Deliberate Unknowing and Strategic Retelling: The Ravages of Cultural Desire in Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly

Abstract

At end of chapter nineteen of Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly, eponymous Huntly silently exults hard-won, gruesome victory. After mortally wounding hostile Indian and then bungling coup de grace, he decides to bayonet his suffering enemy, task of cruel lenity which leaves him overpowered by [its] horrors and lamenting fact that are deeds which compels thousands of rational beings to perform and to witness! (1) Moments later, however, savagely merciful Huntly describes how, cheered by dawn, he stuck [the dead Indian's] musquet ground, and left it standing upright middle of road (203). He then continues both his journey and his retrospective narration, seemingly oblivious to psychological implications of this triumphant celebration of deliberate and extended carnage. Huntly's lack of self-scrutiny at this textual moment is both striking and significant: confessional narrative purportedly devoted to an enlightened explication of events of his recent past, his sudden, silent freak of fancy (203) is singular anomaly. His erection of Indian's musquet in middle of road phallically figures both his gruesome conquest and significant gap palliative rhetoric that invokes compulsions of perverse nature order to justify such deeds. Huntly's gesture symbolically establishes psychological and textual crossroads where masculinity, narrativity, and American national identity violently and memorably intersect. In effect, Indian's musquet serves as signpost, silent but evocative marker of repressions and epistemological elisions upon which American literary identity is premised this novel. Such moments of narrative repression, elision, and digression have recently been identified and analyzed as hallmarks of hysterical discourse. (2) In particular, critics have examined how this nervous disorder functions as gendered social and cultural construct--in G. S. Rousseau's words, as both transformative, protean condition par excellence and the barometer responding ... to perpetual stresses of gender and sexuality and to the cultural stresses weighing on sexual relations and gender formations. (3) However, much of this scholarship has focused primarily on role of hysteria within texts and contexts of writing by women. Insofar as they overlook function of encoded ideals of normal and abnormal masculinity construction of experience, (4) many feminist studies of hysteria tell only half of story. As cultural barometer, hysteria registers social and sexual pressures exerted upon both genders; fact that very possibility of male hysteria has been consistently avoided or minimized discussions of etiology of condition represents significantly gendered cultural omission. One particularly notable exception is Mark Micale's Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations. Micale traces evolution of substantially independent discursive [cultural] tradition of male hysteria (primarily British and French) literature of late nineteenth century and posits a lineage of cultural figures that extend[s] from degenerate genius of fin de siecle, back to tubercular Romantic poet, thence through melancholic writer of [the] eighteenth-century. (5) He thus claims that male writers were able to use category [of hysteria] to develop new modes of sensibility and thereby to expand scope of emotional, intellectual, and aesthetic resources at their command, and that ultimately, representations and self-representations of male hysteria have been employed by male artists and writers to strike and register Sturm und Drang of artistic creativity (260). As G. S. Rousseau has argued, however, the history of hysteria is as much 'his-story' of male fear as the history of linguistic embodiments, rhetorics, and emplotments (93). …