The English gothic novel developed, as Robert Kiely points out, from an odd fusion of the recently developed novelistic form, which attempts to portray realistically and objectively man in society, with an aesthetic theory of sublimity which turns for its effects to subjective visions of the terrifying.6 That aesthetic theory was first formulated and justified in English in Edmund Burke's influential 1757 treatise, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.7 Working from an affective, not mimetic, critical perspective,8 Burke asserts that pain rather than pleasure provides the mind with its most powerful feelings. Sublimity, he claims, has its source in "whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror" (Part 1, Sec. VII). Beauty, in contrast, consists of "that quality or those qualities in bodies by which they cause love, or some passion similar to it" (Part 111, Sec. 1). While the beautiful excites feelings of pleasure in man, the sublime, rooted In the deepest of all passions, self-preservation, excites even more powerful feelings of dread. Thus the creation of terror becomes a worthier aesthetic goal than the creation of beauty.

Investigating the sources of beauty and sublimity, Burke determines that beauty resides in that which is perceived clearly and loved. Sublimity, or terror, on the other hand, cannot be contained in the perceived finite; rather, it depends on the suggestion of something greater than man, of the infinite, unknown, and potentially dangerous. Terror, as Burke uses it and as I shall use it throughout this study, differs from fear in its addition of an element of mystery which obscures the precise amount of danger in any situation. it achieves its effect by suspending the reasoning powers in horror and awe. Cataloging, often in laughable detail, the sources of the sublime and the beautiful, Burke produces what amounts to a formula for creating each. The pleasure derived from contemplating the beautiful is easily elicited by portraying smallness, smoothness, gradual variation, delicacy, and clearness of color. Terror and sublimity are aroused by ideas of power, vastness, obscurity, darkness, magnificence, and supernaturalness.

By justifying an aesthetic which values terror more highly than any other feeling, Burke created a raison d'etre for a new literary genre which would attempt to arouse that feeling. The recently established novelistic form would hardly seem, at first thought, an appropriate base or which to build this new genre. its emphasis was on man in society, portrayed as realistically and objectively as possible, As Kiely points out, it throve on the details of every-day life.9 The powerful, the infinite, the obscure, and the supernatural seem more the province of poetry than of fiction. The new novelistic get was vital and growing, however, and responded to the challenge of accommodating this aesthetic theory. In 1764 Horace Walpole published The Castle of Otranto, a remarkable book which modified the novelistic form to fit the aesthetic of terror.

Examining Walpole's startlingly original novel, we can see the elements of Burke's formula clearly. The work is set in a crumbling medieval Gothic castle, vast, magnificent, and dark, which is permeated with gloom and supernatural horrors. A helmet grows to giant proportions and crushes Conrad, the son of Manfred, the current prince of Otranto, and a picture walks off a wall into; a room. The cause of these mysterious occurrences, and thus the ultimate source of terror in the work, is the corruption of the powerful aristocratic line of Otranto. The displacement of the pure line began long "before the period dealt with in the book, but we see an example of the consequent corruption in the character of the tyrannical Manfred. When he loses his heir he wants to cast aside his no longer fertile wife and continue his line through the beautiful young Isabella, Conrad's bethrothed. Manfred pursues Isabella through the castle's many dungeons and passageways, dark and terrifying in their unknown potential for producing danger or death. He fails to capture her, for she is helped to escape by Theodore, a seeming peasant who turns out to be the true heir of the line of Otranto. Manfred symbolizes the corruption of the whole aristocratic line. Jerome , the friar, explains to another character that "a tyrant's race must be swept from the earth to the third and fourth generation."10 Only with the reappearance of the true heir and restoration of the pure line do the terrors end. The supernatural events, the vastness, magnificence, and obscurity of the castle, and the powerful but dangerous and corrupt tyrant Manfred all combine to create an atmosphere of gloom and terror which should, according to Burke's theory, arouse feelings of sublimity in the reader.

