"The Tyranny of Sleep: Somnambulism, Moral Citizenship, and Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly"

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JUstine s. MUrison University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

The Tyranny of SleepSomnambulism, Moral Citizenship, and Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly

Charles Brockden Brown’s memorable preface to his novel Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799) has become a talisman in American studies scholarship, repeatedly invoked for its power to express the cultural nationalism of post-Revolutionary America. In this preface, Brown announces that in America “new springs of action should operate; that the field of investigation, opened to us by our own country, should differ essentially from those which exist in Europe” and that he proposes in Edgar Huntly “a series of adventures, growing out of the condition of our country, and connected with one of the most common and most won-derful diseases or affections of the human frame” (3). This iconic passage has allowed scholars to read Edgar Huntly as a national allegory in which Edgar’s armed conflict with the Lenni Lenape Indians and his seemingly passive sleepwalking participate in the construction of a particularly vio-lent and imperial—yet paradoxically inert—American identity during the early national period. But what can we make of Brown’s peculiar insistence on somnambulism as a “disease”? If Edgar Huntly constitutes a national tale, what kind of national psychology does it describe and how does that psyche relate to the era’s scientific studies of the mind? The real opacity of Brown’s preface rests, I believe, not on his rejec-tion of European gothic conventions but quite heavily on his ambigu-ous verb “connected,” as in the connection between the nation and the mental disease of somnambulism. Although we are familiar with the role sleep and dreams played in twentieth-century Freudian psychology, their prominence in eighteenth-century psychological theory anticipates yet diverges from these later developments. Natural somnambulism—as op-posed to magnetic, or mesmerized, somnambulism—was a typical cate-gory of mental disease in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Physi-

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cians noted that somnambulists displayed the ability to walk nimbly, even in dangerous paths, and that they never remembered how they behaved while they slept. Because somnambulism combined this loss of memory with apparently rational behavior, late eighteenth-century psychological theory relied on sleep and sleep disorders to define the faculties of the mind, and these descriptions of the mind were heavily freighted with po-litical meaning peculiar to the issues of the revolutionary Atlantic world. Readings of Brown’s “political unconscious” have often overshadowed these other possible relationships between psychology and politics in the eighteenth century.1 In its simultaneous concentration on Edgar’s interi-ority and his self-defensive vigilantism against the Delaware Indians, Edgar Huntly, in particular, elicits readings that concentrate on either the novel’s psychological or, more recently, political plot, readings that are often con-structed in opposition to each other. For instance, in his remarkable argu-ment about how Brown pursues the logic of the Alien and Sedition Acts in Edgar Huntly, Jared Gardner claims that “the treatment of Brown’s Indians as representations of an essentially internal personal struggle—whether be-tween father and son or between civilized man and his ‘dark side’—univer-salizes a conflict that Brown himself understood as local and psychologizes a project that Brown understood as essentially political” (52–53). Although Gardner here responds to the way Edgar Huntly makes itself available to Freudian readings, this cleaving of the psychological from the political in-evitably re-creates rather than resolves the question about somnambulism at the heart of the novel, for Brown asks in Edgar Huntly whether psychol-ogy is ever outside of history or politics. Edgar Huntly allows Brown to explore the consequences of the ten-dency in 1790s America to make citizenship—and national identity more broadly—a state of mind. Best exemplified by the writings of Benjamin Rush, the foremost American medical expert of the era, medical concep-tions of the mind popular in the late eighteenth century explain how the status of citizenship fused morality, memory, and residency, articulating an evidentiary basis for what I will call “moral citizenship.” In this way, citizenship became a psychological question of moral character as much as a political definition of rights and requirements. The emergence of moral citizenship in the 1780s and 1790s drew upon the peculiar medical con-struction of the mind, a discourse that depended upon somnambulism, in its turn, to prove empirically the existence of the faculties of memory and

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morality. Because these two faculties were the basis of the psychology of citizenship, the political reliance on the science of the mind was dizzyingly circular, posing citizens as both unconsciously molded by the specificities of their governments and yet required to assert a moral and mental control over such constructions. Brown dwells on this circular logic in Edgar Huntly, exposing how the construction of citizenship in the 1790s depended upon an undertheorized psychological analogy between mind and nation that ignored some of its most vulnerable, and indeed threatening, ramifications. In what follows, I argue that in Edgar Huntly Brown critiques how the science of the mind constructed an innate (even, at times, allegorical) relationship between po-litical and geographic circumstances, on the one hand, and national iden-tity on the other, the terms that would give citizenship shape and meaning in the era of the Alien and Sedition Acts. Brown questions the implied analogy between mind and nation that conflates personal immorality with national degeneration, suggesting that the very notion of a moral citizen-ship flirts with mental disease. In doing so, Brown not only comments on the role of mind and morality in the political debates over naturalization and citizenship, and in particular the way morality became fused to what at first glance appears to be a legal (rather than an affective or psychological) role, he also uses the suggestive conjunction of politics and psychology to undermine the central premise of the eighteenth-century novel: that mem-ory could produce a reliable history or a morally responsible citizenry.

ConstitUtions oF the Mind

In both Edgar Huntly and his short story “Somnambulism” (1805), Brown dwells on the disruptions that sleepwalking poses for narrative order. Brown claims to have conceived of his sleepwalking stories after reading a report of a somnambulist’s murderous actions in the Vienna Gazette of June 14, 1784.2 His interest in sleep, though, was also inflected by its relationship to medicine. As he indicates in a footnote to Wieland, Brown gleaned important medical conceptions about the mind for his fic-tion from Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia (1794). In reading Zoonomia, Brown would have been introduced to an important conception of sleep in the eighteenth century, that it betrayed diseased symptoms, and more crucially for his composition of Edgar Huntly, that these symptoms “abound with


many very curious and instructive phenomena” (Darwin 198). Brown not only read about sleep and sleepwalking in Zoonomia, his close friend Elihu Hubbard Smith, a New York physician, introduced Brown to a particular sleepwalking event. On a trip to Connecticut in July 1798 that was per-sonal, medical, and literary (on the side, Smith drummed up subscriptions for Brown’s “Alcuin” and “Sky-Walk”), Smith records an amusing story of a sleepwalking acquaintance, noting that it “will do for C.B. Brown” (454). Brown’s interest in the medical aspect of sleep, and Smith’s support of Brown’s explorations of it in fiction, bears out Bryan Waterman’s argument that the “information revolution” of the late eighteenth century was both professional and interdisciplinary; Brown saw his participation in medical debates as enacting the role of the author as the “arbiter of knowledge” for the new nation (216). Brown’s continual return to sleep diseases in his fiction can best be understood as a significant marker of his medical orientation, an interest that had both formal and political impact on his fiction. In the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, the popularity of an emerging medical discourse about the mind and the way in which it promised—yet failed—to offer coherent, stable theories of personal identity made it a productive site for political reflections. The predominant theory of the mind in this era com-bined an inherited notion of faculty psychology, in which autonomous but interrelated psychological functions constituted the mind, with the theo-ries of sensory association first outlined by John Locke and expanded into a medical discourse by David Hartley. By the mid-eighteenth century, the methodology of natural historians, influenced by Carl von Linné, had cre-ated a vogue in the medical community for the classification of mental faculties and diseases. The assumption underlying faculty psychology was that mental health should arise out of an exact (though never fully articu-lated) working relationship between the faculties. Yet as medical historian Robert M. Young explains, this shift to a classificatory methodology in the science of the mind begs its own question by “confusing classification with explanation”; after all, as Young puts it, “[f ]aculties are only class concepts invested with a fictional reality” (22). The fictional quality of inquiries into the mind arose from the very nature of these studies: in the end, physicians and phrenologists theorized mental faculties but could not prove empiri-cally their existence. By the late eighteenth century, faculty psychology and association-


