Edgar Huntly or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker

Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly (1799) is the most ambitious work by America's first important novelist. Not only a complex and challenging novel in its own right, it distinctly foreshadows the concern with depth psychology in later American fiction from Poe to Faulkner, as well as the scientific discoveries of Freud himself. Though much of what occurs in the novel may have escaped Brown's own understanding and intentions, he was certainly conscious of having presented, in this novel, a particularly American version of the classic Gothic novel with its "castles and chimeras": namely, the horror of a rational mind in mortal conflict with Nature.

Set in rural Pennsylvania, the novel recounts the fate of young Edgar Huntly as he goes in search of the murderer of his fiancee's brother. Once he believes he has discovered the killer sleepwalking at the scene of the crime, he pursues the man relentlessly, and then obsessively, until it becomes clear to Brown's readers that Huntly is driven by motives buried deep within his subconsious. Eventually, after some chilling encounters in the wilderness with precipices, panthers and demonic Indians, Huntly is forced to admit that "passage into new forms, overleaping the bars of time and space, reversal of the laws of inanimate and intelligent existence, had been mine to perform and to witness."

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