SOURCE: "Charles Brockden Brown and the Uses of Gothicism: A Reassessment," in ESQ: A Journal of The American Renaissance, Vol. 18, No. 1, 1st Quarter, 1972, pp. 10-18.

[In the essay that follows, Hume differentiates between the Gothic novel and the presence of Gothic elements in a novel, measuring Brown's work against these standards. Hume concludes that Brown is concerned in all his novels with the psychology of his characters and that he utilizes the "trappings of Gothicism " in order to create situations to which his characters react, but that his novels are not truly Gothic.]

Although Charles Brockden Brown has long been thought of as the first American Gothic novelist—essentially a forerunner of Poe—recent critics have been turning away from this view of him, and we may well wonder just how much substance there is in the Gothic ascription.¹ Certainly to date no one has shown that in sources or mode Brown was drawing significantly on contemporary English Gothic novelists; and indeed, I shall try to prove the opposite. In truth the form of his novels seems more influenced by Godwin, Bage, and Holcroft than by the Gothicists. This has led several critics, notably Clark, to view them as "novels of purpose"—the purpose being "dissemination of … radicalism."² But this description represents Brown's work no better than earlier labels.

Brown can actually be usefully viewed in a number of contexts. He is a writer of novels of feminine distress in the tradition of Richardson, a point rightly emphasized by Leslie Fielder. At the same time he is often much concerned with "manners" in the fashion of Fanny Burney and others. As a journalist and social thinker he invites explication with reference to his nonfictional work. His obvious use of Godwin further encourages the notion that he was a novelist of ideas. As the forbear of Cooper and Poe and as the object of Shelley's admiration, Brown becomes the subject of a hunt for other men's sources and hence an object of "historical" curiosity. Finally, of course, Brown can be viewed as a writer of Gothic novels.

Critical accounts of Brown agree on some points—especially his slovenly construction—but diverge wildly on others: all four of the major novels have been firmly upheld as the "best." I suspect that this heterogeneity of opinion results from critics coming to Brown with different purposes and concerns in mind, and the resulting chaos makes me the more anxious to state my aims and biases at the outset. I take it as beyond question that Brown does extensively employ the trappings of Gothicism; whether any of his novels is "Gothic" in more than a superficial sense is another matter. I think it useful, therefore, (1) to consider how central the conception of the Gothic is to Brown's novels; (2) to inquire precisely what part it plays in them; and (3) to contrast Brown's work with the Gothic types produced by his contemporaries and predecessors.

I

Although critics speak glibly of "the Gothic novel" and "the Gothic imagination," these entities are in fact exceedingly ill-defined. Even in the 1764–1820 period in England, the Gothic novel does not exist as a clear and independent form, and it would be hard to claim even that a special Gothic tradition was developing. A distinction between Gothicism and the Gothic novel is crucial. Gothic devices—midnight scenes, haunted castles, and the like—appear almost ubiquitously in late eighteenth-century fiction.³ Writers like Clara Reeve and Sophia Lee use Gothicism to enliven otherwise ordinary sentimental or historical tales, just as Godwin is not above doing so in his mechanistically didactic Caleb Williams (1794). In the brief period when Brown was writing novels (1798–1801) no real Gothic "school" was apparent. Mrs. Radcliffe's sentimentaldistress tales were all the rage, and Lewis' The Monk (1796) was a succès de scandale, but no distinct form had jelled. With the benefit of hindsight, modern critics can see in the works of Walpole, Radcliffe, and Lewis potentialities and devices which were later to be exploited by such writers as Mary Shelley, Maturin, and Emily Brontë; nonetheless, in studying Brown we have to recollect that he would not have conceived the Gothic novel as a special and distinct form or regarded it as possessing special psychological and affective characteristics.⁴

