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Asylums, Aliens, and Disabilities in Charles ASYLUMS, ALIENS, AND DISABILITIES IN CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN’S GOTHIC NOVELS A Thesis Presented to the faculty of the Department of English California State University, Sacramento Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in English (Literature) by Sarah Eleonora Faye SPRING 2014 ASYLUMS, ALIENS, AND DISABILITIES IN CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN’S GOTHIC NOVELS A Thesis by Sarah Eleonora Faye Approved by: __________________________________, Committee Chair Nancy Sweet, Ph.D. __________________________________, Second Reader Jason Gieger, Ph.D. ____________________________ Date ii Student: Sarah Eleonora Faye I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University format manual, and that this thesis is suitable for shelving in the Library and credit is to be awarded for the thesis. __________________________, Department Chair ___________________ David Toise, Ph,D. Date Department of English iii Abstract of ASYLUMS, ALIENS, AND DISABILITIES IN CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN’S GOTHIC NOVELS by Sarah Eleonora Faye This thesis focuses on Charles Brockden Brown’s ambiguous use of disabilities in an attempt to understand Brown’s stance on the Early Republic’s nativist debates. While Brown’s representations of disabilities mimic the tropes of nativist politico-medical rhetoric, they also push readers into identifying with flawed characters and questioning nativist intolerance. Brown debunks the simplistic worldview of the nativists, leading his readers into considering that they might already be degenerated physically and mentally, that we cannot separate ourselves from the Other, and that refusing to accept human imperfection means creating a society of unattainable norms. Thus, ambiguity is central to Brown’s work: he deconstructs all the binaries he sets up to give us a radical depiction of the Early Republic as complex, imperfect, and diverse. _______________________, Committee Chair Nancy Sweet, Ph.D. _______________________ Dat iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am extremely grateful to my advisors, Nancy Sweet and Jason Gieger, for their support, patience, and scholarly guidance throughout the drafting of this thesis. Professor Sweet, thank you for being so enthusiastic about this project and for helping me articulate an increasingly complex argument. I can never thank you enough for having introduced me to Brown and for helping me navigate through his fascinating (and frustrating!) ambiguity. Professor Gieger, thank you for your insights and guidance during this project. Your passion for eighteenth-century gothic novels has inspired me to strive for excellence, draft after draft. I also want to thank Catherine Kudlick, who has made me discover the fascinating world of Disability Studies and who has enriched my understanding of literature, history, and society. Finally, thank you to Craig Faye, whose constant belief in my success lit the way along the tortuous path towards completing this thesis. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………….…v Chapter 1. INTRODUCING THE CONTRADICTORY TIMES AND NOVELS OF CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN…………………………………………………………………1 2. DISABILITIES AND METAPHORS IN ORMOND AND ARTHUR MERVYN…….20 3. SYMPATHY, MADNESS, AND THE POLITICS OF SAMENESS IN EDGAR HUNTLY……..………………………………………………………………………...44 4. AMERICA AS AN “ASYLUM”: DECONSTRUCTING MADNESS AND REASON IN WIELAND…………...……………………………………………………………...69 5. DECONSTRUCTING BINARIES TO EXPLORE IMPERFECTION IN BROWN’S GOTHIC NOVELS……………………………………………………………………87 6. EPILOGUE………………………………………………………………………..…110 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………….116 vi 1 Chapter 1 INTRODUCING THE CONTRADICTORY TIMES AND NOVELS OF CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN For someone who wants to write original American literature “to exhibit a series of adventures, growing out of the condition of our country” (Brown, Edgar Huntly 3), Charles Brockden Brown oddly ends most of his gothic novels with the departure of his heroes and heroines (Arthur Mervyn, Clara Wieland, and Constantia Dudley) from America to Europe. This oddity is just one of the difficulties that readers encounter when reading his novels since Brown always seems to be articulating one belief while illustrating another. In his four major novels, Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep- Walker (1799), Wieland; or the Transformation (1798), Ormond; or the Secret Witness (1799), and Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 (1798-1799), Brown both illustrates and rejects the values of his society. While Brown’s representation of physical disability as a punishment for failing to embrace the Early Republic’s values of reason, self-restraint, and common sense