What he has produced, however, is a book as contradictory and as confusing in its pronouncements and outlook as the early American Republic itself. Brackenridge cannot seem to decide between the aristocratic assumptions of Farrago and the populist impulses of O'Regan; while he shares Farrago's fear of the mob, for example, he apparently admires O'Regan's determination to rise in American society, even if he is unqualified for every position or office he seeks. If he seems dubious about the leveling tendencies of democracy, he also tends to reject the reactionary declarations and prejudiced views of an (often self-proclaimed) elite citizenry. Not surprisingly, Brackenridge shifts political allegiances in his book just as he did in his life, championing Federalism during the time of the Constitutional debates, then subsequently becoming an Anti-Federalist when government policies began to privilege land speculation at the expense of impoverished farmers. But, finally, the novelist seems unsure as to which version of the democratic system he supports, either total participatory democracy, or some limited form of democratic government where an enlightened leadership rules on behalf of a populace not quite intelligent and therefore trustworthy enough to govern itself. The equivocation may very well mirror the endless uncertainties of political life in the new nation, but it also weakens the already shaky foundations of the fledgling novel.
Perhaps Americans had the most success adapting the form of the novel that would seem to be the least suited to the open, expansive American landscape, the gothic, which depended for its effects on such feudal artifacts as intricately constructed castles and ruined abbeys, and such Old World types as evil barons and mad monks. But the gothic also specialized in such human foibles as superstition and delusion, as well as human anxieties over hidden corruption and uncertain, if not outrightly malign, motivation. The claustrophobic structures and mazelike pathways that tend to recur in these stories become metaphors for the distorted, haunted minds of the protagonists of these novels, characters whose respectable, seemingly normal outer lives mask savage, abnormal inner ones. The gothic thus be-21- came the perfect form for expressing the fears that American society, with its concomitant ideologies of liberalism and individualism, not only had continued the abuses of a hierarchical social structure but also had actually opened the way to even greater treacheries: selfmade, self-improved, self-confident, and self-determined men abusing power, subverting authority, undermining order.
No practitioner of the gothic was more attuned to these potential problems in American society than Charles Brockden Brown, and no American novelist exploited them more successfully than he did in several books from the late 1790s, including Wieland (1798), Ormond (1799), Arthur Mervyn (Part I, 1799; Part II, 1800), and Edgar Huntly (1799). In these experimental and daring, though flawed novels, Brown tested the limits of reason in a country willing to believe in its limitlessness, examined the darker and perhaps evil impulses of unchecked imagination, and explored the consequences of personality unloosed from its moorings in some form of stable, traditional community. Not surprisingly, given his interests, all four novels become fixated on violent disruption of a previously harmonious group of people, sometimes caused by an outside agent (Carwin in Wieland), sometimes by an internal one (Edgar Huntly himself). In each case, there is no refuge from the turbulence and confusion that results, no return to the fixed relations of things as they used to be. Drawing on the radical creeds, speculative philosophy, and psychological experimentation of his own time for the plots and metaphors of his novels, Brown introduced such ideas as ventriloquism, somnambulism, and spontaneous combustion into American fiction, suggesting the end of the once stable relationship between appearance and reality, and between the individual and society. Moreover, long before it became a fashionable critical notion, Brown posited the belief that the self was basically unknowable, indeterminate; the more we look for an inviolate order within, the more we discover the basic rule of fragmentation.
These ideas are most prevalent — especially the discovery of disorder within and the consequent inability to reconstruct an ordered self — in Brown's best novel, Wieland, which dramatizes, as Jay Fliegelman has argued, one of the most perplexing issues in the early republican period, the "conflicting claims of authority and liberty." The tension within Brown's narrator, Clara Wieland, is precisely be-22- tween these two mutually exclusive demands, represented by Henry Pleyel, the rationalist who eschews all other forms of knowledge, and Carwin, the man of passionate will who tests and manipulates Clara in order to destroy her faith in the rational side of her being, and by implication in Pleyel as well. (He also manages to ruin her reputation, by inference rather than act, in the mind of Pleyel, who essentially abandons her.) Thus, the authority of supreme reason wars with the license of unchecked liberty, the one constrained and controlled, the other raw and raging. Clara's crazed brother, Theodore, who in his pursuit of religious certainty kills his entire family (and would have added Clara to the list of victims were he not prevented by Carwin), illustrates not only the dangers of enthusiasm but also those of submitting too readily, too pleasurably, to the demands of a higher, more potent will. In other words, Theodore combines the excesses of both authority and liberty, and he must be eliminated. But his death brings no resolution to the essential conflict, and Clara, though she regains health at the end, never achieves self-knowledge. Brown's novel, compelling and powerful in its psychological undercurrents and social implications, ends irresolutely, thus weakly. Novelistically, Brown could not resolve the tensions; culturally, he could not solve the contradictions.
At the close of this period of the "early American novel," James Fenimore Cooper, in all probability America's first significant novelist, if not quite a genuine "cultural voice," produced a novel that indeed sought to reunify the spirit of a discordant nation. In The Spy (1821), Cooper concentrates on the issue of virtuous behavior in the Republic, and though his story is set in the Revolutionary era, he means the lesson to pertain to his own, which he saw threatened by the powerful forces of discord, emanating for the most part from a populace that had turned toward the pursuit of material satisfaction at the expense of national loyalty. Cooper illustrates his meaning through the symbolic structure of the novel, which centers on the Wharton family and the patriarch's attempt to preserve the sanctuary of his home in a time of crisis. The attempt is a futile one, for the elder Wharton, like Cooper's America, has conceived the task purely in material terms. As with the businessmen whom Cooper despised, money is Wharton's bottom line, dictating relationships as well as physical movement. The complicated plot turns on the fact that -23- Wharton has placed his family in a dangerous situation because he has refused to accept the moral responsibilities of citizenship.