Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly : The Picturesque Traveler as Sleepwalker

Abstract

CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN'S EDGAR HUNTLY: THE PICTURESQUE TRAVELER AS SLEEPWALKER Beth L. Lueck* Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly: or, Memoirs of a SleepWalker (1799) stands as an early landmark in American literature for its original use of the picturesque traveler convention to characterize the protagonist and to develop theme. Because the picturesque tour had been popular in England for little more than a decade when Brown first began writing, its use in an American novel at the close of the eighteenth century is remarkable. Although Brown's borrowing of British aesthetics for landscape description, notably the picturesque and the sublime, is not original in American literature, even at this early date, he is one of the earliest American writers to place himself consciously within the British aesthetic tradition. Moreover, the use of the picturesque traveler not only as subject, but also as a narrative device and as a method of developing theme in the novel, is strikingly original in Brown's writing and creates a fictional work of great depth and complexity. In Edgar Huntly's repeated excursions into the wilderness, Brown attempts to relocate the picturesque tourist onto American soil. But the protagonist's imitating the picturesque tourist is unsuccessful and even ludicrous. The resulting disjunction between picturesque conventions and American landscape suggests that, without some sacrifice of credibility or without a consideration of the potentially dangerous New World landscape, the picturesque tour as it was known in Great Britain could not be readily transplanted to America. Brown was familiar with British uses of the picturesque and sublime and was interested in adapting these conventions as ways of looking at and appreciating American landscapes. The evidence of Brown's knowledge of aesthetics comes from the articles he wrote or edited for The Monthly Magazine, and American Review (1799—1800) and The Literary Magazine, and American Register (1803—08), both of which he edited . Articles in both periodicals attest to their editor's continued interest in aesthetics.' In one essay that appeared the year after Edgar Huntly's publication, Brown recommends '"the pleasure which the beauties of nature afford'" to persons of a cultivated mind. For those ignorant souls *Beth L. Lueck is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of WisconsinMilwaukee . She has published an article in the Walt Whitman Review and is currently working on a book on picturesque travel in American literature. 26Beth L. Lueck whose poverty of imagination and vocabulary brings them to call every scene merely "pretty" or "fine," he enthusiastically recommends the study of picturesque beauty in the works of William Gilpin, who is "eminent for displaying the principles of landscape," particularly in his Remarks on Forest Scenery (1791). Brown also advises that the landscape enthusiast read Ann Radcliffe's novels and those of other "commentators upon Gilpin" who travel in search of picturesque beauty.2 Brown only alludes to picturesque travel in this early article, but he devotes a later essay in The Literary Magazine to the subject, an article which has been ignored by most critics.3 "Men of true taste," according to Brown, appreciate all kinds of beauty in nature, including picturesqueness and sublimity. "In a word," he concludes, "they reverence and admire the works of God, and look with benevolence and pleasure on the works of men." Brown's article concentrates on those in search of the picturesque: "Of all kinds of travellers, or pedestrian hunters, those that travel in search of the pleasure of the picturesque are the fewest in number , particularly in America, but perhaps they are the most judicious in their choice of an object of pursuit." From this point on, Brown lets "a great traveller of this kind," William Gilpin, speak in favor of picturesque travel. Indeed, most of the article quotes verbatim from Gilpin's essay "On Picturesque Travel" (1792).4 In Gilpin's description of the objects and characteristics of picturesque travel, three key phases are evident: pursuit, attainment, and recollection and recreation. First, the picturesque traveler pursues landscape beauty, always searching for new scenes; second, the traveler attains the objective and enjoys both the initial impact of the scenery and an examination of it by the rules of painting; third...