Charles Brockden Brown: Three Gothic Novels

by Charles Brockden Brown, Sydney J. Krause (Editor)

Haunted, dreamlike scenes define the fictional world of Charles Brockden Brown, America's first professional novelist. Published in the final years of the 18th century, Brown's startlingly prophetic novels are a virtual resume of themes that would constantly recur in American literature: madness and murder, suicide and religious obsession, the seduction of innocence and the dangers of wilderness and settlement alike. In Three Gothic Novels, The Library of America collects the most significant of Brown's works. Wieland; or The Transformation (1798), his novel of a religious fanatic preyed upon by a sinister ventriloquist, is often considered his masterpiece. A relentlessly dark exploration of guilt, deception, and compulsion, it creates a sustained mood of irrational terror in the midst of the Pennsylvania countryside. In Arthur Mervyn; or Memoirs of the Year 1793 (1799), Brown draws on his own experiences to create indelible scenes of Philadelphia devastated by a yellow fever epidemic, while telling the story of a young man caught in the snares of a professional swindler. Edgar Huntly; or Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799) fuses traditional Gothic themes with motifs drawn from the American wilderness in a series of eerily unreal adventures that test the limits of the protagonist's self-knowledge. All three novels reveal Brown as the pioneer of a major vein of American writing, a novelist whose literary progeny encompasses Poe, Hawthorne, Faulkner, and the whole tradition of horror and noir from Cornell Woolrich to Stephen King.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Gothic, 18th Century, Horror, Literary Fiction, Literature

925 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 1998

About the author

Charles Brockden Brown (January 17, 1771 – February 22, 1810), an American novelist, historian, and editor of the Early National period, is generally regarded by scholars as the most ambitious and accomplished US novelist before James Fenimore Cooper. He is the most frequently studied and republished practitioner of the "early American novel," or the US novel between 1789 and roughly 1820. Although Brown was by no means the first American novelist, as some early criticism claimed, the breadth and complexity of his achievement as a writer in multiple genres (novels, short stories, essays and periodical writings of every sort, poetry, historiography, reviews) makes him a crucial figure in US literature and culture of the 1790s and first decade of the 19th century, and a significant public intellectual in the wider Atlantic print culture and public sphere of the era of the French Revolution.

Reviews

[Lilianna Gumberidze · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished it and just Great!

[Christopher Sutch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brown took the conventions of the Gothic novel and applied them to American concerns and American locales. The results are pretty interesting. There is the same fascination with familial relations (and quite tangled they are), especially posterity and inheritance, the same spooky houses and eerie incidents. But the issues are American religion, the yellow fever in Philadelphia, and "Indian massacres." Brown has undoubtedly suffered from the traditional literary critical distaste for "genre fiction." These early American novels show the development of an American aesthetic in its early stages: taking its formal characteristics from the Old World but innovating them and making them relevant to the New. Brown was an important writer for that reason, and also because these novels are a pretty good read even two hundred years later.

[Canavan · Rating 3 out of 5]

✭✭✭

Incorporates:

Wieland; or, The Transformation: An American Tale, Charles Brockden Brown (1798). ✭✭✭
Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793, Charles Brockden Brown (1799). Not yet read.
Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker, Charles Brockden Brown (1799). Not yet read.

[Mohammed omran · Rating 3 out of 5]

.McCaffrey's description of Laird's house is a fascinating look back at yesterday's housekeeping---not really all that long ago!---and makes me very grateful for my central heating! Even if I would adore the major's house."Kilternan Legacy" is a lovely escape for a rather dim and meek woman. An Irish great-aunt dies, leaving her small estate to the newly divorced Irene Teasey. It provides an opportunity for Irene junior, Rene, to put some distance between her and her twins and her fruitcake of an ex. The greater legacy, however, is the circle of friends and certain members of the Irish side of the family who gather round Rene, Snow, and Simon, aiding and protecting her.This one sounds like it takes place during the 1960s as well and there's a women's rights aspect to it as the disinherited family members try to symbolically whack Rene over the head with "what should be done" as well as the reasons for Great-Aunt Irene's choice of tenants in her cottages.I did like this story very much and would have liked it even better if Rene hadn't been such a ditz; thank god for her determined fourteen-year-olds!The CoverThe cover of the version I read is quite spare with its pale pink background and woodcut-looking sketch in black-and-pink of a the heads of a couple embracing. All tucked within an inset frame.The title of the version I read must have been a last-minute grab. It's certainly not very catchy, nor is it accurate.

[Todd Stockslager · Rating 2 out of 5]

Review title: He had Poe-tential

Charles Brockton Brown is mostly forgotten but was one of the first a American novelists when he published these Gothic horror stories in the 1790s. I was introduced to him and his three most-known novels through A New Literary History of America.

