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The haunted frontier: troubling gothic conventions in nineteenth-century literature of the American west

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The haunted frontier: troubling gothic conventions in nineteenth-century literature of the American west

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THE HAUNTED FRONTIER:

TROUBLING GOTHIC CONVENTIONS IN NINETEENTH-

CENTURY LITERATURE OF THE AMERICAN WEST

by

Wendy Anne Witherspoon

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)

December 2007

Copyright 2007 Wendy Anne Witherspoon

ii

DEDICATION
For Ben
iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Professors Margaret Russett and William Handley for their
supervision of this dissertation. Their intellectual rigor, unwavering encouragement and
generosity of spirit not only helped me conceptualize this project, but also continually
inspired me throughout its development. Professor Karen Halttunen offered an
exquisitely tuned ear for making it interesting. These professors are matchless models
for the kind of scholar I hope to be.
This dissertation was completed with the support of the following fellowships at
the University of Southern California: the College Merit Fellowship, the Graduate
School Arnold and Oakley Fellowship, the Marta Feuchtwanger Merit Award, and the
College of Letters, Arts & Sciences Final Year Dissertation Fellowship.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Dedication ii
Acknowledgments iii
Abstract v
Introduction 1
Introduction Endnotes 30
Chapter One, A Tale of Two Murderers: Repetition in Charles Brockden
Brown’s Edgar Huntly
32
Chapter One Endnotes 68
Chapter Two, Monsters and Madwomen in Utah: Gothic Contamination 69
Chapter Two Endnotes 104
Chapter Three, Chasing Ramona 106
Chapter Three Endnotes 143
Chapter Four, Deadwood: Legally Gothic 145
Chapter Four Endnotes 177
Bibliography 179

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ABSTRACT
The gothic genre has always been tied to empire-building, flourishing, as it does,
in two distinctly imperialist moments: late eighteenth-century Britain and nineteenth-
century America. “The Haunted Frontier” argues that liminal political spaces of contact
coveted by nations with appetites for expansion – “frontiers”-- must be considered a
central feature of the gothic genre. The converse is also true: gothic conventions are
mobilized both strategically and inadvertently in frontier literature, producing an effect
that generally undermines ideological promotions of empire building and, more
specifically, unsettles particular mythological constructions of the American frontier as
a site of rational progress.
The study begins by enunciating the significance of the frontier in the
paradigmatic British gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe, William Godwin, and Charlotte
Brontë, arguing that the frontier settings of parts of these texts construct national
stability in opposition to foreign “horrors.” “The Haunted Frontier” then directs the
American gothic genre toward a trans-national and trans-regional re-conceptualization
wherein the ideological space of the frontier becomes a central site of generic mutation.
To articulate the contours of the frontier gothic as a genre, this study draws on a wide
range of literary representations of the nineteenth-century American West, including
Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly, or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker (1800), mid-
nineteenth century anti-polygamy novels, and Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884).
Gothic form as well as gothic topoi such as the uncanny and contamination operate in
vi

these novels to trouble some of the texts’ ideological claims for Anglo-American
cultural legitimacy in contested regions.
“The Haunted Frontier” concludes by showing the persistence of the frontier
gothic in contemporary representations of the American West. Extending the work of
Giorgio Agamben, this study reveals that gothic motifs in the Home Box Office series
Deadwood (2004-2006) suggest the intrinsic violence of law. Moreover, neither the
frontier nor the gothic genre has vanished, but both have become central to
understanding our postmodern lives; frontier gothic, then, is no longer the generic
exception, but the rule.
1

INTRODUCTION
One does not typically think of the gothic genre when considering nineteenth-
century literature of the American West. In the first place, the expansive, bright
landscapes of many frontier narratives seem to foreclose upon the gloomy, tenebrous
castles and foggy moors of most gothic settings. What’s more, familiar constructions of
the American West as a space symbolically linked to hegemonic conceptions of
American exceptionalism seem to militate against the kind of transgressive desires
suggested by gothic plots, replete with their haunted houses, mad doppelgangers,
stupefying terror, and incestuous entanglements. And yet, as a liminal space that tests
the boundaries of personal and national identity, the frontier is very much a gothic
locale. Because of the surreptitious ability of the gothic genre to challenge monolithic
cultural discourse, gothic conventions have always been important devices for those
writing about the American frontier. Given the opposition of these genres, one
conventionally linked with notions of the frontier as a site of positive rational progress,
and the other conventionally linked with all that is regressive, repressed, and irrational,
why do writers of the American frontier so frequently turn to the gothic genre to make
sense of the Western experience?
The existence of gothic motifs in literature of the American frontier has been
established by myriad literary critics, and my work updates and extends those studies in
several ways.
1
First, with a sustained focus on the long nineteenth century, I attend
more closely to the way the roots of the British gothic genre were imported to the New
World and grafted onto the burgeoning American literary tradition. Second, the specific
2

way I enunciate the contours of the gothic genre, structurally, as marked by what Eve
Sedgwick has called “unspeakability,” allows me to make larger claims for the
American gothic genre. And third, my methodological approach strives toward a trans-
regional and transnational perspective with the hope that unsettling the idea of “region”
and “nation” can broaden the cultural and epistemological matrix within which we can
see how and why gothic conventions achieved certain effects. Taken as a whole, my
dissertation provides a reconsideration of the ways the American gothic genre becomes
modulated cross-regionally when one considers the West as a gothic domain, and a
demonstration of how Western literature, so easily associated with a nationalist
imaginary, more often betrays an unsettling relation to the historical project of nation-
building.
The contours of the terms “gothic” and “frontier” are dynamic, with the former
taking on enormous changes when modified by the terms “British” or “American,” and
the latter existing less as a geographic locale and more as an ever-shifting theoretical
“region,” the silhouette of which is illuminated by history, politics, geography and
ideology.
2
Frontiers imply borderlands, both personal and public; they are places of
contact and contagion, confrontation and amalgamation. Frontiers as liminal spaces of
the body and of the body politic place selves and national characters in relief and
highlight all that is still contested about such identities. If this all sounds a bit gothic,
that’s because it is: liminality is a central issue in the gothic genre, which attends to a
myriad borderlands – historical, political, cultural, psychological, racial, or gendered.
The gothic always imagines the space of the frontier as a meeting place, a dangerous
3

place of potential amalgamation and “contamination.” Formally, too, the gothic genre
is the genre “par excellence” of contamination as a hybrid of many forms, and so it not
only formally mimics but also complicates the issues of liminality it often attempts to
enunciate.
3
But textual hybridity is just one of the ways the gothic form offers an
uneasy sort of refuge for those writing about the American frontier in the nineteenth
century. As I will show, the structural and conventional components of the gothic genre
almost always complicate the ideological matrices of the works in which they appear.
While the frontier under consideration here is particular (while perhaps not
discrete), what I demonstrate most generally is that all frontier literature is gothic -- all
gothic literature is really about frontiers. The particular frontier representations under
study here comprise three novels (written in the nineteenth century) and one television
show (created in the present day). As the chapters of this study move through the
nineteenth century, the “frontier” morphs and shifts from Pennsylvania’s Delaware
Water Gap of Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly: Memoirs of a Sleepwalker
(1800), to the Utah territory of the anti-polygamy novels of the 1850s, to the Old
California of Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona: A Story (1884). The final chapter, about
the Home Box Office series, Deadwood (2004-2006), which is set in 1876 in the Black
Hills of what is now South Dakota, provides a kind of “afterward,” to this study,
analyzing how the nineteenth-century gothic frontier becomes re-imagined through a
twenty-first century postmodern lens.
Broadly, frontier narratives of the nineteenth century that featured “civilization”
of western lands stereotypically functioned in the service of America’s imperialistic
4

cravings, as evidenced by the popularity of Bishop Berkeley’s eighteenth-century verse,
“Westward the course of empire takes its way” (Stephanson 18). As Patricia Limerick
has shown vis-à-vis Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Thesis,” the mythologizing of
the West as a site of rational progress has consistently reified ethnocentric narratives of
national identity that served particular (Anglo-American) political interests. In general,
the presence of gothic conventions in frontier texts troubles the hegemony typically
produced via such narratives. As David Mogen, Scott Sanders, and Joanne Karpinski
argue, frontier gothic literature “expresses how alienation and fear both subvert and
continually redefine the American ideal of the future as a frontier leading each of us and
our nation to ever more positive cultural and psychological transformations” (316). It is
not my intention simply to recuperate texts that not only supported cultural and racial
discrimination but also produced real and detrimental political effects such as Native
American removal policies. Instead, it is my contention that by attending to the process
of canon formation that has excluded the West as a gothic domain, we can begin to see
the trans-national and trans-regional relationships that give us a better view of the way
American frontier mythology has both contributed to and also challenged national
cultural and literary identities.
4

Trans-nationalism argues that without studying the way discourses shape and are
shaped by forces beyond traditional, national borders, we only end up reifying the very
nationalistic arguments we endeavor to critique. This project aims for a trans-
nationalist perspective by beginning with the rise of the gothic novel in Britain, in the
hope that closer attention to the importation and mutation of the genre will help clarify
5

the ideological work it performs in the American context. In the eighteenth century,
Britain’s imperial and technological power gave rise to a surging nationalism, which
revived interest in locating a uniquely “British” ancient history, and the history of the
Goths was pressed into service. The significance of the Goths – a marauding group that
drove the Roman Empire out of Europe in the fifth century – centered on their notions
of constitutional law and asymmetrical architecture, and so the history of the Goths
came to refer oxymoronically in the national imagination to both order and wildness.
The construction of a literary genre around this term, then, seems to contain the
possibility of slippage from the start.
The rise of the British gothic novel is usually dated to the late eighteenth century
works of Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, and Matthew Lewis.

The British gothic
novel has provided fertile ground for the critical discussion of a wide range of topics,
including issues of psychology, race, class, nationalism, secularization, and feminism.
5

While gothic novels support seemingly limitless critical inquiry, no other genre seems
so purely conventional in its construction. As Sedgwick suggests, as soon as you know
a novel is of the gothic variety, you know almost certainly what it will contain – a
haunted castle, a trembling heroine, her impetuous lover, and an evil villain who
threatens them, as well as convents, monasteries, prophetic dreams, subterranean
imprisonments, threats of rape and murder, and perhaps most significantly, the presence
of the supernatural. Another element common to many British novels is an engagement
with the “cult of the sublime,” in which, as Edmund Burke theorized, feelings of awe
could be excited through vicarious experience.
6
While gothic novelists attempted to
6

garner artistic respectability, perhaps, by endowing their heroines with an appreciation
for the sublime, their achievement is considered less intellectually rigorous. In
Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), for example, Emily has so many sublime
responses to nature throughout the novel that at one point, even as she is being
kidnapped and forced to march over the Alps by the evil Montoni, she stops to admire
the sublime view.
The Alps themselves function as a kind of frontier in the British gothic novel,
their craggy outcroppings, jagged ridges, shady vales and sublime views marking a
perilous border between “civilized” and “savage” spaces. As I will show, frontiers in
these novels often suggest a threatening “other,” imposing a binary between
constructions of a barbarous wilderness and a normative England, and signifying all that
is unpropitious to the project of nation-building: aristocracy, Catholicism, lawlessness,
unrestrained passion. Just as Emily St. Aubert is reassured by her return to France from
the wildness of Italy in Udolpho, so are British readers at once titillated by the “horrors”
of foreign lands and also soothed by the implied stability of their own nation. The
feature is such a commonplace in gothic novels by the early nineteenth century that Jane
Austen parodies the simple-mindedness of readers via Northanger Abbey’s Catherine
Morland, who remarks with stunning naïveté: “Charming as were all Mrs. Radcliffe’s
works, and charming even as were the works of all her imitators, it was not in them
perhaps that human nature, at least in the midland counties of England, was to be
looked for. Of the Alps and Pyrenees, with their pine forests and their vices, they might
give a faithful delineation; and Italy, Switzerland, and the south of France, might be as
7

fruitful in horrors as they were there represented” (174). While Catherine Morland’s
sense of her own security within the borders of England upon reading Udolpho seems to
suggest that frontiers in the context of the British gothic novel act conservatively to
build national consensus against the ideological threats of bordering cultures, one
structure of the gothic (Sedgwick’s “unspeakability”) undermines this straightforward
interpretation.
Radcliffe’s The Italian (1796) is particularly engaged with constructions of
English national identity and, as I will show, its gothic structure continually trips up the
novel’s apparent ideological intent. The Italian was published as nationalism was
becoming a force in the late eighteenth century, and travel (via trips or books) was
emerging as an important part of defining national difference. For women, the gothic
novel was similarly (although controversially) a means of vicarious travel: “the [g]othic
novel was a device to send maidens on distant and exciting journeys without offending
the proprieties. . . a feminine substitute for the picaresque” (Moers 126). One of
Radcliffe’s significant contributions to the gothic genre, in fact, was her “ability to
conjure distant scenes in the language of the sublime or the picturesque; a rocky defile,
pastoral uplands gilded by the setting sun, a seashore under a stormy sky” (Clery,
“Introduction” ix). British readers (and travelers) consumed these exotic locales in the
process of nation-building: “British tourists. . . were engaged in a continual process of
defining and sifting differences, ready to assimilate certain aspects of foreign culture,
rejecting others in order to reinforce the boundaries of British selfhood” (Clery,
“Introduction” x).
8

While France may have been the most significant force against which British
nationhood defined itself in the eighteenth century, Italy also played an important role
in this process. The nearly compulsory visit to Rome for all young British patriots of a
certain class was part of a cultural appreciation of classical art and identification with
the “Augustan” age. While in Rome, the young British nationals “had their portraits
painted, standing amid imposing relics, and returned home bearing as trophies classical
medals or urns” (Clery, “Introduction” xi). While Italy retained a great deal of snob
appeal for the British (Italian architecture, art, and music filled the homes of British
aristocrats), it also contained Italians, which had been stereotyped in Jacobean tragedy
as passionate and cruel, as well as the greatest bogeyman in all of gothic literature: the
Pope. British Protestants’ antagonism toward Catholics was fueled in the first half of
the eighteenth century, when the Catholic Stuarts challenged the legitimacy of the
Protestant order in Britain. The anti-Catholic literature that flowed during the era made
the following case: Catholicism is inimical to national interests since Catholics must
give their primary allegiance to a foreign king, the Pope; Catholicism was disastrous
economically, with monasteries full of idle monks and nuns and the common people
kept in poverty; Catholicism promoted superstition and ignorance and was sustained by
an inquisitorial system that denied freedom of conscience (Clery, “Introduction” xvi).
And yet, after 1746, the Catholic threat was neutralized as the Stuarts were finally
defeated. British Protestants’ increased tolerance of Catholics after this date is revealed
both in legislation as well as in a particular aestheticization of the Catholic threat.
9

The neutralization of the threat is significant because it opens up the possibilities
of a sublime response which occurs, for Burke, in reaction to an intellectually terrifying
notion of things which don’t have a “[s]tale unaffecting familiarity” (43). The sublime
occurs, as Thomas Weiskel summarizes, when an “attempt to represent (an object)
determines the mind to regard its inability to grasp wholly the object as symbol of the
mind’s relation to a transcendent order” (23). As anti-Catholism becomes secular and
cultural, representations of it in gothic literature are designed to provoke a particular
response, similar to how a gothic building in a state of disrepair would have produced a
requisite “mixture of aesthetic enthusiasm and strenuous but unfocused disapproval” in
the proper British subject (Clery, “Introduction” xvii). Catholicism, then, void of actual
threat, becomes a literary touchstone that produces a cultural response that unifies the
nation. This process works as Benedict Anderson theorizes in Imagined Communities
(1983): the tomb of the unknown soldier, for Anderson, suggests how previously sacred
topics (death, religion) are transformed into the secular such that the concept of the
modern “nation” begins to produce an imaginative response to universal concerns.
As Cannon Schmitt has shown, nationality is the main theme of The Italian –
both the title and the frame tale suggest that the novel will reveal the secrets of an alien
national identity. The novel participates in the cultural construction of “Englishness”
primarily via a heroine who exhibits the culturally valued qualities of innocence,
frankness, and self-reliance. The delayed revelation of Ellena’s nobility also plays into
the cultural construction of Englishness as it allows Vivaldi to love her for her middle-
class industriousness. Most importantly, however, as Schmitt explains, “Ellena is
10

recognizable as English only because she is defined against the foreign” (860). And
foreignness in The Italian is focused in Schedoni. The equation of the foreign and the
forbidden in the gothic novel, noted by Chloe Chard in her introduction to The Romance
of the Forest (1791), means that a simple assertion of Schedoni’s foreignness coupled
with the blackness of his crimes (murder, kidnapping, forgery, poisoning) construct the
villain as the English anti-type (Chard xiii). As Schmitt explains, “The Italian figures
Ellena as English and Schedoni as Italian – or, more broadly, simply foreign. That
Ellena is actually Italian herself may seem to contradict this argument about her
Englishness. On the contrary, the national label she is given serves to suggest the
universality of the English ideal: according to the logic of the novel, that is, all good
women behave as if they were Englishwomen. The novel’s foreign setting also allows
for the contrasting of this ideal with a fantastically amplified and distorted foreignness”
(862).
For my purposes, the novel’s foreign setting can be seen as a type of frontier – a
land beyond national borders -- where national identity is constructed and contested.
The schisms and self-contradictions within national identity can be illuminated by
attention to a particular “structure” found in gothic novels that, I contend, is often
displayed in the novels’ representations of frontiers. The “structure” to which I refer is
Sedgwick’s “unspeakability.” As Sedgwick has shown, this particular gothic
convention, in which the heroine is blocked from some crucial bit of information
regarding her own history, can be schematized spatially, so that the blockage creates a
division between two parallel spaces instead of according to the typical psychological
11

divisions, outer/inner. The gothic threat that surrounds these divided spaces is the threat
of breaching this partition by sharing information, or speaking; hence, Sedgwick’s term
for this common gothic structure of divided space, “unspeakability.” Sedgwick’s
conception of unspeakability not only codified the gothic convention of subjective
blockages spatially, but also shifted the critical focus from the fact of the (outer/inner or
parallel) division to the struggle over the division itself.
Furthermore, for Sedgwick, the self is not the only entity in gothic novels to
suffer from the kinds of blockages and divisions typically attributed to the psyche.
Subterranean vaults, for example, create parallel spheres in which walls (and earth)
separate human prisoners from the outside world. What’s more, as Sedgwick explains,
the gothic occurs as a dividing wall’s stability becomes threatened: “The worst
violence, the most potent magic, and the most paralyzing instances of the uncanny in
these novels do not occur in, for example, the catacombs of the Inquisition or the
stultification of nightmares. Instead, they are evoked in the very breach of the
imprisoning wall” (13). In other words, gothic horror sometimes occurs in vaults, such
as the rape of Antonia in subterranean passage in The Monk; but more often, gothic
violence occurs at the threshold of a barrier, as the rioters in The Monk are burned to
death trying to escape the convent they have just set afire, and Ambrosio, in the same
novel, stabs Antonia only after he realizes the vault is being invaded. This pattern
suggests, for Sedgwick, that gothic violence has less to do with the depths or divisions
themselves, than with a threatened interaction between the divided spaces (24). For
Sedgwick, the fear evoked in these breaches usually served as a metaphor for a
12

linguistic despair over the use of direct language because of the way unspeakability
most obviously suggests a difficulty in talking about something. I would like to extend
her theoretical point to show the way the gothic structure of unspeakability functions in
gothic novels to mirror and complicate the novels’ ideological intents. Most
importantly, gothic unspeakability structurally and thematically mimics (and
neutralizes) the threatening space of the frontier, a space that is full of “violated
separations.”
The Italian, for example, includes many moments of unspeakability that serve to
enunciate the foreign state and foreign identity not only as other to England and
Englishness, but also as divided against itself and constantly in danger of collapse.
Spying, for example, is a type of unspeakability because the spy and the object of his
attention occupy separate spheres, which must not be breeched on pain of revelation.
While the spy is constructed as “other” to English religious conceptions of freedom of
conscience and legal conceptions of due process of law, multiple levels of spying occur
in the opening scenes of the novel. While the mysterious monk spies on Vincentio, the
hero is also spying (much to his own self-disapproval) on Ellena. By this mutual
spying, Schedoni watching Vincentio watching Ellena like a series of nested boxes, the
dramatic threat that is inaugurated is the threat that the information contained in the
boxes will be let loose (Vincentio’s love for Ellena, or Ellena’s true identity, will be
revealed). This gothic structure of unspeakability, which occurs when information can’t
be shared, points, for Sedgwick, to a despair about the direct use of language. But I
contend that the structure of unspeakability also points to a problem that inheres in
13

representations of frontiers -- liminal places of contact among diverse cultures -- where
the most volatile threat is that what should remain secret will become known, what
should be kept separate will become mixed.
Many more examples of the gothic structure of unspeakability appear at work in
The Italian. During Ellena’s captivity in the monastery of San Stefano, for example,
she meets Olivia, who turns out to be her mother. Ellena and Olivia exchange many
meaningful looks, and Olivia even tells Ellena, “your features have some resemblance
to those of a friend I once had” (The Italian 93), but the silence that prevails between
them about their lives not only furthers the plot (keeping Ellena’s true identity a point of
readerly curiosity until the end), but also thematizes the kinds of “unspeakable”
separations that occur on frontiers. Ostensibly, in England, such secretiveness would
not be necessary because English identity is an integral whole in comparison to the
fractured identities found on the “frontier” of Italy. The confessional and the
Inquisition, central in The Italian, are also instances of this kind of unspeakability
because they “render absolute rather than relative the question of what is speakable”
(Sedgwick 14). In the confessional, the confessant must tell everything and the
confessor may repeat nothing, and in the Inquisition, the victim must swear to reveal the
truth and also promise to keep secret whatever he sees or hears (Sedgwick 14). In The
Italian, a confessional booth thematically underscores the many levels of unspeakability
occurring in the frame tale. Much has been made of the way the frame-tale opening
scene of The Italian -- in which a harbored assassin enters a confessional booth as a
group of traveling Englishmen and women look on in horror – constructs Englishness in
14

opposition to a foreign “other.” The construction of national identity operates via the
gothic motifs of unspeakability: the confessional booth and the travelers who watch the
monk enter it not only don’t speak to the mysterious monk, but also seem to watch him
as if he’s an actor on stage (the text even offers stage directions at this point, specifying
where all the characters are standing in relation to one another). What’s more, the
frame tale itself has an outside/inside relation to the main tale, creating a formal
division on top of the thematic divisions. All these divisions, both formal and thematic,
amount to kinds of gothic “unspeakability,” and suggest that foreign states or
“frontiers” are characterized by fissures and fractures and the threat of adulteration.
The American gothic is often seen as a subsidiary, marginalized form of the
British gothic.
7

While the paradigmatic authors of the nineteenth-century American
gothic canon continue to be Hawthorne and Poe, recent critics have been less interested
in labeling American works “American gothic” and more interested in examining how
the genre’s conventions show up in a variety of works that might not otherwise be seen
as “gothic.” For example, in J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur’s Letters from an
American Farmer (1782), an Enlightenment fable of agricultural yeomanry, the moment
when James sees a caged slave hanging in the woods might be seen as a gothic moment.
The gothic is central to American literature because it gives voice to the dark underside
of the American dream; as Eric Savoy writes of the paradox: “an optimistic country
founded upon the Enlightenment principles of liberty and ‘the pursuit of happiness,’ a
country that supposedly repudiated the burden of history and its irrational claims, has
15

produced a strain of literature that is haunted by an insistent, undead past and fascinated
by the strange beauty of sorrow” (167).
What’s more, as Savoy notes, in the American gothic, dream and nightmare
figurations are not simply in opposition, but interfuse and interact in such a way that
“the past constantly inhabits the present, where progress generates an almost unbearable
anxiety about its costs, and where an insatiable appetite for spectacles of grotesque
violence is part of the texture of everyday reality” (Savoy 167). Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
mysterious paintings and uneasy spirits in his House of Seven Gables (Hawthorne 314),
for example, reveal the land-thieving sin at the heart of Puritan colonization, while the
complicated black and white thematics of a voyage to the South in Edgar Allan Poe’s
Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) suggest the destructiveness of national
obsessions about race. For Teresa Goddu, American Gothic literature “criticizes
America’s national myth of new-world innocence by voicing the cultural contradictions
that undermine the nation’s claim to purity and equality” (10).
The American gothic has always had a problematic relationship to regionalism.
Quite often, questions of race become speciously associated with regional issues, which
has the effect of abjecting race from the national canon. In Playing in the Dark:
Whiteness and the Literary Imagination and “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The
Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” Toni Morrison argues that literary
critics must pay attention to race in literature, and in particular, in American gothic
literature. As Goddu has shown, the equation of the gothic with the South has produced
an effect in which all that is gothic/dark/racially charged might be found in the South, as
16

opposed to the “pure” national canon, ostensibly located in the Northeast. A better
method for considering generic placement is a cross-regional approach, which looks at
the way texts are formed by the relationships between various regions (as opposed to
the center/periphery model). Cross-regionalism produces a better understanding of the
way discourses were contested and mutually constituting in a particular historical
moment. While Pym, for example, has most often been seen as a racist allegory of
white supremacy in the South, deconstructing the provincial regionalism that enables
that reading allows us to see how the text both shapes and is shaped by broader racial
discourses concerning Native Americans and African Americans. In the end, for
Goddu, Pym’s voyage of self-discovery is about learning what whiteness has to do with
blackness. By de-regionalizing the American gothic, and seeing the texts of the genre
instead as participating in a dialogic relationship with various regions and cultural
conversations, one can see the how gothic structures work to upset hegemonic national
narratives.
Through the late seventeenth century and into the eighteenth, the Puritan sense
of the “Devil in the Wilderness” had been promoted through captivity narratives, in
which the heroines’ fictional abductions were read as divine punishment for a family’s
decision to move too far from the settlements and the church.
8
In the late eighteenth
century, however, America nearly tripled its territory, settlements developed on both
sides of the Ohio River, and pressure grew to secure access to the Mississippi River for
trade routes. As expansion became imminent, literary representations of the frontier
17

shifted in the service of this imperialistic desire as, Annette Kolodny has shown in The
Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers (1984).
Anglo-American history has read the West as a product of conquest, as a series
of purchases and acquisitions – the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the acquisitions of
Texas and the Oregon Territory, the Mexican Cession in the 1840s, and the 1853
Gadsden Purchase. Part of reading the West in this way is a continual process of
reading the threat of the frontier as neutralized, and the gothic frontier furthers that
reading by providing images of a terrifying (yet tamed) frontier that provoke a
particular (sublime) response in the reader. Meriwether Lewis invokes the sublime
throughout The Journals of Lewis and Clark, describing, for example, a rainbow he sees
at the Great Falls of of the Missouri River as “majestically grand.” After several
frustrating attempts to describe the rainbow, Lewis gives up, and seemingly in the spirit
of Wordsworth’s admonishment about the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,
decides that he “could not perhaps succeed better than pening [sic] the first impressions
of the mind” (138). By the time Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail was published in
1849, a sublime response to the frontier – culled straight from the British gothic novel –
was a familiar trope. Consider Parkman’s description of ascending the Black Hills:

I began to climb the mountain. I was weak and weary, and made slow progress,
often pausing to rest, but after an hour elapsed, I gained a height, whence the
little valley out of which I had climbed seemed like a deep, dark gulf, though the
inaccessible peak of the mountain was still towering to a much greater distance
above. Objects familiar from childhood surrounded me; crags and rocks, a
black and sullen brook that gurgled with a hollow voice deep among the
crevices, a wood of mossy distorted trees and prostrate trunks flung down by age
and storms, scattered among the rocks, or damming the foaming waters of the
little brook. The objects were the same, yet they were thrown into a wilder and
more startling scene, for the black crags and savage trees assumed a grim and
18

threatening aspect, and close across the valley the opposing mountain
confronted me, rising from the gulf for thousands of feet, with its bare pinnacles
and its ragged covering of pines. (315-16)

The “grim and threatening” scene itself would have been recognizable to the nineteenth-
century reader as provoking a sublime response. And then, as is typical in the gothic
novel, Parkman goes further to suddenly find a moment of repose among the “tamed”
wilderness where he can reflect upon the wildness of the scene in comfort, keenly
observing Wordsworth’s admonishment that poetry must emanate not only from the
“spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” but also from “emotion recollected in
tranquility” (151):

Yet the scene was not without its milder features. As I ascended, I found
frequent little grassy terraces, and there was one of these close at hand, across
which the brook was stealing, beneath the shade of scattered trees that seemed
artificially planted. Here I made a welcome discovery, no other than a bed of
strawberries, with their white flowers and their red fruit, close nestled among the
grass by the side of the brook, and I sat down by them, hailing them as old
acquaintances; for among those lonely and perilous mountains, they awakened
delicious associations of the gardens and peaceful homes of far-distant New
England (316).

Sublime images of the frontier serve imperialism and nation-building by suggesting a
landscape that has been “tamed” and made ready for (white) occupation and
cultivation.
9

And just as the landscape becomes a gothic trope in the interest of “intellectually
clearing” the land for white settlers, so too do Native Americans become gothic images
in the service of America’s imperialistic appetite. Lucy Maddox has shown how such
constructions of “imagined” Indianness have contributed to Anglo-American policies of
19

Indian removal and disenfranchisement. For Susan Scheckel, this imagined Indianness
in American literature solved a particular problem in the construction of national
identity – the problem of American desire to see itself as a “moral” nation despite its
policies of removal.
10
Building on these studies, Renée Berglund has shown more
recently that one form of literary removal for Native Americans in the nineteenth
century was via spectralization and the use of the gothic: “[g]uilt over the dispossession
of Indians and fear of their departed spirits sometimes function as perverse sources of
pleasure and pride for white Americans because they signify a successful appropriation
of the American spirit. In Europe, people were haunted by their own ancestors. In
America, they have the opportunity to be haunted by the ghosts of Indians” (19).
In Brown’s Edgar Huntly, Brown intended to inaugurate a new vision of
American literature based on the unique circumstances of the new world, to “exhibit a
series of adventures, growing out of the condition of our country” (Brown, Edgar
Huntly 641). Furthermore, Brown explicitly rejects the use of “[p]uerile superstition
and exploded manners; Gothic castles and chimeras” in favor of “incidents of Indian
hostility, and the perils of the western wilderness” as “far more suitable” for an
American author in “engaging the sympathy of the reader” (641). And yet, Brown
repeats and revises the European gothic mode. Janie Hinds has noted one significant
difference between Brown and his European predecessors. Whereas Sedgwick defined
unspeakability in one sense as “the difficulty the story has in getting itself told,” the
stuttering digressions that abound in European gothic novels do finally connect with the
main narrative, although in a “muffled form” (13-14). Hinds shows, however, that in
20

Brown’s novels, especially in Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798) and in Edgar
Huntly, the digressions “often do not finally connect with the larger narrative; here, the
story does not always get through, but instead can just as easily disappear altogether”
(112). As Hinds writes, “[p]laced within either a literal or figurative wilderness,
Brown’s narrators find themselves unable to construct narrative out of chaos, unable to
conform their stories to conventional fictional structures. They produce instead
discursive forms of terror-inspiring incoherence” (109). For Hinds, the frontier in
Edgar Huntly functions as “a force in itself, almost as a character with an assertive will,
to create both an impetus and an arena for the working out of gothic terror” (109).
While most critics have looked to the final portion of the novel, in which the
hero makes his way through the American wilderness, to make a variety of claims about
American gothic literature, I argue in chapter one, that a more significant section is the
antagonist’s narrative. In this gothic tale-within-a-tale, Clithero Edny narrates his
personal story of growing up and working in Ireland as the ward/servant of the
aristocratic Euphemia Lorimer and of his ultimate betrayal of this lady before fleeing to
America. Clithero’s tale, told to Edgar while the two characters are sitting in the
Pennsylvania wilderness, places a European gothic story in the heart of the American
frontier and also inaugurates a debate about the place of Americans – and American
literature -- in that wilderness. As I show in chapter one, Clithero’s story not only
“Signifies” (in Henry Gates’s term) on William Godwin’s gothic Things as They Are, or
the Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), but uses the theme of repetition to suggest
that (political and literary) sons are doomed to repeat the sins of their fathers.
21

The theme of repetition is staged in Edgar Huntly via gothic moments of
uncanny, which reveal, as Freud would later theorize, a universal repetition-compulsion,
by which, he thought, we all experience and continually relive childhood trauma as an
on-going phenomenon. While the limitations of Freud’s theory for modern
psychoanalysis are legion, the theory nonetheless points us in a useful direction for
understanding Brown’s attempt to repeat and revise (to “Signify” on) the gothic for an
American audience. As Edgar traverses the American wilderness, he is constantly
confronted by scenes which seem familiar but which he cannot quite interpret. While
many critics have seen this trait of Edgar’s as an issue of reading correctly, it is also an
issue of reliving a trauma, and the figure is used to illustrate both a political and a
literary point. For Edgar Huntly and Caleb Williams, the unspeakability of the story-
within-a-story format also formally suggests a kind of repetition: what’s going on in the
frame tale in each novel resembles the elements of the inner tale such that the
resemblance between the stories gives the reader a sense of the uncanny. Ultimately,
the horror from which the hero cannot escape is the history of man’s wandering on
political and literary frontiers, doomed to repeat the mistakes he only dimly recognizes.
In chapter two I turn to a cultural movement that provided a whole new impetus
for the literary use of Gothic conventions in the middle of the nineteenth century: the
advent of Mormonism. Quickly acquiring “monstrous” proportions in the public
imagination, the Mormon “problem” was such a source of public rancor by 1856 that
the new Republican party vowed in its platform to abolish the “twin relics of barbarism
-- Slavery and Polygamy” (Johnson 27). Precipitated by Orson Pratt’s public
22

announcement of Mormon polygamy practices in 1852, the anti-polygamy movement
became what one historian has called the “single most successful nineteenth-century
political and legal reform campaign” (Barringer 339).

