The years between Washington’s election as President in 1789
and the Peace of Ghent in 1814, brought great alterations in American
life. The United States was a booming, wealthy nation, and as they
took on political shape, Americans sought to evolve a culture of their
own, in order not to remain linked to the cultural tradition of Britain
and Europe
2
. The American problem was how to choose from her
European heritage those things that might delineate and exemplify the
American way of life. But it was not so easy to produce great art on
demand. As Washington Irving pointed out a few years later, the
serious problem was that the United States lacked “the charms of
storied and poetical association” while in Europe
“there were to be seen the masterpieces of art, the
refinements of highly-cultivated society, the quaint
peculiarities of ancient and local custom. ... Europe was rich
in the accumulated treasures of age. Her very ruins told the
history of times gone by, and every mouldering stone was a
chronicle”
3
.
2
For a complete view of the United States in those years, see: STEVEN WATTS, The
Romance of Real Life. Charles Brockden Brown and the Origins of American Culture,
Baltimore, Hopkins University Press, 1994, chap. 1 and BILL CHRISTOPHERSEN, The
Apparition in the Glass. Charles Brockden Brown’s American Gothic, Athens, University of
Georgia Press, 1993, chap. 1
3
WASHINGTON IRVING, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., New York, Signet,
1961, p.14, quoted in MAURICE BENNETT, An American Trdition. Three Studies: Charles
Brockden Brown, Hawthorne and James, ed. by Stanford University, New York, Garland
Publications, 1987, p.45
America had no usable past to stir the artist’s fancy. The United States
had no tradition of literary patronage among the wealthy, and there
were very few artists and writers who had the personal resources
needed for a full-time career. America lacked an audience of both the
size and perception necessary for the professional literary man: only
about the three per cent of Americans lived in cities
4
, and the overall
cultural level was not adequate for a new fiction. As Leslie Fiedler
points out: “As practical men, the new middle classes found literature
frivolous;... as class-conscious citizens, they felt it too committed to
the court and the salon”
5
. Moreover, in the United States, books were
produced chiefly by men who were obliged to depend upon other
employments for their support. There was also the practical matter of
the lack of an adequate copyright law
6
in the United States. An
American writer of that century found his market thin indeed, as he
was in competition with cheap (or pirated) reprints of English authors.
To originate an “American style” in literature required the
construction of a body of positive principles; the American author
4
ALEXANDER COWIE, The rise of the American Novel, New York, American Book
Company, 1951, p.2
5
LESLIE FIEDLER, Love and death in the American Novel, New York, Criterion Books
Inc., 1960, quoted in MAURICE BENNETT, An American Trdition. Three Studies: Charles
Brockden Brown, Hawthorne and James, op. cit., p. 43
6
ALEXANDER COWIE, The rise of the American Novel, op. cit., p.2
must have something American to write about and a defined,
recognizably native manner of writing it. About this conceit, Charles
Brockden Brown sustained the primary role of the author:
“He who shall examine objects with his own eyes, who shall
employ the European models merely for the improvement of
his taste, and adapt his fiction to all that is genuine and
peculiar in the scenes before him, will be entitled at least to
the praise of originality. ... He, therefore, who paints, not
from books, but from nature, who introduces those lines and
hues in which we differ, rather than those in which we
resemble our kindred nations beyond the ocean, may lay
some claim to the patronage of his countrymen”
7
.
First of all, the American artist had the Indians and the frontier as an
undeniably great literary resource. And that’s what Brown himself
suggested in his preface to Edgar Huntly: America provided material
widely different and therefore new, to anything British novelists
possessed. The quest for an American art was fundamentally a search
for the proper way to use the resources of the American land, the
American past, and American society to produce something
aesthetically correct, morally true, and at the same time expressive of
American life and ideals. Brown himself wrote:
7
CHARLES B. BROWN, The Rhapsodist and Other Uncollected Writings by Charles
Brockden Brown, ed. HARRY WARFEL, New York, Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints,
1977, pp. 135 - 136
“I venture to intrude myself upon the public, not in the fond
expectation of contributing a more than ordinary share of
amusement or instruction to the common stock. My ambition
has already devoted me to the service of my country,...”