Make no mistake, these are extreme examples of "It was a dark and stormy night" Gothic novels of the kind Charles Schulz mocked in a memorable series of Peanuts comic strips: wordy, overwrought, flowery euphemistic language, language sentences with complex comma placement and pronoun usage left me wondering who said what to whom. But if you take a modern reading-for-meaning approach to condense the worst, there are actually good stories here. I thought while reading one of the stories that a generative AI tool prompted to produce a version of the story in the style of, say, Stephen King could possibly produce a popular novel out of it. Not that I'm advocating for AI-created writing, far from it; I find the idea abhorrent. But to bring a long-dead writer's outdated and prolix language and style up to date for modern readers might be an interesting and acceptable use case.

The novel I had in mind was Wieland, a murder mystery that involved a family plagued by death: A father dead under mysterious circumstances that may have been natural, supernatural, or murder, the son and daughter bonded and haunted by the father's death, and the son's wife and children brutally murdered. It was a story of the type that in a few decades Edgar Alan Poe would shorten to taut fraught mysteries that we still read.

One problem with these Brown novels is the use of first person narration and stories-within-stories that make it difficult to know who is narrating and to whom the narrator is referring when pronouns are used instead of character names. Arthur Mervyn, the second novel in this Library of America edition, is the worst in this regard. I think about half way through we are three or four layers deep in this embedded story telling so that I couldn't remember where we started or who was talking to whom. And especially in this story I was questioning if the narrator, any of them, was a reliable narrator at all. Should I believe what I was reading was true within the story? And in fact just as I was asking this question I turned the page to a new chapter and a new narrator asked the same question!: "Had I heard Mervyn's story from another, or read it in a book, I might, perhaps, have found it possible to suspect the truth." (p. 436). But to give Brown his credit here, this passage makes it clear that the reliable-narrator question was an intentional part of the story, not (or not just) a stylistic confusion.

And by the end through the narrator and narrative twists and turns, Arthur Mervyn actually has a happy ending, reading perhaps more like Dickens than Poe. So again to give Brown the author his credit, he didn't just rewrite his first novel or write another in the same genre, but wrote something new. And truly new, if we remind ourselves that he was one of if not the first America novelist.

The third of the novels here, Edgar Huntly, Or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker, is just too turgid and overwrought to be readable. Think James Fenimore Cooper in a fever dream of Jekyll and Hyde frontiersmen and native Americans in impossible situations. Sadly, while I have found some interest in these three novels, they are too hard to read as fiction for the modern eye, so I'm rating them only two stars.

[Nathan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Possibly one of the worst things to have ever happened.

I can only hint at the violations against literature, grammar, art, time, space, character, gender, and reason committed by this book.

The most poorly overwritten, underplanned, ill-conceived and thoroughly executed collection of novels, handsomely bound in cloth.

Some samples, chosen at random:

"Welbeck put his hands to his head and exclaimed: curses on thy lips, infernal messenger! Chant elsewhere thy rueful ditty! Vanish! if thou woulds't not feel in thy heart fangs red with blood less guilty than thine."

Chant elsewhere thy rueful ditty! That's telling him, Welbeck. Feel in thy heart fangs red with blood . . . what does "red" feel like? Are the fangs red prior to being in the heart (presumably biting into it), or from the heart itself? How is blood guilty? That passage is nonsensical to the point of comical, but it's presented in what's supposed to be an emotionally charged moment - it should be terrifying. At best it's confusing.

"My surprise and my horror were still strong enough to give a shrill and piercing tone to my voice. The chasm and the rocks loudened and reverberated my accents while I exclaimed . . . Man! Clithero!"

Seriously, Clithero. The worst names in this book . . . I suppose "loudened and reverberated" serves for "echoed." So imagine the hero's apparently high-pitched screams of "Clithero!" By the way, this is in a scene that conveys his bravery.

"It was still dark, but my sleep was at an end, and, by a common apparatus, that lay beside my bed, I could instantly produce a light."

Oh, wonder of wonders! How could - or to adopt Brown's language - how coulds't the narrator fail to share the name of this device? If it is a "common apparatus," just say what it is! "It was still dark, so I lit a match." Common apparatus! Infuriating!

I cannot be angry with Charles Brockden Brown. He's been dead for two centuries and it's not his fault I feel compelled to finish a book once I've started it. Do not you make the same mistake.

[MMezzancello · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three of Brown's most important novels, in my opinion. Very telling of the underlying violence, mystery, and turmoil swirling in the collective unconscious of the early White Americans. A great collection for studying the origins of the American Novel and how it had been shaped.