Other novelists soon followed Walpole's lead, both in his ultimate aesthetic goal of evoking feelings of terror and thus sublimity in the reader and, to a great extent, in the machinery used to achieve that goal. Walpole discovered that Europe's ancient aristocratic social system and its physical setting provided machinery to fit Burke's formula; most writers of the novel of terror following him accepted these basic elements. The ultimate source of power and thus terror was almost invariably a member of the aristocracy or church hierarchy and the setting was either a Gothic castle or a decaying abbey. The target of the terrors was usually, as in Walpole's book, a beautiful young woman, and the power was often displayed in sexual terms. Although some of them, in their devotion to novelistic accuracy, felt the need to use explainable rather than supernatural events (a trend begun by Clara Reeve in her Old English Baron), most of them depended on at least a suggestion of the supernatural.

Ann Radcliffe, perhaps Walpole's most famous follower, used and added to Walpole's machinery. In The Mysteries of Udolpho many of the beautiful Emily St. Aubert's terrors are eventually explained away, but the real terrors of her situation are caused by Montoni, a degenerate member of a ruined line of nobility, and his wife, a relative of Emily. They keep Emily a virtual prisoner in Udolpho Castle while trying to force upon her as husband Count Morano, another member of the nobility. Udolpho Castle, like the castle of Otranto, embodies the power of an aristocratic hierarchy rooted in the past, though this time not an illegitimate line. The power inherent in the hierarchic system is used to terrorize the innocent Emily.

While in The Castle of Otranto the corruption of a noble line causes the terror, and a reversion to a pure line resolves the problem, in The Mysteries of Udolpho Radcliffe more explicitly establishes the entire aristocratic hierarchy based on a social system of the past as a source of terror. Radcliffe includes all of high class society along with Montoni and Moreno as the source of terror by establishing a clear dichotomy between those characters who move in society and are corrupt and unfeeling and those who avoid society and turn to nature instead. Emily's father praises the hero Valancourt because he "'has never been at Paris"' and is uncorrupted by high society. Though well born, the young man is acquainted with nature, not society, and possesses "the dignity of an elevated mind unbiassed by intercourse with the world."11 Society almost corrupts him when he finally does cone in contact with it, but he escapes before it ruins him. Emily, one of many "natural" heroines of this era, has close rapport with nature and is happy living with only her parents for company. When society intervenes, in the form of the degenerate aristocrats Montoni and Morano, she finds her life suddenly full of terrors as she is whisked off to Udolpho Castle.

Thus Radcliffe clearly establishes society and the aristocracy as sources of terror to which she contrasts nature and those people shaped by nature rather than by society. She strengthens this contrast by using the ability to respond to nature as an index to virtue in characters. In her books, "presumably nature is dependable, logical, and it rewards investigation,"12 Kiely asserts, while society is quite otherwise. Nature cannot enter the terrifying castle. Kiely points out that "despite the increasing importance of vistas and shady groves, gothic novels, as their titles often suggest, are particularly concerned with buildings. In fact, the abbeys and castles of early romantic fiction appear to be designed to keep nature out."13 In Radcliffe's hands Walpole's crumbling Gothic castle more clearly symbolizes the decaying aristocratic line and, going beyond Walpole, the crumbling foundations of a society based on hereditary hierarchy. As Leslie Fiedler notes, "The haunted castle of the European gothic is an apt symbol for a particular body of attitudes toward the past which was a chief concern of the genre."14

The ancient Roman Catholic hierarchy existed as a closely related alternate source of power and thus of terror for gothic novelists. Like the aristocratic hierarchy, it had its roots in the past but reached into the present. The Roman church was still misunderstood and often feared by the Anglican English at this tine, so it was obscure and mysterious as well as powerful, and thus, in Burke's terms, a suitable source of terror. Matthew Gregory ("Monk") Lewis created his famous Ambrosio, or the Monk with a corrupt abbot as villain and source of terror. His crimes include the incestuous violation of his sister as well as the murder of his mother. The Catholic Church is used by other gothicists, also. In Udolpho Radcliffe sometimes criticizes the church for perpetuating superstitions and the terrors caused by them. And in perhaps her finest work, The Italian, the villain is a monk, the corrupt monk Schedoni. The disintegrating abbeys symbolize the corrupt system of ecclesiastical privilege just as clearly as the Gothic castle symbolizes the corrupt system of aristocratic privilege. Thus terrors cone from the entrenched powers of the past--the aristocracy and the church. The villain is, as Fiedler "the devious Inquisitor, the concupiscent priest, the corrupt nobleman --or, with almost equal appropriateness, the depraved abbess or the lascivious lady of the manor."15