8
Brown was the first American to adopt letters as his sole profession
and for a time actually made a go of it, as he said in one of his letters
to his brother, James Brown, dated New York, April, 1800:
“Bookmaking, as you observe, is the dullest of all trades, and
the most that any American can look for in his native country
is to be reimbursed for his unavoidable expenses. The
saleability of my works much depend upon their popularity
in England, ...
”
9
.
He was the shaper of a tradition which affected many later writers; he
was the first to introduce the Indians into fiction; he anticipated the
deep interest in psychotic characters and inserted in the form of
fiction the explanation of their mental difficulties; he likewise
anticipated in his treatment of horror and his suggestion of poetic
gloom the writings of Hawthorne and Poe. A follower of the Gothic
school of romance, he wrote books that are at least the equal of their
parallels in contemporary English literature: Mrs. Radcliffe’s The
8
Ibid., p. 2
9
CHARLES B. BROWN, quoted in Cyclopedia of American Literature, ed. LAIRD
SIMONS, M., Philadelphia, Rutter & Co., 1875, p. 612
Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto
(1764)
10
.
1.1 Charles Brockden Brown
Born in Philadelphia on the 17th of January, 1771, Brown was
of Quaker lineage
11
, which surely gave his mind the liberal bent so
strongly developed in his early manhood
12
. The early years of the
future novelist were marked by intellectual precocity and physical
weakness:
“...he seldom mingled in the sports of children,...he required
nothing but a book to divert him”
13
.
From the age of eleven to sixteen, he pursued classical studies, at the
end of which he had three historical poems planned out, one on the
discovery of America, another on Cortez, and a third devoted to
10
DONALD A. RINGE, American Gothic; Imagination and Reason in Nineteenth Century
Fiction, Lexington, University Press of Kentucky, 1982, p. 14
11
”A Quaker is a member of the Religious Society of Friends. The Quakers are a group of
Christians who use no scripture and believe in great simplicity, in daily life and in worship.
Their services consist mainly of silent meditation. Quakers have traditionally been
committed to Pacifism. Pennsylvania was settled by a group of Quakers fleeing religious
persecutions”, in The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Boston, Hougton Mifflin Company,
1988, p. 103
12
DONALD A. RINGE, Charles Brockden Brown, Boston, Twaine Publishers, 1991, p.4
13
PAUL ALLEN, The Life of Charles Brockden Brown, Delmar, New York, Scholars’
Facsimiles and Reprints, 1975, p.10
Pizzarro. As a law student, Brown felt the study as discordant with his
mental as its practice with his personal habits.
“The benefit which he proposed to derive from this severe
tax upon his time was, to make his page the record of his
own mind, to mark his various stages of improvement from
time to time, to acquire a promptitude in his narrative of
facts, and a graceful style of writing”
14
.
In that period, recording daily his thoughts and copying the letters he
wrote to his friends and those which he received in return, he
gradually improved his style. The Rhapsodist, published in 1789 in
the “Columbus Magazine”, was a series of essays, interesting mainly
as emphasizing his love of solitude, in which Brown
“...presented a clear sublimation of personal issues and social
preoccupations into a literary form”
15
.
By 1792 he had withdrawn from his studies because of the strong
influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
16
, and then turned to literature as
his chief vocation. The decision to abandon the law career was
regretted by his family, who had no fortune on which he could fall
back from the hazards of an author’s career for support.
14
ibid., p.12-13
15
STEVEN WATTS, The Romance of Real Life: Charles Brockden Brown and the Origins
of American Culture, op. cit., p.36
16
DONALD A. RINGE, Charles Brockden Brown, op. cit., p.4
Then, partly to seek new horizons and partly to escape the ravages of
yellow fever, Brown went to New York, to visit Dr. Elihu Hubbard
Smith whom he had first met in Philadelphia in the winter of 1790,
and “fed fuel to his burning philosophical interests” while introducing
him to his future biographer, the painter and playwright William
Dunlap
17
, and to the “Friendly Club”, a center of literary interest. In
the fall of 1797 he wrote Alcuin, a dialogue, in which the topic of
marriage is discussed with some degree of subtely and which became
the first of Brown’s major works to appear in print
18
. During the
summer of 1798, the yellow fever broke out in New York; Brown was
then resident in Smith’s house and both friends caught the infection,
but Smith died and Brown recovered. His novel of Arthur Mervyn
gives a testimony of the lasting effect which his experience as an eye-
witness of and sufferer from the pestilence here and in his native city
in 1793, had upon him. Again, we find him in 1798 contributing a
series of papers entitled The Man at Home to the “Weekly Magazine”.