Activists published a newspaper,
The Anti-Polygamy Standard, and organized mass demonstrations. But perhaps the
most successful weapon in the war against polygamy was the anti-polygamy novel, in
the typical plot of which heroines are constantly in danger of being forced into harem-
like marriages and treated as slaves. Borrowing from techniques employed most
famously by Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,

anti-polygamy novelists
used both sentimentalism as well as Gothic conventions -- apparitions, subterranean
prisons, the threat of incest, missing letters, tales-within-tales, heinous villains and
orphan heroines -- to inspire horror in their readers and to attempt to achieve a political
effect: preventing the admission of a “moral monster” into the United States.
11

Four early and highly influential anti-polygamy novels published within a two-
year span, 1855-56, were seminal in regard to their use of Gothicism: Orvilla S.
Belisle’s The Prophets; or, Mormonism Unveiled (1855), Alfreda Eva Bell’s Boadicea
the Mormon Wife (1855), Meta Victoria Fuller Victor’s Mormon Wives: A Narrative of
Facts Stranger Than Fiction (1856), and Maria Ward’s Female Life Among the
Mormons: A Narrative of Many Years’ Personal Experience by the Wife of a Mormon
Elder, Recently from Utah (1860). As many critics have noted, the particular way the
Mormons are vilified in these novels – and in the many anti-polygamy novels that
followed throughout the remainder of the century -- is an attempt at what Edward Said
has called cultural “self-confirmation” (12). As Terryl Givens has shown, anti-
23

polygamy literature often constructs Mormons as ethnically marked in order to
imaginatively distance them from the mainstream white population, thereby
constructing and policing American identity. But even though the Mormon population
in Utah is maligned in these novels, it also serves as a mirror for American identity
because so many of its characteristics matched traditional American values. Industrious
and religiously zealous, the Mormons struck out on what they believed to be a divinely
inspired mission to build a “City on a hill” and ended up colonizing a new territory:
“Founded in the United States by a New Englander, (Mormonism) incorporated many
of the popular beliefs, religious controversies, and social values of early-nineteenth-
century rural New York in its theology” (White 164).
There is a double-edged quality to anti-polygamy novels: the attempt to
demonize the Mormon “other” and at the same time, the process of working out
unresolved contradictions in America’s own sense of its racial, sexual, and imperialistic
identity. In the second chapter, I contend that the gothic structures of unspeakability
and metonymic contagion or “contamination” in anti-polygamy literature play into this
equivocal propensity by constantly unsettling the difference between (American) self
and “other.” Although the gothic genre obsesses almost feverishly about all kinds of
chastities and corruptions, the gothic structures of unspeakability and contamination
paradoxically undermine and contaminate the very boundaries of identity (racial,
sexual, national) that gothic novels endeavor to establish. Such is the case with anti-
polygamy novels: endeavoring to establish self-other binaries with respect to whiteness
and womanhood in an attempt to police the nation’s racial and sexual identity, the
24

gothic structures of unspeakability and contamination in these novels consistently
unsettle these very boundaries.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the use of the gothic had significantly
waned as authors such as Bret Harte and Mark Twain turned to realism and humor to
demythologize the frontier. So Jackson’s Ramona, the first novel about Southern
California ever published, is generically anachronistic because Jackson returns to gothic
conventions in an attempt to expose racial injustice against Indians on the borderlands
of Old California. Ramona has left an indelible mark upon the literature, landscape, and
culture of the region, inspiring architectural movements, the renaming of whole towns
after the main character, and the adaptation of the novel into the Ramona Pageant, the
longest-running open-air play in the United States. In Jackson’s story, Ramona is the
orphan daughter of an Indian woman and a white man, and she is grudgingly adopted
and raised by her tyrannical Californiana aunt, Señora Moreno. Ignorant of her racial
heritage and innocent as a “wood dove,” Ramona falls in love with an Indian man,
Alessandro Assis, and the novel traces the couple’s plight as they flee from the
persecution of Anglo-Americans encroaching on Indian lands. While Jackson’s novel
uses sentimentalism and gothic conventions in an attempt to expose racial injustice
against Indians, critics have shown that the novel validates Anglo-American hegemony
in several ways: its characterization of the legacy of conquest as inevitable and its
affirmation of elitist constructions of whiteness ultimately reinforce American readers’
sense of entitlement to the land.
25

The third chapter argues that attention to the gothic structure of unspeakability
in the text further illuminates this dual propensity. While Jackson seems to be
consciously working against a tendency of her contemporaries to spectralize Indian
figures (which had the effect of justifying American imperialism), for example, she
nonetheless fails to envision adequate survival skills for her Indian hero within the
world that oppresses him. First, this chapter argues that moments of gothic
unspeakability in the text keep pointing up the difficulty of addressing the issues
Jackson is trying to confront, including dispossession, genocide, and interracial
marriage on the frontier. My aim here is not to resurrect the reputation of a text, but
rather to show the way the text itself strains against its own material. What’s more, I
show that moments of unspeakability in the text also reveal the way each of the novel’s
characters strives to possess a marker of cultural legitimacy – and that marker is
Ramona.
Unspeakable moments in Ramona (as in many other gothic novels) most often
center on the threat of the heroine’s escape; however, in Ramona, the heroine’s escape
from multitudinous antagonists takes on a pointedly racial and cultural dimension.
Although Ramona is a half-Indian, half-white, Catholic mestiza, she is constructed as an
idealized symbol of Anglo-American Protestant femininity. I suggest that Ramona
functions as a marker of Anglo-American hegemony throughout the text, as a talisman
desired by Anglo-American, Native American and Californio alike. The desire for
Ramona does not necessarily indicate a desire for whiteness, but rather, possession of
Ramona-as-talisman provides a (specious) sense of legitimacy in the contested region.
26

As Ramona makes her journey across Alta California, her geographic locations and
cultural alliances cause divisions between those who “possess” her and those who do
not. Ultimately, I argue that Ramona is not only the marker of Anglo-American
entitlement that each culture needs in order to survive dispossession, but also the
symbolic product and producer of Anglo-American imperialism.
The final chapter of my dissertation includes a consideration of the surprising
way the gothic mode persists even today to articulate anxiety not only about nostalgic
representations of western American history but also about violence at the heart of
Western civilization. Some surprisingly gothic moments in the HBO television series
Deadwood point to a continued contemporary disquietude about America’s imagined
nationhood and to a disturbed relationship to its own violent history in the West. While
it’s surprising enough that Deadwood, a fictionalized account of outlaw miners who
squatted in the middle of Indian Territory in 1876, uses gothic motifs to complicate the
themes of more traditional westerns, what’s even more interesting is that Deadwod’s
primary thematic preoccupation is the foundational violence at the heart of the law.
In gothic texts, figurations of law and lawlessness are often tied up with the
expression of a number of themes that are central to the gothic genre, including
transgressive desires and anxieties about individual and national identities. In Udolpho,
Montoni acts as the final judge and jury in declaring Madame Montoni guilty of
attempting to poison him. “Spare your words,” he tells his wife, “your countenance
makes full confession of your crime” (Radcliffe Udolpho 314). In Dickens’ Bleak
House, the suit of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce drones on for generations and becomes so
27

complicated that “no man alive knows what it means” (16). As Leslie Moran suggests,
law in gothic texts is often associated with the ad hoc, unreason, the outmoded, the
judicial in contrast to the Parliamentary, unwritten law in contrast to the written law
(87). In the cinematic Western, motifs of law and lawlessness have similarly pointed to
a range of issues that are central to the genre: the battle over the land, fears about
urbanization and modernization, and anxieties about social transformation. Moreover,
Deadwood expresses dissatisfaction with the institution of law, and gothic moments in
the show not only mark that dissatisfaction but also suggest that this dissatisfaction is
the result of the law’s own endemically violent nature.
Deadwood is about more than just the way law can be perverted or appropriated,
although on its face it is certainly about that; the show is, in fact, about the gothic
notion that the origins of the law are violent, so the apparent distinction between
vigilante justice and formalized law, while a common theme of Westerns, is misleading.
In this chapter I rely on the work of Giorgio Agamben, who theorizes that the homo
sacer exception -- the (sacred) man in ancient Roman law who could be “killed and yet
not sacrificed” (8) – means that every individual is a “bare life,” a form of “natural” life
which must be denied in order to enter into political life. The state of the exception,
then, comes to be the foundation for the entire political system, and the origins of the
Western political and legal systems are exposed as endemically violent. If transgression
is part and parcel of establishing the law, threats emanate from within the system rather
than from outside until, as Agamben concludes, “the (concentration) camp (becomes)
the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West” (181).
28

Deadwood is brimming with moments that thematize the violent origins of the
law, and these moments are often marked by gothic conventions, including not only
obscure lighting, damsels in distress, and suggestions of the supernatural, but also many
instances of unspeakability. In the opening scene of the pilot, for example, Montana
Marshal Seth Bullock (played by Timothy Olyphant) executes horse-thief Clell Watson
(James Parks) the day before his scheduled hanging rather than turn the thief over to an
angry mob. Bullock’s decision to make an exception of Watson and execute him before
his scheduled execution appointment makes Watson an example of Agamben’s homo
sacer – an exception to the law in the name of the law. The gothic conventions that
attend this scene -- the dim candlelight, the torches outside, the threat of violence, and
Bullock’s unspeakable silence about his plan – are the moments that signal that more is
at stake than simply the way the law is being perverted. In fact, the threat that lingers
over this scene suggests that the violent “taming” of the West is coterminous not merely
with the absence of the law on the frontier, but also with the impending and threatening
presence of the law.
The gothic genre arrived on American shores in the late eighteenth century, and
the genre’s conventions and structures morphed and evolved over the next half century
in an uneasy alliance with the process of Western expansion. The gothic genre and the
mythology of the American frontier are inexplicably linked, and there are any number
of texts that would be productive to consider in this light. In the 1820s, for example,
after the Louisiana Purchase doubled the territory of the United States and the
Jeffersonian ideal of a republican yeomanry validated expansion as acceptable and
29

necessary for national health, a period ensued of cultural disquietude about the human
cost of expansion. Concerns included not only worries about the white man’s potential
“contamination” by Indians but also misgivings about American policies of removal
and genocide. A spate of frontier historical romances in this period confronted the
subject of miscegenation between Anglo- and Native Americans: Lydia Maria Child’s
Hobomok (1824), Catherine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie (1827), and James
Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish
(1829). Studying the gothic motifs of these frontier romances -- and of many other texts
throughout the nineteenth century and beyond -- would certainly provide insight into the
particular cultural anxieties these otherwise hegemonic narratives seem to reveal.
It is my contention that we must study the American gothic within the context of
broader cultural, regional, and national matrices, attending to the relationships between
continents and regions, in order to truly understand the way the structures of the genre
continue to suggest the chasms and contradictions within national identity. Moreover,
my dissertation ultimately makes the claim that while the cross-fertilization of the
gothic genre and frontier literature is nothing new, a new study of their intersecting
concerns produces a better critical understanding of the way American frontier
mythology both reifies and unsettles national cultural and literary identities.
30

INTRODUCTION ENDNOTES

1
The only volume to date entirely devoted to the topic is Frontier Gothic:
Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in American Literature (1993), which generally
seeks to locate gothic conventions in a variety of literary texts by authors such as
Charles Brockden Brown, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Flannery O’Conner, Edward
Abbey and Sam Shepard.

2
As Richard White writes, “[s]electing some geographical criterion to define the
West not only does not work, but also distorts the nature of the western environment
itself by making static what was dynamic” (4).

3
As Maggie Kilgour notes, the gothic genre mixes British folklore, ballads,
romance, Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy (especially Shakespeare), Spenser, Milton,
Renaissance ideas of melancholy, the graveyard poets, Ossian, the sublime, sentimental
novelists (Richardson and Rousseau), and German terror fiction.

4
As Paul Giles suggests, “[t]o problematize the geographical integrity of the
United States is, inevitably, also to problematize the ‘natural’ affiliation of certain
values with a territory that can no longer be regarded as organically complete or self-
contained” (64). This is an especially judicious approach for this study not only
because my topic centers on America’s imperialistic policies and fluctuating national
borders in the nineteenth century, but also because a key quality of the gothic is its
specific tendency to subvert national narratives. I also follow José David Saldívar’s
suggestion in Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (1997), that
border regions (for Saldívar, the U.S.-Mexico border zone) should be considered a
“paradigm of crossings, intercultural exchanges, circulations, resistances, and
negotiations” (ix), evoked by the Chicana/o Studies appellation of la frontera. I also
follow Anne Goldman’s suggestion in Continental Divides: Revisioning American
Literature (2000), that it’s important to unsettle the (New England) “center” of
canonical American literature via “transcontinental” literary criticism that interrogates
the geographical, social, and political relationship between regions. It is important,
Goldman argues, to upset the center/periphery model in which canonical American
works are seen as originating in New England and everything else is considered
“regional” or “peripheral.” Another important work on this topic is Stephanie
LeMenager’s Manifest and Other Destinies: Territorial Fictions of the Nineteenth-
Century United States (2004).

5
Seminal critical works that generally catalogue the conventions and trace the
development of the British gothic include: Edith Birkhead’s The Tale of Terror: A Study
of Gothic Romance (1921), Eino Railo’s The Haunted Castle: A Study of the Elements
of English Romanticism (1927), Mario Praz’s The Romantic Agony (1933), Montague
Summers’s The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel (1938), and Devendra
Varma’s The Gothic Flame (1957). More recent book-length studies include: Elizabeth
MacAndrew’s The Gothic Tradition in Fiction (1979), William Patrick Day’s In the
Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study of Gothic Fantasy (1985), Eve Sedgwick’s The
Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1986), E.J. Clery’s The Rise of Supernatural Fiction,
1762-1800 (1999), and Maggie Kilgour’s The Rise of the Gothic Novel (1995). The
range of critical fields in which the gothic genre might be discussed is quite broad. For
example, in Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women (1982),
31

Tania Modleski explores the way gothic novels express women’s sense of domestic
entrapment in The Literature of Terror: A History of Ghothic Fiction from 1765 to the
Present Day (1980), David Punter provides a Marxist critique of the genre.

6
In the mid-eighteenth century, Edmund Burke theorized that the experience of
the sublime excited feelings of fear, danger or awe from a safe distance. Kant built on
this idea in The Critique of Judgment (1790) by suggesting that the experience of the
sublime suggested the presence of a powerful imaginative faculty. Romanticism
engaged with theories of the sublime through poems such as Wordsworth’s “Tintern
Abbey” (1798), which suggests the power of the imagination to transform nature.

7
The American gothic is quite a neglected field of study. After Leslie Fiedler
inaugurated the discussion in his Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), only
four other book-length studies have been published in the area: Irving Malin’s New
American Gothic (1962), Donald Ringe’s American Gothic: Imagination and Reason in
Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1982), Louis Gross’s From Wieland to The Day of the
Dead: Redefining the American Gothic (1989), and Teresa Goddu’s Gothic America:
Narrative, History, and Nation (1997).

8
For example, Cotton Mather sees Hannah Swarton’s captivity as a punishment
for her family’s decision to leave the parish environs and to move to the northern part
Casco-Bay, where there was no church or minister. As Annette Kolodny explains, “her
story thus tended to discourage the growing atomism of the Puritan settlements, an
atomism against which Mather himself so often inveighed” (24).

9
Diego Saglia finds landscape in gothic fiction to be a “narrative site where the
author stages confrontations between persecutors and victims, and dramatizes a conflict
between agents of similarity and figures of difference” (13).

10
For Joshua Bellin, however, both Maddox and Scheckel are guilty of
perpetuating the arguments they seek to critique. That is, in focusing on “imagined”
Indianness, they effectively reinforce the absence of Native Americans in literary
history. Instead, Bellin would argue for an “intercultural” literary criticism that focuses
on the way in which texts not only form but are also formed by cultural contact on a
frontier that may be seen as a meeting ground for a variety of peoples. In Bellin’s view,
texts should be seen as dialogic, and we should attempt to recover the suppressed
textual voice of the “other” (Native American) that is being silenced hegemonic voices
that recuperate authority in the text.

11
For a discussion of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s use of gothic conventions to
achieve social reform in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, see Karen Halttunen, “Gothic Imagination
and Social Reform: The Haunted Houses of Lyman Beecher, Henry Ward Beecher, and
Harriet Beecher Stowe” (1986).

32

CHAPTER ONE
A TALE OF TWO MURDERERS:
REPETITION IN CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN’S EDGAR HUNTLY
Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly, or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker is many
things to many different literary critics. For scholars of the American gothic, it has
been seen as a revolutionary adaptation of the British form. For scholars of the
American West, it is an (often baffling) litmus test of cultural attitudes about the early
republic’s western expansion. While most critics set their focus on either the elements
of gothicism or attitudes about American colonialism in the novel, these issues are
deeply entangled. The novel itself, written in 1799 and set in 1767, takes the form of a
long epistle and is divided into three parts.
1
In the first part, we discover that the letter-
writer and narrator, Edgar Huntly, is writing to his fiancée, Mary Waldegrave, about his
search for her brother’s killer. The second part of the novel is told from the perspective
of Edgar’s prime suspect (and alter ego), Clithero Edny, a sleepwalker. In Clithero’s
gothic tale-within-a-tale, Clithero relates his personal story of growing up as the
ward/servant of the aristocratic Euphemia Lorimer and of his ultimate betrayal of this
lady before fleeing to America. In the final part of the novel, Edgar begins
sleepwalking himself and falls into a deep, cavernous pit in the middle of the Norwalk
woods. As he emerges from the pit, he kills a panther and several Indians as he
navigates the wilderness in order to return “home.”
Critics interested in positioning Brown within the American literary canon have
usually focused on the final portion of the novel. Set in the wilderness and featuring
33

Native Americans, this final portion overtly addresses Brown’s stated purpose in his
preface, to eschew “[p]uerile superstition and exploded manners; Gothic castles and
chimeras” in favor of “incidents of Indian hostility, and the perils of the western
wilderness.” Critics have looked to the final portion of the novel to make a variety of
claims about the early American gothic. For Leslie Fielder, the novel shows the
conservatism of the foundations of the American gothic, and how the “heathen,
unredeemed wilderness and not the decaying monuments of a dying class, nature and
not society becomes the symbol of evil” (160). For Richard Slotkin, Edgar Huntly’s
quest is a “hunt for his identity from among the choices offered him by the American
wilderness – that symbolic equivalent of the tangled mind of man” (390). For Dennis
Berthold, Edgar’s psychological growth (representative of literary growth) depends on
his recognition of icons--a tomahawk, a panther, moccasins, a remote farmhouse--as
innately American. Edgar’s ability to understand and control these icons is what
enables him to conquer the primitive state into which he has regressed--represented by
gothic confusion--and to become a “whole person” (Berthold 131), suggesting, for
Berthold, a growth from “savagery” to “civilization” as well as a literary progression in
the early republic from gothicism, to nationalism to realism.
The final portion of the novel, in which Edgar wanders through the uncanny
“frontier” of the Delaware River Gap, certainly provides a critical purchase for those
interested in placing Edgar Huntly within the American gothic canon. As Jane Hinds
suggests, this landscape functions as a “force in itself, almost as a character with an
assertive will, to create both an impetus and an arena for the working out of gothic
34

terror” (Hinds, “Frontiers of Discourse” 109). I would argue, however, that an earlier
portion of the novel – the portion in which Clithero narrates his backstory – offers an
equally illuminative perspective on the burgeoning use of the gothic in early American
literature. Clithero’s tale, told to Edgar while the two characters are sitting in the
Pennsylvania wilderness, places a European gothic story in the heart of the American
frontier, even as it inaugurates a debate about the place of Americans in that wilderness.
The Clithero character often has been read as a metaphorical figure that points to
American political concerns. Jared Gardner sees Clithero as a savage whose Irishness
aligns him with Native Americans as “un-American American(s)” within the cultural
context that produced the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 (430), while Sydney Krause
reads Clithero as a more sympathetic metaphor for Delaware Indians mourning the loss
of the seventeenth-century Quaker leader William Penn (Krause, “Penn’s Elm” 471).
Many critics have noted the way Edgar seems to turn into the murdering Clithero after
hearing Clithero’s gothic tale. Before falling into the cave-pit, Edgar listens to
Clithero’s gothic story, and this seems to transform him such that he becomes
“contaminated” and doomed to repeat it. As Dana Luciano puts it, this process of
becoming infected by a story allegorizes what many readers in the eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century thought to be the danger of reading a gothic novel: “[w]riting in a
genre that was said to harm the nation, Edgar Huntly’s narrator does his best to show
himself and his reader the many ways it could do so – and in the process tortures both
nearly to death” (4).
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While Brown clearly seems to be critiquing the gothic as an inappropriate mode
with which to educate the new nation about itself, there is also the more subtle
suggestion that in the heart of the American wilderness -- taken as a metaphor for
American identity -- there still lingers the specter of a European past. What’s more,
gothic motifs of repetition, wandering, and the uncanny are used throughout the novel
to suggest the impossibility of starting anew in the new world. Using Freud’s theories
of the uncanny and repetition-compulsion, I will show that the central trauma
confronting Edgar is the trauma of history -- the fear of repeating the father’s violent
sins. As a “pre-history” of Edgar’s fall, Clithero’s tale suggests an analogy between the
political nature of Clithero’s crimes and those committed by Edgar. Thus, Clithero’s
story provides a link between the apparently disparate contexts of English class
structure and American expansionism; moreover, Brown’s use of the gothic in Edgar
Huntly is not just happenstance -- the gothic form provides a crucial backdrop for
Brown to the novel’s ideology insofar as gothic motifs of the uncanny, repetition, and
wandering suggest the inescapable trauma of history. And it turns out that Brown’s
juxtaposition of the gothic and the frontier will be a twinning that proves inextricable
for the burgeoning American literature of the early republic.
In the last quarter century, critics have begun to re-evaluate Brown’s status in
the canon as a “flawed writer and precursor to the ostensibly greater and more canonical
writers of the American nineteenth century” (Barnard, “Introduction” ix). A recent
broadening of the field of Brown studies to include his work as an essayist, historian,
and editor has helped our understanding of Brown’s complexity.
2
In the 1990s, critics
36

struggled to compartmentalize Brown into one of two camps: liberal or conservative.
Cathy Davidson assessed that Brown “asked precisely those questions that bourgeois
ideology labored to suppress” (237), while Steven Watts suggested that Brown
ultimately promoted a “bourgeois creed of genteel self-control” (xviii). The conundrum
of Brown’s politics will not be marshaled here. Instead, I will show that the gothic form
Brown imports into American literature functions to complicate any straightforwardly
“ideological” interpretation of his novel.
Brown’s Wieland; or, The Transformation is considered the first major novel to
adapt the conventions of the British Gothic to American circumstances. Brown based
Wieland on a bizarre incident in 1781, in which a farmer in upstate New York ritually
murdered his wife and four children after hearing the command of religious “voices.”
In the novel, the Wieland family, descended from a rebellious and extremist ancestry in
Europe and recovered from a bizarre incident in which their father mysteriously burst
into flames, appears to have found a personal, isolated, intellectual haven in America.
But slight prodding from a couple outsiders turns the Calvinistic son, Theodore, into a
raving murderer. For Savoy, Wieland offers a dark view of history and points to the
way in which the American gothic would always in some way deal with the return of
the repressed: “The sins of the fathers – their excesses, their violence and abuses, their
predispositions toward the irrational – are visited upon their children, who, despite their
illusions of liberty, find themselves in the ironic situation of an intergenerational
compulsion to repeat the past” (Savoy 172).
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Trauma and repetition are what have always given the gothic its shape, and
Freud’s identification of the repetition-compulsion and the uncanny have helped us to
understand the gothic’s insistence on history as a nightmare from which one can not
awaken. As Freud theorizes, that which is “unheimlich” is not simply that which is new
and unfamiliar, but it also must have the quality of being, as Schelling says, that which
“should have remained secret and hidden but has come to light” (Freud, “The Uncanny”
156). Freud finds the figure of the sandman in the Hoffman story, “The Sandman,” to
be uncanny because the fear of losing one’s eyes, for Freud, arouses the early-childhood
fear of castration by the father. What’s more, the continual remembrance or repetition
of a repressed trauma –the repetition-compulsion, for Freud, is universal. Tasso, Freud
notes, famously distilled the phenomenon in Gerusalemme Liberata, in which the hero,
Tancred, unwittingly kills his beloved Clorinda while she is in disguise as a knight, then
horrifically continues to stab her when her soul is disguised as a tree. For Freud, this
shows that “there really does exist in the mind a compulsion to repeat which overrides
the pleasure principle” (Freud, “Pleasure Principle” 173). What Freud finds in “The
Uncanny” (1919) and further develops in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), is that
“whatever reminds us of this inner repetition compulsion is perceived as uncanny”
(Freud, “The Uncanny” 164).
Ghosts, doppelgangers, and wandering are especially important features of the
uncanny as a perception of the repetition-compulsion. For the child, the double
provides an “insurance against the destruction to the ego,” but for adults, who have left
the stage of narcissism behind, the double becomes the “ghastly harbinger of death”
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(Freud, “The Uncanny” 162). Doubles are decidedly uncanny: “The quality of
uncanniness can only come from the circumstance of the ‘double’ being a creation
dating back to a very early mental stage – long since left behind, and one, no doubt, in
which it wore a more friendly aspect. The ‘double’ has become a vision of terror”
(163). Wandering, as in a foreign city or among the mist of high altitude, and stumbling
upon a recurring object, also produces a sense of the uncanny. The common thread is
that it is not what is repeated that produces the feeling of uncanniness, but rather, the
repetition reminds us that we have a compulsion to repeat. As Neil Hertz writes, “The
feeling of the uncanny would seem to be generated by being reminded of the repetition
compulsion, not by being reminded of whatever it is that is repeated. The becoming
aware of the process is felt as eerie, not the becoming aware of some particular item in
the unconscious, once familiar, then repressed, now coming back into consciousness”
(101-02). Freud drew on gothic literature such as “The Sandman” in his work, so while
analyzing Brown’s novel according to Freud’s theory may seem both anachronistic and
methodologically inappropriate, the gothic motifs of repetition and the uncanny have
historical-political dimensions that circulated in literature for centuries before Freud
theorized their psychological significance. In the end, we discover that what Freud calls
the uncanny is not just the psychologically familiar but also the politically familiar, and
the horror from which our hero cannot escape is the history of man’s wandering on the
frontier. Moreover, the central trauma that emerges in Edgar Huntly is the history of
wandering on an uncannily familiar frontier, where sons are doomed to repeat the sins
of the father because they don’t recognize their own ancestral crimes.
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In the gothic, the sense of the uncanny is most often evoked through the images
of the supernatural. The presence of the supernatural as a gothic convention has often
been read as both a tracing of the movement from the superstitious Middle Ages to the
Enlightenment, and also as a reaction against Enlightenment reason. What’s more, as
every reader of Radcliffe knows, the presence of the supernatural often gives way to an
explanation by which the supernatural events were really covers for criminal activity –
consider the secret door in Ellena’s prison room at Spalatro’s through which assassins
may enter, and which causes her to see “ghosts” glide through the room in The Italian.
Moreover, the linking of the supernatural with criminal activity in gothic novels often is
suggestive of systems that exist parallel to legal or natural law, and which are very real
and rightfully terrifying. As Clery explains, “[w]hen supposed phantoms are detected
so are systems of lawlessness and cruelty which secretly coexist with the ‘natural’
economies of legitimate profit-making, or of familial affection and duty” (114).
Finally, as Eugenia DeLamotte suggests, the fear of power in Gothic romance is “a fear
not only of supernatural powers but also of social forces so vast and impersonal that
they seem to have supernatural strength” (DeLamotte 17).
If we take this notion that the supernatural in the gothic is suggestive of both
lawlessness and also insidiously powerful social forces, and combine it with Freud’s
conception of the uncanny, we discover that the supernatural in the gothic mode points
to the horror of repeating history – a decidedly American gothic theme. In Edgar
Huntly, the narrator first experiences Clithero as a ghost, and this figuration sets up a
scenario in which the narrator’s pursuit of Clithero comes to stand for the reliving of the
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traumatic lawlessness of American history, a continual running up against perniciously
transparent social forces that have been brought to America from the old world. The
reader’s very first glimpse of Clithero is as an “apparition” that suddenly appears to
Edgar during a moonlit walk – Edgar sees Clithero only dimly, “a figure, robust and
strange, and half naked” whose occupation, digging under the Elm is “mysterious and
obscure” (Edgar Huntly 647). Even though somnambulism is a major motif in the
novel, the imagery surrounding Clithero in this moment and many others calls to mind
the issue of spectrality. While Edgar soon explains that he takes this person to be
“asleep,” Clithero’s behavior continues to be figured as spectral rather than simply
somnolent. Clithero suddenly appears and disappears, darting among bushes or into the
cave, and leading Edgar along an extremely obscure and circuitous path when Edgar
attempts to follow him. Sometimes, even the sound of Edgar’s voice startles Clithero as
if he were living in another world. After Clithero agrees to tell Edgar his “confession,”
Clithero disappears for several days, and when Edgar finally decides to seek him out,
Clithero suddenly appears, ghostlike, “pale and wan” (668).
Clithero’s figuration as a ghost by Edgar suggests that Edgar’s experience in the
new world is to be haunted by the European past. Furthermore, Clithero’s figuration as
representative of literary and political history is solidified by his story, in which there’s
much to suggest that Clithero, like Edgar, feels a sense of the uncanny and lawlessness
surrounding the people he encounters. Not surprisingly, virtually every character in
Clithero’s tale is at some point described in spectral terms. When Clithero begins to fall
in love with Clarice, for example, her image begins to occur to him with “unseasonable
41

frequency,” enhanced by mysteriously “nameless and indefinable additions” (682). Of
course, in the climactic moment of Clithero’s attempted murder of Clarice, Mrs.
Lorimer appears as a supernatural being: “Negligently habited in flowing and brilliant
white, with features bursting with terror and wonder” (712). Mrs. Lorimer’s household,
especially on the night of the attempted murder, is also a gothic labyrinth suggesting
power and confusion. Clithero travels down “winding passages” and even walks
through the wrong door in confusion before reaching Mrs. Lorimer’s “sacred recess”
(707-708). The sense of the uncanny that Clithero experiences in his own story, then,
becomes like a hall of mirrors, amplifying Edgar’s own sense of the uncanny, and
underscoring the way in which literary and political history is a nightmare from which
there is no escape.
Most significant for the themes of repetition and doubles, is the supernatural link
that Clithero imagines between Euphemia Lorimer and her brother, Arthur Wiatte.
Euphemia and Arthur are established as doubles in the vein of the British gothic novel.
As early as The Castle of Otranto (1764), doubles suggested the problem of aristocratic
succession –Manfred’s son and illegitimate heir to Otranto, Conrad, is the double of the
young peasant and rightful heir, Theodore. And in The Monk (1796), Antonia and
Ambrosio inaugurate the gothic tradition of incestuous twins. In the American gothic,
the motif flourishes – after Brown, Edgar Allan Poe will use doppelgangers to great
effect in “Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) and “William Wilson” (1839), and
William Faulkner will take the motif to new heights with the incestuous entanglements
of Judith and Henry Sutpen and Charles Bon in Absalom, Absalom! (1936). In Edgar
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Huntly, Clithero is haunted by Mrs. Lorimer’s prophetic words that “[t]he stroke that
deprives [Arthur] of life will not only have the same effect upon [her], but will set [her]
portion in everlasting misery” (705). Clithero tries to imagine how the deathly link
could be effected, working himself into a paroxysm of dreadful speculation: “Were
they linked by a sympathy whose influence was independent of sensible
communication?. . . Was this a new instance of subtlety of mind? Had she already
endured his agonies, and like him already ceased to breathe?” (707). While the
“supernatural” link between the twins doesn’t exist, the particular plot twists that make
Mrs. Lorimer’s prophesy turn out to be somewhat true (if one considers her miscarriage
linked back to Clithero’s murder of Arthur), reinforces the theme of doubles, creating a
Faulkner-esque hall of mirrors. The theme of doubling is important for Brown because
dualities complicate straightforward interpretations, both problematizing the notion of
an objective truth and presenting a world view in which escape from an entrapping fate
is impossible. What’s more, the structure of the novel echoes these notions: as
Euphemia is related to and reflects Arthur, so Clithero’s tale is concomitant with
Edgar’s, and so, finally, the American gothic is corresponds with the British. Literary
“twins,” then, the British gothic becomes one more voice – an incessant echo -- in the
wilderness of American literature.
The theme of doubling is carried out in Edgar Huntly via more than merely
personification. The premier element that is “doubled” in the novel is murder, and the
motif reflects both a cultural anxiety about the state of the soul as well as a thematic
interest in the nature of violence. As Karen Halttunen has explained, murder demands
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that the community unite to explain and restore order, especially in an Enlightenment
context in which conceptions of innate depravity were waning. For Halttunen, the
gothic convention of horror– speechlessness, inability to assign meaning, etc. – provides
a model for reacting to the crime of murder and narrative mystery suggests the
impossibility of understanding such a crime. As Halttunen shows, the gothic is about
trying, and failing, to understand the crime in a world in which humans are no longer
considered innately evil: “[t]he most important cultural work performed by the Gothic
narrative of murder was its reconstruction of the criminal transgressor: from common
sinner with whom the larger community of sinners were urged to identify in the service
of their own salvation, into moral monster from whom readers were instructed to shrink,
with a sense of horror that confirmed their own ‘normalcy’ in the face of the morally
alien, and with a sense of mystery that testified to their own inability even to conceive
of such an aberrant act” (Halttunen 5). The multiple murders and murderers in Edgar
Huntly amplify and complicate this gothic function. While readers are unsettled by the
behavior of both Clithero and Edgar, the novel’s multiple murders suggest the
inescapable nature of violence.
In Edgar Huntly, it’s not just two but a long series of murders that reflect and
double each other -- Clithero’s murder of Arthur Wiatte and his attempted murder of
Euphemia/Clarice, the (backstory) murder of Edgar’s parents by Indians, the murder of
a girl near the Selby farm (apparently) by Indians, and the unsolved murder of
Waldegrave. Much critical energy has been spent on Edgar’s murderous spree against
the Indians, which is precipitated by his killing and eating a raw panther and then
44

