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      The American Transformation of the British Individual

      Beginning in the 1790s, North American readers evidently developed an appetite for British and European romances alongside the homegrown publications of Charles Brockden Brown, Isaac Mitchell, and Sally Sayward Barrell Keating Wood. Although Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland; Or, The Transformation (published in September 1798) is widely regarded as the first “American” gothic novel, imported and reprinted editions of Britain and the continent’s most popular gothic novelists—Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, Clara Reeve, Monk Lewis, and Carl Grosse, to name just a few—were available several years before Brown’s novel made its debut. In Philadelphia in 1795, for instance, Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest and A Sicilian Romance appeared alongside Charlotte Smith’s Montalbert, which was reprinted again in 1800 along with The Mysteries of Udolpho. Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest and The Mysteries of Udolpho were reprinted in the same year in Boston, while The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne; a Highland Story appeared in Philadelphia in 1796; The Italian came out in Philadelphia and New York in 1797. Smith’s D’Arcy was reprinted in Philadelphia in 1796 and Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle in 1802. Also available were complete and expurgated versions of M. G. Lewis’s Ambrosio; Or, The Monk (Boston, 1799) and Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (New York, 1801). Anonymous novels such as Count Roderick’s Castle; Or, Gothic Times, a Tale (Baltimore, 1795), The Cavern of Death; a Moral Tale (Philadelphia, 1795), and The Horrors of Oakendale Abbey; a Romance (New York, 1799) vied with reprinted German romances like Friedrich von Schiller’s The Ghost Seer (New York, 1796). Critically neglected British gothic novels like Stephen Cullen’s The Haunted Priory (Philadelphia, 1794), George Moore’s Grasville Abbey: A Romance (Salem, Mass., 1799), and Regina Maria Roche’s The Children of the Abbey (Philadelphia, 1800) also seemed to have enjoyed a welcome reception in the United States.¹ Nor was the vogue for the gothic restricted to the novel. In American periodicals, there appeared reviews, poems, excerpts, and even parodies of British and German gothic works, all testifying to the enduring popularity of this form. Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest and The Italian, Lewis’s The Monk, and a version of William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) called The Iron Chest were adapted as stage plays in Britain and exported to the United States. The gothic mode evidently provided a staple for theatergoers well into the nineteenth century, as productions of gothic plays appeared frequently in all major American theatrical centers between 1794 and 1830.² Such was the public’s appetite for gothic romances that Royall Tyler made it a topic of satire in the preface to The Algerine Captive (1797), in which he relates the tale of “Dolly, the dairy maid, and Jonathan, the hired man … [who] amused themselves into so agreeable a terrour with the haunted houses and hobgobblins of Mrs. Ratcliffe that they were both afraid to sleep alone.”³ As Donald Ringe puts it, Wieland may have “marked the beginning of American Gothic fiction,” but it “did not mark the beginning of Gothic fiction in America.”⁴

      Clearly, any account of the gothic romance in post-Revolutionary literary history must first come to terms with this proliferation of imported and reprinted editions of British and European texts. By and large, however, we have tended to overlook or underemphasize this complex publication history. More conventionally, the story of the gothic in America tends to go like this: the gothic novel took root here first and foremost as an “indigenous” literary form by responding to specifically “American” forms of experience, such as slavery, frontier expansion, industrialization, and revolution. The cultural anxieties wrought by America’s rapid social, political, and economic changes produced a body of work that diverged from its British counterpart along the lines of historical experience. To this end, gothic writers here rejected the traditional trappings of European romance (castles, monasteries, lascivious monks, etc.) as “ludicrous,” “unconvincing,” or simply downright “meaningless” for a nation born of the principles of reason and independence.⁵ To make this case, criticism routinely invokes Charles Brockden Brown’s famous preface to Edgar Huntly; Or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker, in which he famously vows to replace the “puerile superstitions and exploded manners” of the European gothic with “incidents of Indian hostility and the perils of the western wilderness.”⁶ Brown claims to liberate the American gothic from the burden of British history to give it an eschatological narrative of cultural origins; scholarship that takes this preface at face value therefore tends to reproduce the powerful foundation myth of America’s self-fashioning. By this line of reasoning, American writers and readers eschewed the atavistic materials of the European romance to produce unique and unanticipated innovations in form and ideology from indigenous materials.⁷ As I see it, the publication history of the gothic in America tells a slightly different story.

      The trade in imported novels suggests that something about the gothic spoke to American interests that goes well beyond its repudiation of British themes or its ability to articulate an indigenous national culture. Even the abbreviated list of titles I offered above tells us that American readers were equally—if not more—devoted to the figurative restoration of disrupted aristocratic bloodlines and the persecution of trapped women as they were to the kind of indigenous concerns Brown placed center stage in Edgar Huntly. Far from rejecting European

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