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American Literature I, Lecture Eleven American Literature I Professor Cyrus R. K. Patell Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly New York University Names and Terms Copyright Act of 1790 – first American copyright law; domestic only virtue / vir / virtus (Lat. for “courage”) Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764) Ann Radcliffe Matthew Lewis, The Monk (1796) Edmund Burke, On the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) Samuel Richardson, Pamela and Clarissa Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland (1798), Ormond (1799), Arthur Mervyn (1799, part I) Points to Remember Two possible critique of Enlightenment thought: 1) The Enlightenment overestimates the power of reason. What happens if reason is not all it is cracked up to be? Enlightenment thinkers underestimate the power of the irrational and the unconscious. This leads to: a) the Romantics’ valorization of the imagination as a higher faculty than reason. b) the Gothic exploration of criminality, madness, and the supernatural. 2) Enlightenment thought suggests that oppression and domination are residues of the feudal past and will eventually fade away. But what if Enlightenment thought does not have an incidental relationship to oppression and domination but rather depends on it? Think of the idea of negative liberty—freedom as freedom from oppression. Don’t you have to have thought of “oppression” first to think of freedom in this way. Is this notion of freedom thus conceptually dependent on a notion of oppression? With which of these critiques is the novel Edgar Huntly most concerned? Novel vs. Romance • Novel associated with women’s experience, seen as a form written primarily for women. • Famous novels named for their female protagonists: Samuel Richardson, Pamela (1740–42); Richardson, Clarissa (1747–48); Susanna Rowson, Charlotte Temple (1791). • Other early novels: William Wells Brown, The Power of Sympathy (1789); Hannah Webster Foster, The Coquette (1797). • Novel’s use of “sympathy,” sentimentality, seduction. Patell / American Literature I / Lecture 11 2 History of English Gothic • Gothic as an inherently political form, arising when the traditional authority of church and state are being challenged by the Enlightenment and the revolutions in North America and France. As a repository for anxieties that arise from this cultural shift. Link between Gothic and the Reign of Terror and its aftermath. • Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764): supernatural gothic, frees up “resources of fancy.” • Ann Radcliffe: rational gothic, supernatural exposed as a sham; Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? as a latter-day version. Resemblance to seduction novels like Clarissa. Her distinction between terror (linked to the sublime) and horror. • Matthew Lewis, The Monk (1795): supernatural, demonic gothic as anti-sublime: horror. From The Monk: “It soon became a mass of putridity, and to every eye was a loathsome and disgusting object, to every eye but a mother’s. My slumbers were constantly interrupted by some obnoxious insect crawling over me. Sometimes I felt the bloated toad, hideous and pampered with the poisonous vapour of the dungeon, dragging his loathsome length along my bosom. Sometimes the quick cold lizard roused me, leaving his slimy track upon my face, and entangling itself in the tresses of my wild and matted hair. Often have I at waking found my fingers ringed with long worms, which bred in the corrupted flesh of my infant. At such times I shrieked with terror and disgust; and while I shook off the reptile.” Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel: The guilt which underlies the gothic and motivates its plots is the guilt of the revolutionary haunted by the (paternal) past which he has been striving to destroy; and the fear that possesses the gothic and motivates its tone is the fear that in destroying the old ego-ideals of Church and State, the West has opened a way for the irruption of darkness: for insanity and the disintegration of the self. Through the pages of the gothic romance, the soul of Europe flees its own darker impulses. Edmund Burke, On the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) : The beautiful, according to Burke, is what is well-formed and aesthetically pleasing, whereas the sublime is what has the power to compel and overwhelm us. Formal gardens are beautiful, but the wilderness is sublime. “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.” Patell / American Literature I / Lecture 11 3 “Indeed, terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently, the ruling principle of the sublime.” Charles Brockden Brown and the Project of American Gothic • Copyright Act of 1790 makes the profession of authorship a possibility for U.S. writers. As a domestic copyright law, doesn’t prevent printers from pirating English books that already have reputations in the U.S. • Law as a mixed blessing: makes it hard for U.S. authors to get published, but also does create a reading public and a market for fiction. • Brown's desire to elevate the novel into a form of moral discourse. Novelist as “storytelling moralist” (preface to now-lost Sky-Walk). • Seeks to detach the novel from ideas of sentimentality, differentiate from novels like Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1747-48), combat notion that the novel is a female genre. • Writing against stereotyped views of gender that associate men with the public sphere and women with domesticity, that see public virtue as a province of males (virtue/virtus/vir), while describing women as creatures of emotion posing a threat to republican values. • The project of American Gothic: the preface to Edgar Huntly. • Edgar as a man of the Enlightenment: his Franklinian view of error and science. • The doubling of Edgar Huntly and Clithero Edny. In what ways are there personal histories similar? In what crucial ways are they different? PASSAGES TO REVIEW AND CONSIDER Edgar as a man of the Enlightenment: his Franklinian view of error and science. 6 Faculties 15 I was fearful 16 Curiosity is vicious Doppelgängers: The doubling of Edgar Huntly and Clithero Edny. In what ways are there personal histories similar? In what crucial ways are they different? Chapters 4-8 make it clear that Clithero has nothing to do with Waldegrave’s death. How does Edgar’s encounter with Clithero cause us to doubt Edgar’s faculty of reason – and the very faculty of reason itself? 31 I am no stranger 32 Edgar’s Reaction 34 You are unacquainted 88 Edgar “dispassionate” 90 Could I not restore Patell / American Literature I / Lecture 11 4 124 Edgar’s dream 125 intellectual existence and moral pre eminence of my friend 128 Letters missing 130 Uncle hears footsteps above at night Clithero’s box: an allegorical scene with multiple meanings. 111 If he were thoroughly known 112 The box In what ways does the box represent the human mind? Edgar’s mind? Narrative? The narrative we’re reading? What does the symbolic linking to Pandora’s box at this point in the narrative suggest to us about what is to come? Is this foreshadowing borne out by the novel’s conclusion? The property subplot: Chapters 14-15: Waldegrave and Weymouth. What does this episode (which is perhaps not sufficiently integrated into the novel as a whole due to Brown’s hasty composition) suggest to us about the importance of property and social mobility to the novel? See p. 149: “An enemy to us …” For Further Thought What is the significance of Edgar’s experience in the woods? How can we compare it to other moments of revelation that we have seen? Can we see it as a conversion narrative? What is the panther described as a “savage”? Today’s Songs Sarah McLachlan, “Building a Mystery” The Pretenders, “Mystery Achievement” Elvis Costello, “Mystery Dance” The Kinks, “Sleepwalker” Matthew Sweet, “Scooby-Doo Theme” .
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