Isaac Mitchell's The Asylum; or, Gothic Castles in the New Republic

Abstract

Despite its European provenance in a romantic revitalization of surviving vestiges of the medieval past, the gothic novel has a long and honorable New World history. It was one of the first fictional forms borrowed from the burgeoning eighteenth-century English novel. Along with a few other newly transplanted varieties of fiction—for example, the sentimental novel, the picaresque adventure, and the travel narrative—it also thrived in the newly independent Republic. That first flourishing is attested to by such noteworthy early American Gothics as Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798) and Isaac Mitchell's The Asylum; or, Alonzo and Melissa (1811)—the former one of the best novels of the period, the latter one of the most popular. The form then reached what was surely an artistic apogee when, toward the middle of the nineteenth century, writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne labored in its haunted gardens. This full flowering has in our time become, to alter the metaphor, a flood. In drugstore and supermarket, wherever inexpensive paperbacks are sold, book racks abound with almost identical volumes, their “covers featuring … gloomy, foreboding castles and apprehensive maidens in modified nightgowns.” Clearly, Americans still have an affinity for castles in literature, particularly if those castles ominously loom over young, beautiful, vulnerable heroines.