Gothic Monstrosity: Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly and the Trope of the Bestial Indian

Abstract

This chapter reads the development and sedimentation of the savage image of American Indians in early American history through the American gothic’s monstrous tropes, concluding with 1799 novel Edgar Huntly by Charles Brockden Brown, acclaimed as the pioneer of American gothic. If for Brown the American equivalent to Gothic castles are the perils of the western wilderness, Native Americans are the monstrous equivalent of that setting’s mythical chimera. Both inhuman and antagonistic Other, for Brown the Indian, at once integral and liminal, is a quintessential element of the American gothic genre.