These long-established hierarchies and the physical structure that housed them, supplemented by various supernatural horrors set, in decaying edifices, were ready at hand to fulfill Burke's formula of power, vastness, and obscurity. Thus most gothic novelists of the eighteenth century did not stray far from the conventions established by Walpole and extended by Radcliffe and Lewis. The implications underlying this conventional location of sources of terror in the aristocracy and church hierarchies rather than, for example, in nature or in the human mind are very important. The English gothic novel is essentially radical in criticizing the established powers. This radicalism is not usually overt; most of the novels are set in the past, as in the pseudo-medieval Castle of Otranto, and some in countries other than England--often Italy, as in The Italian and The Mysteries of Udolpho, or Spain, as in Ambrosio, or the Monk. Nevertheless, Fiedler observes, "the writers of gothic novels looked on the 'gothic' times with which they dealt . . . as corrupt and detestable. Their vision of that past was bitterly critical, and they evoked the olden days not to sentimentalize but to condemn them. Most gothicists were not only avant-garde in their literary aspirations, but radical in their politics."16 Fiedler perhaps overstates his case in that last sentence; as Kiely comments, "Most early romantic novelists were not political or social radicals."17 And yet, it is an easy step from deploring a corrupt aristocracy in the past or in another country to criticizing an aristocratic system in their own England--a system which still allowed too much opportunity for abuses on the part of those in power.

Most of these gothicists, however, did not take this step. They avoided the full implications of their symbolism, and were not openly radical. But for all their avoiding or ignoring of the implications of their choice of source of terror, as Kiely continues, "they had chosen the one genre in which to give free play to private vision and extreme emotion was to come into inevitable conflict with the idea of a well-regulated society."18 The novel attempted to portray man in society realistically, and a novel of terror thus seems to imply some dislocation in society. The implicit criticism of established powers was not overlooked by defenders of the establishment, Kiely tells us:

While most of these early gothicists avoided the full consequences of the machinery they had adopted in their quest for the sublimity described by Burke, some writers used many elements of the form to express clearly a radical political stance and a positive view of man as a perfectible being whose problems are caused by a bad social system. William Godwin, in his Caleb Williams (1794), combined some of the machinery discussed above with specific moral and social ideas which he had written about elsewhere, especially in his well known work of political science, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Political Justice, published in the preceding year. He believes that the social and legal system with its privileged classes is a corrupting influence on wen. Men are not basically bad, but rather capable of being either good or evil according to their environment. With Enlightenment optimism, he believes that men are rational, and that a rational social system will produce good men. In Caleb Williams, the original first title of which was Things as They Are, Godwin censures the existing social and moral system by dramatizing the terrors it can produce. Although he uses no supernatural incidents and does not set the tale in a Gothic castle, he does create as villain and source of terror a corrupt aristocrat--this time a member of the English social hierarchy of his own time . A false aristocratic concept of pride and reputation, part of the dead weight of the past that still lives in the present, causes Falkland to cover up for his murder of an evil man by murdering two innocent observers. The terror of exposure then leads him to unrelenting pursuit of one he fears will reveal his sham . The legal inequalities of the social system allow the guilty but powerful Falkland to persecute and terrorize the innocent, powerless Caleb Williams.

In this novel, then, Godwin makes a clear connection between the terrors experienced by Caleb Williams (and, for that matter, by Falkland) and the source of these terrors, a corrupt social system, and he uses this connection for didactic purposes. Here the radical potential of the convention-dominated novel of terror in England is most fully revealed. Stripped of its less essential elements, the gothic novel in England posits as a source of terror the existing power hierarchies of European society. By adopting and maintaining, during its early years, at least, conventional machinery, it evolved as a genre essentially radical in its potential or real implications.

