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Black Gothic

Carroll Smith-Rosenberg

in This Violent Empire: The Birth of an American National Identity

This chapter turns to two early republican novels to explore the ways they presented the intermix of sameness and difference, class, race, and gender during the opening days of the new Republic, when ... More

This chapter turns to two early republican novels to explore the ways they presented the intermix of sameness and difference, class, race, and gender during the opening days of the new Republic, when radical economic and political change intersected. These are Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn and Leonora Sansay's Zelica, the Creole.Less

Charles Brockden Brown, Louisiana, and the Contingencies of Empire

Robert S. Levine

in Dislocating Race & Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Nationalism

This chapter considers Brown in relation to the “affairs of Louisiana,” and points to the limits of traditional formulations of U.S. nationalism, and literary nationalism, when viewed exclusively in ... More

This chapter considers Brown in relation to the “affairs of Louisiana,” and points to the limits of traditional formulations of U.S. nationalism, and literary nationalism, when viewed exclusively in terms of the United States versus Great Britain. Imperial conflict by the Mississippi and in the Caribbean, the ongoing slave trade, and the close connections among the American Revolution, French Revolution, and Haitian Revolution were crucial to U.S. nationalism, literary nationalism, and the debates on Louisiana. There was no single nationalism or literary nationalism that encompassed all such developments. What we can say is that American literary nationalism during this period had a range of perspectives and numerous advocates and practitioners, and that the debates on the Louisiana Purchase brought a renewed attention to the dynamics of race as a constituent of nation.Less

The Transformation, the Self Devoted, and the Dead Recalled: Sympathy in Brown's Fiction

Caleb Crain

in American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation

This chapter presents a reading of three of Charles Brockden Brown's novels as parables of deformed sympathy. These are Wieland, Arthur Mervyn, and Edgar Huntly.

Classical Idols and the Early American Gothic: The Skepticism of Charles Brockden Brown

James Uden

in Spectres of Antiquity: Classical Literature and the Gothic, 1740-1830

The fifth chapter of the book moves across the Atlantic to consider the influential author of the early American Gothic, Charles Brockden Brown. Although scholars have examined classical themes in ... More

The fifth chapter of the book moves across the Atlantic to consider the influential author of the early American Gothic, Charles Brockden Brown. Although scholars have examined classical themes in certain branches of his published work, this chapter gives the first comprehensive vision of classicism in Brown, taking into account his novels, short fiction, and periodical writing. Overall, his texts communicate a powerful skepticism about the status and value of antiquity in the new nation, although Brown himself is not reticent about demonstrating his own classical erudition. The chapter centers around readings of two of Brown’s novels: Wieland; or The Transformation (1798), with its sinister vision of superstitious reverence for the Roman orator Cicero, and Ormond (1799), which encourages readers to question the conservative, classicizing vision of American culture voiced by the novel’s own narrator, Sophia. Brown’s novels illustrate well what John C. Shields has called the “acceptance and denial” pattern of American classicism, in which writers assert their own status and learning through the use of classical literature and ideas, and yet simultaneously call for a progressive departure from desiccated European tradition. The Gothic is the perfect genre for capturing that contradiction, since it expresses in sinister terms the lingering power of history over contemporary minds.Less

The Dictate of Phrenzy: Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland

Steven Connor

in Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism

It is important to try to recapture the seriousness with which Abbé Jean-Baptiste de la Chapelle and some others took the question of ventriloquism, and this chapter examines the importance of the ... More

It is important to try to recapture the seriousness with which Abbé Jean-Baptiste de la Chapelle and some others took the question of ventriloquism, and this chapter examines the importance of the topic within one of the earliest novels of the new American republic. It is also important to remember that this was the period in which ventriloquism was beginning to find its place within what would become a culture of mass entertainment. It was to be expected that the growing tendency for ventriloquism to take a narrative form would result in its appearance in more developed narratives. However, it was scarcely to be expected that a young American writer, determined to assist in the formation of a distinctively American form of novel in the early days of the new republic, would make ventriloquism the centrepiece of his work. However, this is precisely what Charles Brockden Brown did in Wieland, Or The Transformation: An American Tale.Less

Transforming into Natives: Crèvecoeur, Marrant, and Brown on Becoming Indian

Katy L. Chiles

in Transformable Race: Surprising Metamorphoses in the Literature of Early America

Chapter 3 examines how J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, John Marrant’s A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, A Black, and Charles Brockden ... More

Chapter 3 examines how J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, John Marrant’s A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, A Black, and Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly take up the natural-historical idea that race was a condition one managed to sustain rather than an immutable bodily fact. These texts explore racial transformation by featuring the protagonists’ journey among American Indian tribes. Understanding how Letters examines whites altering racially in the New World provides a new understanding of what Crèvecoeur’s “American” is. Marrant’s Narrative offers up a picture of an African American “becoming” Native American. Brown’s Edgar Huntly explores what might happen to creole whites by depicting the strange transformation Edgar undergoes. In these texts, the concept of racial transformation—rather than one of passing—underpins these literary depictions of how one’s race begins to change into that of another.Less

