ABSTRACT
The American Gothic literary tradition arguably begins at the cusp of the nineteenth century, with the publication by Philadelphia native Charles Brockden Brown of his four Gothic novels, Wieland; Or, The Transformation. An American Tale (1798); Ormond; Or, The Secret Witness (1799); Arthur Mervyn; Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 (1799 and 1800); and Edgar Huntly; Or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799). In each of these works, Brown adapted to his post-Revolutionary American setting the conventions of the European Gothic novel associated with Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Friedrich von Schiller and others. The birth of the American Gothic, therefore, must be considered as Brown's artistic transmogrification of a confluence of cultural forces in light of available literary templates. This chapter accordingly will first survey the gothicized conditions of daily life during the colonial and early American republic periods, with attention paid in particular to the “raw materials” for the Gothic offered by the looming presence of the wilderness and the associated confrontation with the racial Other, the legacy of New England Puritanism, the pervasiveness of disease, and the overheated political contest between Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans with its attendant conspiracy paranoia. The literary templates available to Brown, including the importation of Gothic novels into America, will then be noted briefly before offering a more detailed consideration of Brown's appropriation of Gothic forms and native materials in North America's first Gothic novels.
