LITMIR.BIZ

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“impossible,” “inconsistent,” “confused,” or “a plain contradiction.”⁴² In short, William Hill Brown adopts Locke’s enterprise and rhetorical method as his own when he normalizes and defends the propertyowning, cultivated subject of the Enlightenment tradition. Nonetheless, Mr. Holmes’s phobic stance exposes the individual as a remarkably fragile, defensive construct all too vulnerable to sources of emotion outside its control. As we shall see, this latent contradiction has far-reaching epistemological and literary consequences.

      In his attempt to naturalize the Lockean mind, Mr. Holmes briefly evokes an alternative form of consciousness—one that is permeable, open to its environment, and directed by forces outside its control. He quickly wards off such a possibility as singular and dysfunctional, but the cat is out of the bag, so to speak. For the remainder of this chapter, I want to discuss how Charles Brockden Brown takes this idea of the permeable subject in a wholly different direction when he explores its potential as a plausible alternative for American subjectivity. Let us now consider how Arthur Mervyn; Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 puts flesh on the very model of anti-individualism discounted by Locke and William Hill Brown and—perhaps more important—why Charles Brockden Brown might present such a model to readers as a viable constituent for an American republic.

      As Charles Brockden Brown seems well aware, the kind of sentimental, literate collective imagined by Sally Sayward Barrell Keating Wood or William Hill Brown presupposes a society of self-governing individuals who all meet the criteria of sovereign individualism as laid out in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. By the same rationale, the kind of sympathetic exchange imagined by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) can only take place between individuals who are likely to respond to emotional display in approximately the same way—a community, in short, based on resemblance rather than on difference. These assumptions turn both sympathy and the contract into exclusive forms of community. Arthur Mervyn, I argue, recognizes the limitations of Enlightenment models for a country built from diverse cultural, religious, and social traditions and sets about reconfiguring these models to suit the interests of an American readership. Written in the eighteenth-century language of empiricism and faculty psychology, this novel performs a series of revisions on Enlightenment models of the individual, sympathy, and contractualism to yield a citizen who can enter into contractual relations in a setting where disparate people of radically diverse backgrounds and interests—including the American Mervyn and the Portuguese-Jewish-British Achsa Fielding—seek to unite as a social body.⁴³ Gothic tropes effectively displace the Enlightenment individual with one that is porous, fluid, and projected beyond the metaphysical boundaries of the body.

      The yellow fever, operating according to the principles of circulation and convergence, proves an apt metaphor for this alternative social organism. Just as the disease invades people and changes the way they are constituted, so this social body invades and transforms other models of community. In Arthur Mervyn, the plague spreads from Philadelphia to the homogeneous country household of the Hadwin family, exposing sympathy as an absolute basis of collectivity that collapses when called upon to incorporate radical difference and diversity. Indeed, the ghastly fate of the sentimental Hadwins indicates Brown’s deep skepticism about the sentimental household, especially when it offers itself as a model of the community at large. Rather than pathologize the yellow fever for its ability to destroy this domestic space—and thereby reproduce the more conventional critical tendency to read the fever as a toxic or damaging agent of change—I want to consider its potential as an alternative model of social relations precisely because it allows feeling to pass unimpeded between subjects.⁴⁴

      Adam Smith Goes to the City

      With limited “experience” and only a belated capacity for reflection, the eponymous protagonist of Arthur Mervyn initially comes to us as the very personification of Locke’s famous blank slate. Yet unlike those novels with which Ian Watt identifies a distinctly British tradition—whereby the inexperienced individual achieves personal and propertied enfranchisement through experience—this protagonist is no less vacuous at the novel’s end than at its start.⁴⁵ Despite his considerable exposure to the world, Mervyn still describes himself in the novel’s penultimate chapter as “a boy in age; bred in clownish ignorance; scarcely ushered into the world; more than childishly unlearned and raw; a barn-door simpleton; a plow-tail, kitchen-hearth, turnip-hoeing novice.”⁴⁶ Whether we take this statement as truthful or disingenuous, clearly the novel does not take the Lockean developmental trajectory (inexperience to experience) as the basis for subjectivity. Rather than read Mervyn as somehow deficient for his apparent failure to meet the conditions of exemplary citizenship, I contend that his “failure” to develop as an individual can be read as an adaptation of Enlightenment individualism to the American experience.

      In Mervyn, Brown crafts a cosmopolitan city dweller whose mind cannot maintain the absolute categorical distinction between subject and object presupposed by Lockean epistemology.⁴⁷ By habitually prying into “other people’s concerns, [making] their sorrow and joys [his],” Mervyn appropriates his associates’ mental property as if it were his own.⁴⁸ That Mervyn’s violation of individual boundaries gets him into trouble at certain points in the novel and proves beneficial at others tells us exactly where Brown asserts another model of the subject and the terms on which its porousness proves a genuine and viable alternative to rational individualism. This model necessarily changes the form of community proposed by the novel in that it exposes the limits of the family and the contract as the more conventional modes of social relation.

      If Locke mapped out the modern individual, then Adam Smith provided a model of community that held such individuals together as an internally cohesive society and hence a model for the nation itself.⁴⁹ For Smith, sympathy is a strictly imaginative process that begins and ends within the individual. To experience a sympathetic connection with another individual, the spectator must take an imaginative leap, as it were, putting oneself in the position of the individual or “agent” whose emotions are on display.⁵⁰ Or so Smith argues: “By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations.” As Smith’s qualifications (“as it were,” “in some measure,” “some idea”) make clear, sympathy does not transmit emotion directly from one individual to another. The spectator never shares the emotions of the “agent” of emotion, for to do so would endanger the autonomy of each. Instead, he (and Smith’s spectator, like Locke’s subject, is always implicitly “he”) experiences a compatible though lesser degree of feeling that is strictly imaginative: “These two sentiments, however, may, it is evident, have such a correspondence with one another, as is sufficient for the harmony of society. Though they will never be unisons, they may be concords, and this is all that is wanted or required.” Smith’s debt to Locke becomes especially clear at this point: reason ensures that “concord” does not capitulate to “unison,” much less the spontaneous and direct transfusion of emotion that Smith labels “contagion.”⁵¹ In this way, Smith’s model defends the concept of the individual against the possibility that emotions enter the body directly from an outside source.

      We can see at this point that Smith tries to guard against the same contradiction that threatened to destabilize Locke’s model—namely, that the subject’s mind must be self-enclosed in order to be its own emotional property and yet requires an external source from which to derive sensations of pleasure and pain. To keep such a contradiction at bay, Smith creates the “internal spectator.” This monitor forms within each individual as he turns his gaze upon himself and makes sure his own display of emotions measures up to the standard he brings to bear on others—to make sure, that is, he is deserving of sympathy. From histrionics to boorish insensibility, Smith insists, the unregulated display of emotion will not be dignified with a sympathetic response. In controlling the emotions to suit standards of “propriety,” the internal spectator ultimately ensures a normative response.⁵²

      Two years after its publication in 1759, Smith’s friend and colleague Adam Ferguson denounced The Theory of Moral Sentiments as “a Heap of absolute Nonsense,” taking particular issue with Smith’s claim that men want to be

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