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CHAPTER 1

The American Transformation of the British Individual

Beginning in the 1790s, North American readers evidently developed an appetite for British and European romances alongside the homegrown publications of Charles Brockden Brown, Isaac Mitchell, and Sally Sayward Barrell Keating Wood. Although Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland; Or, The Transformation (published in September 1798) is widely regarded as the first “American” gothic novel, imported and reprinted editions of Britain and the continent’s most popular gothic novelists—Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, Clara Reeve, Monk Lewis, and Carl Grosse, to name just a few—were available several years before Brown’s novel made its debut. In Philadelphia in 1795, for instance, Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest and A Sicilian Romance appeared alongside Charlotte Smith’s Montalbert, which was reprinted again in 1800 along with The Mysteries of Udolpho. Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest and The Mysteries of Udolpho were reprinted in the same year in Boston, while The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne; a Highland Story appeared in Philadelphia in 1796; The Italian came out in Philadelphia and New York in 1797. Smith’s D’Arcy was reprinted in Philadelphia in 1796 and Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle in 1802. Also available were complete and expurgated versions of M. G. Lewis’s Ambrosio; Or, The Monk (Boston, 1799) and Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (New York, 1801). Anonymous novels such as Count Roderick’s Castle; Or, Gothic Times, a Tale (Baltimore, 1795), The Cavern of Death; a Moral Tale (Philadelphia, 1795), and The Horrors of Oakendale Abbey; a Romance (New York, 1799) vied with reprinted German romances like Friedrich von Schiller’s The Ghost Seer (New York, 1796). Critically neglected British gothic novels like Stephen Cullen’s The Haunted Priory (Philadelphia, 1794), George Moore’s Grasville Abbey: A Romance (Salem, Mass., 1799), and Regina Maria Roche’s The Children of the Abbey (Philadelphia, 1800) also seemed to have enjoyed a welcome reception in the United States.¹ Nor was the vogue for the gothic restricted to the novel. In American periodicals, there appeared reviews, poems, excerpts, and even parodies of British and German gothic works, all testifying to the enduring popularity of this form. Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest and The Italian, Lewis’s The Monk, and a version of William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) called The Iron Chest were adapted as stage plays in Britain and exported to the United States. The gothic mode evidently provided a staple for theatergoers well into the nineteenth century, as productions of gothic plays appeared frequently in all major American theatrical centers between 1794 and 1830.² Such was the public’s appetite for gothic romances that Royall Tyler made it a topic of satire in the preface to The Algerine Captive (1797), in which he relates the tale of “Dolly, the dairy maid, and Jonathan, the hired man … [who] amused themselves into so agreeable a terrour with the haunted houses and hobgobblins of Mrs. Ratcliffe that they were both afraid to sleep alone.”³ As Donald Ringe puts it, Wieland may have “marked the beginning of American Gothic fiction,” but it “did not mark the beginning of Gothic fiction in America.”⁴

Clearly, any account of the gothic romance in post-Revolutionary literary history must first come to terms with this proliferation of imported and reprinted editions of British and European texts. By and large, however, we have tended to overlook or underemphasize this complex publication history. More conventionally, the story of the gothic in America tends to go like this: the gothic novel took root here first and foremost as an “indigenous” literary form by responding to specifically “American” forms of experience, such as slavery, frontier expansion, industrialization, and revolution. The cultural anxieties wrought by America’s rapid social, political, and economic changes produced a body of work that diverged from its British counterpart along the lines of historical experience. To this end, gothic writers here rejected the traditional trappings of European romance (castles, monasteries, lascivious monks, etc.) as “ludicrous,” “unconvincing,” or simply downright “meaningless” for a nation born of the principles of reason and independence.⁵ To make this case, criticism routinely invokes Charles Brockden Brown’s famous preface to Edgar Huntly; Or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker, in which he famously vows to replace the “puerile superstitions and exploded manners” of the European gothic with “incidents of Indian hostility and the perils of the western wilderness.”⁶ Brown claims to liberate the American gothic from the burden of British history to give it an eschatological narrative of cultural origins; scholarship that takes this preface at face value therefore tends to reproduce the powerful foundation myth of America’s self-fashioning. By this line of reasoning, American writers and readers eschewed the atavistic materials of the European romance to produce unique and unanticipated innovations in form and ideology from indigenous materials.⁷ As I see it, the publication history of the gothic in America tells a slightly different story.

The trade in imported novels suggests that something about the gothic spoke to American interests that goes well beyond its repudiation of British themes or its ability to articulate an indigenous national culture. Even the abbreviated list of titles I offered above tells us that American readers were equally—if not more—devoted to the figurative restoration of disrupted aristocratic bloodlines and the persecution of trapped women as they were to the kind of indigenous concerns Brown placed center stage in Edgar Huntly. Far from rejecting European tropes, moreover, the texts produced on American soil remain indebted to the narrative materials of the British gothic. I have in mind, for instance, the incest motif in William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy or Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839); the castle in Isaac Mitchell’s The Asylum; Or, Alonzo and Melissa (1811); Leonora Sansay’s confinement and persecution of her female protagonists at the hands of tyrannical males in The Secret History; Or, the Horrors of St Domingo (1808); the veiled woman in William Wells Brown’s Clotel; Or, The President’s Daughter or Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852); Herman Melville’s crenellated ship in Benito Cereno (1855); siblings separated at birth in Mark Twain’s Puddn’head Wilson (1894); Shirley Jackson’s castle-like house in The Haunting of Hill House (1959); or the return of the dead in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). These are just a few examples where the text’s organizing metaphors are taken directly from the pages of Radcliffe or Lewis. Without a doubt, Brown and many of his contemporaries were committed to producing a national literary tradition but we cannot present the period’s acts of self-description as evidence of that tradition without accounting for the large body of literature that engages the formal conventions of the British mode. To agree, then, with Donald Ringe’s assessment that “it is idle to speak of American Gothic … as if it were something completely distinct from its European counterpart,” we evidently need an explanatory model that can navigate the complex and changing relationship between this transatlantic entanglement of forms and an emergent national literary culture.⁸ Published in New Hampshire in 1800, Maine author Sally Sayward Barrell Keating Wood’s Julia and the Illuminated Baron offers a convenient means to a possible explanation.

Set primarily in late Revolutionary France, Wood’s novel relates the trials of the virtuous and well-born Julia at the hands of the Count de Launa, a member of the Illuminati, and her noble family’s subsequent flight to England after the events of the Revolution turn them into refugees. Second only to Charles Brockden Brown and Susanna Rowson in terms of novelistic output, Wood nonetheless remains largely excluded from the most influential accounts of the early American novel. Fiedler calls Julia and the Illuminated Baron “a gothic-sentimental farrago,” Cathy Davidson describes it as “inconsistent” and “muddled,” and most book-length studies of the American gothic do not mention it at all.⁹ With its spectral hauntings, secret histories, impregnable castles, and innocence persecuted, Julia and the Illuminated Baron uses every Radcliffean signature in the book while refusing to conform to a strictly American nationalist framework. This is just one reason, I suspect, that it remains so neglected: Wood’s tale of l’ancienne noblesse and Old World degeneracy appears far removed from the “specifically American concerns”—namely, race, gender, frontier expansion, the failure of America’s liberal promise, and so forth—that have long given the American gothic its generic coordinates.¹⁰ To be sure, Julia is a thinly veiled conservative allegory about the evils of philosophical radicalism on social and political stability that echoes contemporary conspiracy theories regarding the Illuminati’s plans for global domination.¹¹ It would be a mistake, however, to read this novel as merely symptomatic of an anxious political climate or heavy-handedly didactic about the triumph of feminine virtue (although it is certainly both). To understand why Wood’s decision to write something so closely resembling a British gothic romance might have made perfect sense to an American readership, let us first consider how she engages in the literary debate of her period over what constitutes an “American” book.

