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Charles Brockden Brown and the Ethics of the Grotesque

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Charles Brockden Brown and the Ethics of the Grotesque CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN AND THE ETHICS OF THE GROTESQUE _______________ A Dissertation Presented to The Faculty of the Department of English University of Houston _______________ In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy _______________ By William Douglas Joachim May, 2015 CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN AND THE ETHICS OF THE GROTESQUE _________________________ William Douglas Joachim APPROVED: _________________________ Roberta Weldon, Ph.D. Committee Chair _________________________ Jason Berger, Ph.D. _________________________ William Monroe, Ph.D. _________________________ Barry Wood, Ph.D. _________________________ Cynthia Freeland, Ph.D. University of Houston ________________________ Steven G. Craig, Ph.D. Interim Dean, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences Department of Economics ii CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN AND THE ETHICS OF THE GROTESQUE _______________ An Abstract of a Dissertation Presented to The Faculty of the Department of English University of Houston _______________ In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy _______________ By William Douglas Joachim May, 2015 iii ABSTRACT This work focuses on tracing the animating ethos of Charles Brockden Brown’s intriguing but confusing novels through close attention to the texts and to the richly complex historical environment from which they emerge and to which they respond. In several non-novelistic writings, including prefaces, letters, essays, and reviews, Brown insists that the value of narratives, whether fictional or historical, lies in their effects in the realm of the ethical; it “lies without doubt in their moral tendency.” But Brown’s narratives go beyond inculcating a moral system; indeed, as I aim to show in my analyses of the novels Wieland and Ormond, each marked by Gothic sensationalism and psychological realism, Brown’s narratives function to challenge the ethics of ethics, to subject ideas to reality-grounded counterfactual scenarios so as to expose the humanity and justice or lack thereof of moral systems. Brown’s relentless skepticism coupled with his deep-seated concern for moral responsibility, I argue, speaks to problematic formal features of the narratives as well. That is, I want to argue that the novels’ resistance to a totalizing explanatory construct serves to prompt a mode of continuous critical engagement, a living practice of attentive reading that is, when transposed into the realm of interpersonal relations, the active awareness and ethical regarding of the other in its true otherness. As such, the novels’ very weirdness—their inconclusiveness, incongruity, and contradictions, in content and form; that which I suggest is best understood as their grotesqueness; that which commands attention and resists assimilation—serves an ethical end. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1: An Introduction . 1 “The Feast of Reason and the Flow of the Soul” . 4 “To Expose Error and Vice” . 12 “A Banquet of Horrors” . 20 Toward an Understanding of the Grotesque . 23 The Grotesque in the Late Enlightenment . 27 Questioning Meaning . 40 Constructing the Other and the Self . 44 Chapter 2: “Abortive Creations”: Incest and Conceptions of Morality in Wieland . 51 “Beyond the Conception of Human Beings” . 53 “The Moral Constitution of Man” . 56 “Sublimer Views” . 64 “A Different Sex” . 70 “Monstrous Conception” . 80 “To Love with a Passion More than Fraternal” . 83 “Begotten upon Selfishness” . 89 “Phantastical Incongruities” . 96 Interlude: Annus Mirabiles / Horribiles . 99 Chapter 3: Spectators, Spectacle, and Speculation: Picturing Reality in Ormond . 104 “An Authentic, and Not a Fictitious Tale” . 107 “This Mode of Multiplying Faces” . 114 “The Vanity of Systems” . 120 “The Folly of Prediction” . 140 “So Painful a State” . 148 v “Inured to the Shedding of Blood?” . 152 Chapter 4: “The Most Efficacious of Moral Instruments”: Brown’s Literary Theory 165 “An Outcast of That Unwarlike Sect” . 169 “Infidel Philosopher” . 177 “The Highest Province of Benevolence” . 187 “The Proper End of Reading” . 199 Notes . 212 Works Cited . 231 vi Dedication This is dedicated to my lovely wife Celina and our wonderful children Rosie and Diego. vii Chapter 1: An Introduction When Charles Brockden Brown’s first novel Wieland; or, The Transformation: An American Tale was published in New York City on September 14, 1798, the proprietor of Hocquet Caritat’s Circulating Library, Bookshop, and Reading Rooms would have given the work pride of place.1 M. Caritat was, after all, the novel’s publisher.2 He was also, not coincidentally, the creator of the largest, most diverse bookstore and library in the young United States. Both endeavors were driven by the same motivation. An émigré from Revolutionary France, Caritat was striving to spread the revolutionaries’ principles through nurturing a republic of the intellect, a collectivity of minds meeting and relating through the medium of the printed