Charles Brockden Brown's Revolution and the Birth of American Gothic (review)

Reviewed by: Charles Brockden Brown’s Revolution and the Birth of American Gothic Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds (bio) Peter Kafer. Charles Brockden Brown’s Revolution and the Birth of American Gothic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. xxi+249pp. US$39.95. ISBN 0-8122-3786-2. In 1777, the Continental Congress Ad Hoc Committee on Spies recommended to the Supreme Executive Council, the governing authority of Pennsylvania, that the men on a list it had assembled should be imprisoned. Among the last arrested and jailed was Elijah Brown, father of Charles Brockden Brown. Elijah Brown was a prickly individualist Quaker who refused to sign an oath of allegiance at the expense of his business, his family, and his freedom. The "horrors" (12) of his father's arrest, together with the horrors of Revolutionary and British warfare in Philadelphia, marked the younger Brown forever, turning him into not only a Gothic novelist but also one who, in effect, told parts of the same story over and over throughout his career as an imaginative writer: this is the thesis of Kafer's Charles Brockden Brown's Revolution and the Birth of American Gothic. The history of Quakers in America is the subject of Kafer's book, with the influence of the Quaker past on Brown's Gothicism as the basis for his argument. On this subject Kafer provides a thorough analysis of a people—a "tribe," he calls them—perpetually on the wrong side of, if not the law, at least cultural hegemony. After his prologue describing the ur-trauma of Brown's childhood experience of his father's arrest, Kafer provides chapters on the Brown-Churchman clan's removal from England to America in the seventeenth century, bringing their Quakerism tinged with mysticism with them; on Philadelphia's social and political upheavals in the 1770s; and on 1790s Philadelphia and its social and political parallels with that city twenty years earlier, before moving on to a reading of Brown's four best-known novels—Wieland, Arthur Mervyn, Ormond, and Edgar Huntly—in the second half of the book. Kafer's first one hundred pages are the most valuable. He has done the most complete archival research in the field of Brown studies to date, with particular attention to Quaker and Philadelphia history. His sources are as wide-ranging as Brown family histories and letters, diaries of Quakers such as Elizabeth Drinker and Sarah Fisher, tax lists and the Philadelphia Directory, and various holdings of the Quaker Collection at Haverford College. The cultural biography that results from this magisterial work is as important as any in the history of Brown studies. The extended family connections among immigrant Quakers from 1650 to 1800, the association among neighbours in and around Vine Street in Philadelphia throughout those years, the doctrinal and experiential implications of Quaker dogma and their predisposition against Scots-Irish Presbyterians is all amassed here, representing a body of cultural evidence that will provide instrumental "thick" cultural description in this field for generations of scholars to come. [End Page 383] But if Charles Brockden Brown's Revolution is a great biography of Quaker culture as it intersected with Revolutionary America, it is neither a biography of Brown nor a nuanced reading of his writing. The Brown of this work is a terrified six-year-old, later a Romantic teenager, inventing stories to tell his friends in order to shock them in the way he was shocked as a child, and still later a member of the Friendly Club, rehearsing his traumas in writing and conversation, albeit in disguised narratives. Only a few episodes in Brown's life, in other words, are developed in any detail. Previous biographies—those of William Dunlap, Harry R. Warfel, David Lee Clark, and Steven Watts— together flesh out a more rounded view of Brown's life. Kafer's Brown is fairly two-dimensional, little more than a mouthpiece for the lurid sensibility that predisposed immigrant Quakers, even to the third and fourth American generations, to expression of the fantastic doctrine of the "inner light." Thus, Kafer's version of Wieland is peopled with avatars of historical Quakers, such as Anthony Benezet, and like-minded mystics, such...

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