Gothic Subjects: The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 179-1861

Gothic Subjects

Gothic Subjects

The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 1790–1861

Siân Silyn Roberts

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2014 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Silyn Roberts, Siân.

Gothic subjects: the transformation of individualism in American fiction, 1790–1861 / Siân Silyn Roberts. — 1st ed.

    p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8122-4613-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Gothic fiction (Literary genre), American—History and criticism. 2. American fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 3. Individualism in literature. 4. Enlightenment—Influence. 5. National characteristics, American, in literature. I. Title.

PS374.G68S57 2014

813'.0872909—dc23

2013044476

To Matthew and my family, with love

CONTENTS

Introduction: The Gothic Enlightenment

Chapter 1. The American Transformation of the British Individual

Chapter 2. Captivity, Incorporation, and the Politics of Going Native

Chapter 3. A Mind for the Gothic: Common Sense and the Problem of Local Culture

Chapter 4. Population and the Limits of Civil Society in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter

Chapter 5. Slavery and Gothic Form: Writing Race as the Bio-Novel

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

The Gothic Enlightenment

In order to make a concrete analysis of power relations, we must abandon the juridical model of sovereignty. That model in effect presupposes that the individual is a subject with natural rights or primitive powers; it sets itself the task of accounting for the ideal genesis of the State; and finally, it makes the law the basic manifestation of power. We should be trying to study power not on the basis of the primitive terms of the relationship, but on the basis of the relationship itself, to the extent that it is the relationship itself that determines the elements on which it bears: rather than asking ideal subjects what part of themselves or their powers they have surrendered in order to let themselves become subjects, we have to look at how relations of subjugation can manufacture subjects. Similarly, rather than looking for the single form or the central point from which all forms of power derive, either by way of consequence or development, we must begin by letting them operate in their multiplicity, their differences, their specificity, and their reversibility; we must therefore study them as relations of force that intersect, refer to one another, converge, or, on the contrary, come into conflict and strive to negate one another.

—Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended (1976)

Say something about objectivity and subjectivity. Be sure and abuse a man called Locke.

—Edgar Allan Poe, How to Write a Blackwood Article (1838)

In the introduction to An Inquiry into the Human Mind (1762), noted Scottish Common Sense philosopher Thomas Reid unleashes an animated assault on his intellectual predecessor, David Hume. Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), he says, is an abyss of skepticism, a ridiculous work of philosophical subtlety that, like the ignis fatuus, contradicts herself, befools her votaries, and deprives them of every object worthy to be pursued.¹ Deeply wary of Hume’s skeptical method and intentions—he must either be a fool, or want to make a fool of me—Reid draws little distinction between the Treatise and a common romance: If [the mind] is indeed what the Treatise of Human Nature makes it, he warns, I find I have been only in an enchanted castle, imposed upon by spectres and apparitions. I blush inwardly to think how I have been deluded.²

Like many of Hume’s detractors, Reid takes particular issue with the heretical implications of the Treatise. Hume had famously disavowed any causal connection between ideas derived from sensation and empirical proof of an objective reality, leaving his successors with the unpalatable proposition that the material world exists only as the changing impressions of a discontinuous mind and not as a stable sensory truth logically inferred from the existence of the Deity.³ Rejecting this challenge to rational religion and morality, Reid proposes common sense as the antidote to Hume’s pyrrhonism. Common sense (a popular metaphysic that set the standard for U.S. college curricula well into the nineteenth century) is a model of perception that assumes universal standards and thus testifies to a shared material reality on the basis of direct, intuitive conviction. As Reid sees it, Hume creates nothing but a misleading fiction when he severs the mind’s epistemic access to the external world. To drive this case home, Reid introduces the trope of the castle, and the contest over competing models of subjectivity takes a decidedly gothic turn.⁴

