Читать книгу Republicanism and the American Gothic - Marilyn Michaud - Страница 7
ОглавлениеTo penetrate fully into a work of literature is finally to make a serious effort to develop the historical imagination, to view the world . . . through another culture, another time, another nationality.
Joseph Anthony Mazzeo1
The initial task of scholarship devoted to the Gothic is often an attempt at definition: what is Gothic? Typically, the discussion will begin with an exploration of the relationship between the nascent British form and its various progenitors followed by the inevitable conclusion that the term is ‘fluid’, ‘troublesome’ and ‘mutable’. The solution, Fred Botting suggests, is more criticism: ‘Elusive, phantom-like, if not phantasmatic, floating across generic and historical boundaries, Gothic (re) appearances demand and disappoint, and demand again, further critical scrutiny to account for their continued mutation.’2 In an effort to illuminate the genre, analysis has splintered into a host of thematic, temporal and regional subspecialities each functioning to demarcate the multiplicity of approaches and the changing interpretative needs orbiting the term ‘Gothic’. Yet, while these new readings challenge some durable myths surrounding the production, circulation and interpretation of texts, they too tend to be fragments, telling only part of the story of the Gothic’s origin and meaning. The result is that significant explanatory relations often go unrecognized and, in particular, the relationship between the term’s literary meaning and its prevalent historical and ideological usages.3 This is particularly true in relation to the American Gothic which for many critics represents a troublesome contradiction. As Teresa Goddu argues, when modified by the word American, the Gothic loses all its ‘usual referents’; not only does it lack the ‘self-evident validity of its British counterpart’, it is essentially antagonistic to American identity.4 American Gothic, Robert Miles asserts, is an ‘oxymoron signalling its own uncanniness’: ‘The Gothic ought to have undergone ideological erasure, foritsmeaning was essentially anti-American: it spelled entrapment, enclosure, the inescapable, parasitic power of the past, the inglorious triumph of class, feudalism, vestigial institutions, and even nature itself.’5
While it is no longer contentious to claim that American culture is ‘drenched in Gothic sensibility’, for many critics, its presence in the land of ‘light and affirmation’ remains an unremitting paradox.6 The popularity of American Gothic fiction indicates how ardently critics feel the need to explain the persistence of the form in a political and cultural environment seemingly divorced from traditional Gothic impulses. To account for a Gothic imagination in American culture, analysis has centred on psychology. Seen as a reflection of colonial anxieties, Puritan repression and pathological guilt resulting from the nation’s encounter with slavery and Indian massacre, the parameters of the American Gothic are marked primarily by ‘psychological, internalised, and predominately racial concerns’.7 In Love and Death in the American Novel, arguably the first work to focus exclusively on American Gothic writing, Leslie Fielder’s reading of early American texts exemplifies this approach: ‘European Gothic identified blackness with the super-ego and was therefore revolutionary in its implications; the American gothic . . . identified evil with the id and was conservative at its deepest level of implications, whatever the intent of its authors.’8 Unlike their British counterparts, American writers are always in a state of ‘beginning, saying for the first time . . . what it is like to stand alone before nature, or in a city as appallingly lonely as any virgin forest’. For Fiedler, the Gothic is juvenile and repetitive because it deals primarily with a world of limited experience: a world American authors return to time and again due to their inability ‘to deal with adult heterosexual love and [their] consequent obsession with death, incest, and innocent homosexuality’. Contemporary writers, he claims, are doomed to repeat these patterns because they share a similar consciousness and the inescapable conditions of American life. Therefore, for Fiedler, the Gothic must be ‘symbolically understood, its machinery and décor translated into metaphors for a terror psychological, social and metaphysical’.9
Fiedler’s analysis has had enormous influence on contemporary readings of American Gothic fiction. Propelled by his unequivocal announcement that the American novel is ‘pre-eminently a novel of terror’, subsequent critics constructed their analysis of the Gothic around the assumption that ‘the psyche is more important than society’.10 As an explanation for why the Gothic is ‘so at home on such inhospitable ground’, Eric Savoy contends that Gothic narratives express ‘a profound anxiety about historical crimes and perverse human desires that cast their shadow over what many would like to be the sunny American republic’. Like Fielder, Savoy views the American Gothic as ‘a pathological symptom rather than a proper literary movement’.11 In American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative, Martin and Savoy claim their project is ‘indebted and in many way supplementary’ to Fiedler’s ‘pioneering conjunction of historicism and psychoanalysis’. For these critics, Fiedler’s analysis has lost none of its ‘freshness’ and provides ‘the cultural frame for subsequent inquiry’.12 Yet, however valuable Fiedler’s work has been to our understanding of American Gothic, it is useful to remember that his interpretative framework arises out of a political culture that eschewed social and ideological conflict in favour of an all-pervading liberal consensus. It was, as Daniel Bell declared, the ‘end of ideology’, a period in which academics were less interested in political history than in wresting the fiction of the ‘American renaissance’ away from the Marxist intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s and replacing it with a pluralist, consensus model free of the anti-capitalism of the Progressives and the formulism of the New Critics. The intellectual movement from Progressive to new liberal ideology was also contemporaneous with the development of the American studies curriculum in the 1950s and a new-found interest in the study of culture. Crystallizing this change was Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination, a work that would come to dominate cultural theory in the mid twentieth century. While conservatives called for ‘a life-drive in literature, for immersion in the American past, for recognition of progress and the goodness of man’, Trilling emphasized ‘the disenchantment of our culture with culture’.13 If the Progressive school interpreted American history as edging ever closer toward a form of democracy that would expose the material roots of conflict in class struggle, post-war liberals were suspicious of a linear model of progress and substituted a model of history characterized by ambiguity, paradox and irony.14 Trilling’s novel, The Middle of the Journey (1947), exposes this interest in the new dialectic, a belief in the self finding a middle way through a confrontation with reality and experience. Although Trilling shared the Progressive desire to reveal the underlying forces of history, his goal was synthesis, not opposition: it was a model that posited, as his novel’s title suggests, a ‘middle landscape’ rejecting the materialistic emphasis on economics or extremism in politics in favour of the internal human psyche. As Russell Reising observes, Trilling’s work ‘presaged a general shift in aesthetic evaluation, an elevation of works which tended to see reality as an ambiguous fabric and a denigration of those which dealt frankly with social, political, and economic matters’. In this new evaluation of ‘realism’, ‘[p]rotest was out, equipoise was in’. The result was an ‘obsession with the search for symbols, allegories and mythic patterns’ in American literature.15
Coetaneous to this intellectual movement was the political determination to redefine liberalism. As Marxism and the Communist party faded from the American intellectual scene, the nineteenth-century concept of liberalism went into decline. The shift began with the outbreak of the Second World War and the federal government’s decade-long curbing of individual liberties. The Alien Registration Act (1940), the Selective Service Act (1940), the conferring of permanent status on the Un-American Activities Committee (1945), federal loyalty programmes and the passage of the McCarran Internal Security Act (1950) outlawing Communism, all resulted in what many liberals viewed as a garrison state using police state methods. The effect was ‘to pose a conflict between national security and individual liberty’. In this climate, the optimism and nostalgia of the liberal imagination weakened and ‘[f]ear settled upon large segments of the citizenry; silence followed; and dissent seemed almost dead’. Individual liberty, the mainstay of traditional liberalism, was suddenly under threat by the growth of the centralized state:
The growth of the corporation in an industrialized and interdependent society also promised economic security to those who fitted into the corporate structure. But such people, the faceless organizationmen, stood to lose their freedom and their identity. The liberal’s faith in progress and science as avenues which would liberate the individual had brought him to the bleak possibility that these avenues would instead eliminate the individual.