The sub-categories employed by Montague Summers (sentimental-Gothic; terror-Gothic; historical-Gothic) are unhelpful, for they lump together very dissimilar works and lead to the supposition that the generic conception of the Gothic is more important than usually it really is: thus The Old English Baron, for example, is in reality a rather soupy romance, and its ghosts are strictly additives. On the other hand, in a few cases a novel's defining characteristics and central thrust seem to rely on its use of Gothic materials. And since several such works exhibit common features, it is natural to view them loosely as a group. But the radical dissimilarity of Brown's works to this group is revealing. First, none of his novels has the characteristic "distinct setting" removed from ordinary standards of probability. His settings are largely urban and realistic: Brown frequently names real streets. English writers were setting their stories in Southern France, Spain, Italy, or the near East, and generally in the past as well. Brown's time is strictly contemporary. Second, Brown's stories lack truly impressive villain-heroes. As I will suggest in more detail later, Wieland, Carwin, Craig, Ormond, Clithero, and Welbeck all lack tragic stature; worse, they all turn out to be rather mean figures; whining, tricky, or demented, but not terrifying or possessed of a moral complexity which also rouses sympathy. Third, the English Gothic writers generally place the innocent in a position where virtue and reason apparently cannot prevail against the villain's Machiavellian evil; a by-product is a prevailing skepticism about reason and religion which produces a marked anti-clericalism, even in so bourgeois a writer as Ann Radcliffe. Brown, though he does place his characters in jeopardy, makes a point of allowing their virtue and strength of mind to protect them; he displays no anti-clericalism; and his ethical system is strictly ordinary. None of his villains is fearsomely attractive, and none is granted the suspension of moral judgment common in the English novels.

Certainly Brown does not write in any of the modes established by his English predecessors. He has only contempt for the supernatural marvels favored by Horace Walpole; indeed, he not only explains all apparently supernatural events but also takes the trouble to annotate his explanations with references to recent scientific discoveries. Brown does sometimes, like Mrs. Radcliffe, hold the reader in long drawn-out suspense, but unlike her he is entirely willing to cross the boundary into out and out horrors—Wieland's mass-murders, the plague scenes and deaths in Ormond and Arthur Mervyn, the butchery in Edgar Huntly. With his realism (a far cry from The Monk), his outright horrors, and his ethical simplicity, Brown is considerably removed from the modes favored by his most Gothic predecessors. In fact, his extensive concentration on feminine distress places him closer to Richardson than to the Gothicists, and this relationship deserves a closer look.

For our purposes, several points about Richardson are important. In his novels distressed females figure prominently; suspense is well drawn out but actual horrors (for example, Clarissa's rape) can occur. Lovelace is the sort of half-attractive villain we see in Ormond, though he too lacks Gothic stature. Perhaps most important is Richardson's emphasis on elaborate psychological analysis. This becomes prominent in later Gothic fiction, but is much less developed in the pre-1800 examples. Compared with his Gothic successors, Richardson places a great deal of emphasis on virtue and moral propriety. Of course, Mrs. Radcliffe is proper enough, but for her the virtuous heroine is a donné, not a subject to be explored in great detail. Here Brown's interest closely parallels Richardson: we can easily see why Shelley rhapsodizes over Constantia Dudley, but could well be indifferent to the commonplace rectitude of Emily St. Aubert. Here indeed is a point on which Brown markedly differs from the Gothicists: they tend to concentrate on the psychology of the villain and leave their technical lead characters rather bland, while Brown concentrates on his virtuous hero or heroine and leaves the villains somewhat undernourished.⁵

No doubt any schematic description of the types of fiction prevalent in a given period is an oversimplification, but such a device can be useful, and some account of the English novel before Brown seems necessary. Perhaps the most salient point in any survey is the multiplicity of aims, concerns, and methods which appears in late eighteenth-century fiction. The novel's antecedents in romance, personal history, and intellectual or moral fable continue to exercise a strong influence on form. (I have in mind seventeenth-century French romances, Defoe, and Gulliver's Travels as representative of such modes.) Distinctions are sometimes made between the epistolary-psychological technique of Richardson and the third-person, "History of" approach of Fielding; to some degree they have distinguishable followings. Sterne's highly individual psychologizing is sometimes cited as a third possibility, though he attracted less imitation. But perhaps a more meaningful set of categories would be the following. (1) Personal history with adventures; for example, Fielding, Smollett, and later imitators. (2) Domestic or "manners" novels, which appear in a number of guises: historical (Sophia Lee), education and morals (Fanny Burney), straight sentimental (Mackenzie's Man of Feeling). (3) Serious, didactic novels (Godwin, Bage, Holcroft). (4) "Gothic" novels (Walpole, Mrs. Radcliffe, Lewis). What, we must ask, is the special nature and thrust of the Gothic form, at least as distinguishable in retrospect?