Conventional scholarship tells us that the metaphor of the castle—the stock-in-trade of gothic fiction—betokens everything from political tyranny to gendered oppression, ancien regime decadence to psychological trauma.⁵ Its appearance in the Inquiry tells a somewhat different story. As Reid imagines it, Hume has challenged the normative epistemological reality of common sense by suggesting that the continuous existence of a material world is a fiction of the imagination, not an a priori rational truth confirmed by the operations of the understanding. According to the laws of common sense, knowledge must be anchored to some empirical referent lest we invest meaning in objects that mediates between perception and reality. Reid rewrites this scenario as a gothic melodrama in which Hume temporarily introduces spectral phenomena and aberrant behavior into a realist world in order to test the category of rational individualism. Persecuted by this haunting prospect that sensible objects exist only as ideas inside the mind, Reid finds himself in the position conventionally reserved for the gothic heroines of Walpole or Radcliffe: he is trapped inside the castle and subject to hostile imperatives and emotions not his own (I blush inwardly to think how I have been deluded). Much like the model of the individual proposed by his predecessor John Locke, Reid’s perceiving subject preserves its autonomy by observing and carefully maintaining the distinction between subjects and objects. The gothic tropes of imprisonment and persecution take over the narrative when that distinction breaks down. To reassert common sense as the dominant, normative metaphysics, Reid casts Hume’s skeptical alternative in phobic terms—renders it, that is, a spectacular object of fear—and banishes its brand of magical thinking to the realm of fiction.

In this example from Reid’s Inquiry, there is a mutually constitutive relationship between gothic strategies of representation, modern theories of individual consciousness, and a realist epistemological order. Recent scholarship has convincingly argued that eighteenth-century British literary culture transformed this relationship into the form of the gothic novel itself. According to this line of thought, early popular romances assert a self-affirming realism by demystifying sources of terror that override personal judgment. Reid adopts a fiercely defensive position against any perceived threat to a stable sense of reality and the continuous subject that inhabits such a world. In much the same way, the eighteenth-century British gothic novel banishes atavistic energies associated with a corrupt aristocracy, distant medieval past, or supernatural agency to leave the world inhabited by characters whose desires and motivations arise solely within themselves—characters, in other words, that closely resemble the modern self. By adjudicating emotion and the operations of desire, the gothic authorizes a distinctly modern prototype of personhood defined by what Adela Pinch calls standards of suitable emotional response.⁶ Thus novels by Radcliffe, Walpole, Reeve, and others subordinate anti-individualistic elements to an all-encompassing narrative of progression and improvement for the purposes of naturalizing the self-governing individual and, by extension, the household and civil society as its basic units of aggregation. By reproducing individuals as containers of cultivated sensibility, the gothic distinguishes a literate middle class from other ethnicities, races, and social groups with divergent cultural practices.⁷ The early British gothic normalizes and naturalizes a modern subject defined by its autonomy and interiority and so works hand-in-glove with the sentimental tradition to modernize kinship relations at the level of the individuated subject and the contractual household. By this line of argument, nothing less than the definition of the individual and its claims to moral authority are at stake in the early British gothic novel.⁸

Now let us now imagine the gothic traveling across the Atlantic in the 1790s to take root in the United States as a popular cultural form. Indeed, it is a well-established fact of American publication history that a wide body of imported and reprinted gothic novels became available to readers up and down the Eastern seaboard at the end of the eighteenth century.⁹ Literary evidence tells us that early American novelists such as Charles Brockden Brown, Isaac Mitchell, and Sally Sayward Barrell Keating Wood were familiar with and drew upon the narrative materials of the British novel. For the sake of argument, then, let us assume that the generic relationship between the gothic mode and the discursive reproduction of the modern individual was transplanted through the conventions of the novel into the homegrown literary productions of these authors. But it seems equally likely that the particular historical, political, and social exigencies of the new United States altered the conditions under which early Americans could imagine themselves achieving individualism or entering into contractual relations. If I am right in this assumption, then early American authors had to confront a disconnect between transmitted cultural forms and the new social setting in which they took root. This book is about how the American gothic addressed this problem and the ways it shaped late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century U.S. literary culture.

