8
From the time when the predatory spirit, which led the northern Barbarians to ravage the south of Europe, had subsided, and given place to its natural offspring, in the establishment of feudal monarchy, the history of this quarter of the world begins to assume a consistent shape; and it offers itself to our contemplation, as relative to the spirit of nations under three successive aspects. These are the spirit of Hierarchy, the spirit of Chivalry, and the spirit of Commerce. Out of these different materials the genius of the government has forged instruments of oppression almost equally destructive. It has never failed to cloud the minds of the nation with some kind of superstition, conformable to the temper of the times. In one age it is the superstition of religion, in another the superstition of honour, in another the superstition of public credit.
—Joel Barlow, Advice to the Privileged Orders (1792–94)
When it shall be said in any country in the world, my poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am the friend of its happiness: when these things can be said, then may that country boast of its constitution and its government.
—Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1791–92)
Class Consciousness in a “Classless” Society
The humor and the title of Royall Tyler’s popular play The Contrast both derive from the sustained juxtaposition of innocent American values with urbane but corrupt European ones. That contrast is, in effect, an early American variation of what Raymond Williams has schematized in English literature as The Country and the City. In Tyler’s play Colonel Henry Manly (consistent with his name) is early portrayed as a representative American man—honest, direct, and forthright. He is compared to the more dubiously named Billy Dimple, who has been to Europe, where he has squandered his inheritance in the pursuit of fashion and European sophistication. This second character quotes Chesterfield and copies the forms of gentility but has little concern for the substance of morality. That same opposition is also played out in a minor key. Manly’s country servant, Jonathan, is, at first, tempted by luxury, but he remains essentially a good, earnest, solid, and stolid Yankee, while Billy’s servant, Jessamy, who is foppish and irresponsible, is a more openly materialistic and misogynistic parody of his master, Dimple. The unfolding play then complicates these contrasts, showing that Dimple is hardly the sophisticate he pretends to be and that Manly, more ambiguously, might not be all that he first seems either. He is, after all, a prig; his American patriotism is a self-parody; his speech, like the campaign slogans of the era, is too full of itself. “His conversation,” his sister Charlotte aptly notes, “is like a rich, old-fashioned brocade,—it will stand alone.”
Tyler can safely compromise the opposition between honest (but priggish) Manly and corrupt (but harmless) Dimple on which the play first turns. The Contrast, after all, is drawing room comedy, a form that typically proves its urbanity (like a New Yorker cartoon) by gently mocking even the social norms that underlie its comedy. But Tyler does little with the other opposition that supports these two players in their contrasts, the master/servant relationship also basic to the play. Both Manly and Dimple depend upon the labor of their servants, and, at the same time, each labors to instruct his servant in his own prejudices and predilections. The country versus the city, the American versus the European dichotomies come under scrutiny in the plot, but the master/servant relationship is a given, unquestioned and unquestionable.
Gender assumptions, as much as class assumptions, are also posited as natural in this play. Maria Van Rough is the traditional heroine who serves as both the plot’s catalyst and prize. The locus for the contrast between Dimple and Manly, she is, in compliance with her father’s materialistic wishes, betrothed to the former, but she is in love with the latter. She does not approve of Dimple’s recently acquired European pretensions; her father is displeased by Manly’s more limited prospects: “Money makes the mare go; keep your eye upon the main chance, Mary.”1 Only near the end of the play, with the revelation that Dimple intends to marry the homely, but rich, Letitia while making Manly’s beautiful sister, Charlotte, his mistress, does Van Rough relent and allow his daughter to marry the man of her choice. This reversal, however, only confirms the play’s superstructure of values. Old Van Rough finally discovers that Dimple has lost his fortune, so the daughter still weds the more well-to-do of the two men, the one who, happily, has been her choice all along. Her virtue is rewarded by a proper match; his status by a proper mate. The outcome of the play—and its implicit connections between gender and class—would be quite different had Maria, say, contracted a passion for the lowly Jonathan. Now that would be a contrast.
That resolution simply would not happen, except, perhaps, as part of some convoluted comic plot device that would itself have to be set right by the end of the play (as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its temporary aberrations that are possible only under the cloak of magic and nightfall). The Contrast affirms a class structure, rich and poor, master and man, and, concomitantly, demarcates the limits and extent of class through the “circulation of women,” Claude Lévi Strauss’s famous phrase for the universal (he insisted) social “exchange” of women that expresses and solidifies the infrastructure of a given society.2
The Contrast can be seen as a critique of capitalistically inspired mercantile marriage, yet one can readily detect in this play the same type of limited social criticism that Williams documents in that large body of English literature that seemingly opposes the values of the city to those of the country:
If what was seen in the town could not be approved, because it made evident and repellent the decisive relations in which men actually lived, the remedy was never a visitor’s morality of plain living and high thinking, or a babble of green fields. It was a change of social relationships and of essential morality. And it was precisely at this point that the “town and country” fiction served: to promote superficial comparisons and to prevent real ones.3
In much that same fashion, the preoccupation with the Manly/Jonathan versus Dimple /Jessamy contrast conveniently obscures the fundamental contrast operating on either side of the conjoining (but potentially destabilizing) slash. As Williams shows at length in The Country and the City, the whole dichotomy needs careful scrutiny. It is simply too easy to posit, in The Contrast, a division between “good old people” (i.e., traditional Americans, stalwart and virtuous) and “bad new people” (those perverted by a current materialism, licentiousness, and aristocratic affectation) and to imply thereby that only the present is plagued by these vices and is plagued only by its fall from the principles of a purer past.
Williams in his first chapter, an “escalator” through pastoral literature, brilliantly demonstrates that virtually every generation has posited a previous Golden Age, a time of “simpler” values, pure and uncorrupted, when noble leaders (“true gentlemen”/Founding Fathers) did not concern themselves with pomp and circumstance but benevolently dispensed their own power in the form of wisdom. This idyll of the perfect pastoral past serves to highlight the evils of the far-from-perfect present—materialism, greed, vain desire. But Williams insists that there is something pernicious behind this simplistic division of the world into country and city, past and present, traditional and modern, a social dichotomy and a longing nostalgia that can be traced at least as far back as Hesiod. The danger of such contrast is that it short-circuits any systemic critique of one’s own society (“We may be corrupt now, but our heritage and our founding principles are pure”) while also obscuring the privations experienced by the unprivileged of the past. Depoliticizing the past in turn depoliticizes the present. “We have heard this sad song for many centuries,” Williams laments, “a seductive song turning protest into retrospect, until we die of time.”4
From this point of view, it should come as no surprise that the early theatrical success of The Contrast derived not from Manly but from Jonathan, the comic country Yankee who went on to become a stock figure in American literature and folk culture. One of the most famous actors of the early Republic, Thomas Wignell, played the Jonathan role, and, in 1790 when the play was published in book form, it was Thomas Wignell’s name—not Royall Tyler’s—that appeared on the title page. The actor stands in for the author; the servant stands in for the man. Yet these are no egalitarian gestures. The original frontispiece affirms the play’s status as drawing room comedy. The engraving by Peter Rushton Maverick depicts the postures, clothing, wigs, and interior design of the Anglo-American gentry.5 For this gentry (illustrated in the text and present in the audience), Jonathan is a figure shrouded in nostalgia—the simple yeoman, impressionable but ultimately harmless. He is a higher class’s wish-fulfillment version of the underling. We laugh with Jonathan—but only because we know that he is powerless to do very much should we decide that we are really laughing at him. The play that takes his part does not privilege his role.
The Contrast was the most popular play in early America. It satirized the bourgeoisie’s pretensions to aristocratic manners without seriously challenging the class structure of American society. As I have shown, Tyler’s critique of his society extends considerably farther in The Algerine Captive, and that, it seems to me, is the point. The same author writes differently for two different genres. The two genres differently address different audiences. The theater, more than any other form, was associated with America’s upper classes. “Ladies and gentlemen are requested to desire their servants, to take up and set down, with their horses [sic] heads toward the East-river, to avoid confusion,” ran an advertisement in the New York Packet published at the same time as The Contrast. “Also, as soon as they are seated, to order their servants out of the boxes.”6 In contrast, the early novel’s growing audience included especially those marginally middleclass Americans most eagerly clamoring for prosperity, independence, and the commodities that could not be produced down on the farm (aspirations for which Dimple, for all his ersatz Europeanism, serves as a reductio ad absurdum). Novels were more affordable than plays and could be shared. They could even be read aloud to an audience that did not have to pay for the entertainment.
PARTICULARLY IN THE Gothic novels to be discussed in this chapter, previously unprivileged heroes and heroines compete, even for their survival, against a whole host of designing aristocrats. The admittedly ludicrous settings (castles in Connecticut) of some of these novels still effectively mark their contrast between an old enforced and artificial order on the one hand and an emerging individualism on the other. However, this genre’s social reference is not limited to abuses and hierarchies of the past. As I will subsequently show in more detail, the Gothic can subtly challenge the status quo of so-called traditional or premodern society while also criticizing the inherent problems of so-called modern society, especially progressive philosophical or economic theories (liberalism, deism, rationalism) based on a notion of human perfectability. The struggling individual has, in the Gothic world, a remarkable potential for good but an equally powerful motivation (and opportunity) for corruption. Mind is infinitely susceptible to benevolence and fellow feeling and simultaneously prey to superstition, delusion, or its own deviousness. Moreover, class privilege only extends the abuses of individuals by giving them the authority to assert their will over others. The Gothic, in short, focuses on the systemic possibilities and problems of postrevolutionary American society and of the postrevolutionary self in action in that society. The comic tone that characterized most picaresque novels yields to melodrama and sensationalism, and the sentimental novel’s challenge to the social structure begins to take on philosophical and even metaphysical dimensions.
Any consideration of class in the literature of the early Republic is complicated, it might here be noted, by the well-established tradition of denying even the existence of the phenomenon. In a recent, laudatory review of Sean Wilentz’s Chants Democratic, a landmark study of class consciousness in early America, Charles G. Steffen (himself a notable contributor to our knowledge of class in the new Republic) wryly observes: “For Americans, historians included, ‘class’ is a fighting word.”7 Other historians (literary, social, economic, and labor) have also “battered away” at the adage that, in a nutshell, “there is no class in America.”8 Yet the received notion of America’s past still predominately posits a stable, egalitarian, consensual, and essentially classless early American society. Even in highly sophisticated historical analyses, as Joyce Appleby has shown in her survey of recent historiographie trends, there is often an implicit, unexamined nostalgia for premodern communitas and a corollary notion that changes wrought in the structure of society, governance, and economics toward the end of the eighteenth century forever destroyed a previously stable (or at least quiescent) state. Nostalgic accounts suggest that the postrevolutionary years were characterized by divisiveness (as if no one in the new Republic was exhilarated by the prospect for change, openness) and that this debilitating turmoil stemmed largely from the forces of modernization, industrialization, and capitalism creating social stratification and class conflict (as if none of these differences existed before the war).9
Gary B. Nash, one of the best analysts of early American class structures, has argued that the persistent myth of a classless prerevolutionary American society has been abstracted primarily from the literature of the time and that many studies based upon literature have tended to recapitulate a sentimentalized, idealistic vision of a vanished, egalitarian America.10 As one case in point, Nash cites the oft-reprinted “What is an American?” chapter of Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782), which, in particularly fulsome terms, insists:
[When an] enlightened Englishman … first lands on this continent, he must greatly rejoice that he lived at a time to see this fair country discovered and settled; he must necessarily feel a share of national pride, when he views the chain of settlements which embellishes these extended shores. When he says to himself, this is the work of my countrymen, who, when convulsed by factions, afflicted by a variety of miseries and want, restless and impatient, took refuge here.… Here he beholds fair cities, substantial villages, extensive fields, an immense country filled with decent houses, good roads, orchards, meadows, and bridges, where an hundred years ago all was wild, woody, and uncultivated! … He is arrived on a new continent; a modern society offers itself to his contemplation, different from what he had hitherto seen. It is not composed, as in Europe, of great lords who possess every thing, and of a herd of people who have nothing. Here are no aristocratical families, no courts, no kings, no bishops, no ecclesiastical dominion, no invisible power giving to a few a very visible one, no great manufacturers employing thousands, no great refinements of luxury. The rich and the poor are not so far removed from each other as they are in Europe.11
Who would not want to believe Crèvecoeur’s vision of America? Nor is that simply a rhetorical question, since, as I have shown in previous chapters, there were many Americans (women, blacks, various immigrant and religious groups, the indigent and the reformers who championed their cause) who could not believe it. For many, however, the nostalgic myth of a once idyllic nation served as the countering image to the bleak portrait of America featured in much of the literature of disenchantment of the 1790s, such as the “Influence of the American Revolution” (1789) in which Dr. Benjamin Rush diagnosed the “contagion” of rebellion spreading through a decidedly postlapsarian America. Note the tone of privileged authority with which Rush writes of that which is destroying or perhaps has already fatally destroyed a far better American past:
The termination of the war by the peace in 1783, did not terminate the American Revolution. The minds of the citizens of the United States were wholly unprepared for their new situation. The excess of the passion for liberty, inflamed by the successful issue of the war, produced, in many people, opinions and conduct which could not be removed by reason nor restrained by government.… The extensive influence which these opinions had upon the understandings, passions and morals of the citizens of the United States, constituted a species of insanity, which I shall take the liberty of distinguishing by the name Anarchia.
Dr. Rush described the prevalence of “anarchia” as a kind of collective “insanity” and traced out the etiology of that social disease. In his view, an “ardor in trade and speculation,” along with the new government’s issuing of a “fallacious … amount of the paper money,” had “unhinged the judgment, deposed the moral faculty, and filled the imagination, in many people, with airy and impracticable schemes of wealth.”12
Dr. Rush’s denunciation of the greedy minions of commodity capitalism and materialism strangely mirrors some modern Marxist idealizations of premodern society (an idealization that Raymond Williams pointedly questions). It is, as Rush’s example illustrates, a rhetoric that can too easily lend itself, even when employed by Marxist historians, to an essentially conservative historiography. Following Rush or Crèvecoeur, modern historians regularly criticize the ennui of postrevolutionary America by contrast with a mythological classless prerevolutionary society characterized by social stability, harmony, traditional values, and community. As Appleby sardonically observes of this enterprise:
The normative quality given continuity and persistence then leads to an interpretation of change as the promoter of tensions, fear, anxiety, and guilt. Indeed, the whole range of pathological terms that figure in our histories comes from investing traditional society with a set of warm and wonderful features perpetually at risk. Twenty-three actions for the recovery of debt in a ten-year period, if twice that of an earlier decade, become poignant testimony to the disintegration of social solidarity or reflections of the unbearable tensions rending a once organic community.13
I have briefly considered the implicit “country versus city” assumptions of some recent historiography because I find many of the same concerns in the early American novel. That is, the novels are often subversive in the sense that they frequently pit a struggling, poor, or middle-class hero or heroine against a far more powerful adversary, one who often claims a traditional authoritarian role in the society at large and over the protagonist’s life. Throwing off the shackles of authority, in this scenario, takes on many of the features of classical liberalism of the Adam Smith variety. The desired goal is personal freedom, economic independence, and a substantial measure of self-determination. These are underdog dramas replete with graphic imagery designed to invest the individual’s physical and emotional struggle with metaphysical dimensions. Yet, at the same time, liberalism, in many of these early novels, is the bugaboo (just as it is in much current historiography). The liberal ideology of individualism and the Smithian ideal of personal freedom lead not to the liberal end of a more perfect society but to perversions of the self and corruption of the society. For the villain, too, sees himself as a proponent of individualism and a champion of personal freedom—his freedom. Even when ostensibly espousing radical causes (as a number of villains do), he seeks mostly to justify his own avarice and thirst for power. The problem, then, is not that the modern world radically deviates from the traditional but that it reflects, like a funhouse mirror, many of its basic assumptions in grotesque new ways. Liberalism, far from mandating a revolutionary restructuring of society, merely opens the way for a different social hegemony with its own possibilities for oppression and exploitation. The villain, whether aristocrat or self-made man, succeeds only because, on some level, his society privileges his place through its laws and, as Paine insisted, its constitution. Democracy may permit new groups of people to reach the top, but there still is a top—and a bottom. Even if all men are created equal, they do not long remain so.
