SOURCE: "Born Decadent: The American Novel and Charles Brockden Brown," in The Southern Review, Vol. 17, No. 3, July, 1981, pp. 501-19.

In the following essay, Young asserts that although Brown 's novels cannot properly be characterized as Gothic, Brown did write "the romance of mystery and terror." Young further argues that the "dark secret" of Romanticism—love between members of the same family or same sex—is also reflected in Brown's works.

"… the Writer must appeal to Physicians and to men conversant with the latent springs and occasional perversions of the human mind."

—Brown, Advertisement to Wieland, 1798

Great ages of practically everything decline and fall, but it takes time. Fin de siècle cannot close in without a siècle behind it, and when Charles Brockden Brown came along the history of American fiction was not quite a decade old. Such an infant, indeed, was the American Novel that he...