ASYLUMS, ALIENS, AND DISABILITIES IN CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN'S GOTHIC NOVELS A ...

130 Pages·2014·0.54 MB·English

ASYLUMS, ALIENS, AND DISABILITIES

IN CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN’S GOTHIC NOVELS

A Thesis

Presented to the faculty of the Department of English
California State University, Sacramento

Submitted in partial satisfaction of
the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

in

English
(Literature)

by

Sarah Eleonora Faye

SPRING
2014
ASYLUMS, ALIENS, AND DISABILITIES

IN CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN’S GOTHIC NOVELS

A Thesis

by

Sarah Eleonora Faye

Approved by:

__________________________________, Committee Chair
Nancy Sweet, Ph.D.

__________________________________, Second Reader
Jason Gieger, Ph.D.

____________________________
Date

ii
Student: Sarah Eleonora Faye

I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University format
manual, and that this thesis is suitable for shelving in the Library and credit is to be awarded for
the thesis.

__________________________, Department Chair ___________________
David Toise, Ph,D. Date

Department of English

iii
Abstract

of

ASYLUMS, ALIENS, AND DISABILITIES

IN CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN’S GOTHIC NOVELS

by

Sarah Eleonora Faye

This thesis focuses on Charles Brockden Brown’s ambiguous use of disabilities in an
attempt to understand Brown’s stance on the Early Republic’s nativist debates. While
Brown’s representations of disabilities mimic the tropes of nativist politico-medical
rhetoric, they also push readers into identifying with flawed characters and questioning
nativist intolerance. Brown debunks the simplistic worldview of the nativists, leading his
readers into considering that they might already be degenerated physically and mentally,
that we cannot separate ourselves from the Other, and that refusing to accept human
imperfection means creating a society of unattainable norms. Thus, ambiguity is central
to Brown’s work: he deconstructs all the binaries he sets up to give us a radical depiction
of the Early Republic as complex, imperfect, and diverse.

_______________________, Committee Chair
Nancy Sweet, Ph.D.

_______________________
Dat
iv
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am extremely grateful to my advisors, Nancy Sweet and Jason Gieger, for their support,
patience, and scholarly guidance throughout the drafting of this thesis. Professor Sweet,
thank you for being so enthusiastic about this project and for helping me articulate an
increasingly complex argument. I can never thank you enough for having introduced me
to Brown and for helping me navigate through his fascinating (and frustrating!)
ambiguity. Professor Gieger, thank you for your insights and guidance during this
project. Your passion for eighteenth-century gothic novels has inspired me to strive for
excellence, draft after draft. I also want to thank Catherine Kudlick, who has made me
discover the fascinating world of Disability Studies and who has enriched my
understanding of literature, history, and society. Finally, thank you to Craig Faye, whose
constant belief in my success lit the way along the tortuous path towards completing this
thesis.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page

Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………….…v

Chapter

1. INTRODUCING THE CONTRADICTORY TIMES AND NOVELS OF CHARLES
BROCKDEN BROWN…………………………………………………………………1
2. DISABILITIES AND METAPHORS IN ORMOND AND ARTHUR MERVYN…….20
3. SYMPATHY, MADNESS, AND THE POLITICS OF SAMENESS IN EDGAR
HUNTLY……..………………………………………………………………………...44
4. AMERICA AS AN “ASYLUM”: DECONSTRUCTING MADNESS AND REASON
IN WIELAND…………...……………………………………………………………...69
5. DECONSTRUCTING BINARIES TO EXPLORE IMPERFECTION IN BROWN’S
GOTHIC NOVELS……………………………………………………………………87
6. EPILOGUE………………………………………………………………………..…110
Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………….116

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1

Chapter 1
INTRODUCING THE CONTRADICTORY TIMES AND NOVELS OF CHARLES
BROCKDEN BROWN

For someone who wants to write original American literature “to exhibit a series
of adventures, growing out of the condition of our country” (Brown, Edgar Huntly 3),
Charles Brockden Brown oddly ends most of his gothic novels with the departure of his
heroes and heroines (Arthur Mervyn, Clara Wieland, and Constantia Dudley) from
America to Europe. This oddity is just one of the difficulties that readers encounter when
reading his novels since Brown always seems to be articulating one belief while
illustrating another. In his four major novels, Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-
Walker (1799), Wieland; or the Transformation (1798), Ormond; or the Secret Witness
(1799), and Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 (1798-1799), Brown both
illustrates and rejects the values of his society. While Brown’s representation of physical
disability as a punishment for failing to embrace the Early Republic’s values of reason,
self-restraint, and common sense show him as potentially upholding his society’s values,
some of his plots depict mental disabilities in ways that blur the lines between the rational
and the irrational. As we will see, disability theory helps to make sense of Brown’s
critical illustration of the values of his time, which then sheds light on the contradictions
that readers feel when they read the novels. In turn, exploring the origin of these internal
contradictions reflects the many paradoxes of the period when Brown wrote his novels:
2

