Lewis and Godwin and their ‘ill-conceived sensational happenings and absurd posturings of character and rhetoric’. Brockden Brown’s work departs from the Gothic because he inaugurates ‘that particular vision of things that might be described as a heightened and mysteriously portentous representation of abstract symbols and ideas on the one hand and the involution of the private psyche’ on the other. Chase elevates Brown’s work from its social and political referents to the realm of psycho-symbolic realism. Edgar Huntly, for example, is Gothic only in tone, in its ‘highly wrought effect of horror, surprise, victimization, and the striving for abnormal psychological states’; only in its irony, symbolism and psychological interiority does Brown’s novel rise above the Gothic to become Romance.23
Critics who focused primarily on twentieth-century Gothic fiction equally ignored the genre’s historical or political contours in favour of terrors psychological. In New American Gothic, Irving Malin locates the distinction between contemporary Gothic writers and their nineteenth-century predecessors in their lack of interest in political tensions and their engagement with the ‘disorder of the buried life’. In Malin’s analysis, ‘the writers of the new American Gothic are aware of tensions between ego and super-ego, self and society; they study the field of psychological conflict’. Organized around the theme of narcissism, for Malin the typical Gothic hero is crippled by self-love. Contrasted with those heroes found in Hawthorne and Melville, who are ‘great’ and ‘Faustian’ in their narcissism, the characters of the new American Gothic are weaklings who cannot demonstrate their self-love in strong ways:‘Love for him is an attempt to create order out of chaos, strength out of weakness; however, it simply creates monsters.’24 A similar theme drives Ihab Hassan’s Radical Innocence. In his examination of works by Truman Capote, Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers, Hassan finds only ‘the self in recoil’: anti-heroes, rebel-victims and innocent narcissists all on a quest for existential fulfilment.25
Despite pronunciations of cultural disenchantment and disaffection, it is now widely acknowledged that the post-war search for an essential Americanism in the nation’s fiction was more reaffirming than adversarial, leading to what David Suchoff calls a ‘safe modernist subversion’, which valued a literature of ‘fragmentation and instability’.26 Liberalism creates, in Irving Howe’s phrase, ‘an atmosphere of blur in the realm of ideas’. To be free of conflicting ideologies, to call yourself a liberal, Howe argued, meant that you did not have to believe in anything; the new aesthetic merely sustained the period’s cultural nationalism and intellectual abdication to the right.27 It was, as Sacvan Bercovitch described it, the ‘cultural secret of academia’, the development of a new discipline ‘designed not to explore its subject’:
If America was not literally a poem in these scholar’s eyes, it was a literary canon that embodied the national promise . . . What followed was a series of investigations of the country’s ‘exceptional’ nature that was as rich, as complex, as interdisciplinary as America herself—a pluralist enterprise armed with the instruments both of aesthetic and of cognitive analysis, all bent on the appreciation of a unique cultural artefact.28
While the current movement of criticism towards historicism offers renewed relevance to the continuing inquiry into the Gothic’s meaning, the analytic and conceptual identity of American fiction is heir to the liberal model of interpretation forged in the post-war era, a mode in which history is ‘internalized as second nature and so forgotten as history’.29 The consequence is that both historians and literary critics have, to borrow Joyce Appleby’s phrase, ‘burned their bridges not to the past—but rather to past ways of looking at [the] past’.30 The central task of this book, therefore, is to approach the Gothic through a different historical lens. Republicanism and the American Gothic argues that the persistence of the Gothic imagination in the United States is more readily understood from a republican than a liberal paradigm, and that a recognition of the transatlantic exchange of ideas is crucial to an understanding of how Americans viewed their past, present and future generally, and specifically what made them distinct from their British counterparts. The importance of revolution in the development of the Gothic cannot be overstated; however, this is not solely in relation to the French Revolution as critics suggest, but to the widespread reforming impulse that characterized the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The English Revolution of 1688 and the American War of Independence, in other words, cannot be isolated from discussion of the revolutionary dimensions of the Gothic. The first aim, therefore, is to examine the central intellectual ideas influencing the revolutionary generation and, in particular, the concept of republicanism as both a political theory and as a form of discourse translated and filtered through seventeenth- and eighteenth-century radical and anti-authoritarian thinkers. While it is true that the words of the revolutionary generation remain strange to us, it is nonetheless useful to perceive events, as much as possible, as the participants themselves saw them in an attempt to rediscover the forgotten dynamism of eighteenth-century language and culture. The Gothic emerged in a period that, next to the English revolutionary decades of the seventeenth century, is the most productive era in the history of Western political thought; this historical context has not been sufficiently explored in terms of its overarching effect on eighteenth-century European and American Gothic fiction. Any attempt to interpret the Gothic outside the context of its originating Enlightenment discourse or, to explain its continuing persistence in American culture, is to ignore one of the essential organizing principles of American politics, culture and manners.‘The Enlightenment’, Fred Botting reminds us, ‘invented the Gothic’ and this is no less true in the case of American Gothic.31 This approach does not negate the influence of Puritanism on American culture; however, the focus of this study is on the secular expressions of republican ideology primarily because religion was largely removed from political discourse in the late eighteenth century due to the rapid rise of commercialism, the doctrine of separation of church and state and secular explanations for human behaviour which were formulated in the new disciplines of science, psychology, economics and law.32 While Puritanism and the concept of liberty were and remain in constant tension, it is equally true that in the process of national formation, the attempt at institutionalizing religious doctrine failed; it was secular republican ideals which not only persisted, but continued to embarrass the progress of liberal values in America. It is with these ideals that this book is primarily concerned.
The second aim is to examine the relevance of the republican tradition in cold war America. While I begin with a focus on the founding era and on the many ways republicanism preoccupied the revolutionary generation, I will also explore how republican ideals continued to shape national consciousness in the twentieth century. The central argument is that the moral and political imperatives that characterized republicanism in the late eighteenth century do not disappear with the rise of modern industrialization, but continue to equip twentieth-century liberal culture with a mode of self-criticism. Accordingly, this book will juxtapose the last decades of the eighteenth century with the early post-war decades of the twentieth century. The first reason for selecting these two periods is that the years 1780 to 1800, and 1950 to 1970 are both post-war cultures and represent moments in American history when questions of national identity and social stability were most pressing. Equally, while both periods are characterized as prosperous, optimistic and progressive, they were also periods of perceived crisis and reactionary zeal. In the early national and antebellum scene, the survival of the new republic was by no means certain. Escalating self-interest did not result in the perfection of society, but to perversions of the self and the corruption of civilization.33 In the wake of the Second World War, Americans were once again accessing the security of the republic and the value of liberalism in the face of totalitarianism, conformity and mass culture. This comparative approach advances a number of propositions. First, when viewed historically through the prism of ideas and the active transmission of these ideas from Europe to America, the distinction between British and American Gothic fiction is less precise. Whether British or American, the Gothic is nourished by the eighteenth century’s often-violent encounter with democracy (whether glorious or terrifying), with the Enlightenment’s quest for knowledge regarding the nature of man’s will and by the search for ideological myths of national origin.