baptismally bathing from a stream. Edgar’s ritualistic transformation into an Indian
killer suggests a critique of white genocide perpetrated against Native Americans.
Edgar and Clithero are both “converted” into murderers partially by nurture and
partially by nature. That is, both characters are spurred on their murderous sprees
partially as a result of circumstances and partially as a result of the repetition-
compulsion. While the conditions that prompt their murderous rampages seem
disparate – aristocratic class structure and American expansion -- these circumstances
are linked by the effects they produce in these characters. This linkage between the
various circumstantial causes of violence will be explored futher below, but for now the
point I want to make is that the novel’s many murders suggests an endemic will toward
repeating violence. Even Clithero and Edgar are repeatedly “murdered” throughout the
novel only to emerge, ghostly, but alive again and again.
3
While the circumstances that
promote violence are varied – an unfair aristocratic class system in Clithero’s tale and
the American wilderness in Edgar’s tale – the fact that violence is repeated is the point.
And literarily, it seems not to matter whether European castles or the American
wilderness populates a novel; the drive to repeat violence produces gothic hauntings in
all literary forms.
For Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, environment was particularly important for
man’s behavior. Brown’s novel and Edgar’s “rebirth” in the wilderness as an Indian
killer play with Crèvecoeur’s notion that American law and land is a site for rational
progress. Crèvecoeur also wrote that the backwoods actually had a degenerative effect
on remote and isolated settlers. Crèvecoeur wrote that backwoods settlers’ proximity to
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the woods led them to use guns to defend themselves against surrounding hostility of
wild animals. From that point, it’s a slippery slope for these settlers into the turpitude
of hunting and neglecting their farming. They become “ferocious, gloomy, and
unsociable” and begin to exhibit a “lawless profligacy” (648). What’s more,
Crèvecoeur writes that eating raw meat altered their temper, and the combination of all
these problems made them even more degenerate than the Indians. This is exactly what
happens to Edgar – he eats raw panther meat and becomes a “hunter,” and this seems to
dramatize the kind of frontier degeneration that Crèvecoeur envisioned. But if the
environment is a trigger for Crèvecoeur, Brown’s novel suggests that man is doomed to
endlessly repeat his ancestors’ violent ways no matter what his surroundings, or his
literary preferences. For despite Edgar’s position as a man of the New World (although,
perhaps the backwoods of that New World), there’s something in Clithero’s European,
gothic story that triggers Edgar’s rampage. So, the origins of violent behavior, for
Brown, seems to transcend particular situations, not only including geographic
situations, but also political, literary and historical as well.
And if the backwoods seems to be disparaged as a place where man might return
to his violent roots in Edgar Huntly, the metropolis certainly fares no better. In
Clithero’s tale, Clithero leaves his parents in the country to go live in Dublin, which he
several times refers to as the “metropolis.” Brown’s Dublin hardly reaches the levels of
dilapidation and decay of London in Dickens’ much later Bleak House (1853), but there
are nonetheless some indications that the modern city is just as much a haunted place as
the wilderness for Brown.
4
Clithero refers to Mrs. Lorimer’s Dublin mansion as an
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“ancient abode” (681), calling forth a sense of the primitive, destructive, “gothic”
history of the place from which was born the modern city. Furthermore, this house and
metropolis are places where “sinister influences” (681) affect Clithero’s reason. The
conflagration with Wiatte, in fact, occurs on a “dark, crooked, and narrow lane” on
Clithero’s return from a bank (700). After the murder, the city becomes truly gothic for
Clithero – he begins to wander, unknowingly tracing his steps back to the banker’s
door; it’s “deepest midnight” and the city is hushed, but Clithero listens for the sounds
of a “dirge” that he believes has begun, and he feels encompassed on all sides by “sable
robes, sobs and a dreary solemnity” (706). This bit of urban gothic in Clithero’s tale
shows that while Brown may have worried about the frontier, his concern about the city
was no less acute. What’s more, even as Edgar begins to return home from the
wilderness after hearing Clithero’s story, the gothicism of the novel does not wane, and
in some ways becomes more intense: there’s a sense of the uncanny as Edgar travels
along a road that he finally determines has led him in a circle as well as the grim
domestic misery of the Selby house, and the mystery of finding Waldegrave’s missing
letters suddenly turn up in a guest room in his neighbor’s house. The uncanny
resemblance between these two locales, and the narrators’ respective wandering within
these locales, suggests that nothing is new in the new world. What’s more, as readers
we are like Edgar – walking lost in the new, literary world of American realism and
continually knocking up against the old world of the British gothic.
Another author who was extremely interested in the idea of repeated behavior is
William Godwin. Writing in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution,
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Godwin proposed in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) that the system of
government surreptitiously and insidiously intrudes itself into men’s lives so that
individuals fail to act entirely of their own free will, and that government “insinuates
itself into our personal dispositions, and insensibly communicates its own spirit to our
private transactions” (9). Godwin was particularly interested in patterns of repeated
behavior: “Man is in no case strictly speaking the beginner of any event or series of
events that takes place in the universe, but only the vehicle through which certain
antecedents operate” (233). Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams
(1794) is usually seen as a kind of fictional sequel emerging from Godwin’s earlier
Political Justice. Caleb Williams is the story of a peasant youth, Caleb, who is taken in
by a seemingly morally upright, wealthy country squire, Ferdinando Falkland. Caleb’s
discovery of his master’s murderous past, however, leads to Caleb’s ruin at the hands of
the powerful Falkland. For most critics, Godwin’s novel suggests that the wrong kinds
of social systems or institutional controls actually cause man’s destructive behavior.
But the novel also reveals a keen interest in causes and effects; the effect of Caleb’s
final accusation on Falkland exposes the difficulty of living by the code of truth,
transparency, and innate virtue that Godwin had proposed in Political Justice. As
David Collings argues, “someone who believes that Caleb’s narrative tells the whole
truth about his life, and therefore actually represents things as they are, forgets that, just
as reason cannot be captured in legislation, the meaning of the life cannot be told in any
single mode of articulation” (856-57). For Collings, the gap between Caleb’s intention
and the effect of his narrative implies, thematically, that “the effects of action are never
48

knowable in advance, that one cannot finally tell the difference between imaginary and
real utility, and thus that no action can be entirely free from self-deception” (857).
While twentieth- and twenty-first century critics have largely ignored the link
between Brown and Godwin, there is much evidence to suggest that Godwin influenced
Brown a great deal. In July 1793, selected chapters from Political Justice were
excerpted in the New York Magazine, and Caleb Williams was reprinted in Philadelphia
in January 1795. Brown’s own Monthly Magazine contains reviews of Godwin’s The
Enquirer and St. Leon (Clemit 107). After reading Caleb Williams, Brown interspersed
his journals for 1796 with “plans and scraps of utopias,” and the next year he wrote
about his plans to write a novel equal to Caleb Williams, most likely alluding to his
unpublished novel Sky-Walk; or, The Man Unknown to Himself (Dunlap 46). Upon the
publication of Wieland, Brown’s contemporaries immediately linked him with Godwin.
Margaret Fuller wrote that “[t]hey were congenial natures, and whichever had come
first might have lent an impulse to the other” (Fuller 378). The relationship between
Godwin and Brown was reciprocal -- in England, Mary Shelley read Wieland just
before starting Frankenstein in 1816,
5
and Godwin himself acknowledged Brown in the
Preface to Mandeville: A Tale of the Seventeenth Century in England (1817).
While Caleb Williams and Edgar Huntly share a thematic interest in the failure
of institutional controls as well as in the concept of repeated behavior, the novels’
similar (and gothic) formal structures also complicate their own political and
ideological intent(s). The most obvious similarity between Caleb Williams and Edgar
Huntly is the similarity of the two narrators’ (typically gothic) pursuits: both Edgar and
49

Caleb are irrationally obsessed with suspected murderers, Clithero and Falkland. While
these narrative pursuits are thematically linked with the pursuit of truth, “truth” in the
end proves an elusive quantity in both novels – Clithero’s death remains uncertain and
the innocence/guilt of Caleb and Falkland remains relative. Formally, the story-within-
a-story format sets up a (typically gothic) inside/outside relationship between the
interior stories and their respective frame tales. In both instances, the narrators are
different from the narrators of the frame tale; however, in Caleb Williams, Caleb
narrates Falkland’s tale himself (oddly recasting himself as a vaguely different narrator),
while Clithero ostensibly narrates his own tale. Because Clithero’s tale is placed within
the larger framework of Edgar’s letter to Mary, Clithero’s tale remains, in some sense,
yet another part of the novel mediated by Edgar, just as Falkland’s tale is mediated by
Caleb.
There is a sense of foreboding, however, surrounding this mediation because the
energies of the novel are directed toward maintaining a separation between the interior
stories and the frame tales. For Sedgwick, the story-within-a-story format is a kind of
“unspeakability.” In the Chinese-box narrative structure of Melmoth the Wanderer
(1820), for example, which twice includes four embedded stories (a story within a story
within a story within a story), “the innermost (stories) are no more intense or explicit
than the outermost, (so) clearly the focus of formal energy must be these strange
barriers” between the stories (Sedgwick 20). For Edgar Huntly and Caleb Williams
(and for all gothic novels, according to Sedgwick), the unspeakability of the story-
within-a-story format also suggests a kind of repetition: what’s going on in the frame
50

tale resembles the elements of the inner tale such that the resemblance between the
stories gives the reader a sense of the uncanny. Moreover, one might say (à la Freud)
that the repetition between the inner tale and the frame tale is suggestive of a kind of
historical trauma that the narrators are continually reliving.
The trauma, it turns out, is the general, repetitive trauma of history: the way, for
Brown and Godwin, sons are doomed to repeat the violent sins of fathers. Not
surprisingly, parents – or rather, parental absences – play a central role in both novels.
Clithero’s humble birth story in Edgar Huntly is remarkably similar to the story of
Caleb’s birth in Caleb Williams. Clithero’s parents in Ireland were “of the better sort of
peasants, and were able to provide [him] with the rudiments of knowledge” (670).
Quite similarly, Caleb’s parents in a “remote county” in England were “humble . . .
peasants, and they had no portion to give [him], but an education free from the usual
sources of depravity” (5). Although Caleb’s parents both die by the time he is 18,
leaving Caleb without parental guidance as he begins his relationship with Falkland,
Clithero’s parents willingly give him up to Mrs. Lorimer when he is a child. There are
many more examples of faulty parenting in the Edgar Huntly, perhaps the most
egregious of which are Mrs. Lorimer’s parents, who are easily cowed by their evil son
into ruining Euphemia’s union with Sarsfield. Clarice is also clearly the product of at
least one poor parent (Arthur), and even Edgar, whose parents were killed by Indians, is
nonetheless the product of absent parents. In Clithero’s tale and in the larger tale as
well, parents can not be trusted to serve as guides for their offspring, and consequently,
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sons continue to have the uncanny experiences of repeating their parents’ mistakes,
perpetuating a system of violence.
But parental authority, for both Brown and Godwin, is really a cover for the
more complex issue of class. In Caleb Williams, as Pamela Clemit notes, “Godwin
makes explicit the political undertones of Gothic romance and brings its familial
associations to bear on class relationships” (55). Caleb’s persecution stems in part from
his own willingness to buy into the class system; just like Clithero, Caleb has “periods
of unreserved confidence in his master in which he regresses to the passive state of
mind induced by an aristocratic regime” (Clemit 61). Clithero holds up Mrs. Lorimer as
a deity because she conforms with the aristocratic virtues of noblesse oblige: “Her
habitual beneficence was bespoken in every look. Always in search of occasions for
doing good, always meditating scenes of happiness, of which she was the author, or of
distress, for which she was preparing relief, the most torpid insensibility was, for a time,
subdued, and the most depraved smitten by charms, of which, in another person, they
would not perhaps have been sensible” (Brown, Edgar Huntly 674). Clithero’s refusal
to acknowledge the oppression inherent in Mrs. Lorimer’s position as an aristocrat and
in the fraudulence of noblesse oblige is indicative of the kind of systemic blindness that
perpetuates class hierarchies.
Clithero claims to enjoy his middle position in the household -- he has leisure
time and ranks above the other servants, and he describes his living conditions as an
exception to the norm for a member of his class: “My station was a servile one, yet
most of the evils of servitude were unknown to me. . . . My lady’s household
52

establishment was large and opulent. Her servants were my inferiors and menials. My
leisure was considerable, and my emoluments large enough to supply me with every
valuable instrument of improvement or pleasure” (673-4). Clithero is educated to be a
companion to Mrs. Lorimer’s son, and yet he is excluded from certain subjects “from
the belief that they were unsuitable to (his) rank and station” (671). Although Clithero
seems to conset to the limits placed upon him, his curious disquisition about his
education belies an ironic sense that the nature of his subjugation is not unlike slavery.
Noting that he has perhaps given too much education (and thus spoiled for servitude),
he opines: “in proportion as my views were refined and enlarged by history and
science, I was likely to contract a thirst of independence, and an impatience of
subjection and poverty” (672). When Mrs. Lorimer’s son falls from the grace of
noblesse oblige, Clithero attributes his dissolution to the “vices that are inherent in
wealth and rank” (672). In contrast, Clithero suggests that his own failings are less
significant because of his class status: “My unfavorable qualities, like those of my
master, were imputed to my condition, though, perhaps, the difference was
advantageous to me, since the vices of servitude are less hateful than those of tyranny”
(672). Despite Clithero’s subtle whiff of awareness of his subaltern status, so much of
his tale is spent in self-accusation and in defense of Mrs. Lorimer that it should be seen
as an act of ventriloquism, shaped by the discourse of masters.
The economic nature of the problem between Clithero and Mrs. Lorimer is
emphasized by his job as her financial steward. Mrs. Lorimer places all her estates in
the city under his direction, and relies with great trust in him on all matters of her
53

estate’s economy. Interestingly, Clithero often describes his social relationship with
Mrs. Lorimer in financial terms. He is so in awe of her, for example, that he believes
his life to be a “cheap sacrifice” in her cause (676). Most significantly, Clithero
describes his attachment to Mrs. Lorimer in economic terms of accumulation and debt:
“No time would suffice to discharge the debt of gratitude that was due to her. Yet it
was continually accumulating. If an anxious thought ever invaded my bosom it arose
from this source” (676). The anxiety that Clithero feels about his growing “debt” to
Mrs. Lorimer provides one plausible explanation for his ultimate attempt on her life:
his “debt” is borne of an archaic, aristocratic system that both master and subject
blindly inhabit, and their inability to escape from this system has dire consequences for
both of them. The gothic tone and heightened tension that pervades the attempted
murder scene suggests that some kind of bigger force is at work behind Clithero’s
actions, but he is blind to it. This force is an archaic social system that makes subjects
feel in debt to their masters and masters in problematic relation to their servants.
Because Mrs. Lorimer is cast as a benevolent, maternal figure who represents the best
version of noblesse oblige, Clithero can not see his own oppression by her, and so
believes himself to be insane. As a good follower of Godwin, in other words, Brown
portrays the lower classes as so oppressed by their masters that they cannot even see
their own oppression, until the fury builds up so much that parricide (or regicide)
becomes inevitable (even though Falkland was the true murderer in Caleb Williams,
Caleb was not totally blameless).
54

Clithero and Euphemia Lorimer are divided by the seemingly insurmountable
partition of class, a partition that produces an effect similar to Sedgwick’s conception of
unspeakability. Clithero’s literal inability to speak – his inability to tell Mrs. Lorimer
first of his love for Clarice, and then of her brother’s arrival and death -- is suggestive of
an “unspeakable” dividing wall between master and servant. Clithero at first casts his
inability to tell Mrs. Lorimer of his love for Clarice in absolute terms: “The truth must
not be told” (683). He rationalizes to himself that he can’t tell Mrs. Lorimer about his
love for Clarice because it would not become his position as a servant, which would be
“equivalent to supplicating for a new benefit” (683). He resolves to tell Mrs. Lorimer
that he must leave, but refuses to tell her why. The condition of absolute unspeakability
that Clithero imposes upon the situation of his love for Clarice sets up a situation
similar to the absolute unspeakability of the Inquisition, a favorite target of gothic
novels, and Mrs. Lorimer becomes Clithero’s Inquisitor. The entire episode is a parody
of the Inquisition, however, as Mrs. Lorimer finally threatens to call in a more
threatening power than herself as Clithero continues to refuse to explain why he must
leave her service. This more threatening power turns out to be the gentle Clarice
herself, whose love for Clithero, as it happens, is mutual, and Mrs. Lorimer gives her
full consent to the union. The breaching of the dividing wall that separated Mrs.
Lorimer and Clithero vis-à-vis the love affair is gently defused in this situation, but it
serves to foreshadow the more intense episode of unspeakability concerning Arthur
Wiatte.
55

When Arthur suddenly reappears in Mrs. Lorimer’s neighborhood after he was
believed to be shipwrecked and dead, Clithero can’t bring himself to tell Mrs. Lorimer
of Arthur’s presence, and Clithero (again) casts this inability in absolute terms: “In
what way could I tell it to her? What end could it answer? Why should I make her
miserable?” (696). Clithero senses that this moment of unspeakability is about more
than just the reappearance of Arthur: “It seemed to include in it, consequences of the
utmost moment, without my being able to discover what these consequences were”
(697). Clithero’s inability to tell Mrs. Lorimer about Arthur is significant because it
metaphorically stands for all that Clithero is unable to tell Mrs. Lorimer about his
position as a subaltern. The possibility of breeching the unspeakable divide – of
speaking, for Clithero – is attended to by gothicism and the threat of violence,
especially murder. Breeching an unspeakable divide in a gothic novel always produces
the most violent scenes, as Sedgwick notes – consider the fire that traps the rioters at the
threshold of the convent they had just invaded in The Monk: “violence seems to pertain
much less to a sojourn in the depths of a monastery, convent, Inquisition, castle, or
hiding place than to an approach – from within or without – to an interfacing surface”
(Sedgwick 24).
Clithero correctly senses that the series of coincidences that surround Arthur’s
reappearance suggest a bigger force at work, a lurking of a “tremendous significance,
which human sagacity could not uncover” (697). The novel implicitly points out that
the mystery underlying the series of coincidences that convert Clithero into a murderer
is the mysterious working of class, which leads subjects to blindly contribute to their
56

own oppression until the fury builds into a murderous rage. For Clithero, the murder of
Arthur and the attempted murder of Euphemia are “liberating” because they mark the
end of Clithero’s servitude and the breech of an unspeakable divide; hence, these
moments are attended with heavy gothicism. As twins, Arthur represents Euphemia,
and the murder of one amounts to the murder of the other. Returning from a late-night
errand to the bank, Clithero turns onto a “dark, crooked, and narrow lane” in the city,
where he unknowingly murders Arthur in self-defense (700). Realizing whom he has
killed – “the brother of my patroness, the father of my love” (703) -- Clithero begins to
wander through the city and unthinkingly retraces his steps in a circle back to the
banker’s door. Clithero’s primary concern is how to “communicate the tidings” to
Euphemia, and he thinks about a manuscript in which Euphemia declares her love for
her brother. At this moment, Clithero also breaks off his narrative and, in an aside to
Edgar, begs heaven for the strength to proceed with his tale. All these gothic elements –
the dark, crooked lane, the wandering, the dopplegänger quality of Euphemia and
Arthur, the manuscript, and the interrupted narrative – point to a the gothic structure of
divided “spaces”: Clithero and Euphemia occupy separate levels in the aristocratic
hierarchy, and the threat of breeching the dividing wall that separates them threatens the
entire class system.
The seemingly deluded logic that brings Clithero to Euphemia’s bedside with
the intention of murder – believing she will “awake but only to perish at the spectacle of
my ingratitude” (710) – leads Clithero to resolve (oxymoronically) to spare Mrs.
Lorimer the pain of awaking to the news, which he believes will surely kill her, by
57

murdering her in her sleep. Critics have usually discounted Clithero’s tale as the tale of
a madman that Edgar simply misreads, mostly on the basis of the seemingly faulty logic
inspiring his attempt to kill Mrs. Lorimer. But if one considers the episode to be a
metaphorical explanation of class relationships, one might imagine a scenario in which
Clithero’s logic is not faulty. In essence, Clithero’s logic goes something like this: “I
can’t tell you this because it would kill you, but you’re going to find out, so I’ll kill you
to spare your pain.” One scenario in which this logic might make sense in an
oxymoronic kind of way is in a colonial context, in which the colonial subject can never
know the truth of what the colonist is planning because it would kill the subject, but
since the subject will find out anyway, the colonist determines that the subjects must be
eradicated. The mendacious and genocidal attitude of the American colonists toward
Native Americans is a case in point. In this way, we might see the gentle Mrs. Lorimer
differently, as a figure for the colonial subject (gendered female), and Clithero, as the
genocidal colonialist. In this scenario, the murderous relationship between
Clithero/colonist and Mrs. Lorimer/subject foreshadows the murderous and confusing
relationship that Edgar will have to Native Americans in the frame tale.
As a figure for both murderer/colonist and servant/subject, then, Clithero
embodies the kind of schizophrenia of what Alan Lawson has called the “Second
World” situation – both colonized and colonizing -- in which the early republic found
itself. As Alan Lawson explains, some “settler colonies” are “colonized at the same
time [they are] colonizing” (“Comparative Studies” 157) such that Second World
narratives speak “in two languages” in a “dual inscription of incompatible geometries”
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(“Cultural Paradigm” 73). And just as the Clithero character may be read dually, so too
may the Mrs. Lorimer character be seen as both an oppressive aristocrat and also the
colonized native that must be expelled from the expanding nation. That characters
could elicit a range of meanings (instead of a single allegorical signification) in a Brown
novel is not unreasonable – ambiguity throughout Brown’s novels often emphasizes
what Brown saw as the limitations of human knowledge. What’s more, as Janie Hinds
suggests, insofar as symbols in Brown novels both critique and hypostatize colonizing
narratives, they should be seen to operate “rhizomically or across significations in a
network. . . , rather than singularly through a paradigmatic meaning” (Hinds, “Deb’s
Dogs” 331).
The Second World tendencies of Edgar Huntly are amplified by the way Edgar’s
and Clithero’s uncanny wandering recapitulates the wandering of Sarsfield and
Weymouth across the British empire. While Sarsfield’s and Weymouth’s travels appear
to be simple and un-freighted adventure tales, the uncanny way in which Edgar and
Clithero repeat their wanderings undermines whatever hegemonic narrative might be
offered by the embedded stories. Sarsfield’s tale, embedded within Clithero’s tale, is an
infectious story of colonial wandering. Having secured a position in the East Indian
Company via Euphemia, Sarsfield disappears from contact with his former lover after
the British are defeated by some unidentified native power. Sarsfield later relates that
he escaped from the “prisons of Hyder” (Haidar Ali) in southern India and wandered on
foot through “Hindoostaun” (northern India). Sarsfield is often read as the voice of
Reason in the novel -- Dana Luciano writes that Sarsfield is “far too rational to believe
59

in ghosts” (7), and Gesa Ackenthun sees Sarsfield as the “archetypal colonialist” (340).
While Sarsfield’s story hypostatizes the European and Asian “frontier” as the
stereotypical place of exotic foreign self or “other,” ostensibly strengthening the
national identity of the home nation, Sarsfield’s wandering also will be echoed in
Edgar’s final wandering through the wilderness; moreover, this doubling (and tripling)
of the tales of wandering in the novel provides a sense of the uncanny, casting the
colonialist project in an unsettling light.
Both Sarsfield and Clithero refer to their travels as “pilgrimages,” but the term is
ironic because their voyages are neither religious nor particularly single-minded.
Instead, Sarsfield and Clithero are perpetually wanderers. Sarsfield is a “pilgrim” only
by the disguises he adopts to avoid detection: “He was sometimes a scholar of Benares,
and sometimes a disciple of the Mosque. According to the exigencies of the times, he
was a pilgrim to Mecca or to Jagunaut” (691). Sarsfield works undercover as a surgeon
in Istanbul, traverses Greece disguised as a beggar, and is captured by banditti in Italy
before finally procuring passage to America where he becomes Edgar’s teacher.
Sarsfield’s many disguises plays into a common motif in gothic novels, in which
disguise often functions as a marker of identity. In The Monk, for example, Antonia’s
veil is nearly as coveted as she because it seems to be marked with sensuality itself.
Disguises, such as veils, may be seen as “contagious” insofar as the wearer begins to
assume the qualities of the disguise (Sedgwick 143). Sarsfield’s many disguises, then,
suggest not only has become the foreign self or “other” so many times over, but also
60

that he would be familiar to everyone, belonging to none. With this kind of universal
familiarity, Sarsfield produces an uncanny experience for everyone he meets.
Clithero is a student of Sarsfield, and he cathects Sarsfield’s stories, “[revering]
the illustrious qualities of my lady, and [weeping] at the calamities to which the infernal
malice of her brother had subjected her” (692). Clithero’s wandering across the
American wilderness recapitulates Sarsfield’s wanderings in quasi-exile across the
“exotic” British colony of India. And when Sarsfield’s (and Clithero’s) wanderings are
repeated and amplified by the disoriented wanderings of Edgar, Sarsfield’s travels take
on a different hue in the reader’s hindsight, and his authority as a symbol of reason and
power is undermined.
Similarly, many critics have noted the way in which Weymouth’s story
inaugurates Edgar’s wandering because Edgar’s wandering begins shortly after he is
apprised that he will have no fortune upon which to rely. When Edgar and Mary
discover that Waldegrave was in possession of a mysterious small fortune of $7,500
upon his death, Mary is suddenly lifted from poverty and a life of servitude. Edgar’s
impending marriage to Mary meant that he and his sisters would not be at the mercy of
their antagonistic cousin upon the death of their uncle. But Weymouth’s claim on the
money returns Mary to poverty, and Edgar knows that his cousin will likely cast him
and his sisters out of his uncle’s house when his uncle dies, leaving them homeless and
penniless. Edgar’s subsequent falling into the pit and wandering, however, may have
just as much to do with Weymouth’s story of wandering as with the disputed money.
Weymouth’s appearance at Edgar’s uncle’s door is suffused with gothic imagery –
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Edgar sits alone by the parlor fire on a moon-lit night, and his interest is suddenly
piqued by the appearance of an uncannily familiar stranger on horseback. Edgar finally
recognizes him as Waldegrave’s friend, Weymouth, who had been missing three years
at sea. Weymouth has come looking for money he left in trust with Waldegrave, and as
Weymouth questions Edgar about the money, he stares at Edgar so hard that he
“seemed anxious to pierce into [Edgar’s] inmost soul” (763). Weymouth’s mysterious
initial questioning of Edgar – when Edgar relates that Waldegrave died with much more
money than could be accounted for – could give Weymouth enough information to
fabricate a story that would give him claim to the money, and the tale he tells -- a tale of
capitalist/colonialist wandering and speculation -- draws all of Edgar’s naïve sympathy.
Weymouth’s rags-to-riches-to-rags-again tale, told to Edgar by the parlor
firelight, is an adventurous and gothic tale. When a shipment of wine that Weymouth
has financed becomes shipwrecked off the coast of Portugal, most of the passengers and
crew are drowned, except Weymouth. Portugal, which colonized a global empire
during the 15
th
and 16
th
centuries, was a major competitor of Britain, and Weymouth’s
exotic and infantilizing characterization of the country would be in line with a
hegemonic British point of view. Weymouth nearly perishes from cold and hunger in a
rude fishing village and in a (typically gothic) cloister, and finally en route (via
“knavish and inhuman” transporters) to a rustic hospital, where he finally gains the
attention of a French gentleman and English merchant, who attend to his recovery.
Weymouth finally recovers sufficiently to embark on a ship to America, where he finds
that Waldegrave, the trustee of his only remaining estate, has died.
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Weymouth’s story of wandering through the “frontiers” of Portugal repeats
Sarsfield’s wandering in many ways. While the native people in Portugal are
characterized as “Other,” the disoriented nature of Weymouth’s travels undermines his
“authority” as a “normalizing” figure. Significantly, the effect of Weymouth’s story on
Edgar is never revealed, as this strand of the novel is never picked up again by Brown.
The open-endedness of Weymouth’s story, however, is consistent with the open-
endedness of Clithero’s story (did he finally drown or not?), suggesting the thematic
importance, in the novel, of the way in which “frontiers” promote confused wanderings
in those who are attempting to “tame” them. Significantly, all four wanderers --
Sarsfield, Clithero, Weymouth, and Edgar -- return home from their adventures on
frontiers having barely escaped with their lives and with no profits to show for their
trouble. Edgar’s confused wandering, then, replicates not just Clithero’s but also
Sarsfield’s and Weymouth’s as well. Wandering is uncanny, for Freud, because one
keeps tripping over the same obstacle again and again, so one is continually reminded
of the obstacle without seeing it clearly, producing a confused relationship to one’s own
identity. The self-estrangement produced by wandering also is consistent with the
colonized/colonizing schizophrenia of a Second World identity.
That the novel is about the fate of the American wilderness is beyond question,
and Edgar’s wandering through a wilderness demarcated by the ghostly presence of
Native Americans is certainly key to understanding Brown’s enigmatic opinion about
the American frontier and all that it signified for American identity in the early republic.
The United States was continually at war with Native Americans beginning with the
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Pequot War in 1637, and George Washington pursued wars with Native Americans that
accounted for five-sixths of all Federal expenses between 1790-1796 (Christopherson
11-12). As Renée Bergland explains, dominant discourses at the end of the eighteenth
century presumed not only that Indian Removal was inevitable but also that novels
would evolve to promote the principles of reason over imagination; however, as
Bergland contends, Brown “challenged this repressive nationalist rationalism by writing
a novel peopled with somnambulists and spectral Indians who prove harder and harder
to distinguish from each other, in a region that proves harder and harder to define” (51).
Similarly, Sydney Krause finds that the Elm in Edgar Huntly symbolizes the peaceful,
fair dealings of William Penn’s 1682 treaty with the Lenni Lenape at Shackamaxon
(Kensington), and that the guilt that drives Edgar is his knowledge of how unfairly
Penn’s descendents have treated the Indians, most notably with the 1737 Walking
Purchase Treaty (“Penn’s Elm”). Not all critics find Brown so sympathetic to Native
Americans. Notably, Fiedler finds that Brown’s Indians represent man’s innate evil
(159), and Gardner finds that both Brown’s Indians, as well as his Irishman, Clithero,
represent the “un-American American” which must be exorcised for the establishment
of American identity (430).
As many critics have noted, Edgar’s wandering throughout the novel allegorizes
the fiasco of the 1737 Walking Purchase Treaty, by which William Penn’s descendants
schemed to steal land from the Delaware Indians. While most critics have found the
novel’s attitude toward Native Americans to be denigrating, Sydney Krause argues for a
more recuperative reading, in which the novel’s important elm tree evokes the image of
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the “Treaty Elm” of Philadelphia, where the Quaker William Penn negotiated a treaty of
friendship at Shackamaxon (Kensington) with the Lenni Lenape in 1682. Despite
Penn’s good relationship with the Indians, his duplicitous sons presented the Delawares
with a false treaty in the 1730s showing that the Indians’ predecessors had agreed to
give their father an area of land in the Forks of the Delaware region to be measured as
far as a man could walk in a day and a half, or roughly forty miles. The Delaware
Indians became angry when, on the day of the walk, September 19, 1737, they found
that Penn’s sons had hired trained runners who could cover nearly twice the area for
which they thought they had bargained.
6
After several such land grabs by whites, a
forced migration of the Delawares began in 1742 (the migration that Old Deb resists).
As Krause argues, Edgar Huntly’s Elm may be reminiscent of Penn’s Elm,
simply relocated from Kensington to another point in Solesbury township that would
have been close to the starting point for the Walking Purchase: “on one hand, Penn’s
tree memorializes a founding Quaker desire for amity between the races; on the other,
it testifies to an eventual erosion of that policy” (Krause 465). In Krause’s schematic,
Clithero comes to represent the dispossessed Delawares, Edgar the white settlers, and
Waldegrave (a teacher at a school for blacks) the well-meaning legacy of William Penn:
“[t]hat an uncomprehending Huntly should watch an Indian surrogate compulsively sit
himself down sobbing in the hole he has dug and then cover it up symbolically attests,
with the one figure, to a sense of native futility and, with the other, to settler obtuseness
over past errors and the havoc they had wrought” (Krause 471).
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Brown’s sympathy with injustices committed against a colonial subject are
portrayed, as Krause notes, in the second of the two-part “Memorandums” that Brown
wrote for his Literary Magazine, and American Register.
7
The “Memorandums” take
the form of a (probably fictional) journal trip in 1801 from a creek near northern
Philadelphia up to Catawissa on the eastern fork of the Susquehanna River. Claiming to
use the spot to immerse himself in solitude, he especially contemplates a fictional elm
tree and wonders, “[w]here are now those venerable and veteran chieftains and
warriors, who were accustomed to assemble beneath its friendly shade. . . . and who
received here with open arms the first white man who came helpless and forlorn among
them? Surely they were unconscious that, in a very few revolving moons, the stranger
whom they here cherished and warmed by the council fire; to whom they here presented
the wampum of consecrated friendship, and with whom they here smoked the sacred
calumet of peace, had come to supplant them in their native possessions, to root out
their posterity from the country, and to trample down the graves of their fathers.”
8
This
apparent sympathy with the Native Americans’ plight in the “Memorandums” seems to
contrast with the anti-Indian sentiment of Edgar Huntly. While Edgar sometimes calls
the Indians “savages” with “uncouth” and “grotesque” tattoos (790), the narrator also
understands, that the Indians have been provoked by whites: “I knew that, at this time,
some hostilities had been committed on the frontier; that a long course of injuries and
encroachments had lately exasperated the Indian tribes” (792); moreover, while Edgar
may indeed become an “Indian killer,” as Gardner argues, imaginatively exterminating
the “other” in the service of the formation of American identity, Edgar nonetheless
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possesses some degree of guilt about the impending genocide, and his disconcerted
wandering across the wilderness thematizes that guilt.
So, is it impossible to glean Brown’s position on expansion from reading Edgar
Huntly? While a simple answer may be out of reach, the complexities and incongruities
of the novel’s characterization of expansion and the wilderness are perhaps even more
fruitful for our understanding of the early republic’s attitude toward not only the frontier
but also American literature. That is, Brown’s novel uses the gothic to inaugurate a
conversation not only about the early republic’s relationship to its new land, but also
about its relationship to its new literature. Clithero’s casting his personal history as a
gothic story and telling it in the middle of the American wilderness puts American
literary identity on notice, so to speak, that it faces a crossroads, a place where it must
honestly face the ghosts that have traveled along with the settlers to the new world. The
use of gothic motifs throughout the novel, including moments of spectrality and the
supernatural, the failure of parental authority, the motif of unspeakability, and many
colonial wanderings, all suggest disquietude about the way in which American sons
seem to keep repeating the sins of their British fathers.
While Fiedler’s assessment may be partially correct, that the American gothic
via Brown is “conservative at its deepest level of implication” (161), the novel also
resists such a simple, polar characterization. As Harriet Hustis has suggested, Edgar’s
lack of self-awareness can be taken as a metaphor for a more complex understanding of
Brown’s attitude toward early American literary identity. Edgar’s lack of self-scrutiny
as he stakes Sarsfield’s musquet in the dirt after a particularly brutal bayoneting of an
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Indian, for example, serves as a signpost of “the repressions and epistemological
elisions upon with American literary identity is premised in this novel” (Hustis 101).
Brown’s importation of the gothic mode for his purposes, I would argue, not only marks
these repressions and elisions, but also marks the nation’s uneasy transition from colony
to colonizer.
68

CHAPTER ONE ENDNOTES

1
Sydney J. Krause argues in her “Historical Essay” that Brown began
composing Edgar Huntly in February 1799 (298).

2
See especially Michael Cody, Charles Brockden Brown and the Literary
Magazine: Cultural Journalism in the Early American Republic (2004), Philip Barnard,
Mark L. Kamrath, Stephen Shapiro, ed., Revising Charles Brockden Brown: Culture,
Politics, and Sexuality in the Early Republic (2004), Peter Kafer, Charles Brockden
Brown’s Revolution and the Birth of American Gothic (2004).

