Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) pursued an ambition to become the early USA’s first professional novelist.

In a two-year period (1799-1800) he produced six complete novels, which serious critics variously praised for describing realistic social issues and important intellectual themes.

Popular audiences didn’t buy his books, and later audiences sympathize—yet odd rewards await patient readers.

Experiencing one of Brown’s better novels is like witnessing a child walking, speaking, growing into someone or something recognizable. Pacing and reference points are uncertain; the language sounds strange, but at length something unpredictable yet meaningful emerges.

No American had ever attempted to write such conceptually adventurous fiction. Most early American novelists worked in the sentimental tradition of domestic romance (e.g., Charlotte Temple), but Brown was influenced by avant-garde European novels like Things as They Are; or The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), a political mystery by William Godwin, future father of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein (1818, 1831), who herself read Brown’s novels. The novels of these writers combined ideas of morality and science with sensational scenes that explored contemporary social and psychological themes.

As Brown wrote in his preface to Edgar Huntly (immediately below), he adapted European fictional conventions to American situations, boldly experimenting to create a distinctly American novel. The results were imperfect in style and especially sales. For the next (and last) ten years of his short life Brown gave up the novel in favor of political analysis and history. But his fiction influenced other ambitious writers: Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans (1826), like Edgar Huntly, set a fictionalized Indian captivity story in a gothic wilderness. Yet the writer whom readers may think of most is Poe (1809-1849), born a year before Brown died. Both Brown and Poe develop obsessive first-person narratives, characters who mirror each other in their actions and fixations, scenes of shocking sensation, interests in science and medicine, and gothic conventions including dark mazes, hidden passages, mental illness, fainting femmes, and threats of violation, suicide, murder, or live burial.

Life of Brown: Brown was born to a large Philadelphia Quaker family whose father and brothers were realtors and merchants. Brown studied and practiced law but also wrote and met with other intellectuals. From 1798 to 1801 Brown published a feminist dialogue and seven novels. Afterward he wrote political pamphlets and history, maintaining interests in politics, feminism, prison reform, and abolition until his death from tuberculosis at the age of 39.

Contemporary concepts annotated in text:

Written in 1799, Edgar Huntly is a transitional text between the Enlightenment / Age of Reason and Romanticism

Qualities representing the Enlightenment or Age of Reason, 1700s

All things, even mental, can be studied, but human thoughts and actions are determined by a larger nature that exceeds our comprehension.

References to God or Providence are distanced; Waldegrave’s obsessions for and against religion are treasured as part of his personality or genius, but they separate him from human society or send him to minister to its depths. In other words, religion has been distanced to a remote God or those left out by the Enlightenment’s progress.

Romanticism

Edgar and Clithero as doppelgangers (+ Arthur Wiatte, Euphemia Lorimer, & Clarice as triple-gangers?)—compare William Wilson

Faculty psychology = mental functions described as separate organs or “faculties,” such as memory, imagination, reason, and many more. Such psychology still makes up much common sense.

Immigration and American justice and equality, through character of Clithero

Problem of society of strangers, whom to trust

Romantic correspondence

Correspondence between internal and outer selves—Can one judge a book by its cover?

Wilderness gothic—standard gothic paraphernalia of haunted houses or mansions is relocated to nature or the outdoors

Buried or locked-up secrets, caverns, secret passages (natural, not architectural), pits, desolate areas, towering hills or cliffs

Plus some indoor gothic: a locked box of ingenious craftsmanship; within it a hidden manuscript

Mazes or labyrinths

The sublime

Romantic hyperbole—use of superlatives: the highest peak, the deepest chasm, the darkest night (which then becomes darker)—anticipates Poe

Romanticism: along with style, subject matter crosses familiar boundaries or limits; characters are tested beyond their limits, or they must go beyond their comfort zone

Doppelganger—compare William Wilson

Unreliable narrator:

Edgar seems like a sincere fellow who wants to do right, but are his judgments reliable?

Clithero speaks with passionate conviction, but why would anyone believe him?

 Related problem of a society of strangers in a new country: how can you tell who’s telling the truth? Whom can you trust? (OK, Texas says trust no one but family, preacher, and sheriff, but not much of a society.)

Why Brown’s fiction is difficult to read:

Romantic rhetoric archaic, florid,

+ Quaker thees and thous

Intellectual ambition or pretensions

Obsessive first-person perspective, unrelieved by alternatives; talky, shifts from one monologue to another, cf. Frankenstein—recall Mary Shelley’s reading

Absence of dialogue, back-and-forth

Few models, first to try what he’s doing, difficulty of being first, groping quality to efforts

Awkwardness as story-teller—stories are elaborately contrived, but confusions abound, along with an amateur fiction writer’s and backfilling

Unclear antecedents to pronouns

An aspiring fiction writer might learn.

Like Poe and other Romantic writers, tendency to write in absolutes or superlatives can be tiring. Never simple “dismay” but always “the deepest dismay”; a dark night is “unrelieved”; every mountain is “dizzying.” (All efforts at sublime.)

Like other first-time writers working on their own, he fails to vary his style in two ways:

Lack of dynamics

All narrative or all talk instead of mix

Also like first time male writers, his protagonist’s characterization is overly competent at everything, if not absolutely heroic.

Reliance on coincidence

Characters:

Edgar Huntly: narrator and protagonist; the second “sleep-walker”

Waldegrave

Mary Waldegrave, the murdered Waldegrave’s sister, to whom Huntly writes describing the events

Mr. S---, a religious teacher and model for Waldegrave

Weymouth, a friend of Waldegrave’s and an international merchant

Chaledro, a monk who helps Weymouth after his shipwreck in Spain

Inglefield, an older mentor to Edgar; owner of farm where Clithero is a servant

Clithero Edny, an Irish immigrant; the first “sleep-walker” of the title; an ingenious craftsman

Inglefield’s sister and housekeeper, an old woman suspicious of Clithero

Miss Inglefield, daughter of Inglefield

Ambrose, Clithero’s fellow-servant at Inglefield’s farm; a religious enthusiast

Monteith, the merchant who finances the surety of Weymouth’s remaining capital, which is left with Waldegrave and then his sister

Euphemia Lorimer

Her daughter Clarice

Mrs. Lorimer’s twin brother

Five Indians

A captive farm girl

Old Deb, a Delaware Indian who stayed behind when the Delawares moved west

A farm wife, first seen at her spinning wheel, who feeds and directs the wandering Edgar

More characters appear at start of chapter 4

Settings

Inglefield’s house

The Elm tree

Chestnut-Hill

Solesbury, the region near the east coast where Huntly lives (near the junctures of Connecticut and Pennsylvania); the name “Solesbury” may pun on “souls buried,” since Edgar and other people and objects are buried and hiding throughout.

Norwalk, the wilder, less settled region inland from Solesbury, where Old Deb lives and Indians use as a base for raids on Solesbury; the name “Norwalk” may pun on “ nor walk,” but the negative construction doesn’t stop Edgar (and Clithero?) from walking or sleepwalking there.

Huntly farm, near the “Forks of Delaware” (meeting of Delaware & LeHigh Rivers) in northeastern Pennsylvania or southeastern Connecticut

Abingdon, where Mary Waldegrave lives (Abingdon, MD?)

Deb’s Hut, the rough cabin where Deb and her dogs live and where, when they are absent, Edgar and the captive farm girl rest

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