Taking her cue from the gothic novels of Walpole, Reeve, and Brockden Brown, Wood announces her aesthetic aims in the novel’s preface. These aims, however, appear to contradict the burgeoning project of literary independence championed by many of her contemporaries: “It may perhaps be objected, that the annals of our own country display a vast field for the imagination, and that we need not cross the atlantic [sic] in search of materials to found the moral tale or amusing story upon … But an aversion to introduce living characters, or those recently dead, rendered Europe a safer, though not more agreeable theatre.”¹² This comment is a striking contrast to Brown’s opening to Edgar Huntly, published just one year earlier. For the reasons I outlined above, Justine Murison calls Huntly’s preface “a talisman of American studies scholarship” because it offers a descriptive theory of American cultural nationalism: set adrift from Old World antiquity and its archive of narrative materials—Catholicism, medievalism, and aristocratic despotism—the American gothic turns to its own indigenous horrors for inspiration.¹³ Wood’s preface complicates that theory. The United States does indeed offer “a vast field for the imagination”; that is, Wood acknowledges the conventional British representation, exploited by Brown, of the New World as a place of compelling aesthetic power.¹⁴ As Wood is well aware, her kinship with European forms and settings opens her to the kind of critique implicit in Royall Tyler’s rhetorical question at the beginning of The Contrast (1787): “Why should our thoughts to distant countries roam, / When each refinement may be found at home?”¹⁵ Europe, on the other hand, allows her to place her novel’s object lessons at a “safer” moral distance, suggesting the kind of removed spectacle with which Adam Smith enjoins us to feel measured compassion.¹⁶ Internal evidence contradicts Wood’s professed reluctance to include “living characters, or those recently dead”: the novel contains references to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Judith Sargent Murray, Sarah Wentworth Morton, and Louis XVI. Thus her decision to set Julia in France obviously stems from reasons other than a stated refusal to implicate historical figures in political scandal. That she clearly expects her readers to find meaning in a story about radical endogamy and restored French bloodlines tells us that this gothic tale locates its “Americanness” in something other than a New World setting or some deeply buried source of guilt or anxiety. In drawing on the British gothic romance tradition, I argue, Wood does not distance herself from the task of literary autochthony; rather, she shifts its terms to include a reconfiguration of British cultural materials for an American audience. Let me suggest how.

The convoluted kinship structures underwriting the plot of Julia and the Illuminated Baron are crucial to understanding this neglected novel’s politics. Julia Vallace is the daughter of the Marquis Alvada and his second wife, who is poisoned in childbirth by the Marquis’s son from his first marriage, the Count de Launa. The Alvada family believes that Julia died as a baby, but she was in fact rescued by a faithful servant determined to protect her from the vengeance of the Count. Raised in ignorance of her noble blood, Julia eventually falls under the protection her aunt, the Countess de Launa, although neither is aware of the blood relationship subsisting between them. She falls in love with Francis Colwort, the putative nephew of an English merchant but in reality the Countess’s long-lost son from her first marriage to the English Earl of Ormond.¹⁷ Unaware that they are cousins, Julia and Colwort become engaged before Colwort is compelled to visit the United States to rescue his other “cousin” (the merchant’s biological daughter) from a failed marriage. While Colwort is away, Julia is abducted and imprisoned by the Count, who—unaware that they are half-brother and sister—proposes marriage on the condition that she convert to the libertine principles of the Illuminati. Through a series of altogether redundant plot devices, Julia escapes the Count, and the close blood ties between the novel’s characters are revealed. Julia and Colwort wed, and the newly reunited Alvada and de Launa clans escape the persecutions of the French Revolution by fleeing to England.

It should be clear from this brief summary that there are few characters in this novel who are not related by birth to every other. They share a common—albeit secret—history that reverberates in the spontaneous attractions of blood. As the Countess tells Julia, “I am draw to you by cords I do not perfectly understand”; the Marquis, encountering Julia for the first time, “felt his whole soul drawn toward her.”¹⁸ When the Count turns his attentions to Julia, however, the threat of incest turns this endogamous social unit into an autophagous and phobic social organism that preys on its own members. The Count’s libertine principles and political deviancy have corrupted the bloodline: “How little value,” Julia moralizes, are “titles, and estates [when] possessed by one who disgraces the one, and dishonors the other; and their virtues are only owned by distant branches of their family; no trace is to be found in their immediate successor, of one virtue.”¹⁹ When the Count dies—wounded, poisoned, and repentant—the family is purified and reborn in the union between Julia and Colwort. This exemplary couple, cut from the cloth of the British sentimental tradition, restores the original family and guarantees its perpetuity through a modern companionate marriage.

Up to this point in the novel, it is fair to say that Julia reproduces the cultural logic of the British gothic. As critics of the English novel have argued, the British tradition labors in defense of a realist world of stable meaning against forces that assail the self-enclosure and self-government of its constituents. These novels introduce atavistic energies and marvelous occurrences into a closed domain—typically a castle, dungeon, or monastery—that animate the object world and challenge the protagonist’s ability to think and feel for herself.²⁰ On discovering what she believes to be a mutilated and decaying corpse in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), for example, Emily St. Aubert is seized by “fits of abstraction” and “shuddering emotion” that spread between bodies to her terrified servants.²¹ The same kind of intrusive objects animate the psychic landscape in The Castle of Otranto (1764). An oversized helmet, a bleeding statue, and a sighing portrait challenge the ontological order of a world that rests on the strict separation of subjects from objects. When, under such circumstances, “resolution … give[s] way to terror,” Walpole challenges the autonomy of his characters by subjecting them to emotion that enters the individual directly from the outside.²² Working within this tradition, Wood likewise challenges her protagonist’s status as an autonomous subject when she introduces the gothic trope of the return of the dead. On a visit to the family’s crypt, Julia is startled by her mother’s miraculously lifelike corpse before, “to her horror, it sunk into ashes, and mouldered into dust.”²³ This temporarily reanimated object provides a convenient way to talk about the mobile relationship between subject and object positions when the individual’s liberty is constrained in the space of the gothic castle. In much the same way that Wood reassigns subjectivity to an object that was itself once a subject, Julia becomes an object in the Count’s self-interested narrative when her property and agency are withheld.

