Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
inuenced by the shift from the Age of Reason to early Romanticism occurring with
contemporary British authors, particularly William Godwin (1756–1836), a radical
political philosopher and Gothic novelist, and Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), a
women’s rights advocate, novelist, and historian. The latter’s inuence appears in
Brown’s Alcuin; a dialogue (1798) which advocated women’s equality and place
in the public sphere, rather than only the domestic or private sphere. Godwin’s
inuence may appear in the Gothic bent of Brown’s work, which, though grounded
in concrete reality, expands into Gothic extravagance and the irrational.
Starting in 1798, Brown published seven novels in four years, the most wellknown
of these being Weiland, a ctionalization of an actual Pennsylvania murder
case. These works use American settings, stories, and events, including Native
Americans, the American frontier, and a yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia.
They also include the uncanny, the mysterious, the psychotic, and the unconscious
(or a mind not at one with itself). The titular character of The Memoirs of Carwin
the Biloquist, for example, uses ventriloquism to suggest supernatural visitations
of the dead. Brown thus serves as forerunner for Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, and Herman Melville.
Brown relied for a living more pragmatically on journalistic writing, editing The
Monthly Magazine and American Review (1799–1800), The Literary Magazine
and American Register (1803–1807), and The American Register and General
Repository of History, Politics, and Science (1807–1810).
3.19.1 Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist
(1805)
Chapter I
I was the second son of a farmer, whose place of residence was a western district
of Pennsylvania. My eldest brother seemed tted by nature for the employment to
which he was destined. His wishes never led him astray from the hay-stack and
the furrow. His ideas never ranged beyond the sphere of his vision, or suggested
the possibility that to-morrow could dier from to-day. He could read and write,
because he had no alternative between learning the lesson prescribed to him, and
punishment. He was diligent, as long as fear urged him forward, but his exertions
ceased with the cessation of this motive. The limits of his acquirements consisted
in signing his name, and spelling out a chapter in the bible.
My character was the reverse of his. My thirst of knowledge was augmented in
proportion as it was supplied with gratication. The more I heard or read, the more
restless and unconquerable my curiosity became. My senses were perpetually alive
to novelty, my fancy teemed with visions of the future, and my attention fastened
upon every thing mysterious or unknown.
My father intended that my knowledge should keep pace with that of my
brother, but conceived that all beyond the mere capacity to write and read was
useless or pernicious. He took as much pains to keep me within these limits, as
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