Dancing between Ferocity and Delicacy in Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker by Charles Brockden Brown

Abstract

“Few, perhaps, among mankind have undergone vicissitudes of peril and wonder equal to mine,” Edgar Huntly relates near the end of the novel Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker by Charles Brockden Brown, claiming the exceptional nature of the danger and mystery he has experienced (849). At this point in the narrative, Huntly’s hero cycle collapses, and the underworld and world of his everyday experience collide. This highly gothic moment, in which Huntly finds his own packet of Waldegrave’s letters in the room of an unknown visitor who is the only inhabitant of a mysteriously empty mansion (and who will turn out to be Huntly’s long-lost friend and mentor), simultaneously represents the climax of the novel, the beginning of the resolution of the mysteries that have driven the narrative, and the place where the shape of the heroic narrative demonstrates its deepest confusion. Huntly’s use of the terms peril, wonder, and vicissitudes evokes Rowlandson’s Narrative as well as other Puritan spiritual texts.¹ This language reminds Huntly’s readers that, despite its irreverent nature and tone, his tale grows out of genres focused on redemption, physical as well as metaphysical.² Thus, when the confusion and obscurity of the story are at their peak, a template appears with which to organize and decode the story. The cipher, however, is not simple, and the ties to captivity and redemption interlace, crisscross, and contradict themselves.