Charles Brockden Brown Research Articles

"Fated to Perish by Consumption": The Political Economy of Arthur Mervyn

Was this the penalty of disobedience?--this the stroke of vindictive and invisible hand? --Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland The study of was new field of inquiry in the late eighteenth century. First appearing in English in Sir James Steuart's An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy (1767), the phrase political economy was taken up by Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations, where he defined it as a branch of the science of statesman or legislator with two objects: first, to provide plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people, or more properly to enable them to provide such revenue or subsistence for themselves; and secondly, to supply the state or commonwealth with revenue sufficient for the public (1) Charles Brockden Brown encountered the discipline when, as member of the New York Friendly Club, he read Wealth of Nations, book that also would have been standard reading in the law curriculum he studied in the 1790s. (2) That he had the subject of in mind when composing Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 is evident in the preface, where Brown noted that the evils of pestilence ... have already supplied new and copious materials for reflection to the physician and the economist. (3) Beyond his academic knowledge of economy, Brown observed business practices and their economic consequences first-hand as he watched his brothers undertake successful mercantile careers in the commercial milieu of Philadelphia. In Arthur Mervyn, Brown captures this environment in all of its complexity. James Justus memorably characterized the economic facet of the novel by noting its concern with commissions, bills of exchange, claims and deeds, banknotes, notes and bonds, sued mortgages and mortgages entered up, forgeries and robberies, patrimonies and inheritances, generous loans and imprudent debts, premiums of insurance, equitable rates of interest and hazardous securities, obdurate creditors and debtors' prisons, executors' powers, competences and subsistencies, rewards, and warrants of attorney. (4) Justus's comprehensive list nicely sums up the microeconomic aspect of the novel, but does not get at the macroeconomic level of inquiry implied by the phrase political economy as Brown used it in his preface. The question is whether Brown applied the larger lessons of the study of to the commercial environment that Arthur Mervyn so effectively analyzes. Besides showing Arthur himself engaged in the project of acquiring revenue sufficient for his own subsistence, does Brown also investigate how Arthur's individual pursuit of wealth affects the prosperity and health of the nation? A strong case can be made that he does. In this essay, by reading the novel in light of the and economic context of the 1790s, I intend to make several related points about Arthur Mervyn. (5) A number of incidents in the novel can be read as Brown's comment on the social costs of speculation, financial practice that generated controversy and scandal in America during the 1790s. The economic liberalism pursued by speculators and embodied by the title character would have been judged wanting by Brown's original audience when viewed in light of the still influential ideology of classical republicanism and the restraints and duties it imposed on the civic-minded individual. And the yellow fever epidemic famously described in the novel might be seen as judgment on economic liberalism, vindictive invisible hand that punished the people of Philadelphia for their habits of conspicuous consumption. Set in 1793, the events of Arthur Mervyn are not far removed from crisis that took place in the government bond market in 1791-92. To pay for expenses incurred during the Revolutionary War, the national government had issued bonds to farmers, merchants, and veterans, who received them in lieu of payment for their goods or services. …

Deb's Dogs: Animals, Indians, and Postcolonial Desire in Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly

Deb's Dogs:Animals, Indians, and Postcolonial Desire in Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly Janie Hinds (bio) In a well-known passage in Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly, the title character, through a misplaced do-gooder instinct, has followed mysterious stranger Clithero Edny into the "regions around Norwalk," has found his "benevolence" rejected and, frustrated, has returned in his sleep, fallen into the pit of a dark cave, killed and eaten a panther, clawed his way out, and on the way home, stumbled on a crude "hut" (206) in the middle of nowhere, with freed captive girl in tow, to shoot and kill some four—or is it five?—Native American men who he assumes have murdered his family, or his friend, or in any case bear murderous intentions toward himself. An unsettling couple of days. Shortly after this moment of high stress Edgar learns whose cabin he has used as both refuge and staging ground for his killing spree. The cabin belongs to Old Deb, also known as Queen Mab, an old friend. Here is how Edgar describes her: sovereign matriarch, relocated but "not forgotten" by her "countrymen," the Lenni Lenape or Delaware, Deb had held her ground when all other tribe members had abandoned, due to "perpetual encroachments of the English colonists," their "ancient seats" (207) some 30 years prior to this story of ongoing frontier conflict. Only two years earlier, Deb had relocated, but only into an isolated, secondhand cabin in the woods, where relatives now visit annually and where she subsists on the produce of her garden and the spoils of her dogs' hunting. Situated as she is both in and out of the Lenni Lenape tribe, Deb has habits that are a peculiar mix of tribal custom, English borrowing, and her own oddities, many associated with her dogs: Her only companions were three dogs, of the Indian or wolf species. These animals differed in nothing from their kinsmen of the forest, but in their attachment and obedience to their mistress. She governed them [End Page 323] with absolute sway: they were her servants and protectors, and attended her person or guarded her threshold, agreeably to her directions. She fed them with corn and they supplied her and themselves with meat. . . . To the rest of mankind they were aliens or enemies. . . . They would suffer none to approach them, but attacked no one who did not imprudently crave their acquaintance, or who kept at a respectful distance from their wigwam. (207–8) Deb appears but briefly in Edgar Huntly and is commonly viewed as less than central; in a novel whose title character is also the first-person narrator, all events focus around Edgar Huntly, according to the critical tradition. However, Deb holds a crucial place in Edgar Huntly's enactment of colonial and postcolonial desire, and her significance is marked by her appearance at the important juncture at which Edgar finds himself stripped of friends, humanity, and even his identity. Critical appraisal of Deb has tended to focus on her ethnic and racial characteristics: Brown presents her, says Robert Newman, as a crazy old woman representative of her tribe in what amounts to an "Indian-hating" novel. She is, at the other extreme, a sovereign leader, resistant to English colonizing and a force to be reckoned with: Brown, Matthew Sivils writes, "did not create this character to be ignored" (303). In these and many other readings, character Edgar Huntly's views—whether taken to be Indian-hating or Indian-loving—are conflated with author Charles Brockden Brown's views, an unfortunate confusion in view of the fact that Brown constructs Edgar as a "somnambulist," an unreliable first-person narrator so frequently on the verge of madness, or at least subject to altered states of mind, that Edgar has little moral authority in the novel as a whole.1 Most persuasive because most complex are Sydney Krause's and Jared Gardner's studies of Deb and the other Delaware in Edgar Huntly. Krause indicates a deeply embedded racism manifest in the character Edgar and possibly going beyond the character to Brown's own role in creating Edgar and the novel's Native Americans; Krause does...