The conventional machinery, however, created a literary impediment for the English gothicists. Writing in a young yet well-established tradition of the realistic social novel but attempting to create subjective visions of the terrifying, English gothicists often found themselves faced with anomalies and contradictions. As Kiely points out, "Incongruity is at the very heart of [Burke's] Enquiry and of the kind of art it inspired. Philosophically, the incongruity arises out of an effort to bring personal perception into formal theoretical alignment with generally accepted conventions about objective reality." Finally, he asserts, the English gothic novel suffers from a "division of intent," a structural and stylistic breakdown. It is characterized by "a sense of unresolved struggle, of intelligence and energy at odds."21 only much later in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights does an English novelist succeed in transcending this incongruity. And Bronte's gothicism succeeds in great part because she ignores society and many of the conventions of the realistic social novel in favor of a very subjective vision of the ultimate. Thus the conventional machinery near at hand was not entirely an asset.

iii

If English novelists could easily adopt Burke's aesthetic of terror by translating his formula into readily available machinery, American novelists of the early nineteenth century were faced with a different and more difficult problem. James Fenimore Cooper voiced a common belief when he stated that one important "obstacle against which American literature has to contend, is in the poverty of materials. There is scarcely an ore which contributes to the wealth of the author, that is found, here, in veins as rich as in Europe."22 As a vast, sparsely populated country with a democratic social system, nineteenth-century America was lacking in most of the elements used by British gothicists in their romances. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed, "The principle of equality not only diverts men from the description of ideal beauty-it also diminishes the number of objects to be described."23

America had, of course, no system of hereditary rank, no aristocracy which gave a small group of people power over a great many more For its earliest years, it had very little social system of any sort, but even after the frontier was somewhat filled in, America's democratic structure forbade a fixed system of rank and power, and leveled all members of society. As Cooper says, "I have never seen a nation so much alike in my life, as the people of the United States."24 Likewise that other system of power so often us-ad as a source of terror in English gothic novels, the ecclesiastical hierarchy, was absent in America. Protestantism, though a powerful social influence on the American settlement, emphasized the we welfare of the individual soul and lacked the established power structure of the Roman Catholic (or Anglican) Church.

In England the aristocratic and ecclesiastical orders were vestiges of a past which still burdened the present. America, however, had little past of its own and was not disposed to burden itself with what it had. Tocqueville discusses this problem:

The language, the dress, and the daily actions of men in democracies are repugnant to ideal conceptions. These things are not poetical in themselves; and if it were otherwise, they would cease to be so, because they are too familiar to all those to whom the poet would speak of them. This forces the poet constantly to search below the external surface which is palpable to the senses, in order to read the inner soul: and nothing lends itself more to the delineation of the Ideal than the scrutiny of the hidden depths in the immaterial nature of man. I need not to ramble over earth and sky to discover a wondrous object woven of contrasts, of greatness and littleness infinite, of intense gloom and of amazing brightness--capable at once of exciting pity, admiration, terror, contempt. I find that object in myself.

.......................................................................

Among a democratic people poetry will not be fed with legendary lays or the memorials of old traditions. The poet will not attempt to people the universe with supernatural beings in whom his readers and his own fancy have ceased to believe; nor will he present virtues and vices in the mask of frigid personification, which are better received under their own features. All these resources fail him; but Man remains, and the poet needs no more, The destinies of mankind--man himself, taken aloof from his age and his country, and standing in the presence of Nature and of God, with his passions, his doubts, his rare prosperities and inconceivable wretchedness--will become the chief, if not the sole theme of poetry among these nations.32

Tocqueville's statement, I shall show, is very accurate with respect to the gothic genre. The American gothicist turns to the human mind and soul as his principal subject and, ultimately, his source of terror, reversing the radical implications of the English gothic novel.

 

 

CHAPTER I

THE INWARD TURN: CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN

Charles Brockden Brown's position in literary history as America's first significant novelist has long been secure. Brown, unlike those few who preceded him and many of those who followed him, attempted to establish and support himself as a serious novelist. During his short career he produced six novels, four of which have received considerable critical attention in the last two decades, in addition to the historical attention always rendered to them. Perhaps even more significantly, he chose to use American rather than English materials in his works. In an article in Weekly Magazine, as well as in the preface to Edgar Huntly and elsewhere, he self-consciously advocated the use of American materials, claiming that "our ecclesiastical and political systems, our domestic and social maxims, are, in many respects, entirely our own."1 His importance in American literature, however, goes beyond the simple introduction of American materials into literature, Many have seen in him the direct predecessor of Poe, Hawthorne, Faulkner, and others, "the originator of that strand of dark romance that runs through the [American] tradition."2

