UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA, IRVINE Gothic Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literature DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE Gothic Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literature DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in English by Brian Joseph Fonken Dissertation Committee: Chancellor’s Professor Brook Thomas, Chair Associate Professor Arlene Keizer Associate Professor Rodrigo Lazo 2015 © 2015 Brian Joseph Fonken TABLE OF CONTENTS Page LIST OF FIGURES iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iv CURRICULUM VITAE v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION vi INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1: The Hideous Designs of Abolitionism-Era Writing 16 CHAPTER 2: Questionable Shapes, Invisible Empires: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of the Ku Klux Klan 63 CHAPTER 3: Gothic Acts of Reading in the Literature of the Nadir 121 WORKS CITED 186 ii LIST OF FIGURES Page Figure 1 The Ride for Life 95 Figure 2 The Masked Sentinel 95 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I owe the deepest thanks to Brook Thomas, my advisor and committee chair. Without his careful reading of my work and his persistent encouragement throughout the process this dissertation would never have been completed. I often felt like he understood my argument better than I did, and it was incredibly useful to complete my first writing project of this magnitude under the direction of somebody with such clarity of vision, from whom I have learned much about how to structure an argument (not to mention how to avoid splitting an infinitive). As a scholar, his breadth of knowledge of American literature has been inspirational, if daunting; as a mentor, his thoughtfulness (a clipping left in the department mailbox, an encouraging word before an exam) has been extraordinary; and as a colleague his genuine interest and kind remarks have been invaluable, helping to get me through the more difficult stages of drafting this dissertation. Thank you to Arlene Keizer, whose feedback and support combine a seemingly impossible mixture of intellectual rigor and laid-back encouragement. (I am also grateful that she agreed to be on my committee after suffering through the seminar paper I wrote for her during my first quarter of graduate school.) Rodrigo Lazo has been a great mentor in all aspects of the profession. In addition to his contributions to my dissertation, I am indebted to him for the great deal that I learned while working with him while teaching in the English 28 series. I received valuable feedback from a number of readers over the past few years. A big thanks to Daniel Gross, who helped me to avoid some of the perils of discussing rhetoric and to escape reductive readings of eighteenth-century gothic. Thanks to professors Jayne Lewis, Ann Van Sant, Richard Godden, Virginia Jackson, Steve Mailloux, and Gail Hart for their valuable feedback as well. I also received great comments from Elaine Parsons and Scott Romine, and got some help early in the project from Robert Levine and Geoffrey Sanborn. My fellow graduate students Erin Sweeney and Rebecca Balon also contributed wonderful ideas and feedback. Finally, I would like to thank Robert and Vivian Folkenflik for their financial support through the Nora Folkenflik Summer Dissertation Fellowship. iv CURRICULUM VITAE Brian Joseph Fonken 2005 B.A. in English and Plan II Honors, University of Texas, Austin 2009 M.A. in English, University of California, Irvine 2015 Ph.D. in English, University of California, Irvine FIELD OF STUDY Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Gothic Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literature By Brian Joseph Fonken Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Irvine, 2015 Chancellor’s Professor Brook Thomas, Chair My dissertation takes a new approach to the study of the American gothic, focusing on the rhetorical strategies by which authors chose to deploy the conventions of gothic writing. While many investigations into the American gothic presuppose a national subject, whose fears and desires can be located and diagnosed, I argue that such a subject is incoherent, and that the psychic cartography of fear in nineteenth-century America varied widely from North to South, master to slave, carpetbagger to scalawag, white supremacist to freedperson. That being the case, it makes sense to read the gothic not as an essential feature of the writing this dissertation examines, but as a set of tropes and conventions which circulated through a variety of texts depicting spectacles of horror or reaching out to readers’ sense of fear. I call gothic episodes all chapters, scenes, and charged moments from literary works and broader print culture whose tropic or affective schema trace back to Gothic Revival texts. Significantly, these texts were well-known to nineteenth-century American readers, whose literate response to the appearance of gothic conventions was frequently expected by the writers deploying them. To supplement the critical narrative