Edgar Huntly or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker, With Related Texts (review)

The striking painting by a French artist on the cover of this American novel signals the editors' refreshing approach to Edgar Huntly through trans-Atlantic discourses of empire, radical-democratic social theory, sensibility, and sexuality. François-Xavier Fabre's Saint Sébastien Expirant (1789) depicts the idealized, nearly nude body of the saint hanging from a tree by one wrist. An arrow penetrates Sebastian's other arm, suggesting the damage that war inflicts on bodies and the role of aboriginal peoples in European conflicts, both of which trouble Edgar Huntly, the protagonist of Brown's novel. Students of history and of literature will benefit from how this edition develops the connections among one individual's unconscious fall into murderous frontier violence and Quaker–Indian relations, revolutionary uprisings, and imperial wars.

Edgar Huntly, set in rural Pennsylvania in 1787 and first published in 1799, begins with Edgar's investigation of the mysterious murder of his best friend. When Edgar discovers the Irish immigrant Clithero sleepwalking beneath the elm tree where his friend was killed, he believes that he has found the culprit. But when Edgar asks for a confession, he finds himself drawn into sympathy with Clithero's tale. Edgar's attempt to rescue Clithero from despair leads Edgar into his own experience of sleepwalking, captivity, and violence against the Delaware Indians who emerge to claim their lost territory. In their introduction, Barnard and Shapiro explore the relationship between these personal episodes of irrationality and conflict and "the shock of the (early) modern in the widest sense, from North America and Ireland to the Asian subcontinent" (ix). They persuasively argue that Edgar Huntly critiques laissez-faire capitalism as the root of the global struggle for power between European nations who enlist local aboriginal peoples in their disputes. The Edgar Huntly that this edition foregrounds is one of the earliest anti-imperialist fictions because it "inverts and deflates the myth that Anglo invasion is a culturally beneficial and socially progressive act" (xlii).

This edition provides students with the tools to contextualize and analyze Edgar Huntly, including an extensive bibliography of relevant scholarship and footnotes that define unfamiliar words, give historical background, or refer the reader back to the introduction. Barnard and Shapiro's selection of related texts from works including William Godwin's Political Justice and Brown's essays gives students insight on Edgar Huntly's sources. However, this edition does not include the one text that was originally published together with Edgar Huntly: Brown's short story, "The Death of Cicero. A Fragment." While some of the extant early American copies of Edgar Huntly lack "The Death of Cicero," many do include it as the final part of the novel's third volume, yet no modern edition has incorporated this story. The relationship between men that "The Death of Cicero" portrays as well as Cicero's support for the Roman republic against the empire make this story relevant to interpreting Edgar Huntly's social and political views. The fact that we are potentially reading a different book from the one that was published for eighteenth-century readers points out the need to bring publication history to bear on how we choose related texts. Barnard and Shapiro's edition of Edgar Huntly significantly expands the approaches to this text for students, but it also raises questions about the construction of the textual artifact that students and scholars use as evidence.¹