The “Black Hole of Calcutta” in Charles Brockden Brown’s America: American Exceptionalism and India in Edgar Huntly

Edgar Huntly (1799) is an early American novel obsessed on many levels with the consequences of following. In the preface to the novel, Charles Brockden Brown promises to break away from European literary models and to craft an exceptionally American novel. In the interior, continental setting of Edgar Huntly, Brown apparently flees the international entanglements that characterize his previous novel, part 1 of Arthur Mervyn (1799), whose transatlantic action oscillates between Philadelphia and the West Indies. By contrast, in his preface to Edgar Huntly, Brown points to the “western wilderness” as the site for an exceptionally American novel in which problems intrinsic to the new nation can be explored.¹ Brown argues that the materials and themes suitable for an American author “should differ essentially from those which exist in Europe” and promises to deliver to readers that American essence by relating the “perils” of the western frontier of the United States. “[F]or a native of America to overlook these,” Brown continues, “would admit of no apology” (3). In spite of its nationalistic preface, the novel’s attempt to locate an exceptional American essence far removed from the sites of its troubling entanglements with European empires on the eastern seaboard is unsuccessful—a form of failure, ironically, that enhances the novel’s interest for modern readers who live in an increasingly globalized world.

Edgar Huntly finds in the western wilderness not the essence of America but, ironically, more marks of European empire and the United States’s entanglements with it. The title character follows an insane Irish fugitive into the “western wilderness” and finds himself enmeshed, both materially and psychologically, with the British expansion of empire in India, Britain’s latest imperial conquest. Furthermore, as I will show, in his apparent flight westward from his British father figure, Sarsefield, Edgar Huntly figuratively follows Sarsefield’s imperial peregrinations into and out of “British” India. Such observations suggest a very different kind of allegorical reading of Edgar Huntly than has conventionally been produced by critics who implicitly take Brown’s prefatory declaration of independence as a critical directive for interpreting the novel. Instead, I argue, the novel expresses America’s struggle with its prospective imperial identity in an international, global context of European imperialism.

The critical reorientation I propose in my reading of Edgar Huntly illuminates the limitations of thinking of the novel as Brown proposes in his preface—as an analysis of issues unique to the founding of the United States. One productive line of such criticism is well represented by Emory Elliott’s Revolutionary Writers: Literature and Authority in the New Republic (1982), which argues that Brown and his literary contemporaries imaginatively proposed an ambivalent policy of containment of the excesses of post-revolutionary America, “vacillating between the poles of republican liberalism and the Federalist fear of mobocracy” (13). Literary critics have mapped this nationalistic paradigm onto Edgar Huntly in various ways, the object of which is usually to discern the fierce political battles between Federalists and Republicans allegorically represented in, for example, the authoritarianism of Sarsefield and Edgar’s flirtation with philosophical radicalism. Paul Downes, in “Sleep-Walking Out of the Revolution: Brown’s Edgar Huntly,” for example, reads the novel as an allegory of the ambiguities of the post-revolutionary state in general and post-revolutionary America in particular. Downes writes, “By dramatizing the continuities between a sentimental radicalism and an autocratic conservatism, the novel contributes to a critical reading of antagonistic politics in the new constitutional democracy” (413). In Downes’s view, the novel deconstructs the apparent Federalist/Republican post-revolutionary political dichotomy rather than promotes the ideology of one side.

Downes’s deconstruction of the political poles traditionally discerned in Edgar Huntly is revisionist but nevertheless remains within the nationalistic paradigm that has governed one traditional approach. Downes’s argument at times nationalizes groups that I argue figure as international presences within the early United States represented in Edgar Huntly. This is most evident in Downes’s reading of the novel’s Lenni-Lenape as a “people [End Page 558...