison, Federalist, 54. 36. Hawthorne, Scarlet Letter, 210. 37. Ibid., 71. 38. Malthus, Essay, 19. 39. Foucault, Society, 242–43. 40. Foucault, Society, 245. In Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben builds on Foucault’s discussion of the population by first challenging Foucault’s insistence that the eighteenth century marked an epistemic shift toward biopolitics. Agamben traces an idea of biopolitics back to classical political theory, making the notion of sovereignty over naked life a long-held political assumption. 41. Foucault, Society, 246. 42. Hawthorne’s notorious ambivalence on the question of slavery has produced a large body of criticism that seeks to resolve the racial politics of his major works. See, for example, Yellin, “Slavery Question”; Arac, “Politics”; Fleischner, “Politics”; Person, “Ironies”; and Madsen, “Shadow.” Arac, for example, argues that Hawthorne’s comparative silence about slavery encodes a political fantasy of inaction. Fleischner argues for the politics of Hawthorne’s aesthetics by suggesting that Hawthorne does not avoid the topic of slavery but rather detaches “the connection between his art and his politics” through a series of “interlocking displacements.” “Politics,” 97. Other critics have sought to relate Hawthorne’s authorial self-construction to the economic realities of a professionalized literary marketplace that was inextricably tied to slave commerce. See, for example,

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Goddu, “Letters Turned to Gold.” I tend to agree with Fleischner’s assertion that the politics of slavery in The Scarlet Letter are to be found in the connection between the novel’s structural patterns and antebellum culture’s responses to slavery. 43. Hawthorne, Scarlet Letter, 76. 44. Ibid., 197. 45. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 8, 2. 46. Hawthorne, Scarlet Letter, 141, 138. Beginning in the middle of the twentieth century, Hawthorne criticism responded to poststructuralism’s attack on the integrity of language by adopting the letter as evidence of the “constitutive uncertainty” of signification. Feidelson, Symbolism, 15. See, for example, Bryson, “Illegible,” and Dauber, Rediscovering. This recognition of the letter’s complex symbolism led to a proliferation of critical interpretations, including “Artist” (Millicent Bell, View of the Artist), “Antinominanism” (Colacurcio, “Footsteps”), “Anne” Hutcheson (Lang, Prophetic Women), “Apathy” (Arac, “Politics”), and “Abolition” (Grossman, “Abolition”), to name just a few prominent examples. 47. Ibid., 140, 141. 48. Ibid., 81. 49. Ibid., 84, 82, 83, 84, 88. 50. Ibid., 81. 51. Ibid., 85. 52. Ibid., 69– 70. 53. Wendy Brown, States of Injury, 182, 145. 54. Hawthorne, Scarlet Letter, 100, 114, 168. 55. Ibid., 150, 150, 151, 113. 56. Ibid., 69. 57. It is an icon, as Leonard Tennenhouse puts it, “of perfect harmony, in which each lover knows what the other is feeling.” Importance, 116. 58. Hawthorne, Scarlet Letter, 123; Sedgwick, Between Men, 21. 59. A number of scholars have commentated on the homoeroticism and masculine social relations of The Scarlet Letter. See, for example, Robert K. Martin, “Hester Prynne”; Derrick, “Curious Subject”; and Kilcup, “Homoerotics.” Derrick, for example, also takes Sedgwick’s homoerotic triangle as a critical starting point to argue that the relationship between Dimmesdale and Chillingworth erodes the presumed autonomy of the disciplined nineteenth-century masculine body through the erotics of homosexual encounter. 60. As Carolyn Vellenga Berman sums it up, “The enshrinement of a nuclear family, with a ‘domestic’ woman at its center, [was] a national norm” by this point in America’s literary history. Creole Crossings, 2. 61. Hawthorne, Scarlet Letter, 114. 62. Ibid., 168. 63. Ibid., 122. 64. Adam Smith, Theory, 11. 65. Hawthorne, Scarlet Letter, 112.

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66. At the end of the nineteenth century, Bram Stoker would describe Dracula as a “filthy leech.” Dracula, 60. 67. See Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly, 55. 68. Ibid., 221, 224. 69. Ibid., 221, 115, 220, 223. 70. Ibid., 205– 6, 202. 71. Ibid., 213–14. Emphasis mine. 72. Ibid., 214. 73. Hawthorne, Tales, 86; Adam Smith, Theory, 180. 74. Hawthorne, Scarlet Letter, 227. 75. Ibid., 71. 76. More conventionally, the novel’s end is read for evidence of Hawthorne’s sexual politics or his political orientation. Critiques of Hawthorne’s alleged antifeminism include, for example, Bardes and Gossett, Declarations; Warren, Narcissus; and Tomc, “Change of Art.” Swann reads the novel’s conclusion— especially the new community of women that takes shape around Hester— as “a radical subversion of the patriarchal structures of society” and thus the implication of personal lives in a public political sphere. Tradition and Revolution, 90. Sacvan Bercovitch and Nina Baym take the opposite view, reading Hester’s redefined social role as Hawthorne’s expression of liberal consensus and compromise. See Office and Shape, respectively. 77. Pfister, Personal Life, 2. 78. See also Michael Gilmore, “Hawthorne and Making of the Middle Class.” 79. Easton, Making, 7. 80. Bercovitch, Office, 22. 81. Ibid., 3, 24. 82. Riis, Race, 123. See Riis’s excellent chapter “A Is for Anything” in Race, 111–35, for a critique of Bercovitch’s reading.

chapter 5 1. See, for example, Lloyd-Smith, American Gothic; Edwards, Gothic Passages; Savoy, “Face”; and Punter, Literature of Terror. These critics collectively agree that the gothic sublimates the horrors of America’s slave history. 2. Jacobs, Incidents, 61, 30. 3. Fiedler, Love and Death, 397. 4. Ibid., 142, 143. 5. Robert K. Martin, “Jim Crow,” 141, 130. 6. For Allan Lloyd-Smith, for example, the gothic signals “the inescapability of the past.” American Gothic, 41. David Punter tells us that it is “intensely preoccupied with the pathology of guilt.” Literature of Terror, 165.

