Reading the text that isn't there: Paranoia in the nineteenth-century American novel (Charles Brockden Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain)

At its most accessible dialogic level, this study is an attempt to synthesize two of the more long-lived claims in American studies: Leslie Fiedler's literarily grounded assertion of the gothic nature of American literature and Richard Hofstadter's historically grounded contention that the American political arena has had, from its inception, a paranoid component. The relationship is a matter of greater complexity and importance than can be accounted for in terms of simple chronological coincidence. Strikingly, just as Sigmund Freud observes that paranoia routinely takes a desired homosexual advance and projects it into the external world as an unwanted homosexual attack, so does Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick observe that the gothic novel relies on a technique of taking an object of desire and projecting it into the world as an object of fear.; I contend that America's fascination with paranoid texts is a product of a national fetishization of American innocence. We assert our innocence despite a historical record that calls our innocence into question, and so we project that desired innocence into the world not as the subject of debate, but as the object of fear. Secret plots against ‘innocent’ American characters or narrators or texts or readers are reminders that our innocence could very well be the cause of our downfall. To perceive our innocence as our chief vulnerability is only to ratify our belief in an innocence that was never proven to begin with.; Through a survey of selected novels from Charles Brockden Brown ( Wieland), Nathaniel Hawthorne (House of the Seven Gables and The Marble Faun), Herman Melville ( Benito Cereno), and Mark Twain (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and A Double-Barreled Detective Story), I study the trajectory of textual cabals that pit text against narrator, text against text, writer and reader against character, and, finally, writer against reader. The growing scope of the textual conspiracy conforms with Hofstadter's claim that the paranoid ultimately sees history itself as a conspiracy.