Abstract: This paper examines how Leonora Sansays epistolary gothic novel Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo constructs the American subject as a distinctively colonialist subject through its main narrator Mary. Although there have been attempts to read Secret History as a text that celebrates cosmopolitanism, primarily focusing on Marys sister Clara, this reading overlooks the fact that Mary, who is the writer of 29-out-of-32 letters in Secret History, shapes her Americanness through a colonialist perspective. Mary gothicizes not only marriage and domesticity of Europe but also miscegenation and hybridism of the West Indies, emphasizing that Clara and herself as white Americans are remarkably different from Europeans or Creoles. She rigidly defends her Americanness against the horrifying hybridization and corruption witnessed in the West Indies. At times, however, Mary appropriates the positive properties of the West Indies and fuses them with her definition of the Americanness. The American subject that she establishes through her carefully regulated letters is a subject that is thoroughly guarded against contamination, yet occasionally porous, able to absorb beneficial elements of other cultures. Marys frequent concealment and censorship of information expose the fact that information cannot be smoothly circulated and equally distributed among participants, and that an ideal cosmopolitan circuit is illusory. The American subject that Mary represents in Secret History is thus far from being cosmopolitan and closer to being colonialist.
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