Brown did not, however, create American literature in a vacuum. The English literary tradition was at hand, and he did not ignore it. As Lulu Rumsey Wiley comments, "He could not break away at once from the form and me method of handling his material, but he surely sought new material from the manners and thoughts of the [American people] and from the events and nature of the country." In fact, Wiley sees elements of five major schools of the contemporary English novel in Brown's novels- "the school of Sentiment, the Autobiographical story, the Historical Tale, the School of Terror and the Rationalistic School of Theory."3 of these schools, the School of Terror, that is, the gothic genre, can be seen as one of the most significant components, especially in Brown's two finest works, Wieland and Edgar Huntly. The mood of terror and mystery that shrouds the English gothic pervades these books, also. Yet an article by Robert D. Hume points out many of the ways in which Brown differs from the English gothic writers. While Hume overstates his case when he denies the usefulness of viewing Brown's novels in the gothic tradition,4 the books are certainly different from those of Radcliffe, for example. Clearly the gothic novel underwent considerable change when it crossed the Atlantic. This transformation is exactly what I wish to consider. The imaginative modifications of the English school of terror made by Brown in order to suit his own aesthetic sense and American materials were a major shaping influence on much that followed in American literature up to the Civil War.

Brown's temperament, often melancholy and morbid to the point of abnormality,5 made it almost inevitable that he would be influenced by and experiment with the aesthetic of terror. R. H. Dana, reviewing the first complete edition of Brown's novels in 1827, commented that "the energies of his soul were me lancholy powers, and their paths lay along the dusky dwelling-places of superstition, and fear, and death, and woe."6 Writing over a century later, biographer Harry Warfel agreed with this assessment: "Overburdened with thought, he failed to see opportunities for portraying ordinary human experience; he preferred terror, melodrama, and abnormality."7 These elements played a primary role in his four major novels, Wieland, Ormond, Arthur Mervyn, and Edgar Huntly, all written in a two year period between 1798 and 1800. in his last two novels, Clara Howard and Jane Talbot (both written in 1801), he abandoned the melancholy and terrifying tone and subject matter, perhaps at the pressure of family and friends. Ernest Marchand and others have seen this as "the sad spectacle of an artist bowing to popular prejudice,"8 Whatever the biographical cause, the aesthetic effect is clear: no one would claim greatness for the latter two novels. Brown's place at the head of the American novelistic tradition rests on the first four novels.

The gothic novel was in its first full flowering in England in the 1790's. Radcliffe, with her explained supernatural, was popularizing the mode started by Walpole, and in 1794 Godwin combined gothic terror with his overtly radical ideas in Caleb Williams. Brown knew and admired the work of both these authors. He praised Radcliffe for her picturesque descriptions in an article "On a Taste for the Picturesque,"9 and, we shall see later, drew heavily on her and on other writers for his nature description. Godwin he idolized both for his radical ideas, shared by Brown in his younger days, though Brown did not necessarily acquire them from Godwin,10 and for his way of conveying them in Caleb Williams, set up by Brown as a touchstone of novelistic excellence to which he compared his own works.11 A man of his times, Brown had also thoroughly imbibed the aesthetic theory of sublimity as we saw it recorded by Burke. He aimed at eliciting the strongest possible feelings, those that produced sublimity, from his audience; he sought "to enchain the attention and ravish the souls" of his readers. He thought a novel "should be a 'contexture of facts capable of suspending the faculties of every soul in curiosity"12 and terror. While not all of the gothicists would have agreed with him that the gothic novel must be made up of facts alone, all of them would have agreed that the gothic novel aimed to "suspend the faculties" of its readers. And, as Radcliffe had shown, this could be done without depending, as Walpole had, on supernatural manifestations. As an enlightened young man, Brown rejected supernaturalism from the start.

As familiar as he was with the Radcliffean tradition, however, he did not crudely uproot the Gothic castle and replant it in America as Isaac Mitchell would do a few years later in The Asylum; or, Alonzo an Melissa. Brown was an artist, not an imitator, and he was, as I mentioned above, a self-consciously American artist, He rejected the "puerile superstition and exploded manners, Gothic castles and chimeras"13 of the English gothic novel entirely. He was an American, and America had no decaying Gothic castles and abbeys and no social system of the past to turn to as setting and source of terror. Society was in its formative stages, not a decaying state. What, then, could he turn to in America to create the same effect of brooding terror—of fear of something unknown and terrible? Fiedler states the problem succinctly:

The gothic, after all, had been invented to deal with the past and with history from a typically Protestant and enlightened point of view; but what could one do with the form in a country which, however Protestant and enlightened, had . . . neither a proper past nor a history? . . . But what was to be done about the social status of such hero-villains? . . . But what of the haunted castle, the ruined abbey, the dungeons of the Inquisitions?14

In his four novels Brown turned to various settings and sources of terror from Philadelphia to the wilderness of Norwalk, from the yellow fever to Indians and panthers, But throughout, in the absence of a terrifying, established state or church, his persistent interest and, finally, his implied source of terror is the human mind.