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7. Dominant American literary culture “participate[s] in the production of a cultural convention: the creation of a national gothic narrative whose conspicuously fictive framework masks the real horror of race war at the core of the peculiar institution.” Ginsberg, “Slavery,” 100. 8. Goddu, Gothic America, 132; Robert K. Martin, “Jim Crow,” 130. 9. That said, John Ernest justly takes issue with scholarship that focuses “on the development of literary talent as mea sured by increasingly recognizable achievements in established genres.” Chaotic Justice, 9. In the case of black writers in particular, Ernest argues, such work reproduces “a romantic narrative of African American writers who endured considerable oppression but still persevered in their literary ambitions until their achievements were established beyond all reasonable doubt.” Ibid. 10. This reading seems at odds with William Wells Brown’s comment in The Black Man (1863), which reproduces the Enlightenment model of human perfectibility: “There is nothing in race or blood, in color or features, that imparts susceptibility of improvement to one race over another. The mind left to itself from infancy, without culture, remains a blank. Knowledge is not innate. Development makes the man.” Black Man, 35–36. On the basis of this remark, the critique might be made that Brown is clearly committed to a wholly Lockean paradigm as the means of disputing racist assumptions of biological essentialism. But I do not think that it necessarily follows that Brown remains committed to this paradigm across his entire body of abolitionist works. 11. Locke, “Second Treatise,” 126. 12. Venture Smith, “Narrative,” 17. This is Equiano’s famous description of his first mercantile transaction, which takes place in numerous locations throughout the Ca ribbean: “At length I endeavored to try my luck and commence merchant. I had but a very small capital to begin with; for one single half bit, which is equal to three pence in England, made up my whole stock. However I trusted to the Lord to be with me; and at one of our trips to St. Eustatia, a Dutch island, I bought a glass tumbler with my half bit, and when I came to Monserrat I sold it for a bit, or sixpence.” “Interesting Narrative,” 131. 13. On the rhetorical relationship between egalitarianism, emergent capitalism, and human commodification, see Waldstreicher, “Vexed Story,” and Kazanjian, Colonizing Trick, 17–22. David R. Roediger argues in The Wages of Whiteness that the status and class privileges associated with “whiteness” emerged in the nineteenth century out of the distinction between wage and slave labor. 14. Gould, “Early Black Atlantic Writing,” 115. 15. Ibid., 116. 16. Patterson’s concept of a human who may be biologically alive but politically dead has much in common with the figure of the population as imagined by Foucault, Agamben, and Hardt and Negri. In Slavery and Social Death, he defines the “socially dead person” as one who has no socially recognized existence outside his relation to a master. Social Death, 5. The slave’s “natal alienation” renders him “culturally isolated from the social heritage of his ancestors.” Ibid.

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17. Douglass, Narrative, 14. 18. In making this claim, Douglass relies on a logic that is fundamentally Malthusian. In 1798, Thomas Malthus famously took issue with the narrative of human perfectibility on the grounds that population growth will always outstrip food production if left unchecked by natural disasters like war, famine, or disease. For Malthus, humanity’s destructive and impersonal reproductive drive will submerge nature’s resources— and any question of the individual— because food production only doubles in the time it takes a population to increase exponentially. Douglass uses a similar calculus to mea sure the consequences of slavery. 19. In revised versions of his autobiography, Douglass would provide increasingly detailed depictions of his mother that contrast with the obscurity characteristic of his father. In My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), this discrepancy underscores the failure of the paternal system of domestic relations: “I say nothing of father, for he is shrouded in a mystery I have never been able to penetrate. Slavery does away with fathers, as it does away with families. Slavery has no use for either fathers or families, and its laws do not recognize their existence in the social arrangements of the plantation.” Narrative, 103. 20. Douglass, Narrative, 37–38. 21. Gates, Figures, 85. “Douglass’s language is made to signify the presence and absence of some quality—in this case, humanity.” Ibid., 89. Robert Stepto agrees: Douglass’s narrative control “yields a portrait of a complex individual marvelously facile in the tones, shapes, and dimensions of his voice.” “Narration,” 185. William L. Andrews challenges this assumption: “Like other modes of first-person discourse in the nineteenth century, black autobiography raises serious doubts about what William Spengemann has called ‘the assumption that a substantial soul or self precedes and governs individual experience and may be discerned through that experience’ as recorded in an autobiography. Because the ontology of autobiography is so problematic, it seems to me more fruitful to treat the form as a complex of linguistic acts in a discursive field than as the verbal emblem of an essential self uniquely stamped on a historical narrative.” Free Story, 23. 22. A word on this novel’s complex publication history: in 1860–1861, Brown serialized a version of Clotel as Miralda; Or, the Beautiful Quadroon. He then used this material to produce Clotelle: A Tale of Southern States in 1864, which he revised again 1867 into Clotelle: Or, The Colored Heroine; A Tale of the Southern States. The 1864 edition uses much of the material found in The Black Man (1863), and both versions continue to draw extensively from his Narrative (1847). 23. Clotel ’s detractors include, for example, Stepto, Behind the Veil; Jackson, AfroAmerican Literature; Bernard Bell, Afro-American Novel; and Schweninger, “Historicity.” For revisionist accounts of Clotel, see Nabers, “Problem of Revolution”; James, “War Wounds”; Reid-Pharr, Conjugal Union; Ernest, Resistance and Reformation; and Paul Gilmore, “ ‘Genewine Artekil.’ ” 24. Armstrong and Tennenhouse point out that Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which divides its action between the sentimental Selby household and Legree’s gothic plantation, likewise presents the story of slavery as two competing narrative traditions, “one devoted to

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accounting for the transnational circulation of goods and people, and the other designed to produce a society of self-governing individuals.” “The Problem of Population,” 676. I am indebted to their work on the population and the literary history of the American novel, but my reading departs from theirs in some important regards. I wish to insert William Wells Brown’s novel into a long tradition of American gothic letters to argue that Clotel reconstitutes the figure of biologized life in its formal ruptures. In doing so, the self-governing individual emerges as a racialized figuration. 25. Recall Equiano’s efforts to engage sympathetic identification when he poses the following question to his readers at the slave auction: “Are the dearest friends and relations, now rendered more dear by their separation from their kindred, still to be parted from each other, and thus prevented from cheering the gloom of slavery with the small comfort of being together and mingling their sufferings and sorrows?” “Interesting Narrative,” 79. Nonetheless, the narrative successes of this strategy are hard to calculate, as other black writers seem equally aware of the ambivalent nature of sentimental identification between black subjects and white readers. In Incidents, for example, Linda’s mistress Mrs. Flint proves “incapable of feeling for the condition of shame and misery in which her unfortunate, helpless slave was placed,” suggesting a degree of skepticism over sympathy’s ability to cross color lines. Incidents, 37. On slavery and sentimental discourse, see Burnham, Captivity; Boudreau, Sympathy; and Samuels, Romances. Jonathan Elmer argues that the ambivalent representations of racialized sovereign individuals in eighteenthand early nineteenth-century literature make visible “the structuring force of a racialized imagination in the new world, the ways in which the culture’s deepest investments are both made available and quite regularly misrecognized through racial categories.” Lingering, 4. 26. William Wells Brown, Clotel, 83–84. 27. Tess Chakkalakal argues that Clotel sets about the task of modernizing U.S. marriage relations by imagining the slave marriage as more affective, and hence more legitimate, than the legally recognized unions of sentimental discourse. See Novel Bondage, 15–30. 28. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 115. 29. William Wells Brown, Clotel, 120–21. 30. Ibid., 88. 31. Ibid., 197, 197– 98. 32. Fiedler dismissed Mitchell’s castle as “not merely unconvincing but meaningless” on the grounds that the atavistic relics of a distant European past had no place in a nation newly minted from the principles of reason and independence. Love and Death, 144. It seems plausible to me, however, that both Mitchell and Brown are quite consciously drawing on the very conventions Fiedler rejected as unsuited to an American setting to take advantage of their narrative logic. 33. It could also be an allusion to Constantin François Chassebœuf, comte de Volney, the author of Voyage en Syrie et en Égypte (1787) and Les Ruines (1791). During a visit to the United States in 1795, Volney became a friend and correspondent of Thomas

