“Disastrous and humiliating is the state of man! By his own hands, is constructed the mass of misery and error in which his steps are forever involved.” – Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (p. 268)
Brown’s Edgar Huntly is built on misperceptions, both figurative and literal. Its narrator suffers countless trials and hardships, and at several key moments, his emotional state and expectations color his perceptions. It goes beyond bias: his actual sensations appear to be altered, as Brown’s language insists that his senses sight and hearing betray Edgar Huntly, rather than accusing him of twisting true perceptions into false interpretations. “My fancy instantly figured to itself an armed man,” Huntly says at one moment (221), but he identifies the perception as “fancy” only after the fact. When Clithero enters Mrs. Lorimer’s chamber with intentions of murder, he recounts: “I…beheld her tranquilly slumbering” (77). Brown does not permit the ambiguity of his character describing that the figure, actually her daughter Clarice, appeared to be Mrs. Lorimer. For Clithero, at that moment, she is Mrs. Lorimer. His imagination has changed his sensory perception. As Scarry notes, the imagination has the capacity for recreating elements present in perception, and in Edgar Huntly, Brown employs this quality to great effect.
Having thus offered a brief analysis of Brown’s mining of the human imaginative capacity and its inherent dangers, I feel the need to approach the novel from a more subjective angle. I will say that, for a variety of reasons, Edgar Huntly has been one of the most profoundly affecting reads I’ve ever experienced. It broached topics that have long been of deep interest to me, and raised questions that I have not only wondered, but explored myself.
Last fall, I took an independent study course in creative writing, and one of the short stories I worked on was fueled by a curiosity about the way we can misunderstand each other, and the circumstances that arise which can easily place us in a dangerous cage, from which there is no safe escape. A friend had given me an unrelated prompt to write about: it was the opening to a story that I had to finish, and it described a romantic scene with a young couple in an empty ballroom after a concluded wedding reception. As I thought about marriage and relationships and the delicate balance of the game in which we rely on implicit understanding but rarely say what we are really thinking, I saw an opportunity for delving into the consequences of misinterpretation. What I also realized (and what is the point of me introducing this tangent) was that this needed to be a horror story. I kept the romantic setting, the wedding reception, the beautiful empty ballroom—but the word “horror” pulsed in the back of my mind the whole time I was writing.
Reading Edgar Huntly, I felt the same horror—though, of course, much more expertly rendered. I could not put this novel down, and I was amazed at how chillingly Brown manages not only to weave a set of circumstances founded on unavoidable misunderstandings—Edgar frequently insists that no other options are open, that no other interpretation could be imagined, or asks series of unanswered questions in the vein of “What else could I have done?”—but also to withhold judgment of his characters and deny the reader any easy answers. So many of the protagonist’s actions are revealed in the end to be folly, but, just as Edgar himself asks, what else could he have done? How can one overcome a falsehood perceived as truth? The power of imagination to alter perception renders this a near-impossible question, one that Brown refuses to answer, and one that applies just as potently today as it did for his late 18th Century American audience.
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