Notes
n o t e s introduction 1. Reid, Inquiry, 18, 16, 20. 2. Ibid., 20, 17–18. 3. John Witherspoon issues this challenge to the skeptical school of Hume and Berkeley: “That our senses are to be trusted in the information they give us, seems to me a first principle, because they are the foundation of all our after reasoning . . . [whereas] the immaterial system, is a wild and ridiculous attempt to unsettle the principles of common sense by metaphysical reasoning, which can hardly produce any thing but contempt in the generality of persons who hear it.” Lectures, 15. William Charvat points out that one of the principal objectives of the Common Sense school was to combat the skeptical philosophy of Hume and Berkeley. Origins, 33. As I. Woodbridge Riley puts it, common sense offered “an aid to faith, a safeguard against morality against the skepticism of Hume and the atheism of the Voltarians.” American Philosophy, 476. 4. Reid is not the only metaphysician to construe the principles of idealism as a fiction to be banished by common sense. In one of his lectures on law entitled “Of Man, as an Individual,” James Wilson turns his attention briefly to the skeptical proposition that “we perceive not external objects themselves, but only ideas; the necessary consequence must be, that we cannot be certain that anything, except those ideas, exists.” To this proposition he responds, “We shall have occasion to examine these castles, which have not even air to support them. Suffice it, at present, to observe, that the existence of the objects of our external senses, in the way and manner in which we perceive that existence, is a branch of intuitive knowledge, and a matter of absolute certainty.” Works, 1:202. Emphasis mine. Drawing on much the same language as Reid, Poe’s narrator in “MS. Found in a Bottle” (1833) calls philosophical skepticism “the ignes fatui of superstition” and the “common error of this age.” Selected Writings, 107. All subsequent citations to Poe’s works are from the Norton edition unless otherwise stated. 5. See, for example, Anne Williams, Art; Kate Ellis, Contested Castle; and Botting, Gothic. 6. Pinch, Strange Fits, 111. 7. Morris, Imagining, 47. 174 notes to pages 4–8 8. Nancy Armstrong sums up this cultural work: “If mainstream novels offered readers the fantasy of domestic plentitude or wholeness of being within the household, then popular romances rendered all alternatives to such a household as a monstrous life form capable of transforming the individual from a self-governing citizen into an instrument of group desire.” How Novels Think, 22–25. On the relationship between the English gothic novel and Enlightenment epistemologies of selfhood, see especially Armstrong, How Novels Think; Tennenhouse, Importance; and Pinch, Strange Fits. These critics participate in the recent revisionist turn—spearheaded by critics such as Fred Botting, David Punter, Robert Mighall, and Chris Baldick—that has lately distinguished British gothic studies. 9. See Ringe, American Gothic, 13–35. I discuss this publication history at greater length in Chapter 1. 10. de Crèvecoeur, Letters, 201; Benjamin Rush, Letters, 1:454; Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly, 9. 11. Jean V. Matthews, Toward, 3. On the social and ethnic diversity of the postRevolutionary American population, see Riordan, Many Identities. Leonard Tennenhouse has argued that broken and makeshift families are an indelible fact of the late eighteenthcentury American experience, causally connected to the kind of international migration we see in novels like Sansay’s Secret History (1808) or Tyler’s Algerine Captive (1797): “The British diaspora in America was made up of a large number of partial families, transplanted second sons, as well as a disproportionately large ratio of single men to unmarried women who emigrated to America under a variety of contracts and conditions. As a result, during and immediately following the very substantial emigrations from Britain from the 1750s to the 1770s, and again after 1781, there was a sizeable population of fractured and makeshift families.” Importance, 44. 12. Franklin, Works, 976. 13. Ibid., 978. 14. Rebecca Rush, Kelroy, 67. 15. On the social and political disturbances of the post-Revolutionary era, see Davidson , Revolution, 216–19, and Gordon Wood, Empire, 13–31. 16. Lukasik, Discerning, 12. 17. Tennenhouse, Importance, 3. 18. See Nancy Armstrong, How Novels Think, 20–25 and throughout. 19. Castiglia, Interior, 2; Button, Contract, 6. 20. The individual takes shape across a range of early British and American discourses , including the novel, that mandate the acquisition of...
OR
Buy This Book in Print