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Jefferson before allegations that he was a French spy forced him to flee the country. Brown may have in mind a passage from Voyage en Syrie et en Égypte where Volney, speculating that the ancient Egyptians were black, offers the following commentary on black antiquity and the abomination of the slave trade: “How are we astonished when we behold the present barbarism and ignorance of the Copts, descended from the profound genius of the Egyptians, and the brilliant imagination of the Greeks; when we reflect that to the race of negroes, at present our slaves, and the objects of our extreme contempt, we owe our arts, sciences, and even the very use of speech; and when we recollect that, in the midst of those nations who call themselves the friends of liberty and humanity, the most barbarous of slaveries is justified; and that it is even a problem whether the understanding of the negroes be of the same species with that of white men!” Travels, 76– 78. It may be that Brown wished to acknowledge Volney’s antislavery sentiments by naming one of his characters after him. 34. William Wells Brown, Clotel, 207. 35. Ibid., 218. 36. Leonard Tennenhouse has this helpful analysis of the trope of the veiled lady: “The veil declares something lies beneath surface appearances to be discovered. In doing so, the veil transforms the object of desire from something whose value registers on the surface of the body into something whose value cannot be seen. Thus the veil lends the object and interiority that could otherwise not be seen; it makes the invisible visible. In this respect, the veiled woman changes the ontology of the desired object, thus what it means for one character to desire another.” Importance, 103–4. 37. Doyle calls this the “racialization of freedom.” Freedom’s Empire, 3. See especially Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 5–10 and throughout. Hartman discusses the complex and often paradoxical consequences of bringing the concept of liberal subjectivity to bear on the enslaved and emancipated: “The recognition of the humanity of the slave did not redress the abuses of the institution nor the wanton use of the captive warranted by his or her status as chattel, since in most cases the acknowledgment of the slave as subject was a complement to the arrangements of chattel property rather than its remedy; nor did selfpossession liberate the former slave from his or her bonds [during Reconstruction] but rather sought to replace the whip with the compulsory contract and the collar with the guilty conscience.” Ibid., 6. Thus the discourse of liberal humanism either works to enforce the slave’s objective status or interpellate her as a “servile, blameworthy, and guilty individual.” Ibid., 9. 38. Ibid., 119. 39. William Wells Brown, Clotel, 88. 40. Ibid., 213, 210. 41. See Bernard Bell, Afro-American Novel, 41–42, and Levine’s introduction to the Bedford edition of Clotel, 20–22, for an overview of such perspectives. As Levine explains it, “Brown linked himself with literary sentimentalism’s project of attempting to make readers feel the plight of the marginalized other by depicting black slaves as not all that different from the whites who were reading about them,” but at the same time, his “light-

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complected black characters can seem perhaps too enamored of the white culture that denies them their rights and humanity.” “Introduction,” 20. The critique might be made that Brown does include racially distinct black characters in the novel and is hence invested in drawing ethnographic and cultural distinctions between blacks and whites. Perhaps the most exaggerated examples of this include Sam, Peck’s farmhand, and Pompey, the slave servant who prepares other slaves for market while proclaiming his black identity in presumably authentic vernacular: “Dis nigger is no countefit; he is de genewine artekil.” Clotel, 90. It is hard to take such insistence at face value, however, since Pompey is obviously crafted from the minstrel tradition and is, moreover, recognizably drawn from Brown’s own highly mediated repre sentation of himself. In the case of Pompey and William, the slave who acts the part of Clotel’s servant during their escape, race is clearly something to be performed within a racist culture, and the “black” figure is no longer distinguishable from the repre sentational strategies used to defi ne color distinctions. 42. Reid-Pharr, Conjugal Union, 38. Somewhat controversially, Robert Reid-Pharr takes the novel’s detractors at their word when he argues that Clotel is “a bad Black American novel.” Ibid., 38. In the context of his argument, however, this means something very specific: for Reid-Pharr, Brown is not primarily concerned with inaugurating a tradition of black novelistic letters or engaging black color consciousness (the more conventional mea sures of a “good” black American novel). Rather, Brown is more interested in “how one might save the republic in spite of the fact of racial difference.” Ibid., 48. Thus Clotel’s failure to secure a place in a household as a function of Brown’s utopic yet racialized postslavery America: “Clotel does such a monstrously bad job at black heroism because her body specifically refuses the logic of infinitely expanding binarisms that would have allowed for the production of a knowable ‘blackness.’ Clotel’s mixed race body is understood by Brown as the very site at which the splits (racial, sexual, psychological, and ideological) that plague America can be healed. . . . As Clotel is sold, betrayed, humiliated, and eventually killed what is being enacted is less a paean to the long-suffering slave than an encomium for a stifled democracy.” Ibid., 45. 43. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 178. 44. Ibid. 45. William Wells Brown, Clotel, 81– 82. As Robert Levine explains, Brown refers here to the Virginian political leader John Randolph (1773–1833), who “was a fiery advocate of the doctrine of states’ rights and the owner of one of Virginia’s largest slave plantations. Nevertheless, he went on record opposing slavery, and in his will he freed his slaves.” “Introduction,” 81n3. 46. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 178. 47. For many prominent eighteenth-century thinkers, the story of population growth worked hand-in-glove with the individualistic paradigm of human sovereignty and civil society. Writers like Smith, Hume, Rousseau, or Condorcet took human increase as a mark of civil society’s successes, where individual reproduction on a mass scale leads to social well-being. In Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, for example, the health of the

