Gothic Subjects
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Beginning in the 1790s, North American readers developed an appetite for the gothic novel, as imported, reprinted, and pirated editions of British and European romances flooded the market alongside homegrown works. In Gothic Subjects , Siân Silyn Roberts accounts for the sudden and considerable appeal of the gothic during this period by contending that it prepared a culturally diverse American readership to think of itself as part of a transatlantic world through which goods, people, and information could circulate. By putting gothic literature in dialogue with the writings of Locke, Hume, Reid, Smith, Rousseau, and other major figures of the European Enlightenment, Silyn Roberts shows how the early American novel participated in the process of revising and transforming the figure of the modern individual for a fluid, contingent Atlantic population. Exploring works of fiction by Charles Brockden Brown, Leonora Sansay, Sally Sayward Barrell Keating Wood, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Montgomery Bird, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and William Wells Brown, among others, Silyn Roberts argues that the gothic helped post-Revolutionary readers to think of themselves as political subjects. By reading the emergence of a national literary style in terms of its appropriation and reinterpretation of British cultural forms, Gothic Subjects situates itself at the crux of several important issues in American literary history: transatlantic literary relations, the connection between literature and political philosophy, the paradoxes of sovereign power, and the form of the novel. In doing so, Gothic Subjects powerfully rethinks some of our previous assumptions about the cultural work of the American gothic tradition.
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Gothic Subjects
The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 1790–1861
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Even as Locke relegates this negated form of consciousness to the realm of the preposterous (much as Reid does with Hume’s magical thinking), it nonetheless makes its way directly from the Essay into the gothic through the trope of metempsychosis, where one mind controls a number of different bodies. A mind thus constituted has to lack the self-control, not to mention bodily control, that the British subject possesses in spades. In Sheppard Lee (1836), for example, Robert Montgomery Bird uses this trope to shift the terms of subjectivity from an elite ontological state of being to a model of the self that can only be described as an incessant state of “becoming.” Bird’s body-snatching protagonist is less a continuous coherent self than a Humean series of mental associations that turn the mind into a by-product of the body’s physical and repeatable habits. Bird challenges the normativity and naturalness of the individualistic model by allowing his protagonist to proliferate exponentially beyond restrictions of geographical place, point of origin, or blood. As I show at greater length in Chapter 3, this feat successfully reconfigures the human mind for a national imaginary that conceives itself as a cluster of disparate and discrete parts. Indeed, one simply cannot imagine Sheppard Lee producing a territorially bounded community calculated as the sum of its individual members. What we have instead is a body politic characterized by the infinite potentiality—indeed, personality—of its constituents.
Gothic Subjects therefore begins with Charles Brockden Brown because I believe he was the first American novelist to put flesh on a latent problem in Locke’s model—namely, that the human mind is permeable and that emotions can travel unimpeded between people. I then show how the American gothic breathes life into other negated forms of Lockean consciousness to test them as viable (noncontractual) forms of collectivity. Such negations include, for example, two minds in one body, which Brown stages as sleepwalking in Edgar Huntly. One mind is housed in two or more bodies in the preternaturally connected twins of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), Bird’s Sheppard Lee, or Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Alice Doane’s Appeal” (1835). In the latter tale, “the similarity of [the] dispositions” between Leonard Doane and Walter Brome “made them seem like joint possessors of an individual nature.”41 Objects that fall outside the generalized categories of experience known as “common sense” disrupt the physical world in “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), and so Poe creates in Dupin a model of perception that does not rely on universal categories of thought. Objects that act like subjects come to us as the return of the dead in Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820), while a world in which the subject cannot control the information entering his mind takes the form of ventriloquism in Wieland; Or, The Transformation (1798). The ability to turn such gothic scenarios into workable models of social unity, I argue, is the extraordinary rhetorical feat that sets the American gothic decisively apart from its British counterpart. By modifying the conceptual cornerstones of Enlightenment thought, the American gothic tradition validates precisely those idiosyncratic, fantastic notions of the individual that the British tradition goes out of its way to render phobic and transforms them into the basis of political membership.
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