word. It was a clear vision that he pursued with a principled dedication and a pragmatic decisiveness. He would later secure the rights to Brown’s next novel Ormond; or, The Secret Witness (1799) even before Wieland’s profitability had been ascertained. And through his influence in the book trade, he would help insure the publication of the rest of Brown’s novels, including Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 (part 1 [1799], part 2 [1800]) and Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799). These efforts in the promotion of Gothic novels, stories of spontaneous combustion, female warriors, Illuminati plotters, and somnambulistic Indian-fighters, may seem disconnected from his lofty Enlightenment goals. Moreover, in the intervening years since their appearance on the shelves, Brown’s novels have gathered to themselves a reputation for being, in a word, odd. They are works that provoke contrary readings and reactions among readers and within them, just as they portray in meticulous detail the shaky perceptions and startling reactions of severely conflicted characters. They are works that invite and resist 1 comparison, even as they take as one of their themes the problematic of resemblance and otherness. But they are works that spark dialogue. As such, they are right in line with Caritat’s project. And for twenty-first century readers, separated by over two hundred years from the heady and tempestuous 1790s, peering into Caritat’s establishment, with its flow of people, languages, ideas, and print commodities, may offer a useful glimpse of the creative-intellectual and political-economic context from which Brown’s novels emerge and—importantly—to which they respond. Opening his doors in the spring of 1797, the resourceful Caritat quickly established himself as an influential figure in the business of books with an ecumenical approach to the young nation’s diverse reading habits: he catered to all tastes. 3 In his published catalogue, he assures prospective buyers and subscribers that his stock will be kept “upon an increasing Plan, [ . ] so that there may be a probability that most of the Books wanted by the inhabitants of this Country will be found in H. Caritat’s Collections” (216). To make good on this promise he regularly sent to London for the latest and most popular titles, occasionally traveling there himself and returning in a ship weighted down with his acquisitions. A great many of these imported goods were novels in the Gothic mode, the specialty of London’s infamous and immensely successful Minerva Press, for which Caritat was an authorized distributor in the U. S. Despite the moans of critics and moralists, the fans of dark adventure and ghoulish frights on both sides of the Atlantic consumed en masse the lurid wares of William Lane’s publishing house, which is now best remembered for producing six of the seven Northanger Horrid Novels, the Gothic must-reads recommended to the impressionable heroine of Jane Austen’s parodic Northanger Abbey (written1803, published 1818).4 Caritat was far 2 from negligent in his attentions to this lucrative market and to its predominantly female readership. As one contemporary put it: His talents were not meanly cultivated by letters; he could tell a good book from a bad one, which few modern librarians can do. But place aux dames was his maxim, and all the ladies of New-York declared that the library of Mr. Caritat was charming. Its shelves could scarcely sustain the weight of Female Frailty, the Posthumous Daughter, and the Cavern of Woe; they required the aid of the carpenter to support the burden of the Cottage-on-the-Moor, the House of Tynian, and the Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne; or they groaned under the multiplied editions of the Devil in Love, More Ghosts, and Rinaldo Rinaldini. Novels were called for by the young and the old; from the tender virgin of thirteen, whose little heart went pit-a-pat at the approach of a beau; to the experienced matron of three score, who could not read without spectacles. (John Davis 186-7)5 This admiring yet gently mocking sketch appears in the travel narrative of Englishman John Davis, an aspiring young writer who, like Brown, found in Caritat a publisher, and a shrewd one at that, a pioneer in the new business of letters. Davis records that when he approached Caritat for career advice, the canny businessman forthrightly told him, “I should be happy to serve you, but I have not the hypocrisy to pretend that my offers of service are disinterested: interest blends itself with all human actions, and you, sir, have it in your power to be useful to me” (19-20). He soon afterward undertook the distribution of Davis’s The Original Letters of the Unfortunate Lovers, Ferdinand and Elisabeth (1798), a transcription of the intimate correspondence between the star-crossed couple at 3 the center of a sensational Manhattan murder-suicide case from the winter before. Of the book tradesman, Davis declares, “Few men knew better how to gratify present curiosity” (26). “The Feast of Reason and the Flow of the Soul” Caritat’s dealing in such fare carried the potential to offend some self-appointed critics of popular taste.
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