Pathologies of the postrevolutionary American soul: The function of disease in the major novels of Charles Brockden Brown

No reader of the major novels of Charles Brockden Brown can help being struck by the recurring images of pathology that govern a fiction which Brown himself described as largely driven by conditions within the early republic. His claim suggests, of course, that Brown shared in what historians of the early national period identify as "the republican fear of political pathology." This dissertation examines the phenomena of spontaneous human combustion and the medical-politics of religious enthusiasm (Wieland), ventriloquially inspired mania (Wieland), yellow fever (Ormond and Arthur Mervyn), and somnambulism (Edgar Huntly) as they were understood by those members of the 18th century medico-scientific community whose works Brown either cites in his major novels or with whose writings on these subjects he is known to have been familiar. Such an approach provides a greater sense of the socio-political metaphoric properties that Brown is likely to have perceived in each disorder and considered relevant to the condition of his immediate generation of readers. Even more vitally, it argues for dramatic revision of our traditional estimations of Brown's intentions in his yellow fever scenes and of his own conception of the medico-political implications of spontaneous human combustion, ventriloquially inspired mania, and somnambulism. What becomes clear is that Brown employed each pathology for reasons less bizarre and more brilliant than we think.