LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

in William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy or Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839); the castle in Isaac Mitchell’s The Asylum; Or, Alonzo and Melissa (1811); Leonora Sansay’s confinement and persecution of her female protagonists at the hands of tyrannical males in The Secret History; Or, the Horrors of St Domingo (1808); the veiled woman in William Wells Brown’s Clotel; Or, The President’s Daughter or Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852); Herman Melville’s crenellated ship in Benito Cereno (1855); siblings separated at birth in Mark Twain’s Puddn’head Wilson (1894); Shirley Jackson’s castle-like house in The Haunting of Hill House (1959); or the return of the dead in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). These are just a few examples where the text’s organizing metaphors are taken directly from the pages of Radcliffe or Lewis. Without a doubt, Brown and many of his contemporaries were committed to producing a national literary tradition but we cannot present the period’s acts of self-description as evidence of that tradition without accounting for the large body of literature that engages the formal conventions of the British mode. To agree, then, with Donald Ringe’s assessment that “it is idle to speak of American Gothic … as if it were something completely distinct from its European counterpart,” we evidently need an explanatory model that can navigate the complex and changing relationship between this transatlantic entanglement of forms and an emergent national literary culture.⁸ Published in New Hampshire in 1800, Maine author Sally Sayward Barrell Keating Wood’s Julia and the Illuminated Baron offers a convenient means to a possible explanation.

      Set primarily in late Revolutionary France, Wood’s novel relates the trials of the virtuous and well-born Julia at the hands of the Count de Launa, a member of the Illuminati, and her noble family’s subsequent flight to England after the events of the Revolution turn them into refugees. Second only to Charles Brockden Brown and Susanna Rowson in terms of novelistic output, Wood nonetheless remains largely excluded from the most influential accounts of the early American novel. Fiedler calls Julia and the Illuminated Baron “a gothic-sentimental farrago,” Cathy Davidson describes it as “inconsistent” and “muddled,” and most book-length studies of the American gothic do not mention it at all.⁹ With its spectral hauntings, secret histories, impregnable castles, and innocence persecuted, Julia and the Illuminated Baron uses every Radcliffean signature in the book while refusing to conform to a strictly American nationalist framework. This is just one reason, I suspect, that it remains so neglected: Wood’s tale of l’ancienne noblesse and Old World degeneracy appears far removed from the “specifically American concerns”—namely, race, gender, frontier expansion, the failure of America’s liberal promise, and so forth—that have long given the American gothic its generic coordinates.¹⁰ To be sure, Julia is a thinly veiled conservative allegory about the evils of philosophical radicalism on social and political stability that echoes contemporary conspiracy theories regarding the Illuminati’s plans for global domination.¹¹ It would be a mistake, however, to read this novel as merely symptomatic of an anxious political climate or heavy-handedly didactic about the triumph of feminine virtue (although it is certainly both). To understand why Wood’s decision to write something so closely resembling a British gothic romance might have made perfect sense to an American readership, let us first consider how she engages in the literary debate of her period over what constitutes an “American” book.

      Taking her cue from the gothic novels of Walpole, Reeve, and Brockden Brown, Wood announces her aesthetic aims in the novel’s preface. These aims, however, appear to contradict the burgeoning project of literary independence championed by many of her contemporaries: “It may perhaps be objected, that the annals of our own country display a vast field for the imagination, and that we need not cross the atlantic [sic] in search of materials to found the moral tale or amusing story upon … But an aversion to introduce living characters, or those recently dead, rendered Europe a safer, though not more agreeable theatre.”¹² This comment is a striking contrast to Brown’s opening to Edgar Huntly, published just one year earlier. For the reasons I outlined above, Justine Murison calls Huntly’s preface “a talisman of American studies scholarship” because it offers a descriptive theory of American cultural nationalism: set adrift from Old World antiquity and its archive of narrative materials—Catholicism, medievalism, and aristocratic despotism—the American gothic turns to its own indigenous horrors for inspiration.¹³ Wood’s preface complicates that theory. The United States does indeed offer “a vast field for the imagination”; that is, Wood acknowledges the conventional British representation, exploited by Brown, of the New World as a place of compelling aesthetic power.¹⁴ As Wood is well aware, her kinship with European forms and settings opens her to the kind of critique implicit in Royall Tyler’s rhetorical question at the beginning of The Contrast (1787): “Why should our thoughts to distant countries roam, / When each refinement may be found at home?”¹⁵ Europe, on the other hand, allows her to place her novel’s object lessons at a “safer” moral distance, suggesting the kind of removed spectacle with which Adam Smith enjoins us to feel measured compassion.¹⁶ Internal evidence contradicts Wood’s professed reluctance to include “living characters, or those recently dead”: the novel contains references to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Judith Sargent Murray, Sarah Wentworth Morton, and Louis XVI. Thus her decision to set Julia in France obviously stems from reasons other than a stated refusal to implicate historical figures in political scandal. That she clearly expects her readers to find meaning in a story about radical endogamy and restored French bloodlines tells us that this gothic tale locates its “Americanness” in something other than a New World setting or some deeply buried source of guilt or anxiety. In drawing on the British gothic romance tradition, I argue, Wood does not distance herself from the task of literary autochthony; rather, she shifts its terms to include a reconfiguration of British cultural materials for an American audience. Let me suggest how.

      The convoluted kinship structures underwriting the plot of Julia and the Illuminated Baron are crucial to understanding this neglected novel’s politics. Julia Vallace is the daughter of the Marquis Alvada and his second wife, who is poisoned in childbirth by the Marquis’s son from his first marriage, the Count de Launa. The Alvada family believes that Julia died as a baby, but she was in fact rescued by a faithful servant determined to protect her from the vengeance of the Count. Raised in ignorance of her noble blood, Julia eventually falls under the protection her aunt, the Countess de Launa, although neither is aware of the blood relationship subsisting between them. She falls in love with Francis Colwort, the putative nephew of an English merchant but in reality the Countess’s long-lost son from her first marriage to the English Earl of Ormond.¹⁷ Unaware that they are cousins, Julia and Colwort become engaged before Colwort is compelled to visit the United States to rescue his other “cousin” (the merchant’s biological daughter) from a failed marriage. While Colwort is away, Julia is abducted and imprisoned by the Count, who—unaware that they are half-brother and sister—proposes marriage on the condition that she convert to the libertine principles of the Illuminati. Through a series of altogether redundant plot devices, Julia escapes the Count, and the close blood ties between the novel’s characters are revealed. Julia and Colwort wed, and the newly reunited Alvada and de Launa clans escape the persecutions of the French Revolution by fleeing to England.

      It should be clear from this brief summary that there are few characters in this novel who are not related by birth to every other. They share a common—albeit secret—history that reverberates in the spontaneous attractions of blood. As the Countess tells Julia, “I am draw to you by cords I do not perfectly understand”; the Marquis, encountering Julia for the first time, “felt his whole soul drawn toward her.”¹⁸ When the Count turns his attentions to Julia, however, the threat of incest turns this endogamous social unit into an autophagous and phobic social organism that preys on its own members. The Count’s libertine principles and political deviancy have corrupted the bloodline: “How little value,” Julia moralizes, are “titles, and estates [when] possessed by one who disgraces the one, and dishonors the other; and their virtues are only owned by distant branches of their family; no trace is to be found in their immediate successor, of one virtue.”¹⁹ When the Count dies—wounded, poisoned, and repentant—the family is purified and reborn in the union between

Скачать книгу