ism had been fused in medical circles with moral philosophy. As a dis-ease, somnambulism makes this fusion of mind and morality visible. Although eighteenth-century physicians did include limited therapeutic remedies for somnambulism, they are scarce in comparison with other mental diseases of the era.3 Instead, sleep became the primary method by which physicians oriented psychology around attempts to locate empirical proofs of the mind. Benjamin Rush was steeped in this fusion of asso-ciationist psychology and moral philosophy through his medical training under William Cullen at the University of Edinburgh. Rush’s lectures to the University of Pennsylvania Medical School demonstrate how medical dis-course depended on a language of observation to explore the limitations of the mental faculties, a method that continually revealed the pitfalls of observation for the new medical science of psychology. Rush is best known in American studies scholarship as the main force behind an early national disciplined interiority through readings of his “Of the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic,” in which he names the production of “republican machines” the goal of education in the new nation.4 Far from this prescrip-tive moment, Rush’s lectures on the mind provide a different perspective on early American interiority, one that reveals the insecurity of faculty psy-chology. Sleep functions in Rush’s theories of the mind as a guard against the inherent vulnerability of a mind composed of autonomous functions. According to Rush, sleep tends to restore the “equilibrium” of the body and mind because “[t]he faculties of the mind are very different in the morning, from what they are in the subsequent parts of the day. By the occupations of the day they are often jumbled together, so as to act with less regularity and order, than they do immediately after a night’s sleep” (Benjamin Rush’s Lectures 646). Rush imagines the faculties as mobile: “jumbling” together and shifting out of order. In its healthful mode, sleep regroups the faculties disordered by the stresses of daily life. Somnambulism, though, muddies this construction of the healthful-ness of sleep. The body’s seemingly rational movements during somnam-bulism resist the construction of sleep as a restful time to heal the mind. More distressingly, somnambulism has a way of upsetting common beliefs that the mind controlled the body: the waking self could be completely absent or histrionically present in the behavior of the sleepwalker, neither of which attests to the presence of mind. This impasse leads Rush to de-scribe somnambulists theatrically to his audience of medical students:


Behold! its eyes are closed, and every sense is insensible to its custom-ary impressions. The countenance indicates neither thought nor pas-sion, and the whole body is reduced in the scale of existence, to the level of a weather cock, or a stream of water. Where now is that memory which was filled a few hours ago with ancient and modern knowledge? Where is that imagination that traversed the globe in the twinkling of an eye? Where is that understanding that combined in constant acts of judgment and reasoning? And where is that will, and where are those passions, that diffused their influence through every feature of the face, and every muscle of the body? They are all in a state of complete annihi-lation, as if they had never existed, or were never to exist again. (673)

Rush begins with the paradox of somnambulism—that the senses become “insensible”—and uses this to describe the somnambular body, reduced to a “weather cock,” as open to any external manipulation. Rush’s incessant questioning—where are the faculties?—foregrounds the impossibility of truly understanding another’s mind through observing his or her behav-ior. Rush can only speculate that imagination, passion, will, and memory must all be missing because he cannot see their operations. These confu-sions about the somnambulist’s mental presence lead Rush to revert to the pronoun “its” to characterize the somnambulist, a grammatical decision that strips the somnambulist of a recognizable subjectivity. Rush’s struggle to locate the mind amid this somnambular annihila-tion participates in a larger conversation about the evidence necessary to understand sleepwalking, particularly how to fill in the absences created by a memory obliterated by the very nature of the disease. Rush lectures, “It has been observed, that somnambulists never remember a single thing they do in their sleep, after they awake; but what is still more remarkable, they remember in each fit of night walking, everything they did in the walk the night before” (668). Rush propounds here a common idea that som-nambulists were divided selves, unable to provide testimony about their own disease. The problem this presented for relying on sleepwalkers’ ex-periences led physicians to investigate somnambulism in an experimental way. According to the “Account of a Remarkable Sleep-Walker,” reprinted in The New York Magazine, or Literary Repository (1792), a “committee of gentlemen” examined a French boy of thirteen who was a reputed sleep-walker. In the course of this examination, among other things, they passed


a finger and a feather over his upper lip, which caused him to jump and run out of the room while asleep; they gave him wine with wormwood, which he refused to drink; and they mixed his clothes with others’ clothes as he attempted to dress himself, an act that caused him to “complain bit-terly” (431). The committee’s report concluded, “[m]an never seems to be a machine so much as in the state of somnambulism; it is then that habit comes to supply those of the senses that cannot be serviceable” (431). The sleepwalker, according to the committee, becomes an automaton, stripped of internal and external senses. “Habit” mechanically fills in for mind. The article ends with the committee’s recommendations for further experi-mentation to determine if somnambulists can read, tell time, or return to familiar places. American periodicals in the 1780s and 1790s were rife with stories of somnambulism like this one, reprinted from British and continental sources. Three other stories—all about Italian or French sleepwalkers—circulated widely in American periodicals. The most popular story re-printed in America was Oliver Goldsmith’s almost fantastic and gothic tale of Cyrillo Padovano, a monk who, in a bout of sleepwalking, steals jewelry from and desecrates the body of his monastery’s patroness.5 Although Goldsmith wrote the story as fiction, inspired by more quotidian tales that appear in his History of the Earth and Animated Nature (1774), it was often reprinted without his name and presented as a true and remarkable ac-count. The other most frequently reprinted sleepwalking stories, one about Augusto Fosari and another about Jean Baptiste Negretti, emphasized ob-servation and experimentation over a gothic setting and a gruesome tale.6 The very mundane nature of the Fosari and Negretti cases allows us to glimpse how somnambulism offered a powerful fusion of experimentation and empiricism for eighteenth-century physicians and a general readership alike. The narrative of Augusto Fosari (or Posari, as it sometimes appears) is told from the point of view of an acquaintance who had the “curiosity to be an eye-witness” of Fosari’s sleepwalking (“Remarkable Story” 6). He and a party of friends follow the sleepwalking Fosari around as he strolls through the gardens, mounts his horse, and imitates the behavior of a bil-liards player. The case of Negretti, a servant in a Venetian home, originally from the report of two Italian doctors, continued to hold medical authority well into the nineteenth century, appearing in Isaac Ray’s influential Trea-tise on the Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity (1838). According to the re-