What emerged in its place is what Eisinger termed the ‘new liberalism’; ‘chastened’ and ‘modified’, it projected an ambiguous and tortured vision which recognized the limitations and problems it had previously been unable to identify.16 This revised liberalism originated from a sense of betrayal and disillusionment after the Moscow show trials and Stalin’s nonaggression pact with Hitler. In ‘Our country and our culture’, Philip Rahv, editor of the Partisan Review, summarized the prevalent view: ‘Among the factors entering into the change, the principal one, to my mind, is the exposure of the Soviet myth and the consequent resolve (shared by nearly all but the few remaining fellow travellers) to be done with Utopian illusions and heady expectations.’17 From the perspective of new liberalism, the Progressive conception of reality was naive and extreme;instead, in both politics and culture, the centre was the place to be.‘The thrust of the democratic faith’, declared Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., ‘is away from fanaticism; it is towards compromise, persuasion, and consent in politics, towards tolerance and diversity in society.’18
Liberal consensus politics had enormous influence on readings of American Gothic fiction. When Richard Chase set out to define the American novel, he found it to be ‘shaped by the contradictions and not by the unities and harmonies of our culture’, and founds his tradition on the thesis that Americans do not write social fiction.19 In The American Novel and its Tradition, he conceives of an isolated hero on a quest through a symbolic universe unfettered by the pressure of social limits. Stirred by the ‘aesthetic possibilities of radical forms of alienation, contradiction, and disorder’, the American novel is essentially romantic. ‘In a romance’, Chase explained, ‘“experience” has less to do with human beings as“social creatures”than as individuals. Heroes, villains, victims, legendary types, confronting other individuals or confronting mysterious or other dire forces – this is what we meet in romances.’20 One of the central assumptions of pluralism was that American writers adopted a variety of literary strategies as a way of compensating for their impoverished social existence. Paradoxically, in their attempt to canonize the writers of the American renaissance, critics avoided association with the Gothic while acknowledging its prevalence in American literature. As Goddu notes, the term ‘Gothic’ and its popular connotations are substituted with a literary vocabulary more amenable to a clean or, we might say, liberal canon.21 Chase, for example, subsumes Gothic under the heading of melodrama:
The term [Gothic] has taken on a general meaning beyond the Mrs. Radcliffe kind of thing and is often used rather loosely to suggest violence, mysteries, improbabilities, morbid passions, inflated and complex language of any sort. It is a useful word but since, in its general reference, it becomes confused with ‘melodrama’, it seems sensible to use ‘melodrama’ for the general category and reserve ‘Gothic’ for its more limited meaning.22
For Chase, the Gothic’s ‘limited meaning’ is characterized by the romances of Radcliffe, Lewis and Godwin and their ‘ill-conceived sensational happenings and absurd posturings of character and rhetoric’. Brockden Brown’s work departs from the Gothic because he inaugurates ‘that particular vision of things that might be described as a heightened and mysteriously portentous representation of abstract symbols and ideas on the one hand and the involution of the private psyche’ on the other. Chase elevates Brown’s work from its social and political referents to the realm of psycho-symbolic realism. Edgar Huntly, for example, is Gothic only in tone, in its ‘highly wrought effect of horror, surprise, victimization, and the striving for abnormal psychological states’; only in its irony, symbolism and psychological interiority does Brown’s novel rise above the Gothic to become Romance.23
Critics who focused primarily on twentieth-century Gothic fiction equally ignored the genre’s historical or political contours in favour of terrors psychological. In New American Gothic, Irving Malin locates the distinction between contemporary Gothic writers and their nineteenth-century predecessors in their lack of interest in political tensions and their engagement with the ‘disorder of the buried life’. In Malin’s analysis, ‘the writers of the new American Gothic are aware of tensions between ego and super-ego, self and society; they study the field of psychological conflict’. Organized around the theme of narcissism, for Malin the typical Gothic hero is crippled by self-love. Contrasted with those heroes found in Hawthorne and Melville, who are ‘great’ and ‘Faustian’ in their narcissism, the characters of the new American Gothic are weaklings who cannot demonstrate their self-love in strong ways:‘Love for him is an attempt to create order out of chaos, strength out of weakness; however, it simply creates monsters.’24 A similar theme drives Ihab Hassan’s Radical Innocence. In his examination of works by Truman Capote, Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers, Hassan finds only ‘the self in recoil’: anti-heroes, rebel-victims and innocent narcissists all on a quest for existential fulfilment.25
Despite pronunciations of cultural disenchantment and disaffection, it is now widely acknowledged that the post-war search for an essential Americanism in the nation’s fiction was more reaffirming than adversarial, leading to what David Suchoff calls a ‘safe modernist subversion’, which valued a literature of ‘fragmentation and instability’.26 Liberalism creates, in Irving Howe’s phrase, ‘an atmosphere of blur in the realm of ideas’. To be free of conflicting ideologies, to call yourself a liberal, Howe argued, meant that you did not have to believe in anything; the new aesthetic merely sustained the period’s cultural nationalism and intellectual abdication to the right.27 It was, as Sacvan Bercovitch described it, the ‘cultural secret of academia’, the development of a new discipline ‘designed not to explore its subject’:
If America was not literally a poem in these scholar’s eyes, it was a literary canon that embodied the national promise . . . What followed was a series of investigations of the country’s ‘exceptional’ nature that was as rich, as complex, as interdisciplinary as America herself—a pluralist enterprise armed with the instruments both of aesthetic and of cognitive analysis, all bent on the appreciation of a unique cultural artefact.28
While the current movement of criticism towards historicism offers renewed relevance to the continuing inquiry into the Gothic’s meaning, the analytic and conceptual identity of American fiction is heir to the liberal model of interpretation forged in the post-war era, a mode in which history is ‘internalized as second nature and so forgotten as history’.29 The consequence is that both historians and literary critics have, to borrow Joyce Appleby’s phrase, ‘burned their bridges not to the past—but rather to past ways of looking at [the] past’.30 The central task of this book, therefore, is to approach the Gothic through a different historical lens. Republicanism and the American Gothic argues that the persistence of the Gothic imagination in the United States is more readily understood from a republican than a liberal paradigm, and that a recognition of the transatlantic exchange of ideas is crucial to an understanding of how Americans viewed their past, present and future generally, and specifically what made them distinct from their British counterparts. The importance of revolution in the development of the Gothic cannot be overstated; however, this is not solely in relation to the French Revolution as critics suggest, but to the widespread reforming impulse that characterized the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The English Revolution of 1688 and the American War of Independence, in other words, cannot be isolated from discussion of the revolutionary dimensions of the Gothic. The first aim, therefore, is to examine the central intellectual ideas influencing the revolutionary generation and, in particular, the concept of republicanism as both a political theory and as a form of discourse translated and filtered through seventeenth- and eighteenth-century radical and anti-authoritarian thinkers. While it is true that the words of the revolutionary generation remain strange to us, it is nonetheless useful to perceive events, as much as possible, as the participants themselves saw them in an attempt to rediscover the forgotten dynamism of eighteenth-century language and culture. The Gothic emerged in a period that, next to the English revolutionary decades of the seventeenth century, is the most productive era in the history of Western political thought; this historical context has not been sufficiently explored in terms of its overarching effect on eighteenth-century European and American Gothic fiction. Any attempt to interpret the Gothic outside the context of its originating Enlightenment discourse or, to explain its continuing persistence in American culture, is to ignore one of the essential organizing principles of American politics, culture and manners.‘The Enlightenment’, Fred Botting reminds us, ‘invented the Gothic’ and this is no less true in the case of American Gothic.31 This approach does not negate the influence of Puritanism on American culture; however, the focus of this study is on the secular expressions of republican ideology primarily because religion was largely removed from political discourse in the late eighteenth century due to the rapid rise of commercialism, the doctrine of separation of church and state and secular explanations for human behaviour which were formulated in the new disciplines of science, psychology, economics and law.32 While Puritanism and the concept of liberty were and remain in constant tension, it is equally true that in the process of national formation, the attempt at institutionalizing religious doctrine failed; it was secular republican ideals which not only persisted, but continued to embarrass the progress of liberal values in America. It is with these ideals that this book is primarily concerned.