These papers are for the most part occupied with reflections on men
and society, and are part essay and part fiction
19
. His first step,
17
ALEXANDER COWIE, The Rise of the American Novel, op. cit., p. 71
18
STEVEN WATTS, The Romance of Real Life: Charles Brockden Brown and the Origins
of American Culture, op. cit., p. 60
19
CHARLES B. BROWN, The Rhapsodist and Other Uncollected Writings by Charles
Brockden Brown, ed. HARRY WARFEL, op. cit., p. x
however, in the career which was to make him famous, was arrested
by an annoying mishap. Brown wrote his first novel, bearing the title
of Sky-Walk, or the Man Unknown to Himself whose forthcoming
publication was announced in “The Weekly Magazine”, March 17,
1798
20
. The printer who had engaged to print the work, died when his
task was nearly completed; his executors refused to fulfill the contract
and thus Sky-Walk was denied a terrestrial career. Afterwards Brown
incorporated portions of his ill-fated novel in Edgar Huntly. The full
title of his first novel was Sky-Walk, or the Man Unknown to Himself-
-An American Tale, and was explained thus:
“Sky-Walk is a popular corruption of Ski-Wakkee, or Big
Spring, the name given by the Lenni Lennaffee Indians to the
district where the principal scenes of this novel are
transacted”. ... “Sky-Walk” is a folk-adaptation of the Indian
sounds in English ears. The subtitle indicates that some
abnormality, possibly sleepwalking, marked the hero’s life.
Because of its announced Indian content, Sky-Walk is said to
have served as a basis for Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a
Sleep-Walker”
21
.
The year 1798 is also an important date for the history of the novel in
America: Charles Brockden Brown published in a duodecimo volume
of some three hundred pages his Wieland. Its success was immediate,
20
Ibid., p. xiii
21
Ibid., p. ix
and so stimulating to its author that in the December after its
publication he wrote Ormond. The publication of this second novel in
New York, 1799, was followed by the first part of Arthur Mervyn
during the same year in Philadelphia. This was followed in a few
months by Edgar Huntly, in 1800 by the second part of Arthur
Mervyn, and in the next year by Clara Howard and Jane Talbot. In
1803 he published the first of several political pamphlets. There “he
staked out a position that was vigorously expansionist yet sharply
critical of American values, and then defended it with a message of
disciplined unity and productivity
22
”. But he was not only, as already
said, the first person in America who ventured to pursue literature as a
profession, but almost the first to make an attempt in the field of
imaginative writing, unconnected with the advocacy of any question
of national or local interest. His novels introduce us to a wide range
of characters, men of mixed and complicated natures, not the blind
slaves and passive agents of a single idea. They bring us to the city,
but it is most often to the city in its plague-stricken agonies, when its
streets are almost as desolate as the frontier settlement and wooded
fastnesses in which the author delights. The characters are more
22
STEVEN WATTS, The Romance of Real Life: Charles Brockden Brown and the Origins
of American Culture, op. cit., p. 176
disposed to soliloquize than to talk. We have few glimpses of indoor
comfort in mansion or cottage, no peaceful views of smiling
landscape. Brown can depict natural scenery, and does it too with a
firm and bold hand. In the wild scenery of Pennsylvania, in the
wilderness of the Forks of the Delaware, he is as much at home as
among the right angles of his native city. Brown used his fiction not
for the exposition, but for the discovery of ideas, which he put to test
through the actions of his characters. He shaped the different artistic
forms of the novel (the sentimental, the autobiographical, the
historical, the novel of purpose, the captivity tale, the Bildungsroman
and, most important of all, the Gothic romance), to his own artistic
ends and turned them into vehicles for the development of important
themes such as sensationalist psychology, theories of education,
benevolist principles and others. However, much he may have learned
from his wide European reading, Brown was no mere imitator.
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