Anyone have a good summary for "Edgar Huntly" by Charles Brockden Brown?

Answer 1

Edgar Huntly Sparknotes

Answer 2

Edgar Huntly

Answer 3

This Site Might Help You.

RE:
Anyone have a good summary for "Edgar Huntly" by Charles Brockden Brown?

Answer 4

2

Answer 5

1

Answer 6

www.sparknotes.com is always a possibility.

Answer 7

Indeed, no mercy was shown toward the Indians who had occupied God’s own country: the settlers in early America nearly wiped out their enemy completely . Although the Ten Commandments do not permit murder, the settlers had no scruples about slaughtering the "savages" -- they read the Bible in their very own way. In the area of Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, people also had moral difficulties in the war against the Indians. Aspects of these problems with human violence come to the surface in the development of the protagonist of Charles Brockden Brown’s novel Edgar Huntly. Reading the text as a predecessor of the experimental novel, three author experiments or violent scenes in which the protagonist’s mind is being scrutinized are to be discussed in this essay . The discussion will reveal that the individual is unable to deal responsibly with human nature: Edgar Huntly implicitly replaces the optimistic Lockean notion of the social nature of man by Hobbes’ rather pessimistic view. The goal of Brown, however, probably was to show the human mind as being able to deal with murder in a rational way. So during the process of writing, the text has shifted from advocating a social nature of man to depicting the failure of man as social and peaceful individual. Put into a modern perspective, Brown’s novel might therefore be seen as implicitly calling for government restrictions on self-justice: in this way, the text points to the issue of administrative interference with the private sphere, a problem that is of concern for America today.

2. The Basic Reason for Edgar Huntly’s Failure

Brown’s experimental novel had to fail from the beginning. The failure is a moral shortcoming of the protagonist of the novel, Edgar Huntly, as social and peaceful individual during his "transition from uncertainty to knowledge"(2). The transition takes place within the settler’s war against the Indians. Brown expects his protagonist to behave rationally and justly during the violent actions of the war; however, Huntly does not act rationally. Thomas Hobbes view of human nature provides a first philosophy of violence that can account this behavior: In Leviathan, Hobbes describes a view of man being a wolf to his fellow man."

for more, please see the first link


or you can download the whole book. See second and third links.

Finally, there's this - see last link please:

"Jared Gardner notes how "few bodies of criticism surrounding a workÉ are so insistently uniform in their concerns and conclusions as that devoted to Edgar HuntlyÉ. While arguing over the particular terms applied, almost every critic reasserts that this is fundamentally a novel about an initiation story, the account of a young man who begins by looking for guilt in others and ends by finding it in himself." [1] To this critical straight- jacket, we might add the routine assumptions that Edgar Huntly's increasing time within the forest region of Norwalk, and away from the settlers' Solesbury village, is his descent into a landscape of mental collapse characterized by the warpath return of the Delaware Indians, the event of most critical appreciation. But it is precisely these "particular terms applied" that occlude the novel's meaning by the presuppositions, or prejudices, implicit in its evaluations. Why should this boy's education into the senses be defined as criminally aberrant? Is it perhaps that any initiation, which does not have the Oedipal family plot as its sole (or even primary) referent for the transmission of knowledge, must be made to submit to normalizing imperatives that refuse the prospect of communalization outside domestic reproduction?

The stakes in challenging these standards frame the novel. The narrator, Edgar Huntly, ends accused of causing a woman's miscarriage from the shock of his speaking about matters considered to be best left only murmured between men. As the abortion brands Huntly as a threat to the natural order, the "untimely birth" acts as the novel's own colophon of warning about the risks of premature declaration, where sleepwalking also portrays Brown's anxiety about being out-of-sync or not yet at the right historical moment for personal disclosure.