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market determines population growth, where a demand for labor “regulates the production of men.” Wealth, 92. For Rousseau, the success of civil government is mea sured by the prosperity of its members: “The government under which . . . the citizens most flourish and multiply is indubitably the best. The one under which the population diminishes and wastes away is the worst.” Social Contract, 117. Hume says much the same thing in his essay “Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations”: “Wherever there are most happiness and virtue, and the wisest institutions, there will also be most people.” Essays, 385. Put another way, these writers think about population in novelistic terms—that is, they reproduce the linear narrative of human perfectibility by mea suring population growth as the fulfillment of individual desire on a mass scale. For Brown, quite the opposite is true under slavery: population growth testifies to the “degraded and immoral” condition of the socalled democratic governing institutions. 48. Foucault, Society, 254–55, 255. 49. Ibid., 255. 50. Laura Ann Stoler’s Race and the Education of Desire (written before Foucault’s Lectures had been translated into English and made widely available through the Picador editions) offers a helpful and lucid account of the connection between biopower, sexuality, and race in Foucault’s political theory. On the emergent theory of scientific racism in the United States, see Tawil, Making. 51. William Wells Brown, Clotel, 196. 52. Brown’s use of statistical representation here and elsewhere in the novel appears to register something of a shift from the late Revolutionary era in the discursive practice surrounding the rhetoric of quantification and information. As Martin Brückner has argued, in the late eighteenth century, “statistical writing invited literary fantasies of political order and schematic models of state power . . . [whereby] authors fulfilled the political ideal of a mathematically conceived system.” “Census,” 285. Statistics, in other words, harmonized and stabilized the ideal nation through the fantasy of mathematical quantification. In Brown, by way of contrast, statistics destabilize the fantasy of political orga ni zation and unity by depicting a vast body of slaves at odds with civil society. In the novel’s conclusion, for example, Brown exposes the sham piety of slaveholding Christians— a standard convention in slave writing— in the following terms: “It is estimated that in the United States, members of the Methodist Church own 219,363 slaves; members of the Baptist church own 226,000 slaves; members of the Episcopalian church own 88,000 slaves; members of the Presbyterian church own 77,000 slaves; members of all other churches own 50,000 slaves, in all 660,563 slaves owned by members of the Christian church in this pious democratic republic!” Clotel, 226. On the relationship between the Enlightenment discourse of quantification and nation making, see also Headrick, Information; Giddens, Critique; and Richard D. Brown, Knowledge. 53. This is the excerpt Brown copies most directly from Beard: “In the midst of disorder and confusion death heaped victims on victims. Friend followed friend in quick succession; the sick were avoided from the fear of contagion, and for the same reason the

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dead were left without burial. . . . During the prevalence of these accumulated disasters, the black population, proof against the pest, remained faithful to the peace which had been forced on them and their venerated chief.” Beard, Life, 216–18. 54. Brown also drew extensively on Beard’s work when writing St. Domingo: Its Revolutions and its Patriots (1855). For a longer discussion of Brown’s many sources and his habit of recycling his own and other authors’ writings, see Ernest, Resistance, 24–34. On the subject of Clotel and black revolution, see Nabers, “Problem”; Ivy Wilson, Specters; and Fabi, “Unguarded.” 55. Beard uses the fever’s effects to contrast the benevolence, charity, and military discipline of the black forces (who are immune, or “proof against the pest”) with the panicking whites, who plunge into scenes of orgiastic decadence and moral corruption. See Beard, Life, 218. Thus the fever in The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture offers a lesson in black humanity and restraint that contrasts with white depravity and the moral failure of colonization. Both Benjamin Rush (Letters) and Carey (Short Account) speculate that the 1793 Philadelphia epidemic originated in the West Indies and that blacks were immune to the disease. Charles Brockden Brown exploits these racialized assumptions in Arthur Mervyn, where uninfected blacks perform crucial work as undertakers and nurses. 56. For an excellent discussion of Arthur Mervyn as theorizing social networks, see Margolis, “Network Theory.” 57. William Wells Brown, Clotel, 195. This section is also copied verbatim from Beard: “The disorder began in the brain, by an oppressive pain accompanied or followed by fever. The patient was devoured with burning thirst. The stomach, distracted by pains, in vain sought relief by efforts to disburden itself. Fiery veins streaked the eye; the face was inflamed, and dyed of a dark dull red colour; the ears from time to time rang painfully. Now mucous secretions surcharged the tongue, and took away the power of speech; now the sick man spoke, but in speaking had a foresight of death. When the violence of the disorder approached the heart, the gums were blackened.” Beard, Life, 214–15. 58. Ernest, Chaotic Justice, 104. 59. Gates, Signifying Monkey, xxv, 51. As Robert Reid-Pharr explains it, African American writers faced the challenge of representing a life defi ned by racial distinctions that were also “a reflection of white fantasy and neurosis.” Reid-Pharr, Conjugal Union, 43. 60. William Wells Brown, Clotel, 226. 61. Ernest, Resistance, 25. 62. Castronovo, “Radical Configurations,” 174. 63. As Ellen Weinauer argues, “The plagiarist challenges the relationship between property and the laboring self on which the concept of the liberal subject is predicated.” “Plagiarism,” 697. This puts Brown in the same company as Melville and Poe, for instance, who would also adopt positions of authorial imposture to reexamine the boundaries of literary subjecthood. Weinauer’s article offers an astute analysis of the relationship between authorial identity and the antebellum discourse of property. 64. William Wells Brown, Clotel, 164.

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65. Levine, “Introduction,” 7; Ernest, Resistance, 31, 33; Reid-Pharr, Conjugal Union, 44; Bernard Bell, Afro-American Novel, 38; Schweninger, “Historicity,” 24. 66. Ernest, Resistance, 32. 67. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 200–201, 201–2, 202, 202, 202. 68. Ibid., 389.