3
Clithero seems to fall to his death from a cliff in the cave (but emerges alive),
and if we’ve been reading correctly, we should know that he will certainly survive his
final “drowning.” Edgar similarly seems to perish over and over again on his trek
through the woods, prompting Sarsfield’s dismay at his former pupil’s sudden
appearance: “Call me to any bar, and exact from me an oath that you have twice been
dead and twice recalled to life; that you move about invisibly, and change your place by
the force, not of muscles, but of thought, and I will give it” (Brown, Edgar Huntly 851).

4
For a discussion of the urban gothic of Bleak House, see Allan Pritchard, “The
Urban Gothic of Bleak House” (1991).

5
Clemit 106.

6
Information about the Walking Treaty is from Krause, 468. Further
information can be found in: Francis Jennings, “The Scandalous Indian Policy of
William Penn’s Sons: Deeds and Documents of the Walking Purchase” (1970).

7
Although the two “Memorandums,” published in 1803 and 1804, were not
signed by Brown, Krause argues persuasively that they must have been written by
Brown because he was perpetually shy of copy and because stylistic consistencies
between the “Memorandums” and Brown’s other writings point to Brown (Krause 484
note 40).

8
From Charles Brockden Brown, “Memorandums Made on a Journey through
Part of Pennsylvania” (Quoted in Krause, 474).

69

CHAPTER TWO
MONSTERS AND MADWOMEN IN UTAH: GOTHIC CONTAMINATION
In December, 2003, CNN’s Paula Zahn Now primetime news magazine show
broadcast a story about a husband and wife, Jeff and Joanne Hanks, who had joined a
polygamous cult in the 1990s. The couple brought its three children to live in the tiny
town of Manti, Utah, where approximately 300 polygamists were following the
guidance of self-described preacher Jim Harmston. For the Hanks family, the story of
Abraham in Genesis provided a Biblical imperative for the practice of polygamy, and
the Hankses believed that living in accordance with scriptural authority would increase
the likelihood of joining Christ when He appeared for what they believed was the
impending Revelation in the year 2000. But two additional wives later (one of whom
was 17 at the time and both of whom eventually divorced Jeff), the millennium came
and went without the appearance of Christ. “We had just wasted seven years of the
prime of our life pursuing a pipe dream,” Jeff Hanks told Zahn.
While the modern Mormon church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day
Saints, renounced polygamy in 1890, the anti-polygamy group Tapestry Against
Polygamy claims that tens of thousands of fundamentalist Mormons as well as some
Christians maintain the practice in Utah and throughout the United States. While those
numbers may be overblown, American culture clearly has not tired of its obsession with
polygamy – in a teaser to the segment on the Hanks family, Zahn promised to “[pull]
back the curtain” on polygamy. More recently, HBO’s Big Love, about a modern
polygamist Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton) who lives in three secretly-adjoining suburban
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houses with his three wives, has received Emmy and Golden Globe nominations. In
2002, when the Olympic Winter Games were held in Utah, a myriad publications,
including The New Yorker, took the opportunity to chronicle the history of Mormonism
and polygamy. National fascination with polygamy dates to the Mormons’
announcement of the practice in 1852, which caused a stir that rivaled the slavery
debates. As Nancy Bentley explains, “[t]hough the Mormon population was small, their
desert city remote, very quickly polygamy was perceived as a national problem, an
urgent threat to the state and a danger to millions of American families” (344). The
nineteenth-century anti-polygamy movement has been called by one historian the
“single most successful nineteenth-century political and legal reform campaign.”
1

Activists published a newspaper, The Anti-Polygamy Standard, and organized mass
demonstrations. More than 150 years later, as the nation continues to debate the nature
and definition of marriage, understanding the causes and effects of the nineteenth-
century debate takes on an immediate significance.
The extent to which polygamy actually threatened monogamous marriage in the
nineteenth century was overblown. While actual numbers vary, most scholars agree
that polygamy was practiced by only a small minority of Mormons at any given time.
2

Most historians agree that the outrage about polygamy masked a complex matrix of
anxiety and concerns regarding the nature of national, religious, sexual and political
identities among the mainstream American population. For Terryl Givens, religious
concerns undergirded the debate about the “Mormon problem” throughout the
nineteenth century. For Louis Kern, anxieties regarding alternative sexual roles
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provided by Mormon polygamy went to the heart of questions surrounding the role of
the self in society. For Bentley, the specter of polygamy within the domestic novel
form that was part of the campaign against polygamy not only disturbed generic
assumptions about the imperative of female consent in sex and marriage but also
challenged the genre’s formulation of the nation as a place of filial belonging.
The way in which the anti-polygamy movement imagined the circumstances
surrounding the Mormon settlement of Utah in the nineteenth century provided
elements for the construction of a gothic novel. Consider: fears about the Mormons’
theocratic political intentions echoed the anti-Catholic sentiments of many British
gothic novels; charismatic leaders Joseph Smith and Brigham Young were
characterized by gentiles (as Mormons called non-Mormons) to be sexual “monsters”
because of their multiple wives. What’s more, the Mormon practice of polygamy
threatened to negate the right of female consent in marriage, a threat which drives the
plot of most gothic novels.
3
Finally, Utah’s territorial status -- granted in 1850 after
Mormons began to settle the tract of land three years earlier – functioned analogously in
the national imagination to British colonial settings as a place to construct the foreign
“other,” often in racial terms, against which national identity could be measured.
4
In
Maria Edgworth’s Belinda (1801), for example, a Creole man (Mr. Vincent) and an
African man (Juba) figure significantly in the romance plot – Belinda ultimately rejects
Mr. Vincent’s hand, but Juba marries an English farm girl.
Given the similarities between the construction of Mormons in the national
imagination and the typical plot of a British gothic novel, then, it is probably no
72

coincidence that the antebellum anti-polygamy movement often drew on gothic motifs
in characterizations of its Mormon foes and their frontier setting. Precipitated by Orson
Pratt’s public announcement of Mormon polygamy practices in 1852, the anti-
polygamy movement became what one historian has called the “single most successful
nineteenth-century political and legal reform campaign.”
5
And perhaps the most
successful weapon in the war against polygamy was the anti-polygamy novel, in the
typical plot of which heroines are forced into harem-like marriages and treated as
slaves. Borrowing from techniques employed by British gothic novelists as well as
American authors such as Brockden Brown, Hawthorne, Poe, and Harriet Beecher
Stowe,

anti-polygamy novelists used gothic conventions -- apparitions, subterranean
prisons, the threat of incest, missing letters, tales-within-tales, heinous villains and
orphan heroines -- to inspire horror in their readers and to attempt to achieve a political
effect: preventing the admission of a “moral monster” into the United States.
One of the many story lines in Maria Ward’s Female Life Among the Mormons
(1855), for example, follows a traditional gothic plot in which a fictionalized Brigham
Young, figured as a gothic villain, kidnaps and threatens a gothic heroine, Emily, who
turns out to be his daughter. Introduced as a blushing and beautiful orphan damsel with
a “romantic story” (151), Emily was raised from infancy in the poorhouse and, in true
gothic heroine fashion, is so humble she has to ask the meaning of the word “beautiful”
when it is applied to her. When one of the poorhouse workers decides to tame her
matted hair into ringlets, Emily determines to bear the painful comb “like a heroine”
(160). Emily discovers that her mother was the victim of the lustful schemes of a
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charlatan preacher (later revealed as Brigham Young), who enticed her away from her
widowed mother (Emily’s grandmother) with the promise of marriage only to imprison
her in a flop house. Finally released by a landlady after Brigham Young stopped paying
rent, Emily’s mother dies after traveling home on foot through the rain with baby Emily
in her arms, but not before she has written an account of her story in a letter she leaves
for her daughter. There are many gothic conventions elucidated in this story, including
the overdetermined heroine, the orphan damsel, and the letter that reveals her secret
identity. But perhaps the most gothic section of Emily’s story has to do with Brigham
Young’s unwonted attentions and the threat of incest. Before their familial connection
is brought to light, Brigham Young imprisons Emily and presses her for her hand, but
when his paternity is discovered (via her mother’s letter), Brigham Young agrees to
release her and to allow her to leave Mormon country with her lover. But this is not a
novel that will end with a recuperative reinstatement of the gothic heroine at the end.
Instead, Emily and her entire party are slain by Brigham Young’s henchmen as they
make their way out of Mormon territory, suggesting the supposedly irredeemable nature
of Mormonism.
The anti-polygamy movement bloomed in the decade preceding the Civil War,
and the particular “threats” that the Mormons posed mirrored conflicts within mid-
nineteenth-century America’s own sense of its racial, sexual, and national identity.
Aside from the “threat” the Mormons’ unorthodox religious, sexual, and communal
living beliefs posed to the mainstream Protestant culture, there was the “question” of
what kind of political, religious, and sexual community the Mormons would create on
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their frontier territory. The acquisition of Oregon in 1846 and the Treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo in 1848 had garnered an extraordinary amount of land for the United States at a
time when debate over the use of already-existing U.S. territories was fierce and was
very much tied to the question of slavery.
6
Free-Soilers, northerners who wanted to ban
slavery in the territories because they were worried about slavery’s effect on white
labor, were outraged when Stephen Douglas’s 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act enfranchised
territorial settlers to decide the question of slavery for themselves. Meanwhile,
Mormon settlers in the Utah territory appealed to Douglas’s concept of popular
sovereignty to establish polygamy. While Mormons were not necessarily slave-holders,
their vehement push for states’ rights (and Brigham Young’s continued applications for
statehood and claims to an enormous tract of land for the state of “Deseret”) fueled
anxiety in the east: “Ironically, the Mormons, whom the Missourians had originally
denounced as abolitionists, now adopted the most extreme states’ rights doctrines in
Utah in order to protect their own peculiar institution – the practice of polygamy”
(White 164).
7
While any real, political connections between slavery and polygamy
were somewhat tangential, these two issues were inextricably linked in the public
imagination. In 1856, the new Republican party vowed to abolish the “twin relics of
barbarism: slavery and polygamy” (White 168).
Considering that this political climate overlay a literary moment in which tastes
for gothic literature still ran high (Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in 1852), it’s not
surprising that novelists would begin to produce gothic fiction that featured the
Mormons. Four early and highly influential anti-polygamy novels published within a
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two-year span, 1855-56, were seminal in this regard: Orvilla S. Belisle’s The Prophets;
or, Mormonism Unveiled (1855), Alfreda Eva Bell’s Boadicea the Mormon Wife
(1855), Meta Victoria Fuller Victor’s Mormon Wives: A Narrative of Facts Stranger
Than Fiction (1856), and Ward’s Female Life Among the Mormons (1855). Even
though the Mormon population in Utah is maligned in these novels, the Mormon
community also provided a mirror for American identity because so many of its
characteristics matched traditional American values: industrious and religiously
zealous, the Mormons struck out on what they believed to be a divinely inspired
mission to build a “City on a hill” and ended up colonizing a new territory. As White
writes, “[t]hat Mormons should be tainted with the brush of un-Americanism is
particularly ironic because Mormonism is in many ways the most American of
religions. Founded in the United States by a New Englander, it incorporated many of
the popular beliefs, religious controversies, and social values of early-nineteenth-
century rural New York in its theology” (164). As many critics have noted, there is a
double-edged quality to anti-polygamy novels: the attempt to demonize the Mormon
“other,” and at the same time, more subtly, the effect of working out unresolved
contradictions in America’s own sense of its racial and sexual identity as well as its
imperialistic mission.
8
It is my contention that the use of gothic conventions plays into
this equivocal propensity by constantly unsettling the border that the novels are
ostensibly constructing between “American” self and “other.”

A primary concern of the gothic has always been the delineation of borders,
which is most often effected by establishing a binary between contaminated “other” and
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pure “self,” a model in which the terms might stand for an individual or a whole
community. Sedgwick’s notion of unspeakability and the way in which the energies of
the gothic novel occur in the breaching of these parrallel structures is useful here to
elucidate the self-other binary constructed by the novels between the Mormons and a
Protestant national hegemony. Sedgwick’s notion that identity, in gothic novels,
inheres in surfaces and is contagious metonymically is also an important theoretical
point for this chapter because it’s the gothic mechanism by which the self-other binary
becomes broken down. In Poe’s Pym, for example, Arthur’s fall into the arms of the
half-breed Dirk Peters “marks” Arthur in such a way that Arthur’s “whiteness” loses its
“purity,” and the story’s ending suggests the impossibility of perfect whiteness (Goddu
92). I want to look at the way these gothic moments of “contamination” in anti-
polygamy literature reveal cultural anxiety about the kinds of racial and sexual mixings
inaugurated by American expansion in the nineteenth century.
A primary concern regarding American imperialism in the West was race, an
issue that complicated the notion of manifest destiny. As White notes, “[m]anifest
destiny . . . assumed that Americans wanted the continent no matter who was already
living on it. Yet most of the people living in territory the expansionists coveted did not
have white skins. In a country that was loudly and proudly racist, the absorption of
large numbers of nonwhites was a proposal unlikely to draw wide support” (74). An
editorial in the Democratic Review expressed doubts about whether the “degraded
Mexican-Spanish” could receive the “virtues of the Anglo-Saxon race” in a debate over
the Mexican-American war (Qutoed in Stephanson 46). Similarly, Andrew Jackson
77

declared that Indians had “neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the
desire of improvement” to live among whites (Quoted in White 89). Racial
justifications for policies of removal and conquest combined with a debate over slavery
in which neither side was calling for equal treatment for blacks. In the push to annex
Texas in the early 1840s, for example, expansionist Senator Robert Walker garnered
northern congressional support by suggesting that the annexation would relieve racial
tensions. As White summarizes the argument: “Blacks, slave and free, would shun the
‘uncongenial’ north and move south. Texas would rapidly drain blacks out of the
border states of the upper South and thus lead gradually to the end of slavery there.
Eventually, all blacks lured by the warm climate and the ‘kindred’ races of Central
America would move first into Texas and then into Latin America, emptying the United
States of black people. Texas would be a safety valve protecting the United States from
racial turmoil” (75). It would be difficult for any nineteenth-century novel dealing with
the West to evade the racist discourses that drove discussion of American imperialism.
And one of the particular issues of purity about which the American gothic
obsesses, of course, is race. As Leslie Fiedler first suggested, the American gothic has
always been tied to questions of race. In his discussion of Poe’s Pym, Fiedler notes the
appropriateness of Poe’s discovery that “the proper subject for American gothic is the
black man, from whose shadow we have not yet emerged” (Love and Death in the
American Novel 397).
9
Fiedler also first suggested the gothic power of the Native
American figure, which “has haunted all Americans, in their dreams at least if not in
their waking consciousness; for it is rooted in our profoundest guilt” (Return of the
78

Vanishing American 75). Gothic tropes in anti-polygamy novels similarly point to
anxieties regarding race in the context of the American frontier, especially as race
relates to the imbricated discourses not only of slavery but also of Native American
removal policies.
10
Because of the very way gothic novels obsess about purity and
contamination, the use of gothic tropes in literature paradoxically undermines and
contaminates the very boundaries it endeavors to establish.
One problem for anti-polygamy writers in constructing the Mormons as
ethnically marked was that most Mormon converts were from the mainstream white
population. Givens suggests that anti-polygamy writers elided this fact via the
suggestion that converts did not choose the religion with perfect free will: captivity and
kidnapping figure prominently in this genre. For Givens, the presence of coercion
ensures that the individual self retains its purity despite its proximity to (contaminating)
Mormon polygamy: “one’s sense of a stable, uncontaminated self can at least be
assured by denying the function of personal choice in whatever seduction by the Other
does occur” (138). I follow Givens in his argument that the anti-polygamy novelists’
use of captivity is a strategy for constructing the Mormons as “other,” but I would argue
that the heroine often does not remain “uncontaminated” during her ordeal. In The
Prophets, or, Mormonism Unveiled, for example, a young girl named Rose comes under
the spell of a Mormon named Richard, who has taken her as his lover despite being
married to her sister, Maud. When Rose agrees to help Richard break into Maud’s
apartment -- even though Maud has refused to see him since she discovered his
polygamy -- the narrator notes that Rose has become so contaminated she doesn’t even
79

realize she’s doing something wrong, “for, alas! the wily sophist had so polluted the
fountain that the whole current of her mind was tainted by the foul contagion” (202, my
emphasis). Experiences marked as gothic in anti-polygamy novels inevitably
“contaminate” heroines and undermine authorial attempts to establish a self-other
binary that would reify national ideological boundaries.
In this chapter I am looking at the way whiteness and womanhood, taken
separately or together as figures for national virtue, become destabilized by gothic
convention. As many critics have noted, the ascension of the British gothic novel in the
eighteenth century coincided with the growth of the ideology of “separate spheres,”
which valorized the proper female role as domestic and distinct from the public world
of economics and politics. Viewed in this light, gothic novels – in which women
characters so often are held captive by male persecutors -- may be seen as expressive of
women’s sense of entrapment within this domestic ideology.
11
In many ways, anti-
polygamy fiction is expressive of the same kind of female unhappiness under domestic
ideology that British gothic novels more generally express, with Mormon institutions
substituting for Catholic institutions, and Mormon elders substituting for monks and
other villains that threaten womanhood and national identity. Clearly, Mormon wives
weren’t the only mid-nineteenth-century American women who could conceivably have
been unhappy with their marital arrangements, so their plight becomes metaphorical.
Significantly, however, because of the function of gothic contamination, gothic heroines
in anti-polygamy novels are unable to maintain the kind of moral purity they are
intended to embody for the buttressing of national identity as female exemplars.
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Instead, gothic contamination produces an effect in which heroines do not exit from
their experience with Mormonism unscarred, and the return of their “contaminated”
bodies to the east in the novels’ endings disseminates the Mormon “other” within the
body politic.
Questions of domestic ideology and sexuality are crystallized in Jane Eyre, and
Charlotte Brontë’s novel was something of an ur-text for anti-polygamy writers.
Published in Britain in 1847 and in America the following year, when “Jane Eyre
fever” passed through New England (Whipple), the novel provides a paradigm of a
polygamy plot infused with discourses of race, womanhood, and national identity. Like
many heroines of anti-polygamy novels, Jane travels away from her home only to be
confronted with the gothic horror of bigamy, which she must reject in order to maintain
her moral purity. In Jane Eyre, Brontë deploys a number of gothic set-pieces that had
become commonplaces by the mid-nineteenth century: the “haunted” mansion with
mysterious secrets, the brooding and wealthy gothic villain who will try to entrap the
heroine, the encounter with the evil other woman, and the heroine’s narrow escape from
the villain’s domain. Significantly, Brontë’s text engages discourses of whiteness and
womanhood in ways that were relevant to the anti-polygamy movement, and it’s my
contention that when anti-polygamy novelists drew on some of the gothic motifs in
Jane Eyre -- perhaps attempting to cash in on its popularity – they also (perhaps
unwittingly) unleashed tendencies in their own novels that would transgress the very
boundaries of nationhood, womanhood, and whiteness that they were trying to police.
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Female Mormon characters are often constructed along the lines of a gothic
“evil other woman” on the model of Jane Eyre’s Bertha. As in their gothic
counterparts, anti-polygamy novels endow these (evil) Mormon women with an
uncanny aura such that the (white Protestant) heroine senses her double’s strange
familiarity. The sense of the uncanny that occurs between the heroine and her Mormon
counterpart unsettles any self-other binary that might otherwise be reified. In Boadicea,
for example, the heroine’s mad doppelganger is her husband’s second wife, Cephysia.
Characterized as “dark” throughout the novel, Cephysia has “abundant black hair” (28)
and is twice referred to as the “brown woman.” At one point the heroine sees the “black
eyes of Cephysia, glittering with fiendish light” as the madwoman spies on her from
behind a tree (72). The first time Hubert parades his mistress before his first wife,
Boadicea regards Cephysia in gothic terms: to Boadicea, Cephysia bears a resemblance
to a female figure representing evil in a German painting that she owns – a painting
that, as Boadicea describes it, blends “the terrible, the hideous, the grotesque” with
“everything beautiful” in a typically a manner evocative of the sublime (26). Boadicea
immediately feels a sense of the uncanny connected with Cephysia: “A horrible
shudder passed over my frame as this woman entered the sitting-room. I felt a fearful
presentiment that my destiny was linked with hers, for what horrors I knew not; but the
hand of death itself seemed to gripe my heart” (28). For Jane Eyre, of course, Bertha is
also strangely familiar – echoing Jane’s restless pacing on the third floor and reflecting
back to Jane all that is foreboding about marriage when she famously dons her veil. In
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Boadicea, the “dark” Cephysia is supposed to represent all that is antithetical to white
monogamy, but her characterization as uncanny undermines this binary.
A common characteristic of the Mormon evil other woman figure in anti-
polygamy novels is insanity, which seems intended to justify American intolerance of
Mormon religion (despite the hypocrisy that such intolerance implies) and also to
provide “evidence” for arguments that “Deseret” was not fit for statehood because it
was not properly governed. As Carolyn Berman argues with respect to Jane Eyre,
“Bertha Mason’s insanity marks the Creole as a target for moral/imperial intervention”
because her madness could be seen as a sign of colonial mismanagement (277). While
patriarchal polygamy was not a system that apparently provided for much female
freedom or equality, Utah had a liberal divorce law, and women in plural marriages
defended the institution of polygamy vigorously at times.

In 1879, after a Mormon
Church official was jailed for refusing to testify against a man accused in court of
polygamy, 25,000 people lined the street of Salt Lake City to cheer him upon his
release. Included in the crowd were 400 women with signs that read, “Women in favor
of polygamy” (Hardy 46). And yet, it is also clear that Mormon women were not
strongly attached to the doctrine, a fact made evident, as Louis Kern writes, “by the vast
amount of apostolic energy expended in convincing, cajoling, cozening, and damning
them into accepting it” (155). The reasons behind this apparent inconsistency in
Mormon women’s attitudes toward polygamy are complex, but as Kern explains,
polygamy rendered cohesive a Mormon theology that included the very attractive idea
that by living according to a particular code, the Saints would become gods on earth.
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For an anti-polygamy readership, however, figures modeled on Jane Eyre’s mad Bertha
bolstered paternalistic attitudes toward Mormonism.
In Boadicea, Cephysia’s madness is intended to inspire readers to see polygamy
as a barbarous practice that degrades women to the point of insanity. Cephysia comes
from a family of “good standing” but had been cut off since she adopted Mormon
doctrines because her conduct had become “shameful” (Bell 28). It’s specifically the
adoption of Mormon doctrines that causes Cephysia’s madness – as if there’s a kind of
self-delusion involved in converting to Mormonism that continues to escalate into
madness as one becomes more entrenched. At one point in the novel, Boadicea finds
Cephysia raving insanely that the Mormon faith will absolve her of any sin she might
commit, even murder (63). In another moment, Cephysia advises Hubert to “keep the
upper hand” regarding Boadicea, an invocation to tyranny that runs counter to the ideal
of female consent in marriage (29). Cephysia’s descent into madness is to be taken as
the culmination of this “tyrannical” system in which systemic female subjugation leads
women to act in a manner that goes against their own self-interest. The gothic evil
other woman is a woman gone mad because of systemic, political and personal
oppression, and anti-polygamy novelists played into this convention in order to
construct Mormonism as “monstrous” and antithetical to national interests. But
drawing upon this particular gothic convention is a double-edged sword, for the evil
other woman also bears an uncanny resemblance to the heroine, which collapses the
very self-other binary the authors are attempting to construct.
84

The heroines of anti-polygamy novels, in fact, occupy a liminal space between
the idealized white Protestant exemplar of nationhood and the Mormon “other” woman.
Like governess figures (as in Jane Eyre), the heroines of anti-polygamy novels are
“used” rhetorically to educate middle-class girls about American cultural identity, while
the figures themselves are excluded from membership in that group.
12
Anti-polygamy
heroines often take great pains to establish domestic havens that stand as counterpoints
to the chaotic Mormon homes around them. As Boadicea sums up nicely: “Home! How
strangely the word sounded – how sweet its whispered promise of seclusion! – for
among the Mormons, the peculiar sanctity of home is unknown. There is not that
privacy, that secluded retreat, which makes every house, where things are as they
should be, a sort of Penetralia, or Inner Temple, a Sanctum Sanctorum” (Bell 24). The
sense of domestic space as a penetralia, as Lockwood refers to it in Wuthering Heights,
is notably elusive for the heroines of anti-polygamy novels, and they repeatedly enter
into the gothic spaces of Mormon homes. Consider the home of Female Life’s Mrs.
Bradish:
The house of Mrs. Bradish stood at some distance from the main road, in
the midst of a large yard that was bounded on the north by a deep, dense wood.
The building itself was avery large antique structure, built long before the
Revolution, and serving, under the seigniorial tenures then in vogue, as the
mansion-house of the hereditary lords of the soil. Some parts of it had fallen
into decay, but enough remained in a good state of preservation to furnish a very
handsome residence to a wealthy family. (16)

Drawing on the gothic convention in which decaying, aristocratic ruins serve as houses
for threatening villains, Mrs. Bradish’s house will prove to be a den of iniquity and vice,
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rape and murder, a labyrinth in which Maria will experience her first “mesmerism”
(figured as mental rape) and fail to escape unscathed.
Sentiments in which heroines express longing for a domestic haven on the
frontier are consistent with a spate of sentimental novels published after the 1840s in
which the West was portrayed as a kind of curative garden. As Kolodny shows, John
Charles Frémont’s expeditions as well as an economic recovery after the Panic of 1837
resulted in the imaginative “reopening” of the frontier in the 1840s, and writers such as
Maria Susanna Cummins, Caroline Soule, and E.D.E.N Southworth established fictional
frontier heroines which allowed female readers/settlers to forge new, connected
relationships to the wilderness. In many ways, the heroines’ task in these sentimental
frontier novels as well as in the anti-polygamy novels is to show how a (properly
educated) female presence might “civilize” the frontier – Boadicea, for example,
arranges classical art around her home. (The very name, Boadicea, has classical
resonances because the historical figure of Boadicea was a queen of the Brythonic
Celtic Iceni people in eastern Britan in the first century A.D., and she is remembered for
leading her tribal people in an uprising against the Roman Empire.) The Mormons, in
these instances, become synonymous with all the forces of the frontier (like the Roman
Empire for the historical Boadicea) that must be “tamed.” Heroines of anti-polygamy
novels, then, are somewhat like Jane Eyre – bringing a semblance of family order to an
unconventional family. On some level, however, these heroines are all failures –
foundering in their attempts to “tame” Mormonism. Despite the heroines’ best efforts,
Mormon husbands always choose to enter into polygamy rather than the bliss of
86

