The Asylum; or, Alonzo and Melissa by Isaac Mitchell (review)

In 2012, Richard Pressman established Early American Reprints, a not-for-profit press housed at St. Mary's University in San Antonio designed to provide reader-friendly and affordable editions of early American texts that might otherwise be unavailable for classroom use. The Asylum—the press's fourth offering—is a wonderful addition to this effort. Published first in serial form in 1804 and then as a book in 1811, it was deeply beloved in its own day—Cathy Davidson has called it "the single most popular Gothic novel in early America" (Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America, 1986, 225). But it has largely fallen out of circulation today, even among academics specializing in the period, displaced by the legacy of Charles Brockden Brown (Mitchell's contemporary), whom scholars have positioned as a more coherent predecessor to Poe, Hawthorne, and other inheritors of the gothic tradition.

Leonard Tennenhouse's wide-ranging and erudite introduction touches on this issue of gothic inheritance among other themes. The Asylum, he argues convincingly, borrows from the British gothic tradition while up dating it to fit the regional and sociopolitical imperatives of the new nation. At the heart of Mitchell's story are two female protagonists—Selina and Melissa—both subjugated by paternal figures more interested in their own economic advancement than in their daughters' well-being. But while Selina's fate hues more closely to that of the traditional British heroine, Melissa's story line offers us something fundamentally new—a dismantling of "the Old World practice of trading women for property" (13). In deed, Melissa is an unusually spirited and singular heroine. When imprisoned by her father in a gothic castle, rather than cowering terrified, she investigates the mansion, attempting to counter the forces of aristocratic domination with American pluck and ingenuity. Later in the novel, Melissa, having finally located her doleful lover, Alonzo, after months of forcible separation, does not reveal herself immediately but rather tests his fidelity (and his sense of humor) by posing as a veiled woman romantically interested in him. In this way, she resembles another minor but memorable female character in the novel—Miss Malcomb, who plays a trick on her brother by cross-dressing as his fiance's secret lover. While Miss Malcomb's fate turns out worse than Melissa's—she's murdered by her brother in his jealous rage—these two women present deeply unusual female protagonists, trickster figures, if you will, who upend our expectations of the gothic heroine.

The protofeminist aspects of the novel will surely make for lively class room discussion, as will its Revolutionary War setting and the intriguing figure of Benjamin Franklin, who makes a brief cameo. Students may be put off by The Asylums complicated framing, its multiple storylines and convoluted plot twists spanning three countries, but, as Tennenhouse argues, these are important aspects of Mitchell's innovative authorial vision. If the wars between England, France, and the colonies scattered families and possessions, leaving disunity and economic mayhem in their wake, then the cross-cutting plots of The Asylum reconstitute this chaos into something resembling social stability. As Alonzo travels across territories and nations in search of Melissa and (when he supposes her to be dead) his life's purpose, he gathers and disseminates information, establishing crucial networks of knowledge, communication, and transparency. In Tennenhouse's words, "With legibility comes social order and political legitimacy" (16).

In addition to its excellent introduction, this edition of The Asylum boasts copious footnotes, particularly helpful for parsing Patriot and Loyalist references in the Revolutionary period. It also contains Isaac Mitchell's 1806 farewell editorial in The Political Barometer, a paper he edited and that first serialized The Asylum in abbreviated form. While it would have been helpful for this editorial to have been contextualized (no notes ac company it and it goes unnoticed by Tennenhouse), it is fascinating as an early articulation...