Gothic Enlightenment: Contagion and Community in Charles Brockden Brown's "Arthur Mervyn"

Ever since Fiedler first turned Indian slaughter, revolutionary patricide, and the slave trade into the gothic novel's privileged referents, American literary criticism has read gothic tropes as the gnawings of a guilty national conscience, where any fantasy of a cohesive narrative-whether that of history, the nation, or the subject-is interrupted by traumatic counternarratives. According to my reading of Brown, the gothic offers a model of community that spoke to the interests of a diverse immigrant populace assembled in close proximity in urban centers at the turn of the eighteenth century.