The second aim is to examine the relevance of the republican tradition in cold war America. While I begin with a focus on the founding era and on the many ways republicanism preoccupied the revolutionary generation, I will also explore how republican ideals continued to shape national consciousness in the twentieth century. The central argument is that the moral and political imperatives that characterized republicanism in the late eighteenth century do not disappear with the rise of modern industrialization, but continue to equip twentieth-century liberal culture with a mode of self-criticism. Accordingly, this book will juxtapose the last decades of the eighteenth century with the early post-war decades of the twentieth century. The first reason for selecting these two periods is that the years 1780 to 1800, and 1950 to 1970 are both post-war cultures and represent moments in American history when questions of national identity and social stability were most pressing. Equally, while both periods are characterized as prosperous, optimistic and progressive, they were also periods of perceived crisis and reactionary zeal. In the early national and antebellum scene, the survival of the new republic was by no means certain. Escalating self-interest did not result in the perfection of society, but to perversions of the self and the corruption of civilization.33 In the wake of the Second World War, Americans were once again accessing the security of the republic and the value of liberalism in the face of totalitarianism, conformity and mass culture. This comparative approach advances a number of propositions. First, when viewed historically through the prism of ideas and the active transmission of these ideas from Europe to America, the distinction between British and American Gothic fiction is less precise. Whether British or American, the Gothic is nourished by the eighteenth century’s often-violent encounter with democracy (whether glorious or terrifying), with the Enlightenment’s quest for knowledge regarding the nature of man’s will and by the search for ideological myths of national origin. Secondly, in the wake of an emerging liberal individuality, the Gothic expresses a profound fear of modernity. As Cathy Davidson notes, in the Gothic, the individual’s propensity for benevolence and self-sacrifice is undercut by the discovery of man’s potential for corruption, deception and self-interest:‘The American Gothic often provided a perturbing vision of self-made men maintaining their new found power by resorting to the same kinds of treachery that evil aristocrats of Europe used to support their own corrupt authority.’34 These fears are particularly forceful in the American context because, as Moses Coit Tyler observed, what was significant about the American experience was that fear was directed ‘not against tyranny inflicted, but only against tyranny anticipated’.35 It was this sense of vulnerability, this fear of the future, which animated political, social and cultural anxiety in the early American republic. Gleaned from an understanding of classical and British history, the perceived threat of encroaching tyranny, corruption and national degeneration bred potent fears in revolutionary America which, despite the rise of liberal capitalism, are still some of the over- riding obsessions in contemporary American culture, repeatedly represented in fiction, film and other modes of discourse. As Eric Savoy notes, the odd centrality of Gothic cultural production in the United States is that ‘the past constantly inhabits the present, [and] progress generates an almost unbearable anxiety about its cost’.36
Approaching American Gothic from a republican perspective also requires an examination of the central themes and assumptions pervading contemporary criticism. The first is the belief that America has no past or history therefore its literature is free of ancestral ghosts. It was Fielder who first posited the view that in the ‘sunlit, neoclassical world’ of Thomas Jefferson, the Gothic was improbable and unconvincing. While writers may have borrowed elements from British tales of terror, the nation’s possession of neither a past nor a history made it difficult to adapt.37 Fiedler’s characterization of the early republic as bathed in Jeffersonian optimism functions to collapse eighteenth-century American culture into an all-pervading consensus devoid of political conflict and dissension. Such analysis is in itself an act of containment, an example of the liberal project of turning history into myth. Undoubtedly, for many republicans, a period of giddy exhilaration followed independence, but this was by no means consensual and more importantly, its moment of optimism was short lived. As a culture on the cusp of industrialization, post-revolutionary America experienced wide-scale political and social unrest, and therefore is more accurately characterized by both promise and peril. Fiedler’s related observation that the nation has no past or history has also proven remarkably tenacious in the criticism of American Gothic fiction. David Punter, for example, claims that where British Gothic has a past to deal with, America’s conception is represented only by ‘a vague historical “Europe”’. Generally defined against, or as a mere refraction of the British form, early American Gothic is thought to draw upon European examples while ultimately failing to replicate the Gothic’s basic impulse of historical tyranny.38 The tendency to bifurcate British and American historical traditions can be traced, in part, to the ideological manipulation of history by post-war academics who largely ignored eighteenth-century culture in their revision of the American renaissance. In 1948, The Literary History of the United States proposed ‘to draw a new and truer picture’ of American literature. In contrast to Moses Coit Tyler’s nineteenth-century concept of joint ownership of America’s literary tradition, the post-war editors of the Literary History rejected a European influence on American writing and instead presented their readers with a vastly different image:
The literary history of this nation began when the first settler from abroad of sensitive mind paused in his adventure long enough to feel that he was under a different sky, breathing new air, and that a New World was all before him with only his strength and Providence for guides. With him began a different emphasis upon an old theme in literature, the theme of cutting loose and faring forth, renewed under the powerful influence of a fresh continent for civilized man. It has provided, ever since those first days, an element in our native literature, whose other theme has come from a nostalgia for the rich culture of Europe, so much of which was perforce left behind.39
Invoking Henry James’s famous list of the ‘absent things in American life’, the new approach abandoned references to the Old World in favour of a wholly American environment: the new frontier. Like Fiedler’s analysis, the liberal contention that Old World social tensions did not exist in the new republic performs two functions: it brackets ideology out of the frame and once again substitutes history for myth.‘It is notorious’, wrote J.G.A. Pocock, ‘that American culture is haunted by myths, many of which arise out of the attempt to escape history and then regenerate it.’40 Examining eighteenth-century culture from a republican paradigm allows for a reassessment of this interpretation. It reveals that early Americans’ sense of history was in many ways indistinguishable from the British Whig interpretation, particularly one that advanced an anti-authoritarian or republican tradition in Europe. Republican historiography argues that American history, through the colonial and revolutionary periods, is an episode in British history, ‘the history of one of those cultures carried to the point where it left the British orbit and began to shape a history of its own’.41 Moreover, while the best of Britain’s constitution with its themes of liberty and equality provided the model for American republicanism, British history’s darker themes of tyranny, corruption and degeneration also reached across the Atlantic to haunt Americans within their own borders.
