LITMIR.BIZ

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of town, disappearing back into the modernizing world—presumably to acquire social capital as a lawyer and a judge. Thus Irving preserves this vital local culture by proposing that one’s membership in such a community depends on the degree to which one learns and adopts the rules governing social behavior there.

      As I see it, the “Americanness” of this quintessentially “American” story lies in its attempt to reconcile a clash between heterogeneous cultures, one of which is modeled according to an English understanding of community. In “Sleepy Hollow,” British notions of property relations and individual sovereignty are presented as incompatible but nonetheless conterminous and coexistent with a larger, more diverse population that thinks in terms of movement and exchange. A British cultural logic, Irving suggests, can only work under conditions of ontological and social mobility by maintaining itself as sequestered, anachronistic, and wholly cut off from the rest of the nation. This suggests a national imaginary that, by the 1820s, has come to think of America as a cluster of discrete local cultures with competing rules of behavior (I discuss this at greater length in Chapter 3). Thus the cultural work of the American gothic is indicated less by its themes, characters, settings, or authorial biography—and still less by sources of historical guilt—than by its attempt to work out a complex problem of how the subject is conceived and what forms of social collectivity that conception implies.

      I therefore resist reading the gothic as the disruption or destruction of some continuous narrative, whether self, history, or the nation. As I see it, this approach succumbs to the mimetic fallacy that the gothic reflects deeply embedded social and political anxieties that precede their articulation in writing. Rather, my interest in the formal proximity between literature and epistemology brings questions of historical formalism back into our discussion about gothic fiction. In the last decade, critics have reinvigorated the study of aesthetics by considering how literary forms are shaped by historical circumstance to perform specific ideological functions—to consider a text’s formal qualities, in other words, “not simply as containers for extrinsic ideological content, but as practices with an ideological significance of their own.”⁸⁰ The field of early American literature—which has long been dominated by a “politically engaged historicism” that has largely divorced questions of social relations from aesthetic forms—is currently recalibrating around this revitalized interest in aesthetics.⁸¹ Ed Cahill’s Liberty of the Imagination (2012), for example, participates in this recent revisionist turn by adroitly demonstrating that complex debates about political collectivity inhere in the eighteenth-century language of aesthetic theory. Similarly, I read the American gothic’s decision to blend, reconfigure, rearrange, and reject British categories of thought as an indication of the social function of form, namely, to produce narrative innovations in subjectivity and collective association. Through this kind of emphasis, I aim to contribute to our understanding of antebellum literary production by revising the conventional division of cultural labor that grants sentimental fiction and the frontier romance a monopoly on nation making. Rather than view the gothic as interrupting, subverting, or otherwise inhibiting such a nationalizing project, my reading places the gothic squarely at the center of a larger literary debate over political psychology and social relations.

      * * *

      Those familiar with Cathy Davidson’s argument in Revolution and the Word (1986) may see some affinity between my proposed line of inquiry and her chapter on the gothic, which she aptly subtitles “the limits of individualism”—a phrase I have taken the liberty of reworking somewhat in the subtitle of Gothic Subjects.⁸² Davidson argues that the gothic critiques “the inherent problems of so-called modern society, especially progressive philosophical or economic theories (liberalism, deism, rationalism) based on a notion of human perfectibility.” For Davidson, the gothic collapses “the liberal ideology of individualism and the Smithian ideal of personal freedom” into “perversions of the self and corruption of the society.” I agree with her proposition that the gothic challenges the American fantasy of self-determination by taking aim at “the interpretative propensities and ideological premises of the individual,” but as I see it, this only tells half the story.⁸³ To take Davidson’s idea one step further, I argue that the gothic exposes “the limits of individualism” in order to put ideologies of the citizen subject and society up for grabs, thereby creating a space of potential in which other models can take shape.

      In Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial of American Authorship (1998), Nancy Ruttenburg asks that we conceive such a space as “a dynamic symbolic system or theater” in which different notions of sovereignty and government compete but do not necessarily cancel one another out.⁸⁴ Drawing on early Puritan conversion narratives and accounts of the Great Awakening of the 1730s, Ruttenburg explains that public performance reconstituted “the conditions of personal autonomy granted a priori to the liberal subject” as the nonliberal, “supraindividual authority” that she calls “democratic personality.” This radical form of democratic subjectivity granted disparate and politically disqualified people the means to constitute themselves as a community: it was, as Ruttenburg puts it, “conspicuously transferable; it individuated without necessarily individuating those who appropriated it.”⁸⁵ Important to my purposes, Ruttenburg regards competing forms of popular sovereignty as contradictory but not incompatible, coexisting not despite but by virtue of their contradictions. Democratic personality and liberal individualism do not invalidate one another; rather, they coexist in a mutually defining relationship that distinguishes the ideological complexity, even incoherence, of early American political culture.

      Ruttenburg makes it possible to imagine contradictory models of personhood and sovereignty coexisting in the United States by separating them into different cultural arenas. In much the same way, I assume that different generic modes propose related but often incongruous models of subjectivity that participate equally in a “dynamic symbolic system” of early American political culture. Thus my readings of gothic literature explore the tensions between the popular and enduring ideal of the sovereign individual and the speculative alternatives worked out in literary form without granting hegemonic status to any single unencumbered, dominant political formation. Ruttenburg’s methodology also yields in nineteenth-century literary works a politics more nuanced than the terms conventionally invoked to express such concepts: liberal, conservative, democratic, elitist, consensual, radical, normative, and so on. I find this approach compelling because the competing forms of selfhood and community I explore in this book do not fit neatly into preexisting categories of U.S. political experience. For example, the metaphor of contagion in Arthur Mervyn imagines a fundamentally continuous social body ideally suited to conditions of ontological uncertainty and urban proximity (Chapter 1). I read the act of “going native” in the captivity narrative less as an atavistic regression from culture to nature than as an incorporation of the self into a cosmopolitan circuit of information and feeling (Chapter 2). A circuit connects disparate people and even people and things and transforms them into a single heterogeneous organism with the capacity to circulate freely through a circum-Atlantic world. In the Jacksonian era, a gathering sense of national identity conflicts with increased political sectionalism, so the gothic shifts its attention from the challenges of cosmopolitan circulation to the problem of regional difference in a nation comprising discrete local groups whose cultural norms are entirely relative and impenetrable to outsiders (Chapter 3). As we see in Sheppard Lee and Poe’s short stories, this problem poses a challenge to the influential Scottish American metaphysic known as “common sense,” which popularized the democratic and nationalizing fantasy that all men share a common set of convictions about material and moral reality. In the years immediately preceding the Civil War, American authors confront the increasingly urgent task of reconciling a contractual model of society with large, displaced, migratory groups of people that arguably seemed on the verge of overwhelming the civil state (Chapter 4). A novel such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) registers a tension between civil society and this larger form of unprotected

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