From Godwinism to radical federalism: The developing political agenda in the fiction of Charles Brockden Brown, 1798-1801
Abstract
This study maintains that Charles Brockden Brown promoted his political agendas--including a strong feminist stance--in the four novels of his major and most productive phase, as well as in his two sentimental novels and Alcuin, a dialogue which addresses the rights of women in the new republic. Although modern criticism, for the most part, has appraised these works as worthy of critical inquiry, it is an appraisal circumscribed by reservations. Critical emphasis on Brown's artistic "deficiencies" (frequently cited are his flat characterizations, inconsistencies in plot, and disjunctive narrativity) has precluded any true inclusion of his works within the canon of American literature. When his works have been included in the canon--albeit marginally even though his fiction has been ensconced on college syllabi and reading lists for many years--they have been studied either as curiosities or as precursors of the works of later, "superior" authors. Arguing against this privileging of the aesthetic over the historic, I contend that Brown wrote to transform the social order. Essentially, this means that through his fiction, Brown is participating in the debate over cultural concerns in the 1790s. These fictions present puissant illustrations of how eighteenth-century American society viewed itself. In writing these novels Brown expounded upon and contemplated answers for the problems afflicting the new republic, while developing and formulating his own philosophy and political agendas. Tracing the development of Brown's philosophical and political thought through his fiction, this study concludes that the earlier works, Alcuin, Wieland, Ormond, and Arthur Mervyn, reveal a republican stance formed by Brown's early fascination with the philosophy of William Godwin, Brown's contemporary, especially when these works are viewed in conjunction with the writings of his Federalist contemporaries--Timothy Dwight, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, and the early Joel Barlow, for example. Only in those works at the end of Brown's novelistic career, notably Edgar Huntly, Clara Howard, and Jane Talbot, does he evince his radical Federalism and his complete renunciation of Godwinism.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Oreovicz, Purdue University.
Subject Area
American literature
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