In what Sir Walter Scott identified as the signature move of the “Radcliffe school” of writing, such anti-individualistic phenomena are ultimately explained away as the fevered hallucinations of an overwrought imagination or the magical events of a remote past at odds with modernity.²⁴ Emily discovers that the corpse is actually a memento mori carved from wax, while Walpole consciously locates his tale of superstitious frenzy “in the darkest ages of Christianity.”²⁵ Julia finds out that her mother’s corpse was merely extremely well preserved by “rich spices and aromatics,” and the “ghost” she sees on the castle grounds is Colwort come to rescue her.²⁶ By warding off these supernatural phenomena as singular, excessive, or phobic, novels such as The Castle of Otranto, The Mysteries of Udolpho, and Julia and the Illuminated Baron ultimately reassert what Horkheimer and Adorno call “a disenchanted nature,” namely, a modern world evacuated of all superstition and subordinated to the sovereignty of the human mind.²⁷

Recent scholarship has suggested that the gothic mode takes up these cultural materials to reconcile early modern kinship structures (which oversee the transfer of property and bloodline along male lines) to modern, consensual social relations.²⁸ The kind of aristocratic despots populating the British gothic represent older forms of traditional hierarchy primarily concerned with the perpetuation of a family or estate. Such tyrannical power is at odds with the distinctly modern forms of individuated desire represented by the persecuted women under their control. In contrast to the phobic feelings that originate in spectral objects and spread between the castle’s inhabitants, this kind of desire originates wholly within the subject and is directed toward socially acceptable forms of masculinity. The Italian’s (1797) Vivaldi, Udolpho’s Valancourt, and Julia’s Colwort represent a new kind of paternal authority—distinct from the patriarchal imperatives of blood-based power relations—that qualifies them as heads of English households. When these novels unite such individuated subjects in a contractual marriage, the home emerges as a site of modern authority represented by a set of domestic practices that reproduce and guarantee self-government and civic virtue within the family and across generations.

Yet Julia’s resemblance to a British gothic romance obscures the fact that the social problem of the novel is actually more American than British. As I see it, Wood’s novel does not simply set out to modernize aristocratic kinship structures at the level of the household. Wood also wants to take this model of social relations on the road, so to speak. By relocating Colwort and Julia to England at the novel’s end, she imagines a more expansive social unit that can claim the distinctive moral qualities associated with established gentry but whose constituents are far removed from a fixed estate or point of origin. To understand why Julia performs such a move—and why Wood appropriates the representational strategies of the British gothic to make it—Leonard Tennenhouse’s work on “the cultural logic of diaspora” offers a helpful interpretative tool.²⁹

As Tennenhouse explains it, a displaced colonial population—such as the English in pre-Revolutionary America—maintains its ties to its nation of origin by reproducing within the colonies a set of cultural practices associated with the homeland. American literature, Tennenhouse argues, insists “on reproducing those aspects of Englishness that do not require one to be in England so much as among English people.” Characterized by “detours, disruptions, circularity, and exchanges,” this model of cultural transmission reformulates British ideas and forms to reproduce a kind of Englishness that can travel beyond set geopolitical limits.³⁰ It is for this reason, I am convinced, that Wood restores the original Alvada family by means of a purified bloodline only to transplant it to England at the novel’s end. Let me explain further.

Julia may begin the novel separated from her original bloodline but she nonetheless preserves her eligibility as a member of that group through her exemplary personal qualities. Her virtue, autonomy, and capacity for selfgovernment qualify her as a match for Colwort, who likewise possesses “the best of minds, and a counterpart of her own.”³¹ Their unique brand of interiority and moral worthiness authorizes them as modern couple in the tradition of British sentimentalism. Their union rescues the original bloodline from the impurities of the Count’s deviant social practices and resanctifies it as a new form of exemplary cultural Englishness at the level of the household, which comes to include a large extended family of unrelated dependents, servants, and friends. Put differently, the novel ends by naturalizing a much more inclusive version of the family than that defined purely by blood relation and estate. In a move that fosters what Tennenhouse identifies as the peculiarly American diasporic fantasy of a return to a cultural home, the family that “returns” to England is characterized primarily by the personal qualities of its constituents. This is an altogether different formation from the predatory, overly endogamous social organism championed by the Count or the closely related kinship group of the Alvadas. When the old Marquis rejoices that, in his daughter Julia he has found “the exact resemblance of her mother,” the novel ends on a note strikingly similar to that of Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1791).³² There, we recall, Mr. Temple returns to England with the daughter of the deceased Charlotte, and with time Mrs. Temple “began to fancy she again possessed her Charlotte.”³³ In both novels, the structure of the original family is restored, but its domestic habits and the quality of its affective ties ultimately matter more than the blood and origin of the people in it.³⁴

Thus the British gothic tradition works hand-in-glove with the sentimental novel to legitimate individuated sources of authority, which are guaranteed by and reproduced in the home. This account gives us new grounds on which to evaluate the extraordinary appeal of early British gothic novels in post-Revolutionary North America. The Radcliffe school of British gothic ultimately resolves ontological uncertainties by means of a common, rational interpretation of the world of objects. In this sense, it works in the service of a realist literary form that deals with life as it exists prior to language. That a wide range of Americans would find this narrative logic appealing for its ability to cut through problems posed by mediation and misrepresentation seems entirely plausible, especially considering that the historical events of the period conspired to foster such apprehensions. This is the same logic underwriting the popular Common Sense school of thought, which provides an immediate conviction of the reality of the external world. It makes sense that a form of writing committed to authorizing the individual as the modern prototype for self-sovereign power would have held considerable appeal for a nation in which established modes of political authority were still very much up for grabs. As Noah Webster puts it, this is a period in which “constitutions of civil government are not yet firmly established [and] national character is not yet formed.”³⁵ The unique brand of interiority with which otherwise defenseless heroines ward off tyrannical oppressors locates political power in the self-authorizing, sovereign category of the individual. Wood’s novel, moreover, locates cultural Englishness in an exemplary domestic arrangement defined by the interior life of its constituents. As a diasporic model of social relations, this family does not require that one be in England to be a member; to the contrary, it simply requires that one meets certain exemplary conditions of personhood.

The Fragile Individual

I have spent some time arguing that the early British gothic tradition opens up its constituents to collective sources of emotion that originate in other people and things to test and reaffirm the boundaries of individual autonomy. In doing so, it defends a realist world in which objects behave like objects and actions are determined by emotions that arise wholly within the mind. It is therefore fair to say that this world closely resembles the one inhabited by John Locke’s rational individual. As I explained in the Introduction, the “individual” is that modern epistemological construct whose social value resides in its interiority, mental qualities, and strict autonomy. This model preserves its self-enclosure by creating an archive of ideas within the mind that mirrors the external world. By processing these ideas through the faculty of reason, the individual ensures the strict separation of subjects and objects. Nonetheless, the mind’s susceptibility to mediated sources of information—misrepresentation, say, or collective emotion—persists as a matter of considerable concern for Locke and his philosophical successors. Indeed, the readiness with which the gothic breaks down the rational distinction between the mind and its world should be enough to suggest that the Lockean individual is, in fact, a profoundly vulnerable formulation. A brief review of Locke’s model of sensory perception will explain why.