port, “M. Pigatti, in the course of his repeated observations upon Negretti remarked, that every night he did something new. He likewise observed, that, while his fit lasted, he enjoyed neither the sense of seeing, nor of hear-ing, nor of smelling, nor of tasting” (“Particular Account” 253). Negretti’s family marked this loss of his external senses through fairly humorous food experiments. While sleepwalking, Negretti prepared himself a salad. According to the report, the family took the salad from him and “gave him one of cabbage highly seasoned. He continued to eat; and to cabbage they substituted a cake, which he swallowed in the same manner, with-out appearing to know the difference; a circumstance which proves that he had not relished the salad by the organs of the taste, but that the soul alone enjoyed this sensation without the intervention of the body” (252). This construction of the sleepwalker as enjoying his food through his soul rather than his body rests, a bit precariously, on the verb “proves”; after all, there is very little proven in the report. Instead, the author theorizes that Negretti’s soul has, under the influence of somnambulism, experienced an unfettered relation to the external world, unhampered by the usual bodily means (the senses) for experiencing it. As can be seen in these various stories, somnambulists allowed physi-cians to demonstrate the way the sensory organs and the different mental faculties could be turned on or off in an independent and autonomous fashion. Because the somnambulist is potentially an automaton, Rush draws on the figure of the sleepwalker as an exemplum of moral ambiguity. In his lectures, Rush argues that people at times “dream of doing or saying things of an immoral nature, at which we should shudder in a state of com-plete and universal wakefulness. Pious people are often distressed at such dreams, but there is no more immorality in them, than there is in striking a friend in the delirium of a fever, or walking in our sleep” (653). Rush’s os-tensible purpose in this passage is to explain that dreaming of immorality does not make someone immoral. To make his point, Rush constructs a moral equivalence between sleepwalking and hitting a friend while deliri-ous. This analogy at first glance seems counterintuitive. The feverish action in one case, that of hitting a friend by mistake, could be considered crimi-nal if done with intent. The action in the case of sleepwalking, however, is simply walking, not behavior that usually requires justification. As Rush implies here and elsewhere, though, the very suspension of the moral faculties in sleep potentially makes all of the sleeper’s actions morally am-biguous.


For Rush, the questions raised by the possible suspension of the moral faculties, exemplified by sleepwalking, became a pressing political ques-tion for post-Revolutionary America. In eighteenth-century psychology, the moral faculties were considered as fundamental a basis for the sound mind as reason. To emphasize their importance, Rush separates them into three distinct faculties, a system he borrows from Scottish moral philoso-pher Dugald Stewart: the moral faculty, which judges others’ morality; the conscience, which judges our own; and the sense of deity, which, as its name suggests, is an innate sense of God. Rush asserts that “[t]he good-ness of the Supreme Being in the gift” of the moral faculties appears in the “rendering our moral happiness independent of the intellectual facul-ties of memory, imagination, and understanding. Had it been otherwise, men would have been good and happy, in proportion to the strength or extent of those faculties” (471). For Rush, these faculties represent more than the mind’s innate capacity for morality; they also constitute an in-strument of political stability. In his “Inquiry into the Influence of Physical Causes upon the Moral Faculty” (1786), originally delivered to the Ameri-can Philosophical Society, Rush claims that to promote social happiness “it is absolutely necessary that our government, which unites into one all the minds of the state, should possess, in an eminent degree, not only the understanding, the passions, and the will, but above all, the moral faculty, and the conscience of the individual” (55). In this passage, Rush begins with the metaphor of citizens’ minds united through government then shifts to the government as a mind writ large that must also possess mental faculties. For Rush, faculty psychology and, in particular, the moral facul-ties were the metaphoric and literal bases of the nation. Rush imagines this national psychology by contrasting the newly formed nation with Indian nations. In his “Inquiry into the Moral Faculty,” Rush “admit[s] with Mr. Locke, that some savage nations are totally devoid of the moral faculty, yet it will by no means follow, that this was the original con-stitution of their minds” (15). The threat implicit in Rush’s claim here is that the United States, in ignoring the psychological and social importance of morality, could degenerate into the “savage” state of Indian nations. Rush’s sleight of hand from individual to national mind also works in reverse. In his lectures on the mind, Rush conscribes Indians to a psychologically in-ferior position in order to make claims about how psychology constitutes and is constituted by civilization. Memory, for Rush, makes visible this dis-tinction. Rush delineates different types of memory, such as the memory


for faces, places, words, names, numbers, and ideas; securely at the top of the hierarchy is the memory for ideas, which “distinguishes man from the dumb animal, and the civilized man from the savage” (447). Rush places Indians outside of civilization—and implicitly equates them with “dumb animals”—by denying them this particular memory for ideas. In his Enquiry into the Natural History of Medicine among the Indians of North America, Rush proposes the idea that to understand national dis-eases, one must understand the physical and psychical character of that nation’s inhabitants. Rush writes of the Indians, “We need only recollect the custom among the Indians, of sleeping in the open air in variable cli-mate—the alternate action of heat and cold upon their bodies, to which the warmth of their cabbins [sic] exposes them—their long marches—their excessive exercise—their intemperance in eating, to which their long fast-ing and their public feasts naturally prompt them,” habits that, according to Rush are responsible for “the empire of diseases among them in every stage of their lives,” which are entirely made up of fever and dysentery (21). With sleep listed as the first sign of their simple (albeit hearty) constitu-tions, Indians represent a contrast to Europeans, whom Rush represents as riddled by the nervous illnesses inspired by the mental strains of civiliza-tion. Although not all commentators agreed with Rush’s conclusions about Indians, the terms of their engagement often echo his emphasis on psycho-logical factors. In his “Distresses of a Frontier Man” in Letters from an American Farmer (1782), J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur defends Indi-ans against calumnies similar to Rush’s, asserting that “[w]ithout temples, without priests, without kings, and without laws, they are in many in-stances superior to us; and the proofs of what I advance are that they live without care, sleep without inquietude, take life as it comes, bearing all its asperities with unparalleled patience, and die without any kind of appre-hension for what they have done or for what they expect to meet with here-after” (215). Indians become, in Crèvecoeur’s description, the most basic of all societies. They lack political hierarchy, the written precedence of law, and, most importantly, a teleological theology that emphasizes judgment in the afterlife. Their sleep, therefore, is quite sound. Rush and Crèvecoeur both comment on the constituent elements of the mind in its relationship to political structures. The terms of civilization can be read in memory and morality, and Indians’ supposed sound sleep evinces either an inno-


