Gothic Subjects the Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 1790-1861 by Sian Silyn-Roberts (Review)

Gothic Subjects

The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 1790-1861 by Sian Silyn-Roberts (review)

Erin Posner

ENG 726: Early American Literature

3/28/2016

In Gothic Subjects: The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 1790-1861, Sian Silyn-Roberts argues for the reasons behind a sudden appeal for the gothic novel in America. One of her arguments for the creation of the ‘American gothic novel’ was an innate longing for personal sovereignty. She contends that throughout the 1700’s, the United States witnessed an increase in immigration, social mobility, changes in property, wealth, and taxation laws, and a sense of the country’s irrelevance in an international trade market (4). Due to these changes in the way people lived, American writers were forced to think up new ways that made this new “globally dispersed social body cohere as a political entity.” Silyn-Roberts states that American fiction writers like Leonora Sansay, Sally Sayward Barrel Keating Wood, Washington Irving, Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne helped to train American minds to think of themselves as “political subjects.” Given these circumstances, the British form of Gothic literature, when crossing the Atlantic, is seen and created in a whole new light.

Through this “new brand” of Gothicism, Silyn-Roberts explores how certain Enlightenment concepts like the “self-contained individual,” as proposed by John Locke, are challenged by this globalized world, and tested by American authors, whose characters are allowed to move beyond the social system of kinship relations to expose the limitations of defining social value solely in blood-based terms. (8) She argues that traditional ideas of hierarchical kinship belonged to the English land-owning elite, but once an individual was able to enter a new cultural paradigm in which people can migrate beyond that social barrier, the genre began to appeal to the American People. In Gothic...