In Locke’s original paradigm, as laid out in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, worldly encounter (or “experience”) fills the empty mind with the raw materials of sensation, which are converted into ideas about the world through the operations of reflection. As the mind becomes aware of its own perceptions, it engages the faculty of judgment to sort and classify its ideas, which accrue as an archive of information against which it can measure subsequent encounters. Locke is less clear on whether sensation precedes a capacity for reflection or the other way around; it is simply enough that the mind exerts dominion over a private field of information and emotions—or intellectual “property”—that acquires social value through disciplined mental action. He then transforms this psychological model into a paradigm for political membership when he makes property the original condition of virtue and government in “The Second Treatise of Government” (1690): “Every man has a property in his own person: this nobody has any right to but himself. The labor of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left in it, he hath mixed his labor with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes his property.”³⁶ Locke evokes the logic of terra nullius, or empty territory awaiting the inscription of sovereignty, to transform self-ownership (or property-in-oneself) into self-government, where the subject’s development of the faculty of judgment makes him sovereign over his own cognitive domain. This domain renders him eligible to contract with other subjects thus constituted. In this way, Locke lays the groundwork for a modern political culture that yokes sovereign power to national collectivity.

Important to my purposes, this model rests on a latent tautology with potentially devastating consequences. As Locke would have it, the autonomy of the individual mind is protected by the internal operations of reflection and understanding. The faculty of judgment separates the mind from the objective reality it perceives. But the materials for reflection come from objects that exist outside the mind. In other words, the very concept of autonomy on which the Lockean mind rests is at odds with the external sources from whence ideas arise. Empirical information, far from being an unmediated source of reflection, can enter the mind fully freighted with affect or meaning. Locke gets around this issue by insisting on reason’s ability to protect the mind from influences outside its control: “Every one, I think, finds in himself, a Power to begin or forbear, continue or put an end to several Actions in himself.”³⁷ Here Locke emphasizes the internality and self-enclosure of the individual mind (“in himself”) to preserve the absolute distinction between subject and surrounding objects. In this way, strictly internal causes account for individual action.

While Locke is quick to discount the possibility that our actions and emotions may originate outside the mind, this idea lives on in fiction writing associated with “sensibility.”³⁸ In the 1790s in particular, the controversy over the moral value of novel reading often centered on the reader’s emotional susceptibility, or the mind’s capacity to regulate the source and direction of its feelings. Opponents of the novel contended that fiction takes advantage of the undiscerning mind, which is particularly vulnerable to sources of information outside its control. The impressionable or uninstructed reader—especially one already prone to deep feeling—must remain vigilant against fiction’s assault on her mental faculties.³⁹ This scenario plays out in Tabitha Gilman Tinney’s satirical novel Female Quixotism (1801), for instance, where an external source of emotion—the novel—collapses the rational distinction between subjects and objects, leaving the reader unable to distinguish truth from fiction.

William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy takes up the problem of the mind’s susceptibility in the following scene, where a moralizing Mr. Holmes discusses the civic education of the ideal subject: “I would describe the human mind as an extensive plain, and knowledge as the river that should water it. If the course of the river be properly directed, the plain will be fertilized and cultivated to advantage; but if books, which are the sources that feed this river, rush into it from every quarter, it will overflow its banks, and the plain will become inundated: When, therefore, knowledge flows on in its proper channel, this extensive and valuable field, the mind, instead of being covered with stagnant waters, is cultivated to the utmost advantage.”⁴⁰ By accounting for the individual’s intellectual maturation in terms of cultivation and property, Mr. Holmes works within a familiar Lockean paradigm recognizable to American readers versed in British letters. Just as Locke describes the mind in the Essay as “white Paper, void of all Characters,” Mr. Holmes imagines the individual’s development as the process by which a “plain” (or Locke’s tabula rasa) is converted into valuable mental property through the addition of knowledge. What is this, if not the process Locke describes in the “Second Treatise” by which the rational individual is transformed into a political subject? This capacity for self-sovereignty, or what Worthy calls the “proper cultivation of [the] intelligent powers,” qualifies Myra and Worthy as a sentimental couple.⁴¹ Each recognizes in the other a unique interiority characterized by the mental properties of taste, self-regulation, and literacy Mr. Holmes describes as both exemplary and normative.

To naturalize this model of the developmental sovereign subject, Mr. Holmes takes a defensive stance against any force that might threaten it. The inexperienced mind, he tells us, must guard itself against any source of information that may cause it to “overflow” or stagnate. It is particularly vulnerable to external forces that can “rush into it from every quarter” and so hijack its rational faculties. This is a problem Locke himself obliquely acknowledged when he placed those ostensibly incapable of rational thought—women, children, slaves, and the elderly—under the care of a paternal guardian. Mr. Holmes, whose name stands in homonymic relation to Locke’s rational head of household, takes on the role of the paternal guardian by guiding the understanding of the ladies to whom he addresses this speech. In this way, William Hill Brown defends the British model of modern sovereignty, whereby the rational subject is formed mimetically in relation to a parent or guardian who regulates the readings practices of his subordinates. This figure fulfills his paternalistic function by protecting and regulating the uninstructed minds under his care and by setting certain standards of literacy as the basis of citizenship. In making this case, Brown adopts precisely the kind of rigorous defensive stance Locke himself takes in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which repeatedly dismisses any alternative to its autonomous, self-enclosed subject as, variously, “ridiculous,” “impossible,” “inconsistent,” “confused,” or “a plain contradiction.”⁴² In short, William Hill Brown adopts Locke’s enterprise and rhetorical method as his own when he normalizes and defends the propertyowning, cultivated subject of the Enlightenment tradition. Nonetheless, Mr. Holmes’s phobic stance exposes the individual as a remarkably fragile, defensive construct all too vulnerable to sources of emotion outside its control. As we shall see, this latent contradiction has far-reaching epistemological and literary consequences.

In his attempt to naturalize the Lockean mind, Mr. Holmes briefly evokes an alternative form of consciousness—one that is permeable, open to its environment, and directed by forces outside its control. He quickly wards off such a possibility as singular and dysfunctional, but the cat is out of the bag, so to speak. For the remainder of this chapter, I want to discuss how Charles Brockden Brown takes this idea of the permeable subject in a wholly different direction when he explores its potential as a plausible alternative for American subjectivity. Let us now consider how Arthur Mervyn; Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 puts flesh on the very model of anti-individualism discounted by Locke and William Hill Brown and—perhaps more important—why Charles Brockden Brown might present such a model to readers as a viable constituent for an American republic.

As Charles Brockden Brown seems well aware, the kind of sentimental, literate collective imagined by Sally Sayward Barrell Keating Wood or William Hill Brown presupposes a society of self-governing individuals who all meet the criteria of sovereign individualism as laid out in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. By the same rationale, the kind of sympathetic exchange imagined by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) can only take place between individuals who are likely to respond to emotional display in approximately the same way—a community, in short, based on resemblance rather than on difference. These assumptions turn both sympathy and the contract into exclusive forms of community. Arthur Mervyn, I argue, recognizes the limitations of Enlightenment models for a country built from diverse cultural, religious, and social traditions and sets about reconfiguring these models to suit the interests of an American readership. Written in the eighteenth-century language of empiricism and faculty psychology, this novel performs a series of revisions on Enlightenment models of the individual, sympathy, and contractualism to yield a citizen who can enter into contractual relations in a setting where disparate people of radically diverse backgrounds and interests—including the American Mervyn and the Portuguese-Jewish-British Achsa Fielding—seek to unite as a social body.⁴³ Gothic tropes effectively displace the Enlightenment individual with one that is porous, fluid, and projected beyond the metaphysical boundaries of the body.

