‘A shriek so terrible!’: Charles Brockden Brown’s Sensational Ventriloquists

Abstract

Charles Brockden Brown populates his gothic fiction with racially ambiguous characters to ask what constitutes national identity and who can be a citizen at a time when these concepts are shifting, unsettled and still contested. This chapter examines how Brown communicates liminal Whiteness through sensational ventriloquism, which marks marginalised White men as non-White noncitizens along the frontier. Through their unusual vocal abilities, itinerant Frank Carwin in Wieland and cognitively impaired Nick Handyside in ‘Somnambulism’ become less than White figures. Their transgressive cries disturb the senses of White middle class families who serve as prime fictional examples of rational White citizens in the early republic. Written as pieces of irrational yet instructive entertainment, Brown transcribes these disruptive and powerful speech acts within his fiction to test the senses and rationality of his republican heroines and gothic readers.