Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly: The American Individual in an Age of Transition

In European literary history, the term “Gothic” was first applied to a type of romantic fiction written during the late 18th and early 19th century. The genre reached its first peak of popularity in the 1790s through the extremely successful novels of England’s first best-selling author Ann Radcliffe. European Gothicism arose out of an atmosphere of societal unravelling. As the period of Romanticism emerged in the late 18th century, the rational ideology of the Enlightenment was questioned. Gothic novelists tried to oppose the established value system and to offer a new conception of the relationship between the human, the natural and the devine. The tales were mostly set in the medieval period in a ruined castle or convent. The stock characteristics of the genre included flat, stereotypical characters, supernatural elements, obscure prophecies, an emphasis on evoking terror and sentimental language.

In the preface “To the Public” of his novel Edgar Huntly, Charles Brockden Brown called for the creation of a national literature independent and distinct from European fiction. He alerts his readers to the cultural function of an American literature:

the field of investigation, opened to us by our own country, should differ essentially from those which exist in Europe ... It is the purpose of this work ... to exhibit a series of adventures, growing out of the condition of our country1

While his contemporaries experimented with the forms of the sentimental and the picaresque novel, Brown, who admired the writings of William Godwin and Ann Radcliffe, was influenced by the genre of the Gothic novel. However, he rejected the usual European characteristics of “Puerile superstition and exploded manners; Gothic castles and chimeras”2 and assimilated the genre to a contemporary, recognizable American environment: “The incidents of Indian hostility, and the perils of the western wilderness, are far more suitable”3. Instead of achieving Gothic effects through supernatural elements, Brown explores the natural terror of the American frontier. Although the wilderness beyond Solesbury seems to possess a surreal, nightmarish quality through the author’s use of hyperbolic language, obscure plot twists and the occurance of strange events, the reader is only presented with real elements of horror: dark caverns, panthers, Indian savages, etc. Transforming the Gothic novel to suit American demands, Brown had understood the true effect of Gothicism long before Poe would reach his famous thesis “that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul”4.