The yellow fever, operating according to the principles of circulation and convergence, proves an apt metaphor for this alternative social organism. Just as the disease invades people and changes the way they are constituted, so this social body invades and transforms other models of community. In Arthur Mervyn, the plague spreads from Philadelphia to the homogeneous country household of the Hadwin family, exposing sympathy as an absolute basis of collectivity that collapses when called upon to incorporate radical difference and diversity. Indeed, the ghastly fate of the sentimental Hadwins indicates Brown’s deep skepticism about the sentimental household, especially when it offers itself as a model of the community at large. Rather than pathologize the yellow fever for its ability to destroy this domestic space—and thereby reproduce the more conventional critical tendency to read the fever as a toxic or damaging agent of change—I want to consider its potential as an alternative model of social relations precisely because it allows feeling to pass unimpeded between subjects.⁴⁴

Adam Smith Goes to the City

With limited “experience” and only a belated capacity for reflection, the eponymous protagonist of Arthur Mervyn initially comes to us as the very personification of Locke’s famous blank slate. Yet unlike those novels with which Ian Watt identifies a distinctly British tradition—whereby the inexperienced individual achieves personal and propertied enfranchisement through experience—this protagonist is no less vacuous at the novel’s end than at its start.⁴⁵ Despite his considerable exposure to the world, Mervyn still describes himself in the novel’s penultimate chapter as “a boy in age; bred in clownish ignorance; scarcely ushered into the world; more than childishly unlearned and raw; a barn-door simpleton; a plow-tail, kitchen-hearth, turnip-hoeing novice.”⁴⁶ Whether we take this statement as truthful or disingenuous, clearly the novel does not take the Lockean developmental trajectory (inexperience to experience) as the basis for subjectivity. Rather than read Mervyn as somehow deficient for his apparent failure to meet the conditions of exemplary citizenship, I contend that his “failure” to develop as an individual can be read as an adaptation of Enlightenment individualism to the American experience.

In Mervyn, Brown crafts a cosmopolitan city dweller whose mind cannot maintain the absolute categorical distinction between subject and object presupposed by Lockean epistemology.⁴⁷ By habitually prying into “other people’s concerns, [making] their sorrow and joys [his],” Mervyn appropriates his associates’ mental property as if it were his own.⁴⁸ That Mervyn’s violation of individual boundaries gets him into trouble at certain points in the novel and proves beneficial at others tells us exactly where Brown asserts another model of the subject and the terms on which its porousness proves a genuine and viable alternative to rational individualism. This model necessarily changes the form of community proposed by the novel in that it exposes the limits of the family and the contract as the more conventional modes of social relation.

If Locke mapped out the modern individual, then Adam Smith provided a model of community that held such individuals together as an internally cohesive society and hence a model for the nation itself.⁴⁹ For Smith, sympathy is a strictly imaginative process that begins and ends within the individual. To experience a sympathetic connection with another individual, the spectator must take an imaginative leap, as it were, putting oneself in the position of the individual or “agent” whose emotions are on display.⁵⁰ Or so Smith argues: “By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations.” As Smith’s qualifications (“as it were,” “in some measure,” “some idea”) make clear, sympathy does not transmit emotion directly from one individual to another. The spectator never shares the emotions of the “agent” of emotion, for to do so would endanger the autonomy of each. Instead, he (and Smith’s spectator, like Locke’s subject, is always implicitly “he”) experiences a compatible though lesser degree of feeling that is strictly imaginative: “These two sentiments, however, may, it is evident, have such a correspondence with one another, as is sufficient for the harmony of society. Though they will never be unisons, they may be concords, and this is all that is wanted or required.” Smith’s debt to Locke becomes especially clear at this point: reason ensures that “concord” does not capitulate to “unison,” much less the spontaneous and direct transfusion of emotion that Smith labels “contagion.”⁵¹ In this way, Smith’s model defends the concept of the individual against the possibility that emotions enter the body directly from an outside source.

We can see at this point that Smith tries to guard against the same contradiction that threatened to destabilize Locke’s model—namely, that the subject’s mind must be self-enclosed in order to be its own emotional property and yet requires an external source from which to derive sensations of pleasure and pain. To keep such a contradiction at bay, Smith creates the “internal spectator.” This monitor forms within each individual as he turns his gaze upon himself and makes sure his own display of emotions measures up to the standard he brings to bear on others—to make sure, that is, he is deserving of sympathy. From histrionics to boorish insensibility, Smith insists, the unregulated display of emotion will not be dignified with a sympathetic response. In controlling the emotions to suit standards of “propriety,” the internal spectator ultimately ensures a normative response.⁵²

Two years after its publication in 1759, Smith’s friend and colleague Adam Ferguson denounced The Theory of Moral Sentiments as “a Heap of absolute Nonsense,” taking particular issue with Smith’s claim that men want to be admired for their emotional control.⁵³ Sympathy, Ferguson countered, is merely another term for social approbation.⁵⁴ When this approbation greets a well-regulated display of emotion, it merely gratifies the agent’s “vanity” and self-regard.⁵⁵ Thus he finds Smith guilty of promoting not only the selfish passions but also the abuse of words.⁵⁶ A dyed-in-the-wool civic republican, Ferguson regards the specter of self-interest as anathema. He locates civil society in an active and closely knit community of politically minded citizens on guard against private, selfish desires. Ferguson’s ideal polity is grounded in such classic moral virtues as benevolence, charity, and martial valor—virtues he found wanting in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.⁵⁷

Ferguson’s reservations arguably come to life in the conman Welbeck, whose self-expression is shrewdly calculated to manipulate the spectator’s feelings. His performative skill is so striking in this respect that, as witness to one of these displays, Mervyn is confounded: “I could hardly persuade myself that it was the same person.”⁵⁸ Welbeck contrives his emotional spectacles to elicit feelings that serve his particular interest, and the threat he poses to republic notions of civic virtue has been thoroughly documented.⁵⁹ But Brown’s critique of Smith goes well beyond its threat to civic virtue. While Ferguson took issue with sympathy on the grounds that it undermined the political and moral health of the nation, favoring instead the more organic affections of “generosity” and “friendship” consolidated through “acquaintance and habitude,” Brown challenges Smith’s use of spectacle on the grounds that we cannot trust what we see.⁶⁰

Smith’s notion of “propriety” requires the agent to regulate his emotional display in such a way that it never exceeds or falls short of the social norm. A sense of propriety, that is, detaches the expression of feeling from the emotion that arises strictly within the agent. As Welbeck clearly demonstrates, the social expression of feeling is always performative. Sympathetic exchange is therefore possible only in a community where everyone’s internal spectator is likely to respond in approximately the same way, where both spectator and agent observe interpretative rules common to that community. This kind of sameness structures the household in domestic fiction, where people can trust each other’s emotions because there is not all that much difference between them to overcome. In Arthur Mervyn, this kind of community is exemplified in the sentimental Hadwin household. As Mervyn observes, the two Hadwin sisters Eliza and Susan “smiled and wept in unison. They thought and acted in different but not discordant keys … this diversity was productive, not of jarring, but of harmony.”⁶¹ Bonds of feeling unite the group in “harmony” while maintaining the individuality of its “different but not discordant” members. That is to say, the Hadwin household represents a community of likeminded but autonomous agents. In a culture of diversity, on the other hand, multiple interpretative standards expose the arbitrariness of a term like propriety. In such an environment, it is impossible—if not downright dangerous—to take any expression of emotion as a sign of authentic feeling. We enter a domain where expression is only arbitrarily yoked to actual emotion—where, moreover, the “internal spectator” regulating emotion is not one we necessarily share.

