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freely.

      The Gothic Contract

      Mervyn’s intrusions come to us as violations of the contractual obligation to respect individual autonomy. Under the terms of the social contract, as spelled out by both Locke and Rousseau, subjects agree not to encroach upon the rights and bodies of other members. As we have seen, this is not a novel in which the logic of individualism is allowed to go uncontested. Brown’s version of porous subjectivity obviously wreaks havoc with this idea of contractualism, which is predicated on the notion of self-enclosure and personal sovereignty. Like sympathy, then, the contract must be reconfigured to take into account that those with whom one is contracting may be fundamentally different from oneself. Accordingly, Brown puts the marriage contract to work in the final chapters of the novel when he unites Mervyn with the wealthy, widowed, and experienced immigrant Achsa Fielding. Like the social contract, the marriage contract can only perform its rhetorical operations if it unites two people whose individualism, in the Enlightenment sense of the term, is extended and completed by those operations—two parties, in other words, who share a notion of what an individual should be.

      According to the logic of the social contract, the individual voluntarily gives up his antisocial tendencies and enters into a mutually beneficial agreement with other individuals who likewise relinquish their disruptive qualities.⁷³ The individual forfeits his acquisitive impulses in exchange for the protection and guarantee of his political and personal rights under the state’s authority. In submitting to the authority of a group composed of individuals just like himself, the subject has, in effect, submitted only to his own authority. As an alternative to a government based on force, the civil state thus becomes an extension of the individual himself. As Locke argues elsewhere in the “Second Treatise,” the individual acquires the rights of a citizen as he learns the laws that govern the rational subject.⁷⁴ While the logic of the exchange suggests that those rights are prerequisite, the rhetoric of the contract suggests that they are produced by it. The capacity for self-government that earns him protection is not only something he brings to the exchange. In entering the exchange (by which he agrees not to encroach upon others to earn some protection for his own person and property), the individual also acquires knowledge of those laws. At this point, the rhetorical behavior of the contract parts ways with its logic. The contract is not so much an originary moment as an ex post facto fiction of origin, creating rather than regulating the constituent parties involved.⁷⁵

      The sentimental novel attests to the powerful afterlife of this paradoxical construction during the very period in which it fell out of favor in political and philosophical thought. Like the social contract, the marriage contract proceeds on assumptions of lack (where each constitutive party is fulfilled by the acquisition of some component in the other) and emotional equality (where each reciprocates the other’s compassion and understanding). It is an exchange based on merit rather than status, where the woman’s sympathy, sensibility, and innocence are regulated by the man’s experience, reason, and judgment, and vice versa. The marriage contract therefore extends and perfects the individualism of the constituent parties by giving each something he or she did not have prior to the exchange that makes them, together, add up to a complete individual at the level of the household. Thus the developmental trajectory of the individual reaches its apotheosis in the contract, which transforms the inchoate subject into a citizen with all the accoutrements of self-government. Brown demonstrates clear awareness of the sentimental promise of individual fulfillment through marriage when he refuses to allow the union of Mervyn and Eliza Hadwin.

      It is a commonplace to read Mervyn’s rejection of Eliza in favor of Achsa Fielding as Brown’s symbolic denunciation of his youthful Godwinian radicalism in favor of a more conservative politics or, alternatively, as evidence of an emerging market capitalism to which Mervyn responds with what appears to be flagrant self-interest.⁷⁶ I would prefer to see what Mervyn’s choice of a marriage partner can tell us about the principle of social cohesion in a cosmopolitan setting. Let us assume that Mervyn’s prospective union with Eliza operates within a sentimental paradigm. As he puts it, “My thoughts have ever hovered over the images of wife and children with more delight than over any other images. My fancy was always active on this theme, and its reveries sufficiently extatic [sic] and glowing; but since my intercourse with this girl, my scattered visions were collected and concentrated. I had now a form and features before me, a sweet and melodious voice vibrated in my ear, my soul was filled, as it were, with her lineaments and gestures, actions, and looks.” A true man of feeling in this regard, Mervyn’s Rousseauean visions of domesticity are wholly confined to a blooming young wife, offspring, and “an hundred acres of plough-land and meadow.” Eliza appears to be Mervyn’s social equal and sentimental counterpart, but he changes his mind upon contemplating the mental qualities of his prospective bride. Although Eliza possesses the “thrilling sensibility and artless graces” that would tempt most men into marriage, she also possesses a degree of inexperience that “gave her sometimes the appearance of folly,” prompting Mervyn to question the suitability of this match: “I considered my youth, my defective education and my limited views. I had passed from my cottage into the world. I had acquired even in my transient sojourn among the busy haunts of men, more knowledge than the lucubrations and employments of all my previous years had conferred. Hence I might infer the childlike immaturity of my understanding, and the rapid progress I was still capable of making. Was this the age to form an irrevocable contract; to chuse the companion of my future life, the associate of my schemes of intellectual and benevolent activity?”⁷⁷ According to his own self-assessment, Mervyn himself is still in the state of “immaturity” that makes him less than an individual. On the other side of the exchange, Eliza lacks the literacy that would allow her to complement her husband’s position and power with taste and affection.

      Mervyn’s reluctance to contract with Eliza therefore stems from the logic of the contract itself, which would see the union of the constituent parties as supplying what is lacking in each. As Mervyn is well aware, neither of them has much of anything to exchange, as both are inexperienced, destitute, and uneducated. Their union augments neither one. Mervyn rejects Eliza—wisely, one could argue—because the product of their combined deficiencies would only result in something less than a complete individual at the level of the household. By refusing their union on the grounds of deficiency in the constituent parties, Brown would seem to endorse the rhetoric of the contract. On the other hand, Mervyn’s rejection of Eliza draws attention to the logic of exclusion upon which the contract rests. Only individuals who meet certain exclusive standards of personal sovereignty are eligible to contract. Thus, when Mervyn turns from Eliza to Achsa, Brown suggests that sentimental standards are not the only standards that qualify contracting parties to make a household. Insofar as the contract determines who can marry whom, nothing short of the principles of civil society are at stake in its operations. Having demolished the sentimental kinship unit as the basis for civil society, what does Brown propose as a substitute?

      Brown initially presents Mervyn’s union to a racialized heiress as the realization of a national fantasy. Fleeing a disastrous marriage in Britain, Achsa comes to America for a chance at rewriting her history. Although Mervyn falls well short of masculine norms of selfhood and affect, he is also, by the novel’s end, something of a proto-citizen in that he comes to possess many of the external attributes of American masculinity. Outwardly, he is autochthonous and has transcended the position assigned to him by birth. He is also a young man of remarkable good looks who has been acquiring cultural capital as an apprentice doctor welcome in the polite circles of Philadelphia. Thus he embodies the masculine qualities that can make Achsa an American through marriage.

      But if we turn this relationship on its head, so to speak, it becomes the mirror image of the sentimental exchange whose constituent parties are inversely gendered. Mervyn is also presented in feminized terms, possessing all the affective qualities of sensibility traditionally found in a sentimental heroine. He gets weepy when he confesses to being “a mere woman.”⁷⁸ He may strike his contemporaries as an American man-on-the-make, but the internal deficiencies of inexperience and a limited understanding that stood in the way of his marriage to Eliza are still very much part of his character. By way of contrast, Achsa is, figuratively speaking, a man by Enlightenment standards. As Mervyn notes, she has “experience” in the world and is “abundant in that very knowledge in which

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