Charles Brockden Brown and the Philadelphia Germans

Charles Brockden Brown and the Philadelphia Germans Sydney J. Krause (bio) If Charles Brockden Brown's major novels may be broadly identified by geography, it is apparent that they all gravitate around Philadelphia, though with varying degrees of focus on the city per se. Arthur Mervyn (referred to as "his Phila. Novel" [Smith, Diary 290]) obviously maintains this focus most completely, save for scant involvement of the hinterlands of Chester County. Edgar Huntly, on the other hand, is set mostly on the near frontier, domain of Native Americans, with a reminder of Old World complications that fester in the psyche of an Irish immigrant. Ormond savors of French and internationalist motifs, with its Monrose (transplanted De Moivre) family, Ormond's adventures in the East of Europe, and the fabled exploits of his sister, Martinette De Beavais, in the French Revolution. But Wieland, Brown's first published novel—designated "An American Tale"—is remarkably German, so indicated by the names of persons and places, along with a variety of circumstances linked to Germany's history and culture. At the earliest stage of composition, Brown even contemplated shipping his Wielands back to Germany to claim their Saxon inheritance1—a thought likely abandoned as his interest was in the American, not the European, Germans, they being a better subject here and one he was acquainted with. In the entire novel, Philadelphia, where events are environed, gets mentioned by name only three times, twice in the beginning and once toward the end (one of which references has nothing to do with the Wielands), while Germany and matters German are referred to by name 30 times—a far from peripheral presence, the extent and ramifications of which point to a subtext that indexes social concerns. Indeed, if one wants to get the full thematic impact of Wieland, it is helpful to think German, as, at the outset, the very application of the titular German name and its relation to the implied Abraham and Isaac motif dealt [End Page 85] with by a leading German writer of that name (Christ of Martin Wieland) are among the most commonly unanswered—and equally unaddressed—questions regarding the novel. By an interesting twist, the Germanness of Wieland is actually anti-German,2 having its ultimate basis in Brown's chauvinist Americanness, backed by an emerging Federalist bias on his part, and, more than that, a reflected antipathy for Otherness. It was an antipathy called for by the times, that being a good way to be amidst the anti foreigner frenzy of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, a mechanism for the expulsion of undesirable foreigners—as most of them suddenly became. Though long-lasting, the Germanophobia, so great in early and mid-eighteenth-century Philadelphia, gained so little real exposure beyond those times, it is not entirely surprising that one has to find it brought to light in a work of fiction. That Brown gave prior consideration to the German element in Wieland is apparent from the fact that national origin was a choice quite deliberately made on his part. For, as has been observed, the reference in the Wieland "Advertisement" to the "authentic case, remarkably similar to that of Wieland," which Brown tells us "most readers will probably recollect" (Wieland 3), was the sensational James Yates murder case written up in 1796.3 This occurrence in key particulars parallels the situation Brown would employ, as both Yates and Wieland are "imbued," as Alexander Cowie puts it, "with a conviction that they have a divine injunction to kill their families—a wife and four children, [and] neither man, when arraigned, evinces the least sign of remorse for his acts. Both also set about attacking their sisters—unsuccessfully; both escape more than once from their places of confinement and both are retaken and tried" ("Historical Essay," Wieland 324). So Brown has from a major source this person with an Irish name (Yates, likely so rendered from Yeats) and an incident quite distant from Philadelphia (Tomhanick, in the extreme western corner of New York State). If he wanted a person capable of outrageous violence, surely, with the great anti-Irish sentiment in Philadelphia of 1798 (the Irish being the...

Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature by Onno Oerlemans (review)