cent social structure or a sordid savagery. The metaphoric relationship be-tween faculty psychology and political governance gives way to a causal relationship in Rush’s and Crèvecoeur’s works. The ease with which they shift from Indians’ mental faculties to their societies expresses a desire to see the mind as reflective of political structures.7 Rush’s claim about the relationship between the state and the mind is more than mere medical bravado. In the questions about citizenship that arose during the constitutional debates and then again surrounding the Alien and Sedition Acts, citizenship—that loose and ill-defined status—became as much an aspect of the mental faculties as it did a political office or list of rights and responsibilities. During the early national period, the ideal of republican citizenship came to be embodied as white and male through its abstracted, public status.8 The process of constructing this bodily abstraction of citizenship depended upon a conception of the mind rooted in eighteenth-century psychology. Indeed, it is in the affective and moral aspects of citizenship that the category gains cultural weight. In in-corporating both the rational capacities of the mind (memory and reason) as well as the “moral” capacities (including morality as well as passions and feelings), faculty psychology provided a vocabulary for how moral capaci-ties and private emotions could be imagined as fundamentally political, a type of “moral citizenship.” Conceptions of the psychology of citizenship, and in particular the natu-ralization of immigrants, united claims of republican virtue and morality with the belief that geographic locality and political institutions shaped minds. In other words, citizenship posed a circular psychological prob-lem. Potential citizens’ readiness to join the republic was evinced by their psychological state; however, their psychological state was determined by their political upbringing. This psychology of citizenship became all the more urgent in 1790s America. The naturalization acts of 1790 and 1798 included increasingly difficult demands for proof of “good character.”9 As Rogers Smith explains, “anxieties about easy naturalization rose after the French Revolution fed into international warfare in 1792, and after Tous-saint L’Ouverture’s black and mulatto rebellion in Haiti” (159). The in-creased concern over immigrants from the continent and the West Indies led to the restrictive 1798 Naturalization Act, an act that wedded the medi-cal discussions of morality with a highly restrictive residency requirement. Moreover, the 1798 Naturalization Act, which increased residency require-


ments to fourteen years (this probationary period would be reduced back to five in 1802), assumed a basic psychological belief: that the government one was raised in would indelibly affect one’s mental and moral faculties. This fear of foreign minds was perhaps best expressed by Thomas Jeffer-son in Notes on the State of Virginia (1782), in which he claimed that Euro-pean immigrants would “bring with them the principles of the govern-ments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another” (84–85). He frets that they “will infuse into” American society “their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass” (85). This language can al-most be read as a template for the debates concerning naturalization in the late 1790s, particularly by Federalists who saw their power recede in the face of immigration that tended to favor the Jeffersonian republicans. For instance, Theodore Sedgwick, Federalist senator and father of author Catherine Maria Sedgwick, argued that those fighting in the continental wars were “tainted” by their different state allegiances and upbringings, in which the “most fierce and unrelenting passions were engaged,” and it is hard to imagine that “men, who, actuated by such passions, had fought on grounds so opposite, almost equally distant from the happy mean that we had chosen, would here mingle in social affections with each other, or with us” (qtd. in Kettner 240). The fears that immigrants will destroy the affective and psychological connections of the new nation are not merely allegorical of economic and political fears; rather, they reveal the way psy-chology had become the basis for conceiving of national cohesion. The belief that the capacity for moral citizenship was determined by the government of one’s upbringing was central to early national psychol-ogy. As Rush claims in the eulogy for his former Edinburgh professor, Dr. Cullen, “The freedom of our constitutions, by imparting vigor and in-dependence to the mind, is favourable to bold and original thinking upon all subjects” (“Eulogium” 208). In arguing that political associations shape citizens’ minds in a literal sense, Rush claims that government can deter-mine citizens’ vulnerability to mental disease. For Rush, though, demo-cratic politics could also lead to the dark underside of “bold and original thinking”: madness. He argues that in “despotic countries where the public passions are torpid, and where life and property are secured only by the extinction of the domestic affections, madness is a rare disease” (Medi-


cal Inquiries 69). Rush implies here, through inversion, that the “freedom” of republican governments—by securing property through domestic af-fections—incites madness. Rush’s suggestion that madness resides latent in liberty arises out of his implied analogy between the mind and gov-ernment. Disordered faculties and an excited citizenry threaten the state with riot, chaotic insanity, and, ultimately, incessant revolution, and all the more so when faced with an influx of residents raised under revolutionary or warring governments.

noVel eXperiMents

As a disease of the mind, somnambulism paradoxically stood for the breakdown or degeneration of personal identity while it also became the methodological means for proving that personal identity existed. When the psychological discourse of senses and faculties emerged in questions of citizenship and national identity, the “evidence” of the morality neces-sary for citizenship depended upon the concerns traced in studies of the sleeping mind. In Edgar Huntly, Brown probes the haunted, ambiguous moments of sleep—when consciousness is suspended, memory eradi-cated, and morality inverted—to consider both formally and themati-cally this national psychology championed in 1790s America. As I hope to show, Edgar Huntly is a novel of eighteenth-century scientific experiment, both staging and challenging conceptions of a stable mind and citizenry.10 Brown is suspicious of the elevation of empirical knowledge about the self, the psychological assumption at the heart of naturalization and citizen-ship, and he therefore draws out the underlying contradictions of this use of the nascent science of the mind as a basis for political theory. Edgar Huntly, like most of Brown’s novels, is capacious in its scope. It includes a transatlantic world of Irish immigrants and Delaware Indians, offering a plot interrupted by different types of madness, from temporary insanity to somnambulism. Often described as two novels in one, Edgar Huntly begins as a series of letters from Edgar to his fiancée, Mary, about his attempts to locate her brother’s (and his best friend’s) murderer, who he initially and incorrectly believes is Clithero Edny, an Irish servant from a neighboring farm whom Edgar sights suspiciously sleepwalking. As it turns out, Clithero is guilt ridden, but not for murdering Waldegrave; while in Ireland, he had murdered (in self-defense) his patroness’s twin brother


