Gothic Subjects: The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 179-1861

Introduction: The Gothic Enlightenment

i n t r o d u c t i o n The Gothic Enlightenment In order to make a concrete analysis of power relations, we must abandon the juridical model of sovereignty. That model in effect presupposes that the individual is a subject with natural rights or primitive powers; it sets itself the task of accounting for the ideal genesis of the State; and finally, it makes the law the basic manifestation of power. We should be trying to study power not on the basis of the primitive terms of the relationship, but on the basis of the relationship itself, to the extent that it is the relationship itself that determines the elements on which it bears: rather than asking ideal subjects what part of themselves or their powers they have surrendered in order to let themselves become subjects, we have to look at how relations of subjugation can manufacture subjects. Similarly, rather than looking for the single form or the central point from which all forms of power derive, either by way of consequence or development, we must begin by letting them operate in their multiplicity, their differences, their specificity, and their reversibility; we must therefore study them as relations of force that intersect, refer to one another, converge, or, on the contrary, come into conflict and strive to negate one another. —Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended (1976) Say something about objectivity and subjectivity. Be sure and abuse a man called Locke. —Edgar Allan Poe, “How to Write a Blackwood Article” (1838) 2 introduction In the introduction to An Inquiry into the Human Mind (1762), noted Scottish Common Sense philosopher Thomas Reid unleashes an animated assault on his intellectual predecessor, David Hume. Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), he says, is an “abyss of skepticism,” a “ridiculous” work of “philosophical subtlety” that, like the ignis fatuus, “contradicts herself, befools her votaries, and deprives them of every object worthy to be pursued.” Deeply wary of Hume’s skeptical method and intentions—“he must either be a fool, or want to make a fool of me”—Reid draws little distinction between the Treatise and a common romance: “If [the mind] is indeed what the Treatise of Human Nature makes it,” he warns, “I find I have been only in an enchanted castle, imposed upon by spectres and apparitions. I blush inwardly to think how I have been deluded.” Like many of Hume’s detractors, Reid takes particular issue with the heretical implications of the Treatise. Hume had famously disavowed any causal connection between ideas derived from sensation and empirical proof of an objective reality, leaving his successors with the unpalatable proposition that the material world exists only as the changing impressions of a discontinuous mind and not as a stable sensory truth logically inferred from the existence of the Deity. Rejecting this challenge to rational religion and morality, Reid proposes common sense as the antidote to Hume’s pyrrhonism. Common sense (a popular metaphysic that set the standard for U.S. college curricula well into the nineteenth century) is a model of perception that assumes universal standards and thus testifies to a shared material reality on the basis of direct, intuitive conviction. As Reid sees it, Hume creates nothing but a misleading fiction when he severs the mind’s epistemic access to the external world. To drive this case home, Reid introduces the trope of the castle, and the contest over competing models of subjectivity takes a decidedly gothic turn. Conventional scholarship tells us that the metaphor of the castle—the stock-in-trade of gothic fiction—betokens everything from political tyranny to gendered oppression, ancien regime decadence to psychological trauma. Its appearance in the Inquiry tells a somewhat different story. As Reid imagines it, Hume has challenged the normative epistemological “reality” of common sense by suggesting that the continuous existence of a material world is a fiction of the imagination, not an a priori rational truth confirmed by the operations of the understanding. According to the laws of common sense, knowledge must be anchored to some empirical referent lest we invest meaning in objects that mediates between perception and reality. Reid rewrites this scenario as a gothic melodrama in which Hume temporarily introduces Introduction 3 spectral phenomena and aberrant behavior into a realist world in order to test the category of rational individualism. Persecuted by this haunting...