For the sake of argument, then, let us assume that cultural differences in Brown’s Philadelphia displace the similarity between spectator and agent necessary for sympathetic exchange. The diverse inhabitants of a city must be able to relate to one another, tolerate diversity, and cohere as a group on a basis other than the organic sameness that characterizes a Smithian community. In such an environment, Brown tells us, the sentimental conventions of domestic fiction will need to undergo radical reconfiguration. The gothic proves capable of performing such a task, as Brown sets about modifying sympathy to form a community where different interpretative strategies are in play.

Brown takes it for granted that one’s social performance of suffering or joy is no reliable index to internal feeling. On the basis of a thoroughly superficial spectacle alone, a spectator can read people wholly unconnected with himself without making any claim to know, feel responsible for, or otherwise care about the agent involved. There is no intimate commonality between spectator and agent based on an ability to feel the same way about things. They agree to tolerate differences because neither assumes that any common ground actually exists. This is an expedient form of sympathy. A superficial cohesion bridges cultural difference while preventing difference from disrupting the social body.

The Contagion Model

Brown’s first step toward making a case for expedient sympathy is to imagine a scenario in which the spectacle of suffering is detached from its source. He does so by creating a rumor of the yellow fever and allowing that rumor to act instead of the disease itself as it spreads beyond Philadelphia and enters the country household of the Hadwins. Rumor acts as the plague’s equivalent and extension in that it spreads from person to person and changes how each sees the world. Bryan Waterman calls this Brown’s “materialist theory of language,” where “words matter because they act like and even affect matter.”⁶² With rumor, emotion no longer originates within an individual or individuals but comes from an external source—language—that, like an infection, enters the subject from without. Its potency lies less in its putative truth than in its ability to grow and transform itself as it gains momentum by circulating through many different people. This exponential expansion creates an excess of meaning that allows for altogether different responses to the imagined spectacle. Emotion spreads as rumor repeats itself, and in the country domain outside Philadelphia, “[its auditors] were very different affected. As often as the tale was embellished with new incidents, or inforced [sic] by new testimony, the hearer grew pale, his breath was stifled by inquietudes, his blood was chilled and his stomach bereaved of its usual energies.… Some were haunted by a melancholy bordering upon madness, and some, in consequence of sleepless panics … were attacked by lingering or mortal diseases.”⁶³ Here we see rumor introduce diversity into a sentimental domain that has hitherto been characterized by its constituents’ ability to think the same way about things. The operations of fiction (“as often as the tale was embellished”) are held directly responsible for these varied reactions. To show that sympathy is no more normative or natural a response than any other, Brown includes an auditor who grows pale and breathes with difficulty—one, in other words, who experiences a lesser form of the disease itself. There are, on the other hand, those who take the news too personally (“some were haunted by a melancholy bordering upon madness”). If these people are badly affected by the rumor, then those who experience sleepless panic experience the account of the disease-ridden city as if it were the city itself. They fail to distinguish fact from fiction, which, in Brown’s view, amounts to contracting the disease.

When Mervyn responds to the news of the plague as pure spectacle, he, by contrast, displays the expedient form of sympathetic identification I have described: “This rumor was of a nature to absorb and suspend the whole soul. A certain sublimity is connected with enormous dangers, that imparts to our consternation or our pity, a tincture of the pleasing.… My own person was exposed to no hazard. I had leisure to conjure up terrific images and to personate the witnesses and sufferers of this calamity. This employment … was ardently pursued, and must therefore have been recommended by some nameless charm.”⁶⁴ Unlike those who react to the rumor as if it were the plague itself, Mervyn treats it as a fiction that allows him to aestheticize the sufferings of the plague victims without actually feeling them. According to Smith, anyone far removed from a spectacle of suffering—anyone like Mervyn and the other auditors who are “exposed to no hazard”—should either react to the spectacle of suffering with sympathetic distance or not react at all. As he puts it, “Whatever interest we take in the fortunes of those with whom we have no acquaintance or connexion [sic], and who are placed altogether outside our sphere of activity, can only produce anxiety to ourselves, without any manner of advantage to them.”⁶⁵ But in a devastating critique of the Enlightenment model, Mervyn’s distance from the spectacle of suffering produces an avid sense of aesthetic “charm,” as opposed to the moderated suffering that supposedly accompanies disinterest. This in itself would invalidate Smith’s notion of sympathy, which depends on proximity to the spectacle, but Mervyn’s ability to take pleasure in others’ pain marks him as lacking any form of internal spectator, at least any form that Smith would recognize.

Rather than rush to condemn Mervyn as somehow deficient, though, let us pause to consider the implications of his response at the level of community. Insofar as he responds only to pure spectacle, Mervyn becomes the agent of disease that destroys the sentimental household. As the city extends its network of communication through rumor to incorporate the domestic domain, contagion and the gathering dysfunction of community itself erodes the boundaries of the sympathetic community. Once this happens, the sympathetic operations of the sentimental community likewise change. Like all the other country auditors, each Hadwin family member reacts to the same rumor in different ways, the most extreme form of which is Susan Hadwin’s “paroxysms of a furious insanity.”⁶⁶ When, driven frantic with worry for her absent fiancé, she tries to kill herself, her feelings step out of line with the rest of her family. As the country becomes an extension of the city through the operations of the rumor, the natural bonds of sympathy are severed. Susan’s exaggerated reaction and eventual demise snap the fragile bonds of the Smithian community.

Mervyn, on the other hand, proves adaptable in the face of this paradigm shift. For all his nostalgic, unfounded longing that his sojourn with the Hadwins would prove “the return to a long-lost and much-loved home,” he cannot return to a community to which he never belonged. He remains a cultural outsider throughout the Hadwin episode, his full integration inhibited by such “obstacle[s]” as religion and economic status. Indeed, his own version of sympathy—performative, superficial, expedient—destroys this community. Consider his response to Susan’s suffering in the face of her fiancé’s absence. Susan’s hyperbolic dismay already disqualifies her as the object of sympathy, so rather than engage in such an exchange by experiencing a lesser degree of the emotion, Mervyn reacts by imagining a purely fictional scenario in which he brings back the truant fiancé safe and sound from the city: “With what transports will his arrival be hailed? How amply will their impatience and their sorrow be compensated by his return! In the spectacle of their joys, how rapturous will be my delight!”⁶⁷

Like so many of Mervyn’s reflections, this series of purely conjectural statements has no foundation in anyone’s emotions but his own. There is no such spectacle to read, only his urge to produce one. He projects what his own reaction to such a scenario would be—transport and rapture—onto other members of this community. Mervyn has not responded with sympathy to their distress; rather, he has mistaken his own emotions for those of his friends.