and attempted to murder her out of a maniacal belief that he was actu-ally saving her from madness and death. The narrative shifts when, in the second half of the novel, we discover that Edgar is also a somnambulist. He awakens in the outskirts of the settled territory, fights Indians, saves a captive white girl, and treks his way back to white “civilization.” Finally, as if to seal these two half novels together, Edgar discovers that Clithero’s patroness, Mrs. Lorimer, has married his old mentor, Sarsefield, and both have returned to America. When Edgar, who has all along pitied Clithero and sought to help him, tells Clithero of this development, Clithero again loses his mind and attempts to kill Mrs. Lorimer. As is often the case with Brown’s novels, this summary does not ap-proach the remarkable form and structure Brown produces in Edgar Huntly. Indeed, in this novel, Brown experiments with the narrative modes necessary to the empiricism championed by practitioners of the science of the mind. Because Clithero and Edgar both sleepwalk, Brown can present his sleepwalking novel from the perspective both of the observer and the sleeper, a narrative experiment not available to physicians such as Rush. Before Edgar’s own sleepwalking has occurred, Brown positions him as a physician observing Clithero, the diseased patient. When Edgar first de-cides to accuse Clithero of Waldegrave’s murder, he weighs the evidence of Clithero’s disturbed sleep against him. Edgar considers that the “incapacity of sound sleep denotes a mind sorely wounded” and that the “thoughts, which consideration of safety enables them to suppress or disguise dur-ing wakefulness, operate without impediment, and exhibit their genuine effects, when the notices of sense are partly excluded, and they shut out from a knowledge of their intire [sic] condition” (13). Edgar reads Cli-thero’s return to the elm where Waldegrave was found murdered through a construction of the mind that emphasizes the upturning of self-control through sleep, and he is therefore fairly confident that Clithero’s somnam-bular behavior reveals guilt. When he confronts Clithero, though, the plan does not go as he expects. Clithero “shuddered and recoiled” from Edgar “as from a spectre” (31). This startling reaction leads Edgar to “repent” of his “experiment,” and it causes him to “stand a silent and powerless spec-tator, and to suffer this paroxysm to subside of itself ” (31). In this scene, sleepwalking has, as Rush warns in his lectures, eluded a coherent diagno-sis. As both specter and spectator, Edgar represents the impotence of em-pirical observation as a psychological methodology. Edgar’s “experiment”


ultimately fails—as do most of his interactions with Clithero—because he has overestimated his ability to read the symptoms of Clithero’s disorder. Edgar is no better at interpreting his own sleepwalking than he is at interpreting Clithero’s. When turning to Edgar’s narrative of somnambu-lism, Brown can imagine beyond the limitations imposed by empirical ob-servation: what would it be like to narrate from the point of view of the mind and body while asleep? In order to represent this formal experiment, Brown inserts gaps between chapters to signify Edgar’s loss of memory. The most prominent gap in the novel bridges chapters 15 and 16, when Edgar falls asleep in his uncle’s house and awakens in a cave in Norwalk. Edgar writes Mary Waldegrave an “eye”-witness account of this gap in his memory. He begins with the empirical assertion, “I have said that I slept. My memory assures me of this: It informs of the previous circumstances of my laying aside my clothes, of placing the light upon a chair within reach of my pillow, of throwing myself upon the bed, and of gazing on the rays of the moon reflected on the wall, and almost obscured by those of the candle” (152). He then begins a recital that culminates in sleep: “I remem-ber my occasional relapses into fits of incoherent fancies, the harbingers of sleep: I remember, as it were, the instant when my thoughts ceased to flow, and my senses were arrested by the leaden wand of forgetfulness” (152). However improbable, Edgar claims to remember the moment in which his identity breaks—when his “thoughts ceased to flow”—in order to arrange his narrative in the face of an incoherent memory. Through Edgar’s re-peated invocations of the phrase “I remember,” Brown highlights what is already the open secret of Edgar Huntly’s subtitle: in order to relate his memoir, Edgar must attend to what he can remember even though it is what he cannot remember—his actions as a somnambulist—that consti-tutes the mystery of his narrative. The limitations of Edgar’s memory enacted by narrative gaps such as this one speak to the formal construction of Brown’s novels. In naming Edgar Huntly a “memoir,” Brown calls explicit attention to the logical re-lationship between memory and first-person narrative only to undercut the trust implied in that relationship.11 Brown, in other words, breaks the generic contract of the memoir in Edgar Huntly, and in doing so, he calls attention to the fissures in the genre of the “memoir.” The generic history of the memoir is not, at first glance, cohesive. Employed as often to de-scribe new maps (for instance, Daniel Beaufort’s 1792 Memoir of a Map


of Ireland) and medical investigations (such as Benjamin Smith Barton’s 1800 Memoir Concerning the Disease of Goitre, as It Prevails in Different Parts of North-America) as it is used to convey official histories, sexual his-tories, and spiritual autobiographies, “memoir” and “memoirs” branch off in a multiplicity of directions in the eighteenth century.12 Yet what unites these variations is a claim to truth implicit in observing, experiencing, and recording events. In this way a sexual history such as John Cleland’s Mem-oirs of a Woman of Pleasure; or, Fanny Hill (1749) can participate in the same genre as Barton’s Memoir Concerning the Rattlesnake (1796). Both ask the audience to trust observation and memory as the organizing principle that creates the believability of (alleged) nonfiction. The emphasis in eighteenth-century fiction on claims to truth is inti-mately related to this generic history. The titles and subtitles of most of Brown’s major fiction confirm his preoccupation with this generic func-tion of the memoir—as in Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker; Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793; Memoirs of Carwin the Bilo-quist; Memoirs of Stephen Calvert; and “Lesson on Concealment: or, Mem-oirs of Mary Selwyn.” As this brief list testifies, Brown’s fiction continually calls attention to the relationship between the novel form and the faculty of memory, yet he does so to question memory’s ability to organize and provide truth.13 Brown not only pursues the fraught relationship between narrative authority and memory in the form he ascribes to Edgar Huntly—“Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker”—but also ruminates on the authority of memory, a rumination that also emerges within the plot of Edgar Huntly. In doing so, Brown constructs competing memories in the novel, many of which cannot be resolved. The pivot of the plot in Edgar Huntly—im-mediately preceding Edgar’s awakening in the Norwalk cave—turns on a clash of evidence and memories surrounding the lack of “memoranda” that causes Edgar to postpone indefinitely his engagement to Mary Walde-grave: Weymouth’s claim on the money found in Waldegrave’s accounts that had devolved upon Mary at his death. Weymouth’s claim to the money sounds plausible enough—and Edgar credits his story because of the “fea-tures and guize [sic] of the relater”—yet there is no evidence offered other than Weymouth’s tale of his adventures and misfortunes (147). Although many of Brown’s characters, like Edgar in this scene, implicitly believe in memoirs offered by their interlocutors, the competing memories disturb the reader’s trust in those same narratives.