It is no coincidence that the American gothic first rose to popularity in a period defined by misrepresentation, internal unrest, and an influx of foreign immigrants whose origins and political intentions were all too uncertain. In the last decades of the eighteenth century, the United States witnessed an unprecedented increase in immigration and social mobility; far-reaching changes in property, proprietary wealth, and taxation laws; crises in federal and state representation; and a mounting sense of the country’s irrelevance in an international trade market. Ominous forecasts abound in the era’s writings: J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur calls the post-Revolutionary years calamitous times; Benjamin Rush, with characteristic energy, issues a dire warning about North Americans degenerating into savages or devouring each other like beasts of prey; and Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly; Or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799) dwells on the dangers of the nation’s mysterious and obscure characters.¹⁰ North America’s population, expanding from 2.8 million in 1780 to 9.6 million in 1820, largely comprised displaced young men and makeshift families that, as one cultural historian puts it, moved and moved again.¹¹ In his essay Information to Those Who Would Remove to America (1782), Benjamin Franklin addresses the numerous problems posed by the quick Increase of Inhabitants on the continent.¹² As Franklin’s essay suggests, the unprecedented population growth and restlessness that followed the Revolution was accelerated in no small part by what he calls the Accession of Strangers from Europe.¹³ In Kelroy (1812), Rebecca Rush’s novel of pecuniary ambition and parental contrivance, the narrator captures this zeitgeist when she cautions her readers against those beings who may be said to spring from nobody knows where; and rise in the world nobody can tell how.¹⁴ Rush’s comment about the opacity of human origin and motive is as much product of this era as the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts, which sought to locate and discipline precisely such foreign or indeterminate elements.¹⁵

The body of literary evidence assembled in this book suggests that British ideals of self-governance and contractualism came under assault in this climate of ontological uncertainty and rapid demographic change. By the end of the eighteenth century, global and local forces had moved people far beyond the traditional blood-based, ecclesiastical, and economic kinship structures that were traditionally relied upon to establish and corroborate identities in Europe and Britain.¹⁶ Disparate and clashing ideological regimes—including industrialization, urbanization, territorial expansion, imperialism, market capitalism, slavery, federalism, and revolution—multiplied the ways in which early Americans interpreted the concept of personal sovereignty. Under unforeseen conditions of social, geographic, and economic mobility, it fell to U.S. fiction writers to imagine ways of making this ambiguous and globally dispersed social body cohere as a political entity. The gothic provided the means to do so. For the gothic to accomplish such a task, however, the unique generic relationship between the cultural form of the early British novel and the discursive reproduction of the modern individual had to undergo a significant transformation on this side of the Atlantic.

Gothic Subjects argues that the American gothic tradition came about as authors sought to formulate in literary terms the kind of subject capable of negotiating the political, social, and demographic exigencies of the new United States. To do so, U.S. authors from the 1790s to the 1860s reshaped the cultural prototypes of eighteenth-century English modernity—chiefly the autonomous subject, contractual domestic relations, and the operations of sympathy—to account for a heterogeneous, fluid milieu of competing populations, rival territorial claims, and altogether different notions of political autonomy. To put this another way, a transformation in the cultural logic of British individualism took place over the course of the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries as U.S. fiction writers adapted the rhetorical figure of the modern subject to an Atlantic, Anglophone world. In doing so, authors such as Charles Brockden Brown, Sally Sayward Barrell Keating Wood, Royall Tyler, Leonora Sansay, Washington Irving, Robert Montgomery Bird, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and William Wells Brown helped post-Revolutionary and antebellum Americans think of themselves as political subjects.

To make this case, I read the American gothic’s literary history as a series of successive displacements in transatlantic novel convention and modern theories of self and government. The gothic therefore participates in the rhetorical practice Leonard Tennenhouse identifies with the cultural logic of diaspora.¹⁷ According to Tennenhouse’s model, English colonists’ efforts to reproduce a cultural homeland through the repetition of British narrative materials yields an altogether distinct Anglo-American literary tradition that both reproduces and transforms the notion of cultural Englishness. This critical approach resists the kind of nationalist literary history that locates American difference in autochthonous themes, settings, characters, or authorial biography. To the contrary, the culturalist notion of diaspora asks that we think of American letters as an ongoing appropriation and negotiation of literary practices that originate elsewhere. Accordingly, I regard the American gothic as a transformation in the cultural logic of British individualism that produces a complex and wholly distinct theory of the political subject in a diasporic setting.

