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Reviews of Books
Renovating Charles Brockden Brown's Revolution
Larry F. Kutchen, Trinity University
| Charles Brockden Brown's Revolution and the Birth of American Gothic. By Peter Kafer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. 272 pages. $39.95 (cloth).Revising Charles Brockden Brown: Culture, Politics, and Sexuality in the Early Republic. Edited by Philip Barnard, Mark L. Kamrath, and Stephen Shapiro. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004. 416 pages. $44.00 (cloth).
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Charles Brockden Brown may have felt the belated effect of the American Revolution far more keenly and directly than any other American writer. Born a Quaker in 1771 in an increasingly antipatriarchal, Whiggish Philadelphia that was throwing off the legacy of William Penn as ruthlessly as it was seeking independence from the Crown, and whose raging paranoia needed to see conspiracy in parliament and pacifism, Brown experienced revolution as a horror that came "out of the blue" (xix). As Peter Kafer recounts in his forceful prologue, that horror began in 1777 when Brown's father, Elijah, with twenty-five other Philadelphia Quakers and alleged loyalists blacklisted by the John Adams-led Congressional Committee on Spies, was arrested in his home, placed in an open cart with his fellow traitors, and ridden through the streets of the city and out to a wilderness exile in western Virginia that would last for nearly a year. |
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According to Kafer, a distinctly and definitively American version of gothic was born when the "revolutionary reverberations" (66) of the 1790s rendered irrepressible Brown's traumatic memories of a childhood scarred by the Revolution. For Brown, as for the young Republic, the postrevolutionary 1790s were, fundamentally, a posttraumatic decade. The persistent and deeply anxious hypervigilance over the contagion of French radicalism and the conspiracies of Jacobins, the plagues of yellow fever that grotesquely embodied the worst nightmares of a haunted Republic, the spread of radical rationalism with the rise of Godwinism and Jeffersonian republicanism, the return of militant mobs to the streets of Philadelphia and New York City—all the sublime terror and temporal confusion of a society poised on the verge of beginning the world again were to Brown a traumatic repetition of innocence and stability lost to the violence of Whig paranoia. |
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The great achievement of Kafer's book is that it gives readers an astonishingly overdue reconstruction of the upside-down world and the wounding experiences that deeply influenced (and possibly, helped "compel" [63]) the gothic art of this most enigmatic and otherworldly of American writers—an art whose vivid complexities typically have overwhelmed any sense of an actual life having informed them. Kafer begins to lift the veil that has fallen over those origins for nearly two centuries. Writing, one senses, through a process of forgetting conducive to early national consolidation, Brown's friend and first biographer, the nation's founding dramatist William Dunlap, recounted in his two-volume Life of Charles Brockden Brown (published in 1815, just five years after Brown's death) "a life story oblivious of the context of Revolutionary Quaker Philadelphia" (197). And, as their titles suggest, the critical biographies since Dunlap's—Pioneer Voice of America, An American Tale, and The Romance of Real Life—have extrapolated Brown's life from the radically destabilizing literary and discursive strategies of his fiction, rendering Brown (for the most part) as the dark, marginalized Romantic artist and liberal hero whose writings make the birth of the American Renaissance commensurate with the birth of the nation. Inverting Dunlap's harshly bourgeois-utilitarian assessment of Brown (the flourishing of his "wild and eccentric brilliance" entailed the lack of those "nerves and muscles" required to compete in the postrevolutionary marketplace), these critics have perpetuated the myth of Brown as the estranged, self-generating artist to position him as the origin of the belatedly revolutionary literature celebrated in F. O. Matthiessen's canon-forming American Renaissance. Viewed as preserving liberal culture from the crass materialism and shallow rationalism of American capitalism, Brown's maddeningly outlandish and opaque gothic art becomes domesticated as the inception of a national literature that would flourish with the fullness of a truly communal voice in the works of Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman.1 |
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