domestic monogamy – and the result is chaos. In Female Life, a visitor to the Bee
household finds 15 women and a brood of children engaged in so much kicking,
screaming, grabbing, and pushing at the dinner table that Mr. Bee finally begins
smacking them with an ox-goad (388). Because these heroines fail in their
domesticating effort, they can be read neither as female exemplars for a white Protestant
national identity nor as wholly opposite of that.
The heroines of anti-polygamy novels are further constructed as not-quite-other
because of their unreliability as narrators. First, there is a disingenuousness to the
heroines’ claims that they did not join the Mormons of their own free will, and this
disingenuousness partly has to do with the way gothic conventions spin out of authorial
control. In Female Life, for example, the narrator is so quickly and easily duped into
following her future husband to Utah that her claims of being “mesmerized” (in the
gothic fashion) seem strained. Indeed, the narrator admits that a “strange and
unaccountable feeling of curiosity” overcame her as she began to learn about the
Mormons, and the trip west certainly affords her an excuse to escape the “enemies” she
claims have ruined her reputation in the East (15). Second, the heroines’ failure to
correctly read the Mormons’ “miracles” suggest the main figures in these novels are
unreliable guides. In Female Life, Maria begins her narrative as a firm rationalist,
incredulous of Mormon “miracles.” Just a few pages into the novel, however, Maria
attends a Mormon meeting where she witnesses Joseph Smith resurrect a dead child and
she is dumbfounded. She “stood gazing, absorbed, almost incapable of sense or motion;
[her] reasoning faculties altogether at a fault on such a subject” (25). In classic
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Radcliffean style, this supernatural event will be explained as a hoax and a product of
Joseph Smith’s mesmerism, but it turns out the trick hides a sinister truth that is even
more horrifying than the possibility of supernatural phenomena: not only has the “dead
girl” been put up to the charade by her Mormon parents, but she also has been the
victim of a rape by Joseph Smith, who then killed the issue of the crime. Moreover,
while the supernatural is explained away, the sub-text of the event turns out to be an
even more heinous story. This is a common occurrence in Radcliffean gothic novels;
as E.J. Clery explains, “when supposed phantoms are detected so are systems of
lawlessness and cruelty which secretly coexist with the ‘natural’ economies of
legitimate profit-making, or of familial affection and duty” (114). The ugly truth is that
the heroine who can’t tell that the “resurrection” of a dead child is a forgery becomes
complicit in the “real” crimes that these forgeries mask.
There is a further problem for anti-polygamy writers in drawing upon gothic
conventions: they often turn to gothic parody in order to ridicule the Mormons’ reliance
on dreams and visions, and in this turn they expose the levers and pulleys of generic
convention, undermining the authority of their own texts.
13
Early in the novel, for
example, Maria giggles over the story of a Mormon family that insisted an “angel” was
planning to appear and take a dead child to heaven. When a figure in white sheets and
bells appears on the appointed night, a party of unbelievers chases the “angel” to a
swamp, where it disrobes him and discovers the uncle of the dead child. The story sets
the tone for how Mormon “miracles” will be read in this novel -- as ridiculous delusion.
But here, the narrator is caught wanting to have her gothic conventions work two ways,
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and her tactic fails. For the “Swamp Angel” is an episode of gothic parody, which
undermines the authenticity of the tales of gothic horror (for example, raped young
women) in other parts of the book. Similarly, a character named Lawrence schemes to
wrest power from Brigham Young by placing himself in a death-like trance and then
claiming that a dead Joseph Smith revealed to him that he was to lead the Mormons.
Key to Lawrence’s plan are Smith’s vestments, which are to be placed on him while he
is in his trance by an accomplice. Brigham Young foils the plan by simply stealing the
garments. When Lawrence “returns to life” and recounts his “vision,” the crowd boos
and accuses him of a “trick” (277). In these episodes, the author uses gothic parody to
expose Mormon “supernaturalism” as a power game, but with these moments, the
author is caught in a clumsy sleight of hand -- attempting to use gothic parody to expose
the machinery of Mormon “miracles” while at the same time attempting to use gothic
horror (entrapment and violence against women) to construct the religion in opposition
to Protestant values.
Similarly, the narrator/author of Female Life would like to suggest that she was
duped into migrating with the Mormons because she fell under the spell of her future
husband’s mesmerism. From the moment she meets him he holds an “unaccountable
power” over her and he seems an “irresistible fascination,” so strong it must be magic:
“His glittering eyes were fixed on mine; his breath fanned my cheek; I felt bewildered
and intoxicated, and partially at least lost the sense of consciousness, and the power of
motion” (12). But because of the way Mormon “miracles” are exposed as fraudulent
throughout the text, Maria’s claim only reveals her as, at best, credulous, and at worst,
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duplicitous. Unlike Northanger Abbey’s Catherine Morland, who learns to “consult
[her] own sense of the probable” and to stop reading the world as a gothic novel, Maria
can never fully reject gothic tropes because they come in so handy for her in other parts
of her story. After recounting one particularly weak miracle, Maria correctly notes the
reader’s growing irritation: “‘Did the people believe in this humbug?’ you inquire. ‘Do
they not all the world over believe in humbugs equally great? in relics and
enchantments?’ Some of them do” (144). In this moment, all credulity is called into
question -- the Mormons, Maria’s, and even the reader’s -- as a species of self-deceit.
The heroines of anti-polygamy novels are further limited in their ability to stand
as female exemplars for nationhood because they become “contaminated” by their
association with polygamy. As Kern explains, “the Gentile world considered plural
wives little better than prostitutes, and once separated from their husbands, they could
not expect to remarry and find support for their children” (189). The overwhelming
concern in anti-polygamy novels is that proximity to and/or participation in Mormon
polygamy exposes a character to what is characterized as a degenerative “disease,”
which ostensibly leaves men and women both physically and spiritually degraded. In
The Prophets, the heroine’s husband, Arthur Guilford changes physically after his
conversion to Mormonism and participation in polygamy, his face acquiring a “flushed,
bloated, sensual cast” (367). For heroines of anti-polygamy novels, there is no escaping
the “contamination” that comes with proximity to the Mormons. In Boadicea, the
heroine escapes after smashing a hidden bottle of rouge against her chest in a fake
suicide attempt. Although Boadicea eventually returns to the States, the broken glass
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that penetrates her skin and causes her to bleed will leave scars that will never fully fade
– marking her indelibly with the sign of polygamy. In Mormon Wives, however, the
repentant villain, Sarah, escapes from the Mormons and vows to dedicate her life to
others -- especially women. There may be no visible signs that Sarah has been
“contaminated” by the Mormons, however, so Sarah’s return to the east is perhaps an
even more frightening prospect: indistinguishable from the general population, Sarah
holds the capacity to “infect” non-Mormons by her contact.
The biggest clue that heroines of anti-polygamy novels become “contaminated”
in their association with polygamy is that anti-polygamy authors are unable to envision
any kind of Jane Eyre-esque idyllic endings that include a monogamous marriage and
procreation for the heroine. Gothic conventions only escalate in the ending of
Boadicea, for example, as Cephysia turns into a mad ghost. When Hubert fails to return
home one evening, Cephysia arrives in his place, requesting that Boadicea follow her to
find her husband. As they walk through the night, Cephysia’s figure begins to “assume
diabolic outlines and weird proportions” (74) before they finally arrive at a murder
scene, where a group of Mormons has just succeeded in strangling Hubert with a rope.
Just before Boadicea swoons over the body of her dead husband, she looks up and sees
Cephysia with a face full of “malignant and devilish satisfaction.” Before “tearing her
hair, howling, and wailing” and “bounding away” (75), Cephysia cries out that Hubert’s
death is only part of the vengeance she plans to wreak on Boadicea. Just a few pages
later, Cephysia poisons Boadicea’s son before bounding away again with a “loud cry of
maniacal exultation” (77). Indeed, despite her most vehement resistence, Boadicea’s
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contact with Mormonism seems to have “marked” her in such a way that she becomes
excluded from monogamy and procreation.
But perhaps the most gothic moment in the text is when Boadicea encounters
Cephysia in a cave on a moonlit night in the final pages of the novel. Dressed in male
clothing and ranting about fiends and Hubert’s ghost, Cephysia grows to a “gigantic
height” in the “pervading gloom” (90) from the perspective of Boadicea’s hiding place.
Suddenly, Cephysia darts from the cave and hangs herself, and when Boadicea finds
her, she can only loosen the rope from the neck of the swinging corpse. Boadicea’s
remark that the rope was “deeply imbedded in the skin of the poor woman’s throat”
(91), recalls the way that glass was imbedded in Boadicea’s own skin just a few pages
earlier, and further binds the characters as doppelgangers. Significantly, the male
clothes that Boadicea strips from the Cephysia’s corpse afford the heroine a disguise
and a means of escape in the end. After dressing in the man’s clothes, Boadicea soon
encounters a traveling party that seems to consist of a tall woman, an old man, and a
young boy and girl; she immediately sees through their disguises, however, and
realizes the tall woman is in fact a boy, and the old man is in fact a young, German
musician with whom she was acquainted. The party, which had disguised itself to
escape from the Mormons and was making its way to the States, invites Boadicea to
join them in a kind of carnivalesque moment that ends the novel. Disguise, here,
operates like another kind of contaminating mark, with the disguises of the novel’s
ending at once suggesting that Boadicea will forever be altered by her experience with
polygamy and also (perhaps unintentionally) that there might be a kind of liberation for
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the heroine after her experience in Utah, unbinding her from the constraints of
hegemonic ideals of feminine virtue.
Finally, heroines of anti-polygamy novels fail in their endeavor to serve as
national exemplars for female virtue because they are universally precluded from
exhibiting any kind of personal growth. The revolutionary potential of Jane Eyre, after
all, resides in its heroine’s growth into a woman who learns how to use her intellect and
freedom of choice to escape the clutches of bigamy and sculpt a monogamous
relationship based on mutual consent and equality. In contrast, the heroines of anti-
polygamy novels seem to sleepwalk through the plots in which they find themselves. In
Female Life, Maria truly seems “mesmerized” throughout the novel -- she may be one
of the least active characters to star in a novel since Catherine Morland slept through
most of Northanger Abbey. Despite her apparent understanding of the nefarious
schemes of the Mormons, Maria time and again fails to act to protect herself and her
friends. She advises a young woman named Emily to do nothing about Brigham
Young’s threat of a forced marriage, and Emily is soon captured and imprisoned. She
fails to warn another married woman about Joseph Smith’s plans for polygamy, and the
woman becomes his second wife and slave, forced to go shoeless in the cold to bring
home wood before finally going insane. She also fails to help Ellen, the girl who was
raped and impregnated by Smith, then forced to play dead for one of his “miracles.”
After Ellen confides to Maria that Joseph Smith is forcing her to marry a boorish,
repulsive, ignorant man who already has ten children, Maria does nothing, and shortly
thereafter Ellen’s body is found in a shallow pool not far from the Mormon camp.
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Unlike Catherine Morland, who finally wakes up and realizes that she is not (exactly)
the heroine of a gothic novel, Maria never fully emerges from her somnambulistic state.
Even in the end, when she finally decides to leave Salt Lake City because she fears for
her own safety, she merely packs up a bundle and walks out of town. She sleeps that
night in woods she describes in gothic terms, where “the loud, long howl of the wolf
mingled ominously with the panther’s scream and the solemn wail of the night-bird”
(447), but awakes the next morning to the sunshine and soon encounters a friendly
Indian, who takes her to his cottage where she meets, coincidentally, a former friend.
Maria’s escape from Mormonism is appropriately anti-climactic, because any traumatic
experience might suggest a kind of growth into self-awareness on the part of the
heroine. Instead, there is a stasis and a flatness about the heroines of anti-polygamy
novels which upsets many authorial attempts to cast them in opposition to the Mormon
“other” and arrests the heroines in a liminal space – somewhere between Utah and
idyllic Ferndean.
Self-other binaries in anti-polygamy novels are similarly blurred (as they are in
many gothic novels) by racial obfuscations. The imbricated discourses of slavery, race
and polygamy are particularly unsettling in the anti-polygamy novel. In Boadicea, for
example, the heroine watches the entire “harem” of “Bernard Yale” pass by her door in
a kind of pageant one day, and while all the women are characterized as “fallen” in one
way or another, they are also all characterized as having some unique claim to nobility.
The first is a tall blonde, who, although she is clearly a drunkard, also has an “angelic”
beauty, whose “glittering and cloud-like curls” are lifted by the wind “like a fairy silken
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banner on the wind” to display a “snowy throat” (42). Several women of the harem are
marked as ethnically “dark,” including one dejected-looking Indian woman. One of the
women, who combines “black lustrous hair with a white complexion, and large oriental
eyes,” also reveals a “noble contour” and “elegant form” (42). The ambiguous social
status of Bernard Yale’s wives unsettles the boundary that the anti-polygamy novel’s
heroine would like to establish between herself and them. Jane Eyre’s Bertha is a
prototype for the gothic novel’s blurring of such racial and sexual lines. As the Creole
daughter of a rich planter, Bertha’s ambiguous race and class unsettles boundaries
between herself and Jane. As Berman argues, Bertha’s ambiguous race/class status
allows her to function as Jane’s doppelganger, blurring not only domestic but also
national boundaries: “The generic Creole ought to mark the difference between English
and other, home and wilderness, salaried and enslaved – but, much like the governess-
turned-wife, she cannot” (287). Similarly, the ambiguities of race and class of the not-
quite-other polygamous wife in anti-polygamy novels prevent these female characters
from clearly enunciating the difference they are intended to embody.
The common trope of Mormon women as “white slaves” in anti-polygamy
novels further contributes to the ambiguous social position of (polygamous, ethnically
marked) Mormon women characters in relation to their (monogamous, white)
doppelgangers. The rhetorical connection with slavery allowed anti-polygamy
reformers to suggest via politically freighted images of bondage the threat that
polygamy posed to marriage and the state. As Nancy Bentley argues, “the most
compelling proof of the barbarism of both slavery and polygamy was the brutal
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indifference both showed to marriage as the sanctification of a woman’s powers of
sexual consent” (346). Figurative connections between polygamy and female slavery
were enormously effective in anti-polygamy fiction. As historian Amy Dru Stanley
suggests, there was no more politically loaded image than the “scourged body of the
bondswoman” (27). In Female Life, the narrator explains that while a few Mormons
own slaves, most don’t hire servants because “generally speaking when one wife is
insufficient to perform the labor, another is taken, perhaps a third, or fourth, and so on”
(321). Furthermore, the narrator claims, a father’s consent is always necessary for the
marriage of a daughter “even though that daughter was a widow and a mother” (321),
and daughters were often sold to the highest bidder, “as if the object for sale was a
horse, and the contracting parties two regular jockeys” (322). Female Life also relies
heavily on gothic imagery of the scourged bondswoman in order to connect polygamy
and slavery, at one point describing the way in which a woman who dared breathe a
word of unhappiness about her marriage to an outsider was kidnapped, “scourged till
the blood ran from her wounds to the ground,” and left overnight (Ward 429). Another
character had “her mouth and tongue seared with a red-hot iron, though they refused to
inform her in what she had offended, and she could remember nothing” (Ward 429).
In addition to rhetorically linking polygamy with slavery, the construction of
Mormon women as “white slaves” also troubles the racial codes that signify social
status. When white women become slaves, “white” no longer quite codes for “free,”
and the entire system of racial binaries begins to break down. As Justin Edwards
writes, “the politics of American racial hierarchies stipulate an order that can be visually
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decoded through a set of signs. Breakdowns in the language of race, like those that
arise out of the rhetoric of passing, bring into relief the inauthenticity of ‘authentic’
identity. This engenders the contingency at the heart of identity that produces, in the
dominant culture, endless attempts to naturalize its own position by positing the
inauthenticity, or secondariness of what it will construe as its others” (xxxii). But the
socially ambiguous Mormon “others” cannot be construed unproblematically as
secondary, because they are too much like the hegemonic, white Protestant imagined
national identity.
What’s more, the construction of the miscegenation threat in anti-polygamy
novels reveals the anxiety that (white) men will take advantage of the lawless
atmosphere of the frontier and begin family alliances which might “damage” national
interests – racially and socially. Rochester’s relationship with Bertha in Jane Eyre
certainly points to this concern in the British context of the West Indies, where all black
and mulatto women were considered to be “common prostitutes” infected with venereal
disease.
14
The perceived threat was especially acute within the context of Mormonism
because of Brigham Young’s stated intention to settle followers among the Indian tribes
of Utah in order to transform them into a “white and delightsome people” as well as the
Book of Mormon’s theory of race. According to the Book of Mormon, America was
populated in ancient times by the fair-skinned and virtuous Nephites and the dark-
skinned and conniving Lamanites (direct ancestors of our Indians). In the story, the
resurrected Jesus manifested himself to these peoples in America, so they became
Christians, but then the Lamanites forgot their heritage and massacred the Nephites,
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including their leader Mormon. According to the scripture, Mormon’s son, Moroni,
survived to record the event on the golden plates, and Moroni reappeared as an angel
hundreds of years later and gave the plates to Joseph Smith (Bloom 86-7).
Miscegenation with Native Americans is a commonplace of anti-polygamy literature,
fueling anxieties regarding racial mixings on the frontier.
In Female Life, a polygamist named Weldy takes two Indians (not to mention
two sisters) among his 14 wives. When Weldy leaves on an extended gold mining trip
to California, one of the more tyrannical “white” wives, Hetty, treats the others as
slaves, which causes even more brutality than is the norm in the chaotic family:
“[b]lows were not infrequently exchanged, hair flew by the handfuls, and many a face
was bruised and battered till it bore little resemblance to the human countenance” (410,
my emphasis). The bruising and battering of the women’s faces produces a kind of
“blackening” that again conflates the discourses of polygamy, slavery, and
miscegenation. Similarly, Jane Eyre’s Bertha has been “blackened,” and when Jane
sees Bertha’s face in her mirror, she writes: “it was a discoloured face. It was a savage
face. I wish I could forget the roll of the red eyes and the fearful blackened inflation of
the lineaments” (Brontë 311, my emphasis). Just as Bertha, the polygamous women
and their progeny are the victims of a nefarious, anti-social action that has caused them
to be marked or stained in some way. The “blackening” of faces and concomitant
savagery in the Weldy household attests to the complex way that images of slavery and
miscegenation were linked rhetorically with polygamy in order to ethnically mark and
distance the Mormons as “other.”
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Furthermore, as Hetty’s tyranny becomes unbearable and particularly unjust, the
Indian wives poison the entire household with a special herb, causing the entire family
to “hoot, halloo, tear their garments, break dishes, and act all sorts of imaginable freaks”
(413). As the Indian women’s acts turn the family members into (gothic) zombies, the
narrative draws on the gothic tropes of insanity, wandering, and unending nightmares to
describe the result:
There is something in lunacy that, in all cases, inclines the patient to wander.
Sleep, good natural balmy sleep, they never know. Physical fatigue and
exhaustion may, after a time, induce a state resembling repose, though having
little of its influence, and producing less of its effects. The inflamed and heated
brain must still act and think – dreams, even more horrible than waking fancy
could produce, torture the restless victims, the most terrible of nightmares
haunts and torments them, and death were a thousand times preferable to a life
of such agony. (413)

The “blackened” and lunatic faces of the Weldy family, then, serve as figures for the
terror of miscegenation, polygamy, slavery, and the absence of female consent in
marriage on the frontier. Invoking gothic tropes such as madness and waking
nightmares, anti-polygamy texts reach to outrageous lengths to reify the Mormon
“difference,” while all the time gothic tropes are also working to unsettle that
difference.
One unintended consequence of the overzealous use of gothic conventions, for
example, is the way in which the Weldy episode recalls a kind of slave revolt run amok:
most of the family members ultimately die, and the Indian women are unceremoniously
hung “without mercy and without regret” (415). The chaos and destruction of the slave
revolt played on readerly anxieties regarding the “crime” of slavery. Significantly, Jane
Eyre’s Bertha represents a crime (of miscegenation and marriage) that is hidden at
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Thornfield, a crime that leads to its destruction in fire: “What crime was this, that lived
incarnate in this sequestered mansion. . . ? – What mystery, that broke out, now in fire
and now in blood at the deadest hours of night?” (Brontë, Jane Eyre 239). Similarly,
the Weldy “slave revolt” may also be seen as a mirror and condemnation of the crime of
slavery in the South – a crime that threatened the destruction of the nation. The Weldy
incident also echoes the 1853 Walker War, in which Ute Indian leader Wakara led a
series of raids on Mormon settlements after the Mormons had encroached on Ute land
and disrupted Wakara’s revenue source via the Mexican slave trade (Powell 615). The
Walker War was just one example of what was happening all across the territories in the
1840s and 1850s, as the United States began to allow settlers to encroach on Indian
lands, leading to Indian wars across the Great Plains for the first time in 40 years (White
90-94). The Weldy episode exemplifies the process of literary haunting by Native
American figures, with the Mormon Weldy functioning as a representative of the
avaricious American settler/imperialist: even though he returns from his gold mining
trip to find his house a gothic ruin, he declares that his newfound gold riches will enable
him to simply purchase more wives and begin again. The family members, meanwhile,
suffer for his sins. Some become ghost-like by running off into the woods, where they
“haunted the dens and caverns of the mountains.” Others are spectralized by becoming
the prey of wild beasts -- their “bleaching skeletons” found later by hunters (415).
These gothic, ghostly mementos remain for future generations to consider, suggesting
the way in which polygamy, slavery, and American policies of Indian removal are all
linked as sins that will haunt the nation.
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Finally, the ambiguous position of the hero himself in anti-polygamy literature
similarly unsettles lines between self and other that the literature is trying to construct.
The mysterious leading man is a commonplace of the gothic novel, and is exemplified
best, perhaps, by Jane Eyre’s Rochester. As Eugenia DeLamotte explains: “If women’s
[g]othic romance before Charlotte Brontë suspected that the hero who offered rescue
and marriage was in some way the same villain who threatened to trap the heroine in his
house forever, Charlotte Brontë’s representation of Rochester as both hero and villain,
egress and entrapment, brings that hidden identity to the surface” (211). In Boadicea,
the novel opens with a tableau of beautiful young lovers, Hubert and Boadicea, standing
apart from a Mormon crowd in “Deseret” and observing a Mormon religious ceremony.
Despite Hubert’s initial, passionate vows of monogamy to Boadicea, the promiscuous
environment of Deseret encourages Hubert to act on the desires of his wandering eye,
and he soon embraces Mormonism and takes a second wife, Cephysia. Hubert is never
fully repudiated because Boadicea never fails in her love for him, and she takes him
back without reproach when he repents and leaves Cephysia. Shortly after Hubert and
Boadicea’s reunion, however, Mormons murder Hubert and Boadicea swoons over his
dead body, declaring he was her “dearest being on earth” (74). Hubert, then, is neither
entirely gothic hero nor villain, and this ambiguous status allows him to both express
and exorcise American desires and fears regarding its own imperialist project in the
West.
Hubert’s fall is clearly tied to a “darkly” passionate and inconstant nature -- he is
described as having “a pair of large black eyes, the burning brilliancy of which he
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appeared to be making a constant effort to subdue” (15, my emphasis). What’s more,
his mouth is described as “at times repulsive, but generally [having] an expression of
sweetness and reflection” (16). Most significantly, Hubert’s moods are described as
“savage” and give Boadicea “an actual palpitation of the heart” (25). In addition to his
ambiguous status as a gothic hero/villain, then, Hubert’s racial status is also ambiguous
– likening him again to a kind of Rochester figure, whose dark ethnicity may be gleaned
from Brontë’s descriptions of his “dark face,” “heavy brow,” “broad and jetty
eyebrows,” “sweep of . . . black hair,” and “full nostrils” (Brontë 145, 151). For
Mitchie, Rochester’s ambiguous racial status aligns him with contemporary British
constructions of the Irish, whose status (in Bhabha’s terms) as “not quite/not white” was
unsettling for the British as colonizers (Mitchie 586). The mixed ethnicity of gothic
villain/heroes such as Hubert and Rochester allow for both the repudiation and
fetishization of certain of their characteristics.
Rochester is characterized as an “oriental despot,” for example, not only because
he is racially described as a “Paynim, an emir, a sultan, a bashaw, and the Grand Turk,”
but also because, as Mitchie argues, when he returns to England, he “enacts the role of
tyrant by assuming a semi-godlike status, taking the law into his own hands, and
delighting in mastery to the point almost of torture” (Mitchie 590). The oriental despot
articulates a variety of colonial fears and desires regarding mastery and accumulation,
but as Mitchie explains, “by projecting those desires out onto a stereotypical image of
otherness, the West could at one and the same time fantasize them as fully exorcised
(there is no limit to the despot’s power) and criticize them (the despot is evil and must
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fall” (591). In Boadicea, the heroine quickly sees Hubert’s tyrannical nature, noting
that “while seeming to consult my wishes, he usually obtained his own will” (25).
Hubert’s characterization as a dark despot and also as a gothic hero/villain establishes
his characterization as a “not-quite-Other” (in Givens’s terms); like Rochester, there is
something desirable to the heroine in her hero despite his failure of virtue. One might
say that Hubert’s tyrannical nature expresses American fantasies of authoritarianism
(especially in the West) while at the same time, his ethnic marking allows for criticism
of that very desire.
To conclude, now, with some formal concerns: many of the gothic moments in
anti-polygamy novels are moments of intertextuality, moments that point us to other
gothic texts. In Boadicea, for example, Cephysia appears to Boadicea to be similar to
the female devil in one of her German paintings. And in Mormon Wives, the temptress
Sarah gallops off on a black pony in a fit of passion, prompting the narrator to comment
that if “James could have seen her in that declining winter light, he would thereafter
have written eternally about one young horsewoman riding down upon the beach,
instead of two horsemen riding over a hill -- if indeed he did not mistake her for an
apparition, and write about a spirit upon a bewitched steed” (89). Because of this
intertextuality, the texts themselves become “marked” as belonging to the gothic genre,
which formalizes the very kinds of contamination their authors are ostensibly attacking.
In Mormon Wives, the narrator explains that Sarah has had her “youthful passions”
corrupted by female pro-polygamy writers, from whom she got the notion that she
might wed her best friend’s husband, Richard, with whom she is madly in love. The
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narrator is particularly incensed that Sarah got these ideas from women writers, who,
she claims, have seduced Sarah: “If it were only men who did this wretched work, it
would be sad enough; but when women turn tempters! It fills one with a shuddering
horror, as when the witch [Geraldine] took the innocent Christabel into her arms and
against her bosom” (141). Ironically, Coleridge’s gothic fragment, “Christabel,”
thematizes the seductiveness and contaminating properties of the gothic mode. The
narrator’s use of gothic allusion in Boadicea illustrates the way in which a gothic trope
can “contaminate” a work at the moment in which the text is attempting to advertise its
purity, so that the horrors of anti-polygamy novels actually become seductive, like the
“horrifying” Geraldine.
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CHAPTER TWO ENDNOTES

1
See Sarah Gordon Barringer, “‘Our National Hearthstone’: Anti-Polygamy
Fiction and the Sentimental Campaign against Moral Diversity in Antebellum America”
(Quoted in Bentley, 344).

2
Richard Van Wagoner argues that 20-40 percent of Mormon families were
polygamous. Louis Kern’s number is a bit lower -- 15 to 20 percent; he also notes that
of the polygamous marriages, as many as two-thirds included only two wives and less
than five percent included five or more wives (171). A significant demographic study
by Stanley Ivins suggested that only seven to 12 percent of Mormon families practiced
polygamy. Finally, Leonard J. Arrington and Davis Bitton claim that no more than five
percent of Mormon marriages were ever polygamous (199). As Hardy notes, it’s
difficult to separate polygamy from the complex matrix of Mormon theology and
culture: “Mormon polygamy naturally resists thematic confinement. Because it is
descended from man’s long and affluent interest in family, sex, and religion, the Saints
drank from ancient springs. It is so branching and tantalizing in its implications that
boundaries are difficult to draw” (Hardy xix).

3
Although technically the Mormons practiced “polygyny,” which is defined as
the marriage of one man to multiple women, most scholars and laymen use the term
“polygamy” to describe the Mormon practice. The term “Mormon” is the informal
name for the members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

4
British colonies were a staple setting of gothic fiction since the 1790s, when
British gothic writers began to realize that “Britain’s growing empire could prove a vast
source of frightening ‘others’ who would, as replacements for the villainous Italian
antiheroes in Walpole or Radcliffe, bring freshness and variety to the genre”
(Paravisini-Gebert 229).

5
Barringer, 339 (Quoted in Bentley, 344).

6
As Richard White notes, “the quarrel between North and South, it must be
stressed, was over the expansion of slavery, not over its existence” (158).

7
Slavery and the slave trade existed in the Utah Territory (sanctioned in 1852),
but it was not an overwhelming presence – the majority of the 50 black slaves in Utah
worked on small farms throughout the territory (Powell 2). As Ken Verdoia and
Richard Firmage write, “[s]ome converts from southern states paid their religious
offerings or tithes to the Mormon church in the form of slaves, with Brigham Young
releasing the slaves from indentured service to take paying positions in his household or
the community” (37).

8
Vilification of the Mormons in these novels (and in the many anti-polygamy
novels that followed throughout the remainder of the century) participates in a process
that Edward Said has called cultural “self-confirmation” – the differentiation of the
cultural “self” from a culture it constructs as “other” (Givens 4). Cultural self-
confirmation often circulates via discourses about race and ethnicity. As Givens has
shown, anti-polygamy literature constructs Mormons as ethnically marked in order to
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imaginatively distance them from the mainstream white population, thereby
constructing and policing American identity.

9
As Justin Edwards argues, texts such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Narrative of
A. Gordon Pym as well as Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson and Herman Melville’s
Benito Cereno all use gothic conventions to express anxiety regarding the breakdown of
signs coding for race and social status, which trouble the binaries that establish the
supremacy/purity of “whiteness.”

10
The use of gothic conventions in mid-nineteenth-century American literature
is similar to the use of the gothic in the British context 50 years earlier, in which
Lizbeth Paravisini-Gebert explains: “the frightening colonial presence that we find in
such English literary texts as Smith’s ‘The Story of Henrietta’ (1800), Maria
Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801) and ‘The Grateful Negro’ (1804), or Thomas Campbell’s
depiction of African barbarity in The Pleasure of Hope (1799) mirrors a growing fear in
British society around 1800 of the consequences of the nation’s exposure to colonial
societies, nonwhite races, non-Christian belief systems, and the moral evils of slavery”
(229-30).

11
As Eugenia DeLamotte explains, “Women’s [g]othic in general speaks for
women’s feelings of vulnerability in a world where their only power was the power of
‘influence’” (151). Furthermore, as DeLamotte notes, the theme of female suffering at
the hands of oppressive, outdated feudal and monastic institutions is really a disguise
for contemporary female suffering (151-52).

12
As Berman argues, the figure of Bertha is the proper counterpart to Jane not
because she serves as Jane’s psychological “dark double,” as Sandra Gilbert and Susan
Gubar have suggested, but rather because the mad Creole’s ambiguous social position
serves as a doppelganger for the ambiguous social position of the governess.
Governesses were so unsettling for middle-class ladies, as Berman explains, because
their manners and education either matched or exceeded those of the lady of the house.
As one of Rochester’s fancy guests, Lady Ingram, complains, “My dearest, don’t
mention governesses; the word makes me nervous” (Brontë, Jane Eyre 206).
Significantly, English governesses were charged with promoting and policing English
cultural identity while at the same time they were excluded from the upper class that
self-identified as the pinnacle of that identity.

13
See Karen Swann.

14
In Edward Long’s widely read 1774 History of Jamaica, he writes that
“intemperance and sensuality are the fatal instruments which, in this island, have
committed such havoc, and sent their heedless voluntaries, in the prime of manhood, to
an untimely grave” (Quoted in Berman 274). For Long, the alleged venereal diseases of
black and mulatto women “both elaborates and masks political concern that such
‘amours’ might produce sentimental and familial alliances endangering British
interests” (Berman 275).

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CHAPTER THREE
CHASING RAMONA
When the title character of Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona is a ten-year-old
orphan, she gathers the courage to ask her unfriendly adoptive aunt, Señora Moreno,
about her dead parents. The cruel Señora Moreno not only refuses to tell Ramona about
her family history but also rebukes her for asking such “troublesome” questions. For
the next nine years, Ramona and Señora Moreno maintain a vigilant silence about
Ramona’s parentage, even though, as the narrator explains, “[t]here were few mornings
on which the girl did not think, ‘Perhaps it will be to-day that she will tell me’”
(Ramona 33). This is a familiar motif to readers of gothic novels: the orphan heroine is
denied access to knowledge of her own family ancestry by a malefactor(ess) driven by
greed or jealousy. To the psychological critic, the orphan’s personal history often
stands for a kind of “inner” psychological identity, and the villain providing an obstacle
represents the heroine’s own repressed fears; thus, the heroine’s harrowing trials come
to stand for a journey into the depths of one’s own desires and paranoia. As I have been
discussing in this dissertation, however, this particular gothic convention, in which the
heroine is blocked from some crucial bit of information regarding her own history, can
be schematized spatially, so that the blockage creates a division between two parallel
spaces instead of according to the typical pyschological divisions, outer/inner. In
Ramona’s case, for example, the knowledge of Ramona’s parentage creates a kind of
dividing wall between the heroine and her taciturn adoptive aunt, such that Ramona and
her aunt may be seen to occupy separate spheres. The gothic threat that surrounds these
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divided spaces, then, becomes the threat of breaching this partition by sharing
information, or speaking; hence, Sedgwick’s term for this common gothic structure of
divided space, “unspeakability.” In this chapter, I would like to extend Sedgwick’s
theoretical point to show how unspeakability in gothic novels can reveal not only
authorial anxiety about a text’s subject matter but also cultural desire for markers of
coherence and legitimacy; moreover, in this particular gothic novel, the heroine herself
becomes a signifier, and the “unspeakable” relationships she bears negotiate a
sometimes incoherent set of ideological agendas.
Set in the complex cultural mélange of late nineteenth-century California,
Ramona is both based on and also participates in a complicated geopolitical situation.
California’s multiplex cultural matrix in the late-nineteenth century included
Californios, who considered themselves descendents of the region’s eighteenth-century
Spanish colonial regime. These elite Mexicans watched as the borders of their large
ranchos were chipped away in the new American courts of law after the Treaty of
Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848. The region’s indigenous Native American population,
meanwhile, was similarly rendered helpless as its tribal lands were being encroached
upon by American settlers. While Jackson’s purpose in the novel was to raise
consciousness about the plight of California’s Native Americans, the text alternately
romanticizes, reifies, stereotypes and (only occasionally) liberates cultural attitudes
about the complex interaction of cultures in the region. In the novel, the half-
Indian/half-white heroine, Ramona, remains ignorant of her racial heritage until she
falls in love and elopes with a Native American man, Alessandro Assis. The novel
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traces the plight of Ramona and Alessandro as they flee not only from the persecution
of Anglo-Americans encroaching on Indian lands but also from the (imagined) pursuit
of Ramona’s adoptive, Californio family, which never condoned her marriage to an
Indian.
Measuring the success of Jackson’s plan to influence federal policy regarding
the treatment of Native Americans with her novel Ramona is a bit complicated. While
the novel was an instant best-seller and certainly woke the nation to its own guilt over
Indian dispossession, it also helped inspire the disastrous Dawes Severalty Act (1887),
which broke up tribal ownership of Native American land and encouraged
encroachment by white settlers. Furthermore, as many critics have shown, Ramona
participates in Anglo-American hegemony not only because nostalgic representations of
contemporary cultural struggles produced a sense of futility about the region’s
problems, but also because Ramona is rife with prejudicial attitudes about racial
hierarchies. As Anne Goldman has argued, Jackson’s characterization of the legacy of
conquest as inevitable, as well as her aestheticization of violence, affirm Anglo-
American readers’ sense of entitlement to the land. And as Margaret Jacobs has argued,
the novel affirms elitist constructions of whiteness in which social mobility is granted to
Indians and to people of Northern European and Indian descent, such as Ramona, who,
the novel suggests, “can become White through changes in environment and education”
(Jacobs 220). In excluding Californios and mestizos from constructions of whiteness,
Jacobs argues, Jackson’s text fails to overcome the ethnocentrism of the white
Protestant culture of which the author is a member. On the other side of the coin, John
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Gonzalez has argued that Jackson’s text is subversive because it upsets a narrative of
Native American assimilation, and David Luis-Brown has suggested that Jackson’s own
construction of whiteness in the novel is undermined by a series of shadow-plots that
propose cross-racial alliances. Finally, Robert McKee Irwin makes the very important
point that Ramona should be considered as a border text, arguing that it should be read
within a larger cultural context than the geographical limits of the United States can
supply.
It is my contention that some of this critical disagreement about the text can be
resolved by attending to the novel’s gothic form. One thing I want to show in this
chapter is that moments of gothic unspeakability in the text keep pointing up the
difficulty of addressing the issues Jackson is trying to confront, including dispossession,
genocide, and interracial marriage on the frontier. My aim here is not to resurrect the
reputation of a text, but rather to show the way the author’s use of gothic conventions
produces an effect in which the text itself strains against its own material. What’s more,
I will show that moments of unspeakability in the text also reveal the way the novel’s
characters each strives to possess a marker of cultural legitimacy – and that marker is
Ramona. As I have outlined above, gothic unspeakability comprises conditions in
which selves or other entities -- including opposing cultural groups -- are divided in
such a way that unification with the “other” becomes threatening.
1
In Ramona, as in
many other gothic novels, “unspeakable” moments most often center on the threat of the
heroine’s escape; however, in Ramona, the heroine’s escape from multitudinous
antagonists takes on a pointedly racial and cultural dimension. Although Ramona is a
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half-Indian, half-white, Catholic mestiza, she is constructed as an idealized symbol of
Anglo-American Protestant femininity. I suggest that Ramona functions as a marker of
Anglo-American hegemony throughout the text, as a talisman desired by Anglo-
American, Native American and Californio alike. The desire for Ramona does not
necessarily indicate a desire for whiteness, but rather, possession of Ramona-as-
talisman provides a (specious) sense of legitimacy in the contested region. As Ramona
makes her journey across Alta California, her geographic locations and cultural
alliances cause divisions between those who “possess” her and those who do not. I am
characterizing these divisions as “unspeakable” situations because they are marked by
the specific threat that Ramona (or knowledge of Ramona) will be shared. Ultimately, I
will show via an analysis of unspeakable moments in the novel that Ramona is the
marker of Anglo-American entitlement that each culture needs in order to survive
dispossession.
And the historical and geopolitical moment in which Ramona was written
contained pointed struggles against dispossession, particularly by the Native American
population of California. Inspired by a public reception in 1879 for Ponca Chief
Standing Bear, whose tribe was being forcibly removed from the Dakota Territory for
the Indian Territory, the already popular Jackson quickly became an activist on behalf
of Native Americans facing dispossession. While Jackson had never evinced any
interest in Native American causes up to this date, her interest in the Ponca’s plight
dovetailed with a theme she had been cultivating in her travel writings for years: the
idea that the “rapacious advance of American civilization” was detrimental not only to
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the landscape but also to local populations (Phillips 223). In 1881, after spending
months at New York’s Astor Library researching federal treaties with Native
Americans, Jackson published A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United States
Government’s Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes (1881), a didactic collection of
data showing U.S. disregard for its treaties with Native Americans.
Century of Dishonor’s dismal sales figures articulated the difficulty of broaching
the subject of Native American dispossession with an American readership that was
unsympathetic to the plight of Indians. Even though Jackson gave a copy to every
congressman at her own expense, she soon saw that the book was failing to stir hearts
and minds to Native American causes: “I confess I am greatly disheartened, by the
entire failure of my book. It has not sold 2,000 copies, outside of those I bought
myself,” she wrote to Amelia Stone Quinton. “Even my own audience, on whom I can
count with certainty for at least 4,000 or 5,000, for any book I publish, refuse to buy
even a book of mine, simply because it is about Indians.”
2
Jackson’s solution – to make
her political message more enticing to Anglo-American readers – was Ramona. “What
I wanted to do,” Jackson told the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, “was to draw a picture
so winning and alluring in the beginning of the story, that the reader would become
thoroughly interested in the characters before he dreamed of what was before him: --
and would have swallowed a big dose of information on the Indian question, without
knowing it.”
3
While Jackson indeed “sugared [her] pill” with Ramona, it is also
important to note the way in which Jackson felt the impossibility of speaking directly
about the topics she was broaching, and this difficulty may have been what led her to
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her use of gothic conventions, and in particular, to the construction of unspeakability.
4

