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Download PDF Datastream GOTHIC ENLIGHTENMENT: AMERICAN FICTION AND THE LIMITS OF SYMPATHY, 1789-1850 BY SIÂN SILYN ROBERTS B.A. UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND, 1998 M.A. UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND, 1999 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AT BROWN UNIVERSITY PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND MAY 2009 © Copyright 2009 by Siân Silyn Roberts Vita Siân Silyn Roberts was born in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1976. She received her B.A. in English Literature from the University of Auckland in 1998, and her M.A. from the same institution in 1999. She has taught courses in American Literature as a Teaching Fellow at Brown University from 2005-2006. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Queens College, CUNY. iv Acknowledgments I owe an immeasurable debt to Nancy Armstrong, not only for her intellectual guidance and extraordinarily generous feedback, but also for having reproduced in me her own considerable skepticism about the fiction of individual sovereignty. I have also been very fortunate in my intellectual mentors, Philip Gould and Leonard Tennenhouse, who read and responded to each part of this dissertation. I wish to thank Prof. Tennenhouse for agreeing to supervise the independent study from which this project emerged. I am also grateful to Jim Egan, who first introduced me to the peculiarities and fascinations of American literature. In true gothic fashion, my American family has nothing to do with biology or attachment to place: my friends have been my pack. My heartfelt thanks go to Rebecca Summerhays, Brian Sweeney, John Funchion, Jonna Iacono, Lea Snyder, Keri Holt, John Melson, David Babcock, Tad Davies, Melanie Spencer, Laurel Rayburn, and Bethany Shepherd. Frances Carpenter’s wisdom, patience, and kindness deserve all my gratitude. My parents, Heather and Siôn, and my sisters, Gretel and Polly, have given me unconditional love and support throughout this long process, for which I cannot thank them enough. Gretel has contributed more to my wellbeing and success than I can ever hope to repay. v Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter One: The Gothic Locke 17 Chapter Two: The Gothic Goes Native 67 Chapter Three: A Mind for the Gothic 98 Chapter Four: The Limits of Liberal Society in The 133 Scarlet Letter Notes 165 vi 1 Introduction Say something about objectivity and subjectivity. Be sure and abuse a man called Locke. Edgar Allan Poe, “How to Write a Blackwood Article” (1838) t is a well-established fact of American political history that the British I Enlightenment models of individual subject and contractual state proposed by John Locke were essential to the revolutionary writings of the 1760’s and 1770’s.i Any number of scholars have documented the influence of Scottish educators who, in staffing colleges up and down the East coast, imported and disseminated Scottish common and moral sense philosophy, the intellectual roots of which can be found in the works of Locke.ii Over the past two decades, a critical consensus coalesced around these facts, namely, that the importance of Scottish thought cannot be overstated, extending “from the realm of ideas (e.g. moral philosophy, political economy, literature, historiography, natural science and medicine) to religion and higher education.”iii The recent outpouring of scholarship on Locke’s influence in America has, in one critic’s assessment, indeed opened up particularly generative avenues of thought for “social and cultural historians,” “historians of ideas,” and “political theorists.”iv Conspicuously absent from this list of intellectual benefactors is the literary critic, for whom it has hitherto been common practice either to minimalize the significance of Scottish Enlightenment thought in American letters, or else to read novels as straightforward fictionalizations of historical events or political theories, theories aimed at asserting independence from English cultural tradition rather than appropriating those traditions.v In an effort to recuperate this largely neglected epistemological tradition, my dissertation argues that antebellum fiction uses gothic conventions to revise Enlightenment categories of the individual, sympathy, and the social contract for a cultural environment made of heterogeneous, mutable, and often migratory groups. I read the fiction of Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Montgomery Bird, and Nathaniel Hawthorne to show how their works challenge the normativity and naturalness of these Enlightenment models. In so doing, I account for the gothic’s substantial appeal during the first half of the nineteenth-century on the grounds that it prepared a culturally diverse readership to think of itself as very much part of a transatlantic world of exchange.vi This line of argument rests on the assumption that Locke’s models of mind and social contract so thoroughly saturated American intellectual life that its influence extended well beyond political and judicial institutions – where it has, to this point, been largely confined – and into literary circles. Thus I take seriously Terence Martin’s claim that Scottish Lockean thought had achieved “an unofficial status of orthodoxy” in educated circles by the beginning of the nineteenth century.vii At the same time, I also believe that, as T. H. Breen has argued, Locke’s importance can be traced back even earlier. As he explains, writers in the decades prior to the Revolution so “repeatedly invoked the authority of John Locke” that “even when the name of the great philosopher did not appear, his ideas still powerfully informed popular public consciousness.”viii “Whether or not they knew Locke’s writings,” Gillian Brown agrees, “early Americans assimilated Lockean liberalism as they grew up.”ix American authors, in short, worked in an intellectual climate where Locke’s notion of the absolute distinction and rational relationship between subject and object, as well as a contractual government devoted to the protection of property, were so pervasive that one did not necessarily need to read 2 Locke to know him. The pervasiveness of this model of self and world is in large part due to the Scottish moral and common sense philosophy of John Witherspoon, Hugh Blair, Lord Kames, Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, Frances Hutcheson, and Adam Smith, whose theories provided the standard for college curricula well into the middle of the nineteenth century.x W. M. Verhoeven puts it in a nutshell in proclaiming that all of these philosophical thinkers “had a common ancestor in Locke.”xi Consider Pennsylvania theologian Samuel Miller’s 1803 intellectual history, the Brief Retrospective of the Eighteenth Century, which offers an account of Thomas Reid’s influential common sense thought. Reid, Miller tells us, totally rejected the ideal system [of Berkeley and Hume], or theory of perception . and maintained that the mind perceives not merely the ideas or images of external objects, but the external objects themselves; that when these are presented to our senses, they produce certain impressions; that these impressions are followed by correspondent sensations; and these sensations by a perception of the existence and qualities of the objects about which the mind is employed.xii Here Reid draws directly on Lockean faculty psychology to explain how we receive sensory information: “material objects” produce “impressions” and “sensations” that produce ideas, or “perceptions,” about the external world.xiii The telling difference between Lockean materialism and common sense thought resides in the process by which one comes to a better knowledge of the material world: “when sensible objects are presented to us, we become persuaded that they exist, and that they possess the qualities we witness, not by a train of reasoning, by formal reflection, or by association of ideas; but by a direct and necessary connection between the presence of such objects and our consequent perceptions.”xiv Here, it is fair to say, common sense philosophy aims merely to remove the gray area between truth and fiction created when the faculties of reason, 3 reflection, or association mediate the relationship between sensation and knowledge of the external world.xv As is the way with all major epistemological shifts, however, a little bit of tinkering can bring about radically new forms of world making. II. British Forms and the American Difference That a wide range of American intellectuals found common sense thought so appealing for its ability to cut through mediation suggests a late-eighteenth century preoccupation with the problems posed by misrepresentation, and literary critics have examined this problem at length.xvi The historical events of the period certainly conspire to foster such apprehensions. In the dozen years before Brown published his major novels, the new nation had been vicariously shaken by two internal rebellions and it had seen Europe thrown into revolutionary upheaval. In view of America’s growing awareness of her own relative powerlessness overseas and an influx of foreign immigrants whose origins and political intentions were all too uncertain, it makes sense to me that American thinkers should have gravitated toward a model of perception that resolved these uncertainties by means of a common, rational interpretation of the world of objects. At the same time, for a culturally diverse and altogether fluid community to espouse common sense entailed a paradox that has yet to be fully explored. The very model of perception that
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