The Tyranny of Sleep: Somnambulism, Moral Citizenship, and Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly

Charles Brockden Brown's memorable preface to his novel Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799) has become a talisman in American studies scholarship, repeatedly invoked for its power to express the cultural nationalism of post-Revolutionary America. In this preface, Brown announces that in America "new springs of action should operate; that the field of investigation, opened to us by our own country, should differ essentially from those which exist in Europe" and that he proposes in Edgar Huntly "a series of adventures, growing out of the condition of our country, and connected with one of the most common and most wonderful diseases or affections of the human frame" (3). This iconic passage has allowed scholars to read Edgar Huntly as a national allegory in which Edgar's armed conflict with the Lenni Lenape Indians and his seemingly passive sleepwalking participate in the construction of a particularly violent and imperial—yet paradoxically inert—American identity during the early national period. But what can we make of Brown's peculiar insistence on somnambulism as a "disease"? If Edgar Huntly constitutes a national tale, what kind of national psychology does it describe and how does that psyche relate to the era's scientific studies of the mind?

The real opacity of Brown's preface rests, I believe, not on his rejection of European gothic conventions but quite heavily on his ambiguous verb "connected," as in the connection between the nation and the mental disease of somnambulism. Although we are familiar with the role sleep and dreams played in twentieth-century Freudian psychology, their prominence in eighteenth-century psychological theory anticipates yet diverges from these later developments. Natural somnambulism—as opposed to magnetic, or mesmerized, somnambulism—was a typical category of mental disease in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Physicians noted that somnambulists displayed the ability to walk nimbly, even in dangerous paths, and that they never remembered how they behaved while they slept. Because somnambulism combined this loss of memory with apparently rational behavior, late eighteenth-century psychological theory relied on sleep and sleep disorders to define the faculties of the mind, and these descriptions of the mind were heavily freighted with political meaning peculiar to the issues of the revolutionary Atlantic world.

Readings of Brown's "political unconscious" have often overshadowed these other possible relationships between psychology and politics in the eighteenth century. ¹ In its simultaneous concentration on Edgar's interiority and his self-defensive vigilantism against the Delaware Indians, Edgar Huntly, in particular, elicits readings that concentrate on either the novel's psychological or, more recently, political plot, readings that are often constructed in opposition to each other. For instance, in his remarkable argument about how Brown pursues the logic of the Alien and Sedition Acts in Edgar Huntly, Jared Gardner claims that "the treatment of Brown's Indians as representations of an essentially internal personal struggle—whether between father and son or between civilized man and his 'dark side'—universalizes a conflict that Brown himself understood as local and psychologizes a project that Brown understood as essentially political" (52–53). Although Gardner here responds to the way Edgar Huntly makes itself available to Freudian readings, this cleaving of the psychological from the political inevitably re-creates rather than resolves the question about somnambulism at the heart of the novel, for Brown asks in Edgar Huntly whether psychology is ever outside of history or politics.

Edgar Huntly allows Brown to explore the consequences of the tendency in 1790s America to make citizenship—and national identity more broadly—a state of mind. Best exemplified by the writings of Benjamin Rush, the foremost American medical expert of the era, medical conceptions of the mind popular in the late eighteenth century explain how the status of citizenship fused morality, memory, and residency, articulating an evidentiary basis for what I will call "moral citizenship." In this way, citizenship became a psychological question of moral character as much as a political definition of rights and requirements. The emergence of moral citizenship in the 1780s and 1790s drew upon the peculiar...