The very form of the novel and the themes encompassed therein, moreover, mirror the
difficulty with which the text itself is written.
Before turning to the plight of the heroine and showing the way she becomes a
(blank) marker of legitimacy in the contested region, I want to elucidate the way the text
strains to tell the story of its Native American subjects. The novel has been much
criticized for its naïve portrayal of the Franciscan mission system, where forced labor
and disease on the string of 21 missions caused the Indian population to dwindle from
72,000 to 18,000 in the eighteenth century (White 33). Mission Indians were supposed
to receive some mission lands after Mexico’s Secularization Act in 1823, but most fled
to the interior as Californios showed little intention of allowing them to become
landowners.
5
Under the Americans, the Indians simply traded one form of servitude for
another -- California Superintendent Edward Fitzgerlad Beale’s “reservation sytem”
consisted of a series of military posts that did little to improve the Indians’ experience
of violence and subjection. The military system waned by the end of the 1860s, leaving
Indians in California to fend for themselves against violent and antagonistic settlers and
an apathetic government. During Jackson’s visits to Southern California for her travel
essays, the author met both Indian and Hispanic residents who (she reports) insisted that
life had been far better for the Indians under Spanish rule (Phillips 245). Kate Phillips
surmises that the influence of Jackson’s evangelical father made her predisposed to
respect the spiritual dedication of the Franciscans (245).
6
While Jackson’s praise of the
mission system is misplaced, attention to the gothic unspeakability that surrounds the
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novel’s imagining of Native Americans reveals the novel’s characterization of Native
American stories as difficult to tell.
Alessandro and Ramona discuss the Mission system on their way to the San
Diego mission to be married. Significantly, although the discussion takes place on the
mesa in daylight, the hero and heroine have retreated to a secluded, wooded spot,
suggestive of gothic mystery and darkness. As the couple looks out over the harbor,
Alessandro tells Ramona the story of Father Payri’s departure from the San Luis Rey
Mission after its destruction by Americans. Alessandro’s story marks itself self-
consciously as narrative because it’s a story handed down by his father, Chief Pablo.
As the story goes, Father Payri was so beloved by the mission Indians that he had to
steal away in the middle of the night so the Indians wouldn’t follow him. As
Alessandro and Ramona look out upon the very harbor where Father Payri boarded a
ship to sail away, Alessandro recounts the story of Payri’s dramatic escape: just as
Father Payri is about to board a ship, hundreds of Indians come galloping to the water’s
edge to mourn his departure by wailing and flinging themselves into the sea. Chief
Pablo is struck “dumb and deaf and with no head” (230) at Father Payri’s departure, and
his inability to speak produces a gothic unspeakability around the event, which
underscores Alessandro’s re-telling of the story in a (significantly) secluded grove: this
story (of Father Payri and the mission system in general) is a story which is difficult to
tell.
Just after the story about the good Father Payri, Alessandro tells Ramona about
one mission Indian who became an overseer at San Gabriel. Jackson seems unwilling
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to address the issue of mission brutality by white priests, so she shifts the focus to the
Indians themselves, and the episode clearly draws on the systematic horror of
antebellum black slave overseers being forced to subjugate and brutalize their own
people. As the story goes, when the San Gabriel Indians ran away, the Indian overseer
tracked them down and cut off pieces of their ears. Then he returned to the mission and
strung them on a string and laughed. Again, the story is marked by a sense of the
difficulty of storytelling as Ramona and Alessandro immediately debate the veracity of
the story. Oddly, Alessandro believes the story because, he says, an old Indian woman
told it to him and “laughed when she told it” -- Alessandro says, “she said it was a joke;
so I think it was true” (231). Alessandro understands the way truths must be expressed
as jokes for those who are forced to live behind what W.E.B. Du Bois would later call
“the veil.” Du Bois’s description of the metaphorical “veil” that the African American
subject wears in the United States is an apt description of the struggle facing Native
American characters in Ramona.
7
DuBois’s idea of a “double-consciousness” is
similar to the idea of gothic unspeakability – the African American or Native American
subject is divided, both psychologically and culturally, and the main thrust of energy in
a gothic novel containing these subjectivities is the threat that these dividing walls
might be sundered.
8
Ramona’s “relief” that she doesn’t have to believe the story further
emphasizes her status as a symbol of Anglo-American hegemony: white audiences do
not want to believe the horror of stories from behind the veil.
Joking is a survival mechanism for speaking in an unspeakable world, and
Alessandro’s inability to joke, to resist through speech, or to “Signify” (as Henry Louis
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Gates might call it), proves to be his undoing. Although Jackson condemned
unscrupulous whites who stole Indian lands, she does not grant her Native American
hero with the power to “speak” about these horrific episodes. Jackson heard first-hand
accounts of the illegal eviction of Indians from Temecula in 1875. In fictionalizing this
horrific event, however, Jackson fails to supply her Native American characters the
power of speech – a skill that would provide some bit of redemption, if only in literary
form.
9
Alessandro stutters as he tells Ramona the story of the American takeover of
Temecula, time and again stopping speechless as he considers the horror of the events:
“Oh, Senorita,” he says, “don’t ask me to tell you any more! It is like death. I can’t”
(Ramona 178). Alessandro then tells the story of José and Carmena and their baby,
who are unjustly evicted by American squatters at Temecula. José goes insane at the
injustice and both he and the baby die, after which Carmena refuses to speak ever again.
The emphasis on speechlessness at the Temecula tragedy reveals the gothic
unspeakability of the episode – those who live behind the veil are unable to speak of the
horror of their experience.
The way characters navigate the trappings of their own gothic surroundings can
suggest the degree to which an author is able to envision strategies of resistance for
those characters. In Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), for example, Cassy rescues
herself from the bonds of concubinage on Legree’s gothic plantation because of her
ability to read and understand the conventions of the gothic novel. By making Legree
believe the attic is haunted, Cassy establishes a safe haven in which she and Emmeline
can hide and effect their escape. As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have noted, in her
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actions, Cassy is “manipulating a familiar fiction” (534) -- by understanding and
manipulating the generic conventions that bind her, Cassy is able to resist and break
free from her oppressor. In Ramona, Jackson fails to envision a similar strategy by
which Native Americans might find a method of resistance – albeit “merely” literary.
Alessandro is born with eyes that “look ever on woe” (311), and he is unable to read
and revise the literary conventions and cultural constructions that bind him. Unlike
Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man narrator, who decides there are advantages to being
invisible and learns to survive by living with his “head in the lion’s mouth” (16),
Alessandro keeps packing their bags and moving with Ramona to more and more
remote locations, aware all the while that there is really nowhere to run. As Alessandro
and Ramona flee to ever more remote locations from the encroaching and dangerous
Americans, Alessandro’s inability to speak of the injustices perpetrated against him
makes him go insane: “Speech, complaint, active antagonism, might have saved him;
but all these were foreign to his self-contained, reticent, repressed nature” (312).
All of this gothic unspeakability is mirrored in the narrative structure itself,
which struggles to get its story told and suggests the way the text strains against its
material. As one example of this narrative stuttering, the episode of Alessandro’s
murder is related in a kind of series of stumble steps. In the first telling, the murder
episode is related from Ramona’s perspective. Standing on the threshold of her house
in a remote mountain canyon, Ramona watches as Alessandro is shot by an American,
Jim Farrar, who has falsely accused him of stealing his horse. That Ramona is standing
on a threshold is significant – she’s standing at the interface between two worlds that
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will meet in violence: Anglo and Native American. A few pages later we are told the
story again, but this time it’s Farrar testifying before a judge his (false) version of the
story: that Alessandro had wielded a knife and Farrar shot in self-defense. In the third
version of the story, we get the truth that only Farrar knows—that Alessandro had no
gun and that his only words were, “Señor, I will explain” (344). Even as Alessandro
was being shot, he was trying to speak, to explain the mistake, but he was (fatally)
prevented from articulation, further emphasizing the impossibility for Native Americans
of speaking in a world that is trying to kill them. In short, with respect to Native
American figures in the novel, both the content and the form of the text reveal a gothic
unspeakablity that points to the difficulties and dangers of confronting removal and
genocide.
Turning more specifically, now, to the plight of the heroine, the unspeakability
that surrounds Ramona is figured via the familiar gothic motif of missing letters and
tattered manuscripts, as the very illegibility of these documents establishes a material
barrier between the heroine and the knowledge she seeks. Many a lost gothic heroine
has held in her hands a paper clue that she’s frustratingly unable to read. Ellena in
Radcliffe’s The Italian, for example, strains in the darkness of her cell in San Stefano to
make out the instructions Vivaldi has sent her regarding her escape: “A thousand times
she turned about the eventful paper, endeavored to trace the lines with her fingers, and
to guess their import, thus enveloped in a mystery” (The Italian 132). Along these
lines, the key to Ramona’s identity resides in a letter that is “unreadable” because it has
been secreted away for years. Ramona’s letter, from her adoptive mother and
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namesake, Ramona Gonzaga, has been locked in a secret safe by Señora Moreno, and
the moments leading up to its revelation comprise a familiar set-piece of a gothic novel
– the threat of imprisonment that is co-terminus with the threat that the heroine’s
identity will be revealed. After Ramona threatens to elope with Alessandro, the heroine
is dragged into Señora Moreno’s bedroom, where the gothic villainness moves a heavy
statue to reveal a secret passageway. Ramona (apparently a good reader of gothic
novels) feels “inexplicable terror” at the prospect of being locked in the closet and
starved to death. Instead of imprisoning her, however, Señora Moreno reads Ramona
the letter, which discloses information about Ramona’s inheritance, but—in the
tradition of gothic letters—fails to reveal the identity of a biological mother. This
failure of the letter, this sense that something lacking in the letter blocks Ramona from a
truth to which she ought to have access, is an example of gothic unspeakability because
Ramona is divided from the truth about her history by some obstacle (the failure of the
letter). What’s more, the tension and power of this gothic moment derive from the
threat that this metaphorical dividing wall will be breached and that Ramona will
someday learn about her mother. In terms of unspeakability, the incomplete letter
serves two functions: first, it thematizes the difficulty of telling stories at all, and
especially this story of dispossession and interracial desire. Second, this incomplete
letter serves as a means for Señora Moreno to police her own cultural identity and to
legitimize her claims to entitlement as a member of the Californio culture.
Californios occupied a tenuous position in Alta California and a complicated
relation to Mexico in the late-nineteenth century. Claiming elite social status as
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descendants of the original Spanish colonists in Alta California, Californios began to be
overrun by Yankee merchants after the Mexican Revolution in 1821 produced a new
Mexican government that opened the region’s border to trade. As a British resident of
Monterey in the 1840s reported: “There is not a yard of tape, a pin, or a piece of
domestic cotton or even a thread that does not come from the United States.”
10

Encroaching Anglo-American settlers had a difficult time comprehending the racial
hierarchies and categorizations of Alta California, which included gentes de razón
(people of European heritage), gentes sin razón (indiginous people), and Californios,
who claimed (often somewhat speciously) limpieza de sangre or pure Spanish blood
(Jacobs 214). Anglo-American visitors to the region often attempted to superimpose
their own black/white dichotomy over these distinctions: some Yankees considered the
non-indigenous population of Alta California to be white, others considered all Spanish-
speaking Mexicans to be “black,” and still others drew a color demarcation along class
lines, categorizing elite and poor Mexicans as separate races (Jacobs 214-15). As
Jacobs explains, there was much at stake in establishing “white” status in California:
In the California Constitution of 1849, only “White Mexicans” could vote.
Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico used similar racial qualifications to deny
suffrage to “Mexican Indians” or any people of Mexican descent living in the
Southwest. It was left to each local jurisdiction to determine who was or was
not [w]hite. Thus, those Californios who claimed to be [w]hite may have been
acting out of two powerful impulses: to reassert the old order in which they held
an elite status and to avoid the plight of non-[w]hites in the new racial order of
the Yankees. (220)

As Jacobs argues, Ramona reveals conflicting ideas about race, both progressive and
conservative, and there are many instances in which Jackson’s characterizations of
Californios and especially of Señora Moreno conform to some of the negative
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stereotypes. But via the unspeakable moment surrounding the reading of Ramona
Gonzaga’s letter, we can see the way in which Señora Moreno strains to perform a
function as an (ineffective) sentinel of Californio legitimacy in the region.
Señora Moreno reveals the truth about Ramona’s biological mother almost
immediately upon finishing her reading of the secret letter. Outraged that Ramona
expresses more interest in her mother’s identity than in the jewels, Señora Moreno
exclaimes scornfully: “Who was your mother? . . . There was no need to write that
down. Your mother was an Indian. Everybody knew that!” That the knowledge of
Ramona’s parentage (and racial lineage) was known by everyone but shared by no one
suggests that the knowledge was, in Sedgwick’s terms, “shared separately”: it was
something everybody knew but nobody discussed, much less wrote down. This
condition of knowledge being shared separately is an instance of gothic unspeakability
because the tension that arises from the blockage stems from the potential danger of
sharing the information. In other words, there was some kind of danger for Señora
Moreno all those years in speaking the truth about Ramona’s mother, as if the act of
verbalizing this information threatens the legitimacy of the Californio world, the
“borders” of which she is attempting to police. The degree of danger that resides in this
threat is made clear not only by Señora Moreno’s anger at being forced to share the
information, but also by the gothic motifs that attend the moment: the threat of
captivity, the secret passageway, the hidden lover. One might say that Señora Moreno
has been forced to tell a story she doesn’t want to tell, revealing the stakes in telling the
novel’s story at all and also the stakes raised by the threat of Ramona’s escape.
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As Señora Moreno’s son, Felipe, points out, it’s difficult to see why Señora
Moreno would object to Ramona’s marrying an Indian because Ramona is part-Indian
herself. Indeed, the reader never quite receives a satisfactory explanation of Señora
Moreno’s motivation for preventing the marriage. On one hand, Señora Moreno’s
antagonism toward Ramona seems to stem from racial prejudice against what the
narrator refers to as Ramona’s “mongrel” blood. Señora Moreno admits she “like[s] not
these crosses” – and the loaded term, “crosses,” bears full weight of its many
implications, both racial and religious (my emphasis, 30). So it’s curious that while
Señora Moreno never loves Ramona, she nonetheless has great interest in securing a
proper marriage for her. Felipe surmises that his mother’s only motivation for securing
Ramona’s marital status would be tied up with maintaining familial reputation:
“Ramona had been the adopted daughter of the Señora Ortegna, bore the Ortegna name,
and had lived as foster-child in the house of the Morenos. Would the Señora permit
such a one to marry an Indian? Felipe doubted” (106). In Señora Moreno’s
conversation with the weedy-minded Felipe about the matter of Ramona’s marriage to
Alessandro, Señora Moreno cleverly leads Felipe to admit that he would not want his
“true” sister to marry an Indian, and he is forced then to reluctantly agree with his
mother that he could not honorably allow his adoptive sister Ramona to marry an Indian
either. Señora Moreno’s motivation for enlisting Felipe in her condemnation of
Ramona and Alessandro’s union can only be understood when one considers Señora
Moreno as a self-appointed arbiter and enforcer of Californio cultural legitimacy in the
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face of Anglo-American imperialism and Ramona as the (paradoxical) talisman or
marker of cultural entitlement.
Like many another gothic heroine, Ramona is constructed early and often in the
novel according to the Victorian conception of the “angel in the house”: an idealized
woman whose model status stems from her qualities of submissiveness, sexual purity,
piety, and domestic grace.
11
By investing Ramona with an idealized femininity coupled
with what Jackson suggests is an acceptable racial make-up (white and Indian), Jackson
(paradoxically) confers upon Ramona the status of ideal Anglo-American woman.
Ramona’s idyllic racial identity as white/Indian is expressed in her physical appearance:
she has “just enough of olive tint in her complexion to underlie and enrich her skin
without making it swarthy” (38). Ramona’s physical features guard her racial identity
like a secret: “[o]nly those who came very near Ramona knew. . . that her eyes were
blue, for the heavy black eyebrows and long black lashes so shaded and shadowed them
that they looked black as night” (38). The very secrecy and hybridity of Ramona’s
racial identity is what makes her a marker of entitlement, and in the world of the novel,
“possession” of Ramona signals legitimacy within the new Anglo-American regime.
But if Ramona were simply a symbol of white, female authenticity, her character
could not slip so easily in and out of the various cultures as they are represented in the
text; in fact, Ramona is constructed metaphorically as so white and pure that her body
is nearer to a symbolic blank. For Sedgwick, this blank beginning is endemic of
characterization in the gothic novel: “Always, for women, and very often for men, life
begins with a blank. The mother, if known, has disappeared temporarily, and an aunt
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may substitute. The women’s names suggest the blank, the white, the innocent, and the
pristine: Blanche (who lives in Chateau-le-Blanc), Virginia, Agnes, Ellena Rosalba,
Emily St. Aubert, even Signora Bianchi” (156). In the beginning of the novel, the
heroine’s (blankly) beatific glow reaches almost comic proportions, as the tiniest
glimpse of Ramona’s face gives everyone who sees it a “flash of pleasure,” even the
chickens: “the shepherds, the herdsmen, the maids, the babies, the dogs, the poultry, all
loved the sight of Ramona” (my emphasis, Ramona 23). The idyllic blankness of
Ramona’s characterization, however, effects an erasure that allows others to impose
their own desires onto her body; ultimately, she becomes the necessary screen upon
which all those around her attempt to write narratives legitimizing their own entitlement
to the land.
Each time Ramona is “transferred” to a different culture, she takes on a different
name. Señora Moreno calls her “Señorita Ramona Ortegna” when she reads the secret
letter, and this fortifies Ramona’s resolve in the face of Señora Moreno’s threats
because it (inexplicably) reminds Ramona that she is “not her old self [but] her new
self, Alessandro’s promised wife” (131). The name, in fact, marks only one of
Ramona’s “old” selves, which could include the names of her biological father, (the
Anglo) Angus Phail, or her (unnamed) Indian biological mother. Ramona was given
her adoptive mother’s name, Ramona Gonzaga Ortegna, upon her christening before
becoming an adoptive member of the Moreno family. Ramona is given yet another
name, “Majella,” meaning “wood dove,” by Alessandro when they marry, and she
declares “I am Ramona no longer” (196). That Ramona’s ever-shifting name suggests
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her function as a palimpsest is best illustrated by the fact that when she signs Father
Gaspara’s marriage record book as “Majella Fayeel,” her own writing quickly becomes
blotted out and illegible (making it difficult for her pursuers to find her). Even
Ramona’s daughter, originally named Majella, has her name changed back to Ramona
in the end of the novel when Ramona moves with Felipe to Mexico. While the
traditional changing of wives’ names upon marriage always threatens to confer the
terrifying status of inanimacy upon women – consider the ghostly Catherine Earnshaw
Linton Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights -- the multitude of names bestowed upon
Ramona suggests a kind of lacuna: she is a blank talisman upon which others write
their cultural narratives.
The reader’s first glimpse of Ramona is from the point of view of Father
Salvierderra, who casts her as the incarnation of an angel in harmony with native flora.
Walking along a path toward the Moreno Estate, Father Salvierderra peers into the
“golden mist” of a hillside covered with wild mustard flowers, and Ramona’s face
suddenly appears, framed by the swaying blooms. Ramona “half creep[s], half
danc[es]” through an opening in the flowers, “more like an apparition of an angel or
saint, than like the flesh-and-blood maiden” (39); moreover, the erasure of Ramona’s
corporeality allows the heroine to function as a blank on which other characters mark
their status. Time and again Ramona is referred to in the novel as “simple”: she has
“not overmuch learning out of books,” and “for serious study or deep thought she had
no vocation” (34). She is “like a clear brook” (34). And yet, she’s fetishized by
everyone who meets her. When Alessandro first sees Ramona, her face becomes his
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obsession; all his previous worries disappear, and “[a] face replaced them; a vague
wonder, pain, joy, he knew not what, filled him so to overflowing he was bewildered”
(53). To the benevolent white American Southerner Aunt Ri, it “‘[p]ears like [Ramona]
wuz suthin’ more ‘n human” (349). Ramona is both less and more than an average
woman—she’s both a blank and also a marker, the supplement that adds legitimacy
within the encroaching Anglo-American hegemony to any culture that can possess her.
And the convention of gothic unspeakability that consistently attends the threat
of Ramona’s transfer from one culture to another further illuminates the heroine’s status
as an elusive marker of cultural authority. When Ramona’s (white) biological father
brings the infant Ramona from her Indian mother to her Californio adoptive mother and
namesake, the (dying) Ramona Ortegna, little Ramona is given a sleeping potion, which
marks the condition of gothic unspeakability that characterizes the event. Sleep in
gothic novels is often suggestive of a duality in which the sleeper’s state mirrors waking
reality, such that the dividing wall between sleep and wakefulness is breached and
reality becomes a nightmare: “[t]o wake from a dream and find it true – that is the
particular terror at which these episodes aim” (Sedgwick 28). The infant Ramona, then,
wakes to the violent nightmare of having been ripped from her biological mother and
given to a dying foster mother who will have to relinquish her again. The violence of
the act is unquestionable, as Angus Phail admits that he brought the baby to his former
lover, Ramona Ortegna, “partly in vengeance” (28). Ramona’s first transfer between
cultures, then, is surrounded by the threat of hostility, suggesting the nightmarish
danger of Ramona’s “passing” between cultures.
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Later in the novel, Felipe is searching all over California for Ramona and
Alessandro when he finally stumbles upon a clue among some gothic ruins in San Juan
Capistrano. In the late eighteenth-century British gothic novel, ruins would most likely
be in the form of a crumbling castle or monastery, signifying at once a distaste and also
a romantic nostalgia for an era of feudalism, aristocracy, and Catholicism.
12
In a late
nineteenth-century Southern California setting, gothic ruins become crumbling,
eighteenth-century Franciscan missions whose era of Indian colonization had passed. In
the old San Juan Capistrano Mission, Felipe finds an Indian acquaintance of Ramona’s,
Antonio, living in a gothic hovel:
The room was damp and dark as a cellar; a fire smouldered in the enormous
fireplace; a few skins and rags were piled near the hearth, and on these lay the
woman, evidently ill. The sunken tile floor was icy cold to the feet; the wind
swept in at a dozen broken places in the corridor side of the wall; there was not
an article of furniture. (Ramona 325)

The gothic atmosphere of the Mission ruins in this scene underscores an unspeakable
threat: the secret of Ramona’s whereabouts must be protected because the several
different cultural “representatives” who are meeting in this scene each desires Ramona.
Felipe is a Californio, Antonio is a Native American, and Ramona is the talisman that
each of these cultures desires to possess. When Antonio realizes that Felipe is
searching for Ramona, unspeakable danger is signaled by a stick suddenly breaking in
the smoldering fire, shooting up a blaze that momentarily illuminates Felipe’s face
before dying out and plunging the room back into darkness. In the brief firelight,
Antonio recognizes Felipe and (unfortunately for the heroine), sends him astray by
giving him false information. Antonio and Felipe cannot work together in the
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schematic of the novel; they are divided or separated by the secret of Ramona’s
location, and by their mutual desire to retain sole possession of Ramona. The threat that
what “divides” Antonio and Felipe (knowledge or control of Ramona) will be revealed
or transferred is attended by the gothic motif of sputtering firelight.
Not surprisingly, since Ramona is such a valuable commodity in the text, she is
the focus of a great deal of attention by the other characters. In fact, “watching
Ramona” is one of the most common pastimes in the novel. All this surveillance of the
heroine produces several different effects: first, motifs of surveillance help to construct
the “spies” in opposition to the virtuous heroine (who would never stoop to spying);
and second, surveillance further emphasizes Ramona’s desirability as an object to be
possessed. As an activity that divides the subject or viewer from the object of
observation, surveillance creates another kind of gothic unspeakability, establishing
parallel “worlds” in which the subject and object share knowledge separately.
Nineteenth-century British gothic novels abound with instances of surveillance.
Consider the mysterious, ghostly visitors to Vivaldi’s Inquisition prison cell in The
Italian or Madame Beck’s rifling through Lucy’s belongings in Villette. Significantly,
the spy in each of these instances (Schedoni in the former and Madame Beck in the
latter) becomes constructed as a cultural “other” by the text. As the act of spying breaks
codes of honor and class, spying constructs the spy as morally inferior and therefore
anathema to an idealized Protestant Anglo hegemony. It is not surprising, then, that
much of the spying in the novel occurs at the Moreno estate, revealing Jackson’s
prejudices against the Californio culture.
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At the Moreno estate, Ramona’s invalid brother, Felipe, recovers from an
illness, and Alessandro places Felipe’s sick-bed on the veranda for fresh air. All the
Moreno family members plus Alessandro begin to gather daily on the veranda, with
Felipe’s bed as the center point, but the porch quickly becomes crisscrossed with the
gazes of spies upon each other. Although the gaze of the text’s characters is
overwhelmingly trained upon Ramona, the spies are set up by the mechanics of gazing
as objects in contrast to the heroine. Señora Moreno and Margarita both watch
Ramona, but the way they watch the heroine suggests their differences from her (and,
not incidentally, reveals Jackson’s race and class prejudice against the Mexican
population of Alta California). Señora Moreno, for example, gazes languidly while
seated in an ancient carved chair, “looking like a sibyl with her black silk banded
headdress severely straight across her brow, and her large dark eyes gazing out” (my
emphasis, 104). With this image, Señora Moreno is stereotyped as a lazy, orientalized
other in contrast to the industrious Ramona, who sits on simple cushions on the floor
“with her embroidery or her book” (105); moreover, Señora Moreno’s surveillance of
Ramona not only creates an unspeakable condition in which the heroine and her
adoptive aunt are isolated from each other by the mechanics of gazing/watching, but
also constructs the latter’s character in opposition to the former.
The best spy in the household is the maid, Margarita, whose espionage skills are
clearly connected to her race and class for Jackson. Stung by the bite of unrequited love
for Alessandro, Margarita becomes a ubiquitous “sprite,” watching all that passes
between Alessandro and Ramona: “There were few hours of any day when she did not
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know to a certainty where both Alessandro and Ramona were; and there had been few
meetings between them which she had not either seen or surmised” (108). After Señora
Moreno discovers Alessandro and Ramona in their first, portentous embrace, Margarita
sees only a few glimpses of the events that transpire, but she “could have given a
tolerably connected account of all that had happened within the last twenty-four hours
to the chief actors in this tragedy which had so suddenly begun in the Moreno
household” (139). Margarita’s spying is played for comic value by Jackson -- the only
reason Ramona is finally able to make her escape with Alessandro is that Margarita has
been given a sleeping potion to ease the pain of a toothache. Margarita’s drug-induced
sleep is a comic parody of the unspeakable gothic dream. She will awake to find that
her worst “nightmare” has come true: Alessandro and Ramona have eloped. My point,
here, is that through the trope of surveillance, Margarita’s race and class as well as her
espionage skills establish her difference from Ramona, reinforcing the heroine’s
desirable status as the ideal, Anglo-American marker of cultural legitimacy.
Alessandro is similarly constructed as a spy largely because of his race, but his
surveillance activities are romanticized as “natural” to the stereotypical noble savage.
After Señora Moreno drags Ramona away from her first embrace with Alessandro, the
Indian lover “crouches” in the darkness, watching Ramona’s window: “As if stalking a
deer in the forest, he listened for sounds from the house. . . . Only the tireless caution
and infinite patience of his Indian blood kept Alessandro from going to her window”
(123). Alessandro’s characterization as spy feeds on racist stereotypes of the Indian as
more animalistic than human; however, what I would like to point out is that all this
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surveillance of the heroine gives the reader the distinct impression that Ramona is an
object to be desired, possessed, and contained. As the narrator suggests early in the
novel, “[m]eshes were closing around Ramona” (90). Felipe’s incestuous craving for
Ramona provides a glaring instance of the heroine’s objectification. Even at the end of
the novel, after Ramona has told Felipe that she can never love another man because
part of her died when Alessandro was murdered, Felipe declares, in essence, that he’s
not interested in her sentience: “[o]nly give yourself to me, my love, I care not whether
you call yourself dead or alive!” (361). Many characters express an inexplicable
attachment to Ramona, and Anglo Americans are not immune to this longing. The evil
white American squatter, Jake, propositions Ramona in Soboba, and Judge Wells, who
presides over Alessandro’s murder trial, wants to adopt Ramona’s baby if Ramona does
not recover from her illness. In sum, for nearly every character in the novel, Ramona is
a fetishized object; furthermore, once her body is obtained, it then must be contained.
Like most gothic heroines, Ramona vacillates between states of actual and
threatened confinement in the novel. While Ramona is held a virtual prisoner on the
Moreno estate, she is threatened with imprisonment in a closet and convent. Later, she
is hidden away on a nearly inaccessible mountaintop in her final home with Alessandro,
where she finds herself “as helpless in her freedom . . . as if she had been chained hand
and foot” (313). In each of these instances, the threat of Ramona’s escape forms the
basis of the gothic terror that surrounds her place of confinement. After Alessandro’s
murder, for example, Ramona’s descent from their San Jacinto mountain-peak
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hideaway is reminiscent of a typical gothic heroine’s terrifying adventure in the woods
at night:
The trail was rough, and hard to find. More than once Ramona stopped, baffled,
among the rocky ridges and precipices. Her clothes were torn, her face
bleeding, from the thorny shrubs; her feet seemed leaden, she made her way so
slowly. It was dark in the ravines; as she climbed spur after spur, and still saw
nothing but pine forests or bleak opens, her heart sank within her. . . . Fear
seized her that she was lost. If that were so, before morning she would be with
Alessandro; for fierce beasts roamed San Jacinto by night. But for the baby’s
sake, she must not die. Feverishly, she pressed on. (317)