In the Preface to the second edition (1765) of The Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole gives a good account of his enterprise, saying in essence that he tried to combine the imaginative freedom of older romances with the psychological realism of recent novels.⁶ We see the same kind of aim in Coleridge's part of the Lyrical Ballads. But although the Gothic novels do exhibit concern for this kind of psychological realism, the reader is principally enthralled not by character but by events or suspense. True, we can be intrigued by the villain-hero, but in the early novels we tend to see rather little of him except from some distance. Seldom are we close enough to hero or heroine to take their perils with more than a conventional seriousness. Even in The Italian I think we are less genuinely concerned for the protagonists than we are bothered by the excruciating social embarrassments in Fanny Burney or Jane Austen. My point is simply that in reading the early Gothic novels we respond less to the characters (even the villains) than to the suspense or horror devices to which we are subjected. These works are designedly affective; their object is to rouse the imagination and feelings of the reader, but unlike Clarissa they do not go about it by bringing the reader as close as possible to the main character, and unlike sentimental tales of the time, the feelings they try to rouse are not principally pity for distress.

Oversimplifying only a little, we can say that the principal aims of the various sorts of novels I have distinguished are significantly different. The realistic historian entertains and instructs in the straightforward fashion of Defoe or Fielding. Domestic novelists pursue much the same aims in a different theater, and they are likely to emphasize feelings, psychology, or sentiment at the expense of action, though in only a few cases is the reader inclined to hang himself for want of plot. The didactic novelists aim to embody social or political ideas in a fictional framework; here the story exists principally as vehicle for an extrinsic concept, and our response is more intellectual than emotional. No doubt the Gothic writer is glad enough to instruct and entertain, but his efforts are really bent to giving the reader an emotional workout, and the vein he chooses to exploit is the imaginative rather than the sentimental; the Gothicist gives us the sublime and the terrible, not tear-jerking pathos or touching benevolence.

The devices which seem so hoary to us—haunted castles, extinguished candles, and so forth—were originally introduced in an effort to sensitize and liberate the reader's imagination, to free the resources of fancy, as Walpole says. Naturally enough they were seized upon and exploited for pure thrill value and quickly became hackneyed—hence Northanger Abbey and hence Brown's sneers at the Gothic in the Preface to Edgar Huntly. But the mere presence of Gothic flummery in a novel does not define its type. If we look beyond such trappings, Brown's novels quite obviously are of a different sort than those of contemporary Gothicists; we are left to ask whether Brown's use of their devices is simply so much frosting to a sentimental-domestic cake. I think not. If we turn from arguments about what generically "constitutes" a Gothic novel and look instead at what Brown does with the "devices," we can see that, though Gothicism is not central to his endeavor, he makes effective use of it as a means toward his own ends.

II

Of Brockden Brown's major novels, two, Clara Howard and Jane Talbot, cannot by any stretch of a definition be termed Gothic; and a responsible critic is more or less obliged to explain their relationship—or lack of it—to the rest of the corpus. The critic's difficulties are compounded by the lack of any tidy pattern of development in Brown's novels: since he wrote the first four more or less simultaneously (and incorporated older work in some places) we can hardly argue that the lessons learned in writing one appear in the management of the next. Clara Howard can fairly be called a dry run for Jane Talbot, but each of the first four is distinct in type and concerns.

