Veronica Ramirez

Edgar Huntly: The All-Encompassing Early American Novel

Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly was one of the more challenging but also one of the more interesting texts that we encountered in Dr. White’s Early American Literature course. Edgar Huntly is an epistolary novel, that contains a bit of all of the following: a captivity narrative, a detective story, a murder mystery, a gothic mystery, a psychological thriller, some immigration and women’s issues, and is also a bit of love story . While it is not uncommon for texts to be labeled by more than one term, Edgar Huntly is unique in that encompasses many aspects of the newly developing novel in America.

Edgar Huntly takes the course objective “To learn about early North American and U.S. texts and cultures and make them matter now” because it is part of a set of novels that marked the emergence of early American literature. It is important to study this novel when studying either early American literature or trying to make the gap to the Romanticism class, because this truly is the gateway between the Enlightenment and the Romanticism period. Edgar Huntly also exemplifies the course objective of “Emergence of “Literature” as we know it today from earlier genres like letters, pamphlets, public documents; spoken and written literatures and cultures”.  It is an epistolary novel but instead of taking compilations of letters such as in Pamela, it has a slight twist in that it is one long letter by one author with several long sections of other characters’ dialogue transcribed by that author.

 The character Edgar Huntly retains some aspects of the Enlightenment period as he methodically searches out the truth. Edgar is educated and he tries to think like detective, and tries to reason out events, and even reasons that murder as revenge is okay. This enlightened man is brought into the romantic period with Brown’s gothic images and the physical and psychological mazes. Brown utilizes the Gothic to situate it in new American landscape and he states in the preface to the public that the European gothic is traditionally “Puerile superstition and exploded manners, Gothic castles and chimeras, are the materials usually employed for this end” and that he believes that for America “the incidents of Indian hostility, and the perils of the Western wilderness, are far more suitable”. Edgar Huntly also reaches back to Puritan literature and beliefs, especially as part of the Web review of the Salem Witch trials and the text of Cotton Mather’s “The Wonders of the Invisible World.” Edgar Huntly and these Puritan texts both integrate the Gothic by speaking of specters, evil spirits and ghosts.

The identity of the new American, breaking away from whatever held them back in Europe, and the fears of the early American frontier person are presented in Edgar Huntly through Clithero, but are also presented in Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur’s “Letters from an American Farmer.” Crevecoeur states that “an American, who leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds.” This allows Clithero to leave his past behind, and restart in a new country, even though the ghosts of his previous life still haunt him.

The newly immigrated Americans encounter the wild and gothic landscape and also the Native Americans. The captivity narrative morphs from a nonfictional story, i.e. Mary Rowlandson, A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration, to a fictional story such as Edgar Huntly by encompassing many of the same story-telling methods that the original nonfictional stories did. In Edgar Huntly, the Native Americans on the border of the frontier are aggressive and violent heathens just like in the Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative. The idea of the captivity narrative is a bit unique to early American literature, even though it has been adapted to represent any captivity by an “other,” but it tries to tell one common American fear, the fear of being capture by the Native Americans.

Edgar Huntly is a unifying text that encompasses a lot of the ideas that we covered during the entire Early American Literature course. It encompasses the fears of living in an unknown new land, living with different classes of people of different nationalities, and struggling with moral and psychological issues. It may seem fantastical to us, but if you extend the realism aspect of living in the frontier, in a new unknown world next to angry Native Americans who are being forced away from their land, with new immigrants arriving daily with possibly shady pasts, and then aspects of this novel could be realistic and that is the key. These events may not have been unusual on their own and thus this novel covers something for everyone. Edgar Huntly is a creation story, the creation story of the early American novel, a story that compiles all the different fears of the new Americans and puts them together for us to delve into and explore at our own risk to our psyche.