Ramona’s descent from the mountain is reminiscent of Emily’s escape from Udolpho
with Ludovico, when she travels through “lonely wilds and dusky vallies, where the
overhanging foliage now admitted, and then excluded the moonlight; -- wilds so
desolate, that they appeared, on the first glance, as if no human being had ever trode
them before” (Udolpho 454). For Ramona, the solitary journey through the wilds at
night will ultimately take her away from Native American culture and return her to
Californio culture and Felipe, who finally will remove her from the United States for
good. That Ramona’s place should have been with the Native Americans (in Jackson’s
view), is suggested by the fact that nature itself seems to conspire to contain her on top
of San Jacinto – she is nearly torn to shreds as she tries to leave.
And as I have suggested earlier, the desire to possess Ramona (and the gothic
terror surrounding her escapes) centers on her function as an emblem of Anglo-
American hegemony. While it may seem surprising that the Catholic heroine could
function as an idealized emblem of the Yankee dominant culture, with its
overwhelmingly Protestant sensibility, Ramona’s Catholicism is crafted in such a way
that it appeals to Protestant readers. Anti-Catholic sentiment was a commonplace in
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eighteenth-century British Gothic novels as British writers attempted to forge a British
national character in opposition to the foreign “others” of Italy and Spain. Anti-
Catholic prejudices in the American Southwest were especially linked with Anglo-
American imperialist interests.
13
Part of the appeal of Ramona for its late nineteenth-
century audience was that the novel played on many traditional, conservative white
Protestant prejudices while ostensibly pressing for more tolerance for particular ethnic
groups. Softening Ramona’s religious practices so that they become palatable to a
Yankee Protestant readership is primarily accomplished via a contrast between two
versions of the faith as they are presented in the novel: Ramona’s and Señora
Moreno’s.
Señora Moreno’s relation to the Catholic church is complicated, fraught with the
tension that existed between Californios and the Mexican government. While many
Californios were attached to the Franciscan missions, they also gained much when the
Missions were secularized in 1833 and their holdings were distributed among well-
connected Californios. Although the novel suggests that Señora Moreno’s estate was
established before the Secularization Act, it nonetheless characterizes Señora Moreno’s
brand of Catholicism as mercenary. Señora Moreno’s acceptance of the statues and
artwork that were removed from the church at San Luis Rey during its occupation by
U.S. soldiers, for example, is dubious as Señora Moreno’s home becomes overflowing
with these (comically mutilated) pieces of art. Although she accepts the position of
temporary caretaker of these relics, it’s clear that she will never return them (just as she
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never returned Ramona’s wardrobe or jewels to their rightful owner), and that they will
adorn her house as possessions far into the future as examples of greedy accumulation.
But materialism isn’t the biggest flaw in Señora Moreno’s brand of religion; Señora
Moreno’s most egregious crime of faith in the eyes of Protestant readers would be the
dissimulating way she hides an unspeakable disconnect between her apparently pious
exterior actions and her evil interior motivations: “So quiet, so reserved, so gentle an
exterior never was known to veil such an imperious and passionate nature” (my
emphasis, 1). In this way, Señora Moreno closely resembles another classic Catholic
gothic villain: Radcliffe’s Schedoni, who throws an “impenetrable veil over his origin”
in The Italian (my italics, The Italian 34). Both Señora Moreno and Schedoni are
spectral figures: the former can be seen “gliding about, in her scanty black gown” (1),
while the latter stalks about in a cowl and the black garments of his order. As Cannan
Schmitt explains, one of the devices specifically attributable to the gothic is “the
fictional presentation of foreign landscapes and foreign villains as anti-types, exempla
of otherness” (855). And Señora Moreno fulfills this role of anti-type not only with her
materialism, but also with a kind of duplicity that creates an unspeakable and enigmatic
schism between evil interior motivations and a pious exterior. The gigantic wooden
crosses that Señora Moreno orders to be erected on the hills surrounding her estate are
an example, as the narrator explains, of an action in which “religious devotion and race
antagonism were so closely blended that it would have puzzled the subtlest of priests to
decide whether her act were a sin or a virtue” (14). And this inscrutability is precisely
Señora Moreno’s flaw: the mystery around Señora Moreno’s character and the lack of
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transparency in her piety suggests a divided self that throws Ramona’s moral integrity
into contrasting relief.
Ramona’s expression of Catholicism in the novel not only stands in contrast to
Señora Moreno’s, but also expresses Jackson’s own Transcendentalist leanings. From
an early age, Jackson rejected many of the tenets of her father’s Calvinism – at the age
of six she told her mother that she did not feel the Bible was true, and she once
requested to be excused from Sunday school (Phillips 53). Although Jackson could
never bring herself to make the kind of Christian “conversion” required of all
Calvinists, she resolved to live her life in the daily observance of Christian duties, so
that “even if I am never saved, I will exert as much of good influence in the world as I
can.”
14
Eventually, Jackson joined the Unitarian Church, which opposed the idea of
innate depravity and predestination and believed salvation to be attainable through
moral behavior (Phillips 87). From her liberal understanding of Unitarianism, it was a
short step to Transcendentalism and Emerson’s Nature (1836). With its emphasis on
human intuition and the spiritual essence of art, Nature provided Jackson with
principles she would integrate into her own religious philosophy as well as into her
poetry and prose.
Significantly, although Ramona practices Catholicism in the novel, her spiritual
growth reflects a movement from blind faith to Transcendentalism, which finally seals
her status as a marker of Anglo-American hegemony.
15
Ramona’s innocent and loving
attachment to Father Salvierderra suggests that the heroine’s practice of Catholicism is
based more on attachment to the human soul than an attachment to the relics of the
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church, although it takes even Ramona some time to understand this. Early in the
novel, Ramona takes refuge from the wrath of Señora Moreno by sleeping at the base of
a statue of the Madonna (which, not incidentally, is one of the statues Señora Moreno
procured from the besieged church at San Luis Rey). With one arm thrown around the
statue of Mary, Ramona thinks to herself, “[Señora Moreno] won’t dare to hurt me at
the Virgin’s feet” (127). Later in the novel, when Ramona’s baby dies, the heroine
fears she is being punished by the Virgin Mary, whose little statue she had
superstitiously separated from its wooden baby Jesus with the hope that this would help
her own baby recover from illness. While Ramona’s faith in the power of icons is
presented as comical, her belief in the power of individual faith is presented as the mark
of her “inner” Protestantism. When Alessandro doubts Catholicism, Ramona tells him
that we know God’s love by “what we feel in our hearts” (240). Finally, near the end of
the novel, Ramona echoes Emerson’s Nature when she tells Felipe, “When one thinks
alone in the wilderness . . . many things become clear” (354). The journey from a
dependence on religious icons to a kind of Emersonian self-reliance in the woods not
only makes Ramona an appealing and sympathetic character for Protestant readers, but
also helps explain her status within the text as a marker of Anglo-American
Protestantism.
But if Ramona is such a prized commodity in the United States, why does she go
to Mexico in the end of the novel? Critics have grappled with this question ever since
the novel’s debut, unsure whether Jackson’s exiling of Ramona and Felipe in Mexico is
a critique of U.S. racism, or whether the ending reveals the author’s own racism. Is
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Jackson’s inability to envision domestic habitation for her heroine a novelistic flaw? Is
it an echo of the surprisingly popular (racist) idea, expressed before the Mexican-
American war, that the annexation of Texas might provide and “escape” valve for (slave
and free) blacks to migrate south and eventually to merge with Mexicans (White 75)?
Does Jackson (perhaps subconsciously) want to preserve the United States for Anglo
America? To try to answer these questions, I would like to consider Ramona’s
construction as a product and producer of American imperialism: as the daughter of a
white merchant and Indian woman, Ramona becomes an enabler of Anglo-America’s
rapacious desire for material and cultural dominance; however, gothic motifs
surrounding the characterization of Ramona as an imperializing force suggests authorial
and/or cultural anxiety about this role. While Ramona’s journey to Mexico in the end
of the novel may be seen as the ultimate (and racist) use of Ramona-as-talisman to
promote Anglo-American Protestant culture by expelling the Indian and Mexican
“other” beyond U.S. borders, the gothic tone of the ending reveals the fissures in this
reading.
Ramona is the daughter of a kind of imperial agent, Angus Phail, a Scottish
member of the merchant marine and the owner of the richest line of ships that traded
along the coast at that time – “the richest stuffs, carvings, woods, pearls, and jewels,
which came into the country, came in his ships” (25). As such, Phail represents the
wealthy Yankee traders who were beginning to control Alta California with their trade
in the nineteenth century. Angus Phail first sees Ramona Gonzaga standing,
significantly, at the Presidio gate. Politically, Ramona Gonzaga has ties to both the
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Mexican military (via her father who is an officer) and also the Catholic Church (via her
uncle who is a priest). These dual ties make Ramona Gonzaga the perfect object for
imperial consumption – with one fell swoop, Angus might appropriate and incorporate
within his being these two, distinct and important branches of Mexican culture in Alta
California, and Angus falls madly and insensibly in love, “like a man bereft of his
sense” (24). Ramona Gonzaga’s resistance and ultimate succumbing to Angus is
suggestive of the Mexican government’s failed resistance in the Mexican-American
war, and Ramona Gonzaga comes to embody the bitterness of Californios, who blamed
their country for surrendering the region to the United States. Significantly, as soon as
Ramona Gonzaga agrees to marry Angus Phail, he sets sail on a commerce trip to San
Blas. Driven to distraction because he must part with his fiancée, he consoles himself
by thinking about the treasures with which he soon will adorn her: “[t]hrough the long
weeks of the voyage he sat on deck, gazing dreamily at the waves, and letting his
imagination feed on pictures of jewels, satins, velvets, laces, which would best deck his
wife’s form and face” (25). In this way, Ramona Gonzaga comes to stand for the
objectified colonial subject, the possession and consumption of which will augment the
national larder.
Significantly, however, Angus’s story ends with his having lost Ramona
Gonzaga to another man during his trading voyage. Angus returns to find that Ramona
Gonzaga has married a Mexican military officer during his absence, and both Angus
and Ramona Gonzaga turn into ghosts as a result of her “faithless” act. Angus becomes
a drunk, sinking lower into the depths of chronic inebriation before he finally disappears
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altogether. In the world of the novel, the rumor that Angus has married an Indian
woman in San Gabriel furthers his ghostly erasure. Ramona Gonzaga does not fare
much better – she has not borne children, and her husband, Francis Ortegna, is a cruel,
drunken adulterer. Ramona Gonzaga Ortegna becomes a lonely, wretched woman
before she finally dies and must give up the baby Ramona to her sister, Señora Moreno.
One can see in Angus and Ramona Gonzaga’s story a parable of the way in which
Anglo-American imperialism and greed results in the death of both the colonizer and
colonized, and their ghosts continue to haunt the story as Angus Phail leaves jewels to
be passed down to the baby Ramona.
And Ramona inherits more than just jewels – she also inherits just a bit of her
father’s imperialistic appetite. As it happens, Ramona is surprisingly similar to another
surreptitiously peripatetic and imperialistic gothic heroine: Lucy Snowe of Charlotte
Brontë’s Villette (1852). Consider: both Ramona and Lucy fall in love with foreign
“others,” and they both learn to navigate in a multicultural, colonial setting. Like Lucy,
Ramona may be seen as an expatriate: having rejected her Californio upbringing, she
travels through a “foreign” country(side) -- Native American lands in Southern
California -- before moving to yet another foreign land, Mexico. The degree to which
both Ramona and Lucy function as markers of hegemonic national authority within a
colonial context is also similar. In Villette, Lucy Snowe’s wandering through Belgium
may be seen as a kind of imperialistic sojurn, as Rajani Sudan argues, in which all the
foreignness that Lucy co-opts become goods for the English “native larder” (115). As a
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talisman that denotes privilege and legitimacy in a contested region, Ramona similarly
absorbs the foreign “other” for the national project.
While both Lucy and Ramona are kinds of homesteaders (or squatters) for the
dominant culture in the colonial settings of the novels, they also (paradoxically) are
ghost-like wanderers throughout the texts. The opening scenes of each novel show the
heroines as displaced persons in what are superficially constructed as friendly, domestic
environments. The idyllic and orderly Bretton home in Villette, for example, features
“large peaceful rooms, the well-arranged furniture, the clear wide windows, the balcony
outside, looking down on a fine antique street, where Sundays and holidays seemed
always to abide” (3). The Moreno estate is similarly painted as “picturesque”: “with
more of sentiment and gayety in it, more also that was truly dramatic, more romance,
than will ever be seen again on those sunny shores” (12). But neither of these “homes”
offers the particular sustenance the heroines need, and both Lucy and Ramona become
like ghosts in these environments before they finally leave. Lucy will first experience
the “tiny messes” intended for an invalid at stifling Miss Marchmont’s (34), before
finding herself lying, corpse-like, in the “shadow of St. Paul’s” on her first evening in
London (42). Ramona similarly undergoes days of fever at the Moreno estate while she
awaits Alessandro. During this time, Ramona glides, ghostlike, around the estate and
wastes away until even the maid Margarita is sure she is dying. The heroines’ ghost-
like characterizations in their “native” cultures suggests that an absence, a disconnect,
or a lacking for them within the national identities of their homelands. So, these
heroines must travel (imperialistically) in order to co-opt the foreign supplement that
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provides cohesion or completeness for the collective subjectivity of the mother country.
The gothic motifs that accompany the heroines’ travels, however, unsettle this
imperialist project.
Ghostly presences continue to haunt Lucy and Ramona in all of the various
locales they visit, suggesting both a continued sense of disconnection from the
“foreign” cultures they are visiting as well as, paradoxically, the danger of succumbing
to the temptations of the foreign “other.” For Lucy, Madame Beck’s Pensionnat de
Demoiselles is haunted by a multitude of ghosts: the crétin, the nun, and Madame Beck
herself. All these creatures represent, in one way or another, both the danger that Lucy
might succumb to the pleasure of the foreign, as Sudan argues, as well as the fear that
she will never obtain a tenable social position, as Eugenia DeLamotte argues (230).
Similarly, Ramona continually finds ghosts in the landscape as she journeys across
Southern California: one of Ramona’s first resting places as she escapes with
Alessandro is an Indian graveyard where she meets the speechless, ghost-like Carmena,
and Alessandro becomes a literal ghost when he is murdered on Mt. San Jacinto. The
ghosts Ramona encounters in the landscape suggest not only the danger of succumbing
to the temptations of the foreign “other,” for Ramona as marker of Anglo American
hegemony, but also, paradoxically, the worry that she might not succumb, thereby
failing to appropriate the necessary foreign “other” as supplement to an incomplete
national identity.
Ramona does finally consume and absorb the foreign “other” through
Alessandro’s death. Standing, significantly, on the threshold of their home high on the
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mountaintop, Ramona watches the shooting by the Yankee Farrar. When she comes to
Alessandro’s dead body, she lays a white altar-cloth over Alessandro’s “mutilated”
face, and runs off down the mountain before falling into a fever at the Cahuilla village.
The covered face and the removal of Alessandro’s body by the Cahuilla Indians (which
prevents the Yankee sheriff from being able to fully prosecute the case) suggest an
erasure of Alessandro from the national body politic, while the blood that soaks into the
ground in martyrdom suggests that national soil will be forever haunted by Alessandro’s
ghostly presence. In this way, Anglo American national identity incorporates the
“other” it requires to supplement its identity, while abjecting the foreign body from its
midst. Similarly, Lucy’s union with Monsieur Paul in Villette finally “supplies the
imperial agent (Lucy) with what it lacks, buttressing Victorian fantasies of cultural
coherence” (Sudan 147). Significantly, Monsieur Paul’s disappearance in the end is
fitting because he’s no longer necessary after he has supplied the imperial agent with
what it needs: integration of the foreign “other” in order to buttress its own identity.
Ramona, as a talisman of legitimacy in the contested California region, similarly
absorbs the foreign “other.”
In the end, while Ramona-as-talisman is used up and expelled from national
borders, the description of her departure and her legacy contains gothic motifs that
suggest the way in which the new Anglo-American national hegemony in the region
will continue to be haunted. Living with Felipe on the Moreno estate, Ramona becomes
ghostlike as she “walked as one in constant fellowship with one unseen” (356). Felipe
finally sells the Moreno estate to speculating Yankees, whose “passion for money and
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reckless spending of it” is distasteful to Felipe’s old world sense of financial decorum
(359). It seems, however, that the Anglo Americans have purchased a kind of haunted
house, with the corpse of Señora Moreno decaying in her grave, there, and Ramona
departing as a specter. As Felipe and Ramona finally prepare their belongings on ship
for the move to Mexico, they row back to the shore one evening in a little boat in a
classically gothic scene: “A full moon shone. Ramona sat bareheaded in the end of the
boat, and the silver radiance form the water seemed to float up around her, and invest
her as with a myriad halos” (360). When Felipe impulsively asks Ramona to marry
him, Ramona replies, “do you not know, Felipe, that part of me is dead, -- dead?” (361)
Inexplicably, Felipe is “beside himself with joy” at Ramona’s response, as he doesn’t
care whether she calls herself dead or alive, so long as she will be his wife. So, in the
end, Felipe takes his half-dead, sister-wife in his arms and they leave for Mexico.
Ramona’s function as marker of legitimacy in the contested region has been used up, so
she is abjected from national borders, but not before Ramona, half-dead and half-
complicit in the imperial endeavor that contributed to her own demise, leaves many
gothic markers across the landscape suggesting all that remains untenable, decaying,
and morally repugnant about Anglo America’s imperialistic project.
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CHAPTER THREE ENDNOTES

1
As Edward Said argues in The World, The Text, and The Critic, cultural “self-
confirmation” is “based on a constantly practiced differentiation of itself from. . . the
Other” (12).

2
Helen Hunt Jackson, “To Amelia Stone Quinton,” August 19, 1881 (Quoted in
Phillips 235).

3
Helen Hunt Jackson, “To Thomas Bailey Aldrich,” December 1, 1884 (Quoted
in Phillips 259).

4
Jackson wrote to a friend that with Ramona she “had sugared [her] pill, and it
remains to be seen if it will go down” (Quoted in Michael Dorris, “Introduction”
XVIII).

5
Governor Figuera called the possibility of Indian land-ownership “a legal
equality [that] would unhinge society” (Quoted in White 40). Indians who did not flee
became laborers in Mexican communities or on Californios’ rancheros.

6
Jackson suggests in her essay, “Father Junipero and His Work,” that while
injustices against the Indians probably occurred in “individual instances,” the system as
a whole was most likely humane. Jackson’s examples of “humane” behavior, however,
include things like flogging as a punishment for drunkenness, which clearly would be
considered quite inhumane by today’s standards. Jackson wanted to extol the missions
because she believed that their “civilization” of the Indians was a step forward in
progress. She also saw the Franciscans as more spiritually devout than the encroaching
Americans. Above all, as Phillips notes, “Jackson praised the Franciscans because she
recognized that Americans had treated the native population of the continent far worse
than the Franciscans ever had” (245).

7
This image of Native Americans residing behind a veil is problematic, I should
note, as it skirts dangerously close to what many critics have called literary and critical
“erasures” of Native Americans. Maddox, Bergland, and Scheckel, have all shown how
constructions of “imagined Indianness” operate as a kind of literary erasure of Native
Americans from the landscape.

8
As DuBois writes, “[i]t is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this
sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul
by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his
two-ness, --an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two un-reconciled
strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it
from being torn asunder” (615).

9
In “The Present Conditions of the Mission Indians” Jackson defines the event
as a gothic monstrosity: “The combination of cruelty and unprincipled greed on the part
of the American settlers, with culpable ignorance, indifference, and neglect on the part
of the Government at Washington has resulted in an aggregate of monstrous injustice”
(88).

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10
Quoted in White 49.

11
The Victorian cult of the ideal domestic woman culminated in Coventry
Patmore’s popular nineteenth-century book of poems, The Angel in the House, in which
the heroine, Honoria, is a girl whose “unselfish grace, gentelness, simplicity, and
nobility reveal that she is not only a pattern Victorian lady but almost literally an angel
on earth” (Gilbert and Gubar 22).

12
As Maggie Kilgour explains, crumbling gothic castles can suggest a nostalgia
for a past, medieval world of organic wholeness, when individuals were bound in a
body politic as opposed to the atomistic quality of bourgeois capitalism.

13
As Jenny Franchot shows, William Hickling Prescott’s Mexico (1843), a
popular fictionalized account of the Spanish discovery, invasion, and conquest of the
Aztecs, “participates in the 1840s Anglo-American campaign to convert a specifically
Catholic foreignness into the ‘native’ through the extension of a strenuous, if self-
doubting, Protestant imperialism” (40). In Prescott’s hands, Cortés becomes
transformed “into an energetic Protestant hero who delivers just retribution on the
Aztecs’ sacerdotal culture for its idolatry and ritualism” (Franchot 43). Transplanting
Catholicism onto the Aztec culture, Prescott creates a Catholic “character” defined by
its incongruous extremes: “Such a character then dramatizes cultural Otherness whose
destruction needs justification or whose meaning remains problematic” (Franchot 43).

14
Helen Hunt Jackson, “To Julius Palmer,” December 15,1850 (Quoted in
Phillips, 56).

15
The conception of New England as the hub of American literary culture was
laid down by: F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance : Art and Expression in the Age
of Emerson and Whitman (1941), Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The
Seventeenth Century (1954) and The New England Mind: From Colony to Province
(1961), and Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (1975). More
recent studies include Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture from Revolution
through Renaissance (1986), Myra Jehlen, American Incarnation : The Individual, the
Nation, and the Continent (1986), and Donald E. Pease, Visionary Compacts :
American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context (1987). Critiquing nineteenth-
century New England’a bid for national literary supremacy is Anne Norton, Alternative
Americas : A Reading of Antebellum Political Culture (1986).

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CHAPTER FOUR
DEADWOOD: LEGALLY GOTHIC
“Pretty quick you’ll have laws, and every other damn thing.”
Wild Bill Hickok, “Here Was A Man,” Deadwood

After a horse and rider pace slowly across a dark and deserted dirt street in the
opening shot of the Home Box Office series, Deadwood, we cut to the inside of a
ramshackle jailhouse and hear our first interior sounds: the pronounced scratching of a
fountain pen on paper. The camera pulls back to reveal grim-looking Montana Marshal
Set Bullock (played by Timothy Olyphant) sitting at a desk and scribbling earnestly in
his journal on one side of the screen while Clell Watson (James Parks) stands locked in
a jail cell opposite him. Outside the jail house, as we soon learn, a torch-wielding mob
is gathering and threatening vigilante justice against Watson, a convicted horse-thief.
There’s nothing terribly groundbreaking about the scene’s imagery as part of the
tradition of the cinematic western – the horse on a desolate frontier street at night, the
frontier jailor and his inmate, or the threat of mob violence. Nor is there anything all
that original about the gothic conventions invoked in the scene – the dim, flickering
candlelight suggesting obfuscated visibility as a metaphor for murky understanding, the
taciturnity of the marshal and the foregrounding of writing implying both the danger
and also the compulsion to share volatile information, or the impending peril of mass
savagery expressing the failure of all that is rational, orderly, and civilized. The cross-
fertilization of the western and the gothic genres, as I have been arguing in this
dissertation, is not a new phenomenon, and Deadwood’s use of gothic motifs to
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complicate the themes of more traditional westerns is not a generic exception but rather
the rule – all frontier literature is gothic, and all gothic literature is about frontiers.
The more specific issue I will address vis-à-vis Deadwood is how the show provides a
good example of one typical postmodern concern of the gothic frontier: the
foundational violence at the heart of the law.
In the first scene, Watson, scheduled to be hung in the morning, leans his arms
through the bars of his cell and asks about Bullock’s impending departure for the outlaw
Deadwood settlement in the heart of land that belonged to the Lakota Sioux: “No law at
all, in Deadwood?” Watson asks Bullock. “Being on Indian land,” Bullock replies
tersely. Watson’s eyes light up, “Jesus Christ Almighty. No law at all” (“Deadwood”).
While gold was the impetus that inspired thousands to pour into the Black Hills in 1877,
Watson’s refrain, “no law at all,” highlights another important attraction of Deadwood:
its status outside the legal borders of the United States. The attraction to a lawless
space is as old and common a motif as Huck Finn deciding to “light out for the
territories,” and for Deadwood producer David Milch, the possibilities of writing about
a space where people lived outside the protection of laws are what attracted him to
Deadwood as a setting for a television show: “I had been writing shows, mostly cop
shows, which had to do with the intersection of law and order, or the failure to intersect,
and I was interested in what it would be like to examine a society where there was order
more or less but no law whatsoever” (Milch, “Audio Commentary”). In the series,
lawlessness itself provides the central gothic mystery, and as I will show, this gothic
mystery centers both on the thrilling life of a town without law and, more radically and
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with more of a postmodern sensibility, on the enigmatic way in which the drive for law
itself becomes a form of violence through which social order is created.
The pilot’s first scene, in fact, contains an excellent illustration of the
complications that the establishment of law creates -- just as Watson and Bullock are
discussing Deadwood, the torch-wielding mob led by Byron Sampson (Christopher
Darga) begins to gather outside the jailhouse and demands Watson’s release so it can
mete out its own punishment. In the scene, which is based on a story related in Kenneth
Kellar’s biography of Bullock, the marshal decides to hang Watson immediately rather
than wait until his scheduled execution time the next morning because Bullock wants to
hang Sampson “under the color of law” rather than capitulate to vigilantism. Watson
initially objects, but quickly sees that the alternative to hanging is the mob’s vengeance.
Watson steps on the little stool Bullock has set out, puts his head in a make-shift noose,
and admonishes the marshal, “you help me with my. . . fall!”
1
Watson jumps into the
noose, but Bullock must yank Watson’s dangling legs to help break his neck, and a
sober silence falls over the mob as Watson’s suspended legs continue to twitch for
several moments. Bullock’s execution of Watson seems to be in the name of holding
the law above vigilantism -- “You call the law in, you don’t get to call it off just
because you’re liquored up and popular on payday,” Bullock tells Sampson.
Bullock’s decision to make an exception of Watson and to execute him before
his scheduled execution time, however, makes Watson a (perhaps crude) example of
what Giorgio Agamben would call the “bare life.” For Agamben, the “bare life” is
what’s produced via the originary act of sovereignty, establishing a relation that defines
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the political realm (Hussain 495). This relation, for Agamben, is the state of exception
or ban. As Nasser Hussain explains, “Bare life is produced in and through this
fundamental act of sovereignty in the sense of being included in the political realm
precisely by virtue of being excluded” (495). Agamben deduces the aporia of the “bare
life” through the obscure figure of the “homo sacer” -- the man/criminal in ancient
Roman law who could be killed but not sacrificed (8). The “homo sacer” embodies the
state of exception in which, for Agamben, every political being exists, and this
condition makes every individual into a “bare life” – one living outside the protection of
the very law it tries to establish: “At once excluding bare life from and capturing it
within the political order, the state of exception actually constituted, in its very
separateness, the hidden foundation on which the entire political system rested”
(Agamben 9).
Because Bullock makes an exception of Watson in the name of the law –
executing him before his scheduled execution time in order to resist vigilantism --
Watson becomes an example of the bare life, an exception to the law in the name of the
law, underscoring the way that the more one tries to establish law, the more one is
inscribed in a system in which civil rights and protections are an illusion. Watson’s
execution in the pilot marks the first of many Deadwood moments in which the
establishment of a “lawful” society reveals, as Agamben predicts, that “every attempt to
found political liberties in the rights of the citizen is. . . in vain” (181). The paradox
Agamben deduces from the figure of the bare life has gothic implications --
transgression is part and parcel of establishing the politico-legal realm, and the threat of
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violence to the subject comes from within the system rather than outside of it. It’s no
surprise that the (uneasy) establishment of the law should be a recurrent concern in the
frontier gothic.
Law is a recurrent theme within eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gothic
literature. The inconstant nature of the law in Udolpho, for example, is embodied in the
capricious and willful Montoni. When Emily inquires by what right Montoni is
enforcing her marriage to Count Morano, Montoni replies, “by the right of my will”
(216). Caleb’s physical and mental imprisonments at the hands of Falkland in Caleb
Williams illustrates the Godwinian principal that positive laws are always perverted (in
comparison to individual reason). Later, in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House (1853), the
suit of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce has droned on for generations and has “become so
complicated, that no man alive knows what it means” (Dickens 16). Dickens’ gothic
description of the degradation wreaked by the Court of Chancery provides an apt
illustration of the law figured as a propagator of violence, death, and decay:
This is the Court of Chancery; which has its worn-out lunatic in every
madhouse, and its dead in every churchyard; which has its ruined suitor, with his
slipshod heels and threadbare dress, borrowing and begging through the round
of every man’s acquaintance; which gives to monied might the means
abundantly of wearying out the right; which so exhausts finances, patience,
courage, hope; so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart; that there is not an
honourable man amont its practitioners who would not give – who does not
often give – the warning, ‘Suffer any wrong that can be done you, rather than
come here!” (15)

As Leslie Moran suggests, the law in gothic novels is represented as “an archaic past
that haunts, corrupts and renders labyrinthine the straight path of rule and reason” (87).
Further, the law in gothic texts is often associated with the ad hoc, unreason, the
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outmoded, with the judicial in contrast to the Parliamentary, with unwritten law in
contrast to the written law (Moran 87). Gothic imagery surrounding the law continues
into the twentieth century, when, for example, Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law”
represents the law as even more exclusionary, baffling, and self-annihilating.
In the cinematic Western, motifs of law and lawlessness have similarly pointed
to a range of issues of interest to the genre: the battle over the land, fears about
urbanization and modernization, and anxieties about social transformation. Richard
Slotkin has argued that, during the “Golden Age of the Western” (the two decades or so
following World War II), the rise and fall of the Western mirrors “the development of
the Cold War and its sustaining ideological consensus from its seedtime in 1948-54 to
its fulfillment in the years of the liberal counteroffensive under Kennedy and Johnson,
to its disruption by the failure of the war in Vietnam” (347). Within this context of
larger social and political moments, the Western genre’s conception of the subject in
relation to notions of justice is ever shifting. For Andre Bazin, the Western is
essentially a cultural commentary on “the relation between law and morality” (145). In
John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), for example, Ransom Stoddard
refuses to yield to force or reason, and “it is his faith in the triumph of law that makes
him noble, rather than a fool” (Williams 95). In the later 1960s, Sergio Leone skewered
the tradition of frontier heroism with his violent Dollars trilogy: A Fistful of Dollars
(1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (1966).
More recently, as many critics have pointed out, Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992)
seems to long for vigilante vengeance in the face of what Orit Kamir characterizes as
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“positive law’s unsatisfactory formalism” (215), the law’s inability to answer the
surplus of feeling engendered by crime as its codes cannot contain the regressive and
proliferating effects of human reaction to injury.
2

If Deadwood expresses dissatisfaction with the institution of law, gothic
moments in the show mark that dissatisfaction. Violence in and of itself does not
constitute gothicism, but horrors that are the result of a repressed past invading the
present certainly do. For Robert Martin, Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and
Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables (1851) both use gothicism to address the issue
of America’s violent original sin: “the emphasis on stolen land and bartered bodies
joins the two texts of Hawthorne and Faulkner as national narratives and originary
myths that locate the gothic as a national repressed, a series of crimes that are not
incidental to but rather constitutive of the nation” (140). Stephen King’s Pet Semetary
(1989) may be about the personal trauma of losing a child, but it’s also about American
colonization. In the film, a young boy is killed by a passing truck on a rural road in
Maine, and his family buries him in a nearby Micmac burial ground, where they’ve
heard of corpses being mysteriously brought back to life. The son does indeed return to
life – but as murderer, and the gothicism of the film is apparent in its refashioning of the
story of the nation’s guilt, “attempting to reveal traumatic contradictions of the
collective past that cannot be spoken” (Bruhm 272).
Deadwood is not the bloodiest show on television, but it may be close. Consider
the opening twenty minutes of Deadwood’s pilot: moments after Watson’s hanging, we
cut to a whore’s room in The Gem Saloon, where a bloodied prostitute, Trixie (Paula
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Malcomson), has just shot a john for beating her up. Doc Cochran (Brad Dourif)
crouches in front of the john, watches him die, then begins poking around at the wound
in his head. Cochran, a neurology buff who (we later find out) has been run out of the
States for grave robbing, sticks a long poker through the john’s skull in fascination.
Later, in the torch-lit middle of the night, the john is dumped into a pen of flesh-eating
pigs, and Trixie is beaten further by Gem Saloon owner Al Swearengen (Ian McShane)
for committing a shooting that’s bad for his business. The violence of Deadwood is
gothic because it suggests the way the biggest threat to this community that lies on
Indian territory is uncannily familiar or unheimlich because it emanates from within its
(mostly white) community, not from without, on the Indian frontier. Furthermore, the
ashes of the dead Indian chief which Swearengen keeps in his armoire and to which
Swearengen occasionally speaks is evocative of the way in which the stealing of the
Lakota land is the unspoken original sin that forever dooms this camp, the sin that has
turned it into a bloodthirsty community that feeds upon itself.
One of the most distinctly gothic storylines in the show involves a little girl
named Sofia Metz (Bree Seanna Wall), who witnesses the horrific massacre of her
family in the wilderness near the camp. Like most gothic heroines, Sofia (whose family
is Norwegian) is the picture of whiteness and purity. As her face pokes out of a covered
wagon in broad daylight – with her long blonde hair and inquisitive look -- she
symbolizes (white) purity and innocence. Later that evening, when word spreads that
the Metz family has been massacred on the road to Spearfish, the scene becomes all
gothic: Wild Bill Hickok (Keith Carradine), Bullock and several men ride out with
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torches, sweeping into the dark, wooded massacre site and encountering white wolves
preying on the hacked-up, dead bodies. Raising their torches to scare off the wolves,
they look in horror on the bloodied body parts strewn about the wagon’s wreckage.
When Bullock sees two wolves sniffing around a bush in the distance, he rides furiously
over and plants his torch in the ground to scare off the wolves. As Bullock’s dutiful
sidekick Sol Star (John Hawkes) watches Bullock with a meaningful look that
underscores the significance of the moment, Bullock gently pulls a comatose little
blonde girl from under the bush. The men saddle up, little Sofia bundled in Bullock’s
arms, and ride back toward town as day breaks.
Sofia’s story is so characteristically gothic because it follows a classic gothic
storyline in which the orphan heroine’s discovery of her own identity reveals a crime
against the social order (DeLaMotte 52). While Sofia herself never seems to fully
understand the significance of the crime committed against her, the other characters and
the viewers are led into a gothic world by the knowledge of the horrific nature of the
crime of which she is a victim. The evil of the crime is nearly senseless: the massacre
has been committed by “road agents,” white men who committed the bloody massacre
in order to make their small-time, arbitrary robbery look as if Indians had committed it.
Sofia’s story is meant to be taken as a symbol of the endemic violence of this
community, and as an illustration of the way the threat from inside the town of
Deadwood is much greater than any threat from Indians on the frontier.
Indeed, as the story unravels, it becomes clear that the “road agents” who
murdered Sofia’s family are connected to the camp’s most powerful man, saloon-owner
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Swearengen. While the road agents were not working for Swearengen in this instance,
Swearengen knows that if Sofia identifies the agents, he might be implicated in the
crime, and others in the camp recognize that Swearengen might want to have Sofia
killed to protect himself. The threat that hovers around Sofia’s life in the first two
episodes contributes to the sense of the gothic nature of the law that permeates the
episode -- since there is no “law” in the camp, no figure of law is able to protect Sofia
from the threat of Swearengen. Cochran uses a shotgun to fend off Swearengen’s thug,
Dan Dority (W. Earl Brown); then, Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert) and Charlie Utter
(Dayton Callie) spirit Sofia away and hide her in a covered wagon until the threat from
Swearengen passes. The paradox is that Swearengen, whose threat against Sofia marks
the absence of law, is also the biggest proponent of the Dakota Territory’s annexation to
the United States. Swearengen, whom I will later show to be an ambiguous gothic
villain, paradoxically represents both the absence of law and the push for it, and this is
one way Milch’s show suggests that law is a trap: the law not only fails as an institution
of refuge, its establishment in fact inflicts violence as well.
If the gothic mystery of Deadwood is that the law doesn’t protect you, then
Milch’s spin on the gunfighter figure is fitting. The outlaw gunfighter type, established
in such films as The Gunfighter (1950), High Noon (1952), and Shane (1953), fights on
the side of right, but nonetheless realizes that his own strength will be his undoing. A
loner, an aristocrat, and ever a dying breed, according to Slotkin, the gunfighter’s sense
of death and nostalgia lends him a gothic sensibility. As Steven Bruhm notes, the
gothic has always pointed to an historical border between past and present, “looking
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back to moments in an imaginary history, pining for a social stability that never existed,
mourning a chivalry that belonged more to the fairy tale than to reality” (259).
Similarly, as Slotkin notes, gunfighters stand “on a historical border between the world
in which things were still ‘possible’ for them and a world in which they and their
profession are becoming outdated” (401). They have become outdated in their own
time because they have realized the double-bind in which power and fame leave them
less secure rather than more, mirroring the paradox of American identity during the
Cold War: “our sense of being at once supremely powerful and utterly vulnerable,
politically dominant and yet helpless to shape the course of crucial events” (Slotkin
383). Finally, gunfighters are tragic figures because “they will become critically
conscious, before the end, of just what has gone wrong with them and their world.
Irony is as essential to the gunfighter’s heroic style as his skill with weapons. It tells us
that, like the ‘man who knows Indians,’ he has ‘seen through’ the mystifications of
society” (Slotkin 401).
If there is something always dying about a gunfighter hero, Deadwood’s version
of James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok makes that clear from the outset; Hickok arrives in
Milch’s Deadwood lying in the back of a covered wagon “like a corpse in state,”
according to the script’s stage directions (Milch “Pilot”). It’s true enough that Hickok
arrived in the real Deadwood in July 1876 with death on his mind -- he told his friend,
Charlie Utter, “Charlie, I feel this is going to be my last camp, and I won’t leave it
alive” (Ames 148). And in a letter to his wife, dated the day before he was killed,
Hickok wrote, “if such should be we never meet again, while firing my last shot, I will
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gently breathe the name of my wife” (Ames 148). Milch’s Hickok preserves the aura of
death and ghostliness that surrounded the historical figure as he entered Deadwood,
suggesting that Hickok’s ambiguous position as frontier gunman/lawman has become
outmoded. The moment Hickok enters the frame, then, it is as a ghost from the past,
haunting the present.
Just as Hickok occupies and ambiguous space between the past and the present,
he also occupies a liminal space between gunman and lawman. And this latter
figuration is one of the elements that contributes to the show’s characterization of the
law as endemically violent. Hickok’s unique understanding of the murderer’s mind is
unsettling to the viewer because his understanding borders on empathy. Hickok knows,
for example, that Ned Mason (Jamie McShane) has participated in the Metz family
massacre because of the way Ned felt the urge to return to town to drink and gamble
after the murders: “I felt that way sometimes after a kill,” Hickok mumbles
(“Deadwood”). Similarly, when he foils Tom Mason’s attempt on his life in Nuttall and
Mann’s Saloon Number Ten in the second episode, Hickok draws and shoots the
drunken Tom Mason (Nick Offerman) before Mason has even drawn his gun from his
holster. When the other bar patrons object that Mason, who writhes on the floor for
several minutes, hadn’t drawn his gun so his intent to murder Hickok could not be
proven, Hickok calmly insists, “He meant me harm.” After Mason finally shouts, “You
killed my brother!” the buffoonish Con Stapleton (Peter Jason) determines that Mason
was “a revenge seeker,” settling the dispute in favor of Hickok over the dying Mason
(“Deep Water”). Hickok’s intuitive understanding of the murderer’s mind is a
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convention of the gunfighter hero, collapsing the oppositional binary between criminal
and lawman. Insofar as gothic villains are typically repressed versions of the
protagonist’s identity, Hickok and his enemies may be imaginatively considered as the
“protectors” and “opponents” of the law combined into one gothic monstrous body, and
the heroic strength Hickok communicates on-screen my be the strength of not being
torn asunder by the competing aspects of his monstrous subjectivity – he is constantly
taming the others that exist within himself. The show’s characterization of Hickok as a
ghost, however, casts a nostalgic light over this kind of heroism, suggesting that the
new order of laws will be threatened by forces that may not be tamable by the new
order of lawmen.
The drum beat of Hickok’s march toward an ignominious death in the first four
episodes of Deadwood is beaten by the (gambling) hands of the dim-witted and grimy
loudmouth, Jack McCall (Garret Dillahunt). Much like the smart-aleck kid who
unwisely forces the hand of gunfighter Jimmy Ringo in Henry King’s The Gunfighter,
the imbecilic McCall can’t resist tempting the most famous man he has ever met. The
tragedy (of which the gunfighter is keenly aware), is that such an ignoble exit is always
part of the gunfighter’s script. In The Gunfighter, the kid’s three brothers chase Ringo,
marking “the steady encroachment of Ringo’s past on his future prospects” (Slotkin
386). Similarly, Jack McCall’s stalking of Hickok underscores Hickok’s increasingly
dissolute behavior – drinking and gambling. Hickok’s descent is more than partially
self-willed; he has become tired of fending off the Jack McCalls of each camp, but
more significantly, tired of holding together the fractured persona that has been required
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of him as a gunman/lawman. In the fourth episode, Hickok’s loyal sidekick, Charlie
Utter, attempts to pull Hickok out of his downward spiral by offering Hickok a
respectable job on Utter’s mail route, but Hickok refuses, asking his friend, “Can you
let me go to hell the way I want to?” (“Here Was a Man”). Hickok’s position as an
“ambiguous” hero corresponds to the gothic novel’s ambiguous villain of the Rochester
mold. Significantly, the ambiguity around Hickok’s character as gunman/lawman
hero/villain amplifies the show’s concerns about the establishment of law on the
frontier.
The common Western motif of bringing law and civilization to a frontier town –
the thrust toward community in a liminal space -- is well-worn. In John Ford’s My
Darling Clementine (1946), the Earp brothers arrive in Tombstone, Arizona, in order to
avenge their brother James’s murder and destroy the evil Clanton clan. At first blush,
the film seems to be about “civilizing” the American frontier in accordance with post
World War II notions of Anglo-American Protestant culture. Wyatt Earp (Henry
Fonda) thrice asks, “what kind of town is this?” in the beginning of the film, and the
town’s response over the course of the film – loudly applauding being called “ladies and
gentlemen,” staging Shakespeare, and building a church – suggests it’s trying to be a
“civilized” town despite all odds: “that such an untamed America should be able to
accommodate law, culture, and religion, it is suggested, is something of a miracle”
(Kitses 22). Although Deadwood’s portrayal of the Earp brothers in its third season
bears little resemblance to the Earps of My Darling Clementine, Deadwood’s portrayal
of a community’s struggle to establish itself as a town with law and culture bears a great
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deal of resemblance to the larger theme of the older film. Even though the allure of
Deadwood was as a place outside of the law because of its location on Indian land, the
show’s main thrust is not only about the struggle for property rights but also about the
struggle for community.
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The central tension of both My Darling Clementine and Deadwood, however,
hinges on the respective heroes’ disinclination to be lawmen. Earp (who was previously
marshal at Dodge City), proves his fitness for the job in an early scene of My Darling
Clementine, removing the drunk Indian Charlie (Charles Stevens) from a saloon Charlie
has been shooting up. After Earp repeatedly declines the mayor’s offer of the marshal
job in the opening scenes with a terse, “not interested,” the discovery of his brother’s
murder and the rustling of the family’s cattle soon prompts Earp to pin the badge on his
own lapel. Similarly, as Bullock heads to Deadwood with Star, Bullock makes it clear
that he has no intention of taking on the marshal position in the outlaw town, and a main
story line for the first season focuses on whether or not Bullock will finally take the
marshal position. Bullock is drawn into the legal realm first at the behest of Hickok,
when Bullock agrees to serve as Alma Garrett’s agent in the issue of her gold mine
against Swearengen. By episode eight, however, Swearengen has begun to see beyond
the Garrett-claim scam he is running to the larger picture of the camp’s potential
annexation by the United States, and he ominously calls Bullock the “perfect. . . front
man” – the perfect sheriff -- for the future of Deadwood (“Suffer the Little Children”).
It takes another lawman – General George Crook (Peter Coyote), to understand
the crux of Bullock’s inner conflict about taking the position: “a man -- a former
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marshal -- who understands the danger of his own temperament, might consider serving
his fellows” (“Sold under Sin”). Bullock finally agrees with a typically terse and
clench-jawed, “I’ll be the fucking sheriff” (“Sold under Sin”), but then spends much of
the second season threatening to quit. In a meeting of the town leaders at the Gem
Saloon in episode thirty-one, Bullock tears off his badge and throws it on the table in a
moment of frustration at the seeming futility of the law, but Swearengen only rolls his
eyes and tells Bullock to put the badge back on (“Unauthorized Cinnamon”). As Crook
predicted, Bullock’s overriding concern is that his own violent temper will get the better
of him someday and “justice” will be breached. In episode twenty-five, Bullock
savagely beats E.B. Farnum (William Sanderson) with little provocation. Bullock’s
constant wavering between contravention and the law suggests a Hamlet-style inner
conflict wherein too much meditation or thought paralyzes action.
4

