STEFAN BRANDT

Imaginary Americas: Literary Self-Imaginary Americas: Literary Self-Fashioning in the USA from the Fashioning in the USA from the Revolutionary Era to Modernity (1776-Revolutionary Era to Modernity (1776-1900) 1900)

Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly (1799)

Edgar Huntly (1799) – written as a long letter to the protagonist’s lover Mary Waldegrave

Attempting to solve the mystery of her brother’s murder

Chief suspect: Clithero, digging under a tree

Clithero has murdered someone, but someone different

The search for truth ends in excesses, absurd encounters, and the discovery of coincidence as a main force

Waldegrave’s murder was a purely coincidental event. He is a victim of Indian aggression.

Historical context of Brown’s novel

The 1770s-1790s – a phase of disorder and political

instability: The Revolutionary Years

1773

1776

1787

Boston Tea Party

Declaration of Independence

The American Constitution (the supreme law of the

United States)

1789 President George Washington (until 1797)

From 1790 to 1820, there was not a book, a speech, a conversation, or a thought in the state.Ralph Waldo Emerson (1852)

Hannah Foster

Susanna Rowson

Royall Tyler

Henry Brackenridge

Literary and cultural context of Brown’s novel

The 1780s and 1790s: The American novel is

developed

1789 William Hill Brown, The Power of Sympathy

As an independent nation, our honor requires us to have a system of our own in language as well as government. Great Britain, whose children we are and whose language we speak, should no longer be our standard; for the taste of her writers is already corrupted and her language on the decline. Noah Webster, Dissertations on the English Language (1789)

The nation of Great Britain is marked by corruption.

Philip Freneau, „The American Village“ (1772)

The task of American national

literature: celebrate American independence and

stress the specificities of the new nation

Fear of Anarchy

After the euphoria of the Independence: Economic

crisis, fear of anarchy

Brown in a letter to Thomas Jefferson attached to his book Wieland (1798):

warning about America as a „sleepwalking anarchist“

Epistolary Novel

The dominant type of novel in early America was the …

I. The Old World and the New World

II. The Real and the Imaginary

III. Authority and Self-Empowerment

IV. Civilization and Nature

The task of the early American novelist was to find a distinctive voice despite the dominance of British traditions. Cathy Davidson (2004)

As a genre, the novel played a significant role in shaping provincial and parochial identities and communities […] into the evolving identity that would become theUnited States of America.Cathy Davidson (2004)

I. The Old World and the New World

It is the purpose of this work […] to exhibit a series of adventures, growing out of the condition of our country.Edgar Huntly (1799)

One merit the writer may at least claim; that of calling forth the passions and engaging the sympathy of the reader, by means hitherto unemployed by preceding authors. Puerile superstition and exploded manners; Gothic castles and chimeras, are the materials usually employed for this end.

The incidents of Indian hostility, and the perils of the western wilderness, are far more suitable; and for a native of America to overlook these, would admit no apology.

Edgar Huntly (1799)

II. The Real and the Imaginary

[In romantic fiction,] the field of action is conceived not so much as a place as a state of mind — the borderland of the human mind where the actual and the imaginary intermingle.Richard Chase (1957)

The inroads of hunger were already experienced, and this knowledge of the desperateness of my calamity, urged me to phrenzy. I had none but capricious and unseen fate to condemn. The author of my distress and the means he had taken to decoy me hither, were incomprehensible. Surely my senses were fettered or depraved by some spell. I was still asleep, and this was merely a tormenting vision, or madness had seized me, and the darkness that environed and the hunger that afflicted me, existed only in my own distempered imagination.

Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly

The “perverse nature” which drives Edgar to perform and witness cruel deeds is a metaphor for the national self.

I found myself stretched upon the ground. I perceived the cottage and the neighbouring thicket, illuminated by a declining moon. My head rested upon something, which, on turning to examine, I found to be one of the slain Indians. The other two remained upon the earth at a small distance, and in the attitudes in which they had fallen. Their arms, the wounded girl, and the troop who were near me when I fainted, were gone.My head had reposed upon the breast of him whom I had shot in this part of his body. The blood had ceased to ooze from the wound, but my dishevelled locks were matted and steeped in that gore which had overflowed and choaked up the orifice. I started from this detestable pillow, and regained my feet.

[…] I reflected that appearances might have easily misled them into a belief of my death: on this supposition, to have carried me away, or to have stayed beside me, would be useless. Other enemies might be abroad, or their families, now that their fears were somewhat tranquilized, might require their presence and protection.

Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly

III. Authority and Self-Empowerment

Indian hostility and the perils of western wilderness

[…] are the ingredients of this tale, and these he [the

author] has been ambitious of depicting in vivid and

faithful colours. The success of his efforts must be

estimated by the liberal and candid reader.

Edgar Huntly (1799)

State controlvs. Unrestrained liberty

The Novel -- endangering the moral substance of the nation

Our countrymen are prone to enterprise, and are

scattered over every sea and every land in pursuit of

that wealth which will not screen them from disease

and infirmity […] and which, when gained, by no

means compensates them for the hardships and

vicissitudes endured in the pursuit.Edgar Huntly (1799)

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.The Declaration of Indepebdence (1776)

IV. Civilization and Nature

My temper never delighted in carnage and blood.Edgar Huntly (1799)

The beast that was now before me was accustomed to assail

whatever could provide him with a banquet of blood, He

would set upon the man and the deer with equal and

irresistible ferocity.

My hunger speedily became ferocious. I tore the linen of my shirt

between my teeth and swallowed the fragments. I felt a strong

propensity to bite the flesh from my arm. My heart overflowed with

cruelty, and I pondered on the delight I should experience in rending

some living animal to pieces, and drinking its blood and grinding its

quivering fibres between my teeth.

For the next session (Literary Self-Fashioning and the Picaresque Novel):

Read and prepare the Henry Brackenridge text - short bio and excerpts from Modern Chivalry (1792/1815)