epilogue 1. Weinstein and Looby, Aesthetic Dimensions, 2. 2. J. M. Bernstein, “The Very Angry Tea Party,” New York Times, 13 June 2010. See also Appiah, “Liberalism,” 305–32. 3. Peabody, Reminiscences, 140. 4. McCosh, Scottish Philosophy, 8. 5. Samuel Miller, Brief Retrospect, 1:12–13. 6. Ibid., 2:5. 7. On Witherspoon’s adaptation of Francis Hutcheson’s theory of moral perception in his American lectures on rhetoric, see Tennen house, Importance, 29– 36, and Cahill, Liberty, 25– 27. For more general histories of Scottish Lockean thought in the United States, see Sher and Smitten, Scotland and America; Sloan, Scottish Enlightenment; Fleischacker, “Impact on America”; Terence Martin, Instructed Vision; Charvat, Origins; Horner, Nineteenth- Century Scottish Philosophy; McCosh, Realist Philosophy; and Riley, American Philosophy. 8. Dimock, Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetiecs of Individualism. 9. Warner, Letters, 174. “The turn toward sentiment can be seen as a key element in both the extension of the national imaginary to the female readership of novels and in the emergence of a liberal paradigm for appreciating printed texts.” Ibid. 10. “By severing individual status from the past, from connections established by blood or custom, Locke addresses the present state of individuals and attributes their conditions to their ongoing activities. Consent valorizes the role of persons in forming their government. And in proclaiming government as an invention of individuals, it suggests the malleability of government to reform.” Gillian Brown, Consent, 23. 11. Dimock, Empire for Liberty, 24. 12. Foster, Coquette, 123. 13. Wood, Julia, 225. 14. Charles Brockden Brown, Jane Talbot, 188. 15. Ibid., 187–88. 16. Twain, Huckleberry Finn, 9. Fiedler concluded that American literature kills off the heterosexual sentimental plot to allow white American masculinity to define itself in relation to men of other races. See Love and Death, 181–200. 17. For an account of the social, political, and historical upheavals of the early nineteenth century, see Eric J. Evans, Modern Britain, 164– 92.

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18. Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland, 59. Carwin’s physical appearance removes him from a sentimental register and inserts him into a gothic one: “His cheeks were pallid and lank, his eyes sunken, his forehead overshadowed by coarse straggling hairs, his teeth large and irregular, though sound and brilliantly white, and his chin discoloured by a tetter. His skin was of course grain, and sallow hue.” Ibid., 60– 61. To show that emotional reaction originates not in spectacle but in language, Brown detaches Carwin’s appearance from his voice, which prompts in Clara an “altogether involuntary and incontroulable” sympathetic response: “When he uttered the words ‘for charity’s sweet sake,’ I dropped the cloth I held in my hand, my heart overflowed with sympathy, and my eyes with unbidden tears.” Ibid., 59. Although his voice produces an excess of feeling that hijacks Clara’s sympathetic faculties, Carwin himself cannot be regarded as a conventional sympathetic spectacle; indeed, he resembles nothing so much as a decomposing corpse, right down to the pustular eruptions on his skin. Similarly, the monster comes to us as an excess of humanity that is literally bursting through its skin: “His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion, and straight black lips.” Shelley, Frankenstein, 35. 19. For a more comprehensive reading of the cosmopolitan dimensions of Frankenstein and early nineteenth-century English literature more generally, see Armstrong, How Novels Think, 68– 78. 20. Foucault, Society, 245. 21. Collins, Woman in White, 3. The Woman in White first appeared in the British journal All the Year Around from 26 November 1859 to 25 August 1860 and in the United States in Harper’s Weekly from 26 November 1859 to 4 August 1860. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 9. 24. Fiedler, Love and Death, 143.

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index

Adorno, Theodor, 34 Agamben, Giorgio: homo sacer, 121, 123, 197 n.2, 198 n.21; on “mass life,” 115, 198 n.40; The Open, 63, 188 n.16. See also population, the Aldridge, Rev. William. See Marrant, John Alien and Sedition Acts, 5 Althusser, Louis, 18 Anderson, Benedict, 86, 185 n.49 Armstrong, Nancy, 8, 174 n.8, 191 n.67, 202 n.24, 209 n.19 Arthur Mervyn. See novels of Charles Brockden Brown Austen, Jane, 8, 60; Pride and Prejudice, 8 Barbary captivity narrative. See captivity narrative bare life. See population, the Beard, John R.: The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the Negro Patriot of Hayti, 157–58, 160, 206–207 nn.53–55, 207 n.57 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 138, 139 bio-novel, the, 26, 142, 159– 63 Bird, Robert Montgomery, 6, 115; Sheppard Lee, 10, 15, 25, 87, 129, 194 n.52, 194 n.55; —, and Hume, 106– 7; —, and metempsychosis, 102–3, 106– 7; —, and property, 103–4, 109–12; —, psychology and consciousness in, 14, 88– 89, 103–14 Brodhead, Richard, 19, 197 n.12 Brontë, Charlotte: Jane Eyre, 8 Brown, Charles Brockden: and British literary culture, 4, 6; and the gothic, 57, 80, 86, 87, 113, 115, 116, 188 n.10; and literary nationalism, 30, 31; and Locke, 14. See also novels of Charles Brockden Brown Brown, Gillian, 15, 18, 91, 167, 175 n.20, 178 n.47

Brown, Wendy, 130 Brown, William Hill, 75; The Power of Sympathy, 9, 30, 39–40, 59 Brown, William Wells, 6, 204 n.33; Clotel; Or, The President’s Daughter, 26, 30, 141–42, 147– 63; —, as “bio-novel,” 159– 63; —, extra-literary sources in, 147, 159– 64; —, and the gothic, 150–52, 153, 157–59; —, and the “population,” 141–42, 154– 63; —, racialization of the individual in, 147, 153–54; —, and sentimentalism, 147–50, 152–53. See also bio-novel, the Burroughs, Stephen: Memoirs of the Notorious Stephen Burroughs, 92– 93, 94 Butler, Judith, 10, 111, 175 n.20, 197 n.2 Button, Mark E., 17 Cahill, Ed, 18, 23–24, 180 n.53 captivity narrative, 25, 87, 166, 189– 90 n.37, 190 n.53; Barbary captivity narrative, 70, 72– 73, 190 n.38; “going native” in, 61– 62, 66– 68, 73, 76– 78, 80, 85; politics of, 66– 67, 70– 75, 78, 144. See also rhizome Carey, Matthew, 158, 207 n.55 Castelli, Elizabeth, 120 Castiglia, Christopher, 16, 20, 175 n.28 castle, the, 2–3, 29, 33–34 65– 66, 111, 132, 150–51 Castronovo, Russ, 160 The Cavern of Death; a Moral Tale, 28 Child, Lydia Maria: “The Quadroons,” 149, 160 Christian spectatorship, 120–21 Clemens, Samuel. See Twain, Mark Collins, Wilkie: The Woman in White, 170– 71 contractualism. See social contract Cooper, James Fennimore, 87 cosmopolitanism, 77– 78, 185 n.47

