The Apparition in the Glass: Charles Brockden Brown's American Gothic (review)

306 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 8:2 history and anthropology. But, in the short run, Darnton's sensitivity as a reader of culture would be complemented by a similar talent that had mastered the rhetorical and narrative strategies of early modem novelists. The result could be the ideal book: an historically and culturally sophisticated analysis of the whole circuit of communication, from the collection of rags for paper to the refinement of linguistic and rhetorical techniques that produced books that made the times tremble. Ronald C. Rosbottom Amherst College Bill Christopherson. 77ie Apparition in the Glass: Charles Brockden Brown's American Gothic. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993. xi + 208pp. US$35.00. ISBN 0-8203-1530-3. The title of this book alludes to a scene in Brown's Arthur Mervyn, in which the hero, searching an empty house in plague-stricken Philadelphia, catches sight in a mirror of a human figure with "a tawny skin, a form grotesquely misproportioned, brawny as Hercules " (p. 105), which strikes him on the temple, knocking him senseless. For Bill Christopherson, this image suggests Brown's overriding concern as an author of "American tales" portraying "the condition of our country." In his four Gothic novels written between 1798 and 1800, Wieland, Ormond, Arthur Mervyn, and Edgar Huntly, Brown seeks to alert his readers to the "grotesque self (p. 108) which lies beneath the new American republic's enlightened self-image. His purpose, however, is less to frighten than to awaken: his fiction offers a testing-ground for "psychological, philosophical, moral, and sociopolitical dilemmas central to turn-of-the-century America" (p. ix). Christopherson 's study provides a salutary corrective to early twentieth-century criticism, which focused almost exclusively on the psychological symbolism of Brown's novels. Building on more recent, historically oriented essays by Larzer Ziff, William Hedges, Robert S. Levine, Edwin S. Fussell, and others, Christopherson's book is a work of synthesis and consolidation rather than of major innovation. Nevertheless, it is to be welcomed as the first full-length study of Brown as a writer persistently engaged with national and political concerns. Before examining the American character of Brown's fiction, Christopherson devotes his first chapter to characterizing America itself, rightly emphasizing the political turbulence which formed the background to Brown's career as a novelist. Taking as his starting-point the familiar view of early America as a "culture of contradictions," he provides a detailed account of a nation undergoing revolutionary changes on all fronts: economic, social, and religious, as well as political and philosophical. The chief index to the American national temperament in the 1790s, however, was the reaction to the French Revolution. The changed perception of events in France from embodying high ideals to instituting atrocities led to a crisis in American national identity and a sharp polarization of political views. According to Christopherson, Brown's Gothic novels , written in this period of "bipartisan conflict" (p. 12), are post-revolutionary fictions concerned with the dangers of freedom, individualism, rationalism, and self-assertion. In a further preliminary chapter, entitled 'Toward an American Romance," Christopherson introduces Brown's fictional method and style. He singles out two aspects of the author's comments on the art of novel-writing, his interest in different forms of national literature, and his emphasis on the necessary interplay of history and romance. REVIEWS 307 Through a discussion of Brown's first and last published works of fiction, the short, serialized pieces The Man at Home (1798) and Memoirs ofCarwin, the Biloquist (1803-5), he shows that the interaction between historical themes and fictional concerns is a constant preoccupation throughout Brown's œuvre. It is odd, however, to find no mention here of Brown's major theoretical statement on fiction, "Walstein's School of History," in which he presents a critique of tiie autobiographical narrative in terms that bear directly on his own formal experiments. The absence of any sense of Brown's sceptical use of the first-person narrative makes Christopherson's remarks on fictional technique the weakest part of this study. Its strength lies in its trenchant argument for the inseparability of public and private concerns. The story is one of a shift from...