Paper for: Dr. Oliver Scheiding, Eberhard-Karls-Universitaet
Tuebingen
Seminar: Early American Fiction
Date: 22. April 1998
No footnotes or bibliography included!
Deut. 7:2.
1.Introduction
Indeed, no mercy was shown toward the Indians who had occupied God’s own country: the settlers in early America nearly wiped out their enemy completely . Although the Ten Commandments do not permit murder, the settlers had no scruples about slaughtering the "savages" -- they read the Bible in their very own way. In the area of Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, people also had moral difficulties in the war against the Indians. Aspects of these problems with human violence come to the surface in the development of the protagonist of Charles Brockden Brown’s novel Edgar Huntly. Reading the text as a predecessor of the experimental novel, three author experiments or violent scenes in which the protagonist’s mind is being scrutinized are to be discussed in this essay . The discussion will reveal that the individual is unable to deal responsibly with human nature: Edgar Huntly implicitly replaces the optimistic Lockean notion of the social nature of man by Hobbes’ rather pessimistic view. The goal of Brown, however, probably was to show the human mind as being able to deal with murder in a rational way. So during the process of writing, the text has shifted from advocating a social nature of man to depicting the failure of man as social and peaceful individual. Put into a modern perspective, Brown’s novel might therefore be seen as implicitly calling for government restrictions on self-justice: in this way, the text points to the issue of administrative interference with the private sphere, a problem that is of concern for America today.
2. The Basic Reason for Edgar Huntly’s Failure
Brown’s experimental novel had to fail from the beginning. The failure is a moral shortcoming of the protagonist of the novel, Edgar Huntly, as social and peaceful individual during his "transition from uncertainty to knowledge"(2). The transition takes place within the settler’s war against the Indians. Brown expects his protagonist to behave rationally and justly during the violent actions of the war; however, Huntly does not act rationally. Thomas Hobbes view of human nature provides a first philosophy of violence that can account this behavior: In Leviathan, Hobbes describes a view of man being a wolf to his fellow man.
And because the condition of Man, [...] is a condition of Warre of every one against every one; [...] it is a precept, or a generall rule of Reason, That every man, ought to endeavour peace, as farre as he has hope of obtaining it; and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek, and use, all helps, and advantages of Warre.
Modern evolutionary psychology offers a second approach to violence which can serve as the basis to Huntly’s failure. This approach "attempt[s] to understand normal social motives as products of the process of evolution by natural selection." Following Darwin’s selection thinking theory, every human organ, process, or action serves the purpose to maintain superiority over other individuals: "What ‘selection thinking’ suggests is that the evolved motivational mechanisms of all creatures, including ourselves, have been designed to expand the organism’s very life in the pursuit of genetic posterity." This makes sure that certain character traits maintain – the oft-cited survival of the fittest. In the hierarchy of needs in human behavior, life is the most important one because of its very basic contribution to fitness. Therefore, killing an opponent is a means to maintain in a better condition than the enemy.
Edgar Huntly is longing for revenge because Indians killed his parents. At first sight, the best solution for achieving personal justice in early America seems to be blood revenge; to reach an institution of legal justice required quite a journey, and these institutions might often have misrepresented personal justice in the eyes of the potential murderer. From the psychological perspective, blood revenge is also regarded as the most profitable strategy for fitness. Although, as Winston Churchill put it, "nothing is more costly, nothing is more sterile, than vengeance", vengeance does not display weaknesses and it does not provoke strong reactions. "In a competitive world, it is important to convince dangerous rivals -- whether individuals or lineages, and whether more or less powerful than oneself -- that one can only be exterminated at unacceptable cost to the exterminator." So blood vengeance is the most useful and ultimate conflict resolution.
In Edgar Huntly, Charles Brockden Brown’s experiments might seem to have several possible solutions. Considering evolutionary psychology, however, the only solution in every experiment is the death of the opponent. Given this argument, the very ground on which Brown wanted to build Edgar Huntly’s "transition from uncertainty to knowledge"(2) seems to be to weak to bear Brown’s social sermons. This might be one reason why passages about Huntly’s social knowledge leave a feeling of constructiveness in the reader and do not fit into the general impression of the character. After all, Edgar Huntly can be said to make a development from knowledge to confusion.