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Count Roderick’s Castle; or, Gothic Times, 28 crime, 92– 94, 99 Crooke, Helkiah, 14 Cullen, Stephen: The Haunted Priory, 28 Davidson, Cathy, 24, 31, 179 n.51, 186 n.59 Davis, Theo, 18, 180 n.53 de Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St. John, 4, 177 n.45 Defoe, Daniel, 8; A Journal of the Plague Year, 49, 186 n.70– 71; Robinson Crusoe, 9, 125 n.27 Deleuze, Gilles, 60, 66, 154, 155, 195 n.71. See also rhizome diaspora, cultural logic of, 6, 35, 36, 75, 80, 85, 174 n.11 Dimock, Wai Chee, 167– 68, 180 n.49 Douglass, Frederick, 141, 202 nn.18–19, 202 n.21; Narrative of the Life, 103, 145–47, 155 Doyle, Laura, 18, 153, 204 n.37 Easton, Alison, 138 Edgar Huntly. See novels of Charles Brockden Brown Eliot, George: Middlemarch, 130 Emerson, Amanda, 121, 122–23 Equiano, Olaudah, 141, 143, 147; The Interesting Narrative, 144, 201 n.12, 203 n.25 Ernest, John, 160 Esposito, Roberto, 19 faculty psychology, 8, 37–38, 41, 82, 167, 176 n.38 The Federalist, 124 Ferguson, Adam, 43, 44, 185 n.54, 185–86 n.57 Fern, Fanny: Ruth Hall, 128 Fiedler, Leslie, 20, 21, 31, 140, 169, 181 n.66; Love and Death in the American Novel, 20, 26–27, 57, 171, 187 n.76, 188 n.10, 203 n.32, 208 n.16 Fisher, Philip, 20, 181 n.66, 188 n.12 Fleischacker, Samuel 17, 192 n.9 Foster, Hannah Webster: The Coquette, 9, 152, 168 Foucault, Michel, 1, 59, 119, 181 n.63, 187 n.75, 198 n.32, 198 n.40 ; on the population, 26, 115, 126, 128, 170, 201 n.16; on racism, 155–56, 206 n.50 Franklin, Benjamin, 5, 8, 113

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 159, 190 n.43 Goddu, Teresa, 20 Godwin, William: Caleb Williams, 29 gothic, the: American, 4– 7, 10, 14, 18, 19, 26, 29–32, 57–58, 140–41, 143, 168; British, 3–4, 6– 7, 9, 13, 30, 33–34, 36, 62, 151, 165, 169– 71; formal conventions of, 2, 3, 14–15, 30, 62, 65– 66, 103, 142, 153, 157; and “guilt thesis,” 20–22, 23, 26–27, 140, 165– 66; publication history in United States, 28–29, 30; relationship to captivity narrative, 65, 72, 80, 144; relationship to slave narrative, 26, 140–41, 144; and subject formation, 2–4, 5– 7, 10–11, 14–16, 19, 20, 23–25, 27, 33–35, 57–58, 151–52, 165, 168, 171 Gould, Philip, 57, 143 Grosse, Carl, 28 Guattari, Félix, 60, 66, 154, 155, 195 n.71. See also rhizome Hardt, Michael, 162, 163, 201 n.16 Hartman, Saidiya, 103, 148, 153, 204 n.37 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 6, 20, 88, 116, 142, 198– 99 n.42; “Alice Doane’s Appeal,” 15; The Blithedale Romance, 30; “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” 87, 128, 136, 159; “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” 87; The Scarlet Letter, 137–39, 197 n.12, 199 n.46, 199 n.56; —, and contractualism, 26, 123–26, 129–34; —, and the population, 26, 116–17, 125–29, 135–37, 139, 170; —, and sympathy, 117–23, 132–34 Horkheimer, Max, 34 The Horrors of Oakendale Abbey; a Romance, 28 Hulliung, Mark, 17, 18, 179 n.50 Hume, David, 89, 173 n.3, 177 n.42, 205– 6 n.47; A Treatise of Human Nature, 2–3, 106– 7, 191 n.63 humoral body, 13–14, 68 Huyler, Jerome, 17 Illuminati, the 31, 33, 182 n.11 individual, the, 1, 3–4, 7– 8, 10, 18, 37–38, 41–42, 89, 98, 166– 68, 174– 75 n.20, 176– 77 n.42, 208 n.10; and contractualism, 50–51, 53, 59, 70; in Hume, 106, 191 n.63; and labor, 38, 64, 66, 110–11, 142–43, 190 n.45; limits of, 10, 12–14, 38–41, 43, 57–58, 90, 91, 115–16, 125, 148–49; in Reid,

Index 89; racialization of, 153–57; reproduction in the novel, 3– 7, 8–11, 34–37, 174 n.8; and sympathy, 42–43. See also Locke, John; social contract The Iron Chest, 29 Irving, Washington, 6, 106, 115; “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” 15, 22–23, 86–88 Jackson, Shirley: The Haunting of Hill House, 30 Jacobs, Harriet, 141, 147; Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 140, 142, 143, 144, 150 Jameson, Fredric, 18, 19 Jane Talbot. See novels of Charles Brockden Brown Jemison, Mary: “A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison,” 60– 61, 62, 66– 67, 69, 71– 72, 81, 152, 190 n.48 Jones, Wendy, 8

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marriage contract, 9–10, 35, 50–54, 56, 59, 125, 130–31, 148, 168. See also social contract mass life. See population, the Matthiessen, F. O. 16 McCosh, James, 89, 166– 67 Melville, Herman, 20, 116, 207 n. 63; Benito Cereno, 30, 168– 69; The Confidence Man, 113; Israel Potter, 116 Miller, Perry, 16, 17 Miller, Samuel: A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, 167, 168, 177 n.42 Mitchell, Isaac, 4, 28; The Asylum; Or, Alonzo and Melissa, 30, 151, 203 n.32 moral sense philosophy, 15, 166, 176 n.42, 179 n.51 Morris, Pam, 8 Morrison, Toni, 30, 181 n.66 Murison, Justine, 20, 31–32, 176 n.38, 194 n.55, 195 n.77

Kazanjian, David, 8 Lacan, Jacques, 94– 95, 96 Lewis, Matthew “Monk,” 28, 30; The Monk, 29 liberalism, 7– 8, 24, 130, 138, 177– 78 n.47 Lloyd-Smith, Allan, 20 Locke, John, 1, 15, 103, 106, 167, 176– 77 n.42; in America, 16–17, 167, 177– 78 n.47, 179 n.51; An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 12–14, 37–40, 55, 57, 107, 178 n.49, 184 n.43, 194 n.44; on the individual, 3, 8, 10, 12–14, 16, 37–39, 60, 67, 89, 91; on paternalism, 39–40, 60, 116, 142; on property, 12, 38, 50, 62, 64, 109–10, 113, 142–43, 180 n.59, 190 n.45; “The Second Treatise of Government,” 38, 39, 51, 62, 188–89 n.21; tabula rasa, 39, 41, 60, 64. See also individual, the; social contract Looby, Christopher, 98, 106, 107, 113, 182 n.81 Lukasik, Christopher, 20 Lynch, Deirdre, 20 MacPherson, C. B., 8 Madison, James, 124, 192 n.6 Malthus, Thomas, 126, 202 n.18 Margolis, Stacey, 20 Marrant, John: A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black, 73– 77, 79, 190 n.43

