Abstract

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.

Share