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This line of reasoning assumes that novels on both sides of the Atlantic were attempting to work out problems in theories of the subject and government, but this cultural work arrived at a fundamentally different conceptual result in America than in the British literary culture in which those theories originated. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the British gothic continued the work of the eighteenth-century romance by updating the category of the individual against a backdrop of urban growth, colonial expansion and rebellion, and a burgeoning print market. English novels went to work defending the modern subject against forms of collectivity that might obliterate individual difference. In that tradition, we see the eighteenth-century poetics of sensibility continually reworked as the dangers of alien desires and psychic energies that are channeled through the figure of the cannibal, the foreigner, the vampire, or the monster to overwhelm any aggregate conceived as a collection of individuals.18 The American gothic novel, on the other hand, takes the individual in a rather different direction by questioning its field of application in a diasporic setting. By detaching identity from geographic origin, consanguinity, or exemplary political status, works of gothic fiction imagine Americanness as an ability to change, adapt, travel, and even subsume individual difference and cultural particularity beneath forms of mass collectivity. In response to any number of social, economic, and historical circumstances that gravely challenged the fantasy of political and individual cohesion, the British subject takes on radically new forms in American fiction.
The result of this literary experiment is a slew of rhetorical figures I heuristically call “gothic subjects.” By this I mean a constellation of different narrative personas whose mutability and adaptability make them ideally suited to a fluctuating Atlantic world. At a time when both British and American intellectuals were preoccupied with the psychology of the political individual—critics have called this “the spirit of the citizen-subject” and “the formation of civic character”—works of psychological fiction offered a testing ground for competing and often contradictory forms of human consciousness and collectivity.19 This notion of “psychology” denotes a specifically eighteenth-century hermeneutics of mental interpretation, where the study of the mind is inextricably tied to epistemological inquiry, moral authority, and the principles of government. To arrive at a historically informed, transatlantic understanding of the gothic’s generic qualities, I recuperate eighteenth-century epistemological traditions to argue that gothic conventions yield forms of political membership better suited to an early Atlantic world bound by the fluctuations of the market, immigration, accident, chance, circumstance, and opportunity.
* * *
To put flesh on this argument, let me begin with a more detailed account of that peculiar rhetorical figure known as the modern “individual” and the means by which it achieved its ideological dominance and cultural prestige over the course of the eighteenth century. Here I distinguish between individualism as a modern discourse of liberal humanism animating any number of market forces and political ideologies—perhaps most famously analyzed as the basis of modern liberal-democratic theory in C. B. MacPherson’s The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (1962)—and the individual as an epistemological division of human subjectivity conceived in abstract terms. Originating in the eighteenth-century discourse of sensory perception known as faculty psychology, the kind of rhetorical formation I have in mind is the self-enclosed, autonomous, unitary, property-owning subject of the Lockean tradition, where “property” includes one’s mental attributes and capabilities.20 This subject obeys a strict one-mind-per-body principle and matures over time and with experience in the world into a more intellectually complex and socially estimable being. Most scholars are willing to credit John Locke with the creation of the individual because he was the first to transfer social value from historically older notions of bloodline and estate to the interior qualities of the mind. As early as 1748, Benjamin Franklin remarked in Poor Richard Improved that Locke “made the whole internal world his own.”21 Writing nearly 250 years later, social theorist Charles Taylor agrees: the “inescapable contemporary sense of inwardness” we associate with the modern sovereign subject has its origins in Locke’s notion of the individual.22
This distinctly modern form of subjectivity achieved its extraordinary ubiquity in the eighteenth century not only because works of political philosophy took it as their primary unit of analysis but also because the British novel adopted it as a model for character. Recent critics of the British tradition such as Wendy Jones, Adela Pinch, Pam Morris, Nancy Armstrong, and Deirdre Lynch have shown how the novel helped naturalize the Lockean individual as the modern standard of selfhood. The novel, Armstrong writes, took up “the project of universalizing the individual subject” by “transforming the body from an indicator of rank to the container of a unique subjectivity.”23 The success of this narrative model of the individual, Armstrong suggests, lay in its unique capacity to reproduce itself in readers and novels alike. Beginning with the works of Defoe, Austen, and Richardson, the early British novel allows its protagonists to move outside a socially stratified system of kinship relations to expose the limitations of defining social value purely in economic or blood-based terms. By tipping its protagonists out of their assigned social positions, the novel transposes social value to unique interior qualities, or what in Jane Eyre (1847) Brontë calls the subject’s “inward treasure.”24 This narrative feat transforms a Crusoe, a Pamela, or an Elizabeth Bennett into the exemplary yet natural standard of the self-governing citizen. In Deirdre Lynch’s terms, “At the turn of the nineteenth century characters became the imaginative resources on which readers drew to make themselves into individuals, to expand their own interior resources of sensibility.”25 As I suggested earlier (and explain in greater detail in Chapter 1), the early British gothic participates in this modernizing process by amplifying the authority of the individual in a world where ontological order has been upset.
Unlike early modern ontologies of self that locate identity firmly in Galenic physiology, place of origin, or birthright, the “individual” offers a model of modern humanity that can thrive in different cultural milieus because it presents itself as normative even as it changes and adapts to each new setting.26 Daniel Defoe makes this case in literary terms when he strands Crusoe on a castaway island far removed from Britain. There, Crusoe’s qualities of mind and contractual imagination matter far more than any notion of a fixed social origin. It therefore makes sense that such a versatile, mobile model of British identity would make its way across the Atlantic in the years preceding the Revolution to reproduce itself discursively in political philosophy, law, medicine, autobiography, history, and fiction—any form of writing, that is, that takes the principles of autonomous individualism as its foundation. At a moment when matters of political authority, self-determination, and autonomy took on particular urgency in the post-Revolutionary United States, it seems entirely plausible that North American intellectuals should have gravitated toward a model of human character that locates social value in a capacity for self-government and emotional control.27 This is, after all, one of the fundamental principles underpinning the sentimental novel, which hinges on the struggle to determine what makes a woman desirable. The woman’s personal authority and interior qualities define the social rules by which a community reproduces itself. To achieve this end, sentimental novels grant their female characters