Gothic Enlightenment: Contagion and Community in Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn

The term "gothic" is surely one of literary criticism's most elastic concepts. As either a generic category or a set of textual conventions, it can define the foundational crimes of the nation, unveil authorial intention in psychobiographical form, or relate a mythic struggle of Manichean proportions. ¹ These theoretical paradigms, all of which identify the American gothic as an expression of guilt, have a common source in Leslie Fiedler, whose greatest legacy to the field of gothic criticism has arguably been his combination of depth psychology and historiography. Ever since Fiedler first turned Indian slaughter, revolutionary patricide, and the slave trade into the gothic novel's privileged referents, American literary criticism has read gothic tropes as the gnawings of a guilty national conscience, where any fantasy of a cohesive narrative—whether that of history, the nation, or the subject—is interrupted by traumatic counternarratives. More recent criticism has updated Fiedler from multiculturalist and historicist perspectives. ² In so doing, such criticism tends to reinforce his claim that the American novel "is most essentially a gothic one" because it projects the nation's "special guilts" (142, 143). I would like to question the presumption of guilt on the grounds that psychologically inflected readings that tease out embedded allusions to an infamous and displaced past do little to explain why the gothic had such a strong and enduring appeal for an American readership. ³

To address this question, I argue that Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn; Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 (1799–1800), written in the eighteenth-century language of empiricism and faculty psychology, ⁴ performs a series of revisions on Enlightenment models of the individual, sympathy, and contractualism in order to yield a citizen who can enter into contractual relations in a setting where disparate people of radically diverse backgrounds and interests—including the American Mervyn and the Portuguese-Jewish-British Achsa Fielding—seek to unite as a social body. To devise such a model, Brown calls attention to the fact that John Locke's society of self-governing individuals assumes that its constituent members all meet the criteria of rational individualism as laid out in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Likewise, he makes the reader versed in British letters aware of the limits of the community imagined by Adam Smith. Sympathetic exchange can only take place between individuals who are likely to respond to emotional display in approximately the same way—a community, in short, based on resemblance rather than on difference. These assumptions turn both sympathy and the contract into exclusive forms of community. Recognizing the limitations of Enlightenment models for a country built from diverse cultural, religious, and social traditions, Brown sets about reconfiguring these models to suit the interests of an American readership. Taking Arthur Mervyn as a test case, I want to show that gothic tropes effectively displace the Enlightenment individual with one that is porous, fluid, and projected beyond the metaphysical boundaries of the body.

The yellow fever, operating according to the principles of circulation and convergence, proves an apt metaphor for this alternative social organism. Just as the disease invades people and changes the way they are constituted, so this social body invades and transforms other models of community. In Arthur Mervyn, the plague spreads from Philadelphia to the homogenous country household of the Hadwin family, exposing sympathy as an absolute basis of collectivity that collapses when called upon to incorporate radical difference and diversity. Indeed, the ghastly fate of the Hadwins indicates Brown's deep skepticism about the sentimental household, especially when it offers itself as a model of the community at large. Rather than pathologize the yellow fever for its ability to destroy this domestic space, I want to consider its potential as an alternative model of social relations precisely because it allows feeling to pass unimpeded between subjects.

According to my reading of Brown, the gothic offers a model of community that spoke to the interests of a diverse immigrant populace assembled in close proximity in urban centers at the turn of the eighteenth century. The inhabitants...