As a fictional construct, this fantasy nevertheless has the power to change the world because it turns sympathy into a destructive force. Its artificial allure and the approval he stands to gain prompt Mervyn, in search of the fiancé, to disappear without telling anyone of his intentions. This decision precipitates a disastrous chain of events: Hadwin follows Mervyn to the city and is fatally exposed to the yellow fever, a raving Susan dies of consumption, and the family farm falls to a brutish uncle who shares none of the Hadwin family feeling. In making his plans, Mervyn never considers that his actions may have dire consequences because he assumes that, were their situations reversed, the Hadwins would think and act the same way that he does. Once difference has intruded into the sentimental domain, those responses become unpredictable. What can really destroy a community, Brown suggests, is the assumption of sameness among its members.

On the other hand, Mervyn’s obtrusiveness proves socially advantageous when we assume that community is made of different people, all of whom will respond in different ways to any given scenario. Mervyn treats everyone, from loved ones to enemies to mere acquaintances, with the same common geniality. This democratic approach to sociability may operate destructively in those sentimental spaces that presuppose intimacy at a deeper level, but it serves Mervyn extremely well in situations where cultural difference prevails. In his encounter with Hadwin’s brother Philip, for example, the violent anger of this self-interested bully is kept at bay only by Mervyn’s unshakeable yet entirely staged affability. The apparently irreconcilable differences between Mervyn and Philip are suspended by a performative stance that Mervyn quite consciously adopts for the purpose of self-preservation. As he acknowledges, “I was indebted for my safety to an inflexible adherence to this medium.”⁶⁸ His performance of congeniality—that is, his “medium”—allows their differences to provide the basis for a functional unity. Mervyn’s superficiality works well in this scenario because he accepts the fundamental difference between two potential combatants and decides to leave those differences alone.

This kind of performativity adapts and responds to an altogether different model of subjectivity. With rumor, the source of emotion is not a single individual but an entire collective. To put it another way, feeling courses through the social body without apparent origin or destination. By generating different responses to a purely fictional spectacle, rumor undermines the notion that one can both have one’s own feelings and still share the feelings of others; those exposed to the rumor catch emotion as if it were the plague itself. With this in mind, consider Brown’s description of Philadelphia in the grip of the yellow fever: “Terror had exterminated all the sentiments of nature. Wives were deserted by husbands, and children by parents.… Men were seized by this disease in the streets; passengers fled from them; entrance into their own dwellings was denied to them; they perished in the public ways.”⁶⁹ Here Brown draws on an older literary tradition that associates descriptions of plague with disintegration and the inversion of social norms. In A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), for example, Daniel Defoe cites several instances in which conventional familial and labor relations have become monstrous: “Mothers murder[ ] their own children in their lunacy [or] hired nurses who attended infected people, us[e] them barbarously, starving them, smothering them, or by other wicked means hastening their end.”⁷⁰ In Defoe’s London, officials respond to the plague by removing many middle-class families to the country and quarantining the remaining populace by locking people in their homes. At pains to preserve the institution of the family through removal or vaccination, Defoe therefore treats these barbarous inversions of familial love as exceptional and offers many more instances in which families stick together despite the plague’s incursions.⁷¹ Brown’s yellow fever, by contrast, constitutes a full-blown assault on Smith’s model, where panic in the City of Brotherly Love destroys every emotional attachment and with it the sentimental family. In the place of a sympathetic community, Brown substitutes a social model whose dynamics resemble the contagion, using the passive voice (“men were seized”) to describe the plague as an entity that enters directly into the subject’s body and assumes control.

Mervyn’s emotional expediency qualifies him as a member of such a network. His superficiality may have destroyed the sentimental model of social relations, but it proves ideally suited to his life in the city, where he is thoroughly indiscriminate in his attachments, paying no heed to either difference or commonality: “I was formed on purpose for the gratification of social intercourse. To love and to be loved; to exchange hearts and mingle sentiments with all the virtuous and amiable … I felt no scruple on any occasion, to disclose every feeling and every event. Any one who could listen, found me willing to talk. Every talker found me willing to listen. Every one had my sympathy and kindness, without claiming it, but I claimed the kindness and sympathy of every one.”⁷² Mervyn’s emotional bonds are characterized by immediacy, spontaneity, and transfusion—he wants to “exchange” and “mingle” with others rather than preserve and distance himself. He may regard the be all and end all of social attachment as “to love and be loved,” but he repeatedly violates the foundational distinctions between subject and object implicit in that formula—namely, to love as a subject and to be loved as an object. For him, there is no difference at all. Brown dramatizes this principle by having Mervyn habitually invade people’s houses, bedrooms, parlors, even prison cells. This intrusion into private interiors reflects and produces a lack of social separation, analogous to his unwillingness to observe the imaginative boundaries that separate people’s emotions. By refusing to observe these boundaries, Mervyn breaks the Lockean rule of one-mind-per-body and introduces the possibility that one mind may exist across two bodies. The logic of individualism demands that such a possibility be foreclosed, and Mervyn consequently encounters violent reactions against his intrusions whenever he enters a domain in which that logic prevails. Whether he is shot by a prostitute or denounced as a thief, Mervyn is excluded because he represents a force that would destroy individualism. However, to grasp this notion of invasion—by Mervyn, rumor, or the plague itself—as another model of humanity altogether rather than as a disruption of Enlightenment categories, we should imagine Mervyn’s model of social relations as something on the order of a network or circuit through which information, in the shape of emotions, can travel freely.

The Gothic Contract

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

According to the logic of the social contract, the individual voluntarily gives up his antisocial tendencies and enters into a mutually beneficial agreement with other individuals who likewise relinquish their disruptive qualities.⁷³ The individual forfeits his acquisitive impulses in exchange for the protection and guarantee of his political and personal rights under the state’s authority. In submitting to the authority of a group composed of individuals just like himself, the subject has, in effect, submitted only to his own authority. As an alternative to a government based on force, the civil state thus becomes an extension of the individual himself. As Locke argues elsewhere in the “Second Treatise,” the individual acquires the rights of a citizen as he learns the laws that govern the rational subject.⁷⁴ While the logic of the exchange suggests that those rights are prerequisite, the rhetoric of the contract suggests that they are produced by it. The capacity for self-government that earns him protection is not only something he brings to the exchange. In entering the exchange (by which he agrees not to encroach upon others to earn some protection for his own person and property), the individual also acquires knowledge of those laws. At this point, the rhetorical behavior of the contract parts ways with its logic. The contract is not so much an originary moment as an ex post facto fiction of origin, creating rather than regulating the constituent parties involved.⁷⁵

The sentimental novel attests to the powerful afterlife of this paradoxical construction during the very period in which it fell out of favor in political and philosophical thought. Like the social contract, the marriage contract proceeds on assumptions of lack (where each constitutive party is fulfilled by the acquisition of some component in the other) and emotional equality (where each reciprocates the other’s compassion and understanding). It is an exchange based on merit rather than status, where the woman’s sympathy, sensibility, and innocence are regulated by the man’s experience, reason, and judgment, and vice versa. The marriage contract therefore extends and perfects the individualism of the constituent parties by giving each something he or she did not have prior to the exchange that makes them, together, add up to a complete individual at the level of the household. Thus the developmental trajectory of the individual reaches its apotheosis in the contract, which transforms the inchoate subject into a citizen with all the accoutrements of self-government. Brown demonstrates clear awareness of the sentimental promise of individual fulfillment through marriage when he refuses to allow the union of Mervyn and Eliza Hadwin.

