Alexandra Kingsley

Charles Brockden Brown is not only one of Philadelphia’s own, but also widely considered the most accomplished early American novelist.  Born into a Philadelphia Quaker family, Brown wrote several Gothic works set in and around the city.  The book I’ll look at next week takes place in the city proper; this week’s book, Edgar Huntly, is set on the forks of the Delaware River, in the Lehigh Valley.

Edgar Huntly is the terrifically weird story of a sleepwalking young man who must find his way through the Gothic wilderness of rural Philadelphia in the late 18th century.  Along the path, he kills and eats a panther, murders every Native American he comes across, and descends into a kind of savagery that leads him to be mistaken for a Native American himself, and nearly murdered by a raiding party of his neighbors.

At the same time, Edgar’s search for the murderer of his best friend leads him to befriend another sleepwalker, an Irishman named Clithero with his own wild story of murder and despair.  This man’s tale and Edgar’s own collide in the end, as Edgar’s misplaced trust causes him to reveal the address his father-figure, whose wife Clithero seeks to hunt down and kill.

The parallels between Clithero and Edgar situate the story firmly in the Freudian idea of “the uncanny,” while the blood-soaked labyrinth of the Pennsylvania countryside gives the novel’s journey a haunted, dream-like progression.

It would not be easy to describe the face of this district, in a few words. Half of Solesbury, thou knowest, admits neither of plough nor spade. The cultivable space lies along the river, and the desert, lying on the north, has gained, by some means, the appellation of Norwalk. Canst thou imagine a space, somewhat circular, about six miles in diameter, and exhibiting a perpetual and intricate variety of craggy eminences and deep dells?

The hollows are single, and walled around by cliffs, ever varying in shape and height, and have seldom any perceptible communication with each other. These hollows are of all dimensions, from the narrowness and depth of a well, to the amplitude of one hundred yards. Winter’s snow is frequently found in these cavities at midsummer. The streams that burst forth from every crevice are thrown, by the irregularities of the surface, into numberless cascades, often disappear in mists or in chasms, and emerge from subterranean channels, and, finally, either subside into lakes, or quietly meander through the lower and more level grounds.

Wherever nature left a flat it is made rugged and scarcely passable by enormous and fallen trunks, accumulated by the storms of ages, and forming, by their slow decay, a moss-covered soil, the haunt of rabbits and lizards. These spots are obscured by the melancholy umbrage of pines, whose eternal murmurs are in unison with vacancy and solitude, with the reverberations of the torrents and the whistling of the blasts. Hickory and poplar, which abound in the lowlands, find here no fostering elements.

A sort of continued vale, winding and abrupt, leads into the midst of this region and through it. This vale serves the purpose of a road. It is a tedious maze and perpetual declivity, and requires, from the passenger, a cautious and sure foot. Openings and ascents occasionally present themselves on each side, which seem to promise you access to the interior region, but always terminate, sooner or later, in insuperable difficulties, at the verge of a precipice or the bottom of a steep.

— Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly

The book is in the public domain; read it for free here.