show him as potentially upholding his society’s values, some of his plots depict mental disabilities in ways that blur the lines between the rational and the irrational. As we will see, disability theory helps to make sense of Brown’s critical illustration of the values of his time, which then sheds light on the contradictions that readers feel when they read the novels. In turn, exploring the origin of these internal contradictions reflects the many paradoxes of the period when Brown wrote his novels: 2 the years between 1798 and 1801 were a contradictory time when people wanted to define what it meant to be American by merging pre-Revolutionary ideals with turbulent world politics, epistemological philosophy, and medicine as a social cure. The Early Republic of the 1790s inherited a comparable sense of world mission that Revolutionary America received from the Puritans’ ideal of becoming a shining example for the world. However, the mission of the 1790s transformed America into a place of refuge. In Common Sense (1775-76), Thomas Paine articulates one of the ideals that the new nation would embrace in its Revolutionary rhetoric: America was to be an “asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe” (Paine, 24, emphasis in the original). Paine’s document paints America as an exceptional place with a world mission, which can be found again in the documents such as “The Declaration of Independence” stating the egalitarian tenet that “all men are created equal” (Jefferson 8). While echoes of this rhetoric of America as an asylum continue to shape the concept of Americanness to this day, we can spot a shift in emphasis just a few years after the Revolution. In “Information to Those Who Would Remove to America,” published in 1784, Benjamin Franklin qualifies the openness of Paine’s asylum. While he reiterates that “strangers are welcome… and every one will enjoy securely the profits of his industry,” Franklin also underlines the fact that only those who are willing to be industrious and do not expect to enjoy the feudal inequalities of Europe will be able to make it in the United States (464). The rhetoric of the 1790s, while still upholding the Revolutionary ideals of America as an exceptional place of civil liberties and the Franklinian beliefs that America makes people exceptional because it 3 rewards them for being industrious and independent, was shaped by international turmoil and the increasing waves of immigrants coming to the United States. Again, the openness of Paine’s asylum had to be re-qualified. The anxious question became: how can we keep America and the American people exceptional when so many European radicals and potential enemies to the Republic are mixing with the Anglo-American population? Even worse, how can the very idea of America as a place superior to others survive when some Americans themselves are not the rational, self-restrained, and hard-working people described by Franklin and therefore fail to uphold the standards of Americanness? While the belief that America is an exceptional space with exceptional people continued to shape what it meant to be American in the 1790s, a growing anxiety about foreign and inner degeneration contributed to the definition of American identity through binaries: American/alien, rational/irrational, healthy/degenerate. European turmoil such as the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and the French Revolution (1789-1799) brought fleeing radical Europeans to the United States, which intensified the fear towards unruly foreigners importing radical ideas from Europe. Indeed, the nativist crisis of 1798-1801, best illustrated by the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 that increased the President’s power to arrest citizens and deport foreigners with radical political ideas, was a result of the American anxieties of seeing European radicals – in particular the Irish – become politically active in the Early Republic (Durey 177, 248). As Michael Durey demonstrates in Transatlantic Radicals and the Early American Republic, European radicals were coming to America as a refuge from legal persecution, treason trials, and as a land of hope where they could implement the radical changes they had 4 failed to bring to their native countries. However, creating a new life in the United States did not always pan out, and some radicals became “rogues” who stole or dealt in forgery (Durey 160). These were certainly not the men Franklin pictured in “Information to Those Who Would Remove to America,” and nativist propaganda, using the rhetoric of human perfectibility found in philosophical and medicinal works, depicted them as the worst threat against the United States. To believe that America is an asylum for those fleeing less perfect societies and to fear that immigrants might cause the degeneration of the United States reveal a belief in human
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