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In this paper a fictional negotiation in emergence of a new nation in Edgar Huntly of Charles Brockden Brown is discussed. After Revolutionary War America's intelligentsia was facing an enormous task of realigning colonial history with the requirement of the new political and ideological order. A new nation was to be defined, and the question of what was to be remembered and what was better forgotten from the Pre-Revolutionary War era posed itself in a number of ways and extended its impact on all cultural realms.
The dialectics of remembering and forgetting ultimately worked in favor of American expansionism that tried to deny its intellectual and economic indebtedness to Englad while retaining England's imperial vision. Edgar Huntly offers its readers the possibility of interpreting this historical development, including its destructive effects on the physical and cultural survival of the Native America. The novel tends of solidify into American practice and policies regarding
in Indian “removal” and in tightening restriction of legal rights of slaves, rather than suggesting that Brown has liberated the voice of Native American in it.
The Gothic mode, which emerged in Europe initially as a critique of society, changes into an assertion of colonial expansionist doctrine in Edgar Huntly. In the novel, the ongoing process of Native expropriation is rendered morally digestible; a necessary prerequisite of America’s emerging national identity. Thus Edgar Huntly is not a critique of American society, even though Brown says in the preface of the novel it takes the form of the European Gothic novel. It rather works in favor of repressing an embarrassing historical continuity that counteracts the assertion of American independence and national identity.
After the writer abandoned fictional writing in the early 1800s, the concerns raised by Edgar Huntly became his prime focus. In a series of political pamphlets Brown called for aggressive actions towards establishing a powerful independent nation.