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Haunted Hemisphere: American Gothic Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century

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Haunted Hemisphere: American Gothic Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century Haunted Hemisphere: American Gothic Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century Katie Richarts Bray Westminster, Maryland B.A., University of Virginia, 2007 M.A., University of Virginia, 2010 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English Language and Literature University of Virginia August, 2014 ii © Copyright by Katie Richarts Bray All Rights Reserved August 2014 iii Abstract “Haunted Hemisphere” calls attention to the hemispheric gothic as a distinct body of literature, a genre that exposes the intertwining of United States narratives with the histories of the wider American hemisphere, against the grain of a contemporary literary culture that rarely spoke directly of the nation's profound involvement in a nexus of supranational cultural and economic relations. Hemispheric gothic works—from well-known novels by authors like Poe and Melville to popular fictions like The Black Vampyre—situate literary marketplaces within the haunted spaces of their plots, and thereby model, in an uncanny microcosmic form, the mutual imbrication of ostensibly distinct markets extending across the hemisphere. The slave revolts and shipwrecks I analyze are not simply generic horrors, but invoke recent historical memories that official discourses sought to repress, such as the Haitian Revolution, and proclaim the historical interdependence of (for example) the United States and Haiti. Through gothic explorations of the uncanny spaces of ships engaged in commercial and imperialist voyages, or the complicated genealogies of early colonial settlers in the Americas, the hemispheric gothic emerges as a transnational literary phenomenon engaged in highlighting the discrepant but shared histories of the New World that propelled nineteenth-century popular and canonical fiction alike. iv Acknowledgements This project would never have seen the light of day without the generous support of a number of mentors, colleagues, institutions, friends, and family members. Seminars led by Elizabeth Dillon at the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College and Amy Kaplan at the Clinton Institute at the University College of Dublin allowed me to work out early ideas about the dissertation. Many thanks to the seminar leaders, my fellow participants, and the institutes. I am also grateful for the support of the English Department at UVa. At Virginia, I would like to thank Allison Booth, Stephen Cushman, Jon D’Errico, Richard Handler, Clare Kinney, Michael Levenson, Victoria Olwell, Stephen Railton, Jeffrey Rossman, Cynthia Wall, Patrick Abatiell, Laurie Duncan, Jean Franzino, Laura Goldblatt, Anna Ioanes, Lisa McGunigal, Lindsay O’Connor, Rebecca Strauss, and Robert Stilling for their insight about matters scholarly and pedagogical. The librarians at UVa’s libraries—and especially in its Special Collections department—have been unfailingly helpful and kind. A series of departmental grants have not only allowed me to share parts of this dissertation at the aforementioned seminars and at the 2011 NEMLA conference, but also supported my Spanish-language studies. Part of my first chapter is forthcoming from American Literature; I am thankful to Priscilla Wald and the journal’s anonymous readers for their sharp feedback. I am also grateful for American Literature’s permission to reprint a revised and expanded form of the article here. Paul Broyles and Dorothy Couchman—my dissertation writing group—have seen and improved every stage of this project. I have been privileged to work with a committee whose scholarship inspires me and whose generous readings and responses have strengthened my arguments: Anna Brickhouse, Eric Lott, Jennifer Greeson, and Grace Hale. Finally, thanks to my family—your love and support means the world to me: Leah, Locher, Alma, Tyler, Megan, and Emily Bray. v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 6 CHAPTER 1: 25 “A Climate … More Prolific … in Sorcery”: The Uncanny Return of the Haitian Revolution CHAPTER 2: 57 Overwritten Histories of National Origins CHAPTER 3: 90 “Under the Garb of Fiction”: Maritime Capitalism CODA: 118 Piracy and Property on the Mississippi: The Grandissimes and Pudd’nhead Wilson WORKS CITED 139 6 Introduction History, despite its wrenching pain, Cannot be unlived, and if faced With courage, need not be lived again. --Maya Angelou When the graphic artist and novelist Mat Johnson published Pym in 2011, he at once implicitly argued that writers of fiction, rather than scholarly critics, are best suited to interpret literary history and answered Toni Morrison’s call to “[expand] the study of American literature into …a wider landscape” that acknowledges and explores the Africanist presence in U.S. culture (3). Pym’s title nods to Edgar Allan Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) and