YES, 34, 2004 YES, 34, 2004 fraughtwith pitfalls.In response, Burwickoffersus the possibilityof a more inclusive , comprehensivedefinition of 'imitation'within a Romantic context, one which includes the mind's own workings: 'The rise of individualism, a major factor in the political turmoil of the age, was also manifest in the literaryexploration of the individual consciousness and the individual experience. The paradox, of course, was that the very self-assessmentcrucial to the social changes then taking place would be appraisedby criticsof subsequentgenerations as self-indulgentescapism' (p.Io). By widening the scope of Romantic mimesis from 'what' the mind beholds, to 'how' it beholds, Burwick opens up a groundbreaking,comparative discussion of how the post-KantianGermanphilosopherswere influentialin the constructionof a BritishRomantic aesthetic. The first three chapters examine the ideas of I'art pour I'art(goingback to the cross-culturalfirstuse of the phrase in 1804),idemetalter(difference as an essential markerof the artist'stransformingactivity),and palingenesis of mind as art respectively.Burwick'sdirectengagementwith the firsttexts in which Schleiermacher, Schelling, Hegel, Coleridge, and De Quincey articulated their thoughtsis particularlyrefreshing,and it drawsattentionto the dangersof reductive readingin laterinterpretations.The finalthree chaptersofferfurtherexplorationsof the persistentpresence of mimesis as a major issue in Romantic texts. Chapter 4 focuseson ekphrasis,on how the mimetic processitselfcan be the object of mimesis, illustratedby an exceptionallypenetratingreading of De Quincey's 'Dream Fugue' in TheEnglish Mail Coach. Chapter 5 casts new light on Coleridge and Wordsworth by an emphasis on how 'optical reflection [...] is a model for visual perception as well as an analogue of mental reflection'(p. 148).The final chapter explores 'three novels of the romantic period which develop their irony through a structuralbifurcation that exposes the mimetic pretense of the storytelling'(exemplifiedin Charles BrockdenBrown'sArthur Mervyn, E. T. A. Hoffmann'sKater Murr,andJames Hogg's Confessions ofa JustifiedSinner). However troubled, tormented, or neurotic the Romantics' engagement with the whole idea of mimesis might have been at times, they did make a convincing aestheticout of the mimeticpredicament.Burwickputs it splendidly:'Ifoccasionally in a perverse pique or an ironic gesture they attempted to shatter one mirror or the other, it was only with the result that every splinter remained to catch new reflections'(p. i5). A warmly recommended study. VICTORIA UNIVERSITY OFWELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND HEIDITHOMSON Romanticismand the Materiality of Nature. By ONNO OERLEMANS. Toronto, Buffalo, NY, and London: University of Toronto Press. 2002. vii + 253 pp. $45; f28. ISBN: 0-8020-4863-3. Given the title and the topic of this book, the assertion that 'romanticism is an important origin for environmentalist thought' should probably come as no surprise. That does not make it accurate. Possibly, indeed probably, for some readers Romantic literatureis the origin of their 'stronginterest'in descriptionsof the externalworld and even perhapstheir 'environmentalistthought', but let us not make the mistake of thinking such interest sprang into being in the Romantic period. More than enough has been writtenabout medieval landscapesand Renaissance forests to correct such misapprehension.What ecocriticism does, and here Onno Oerlemans's book is on sounder ground, is to offer a newer, more rigorous fraughtwith pitfalls.In response, Burwickoffersus the possibilityof a more inclusive , comprehensivedefinition of 'imitation'within a Romantic context, one which includes the mind's own workings: 'The rise of individualism, a major factor in the political turmoil of the age, was also manifest in the literaryexploration of the individual consciousness and the individual experience. The paradox, of course, was that the very self-assessmentcrucial to the social changes then taking place would be appraisedby criticsof subsequentgenerations as self-indulgentescapism' (p.Io). By widening the scope of Romantic mimesis from 'what' the mind beholds, to 'how' it beholds, Burwick opens up a groundbreaking,comparative discussion of how the post-KantianGermanphilosopherswere influentialin the constructionof a BritishRomantic aesthetic. The first three chapters examine the ideas of I'art pour I'art(goingback to the cross-culturalfirstuse of the phrase in 1804),idemetalter(difference as an essential markerof the artist'stransformingactivity),and palingenesis of mind as art respectively.Burwick'sdirectengagementwith the firsttexts in which Schleiermacher, Schelling, Hegel, Coleridge, and De Quincey articulated their thoughtsis particularlyrefreshing,and it drawsattentionto the dangersof reductive readingin laterinterpretations.The finalthree chaptersofferfurtherexplorationsof the persistentpresence of mimesis as a major issue in Romantic texts. Chapter...

At One with the Land: The Domestic Remove—Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland and Matters of National Belonging

The idea that where one lives in America affects how one lives and what personal values, politics, and lifestyles one assumes has long been a part of American thought. Writers, moralists, and politicians alike have long mediated on the value of geography in determining lifestyle, and the image of the pastoral idyll has long been proffered as a balm for those wearied by the supposed trials of urban life. Authors of American fiction have historically relied upon the possi­bilities and associations offered by setting novels on the frontier, in the backwoods, in the suburbs, and at any number of other varia­tions on the idea of a retreat from established urban centres. Promi­nent examples abound; most notably, in the nineteenth-century, there was Henry David Thoreau’s writing about his time in a small cabin on Walden Pond. In Walden; Or, Life in the Woods (1854), Tho­reau espouses the value of eschewing material goods and the trap­pings of contemporary society (“etiquette and politeness”) in favour of basic physical necessities and solitude. But Thoreau, writing in the 1850s, is clearly and deliberately writing against a whole tradi­tion in American thought that does not see this kind of removal from a highly ordered society as productive. The earliest evidence of this tradition is the famous speech John Winthrop gave onboard ship in 1630, “A Model of Christian Charity” (1838).

Crime and the Nation: Prison Reform and Popular Fiction in Philadelphia, 1786—1800. By Peter Okun. (New York: Routledge, 2002. xxii, 167 pp. $70.00, ISBN 0-415-93386-2.)

Peter Okun, a professor of English, analyzes “crime and punishment as it was imagined” (p. xv) during the 1790s in the writings of Philadelphia's prison reformers and in popular fiction. His methodology “is indebted to certain post-structuralist and materialist formulations” (p. xviii), especially those of Fredric Jameson. But Okun, who reverentially draws upon Michel Foucault's writings even more than the index suggests, utilizes a great many theoretical works. Although he stresses the importance of historical context, when examining the Philadelphia as well as the general American context Okun relies on a decidedly narrow scholarship base. Okun's approach makes it difficult to summarize even his main points. Still, his central point about prison reformers is that they had a utopian vision of how segregating prisoners and using “the ideal management of space” (p. 112) could reform some and make others help pay their way. For Okun, the desire to fashion “the reformed prison as a domestic utopia” (p. 113) was “bound … to a post-Revolutionary, nationalizing aesthetic” (p. 149) that reflected the reformers' middle-class world view. Okun holds that “there was considerable [literary] promiscuity between” (p. 148) prison reformers and the writers of 1790s fiction. Yet, while both groups emphasized “the scientific knowledge systems of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment” (p. 148), the authors of fiction revealed “a bloody and irrational underside to the domestic-ideal Republican prison reformers held in such high regard” (p. 113). For Okun, the chief reformers were Dr. Benjamin Rush and the other members of a group whose name he has trouble getting right—The Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons. The key novelists were Charles Brockden Brown and Susanna Rowson.

