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Charles Brockden Brown’s quintessential protagonist, “The Man Unknown to Himself” is the young nation, America. Brown’s purpose is less to shock or frighten than to awaken. The image of the sleeper in need of awakening pervades Brown’s gothic fictions and becomes the controlling metaphor in Edgar Huntly. Brown’s America demands awakening to the extent it needs to acknowledge various gaps between ideals and experiences that have grown too large to ignore. Society or an individual may sleep precisely to avoid acknowledging such gaps. Besides identifying a depraved potential in the individual and the nation, Brown also objectifies the ways in which both contrive to hide from their deep selves. In Edgar Huntly, Brown deliberately redramatizes the transformation presented in Wieland, tracing its source to our most basic instincts, then damns the very act of self-scrutiny as fatal.
In his last novel, Edgar Huntly, Brown also gropes to find a way of surviving in America, instead of leaving for Europe or being killed as the protagonists of his three other novels do. In this respect it seems Huntly makes a success of surviving in America. The protagonist, however, fails his initiation since he does not come to maturity by evading confrontation with his hidden self even after severe experiences in the wilderness. On the other hand, Brown succeeds in his own initiation with writing Edgar Huntly. He eventually realizes that he has to admit the dilemma of America or that of humanexistence, in which thorough self-inspection can be ended in catastrophe. He lets Edgar Huntly manage to survive in America even though the protagonist is left alone in dangerously confused circumstances.