“The Imperial Gothic in Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly,”

By Katharine Stevenson

            Freud’s Gothic concept of the uncanny can be applied in almost all of its forms to Edgar Huntly, proving that “there are many more means of creating uncanny effects in fiction than there are in real life” (Freud 158). However, the most obvious and most important forms exemplified in the novel are those of repetition, automatism, and the return of the repressed, all of which help to illustrate the imperialistic attitude of Brown’s novel as personified in Edgar, a character who believes he has “the duty of preserving [his] life for the benefit of mankind” (Brown 125).
The concepts of repetition and doppelgangers appear multiple times in Edgar Huntly, illustrating how uncanniness is a reflection of colonial quotation: In “quoting” a culture, the colonizer construes new people, experiences, and things as versions of the familiar in order to avoid feelings of displacement and alienation; similarly, uncanniness is often caused by the encounter of slightly altered versions of the familiar that are not under colonial control and are therefore rendered frightening or threatening to agents of empire. The first obvious example we see of this repetitive uncanniness is the Elm tree under which Waldegrave is murdered in the very first chapter. Weeks after his friend’s death, Huntly advances upon the Elm tree, and the sight of “this object had somewhat of a mechanical influence upon [him]” (Brown 22). He continues to feel fear when confronted with the Elm because of the horrific scene of destruction he now associates with it. The reader later learns that it was a Delaware Indian who killed Waldegrave, and this knowledge throws the uncanniness of the Elm more sharply into an imperialist light: Edgar’s fear is caused by the trespass of an object of colonization into the colonizer’s safe, somewhat familiar territory. The complete colonization- or, quite literally, the “whiteness”- of this space means security and peace of mind to Edgar, who convinces himself that the North American land across which he wanders is pure and untouched: “A sort of sanctity environed it, owing to the consciousness of absolute and utter loneliness. It was probable that human feet had never before gained this recess, that human eyes had never been fixed upon these gushing waters” (Brown 71). Edgar, as an agent of colonization, is reluctant to admit that he is only a secondary, repeated presence in the wilderness of Pennsylvania. These deluded musings are later shattered after his bout of somnambulism when he comes upon the sleeping Indians, whom he sees as trespassers into his own realm. The behavior of Old Deb strikes another blow to Edgar’s imperialistic sensibilities later on, when it is discovered that she commanded the very Delawares who laid waste to Huntly’s neighbors and properties. While Deb has not been assimilated into the European/American culture of the colonizing people, she is also not considered a threat in the same way that the other Indians are hated and feared. Because of her relatively civilized way of life, her “affection” for Edgar, and her gender, she is regarded as a non-threatening Indian presence (Brown 138). When it is revealed that she condones the Delaware’s violence, her duplicitous nature is exposed, closely corresponding to the civilized/savage dichotomy that unfolds within Edgar throughout the novel. Perhaps the most striking instance is when Edgar stumbles upon a rural farmhouse during his search for a road leading out of the wilderness. He expects to be able to “claim consanguinity with such beings” as inhabit the house, but when he enters he finds the family within to be empty shells of the respectable, hard-working “beings” he had hoped to meet, corrupted by their isolation in a rural landscape vulnerable to Indian attack (Brown 150). They appear civilized, but they are inwardly “debauched” just as Edgar subconsciously fears he is becoming (Brown 151); through them he “is capable of self-observation”, and what he sees is an unsettling and uncanny emerging version of himself (Freud 142).
The notion of automatism is important to the imperialistic aspects of Edgar Huntly in that actions by the colonizer must become, to some extent, automatic in order to avoid corruption and inappropriate involvement in the process of colonization. Edgar’s reversion into automation allows him to take advantage of the instincts necessary for his survival, but also frightens him because in this reduced state of consciousness, he is powerless to stop even his most repressed urges from rising to the surface and manifesting themselves. According to Freud, states of madness, epileptic seizure, and sleepwalking, among others, are uncanny due to the unveiling of man’s most basic mechanical and mental functions that they allow. He writes that “the ordinary person sees in [these states] the workings of forces hitherto unsuspected in his fellow man but which at the same time he is dimly aware of in a remote corner of his own being” (Freud 151). This faint recognition of himself is what makes Edgar’s first encounter with the sleepwalking Clithero uncanny. Watching Clithero’s approach, Edgar’s “eye followed him as long as he was visible, but [his] feet were rooted to the spot” (Brown 10). This experience begins Edgar’s spiral into sleepwalking, so disconcerted is he by the sight of another man with whom he identifies reduced to this state. Clithero himself is similarly worried by the prospect of his own somnambulism, constantly “distressed at the discovery that [his] thoughts found their way to [his] lips, without [his] being conscious of it, and that [his] steps wandered forth unknowingly and without the guidance of [his] will” (Brown 62). This terror of the loss of free will seems to be at the heart of the characters’ fear of automatism; Clithero compares the state to the feeling of extreme physical distress, in which he admits that his “muscles would have acted almost in defiance of [his] will” (Brown 120), and Edgar describes himself during his altercation with the Indians as “not governed by the soul which usually