Charles Brockden Brown: Quantitative Analysis and Literary Interpretation

This study is a test case in the use of stylometric techniques to provide an entrance into questions of literary criticism and interpretation. The study applies multivariate analysis to two texts of Charles Brockden Brown, sometimes considered the first professional writer in the United States. Both a scatter graph of a principal components analysis and a cluster analysis show that individual chapters from each of two novels (Wieland and Carwin) group together, except for three chapters of Wieland that cluster with the Carwin chapters. One chapter of Wieland that clusters with the Carwin chapters is narrated by the same character who narrates all of Carwin, thus providing statistical evidence that Brown has created a narrator with a distinctive voice. Accounting for the clustering of the other two chapters calls for a consideration of several of the more crucial and problematic interpretative issues in the novel, and suggests that quantitative analysis can indeed provide background and evidence for literary critical discussion and understanding.

Deliberate Unknowing and Strategic Retelling: The Ravages of Cultural Desire in Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly

At end of chapter nineteen of Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly, eponymous Huntly silently exults hard-won, gruesome victory. After mortally wounding hostile Indian and then bungling coup de grace, he decides to bayonet his suffering enemy, task of cruel lenity which leaves him overpowered by [its] horrors and lamenting fact that are deeds which compels thousands of rational beings to perform and to witness! (1) Moments later, however, savagely merciful Huntly describes how, cheered by dawn, he stuck [the dead Indian's] musquet ground, and left it standing upright middle of road (203). He then continues both his journey and his retrospective narration, seemingly oblivious to psychological implications of this triumphant celebration of deliberate and extended carnage. Huntly's lack of self-scrutiny at this textual moment is both striking and significant: confessional narrative purportedly devoted to an enlightened explication of events of his recent past, his sudden, silent freak of fancy (203) is singular anomaly. His erection of Indian's musquet in middle of road phallically figures both his gruesome conquest and significant gap palliative rhetoric that invokes compulsions of perverse nature order to justify such deeds. Huntly's gesture symbolically establishes psychological and textual crossroads where masculinity, narrativity, and American national identity violently and memorably intersect. In effect, Indian's musquet serves as signpost, silent but evocative marker of repressions and epistemological elisions upon which American literary identity is premised this novel. Such moments of narrative repression, elision, and digression have recently been identified and analyzed as hallmarks of hysterical discourse. (2) In particular, critics have examined how this nervous disorder functions as gendered social and cultural construct--in G. S. Rousseau's words, as both transformative, protean condition par excellence and the barometer responding ... to perpetual stresses of gender and sexuality and to the cultural stresses weighing on sexual relations and gender formations. (3) However, much of this scholarship has focused primarily on role of hysteria within texts and contexts of writing by women. Insofar as they overlook function of encoded ideals of normal and abnormal masculinity construction of experience, (4) many feminist studies of hysteria tell only half of story. As cultural barometer, hysteria registers social and sexual pressures exerted upon both genders; fact that very possibility of male hysteria has been consistently avoided or minimized discussions of etiology of condition represents significantly gendered cultural omission. One particularly notable exception is Mark Micale's Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations. Micale traces evolution of substantially independent discursive [cultural] tradition of male hysteria (primarily British and French) literature of late nineteenth century and posits a lineage of cultural figures that extend[s] from degenerate genius of fin de siecle, back to tubercular Romantic poet, thence through melancholic writer of [the] eighteenth-century. (5) He thus claims that male writers were able to use category [of hysteria] to develop new modes of sensibility and thereby to expand scope of emotional, intellectual, and aesthetic resources at their command, and that ultimately, representations and self-representations of male hysteria have been employed by male artists and writers to strike and register Sturm und Drang of artistic creativity (260). As G. S. Rousseau has argued, however, the history of hysteria is as much 'his-story' of male fear as the history of linguistic embodiments, rhetorics, and emplotments (93). …

The Courtesies of Authorship: Hannah Adams and Authorial Ethics in the Early Republic

In 1814, twenty-five years after Isaiah Thomas printed the first indigenous American novel and five years before Washington Irving proved that professional literary in America was viable, John Lowell published an anonymous review of a text just as significant the early history of in America, Jedidiah Morse's An Appeal the Publick (1814). (1) A polemical log of his long-running debate with historian Hannah Adams over publishing rights and authorial ethics, Morse's account prompted Lowell concede that the right of is one of those ill-defined properties, which in all countries, leaves room for controversy (28). It is this nebulous right of authorship that particularly interests me here, because even with the recent rich work on women's and on the early printing/publishing industry, significant work remains be on non-literary women authors' interactions with early American print culture and the ways in which these authors steered its development. (2) I argue that the authorial career of the colonial and religious historian Hannah Adams (1755-1831) indicated the ethical problems created by the confluence of the emergent publishing industry and the rise of professional women authors. In doing so, I focus on what Charles Brockden Brown christened the of national transactions, the public print sphere, and the way Adams's name circulated within it (446). (3) Indeed, this realm seemed make the successes and failures of women authors a public issue, an obsession Adams recognized and lamented, so much so that her 1832 memoir, although perhaps one of the most revealing records of the early American authorial consciousness, is deficient in many details concerning her long authorial career. The Ladies Magazine said much the same: She must have had much more tell of the history of her mind, its struggles, and trials, and triumphs, and the effect of all these in forming her character--but her humble opinion of herself, induced her attach less importance trifling details than her readers would have done (Literary Notices 238). What little Adams did offer was carefully understated and oblique; at her most vituperative she is still vague, as when she writes that her exposed her to the censure, or ridicule of those, whose ideas on the subject are derived from the varying modes of fashion, and not from the unchanging laws of moral rectitude (Adams and Lee 33). In viewing Adams through these memoirs but also through prefaces and public records that pertain her work, we discover an exquisite illustration of an authorial identity at once independent and dependent, intellectual and popular, gendered and ungendered, righteous and immoral, aggressive and reticent--an early author struggling with the ethical polemics inherent professional and its relationship the print market. At stake in this analysis is not just a glimpse of woman's professional in its formative stages but, more broadly, an awareness of an early version of the authorial self and its relationship the market famously present in later antebellum literary writers. In the record of Adams's vocational life, we see the ancestor of Fanny Fern's regular business woman, Ruth Hall, and, in another sense, an early incarnation of Emily Dickinson's lament that Publication--is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man (Fern 223; Dickinson 544). As one reviewer noted, Adams's career exposed before any other the peculiar of a female presenting herself as the of and the assertor [sic] of literary claims (Literary Notices 239). In my first two sections I explore this peculiar trial by dividing Adams into the two selves most early professional writers had occupy: businessperson and writer. The former is practical and measured, dealing with the uncertain business of early American print culture; she is the maker of bargains in the print sphere. …