3. The Three Experiments
3.1 Huntly’s Attitude in the Beginning
In the beginning of the novel, Huntly’s attitude is liberal, but he has quite a few doubts. The overall development of the novel with the shift of attitude is governed by a key question: should one attack ones enemy? "Was it proper to [...] rush upon him and extort from him, by violence or menaces, any explanation of the scene"(7)? Huntly poses this question for the first time when he suspects Clithero to be the murderer of Waldegrave. In the beginning of the novel, Huntly’s attitude in regard to the question is mainly determined by Lockean ideas, which were widely believed to hold true in 18th century America. Locke basically thought that man is social and rational by nature. His view can thus be said to be more optimistic than the ideas of Thomas Hobbes, as it can be seen in the following passage:
[...] all Men may be restrained from invading others Rights, and from doing hurt to one another, and the Law of Nature be observed, which willeth the Peace and Preservation of all Mankind, the Execution of the Law of Nature is in that State, put into every Mans hands, whereby every one has a right to punish the transgressors of that Law to such a Degree, as may hinder its violation.
As long as Huntly is not directly confronted with his enemies, he believes in acting rational, social, and free. He is sure of his opinions and moral attitude towards violence against any human being: "What does vengeance desire but to inflict misery"(22)? Huntly asks, and he also tries to understand Clithero’s motive for attempting to kill the woman he loves. Clithero’s "conduct was dictated by a motive allied to virtue"(94), Huntly concludes. However, this feeling of liberal justice established at the very beginning of the novel is soon being overshadowed by doubts. Huntly feels that "to forbear inquiry or withhold punishment was to violate my duty to my God and to mankind"(4) and he even cries for "eternal revenge"(30) for the murder of his parents. But Huntly’s doubts do not stay for a long time. Brown leads his protagonist back to Lockean belief again right before the first Indian experiment happens. For the time being, Huntly has come to first conclusion in saying to the reader: "You expect that, having detected the offender, I will hunt him to infamy and death. You are mistaken"(30).
During the first hundred pages of the novel, Edgar Huntly’s mind is seemingly beginning to change. The opening passages with the introduction to Huntly’s attitude represent the wrong development of the entire novel. Whereas Charles Brockden Brown probably intended his book to prove that humans can interact socially and peacefully, the text develops a different attitude from the very beginning. A notion of failure of man as social and peaceful individual, which is based on the findings of psychology and philosophy discussed above, manifests itself. The theoretical social behavior would not hold up to practical confrontation with the enemy -- Edgar Huntly would find delight in carnage and blood very soon.
3.2. The First Experiment
Edgar Huntly’s transition from social behavior to violence has three stages which correspond to three Indian encounters the protagonist has to face. In the first encounter, Huntly can still control himself, but he has a premonition of true human nature. He finds himself lying on the ground of a cavern into which he had been thrown be Indians. He is attacked by a panther, and having defeated the animal, he drinks its blood. Huntly says: "The first suggestion that occurred to me was to feed upon the carcass of this animal"(175). So in the spontaneous action of drinking the blood of the panther, his natural enemy, Huntly is accepting his role in nature as violent, unsociable being, which is fighting against others for its own survival. The first step is taken; he feels that a voyage into his hidden nature begins: "My doom was ratified by powers which no human energies can counterwork"(84). Huntly knows that there is no way back. Therefore, the character of Huntly can be seen as being not as limited in regard to the knowledge about his own motivations as the author himself, because Brown tries to lead his protagonist back to society in the end. The story continues with Huntly discovering three Indians sleeping by a fire. First, Huntly wants to escape without attacking them. No feeling of vengeance comes to his mind, so he "determine[s] to make his dangerous experiment without delay"(183). Making this decision, Brown’s protagonist acts socially and justly. However, when moving toward the three Indians Huntly discovers that a fourth one is awake; he cannot pass this guard without being noticed. Furthermore, the Indians have taken another captive, a white girl who is lying on the ground next to them. When Huntly also discovers that a rifle is in the possession of the Indians, he suddenly finds himself in a situation without a solution: He cannot get past the armed guard. At this point Brown changes the setting of his first experiment. The guard walks out of the cavern without the rifle, so Huntly grabs it and follows him out of the cavern. Outside, the guard notices him. In constructing this situation, Brown has narrowed down all possibilities to just one: the death of the enemy. Therefore, Huntly sees his rifle as the only "method of removing