Negri, Antonio, 162, 163, 201 n.16 novels of Charles Brockden Brown: Arthur Mervyn, 11–12, 40–58, 65, 72, 75, 104; —, and contagion, 11–12, 25, 41, 45–50, 61, 158, 184 n.44; —, and contractualism 50–57, 85; —, revision of the individual in, 41–42, 49–50; —, and sympathy, 43–50, 57–58, 132; Edgar Huntly, 4–5, 15, 30, 62– 70, 72, 75– 76, 83; —, and the captivity narrative, 64– 65, 68– 70, 76, 78, 79, 80; —, and epistolary form, 75– 76; —, and the individual, 55, 62– 70, 87, 128, 133; preface to, 29–32; Jane Talbot, 168; Ormond, 70, 72, 83– 85, 183 n.17, 187 n.76; Wieland, 15, 27, 29, 76– 80, 84, 85, 169– 70, 209 n.18; —, and the captivity narrative, 70, 75– 80, 83, 152 Ormond. See novels of Charles Brockden Brown Patterson, Orlando, 144, 195 n.74, 201 n.16. See also social death Peabody, Elizabeth P., 166 Pfister, Joel, 138 Pinch, Adela, 3, 8 Poe, Edgar Allan, 6, 20, 25–26, 88– 89, 106, 112–14, 115, 122; “Berenice,” 97; “The Cask of Amontillado,” 103; “The Fall of the House of Usher,” 15, 30, 87, 97–103,

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Poe, Edgar Allan (continued) 113–14, 132, 168, 169; “The Gold Bug,” 103; “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” 1; “Ligeia,” 103; “The Man of the Crowd,” 15, 91– 94, 95, 98; “Metzengerstein,” 102; “Morella,” 102–3; “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” 96– 97, 193 n.28; “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” 95, 97; “The Purloined Letter,” 90– 91, 94– 97; review of Sheppard Lee, 102–3, 105; “The Tell-Tale Heart,” 97 population, the, 26, 115, 117, 198 n.40, 201 n.16; and race, 26, 147, 154–56; relationship to contractual state, 115–16, 125–26, 129–30, 141–42, 165, 170; and the slave narrative, 141–42, 144–46, 171; as novel form, 162– 63, 170 racism, 154–56 Radcliffe, Ann, 3, 28, 30; The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, 28; The Italian, 28, 29, 35; The Mysteries of Udolpho, 28, 33, 34, 130, 151; The Romance of the Forest, 28, 29; A Sicilian Romance, 28 realism, 2–3, 33–34, 36 Reeve, Clara, 3, 28, 31; The Old English Baron, 21 Reid, Thomas: An Inquiry into the Human Mind, 2–3, 89, 173 n.4, 177 n.42. See also common sense Reid-Pharr, Robert, 154, 205 n.42, 207 n.59 rhizome, 59– 60, 62, 64, 195 n.71 Richardson, Samuel, 8, 60, 75; Clarissa, 84, 149, 191 n.67; Pamela, 8, 149 Riley, I. Woodbridge, 88, 173 n.3, 178 n.49 Ringe, Donald, 20, 29, 30 Roche, Regina Maria: The Children of the Abbey, 29 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: on the social contract, 50, 148, 178– 79 n.50, 197 n.2; on sympathy, 68– 69, 118–19, 127 Rowlandson, Mary, 62, 84; The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, 71– 72, 74, 77, 81, 82, 189 n.37 Rowson, Susanna, 31; Charlotte Temple, 36 Rush, Benjamin, 4, 15–16, 158, 167, 176 n.38, 192 n.9, 207 n.55 Rush, Rebecca: Kelroy, 5 Ruttenburg, Nancy, 20, 24–25

Sansay, Leonora, 6, 115, 168; Secret History, 30, 80– 83, 174 n.11, 191 n.60 Savoy, Eric, 20 Schiller, Friedrich von: The Ghost Seer, 28 Scott, Walter, 34, 183 n.24 Scribner’s, 112 Seaver, James E. See Jemison, Mary Sedgwick, Eve, 132 seduction, 83– 84, 152 sensibility, 6– 7, 38–39 sentimentalism: and the marriage contract, 33, 36, 51, 59, 145, 149, 168; and nationalist ideology, 18–19, 24, 59, 180 n.58; reproduction of the individual in, 4, 9–10, 36, 40, 59, 75, 146, 150, 163, 168, 187 n.1; and sympathy, 132, 143, 147–49, 203 n.25 Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein, 169– 70, 171 Simmel, Georg, 121–22, 123 skepticism, 2–3, 89, 173 nn.3–4. See also Hume, David Slauter, Eric, 17 sleepwalking, 15, 55, 62 Smith, Adam: on contagion, 136; on sympathy, 11, 32, 42–44, 46–47, 58, 63, 69, 117–18, 122, 133, 185 nn.49–50; The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 40–41, 43, 117, 122, 133, 183 n.16 Smith, Charlotte, 27; D’Arcy, 28; Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle, 28; Montalbert, 28 Smith, Venture, 143 social contract, 17, 50–51, 58, 71, 82– 83, 124–25, 129–34, 145, 178– 79 n.50, 198 n.30; and marriage, 50–51, 59, 124, 148. See also marriage contract social death, 109, 126–27, 144, 195 n.74, 201 n.16 Southern Literary Messenger, 102 Stepto, Robert, 159 Stern, Julia, 19 Stoker, Bram: Dracula, 170, 171 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 116; Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 116, 128, 129, 143, 144, 170; —, gothic tropes in, 142, 202 n.24 sympathy, 15, 41, 42–50, 58, 63, 117–22, 132, 168– 70; and Rousseau, 68– 69, 118; and the slave narrative, 143, 146–48, 150; and Smith, 42–44, 117–18, 122, 133. See also Rousseau, Jean-Jacque; sentimentalism; Smith, Adam

