Sleepwalking, Class Mobility, and the Search for the Social Origins of Populism in Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly

This paper argues that Brown's sleepwalkers in Edgar Huntly offer us an early figuration for the problems inherent in the phenomenon we now refer to as “populism.” Both populism and sleepwalking function through paradoxical and incongruent forms of expression that appear incoherent. The most prominent explanations that account for this paradoxical form of expression rely on an analysis of the breakdown of discourse. However, this paper argues that the incongruous form of expression is rooted in the reconfiguration of the social arrangements that enable Clithero and Edgar to advance socially but also places them in proximity to social crises. The contradictions of this position of social mobility are the source of the contradictions of the expression of sleepwalking. In depicting a world that makes social identity precarious, Brown offers us an explanation for how such paradoxical modes of expression are rooted in unstable resolutions of post-revolutionary society.

Settler Vagrancy

This chapter assesses the legal and imaginative specificity of vagrancy law and its relation to land in North America. It reads Charles Brockden Brown's novels Wieland (1798) and Edgar Huntly (1799) — both long regarded as crucial and ambivalent meditations on the viability of the new American republic — alongside archival records of vagrancy arrests in Philadelphia in the 1790s. The chapter shows how the emergent category of nationally distinct American whiteness relied on figures of mobility through the frontier, yet remained uncomfortably difficult to distinguish from the criminalized (and often differently racialized) category of vagrancy. It also looks at the startling prominence of literary history in the landmark 1972 Supreme Court case Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville, which struck down vagrancy laws as unconstitutional. The chapter argues that a particularly potent literary afterlife of the figure of the vagrant rendered this figure a symbol of free, white settler mobility.

Edgar Huntly's Gun Violence and Indigenous Mechanisms of Peace

This essay analyzes American gun culture, past and present, through two lenses: a set of early Euro-American writings on weapons and defense, including Charles Brockden Brown's well-known novel Edgar Huntly, and a little-known but capacious archive of Native American materials, philosophy, and story. While the Euro-American writings and the Indigenous archive both raise crucial questions about the relation between weapons and human subjectivity, only the Indigenous archive presents vital alternative object orientations that promote peace. Considering wampum belts in particular as an Indigenous mechanism of peace, this essay argues that to understand American gun violence we must pay attention to Indigenous efforts to cultivate relationships by putting forth healing objects and burying the weapons of war, efforts that are largely erased from the colonial records and from the contemporary imagination of the past. Ultimately, Native American theorizations of object orientation and human subjectivity challenge both our understanding of the colonial past and our current conversation surrounding gun violence.

Brown’s Philadelphia Quaker Milieu

Charles Brockden Brown’s Philadelphia Quaker upbringing was one of many influences on his work. Over the course of the eighteenth century, Philadelphia Quakers went from a dominant to a persecuted minority. Quaker treatment of Native American and Scots-Irish neighbors was the source of internal and external strife, especially in the aftermath of the Paxton Boys uprising. Aspects of this history can be discerned in Brown’s writing on Quakers. Brown directly discussed Quakers in a number of periodical pieces after 1800, and he made imaginative explorations of religious and Quaker issues in his novels Arthur Mervyn, Wieland, and, in particular, Edgar Huntly. While the mature Brown retained an acute sense of Quaker history and practice, he denied Quakers any particular regard or advocacy.

On Felons and Fallacies

Taking as a point of departure Paul Giles’s recent proposition of an antipodean America whereby America and Australia entered in the late eighteenth century into a triangulated relationship with Britain (as the old colony and the new vis-à-vis their imperial forebear), this chapter posits Edgar Huntly as a novel that is highly aware of the expansion of the business of empire building occurring in the 1780s. Most significantly for the emerging field of antipodean or trans-Pacific American studies, the chapter argues not only that Charles Brockden Brown’s foregrounding of violence between indigenous and settler communities contests the doctrine of terra nullius (uninhabited land) on which Australia was founded but also that his representation of Arthur Wiatte and Clithero Edny as Irish convicts equally stages a critique of transportation.

Brown’s American Gothic

This chapter argues that Edgar Huntly is the foundational text for the American Gothic, a genre that shadows American history. Noting the strange similarity between Charles Brockden Brown’s romance and Francisco Goya’s The Sleep of Reason, produced in the same year, the chapter argues that Brown and Goya are alike in ironizing the Enlightenment by noting that violence as often arises from reason as from its repression, as much from intellectuals striving to do good as from irrational impulses. Like many Gothic texts, the romance’s presiding metaphor is live burial, in a cave but also in language, in the very instrument of reason. The romance parallels the sleepwalking of the ambiguous foreign other, Clithere, and narrator Edgar; and just as Clithero’s narrative proves to be a compromised tissue of intertextual fantasies and lies, ostensibly benevolent but ultimately murderous, so doubt is cast on the narrator, also dangerously fettered by reason.