The American Frontier and the Initiation Rite to a National Literature

The Example of “Edgar Huntly” by Charles Brockden Brown

Abstract

Since its beginning, much American writing has been based on a rhetoric of migration. For the novelists of the New Republic, internal migration of the westward movement had already become a national archetype from which many American myths were to spring. A case in point is C. Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly where the frontier environment becomes the projection of a condition of the human mind. The uncertainty of the frontier, and its parallel metaphor of sleep-walking, come to prefigure the gnoseological and philosophical turmoil of Post-Revolutionary Americans. In Brown's gothic novel, the American wilderness and its native inhabitants generate horror, and evil takes on an ontological rather than historical dimension.