The sign of foreshortened nativity also begins the narrative as Edgar returns at night to the recent murder and burial site of his friend Waldegrave. Shocked at an attack the settlers have not cared to investigate, Huntly hopes to capture the murderer who might also be returning to the scene. Edgar's wish is realized as he sees there "the shape of a man, tall and robustÉsomething like flannel was wrapped round his waist and covered his lower limbs. The rest of his frame was naked." "A figure, robust and strange, and half naked," he exclaims, "was calculated to rouse up my whole soul." But his mood changes when the man begins crying. As the man then rises to go into Norwalk, he passes so close by Edgar as to almost touch his arm without appearing to notice him. An amazed Huntly can only rationalize this act by saying that the man must be sleepwalking.

Returning the next night, Edgar finds the muscled man about to go once more into Norwalk's forest, as if he had been waiting for Edgar's arrival. This time Edgar follows. Anxious that he may have intuited the situation dangerously wrong, Huntly reminds himself, "What had I to fear. Man to man I needed not to dread his encounter." Taut with excitement, he advances to the "verge of a considerable precipice." But when the fellow steps into a cave, Edgar's nerves "failed" him, and he returns home. Reflecting in bed about the previous night, Edgar wonders what would draw someone to Norwalk's "subterranean retreats [since] all this region was limestone, a substance that eminently abounds in rifts and cavities. These, by the gradual decay of their cementing parts, frequently make their appearance in spots where they might have least been expected."

Edgar's fascination with this zone was first roused by a visiting Englishman, who was "fond of penetrating into Norwalk's recesses." But after the foreigner's unexpected departure, Huntly says he has no one to show him anything more than Norwalk's "outlines and most accessible parts." Hoping to go beyond dreaming what it would feel like to be inside Norwalk, Huntly returns to the graveside to find the man once more. This time he does not hesitate and, pursuing the man, enters a cavern of "dunnest obscurity." It is an experiential space he describes as this: "If you imagine a cylindrical mass, with a cavity dug in the center, whose edge conforms to the exterior edge, and if you place in this cavity another cylinder, higher than that which surrounds it, but so small as to leave between its sides and those of the cavity a hollow space, you will gain as distinct an image of the hill as words can convey."

While frontier adventurers often femininize Nature, the geography represented here is an anal topography, where Edgar's access to the limestone openings of crevices, typically thought of as cemented shut, symbolizes his entry into a terrain of male-male intercourse beyond organized heterosexuality. Although George Toles perceptively describes Norwalk's atmosphere of alienating claustrophobia as capturing "the odd and startling shadow projections of the city world," he misses how the stranger's blank stare, silent brush past Edgar, and the latter's pursuit re-enacts city street cruising and how the superficially daunting desolation of peripheral metropolitan spaces, from London's West End warrens to the post-industrial West Village piers, have functioned as the grounds for gay open-air intimacy, where the seeming danger of urban decay paradoxically ensures the protection of isolation. As Brown's only non-urbanized locale, Norwalk's twilight woods not only represents the city's spaces of liaison, but its sylvan displacement also hypostasizes it as an utopian space, no longer simply marginal to the mainstream city but radically separate from it.

When Edgar confronts the Irish farmhand, Clithero Edny (now recognized as the stranger) ostensibly about the murder, Edny replies with an autobiographical confession. Born to the countryside, Clithero is taken to sophisticated Dublin by his family's absentee landlord, the widow Lorimer, to tutor her son, who is sadly "steeped in vices and depravity." She then decides her niece should marry him. This proposal is doubled by the return of her own first love, which was a union that had earlier been prevented by her twin brother, Wiatte. For Edny, Lorimer is a model of virtue while Wiatte is an "exception" to "human nature" whose "wickednessÉexceeded in depravity beyond the deepest guilt." Banished for robbery, and vowing revenge for his sister's refusal to defend him, Wiatte reappears on the eve of the double marriage. The return of this repressed Wiatte fills Edny with dread as it appears to mean "something portentous." "It seemed," he says, "as there lurked, under those appearances, a tremendous significanceÉwithout my being able to discover what these consequences were." Later, while walking down a dark, narrow alleyway, Edny is anonymously assaulted. With "passive" will, he draws a pistol, which unexpectedly explodes, and fatally wounds the attacker afterwards revealed to be Wiatte. Realizing that he has just killed his future father-in-law, Edny hysterically rushes home to kill a sleeping Lorimer in order to prevent her from hearing the news. About to knife the sleeping body, Edny's arm is deflected by Lorimer, who was not after all in the bed and she reveals Clithero's intended victim as his fiancee. Prevented then from killing himself, Edny emigrates to America, where he seeks penitential obscurity.

About Clithero's tale, it is hard not to recall Eve Sedgwick's reading of Billy Budd's spastic murder of Claggert as a homosexual panic that seeks to destroy one's own desire by displacing onto a someone configured as pure evil. [3] As Clithero pairs Lorimer and Wiatte to differentiate them, where the female object choice is celebrated as pure and benevolent and the masculine one as corrupt and malicious, he hopes to gird himself within the moral orthopedics of heterosexuality to carry off his marriage, even as Wiatte's return, as one who has already Lorimer's marriage, manifests Edny's desire for escape. Yet his own fear of self-disclosure also results in him killing Wiatte and attempting the same with Clarice, in a self-protective tactic to restore his mental equilibrium by nullifying the competing dictates of sexuality while denying its impulse through the explanatory language of accidents. Edny accepts the blame for Waldegrave's murder because the circumstantial "distinct resemblance" between Wiatte's and Waldegrave's murder leads him to assume that he has compulsively re-enacted violence to quell a renewed desire. Having failed to drain his desire through the physical duress of manual labor, he lurches into a more cruel discipline by fleeing into Norwalk, where he will try waste his body through anorexic sequestration.

While Edny's confession reveals him to be at the painful threshold of self- realization, Edgar clearly understands the tale's meaning. If Edgar Huntly is the eager hunter for contact, then Edny's tale cautions that sexual liberation might be more complicated than instant revolution, an ambivalence marked in his name, which sounds an idyllic Eros that may be simultaneously affirmed, Eden-aye, and denied, Eden-nay. In this encounter of an older man with a younger, which is the scene of cultural transmission, of one generation's passing on their experience for youth's edification or disregard, Clithero presents Edgar with the unsettling notion about the psychic trials of being "in the life" that has been formed by the pressures of minoritization, which includes the dynamics of submission and self-hatred. The challenge of replying to this past lies not simply in the act of reclaiming history, either in acts of historical closure, such as the modes of celebration and elegy, or the bearing witness to injustice, but the more delicate one of recognizing an inter-active identity that is still not solely of our choosing and where loss is a continuing presence. This is the task of leveraging history into a cultural politics and for a long-term political culture. The current reluctance, at times, to do so accounts, perhaps, for the malaise now in AIDS activism, as many in our generation, or younger, assume the plague to be embedded in the safe generational distance of an immediate post-Stonewall culture, which several do not even connect with even at the level of memory.

Edny's story also gives Brown a pause as he interrupts the novel's composition for a concatenating series of fictions about disclosure, which he uses to prepare his own response to Edny. For example, "The Memoirs of Mary Selwyn; or, a Lesson in Concealment," about a woman's embarrassed death after the revelation of past sexual activity, acts, according to Warner Berthoff, as Brown's testing of the Godwinite manifesto of "sincerity and transparency in human relations." [4] My point being that the story functionally signposts how the radical Anglo-Jacobin rhetoric of removing artificial constraints in order to remake social relations encouraged Brown and gave him a syntax within which to speak gay desire. And not Brown only, since the first roots of queer politicization occurred within Anglo-Jacobin circles amidst other currents of the revolutionary energies of the 1790s. The significance of this is that by tracing the flow of progressivist movements for queer association and participation, rather than looking to court and prison records, we can replace a criminalized past with a visionary one.

With this enabling discourse, Brown returns to finish Edgar Huntly by inverting Edny's paranoia. If Brown claims his novel as an American gothic, the distinction comes not because its American wilderness replaces European castles alongside a costume drama exchange of aboriginal for aristocrat, but that Clithero's dread is taken as an European ancien regime affect. The difference of the New World is how it replaces a mentality of self-alienation for one of amorous dignity where Norwalk's jacobinized frontier is the land, if not of natural rights, then at least one where there are no natural wrongs.

After this point, Edgar strives to overcome Edny's fear of incrimination by physically doubling and re-enacting whatever Edny has experienced. From likewise being defined as a sleepwalker to replicating Edny's shaggy looks and becoming an emaciated captive in Norwalk. Edgar implements a mimicry that is not such much about defiance of a reified Law than in the ideal of creating community through de-individuation. In this proposition, Edgar uses the Delaware Indian attack directed by an older Indian woman as an alternative communal model, where the "ovarian primitive horde" of the Queen bee and her house of drones contrasts to what Huntly calls Solesbury's "patriarchal scheme" of heterosexual families, to propose a collective body of similarity within an unpersonalized tribe (the essence of clone culture), where the trauma of the closet's imposed double consciousness is overcome through a protective fusion within an insular ghetto.

While Edgar is lying in bed and thinking of his Irishman, he awakes to find himself in a Norwalk cave blocked by hostile Lenni Lenape, the scene which introduces the Indian Wars. This segue, from Edny's bed to Norwalk's cavern, lampooned by critics, thrusts Edgar into "captivity narrative mode" and represents the double retaliation of Solesbury against the overlaying space of Edgar's bed and forest, where the two landscapes of gay desire are put under attack. If the Delaware attack functions as the medium for Edgar's expression, it is available, as symbolic representation, to be also used by the settlers to as an alibi for over-running Norwalk with their clattering guns. This re-territorialization is meant to force Edgar into a contest of militant re-masculinization where he is to be regenerated through patriotic gore. Emphasizing that the intent of the war is to secure Edgar's recovery from affiliation with Edny, when Edgar's old teacher returns to America, he is now married to Lorimer and brings along Clithero's old fiancee for Edgar to marry, as though Edgar will be made to repair Edny's retreat from the family.

Concluding with Edgar's letters that cause Lorimer's miscarriage, the novel reveals that while Edgar has escaped the role of hero-husband, Edny remains isolated and circumscribed by violent dread. Captured and taken on ship to be locked within a mental asylum, Edny escapes his chains to jump overboard and drown himself.

Ending with the half-naked figure of Edny in the wrapping sheets of seaweed, instead of Edgar's bed, why does Norwalk's gay utopia fail? Why does Brown leave off by reinscribing a figural history typified by the medicalized suicide?

The novel replies with what it had earlier proposed as the root of homophobia - thoughtlessness. In flight from the battles, Huntly rises from the brush to see a house neatly painted and planed. This model home, however, contains within it the terror of domestic violence as Edgar hears a man's drunken cursing inside and the cries of a mother and child from the barn. Remembering this as the dwelling of an abusive husband, Edgar decides that "this was not time to waste my sympathy on others... here was no asylum for me," and, self-absorbed, he glides onward without attempting to help. Edgar's failure, often repeated in the novel, is his inability to recognize the potential coalitional affinity between him and Edny, the settler women, and the Delaware Indians as mutual captives within Solesbury's patriarchal structure of command. Yet, it is Brown's message that Edgar's ideal of an autonomous, self-coherent culture will never secure durable rights on its own and that dominant authority can only be challenged in a united states of dissident interests. Thus, the imperatives of opposition require us to breech our own frontier and insistently work to link political agendas, like the ones Brown suggests of reproductive and sexual rights. To abandon this labor of coalition will mean the continual reiteration of lost dreams and personal dismay. But the reward for its achievement will be, not least, those pleasures of the nightwood within our own, and everyone's, queer nation."

* pick as best answer

Answer 8

There's this:

"Charles Brockden Brown’s "Edgar Huntly" as Experimental Novel

"And when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them, thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them."
Deut. 7:2.

1.Introduction

Indeed, no mercy was shown toward the Indians who had occupied God’s own country: the settlers in early America nearly wiped out their enemy completely . Although the Ten Commandments do not permit murder, the settlers had no scruples about slaughtering the "savages" -- they read the Bible in their very own way. In the area of Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, people also had moral difficulties in the war against the Indians. Aspects of these problems with human violence come to the surface in the development of the protagonist of Charles Brockden Brown’s novel Edgar Huntly. Reading the text as a predecessor of the experimental novel, three author experiments or violent scenes in which the protagonist’s mind is being scrutinized are to be discussed in this essay . The discussion will reveal that the individual is unable to deal responsibly with human nature: Edgar Huntly implicitly replaces the optimistic Lockean notion of the social nature of man by Hobbes’ rather pessimistic view. The goal of Brown, however, probably was to show the human mind as being able to deal with murder in a rational way. So during the process of writing, the text has shifted from advocating a social nature of man to depicting the failure of man as social and peaceful individual. Put into a modern perspective, Brown’s novel might therefore be seen as implicitly calling for government restrictions on self-justice: in this way, the text points to the issue of administrative interference with the private sphere, a problem that is of concern for America today.

2. The Basic Reason for Edgar Huntly’s Failure

Brown’s experimental novel had to fail from the beginning. The failure is a moral shortcoming of the protagonist of the novel, Edgar Huntly, as social and peaceful individual during his "transition from uncertainty to knowledge"(2). The transition takes place within the settler’s war against the Indians. Brown expects his protagonist to behave rationally and justly during the violent actions of the war; however, Huntly does not act rationally. Thomas Hobbes view of human nature provides a first philosophy of violence that can account this behavior: In Leviathan, Hobbes describes a view of man being a wolf to his fellow man."

for more, please see the first link


or you can download the whole book. See second and third links.

Finally, there's this - see last link please:

"Jared Gardner notes how "few bodies of criticism surrounding a workÉ are so insistently uniform in their concerns and conclusions as that devoted to Edgar HuntlyÉ. While arguing over the particular terms applied, almost every critic reasserts that this is fundamentally a novel about an initiation story, the account of a young man who begins by looking for guilt in others and ends by finding it in himself." [1] To this critical straight- jacket, we might add the routine assumptions that Edgar Huntly's increasing time within the forest region of Norwalk, and away from the settlers' Solesbury village, is his descent into a landscape of mental collapse characterized by the warpath return of the Delaware Indians, the event of most critical appreciation. But it is precisely these "particular terms applied" that occlude the novel's meaning by the presuppositions, or prejudices, implicit in its evaluations. Why should this boy's education into the senses be defined as criminally aberrant? Is it perhaps that any initiation, which does not have the Oedipal family plot as its sole (or even primary) referent for the transmission of knowledge, must be made to submit to normalizing imperatives that refuse the prospect of communalization outside domestic reproduction?

The stakes in challenging these standards frame the novel. The narrator, Edgar Huntly, ends accused of causing a woman's miscarriage from the shock of his speaking about matters considered to be best left only murmured between men. As the abortion brands Huntly as a threat to the natural order, the "untimely birth" acts as the novel's own colophon of warning about the risks of premature declaration, where sleepwalking also portrays Brown's anxiety about being out-of-sync or not yet at the right historical moment for personal disclosure.

The sign of foreshortened nativity also begins the narrative as Edgar returns at night to the recent murder and burial site of his friend Waldegrave. Shocked at an attack the settlers have not cared to investigate, Huntly hopes to capture the murderer who might also be returning to the scene. Edgar's wish is realized as he sees there "the shape of a man, tall and robustÉsomething like flannel was wrapped round his waist and covered his lower limbs. The rest of his frame was naked." "A figure, robust and strange, and half naked," he exclaims, "was calculated to rouse up my whole soul." But his mood changes when the man begins crying. As the man then rises to go into Norwalk, he passes so close by Edgar as to almost touch his arm without appearing to notice him. An amazed Huntly can only rationalize this act by saying that the man must be sleepwalking.

Returning the next night, Edgar finds the muscled man about to go once more into Norwalk's forest, as if he had been waiting for Edgar's arrival. This time Edgar follows. Anxious that he may have intuited the situation dangerously wrong, Huntly reminds himself, "What had I to fear. Man to man I needed not to dread his encounter." Taut with excitement, he advances to the "verge of a considerable precipice." But when the fellow steps into a cave, Edgar's nerves "failed" him, and he returns home. Reflecting in bed about the previous night, Edgar wonders what would draw someone to Norwalk's "subterranean retreats [since] all this region was limestone, a substance that eminently abounds in rifts and cavities. These, by the gradual decay of their cementing parts, frequently make their appearance in spots where they might have least been expected."

Edgar's fascination with this zone was first roused by a visiting Englishman, who was "fond of penetrating into Norwalk's recesses." But after the foreigner's unexpected departure, Huntly says he has no one to show him anything more than Norwalk's "outlines and most accessible parts." Hoping to go beyond dreaming what it would feel like to be inside Norwalk, Huntly returns to the graveside to find the man once more. This time he does not hesitate and, pursuing the man, enters a cavern of "dunnest obscurity." It is an experiential space he describes as this: "If you imagine a cylindrical mass, with a cavity dug in the center, whose edge conforms to the exterior edge, and if you place in this cavity another cylinder, higher than that which surrounds it, but so small as to leave between its sides and those of the cavity a hollow space, you will gain as distinct an image of the hill as words can convey."

While frontier adventurers often femininize Nature, the geography represented here is an anal topography, where Edgar's access to the limestone openings of crevices, typically thought of as cemented shut, symbolizes his entry into a terrain of male-male intercourse beyond organized heterosexuality. Although George Toles perceptively describes Norwalk's atmosphere of alienating claustrophobia as capturing "the odd and startling shadow projections of the city world," he misses how the stranger's blank stare, silent brush past Edgar, and the latter's pursuit re-enacts city street cruising and how the superficially daunting desolation of peripheral metropolitan spaces, from London's West End warrens to the post-industrial West Village piers, have functioned as the grounds for gay open-air intimacy, where the seeming danger of urban decay paradoxically ensures the protection of isolation. As Brown's only non-urbanized locale, Norwalk's twilight woods not only represents the city's spaces of liaison, but its sylvan displacement also hypostasizes it as an utopian space, no longer simply marginal to the mainstream city but radically separate from it.

When Edgar confronts the Irish farmhand, Clithero Edny (now recognized as the stranger) ostensibly about the murder, Edny replies with an autobiographical confession. Born to the countryside, Clithero is taken to sophisticated Dublin by his family's absentee landlord, the widow Lorimer, to tutor her son, who is sadly "steeped in vices and depravity." She then decides her niece should marry him. This proposal is doubled by the return of her own first love, which was a union that had earlier been prevented by her twin brother, Wiatte. For Edny, Lorimer is a model of virtue while Wiatte is an "exception" to "human nature" whose "wickednessÉexceeded in depravity beyond the deepest guilt." Banished for robbery, and vowing revenge for his sister's refusal to defend him, Wiatte reappears on the eve of the double marriage. The return of this repressed Wiatte fills Edny with dread as it appears to mean "something portentous." "It seemed," he says, "as there lurked, under those appearances, a tremendous significanceÉwithout my being able to discover what these consequences were." Later, while walking down a dark, narrow alleyway, Edny is anonymously assaulted. With "passive" will, he draws a pistol, which unexpectedly explodes, and fatally wounds the attacker afterwards revealed to be Wiatte. Realizing that he has just killed his future father-in-law, Edny hysterically rushes home to kill a sleeping Lorimer in order to prevent her from hearing the news. About to knife the sleeping body, Edny's arm is deflected by Lorimer, who was not after all in the bed and she reveals Clithero's intended victim as his fiancee. Prevented then from killing himself, Edny emigrates to America, where he seeks penitential obscurity.

About Clithero's tale, it is hard not to recall Eve Sedgwick's reading of Billy Budd's spastic murder of Claggert as a homosexual panic that seeks to destroy one's own desire by displacing onto a someone configured as pure evil. [3] As Clithero pairs Lorimer and Wiatte to differentiate them, where the female object choice is celebrated as pure and benevolent and the masculine one as corrupt and malicious, he hopes to gird himself within the moral orthopedics of heterosexuality to carry off his marriage, even as Wiatte's return, as one who has already Lorimer's marriage, manifests Edny's desire for escape. Yet his own fear of self-disclosure also results in him killing Wiatte and attempting the same with Clarice, in a self-protective tactic to restore his mental equilibrium by nullifying the competing dictates of sexuality while denying its impulse through the explanatory language of accidents. Edny accepts the blame for Waldegrave's murder because the circumstantial "distinct resemblance" between Wiatte's and Waldegrave's murder leads him to assume that he has compulsively re-enacted violence to quell a renewed desire. Having failed to drain his desire through the physical duress of manual labor, he lurches into a more cruel discipline by fleeing into Norwalk, where he will try waste his body through anorexic sequestration.

While Edny's confession reveals him to be at the painful threshold of self- realization, Edgar clearly understands the tale's meaning. If Edgar Huntly is the eager hunter for contact, then Edny's tale cautions that sexual liberation might be more complicated than instant revolution, an ambivalence marked in his name, which sounds an idyllic Eros that may be simultaneously affirmed, Eden-aye, and denied, Eden-nay. In this encounter of an older man with a younger, which is the scene of cultural transmission, of one generation's passing on their experience for youth's edification or disregard, Clithero presents Edgar with the unsettling notion about the psychic trials of being "in the life" that has been formed by the pressures of minoritization, which includes the dynamics of submission and self-hatred. The challenge of replying to this past lies not simply in the act of reclaiming history, either in acts of historical closure, such as the modes of celebration and elegy, or the bearing witness to injustice, but the more delicate one of recognizing an inter-active identity that is still not solely of our choosing and where loss is a continuing presence. This is the task of leveraging history into a cultural politics and for a long-term political culture. The current reluctance, at times, to do so accounts, perhaps, for the malaise now in AIDS activism, as many in our generation, or younger, assume the plague to be embedded in the safe generational distance of an immediate post-Stonewall culture, which several do not even connect with even at the level of memory.

Edny's story also gives Brown a pause as he interrupts the novel's composition for a concatenating series of fictions about disclosure, which he uses to prepare his own response to Edny. For example, "The Memoirs of Mary Selwyn; or, a Lesson in Concealment," about a woman's embarrassed death after the revelation of past sexual activity, acts, according to Warner Berthoff, as Brown's testing of the Godwinite manifesto of "sincerity and transparency in human relations." [4] My point being that the story functionally signposts how the radical Anglo-Jacobin rhetoric of removing artificial constraints in order to remake social relations encouraged Brown and gave him a syntax within which to speak gay desire. And not Brown only, since the first roots of queer politicization occurred within Anglo-Jacobin circles amidst other currents of the revolutionary energies of the 1790s. The significance of this is that by tracing the flow of progressivist movements for queer association and participation, rather than looking to court and prison records, we can replace a criminalized past with a visionary one.

With this enabling discourse, Brown returns to finish Edgar Huntly by inverting Edny's paranoia. If Brown claims his novel as an American gothic, the distinction comes not because its American wilderness replaces European castles alongside a costume drama exchange of aboriginal for aristocrat, but that Clithero's dread is taken as an European ancien regime affect. The difference of the New World is how it replaces a mentality of self-alienation for one of amorous dignity where Norwalk's jacobinized frontier is the land, if not of natural rights, then at least one where there are no natural wrongs.

After this point, Edgar strives to overcome Edny's fear of incrimination by physically doubling and re-enacting whatever Edny has experienced. From likewise being defined as a sleepwalker to replicating Edny's shaggy looks and becoming an emaciated captive in Norwalk. Edgar implements a mimicry that is not such much about defiance of a reified Law than in the ideal of creating community through de-individuation. In this proposition, Edgar uses the Delaware Indian attack directed by an older Indian woman as an alternative communal model, where the "ovarian primitive horde" of the Queen bee and her house of drones contrasts to what Huntly calls Solesbury's "patriarchal scheme" of heterosexual families, to propose a collective body of similarity within an unpersonalized tribe (the essence of clone culture), where the trauma of the closet's imposed double consciousness is overcome through a protective fusion within an insular ghetto.

While Edgar is lying in bed and thinking of his Irishman, he awakes to find himself in a Norwalk cave blocked by hostile Lenni Lenape, the scene which introduces the Indian Wars. This segue, from Edny's bed to Norwalk's cavern, lampooned by critics, thrusts Edgar into "captivity narrative mode" and represents the double retaliation of Solesbury against the overlaying space of Edgar's bed and forest, where the two landscapes of gay desire are put under attack. If the Delaware attack functions as the medium for Edgar's expression, it is available, as symbolic representation, to be also used by the settlers to as an alibi for over-running Norwalk with their clattering guns. This re-territorialization is meant to force Edgar into a contest of militant re-masculinization where he is to be regenerated through patriotic gore. Emphasizing that the intent of the war is to secure Edgar's recovery from affiliation with Edny, when Edgar's old teacher returns to America, he is now married to Lorimer and brings along Clithero's old fiancee for Edgar to marry, as though Edgar will be made to repair Edny's retreat from the family.

Concluding with Edgar's letters that cause Lorimer's miscarriage, the novel reveals that while Edgar has escaped the role of hero-husband, Edny remains isolated and circumscribed by violent dread. Captured and taken on ship to be locked within a mental asylum, Edny escapes his chains to jump overboard and drown himself.

Ending with the half-naked figure of Edny in the wrapping sheets of seaweed, instead of Edgar's bed, why does Norwalk's gay utopia fail? Why does Brown leave off by reinscribing a figural history typified by the medicalized suicide?

The novel replies with what it had earlier proposed as the root of homophobia - thoughtlessness. In flight from the battles, Huntly rises from the brush to see a house neatly painted and planed. This model home, however, contains within it the terror of domestic violence as Edgar hears a man's drunken cursing inside and the cries of a mother and child from the barn. Remembering this as the dwelling of an abusive husband, Edgar decides that "this was not time to waste my sympathy on others... here was no asylum for me," and, self-absorbed, he glides onward without attempting to help. Edgar's failure, often repeated in the novel, is his inability to recognize the potential coalitional affinity between him and Edny, the settler women, and the Delaware Indians as mutual captives within Solesbury's patriarchal structure of command. Yet, it is Brown's message that Edgar's ideal of an autonomous, self-coherent culture will never secure durable rights on its own and that dominant authority can only be challenged in a united states of dissident interests. Thus, the imperatives of opposition require us to breech our own frontier and insistently work to link political agendas, like the ones Brown suggests of reproductive and sexual rights. To abandon this labor of coalition will mean the continual reiteration of lost dreams and personal dismay. But the reward for its achievement will be, not least, those pleasures of the nightwood within our own, and everyone's, queer nation."