"I May Be a Stranger to the Grounds of Your Belief": Constructing Sense of Place in Wieland

"I May Be a Stranger to the Grounds of Your Belief":Constructing Sense of Place in Wieland Lisa West Norwood (bio) America has opened new views to the naturalist and politician, but has seldome furnished themes to the moral painter. That new springs of action and new motives to curiosity should operate—that the field of investigation opened to us by our own country, should differ essentially from those which exist in Europe,—may be readily conceived. The sources of amusement to the fancy and instruction to the heart, that are peculiar to ourselves, are equally numerous and inexhaustible. It is the purpose of this work to profit by some of these sources; to exhibit a series of adventures, growing out of the condition of our country, and connected with one of the most common and most wonderful diseases or affections of the human frame. —Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly Charles Brockden Brown's frequently cited note "To the Public" in Edgar Huntly reveals his interest in the unfolding "field of investigation" that separates American views, politics, and morals from their European counterparts. Such a "field of investigation" can only be both literal and abstract to Brockden Brown. It is literal in the field's origin in the American landscape, whose symbolic and narrative value he explores in the novel. It is abstract in the sense that he does not explicitly name the landscape as his subject matter; he rather refers to "the incidents of Indian hostility" and "the perils of the western wilderness," topics that are associated with the landscape and grow "out of the condition of our country" but do not describe the landscape itself. In this note, Brockden Brown appears to espouse the argument that Myra Jehlen sets forth in American Incarnation, that "it is precisely because the concept of America is rooted in the physical that it can be infinitely metaphysical. The concept of the New World could not come to everyday life as a pure abstraction; it had to interpret some actual territory, a real [End Page 89] place" (9–10). However, as Jehlen herself admits, the "incarnation" of the idea of "America" in continent, individual, or nation does not lend itself to fiction writing but rather invites "the possibility of a fundamental conflict between the ideology of fiction and that of America" (134) because of its transcendental tendencies and resistance to multiple points of view. Wieland, unlike Edgar Huntly, has received little critical attention on landscape or sense of place.1 Yet the narrative of Wieland, like Brockden Brown's other early work, also revolves around the capacity of the landscape to generate and retain meaning. If Brockden Brown's note in Edgar Huntly supports Jehlen's concept of incarnation, his use of place in Wieland does not, for it focuses more directly on connecting interpretations of the landscape with the particular demands of fiction writing: how to incorporate landscape description into narrative, how to link places and events in the novel, and how to present competing methodologies of sense of place among the characters. As a result, in Wieland, the connection between land and subjectivity is both less explicit and more intimate than in Edgar Huntly. It is less explicit because the landscape of Mettingen cannot be reduced to a consistent symbolic meaning, and more intimate because the novel reveals that there is no thinking that is not tied to the places in the novel or the connections between them. Clara attempts to localize Mettingen and describe the settings as they relate to the characters and everyday activities. Pleyel and others employ surveying language, creating geometric and abstract formulations that compete with the establishment of domestic space. Carwin confuses the others' sense of place with his ability to project his voice into different places, especially "impossible" places, such as the space between the lattice and the rock in Clara's summerhouse "not wide enough to admit a human body" (72). Thus, even more so than the rhetoric in the preface to Edgar Huntly that associates the new views of the American landscape with a new literature and system of morals, Wieland seeks to establish the ways sense of place is constructed and contested in...