Just as this lack of memoranda disturbs the coherence of Edgar’s nar-rative, two important representations of memoirs, Mrs. Lorimer’s memoir and Waldegrave’s letters, circulate in ways that Brown implies are morally and psychically dangerous. These memoirs clarify how Brown works the genre of the memoir against the dubious authorizing claims it implies, and he does so by yoking them to diseased states of sleep. While sleepwalk-ing, Clithero buries Mrs. Lorimer’s memoirs, and, acting the detective, Edgar returns to the spot and digs them up. Upon reading them, Edgar exclaims, “Exempt as this lady was from almost every defect, she was in-debted for her ruin to absurd opinions of the sacredness of consanguinity, to her anxiety for the preservation of a ruffian, because that ruffian was a brother” (116). Mrs. Lorimer’s “absurd opinions” about the connection both in life and death between herself and her twin brother, Wiatte, suggest a dependence upon aristocratic notions of blood that seems ridiculous to Edgar, who styles himself, on occasion, a Deist republican. As Edgar re-turns from his second expedition to Norwalk in search of Clithero, he falls asleep to dream of a different set of written texts, Waldegrave’s letters to him, which he had told Mary he would edit and send to her. Edgar, how-ever, had promised Waldegrave to burn these very letters. When Walde-grave converted to a quite strict pietism under the tutelage of Sarsefield, he wanted Edgar to destroy the letters because “they would communicate the poison when the antidote could not be administered,” since his ar-guments for his subsequent conversion occurred in conversation, not in writing (126). Brown translates this threat of a metaphysical poison into the vocabulary of mental disease, somnambulism. Edgar’s first somnam-bular activity, in fact, coincides with and is impelled by the dream he has in this scene. He interprets his dream of Waldegrave as one of “inquietude and anger” on Waldegrave’s part: “Some service or duty remained to be performed by me, which I had culpably neglected: to inspirit my zeal, to awaken my remembrance, and incite me to the performance of this duty, did this glimmering messenger, this half indignant apparition come” (124). While dreaming of this apparition, Edgar hides the letters from himself; his somnambular self specifically rejects the moral duty to destroy the let-ters even as Waldegrave’s apparition reminds him of his promise. Mrs. Lorimer’s memoir and Waldegrave’s letters play a vital role in the plot as a whole—though textually absent—since they both initiate sleep-walking. More crucially, Brown connects them through their morally and


politically suspect philosophies. Whereas Mrs. Lorimer’s memoir elabo-rates the blood ties between her and her brother, emphasizing an almost antiquated and antidemocratic notion of racial and familial bonds, Walde-grave’s letters tend in the opposite direction. According to Edgar, Walde-grave’s dangerous creed was “to deify necessity and universalize matter; to destroy the popular distinctions between soul and body, and to dissolve the supposed connection between the moral condition of man, anterior and subsequent to death” (125). Central to Waldegrave’s doctrine is a de-cided materialist answer to questions of the soul and the mind, that is, that the mind is material rather than immortal and divine. The second half of Waldegrave’s creed dismisses the purposes of morality as a connection to judgment after death, implying that the soul dies with the body. As Dana Luciano has argued, although Waldegrave fears the effects of his atheistical arguments on Mary’s principles, Brown makes clear in the novel that the consequences of reading narratives are just as perni-cious, especially for women readers who still constituted the main targets of eighteenth-century antiromance discourse. Luciano writes: “Absorp-tion into a well-told story produces a state like sleepwalking, in which the body runs away with itself, is outside all conscious control” (19). I propose, though, revising the terms of Luciano’s argument: it is not only that the sleepwalker is out of conscious control, but out of conscientious control, just as Waldegrave imagined would happen to a reader of his letters who did not have recourse to his altered, religious beliefs. The reader of memoirs and the somnambulist share the same characteristics since in both, the “author” of one’s morals and one’s actions may be located outside of the mind. Potentially freed from the controls of conscience, from his or her moral faculties, the sleepwalker’s danger is essentially moral.

the tYrannY oF sleep

What connects Mrs. Lorimer’s memoirs and Waldegrave’s letters then is not a unified political ideology, for Brown poses them at opposite ends of the spectrum, but their implied influence over readers’ political beliefs. Instead of pursuing a partisan argument in Edgar Huntly, Brown dwells on the questions of morality underlying the politics of citizenship. Walde-grave’s letters forcefully stage these connections between memoirs, poli-tics, and morality. Edgar “did not entirely abjure” Waldegrave’s material-


ism because of Waldegrave’s “great copiousness and eloquence” in defense of it (126). He justifies his unwillingness to destroy these letters by claiming that “mixed up with abstract reasonings, were numberless passages which elucidated the character and history of my friend. These were too precious to be consigned to oblivion, and to take them out of their present con-nection and arrangement, would be to mutilate and deform them” (127). Just as Waldegrave’s materialism is inextricably bound to his memoirs, Edgar’s trust in memoir as an organizing narrative principle cannot be re-moved from his republicanism or his materialism. Indeed, Brown ends the novel by dwelling on Edgar’s inability to separate the two. Throughout the novel, Edgar credits Clithero’s memories of the events in Ireland. Because of this trust, Edgar believes Clithero to be “a slave of the errors of educa-tion, and the prejudices of rank” and that “his understanding was deluded by phantoms in the mask of virtue and duty” (281). In ignoring Clithero’s disordered mind for his own political critique of aristocracy, Edgar also overestimates the power of his own republican politics to transform Cli-thero into a useful citizen, claiming to Sarsefield that he acted only by the “impulse of misguided, indeed, but powerful benevolence” (281). In giving the final words of the novel to Sarsefield’s repudiation of Edgar’s interpre-tation of his actions, Brown suggests that, though Edgar may not have seen the danger inherent in his political misreading of Clithero, the audience should sense the problem of transforming mental disturbance into politi-cal allegory. Brown’s critique of easy political allegories for messy psychological states animates much of the narrative in Edgar Huntly, most notably that of the Delaware Indian uprising. As Sydney Krause, among others, has shown us, the relationship between Edgar’s somnambulism and his Indian killing can be seen as an allegorical representation of the infamous Walking Purchase Treaty of 1737. In the treaty with the Delaware, Thomas Penn contracted to buy the land that a man could walk in a day and a half, about forty miles. When Penn hired trained runners to determine how much land could be “walked” in a day, the Delaware were coerced into selling twice as much land as they had intended.14 Yet the lesson that Edgar fails to learn through his association with Clithero can also help us understand how sleepwalk-ing was not only an allegory for historical events but also a crucial ingre-dient of the political landscape of 1790s America. Indeed, what is perhaps most notable in Brown’s gesture to the Walking Purchase in Edgar Huntly


is that he turns not to the act of walking (or, more historically apt, of run-ning) but the act of sleepwalking to represent the frontier politics at play between the Lenni Lenape and white settlers in Pennsylvania. By putting psychology and frontier politics in conversation with each other through somnambulism, Brown pursues the contradictions inherent in Rush’s national psychology, in which residency under a political insti-tution molds one’s moral capacity for citizenship. Just as politically and morally suspect memoirs inspire Edgar’s somnambulatory movement, an image of America as a land without memory inspires dangerous voluntary travel—particularly the transatlantic journeys of Clithero and Sarsefield. Brown describes Clithero Edny’s and Sarsefield’s relocations to America as driven by the desire to forget. Sarsefield tells Edgar that to “promote forgetfulness” of the death of his wife’s twin brother, Wiatte, “I persuaded her to leave her country, which contrasted a thousand memorials of past calamity, and which was lapsing fast into civil broils” (267). Similarly, Cli-thero explains to Edgar that after his maniacal and possessed attempt to kill his benefactress, now Sarsefield’s wife, he yearned only “to rush from the presence of these women, to hide me forever from their scrutiny, and their upbraiding, to snatch from their minds all traces of the existence of Clithero” (81). While Sarsefield imagines America as lacking memory, Cli-thero conceives of it as a land that erases the past rather than lacks one itself. Both, though, inscribe America as a land that, like the Indians in Rush’s writings, stands outside of memory. Brown pointedly counters this construction of America as a land without memory by making the cause of the Delaware uprising Old Deb’s brooding on past wrongs from the white communities. Potentially conflating the psychological profile of Indians as lacking memory with the land they came to represent through their ab-sence, these characters learn too late that the ease with which one can as-sert an allegorical relationship between mind and state, psyche and nation, does not mean that one can translate this into either a healthful state of mind or government. In critiquing the allegory implicit in the theory of national psychology, Brown explores how the continual interpretation of Indians as simple, hearty, and healthy sets up Edgar’s continual misreadings of the relation-ship between his own mental disease and the claims of moral citizenship. This tension between national and individual psychology becomes most apparent in the scenes in which Edgar stumbles into the Delaware Indian