Of the four major novels, Ormond and Arthur Mervyn are the least gothic in atmosphere, so I shall deal with them briefly before concentrating on Wieland and Edgar Huntly. Since the novels were written during such a short period of time , several at once, chronological development is not significant and may safely be ignored.

* * *

Much of Ormond seems to be more in the sent imental-domes tic than the gothic genre, though heroine Constantia's rationalism and lack of sentimentality prevent us from feeling too much of the pity the true sentimentalist tries to elicit. Donald Ringe makes a good case that Ormond is a feminist novel concerned with the proper education of a woman, admitting, though, that Brown loses focus on this purpose in the melodramatic, gothic ending which many have severely criticized.15 In spite of its similarity to other genres, the book does have two extended passages clearly gothic in atmosphere--the ending just mentioned and the yellow fever sections--and a villain who finally rivals those of the English gothic novels. Ernest Marchand places it "about midway in the series of Brown's novels. In it he abandons the marvelous of Wieland (except for a faint suggestion seen in Ormond's almost superhuman skill at disguise), but retains and develops in the hero-villain of the title role the conception of character first revealed in Carwin."16

Yellow fever is not as important a source of terror in Ormond as in Arthur Mervyn, but it is the first occurrence which elicits terror, not just courage and determination, from Constantia and the reader. Brown had lived through the epidemics of 1793 and 1798, and in the latter had helplessly watched 'his close friend Elihu Hubbard Smith die while he himself contracted the disease but recovered. We know from a letter to his brother Janes that as early as October of 1796 he contemplated using the plague as a literary subject.17 It was a potential source of terror found in America, though not confined to it, Moreover, the plague was a natural phenomenon rather than a "puerile superstition." At first this very real disease seems to be substitute( directly for supernatural manifestations or suggestions. To Constantia it is an "unseen and terrible foe" which causes "trepidations . . . mingled with emotions not unakin to sublimity."18 The theory of terror and the sublime from which the gothic emerged clearly underlies her vision. Here is something her rationality cannot combat.

Brown does not sustain this natural (as opposed to supernatural or human) terror in its pure form for very long, however.19 Brown's interest is always in the human mind, and he soon shifts the source of terror from the disease itself to the irrational human reactions to it The most gothic passage is the midnight burial witnessed by Baxter. Baxter's ensuing illness, Sophia tells us, is "an example of the force of imagination." Panic, she says, activated the disease which otherwise "might perhaps have lain dormant" (p. 38). We are also informed about the terrifying end of Whiston. He attempts to flee from the disease, leaving his sister dying, but his flight and "mental as well as bodily anguish" bring on the disease in him (p. 40). Whiston's irrationality is compounded by the reactions of people at the farm where he falls ill. Terrified of the illness, they refuse to go near enough to him to aid him or to bury his body when he dies. This in turn causes the disease to attack them. Again, irrational human panic in the face of the disease becomes the true source of terror. Even though most of the plague scenes are set in the city, Brown can turn to no social system as source of terror. The disease is natural, and the human irrationality it elicits does not depend on rank or privilege. The yellow fever becomes almost symbolic of the irrational element in the human psyche.

These epidemic scenes, however, form only a minor episode in Ormond. More important in terms of gothicism is Ormond's function as gothic villain, a role which culminates in the terrifying final scenes of the novel. Brown had theorized in a Weekly Magazine article that "Great energy employed in the promotion of vicious purposes, constitutes a very useful spectacle."20 And he need only have looked at Caleb Williams to find a model. In Falkland, Godwin presents overtly the characteristics implied in pure gothic novels like those of Radcliffe and Walpole. The villain is a man of great potential warped by the codes of society and by the power that such a social system gives him. Brown was faced with a problem, however, in transferring this conception of the villain-hero into an American book. Often, as we shall see, he has no single, dominant villain. In the egalitarian society of America, where was he to turn for such a powerful figure?