Property/Personhood

James D. Lilley

in Common Things: Romance and the Aesthetics of Belonging in Atlantic Modernity

In chapter 3, I focus on Charles Brockden Brown’s important novel Arthur Mervyn (1799). Brown’s text exposes the twin, Lockean foundations of U.S. political, racial, and financial ... More

In chapter 3, I focus on Charles Brockden Brown’s important novel Arthur Mervyn (1799). Brown’s text exposes the twin, Lockean foundations of U.S. political, racial, and financial communities—property and personhood—as Gothic conjurations rather than as solid, common things. Brown’s novel shows how property and its ruinous “pest” work together to coproduce the illusion of the modern subject: if Lockean property is a romance of contagion enabling the subject to connect itself, through a labor of prosthesis, to a world of property, then the pest names the “thing” that animates its ruin. No matter in which direction these circuits flow—toward accretion or decomposition, toward civilization or destitution—their contagious current produces the fantasy of isolated-but-connected subjects who inhabit a world of private, ownable things. In Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee (1836) and James Fenimore Cooper’s Autobiography of a Pocket-Handkerchief (1843), these same immunitary processes are converted into a regime of Gothic effects that include metempsychosis, mesmerism, and galvanic reanimation. Instead of ridiculing these special effects, the texts in this chapter show how they help to congeal the Anglo Saxon’s “fleshly matrix” of spirit, matter, and personhood.Less

Walking the Property:: Ownership, Space, and the Body in Motion in Edgar Huntly

Chad Luck

in The Body of Property: Antebellum American Fiction and the Phenomenology of Possession

This chapter uncovers in Charles Brockden Brown’s gothic frontier novel a sophisticated engagement with eighteenth-century sensational psychologists, including Locke, Hume, and Condillac. The ... More

This chapter uncovers in Charles Brockden Brown’s gothic frontier novel a sophisticated engagement with eighteenth-century sensational psychologists, including Locke, Hume, and Condillac. The chapter argues that in the novel’s famous cave sequence, Brown ingeniously narrativizes Condillac’s dictum that “touch teaches vision” and in so doing enacts a subterranean model of spatial orientation that directly evokes the “plenum versus vacuum” debates of Locke and Hume. The novel then links this spatio-sensory exploration to an array of eighteenth-century property laws that focus on the creation of boundary lines. It becomes clear that Brown’s fictional account of settler-Indian violence on the Pennsylvania frontier is designed to imaginatively re-walk the infamous “Walking Purchase” treaty of 1737 in which the Delaware tribe was defrauded of 750,000 acres. In doing so, the novel calls attention to the Native American bodies conveniently erased from the legal and historical record.Less

Sovereignty, Race, and Melancholy in the Transatlantic Romantic Novel

in On Lingering and Being Last: Race and Sovereignty in the New World

This chapter offers a different understanding of the role of melancholic discourse in romanticism, whatever may be the attractions of an “interested cosmopolitanism.” The author argues that the ... More

This chapter offers a different understanding of the role of melancholic discourse in romanticism, whatever may be the attractions of an “interested cosmopolitanism.” The author argues that the melancholy logic of the last produces deterritorializing effects on both sides of the Atlantic, but with a distinctively racialized cast in America. Anglophone romanticism in general was agitated by what he characterized as the political restlessness of a post-tyrannical world. His main focus is on two American novels, Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly (1799) and John Neal's Logan: A Family History (1822). An initial sense of the essential continuities and crucial differences between the English and American variants of the logic of the last can be gained, if one turns briefly to The Last Man (1826), Shelley's morose novel about the destruction of humankind by a global plague.Less

The Literary Museum and the Unsettling of the Early American Novel

Jared Gardner

in The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture

This introductory chapter discusses the intertwined histories of novel and magazine publications and how certain authors, generally attributed to the “rise of the novel,” have made a significant ... More

This introductory chapter discusses the intertwined histories of novel and magazine publications and how certain authors, generally attributed to the “rise of the novel,” have made a significant shift from novel-writing to periodical culture. In particular, the chapter examines the career of Charles Brockden Brown as he draws influences from other writers during the time while also developing an editorial function which he would work to define in his last fictions and in his periodical work of his final years. This chapter also explores the writings of a particular author whom Brown has read—Hannah Webster Foster, whose career witnesses an even more abrupt turn away from the novel.Less

The Fiction of Hesitation

Matthew Garrett

in Episodic Poetics: Politics and Literary Form after the Constitution

Chapter 3 looks to the wide field of novelistic production in the period to analyze two aspects of literary structure: plotting and narrative discourse. The episode is a problem of plotting within ... More

Chapter 3 looks to the wide field of novelistic production in the period to analyze two aspects of literary structure: plotting and narrative discourse. The episode is a problem of plotting within the field of literary production; and this problem with plotting is paradoxically also a formal solution to the problem of emplotment within the early national political imagination—that is, of the narrativization of competing claims about what will constitute a desirable social and political future. Through close attention to Susanna Rowson’s Trials of the Human Heart, Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond, and the anonymous History of Constantius and Pulchera, the chapter shows how episodic narrative in the novel functions as a form of hesitation, in terms of both narrative structure and sociopolitical meaning. In this fiction, the lack of integration of the parts into the whole reveals a formal hesitation before the historical challenges of the early republic.Less

