A Darkness Visible: the Case of Charles Brockden Brown

Abstract

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s celebrated inclusion of Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810) in ‘The Hall of Fantasy’ sets him, to be sure, infinitely among his betters, at first glance a truly discrepant name to be found in so august an assembly. But, if duly assigned a place at the periphery, ‘an obscure and shadowy niche’, Brown does have at least one legitimate cause for being named in this roll-call of the great and the good. Like Homer, Dante and Shakespeare, or any of the rest — especially his fellow novelists Richardson, Fielding and Scott — he was despite all his limits an essential founding presence, a figure of departure. For it fell to him to take his place as America’s first fiction writer of consequence, a begetter of that line of ‘romance’ which begins at the turn of the nineteenth century, and which, with key stop-overs at the likes of Poe, Melville and Hawthorne, evolves through to Faulkner and well beyond.³

In niches and pedestals, around the hall, stood the statues or busts of men, who, in every age, have been rulers and demi-gods in the realms of imagination, and in kindred regions. The grand old countenance of Homer; the dark presence of Dante; the wild Ariosto; Rabelais’s smile of deep-wrought mirth; the profound, pathetic humour of Cervantes; the all-glorious Shakespeare; Spenser, meet guest for an allegoric structure; the severe divinity of Milton; and Bunyan, moulded of homeliest clay, but instinct with celestial fire — were those that chiefly attracted my eye. Fielding, Richardson, and Scott, occupied conspicuous pedestals. In an obscure and shadowy niche was reposited the bust of our countryman, the author of Arthur Mervyn.

(Hawthorne, ‘The Hall of Fantasy’, 1842)¹

All was astounding by its novelty, or terrific by its horror…. My understanding was bemazed, and my senses were taught to distrust their own testimony.

(Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 1799)²