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American Literature 76.3 (2004) 437-466



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Fictional Feeling:

Philosophy, Cognitive Science, and the American Gothic

Macalester College

An interest in the deep structure of aesthetic pleasure and in the emotions that shake us when reading has in recent years come increasingly to the fore in literary and cultural studies.1 This coalescing interest has gathered strength with the waning of reader-response criticism in the nineties, which had long been criticized for its tendency to privilege meaning over feeling and interpreting over imagining in its account of the reading experience,2 and with the concurrent and important rise of sensibility studies in Americanist research, which legitimized readerly emotion as a category of analysis but tended to do so primarily insofar as it could illuminate urgent political or cultural anxieties and needs.3 In this essay I want to contribute to the discipline's renewed interest in the feelings of reading, its anticipated return to the "tears and prickles" of literature dismissed so long ago by Wimsatt and Beardsley.4 I will do so by using Charles Brockden Brown as a case study in the experience of fright. Fear is an especially suitable emotion for study, as I will argue, because of its illuminating extremity, and Brown is an especially suitable author. His works, as I hope to reveal, are among the most brilliant examinations available in the American literary tradition of what happens when readers read.5

One of the most frightened (mis)readers in all of Brown's fiction is Baxter in "The Man at Home." A character developed from Brown's observations of the yellow fever epidemics in Philadelphia in 1793 and 1797, Baxter falls ill and dies because he believes, falsely, that he has just witnessed the midnight burial of a fever-infected corpse and has therefore been exposed to the disease. This death scene, which Brown [End Page 437] returned to and replayed more extensively in his novel Ormond (1799), offered a paradox so compelling to Brown that he could only resolve it through a new, more vigorous conception of "the force of imagination."6 How could the observer of a danger not real nonetheless be physically stricken by it?

Brown's fictions are built upon this paradox and are, as I will argue, self-conscious about it. Like the later British sensation novels tracked by D. A. Miller, Brown's books function corporeally to touch the reader: they render our (real) bodies susceptible to the same physical symptoms of fear and anxiety that afflict the (unreal) characters we observe.7 As a reviewer in 1819 declared of Brown's writing, "It produces throughout the liveliest sense of danger. . . . If we do not return to [his novels], it is to avoid suffering, and not that they want fascination, and a terrible one, if we are willing to encounter it more than once."8 Another asserted that the author was unparalleled in his ability to keep the reader's "anxiety alive from first to last" and to excite "breathless apprehension."9 Alone in our bedrooms, we read that Clara Wieland, orphaned by disease, is alone in hers. She is trying to sleep but is anxious and agitated. The toll of midnight triggers thoughts of her father's mysterious death—but thought ceases suddenly when she hears a whisper from lips close to her ear. Something is in the room with her. Our pupils dilate slightly, we feel a sudden chill as the down on our arms and legs bristles. Later in the novel, Clara will suspect that this intruder, a man plotting her murder, has returned and is hiding in her closet. She approaches the closet slowly, step by step. The small muscles of our fingers, forehead, jaw, and feet contract. She lays her hand on the lock, pauses, and prepares to open it. The increasingly agitated, fractional movements of our reading bodies are a myriad of aborted, preconscious gestures of physical rescue.10 In Arthur Mervyn (1799), the protagonist enters a house heaped with bodies dead from the plague. Without warning, a contagious vapor...

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