uprising. After Edgar awakens in Norwalk and finds his way out of the pit, he creeps along a cave only to find a group of Indians encamped at its en-trance, blocking his hopes of escape. In spying this group of Indians, Edgar describes his reaction to them in psychological terms, explaining that most of his family had been killed by Indians after they attempted to settle a farm on the border area between the white and Delaware communities. Edgar writes:

Most men are haunted by some species of terror or antipathy, which they are, for the most part, able to trace to some incident which befel [sic] them in their early years. You will not be surprized that the fate of my parents, and the sight of the body of one of this savage band, who, in the pursuit that was made after them, was overtaken and killed, should produce lasting and terrific images in my fancy. I never looked upon, or called up the image of a savage without shuddering. (166)

The dead Indian at his parents’ ransacked house haunts Edgar. In tracing back the roots of his racial fears, Edgar makes no distinction between his dread of real Indians and his ability to terrorize himself with images of them in his mind. His mental terrors, as he elaborates, allow him to set aside reason and give full reign to “fancy.” Brown has Edgar surreptitiously equate recall and observation so that looking upon an armed Indian and thinking about one privately can create the same mental effect. In other words, empirical observation always risks embedding within it these potentially fanciful constructions. In the moments when Edgar confronts the moral quandaries of killing real Indians, though, he transfers them to the symptoms of somnambu-lism. As he decides to murder an Indian blocking his route to water, he narrates that the “means were in my hand, and they were used. In an ex-tremity like this, my muscles would have acted almost in defiance of my will” (172). Edgar here conflates his earlier sleepwalking with this moment of murder by describing his body as acting outside of his moral control. His language explicitly evokes the automaton whose body and muscles act in “defiance” of the mind. He faces a dilemma that, when shifted to the language of somnambulism, allows him to elide the question of morality at the very moment when the moral faculty was supposed to intervene on his behalf. In turn, Brown fuses political metaphors to the medical language of


somnambulism Clithero and Edgar use to account for their questionable moral actions, and in these moments Brown crystallizes the way men-tal disease and political power can ultimately become circular and self-implicating. During Clithero’s narrative of the incidents in Ireland in which he maniacally attempted to kill Mrs. Lorimer, he asks Edgar, “Was it I that hurried to the deed? No. It was the dæmon that possessed me. My limbs were guided to the one bloody office by a power foreign and superior to mine. I had been defrauded, for a moment, of the empire of my muscles” (79). Clithero describes his madness here as an overtaking of his reason, morality, and body by a “power foreign and superior” to him, one that will possess him until he kills Mrs. Lorimer. Notably, Clithero’s political meta-phors are imperial; his madness, like his upbringing, is fundamentally that of a colonial Irish subject in the British Empire. Brown also draws upon a politically inflected language for Edgar’s speculations on his mysterious awakening in the cave after his most significant bout of somnambulism. Edgar writes to Mary, “Methought I was the victim of some tyrant who had thrust me into a dungeon of his fortress, and left me no power to de-termine whether he intended I should perish with famine, or linger out a long life in hopeless imprisonment” (154). Brown’s choice of “tyrant” as the word Edgar immediately associates with his sleepwalking registers with the antityranny discourse of the Revolutionary period. As it turns out, though, Edgar is the “tyrant” who carried himself to the cave. Through the course of the ensuing narrative, Edgar discovers that his own mind can betray his waking republican sympathies. In Edgar Huntly, therefore, Brown ultimately explores how politi-cally malleable eighteenth-century psychological language can be. Read together, Clithero’s and Edgar’s political metaphors conflate imperial con-quest with republican self-government, implying that, in the end, tyranny first arises internally. In demonstrating the routine way in which memory and the moral faculties can be interrupted, Brown suggests that building a model of the nation from a model of the mind, as Rush does, risks exactly what Rush seeks to avoid: social chaos. By considering sleep disorders, and not just sleep, as a category of national character, Brown articulates how the analogy between mind and nation poses national identity as always vulnerable to disease, even at its most quotidian moments. Indeed, at the very point in the novel in which scholars claim Edgar achieves national identity, Brown posits the most insidious aspects of Edgar’s psyche: that


citizenship implies a psychological subject immune to its own participa-tion in the contradictions of republican government, the brutalities of the frontier, and the violence of imperialism. Brown’s engagement with the political ramifications of somnambulism in Edgar Huntly returns us to the scholarly quandary of the novel: whether Brown’s twinned themes of psychology and politics can be extricated from one another. In the 1790s, the terms of faculty psychology were becoming the basis of conceiving of national identity as a “natural” fact of the mind, that is, springing spontaneously from the minds of a group drawn together politically and geographically. The idea that political structures can some-how produce states of mind tempts physicians like Rush to conceive of citizenship as a process of automatic reflection in which governments can produce minds rather than vice versa. In making doubtful the promise of Rush’s national psychology, Brown more particularly questions how much one can manipulate federal laws in order to manufacture a certain type of national identity. In symbolizing this desire in the figure of the sleep-walker, Brown points out how unclear it is who controls this automaton/citizen. For although Edgar’s murders of Indians may consolidate a racially pure frontier, Brown makes clear with his doubled sleepwalker, Clithero, that this is merely happenstance rather than a predetermined outcome. The political allegory of the novel breaks down precisely because Brown questions the medical and political analogies between mind and nation. By turning to somnambulism (the mind operating without memory and morality), Brown explores how eighteenth-century psychology constructs and paradoxically also destroys theories of national identity. Indeed, the danger latent in moral citizenship in 1790s America, according to Edgar Huntly, is not simply that immigrants’ passions would run amok, but that citizens would betray themselves into tyranny because they do not have conscious or conscientious control over their own tyrannical impulses.

notes

1. Edgar Huntly scholarship generally falls into two stages: older readings that con-centrate on Edgar Huntly’s quite Freudian psychological states, particularly his descent into “savagery,” and more recent interpretations that investigate the poli-tics of the novel, from issues of democracy to the dispossession of the Delaware Indians. In Gothic America, Teresa Goddu articulates how this critical heritage came about: “If the British gothic is read in social terms, the American gothic is


viewed within psychological and theoretical rubrics. Because of America’s seem-ing lack of history and its Puritan heritage, the American gothic, it has been ar-gued, takes a turn inward, away from society and toward the psyche and the hid-den blackness of the American soul” (9). For examples of psychological readings of the novel, see Fiedler, Bradfield, and Christopherson. In the eruption of “na-tion” and “empire” as the preeminent terms of analysis in the 1990s, recent criti-cal readings of Edgar Huntly emphasize Brown’s participation in the construc-tion of American identity and its relationship to America’s internal colonialism. This is the explicit argument of Jared Gardner in Master Plots, which stands as one of the most thoroughly persuasive readings about American identity in Edgar Huntly. The terms of American identity in Edgar Huntly and other Brown novels guide other recent studies: Rowe, Krause, Smith-Rosenberg, Downes, and Hinds.

