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Walking the Property:: Ownership, Space, and the Body in Motion in Edgar Huntly

Chad Luck

in The Body of Property: Antebellum American Fiction and the Phenomenology of Possession

This chapter uncovers in Charles Brockden Brown’s gothic frontier novel a sophisticated engagement with eighteenth-century sensational psychologists, including Locke, Hume, and Condillac. The ... More

This chapter uncovers in Charles Brockden Brown’s gothic frontier novel a sophisticated engagement with eighteenth-century sensational psychologists, including Locke, Hume, and Condillac. The chapter argues that in the novel’s famous cave sequence, Brown ingeniously narrativizes Condillac’s dictum that “touch teaches vision” and in so doing enacts a subterranean model of spatial orientation that directly evokes the “plenum versus vacuum” debates of Locke and Hume. The novel then links this spatio-sensory exploration to an array of eighteenth-century property laws that focus on the creation of boundary lines. It becomes clear that Brown’s fictional account of settler-Indian violence on the Pennsylvania frontier is designed to imaginatively re-walk the infamous “Walking Purchase” treaty of 1737 in which the Delaware tribe was defrauded of 750,000 acres. In doing so, the novel calls attention to the Native American bodies conveniently erased from the legal and historical record.Less

Sovereignty, Race, and Melancholy in the Transatlantic Romantic Novel

in On Lingering and Being Last: Race and Sovereignty in the New World

This chapter offers a different understanding of the role of melancholic discourse in romanticism, whatever may be the attractions of an “interested cosmopolitanism.” The author argues that the ... More

This chapter offers a different understanding of the role of melancholic discourse in romanticism, whatever may be the attractions of an “interested cosmopolitanism.” The author argues that the melancholy logic of the last produces deterritorializing effects on both sides of the Atlantic, but with a distinctively racialized cast in America. Anglophone romanticism in general was agitated by what he characterized as the political restlessness of a post-tyrannical world. His main focus is on two American novels, Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly (1799) and John Neal's Logan: A Family History (1822). An initial sense of the essential continuities and crucial differences between the English and American variants of the logic of the last can be gained, if one turns briefly to The Last Man (1826), Shelley's morose novel about the destruction of humankind by a global plague.Less

Transforming into Natives: Crèvecoeur, Marrant, and Brown on Becoming Indian

Katy L. Chiles

in Transformable Race: Surprising Metamorphoses in the Literature of Early America

Chapter 3 examines how J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, John Marrant’s A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, A Black, and Charles Brockden ... More

Chapter 3 examines how J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, John Marrant’s A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, A Black, and Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly take up the natural-historical idea that race was a condition one managed to sustain rather than an immutable bodily fact. These texts explore racial transformation by featuring the protagonists’ journey among American Indian tribes. Understanding how Letters examines whites altering racially in the New World provides a new understanding of what Crèvecoeur’s “American” is. Marrant’s Narrative offers up a picture of an African American “becoming” Native American. Brown’s Edgar Huntly explores what might happen to creole whites by depicting the strange transformation Edgar undergoes. In these texts, the concept of racial transformation—rather than one of passing—underpins these literary depictions of how one’s race begins to change into that of another.Less

The Transformation, the Self Devoted, and the Dead Recalled: Sympathy in Brown's Fiction

Caleb Crain

in American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation

This chapter presents a reading of three of Charles Brockden Brown's novels as parables of deformed sympathy. These are Wieland, Arthur Mervyn, and Edgar Huntly.

Gothic Monstrosity: Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly and the Trope of the Bestial Indian

Christine Yao

in American Gothic Culture: An Edinburgh Companion

This chapter reads the development and sedimentation of the savage image of American Indians in early American history through the American gothic’s monstrous tropes, concluding with 1799 novel Edgar ... More

This chapter reads the development and sedimentation of the savage image of American Indians in early American history through the American gothic’s monstrous tropes, concluding with 1799 novel Edgar Huntly by Charles Brockden Brown, acclaimed as the pioneer of American gothic. If for Brown the American equivalent to Gothic castles are the perils of the western wilderness, Native Americans are the monstrous equivalent of that setting’s mythical chimera. Both inhuman and antagonistic Other, for Brown the Indian, at once integral and liminal, is a quintessential element of the American gothic genre.Less

Walter Scott and the American Historical Novel

Fiona Robertson

in The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 5: The American Novel to 1870

This chapter explores the complications of Walter Scott’s role in the fictionalization of America’s past. It begins by discussing Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s 1835 tale The Linwoods; or, “Sixty Years ... More

This chapter explores the complications of Walter Scott’s role in the fictionalization of America’s past. It begins by discussing Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s 1835 tale The Linwoods; or, “Sixty Years Since” in America and its association with Walter Scott’s first novel, Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since (1814). It then considers Scott’s place in the history of American literature and America’s influence on his career and imaginative development before comparing Scott’s Guy Mannering with Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799). It also analyzes Scott’s influence in the U.S. South before concluding with an assessment of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s links with Scott through his historical fiction such as The Scarlet Letter: A Romance (1850).Less

Frontier Novels, Border Wars, and Indian Removal

Dana D. Nelson

in The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 5: The American Novel to 1870

This chapter focuses on the American novel’s depiction of frontier conflict and U.S. Indian policy in the nineteenth century, particularly the seizure of Indian lands and the forcible removal, ... More

This chapter focuses on the American novel’s depiction of frontier conflict and U.S. Indian policy in the nineteenth century, particularly the seizure of Indian lands and the forcible removal, dispossession, and sequestering of Native Americans. It first considers Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis” and its criticism by scholars before discussing the emergence of the frontier novel that acknowledges the legacies of and possibilities for intercultural co-creation while exploring the negative impact of white racism on the frontier. It then turns to America’s first frontier novel, Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799) and the reconfiguration of the “Middle Ground” of the backcountry as frontier. It also examines frontier novels that staked out a possessive relation to Indianness, including John Neal’s Logan: A Family History (1822) and Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok (1824). Finally, the chapter looks at frontier novels and narratives that sought to accelerate Indian hating.Less