the years between 1798 and 1801 were a contradictory time when people wanted to
define what it meant to be American by merging pre-Revolutionary ideals with turbulent
world politics, epistemological philosophy, and medicine as a social cure.
The Early Republic of the 1790s inherited a comparable sense of world mission
that Revolutionary America received from the Puritans’ ideal of becoming a shining
example for the world. However, the mission of the 1790s transformed America into a
place of refuge. In Common Sense (1775-76), Thomas Paine articulates one of the ideals
that the new nation would embrace in its Revolutionary rhetoric: America was to be an
“asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of
Europe” (Paine, 24, emphasis in the original). Paine’s document paints America as an
exceptional place with a world mission, which can be found again in the documents such
as “The Declaration of Independence” stating the egalitarian tenet that “all men are
created equal” (Jefferson 8). While echoes of this rhetoric of America as an asylum
continue to shape the concept of Americanness to this day, we can spot a shift in
emphasis just a few years after the Revolution. In “Information to Those Who Would
Remove to America,” published in 1784, Benjamin Franklin qualifies the openness of
Paine’s asylum. While he reiterates that “strangers are welcome… and every one will
enjoy securely the profits of his industry,” Franklin also underlines the fact that only
those who are willing to be industrious and do not expect to enjoy the feudal inequalities
of Europe will be able to make it in the United States (464). The rhetoric of the 1790s,
while still upholding the Revolutionary ideals of America as an exceptional place of civil
liberties and the Franklinian beliefs that America makes people exceptional because it
3

rewards them for being industrious and independent, was shaped by international turmoil
and the increasing waves of immigrants coming to the United States. Again, the openness
of Paine’s asylum had to be re-qualified. The anxious question became: how can we keep
America and the American people exceptional when so many European radicals and
potential enemies to the Republic are mixing with the Anglo-American population? Even
worse, how can the very idea of America as a place superior to others survive when some
Americans themselves are not the rational, self-restrained, and hard-working people
described by Franklin and therefore fail to uphold the standards of Americanness? While
the belief that America is an exceptional space with exceptional people continued to
shape what it meant to be American in the 1790s, a growing anxiety about foreign and
inner degeneration contributed to the definition of American identity through binaries:
American/alien, rational/irrational, healthy/degenerate.
European turmoil such as the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and the French Revolution
(1789-1799) brought fleeing radical Europeans to the United States, which intensified the
fear towards unruly foreigners importing radical ideas from Europe. Indeed, the nativist
crisis of 1798-1801, best illustrated by the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 that increased
the President’s power to arrest citizens and deport foreigners with radical political ideas,
was a result of the American anxieties of seeing European radicals – in particular the
Irish – become politically active in the Early Republic (Durey 177, 248). As Michael
Durey demonstrates in Transatlantic Radicals and the Early American Republic,
European radicals were coming to America as a refuge from legal persecution, treason
trials, and as a land of hope where they could implement the radical changes they had
4

failed to bring to their native countries. However, creating a new life in the United States
did not always pan out, and some radicals became “rogues” who stole or dealt in forgery
(Durey 160). These were certainly not the men Franklin pictured in “Information to
Those Who Would Remove to America,” and nativist propaganda, using the rhetoric of
human perfectibility found in philosophical and medicinal works, depicted them as the
worst threat against the United States.
To believe that America is an asylum for those fleeing less perfect societies and to
fear that immigrants might cause the degeneration of the United States reveal a belief in
human progress since it creates a hierarchy of societies; this worldview goes hand in hand
with the medical discourse of the time. Starting a trend that would endure throughout the
nineteenth century, the eighteenth-century doctors focused on human perfectibility (both
physical and moral) and on a “medicine that offer[ed] the most ambitious programs for
improving the human race” (Winston 265). This belief was to transform the role of
doctors as the social curers infiltrating into the most private affairs of their society. For
example, believing that “defect or deformity in one of the parent’s body parts could result
in the disability being passed on to the offspring,” led doctors to categorize human people
in terms of their reproductive suitability (Winston 267). These categories became
pertinent to nativists worried that unsuitable people (both alien and unideal Americans)
would cause the degeneration of the American population. In fact, doctors became more
and more the dictators of the social norm; during the Revolutionary War, Benjamin Rush,
who was himself a doctor, described the ideal army general being “modest, sober, and
temperate” (qtd. in Stozier 419). Even though George Washington did not approve of a