The class conflict as well as the conflicting visions of America as a class society found in the early Gothic novels attest, I would suggest, to the complexity of the social moment in which these fictions were written, as well as to the fact that the writers were attuned to subtle changes, changes that we, employing the perspicacious vision of hindsight, have not yet fully gauged. With remarkable acuity many of the early novelists sensed both the promise and the problems inherent in the ideology of individualism and even anticipated the devolution of individual self-interest and the emerging contradictions of bourgeois ideology schematized by Georg Lukács:
As a necessary result of capitalism’s anarchy of production, the bourgeois class, when struggling for power and when first in power, could have but one ideology: that of individual freedom. The crisis of capitalist culture must appear the moment this ideology is in contradiction with the bourgeois social order. As long as the advancing bourgeois class—in the eighteenth century, for example—directed this ideology against the constraints of feudal estate society, it was an adequate expression of the given state of class struggle. Thus the bourgeoisie in this period was actually able to have a genuine culture. But as the bourgeoisie came to power (beginning with the French Revolution), it could no longer seriously carry through its own ideology; it could not apply the idea of individual freedom to the whole society without the self-negation of the social order that brought this ideology into being in the first place. Briefly: it was impossible for the bourgeois class to apply its own idea of freedom to the proletariat. The unsurpassable dualism of this situation is the following: the bourgeoisie must either deny this ideology or employ it as a veil covering those actions which contradict it.14
The veil Lukács would here lift is essentially the same one behind which a number of early American novelists sought to peer. As I have emphasized throughout this study, because the novel as a form was marginalized by social authorities, because novelists could neither support themselves by their trade nor claim a respectable position within society because of it, the early American novel, generically and within its unique cultural moment, was ideally positioned to evaluate American society and to provide a critique of what was sorely missing in the exuberant postrevolutionary rhetoric of republicanism and, conversely but simultaneously, what was most dubious about an elite’s jeremiads against an increasingly heterogeneous social order. Just as those two dialectical ideologies—of promise and of peril—existed in roughly equal proportions in the early national period, so too did the novel analyze the limitations of each vision of the future and revision of the past. In short, the American novel caught its society precisely at the moment Lukács documents, as the bourgeoisie was coming into power, and trained its sights upon that process of nascent empowerment. In plot and characterization, the early American novel was less concerned with dialectical extremes than with the ramifications of polarized ideologies within the workaday world.
The Gothic exhibited a particular genius (even in those novels that fall far short of aesthetic genius) for supplying the metaphors with which to explore a transitional culture. Without, in any way, offering a full-scale critique of bourgeois ideology, the early American Gothic often provided a perturbing vision of self-made men maintaining their newfound power by resorting to the same kinds of treachery that evil aristocrats of both European and early American Gothics used to assert their own perverting authority. The traditional Gothic constellation of grotesque images and symbols and the hyperbolic language of emotional torture or mental anguish are, in the American novels, appropriated to expose the weakness and potential for evil within the new Republic. Whether in the interconnected stories that constitute Isaac Mitchell’s The Asylum (1811), in which Old World aristocratic values are transported to the Republic, or in Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn (1799–1800), in which the spirit of materialism, like the contagion of yellow fever, sweeps the nation’s capital, the Gothic created its own symbolic space where the hierarchies of a traditional society and the excesses of individualism could both be called into question.
Castles in the New Republic
Two of the first commentators on the phenomenon of the Gothic novel, William Wordsworth and the Marquis de Sade, each saw the emerging form as a comment on the history of the time. For Wordsworth, the Gothic novelists superseded and opposed their sentimental predecessors by brutally fronting the brutality of the modern world—its industrialization, its decay. For the Marquis de Sade, the Gothic was the fitting expression of the “Iron Age,” his term for a world wracked by revolution, oppression, and crime. Certainly, it was a time of widespread social unrest. In both France and America, there was a revolutionary restructuring of society. In Geneva (1782), Holland (1794), Poland (1794), Ireland (1798), and Naples (1799) there were attempts to do so.15 To fictionalize such a tumultuous time, such a depraved time, de Sade insisted, Gothic novelists found it “necessary to call hell to the rescue.”16
But to interpret the late eighteenth century as simply an era of revolution is to homogenize a most disparate period in history. The age was also characterized by its reactionary zeal. In the United States, as I have shown, the late 1790s saw the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, arguably the most extensive legislative abrogation of civil liberties in American history, and, in England, the same decade witnessed the State Trials of 1793 and 1794, the prosecution of The Rights of Man, and the “Twin Acts” against “treasonable practices” and “seditious meetings,” all of which had their effects on the literary enterprise of the era. The conviction and imprisonment of Joseph Gerrald for sedition in 1794, to cite one specific case, so alarmed William Godwin that he immediately wrote a toneddown ending of Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794). “In compliance with the alarms of booksellers,” he also suppressed the original preface (“It is now known to philosophers that the spirit and character of the government intrudes itself into every rank of society”) to the first edition of his novel. In 1795, however, Godwin decided to publish his original preface with the second edition of Things as They Are, and also to explain the reason for its earlier suppression. “Terror was the order of the day,” he retrospectively observed, “and it was feared that even the humble novelist might be shown to be constructively a traitor.”17 Notice how Godwin here uses the code word “terror,” synonymous with revolution run amok in France, to impugn the repressive tactics of his own government.
The trials in England received almost as much attention in the American press as did the revolutionary happenings in France or the various American trials for sedition. All of these contradictory social events were watched closely by American writers, most notably by the members of the New York Friendly Club, who included among them the young Godwinian Charles Brockden Brown. In the aftermath of their own Revolution, in a time of political dissent and countering oppression both within the land and abroad, American novelists, too, summoned hell to their fictive aid and found in the Gothic mode an apt formulation for their own disquietude.
Sometimes early American Gothic novels appropriate and re-create for an American audience almost intact the various external trappings of the Gothic as first envisioned in dreams (he claimed) and then set down in text by Horace Walpole. What Walpole dreamt soon became a veritable fictional industry in the capable hands of Ann Radcliffe, the best-selling English writer of the eighteenth century.18 Evil aristocrats, castles, ghosts, unnatural figures who appear and vanish in the murky gloom proliferate in these novels, which also typically feature an ordinary heroine (less often, a hero) who ultimately prevails against all the dark trappings of the plot. The heroes (these protagonists are always male) in other early American Gothic novels, however, not only confront external villainy but also come to face the terrifying potentialities for villainy that they discover within themselves.
As I will later show in some detail, there were widely different versions of the Gothic. Nevertheless, the diverse early American novels that we have come, historically, to label Gothic are unified by a concern (not always the same concern) with both individual psychology and the psychology of social relationships, with the inherent limitations of individual consciousness and the consequent need for some control of individual freedom, with the equally inherent weaknesses of existing systems, and with the need for social reform. None of the early American novels offers a simple solution to the multiple and multifaceted problems of the individual within society, nor do we expect them to. Sometimes, in fact, the analysis is ineffectively ambivalent or downright muddled, as in S.S.B.K. Wood’s Julia, and the Illuminated Baron (1800). This particular Gothic account of villainy perpetrated by Vancien régime against the unprivileged is strangely transformed into an allegory of the evils of social dissent and upheaval. The villainous Count de Launa—a French aristocrat who resorts to any treachery, even murder, to augment his power and wealth and who abducts, with lascivious intent, the virtuous orphan Julia—is also revealed to be a member of the Illuminati, a secret society largely responsible for the French Revolution. That last social event hardly served the best interests of French aristocrats. The Count would not seem to know which side his croissant was buttered on, and Wood’s allegory of middleclass virtue triumphing in the struggle against corrupt aristocratic values (read: vice) stumbles itself into a struggle with its own inconsistent conservative social convictions.
Wood’s metaphors may be more mixed and her skill more limited than some other early American Gothicists, but her novel nevertheless emphasizes and exaggerates one feature of the English Gothic adopted by many American writers, that is, the simultaneous critique of both the upper class and the lower, of Vancienne noblesse and the ignobile vulgus. As Ronald Paulson has noted, the mob, in Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk (1795), recapitulates the hypocrisy and corruption of the tyrannical monastery it overthrows, and thus a reaction against religious and class oppression soon leads to a carnivalesque indulgence in ruthless destruction and murder that culminates in the fiery roof of the building crashing down upon the rebel/revelers. The end of the old order (the monastery) is the end of the new one (the mob), too.19 Lewis deploys his symbols more capably than does Wood, but the same simultaneous social critique of the high and the low, the individual and the mob, occurs again and again in early American Gothics. Besides permitting the author to explore both group psychology and the workings of one aberrant mind, the double focus also proves a perfect base from which to evaluate the advantages and limitations of republican ideals of self-improvement and self-determination. The same quality necessary for the elevation of the hero—ultimately, an unshakable self-confidence in one’s reading of oneself and the world—also provides the villain with his rationale and raison d’être. In short, the way up can also be, in ways Dante did not anticipate, the way down, since the recipe for great social success is also the recipe for megalomania, for both individual and social evil of the highest order.
Whether specializing in subtle psychological analysis or sensational physical effects (in the “Costume Gothic” mode), early American Gothics nearly always feature an important female character—as victim, victor, or villainess. But in none of these roles does the Gothic woman challenge the excesses of individualism, for the simple reason that there was no construct of the “self-made woman” within the early Republic. The critique of individualism in American Gothic fiction is therefore limited primarily to novels in which a young man measures his powers against society, sometimes in extreme form (as with Wieland’s Carwin) and sometimes more prosaically (as with Arthur Mervyn) by working his way up the social ladder. Often this tested protagonist is an employee of a man who is rich, powerful, and corrupt. Novels such as Edgar Huntly or Arthur Mervyn examine the problematics of individualism but, and this is a crucial distinction, not from the point of view of the authority figures who have most to lose from an acquisitive middle class but from the point of view of those who, materially, have much to gain and who also have, the novelists warn, much, humanly, to lose. As Huntly observes (echoing sentiments of his author): “Our countrymen are prone to enterprize, and are scattered over every sea and every land in pursuit of that wealth which will not screen them from disease and infirmity, which is missed much oftener than found, and which, when gained, by no means compensates them for the hardships and vicissitudes endured in the pursuit.”20
THE RESILIENCE OF THE Gothic form in American fiction is remarkable and seems due less to its specific social critique than to the richness of the symbols the Gothic uses to signify its meaning. Gothic allegories of the corrupted self persist throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. Some of the best-known heroes of the American Renaissance or of the Southern—Roderick Usher, Roger Chillingworth, Ahab, Thomas Sutpen, to name only a few—have a distinct Gothic ancestry. Furthermore, the Costume Gothic novel has proved to be an equally persistent subgenre, and its basic plot structures and devices have persisted with surprisingly little variation from the last decades of the eighteenth century right down to the present. Books with “covers featuring” (in Margaret Atwood’s description) “gloomy, foreboding castles and apprehensive maidens in modified nightgowns” can be found in almost any drugstore or supermarket—an essential commodity like cornflakes or aspirin.21 Clearly, Americans still have an affinity for castles in literature, particularly if those castles loom ominously over a young, beautiful, vulnerable heroine.22
The pictorial label on today’s mass-produced Costume Gothics signifies the same relationship between individuals and institutions, between women and men, that we find at the heart of even the earliest of America’s Costume Gothics. Foreboding castle and apprehensive maiden are the two essential ingredients. The castle, in ruin or at least disrepair, symbolizes crumbling authority, the hierarchies of the past literally deteriorating yet still very much present in the form of the castle itself.23 The empty castle also speaks to the enduring absence of the humans who upheld an old social order, families dwindling or departed and a whole earlier age lost. Nor is there nostalgia inherent in that remembrance of time past. On the contrary, the heralded past, symbolically as well as psychologically and particularly for the captive heroine, betokens repression and oppression, torture and incarceration, social tyranny and political corruption, and (here, again, the castle’s state of dissolution signifies) private decadence and the enforced debauchery of others. Analogous to some ancient appalling deity implacably demanding a surfeit of innocent flesh, the Gothic castle is a nightmare presence in the twilight of its own existence, but a relic striving to prove its own continuing vitality by triumphing over a living creature. And the best triumph of all is over a young virginal woman, for in that victory the castle would perpetuate its commitment to sin and death at the cost of her possibilities for fostering love and life.
The castle, more than a symbol, has a life of its own. In novel after novel, the agency of evil is (or seems to be) the castle it/himself, and that individuation marks the potentizing of this inert dwelling within Gothic fiction. The evil count or baron typically absents himself from the action, leaving the castle to exercise an authority no longer vested in his person alone. He may pruriently watch over the tortures inflicted upon his captive within his chamber of horrors; he may even direct the action, but, like a pornographer, he knows that proving power, not enjoying sex, is the name of the game, and he all-too-clearly intuits that, without the agency of the dank dungeon, without the assistance of fearful apparitions, his relationship with the heroine is far too equal to be stimulating. The two of them at last alone together is just the old battle of the sexes again, a battle he is not sure he can win. Thus, he allows the castle to stand in for himself and to embody the potency that he only contingently possesses. Yet the castle, as his power displaced and deferred, calls that power into question even as it asserts it in ostensibly the most unquestionable terms. It is hard to say no to a dungeon, but what kind of man needs a dungeon to speak in his place?
The substitution operates on other levels as well. By pitting the maiden primarily against the agency of the decaying castle, Costume Gothics provide her with an adversary both more and less than human. The meaning of her agon can consequently go well beyond the social and political implications of the action. The Gothic is by no means simply a seduction novel in monumental dress. In the sentimental novel, the heroine was bound by home and hearth; her plight officially centered almost exclusively in her physical self, in the preservation of her virginity. The Gothic, however, transforms home into castle, and that is a different iconography entirely. The castle is not her home, nor is it her dream of home. It is a nightmare domesticity, a house with doors locked shut from the outside to enclose a perverted sexuality within. It is a would-be whore/horror house in an empty social setting. The Gothic heroine has no surrounding community to support her or to tell her just what she ought and ought not do.
The typical early American sentimental heroine severs her bonds with community once she fails her test; but in early American Gothic novels, those bonds are severed long before the test begins. In Isaac Mitchell’s The Asylum; or, Alonzo and Melissa (1811), for example, Alonzo has joint billing in the title but plays only a minor part in the Gothic plot. After Melissa has survived a host of horrors, Alonzo happens upon her accidentally when he decides to take refuge from a thunder shower in a conveniently located castle. He then seems singularly incapable of penetrating the web of preternatural or superhuman constraints that hold her there. He even leaves her behind to go seeking help, only to discover, on his return, that she, predictably, has vanished once more. Typically, the Gothic heroine has no one to save her and thus must save herself. Against a host of human and supernatural adversaries, she proceeds alone.
Or not completely, for the reader vicariously accompanies the heroine throughout her various trials. This relationship between reader and text marks another departure from the sentimental form. As Fielding early observed and as numerous subsequent critics have pointed out, the sentimental novel, especially in its seduction format, necessarily flirts with prurience and readily beds down with pornography. The reader is sidelined by the conventionally sentimental, is cast as a voyeuristic observer of the protagonist’s private affairs. For example, in The Coquette, we read over Deighton’s shoulder his letters from Major Sanford, which reveal a misogyny that the Major is careful to conceal from Miss Eliza Wharton. We anticipate what she will find out the hard way about the dangers with which she flirts—dangers that we know all too well and dangers that give point to the crucial question “Will she or won’t she?” In a sense, the reader plays Pandarus to the plot, investing his or her erotic impulses in another’s action, and the heroine’s seduction, the consummation of her enterprise and ours, finally conjoins character and reader in a community of judgment that can sadly come only after the fall. By contrast, the Gothic reader and the Gothic protagonist all along occupy much the same position. Both are mostly in the dark, and the reader, as much as the protagonist, can fear those things that go bump in the night. No overview perspective is provided. On the contrary, the text wisely remains determinedly indefinite at precisely those points where clarity could dispel the murky ambiguity on which it turns. We may finally sympathize with the sentimental heroine, but we pity the Gothic heroine all along, and since her fear is our fear, we do not anticipate her fall but depend upon her instincts for survival.
For all the sustained mystery of the Gothic, however, there is also a countering (and often terrifying) explicitness that again marks a departure from sentimental form. Conventions of decorum or censorship required that any seduction should occur offstage, and all attendant details such as precipitating desire or consequent pregnancy were decently veiled in a language of circumspection and circumlocution. Characters, too, were often similarly abstract. Only in the very best sentimental novels were different women protagonists presented as individuals rather than as types or exempla. In Gothic fiction, however, the most lurid actions occur center stage and are recounted in lush, lavish language and with a high degree of specificity. Psychology, not morality, is at issue, and psychology must be personalized, individualized. Women could be defined by their character, their capabilities, and not, as in the sentimental, by the state of their maiden-head or their marital status. The Gothic also enlarged the arena in which the heroine could realize her nature. Gothic heroines such as Clara Wieland or Constantia Dudley in Ormond (1799) face threats other than possible seduction or mésalliance, perform actions more positive than passive sexual resistance. The Gothic thereby extended the arena of eighteenth-century fictive concerns; for women especially, the circle of action expanded from the narrow confines of the drawing room to the great house, to the bare expanse of wilderness, and, most important, to regions of the mind quite unplumbed in the usual sentimental test.
Narratively, the Gothic prepared the way for romance and other nineteenth-century variations on earlier fictional formulae.24 By its intermingling of high and low mimetic modes, especially by lending the aura of realism to the fantastic, it opened new fictive possibilities beyond either the bedroom or the drawing room, seduction fiction or comedies of manners. Retrospectively, we can also see the Gothic as combining the sentimental novel’s introspection and anatomizing of the nuances of human emotions (especially in the epistolary mode) with the picaresque’s fascination with the different, the exotic, the bizarre. But the Gothic goes considerably beyond this fruitful concatenation of seemingly antithetical fictional forms. By testing the definition of “reality” and putting to a critical test the assumptions of realism, Gothic novels raise rational, human questions about the possible nature of the irrational and the suprahuman. They ask (often without waiting for an answer) precisely what line separates the darker impulses of the imagination from the external manifestations of the bizarre.25 By so doing, the Gothic challenges the primacy of the individual mind and the claims of reason. The very postulation of that challenge demarcates the inherent limitations of the tabula rasa as a model of mind and calls into question the Enlightenment’s persistent concern to define itself, to count itself into unquestionable existence. The sleep of Reason, as Goya noted, begets monsters.
One of the more interesting manifestations of this new challenge to individual consciousness in Gothic fiction is its utilization of the uncanny (a term from Freud but more recently given currency by Christine Brooke-Rose, Hélène Cixous, and Tzvetan Todorov). By uncanny I refer to a frightful interpenetration of the known and even monotonously knowable (the Gothic’s tendency to relentless repetition) by the utterly inexplicable—the waking nightmare of the ghost suddenly appearing in the doorway, the encounter with the severed hand or head.26 The esoteric unknown (one focus of the picaresque) provides little real basis for terror, since the reader has no way to conjoin the encountered danger with his or her own quotidian life. But when the horror occurs in appallingly familiar circumstances, there is nowhere (literally or figuratively) for reader or protagonist to hide. It can happen here! Clara Wieland’s death-defying encounter with Theodore in her bedroom not only recalls, as numerous critics have noted, the seduction novel but also anticipates Alfred Hitchcock’s cinematic device of making individuals most susceptible to evil in the middle of familiar surroundings and while engaged in habitual actions—being slashed to death, for example, while taking a shower, not on a dark, deserted street.
The uncanny’s intrusion into the natural processes of life asserts a norm (a basic status quo) from which things have been diverted and to which they should more or less return. But that is hardly a reassuring proposition for the individual who now must be on guard in even the most mundane circumstances. For once reader and character have experienced the Gothic’s unpredictable disorder, any reestablished order is no longer certain. Clara Wieland’s obsessed narrative may be retrospective from a critic’s taxonomical perspective, but for the narrator and the reader, the events are now, here. The retelling itself is a monument to compelling Gothic experiences that are over but by no means finished. Even in the Radcliffean explanatory mode—and almost all American Gothics adopt Radcliffe’s compulsion to explain—mystery is not solved but merely transferred from the external world to the internal, from nature out of joint to perception, at least for a time, out of focus.27 And where, these novels continue to demand, does the one end and the other begin—and how can one ever tell for sure? If fooled once (the ghost looked real, the blood felt sticky and warm), cannot the reader or the character be fooled again? Moreover, at some level, villainy requires a villain. And which, one might ask, is worse, a cosmology of malignant spirits or a community populated by ruthless people who will stop at nothing to satisfy their deviant desires? Rationality resolves none of these questions; explanation merely translates the locus of evil from the supernatural, the abstract, and the remote to the human, the personal, and the present.
The propinquity of the appalling is underscored by the opening scene of numerous early American Gothic novels. Typically, we have a peaceful, bucolic set piece describing the American landscape. Thus, the “whipperwhill’s sprightly song echoed along the adjacent groves” as Alonzo and Melissa, seated within a fertile glen, discoursed on the beauties of nature. With alarming ease, however, that pastoral setting is unsettled, suggesting that the supernatural and the subhuman inhere in the natural and the human. Whether the heroine, like Melissa, is abducted from her bower to be imprisoned in the decrepit castle or whether some twisted individual like Carwin moves into the neighborhood, it is soon clear that nothing will ever be the same again.
The interpenetration of the uncanny and the quotidian creates a constant narrative tension and dis-ease. The reader may hope that the ending of the novel has put to rest those unruly elements arising seemingly from nowhere, but the clear implication is that disorder and villainy are only more or less temporarily forestalled. Thus, the House of Usher falls into the tarn; the black-veiled minister dies; the monster turns his back on civilization and returns to lagoon, ocean, wilderness—someplace other than the world of humankind. Yet the tarn endures, the monster is not dead, the minister dies, but the veil that rendered him frightful still remains. The horrors raised by the narrative are temporarily quelled, but they are not, in the larger universe of which the Gothic is but a symptom, totally abrogated. It is in this sense that the Gothic works a final trick upon the reader. Far more subtly than those picaresque novels (such as Modern Chivalry) that simply clowned their way to a nonconclusion, the Gothic resists ending even as it assumes the cloak of conventional sentimental closure. But a solemn distribution of rewards and punishments scarcely brings to life again the innocent dead, nor does an appended Radcliffean explanation of the misestimated dangers undo the real fears that the reader and protagonist previously endured. In this sense, the Gothic novel is, in its conclusion, typically neither open nor closed—but slightly ajar.
ISAAC MITCHELL’S The Asylum; or, Alonzo and Melissa was the single most popular Gothic novel in early America and the best of the Costume Gothics. First serialized in the Poughkeepsie Political Barometer in 1804, then expanded and published in book form by Mitchell, a Poughkeepsie newspaper editor, in 1811, it was also soon sold in a pirated, uncopyrighted version plagiarized almost verbatim from the newspaper serialization and published by one “Daniel Jackson, Jun.” as A Short Account of the Courtship of Alonzo and Melissa; Setting Forth Their Hardships and Difficulties, Caused by the Barbarity of an Unfeeling Father (1811). This pirated version was reprinted at least twenty-five times throughout the nineteenth century, generally with Jackson’s name on the title page.28 The book continued to be a steady seller up to the twentieth century. Writing in 1907, Lillie Deming Loshe noted that the novel “is probably known to-day to many who have never read The Mysteries of Udolpho.”29 Mark Twain had a copy of the book in his library in 1869 and in Life on the Mississippi lists it among the books still widely read in America; a less illustrious reader, George Maynard, notes on April 18, 1905, in his copy of the book, that he had first read it “with great interest” when he “was a boy … nearly fifty years ago.”30
Like virtually all nineteenth-century readers of the book—widely known, simply, as Alonzo and Melissa—Twain and Maynard read only the second volume of Mitchell’s novel. The unusual publishing history of the book makes it particularly interesting for my purposes. As suggested by the frontispiece to the Poughkeepsie edition (a scene of soulful sentiment in a shadowy graveyard), the first full Asylum grafts a Gothic tale onto a sentimental one. After a brief introduction of Melissa Bloomfield—who will be the main character of the second, Gothic volume—the novel spends some 250 pages retelling a sentimental story set in Europe. Related by and about one Seiina du Ruyter Bergher, the sentimental first half of the novel is a standard account of parental interference in a young couple’s love and the couple’s consequent flight from patriarchal authority. That flight brings them to America, to Selina’s retrospective recounting of her story, and to Melissa’s reenacting of it in a Gothic mode, which also finally accounts for the high praise given to both Mrs. Radcliffe and Brockden Brown in Mitchell’s preface. The long-deferred Gothic novel anticipated in the preface is more original in execution and has more interesting implications than its sentimental antecedent and frame. The Gothic volume also grants its heroine far more latitude than does the sentimental half. Unlike Selina, who acts mostly through a well-timed series of swoons, Melissa shows a dash and a verve that carry her successfully through a remarkable sequence of adventures. It is her forthright story, not Selina’s fainting one, that was originally published in the Barometer, that was plagiarized by Jackson, and that became the nineteenth-century best-seller.
The Gothic half is by far the better read, but something is lost when only it is read. What was long missing was not so much the sentimental story itself but the political import underlying the Gothic story yet emphasized by the sentimental one. Since most of the first volume is a flashback (admittedly a very slow one) set in Europe, Mitchell can overtly conjoin the abuses perpetrated by aristocratic Old World villainy with the abuses perpetrated by Colonel Bloomfield, an American gentleman who has retained too many of the Gothic features of a European class system that a good American should have left behind. Indeed, the first page of the novel introduces this Americanized aristocrat as a homegrown Gothic villain. Bloomfield, we are told, is a landowner of British extraction descended from an ancient family; he is a man who “prided himself with all that distinguished haughtiness so characteristic of national prejudice and manners” (1:30). Mitchell portrays Bloomfield’s financial dealings and his class bias in damning detail. We are told that he has augmented the “patrimony he inherited from his father” largely by buying up cheap land that he has then “advantageously rented.” Because he is one of the few people in western Connecticut with ready cash, he hires poor workers at reduced wages instead of paying, as was more typical, in goods or room and board, and then, apparently, he supplements those low wages with loans at substantial interest rates. The results are debts that must be discharged; or, in effect (and very European this), a peasantry required to work for virtually nothing. Moreover, along with the worst features of the old European gentry, Bloomfield exhibits some of the more dubious features of the emerging American one. Boasting of his own bloodlines and referring to America’s wealthiest citizens as “a kind of nobility,” he can also quite inconsistently insist that anyone in America who is smart enough and diligent enough can be rich. Armed with this liberal justification for his own position, he need have no qualms about how he disposes his wealth. American equality as much as European privilege can define the poor as “inferior kind[s] of beings” (1:30) who deserve whatever happens to them. All that is required is a few concessions to appearance. Like Franklin in Philadelphia, Bloomfield maintains a plain, puritanical mien and obviously expects moral credit for this affectation of modesty. But in all his actions, he is really governed by a cold and calculating assessment of his own immediate self-interest. Thus he brags that he married late and “chose his wife as he would have done a farm, not so much for beauty as for convenience” (1:30). He has few enemies, we are told, and fewer friends.
FIGURE 15. This frontispiece from Isaac Mitchell’s The Asylum; or, Alonzo and Melissa (Poughkeepsie: Joseph Nelson, 1811) perfectly captures the mixture of sentiment and Gothicism that pervades Mitchell’s novel. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
This portrait of the American farmer is very different from that found in Crèvecoeur’s panegyric to the classless society. Bloomfield is also a different corrupt aristocrat from those seen in early American Gothics such as Susanna Rowson’s Reuben and Rachel (1798) or Wood’s Amelia; or, The Influence of Virtue (1802), which were set in Europe mostly, it seems, because the authors could not accommodate the requisite high-born villain to an American setting. Mitchell, with some sophistication, combines his European and American tales through the agency of Melissa Bloomfield, the colonel’s daughter, the auditor of Selina’s tale of sentimental adventure and the protagonist of her own Gothic one. Riding about the bucolic American countryside, Melissa happens upon the emigrant Selina, who tells of how her unscrupulous, mercenary father sought to force her to wed the wealthy Count Hubert, a boorish man many years her senior. Instead, she secretly marries the man of her choice, Colonel Bergher, who presently, in self-defense, must shoot the count and then has to escape with his young wife, hotly pursued by the minions of the offended aristocracy. Since the count was related to the ruling families of practically every European country, the nobility of a whole continent, it seems, is intent on capturing the offending lovers. The young couple flee first to England, then to America, where, in New London, beyond the reach of Europe’s rulers or their spies, they are at last living happily together and learning to support themselves by farming.
Volume 1 concludes with Melissa, after hearing Selina’s tale, drawing a double moral—“She perceived to what misfortunes an opposition to parental authority must lead, and also the dreadful effects of parental authority” (1:206)—and then voicing a final foreshadowing lament: “O my God! preserve me from trials similar to these” (1:206). Melissa’s life, to this point, has seemed idyllic and provides an American contrast to Selina’s tale of European tribulations. But early in volume 2, Melissa learns that the man to whom she is betrothed, Alonzo, has just lost his family fortune. In one of the first actions of the Revolutionary War, the British have confiscated his father’s fleet. And worse, fellow American tradesmen take advantage of the father’s suddenly compromised financial position to refuse to pay him the debts they owe. Consequently and quite characteristically, Colonel Bloomfield immediately breaks off his daughter’s engagement to the no longer suitable Alonzo and insists she marry a man of her father’s choosing. Melissa refuses. In order to frighten her into compliance, Bloomfield confines her in a Connecticut castle of “real Gothic architecture” (2:59).
The Gothic villain Americanized leads to a sentimental novel Gothicized, and Mitchell transplants, virtually intact, a European castle from Radcliffe’s fiction to the wilds of Connecticut. This old, abandoned, decaying, pseudomedieval fortress comes replete with moat, battlements, heavy gates, darkly empty rooms, and even exotic herbs and flowers in an ominously overgrown garden. Kept captive within the castle by a sanctimonious spinster aunt who is also convinced of the rectitude of this action, Melissa maintains her integrity and independence and virtually orders the aunt from their joint captivity. With a reluctant captive residing within its walls, the castle thereupon begins to act as Gothic castles are wont to do, and Melissa is subjected to a whole round of unnatural visitations. After a “deathlike stillness,” she hears noises, including the whispers of several unseen men in the courtyard. While she is supposedly alone in her own room, a cold hand grasps her arm, yet, when she gathers her wits and lights a taper, she sees nothing but the empty dark. She bravely proceeds down the stairs to see that the doors are all locked and again hears whispers, “AWAY! AWAY!” Like Carwin’s “Hold, Hold!” the command is both a warning and a threat. More like Clara in Wieland than the swooning Selina of the sentimental half of The Asylum, Melissa does not succumb to debilitating fear but resolutely confronts the threats, assuming them to be more cruel attempts by her father to bring her to submit to his will. Whereupon the preternatural occurrences come all the faster; the next morning she is treated to the sound of falling bodies, a rolling ball of fire, a black-clothed figure on the stairway, and another figure, this one bleeding and carrying a bloody dagger, who approaches and then falls down seemingly to die at her feet while a second voice counsels her, in almost comically understated terms, to “Begone! Begone from this house!” By the clear light of the following day, Melissa “endeavored to reason cooly on the events of the past night but reason could not elucidate them” (2:86).
The unraveling of the plot is too complex to summarize here. Suffice to say, chance predictably intervenes both to unite with some regularity the lovers and almost as often to separate them. Nevertheless, Melissa not only weathers her Gothic test alone, she also converts it into a test for both her father and her lover. When a cousin of the same name conveniently dies, Melissa and a well-disposed uncle scheme to conflate the two identities so that her own family and her lover mourn for her. Only when Alonzo proves his enduring constancy, despite her death, by resisting another maiden (really Melissa in disguise), and only after her father has been brought to confess his own wrongdoing through another masquerade arranged by Melissa, does she finally marry her beloved.
Only retrospectively, too, do we learn the real “cause” of the supernatural events Melissa witnessed in the castle. It was not her father, the self-made American gentleman so proud of his American “nobility” and British lineage, who inflicted on his daughter the machinations in (and of) the castle. Her tormentors were a band of lowly criminals who apparently used the site of her imprisonment as a clandestine base of operations from which to sell contraband merchandise, apparently to other disloyal Americans and to the advancing British as well. Hoping to remove Melissa from the building without harming her physically or alerting her to their illegal doings, they sought to frighten her into compliance with their intentions through the agency of such devices as grotesque masks, fake blood, pasteboard figures, and the secret passageways that must abound in any self-respecting castle, even an American model. The more Melissa resisted, the harder they tried, and vice versa, but with her will ultimately outweighing theirs just as it also outweighed, and in exactly the same circumstances, her father’s.
At the end of the novel, with the criminals apprehended, the inexplicable supernatural dangers prove to be quite comprehensible ones—private and public crimes, cowardice, greed, and particularly an underhanded pursuit only of one’s own coldly calculated advantage. This conclusion emphasizes the similarities between the British-American self-made aristocrat and the Loyalist lower orders. In their willingness to substitute materialism for principles (love of family, love of country) and to use perverted means—Gothic means—to achieve their dubious ends, each mirrors the other’s aspirations. Each, ironically, is foiled by Melissa, whose life was endangered by the same men threatening her nation as well as by her own father, who, like the Loyalist thieves within and the British without, too much posited aristocratic privilege over more human values. The Asylum ends, then, as an allegory of the Revolution but one that emphasizes internal, not external, sources of oppression and division. And what is internal abides.
In another sense, too, the novel’s conclusion is characteristically ajar. Alonzo and Melissa, finally wed, anticipate settling into a “happy, secluded Asylum.” That end and that language both evoke the rhetoric of Jeffersonian agrarianism with its idealization of rural retreat. By the time the novel was published, however, the word asylum had taken on a second, euphemistic association. It also named a retreat for the criminally insane, as exemplified in the huge and appropriately Gothic fortress of Newgate Prison or, even more, in the new walled institution built in York, England, and described in pastoral, even Jeffersonian, terms by Samuel Tuke in Description of the Retreat, an Institution Near York for Insane Persons of the Society of Friends (1813). This new kind of asylum, justified by a belief in the salutary benefits of the country and of removal from the hubbub of modern, urban social life, also signaled a new attitude toward Otherness, an Enlightened age’s solution to the problems of evil and madness. This benign institutionalization of the insane, as Foucault suggests in Madness and Civilization, was a way of controlling and objectifying the irrational Other by appointing select members of the society (the doctor as priest) to “certify” the existence, the treatment, and the cure of the Other in order that the society at large need not be disturbed by its presence.31 But Mitchell’s ending, with its encircling series of revelations and its rewriting of Revolutionary history, suggests that no civilization can totally evade the signs of its own madness and that no asylum (in either sense of the word) can exist divorced from its society, or even, in any real sense, distanced from it, for isolation itself necessarily turns the asylum as pastoral retreat into the asylum as prison.
There is still another disjunction in the various conjunctions that tie together the novel at its end. The final reconciliations bring together not just the lovers and the parent and child but also warring nations and thus mark the end of the Revolutionary War with its attendant horrors. An Englishman who had saved Alonzo and whom Alonzo, later, was able to save, departs for home, where he plans to open a pub called “The Grateful American.” But Mitchell’s narrative is, after all, retrospective. At the same time that the novel was serialized in the Barometer; the newspaper already rightly predicted another war with England, and, by 1811, when the novel was published, war seemed inevitable. Even as the author was writing of the promise of the past, that promise was being forgotten. So the novel’s Gothic images, signifying division in the present and division from the past, could continue to inform the American consciousness during the aftermath of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and even up to the verge of World War I. As Fredric Jameson has argued of the social potency of literary symbols, “fantasy or protonarrative structure” is, merely and ultimately, “the vehicle for our experience of the real.”32 Mitchell’s novel—plagiarized, pirated, bowdlerized—exerted its peculiar symbolic force as division and violence ruled again. And again. Even fallen, his Gothic castle continued to signify.
The Gothic Within
What happens to the early American Gothic once the castle has fallen into the tarn? Can the paradigms for private villainy and perverted authority be grounded in America? Can a Philadelphia, not a Paris or a London, be the city of brotherly corruption? In other words, does the Gothic require the castle or is the ruined castle an external sign of a deeper decay within? Can one challenge hierarchy, authority, patriarchy, and traditional values without recourse to Europe with its potent symbols and synecdoches for other forms of oppression—the Inquisition or the Directory? Does America have enough of a history to sustain the Gothic’s generic challenge to history, its rewriting and unwriting of history?
Such questions occupied a second group of Gothic writers in the new Republic. Their models were not so much the Costume Gothics of Walpole, Radcliffe, and Lewis but the reformist novels—called by their detractors Jacobin novels—of Robert Bage, Mary Hays, Thomas Holcroft, Elizabeth Inchbald, Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, and, most of all, William Godwin. To speak of models, however, is to obscure the crucial point that any novel of reform necessarily addresses its own specific social situation. Reform, like revolution, comes from inside a system, and the political writer must focus on the perceived inequities and injustices of the political present in which she or he writes. The castle thus becomes simply irrelevant for reform-minded American Gothicists. In eighteenth- or early-nineteenth-century Connecticut, it was anachronistic and strikingly out of place, at best an eccentric Yankee’s Disneyland trivialization of a European past or an attempt to beat Mark Twain to King Arthur’s court. As a central symbol and setting, it was therefore simply jettisoned by the new Republic’s own Jacobins—“Adelio” (author of A Journey to Philadelphia, 1804), the anonymous author of St. Herbert (1813), Rebecca Rush, Caroline Matilda Warren, George Watterston, and, most of all, Charles Brockden Brown.
Two novels that indicate how some of these problems were solved in the homespun versions of the reformist novels also both prominently employ the cruelparent motif and so provide revealing contrasts with The Asylum. Neither St. Herbert, a Tale (originally serialized in the New York Weekly Magazine in 1796 and then published in book form in 1813) nor Kelroy, a Novel (1812) was ever reprinted. Each appeared anonymously—the first “By an American Lady” (whose identity remains unknown) and the second “By a Lady of Pennsylvania,” actually Rebecca Rush, the daughter of the Philadelphia jurist Jacob Rush and the niece of Benjamin Rush. Each addresses important narrative problems, and Kelroy does so with a remarkable facility, deftly interweaving comic and tragic scenes to ground a convincing Gothic disaster in an astutely observed novel of manners. Furthermore, Rush had a good ear for language and remarkable powers of characterization. Her Mrs. Hammond is a striking creation; Harrison T. Meserole has deemed her “the most memorable female villain in American literature.”33 All in all, Rush’s novel is one of the best written in America before 1820. Yet posterity has not dealt generously with her. There is still no modern reprint of this eminently readable work, and only a dozen or so copies of the original edition survive. Her own time did not deal particularly generously with her either. The author earned only $100 from her novel, received little critical notice after its publication, and never wrote another—a significant loss to American literary history.34
Let us look first, however, at St. Herbert, an anonymous novel in which the European castle is modestly but successfully domesticated and that conjoins, as does The Asylum, a sentimental love story with a Gothic thriller. As in The Asylum, true love is continually thwarted, for three generations, in fact. In St. Herbert, however, there is a conjunctive relationship between the human world and the preternatural, which is now symbolized not by some incongruous castle but by a fully believable old manse still surrounded by a dark forest. No moats, turrets, or battlements are necessary. This old American house, with its creaking doors (or was it a moan?) and its drafty corridors (a supernatural sigh? the chilling presence of the undead?) itself sets forth the ambiguity of the preternatural in an appropriately American mode. Nor is that mode fixed; the character of the house seemingly changes with the mood of its inhabitants. Originally used by the evil, aristocratic Maurisson to imprison in fearful isolation the woman whose love he could not buy, it later serves as a happy refuge for St. Herbert and Louisa Howard, the daughter of the woman Maurisson could hold captive but could not possess. But Maurisson presently spoils this match, causing the second Louisa to die of grief after bearing a daughter, also named Louisa, a daughter who apparently inherits, too, a family penchant for both misfortune and the abandoned manse. This third-generation Louisa as a young woman decides that her marital prospects are hopelessly blighted and seeks temporary refuge in the haunted house, where she is, for a time, seemingly comforted by the mournful associations it embodies. Yet she still declines and dies, whereupon her tardy lover returns from trying to seek the fortune that would have made him a suitable husband, discovers Louisa is no more, and, in despair, commits suicide upon her grave, leaving only the aging manse as a still-abiding monument to love misclaimed, misestimated, misdirected, or otherwise gone awry. Only St. Herbert endures to tell the sad tale of three unhappy generations and to testify to the powers for corruption in the new Republic. Significantly, he finds solace not in religion (the usual panacea) but in the wise counsel of an Indian, who inspires him with a model of endurance in the face of tragedy.35
Stoicism is the only consolation at the end of St. Herbert, but the ending of Rebecca Rush’s Kelroy offers even less than that. Indeed, the grim conclusion of each novel well might explain its early unpopularity and virtual disappearance from the literary scene. The nineteenth-century reader generally preferred to have a reformist social message sweetened by a happy ending, and such an ending is precisely what the “American Lady” and the “Lady of Philadelphia,” adhering to the logic of their plots, chose not to provide.
Kelroy does not require a haunted house, much less a castle, for its effects. The Gothic here lies partly within the avaricious soul of Mrs. Hammond and partly within the immediate source of that soul’s defects, the rigid class requirements of Philadelphia in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. For a “classless” society, America certainly has received its share of social criticism from novelists. Rush, for example, grounds the villainous Mrs. Hammond in emerging New World ideas as to just what constituted the good life and in the darker aspirations of an American would-be aristocracy not backed by the historic claims and trappings of their European equivalents. This same grounding also gives us the Richardsonian cruel-parent motif. Put the two together, they spell mother as the evil agent of the plot, as the Gothic antagonist in the most deceptive dress of dust cap and apron. All that mitigates the villainy of Mrs. Hammond is her naivete, and here, too, Rush displays a keen understanding of her society and particularly of its patriarchal power beyond the reach and machinations of Mrs. Hammond. Certainly, that lady is less sinned against than sinning, but she is not entirely without pathos. Merchants and realtors regularly take advantage of her inexperience in financial matters. More to the point, she is fully aware of her own inability, as a woman, to earn her own way in the world. Mrs. Hammond must seek some mode, consistent with accepted female roles, of providing for herself and her daughters. Widowed at thirty, with two young children to raise, she realistically calculates that her chances for making another good marriage are not very high. She has been left enough for her and her daughters to live modestly, but modest living is not her forte. Rightly estimating that her best assets are her daughters as they might be desired by men of means, she sets out to marry them to best advantage—their advantage and hers.
Her concern was perhaps initially more for her daughters than for herself. However (and this is the etiology of villainy in the female mode), she increasingly employs a proclaimed solicitude only for her daughters’ welfare to justify her own self-indulgence, her own preference for high living. Ruthless maternalism more and more verges into megalomania, as ostensibly unquestionable ends (what mother would not promote her children’s happiness?) occasion most questionable means. Mrs. Hammond resorts to deception, prevarication, and forgery. Most damning of all, she finally exhibits an utter disregard for the feelings of her youngest daughter, Emily, who is characterized, above all, by her delicate feelings, and that maternal disregard gives, of course, the lie to all of Mrs. Hammond’s motherly rationalizations.
The mother is capable in her conniving fashion. After her husband’s death, while her two daughters are growing to marriageable age, she cuts herself off from society to be a good widow mourning the death of her husband and solaced by the daughters who occupy her care (but actually to conserve the family’s limited financial resources until they can do the most good). When Lucy, the older of the two, turns sixteen, the whole family “comes out”: “Nobody’s parties were half so crouded, or so fashionable as Mrs. Hammond’s; nobody was half so elegant, or so fashionable as her daughters; and by some well timed innuendoes … she circulated a belief that their fortunes would be as immense, as their claims to admiration were indisputable.”36 Mrs. Hammond understands that affluence (not female virtue) is what is rewarded in America. She displays her daughters in the most expensive European fashions of the day, wagering, in effect, her limited legacy on the chance that a suitably wealthy man can be brought to marry the girl, to support her in an appropriate fashion, and to contribute something to his mother-in-law’s support, too. At first it seems as if it all well might work. Mrs. Hammond, more than Lucy, lands the visiting Lord Walsingham. The new husband is a man of impeccable social standing, considerable wealth, and exemplary kindness (which Mrs. Hammond foolishly misinterprets as malleable weakness).
With one daughter down and one to go, Mrs. Hammond next concentrates her efforts on the seventeen-year-old Emily. Unfortunately, Emily’s aspirations do not coincide with her mother’s, whereas Lucy’s unfortunately did. The younger daughter soon encounters Walsingham’s friend, the Wertherian Kelroy, clothed all in black and enveloped in an aura of Romantic sensibility, and falls hopelessly in love with him even though he has not a penny to his name. He, hearing this beautiful young lady play soulfully upon the piano, is presently equally smitten, while, naturally, Mrs. Hammond is enraged. As her assets dwindle, as her debts mount, and as her son-in-law proves far less accommodating than she had hoped, she decides that the second half of her plan must succeed better than the already faltering first half and does everything in her power to direct her second daughter to that end. When Kelroy goes off to India to make his fortune, and perhaps to gain thereby the mother’s approval, she intercepts the lovers’ letters and forges substitutes in which each informs the other of diminished love and divided attentions. Only then does Emily, in despair and (she thinks) on the rebound, reluctantly agree to marry Dunlevy, a nice enough and (for the mother) rich enough suitor.
What I find particularly intriguing in this novel is the way in which Rush, a year after the publication of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811) and before Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Emma (1816), already Gothicizes the novel of social manners by turning the Austenesque plot of arranging suitable marriages for the suitable into a grim matrimonial poker game. Metaphors of hazard and chance (particularly references to cards and lottery) pervade Kelroy. And appropriately so; for women, the gamble of marriage was the only game in town. If Mrs. Hammond can make her daughters appear rich, they can marry well; if she fails, they will marry poorly and live poor, for they have no income nor earning ability of their own. Personal worth counts for little in a materialistic world in which women get anted up before society and auctioned off to the highest bidder or (the game is played from the other side, too) the best bluffer. Rush acutely perceives the Gothic underside to this “circulation of women,” and her early story of pride and prejudice reveals the tawdry underpinnings of the social edifice that Austen depicts with irony, subtlety, but also with a certain genteel obfuscation. As I regularly ask my students, would it be the same happy ending if Darcy lost his fortune and Pemberley, too, the day before the wedding? Of course not. And Rebecca Rush, more than Jane Austen, emphasizes the mercantile basis of bourgeois “love.”
The hypocrisy at the heart of an only theoretically classless society and particularly the low social status of women as mostly objects of social exchange along with their incommensurately high responsibility (responsibility without concomitant privilege) as perpetuators of etiquette, manners, even sense and sensibility, stands fully exposed at the end of Kelroy. The prospects for any woman, particularly a discerning one, are not bright. As Walsingham tells Emily:
Experience will teach you the real characters of the beings who chiefly compose your species. You will find them a set of harpies, absurd, treacherous, and deceitful—regardless of strong obligations, and mindful of slight injuries—and when your integrity has been shocked, and every just, and native feeling severely tried, the sensibility which you now so liberally bestow on others, will then be absorbed in lamenting its own cruel disappointments, and inefficacious tenderness; and you will gladly consult the dictates of your understanding, to prevent being preyed on by continual depravity. (P. 129)
Nothing in the novel dispels this gloomy prognosis, not even the conclusion in which Mrs. Hammond, at least, finally gets her just desserts. Rush effectively contrives a most suitable end for the avaricious mother, but it is an end so utterly pathetic that we can neither sympathize with her plight (for she has earned it) nor celebrate her demise. It is a defeat, moreover, forged out of what first seems to be this dubious character’s total victory. With both her daughters wed (although not as much to her advantage as she anticipated), the mother finds that her own well-being really does not depend on theirs. She wins $50,000 in a lottery. She does not, however, long enjoy this first substantial wealth, as opposed to the simulacrum of the real thing. At the very apex of her new good fortune, Mrs. Hammond, no longer as young as she pretends to be, suffers a debilitating stroke. Bedridden, paralyzed, fully aware that she is going to die, she summons Emily to her bed. Newly wed, Emily has by no means recovered from what she thinks has been Kelroy’s defection. The daughter holds her mother’s limp hand while the mother frantically tries to tell her something but simply cannot articulate whatever it is that she wants to say.37 Neither Emily nor the reader ever knows if Mrs. Hammond intended a deathbed confession, a plea for forgiveness, or merely another of her capable rationalizations.
Mrs. Hammond dies with her last unspoken words constricted in her throat, to be followed soon after by her victim daughter. Emily finds in the dead woman’s desk proof of her mother’s deviousness and proof, too, of Kelroy’s abiding love. The daughter is devastated to discover a stack of letters that the designing mother had intercepted, Kelroy’s letters to her and hers to Kelroy, along with damning copies of the forged “dear John” letters from each to the other. But despite Emily’s death, followed soon after by Kelroy’s as well, the image of the end that predominates in the book is of Mrs. Hammond, choking upon her last incomprehensible utterance, a grim reaping for this republican mother. Her final fate, being reduced to a most ironic rich silence, resoundingly refutes her governing assumption that human value is synonymous with net worth.
ι WILL PASS OVER briefly a number of reformist Gothicists who borrow all too obviously from the work of Charles Brockden Brown. Carnell, for example, in “Adelio’s” A Journey to Philadelphia; or, Memoirs of Charles Coleman Saunders, combines the worst features of Carwin, Clithero (from Edgar Huntly), and Colden (from Jane Talbot) without exhibiting the psychological complexity of any of these hero-villains. Or in The Gamesters; or, Ruins of Innocence (1805), Caroline Matilda Warren pairs Leander Anderson with Edward Somerton to explore the symbiosis of evil in much the same manner as does Godwin with Caleb Williams-Falkland or Brown with Arthur Mervyn-Welbeck and Edgar Huntly-Clithero. Warren’s protagonist for a time resists the villainous assaults of Somerton but is finally seduced by this high roller and ends, miserably, having destroyed everyone he loved and everything he once possessed through his uncontrollable aleatory passions and his attempts at high living. Brown’s characters are copied and so are his characteristic plot devices. In the two novels of George Watterston, Glencarn; or, The Disappointment of Youth (1810) and The Lawyer; or Man as He Ought Not to Be (1808), Brownian ploys proliferate, especially the endless repetition of mistaken identities, the deployment of psychological and physical doubles, a reliance on ventriloquism, and the larger narrative strategy of the confession that substantially indicts the narrator who would thereby exonerate himself.38
More than an obvious homage to Charles Brockden Brown conjoins these novelists and their novels. They are all concerned with the very way in which evil can be rooted in the concept of individualism. Characters in these novels flagrantly demarcate the self from the other, the individual from society, to pit themselves against the enemy that stands in their way, which, collectivized, constitutes the actual community. In short, these characters lack any sense of social responsibility that might act as a check upon individual desire; they simply cannot balance the abstract claims of a community to which they belong (for they do not see themselves as belonging to one) against their individual and mostly materialistic tendencies. In each novel, a character seeks to distinguish himself (never herself) from his peers. The personal or social weaknesses of others provide means to do so—are, indeed, the very rungs of the ladder to success. Metaphors of self-improvement or self-realization thereby become diabolical as they set the aspiring self against the rest of the world in a battle of wills. The resultant contest of survival predates Social Darwinism but also somehow exceeds it by requiring no ostensibly neutral construct such as fitness or progress to justify in theory its tyranny in practice.
Not coincidentally, the legal profession in particular is attacked in these Jacobin novels; here again, the Brownian legacy is apparent. Brown’s antipathy for the law, incurred during his own early legal apprenticeship, is well known: “[I] was perpetually encumbered with the rubbish of law, and waded with laborious steps through its endless tautologies, its impertinent circuities, its lying assertions and hateful artifices.” But more than that, the business of law was mostly business. Its enterprise attested that American society was more vitally concerned with property rights than with human rights (indeed, slaves were property, and, arguably, wives were too), was more interested in protecting the advantage of individual men than in promoting justice in the nation. Moreover, as these reformist novels endlessly attest, the law lived not by its letter nor even its spirit but by its misuse, by pettifoggery, demagoguery, and sophistry. Issues were decided by the abilities of slippery-tongued barristers to talk away the facts, to twist words into justifications of the unjustifiable. All the villains of the Jacobin novels have mastered these requisite skills and can, like Morcell of The Lawyer, profit from them both professionally and personally. For as Watterston or Brown knew full well, the most capable lawyer typically serves the highest bidder and not the person with the best or the most socially beneficial cause: “Intellectual ore is of no value [to the lawyer] but as it is capable of being turned into gold, and learning and eloquence are desirable only as the means of more expeditiously filling our coffers.”39 In another sense, too, law is of the marketplace, and seeking justice translates out as hiring the best legal counsel that money can buy. In Watterston’s novel that counsel is Morcell or his mentor, the equally sleazy barrister Dorsey. Of course villainy prevails! It is ardently sought by those in a position to avail themselves of its services and to reward it accordingly.
The same novels that provide a salient, systemic critique of America’s early maladies do not, however, abound with suggested remedies, although the villain’s final discomfiture may inoculate the reader against following his course. Thus a Carnell or a Leander Anderson dies a violent or even self-inflicted death, in isolation and finally aware of his own corruption; a Morcell or a Somerton belatedly recognizes his previous evil ways and devotes his remaining days to benevolence and philanthropy, totally subjugating his individual desires to the good of the society he earlier discounted. But it must be noted that either of these solutions is itself an essentially personal and individualistic reaction to what has been exposed as a systemic problem, and a problem of individualism at that. The antagonist, in short, exhibits even in reform the faults and fault lines of his society; consequently, the new philanthropist, at last weaned from his previous evil ways, hardly refutes the world of getting and spending that he so recently, profitably, and selfishly inhabited.
Rereading Arthur Mervyn
The very decision to write a novel in the new Republic, especially a Gothic novel, constituted an ideological choice almost as definite as the decision to write a Federalist manifesto. Nor do I find it merely coincidental that Brockden Brown, in 1803, publicly rejected both the novel form and his earlier Godwinism. This is not to argue a causal connection between genre and narrow party politics: Republicans and Federalists both wrote novels, and even a construct such as Federalist dubiously categorizes and conventionalizes a writer such as Royall Tyler. However, and as Brown knew full well, writing a novel in 1800 meant writing for an audience that included unprivileged readers. It meant, in many cases, alienating men of education and social probity who had little patience for tales of mystery, for parables of perverted power and passion. Moreover, the Gothic in particular questioned the rules of rationalism that, for those in power, conveniently ordered their interest and their status. “The man of Truth, Charles! the pupil of Reason,” his friend Dr. Elihu Hubbard Smith wrote to Brockden Brown in 1796, “has no mysteries.… The man of poesey, Charles, is not often that of Philosophy & Truth.”40
It must be remembered that the term Gothic was originally pejorative and connoted the barbaric, the archaic, the unspeakable. As David Punter, a Marxist theorist of the Gothic, has noted, even in its form—deliberately “fragmentary, inconsistent, jagged”—the Gothic challenged the Age of Reason’s ruling premises about the purposes of discourse, the status of knowledge, and the limits of both realism and rationality and thus consistently undermined the cherished complacencies of emerging bourgeois culture.41 If humans cannot decide for themselves what is good and what is evil, or, worse, if they cannot master their propensities for the latter, then what is the basis of human society? That question, of course, has particular pertinence in a democracy that officially ascribes to liberalism (i.e., laissez-faire capitalism) and the Protestant ethic (both of which are implicitly grounded in the same rationalist faith in the perfectability of human nature). But what if the most successful person is the most selfish, the most conniving, in short, the most evil? What if rationality is measured by what one can get away with, by the ability to fool most of the people most of the time? A prime function of bourgeois ideology is to avoid those very considerations by making a mythology of success and casting any rags-to-riches scenario as proof positive of equal opportunity for all. The Gothic, however, especially as handled by writers such as Rebecca Rush or George Watterston or Charles Brockden Brown, asked precisely those questions that bourgeois ideology labored to suppress. It was all so easy, Welbeck insists in Arthur Mervyn. If you are rich enough, you can get away, literally, with murder.
Brockden Brown, however, does not particularly concern himself with this Liverpudlian emigrant proficient at duping Americans. Welbeck is too easy a target. He wears his villainy as obviously as he wears the ill-gotten gains it allows him to flaunt, the (rented) Philadelphia mansion that displays his high status to the world. Welbeck is all palpitating lust, deceit, avarice, and duplicity. He sins; he dies. It is a story we have read before. What is intriguing about Brown’s adaptation of the Gothic form (and here he goes further even than Godwin) is the way in which he shifts the expected anatomy of evil from the prime villain to the villain’s possible apprentice, the eponymous Arthur Mervyn. Moreover, by making Mervyn’s life at least outwardly conform to accepted bourgeois patterns, to America’s own idealizations of its own principles (the country versus the city, the Protestant ethic), Brown raises perturbing questions about how much the Gothic might be rooted in the very essentials of American democracy. Welbeck’s evil proves little. Any social program will occasionally misfire and throw out not a proper citizen but a villain whose evil grotesquely caricatures the society’s own values (in Welbeck’s case, a burning desire for both material possessions and social respectability). And Welbeck is a caricature. But if Arthur Mervyn, all-American boy, is also evil, then we must delve far deeper to grapple with the problem.
There are no Connecticut castles in Brown’s fiction, no clanking chains, but Brown fully indulged a Gothic fascination for the least acceptable aspects of the human psyche. He was obsessed with evil: its various forms, both private and public; its social etiology and consequences; and particularly with the ways in which rationalization, prevarication, and hypocrisy (in short, subverted narratology) provided the Age of Reason with its perverse mirror image. In a world wracked by disease—the metaphor of the yellow fever—story itself is cast as one of the prime carriers. Thus Welbeck’s ensnaring narrative implicates the archetypal youth from the country, Arthur, more and more in a web of complex evil. As Welbeck’s accomplice and confidante, Arthur gains his first real education in the ways of the world. How are we going to keep him down on the farm…? Becoming a man of his world, Arthur, in turn, soon has his tales to tell to the benevolent, archetypally middle-class Dr. Stevens, who is increasingly implicated in the Gothic happenings of that unfolding narrative. And the narration of these different narrations itself unfolds in Philadelphia in the plague year of 1793, which provides, far more than any castle, the perfect Gothic setting for the machinations of Brown and Welbeck and Mervyn’s interconnected plots.
CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN occupies a distinct place in this history of the origins of American fiction, partly because of the reception his work received in his own time and continues to receive in ours. Unlike most of the early novelists, Brown survives in the historical archive in a way that makes both him and his work uniquely accessible to the modern reader. We have fragments of his diaries and over 150 of his letters, some manuscripts of his works, various unpublished ephemera, and a remarkable range of articulate early responses to his work. In Charles Brockden Brown: A Reference Guide, Patricia L. Parker records forty-three published assessments of Brown written between 1798 (the publication date of his first novel, Wieland) and 1820. He liked to think of himself as the best American novelist of his generation, and on that score his peers agreed. His Ormond (1799) was the first American novel to be published in England. Almost immediately after Brown’s death in 1810, his friends and fellow writers began promoting a complete edition of his novels, and in 1827 that demand was fulfilled to become another American first. At this same time, still one more first was in the works. In 1824, John Neal turned Brown’s life into a type of the “plight of the American writer,” praised abroad, neglected at home. By 1830, Charles Brockden Brown became the first American novelist to be cast, in the best Romantic tradition, as the moody iconoclast, appreciated by the “intelligent, the cultivated, and the reflecting classes of society” but, of course, spurned by the philistine masses. He was, well before Melville, Hawthorne, or Poe, the starving “man of genius,” the writer consigned finally to silence for want of a suitably appreciative audience.42 That very iconography of the neglected great author serves to encourage contemporary readers not to make the same mistake.