Wieland, the first completed, is the most overtly Gothic and by far the closest to English Gothic models. Clara Wieland's virtue and life are threatened; in Radcliffean fashion we are held in suspense for long periods, and the apparently supernatural is ultimately given natural (if here scientific) explanation—spontaneous combustion, ventriloquism, and so forth. But unlike Radcliffe, Brown is perfectly willing to butcher the innocent, and so his stage is liberally strewn with the bodies of women and children—a direct assault on our sensibilities of the sort favored by M. G. Lewis. But unlike Lewis or Beckford, Brown does not exaggerate his horrors to the verge of burlesque or beyond. Wieland is unique among Brown's novels in having the sort of isolated, largely self-contained setting common in Gothic novels; lack of social realism is almost a sine qua non for this sort of terror story. Two major points, however, differentiate Wieland from what are usually thought of as Gothic novels. First is the lack of a true villain-hero. Carwin is responsible for some of the terrors and misunderstandings, but we finally see him as a snivelling apologist for his doings rather than as a self-willed Ubermensch who glories in his own damnation. The novel's actual horrors are enacted by Wieland himself, but he is not consciously doing evil, and when his religious dementia is punctured his horror and remorse lead him immediately to suicide. Again, this is not the stuff of which a Gothic villain is made: we regard Wieland not with awe but with horror and pity. The lack of a fearsomely attractive villain leads to a second point of differentiation: the suspense and horrors of the novel do not work directly on the reader's imagination, for our interest is really directed elsewhere. As a recent critic puts it, "The dramatic heart of the novel is not in the events themselves but in the reaction of Clara and Wieland to them."⁷ This seems to me a crucial point. Even in Wieland, the most ostentatiously Gothic of Brown's novels, the trappings of terror and horror are employed not to work upon the reader but to produce reactions in the characters, and the reactions then become the subject of close analysis. We will see this pattern repeated in other novels.

Ormond can be characterized as domestic, realistic, and didactic. The struggle of Constantia Dudley to support her blind and broken father amid the ravages of plague (etc., etc.) is a straightforward sentimental-domestic story whose realism and financial detail make it an exceptionally effective specimen of its type. Constantia is an idealized character, but Brown scrupulously avoids emotional excess, even in bathetic situations. Against the background of this realistic tale of poverty is set Ormond. Among Brown's villains he comes closest to the usual Gothic recipe: great spirit and ability perverted to evil ends. Ornond's pseudorationalistic principles and hunger for absolute power over others are reminiscent of the villains of Lewis and Radcliffe. His relative indifference to Helena's suicide suggests a moral callousness appropriate to such a figure. Nonetheless, a number of factors combine to undercut his stature. Constantia is so virtuous by nature that we cannot imagine her succumbing to his blandishments, however plausible.⁸ Ormond is a serious threat only in a physical sense, which turns out to be awkward, for when he engineers Dudley's murder and tries to rape Constantia he has come such a way from his previous character that the whole story alters its character too and becomes a melodrama. Brown's clumsy attempt to prepare for the rape scene by abruptly introducing a gory anecdote about Ormond's past (Chap. 27) is indicative of his difficulties.

Indeed, our whole view of Ormond is made awkward by the narrative standpoint of the novel, which is supposedly told by Constantia's friend Sophia Courtland, who is an observer only in the last chapters. This device permits Brown to dwell lovingly on Constantia's virtues, but it means that our view of Ormond is second and third hand: except for some ex post facto hint dropping, Ormond appears during most of the story filtered through Constantia's rather good opinion of him, which considerably reduces his impressiveness as a villain. Such imaginative excursions as Miss Courtland makes into his mind take place in his free-thinking phase, so we are the more surprised when he turns out to be a villain of the deepest dye. In patches Ormond is a striking piece of work, but overall it seems to me the least cohesive of Brown's novels. From a sentimental novel of manners and morals it abruptly turns into a suspense thriller, and the gap is not comfortably bridged. Our extrinsic view of the title villain gives him neither tragic stature nor even real impressiveness. In this respect Brown's villains are constantly disappointing. None of them is really morally complex (as is Mrs. Radcliffe's Schedoni), or psychologically maimed (as is Bronte's Heathcliff), or doomed to destruction by perverse self-will (Melville's Ahab). Brown's creations turn out to be insane (Wieland, Clithero), or essentially bestial (Ormond), or not evilly intentioned (Carwin), or simply to be tricky rogues (Thomas Craig, Welbeck). We never get inside these men as we do even Schedoni or Lewis' Ambrosio; we see no great potentiality for good in them (definitely a characteristic of most Gothic villains); and the audience finds them more to be pitied or hated than feared.

