Re(forming) the republic: Gothic negotiations of American subjectivity from revolution to empire

This dissertation explores the link between a uniquely American gothic literary tradition and the establishment of American subjectivity and nationhood. Filled with virginal maidens fleeing lascivious patriarchs through haunted castles, dungeons, and subterranean passages, the British gothic went through quite a transformation as it reached the shores of the New World. For, the American frontier provided its new immigrants with unique terrors that required an extension and reinvention of familiar gothic tropes. The British castle was then replaced by the American frontier as a site for revolution, ritualized violence, obscured identities, psychological fragmentation, the threat of miscegenation, and a confrontation with racialized others, both Indian and black. The American gothic was initiated upon the chaos of the American Revolution through its insistence upon breaking ties with England in order to establish a republic tied to a unique subjectivity: "new" American men and women. The first two chapters utilizes Douglas Glover's The Life and Times of Captain N and Herman Melville's Israel Potter to discuss how common men's experience of the Revolution evoked the gothic and challenged their negotiation of American subjectivities through severe fragmentation including the Yankee/Tory dichotomy, bloody massacres, obscured identities, illicit sexual desires, and familial decay. The chapters on Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie and Pauline Hopkins's Contending Forces explore their utilization of the gothic to illuminate the challenges faced by "new" women as they sought an empowering American subjectivity. While Sedgwick gestures towards courtship and marriage as gothic entrapments for the white women, Hopkins creates a black female gothic to articulate the dangers posed by the sexualized black female body and the entrapping qualities of the "cult of true womanhood" post-Reconstruction. The last chapter, on Willa Cather's The Professor's House, discusses how the gothic haunts the narrative of American empire. It demonstrates how nostalgia for a white masculinity based on the mythology of the rugged, adventurous frontier elides the brutal realities of American internal colonization. In addition, it also explores the gothic deterioration of the modern American family as the Gothicism of the frontier is replaced by the horrors of American capitalism and the marketplace.