Articles and Publications

Articles and Publications by Christopher Densmore and Barbara Addison Major scholarly studies on seventeenth century Quakerism include Meredith Baldwin Weddle, Walking in the Way ofPeace: QuakerPacifism in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2001), focusing on New England Quaker response to King Phillip's War, 1675-1676; Adrian Davies, The Quakers in English Society, 1655-1725 (Oxford University Press, 2000), and Douglas Gwyn, Seekers Found: Atonement in Early QuakerExperience (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill, 2000). Gwyn's coverage begins with Caspar Schwenckfeld and Sebastian Franck in the 1520s and 1 53Os before moving onto the Seekers, Ranters and Quakers fromthe 1640s to 1 700, andconcludes with observations onthe modern state ofQuakerism. Stefano Villani used unpublished Inquisition records in Lisbon for English Quaker Ann Gargill's travels in Portugal in the 1650s in "Una quacchera a Lisbona: i Viaggi e gli Scritti di Ann Gargill,"Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore diPisa- Classe diLettere eFilosofia, ser. IV, vol. 4: 1 (1999): 2478 1 . Mary K. Geiter, "William Penn and Jacobitism: A Smoking Gun?," Historical Research [Great Britain] 73:181 (2000): 213-18, examines Penn's role during the Glorious Revolution based on a 1691 deposition by Thomas White, now in the Huntington Library. Nuala Zahedieh, "Making Mercantilism Work: London Merchants and the Atlantic Trade in the Seventeenth Century," in the Transactions ofthe Royal Historical Society 9 (1999): 143-158, based on London port books of 1686, includes a discussion of Quakers as part of the colonial merchant class. Recent dissertations on Quakers in seventeenth century Britain include Gary M. Knarr, Watchmen ofEngland: Early Quaker Theology and Social Protest (Ph.D. thesis, Queens University [Canada], 1998), David E. Schmidt, "Till ChristJesus Be Exalted": QuakerPoliticalPamphlets During the Restoration ofthe Rump Parliament (Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1 998) and Cathy D.N. Ream,MargaretFellasEducator: a Woman Who Learned and Led (University ofKansas, 1998). Julie Sievers, "Awakening the Inner Light: Elizabeth Ashbridge and the Transformation of Quaker Community," Early American Literature 36:2 (2001): 235-262, investigates theplace ofQuakers inthe social andreligious culture of the mid-seventeenth century. Peter Kafer, "Charles Brockden Brown andthe Pleasures ofUnsanctifiedImagination, 1787-1793," William and Mary Quarterly , 3rd ser. 57:3 (July 2000): 543-68, places Brown's writings in a Quaker context and judges Brown's Wieland a "profoundly Quaker work." English Quaker John Fothergill's contributions to medicine are covered in "Dr. John Fothergill and Eighteenth Century Medicine," by G.S. Plaut,JournalofMedicalBiography [GreatBritain] 7:4 (1999): 192-96. 78Quaker History Silas B. Weeks, NewEngland QuakerMeetinghouses : PastandPresent (Richmond, Indiana: Friends United Press, 2001), is a comprehensive survey, organized by state and locality, ofmeeting houses, both those built forthepurpose andbuildingsusedby Friends, with information onbuildings no longer standing, on burial grounds and meeting history. A different approach is taken in Seth Beeson Hinshaw's The Evolution of Quaker Meeting Houses in North America, 1670-2000 (M.S. thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 2001) , where the focus is on the historical development of meeting house forms from English prototypes, to a mid-eighteenth century "Quaker Ideal Plan" and then how meeting houses and churches evolved among the major branches of the Society of Friends. The presence of a delegation of Friends from Philadelphia Yearly Meeting is noted in G. Peter Jemison and Anna M. Schein (eds.), Treaty of Canandaigua 1794: 200 Years of Treaty Relations Between the Iroquois Confederacy and the United States (Santa Fe, New Mexico: Clear Light Publishers, 2000). "Rowland T. Robinson, Rokeby, and the Underground Railroad in Vermont," by Jane Williamson, Vermont History, vol. 69, Supplement (Winter 2001), 7-3 1 and "Being Good: An Abolitionist Family Attempts to Live Up to Its Own Standards," by Ronald Salomon, 32-47, draw on the family letters of Thomas (1796-1879) and Rachel Gilpin Robinson (1 799-1 862), radical Hicksite Quakers ofFerrisburgh, Vermont. Abolition is also the theme of The Religious World ofAnti-Slavery Women by Ann M. Speicher (Syracuse University Press, 2000), covering Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Lucretia Mott, Abby Kelley Foster, who all were at one time Quakers, and Sallie Holley, who was not. ThyAffectionate Friend: the Letters ofElias Hicks and William Poole by Paul Buckley (M.A. Th. thesis, Earlham School of Religion, 2001), contains...

Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II

John Carlos Rowe, considered one of the most eminent and progressive critics of American literature, has in recent years become instrumental in shaping the path of American studies. His latest book examines literary responses to U.S. imperialism from the late eighteenth century to the 1940s. Interpreting texts by Charles Brockden Brown, Poe, Melville, John Rollin Ridge, Twain, Henry Adams, Stephen Crane, W. E. B Du Bois, John Neihardt, Nick Black Elk, and Zora Neale Hurston, Rowe argues that U.S. literature has a long tradition of responding critically or contributing to our imperialist ventures. Following in the critical footsteps of Richard Slotkin and Edward Said, Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism is particularly innovative in taking account of the public and cultural response to imperialism. In this sense it could not be more relevant to what is happening in the scholarship, and should be vital reading for scholars and students of American literature and culture.

Un obscur dialogue au siècle des Lumières : Alcuin

This article examines the influence of the Enlightenment philosophy on Charles Brockden Brown’s Alcuin ; or the Rights of Women, the author’s first major work, published in 1797. After endeavoring to place this fictional dialogue in the context of the political debates of its time, the article presents and analyzes the contents of a little known and quite puzzling work, often wrongly considered as the straightforward expression of the author’s thesis on the thorny question of the rights of women. More broadly, it aims at emphasizing the specificity of a text whose author, while still exhibiting some typically « enlightened » characteristics, already foreshadows the « dark » aspects of Romanticism.

The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (review)

Renée Bergland has provided an insightful reading of a particular motif in American literature that presents new perspectives for those interpreters of American literature who teach American Studies-grounded survey courses in high school and undergraduate college classrooms. However, one must accept Bergland's premise—which many, but not all, American Studies professors do—that American "land is haunted because it is stolen" (9) in order to accept her most compelling and unique conclusions. Her broad understanding of American intellectual history informs her initial discussion of the topic of "Indian Ghosts and American Subjects," and her frame of reference ranges chronologically in the balance of the text from Cotton Mather and Mary Rowlandson to Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, and Samuel Woodworth to Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. In the final chapter, she engages in a concluding discussion concerning the "Spectral Indian" which illustrates its argument through continuing reference to Stephen King's Pet Sematary (1983) and to Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony (1977). Although her informed discussion deftly justifies the relevance both of King's popular culture and of Silko's work of high culture in the same paragraph (indeed, often in the same sentence!), her discussion of Ceremony is not as nuanced and insightful as her treatment of earlier American writers in the text.