Perhaps one of the strongest objections to calling Brown's novels Gothic is the limited stature of his villains. They simply do not loom large enough. In the novels of Walpole, Radcliffe, and Lewis we do technically follow the hero or heroine, but the whole nature of the story is conditioned by the character and machinations of the villain. Brown's villains seem less central, and none of them possesses a conscious mixture of good and evil; those with good in them do not consciously do great evil, while the rogues care nothing for good.

Wieland and Ormond, despite their titles, concentrate on the character and psychology of the heroine. Constantia is the more interesting, but the first person narrative scheme of the former novel makes it more internally cohesive. Edgar Huntly and Arthur Mervyn are quite different in kind. Both follow young men; both are quite overtly adventure stories. The brief Preface to the former novel helps clarify Brown's aims. He will give us a history of adventures but with two new twists. The scene will be American, and hence fresh. More important, he will seek to excite the reader's imagination not by employing "puerile superstition and exploded manners, Gothic castles and chimeras," but by turning to a medical phenomenon (sleepwalking) and "the incidents of Indian hostility, and the perils of the Western wilderness." This explicit rejection of Gothic trappings need not mean, of course, that Brown is rejecting Gothic aims; indeed, when he speaks of "calling forth the passions and engaging the sympathies of the reader by means hitherto unemployed by preceding authors," he sounds very like contemporary Gothicists.

Nonetheless, though Edgar Huntly is a rousing adventure story, its basis is not the terrors—Indians, panthers, and so forth—with which it is liberally supplied. Rather, the novel is really a bungled Bildungsroman. We follow the narration of Edgar very closely, and our interest is almost entirely concentrated on his struggles against elemental forces. In retrospect, two points stand out in the reader's mind: the sheer excitement of Edgar's puzzles and predicaments, and annoyance at an infelicitous narrative scheme. Brown holds us rigidly to what Edgar knows, which is fine up to a point. He does not know about his sleep-walking, and though a reader might suspect from the secret-compartment episode, we share his assumption that Indians must have cast him into the pit in the cave, while presumably carrying off his sister. This supposition is ingeniously supported by the appearance of Edgar's gun in Indian hands. This is gimmicky, but perfectly good adventure story technique. The first person narration necessary to this device, however, becomes a major problem at the end of the story. Brown attempts to avoid a predictable, bland conclusion by making Edgar's view of Clithero completely wrong. Against all previous evidence Clithero turns out to be a homicidal maniac, and Mrs. Sarsefield's miscarriage (the result of fright) presumably teaches Edgar to "be more circumspect and more obsequious for the future," but since we had every reason to think Edgar's judgment correct, this ending is distinctly disconcerting. If we take the conclusion as proof of ironic undercutting of the hero, what are we left with? Edgar's education comes in a single lump, and the rest of the tale seems irrelevant to it.⁹

Arthur Mervyn is likewise a Bildungsroman, but of a very different order. Instead of adventures in the woods, it gives us an account of a young man's mishaps in a plague-stricken city. Though specific Philadelphian detail is sparse, the descriptions are strikingly plain and realistic. But unlike Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, the novel is not simply a descriptive account. Here young Mervyn's experiences are central, and the plague is merely background for his struggles to make his way and his unlucky involvement with the villain Welbeck. The narrative perspective is distinctly complicated: it consists essentially of a Chinese box of story within story.¹⁰ Early in Part II Brown succeeds in casting serious doubt on the reliability of Mervyn's earlier narration: this fact, added to the multiplicity of narrators, makes the reader's response to Arthur Mervyn less straightforward and trusting than in the other novels. The result is an increase in complexity and a more active speculation about the truths of the case. Despite innumerable loose ends and some illmotivated actions (for example, Wallace abandoning Mervyn in a friend's bedroom) the story is gripping and the truth stimulatingly uncertain. Several plot lines are continually left hanging fire, which builds suspense and anticipation, while the plague provides plenty of horrors. Nonetheless, I could not call Arthur Mervyn a Gothic novel. For one thing, Mervyn is menaced not by a titanic villain or by vague but terrifying powers; rather, he is endangered by poverty, disease, and his peripheral involvement in Welbeck's criminal activities. For another thing, the type of narrative employed keeps our attention more on the reactions of the teller than on the events he is relating. This last point is worth expanding, for I think it is one of the key differentiations of Brown's novels from contemporary Gothic work.