2. In “Somnambulism,” first published in Brown’s Literary Magazine, and Ameri-can Register, the main character narrates the gruesome murders of the woman (whom he unrequitedly loves) and her father, supposedly by a wandering mad-man named Nick Handyside. The narrative, though, implies that the narrator himself is responsible for the murders, which he believes he witnesses through a dream. For more on the composition history of “Somnambulism,” see the collec-tion of Brown’s stories in Weber.

3. Rush does suggest a cure drawn from a popular periodical story of placing tubs of water in the bedroom of the sleepwalker. The sleepwalker in the middle of the night supposedly would step in the basins of water and awaken; this would train the sleeper, through habituation, to stop sleepwalking. See Rush, Medical Inquiries, 305.

4. Dana Nelson’s reading of Rush’s piece on education provides the framework for her argument about interiority in National Manhood. Also see Gilmore’s recent article and Meranze.

5. The Padovano story is an extensive rewrite of Goldsmith’s anecdote of an Ital-ian monk who performs automatic writing while asleep in his History of Earth and Animated Nature. Goldsmith’s story was first published in the February 1773 issue of The Westminster Magazine. Among the American periodicals to reprint Goldsmith’s tale were The Massachusetts Magazine in January 1790, The Phila-delphia Minerva on July 30, 1796, The New York Magazine, or Literary Repository in November 1796, and Weekly Museum in June 1798, to name only those before 1800. For more about other versions of the Padovano story, see Cox.

6. These stories continued to be republished throughout the first half of the nine-teenth century as well, and more stories, including a popular tale of a man sleep-walking during the American Revolution, join them. See also Benjamin Reiss’s work on the Springfield somnambulist. In Body and Soul, Robert Cox recounts another famous story of a sleepwalker, Rachel Baker, the sleeping preacher. Stories about induced or magnetic sleep peak in America in the 1840s, much after Mesmerism has faded as a popular topic in Europe.


7. Brown, as may be expected in a novel on sleepwalking, also uses sleep as a way to characterize the Indians that Edgar runs across in his confused perambulations. As Edgar creeps out of the cave in Norwalk he pauses in his narrative, somewhat awkwardly, to comment that “[t]he slumber of an Indian is broken by the slight-est noise; but if all noise be precluded, it is commonly profound,” and continues that “[s]leep usually comes at their bidding, and if, perchance, they should be wakeful at an unseasonable moment, they always sit upon their haunches, and, leaning their elbows on their knees, consume the tedious hours in smoking” (167). Unlike Clithero and Edgar—the sleepwalkers of the novel—these Indians lack a certain level of mental complexity that would disturb their sleep; Brown’s Indians, in other words, do not spend guilt-ridden nights awake or, worse, wan-dering the wilderness in their sleep.

8. For more on the process of this abstraction, see Holland, and R. Smith. 9. See Kettner. 10. In considering the novel as an experiment, my argument aligns with other recent

assessments of Brown’s knowledge of medicine and the interdisciplinary nature of early America, in particular, Bryan Waterman’s argument in “Arthur Mervyn’s Medical Repository.”

11. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the English usage of “memoir” dates back to the late medieval period. Its earliest uses refer to records, testimonials, and warrants in a legal sense as well as for diplomatic and official writings. These uses remain in the English language, but by the seventeenth century “memoir” usually referred to histories written by a witness of the events or reminiscences and biographical or autobiographical observations and notes. Although “mem-oir” survives into the eighteenth century in its medieval meaning as a legal term, such as in Memoir, on the Sugar-Trade of the British Colonies (1793), the over-whelming majority of publications, especially in America, refer to adventure or religion. For background on the genre of self-writing before the “autobiography,” see Arch.

12. For more on the pornographic libel and its relationship to Brown’s Edgar Huntly, see Shapiro. By the end of the century, very few novelists have employed “mem-oirs” as their subgenre perhaps for the reason that Shapiro indicates, that “porno-graphic libels” such as John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749), the original title for Fanny Hill, were associated with the term. It must be noted, though, that “memoirs” most often denoted historical and spiritual biography and autobiography; used unironically, “memoirs” signify an attempt to convey truth based on experiential evidence. Though authors such as Cleland and De-larivière Manley use “memoirs” to signal “secret,” and thus sexual histories, by the time Brown writes, “memoirs” are also employed for novels such as Frances Burney’s Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress (1782).

13. In many of Brown’s novels, memoirs appear at moments of important moral dilemmas only to undermine the very claims of a genre that builds trust through the evidence of conscious memory. In Arthur Mervyn, Welbeck’s plan to publish


Lodi’s manuscript memoirs of the ducal house of Visconti as his own calls atten-tion to the unreliable nature of this genre. Similarly, in The Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, Carwin wrestles with whether to expose his ventriloquist powers as he recites his life’s story to Ludloe for initiation into Ludloe’s secret society. In Wieland, Clara’s diary entry about her nap in the recess provides Pleyel with the circumstantial evidence for his incorrect belief that she has had an affair with Carwin. All three of these examples pose memoirs as unreliable and, at times, quite damaging to social cohesion.

14. See Krause. Matthew Sivils also connects the Walking Purchase to the sleepwalk-ing of the novel.

works Cited

“Account of a Remarkable Sleep-Walker.” New York Magazine, or Literary Repository 3 (1792): 426–31.

Arch, Stephen Carl. After Franklin: The Emergence of Autobiography in Post-Revolutionary America, 1780–1830. Hanover: U of New Hampshire P, 2001.

Bradfield, Scott. Dreaming Revolution: Transgression in the Development of the American Romance. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1993.

Brown, Charles Brockden. Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker. Ed. Norman S. Grabo. New York: Penguin, 1988.

———. Somnambulism and Other Stories. Ed. Alfred Weber. Frankfurt: Lang, 1987.

Christopherson, Bill. The Apparition in the Glass: Charles Brockden Brown’s American Gothic. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1993.

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"The Tyranny of Sleep: Somnambulism, Moral Citizenship, and Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly"

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