Kambriel: Rappaccini's Daughter Veil

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• STEFAN BRANDT
• Imaginary Americas Literary Self-Fashioning in
  the USA from the Revolutionary Era to Modernity
  (1776-1900)

Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly (1799)
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Edgar Huntly (1799) written as a long letter to
the protagonists lover Mary Waldegrave
Attempting to solve the mystery of her brothers
murder
Chief suspect Clithero, digging under a tree
Clithero has murdered someone, but someone
different
The search for truth ends in excesses, absurd
encounters, and the discovery of coincidence as a
main force
Waldegraves murder was a purely coincidental
event. He is a victim of Indian aggression.
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Historical context of Browns novel
The 1770s-1790s a phase of disorder and
political instability The Revolutionary Years
1773
Boston Tea Party
1776
Declaration of Independence
1787
The American Constitution (the supreme law of
the United States)
1789
President George Washington (until 1797)
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Henry Brackenridge
Susanna Rowson
From 1790 to 1820, there was not a book, a
speech, a conversation, or a thought in the
state.Ralph Waldo Emerson (1852)
Hannah Foster
Royall Tyler
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Literary and cultural context of Browns novel
The 1780s and 1790s The American novel is
developed
1789
William Hill Brown, The Power of Sympathy
The task of American national literature
celebrate American independence and stress the
specificities of the new nation
As an independent nation, our honor requires us
to have a system of our own in language as well
as government. Great Britain, whose children we
are and whose language we speak, should no longer
be our standard for the taste of her writers is
already corrupted and her language on the
decline. Noah Webster, Dissertations on the
English Language (1789)
The nation of Great Britain is marked by
corruption. Philip Freneau, The American
Village (1772)
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Fear of Anarchy
After the euphoria of the Independence Economic
crisis, fear of anarchy
Brown in a letter to Thomas Jefferson attached to
his book Wieland (1798) warning about America as
a sleepwalking anarchist
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The dominant type of novel in early America was
the

• Epistolary Novel

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I. The Old World and the New World
II. The Real and the Imaginary
III. Authority and Self-Empowerment
IV. Civilization and Nature
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The task of the early American novelist was to
find a distinctive voice despite the dominance of
British traditions. Cathy Davidson (2004)
As a genre, the novel played a significant role
in shaping provincial and parochial identities
and communities into the evolving identity
that would become theUnited States of
America.Cathy Davidson (2004)
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I. The Old World and the New World
It is the purpose of this work to exhibit a
series of adventures, growing out of the
condition of our country.Edgar Huntly (1799)
One merit the writer may at least claim that of
calling forth the passions and engaging the
sympathy of the reader, by means hitherto
unemployed by preceding authors. Puerile
superstition and exploded manners Gothic castles
and chimeras, are the materials usually employed
for this end. The incidents of Indian
hostility, and the perils of the western
wilderness, are far more suitable and for a
native of America to overlook these, would admit
no apology. Edgar Huntly (1799)
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II. The Real and the Imaginary
The inroads of hunger were already experienced,
and this knowledge of the desperateness of my
calamity, urged me to phrenzy. I had none but
capricious and unseen fate to condemn. The author
of my distress and the means he had taken to
decoy me hither, were incomprehensible. Surely my
senses were fettered or depraved by some spell. I
was still asleep, and this was merely a
tormenting vision, or madness had seized me, and
the darkness that environed and the hunger that
afflicted me, existed only in my own distempered
imagination. Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar
Huntly
The perverse nature which drives Edgar to
perform and witness cruel deeds is a metaphor for
the national self.
In romantic fiction, the field of action is
conceived not so much as a place as a state of
mind the borderland of the human mind where the
actual and the imaginary intermingle.Richard
Chase (1957)
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I found myself stretched upon the ground. I
perceived the cottage and the neighbouring
thicket, illuminated by a declining moon. My head
rested upon something, which, on turning to
examine, I found to be one of the slain Indians.
The other two remained upon the earth at a small
distance, and in the attitudes in which they had
fallen. Their arms, the wounded girl, and the
troop who were near me when I fainted, were
gone.My head had reposed upon the breast of him
whom I had shot in this part of his body. The
blood had ceased to ooze from the wound, but my
dishevelled locks were matted and steeped in that
gore which had overflowed and choaked up the
orifice. I started from this detestable pillow,
and regained my feet. I reflected that
appearances might have easily misled them into a
belief of my death on this supposition, to have
carried me away, or to have stayed beside me,
would be useless. Other enemies might be abroad,
or their families, now that their fears were
somewhat tranquilized, might require their
presence and protection. Charles Brockden
Brown, Edgar Huntly
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III. Authority and Self-Empowerment

• State control vs.

Unrestrained liberty
The Novel -- endangering the moral substance of
the nation
Indian hostility and the perils of western
wilderness are the ingredients of this tale,
and these he the author has been ambitious of
depicting in vivid and faithful colours. The
success of his efforts must be estimated by the
liberal and candid reader. Edgar Huntly
(1799)
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Our countrymen are prone to enterprise, and are
scattered over every sea and every land in
pursuit of that wealth which will not screen them
from disease and infirmity and which, when
gained, by no means compensates them for the
hardships and vicissitudes endured in the
pursuit.Edgar Huntly (1799)
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all
men are created equal, that they are endowed by
their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,
that among these are Life, Liberty and the
pursuit of Happiness.The Declaration of
Indepebdence (1776)
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The beast that was now before me was accustomed
to assail whatever could provide him with a
banquet of blood, He would set upon the man and
the deer with equal and irresistible ferocity.
IV. Civilization and Nature
My hunger speedily became ferocious. I tore the
linen of my shirt between my teeth and swallowed
the fragments. I felt a strong propensity to bite
the flesh from my arm. My heart overflowed with
cruelty, and I pondered on the delight I should
experience in rending some living animal to
pieces, and drinking its blood and grinding its
quivering fibres between my teeth.
My temper never delighted in carnage and
blood. Edgar Huntly (1799)
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• For the next session
• (Literary Self-Fashioning and the Picaresque
  Novel)
• Read and prepare the Henry Brackenridge text
• - short bio and excerpts from Modern Chivalry
  (1792/1815)