American sympathy: men, friendship, and literature in the new nation

friend in history, Henry David Thoreau once wrote, looks like some premature soul. And in the history of friendship in early America, Caleb Crain sees the soul of the nation's literature. In a sensitive analysis that weaves together literary criticism and historical narrative, Crain describes the strong friendships between men that supported and inspired some of America's greatest writing--the Gothic novels of Charles Brockden Brown, the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the novels of Herman Melville. He traces the genealogy of these friendships through a series of stories. A dapper English spy inspires a Quaker boy to run away from home. Three Philadelphia gentlemen conduct a romance through diaries and letters in the 1780s. Flighty teenager Charles Brockden Brown metamorphoses into a horror novelist by treating his friends as his literary guinea pigs. Emerson exchanges glances with a Harvard classmate but sacrifices his crush on the altar of literature--a decision Margaret Fuller invites him to reconsider two decades later. Throughout this engaging book, Crain demonstrates the many ways in which the struggle to commit feelings to paper informed the shape and texture of American literature.

Charles Brockden Brown's Biloquial Nation: National Culture and White Settler Colonialism in Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist

Charles Brockden Brown's Biloquial Nation: National Culture and White Settler Colonialism in <i>Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist</i>

"Snug Stored Below": The Politics of Race in James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers

Due to the poor reception of Arthur Mervyn, Edgar Huntley, and Wieland, Charles Brockden Brown gave up the novel in the early 1800s, and began a short but infamous career as a Federalist pamphleteer. His 1803 political tract, An Address to the Government on Cession of Louisiana to the French, is an allegory of a nation exposed to duplicitous outsiders. The tract is a consummate example of Federalist propaganda, a fictional letter written by an imaginary French official, who claims that the United States, torn by factionalism and discontent, is ripe for the pickings. Brown draws from his experience as a novelist to invent a wild tale of an impending slave insurrection that awaits the final order from France. Published after the discovery of ex-slave Gabriel Prosser's plot to attack Charleston, the pamphlet further convinced Americans of the truth of their longstanding fear--the French were going to use a proxy army of disaffected slaves to attack the United States. (1) Brown's pamphlet was part of a larger nationalist discourse in the early nineteenth-century that increasingly came to view the racial divide in the United States as impassable. (2) Brown reiterates an ideology over which Thomas Jefferson brooded about in Notes on the State of Virginia in 1784. The differences between the two races were fixed in nature, Jefferson wrote, and to free the slaves without a plan for expatriation, to let ex-slaves live alongside their former masters, would fill those of African descent with ten thousand recollections ... of the injuries they sustained. (3) A plan for deporting free African-Americans to Africa became even more urgent after the abolishment of the slave trade in 1807. Far from initiating the gradual death of chattel slavery by cutting off its lifeblood, the moratorium on the slave trade simply gave rise to a domestic slave market. In addition, new technology further strengthened the institution of slavery. Southern planters and northern investors purchased land and slave labor to take advantage of the cotton gin and a hardy upland cotton hybrid, and in the process, they created an internal slave trade far more productive and lucrative than the triangulation between Africa, the West Indies, and the United States. When James Fenimore Cooper began writing novels in 1819 the resurgence of slavery had already begun to define the limits, logic, and rhetoric of a democratic politics. Nationwide African-American resistance to an entrenched slave system led political leaders on a search for a mechanism that would both stabilize the planter's property in the South and neutralize the political agency of free African-Americans in the North. A group of prominent white citizens provided an answer in 1817, with the inauguration of the American Colonization Society. Taking Jefferson's theory of a fatefully segregated society to its logical end, they devised a plan to relocate free African-Americans to a new African colony. The American Colonization Society immediately became the key instrument of racial reform in the United States. By voicing a homogeneous American identity, it gave the nation an opportunity to resolve its central racial, and thus political, contradiction through the expatriation of African-Americans to Africa rather than amending the Constitution. (4) As a catalyst for a nationwide conversation about the relationship of race to constitutional liberty and citizenship, the colonization movement rehearsed a looming political debate about the future of slavery and democratic liberty in the United States. In 1819 Congress began to redefine the slave system, and after two years of strife between northern and southern representatives, they ended what had become known as the Missouri controversy with an ominous compromise. Admitting Maine into the union as a free state and Missouri as a slave state, legislators completed the agreement by drawing a geographical line along 36[degrees]/30[degrees], a barrier that forced slavery south of the line and forecasted the coming of Civil War. …

