SOURCE: "Charles Brockden Brown and the Uses of Gothicism: A Reassessment," in ESQ: A Journal of The American Renaissance, Vol. 18, No. 1, 1st Quarter, 1972, pp. 10-18.

In the essay that follows, Hume differentiates between the Gothic novel and the presence of Gothic elements in a novel, measuring Brown's work against these standards. Hume concludes that Brown is concerned in all his novels with the psychology of his characters and that he utilizes the "trappings of Gothicism " in order to create situations to which his characters react, but that his novels are not truly Gothic.

Although Charles Brockden Brown has long been thought of as the first American Gothic novelist—essentially a forerunner of Poe—recent critics have been turning away from this view of him, and we may well wonder just how much substance there is in the Gothic ascription.¹ Certainly to date no one has shown that in...