Settler Vagrancy

Sal Nicolazzo

in Vagrant Figures: Law, Literature, and the Origins of the Police

This chapter assesses the legal and imaginative specificity of vagrancy law and its relation to land in North America. It reads Charles Brockden Brown's novels Wieland (1798) and Edgar Huntly (1799) ... More

This chapter assesses the legal and imaginative specificity of vagrancy law and its relation to land in North America. It reads Charles Brockden Brown's novels Wieland (1798) and Edgar Huntly (1799) — both long regarded as crucial and ambivalent meditations on the viability of the new American republic — alongside archival records of vagrancy arrests in Philadelphia in the 1790s. The chapter shows how the emergent category of nationally distinct American whiteness relied on figures of mobility through the frontier, yet remained uncomfortably difficult to distinguish from the criminalized (and often differently racialized) category of vagrancy. It also looks at the startling prominence of literary history in the landmark 1972 Supreme Court case Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville, which struck down vagrancy laws as unconstitutional. The chapter argues that a particularly potent literary afterlife of the figure of the vagrant rendered this figure a symbol of free, white settler mobility.Less

Vox Populi, Vox Dei: Enchanted Subjectivity in and the Post-Revolutionary World

Michelle Sizemore

in American Enchantment: Rituals of the People in the Post-Revolutionary World

This chapter presents enchanted subjectivity as a model of political subjectivity in which individuals claim to speak for God, not for themselves, as commonly assumed for a democratic society. This ... More

This chapter presents enchanted subjectivity as a model of political subjectivity in which individuals claim to speak for God, not for themselves, as commonly assumed for a democratic society. This phenomenon occurred in both the political and religious realms, as demonstrated in the popular republican expression “Vox populi, vox dei” (The voice of the people is the voice of God) and in the prophecies of the Second Great Awakening. Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798) brings together the political and religious culture of prophecy in his novel about ventriloquism, an early exploration of political theology, that is, a study of the ways in which theological principles infuse republican political arrangements.Less

Pleas for Democracy: Federalism, Expansionism, and Nativism

Elizabeth Fenton

in Religious Liberties: Anti-Catholicism and Liberal Democracy in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture

This chapter links the anti-Catholic anxieties evident in early national novels to Federalist-era debates about the relationship between a nation’s territorial scope and its capacity to protect the ... More

This chapter links the anti-Catholic anxieties evident in early national novels to Federalist-era debates about the relationship between a nation’s territorial scope and its capacity to protect the liberties of diverse citizens. Federalists argued that a large territory would best support a democratic government, while opponents argued that an expanding frontier would produce despotism. In Charles Brockden Brown’s gothic novel Wieland (1798) and Catharine Sedgwick’s historical romance Hope Leslie (1827), the Catholic embodies these debates, as it both threatens to undermine democratic practice at nation’s edge and represents the kind of minority position that said practice intends to protect. The chapter concludes with analysis of Lyman Beecher’s infamous anti-Catholic diatribe A Plea for the West (1835), an explicit articulation of concern that the expanding nation could fall prey to Catholicism at the frontier and thereby relinquish its commitments to liberty.Less

Gothic Monstrosity: Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly and the Trope of the Bestial Indian

Christine Yao

in American Gothic Culture: An Edinburgh Companion

This chapter reads the development and sedimentation of the savage image of American Indians in early American history through the American gothic’s monstrous tropes, concluding with 1799 novel Edgar ... More

This chapter reads the development and sedimentation of the savage image of American Indians in early American history through the American gothic’s monstrous tropes, concluding with 1799 novel Edgar Huntly by Charles Brockden Brown, acclaimed as the pioneer of American gothic. If for Brown the American equivalent to Gothic castles are the perils of the western wilderness, Native Americans are the monstrous equivalent of that setting’s mythical chimera. Both inhuman and antagonistic Other, for Brown the Indian, at once integral and liminal, is a quintessential element of the American gothic genre.Less

Coils: Financial Speculation and Global Revolution in Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond

Michelle Burnham

in Transoceanic America: Risk, Writing, and Revolution in the Global Pacific

This chapter reads Charles Brockden Brown’s 1799 novel Ormond in the context of Philadelphia’s newly intimate commercial relationship with the East Indies during the final decades of the eighteenth ... More

This chapter reads Charles Brockden Brown’s 1799 novel Ormond in the context of Philadelphia’s newly intimate commercial relationship with the East Indies during the final decades of the eighteenth century. The novel draws from accounts of the Pacific and Siberia by such figures as Maurice Benyowsky, August von Kotzebue, and John Ledyard. Ormond embodies many of the features of the new merchant millionaires whose Philadelphia fortunes derived from transoceanic speculations in the East India trade. Such a transoceanic context aligns Ormond’s revolutionary politics with the logic and temporality of global finance capital rather than the Illuminati conspiracy with which he is often associated. Similarly, the narrative pace of Ormond mimics the expectant temporalities of financial investment and revolutionary discourse to show how seductive spectacles of the future distract us from the present acts of violence necessary to arrive at them.Less