Renovating Charles Brockden Brown's Revolution

Abstract

Charles Brockden Brown may have felt the belated effect of the American Revolution far more keenly and directly than any other American writer. Born a Quaker in 1771 in an increasingly antipatriarchal, Whiggish Philadelphia that was throwing off the legacy of William Penn as ruthlessly as it was seeking independence from the Crown, and whose raging paranoia needed to see conspiracy in parliament and pacifism, Brown experienced revolution as a horror that came of the blue (xix). As Peter Kafer recounts in his forceful prologue, that horror began in 1777 when Brown's father, Elijah, with twenty-five other Philadelphia Quakers and alleged loyalists blacklisted by the John Adams-led Congressional Committee on Spies, was arrested in his home, placed in an open cart with his fellow traitors, and ridden through the streets of the city and out to a wilderness exile in western Virginia that would last for nearly a year. According to Kafer, a distinctly and definitively American version of gothic was born when the revolutionary reverberations (66) of the 1790s rendered irrepressible Brown's traumatic memories of a childhood scarred by the Revolution. For Brown, as for the young Republic, the postrevolutionary 1790s were, fundamentally, a posttraumatic decade. The persistent and deeply anxious hypervigilance over the contagion of French radicalism and the conspiracies of Jacobins, the plagues of yellow fever that grotesquely embodied the worst nightmares of a haunted Republic, the spread of radical rationalism with the rise of Godwinism and Jeffersonian republicanism, the return of militant mobs to the streets of Philadelphia and New York City-all the sublime terror and temporal confusion of a society poised on the verge of beginning the world again were to Brown a traumatic repetition of innocence and stability lost to the violence of Whig paranoia. The great achievement of Kafer's book is that it gives readers an astonishingly overdue reconstruction of the upside-down world and the