In this way, Bullock is similar not only to Hamlet, but also to Fonda’s Earp in
Clementine. Earp’s conflict between upholding the law and initiating action against Old
Man Clanton establishes him as a hero in the mold of Hamlet, and Ford’s many
references to the Shakespeare play in the film hammer home the theme. As Scott
Simmon argues, this is a central thrust of the film: “[w]ill Wyatt be so rigorous in
applying the letter of the law that he will let the Clantons escape? Will he lose his way
in the details of bickering with Doc Holliday. . . ? Will Wyatt, like Hamlet, let his
disgust at corruption paralyze action? And will he take his vengeance in a way so
roundabout and relaxed, so ‘lapsed in time and passion,’ that the Clantons will get the
better of him? Thus will revenge itself – for some, the defining trait of the classic
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Western – be lost in ‘the law’s delay’?” (154). Delay, paralysis, ambivalence, and a
furious temper – these are the qualities Milch endows in his figuration of the lawman
Bullock. While the gothic motifs of ghosts and madness of Hamlet are not present in
Deadwood, Milch’s Bullock nonetheless retains many of the features of one of
Shakespeare’s most gothic heroes. Most importantly, Bullock’s overwhelming anxiety
(he seems always to be grimacing) comes from trying to stand for the presence of the
law, an institution that threatens to tear the subject and the state asunder. No sane
person, after all, would take a position as a protector of an institution that, as Agamben
theorizes, perpetually inscribes the subject in a position of liminality. As the whore-
murdering Deadwood character Francis Wolcott (also played by Dillahunt) remarks, “I
am a sinner who does not expect forgiveness, but I am not a government official.”
So the simple good guy/bad guy terms of the conventional western are mixed up
a bit, with the hero Bullock depicted as anxious and tormented, and the antagonist,
Swearengen, depicted at times as principled and compassionate. As Heather Havrilesky
writes:
“[o]ne of the sublime choices creator David Milch made when forming the
characters of Deadwood was to give Al Swearengen, the town’s outlaw, a very
practical belief in rules and order, an eye-rolling tolerance for slackers and
miscreants, and a firm grasp of the value of incentives, manipulations and
“flanking maneuvers” of all sorts. . . . In contrast, Bullock, ostensibly a man of
the law, gives pretense to behaving like ‘the decent and decorous’ but loses his
temper and behaves recklessly at every turn. In Swearengen’s very deliberate,
pragmatic eyes, Bullock is ‘an errant maniac.’” (“The Gory Finish”)

Together, the “morally corrupt pragmatist,” Swearengen, and the “tempermental
idealist,” Bullock, represent two halves of the conventionally ambiguous gothic hero, a
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Rochester-type, figured as “both hero and villain, egress and entrapment” (DeLamotte
211). Bullock and Swearengen are even each involved in separate, Jane Eyre-esque
love triangles, and it could be argued that Swearengen acts with more honor in his
entanglement, surrendering his beloved Trixie (Paula Malcomson) when he realizes she
loves Star.
Insofar as most prime time television does the work of ideological
normalization, however, even the most subversive of shows (which Deadwood is not)
often play into hegemonic and dominant ideology in some manner. While the villains
may have human qualities and the heroes may be fallible, the line between good and
evil is not totally effaced in Deadwood. One mechanism by which audiences recognize
who’s fighting on the side of the ideological “good” in Deadwood, is by the way the
characters seem to instantly recognize it in each other, and much of this recognition has
to do with what John Carlos Rowe has called “romantic individuation,” which includes
“self-consciousness, control over one’s representation of self, manly assertiveness, a
distinct power over signs, and the desire for higher civilization” (167). We, as an
audience, instantly know when a character possesses these traits because those who
have them signal recognition of them in each other.
In Deadwood, Bullock is the main barometer of the degree to which others
possess the qualities of romantic individuation, and a single camera close-up on
Bullock’s visage instantly communicates his judgment to the audience. Bullock is
instantly friendly with Hickok, for example, and immediately icy and testy with
Swearengen. Instantaneous action is another trait possessed by those who have
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romantic individuation, revealing what Doug Williams has called a “blend of wilderness
and civilization mediated through the hero’s will in a perfect moment” (105). When
Hickok and Bullock wordlessly combine to instantly shoot Ned Mason, they reveal their
high propensities for instantaneous action, reinforcing the binary between good and evil
and suggesting that theirs can be a regenerative power, “[y]ou have it, or you do not;
you are of the elect or you are not” (Williams 105).
The myth of progressive individualism has implications for our legal system.
As Rowe argues, a legal system based on progressive individualism would “[ignore]
different classes, races, and political or economic interests for the sake of judging the
‘individual’ alone according to his deficiencies or merits” (160). Of course, the myth
that our legal system can be color and class blind is one of the myths that draws people
into believing in it, and then they find themselves trapped in a legal system that does the
opposite. As Rowe explains, “The personification of genius as a divine power,
predictably masculine, is typical of romantic idealizations of human rationality as the
‘divine mind,’ and it is the utopian goal of realizing such genius that justifies Manifest
Destiny and transposes colonial tyranny into a metaphysical (and thus less obviously
politicized) “imperial” power” (160-61). What’s more, the myth of progressive
individualism, which draws subjects into the push toward law and community, also
draws them into a political and legal system in which they are forced to operate against
their own self-interest.
The primary means by which the legal system is construed as endemically
violent in Deadwood is via the shifting characterization of its primary monster: Al
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Swearengen, whose particular villainy is often difficult to pin down. As Kim Michasiw
writes, such indeterminacy is key to the gothic: “Not: the cannibal monster is in the
nursery snacking on the soft skulls of the infant twins. Rather: the cannibal monster
may be in the nursery, or he may be somewhere else, or she may be in the nursery
disguised as one of the twins. Or: there may be no cannibal at all, though this would be
a fine place for one” (237-38). Such is the case with Swearengen’s particular brand of
monstrosity. In the pilot, moments after Trixie has been beaten by a john, Al takes her
into his office and brutally beats and strangles her again for having killed the man who
beat her: whores shooting johns is simply bad for business. “I’ll be good,” Trixie tells
Al as his foot crushes her throat (“Deadwood”). In the next episode, Swearengen goes
to see Sofia Metz, lying supposedly comatose in Doc Cochran’s shack under the care
and protection of Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert). After a close-up of Trixie’s bruised
face, we see Swearengen striding balefully down Deadwood’s muddy Main Street,
significantly passing dead deer hanging on merchants’ booths (in case we missed the
sense of danger his walk implies). Swearengen terrorizes the normally unflappable Jane
with one simple menacing look, then pinches the flesh of Sofia’s arm. Sofia’s
startlingly big blue eyes shoot open, and Swearengen simply greets her with a sinister,
“hello.” While the violence, the ominous music, and the almost supernatural powers of
intimidation construct Swearengen as a pure gothic villain, his character becomes more
indeterminate as the series progresses.
In the pantheon of Western cinematic and literary character types, Swearengen
is an “avenger,” a frontier settler who has been transformed into a monster, but whose
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evil services the advance of civilization. The Indian-killing Quaker trapper, Nathan
Slaughter, of Robert Montgomery Bird’s Nick of the Woods (1837) is an example of this
archetype. In the original form of the avenger myth, as Doug Williams explains,
“Indians murder a boy or a young man’s family. Spiritually, the civilized boy or man
dies in that instant; all that is left is a murderous rage against Indians, and indeed,
wilderness itself” (108). John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards in Ford’s The Searchers (1956)
is another example of this type. Ethan hates Indians because “their presence reminds
him of the mythical Indian within him, of the human monster without God or
community” (Williams 109). But the avenger is also an expert frontiersman, combining
“the Puritan’s hatred of the wilderness with the Leatherstocking hero’s knowledge of it,
to become a monster whose evil serves to advance the good of civilization” (Williams
108).
Milch’s spin on the avenger myth, in the character of Swearengen, is that it was
not Indians on the frontier who terrorized him, but rather the cruel urban society of the
East, where his mother was a prostitute and could not keep him. In episode eleven,
Swearengen goes on a drunken, profanity-laced rampage about his own childhood with
a prostitute with whom he is about to have violent sex. Swearengen tells the prostitute,
Dolly (Ashleigh Kizer), that he had been an orphan in the very orphanage where he
“purchased” Dolly many years later. When he was a child, Swearengen’s mother left
him on the front porch of the orphanage and then left to continue her own life as a
prostitute. Later (again while having violent sex with Dolly), Swearengen reveals that
an orphanage proctor once restrained him from going to his mother on board a ship,
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where his mother had changed her mind about giving him up. The point of the story,
for Swearengen, is “[d]on’t be sorry, don’t look back because, believe me, no one gives
a fuck” (“Jewel’s Boot Is Made for Walking”). But Swearengen’s violent façade belies
a man whose rampages stem from deeper psychological hurts and betrayals sustained in
the “civilized” east. And Swearengen is also not an excellent frontiersman in the way
of iconic Western avengers such as Ethan of The Searchers or even Munny (Clint
Eastwood) of Unforgiven – men who seem more comfortable in the wilderness than in
the confines of society. Swearengen believes he paid his dues as a frontiersman while
stuck in the muck of a creek clearing trees and building his saloon (in the show’s
backstory), and as we meet him he seems much more at home behind his desk in his
office above his saloon. So, Swearengen is kind of a postmodern frontier avenger –
traumatized by an absent mother and more comfortable as a “desk man” than a
woodsman, Swearengen’s monstrosity nonetheless services the advance of civilization.
The avenger “advances” civilization in both a forward and backward manner –
populating a frontier, but at a human cost. Swearengen’s orchestrations of the camp’s
push for legal status are self-interested: he wants Deadwood to be annexed to the
United States as part of the Dakota Territory because it would mean property rights, but
he realizes he will need to bribe politicians to keep them in his pocket. When word
arrives that the U.S. is ready to renegotiate its treaty with the Sioux, Swearengen begins
his back-room dealing. At one point, he tricks Commissioner Jarry into believing that
representatives from Montana have offered Swearengen $50,000 to become part of the
Montana territory, and Jarry believes him, matching the “bribe” money and also
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offering election parameters according to Swearengen’s specifications. Milch’s
portrayal of Swearengen as the kind of nefarious figure who drove U.S. expansion is a
by-now familiar rewriting of the kinds of “civilizing” figurations of the 1950s Westerns,
such as My Darling Clementine; moreover, with his particular brand of complicated
brutishness, the rule of law that Swearengen inaugurates in Deadwood is both a forward
and a backward move in terms of “civilization” – it is law equated with violence, and its
characterization as such in the show seems to illustrate the maxim that law is a form of
violence through which the social order is made possible (Moran 88).
Bringing the law to Deadwood, for Swearengen, involves interacting with
characters who typify the kind of law personages found in gothic texts. For Moran,
“[l]awyers, solicitors, barristers and judges, appear as characters in [g]othic texts
embodying of a certain ambivalence between good and evil, between law as order and
right reason and law as corruption” (Moran 88). Federal Magistrate Claggett (Marshall
Bell) arrives in Deadwood in episode nine with a double message: first, that the United
States is poised to revise its treaty with the Sioux in order to annex the Black Hills and
that Deadwood business owners stand a good chance of securing property rights if they
form an ad hoc government to show there is something to build on; and second, that
there’s an arrest warrant out for Swearengen on murder charges and that Claggett is
extorting $5,000 from Swearengen to quash the warrant (“No Other Sons and
Daughters”). Swearengen double-deals with Claggett’s bagman, Silas Adams (Titus
Welliver), on the matter of the bribe and Silas finally cuts Claggett’s throat, pulling the
warrant out of the magistrate’s pocket and proving his allegiance to Swearengen (“Sold
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under Sin”). Magistrate Claggett clearly represents law as corruption, but Adams’s
murder of the magistrate is hardly in the name of vigilante justice; instead, murder is
endemic in this gothic town where there’s no distinction between inside and outside of
the law. The “law” that is headed toward town under Swearengen’s guidance seems to
be riding on the shoulders of violence and corruption, and the only figure of morally
upright law, Bullock, seems ambivalent about his desire and ability to confront the
perversion of government. While the episode seems to suggest merely that the law may
be perverted, I am arguing that the gothic moments in the show suggest something more
radical – that the law is intrinsically corrupt.
Such intrinsic corruption of the law is implied, for example, by the way that the
theme of interpretation takes on gothic characteristics. If Swearengen is the paradoxical
driving force behind bringing “law” (such as it is) to the frontier, he is also charged with
the task of understanding and interpreting the “foreign” landscape. Ironically, this task
is typically the function of the gothic heroine in a gothic novel. Jane Austen mocks this
convention in Northanger Abbey when Catherine Morland, so busy anticipating some
gothic entrapments in Northanger Abbey, has her curiosity piqued by an old chest she
discovers in her guest room – “What can it hold?—Why should it be placed here?”
(143). The chest turns out to be simply an innocuous antique, but the convention
nonetheless often places the heroine in a position of what DeLamotte would call
“negative capability” or not knowing (48). On the surface, Swearengen almost never
lets on that he doesn’t know what’s happening or that he is not in control of the
situation. But in fact, he often can’t figure out what’s going on. In one humorous
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moment, for example, in the middle of the second season, Swearengen suddenly
discovers that a mysterious door connects The Gem to the offices of the town’s
newspaper, The Pioneer. Peering over a balcony into The Pioneer offices, where editor
A.W. Merrick (Jeffrey Jones) sits working at his press, Swearengen, recently recovered
from a stroke, hobbles through the door with a cane and asks, “Did you know this . . .
walkway connected us?” (“E.B. Was Left Out”). That Swearengen wouldn’t know
about a door in his own saloon is improbable, but this moment of “negative capability”
– as well as his stumbling on his cane – provides a glimpse into an important, and
gothic, characteristic of Swearengen: his capacity as a (sometimes bumbling) gothic
“interpreter.”
The primary source of gothic terror is “not knowing,” as DeLamotte suggests,
and Swearengen’s function as an interpreter on the unknown frontier suggests that he
must take the lead in diving into all that is potentially terrifying about the place, and
often he’s left in (gothic) darkness. One of the earliest instances of Swearengen’s
interpretive powers is actually humorous: Chinese butcher and drug lord Mr. Wu
(Keone Young) tries to communicate with Swearengen about thee robbery and murder
of his opium curriers by drawing a map of the robbery scene. Furious that his own
opium supply has been cut off with the crime, Swearengen demands to know who the
murderers were, “Who?!” Swearengen shouts. “Wu!” Mr. Wu rejoins in a “who’s-on-
first” style misunderstanding (“Mister Wu”). Swearengen quickly discovers the
murderers’ identity and murders one of them as a token of justice for Mr. Wu. As the
series escalates, Swearengen’s interpretative skills are continually developed. Moments
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after Swearengen recovers from an episode of kidney stones and a stroke, Dority wants
to update him on the confusing events in the camp -- “[y]ou got to bring all your . . .
wiles to bear Al, ‘cause developments need interpreting on every . . . front”
(“Complications”). Swearengen berates Bullock for being unaware of the scheming:
“Bedridden I know more than you,” he mocks. Later in the series, Swearengen’s rival,
tycoon George Hearst, sends Swearengen a cryptic note, which Swearengen correctly
decodes, enabling Swearengen to anticipate an ambush by Hearst. The only reason
Hearst would bother to send Swearengen in the note in advance is to test Swearengen’s
interpretive powers – it’s a test to see who can “read” the frontier better, who will be the
ascendant gothic villain. Swearengen fails to interpret the next Hearst missive
correctly, however, and wanders into a trap. Swearengen’s failure to read correctly has
dire and violent consequences -- Hearst chops off Swearengen’s finger with an axe.
Finally, Hearst’s top thug, Captain Turner (Alan Graf), sends his own coded
note to Swearengen’s main thug Dority, inviting him to fight to the death. While Dority
is eager to fight, Swearengen delays until he can “decipher his reason.” Swearengen
mulls the meaning of the proposed fight for the entire episode until finally, sitting alone
at his desk, he downs a shot of whiskey, wheels his chair around to face an armoire, and
opens the door with a key. Speaking mysteriously into the closet, Swearengen says,
“Watching us advance on your stupid teepee, Chief, knowing you had to make your
move, did you not just want first to fucking understand?” (“A Two-Headed Beast”). As
Swearengen is speaking, the camera switches to an angle over his shoulder so we see
inside the cabinet and realize he’s speaking to a wooden urn – apparently filled with
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ashes from a Sioux chief. Swearengen’s question is met, of course, with silence, and he
finally shrugs, closes the armoire door, and tells Dority that he can’t figure it out, so
Dority may as well fight.
Nothing could play more perfectly into the generic codes of the postmodern
frontier gothic than the fact that Swearengen secretly communes with the ashes of an
Indian chief. The ashes of the Indian chief represent the crime against the social order –
Native American genocide -- that’s at the heart of the horror of Deadwood. While the
suggestion of the supernatural is certainly a gothic convention, the realism of the show
overwhelmingly negates any possibility that the dead Chief might speak – this is simply
not that kind of show. Nonetheless, the ultimate and gothic implication in this scene is
that the only way one can interpret and make sense of the many frontiers elucidated in
the show is via death. The Native American watches the encroachment of Western
civilization on his tepee, and is finally able to interpret white motivations when he is no
longer able to articulate or speak of them. Swearengen seems to have an understanding
of the brutish forces that are conquering and bringing so-called “law” to the frontier, but
even Swearengen is unable to fully comprehend the degree of horror that such
“civilization” implies (as evidenced by his searching query to the Chief’s ashes in his
closet), and only Swearengen is able to live with the extent of this knowledge he
possesses without being torn asunder.
The women in the show are not so lucky. Historically, The Gem’s owner ran a
white slave operation, luring women from the East: “After they arrived, they were
stranded, scared, and helpless, and many did not speak English. The alternative was the
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street – and for a woman in the all-male, lawless Deadwood, that meant no alternative at
all” (Ames 16). While the treatment of the female characters in the show probably
reveals the accurate debasement and mistreatment of women in the lawless camp, it also
shows the way in which law does very little to bolster female status. At first blush,
Alma Garrett Ellsworth (Molly Parker) does not seem to be a gothic heroine: a drug-
addict and the mistress of an adulterer, Alma hardly adheres to nineteenth-century
notions of virtue and the angel in the house. She’s the daughter of a debtor father and
she marries for convenience in order to pay her father’s debts (and later finds out that
even this “selling” of herself did no good because her father just got himself back into
debt again). Most egregiously, her affair with Bullock, ostensibly the heiros gamos (the
holy marriage that tames the frontier), and the driving love interest of the show, is an
adulterous one that produces an abortion.
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Yet Alma’s function as a gothic heroine furthers the show’s theme of law as an
endemically subjugating institution. The death of Alma’s first husband, Brom Garrett
(Timothy Omundson), is one of the most gothic moments in the show. As a foggy
dawn breaks over Main Street in episode four, Swearengen’s thug Dority leads a
donkey with the bloodied corpse of Garrett (who has just been thrown off a cliff on his
gold mine) slung over its back. Alma sees Dority and Garrett arrive through the
window, downs some laudanum, then walks downstairs in her nightclothes to see to her
dead husband. As her long white nightgown trails in the mud of the street, she touches
her hands to Garrett’s bloody face. She looks up to hear the obsequious Farnum stutter
that it must have been a tragic fall, and then she turns to gaze knowingly on Dority: “Is
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that what happened, Mr. Dority, a tragic turn? A terrible, accidental fall?” (“Here Was
a Man”). The moment signals that a shadow hangs over Alma’s life, which she can’t
shake despite her intelligence and bravery. Like many another gothic heroine, Alma is
terrorized by a father figure, Otis Russell (William Russ), who tracks her down at the
camp and tries to blackmail her into partnership in her rich gold claim. Russell’s
sinister and manipulative behavior sends his daughter scurrying tearfully from the room.
Alma’s trouble with men – dead husband, deadbeat father, adulterous lover – is
suggestive of a twist on the female gothic’s preoccupation with the threat of domestic
entrapment.
Most significantly for the theme of the law’s endemic subjugation is the way in
which Alma – in the fashion of a gothic heroine -- continually finds herself in scrapes
from which she must be saved. In the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gothic, when
villains persecuted heroines, often the only method of resistance was a heroine’s sense
of virtue or what DeLamotte calls “conscious worth.” Dependent on the idea of divine
justice, conscious worth or virtue could be a physical defense, a psychological defense,
or a religious defense against gothic villains. Ironically, as DeLaMotte argues,
“sentimental gothicists allow heroines to be protected by conscious worth for a while,
but they are always saved in the end by coincidences. So the message is that gothic
heroines really are defenseless” (34). Although Alma is intelligent and brave in many
instances (confronting her husband’s murderer and ultimately running a bank in town),
she is ultimately portrayed as a damsel in need of protection. Alma’s second husband,
Whitney Ellsworth (Jim Beaver), must comfort her after she makes a fool of herself
174

trying to negotiate a business deal with the nefarious Hearst, and Bullock comforts her
when Ellsworth is shot. Finally, Alma is bullied into selling her claim to Hearst.
Alma’s status as a businesswoman who is nonetheless a defenseless gothic heroine
suggests the position of all subjects in Agamben’s conception of the establishment of
law: women are symbolic of all subjects involved in a political process that inscribes
everyone in a system of subjugation.
The ambiguous sexuality of Calamity Jane, however, may offer an imaginative
escape not only from the perils of domestic entrapment but also from the dangerous
situation of a bare life within Foucault’s biopolitics. In the classic Western, the hero’s
marriage to the eastern woman in the name of cultivating the frontier is seen as a loss of
masculinity, and the traditional female’s role is also circumscribed, as Pam Cook
explains: “[o]ver and over again, the woman relinquishes her desire to be active and
independent, ceding power to the hero and accepting secondary status as mother figure,
educator and social mediator” (294). In these films, ambiguous femininity was a force
to be contained, and the tomboy usually ended up married in a dress in the end.
6

Deadwood’s Jane is often played for laughs, drawing raucous guffaws at The Gem
Saloon when she declares loudly, “I don’t drink where I’m the only one with balls”
(“Deadwood”). Jane is portrayed, early in the series, as her character was portrayed in
Edward L. Wheeler’s late-nineteenth century Deadwood Dick dime novel series,
especially insofar as her love interest in Hickok.
7
But as the Deadwood television series
escalates, Jane’s characterization begins to offer a kind of alternative erotic pleasure and
political possibility.
8
In Deadwood, however historically inaccurate the portrayal may
175

be, Jane stands as a reminder of what society represses. Her lesbian relationship with
the prostitute Joanie Stubbs (Kim Dickens), becomes the most caring and loving in
town, and while they may tussle over Jane’s petty jealousies, they provide a celebration
of alternative sexuality and subjectivity, snuggling together under Wild Bill’s old
bearskin blanket.
If the gothic moments of Deadwood remind us of the violent and estranging
nature of the social contract, they also provoke us occasionally to question the law of
genre. Genre markers are like sign posts, telling us how to read a text, but as Derrida
shows, the very idea that one can mix genres begs the question of generic “purity” (230)
because the genre designation, the “re-mark of belonging,” always lies outside the
genre. For example, although the subtitle in the nineteenth-century came to designate
the novel, the subtitle originated outside of the novel form (Derrida 230). Similarly, as
Agamben would say, the mark of the law (the ability of the sovereign to make an
exception) always lies outside of the law. So genres and the law come to be
untrustworthy crutches – leading us down a path that is sure to deceive us, or at least
make us read incorrectly. With respect to genre, Deadwood provides many markers to
help us understand what we’re watching – its outlaw gunfighter, avenger and lawman
figures offer generic signposts of the classic Western, and its motifs of interpretation
and spectralization offer generic clues to its status as a gothic text. What’s more,
Deadwood’s reliance on the myth of progressive individualism as well as, more
generally, the fact that television generally serves an ideologically normalizing function
176

means that, while the series may mix elements of different genres, it does not
necessarily subvert, in toto, generic conceptions.
However, as Angela Carter once commented, “We live in [g]othic times” (122).
For Carter, marginal literary genres such as the gothic, which once resided on the
fringes of the literary canon, have become more central. But gothic times also refer to
the social, cultural and political era in which we live – the postmodern condition:
boundaries and Lyotard’s master narratives have become nebulous, the landscape is
characterized by void and annihilation, and transgression has become the norm. For
literature, this means the gothic has become (oxymoronically) a kind of master trope,
expressive of the darkness that underlies all of society. Similarly, the frontier has not
vanished, but become the central metaphor by which we understand our lives as forever
liminal. Putting this together, frontier gothic is no longer the exception but the rule.
We must see all frontier stories in terms of gothicism, all gothic stories in terms of the
(postmodern) frontiers they reveal. Whereas the nineteenth-century frontier gothic
underlined the dark underside of colonization, both imposing and upsetting binaries, the
twenty-first century frontier gothic is all dark – no unifying paternal figure will restore
the dissolved boundaries. The postmodern frontier gothic may be seen in stories of
boundary crossing, where darkness can’t be escaped and the landscape will not yield to
interpretation. Most interesting is when our foundational myths – such as the myth of
bringing law to the frontier -- are rewritten in this vein, as they are in the HBO
television series, Deadwood.
177

CHAPTER FOUR ENDNOTES

1
The language of Deadwood has received much attention, especially its mixture
of religious language with modern obscenities. Milch explains that while he has
modernized the obscenities that might have been used in the nineteenth-century, the
profaning of scriptural language was common on the frontier in that time-period, and it
would have shocked and appalled polite society from the east in much the same way
that modern audiences are shocked by the HBO show’s language: “The juxtaposition of
the rhetoric of the religious and the profane or religious and obscene, that got us in all
kinds of trouble. It just seemed to me that that would have been the way that they spoke
and everything that I read, both in the primary materials about Deadwood itself and
more generally about the language of the west, supported that idea. I think the fact that
people took offense had more to do with the conventions of the western as it had
developed from the 30s on rather than any realistic understanding of the way people had
spoken in the previous century” (David Milch, “Audio Commentary.” I have omitted
the modern obscenities in this chapter wherever such omission did not alter the
significance of the passage for my interpretation. For more about the language of the
nineteenth-century American West, see H.L. Mencken, The American Language: A
Preliminary Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States (1919).

2
See especially William I. Miller, “Clint Eastwood and Equity: Popular
Culture’s Theory of Revenge” (1993). Other writers who share Miller’s view include:
Maurice Yacowar, “Re-Membering the Western: Clint Eastwood’s ‘Unforgiven,’”
(1993), Leonard Engel, “Rewriting Western Myths in Clint Eastwood’s New-Old
Western,” (1994), Austin Sarat, “When Memory Speaks: Remembrance and Revenge
in Unforgiven,” (2002), and M.W. Blundell, and K. Ormand, “Western Values, or the
People’s Homer: Unforgiven as a Reading of the Iliad,” (1997). In contrast, Orit Kamir
makes a distinction between “honor” and “dignity” and suggests that the film rejects
“the whole Western ethos that [honor-based] law represents” (216).

3
In the audio commentary for the pilot episode, which Milch narrates, Milch
points to a scene between Bullock, Star, and the preacher H.W. Smith (Ray McKinnon).
Although Smith seems to be a bit of an eccentric, Bullock and Star agree to hire him for
the night to watch their store, and then the three share the names of their hometowns
with each other. Within the imbricated discourses of law and community, in which
“community” is often defined by the law’s protectors, this small sharing of information
marks a gesture toward community – toward protecting each other in a place that is
ostensibly unprotected by the law of the United States (Milch, “Audio Commentary”).

4
For Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Hamlet expressed Shakespeare’s philosophy
about the need to balance sensory perception of exterior objects with meditation on
interior thoughts: “In Hamlet this balance is disturbed: his thoughts, and the images of
his fancy, are far more vivid than his actual perceptions, and his very perceptions,
instantly passing through the medium of his contemplations, acquire, as they pass, a
form and a colour not naturally their own. Hence we see a great, an almost enormous,
intellectual activity, and a proportionate aversion to real action consequent upon it, with
all its symptoms and accompanying qualities” (Coleridge, Lectures and Notes 344). For
a synthesis of critical positions regarding the inaction of Hamlet, see Robert R. Reed,
Jr., “Hamlet, the Pseudo-Procrastinator” (1958).

178

5
In the classic Western, the civilized (Eastern) woman functions as a civilizing
force, entering the wilderness “already pregnant with civilization, the spirit of reason;
she requires the material intermediary to bring this spiritual pregnancy into being”
(Williams 99). The presence of the proper Eastern woman, such as Clementine in My
Darling Clementine, provides the frontiersman with a purpose for his competence, and
the marriage between opposites becomes the “heiros gamos, the holy marriage which
awakens the desert, and allows it to become a garden” (Williams 99)

6
As Pam Cook argues, Westerns such as the original Calamity Jane (1953), in
which Jane ends up marrying Hickok (but not before he inexplicably dresses as an
Indian squaw), and The Missouri Breaks (1976), in which Marlon Brando dresses up as
a pioneer woman, subvert the Western’s privileging of masculine desires: “[b]oth these
films exploit and expose a potential perversity at the heart of the genre, its regressive
drive to elude the law of the father, to play forbidden games” (Cook 296).

7
For a thorough recent biography of Calamity Jane, see James D. McLaird,
Calamity Jane: The Woman and the Legend (2005).

8
As Cook predicts, “[t]he tomboy offers a different sort of erotic pleasure from
the mother, one focused on her bottom, and which provokes the desire of the hero to
spank her. This sexual tussle, usually played for laughs, is a kind of parody of the
father/daughter, father/mother power relations which will eventually put the tomboy in
her place” (296).

179

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Asset Metadata

Creator Witherspoon, Wendy Anne (author)

Core Title The haunted frontier: troubling gothic conventions in nineteenth-century literature of the American west

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 11/12/2007

Defense Date 10/05/2007

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag American criticism,American history,American Literature,British gothic novel,frontier life,gothic revival,North America,OAI-PMH Harvest,pioneer life

Place Name USA (countries)

Language English

Advisor Handley, William (committee chair), Russett, Margaret (committee chair), Halttunen, Karen (committee member)

Creator Email withersp@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m919

Unique identifier UC1233255

Identifier etd-Witherspoon-20071112 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-592084 (legacy record id),usctheses-m919 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Witherspoon-20071112.pdf

Dmrecord 592084

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Witherspoon, Wendy Anne

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu