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

Abstract

In gothic fiction, monstrous acts committed by monstrous creatures mark spatial and symbolic frontiers: horror is generated not only when deviant acts such as cannibalism are carried out by bestial monsters on the fringes of society, but also these savage acts can collapse the conventional categories of the human and the monster. Within the framework of the American gothic, these integral tropes of cannibalism and bestial savagery – visible in works as diverse as Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) – can be traced back to the colonial legacy representing American Indians as animalistic and cannibalistic.1 The monsters that haunt the American gothic signal the return of the traumas of national history and the speaking of suppressed voices from the ongoing violence of America’s colonial past. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen claims the figure of the monster is ‘an embodiment of a certain cultural moment – of a time, a feeling, and a place’, demanding analysis ‘within the intricate matrix of relations (social, cultural, and literary-historical) that generate them’ (Cohen 1996: 4, 5). In what follows, I focus on the development and sedimentation of the savage image of American Indians in early American history through the monstrous tropes of the American gothic, concluding this genealogy with Charles Brockden Brown’s 1799 novel, Edgar Huntly. In his introduction to Edgar Huntly, Brown discusses the inspirational devices available to the American writer: ‘Gothic castles and chimeras, are the materials usually employed for this end. The incidents of Indian hostility, and the perils of the western wilderness, are far more suitable; and, for a native to America to overlook these, would admit of no apology’ (Brown 1988: 3). If for Brown, acclaimed as the pioneer of American gothic, the American setting equivalent to ‘Gothic castles’ are the ‘perils of the western wilderness’, Native Americans are the monstrous equivalent of the mythical chimera. With both the chimera and the Indian posited as inhuman and antagonistic Others,