ABSTRACT
Patrick McGrath’s Martha Peake: A Novel of the Revolution is a gothic story that through its two contradictory historical narratives concerning the fate of the Cornish smuggler Harry Peake and his unfortunate daughter Martha, and their relation to the ideological struggle of the American Revolution, raises the specter of “free trade.” William and Ambrose Tree fail to impress their histories with a stamp of authority and as a consequence highlight a central fault line in the economic ideology of free trade at the heart of the American Revolution and the American Dream: that instead of giving the people an equal opportunity to prosper, it forces them to become each other’s rivals, in the process infecting them with the desire to own ever “more yet in this vein,” a form of madness that has been given the name “affluenza,” a true curse on twenty-first-century societies across the globe.