this impediment"(187). He kills the guard, frees the captive, and says afterward: "no words can describe the torment of my thirst"(187). Huntly is sure that he has found the murderers of his family. Carrying the captive, he escapes and leaves the other three Indians sleeping in the cavern. Then Huntly states: Never before I had taken the life of a human creature. On this I had, indeed, entertained somewhat of religious scruples. These scruples did not forbid me to defend myself, but they made me cautious and reluctant to decide. Though they could not withhold my hand when urged by a necessity like this, they were sufficient to make me look back upon the deed with remorse and dismay. (189) So after the first experiment, Brown makes his character think he can control himself. Brown made Huntly decide to believe that his mind was governed by an unnatural force, and this gives Huntly feelings of regret concerning the death of the Indian. However, Brown, thinking that he has proven that humans can deal with murder rationally, has to force the character of Huntly into his social beliefs – they are already undermined in the first hundred pages of the novel. Does John Locke really seem to be right? Can one kill a man and still be a rational human being? After the first experiment is over, Huntly still thinks so: "The moment of insanity had gone by, and I was once more myself"(87) -- well, he probably would have succeeded to maintain "himself" if Brown had not continued the novel…
3.3. The Second Experiment
In the second experiment, Edgar Huntly’s transition from knowledge to confusion becomes more evident. Huntly reaches the deserted hut of an old Indian woman together with the captive he rescued. In the hut he examines the Indians’ musket and discovers that it belongs to his uncle. This discovery causes the satisfaction of fulfilled vengeance described above in Huntly as he thinks about his killing an Indian in the first experiment: "I was somewhat comforted in thinking that thus much of necessary vengeance had been executed"(196). Now that Brown has established a basis for Huntly’s longing for blood revenge, he continues the second experiment by making the other three Indians find Huntly in the hut. Huntly can hide before they enter; he can make his way out and waits outside. He hears the Indians striking the captive, which evokes a new thirst for blood: "I rebuked myself for having thus long delayed"(201), Huntly says. As soon as the Indians appear at the front door of the hut, he shoots two Indians and injures another:
It was as I expected. Scarcely was my eye again fixed upon the entrance, when a tawny and terrific visage was stretched fearfully forth. It was the signal of his fate. His glances , cast wildly and swiftly around, lighted upon me, and on the fatal instrument which was pointed at his forehead. His muscles were at once exerted to withdraw his head, and to vociferate a warning to his fellow; but his movement was too slow. The ball entered above his ear. He tumbled headlong to the ground, bereaved of sensation though not of life, and had power only to struggle and mutter. (201)
In this passage of the second experiment, any moral contemplation has disappeared. The depiction of the brutal killing does not fulfill the expectations one has from Browns sermons of the social and religious Huntly. For the first time in the novel, Huntly has become a killer; he has traveled backward to become an animal again – Thomas Hobbes would undoubtedly have liked the passage. Huntly himself also notices this development with fear: "The transition I had undergone was so wild and inexplicable"(204), he finds. This statement actually contradicts Huntly’s or rather Brown’s later interpretation of a would-be transition to knowledge; the transition is rather a voyage from the explicable to the inexplicable. So in the second experiment, one obviously finds further evidence for the not calculated shift in the text. Huntly is becoming whom he is fighting against in the Indians: a man of nature.
3.4. The Third Experiment
With the third and final experiment the transition is complete: Edgar Huntly has found his human nature. Huntly is on his way to Inglefield again when he sees the injured Indian creeping on a path. He tries to shoot the Indian, but he is not successful: the Indian is only more severely injured. So Huntly grabs his musket and rams the bayonet into the Indian’s heart: he dies a horrible and inhuman death. Huntly’s acting in this passage is rather not governed by social behavior, at least it is not when he rams the bayonet into the body of the half dead enemy. Huntly discovers that the only "fate of man and universe is survival"(213), and he accepts this new state of mind with enthusiasm after having struggled with his doubts: "Prompted by some freak of fancy, I stuck his musket in the ground, and left it standing upright in the middle of the road"(313).
Hobbes’ concept won at last. Huntly has found his true self, which is not the one he started out with in the Midwest, and also not the one Brown wanted him to develop during the novel. With his sermons, Brown wants the reader to believe that Huntly changes his mind again as in the beginning of the text. The third experiment, however, leaves poor Huntly so confused that no attentive reader would believe in the transition to knowledge.