regulates [his] conduct” (Brown 128). Another argument, presented by Cassuto, postulates that Edgar is not only ruled by instinct during the episodes of automation, but that he is primarily motivated by “unconscious guilt over his parents’ deaths”, an opinion which seems to be supported by Edgar’s wild leaps of reason when it comes to the Delawares’ previous actions, his desperate, groundless speculation that certain Indians he has killed might be the same ones who killed his family, and his somewhat paranoid fear for the safety of his sisters (Cassuto 120). The “rashness” in Edgar, which Sarsefield refers to in the last page of the novel, could be attributed to desperation to relieve himself of this subconscious guilt by solving the mystery of Waldegrave’s murder or by reconciling Clithero with his loved ones (Brown 194) (Cassuto 120). This sudden influence of childhood trauma is “practically a textbook definition of Freud’s uncanny” (Cassuto 119). However, this theory is better categorized as a return of the repressed than as an aspect of automatism.
The return or surfacing of the repressed is the most important aspect of the uncanny when viewing the concept in imperialistic terms. The repressed fears and desires of the agents of empire are numerous, but those that occur most prominently in Edgar Huntly are the hunger or desire to conquer and colonize more thoroughly, and the fear of becoming like the native. According to Freud, “every emotional affect, whatever its quality, is transformed by repression into morbid anxiety” (Freud 130). This is certainly true of Edgar’s paranoia concerning hunger and his anxious justifications of his own acts of violence against the Delawares. Beginning on page 109, Edgar describes a long period of hunger followed by satiation after awaking from his first episode of sleepwalking. This hunger, while experienced consciously as an entirely physical affliction, obviously signals the start of Edgar’s transformation, or perhaps degeneration, into a more instinctual and much more bloodthirsty being. Despite the fact that Edgar has only been gone from his home for a matter of “some hours”, he becomes convinced that “unless [his] deliverance were speedily effected, [he] must suffer a tedious and lingering death” (Brown 109), continually assuring himself that “[his] perceptions were real” (Brown 110). In this state of near-madness, Huntly feels his “heart overflowed with cruelty” and wishes for nothing more than to “[rend] some living animal to pieces, and [drink] its blood and [grind’ its quivering fibres between [his] teeth” (Brown 110). This indiscriminate ravenousness can be seen as the perverted emergence of a repressed colonial desire to conquer and assimilate other less civilized or “raw” cultures and spaces. Edgar’s wish is soon granted when he finds that a panther is crouched near him, and manages to kill it with a single blow from a stolen Indian tomahawk. The clear association of the panther with the Delaware Indians- Edgar refers to them both as “savages”- makes the imperial analogy all the more applicable (Brown 111). Edgar proceeds to feast upon the “yet warm blood and reeking fibres” of the dead animal, after which he is “seized by pangs” in his stomach for hours as his body struggles to digest the unsuitable food, just as Edgar and his white counterparts struggle to turn Pennsylvania into a safe, “quoted”, or digested version of the civilized lands from whence they came (Brown 112). Edgar’s fear that he is becoming like the Delawares and his repressed knowledge that they are essentially alike become obvious as he interacts with them. Edgar repeatedly claims his own detestation of violence, and repeatedly emphasizes that the Indians are capable of the utmost “enmity and bloodshed”, and yet, as the novel wears on, Edgar turns into a more and more effective and efficient Indian-killing machine (Brown 116), becoming closer to his enemies through the shared “utter savagery of their voiceless transactions” against one another (Cassuto 123). In most instances, the Indians are referred to with words such as “uncouth”, “savage”, “grotesque”, “strange”, and “terrific”, but after each deadly conflict with them Edgar provides a slew of justification for his actions and even praises the Delawares, a subconscious melioration of his own similarities to them (Brown 115). Preparing to encounter the Delawares in the cave, Edgar acknowledges that preparation for conflict “would never be omitted by a warrior of [their] hue” (Brown 119), and after wreaking complete devastation upon them at Old Deb’s hut, he describes the scene in words that stand in sharp contrast to the feelings he generally claims to have towards the Delawares: “Three beings, full of energy and heroism, endowed with minds strenuous and lofty, poured out their lives before me” (Brown 129). Edgar’s confusion when it comes to his own viciousness pitted against the savagery of the Indians is an example of “the ambivalence that Freud sees as integral to the uncanny” (Cassuto 123).
Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly exemplifies almost every aspect of Freud’s Gothic concept of the uncanny. The themes of repetition, automatism, and repression offer the most insight into the imperialistic nature of the novel, and especially into the “discourse of the unconscious” of the novel’s protagonist, an extremely colonial
Indian-fighting figure (Cassuto 124). Viewed through the psychoanalytic lens of Freud’s theory, Huntly becomes a far more complex character, and his complicated motives lend depth to all of his actions, particularly his interactions with the remaining Indians in colonial Pennsylvania. The uncanny effects with which Edgar comes into contact are, in context, explicitly imperial examples of the Gothic.

Bibliography

Brown, Charles Brockden. Edgar Huntly. Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.: Indianapolis/Cambridge, 2006.
Freud, Sigmund. On Creativity And The Unconscious. Harper and Row, Publishers: NewYork.
Cassuto, Leonard. ‘[Un]consciousness Itself Is The Malady’: ‘Edgar Huntly’ and theDiscourse of the Other. Modern Language Studies, Volume 23 Number 4,Autumn 1993. pp. 118-130