An Aesthetics of Crime

Cop Knowledge: Police Power and Cultural Narrative in Twentieth-Century America. By Christopher P. Wilson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. 282 pages. $42.00 (cloth). $16.00 (paper). Hard Boiled: Working-Class Readers and Pulp Magazines. By Erin A. Smith. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000. 248 pages. $64.50 (cloth). $19.95 (paper). Public Enemies, Public Heroes: Screening the Gangster from Little Caesar to Touch of Evil. By Jonathan Munby. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. 264 pages. $45.00 (cloth). $16.00 (paper). Shots in the Mirror: Crime Films and Society. By Nicole Rafter. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 224 pages. $35.00 (cloth). $14.95 (paper). As a historian of criminology, Nicole Rafter has demonstrated that she has a strong understanding of the different approaches that criminologists have taken in thinking about the origin and prevention of crime. Creating Born Criminals, her social history of biological theories of crime in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, effectively traces the work of some of the early attempts at a scientific approach to why individuals commit crime and how we might identify those most likely to engage in criminal behavior. In her recent study, Shots in the Mirror: Crime Films and Society, Rafter extends her work into the [End Page 535] realm of interpreting film. In it she argues that all crime films implicitly make two arguments at once. While they present a social critique, they also typically offer an audience "some solace or resolution by showing a triumph over corruption and brutality" (3). Although she is quite comprehensive in her approach to film criticism, she offers a much more subtle interpretation of historical texts, events, and movements. She is literate in the varying causes to which criminologists assign the origin of criminal behavior, including psychological, biological, and environmental reasons, as well as that of rational choice. Not surprisingly, she takes a broadly inclusive approach to the genre of the crime film. She does not just write of gangster films, she also investigates cop films, courtroom films, and prison and execution films. But in all of these categories, Rafter all too easily falls into only one way of thinking about crime and punishment: as a reification of power. She writes, "A key source of crime films' enduring attraction . . . lies in the way they provide a cultural space for the expression of resistance to authority" (10). She suggests, however, that any subversive element within these films is ultimately mediated through the representation of the systems of social control as "normal, unproblematic, or even useful" (10). The status quo, as she writes for instance of Escape from Alcatraz, is left "undisturbed" (11). Rafter's work in Shots in the Mirror illustrates a crucial dilemma that faces those critics who operate within the arena of the culture of crime--how to move beyond what has become the traditional approach to interpreting the crime narrative. Representations of crime, whether fictional or not, continue to fascinate the American public, as they have since the age of Charles Brockden Brown. Crime narratives operate as a deeply compelling metaphor for the workings of American culture because of the powerful symbolic resonances in the individual criminal's transgressive act. We define our culture not only by our shared beliefs but by our laws--by what is prohibited or defined as outside the bounds of propriety. In representing the transgressive act, crime narratives challenge our assumptions about such often culturally absolute terms as right and wrong, good and evil, and legality and illegality, especially by illustrating how contingent those terms are on socioeconomic conditions. Critics are especially drawn to these narratives because they can readily decode the ways that writers and directors represent cultural values within constructed texts as a means of social commentary and critique. Critics of the recent past, however, [End Page 536] have too readily embraced a perspective on these narratives that merely emphasizes the contest of power that these narratives seem to metaphorically represent. The influence of Michel Foucault has dominated...

Gothic Logic: Charles Brockden Brown and the Science of Sensationalism

This essay argues that in his particular brand of transatlantic Gothicism, Charles Brockden Brown (17711810) grafts an earlier, European branch of the Gothic narrative of the incredible and the supernatural on to the New World/New England strand of the apparition tale, producing in effect a vernacular American Gothic narrative of the empirical beyond in which printing and the discourse of science helped create bizarre and detailed tales reflecting the contemporaneous cultural forces of growing skepticism and materialism.

Charles Brockden Brown and the "Art of the Historian": An Essay concerning (Post)Modern Historical Understanding

In the inaugural publication of his Annals of Europe and America, which appeared serially in the American Register, or General Repository of History, Politics & Science from 1807-09, Charles Brockden Brown commented on the difficulties of history writing, remarking that the chain of successive and dependent causes is endless and that an active imagination was necessary for representing the past. An individual, wrote Brown, be said to be imperfectly acquainted with the last link, who has not attentively scrutinized the very first in the series, however remote it may be.1 Although this early American novelist used his knowledge of to write narrative, his self-conscious commentary about history writing may seem unremarkable given our familiarity with romantic history writers such as Washington Irving and William Prescott and the more modern assumption that the historian seeks truth but can never really obtain it in an absolute shape or form.2 Yet recent debates about and the boundaries between fact and fiction in history writing have returned scholars to this familiar territory, causing historians to re-evaluate assumptions of progress and reasoning associated with methods of late Enlightenment historiography and the empirical foundationalism of history's literary form.3 Most prominently, the publication of Robert Berkhofer's Beyond the Great Story has renewed the long-standing disagreement over representation and the role of poststructuralist theories in understanding the rhetorical and ideological aspects of inquiry. As Betsy Erkkila has observed, the very moment when literary critics are turning to history as the solid ground of their cultural analysis, historians are experiencing an increasing crisis about the ontological status of history itself.4 Historians are, in other words, reassessing more closely than ever long-standing Enlightenment assumptions about the form and purpose of history. At the heart of such debates is the degree to which historians are willing to examine-and accept-history as a literary artifact and to concede certainty and meaning. While such debates often focus on the inherent contradictions of opposing views and the value of inter- and intradisciplinary inquiry, minimal attention has been given to the ways late eighteenth-century historians and novelists grappled with issues concerning representation and truth and how such inquiries correspond with our own.5 That is, if, as Peter Novick has observed, the objectivist point of view has remained the ideal: It has been the key term in defining progress in scholarship,6 several questions linger about and aesthetic issues at the end of the eighteenth century and how they relate to contemporary debates about representation and narrative meaning. For example, if early national history writers understood the question relative to then overlapping perceptions of writing and fiction, to what extent were those modes of writing distinguished from each other in the late eighteenth century? Did romantic ideas, in other words, about the role and meaning of history intersect or overlap with late Enlightenment ones and alter methods of representation? By extension, if greater self-consciousness is one of the windfalls of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century historiography, to what degree does discourse from that period about historical objectivity and bias relate to our own debates about the fictive nature of history writing? Are boundaries, historiographical or otherwise, always in place, or can past ways of approaching, or writing about, history resemble and inform the present? That is, if it is possible that we postmoderns have unfairly characterized the Age of Reason as essentially rational or objective, have we also given too much credence to poststructuralists and their claims or assumptions about narrative meaning and linguistic representation? …