This line of reasoning assumes that novels on both sides of the Atlantic were attempting to work out problems in theories of the subject and government, but this cultural work arrived at a fundamentally different conceptual result in America than in the British literary culture in which those theories originated. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the British gothic continued the work of the eighteenth-century romance by updating the category of the individual against a backdrop of urban growth, colonial expansion and rebellion, and a burgeoning print market. English novels went to work defending the modern subject against forms of collectivity that might obliterate individual difference. In that tradition, we see the eighteenth-century poetics of sensibility continually reworked as the dangers of alien desires and psychic energies that are channeled through the figure of the cannibal, the foreigner, the vampire, or the monster to overwhelm any aggregate conceived as a collection of individuals.¹⁸ The American gothic novel, on the other hand, takes the individual in a rather different direction by questioning its field of application in a diasporic setting. By detaching identity from geographic origin, consanguinity, or exemplary political status, works of gothic fiction imagine Americanness as an ability to change, adapt, travel, and even subsume individual difference and cultural particularity beneath forms of mass collectivity. In response to any number of social, economic, and historical circumstances that gravely challenged the fantasy of political and individual cohesion, the British subject takes on radically new forms in American fiction.

The result of this literary experiment is a slew of rhetorical figures I heuristically call gothic subjects. By this I mean a constellation of different narrative personas whose mutability and adaptability make them ideally suited to a fluctuating Atlantic world. At a time when both British and American intellectuals were preoccupied with the psychology of the political individual—critics have called this the spirit of the citizen-subject and the formation of civic character—works of psychological fiction offered a testing ground for competing and often contradictory forms of human consciousness and collectivity.¹⁹ This notion of psychology denotes a specifically eighteenth-century hermeneutics of mental interpretation, where the study of the mind is inextricably tied to epistemological inquiry, moral authority, and the principles of government. To arrive at a historically informed, transatlantic understanding of the gothic’s generic qualities, I recuperate eighteenth-century epistemological traditions to argue that gothic conventions yield forms of political membership better suited to an early Atlantic world bound by the fluctuations of the market, immigration, accident, chance, circumstance, and opportunity.

*   *   *

To put flesh on this argument, let me begin with a more detailed account of that peculiar rhetorical figure known as the modern individual and the means by which it achieved its ideological dominance and cultural prestige over the course of the eighteenth century. Here I distinguish between individualism as a modern discourse of liberal humanism animating any number of market forces and political ideologies—perhaps most famously analyzed as the basis of modern liberal-democratic theory in C. B. MacPherson’s The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (1962)—and the individual as an epistemological division of human subjectivity conceived in abstract terms. Originating in the eighteenth-century discourse of sensory perception known as faculty psychology, the kind of rhetorical formation I have in mind is the self-enclosed, autonomous, unitary, property-owning subject of the Lockean tradition, where property includes one’s mental attributes and capabilities.²⁰ This subject obeys a strict one-mind-per-body principle and matures over time and with experience in the world into a more intellectually complex and socially estimable being. Most scholars are willing to credit John Locke with the creation of the individual because he was the first to transfer social value from historically older notions of bloodline and estate to the interior qualities of the mind. As early as 1748, Benjamin Franklin remarked in Poor Richard Improved that Locke "made the whole internal world his own.²¹ Writing nearly 250 years later, social theorist Charles Taylor agrees: the inescapable contemporary sense of inwardness" we associate with the modern sovereign subject has its origins in Locke’s notion of the individual.²²