In a curious and, on one level, very significant inversion, he creates in this novel a villain whose power derives not from his position in a social hierarchy, but from his membership in a group whose goal is to overthrow such hierarchies and establish a utopian society. Ormond believes that man is basically good and capable of great things, "but he carefully distinguishe[s] between men in the abstract, and men as they are." Men as they are are corrupted by society: "A mortal poison pervaded the whole system, by mans of which every thing received was converted into bane and purulence." "The principles of the social machine must be rectified before man can be beneficially active," and Brown hints that the goal of the secret society is to do so (p. 92). He models the radical organization, as Lillie D. Loshe and others have pointed out, on the existing secret society of Illuminati, grafting onto their mysterious power and "their indifference to the employment of evil mans if the end attained be good"21 the view of man and society vaguely implied by most English gothic novels and clearly presented in Caleb Williams.

The reversal of the nature of the villain and thus the implications of the novel, on one level, is complete. Warfel, for example, asserts of Ormond that "in him evil flourishes as a result of an intellectually conceived principle"22--and the principle is Godwinian enlightened rationalism. This would seem to make radicalism the source of terror and the existing social order good, The novel is more complex and subtle than this reading would indicate, however, and the implications more significant. As John Cleman has convincingly argued, "Gratification of personal desires or passions, especially the sex urge, is the main well-spring of evil in Brown's arch-villains," rather than principle.23 Ormond's final attack on Constantia seems, as many critics have noted, too extreme and violent for a character who has depended on his reasoning, specious though it may be, up to this point.24 It is not wholly unbelievable, however. He has been driven throughout the novel by a desire for power over others and by simple lust, and when more subtle mans fail, he turns to violence to secure his desires.

Ormond's human passions, then, not his radical principles, are the true source of his villainy. Irrational urges are not, however, limited to Ormond. The "Imp of the Perverse" (to look ahead to Poe's term) resides in everyone. Constantia contributes to her own danger by her irrational attraction to Ormond. Even the admiring Sophia observes,

In no case, perhaps, is the decision of a human being impartial, or totally uninfluenced by sinister and selfish motives. If Constantia surpassed others, it was not because her motives were pure, but because they possessed more of purity than those of others. Sinister considerations flow in upon us through imperceptible channels, and modify our thoughts in numberless ways, without our being conscious of their presence. (p. 130)

 

 

REFERENCES

6 Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), pp. 3-6.

7 My quotations are from Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ad. J. T. Boulton (London- Routledge and Kagan Paul, 1958), but for ease of comparison I shall refer to part and section number rather than to page number.

8 The very adoption of an affective critical theory is a significant break with the young novelistic tradition, based as it was on the imitation of reality. But literature, Burke argues, is not suited to imitating reality as visual forms of art aret "In reality poetry and rhetoric do not succeed in exact description so well as painting does; their business is to affect rather by sympathy than imitation; to display rather the effect of things on the mind of the speaker, or of others, than to present a clear idea of the things themselves" (Part V, Section 5). This critical focus on the feelings of the perceiver rather than on an external, objective reality necessarily implies an affectivity new to the novel. Novelists who accepted this theory and wished to elicit feelings of sublimity had to shift their perspective from the world without to the feelings within the reader. I shall comment below on the problems created by the shift.

9 Kiely, p. 9.

10 Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764; rpt. London: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 91.

11 Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (179-14; rpt. London: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 41, 49.

12 Kiely, p. 67.

13 Kiely, P. 253.

14 Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, rev. ed. (N.Y.: Stein and Day, 1966), pp. 144-45.

15 Fiedler, p. 132.

16 Fiedler, p. 137.

17 Kiely, p. 22.

18 Kiely, p. 22.

19 Kiely, p. 119.

20 Kiely p. 36.

21 Kiely pp. 14-15, 1.

22 James Fenimore Cooper, Notions of the Americans, intro. by Robert E. Spiller, American Classics (N.Y.: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1963), p. 108.

23 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve Esq. with preface and notes by John C. Spencer, 5th ed. (N.Y.: H. G. Langley, 1843), p. 76.

