Early Ibero/Anglicist Summit
“Revolution, Nation, Novel” Panel
C.B. Brown’s Edgar Huntly (6 minutes):
I. Archival importance (pass out handout):
As is evident from the growing numbers of articles and books as well as panels, entire conferences, and now a society devoted to Brown and his era, Charles Brockden Brown’s writings—from 1789 to 1810 when he died—are more pertinent to the study of the early republic than they have ever been. Brown’s marginalization has been caused in part by a critical dismissal of the forms in which he worked, but as Mary Chapman observes in her recent introduction to Ormond, the “renaissance” in Brown scholarship has been driven by developments in literary theory and, subsequently, the manner in which Brown’s writings challenge “the organizing hierarchies of class, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and nation that culture has naturalized” (11)
Brown’s novel Edgar Huntly or Memoirs of a Sleep-walker, which I’ll talk more about in the next few minutes, was published in 1799 along with five other novels during a three-year period. It addresses not only the enduring Indian question but also the “uncertainty,” as Norman Grabo puts it, “that still prevailed about the great American experiment at the very end of the eighteenth century” (xxiii).
II. Pedagogical treatment, or how approached in the classroom:
The main action of the novel, as some of you know, revolves around Edgar Huntly’s “remembrance” of an encounter one night with the distraught Clithero Edny and his desire to understand whether or not the half-naked Irishman had anything to do with the murder of Waldegrave. Edgar’s subsequent pursuit of the truth and Clithero takes him through the wilds of Norwalk and a series of adventures, including battle with bloodthirsty Indians, that test his sanity and reasoning processes. A subplot of the novel includes Sarsefield’s inability to “forget or forgive” Clithero’s former actions toward Mrs. Lorimar and the development of an impasse between Edgar and his former mentor Sarsefield. The novel concludes ambiguously with Edgar’s understanding of his irrationality and the “impulse of powerful but misguided benevolence,” Clithero enroute to an asylum and drowning, and the patriarchal authority figure of Sarsefield declaring that Clithero’s apparent suicide was “the last arrow in the quiver of adversity.”
When I teach Edgar Huntly in my (undergraduate) early American novel course, I usually position it between Foster’s The Coquette and Sedewick’s Hope Leslie or Cooper’s The Pioneers. I give brief lectures on late Enlightenment thought and epistemology, the gothic novel, and republicanism before we consider what happens in the story and how Brown’s novel relates to the Hawthorne’s and Richard Chase’s definitions of “romance” and “novel.” I also use a handout that contains a series of questions—sometimes answered individually by students, sometimes discussed in small groups, sometimes discussed by the class as whole. For example, key questions that we discuss early on are question 1, Brown’s prefatory statement, where he seeks to be a “moral painter,” and his use of the epistolary method as well as such terms as “history,” “tale,” and “truth”; question 2, Edgar’s relationship to Mary Waldegrave (his fiancé), the sleep-walking Irishman Clithero, and other characters; and question 5, the ideological contexts of Brown’s novel relative to historical colonial relations with the Delaware Indians and the Constitutional debates of 1787.
In terms of specific critical approaches (in the undergraduate classroom), I find that Jane Tompkins remarks in Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (1986) still provides the single most useful critical intervention. Her remarks about “the positive value” of “sensational, formulaic plots,” “stereotyped characters,” and clichéd language (as opposed to a modernist criteria) in understanding a “specific set of political, economic, social, or religious conditions” provides a useful paradigm for understanding Brown’s novel and its appropriation, for instance, of the “captivity narrative” genre. It enables students to imagine the kind of radical cultural work a novel such as Brown’s is undertaking, particularly in regard to the historical past.
III. Research issues or questions (basic) about this text:
Although I have never taught Edgar Huntly in a graduate class, I would use Tompkins’s work and, for the purposes of this panel, two others because of the ways they help clarify the novel’s literary and political interventions: Paul Downes’s article in Eighteenth Century Studies (1996) “Sleep-walking Out of the Revolution: Brown’s Edgar Huntly,” which traces the novel’s narrative detours and postponements relative to the “paradoxes, incoherences, and divisions at work during the revolutionary period” (223). He argues that Brown’s novel comments on the “antagonistic politics in the new constitutional democracy”—the ties between “sentimental radicalism and an autocratic conservatism”—and shows how Edgar, like Clithero, enacts this confusion. Along with Jared Gardner’s “Alien Nation: Edgar Huntly’s Savage Awakening” (1994), Sydney Krause’s “Penn’s Elm and Edgar Huntly: Dark ‘Instruction to the Hear’” in American Literature (1994) is provocative. Krause recovers a neglected context for Brown’s novel—William Penn’s treaty with the Delaware Indians by an elm tree in the autumn of 1682—and the ways Brown uses the historical past and sentiment to deconstruct imperial discourses and prompt readers to reflect on issues of race, nation, empire, and displaced peoples.
More recently, scholarship has focused on issues of gender, sexuality, and identity in the novel and its ability to operate as a “post-colonial” text. In addition to Dana Luciano’s focus on the body as a site of rationality and its potential to “turn rationality against itself,” Stephen Shapiro historicizes same sex desire in the mid-Atlantic cities of the 1790s, paying close attention to immigration patterns, sexual subcultures, and Brown’s personal friendships. He raises questions about scenes or incidents of emotional exchange, violence, and alienation and the extent to which Brown’s engagement with male erotics explores and denaturalizes existing categories of sexual identity. My own research looks at re-presentations of “the Other” as it concerns Brown’s use of “memory” and the embedded histories of British colonialism not only in America but also in Ireland and India. It asks how we are to understand Clithero’s role as an Irish “subject” or Sarsefield’s history in India. To what extent do these other histories in Brown’s novel operate dialogically and introduce a discourse of dispossession, disruption, or dissent? What is the relationship between Brown’s politics in Edgar Huntly and later writings such as his “Annals of America and Europe”?
As scholarship (like Michelle Burnham’s and Edward Watts’s) continues to explore the postcolonial dimensions of sentiment and how it intersects with other discourses, it will undoubtedly engage others and gain a clearer understanding of how authors like Brown interrogate institutional and individual oppression. In addition, if the relationship between “history” and “fiction” was, as Suzanne Gearhart claims, the “central question in the history of philosophy of that age,” the writing of Brown and others raise provocative questions about historical or imagined “re-presentation”—in particular, how we understand late enlightenment philosophy and the emergence of a “postcolonial” ethos or a “postmodern” aesthetic.