Deb's Dogs: Animals, Indians, and Postcolonial Desire in Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly

In a well-known passage in Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly, the title character, through a misplaced do-gooder instinct, has followed mysterious stranger Clithero Edny into the "regions around Norwalk," has found his "benevolence" rejected and, frustrated, has returned in his sleep, fallen into the pit of a dark cave, killed and eaten a panther, clawed his way out, and on the way home, stumbled on a crude "hut" (206) in the middle of nowhere, with freed captive girl in tow, to shoot and kill some four—or is it five?—Native American men who he assumes have murdered his family, or his friend, or in any case bear murderous intentions toward himself. An unsettling couple of days.

Shortly after this moment of high stress Edgar learns whose cabin he has used as both refuge and staging ground for his killing spree. The cabin belongs to Old Deb, also known as Queen Mab, an old friend. Here is how Edgar describes her: sovereign matriarch, relocated but "not forgotten" by her "countrymen," the Lenni Lenape or Delaware, Deb had held her ground when all other tribe members had abandoned, due to "perpetual encroachments of the English colonists," their "ancient seats" (207) some 30 years prior to this story of ongoing frontier conflict. Only two years earlier, Deb had relocated, but only into an isolated, secondhand cabin in the woods, where relatives now visit annually and where she subsists on the produce of her garden and the spoils of her dogs' hunting.

Situated as she is both in and out of the Lenni Lenape tribe, Deb has habits that are a peculiar mix of tribal custom, English borrowing, and her own oddities, many associated with her dogs:

Her only companions were three dogs, of the Indian or wolf species. These animals differed in nothing from their kinsmen of the forest, but in their attachment and obedience to their mistress. She governed them with absolute sway: they were her servants and protectors, and attended her person or guarded her threshold, agreeably to her directions. She fed them with corn and they supplied her and themselves with meat. . . . To the rest of mankind they were aliens or enemies. . . . They would suffer none to approach them, but attacked no one who did not imprudently crave their acquaintance, or who kept at a respectful distance from their wigwam.

(207–8)

Deb appears but briefly in Edgar Huntly and is commonly viewed as less than central; in a novel whose title character is also the first-person narrator, all events focus around Edgar Huntly, according to the critical tradition. However, Deb holds a crucial place in Edgar Huntly's enactment of colonial and postcolonial desire, and her significance is marked by her appearance at the important juncture at which Edgar finds himself stripped of friends, humanity, and even his identity. Critical appraisal of Deb has tended to focus on her ethnic and racial characteristics: Brown presents her, says Robert Newman, as a crazy old woman representative of her tribe in what amounts to an "Indian-hating" novel. She is, at the other extreme, a sovereign leader, resistant to English colonizing and a force to be reckoned with: Brown, Matthew Sivils writes, "did not create this character to be ignored" (303). In these and many other readings, character Edgar Huntly's views—whether taken to be Indian-hating or Indian-loving—are conflated with author Charles Brockden Brown's views, an unfortunate confusion in view of the fact that Brown constructs Edgar as a "somnambulist," an unreliable first-person narrator so frequently on the verge of madness, or at least subject to altered states of mind, that Edgar has little moral authority in the novel as a whole.¹

Most persuasive because most complex are Sydney Krause's and Jared Gardner's studies of Deb and the other Delaware in Edgar Huntly. Krause indicates a deeply embedded racism manifest in the character Edgar and possibly going beyond the character to Brown's own role in creating Edgar and the novel's Native Americans; Krause does...