Index Tawil, Ezra, 18, 105, 195 n.63 Taylor, Charles, 8 Tennenhouse, Leonard, 6, 18, 35, 36, 174 n.11, 181 n.72, 199 n.57, 202–3 n.24, 204 n.36, 208 n.7. See also diaspora, cultural logic of Tinney, Tabitha Gilman: Female Quixotism, 39 Tompkins, Jane, 18–19 Twain, Mark: Huckleberry Finn, 169; Puddn’ head Wilson, 30 Tyler, Royall, 6; The Algerine Captive, 29, 72– 73, 174 n.11; The Contrast, 32 vampire, 7, 133, 170 Walpole, Horace, 3, 31; The Castle of Otranto, 28, 33–34, 130 Warner, Michael, 167, 208 n.9

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Warner, Susan, 116; The Wide, Wide World, 116, 128 Waterman, Bryan, 45, 184 n.44 Watt, Ian, 10, 41 Webster, Noah, 36–37, 176 n.42 Wheatley, Phillis, 144, 147 Wieland. See novels of Charles Brockden Brown Williams, John, 70, 71, 189 n.37, 190 n.53 Witherspoon, John, 167, 173 n.3, 192 n.9, 208 n.7 Woertendyke, Gretchen, 18, 191 n.60 Wood, Sally Saywood Barrell Keating, 4, 6, 28, 40, 57; Julia and the Illuminated Baron, 30–36, 37, 183 n.17 yellow fever, 11, 41, 45–46, 49–50, 61, 72, 76; and mass life, 142, 154, 157–59, 161, 163

acknowledgments

This book is about the transformation of individualism in American literary culture, so it is entirely fitting that writing it exposed the fiction of my own autonomy. If I prove cynical about the notion of an autonomous subject in these pages, it is only because I have been everywhere transformed and sustained by a wonderful network of friends, colleagues, and family. This project first took shape under the extraordinarily generous guidance of Nancy Armstrong. I am so thankful to be the beneficiary of her incisive intellect, exhaustive written critique, remarkable foresight, and expert advice. The book’s foundations were also laid in dialogue with Leonard Tennenhouse, who introduced me to the complexities of Scottish Enlightenment thought and the rich rewards of studying the early American novel. I owe an incalculable debt of gratitude to these two exemplary scholars, in whose mentorship I have been unusually fortunate. They set the standard of scholarship and professionalism to which I continue to aspire. I was lucky enough to begin writing on this topic in earnest at Brown University, where I profited from the collegiality and guidance of several outstanding scholars, particularly Philip Gould, Deak Nabers, William Keach, Jean Ferrick, Kevin McLaughlin, and Jim Egan (who converted me to the field of early American literature). For demystifying the process of book writing and offering concrete advice when it was needed most, I owe thanks to some wonderful colleagues at Queens College, CUNY: Glenn Burger, Carrie Hintz, Steven Kruger, Talia Schaffer, and Amy Wan. I am deeply appreciative of the generosity and goodwill of those friends and colleagues who commented on different sections of the manuscript and supported me throughout this project: David Babcock, Philip Barnard, Ryan Black, Fred Buell, Michelle Burnham, Ed Cahill, Seo-Young Chu, Nicole Cooley, Andy Doolen, Tad Davies, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Michael Drexler, Annmarie Drury, Kevin Ferguson, Gloria Fisk, Miles Grier, Caroline Hong, Jonna Iacono, James Lilley, Amelia Macandrew, Rich McCoy, John Melson, Laurel Rayburn, David

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Richter, Veronica Schanoes, Roger Sedarat, Bethany Shepherd, Lea Snyder, Melanie Spencer, Rebecca Summerhays, Andrea Walkden, Bryan Waterman, Karen Weingarten, John Weir, and Ed White. I owe much to Michael Neill’s early mentorship. Brian Sweeney, John Funchion, and Keri Holt are expert Americanists without whose sharp insight, humor, and enduring friendship I would be utterly lost. I am particularly grateful to Ezra Tawil for his perceptive suggestions for revision and his unerring kindness and encouragement. Finally, Duncan Faherty deserves special thanks as the very best of mentors, an inspirational scholar and teacher, and good friend. I consider myself most fortunate to be counted among the many scholars in the field of early American literature who have benefited from his generosity and intellectual acuity. I am profoundly grateful to Duncan for his consistent encouragement and support. I offer thanks to Queens College and the Research Foundation of CUNY for the resources and release time that enabled me to finish this book. Jerry Singerman at the University of Pennsylvania Press provided expert guidance and identified excellent readers whose comments proved invaluable in the manuscript’s revision. I also owe particular thanks to Jay Barksdale, the New York Public Library liaison for the Wertheim Study. The Study gave me access to the intellectual resources of New York City and a quiet space to make use of them. Parts of this book were presented before the Society of Early Americanists, the Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, the American Literature Association, the Society for Novel Studies, and the Charles Brockden Brown Society, and I am thankful for the feedback and encouragement I received in these supportive environments. Much of the work in Chapter 5 took shape after I attended the “Novel Worlds” conference at Duke University in April 2012, so I would like to thank the conference organizers and my fellow panelists Ian Duncan, Sandra MacPherson, and Mario Ortiz. Miles Grier also provided invaluable feedback on this chapter. Some parts of the Introduction and Chapter 5 are excerpted by permission of the publisher from “A Transnational Perspective on American Gothic Criticism,” in Transnational Gothic: Literary and Social Exchanges in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Monika Elbert and Bridget M. Marshall (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 19– 33, copyright © 2013. An earlier version of Chapter 1 appeared in Early American Literature, vol. 44, no. 2, copyright © 2009 by the University of North Carolina Press, used by permission of the publisher, www.uncpress .unc.edu. I wish to thank the publishers for permission to reprint this work here.

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This book may evince some skepticism about the domestic model of social reproduction, but I gratefully acknowledge that I owe every success to my family. My parents Siôn and Heather reproduced in me their own admirable intellectual curiosity, and they have been unwavering in their support and love when I chose to keep studying, even when I moved to the United States to do so. I can never adequately express my gratitude for the advantages they bestowed on me. Polly and Mr. B give me a warm haven in New Zealand. Diane and Greg Marra have made sure I am never without a home in the United States. Darran, Robert, and Benjamin are simply joyous. My sister Gretel gives me inspiration and encouragement, and she has helped me in more ways than I can calculate. She is the best proof I have that family thrives on exemplary standards of selfhood. But I owe most of all to my husband and dearest friend Matthew Gilbert, whose limitless patience, deep love, and remarkable consideration have buoyed me through the completion of the manuscript. His indefatigable humor provides the ballast to our lives. I wish I could have incorporated more of his editorial suggestions.