This distinctly modern form of subjectivity achieved its extraordinary ubiquity in the eighteenth century not only because works of political philosophy took it as their primary unit of analysis but also because the British novel adopted it as a model for character. Recent critics of the British tradition such as Wendy Jones, Adela Pinch, Pam Morris, Nancy Armstrong, and Deirdre Lynch have shown how the novel helped naturalize the Lockean individual as the modern standard of selfhood. The novel, Armstrong writes, took up the project of universalizing the individual subject by transforming the body from an indicator of rank to the container of a unique subjectivity.²³ The success of this narrative model of the individual, Armstrong suggests, lay in its unique capacity to reproduce itself in readers and novels alike. Beginning with the works of Defoe, Austen, and Richardson, the early British novel allows its protagonists to move outside a socially stratified system of kinship relations to expose the limitations of defining social value purely in economic or blood-based terms. By tipping its protagonists out of their assigned social positions, the novel transposes social value to unique interior qualities, or what in Jane Eyre (1847) Brontë calls the subject’s inward treasure.²⁴ This narrative feat transforms a Crusoe, a Pamela, or an Elizabeth Bennett into the exemplary yet natural standard of the self-governing citizen. In Deirdre Lynch’s terms, At the turn of the nineteenth century characters became the imaginative resources on which readers drew to make themselves into individuals, to expand their own interior resources of sensibility.²⁵ As I suggested earlier (and explain in greater detail in Chapter 1), the early British gothic participates in this modernizing process by amplifying the authority of the individual in a world where ontological order has been upset.

Unlike early modern ontologies of self that locate identity firmly in Galenic physiology, place of origin, or birthright, the individual offers a model of modern humanity that can thrive in different cultural milieus because it presents itself as normative even as it changes and adapts to each new setting.²⁶ Daniel Defoe makes this case in literary terms when he strands Crusoe on a castaway island far removed from Britain. There, Crusoe’s qualities of mind and contractual imagination matter far more than any notion of a fixed social origin. It therefore makes sense that such a versatile, mobile model of British identity would make its way across the Atlantic in the years preceding the Revolution to reproduce itself discursively in political philosophy, law, medicine, autobiography, history, and fiction—any form of writing, that is, that takes the principles of autonomous individualism as its foundation. At a moment when matters of political authority, self-determination, and autonomy took on particular urgency in the post-Revolutionary United States, it seems entirely plausible that North American intellectuals should have gravitated toward a model of human character that locates social value in a capacity for self-government and emotional control.²⁷ This is, after all, one of the fundamental principles underpinning the sentimental novel, which hinges on the struggle to determine what makes a woman desirable. The woman’s personal authority and interior qualities define the social rules by which a community reproduces itself. To achieve this end, sentimental novels grant their female characters a unique interiority—we might say, they are individuated—that transforms them into legitimate bearers of cultural value. Thus two people of matching interiority and equal merit—Lucy Freeman and Mr. Sumner, say, in The Coquette (1797) or Myra and Worthy in The Power of Sympathy (1789)—achieve individual perfection through marriage as each augments the other with something he or she lacked prior to the exchange. This is essentially the erotic counterpart to a political model of contractual community; in both instances, the good is constituted through shared standards of taste and judgment rather than subordination and coercion. Thus the marriage contract maintains the integrity of self-sovereign authority by regulating and enforcing the social and cognitive distinctions on which the institutional norms of individualism rest.

But as recent cultural historians have argued, from its earliest moments, American literary culture found itself at odds with the kind of exemplary and progressive spirits unilaterally identified with unitary, disciplined subjecthood.²⁸ As David Kazanjian explains, for such a formulation to work, it had to ignore all the myriad, particularistic differences among subjects—trade, heritage, wealth, race, gender, religion, the list is supposedly infinite—in order to apprehend each subject equally.²⁹ Insofar as it measures human sovereignty strictly as the unproblematic unfolding of mental and political complexity along developmental lines, the individual is an elite cultural formulation. As Judith Butler succinctly puts it, liberal versions of human ontology have a tendency to think in the exclusive terms of bounded beings—distinct, recognizable, delineated, subjects.³⁰ Enlightenment epistemologies of the modern subject restrict civic membership to only those figures of self-sovereign authority who fit the Enlightenment definition of the individual in the first place. In Locke’s original formulation, these were men who belonged to an English land-owning elite arranged within a traditional hierarchy of kinship relations. But the moment the individual enters a cultural milieu in which people have circulated far beyond that system of social stratification and share altogether different notions of self-fulfillment and political authority—a place, arguably, much like the post-Revolutionary United States—the limitations of this model become strikingly clear.