III

First-person narration by the protagonist is not well suited to elicting the sort of effect Gothic writers try to produce in the reader. The imaginative involvement of the reader in a dark and irrational world—usually a world removed from the ordinary—which the Gothicists seek is missing in Brown. His realistic settings and emphasis on science and reason place his fiction on a more ordinary plane of existence. Nowhere do we find any of his villains really impressive or attractive. Where one of them temporarily appears so—as Ornond does to Constantia—we are quickly assured that it is so only because she has not the experience and insight which would let her judge correctly. The presence of a large-scale villain is a prime characteristic of eighteenth-century Gothic novels; however not only do Brown's villains lack stature, but we see them wholly from the outside. Brown's concentration on the viewpoint of hero or heroine brings us very close to these characters: the result is that we are more interested in their reactions than in the events which occasion them.

Critics who overemphasize the presence of pseudo-Gothic elements in the first four novels are generally less than pleased with Clara Howard and Jane Talbot. These two works are epistolary, and the letters are not, as in the earlier novels, lengthy recollected accounts. The subject in each instance is social, moral, and family barriers to a marriage. Action is almost entirely of the drawing room variety, or off stage. The substance of these novels, especially the long drawn-out Jane Talbot, consists of minute analysis of the feelings of heroine and hero as they respond to a seemingly endless series of ethical dilemmas and social contretemps. What we see in these novels, I believe, is not a radical shift in Brown's subject and interests, but simply an increasingly exclusive concentration on psychological analysis at the expense of action. Even in Wieland the psychological bias is very strong. Nowhere in Brown's novels are we really gripped principally by suspense about intrinsic events (Edgar Huntly comes closest to doing this); rather, we live inside the lead characters and are preoccupied with them. In this respect the novels are far more Richardsonian than Gothic. Even in his most action-oriented stories Brown includes a substantial admixture of "manners." In his ethical concerns, education themes, and sentiment, Brown can justly be compared with late eighteenth-century domestic novelists like Burney. The comparison is most apt in the last two novels, but these elements are present earlier, though they are less prominent.

Yet the intriguing suggestion that Brown writes "novels of purpose" does not seem to me fully tenable, though some support for it can be found in Brown's prefaces, essays, and letters. This is not the place for a thorough consideration of the matter: I raise it merely for purposes of clarification. In correctly rejecting Gothicism as Brown's principal concern, several critics have maintained that he is "a novelist of ideas" in the fashion of Godwin and Holcroft. But unlike those writers Brown does not seem to construct his novels to convey a clearly defined idea or argument—at least, no one has yet explained what they might be in each instance. Warner Berthoff wisely qualifies this view by saying that "narrative for Brown was not merely a means of illustrating and embellishing pre-established ideas; it was capable of a more positive and creative kind of statement; it was an instrument for discovering ideas, for exploring and testing them out; it was, we may say, an alternative to formal, systematic speculative thought."¹¹ Fair enough: all of the novels are laden with bits and pieces of moral and social speculation. I would say, however, that this is merely the natural result of Brown's preoccupation with such matters in his other writings. At least for me, what stands out in Brown's fiction is not ideas but people. I do not mean that many of his characters are particularly memorable as individuals, but that his concentration on his protagonists' responses seems to be the defining characteristic of his method.

