Ireland, America, and gothic memory: Transatlantic terror in the early republic

Boundary 2

Volumn 31, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 25-47

  Gibbons, Luke ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60950225267     PISSN: 01903659     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01903659-31-1-25     Document Type: Review

References (54)

1. Jon Stratton and Ian Ang, "Multicultural Imagined Communities: Cultural Difference and National Identity in the USA and Australia," in Multicultural States: Rethinking Difference and Identity, ed. David Bennett (London: Routledge, 1998), 159. Their comments indicate that the contestation of territory and culture also shows how race may extend beyond color or epidermal schemas - a factor crucial to discussions of race and colonialism in an Irish context.
2. Leslie A. Fiedler, "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!" in An End to Innocence: Essays on Culture and Politics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962), 150-51. Fiedler's seminal essay was first published in 1948, and it is difficult not to suspect that, as a Jewish intellectual who was also a white American, the notion of collective genocidal guilt at this date took on a searching political ambiguity that Fiedler, more than any other critic, brought to cultural debates during the Cold War era.
3. Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Poet of the Future" (1883),
4. cited in Kerwin Lee Klein, Frontiers of Historical Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 82-83.
5. Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of History" (1891), in Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner (New York: H. Holt, 1994), 15.
6. Sidney Hook, Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 22,
7. cited in Klein, Frontiers of Historical Imagination, 203.
8. Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (London: Paladin, 1970), 133.
9. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1765), in Three Gothic Novels, ed. Peter Fairclough (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 41.
10. R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: Phoenix, 1975), 7.
11. Fiedler, Love and Death, 135-36.
12. Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker, ed. Norman S. Grabo (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), 3.
13. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically as EH. Such displacements of gothic terror became formulaic in preparing the groundwork for American historical fiction. In his 1833 address entitled "The Importance of illustrating New England History by a Series of Romances like the Waverly Novels," Rufus Choate suggested that King Philip would provide an excellent tragic hero for the American national drama (cited in Susan Scheckel, The Insistence of the Indian: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century American Culture [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998], 8).
14. Rex Syndergaard, "'Wild Irishmen' and the Alien and Sedition Acts," Eire-Ireland 9, no. 1 (Spring 1974): 19-20.
15. See L. M. McCraith, The Romance of Irish Heroines (Dublin: Talbot Press, n.d.), 17, on Mab, Queen Maeve, and Spenser's Fairy Queen. Queen Mab was also the subject of poems by Shelley and Thomas Hood, and of a painting by J. M. W. Turner.
16. Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier," in Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner, 33.
17. Constantin François Volney, A View of the Soil and Climate of the United States of America, trans. Charles Brockden Brown (Philadelphia: J. Conrad and Company, 1804), 395,
18. cited in Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 383. As Slotkin comments, the very ambivalence of the term the American hunter, and the difficulty in deciding whether it refers to Native or white Americans, is part of the problem itself.
19. Jared Gardner, Master Plots: Race and the Founding of American Literature, 1787-1845 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
20. Charles Brockden Brown, An Address to the Government of the United States on the Cession of Louisiana to the French (Philadelphia: John Conrad and Co., 1803),
21. cited in Gardner, Master Plots, 55.
22. For the classic discussion, see Richard Hofstader, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," in The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1966).
23. Syndergaard, "'Wild Irishmen' and the Alien and Sedition Acts," 19-20.
24. Michael Durey, Transatlantic Radicals and the Early Republic (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 231-57.
25. Durey, Transatlantic Radicals, 249-50.
26. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. C. D. Clark (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001), 226-27;
27. "Letter 1. On the Overtures of Peace" (1796), in Works (London: Bell, 1899), 5: 212. Burke's trope was quickly adopted by conservative elements in America.
28. See Arthur G. Kimball, "Savages and Savagism: Brockden Brown's Dramatic Irony," Studies in Romanticism 6 (1967): 219.
29. For an extended discussion of Burke's original rhetorical intervention, see my "'Subtiliz'd into Savagery': Edmund Burke, Progress, and Primitivism," in "Atlantic Genealogies," ed. Ian Baucom
30. special issue, South Atlantic Quarterly 100, no.1 (Winter 2001): 83-109.
31. Burke, Reflections, 327.
32. For an extended discussion of Burke's paranoid style, see Seamus Deane, "Philosophes and Regicides: The Great Conspiracy," in Foreign Affections: Edmund Burke, Europe, and Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 2004).
33. Abbé Barruel, Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, trans. Robert Clifford (London: E. Booker, 1798).
34. See also Seamus Deane, The French Revolution and Enlightenment in England, 1789-1832 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 11, 22-24, 112-13;
35. Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 110-15;
36. Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 115-17.
37. Barruel, Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism,
38. R. B. McDowell, Ireland in the Age of Imperialism and Revolution, 1760-1801 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 361.
39. Alexander Knox, Essays on the Political Circumstances of Ireland (Dublin: Graisberry and Campbell, 1798), 139, essay 7, May 28, 1797.
40. Knox, Essays on the Political Circumstances of Ireland, 142-43. Knox is careful to avoid the further conspiratorial claim that Catholics and Jesuits were actually organizing the United Irish conspiracy - this he clearly imputes to atheistical leaders of the classic Illuminati stamp. Others, as we shall see below, were not as reluctant to take this further step, discerning shadowy Catholic designs behind the Illuminati in their gothic, Irish manifestations.
41. Robert Clifford, Application of Barruel's Memoirs of Jacobinism to the Secret Societies of Ireland and Great Britain (London: E. Booker, 1798), 2.
42. Clifford, Application of Barruel's Memoirs of Jacobinism, 8.
43. Jim Smyth, The Men of No Property: Irish Radicals and Popular Politics in the Late Eighteenth Century (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1992), 147-56;
44. Kevin Whelan, "The United Irishmen, The Enlightenment, and Popular Culture," in The United Irishmen: Republicanism, Radicalism, and Rebellion, ed. David Dickson, Dáire Keogh, and Kevin Whelan (Dublin: Lilliput, 1993), 286-88;
45. Kevin Whelan, The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism, and the Construction of Irish Identity, 1760-1830 (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), 77-80.
46. Jim Smyth, "Freemasonry and the United Irishmen," in The United Irishmen, 172.
47. Wieland, we are told, had "sprung from the same family" as the famous German poet Christoph Martin Wieland (1733-1813), who, as noted above, was associated with the Illuminati (Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland; or, The Transformation; and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, ed. Emory Elliott [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994], 6). Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text as Memoirs.
48. Hugh B. C. Pollard, The Secret Societies of Ireland: Their Rise and Progress (1922; repr., Kilkenny: Irish Historical Press, 1998), 12-13.
49. For all its paranoia, Pollard's linking of the Jacobins with the Jesuits is not entirely fanciful: Mirabeau advocated a scheme for an "intimate association," modeled on the Jesuits, differing only in its aims: "We have quite contrary views, those of enlightening men, of making them free and happy, but who . should prevent us from doing for good what the Jesuits have done for evil" (cited in Mervyn Jones, "Freemasonry," in Secret Societies, ed. Norman MacKenzie [London: Aldus Books, 1967], 170).
50. Fiedler, "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!" 151.
51. More problematically for isolationist impulses in that the African heritage of slaves required moving outside the parameters of the United States, as Paul Gilroy so eloquently charts in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993). Carwin's biloquism might well be the perfect vocal means of expressing this "double consciousness."
52. In addition to Gardner's pioneering work on the Irish in Brown, see also Diana Loercher Pazicky, Cultural Orphans in America (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997).
53. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic;
54. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000);