The second, closely related, assumption is that because revolutionary America had no past or concept of historical tyranny, traditional Gothic figures had no place in American culture.‘With what native classes or groups’, Fiedler asks, ‘could [hero-villains] be identified? Traditionally aristocrats, monks, servants of the Inquisition, members of secret societies like the Illuminati, how could they be convincingly introduced on the American scene?’42 Contemporary critics echo this view:‘the malevolent aristocrats, ruined castles and abbeys and chivalric codes dominating a gloomy and Gothic European tradition were highly inappropriate to the new world of North America. They were too far removed to have the same significance or effects of terror.’43 Yet, the writings of the revolutionary generation reveal that Americans possessed a profound understanding and fear of aristocratic tyranny. Nourished by the anti-establishment tradition that helped define British consciousness, early Americans viewed the rise of power and corruption as the predominant threat to republican institutions and manners. The profusion of sermons, speeches and orations on the rising influence of the aristocratic class, on the canker of corruption, the spectre of treason and the insidious infiltration of America by the Illuminati, all expose the generation’s fear of tyranny, degeneracy and conspiracy. Not only did staunch monarchists, fledgling aristocrats and radical subversives stalk the American scene, each functioned as the republic’s first gothicized villains. Therefore, while the physical manifestations of crumbling castles and abbeys may have been absent, the ideas inherent in these conventions, transmitted through the flow of expatriates to America and from the revolutionaries’ own experiences and readings of history provided a wellspring of terror deep enough to support an American Gothic tradition.
The third assumption is that as the revolutionary generation forged a new national identity, the Gothic departed from its initial impulse of terror and took on uniquely American characteristics. It is now axiomatic to cite Brockden Brown’s preface to Edgar Huntly (1799) as the principal example of how early American authors were abandoning the traditions of the Old World to initiate a literary aesthetic of their own. Brown’s repudiation of the ‘puerile superstition and exploded manners; Gothic castles and chimeras’ of European authors in favour of writing that is ‘peculiar to ourselves’ is repeatedly offered as evidence of the uniqueness of American Gothic writing.44 Undoubtedly, many young republicans were keen to establish their nation’s literary fame: it was, after all, an age of experiments and authors understood that new initiatives applied not only to politics or culture generally, but to the shaping of imaginative works. However, to accept an a priori national distinctiveness in the reading of early American Gothic is to ignore one of the fundamental concerns of the age. As Clinton Rossiter observes, from Washington onwards, ‘the American people were engaged in an industrious search for self-identity’ and in the late eighteenth century, they were only beginning to establish what form this identity would assume:
[w]hile Americans saw and identified themselves as a new people on the face of the earth, two fateful questions remained to be answered: First, were they different and better enough to rejoice confidently in the fact and, if they were, in what ways? Second, was the fate of America to be a country, that is, one sovereign nation like Britain and France, or a ‘country’, that is, a parcel of related yet basically sovereign half-nations, city-states, and provinces like Germany and Italy?45
It was a French national who posed the all important question: ‘[w]hat then is the American, this new man?’ For Crèvecoeur, the American is a man who ‘acts upon new principles’, entertains ‘new ideas’, and forms ‘new opinions’.46 Yet, exactly what these new principles, ideas and opinions actually were was only in the process of being clarified. Phrases such as ‘the condition of our country’, ‘American character’ and ‘American peculiarities’ in revolutionary writing do not point to a fully formulated national identity; rather they were exercises in the creation of a national discourse voiced everywhere by Americans, English expatriates, French émigrés and anyone else who supported the republican cause. As William Hedges observes, ‘the magic of e pluribus anum should not blind us. The literature is indeed that of a people who did not know themselves to a much greater extent than we have acknowledged.’47
If the contours of American identity remained unfixed in the 1780s and 1790s, the notion that Americans sought to create an independent culture free from colonial imitation of English models is equally problematical. While there was much talk of printing specifically American books, this had less to do with aesthetics than with commercial national rhetoric. As Michael Warner argues,
when advertisements and subscription proposals tell readers than an author is American, they do not necessarily point to a link between traits of nationality and those of aesthetics; they merely solicit patrons’ encouragement of the domestic trade, much as they might for the making of shoes.48
Brockden Brown’s call to excite the passions and sympathy of his readers through the inclusion of ‘new ingredients’ could also be read as the attempt by an author to promote his novel in America’s burgeoning print culture, a culture that identified literature with the public and commercial spheres. As Brown’s friend Samuel Miller declared, ‘In this century, for the first time AUTHORSHIP BECAME A TRADE. Multitudes of writers toiled, not for the promotion of science, nor even with a governing view to advance their own reputation, but for the market.’49 The tendency to privilege authorial or private subjectivity rather than republican didacticism in eighteenth-century American fiction creates what Warner calls ‘a space between the novel and the public sphere’, which, he argues, in the 1790s was not clearly formed. To define cultural goods as indigenous or ‘American’ required a set of cultural assumptions that did not exist before the nineteenth century when ‘a national imaginary and a liberal ideology of literature arose together, because both divorced the public value of printed commodities from the public discourse’.50 That American Gothic is characterized as paradoxical is largely down to the persistence of these assumptions. Influenced by liberal aesthetics and ideology, criticism has largely ignored eighteenth-century discourse in favour of psychological interiority and myth analysis. Therefore, in order to uncover the ideological contours of American Gothic fiction, it is necessary to employ a method of historical inquiry that examines the vocabulary and rhetorical strategies of another generation; to recapture, as much as is possible, the fears of those who participated in events.
To begin historicizing the Gothic through the republican paradigm, this book draws on Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall’s contention that early Gothic fiction is historical at its root; that its vital elements are cultural not psychological, rational not romantic. In ‘Gothic criticism’, Baldick and Mighall claim that the view of Gothic as ‘antirealist fantasy’ or dream writing is a large-scale misconception that reinforces the assumption that the Gothic is to be defined ‘according to the realms of psychological depth from which it is supposed to originate . . . or the psychological responses it is believed to provoke’. The problem with the view of the Gothic as an irrational, nonrealistic literature of nightmare is its ‘prevalent de-historicising of gothic writing and its cultural referents’ in favour of psychological interiority by which history is evoked only to be ‘collapsed into the psychodrama enacted by “each individual”, irrespective of culture, context or period’.51 According to these critics, the cardinal error of Gothic criticism is ‘[t]he assimilation of Gothic fiction into romantic and pre-romantic nostalgia for the Middle Ages’. They cite the fact that very few early Gothic novels are actually situated in the Middle Ages and, more importantly, the contention that the Gothic looks backward to an idealized past displays an ‘irreconcilable opposition between critical illusion and textual evidence’:
Most Gothic novels have little to do with ‘the medieval world’, especially not an idealised one; they represent the past not as paradisal but as ‘nasty’ in its ‘possessive’ curtailing of individual liberties; and they gratefully endorse Protestant bourgeois values as ‘kinder’ than those of feudal barons.
For Baldick and Mighall, this insistence on nostalgic medievalism leads to the assumption that the Gothic embodies an essentially romantic and poetic project and any affiliations with enlightened realism are dispelled in the packaging of the Gothic as a romantic or anti-enlightenment rebellion. Rather, it is ‘Protestant scepticism and enlightened Whiggery’ that are essential to Gothic fiction. Structured thematically around sectarian nightmares, for Baldick and Mighall, the Gothic is a staunchly anti-Catholic, ‘bourgeois genre’.52
While Baldick and Mighall’s work broadens our understanding of the importance of historical context in understanding British Gothic fiction, it is necessary to expand their thesis of ‘aggressive Protestanism’ and ‘enlightened Whiggery’ to a wider intellectual base, one that includes the faction of Whig interests in the eighteenth century. Anti-Catholicism is only one expression of a wider discursive conflict permeating the Gothic, and to restrict depictions of tyranny to monastic institutions negates the Gothic’s engagement with other forms of authoritarianism. Gothic literature has always been concerned with power and the abuse of power. From the eighteenth-century British terrors of Walpole, Lewis, Godwin and Radcliffe, to the American works of Brockden Brown, the Gothic’s function has been to re-enact the struggle between liberty and tyranny, sovereignty and self-government. Whether we read the Gothic as a depiction of patriarchal oppression, Catholic superstition or feudal systems of political representation, we are nonetheless describing forms of tyranny that spring from the Enlightenment debates between aristocratic defenders of constitutional order and radical dissent. The focus on Catholicism as the mainstay of Gothic tyranny ignores the turbulent transition from subject to citizen that defined the revolutionary generation on both sides of the Atlantic. Therefore, any history of the Whigs and their role in the meaning of Gothic fiction must first acknowledge the profound schism in Whig political culture; in other words, we must distinguish the radicals from the orthodox: Milton, Paine and Hollis from Halifax, Walpole and Burke. As Marilyn Butler notes, while we think of the eighteenth-century government as stable and successful, the critique of the ruling Whig oligarchy was strong and so deeply rooted that it merged into an ‘alternative ideology’:
The system’s natural opponents among the politicised classes included . . . elements of the old Tory country gentry, and of the urban Old Whigs, or radicals, all of whom looked back . . . to the fierce doctrinaire disputes of the seventeenth century. By the second half of the eighteenth century, this opposition was generating a powerful rhetoric, heady enough to sustain the American Revolution . . . salient themes include a sense of personal liberty and autonomy, a belief in civic virtue, and a hatred of corruption – all of which can be seen as symptomatic of a ‘republican’ tradition in Western Europe.53
An example of the schism operating in Whig culture appears in the correspondence between two eighteenth-century antiquarians, Horace Walpole and Thomas Hollis. As author of the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764), Walpole’s attempt to ‘blend two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern’, established the aesthetic material of the Gothic. Walpole’s wild tale of usurpation, his animosity toward Voltaire and the ‘illuminated pit of Paris’ situate Walpole in opposition to contemporary radical Whigs such as Hollis.54 For Walpole, Hollis’s emphasis on ‘king killing’ and the legitimacy of resistance to tyrants was an anachronism. From the orthodox Whig view, republicanism ignored a century of achievement by the ruling class that strengthened the structure of the English constitution and slowly formed a balance between the people and the aristocracy, commons and cabinet.55 Walpole’s Whig politics, therefore, suggests that The Castle of Otranto does not represent a fear of ‘the parasitic power of the past’,56 but a celebration of the material and political progress of the Enlightenment. Radical republicans, on the other hand, envisioned a gloomier world. Unlike Walpole, Hollis’s concept of liberty was that of the ancient republics reflected in the minds of thinkers such as Milton, Marvell and Sidney. What these men saw in the new and growing prosperity of England was an ominous parallel to the luxury and corruption that marked the rise of tyranny in the ancient world. Civilization, they believed, was vulnerable and continually besieged by forces threatening its survival. As Gibbon had taught them,
[n]o theory of human progress could be constructed which did not carry the negative implication that progress was at the same time decay, that culture entailed some loss of freedom and virtue, that what multiplied human capacities also fractured the unity of human personality.57
Progress, in other words, was inevitably a movement toward decline. This ‘quarrel with modernity’ reveals the complex dialectic operating at the heart of Whig culture. As Pocock notes, in the eighteenth century there existed a natural antithesis between republicanism and liberalism, classicism and progressivism: ‘The Old Whigs identified freedom with virtue and located it in a past; the Modern Whigs identified it with wealth, enlightenment, and progress towards a future. Around this antithesis . . . nearly all eighteenth-century philosophy of history can be organized.’58 This Enlightenment contradiction arose out of an acute awareness of the fragility of classical republics:
The republic was vulnerable to corruption, to political, moral, or economic changes which destroyed the equality on which it rested, and these changes might occur not accidentally, but in consequence of the republic’s own virtue. Because it was virtuous it defeated its enemies; because it defeated its enemies it acquired empire; but empire brought to some citizens . . . the opportunity to acquire power incompatible with equality and uncontrollable by law, and so the republic was destroyed by success and excess.59
The cause of liberty and equality that many radical or ‘Old’ Whigs promoted evoked not a superstitious medieval past returning to haunt the present, but a classical view of liberty and democracy perpetually under threat by corruption and power. Protestant scepticism, then, also encompassed a pessimistic world-view that saw the inevitable rise of tyranny and the fall of empire. Moreover, it was this ‘republican tradition’, so prominent in British and European Enlightenment thought, that when transmitted to the colonies, provided an explanatory structure for independence and revolution. Republicanism, therefore, was more than a form of rhetoric as Butler suggests, but a prominent discourse in Enlightenment culture, spoken everywhere in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe and America. Whether Whig or Tory, the discourse of republicanism formed an essential discursive element regarding the problem of resistance within the civil order. Variously conceived of as democracy, liberty or equality, republicanism constituted an alternative world view that looked to the classical past for lessons on political theory and national identity. In the Old Whig view, there exists an overt pessimism and fear surrounding the ability of civilization to uphold the tenets of republicanism. Republicanism, therefore, is also a panicridden ideology animated by fears of tyranny, decay, conspiracy and corruption and it is with these ideological fears that the Gothic is deeply entangled.
The antithesis between Walpole and Hollis’s world view also parallels the debates surrounding ‘the myth of the Goth’ that arose in the revolutionary period. Before being employed as a descriptive term for Walpole’s novel, the term ‘Gothic’ possessed controversial political, ideological and cultural meanings. Historically, it describes the ancient Teutonic races that subverted the Roman Empire; however, in the seventeenth century, British defenders of parliamentary prerogative developed a new, politically contentious conception of the Goths, which as the various shades of Whiggery reveal, was eventually used either as a justification for resistance to tyrants or as an argument for the continuation of an organic constitutional order. For Whigs such as Robert Walpole, the ancient Gothic constitution represented a dark period of feudal slavery: ‘The primitive purity of our constitution was that the people had no share in government, but were the villains, vessels, or bondsmen of the lords.’60 Only with the advent of the Glorious Revolution was the British government free from tyranny. The orthodox Whig view of history, by contrast, advanced the theory that the Goths were morally pure, brave and humane, and, politically, the original democrats of the world. Britain’s Gothic heritage signalled not only an inherent freedom lost in 1066 and regained in 1688, it reinforced a view of the British constitution’s organic perfection, a return to order and continuity. For Edmund Burke, tradition, or what he saw as the natural historical and political order, was essential to freedom. It was the French revolutionaries and Enlightenment philosophers, prostrating themselves to the gods of reason and democracy, who sought to undermine freedom and re-introduce tyranny and barbarity:
The usurpation which, in order to subvert ancient institutions, has destroyed ancient principles, will hold power by arts similar to those by which it has acquired it. When the old feudal and chivalrous spirit of Fealty, which, by freeing kings from fear, freed both kings and subjects from the precautions of tyranny, shall be extinct in the minds of men, plots and assassinations will be anticipated by preventive murder and preventive confiscation, and that long roll of grim and bloody maxims, which form the political code of all power, not standing on its own honour, and the honour of those who are to obey it. Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle.61
Yet for radical, or ‘Old’ Whigs, Burke’s fusion of tradition and freedom, his ‘superstitious respect for kings, and the spirit of chivalry’, transmogrified the Gothic past into a regressive feudal idolatry.62 As Clery and Miles point out, ‘what was at stake in these discussions was the elaboration of persuasive myths of the nation’s past as a means of influencing its present and future course. In general terms, the myth of Gothic origins was fundamental to an emergent sense of British national distinctiveness’.63 In The Rise of the Gothic Novel, Maggie Kilgour argues that the contrasting of Anglo-Saxon political freedom with classical tyranny, especially Roman and later French neoclassicism, is a ‘peculiarly British characteristic, a sign of a national inherent love of freedom [and] liberty’.64 Moreover, it is the political and ideological contours of this characterization that determine Gothic literature’s themes of historical tyranny and usurpation, of Norman oppression and lost liberty. Yet, however fruitful the history of the Goths has been in untangling the politics of eighteenth-century British Gothic fiction, a similar influence is undeveloped in the scholarship devoted to American Gothic. Not only was this ‘peculiarly British characteristic’ shared by the American revolutionary generation who adopted and shaped Anglo-Saxon history for their own use, they also symbolically identified with Gothic customs and institutions. As Samuel Kliger argues, the colonists’ retreat from England was the first attempt to recreate an idealized Gothic society in the New World:
In the same sense that Americans are ‘Goths’, so were their Anglo- Saxon forbears who received the ‘Gothic’ gift of democracy as a result of the Germanic invasion of England . . . Unfortunately, however, a lingering ‘Roman’ element in England tended at times to come to the surface of English political life. Therefore, in order to realize their ‘Gothic’ destiny unhampered, a band of hardy Anglo-Saxons migrated to America. The ‘Gothic’ pattern of life which England succeeded in establishing only in part would thus be completely realized in America.65
In colonial America, the term Gothic retained its Old Whig connotations of Anglo-Saxon liberty and equality, and this myth of alienation from and return to an original state of harmony and innocence would eventually provide the political mooring for American republicanism. Much of the intellectual coherence of the colonists’ political arguments rested on their views of the past and the goal of revolution was in part the realization of those original Gothic ideals, unhampered by the corruption and tyranny of the present system. One of the greatest American scholars of Anglo- Saxon history was Thomas Jefferson who invoked the Saxon constitution for the American cause. Jefferson’s interpretation of the Gothic past reveals much about the revolutionary generation’s approach to questions of political heritage and national identity. From his readings of Rapin’s History of England and Gordon’s translation of Tacitus, Jefferson conceived of an Anglo-Saxon past in terms of a useable political heritage:‘as we have employed some of the best materials of the British constitution in the construction of our own government, a knowledge of British history becomes useful to the American politician’.66 In A Summary View of the Rights of British America, he affirms the values and traditions of the Whig interpretation of history as an argument for the right to be free from the country ‘which chance, not choice has placed them’, and believing that Saxon rights were being abused by parliamentary exercises of tyranny, despotism and usurped power, turned the British government’s own Saxon history against them as an argument for American independence. For the majority of Americans, the most characteristic view of their Gothic history was of an ideal constitution complete with an elected House of Commons in Saxon England, destroyed by the Norman Conquest, regained with modifications in the Glorious Revolution and once again challenged by the festering corruption of British politics. English history was portrayed as a continual struggle for the restoration of ancient rights and it was this struggle, according to John Adams, that had peopled America. Therefore, while the term ‘Gothic’ ‘coexists and overlaps with the more familiar literary and aesthetic material within the semantic constellation of the British “Gothic’”, it also coincides with the American conception of liberty and republican government.67
The ambiguity and shifting about of the term is commonplace in the Gothic tradition, but the debates surrounding Gothic manners and institutions should not be viewed solely as a British phenomenon but enlarged to encompass the republican world of late eighteenth-century America. Early republicans mythologized their own national formations in much the same way as the British Whigs and, like their English counterparts, viewed their Gothic history in binary terms: one of light and liberty, the other dark and barbarous; one an ancient Elysium, the other a feudal nightmare. The recovery of the original force of this myth can also bring something of immediate value to discussions of post-war America. Confronted with the spectre of totalitarianism and the corrupting effects of conformity and mass culture, the myth of the Goth restates for a new generation the legitimacy of resistance to tyrants. The resurgence of biblical and Roman empire film epics in the 1950s and 1960s, for example, attests to the continuing relevance of this narrative. While loosely couched in spiritual themes, films such as Quo Vadis? (1951), Julius Caesar (1953), Ben Hur (1959), Spartacus (1960) and The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) each depict the brutality of tyranny and the corruption of Rome while appealing to the Anglo-Saxon traits of simplicity, bravery and love of liberty. From cold war film to political and social analysis, Anglo-Saxon identity not only underlies the continuity between British and American concepts of political identity, it also supplies the imagery and iconography for contemporary America’s fears of tyranny, corruption and conspiracy.
While this book is grounded in the work of historians, the choice of interpretative method accounts for the second reason for focusing on post-war Gothic fiction. It is precisely in this period that historians began to interpret American history through the paradigm of republicanism. The emphasis on ideas as the animating force of the American Revolution and early national period began in the late 1940s with the work of historians such as Caroline Robbins and Cecilia Kenyon who initiated the move toward understanding English libertarian thought and its transmission to America. Following these efforts, republicanism entered the scholarly lexicon to become ‘the success story of the 1980s’.68 It is not the burden of this book to evaluate the efficacy of the ‘republican synthesis’ or ‘neo-Whig’ framework, rather to suggest that the dominance of the liberal consensus approach on both historical interpretation and literary criticism has impeded a fuller understanding of the nation’s Gothic fiction. An examination of mid twentieth-century Gothic reveals that the language of classical republicanism still had wide currency because, like their eighteenth-century forbears, post-war Americans perceived their liberty to be under threat by external treachery and internal decay. Therefore, classical republicanism’s lexicon of degeneration, corruption, tyranny and conspiracy provided a familiar structure to a generation’s fight against the threats of totalitarianism and mass culture. The discourse of republicanism called for a renewed civic consciousness in a period of conformity and unbridled consumer capitalism, and thereby functioned not only as an articulation or negotiation of contemporary cultural anxieties, but also as a critique of modern liberal culture. Chapter 1 provides a historical framework for discussing and analysing contemporary American Gothic. While it begins by briefly examining the shift from progressive socioeconomic theories of American history to a liberal consensus approach, it is primarily concerned with tracing the development of the ‘republican paradigm’ that arose in the post-war period and which came to challenge the dominant approaches to American revolutionary history. Specifically, this chapter reviews the scholarship devoted to republican historiography through its most influential proponents: Caroline Robbins, Bernard Bailyn, Gordon S. Wood and J. G. A. Pocock. Opposed to the view that ideas played no part in the development of American politics and culture, these historians set out to explore the influence of classical and British libertarian thought and modes of discourse on the colonies and the importance of this transatlantic exchange on the revolution itself and on the creation of an American republic. The chapter briefly outlines some of the central assumptions of the republican tradition as advanced by these so called ‘neo-Whig’ historians. Subsequent chapters will each consist of three parts. The first section examines a specific assumption regarding republican ideology in late eighteenth-century America and how it functioned to refine cultural identity. The second situates the language of classical republicanism in a cold war context, arguing that while the terms may change, republican values and fears are transmitted over time and remain in tension with new liberal ideals. The final section offers a close reading of a mid twentieth-century text exploring how traditional Gothic figures continue to affirm the nation’s historical fears of degeneration, corruption, deception and tyranny. Chapter 2 examines the vampire as a figure of corruption and degeneration. By reviewing the eighteenth-century cyclical theory of history and the fear of national degeneration that emerges from the idea of progress, it reveals how the concepts of corruption and degeneration were commonly expressed in metaphors of barbarity, infection and vampirism. The second part of this chapter reveals how a similar theory of history operates in cold war culture. The conception of the republic as a vulnerable organism perpetually threatened by corruption is reconstructed not as the fear of communist tyranny, but as an internal battle between tradition and progress, nature and culture. The third section offers a close reading of Richard Matheson’s vampire novel I Am Legend (1954), arguing how the text engages with the historical theme of degeneration while articulating the central contradictions of post-war culture. Chapter 3 explores the figure of the double and the eighteenth-century concept of virtue. It argues that the fear of effeminacy, luxury and selfinterest not only disclosed the gender implications of republican identity, but also represented the nation’s first crisis of masculinity. The second section reveals that in the cold war era, the concept of masculine virtue manifests as an effort to shore up a liberal consensus in an age of perceived political impotence and social conformity. The third section explores the figure of the double in David Ely’s novel Seconds (1963). It argues that the double re-emerges as a figure of failed masculinity softened not by the lures of eighteenth-century luxury and effeminacy, but by its modern corollaries: conformity and self-interest. Chapter 4 explores the concepts of conspiracy and hypocrisy in late eighteenth-century Britain and America. It argues that rather than being based in irrationality, the widespread use of conspiratorial modes of interpretation stem from the Enlightenment’s engagement with the new science of causality and the rational concept of free will. In the American revolutionary context, the fear of conspiracy and hypocrisy interacts with the politics of sincerity: the need to decipher the discrepancy between words and deeds, motives and actions. Chapter 4 then explores how a similar discourse of conspiracy and dissimulation fuelled the panic of subversion and cultural decay in the post-war period. In Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967), the Gothic figure of the impostor or deceiver reveals the continuing interaction between motives and intentions, and hypocrisy and sincerity in the modern age. Chapter 5 examines the agrarian model of republican citizenship. It begins with a brief review of the development of a pastoral tradition in American writing and its interdependence with the discourse of republicanism. It discusses how agrarianism functioned as a way of distinguishing the Old World from the New, and the virtuous from the corrupt, and reveals that the essential threat to agrarian virtue was the rise of commerce and industrialization. The chapter then explores the republican dialectic of virtue and corruption in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1965). It argues that while Capote exploits the paraphernalia of the Gothic to explore the invasion and destruction of iconic Americans by monstrous outcasts, the characterization and structure of the narrative exposes the inherent ambiguity surrounding the values of agrarian virtue and progressive individualism in modern America.
Notes
1Joseph Anthony Mazzeo, ‘Some interpretations of the history of ideas’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 33, 3 (1972), 379–94 (389).
2Fred Botting, ‘Preface’, in Fred Botting (ed.), The Gothic, Essays and Studies (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001), pp. 1–6; for discussions on the Gothic’s mutability see Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996);Teresa Goddu, Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Jerrold E. Hogle, ‘Introduction’, in Jerrold E. Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 1–20; Robert Miles, Gothic Writing, 1750–1820: A Genealogy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002); Marie Mulvey-Roberts, ‘Introduction’, in Marie Mulvey-Roberts (ed.), The Handbook to Gothic Literature (New York: New York University Press, 1998), pp. xv–xviii; David Punter, The Literature of Terror: Volume 1, The Gothic Tradition (New York: Longman, 1996).
3The term’s artistic and architectural usages also intersect with its literary meanings; however, I am primarily concerned with the historical and political contours of the Gothic. For more on eighteenth-century Gothic art and architecture see Samuel Kliger, ‘Whig aesthetics: a phase of eighteenth-century taste’, ELH, 16 (1949), 135–50.
4 Goddu, Gothic America, p. 3.
5Robert Miles, ‘“Tranced Griefs”: Melville’s Pierre and the origins of the Gothic’, ELH, 66, 1 (1999), 157–77 (158).
6Edward J. Ingebretsen, At Stake: Monsters and the Rhetoric of Fear in Public Culture (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001), p. 21; Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (2nd edn; New York: Dell, 1966), p. 9.
7Justin D. Edwards, Gothic Passages: Racial Ambiguity and the American Gothic (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2003), p. xvii.
8Fiedler, Love and Death, p. 149.
9Ibid., pp. xi, xxiii (original emphasis).
10Ibid., p. 6; Irving Malin, New American Gothic (Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962), p. 5.
11Eric Savoy, ‘The rise of American Gothic’, in Jerrold E. Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 167–88 (p. 168).
12Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy (eds), American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1988), p. viii.
13Lionel Trilling, Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (Middlesex: Penguin, 1963), p. 19; Chester E. Eisinger, Fiction of the Forties (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1963), p. 9.
14Russell J. Reising, The Unusable Past: Theory and the Study of American Literature (New York: Methuen, 1986), p. 95.
15Ibid., p. 97; Philip Rahv, ‘Fiction and the criticism of fiction’, Kenyon Review, 18 (1956), 276–99 (280).
16Eisinger, Fiction of the Forties, pp. 96, 97, 86.
17Philip Rahv, ‘Our country and our culture’, Partisan Review, 19 (1952), 283–326 (304).
18 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1949), p. 245.
19Richard Chase, The American Novel and its Tradition (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1957), p. 1.
20Ibid., pp. 2, 22.
21Goddu, Gothic America, p. 7.
22Chase, The American Novel, p. 37
23Ibid., pp. 30, 36.
24Malin, New American Gothic, p. 5.
25Ihab Hassan, Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 31
26David Suchoff, ‘New historicism and containment: towards a post-cold war cultural theory’, Arizona Quarterly, 48 (1992), 137–61 (142).
27Irving Howe, ‘This age of conformity’, in Philip Rahv and William Phillips (eds), The Partisan Review Anthology (1954; London: Macmillan,1962), pp. 145–64 (p. 151).
28Sacvan Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 10, 11.
29Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflective Sociology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 190.
30Joyce Appleby, ‘Republicanism and ideology’, American Quarterly, 37, 4 (1985), 461–73 (463).
31Fred Botting, ‘In Gothic darkly: heterotopia, history, culture’, in David Punter (ed.), A Companion to the Gothic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 3–14 (p. 3).
32Robert A. Ferguson, Reading the Early Republic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 54.
33Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 312.
34Ibid., p. 314.
35Moses Coit Tyler, The Literary History of the American Revolution, 1763–1783 (New York: n. p., 1897), pp. 8–9.
36Savoy, ‘The rise of American Gothic’, p. 167.
37Fiedler, Love and Death, p. 131.
38 Punter, Literature of Terror, p. 165.
39Quoted in Robert Lawson-Peebles, American Literature before 1880 (Harlow, England: Pearson Longman, 2003), pp. 18, 19.
40J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Republican Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 545.
41J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Between Gog and Magog: the republican thesis and the ideologia Americana’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 48, 2 (1987), 325–46 (334).
42Fiedler, Love and Death, p. 131.
43Botting, Gothic, p. 114.
44Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly, Or Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (New York: Penguin, 1988), p. 3.
45Clinton Rossiter, ‘Nationalism and American identity in the early republic’, in Sean Wilentz (ed.), Major Problems in the Early Republic: 1787–1848 (Lexington: D. C. Heath, 1992), pp. 14–23 (pp. 14–15).
46J. Hector St Jean de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, in Nina Baym et al. (eds), Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. 1 (4th edn; New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), pp. 657–81 (pp. 659, 660).
47William L. Hedges, ‘The myth of the republic and the theory of American literature’, Prospects, 4 (1974), 101–20 (110).
48Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 119.
49Quoted in Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland, ed. Jay Fliegelman (New York: Penguin, 1991), p. xxvi.
50Warner, Letters of the Republic, p. 120.
51Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall, ‘Gothic criticism’, in David Punter (ed.), A Companion to the Gothic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 209–28 (pp. 216, 215, 218). For psychological readings of the Gothic, see Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); William Patrick Day, In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study of Gothic Fantasy (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1985); Carol Ann Howells, Love, Mystery and Misery: Feeling in Gothic Fiction (London: Athlone Press, 1975).
52Baldick and Mighall, ‘Gothic criticism’, pp. 213, 214, 215, 226.
53Marilyn Butler, ‘Introduction’, in Marilyn Butler (ed.), Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 3.
54Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (London: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 7, 12.
55Caroline Robbins, ‘The strenuous Whig: Thomas Hollis of Lincoln’s Inn’, William and Mary Quarterly, 7, 3 (1950), 406–53 (409).
56Miles, ‘“Tranced Griefs”’, 158.
57J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Gibbon’s decline and fall and the world view of the late Enlightenment’, Eighteenth Century Studies, 10, 3 (1977), 287–303 (293).
58J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 231.
59Pocock, ‘Gibbon’s decline and fall’, 288.
60 Maggie Kilgour, The Rise of the Gothic Novel (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 13.
61Edmund Burke, ‘Reflections on the revolution in France and on the proceedings in certain societies in London relative to that event’, in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, vol. II (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854), p. 350.
62E. J. Clery and Robert Miles (eds), Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook, 1700–1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 246; Miles, ‘“Tranced Griefs”’, 163.
63Clery and Miles, Gothic Documents, p. 48.
64Kilgour, The Rise of the Gothic Novel, p. 14.
65Samuel Kliger, ‘Emerson and the usable Anglo-Saxon past’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 16, 4 (1955), 476–93 (476–7).
66Thomas Jefferson to John Norwell (14 June 1807), Jefferson Digital Archive, University of Virginia Library, http://etext.lib.virginia.edu (accessed 3 March 2005).
67Clery and Miles, Gothic Documents, p. 2.
68Daniel Rogers, ‘Republicanism: the career of a concept’, The Journal of American History, 79, 1 (1992), 11–38 (11).
