External and real, but not supernatural, the terror of the soul in Brockden Brown and Poe

grantor: University of TorontoWilliam Hazlitt noted in 1829 that the works of Charles Brockden Brown "were a banquet of horrors," arguing that the lack of European Gothic settings in the New World produced a different vein in the history of the tale of terror, as "the genius of America is essentially mechanical and modern." Brown was obliged to suit his Gothic narratives to his New World environment by explaining apparently supernatural elements as being fundamentally natural in origin. In this, Brown was heir to the Gothic tradition of William Godwin and Ann Radcliffe in advocating psychological and rational explanations, rather than to that of M. G. Lewis which espoused patently supernatural excesses. Edgar Allan Poe wrote fiction which was much more internalized than Godwin's or even Brown's, exploring terrors that were "not of Germany, but of the soul," placing the emphasis on psychological observation rather than grounding his tales in Brown's realistic locales. This dissertation will explore how Brown and Poe deviated from the European schools, with their rejection of Gothic trappings in favour of presenting the capacity for violence inherent in the human mind. The Gothic tradition is analyzed in Chapter 1, which details how Brown and Poe present an American translation of European terrors without resorting to the actual supernatural. Brown's novels are treated in Chapter 2, which examines his explanations of the apparently supernatural through such devices as ventriloquism and spontaneous combustion, along with religious mania. Poe's short stories are analyzed in Chapter 3, which depicts how he further internalizes Brown's exploration of unbalanced mental states with depictions of insanity, revenge, and mournful obsession. Brown's and Poe's works are compared in Chapter 4, which examines how both authors explore the phobias of premature burial and the loss of physical control, through somnambulism or mesmerism, as well as the terrors implicit in outbreaks of plague. Both Brown's subjective but rational realism and Poe's more romantic subjectivism emanate from the Gothic tradition.Ph.D