It is a commonplace to read Mervyn’s rejection of Eliza in favor of Achsa Fielding as Brown’s symbolic denunciation of his youthful Godwinian radicalism in favor of a more conservative politics or, alternatively, as evidence of an emerging market capitalism to which Mervyn responds with what appears to be flagrant self-interest.⁷⁶ I would prefer to see what Mervyn’s choice of a marriage partner can tell us about the principle of social cohesion in a cosmopolitan setting. Let us assume that Mervyn’s prospective union with Eliza operates within a sentimental paradigm. As he puts it, “My thoughts have ever hovered over the images of wife and children with more delight than over any other images. My fancy was always active on this theme, and its reveries sufficiently extatic [sic] and glowing; but since my intercourse with this girl, my scattered visions were collected and concentrated. I had now a form and features before me, a sweet and melodious voice vibrated in my ear, my soul was filled, as it were, with her lineaments and gestures, actions, and looks.” A true man of feeling in this regard, Mervyn’s Rousseauean visions of domesticity are wholly confined to a blooming young wife, offspring, and “an hundred acres of plough-land and meadow.” Eliza appears to be Mervyn’s social equal and sentimental counterpart, but he changes his mind upon contemplating the mental qualities of his prospective bride. Although Eliza possesses the “thrilling sensibility and artless graces” that would tempt most men into marriage, she also possesses a degree of inexperience that “gave her sometimes the appearance of folly,” prompting Mervyn to question the suitability of this match: “I considered my youth, my defective education and my limited views. I had passed from my cottage into the world. I had acquired even in my transient sojourn among the busy haunts of men, more knowledge than the lucubrations and employments of all my previous years had conferred. Hence I might infer the childlike immaturity of my understanding, and the rapid progress I was still capable of making. Was this the age to form an irrevocable contract; to chuse the companion of my future life, the associate of my schemes of intellectual and benevolent activity?”⁷⁷ According to his own self-assessment, Mervyn himself is still in the state of “immaturity” that makes him less than an individual. On the other side of the exchange, Eliza lacks the literacy that would allow her to complement her husband’s position and power with taste and affection.

Mervyn’s reluctance to contract with Eliza therefore stems from the logic of the contract itself, which would see the union of the constituent parties as supplying what is lacking in each. As Mervyn is well aware, neither of them has much of anything to exchange, as both are inexperienced, destitute, and uneducated. Their union augments neither one. Mervyn rejects Eliza—wisely, one could argue—because the product of their combined deficiencies would only result in something less than a complete individual at the level of the household. By refusing their union on the grounds of deficiency in the constituent parties, Brown would seem to endorse the rhetoric of the contract. On the other hand, Mervyn’s rejection of Eliza draws attention to the logic of exclusion upon which the contract rests. Only individuals who meet certain exclusive standards of personal sovereignty are eligible to contract. Thus, when Mervyn turns from Eliza to Achsa, Brown suggests that sentimental standards are not the only standards that qualify contracting parties to make a household. Insofar as the contract determines who can marry whom, nothing short of the principles of civil society are at stake in its operations. Having demolished the sentimental kinship unit as the basis for civil society, what does Brown propose as a substitute?

Brown initially presents Mervyn’s union to a racialized heiress as the realization of a national fantasy. Fleeing a disastrous marriage in Britain, Achsa comes to America for a chance at rewriting her history. Although Mervyn falls well short of masculine norms of selfhood and affect, he is also, by the novel’s end, something of a proto-citizen in that he comes to possess many of the external attributes of American masculinity. Outwardly, he is autochthonous and has transcended the position assigned to him by birth. He is also a young man of remarkable good looks who has been acquiring cultural capital as an apprentice doctor welcome in the polite circles of Philadelphia. Thus he embodies the masculine qualities that can make Achsa an American through marriage.

But if we turn this relationship on its head, so to speak, it becomes the mirror image of the sentimental exchange whose constituent parties are inversely gendered. Mervyn is also presented in feminized terms, possessing all the affective qualities of sensibility traditionally found in a sentimental heroine. He gets weepy when he confesses to being “a mere woman.”⁷⁸ He may strike his contemporaries as an American man-on-the-make, but the internal deficiencies of inexperience and a limited understanding that stood in the way of his marriage to Eliza are still very much part of his character. By way of contrast, Achsa is, figuratively speaking, a man by Enlightenment standards. As Mervyn notes, she has “experience” in the world and is “abundant in that very knowledge in which [he] was most deficient.” She is also wealthy, literate, and independent; is considerably older than Mervyn; and acquires dependents who rely on her for patronage. Mervyn may like to call her “mamma,” but she is hardly a maternal woman, having abandoned her eight-year-old son from her previous marriage. Moreover, she lacks the physiognomy of a traditional love object; she is as “unsightly as a night-hag, tawney as a moor, the eye of a gypsey, low in stature, contemptibly diminutive.”⁷⁹ In terms of their emotional property, Mervyn brings to the contract the feelings and dependency of a female, while she brings the experience and property of a male.

This rather neat inversion at the level of gender cannot produce a sentimental couple. The split in Mervyn—presented along gendered lines as autochthonous American masculinity and vacuous British femininity—prohibits a sentimental union because Mervyn brings more than just inexperience and dependency to the contract. He also brings indigenous manhood. He has, in other words, a kind of excessive individualism that upsets the sentimental rhetoric of contractualism regardless of who actually gets to wear the pants in this relationship. Likewise, Achsa brings something to the union beyond her masculine attributes. When her unfavorable appearance is likened to that of a “night-hag,” a “moor,” and a “gypsey,” we are clearly in the presence of something in excess of both masculinity and femininity. This excess is presented in racialized terms; resembling both a moor and a gypsy, Achsa is a British Jewess of Portuguese descent who tries, unsuccessfully, to hide her mixed origins from Mervyn.

It is important to my argument that Mervyn spontaneously guess the secret of her essential difference without the aid of sensory clues. There is just something about her that tips him off, prompting him to interrupt one of their conversations:

As I live, my good mamma, those eyes of yours have told me a secret. I almost think they spoke to me; and I am not less amazed at the strangeness than at the distinctness of their story.

And pry’thee what have they said?

Perhaps I was mistaken. I might have been deceived by a fancied voice; or have confounded one word with another near akin to it; but let me die, if I did not think they said that you were—a Jew.

At this sound, her features were instantly veiled with the deepest sorrow and confusion. She put her hand to her eyes, the tears started and she sobbed.⁸⁰