As a neglected early writer, however, Brown rather resembles his fellow fictionalists, for none of them, not even Rowson or Foster, could support themselves with their novels. Brown, in fact, did better than most, managing for much of his life to earn a living through his fiction, his editing, and his political writings. Certainly he was frustrated by the difficulties of being a writer in the early Republic, but, unlike the indomitable Parson Weems, he did not feel called upon to sell his books door-to-door along the nation’s highways and byways. Nor did he take to the stage or the schoolroom, like Rowson or Foster, to support and promote his literary habit. Unlike most of his colleagues, he enjoyed public esteem: “The flattering reception that has been given, by the public, to Arthur Mervyn, has prompted the writer to solicit a continuance of the same favour, and to offer to the world a new performance.”43 Although only one of his novels, Edgar Huntly, was reprinted in America during his lifetime, it must be noted that a second edition was the exception for American novels before 1820, not the rule. Less than five years after Brown’s death, Paul Allen’s full-length biography of the writer was in press, whereas, as I have shown for most early American novelists, only fragments of information survive to the present, and for many virtually nothing remains but a book—not even the name of the author who wrote it. Brown, in contrast, could anticipate that he would survive in the archive, for his admirers were educated and important enough to write reviews for the kinds of magazines that were being assiduously collected by the historical societies springing up in the years after the Revolution. Furthermore, most of the extant copies of the first editions of his novels that I have handled do not evidence the kind of hard use that characterizes first edition specimens of other early novels, and they seem to have been obtained by these same libraries (dedicated, as the libraries were, to preserving the heritage of a new nation) soon after their initial publication, often in pristine form. Brown’s books had become collector’s items without being widely read.
The evidence suggests that even though Brown never achieved financial success with his fiction, he did attain one goal he set for himself, the cultivation of an elite audience. Brown, as earlier noted, understood who most of America’s novel readers were, and he also, like all early novelists, understood the opprobrium under which any American novelist wrote. He articulated his ambition to adapt the novel to moralistic purposes, as did practically all of his peers, and, more exceptional, he also articulated a desire to cultivate for the novel an audience of educated readers. In his prefaces and in his literary criticism, Brown strove to educate the educated to the intellectual benefits of novel reading. At the same time, he also wanted to retain the novel’s primary unprivileged readership—the “class of readers” who read few books besides novels. “To gain [the] homage” of those “who study and reflect,” he insisted in the advertisement for the unpublished (and now lost) Sky Walk, it was not necessary “to forego the approbation of those whose circumstances have hindered them from making … progress” in the world, for “a contexture of facts capable of suspending the faculties of every soul in curiosity, may be joined with depth of views into human nature and all the subtleties of reasoning.”44 It is some measure of Brown’s success, perhaps, that Samuel Miller, who was otherwise intolerant of novels and novel reading, could begrudgingly praise Brown’s “respectable specimen[s] of fictitious history” in his A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century (1803).45 But then again, Miller was a personal friend, and Miller, no doubt, sighed with relief when Brown, during the same year in which Miller’s history appeared, publicly renounced his previous writings and, presumably, those “idle and thoughtless” readers who favored novels over literary criticism or political tracts, both of which constituted the literary program Brown set himself for his “late” (he was only thirty-two) years.46
My concern here, however, is not with Brown’s psychobiography or with his motivations for abandoning fiction after 1801 but with his readers and the various ways in which readers, then as now, have attempted to make sense of Arthur Mervyn. No other novelist of the early national period has been accorded such an extensive body of response, and this abundant record of reaction would at first seem to be a luxury for a critic who has had to re-create responses to early fiction from scrabblings and other fragmentary sources. With Brockden Brown, there is a different theoretical issue posed precisely by this plethora. Brown is the only canonical writer discussed in this study, the only writer to be regularly taught in the college classroom or to have commanded a body of critical response. The history of Arthur Mervyn is not, then, simply a matter of its publication dates and a record of, for the most part, subsequent public neglect but is a history of how the novel has been interpreted. It carries its readings with it. One cannot now read Brown “innocently,” the way early readers read The Asylum, say, or The History of Constantius and Pulchera, the way contemporary readers read The Exorcist or Airport IV. All modern editions of Brown’s novels come packaged with a critical introduction that also alerts the reader to the canonical stature of the book. Moreover the range of opinion on Arthur Mervyn is so varied that one must read against this body of interpretation; thus every reading of the novel becomes essentially a rereading or even an unreading of other readings.
The critical reception of Arthur Mervyn is as labyrinthine and contradictory as anything in a Gothic novel (even, for that matter, in one of Brown’s own Gothic novels). Most of the debate centers on the character of Arthur Mervyn. He is a “hero whose virtue … stands in need of no riches.” He is an inconstant scoundrel who betrays the love of a good woman for the lucre of a wealthy widow. He is a model of “enlightened self-interest” and “rigid morality” but also a “young American on the make” and a “meddlesome, self-righteous bungler who comes close to destroying himself and everyone in his path.” He is a man of “constancy” and “virtuous impulses” or a “modern bourgeois teenage Tartuffe,” a “chameleon of convenient virtue”—and a “chameleon of convenient vice.” He is an “innocent,” “an American Adam,” who has, however, a “tendency toward casuistry and rather indiscreet curiosity.” He is “a mama’s boy, pampered and spoiled,” an “imp of the perverse.” Or: “Neither a hero nor a villain,” Mervyn “lacks the force of will to be either.” He is, symbolically and structurally, Maravegli, the self-sacrificing gentleman and the type of saintly benevolence. He is, figuratively and even literally, Clavering, the consummate con man posing as a country bumpkin for his own nefarious purposes. “Pierce Arthur Mervyn,” yet another critic writes, “and all you find is Arthur Mervyn.”47
Will the real Arthur Mervyn please stand up? Mervyn at one point asks, “Who and what was Welbeck?” but readers of the novel have far more insistently asked, “Who is Mervyn?”48 This is, indeed, the central question of the novel. It supplies the structuring narrative device of the book and serves as both its modus operandi and raison d’être. The narrative configures as a trial. Mervyn stands accused of being Mervyn by the prosecutor, Wortley; he pleads a different Mervyn (two of them, in fact) before the judge, Dr. Stevens. The reader, as jury, must render his or her own verdict on the whole proceedings.
The ersatz trial effectively literalizes a most important element of the Gothic, its challenge to rationality, by making inquiry both the subject and the form of the text. Neither Stevens nor the reader is ever granted any definitive grounds for final judgment. In fact, the extended metaphoric trial becomes possible only because a more literal one is subverted in the novel and subverted partly through the suppression of evidence by our metaphoric judge and moral guide, Dr. Stevens. Wortley, who is Stevens’s “dearest friend” and who, Stevens assures us, is “venerable for his discernment and integrity” (p. 12), views Mervyn as a dissembler, a criminal. Mervyn, Wortley is convinced, aided Welbeck in defrauding creditors (Wortley among them) and is, moreover, implicated in who knows what other heinous crimes perpetrated by the villainous Welbeck. At the beginning of volume 2, Wortley informs Stevens with some satisfaction that an actual warrant for Mervyn’s arrest has been issued. Stevens is deeply perturbed because he wants to believe in Mervyn’s innocence but also knows that much of Mervyn’s defense would be inadmissible in a court of law. For Mervyn defends himself, like some republican Scheherazade, by telling stories—complex, encircling narratives (at one point he narrates a tale within a tale within a tale) that often turn on little more than hearsay and conjecture, neither of which have any standing in a standard court of inquiry.
Mervyn’s innocence, however, is not all that is here on trial. The larger legal system is also under scrutiny. The law, in a very real sense, is not the solution to a dilemma but is part of the problem, and Dr. Stevens, as the metaphoric judge, also becomes, by volume 2, almost a coconspirator in the case. Furthermore, everything we see of the legal system in the novel calls its justice into question. Honest men, like Stevens’s friend Carlton, rot away in debtors’ prison, placed there by vindictive creditors who do not need the cash that holds another captive. Lawyers scalp their clients. One wishes to charge Mervyn a 50 percent commission to help him sue to obtain a reward he has already rightly earned. Or the law enables wicked men to flourish. On the highest social level, there is the elder Thetford—a usurer who charges an interest of 5 percent per month—who thrives on the side of the law; and there are equally wicked men lower on the social scale, like Philip Hadwin, who legally cheats his penniless niece of the inheritance that rightly should be hers.
It is by no means clear that Stevens’s evasive procedure is above reproach either. In both a literal and figurative sense, the doctor takes the law into his own hands and prefers to decide Mervyn’s case on a personal, individualistic basis—as if personal bias can better weigh the guilt or innocence of an individual than can the more formalized proceedings of the legal system. Stevens’s decision to judge Mervyn for himself makes him, moreover, an accomplice in Mervyn’s life, much as Mervyn became increasingly implicated in Welbeck’s dealings after accepting Welbeck’s story.
We might notice, too, how the promise of confidence that Welbeck extracts from Mervyn and that Mervyn, in turn, elicits from Stevens only problematizes the burden of each discourse. What is the responsibility of the listener to the teller, the judge/interpreter/critic to the text? Can Stevens possibly be objective (Can Mervyn? Can we?) once he has heard of extenuating circumstances, good intentions, noble motives? Even if we demand the facts, and nothing but the facts, those facts themselves are shown to be open to different interpretations and to alter as they pass from narrator to narrator.
One particularly telling example of the indeterminacy of the data is provided by the body buried in the basement. For Welbeck, an undesired duel with his former benefactor ended quite differently than intended. To paraphrase his account: I aimed to miss him, he to kill me, he missed his aim, I missed mine, and you (Arthur) heard only one shot because we fired simultaneously, and now, unfortunately, we have a body to dispose of, but these things happen, and fortunately the basement is handy. Welbeck’s rationalist account for Arthur then becomes Arthur’s Gothic tale told to Stevens. Mervyn describes the burial in gruesome detail and even confesses that by the light of a flickering taper he thought he saw Watson’s eyes open and then close. Too frightened for his own safety to consider the possibility that Watson may be still alive, Mervyn first, like a man bereft of reason, runs through the dark labyrinthine corridors of the tomblike basement, collides with a wall, bloodies himself, and then, even more horrified, returns to help Welbeck complete the task. Stevens, moved by that story but recognizing that it might not be convincing in court, decides not to inform the authorities. Which gives us yet another version of the story. Sounding very much like the defendant, the judge explains, “I did not perceive any immediate advantage to flow from imparting the knowledge I had lately gained to others” (p. 225). It is a rationalist account again and one almost as dubious (what of Captain Watson’s relatives?) and as self-serving as Welbeck’s.
By this point in the narrative, Dr. Stevens, for better or worse, has essentially cast his lot with Mervyn. For him, the innocence of the young, handsome, fever-wracked stranger whom he took into his home has become almost an article of faith. He helped Arthur knowing full well that he risked the life of his wife and child, and his own life, too, on which many of the city’s sick depend for what little aid can be offered to them. Indeed, in the face of the monstrous disorder threatening the City of Brotherly Love and giving the lie to its name, Stevens still asserts a personal benevolence and cares for his fellow citizens without seeking to profit from their distress. But he also premised his kindness to Arthur on the innocence that he perceived in the young man’s face: “Had I heard Mervyn’s story from another, or read it in a book, I might, perhaps, have found it possible to suspect the truth; but, as long as the impression, made by his tones, gestures and looks, remained in my memory, this suspicion was impossible.… The face of Mervyn is the index of an honest mind” (pp. 229–30). Confidence men, the good Dr. Stevens’s reading has already warned him, can look honest and helpless when it suits their needs. He thus confronts two contradictory texts, the story he reads in Arthur’s face and Arthur’s story as he would read it were it not authorized by that author’s face. No wonder Wortley’s accusations perturb the doctor’s reading of his reading. Is he being particularly perceptive or particularly gullible? Arthur’s question is transposed into Stevens’s question, and that way moral chaos lies: “If Mervyn has deceived me, there is an end to my confidence in human nature. All limits to dissimulation, and all distinctions between vice and virtue will be effaced. No man’s word, no force of collateral evidence shall weigh with me an hair” (pp. 248–49).
There is in the doctor’s dilemma both a touching humanitarianism and a frightening absolutism. Why, we well might ask, does he stake so much on a young man he has known so briefly? It is partly, I would suggest, because he views Arthur less as a man than as an embodiment of the culture’s self-sanctifying myths, which is precisely how Arthur labors to be seen. Mervyn, as he describes himself in his narrative, is a poor, unschooled country boy (a “perfect example of indigence” [p. 46]) whose determination and intelligence have already more than effaced the fact of his humble origins. At one point, he tells how he employed his self-taught knowledge of Latin to translate an Italian manuscript. Or he will dispose of some complex point of jurisprudence (corporate, international, or maritime law; indemnity procedures; civil liberties; whatever) and thereby attest to his mastery of law, which is an all-the-more-remarkable accomplishment considering he has not been trained to that or any other profession. For Mervyn, as a kind of latter-day Franklin, is exactly the pattern of American success in which Stevens believes. As William Hedges aptly observes, “Mervyn has a mission not only to do good but to make good,” and nothing in Stevens’s ethos or experience prepares him to deem that Protestant ethic in action to be a crime.49 It is his own dream of radical innocence in a fallen world come to meet him with a smiling face. Small wonder he believes.
Arthur also believes in Arthur as an American Adam and is as intent upon proving his innocence to Stevens as Stevens is on accepting his proof. The young man’s whole narrative is, in fact, specifically intended to refute Wortley’s charges. Volume 1 is a cagey self-defense cast in the form of a moral autobiography. Arthur tells of how he was forced to leave home by a widowed and unwise father who was himself victimized by a lascivious dairymaid who schemed her way into marriage with the father and then turned him against the son; of how, after being robbed by unscrupulous innkeepers, he arrived, penniless, in the city to be further victimized, through his very innocence, first by Wallace and then by the calculating Welbeck; of how he freed himself from that bondage and also triumphed over numerous other temptations only to be felled by the dread yellow fever and left, for all his acts of kindness, dependent on the kindness of another. Autobiography verges toward hagiography (Arthur and Stevens’s) as Arthur Mervyn, First Part ends with Arthur’s summation of his case before his reluctant judge and his sympathetic jury who, both embodied in Stevens, also stand with the prisoner at the bar:
In consequence of your care, I have been restored to life and to health. Your conduct was not influenced by the prospect of pecuniary recompence, of service, or of gratitude. It is only in one way that I am able to heighten the gratification which must flow from reflection on your conduct—by shewing that the being whose life you have prolonged, though uneducated, ignorant, and poor, is not profligate and worthless, and will not dedicate that life which your bounty has given, to mischievous or contemptible purposes. (Pp. 214–15)
Over a year later, and with the publication of volume 2, Dr. Stevens can early assure the reader that he has fully accepted “the truth of the tale” (p. 219). But as the very fact of volume 2 amply attests, the tale is not yet all told, nor is the trial over. Wortley reappears with a more damning bill of particulars and with witnesses to support him. This second brief for the prosecution is presented while Mervyn is away, by his own testimony, doing good deeds in the country. When Arthur reappears not only is he again charged for his role in the Welbeck/ Wortley fraud, he also faces the further charge that his whole previous defense was a fraud. The life he postulated has been countered by an opposing portrait of the young man as rogue and reprobate. This different Mervyn allegedly seduced his stepmother and then stole his father’s money and best horse to make his getaway. It is hardly the stuff out of which an American Adam is officially made.
The ongoing trial, as the organizing narrative device of the novel, allows Brockden Brown to investigate rules of psychological and social discourse and to show how the individual self, the social setting, and any story in which each gets told are all a matter of selection. It is not surprising, then, that the Franklin homologies of this novel are often remarked, for Franklin presides over both the story of the central character and the story of the making of that story. Brown, of course, need not have had his fellow Philadelphian specifically in mind when he wrote Arthur Mervyn, but it may be of more than passing significance that by 1793 (the year in which the action of Arthur Mervyn takes place) three biographies of Franklin had appeared, each based on portions of Franklin’s own Memoirs, each purporting to be true, and each presenting a rather different man—Franklin as the wise and virtuous American patriot, Franklin as unprincipled opportunist and even traitor, Franklin as conniver and lecher. That the “venerable Ben” emerges from what purported to be an English translation—The Private Life of the Late Benjamin Franklin (1793)—of the scurrilous French Mémoires de la vie privée de Benjamin Franklin (1791) only emphasizes what a little judicious selection could do.50 It might also be remembered that Brown’s first published work (1789) was a eulogy for Franklin (who would not die for another year) and that an editor, apparently deciding it was too good for its subject, published it as a eulogy for Washington (who would not die for another decade).51 Before he wrote his novel in the form of pretended problematic biography, Brown already knew how duplicitous and self-serving (various selves) the real thing could be.
Shaping his narrative to meet the charges against him, Mervyn tries to make his tale unquestionably true by making it preeminently mythic, and the paradigms for that myth were already part and parcel of American popular culture and the larger ideology of individualism—poor boy from the country, the dangers of the city and the sharper, the shield of perfect innocence, the road to riches. The problem, however, is that the material out of which he makes his story is not quite the same as his story as he would make it, and Arthur, as unintentional deconstructionist, regularly stumbles into the interstices between the two. We notice, for example, how frequently he acknowledges, for the reader and Stevens, that he had not quite, in some particular instance, told the whole truth. Something was omitted because it would have served “no useful purpose” (useful to whom?), or he had promised confidentiality, or he had, simply, forgotten. In retrospect, he reports, these omissions almost inevitably have had disastrous consequences, and “sincerity” and openness, he has learned, “is the best policy.” But he keeps having to relearn that same lesson as he once more must retell of still another incident in part 2 that had been fudged in part 1, now explaining the hitherto suppressed parts of his previous story the better to prove his past good intentions and his present honesty.
His defense is his story of his life, but it is even more his and Stevens’s and the time’s belief that a “full, circumstantial and explicit story” can “remove every doubt” (p. 385). That is Arthur’s narrative and moral credo. As Norman Grabo has observed, volume 2, especially, is virtually an orgy of self-revelation, with Mervyn rushing about telling complete strangers (such as Watson’s family in Baltimore) the story of his life.52 As he becomes more and more confident with each narrative “conquest,” he intrudes into other people’s business or enters (with escalating frequency) their houses without so much as knocking. The power of compelled belief informs his tale. He utterly convinces Stevens of his innocence, and even Wortley withdraws his accusations. Words prevail; Mervyn triumphs; his best con, perhaps (the issue is not conclusively resolved in the novel), is his resolute insistence that he has never conned anyone.
One measure of Arthur’s success is that he finally takes control of his own story. Only near the end of the novel (2:chap. 22) do we learn how the text itself has been transmitted. As nearly all critics admit, it is an awkward device, but it is an important one that both records Stevens’s motivations for preserving this story and also calls those motivations (Stevens’s and Arthur’s) into question:
Mrs. Wentworth has put me [Arthur] upon a strange task—not disagreeable, however, but such as I should, perhaps, have declined had not the absence of my Bess, and her mamma, made the time hang somewhat heavy. I have, oftener than once, and far more circumstantially than now, told her my adventures, but she is not satisfied. She wants a written narrative, for some purpose which she tells me she will disclose to me hereafter.
Luckily, my friend Stevens has saved me more than half the trouble. He has done me the favor to compile much of my history with his own hand. I cannot imagine what could prompt him to so wearisome an undertaking; but he says that adventures and a destiny so singular as mine, ought not to be abandoned to forgetfulness like any vulgar and everyday existence. Besides, when he wrote it, he suspected that it might be necessary to the safety of my reputation and my life, from the consequences of my connection with Welbeck. (P. 412)
Mervyn’s is an exemplary life that should be preserved for posterity; it is a suspect life that must be preserved from punishment. Artful Arthur, who so often earlier told his tale, here artlessly wonders why anyone might want it to be written down but obligingly becomes Mrs. Wentworth’s scribe, just as he had earlier been Welbeck’s or Stevens had been his. This deferring of the authority for authorship invites a complicity in the act of reading, a symbiosis of confessor and confessee, of text and reader. Or differently put, the whole narrative process is textualized and contextualized. As I have shown, when Stevens rewrites Arthur’s story, he writes/rights Arthur and thus himself and then is himself rewritten, or at least edited, by the subject and object of his own discourse. As Arthur writes, “To bed, my friend, it is late … but let me take these sheets along with me. I will read them, that I am determined, before I sleep, and watch if you have told the whole truth” (p. 412). Mervyn’s story becomes Stevens’s becomes Mervyn’s.…
Neither is Arthur, ostensibly in the scribal service of Mrs. Wentworth, necessarily any more dependable or subservient than he was in the narrative service of Stevens. On the contrary, considerable evidence indicates that once he begins writing his own story, he also begins more efficiently to direct the course of his life. For example, no longer promoting the pretense that he yearns only “to plough, to sow, and to reap” (p. 11), he casts his lot with the city and agrees to become Stevens’s apprentice and work toward a medical career. Even more obviously, no longer enamored of sweet, country “Bess” (Eliza Hadwin), he proposes to his “mamma,” a wealthy widow, Achsa Fielding (with whom, naturally, he has exchanged life stories), and in the last line of the novel, Arthur relinquishes his pen in favor of marriage (Freudian critics like this) and prepares to become “the happiest of men” (p. 446). Marriage, the conventional happy ending of sentimental fiction, resolves the machinations of the plot. And there the case, the protagonist, and the novel all rest.
HE WON THE GIRL, didn’t he? Is not that proof positive of the conventional hero and thus the appropriate end of Arthur’s narrative enterprise? Except perhaps “mamma” was the wrong girl. That ending has perturbed readers from Brown’s day to ours. Even more to the point, by Arthur’s own account, only a “full disclosure” of all that he had done could be adequate grounds for judging his case and recognizing his innocence. Yet readers from the first publication of the novel to the present have found Arthur’s final, definitive account to be both unfinished and indefinite. Virtually all of Brown’s first reviewers demurred over basic points in the plot, while the textual openings left by Arthur’s telling—and retelling—of his tale and by Stevens’s conscientious further retelling in the setdown narrative itself have left ample room for contemporary critics to construct their own—and very different—stories of Arthur Mervyn.
Typically, nineteenth-century readers laid the blame for inconsistencies at the author’s feet, not at Arthur’s. Early reviewers complained of the novel’s repetitions and doublings of identities—Mervyn’s resemblance to both Clavering and Lodi, for example—and a number of contemporaneous commentators—most notably, Percy Bysshe Shelley as well as Brown’s biographer, William Dunlap—expressed “disgust” that, after fully describing Arthur’s love for the orphaned, indigent, innocent Eliza Hadwin, Brown then had his hero precipitously drop this fifteen-year-old maiden for a wealthy widow who was all of twenty-six years of age. Could a man who had all along aggressively brandished his benevolence finally act in that callous fashion, they wondered. These first critics did not concern themselves with the psychological inconsistencies or the structural indeterminacies of the plot, but they virtually all agreed that the work was “flawed” in that it set forth too many “trivial occurrences” and was, finally, “unfinished.” Dunlap even felt compelled to address these charges in his Life of Charles Brockden Brown (1815) and did so by explaining that “the faults which deform this interesting and eloquent narrative, are altogether owing to haste, both in composing and in publishing. The work was sent to the printer before the writer had fully determined its plot.”53
The early responses to Brown’s fiction do not provide an univocal interpretation of Arthur Mervyn but emphasize its “gaps,” those areas where the reader is exasperated by contrivance or baffled by seeming deflections from the “lessons of justice and humanity” (p. 3) promised by the book’s preface. Nor do Brown’s own statements on his novel help us to “read” his most problematic character. Modern critics who favor a “Mervyn the Virtuous” reading regularly cite the letter Brockden Brown wrote his brother, James, on February 15, 1799, in which we find one of the clearest examples of an extrinsic “statement of intention” penned by an early American novelist. To be sure, the letter explicitly indicates that Mervyn is designed to be a good man: “Arthur is intended as an hero whose virtue, in order to be productive of benefit to others, and felicity to himself, stands in no need of riches.” Yet Brown’s letter was not, of course, intended for contemporary critics still debating Arthur’s morality. It was addressed to the brother who, despite his general distrust of the whole literary vocation, had agreed to oversee Arthur Mervyn through the press while Charles tripped off to New York. The opening portions of the letter suggest that James had objected to the final incidents of part 1 of the novel, the scene in which Welbeck convinces Mervyn that the $20,000 that Mervyn wishes to will to Clemenza Lodi (and that originally belonged to her brother) are actually the product of Welbeck’s counterfeiting skills, whereupon Mervyn, in righteous horror, at once burns the bills, only to discover later that they were valid after all. After first apologizing for allowing his brother’s “last letter to remain so long unanswered,” the author defends this awkward plot device on moral grounds, the unfolding of which are all to be revealed when the second volume of the novel is published. In that volume, Brown promises, Mervyn, though penniless, will come to the aid of the Hadwins and will be rewarded for his efforts by “marriage with the youngest; the death of the elder by a consumption and grief, leaves him in possession of competence, and the rewards of virtue. This scheme, as you see, required the destruction of the bills.”54
This letter—and the critical uses to which it has been put—embodies itself another allegory of problematic reading. To start, nearly all early American novelists claimed that their books served to inculcate virtue, but that claim, as I have shown, was often only pro forma, and it is difficult to take any statement of moral intentions as definitive. Furthermore, there is a tendency among historians (literary or otherwise) to privilege the written record, to trust those documents that do survive to convey an unvarnished rendering of the truth, as if no diarists two hundred years ago ever engaged in dubious self-dramatization or no correspondents craftily shaped their letters to their own private and particular purposes. Might not the artist be mostly attempting to assert the “higher purposes” of his calling to his more affluent brother or defending his “artistic integrity” against another’s critique of a weakness in his plot? The “condescension of posterity” also shows itself when we take seriously and absolutely the kinds of statements that we would view more sceptically if uttered by our peers. Nor can we read the letter as a definitive statement of the author’s intentions with respect to his character. The same missive that promises a virtuous hero also promises that this hero will marry Eliza. He doesn’t. Does that mean he isn’t?55
While the early critics typically blamed the writer for the inconsistencies or excesses in the plot, most twentieth-century commentators have preferred to exonerate Brown and to indict Arthur Mervyn. Any divergences from an implicitly or explicitly promised line of development or other similar “flaws” become further evidence of Arthur’s naivete and of the errors youth is prone to (the more forgiving appraisal) or of his devious nature and dishonest ways (the more censorious one). This essentially New Critical argument assumes that the text itself is flawless. “Seeming” faults are only seeming, are craftily concealed reading directions, are, in short, there to be explained away by the discerning critic. The critic, in essence, is not the reader of the text but its editor, smoothing away its apparent flaws. Such explication, typically expended on authors already canonized (indeed, the sign of canonization), may well be one effect of what Foucault has called the “birth of the author” during the nineteenth century. Conversely, the Romantic glorification of the supremacy of the artist in the intellectual pantheon is itself reified by twentieth-century critics finding just the author they went looking for.56
No wonder, then, that modern criticism has had a field day with Arthur Mervyn. First, the novel’s trial-like structure inherently favors a psychological investigation of the repressions and omissions in the official record, which is thereby rendered still more official through the critic’s Freudian authority. Even more important, the very indeterminacies in the text that demand critical enterprise also leave ample room for that same enterprise. Thus, James Russo, to consider an extreme example, can, in effect, reinvent the entire plot, eliding different characters into one in order to rid the novel of ambiguities and excesses. In Russo’s reading, Mervyn actually is Clavering in disguise and Clavering/Mervyn is also Lodi and Colvil too. Welbeck becomes a relatively harmless old codger ruined by this composite villain, who assumes, as convenience demands, the name and identity of “Arthur Mervyn.” Yet some loose ends still remain. What was the horrific sight that Mervyn witnessed through the opening in the attic at the end of volume 1? He promises to tell and never mentions it again. Russo proposes that Brown intended to write a third volume of the novel that would take care of all such problems, which is not so different from Dunlap’s explanation of the “faults which deform this interesting and eloquent narrative” after all.57
Although few would go as far as Russo, most modern critics follow the example of Stevens in the text and seek a totalizing reading that largely resolves ambiguities and inconsistencies through explanation, judicious evasion, or, more often, by recourse to some overriding ideology that “makes sense” of difference. Leslie Fiedler relies on Freudian analysis to give us the real character of Mervyn behind his confused testimony. Or other critics have proposed to place Arthur Mervyn in its “historical context” and have thereby both fully condemned and fully exonerated its protagonist.58 Yet no contemporary reading dispels those problems that the early reviewers rightly recognized. Gaps do remain. Clavering tells his pathetic story to the admiring Arthur—his double? his avatar?—but Mrs. Wentworth subsequently relates a different and altogether less flattering story of the same character. Brown never accounts for this discrepancy; Arthur never acknowledges it; yet much of our appreciation for Arthur rests on his explanations about Clavering to his disbelieving aunt, Mrs. Wentworth. More damning still is the problem of the body in the basement. Was the captain really dead? Did his one “glance, languid but wild” (p. no) attest to Arthur’s wild imagination (quite understandable under the circumstances), or did it prove a murder not in the past but in progress and a murder in which Arthur plays a crucial part? Not, perhaps, coincidentally, much the same scene is later reenacted with Arthur cast as the victim about to be “buried alive” by the ghoulish “hearse men” in plaguewracked Philadelphia. When Arthur “opened [his] eyes,” a stranger “assisted [him] to regain [his] feet” (p. 149). In vivid contrast, Arthur did not try to aid a man perhaps still alive but, instead and for all practical purposes, shoveled all the faster.
Or we might notice how regularly seemingly significant characters simply vanish from the narrative. There is Wallace, who gets volume 2 going and then is himself gone; Miss Carlton, who at first seems a possible love interest for Arthur, except she cannot afford him; Miss Fanny Maurice, another possibility, except her mother will never give up any of her cash. But the most important disappearing act (and the one that many of the early critics resented) is Eliza’s. She drops from the novel just before what should be the climax of the subsidiary love story in which she supposedly stars. Achsa invites Eliza to live with her; Arthur goes out to the country to get the girl and delivers her to “mamma.” Afterward, Eliza is seen only once, briefly, when she confirms Arthur’s bout of somnambulism. Is she pining away in grief for her beloved, whose heart more and more belongs to “mamma”? Or is she relieved to be so easily rid of one so obviously inconstant? Arthur proclaims that “there is nothing upon earth more dear to me than my Bess” (p. 404) and then never even notices dear Bess’s response when Achsa proves dearer.
The inconsistencies in the narration finally center most of all in the protagonist himself and do so most obviously when Mrs. Althorpe insists that Arthur was not the boy he claimed to be. Dr. Stevens has summoned his friend so that she might be a more “objective” witness than Wortley. Mrs. Althorpe, who has long known the Mervyn family, tells of a lazy youth who refused to plough but passed his time in moody walks, who shunned the schoolroom for a life of pampered leisure, who mocked his father and held himself aloof from his neighbors. She also repeats the accusation—held by “all the neighbors”—that Mervyn had “made a prostitute” of his future stepmother and then, after her marriage to the father, had publicly derided both of them before making off with all of his father’s cash and his best horse too. The doctor decides that this “narrative… ill accorded with the tale” told by Arthur.
Arthur apparently thinks so, too, and in volume 2 dramatically revises his earlier idyll of the country versus the city to switch, in effect, stories in midstream. The protagonist’s proclaimed love of the country ran like a leitmotif through volume 1. He regularly forswore the evils of city life and promised a salutary return to the countryside: “I saw that the city was no place for me.… My ancient occupations rose to my view enhanced by a thousand imaginary charms” (p. 46); or “I wondered at the contrariety that exists between the scenes of the city and the country; and fostered with more zeal than ever, the resolution to avoid those seats of depravity and danger” (p. 154). With approximately the same frequency that Welbeck verbally commits himself to death before dishonor and with as little effect, Arthur vows to return to the simple life of the ploughman and the day laborer.59 Only after Stevens reveals Mrs. Althorpe’s different version of his country life does Arthur sheepishly admit that he never really liked the farmer’s life at all, that he spent as little time behind a horse as he possibly could manage, and that he did, indeed, pass most of his youth dreamily wandering among his father’s hundred acres. “It is true,” he says in answer to Mrs. Althorpe’s charges, “I took up the spade and the hoe as rarely, and for as short a time, as possible” (p. 341).
The poor boy from the country who makes good in the city was already a feature of the American pantheon. But making good through thrift, ability, hard work, and a saving innocence teaches one social lesson, whereas making good through pose and prevarication, through cunning and conning, teaches quite another. Both Arthur and Stevens would shun that second lesson, and do so through another story. Arthur at once comes up with a version of his past that subsumes the two versions already presented by claiming a justifying motive for the deceptions of his previous account and a higher nobility implicit in and redeeming the actions that Mrs. Althorpe found so dubious. He now admits that he hesitated to tell Stevens of his real childhood because the truth was too painful to repeat. The new story he then provides is as conventionally believable as the old one and considerably more interesting. Sawny Mervyn was a drunken, ignorant, sadistic father (a penny-pinching Scotsman, a shiftless peasant, an overbearing patriarch) who brutalized his poor wife (the martyred, helpless female). Of course (this plot is easy to fill in), Arthur (though frail of body, he was bold of spirit) always interceded on his mother’s behalf. He could not take up the plough, for he was too busy protecting his “darling mamma.” Besides, she had already lost her other children to a genetic malady that cut their lives short before their nineteenth birthdays (Arthur is eighteen as he speaks) and weakened him. Mrs. Mervyn begged her last, living son not to labor in the fields. How could he refuse her? His life depended on acceding to her request, and her life depended on him. All of this—suffering, self-sacrificing, surviving against awesome odds—is most moving. Arthur is either an even better man than Stevens previously suspected or an even more accomplished storyteller.
Arthur was the first to try to render a totalizing reading of his life, and he, too, has loose ends that he must somehow tie up. More specifically, his focus on his virtuous concern for his mother does not quite address Mrs. Althorpe’s charges regarding his stepmother. Admittedly, Arthur, like Mrs. Althorpe, cannot be too explicit on this subject. Sexuality, in these early novels, always had to be presented in euphemistic terms, and Arthur only hints of an attempted seduction, not his of her but hers of him. The lascivious servant, Betty Lawrence, apparently threw herself regularly and “voluptuously” (one of his favorite words) into the virtuous youth’s path. And on one such occasion (presumably Betty was sansculotte), a neighbor spied the two of them and concluded the obvious. “It was useless to attempt to rectify his mistake,” Arthur laments, “by explaining appearances, in a manner consistent with my innocence. This mode of explication implied a continence in me which he denied to be possible.… A temptation which this judge of human nature knew he was unable to resist, he sagely concluded to be irresistible by any other man, and quickly established the belief among my neighbors, that the woman who had married the father had been prostituted to the son” (pp. 346–47). Brutal father, victim mother, seducing servant who connives herself into the role of wicked stepmother: again, it all fits together and is conventional enough to bear the stamp of truth.
Arthur produces no evidence to confirm his second story, just as he produced none to confirm the first. Late in the novel, Brown does lead us to expect some final resolution in an imminent deathbed meeting between Arthur and his father, now dying of alcoholism and in debtors’ prison, presumably robbed blind by Betty (but possibly robbed by his son). The tone of that last encounter—“Arthur, my son, forgive me; I knew not what I did” or “Ungrateful wretch! Do not come now to triumph over my total defeat!”—could resolve the nature of the past relationship between the two and solve the ambiguity at the heart of the plot and protagonist, even as it also allowed the author another of the deathbed scenes he liked so well. Instead, Arthur makes his way to the jail to find his father already dead. The only note of certainty added to the tale is the definitive silence of death, which somehow casts a darker hue over the very question that a few final words might have answered.
Stevens and the trusting reader must accept Arthur’s story mostly on faith. For Stevens, faith in the character is also faith in the land whose story Arthur’s story at its best sets forth—the land of opportunity, the country of the free. Yet America, in the novel, is also a society wracked by greed and lust, is the country ravaged by yellow fever. The new nation’s capital, Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, has become a hellish nightmare-scape, with death endemic, the signs (visible, audible, and olfactory) of disease everywhere, and corpses rotting in the street. Nor does Brown spare us the appropriately Gothic details. The decorous castle in the quiet countryside of Connecticut is succeeded by a far more fearful and believable symbol of human order gone awry. The elaborate Bush-hill mansion has become Bush-hill hospital has become a plague house, a hideous asylum from which there is no escape and in which the dying elicit only the laughter of the attendants who do not tend them: “You will scarcely believe that, in this scene of horrors, the sound of laughter should be overheard. While the upper rooms of this building are filled with the sick and the dying, the lower apartments are the scene of carrousals and mirth.” With such death’s head “debauchery and riot” (p. 173), the social implications of the plague are fully drawn:
The city … was involved in confusion and panick, for a pestilential disease had begun its destructive progress. Magistrates and citizens were flying to the country. The numbers of the sick multiplied beyond all example; even in the pest affected cities of the Levant. The malady was malignant, and unsparing.
The usual occupations and amusements of life were at an end. Terror had exterminated all the sentiments of nature. Wives were deserted by husbands, and children by parents. Some had shut themselves in their houses, and debarred themselves from all communication with the rest of mankind.… 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. (Pp. 128–29)
Stevens has jeopardized his life to help his fellow Americans, to deny that yellow fever can represent his countrymen, his nation. He is, in effect, poised between the public manifestations of the plague, with its story of debauchery, deceit, division, and death, and Arthur’s story of innocence, benevolence, and virtue rewarded, with its personification of the liberal credo and its proof of the validity of the ideological basis for the American experiment in democracy. Given those alternative visions, his choice of Arthur is both self-evidently understandable and plagued with damning doubts. For what if Mervyn proves to be just another con man? That fear must be measured against the backdrop of the other metaphors for disorder Stevens sees all around him. The urgency with which he believes Mervyn underscores the very desperateness of the considerations that underlie that belief. He does not want to be (metaphorically speaking) the victim in a Gothic story. He does not want to discover America as the Haunted Castle, Rush’s fictive land, Anarchia, where dissension and dissimulation reign. Stevens’s belief in Arthur thus provides his own, positive answer to Crèvecoeur’s question “What is an American?”
But what is Stevens’s America? The novel provides no ready answer. We see incipient urban corruption graphically metaphored in the plague and more pervasively present in the generally corrupt business dealings that undergird much of the business of the novel, and the temptation is to cast the country as the natural and saving alternative to the death and decay rampant in the city. Yet the “traditional” world of the countryside is hardly the seat of pastoral virtue and bucolic bliss that Mervyn describes in his early eclogues. Country people, too, can be contentious, petty, narrow-minded, and self-serving. Philip Hadwin, to cite one example, is a drunkard who abuses his wife and children and cheats his niece out of her property. Nor is the pestilential Philadelphia, the thriving mercantile capital of America, only a Gothic cityscape. As Jane Tompkins has shown, for every act of metropolitan deceit and corruption, Brown provides a countering example of urban benevolence.60 Take your pick: America the corrupt or America the beautiful. There is ample evidence for either reading.
The ending of the novel especially invites different readings and does so, first, by inverting much of the previous novel. As Emory Elliott observes, Arthur finally plays Stevens to Achsa’s Arthur and has as great a need to believe her improbable story as Stevens had for believing Arthur’s.61 Arthur meets the woman who will become his bride in the unpropitious setting of a house of prostitution. He, of course, quickly explains his presence there (he valiantly sought to rescue Clemenza Lodi from captivity and iniquity), and she, in turn, tells him an equally implausible tale designed to prove her incontestable innocence. She also tells him (and he accepts as true) a more suspect story of how a daughter of a rich Portuguese Jew of the merchant class was able to marry into the British aristocracy; of how her new husband presently ran off with an older woman and then, subsequently, bigamously, married yet another woman, this one a French aristocrat; of how he participated in the Revolution but was, nonetheless, killed by Robespierre’s henchmen; of how that death has set her free. The political message here is appropriately mixed. The violation of traditional British class structure leads to unhappiness; France is wracked by the Terror; both facts seem to affirm a conservative political message. Yet the timely intervention of Robespierre makes possible the marriage that gives us the requisite happy ending of the whole novel, which hardly validates traditional values. The Terror makes a space for a highly unconventional but seemingly passionate love.
In accepting Achsa’s story, Arthur also accepts Achsa as his wife—his rich wife, and here we are not too far removed from that “contrast” that I postulated at the beginning of this chapter: rude Jonathan wedding Maria Van Rough. Women were allowed to dream of marrying above their class. That is a fantasy ending promoted by a number of eighteenth-century novels for women. But Achsa tried it once and didn’t like it. She therefore subsequently sets her sights on a nubile, innocent, country youth, who is often described by his physical beauty, whereas Achsa is consistently defined as beautiful of mind but emphatically not of body. The sexual role reversals implicit in that relationship portend a tantalizing Wollstonecraftian egalitarianism and remind the reader that Brown was, after all, the author of Alcuin, one of the most important feminist tracts of the 1790s. Finally, Achsa’s ancestry, if not her religious practice, is Jewish, and that religious and ethnic difference serves only to enhance her cosmopolitan desirability in Arthur’s provincial estimation.
If Arthur is a hero and this marriage is the reward for his virtue, it is a singularly appropriate reward. Thanks to the love story that has displaced the Gothic story with which the novel began, cultural diversity, feminism, and class mobility are all incorporated into the society imaged by this union. The ending also vindicates Arthur’s previous account of himself and thus Stevens’s faith in that account, which was really his faith in his country. America works—not as some stable, traditional, premodern community (that idyll of the American past is absent from Arthur Mervyn) but as a vital, dynamic society that flourishes in heterogeneity and originality.
But if Arthur is as much the dupe of Achsa’s tale as Stevens may have been of Arthur’s, then the con man, pretending to love her but really after her wealth, is still up to his old tricks and has himself perhaps been conned into marriage with a woman of dubious, if not ill, repute. In this reading, the final marriage need not portend the dawning of a new and more open society but can signal a reign of deceit and disorder more insidious than either a duplicitous Arthur or a duplicitous Achsa (he marrying her only for her money, she leading him on without any) imagined. The ending holds out the promise of individuality and energy yet does not entirely exclude the possibility of egomania and alienation—oppositions that, as the plot of the entire novel suggests, can be flip sides of the same republican coin.
Two radically different stories, each with its concomitant America, are shadowed forth. As the history of the novel’s reception attests, both stories are latent within the text and both are possible within the nation that the text evokes. One reads the ending and makes one’s choice. And the choice must be, finally, the reader’s, for there is no way of knowing for sure Brown’s own intentions concerning his ambiguous and indeterminate narrative. What we do know is that his friends frequently lamented the writer’s inability to stick to the straight-and-narrow path of rational (by which they often meant nonfictional) discourse. “He starts an idea,” Dr. Elihu Hubbard Smith complained in his diary, “pursues it a little way; new ones spring up; he runs a short distance after each; meantime the original one is likely to escape entirely.”62 Brown himself, in an early novel that he, appropriately, never finished, remarked philosophically on the complexity and indeterminacy of mind:
The vicissitudes to which the human character and opinions are liable cannot be considered without astonishment. No one more widely differs in his sentiments and dispositions from others than at different periods from himself, and those intellectual revolutions always correspond with external circumstances. We vary according to the variations of the scene and hour, and it is not less difficult to tell what our views and opinions will be twelve months hence than to foresee the particular circumstances in which we shall then be placed.63
Brown posits an intriguingly modern concept of personality, an awareness of fragmentation—the mutable, indeterminate, changeling self—without the anxiety that pervades the censorious remarks made by his friend, Dr. Smith. Indeed, Brown’s theory of personality short-circuits dogmatic notions of intentionality (one cannot even know one’s own intentions) or historicity (context continually changes) and thus undermines critical attempts to arrive at a definitive reading of Arthur Mervyn the character; of Arthur Mervyn the novel; of Charles Brockden Brown the writer; or, for that matter, of the reading self.
It did not, in short, take the twentieth century to invent Derrida or Bakhtin. Arthur Mervyn, I would finally suggest, might best be seen as an early American version of Bakhtin’s “dialogical” text, a carnivalesque performance in which the author resolutely refuses to delimit his intentions while also allowing his characters their own ambiguities and even a spirit of “revolt” against any constraining proprieties the text might threaten to impose. In Bakhtin’s view, the dialogical text is particularly subversive since it challenges complacency, forces the reader’s active participation in the text, and resolutely refuses to assuage uncertainty with comforting, final solutions. As noted in an earlier chapter, Bakhtin found the freedom of the individual to make an interpretive choice innately subversive and applauded the tendencies of a novel such as Arthur Mervyn (the example is mine, not his; he preferred Rabelais) to challenge, frustrate, and finally deny the interpretive propensities and ideological premises of the individual, especially of the individual committed to a rationalist model of mind, a rigid ideal of a static hierarchical social order, and a concept of fiction as some mechanical rehearsal of the pieties of the time.64 Arthur Mervyn can, of course, accommodate the pieties of its time or ours, but only through a provisional and partial reading that is both asserted and questioned within the text. In contemporary parlance, then, Brown, soon after the inception of the novel in America, wrote metafiction, fiction about the making of fictions—the writer’s, the character’s, the reader’s, and the nation’s.