about the gothic that explains its power as originating in the psychologically repressed, I want to emphasize how writers rationally employed the mode to create calculated vi effects. I read these episodes as primarily persuasive rather than mimetic and thereby recover the rhetorical import of the gothic as understood by the authors who deployed its conventions. The following chapters examine how gothic episodes were put to work by abolitionists, proslavery advocates, freedmen, Klansmen, carpetbaggers, and advocates of African American civil rights, and I show how gothic effects were calculated to play upon diverse fears, prejudices, and desires for a variety of strategic purposes, from energizing supporters of political causes to manipulating the historical record of Reconstruction. Gothic episodes appear early on in a variety of American literary traditions, putting the so-called “literature of fear” to work in shaping the history and culture of the American nineteenth century. vii Introduction On August 30, 1831, the Richmond Enquirer published an article reporting the Nat Turner rebellion under the headline “THE BANDITTI.” The appellation, which would likely have been aligned in the minds of the paper’s readership with the gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis, concords with the article’s first description of the revolt: “What strikes us as the most remarkable thing in this matter,” writes the editor, “is the horrible ferocity of these monsters. They remind one of a parcel of blood-thirsty wolves rushing down from the Alps; or, rather, like a former incursion of the Indians upon the white settlements” (Greenberg 67). In the moves from bandit, to monster, to wolf—or put another way, from human, to chimera, to animal—the article concisely dehumanizes the rebels in a fashion typical of the ideology of American slavery. It also produces a series of spatiotemporal displacements similar to those found in much gothic writing. The figure of the blood-thirsty wolf simultaneously reinforces two contradictory tropes from the American discourse of slavery, those of the cannibal and the animal. Dislocating that figure and placing it in Europe’s Alps, the article articulates slave violence as a fearsome threat, but also tempers that threat by imagining it in a foreign landscape. Then, by comparing the recently quelled slave revolt to Indian raids, the article presents an image of racialized savagery that is contained by its inevitable and overwhelming eradication. Alpine wolves will never arrive at Southern doorsteps, and Indian raiding parties in Virginia have already been decimated by the events of national history. When faced with pieces of gothic writing such as this, I focus on questions of strategy: For what reasons did the editor choose to clothe the narrative of Nat Turner’s rebellion in the trappings of gothic conventions? Or stated more broadly, why was “Southern discourse…all too 1 ready to conflate the real horrors of slavery and insurrection with the conventions of Radcliffean cliché” (Ginsberg 100)? By the 1830s, the Southern press had developed an expertise in not reporting the news, as was inevitable in any society built around an institution founded upon mutual fear and its logical attendants, repression, denial, and censorship. Ed White writes that the Southern press “fairly consistently restricted information about slave resistance, for the obvious reason that the more you talk about it, the more likely it is to occur” (96). This fact left newspapers like the Enquirer in a bind: How could they make the events of the rebellion known while also keeping them concealed? How could they narrate the event to a select audience of slaveholders while obfuscating it to Northerners and the slaves themselves? Gothic writing provided one answer to this problem. The language of excess, it allowed the editor to articulate a picture of the rebellion that was vivid and extreme, provocative of a jolt of fear that would bolster the vigilance of its Southern readership. But that language is also the language of fantasy, allowing the effacement of the event at its moment of inscription. One cannot plan one’s own slave revolt with the strategy of rushing down a mountainside like a pack of wolves. While gothic writing has long been conceived in terms of the unconscious, the return of the repressed as manifested in a haunting (be it of author, discourse, or nation), in this study I will examine the way that gothic conventions were deliberately deployed by writers to produce calculated effects. This orientation functions on several premises that differ slightly from those of much critical writing on the gothic. The first and perhaps most significant is the supposition that gothic writing was a known entity, an already-received literary genre whose conventions would be recognizable to American readers in the nineteenth century. Despite Ralph Waldo Emerson’s pronouncement in 1837 that the American “day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close” (53), the influence of English 2 gothic novels reverberated far past that date in the canon of American letters.