It is for this reason, I suspect, that the authors included in this study repeatedly take the individual to task as both a fiction and a fragile, defensive construct perilously vulnerable to competing measures of human life. Beginning in the 1790s, American authors started to use gothic tropes to represent the individual as an impossible fantasy wholly unsuited to an urban, cosmopolitan community of competing interests, heterogeneous cultures, and different notions of political and personal authority. As I see it, post-Revolutionary and antebellum U.S. fiction comes fully freighted with characters bearing little resemblance to the kind of internally coherent, developmental subject of the British sentimental tradition with whom Ian Watt enjoins us to identify the rise of the novel.³¹ Arthur Mervyn, C. Auguste Dupin, Updike Underhill, Sheppard Lee, and Hester Prynne are obvious cases in point. It is fair to say that none of these characters qualifies as an individual as modern political theory understood that term, namely, as the ordered, continuous, autonomous self whose social value resides in its unique interiority, developmental progress, moral discipline, and capacity for critical reflection. To the contrary, the narrative personas of the American novel—especially where it appears gothic in character—are more often restless, indeterminate social forces inimical to Enlightenment rules of behavior but who nonetheless thrive in conditions of ontological mobility.

A literary example from Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn (1799–1800) will serve to clarify this point. This is the novel’s description of Philadelphia in the grip of the yellow fever: Terror had exterminated all the sentiments of nature. Wives were deserted by husbands, and children by parents.… Men were seized by this disease in the streets; passengers fled from them; entrance into their own dwellings was denied to them; they perished in the public ways.³² The novel’s horrific account of the household’s disintegration effectively questions the Enlightenment assumption that family feeling is an unbreakable bond and the basis for the kind of fellow feeling—among independent householders—that would create a community recognizable to Adam Smith as sympathetic. That the family falls apart so readily here should tell us that Brown is questioning its conventional application as a model for the nation at large. Indeed, Brown suggests, the affective model of social relations is particularly ill-suited to the kind of heterogeneous community one encounters in a city. Let me suggest why.

Brown’s Philadelphia is an urban space in which all manner of people are forced into close proximity with others (like the conman Welbeck) whose origins and intentions are, at best, unknowable or, at worst, outright hostile. The case can be made that, in such an environment, any assumption of fellow-feeling—that people have common ideas and emotions capable of uniting them in a single interest—can be downright dangerous. To think his way through this problem (I elaborate on this in Chapter 1), Brown uses the device of the plague to displace the self-enclosed household as the basic unit and model of society with a totally inimical model in which feeling flows unimpeded between people and even between objects and people. As the agent and representative of a society thus constituted, Mervyn refuses to observe the boundaries separating subject from object and allows feeling to pass between himself and those with whom he comes into contact. In refusing to observe the separation between himself and others, Mervyn assumes that everyone is just like him. Any domain where the logic of individualism prevails (the idyllic Hadwin household, for example) depends on unbreachable individual boundaries for its health and cohesion. Thus Mervyn’s invasions prove utterly disastrous in such spaces.

In the city, by contrast, this form of human interaction comes to us as Mervyn’s strikingly advantageous ability to ingratiate himself with practically anyone. His indiscriminate affability gets him out of danger, grants him access to Philadelphia’s elite, and even secures him a wealthy wife. Indeed, what might be seen as a lack of discrimination in British terms might well earn the descriptor democratic in the new United States. By and large, criticism has tended to read the novel’s notorious ambiguities as evidence of Mervyn’s divided moral, economic, or political consciousness.³³ I would simply prefer to say that the different and conflicting accounts we receive of Mervyn’s actions and motives tell us that he is all things to all people. He has the potential, in short, to be anyone.

To imagine such an adaptable subject, however, Brown must redefine autonomy, self-enclosure, and fixed social position—whether in a body, a household, or a civil state—as prohibitive and static formulations that trap people and things in one place. In Lockean terms, this is both paradoxical and counterintuitive: Locke’s civil society takes property ownership as the original condition of self-government, and the categories of self and contract exist to protect that property against