A Study Of“transformation” Of The Community In Charles Brockden Brown’s Four Major Gothic Novels

Until the 1980 s,Charles Brockden Brown was generally construed as a secondary artist or a marginal figure.However,with the rise of post-modernism criticism and the receding of the influence of cold war consensus narratives,the conceptual space for criticism of a more complex early Republic began to flourish.Scholars began to draw their attention to this flawed precursor who is always delighted to discuss the complexity of social positions in his novels and essays.This thesis is divided into four chapters.First,it explains why American gothic can be analyzed with transatlantic research method and makes clear the definition of ideal individuals and communities contained in English gothic novels.Taking his four major gothic novels as examples,this thesis then mainly argues how Brown formulates in literary terms a kind of subject which is capable of negotiating the political,social,and demographic exigencies of the new United States.In Locke’s original formulation,the men who belonged to an English land-owning elite arranged within a traditional hierarchy of kinship relations.But when the individual enters a cultural milieu where people share altogether different notions of self-fulfillment and political authority---a place much like the post-Revolutionary United States,the limitations of this model becomes strikingly clear.As the first American novelist to put flesh on the latent problem in Locke’s model,in Arthur Mervyn;Or,Memories of the Year 1793,Brown creates a rumor of the yellow fever which can spread from person to person and change how each sees the world.By comparing the differences of responds triggered by one rumor between Mervyn and the Hadwins,Brown destroys the sentimental model of social relations.Then he makes Mervyn habitually invade people’s houses,bedrooms,parlors,even prison cells like a raging plague.By refusing to observe the imaginative boundaries that separate people’s emotions and violating the foundational distinctions between subject and object,Mervyn gets varies of “information” which boosts his success rate considerably.His success proves that Brown’s version of fluid and porous individuals ideally suited to the life in the city.Except for Philadelphia,Brown also foregrounds the wilderness as part of his American Gothic.Under unforeseen conditions of social and geographic mobility,Brown makes use of the “daughter” image from captivity narrative conventions to transform the wilderness into a site of social and somatic incorporation.In Wieland or The Transformation,an American Tale,although Clara chooses to take on “other” cultural practices that might help her adapt to the wilderness,this polluted daughter is still rewarded with a household of her own because of the qualities of cultural mobility and adaptability.In Edgar Huntly;Or,Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker,Edgar Huntly’s capability of transformation is also emphasized by Brown.For example,Huntly even claims that he has a kinship with Indians at the end of the story.By reproducing a individual who can going native in the wilderness,Brown reconfigures the elite and exclusionary social formation of Rowlandson’s narrative into one that can tolerate diversity.Nevertheless,not everyone would like to accept the logic of hybridization,such as Mervyn,the unity with Portuguese-Jewish-British Achsa Fielding makes him “half-delirious”.In Ormond;Or,The Secret Witness,Constantia Dudley not only refused to marry Ormond,a barbaric masculine figure who is distinguished by his “intercourse with savages”,but also kills him.To solve the question that individuals reject to build a cross-cultural alliance with each other,Brown uses Clithero Edny’s family to imagine a social unit whose constituent parts are not individuals so much as copies of one another.The collective as a whole matters more than the individual which is merely a relay in a network of exchange and less important than the lines connecting its various components.Compared with the traditional contract,Brown proposes a variation that has the power to incorporate the foreign and strange in the absence of traditional rules of kinship and exchange.American wilderness represents a different cultural space that supports this kind of tribal or clan-like forms of sociability.In order to integrate into this community,“individuals” need to have the ability to reconstitute themselves in converging with other people and things.The smaller circuits expanding outward from the “individuals” form a network without boundaries or limits.The network connects disparate people and even people and things and transforms them into a single heterogeneous organism.In this way,the static,exclusionary model of the nation is replaced by a rhizomatic community located in the wilderness.Here Brown emerges less as a “single author” than as a viable and productive representative for the investigation of numerous issues in early American studies and scholarship.By detaching identity from geographic origin,consanguinity,or exemplary political status,works of Brown imagine Americanness as an ability to change,adapt,travel,and even subsume individual difference and cultural particularity beneath forms of mass collectivity.This account gives us grounds on which to evaluate the extraordinary appeal of gothic novels in post-Revolutionary North America.The model of community based on incorporation and assimilation proposed by Brown makes the people who “come to think of themselves as Pennsylvanians or Virginians rather than as Americans” think of themselves as very much part of a transatlantic world of exchange during the last half of the eighteen-century and let them start to think in a way like a people bonded by a shared sense of purpose and identity.