If this is a reasonably accurate account of Brown's fiction, the relation of his work to the English Gothic novel should not be hard to define. Unlike Walpole, Radcliffe, and Lewis, Brown is not principally an affective writer. In mode he is sui generis: his combination of personal history with domestic manners, morals, education, didacticism, and psychological analysis is based on no one model. What gives rise to the persistence of the Gothic label is Brown's undeniable employment of quasi-Gothic devices and situations. The midnight scene, the extinguished candle, the threat to female virtue, and so forth, though not exclusively the property of the Gothicists, are all too often considered the defining features of the Gothic novel, and the label too hastily applied. Actually, Brown's narrative perspective, his villains, his realistic settings, and particularly his rigorous morals are all quite inappropriate to the sort of novel in which the Gothic element is central to the nature and impact of the work. But Brown's Gothicism is not mere windowdressing. Unlike such popular writers as Clara Reeve and Sophia Lee, Brown does not produce sentimental romances in which scary episodes and mock-supernaturalism add a frisson for the customer's greater entertainment. When he employs such devices, his object is to produce a reaction in the character, not the reader. Considered as suspense stories, or proto-Poe, Brown's novels seem pretty poor stuff. But to view them this way is unjust, for what Brown really seems to be after in each of his six major novels is close attention to the psychology of his characters—and it is this concentration which makes any reader but the most captious critic relatively unworried by Brown's botched structures and loose ends. Brown's perpetual emphasis on the reactions of his characters to events rather than on the events themselves accounts for the curious role of the Gothic in his novels. For though the Gothic does not serve a merely decorative function, it is employed not for the affective purposes we expect, but to provide situations, problems, and trials for the characters to respond to.

Notes

¹ For example, Warner Berthoff says at the outset of one of the best studies of Brown's fictional mode and method: "The assumption underlying this article is that Gothic sensation and even the touches of realism and psychological penetration are but the secondary and incidental properties of Brown's fiction; that it is essentially a fiction of ideas." See "¢ Lesson on Concealment': Brockden Brown's Method in Fiction," Philological Quarterly, 37 (1958), 45-57.

² David Lee Clark, Charles Brockden Brown (Durham, N.C., 1952), p. 192. No remotely adequate study of Brown's "sources" exists; probably none could be written. Brown himself acknowledges Godwin's influence; Dunlap's Diary attests his knowledge of Holcroft.

³ For an account of the use of Gothic trappings in several types of novels, see J. M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England 1770–1800 (1932; rpt. Lincoln, 1961), Chap. 7.

⁴ For an attempt at this kind of ef post facto definition (relevant mainly to later writers) see my "Gothic versus Romantic: A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel," PMLA, 84 (1969), 282-290.

⁵ The one major instance in which he does follow such a character—Carwin the Biloquist—breaks off before the man has actually become a villain.

⁶ "It was an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern. In the former all was imagination and improbability: in the latter, nature is always intended to be, and sometimes has been, copied with success. Invention has not been wanting; but the great resources of fancy have been dammed up, by a strict adherence to common life. But if in the latter species Nature has cramped imagination, she did but take her revenge, having been totally excluded from old romances…. The author of the following pages thought it possible to reconcile the two kinds. Desirous of leaving the powers of fancy at liberty to expatiate through the boundless realms of invention, and thence of creating more interesting situations, he wished to conduct the mortal agents in his drama according to the rules of probability; in short, to make them think, speak and act, as it might be supposed mere men and women would do in extraordinary positions. He had observed, that in all inspired writings, the personages under the dispensation of miracles, and witnesses to the most stupendous phenomena, never lose sight of their human character: whereas in the productions of romantic story, an improbable event never fails to be attended by an absurd dialogue." The Castle of Otranto, ed. W. S. Lewis (Oxford, 1964), pp. 7-8.

⁷ William M. Manly, "The Importance of Point of View in Brockden Brown's Wieland," American Literature, 35 (1963), 311-321; quotation from p. 320.

⁸ Brown does attempt (Chap. 18) to suggest that her lack of religious principles endangers her virtue, since "all opinions in her mind were mutable." But I doubt that many readers are convinced, especially as we never see Constantia waver in her principles.

⁹ Arthur G. Kimball, in "Savages and Savagism: Brockden Brown's Dramatic Irony," Studies in Romanticism, 6 (1967), 214-225, ingeniously explains the conclusion as part of a systematic irony. But if Brown was aiming at this, I don't think he brought it off.

¹⁰ For a disentanglement, see Kenneth Bernard, "Arthur Mervyn: The Ordeal of Innocence," Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 6 (1965), 441-459.

¹¹ Berthoff, "A Lesson on Concealment," p. 46.