24 Cooper, p. 108.

25 Tocqueville, p. 76.

26 R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), p. 5.

27 Tocqueville, p. 76.

28 Cooper, p. 108.

29 In The Rise of the American Novel (N.Y.: American Book Company, 1951) Alexander Cowie says the book -was "probably one of the most popular works of fiction written in nineteenth-century America" (p. 104).

30 Tocqueville, p. 75.

31 Tocqueville, pp. 77-78

32 Tocqueville, pp. 80-81.

 

CHAPTER 1, THE INWARD TURN

1 Quoted in Ernest Marchand, "Introduction," Charles Brockden Brown's Ormond, American Fiction Series (N.Y.: American Book Company, 1937), p. xx.

2 Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957), p. 30. See also Lulu Rumsey Wiley, The Sources and Influences of the Novels of Charles Brockden Brown (N.Y.: Vantage Press 1950), p. 52; and Harry R. Warfel, Charles Brown: American Gothic Novelist (Gainesville- University of Florida Press, 1949), p. 4.

3 Wiley, p. 52, 58.

4 Robert D. Hum , "Charles Brockden Brown and the Uses of Gothicism A Reassessment," ESQ, 66 (1972), 10-18. Hume supports his argument with two major points. First, he says the books do not have a single, dominating hero-villain who is attractive and terrifying at the same time. This is simply one of the differences dictated by American materials, however, as I will discuss later in the chapter. The terror and mystery that make the works gothic do not demand such a villain. A potentially more damaging criticism is his claim that the books do not evoke terror in the reader, but dispassionately study the effects of terror on the characters. Contemporaries and later readers alike have dissented. By focusing on the reactions of the characters to events, he creates in us "thoughts and feelings only a little less powerful" than those of the characters, as Wiley tells us (p. 80).

5 William Dunlap (The Life of Charles Brockden Brown, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: James P. Parke, 1815)) and other biographers cite a letter to Dunlap expressing, as Donald A. Ringe puts it, "such extremes of morbid self-consciousness and depths of self-abhorrence that Dunlap did not acknowledge it" (Charles Brockden Brown, Twayne's United States Authors Series, 98 (N.Y.: Twayne Publishers, 1966), p. 22). At another time Elihu G. Smith unsuccessfully tried to counter his morbidity by presenting rational reasons against it (Warfel, p. 58). This streak, however, was probably never exorcised; it was only subdued by the pressures of his brother and friends.

6 Richard H. Dana, Sr., Review of the novels of Charles Brockden Brown, The U.S. Review and Literary Gazette, 2 (Aug. 1827), 323.

7 Warfel, p. 12.

8 Ernest Marchand, "The Literary Opinions of Charles Brockden Brown," Studies in Philology, 31 (1934), 549-50.

9 Literary Magazine 2 (June, 1804), 165, as cited in Marchand, "Literary Opinions," 556.

10 See Chase, p. 34; Ringe, p. 19; Coad, p. 81; etc.

11 See journal entry quoted in Lillie D. Loshe, The Early American Novel (N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1907), p. 32.

12 Letter to Weekly Magazine announcing appearance of Skywalk, as quoted in Marchand, "Literary Opinions," 556.

13 Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep Walker, ed. with introduction by David Stineback (New Haven, Connecticut: College and University Press, 1973), p. 29.

14 Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (N.Y. Criterion Books, 1960), pp. 128-9.

15 Ringe, pp. 50-64.

16 Marchand, Introduction to Ormond, p. xxix.

17 0ctober 25, 1796 letter, quoted in David Lee Clark, Charles Brockden Brown- Pioneer Voice of America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1952), p. 156.

18 0rmond, as cited above. Further references to this novel will be to the same edition and will be indicated by parenthetical page references in the text.

19 John Cleman argues this very persuasively in the opening pages of "Ambiguous Evil: A Study of Villains and Heroes in Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland," Early American Literature, 10 (1975), 192-3.

20 "Man at Home " Weekly Magazine, I (March 31, 1798), 257. Cited in Marchand, Introduction to Ormond, p. xxviii.

21 Loshe, p. 41, and elsewhere.

22 Warfel, p. 132.

23 Cleman, 198.

24 See, for example, Ringe, p. 61.

Used with permission from JoAnne Yates, Ph.D.

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