Johnson’s website guides readers through a genealogy of sequels (or “offspring”) to Poe’s novel that starts with Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) and ends with his own novel.1 But for readers not familiar with Poe’s novel, in Pym’s second chapter its protagonist Chris Jaynes, a professor of American literature, gives a full (and snarky) account of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym’s publication history and plot, suggesting that Poe, “a self-proclaimed ‘magazinist’ … attempted the long form only because that’s what his editors at Harper Brothers were looking for. Poe was broke, his relationship with the Messenger soured, his intended entrée into New York literary society failed in drunken spectacle” (22). Jaynes’s analysis of Poe’s novel is accurate and attentive to detail: when he introduces Dirk Peters, he compares his description to those of “some of the other darkies haunting Poe’s collected works” (24, emphasis Johnson’s). This detailed comparison, replete with the quotations readers might expect to find in a scholarly essay, also signals to Jaynes’s commitment to exploring race in ways that make his academic 1 Johnson’s full list includes Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), Jules Verne’s An Antarctic Mystery (Le Sphinx des glaces) (1897), Charles Romyen Dake’s A Strange Discovery (1899), and H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (1936). One of the criteria for his list is that these works be freely available on the internet, so in the public domain in the United States. (The Lovecraft novel was published after 1923, so it would still be protected by U.S. copyright laws if its copyright had been renewed, but S.T. Joshi suggests that the renewals were never properly filed for most of Lovecraft’s published work and that at best, its copyright status is “murky” [641].) 7 colleagues uncomfortable. Despite these marks of scholarly work, Jaynes’s tone is sarcastic and irreverent: after he quotes Poe’s description of Peters, he interjects “Negro what?” and he rarely hesitates to express the ugliest racial truths about American society, as he sees them: Poe wrote Peters as a “half-breed Indian,” Jaynes contends, because “half whiteness is not allowed.”2 But this kind of analysis is more than the university that supports Jaynes can stomach: Jaynes was recently denied tenure “‘for refusing to sit on the campus Diversity Committee,’” as he puts it (14). He argues that while the university wants a diversity committee, it isn’t actually committed to diverse perspectives, and he refuses to validate its initiatives as a token presence on what he sees as a meaningless committee. His colleagues see Jaynes’s work on Poe as the retreat of “an apolitical coward,” who refuses to teach the African American literature he was hired to teach, whereas Jaynes categorizes his scholarly work as “running so hard toward [the battle that he] was around the world and coming back in the other direction” (14, 34). Ultimately Jaynes and Pym echo Morrison’s argument: we must explore the Africanist presence in all U.S. literature, not just in texts written by African Americans. In its meta-fictional engagement with Poe’s earlier novel, then, Pym is intensely aware not only of its own place in a literary history that extends at least two centuries into the past, but also of the market forces that shaped that history, and which will help determine its own success. More importantly, in the face of the failure of his tenure bid, Jaynes decides to reestablish his career by investigating the claims of a manuscript, “more the notes for a book than the book itself,” titled “The True and Interesting Narrative of Dirk Peters, Coloured Man, As Written by Himself. Springfield, Illinois, 1837” (37, 38). This return to Poe’s putative source is part of Pym’s pervasive strategy of doubling: just as Peters is a double for Pym (both in Poe’s tale and 2 24, 25, 25. Pym authenticates the scholarly credentials of its narrator by peppering the text with unnumbered footnotes. These notes rarely cite sources (and then most often Peters’s narrative), but instead, offer tangential pieces of commentary in the same irreverent tone as the main text. 8 even more so in Johnson’s, where Peters has a narrative voice through this manuscript), Jaynes, who tells an alternative version of Peter’s tale and who is also a mixed-race protagonist, is a double for Peters. If this manuscript is really the work of Dirk Peters, previously known only as a character in Poe’s novel, Jaynes reasons, then the rest of the novel might be more historical than anyone has ever been willing to give it credit for, and he decides to look for the site of its final scenes: “Tsalal, the great undiscovered African Diasporan homeland” (39). While the prospect of finding such a place, where some people may have been able to escape the evils of slavery and imperialism, thrills Jaynes, the novel recognizes this potential homeland—geographically distinct from the source of the Diaspora—for what it is: a heartfelt fantasy.
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