4. The State of Huntly after the Experiments
Later, when Huntly writes the letter the book consists of to his fiancé, he tries to reverse the shift from violence to a liberal attitude again. "I review this scene with loathing and horror. Now that it is past I look back upon it as on some hideous dream. The whole appears to be some freak of insanity" (175), Huntly says. The reader knows, however, that Huntly is mistaken and that he has experienced an premonition of human condition. Nature is the one that guides him back to his home after he has unconsciously accepted his role as a being that is only struggling for survival: Huntly leaps into a river and he is saved from bullets fired at him by his friends by -- the water:
Meanwhile, my safety depended on eluding the bullets that continued incessantly to strike the water at an arm’s length from my body. For this end I plunged beneath the surface, and only rose to inhale fresh air. Presently the firing ceased, the flashes that lately illuminated the bank disappeared, and a certain bustle and murmur of confused voices gave place to solitude and silence.
The last pages of the novel are characterized by Huntly’s confusion, not by knowledge. The rhetoric formula which Brown uses throughout the novel to make Huntly’s character appear more composed do merely contribute to the notion of confusion at the end of the text than to its coherence. The reader thus can understand Huntly’s fear when he cries out: "How little cognizance have men over the actions and motives of each other! How total is our blindness with regard to our own performances"(294)! So Huntly knows a lot more than Brown. The character can not be said to try to hide his feeling of insecurity. However, he also does not recognize the possibility of an ultimate reunification with nature: when Huntly steps out of the river, he gets right into society again. So after all three experiments, Huntly has not accepted his true nature.
5. Clithero as Counterexample
In contrast to Huntly, Clithero has accepted his shift to being a violent being in society. A worker from Ireland, Clithero has almost killed his love there and wants to start a new life in America. He is haunted by nightmares and thus cannot sleep. In America, he has the chance to build a new self, but the suspicious society around him makes this impossible: Huntly’s investigations interfere with Clithero seeking rest. He confesses his crimes to Huntly and then hides in caverns. When sleep-walking, he leads Huntly into these caverns, which can be seen as the human mind. Having revealed his secrets to Huntly, Clithero stays in the hut of the old Indian women and works on a farm – he lives in peace with nature. Huntly meets him there, and he recognizes that "His fatal and gloomy thoughts seemed to have somewhat yielded into tranquillity"(299). At the end of the novel, Huntly would better have agreed to what Clithero says when he accuses him of foolish thinking:
You, like others, are blind to the most momentous consequences of your own actions. You talk of imparting consolation. You boast the beneficence of your intentions. You set yourself to do me a benefit. What are the effects of your misguided zeal and random efforts? They have brought my life to a miserable close. They have shrouded the last scene of it in blood. They have put the seal to my perdition. (34)
By leading Huntly into caverns, Clithero is the one who makes Huntly’s possible reunification with nature possible. Unfortunately, Clithero is also the person who is punished by society for this action: He drowns in the ocean at the end. Clithero’s fate would have been the fate of Huntly, if Huntly would have accepted his role in nature as anti-social being. The development of Clithero can be regarded as a counterexample to Huntly and it then shows that humans are unable to deal with their own actions. From a modern point of view, this means that a higher organization has to be established to decide over individuals in a community.
6. Conclusion
In the novel Edgar Huntly, William Hill Brown has driven his protagonist into a state of complete confusion. Two approaches suggest that his confused state of mind was the only possible ending for the novel: the view put forward in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan and the view of modern evolutionary psychology. Three experiments, in which the hero has to kill Indians, record the moral shortcomings of Edgar Huntly. The ending of the novel leaves Huntly trying to forget the new experiences he had with violence and stepping from nature back into his old surroundings.
Brown seemingly did not want his protagonist to know about the true human nature. In his own failure in keeping Huntly from his nature, he nevertheless accomplished a stunning demonstration of the possibilities of free imagination. For the first time in the history of the American novel, Brown has reached the complete freedom of imagination -- an imagination so strong that it could not be controlled. Even by the author himself .
The new freedom, however, goes together with a transition of society from an artificial, social behavior toward a natural and violent behavior. From this perspective, Brown’s novel reveals two aspects: the society in the 1780s was not capable of dealing with human nature, as the death of Clithero suggests. Furthermore, Huntly’s or rather Brown’s escape into a Lockean ideal of peaceful living could not work in the competitive situation of early America -- and America today. This manifests itself in the breathtaking increase of violence in American society. One could argue that America is moving toward the beginning of evolution -- with an administration interfering less in violent behavior. With regard to these arguments, Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly can be read as a warning for American society. Maybe what was not listened to two hundred years ago will be understood now. Unfortunately, America has never listened a lot to its artists -- maybe listening better to voices like Brown’s would have held trouble at bay. If America does not take the chance to listen to them now, the only thing that remains to be said is: to each his own.
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