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Edited by Maurizio Ascari and Stephen Knight

From the Sublime to City Crime

Abstract for Administrative Purposes Only

This essay is part of

Maurizio Ascari and Stephen Knight

(edited by) From the Sublime to City Crime

Monaco, LiberFaber, 2014, ISBN: 978-2-36580-153-9

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Contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................. 5

MAURIZIO ASCARI, STEPHEN KNIGHT

INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................. 7

MAURICE HINDLE

THEATRES OF CALAMITY: GODWIN, BURKE, AND THE LANGUAGE OF GOTHIC ............................................................................. 23

KATIE GARNER

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT’S SUBLIME CRIMES .............................. 45

ALESSANDRA CALANCHI

TENDER IS THE WILD: SUBLIMINAL SOUNDSCAPES AND THE AURAL SUBLIME IN CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN’S PROTO-CRIME FICTION ............................................................................................ 72

MATTHEW MCGUIRE

CRIME FICTION AND THE RADICAL SUBLIME: GODWIN, HOGG AND DE QUINCEY ....................................................................................... 107

MAURIZIO ASCARI

IN PURSUIT OF THE SUBLIME: DE QUINCEY AND THE ROMANTICS’ METAPHYSICAL CONCEPTION OF CRIME ............ 131

STRUAN SINCLAIR

‘AN APARTMENT SO BEDIZZENED’: EDGAR ALLAN POE’S SUPERPERCEIVERS ................................................................................... 160

GIACOMO MANNIRONI

CRIMINAL AMBITIONS: THE YOUNG BALZAC AND THE INFLUENCE OF BRITISH ROMANTICISM ........................................... 193

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YVONNE LEFFLER

EARLY CRIME FICTION IN NORDIC LITERATURE ...................215

DAVID LEVENTE PALATINUS

PRIMUM NON NOCERE – AUTOPSY,‘BAD MEDICINE’ AND THE BODY IN THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES ..... 245

HEATHER WORTHINGTON

REPRESSION AND TRANSGRESSION IN SAMUEL WARREN’S ‘THE BRACELETS’ AND PASSAGES FROM THE DIARY OF A LATE PHYSICIAN .................................................................................................... 281

STEPHEN KNIGHT

THE MYSTERIES OF THE CITIES AND THE MYTH OF URBAN GOTHIC .......................................................................................................... 308

ANNA KAY

THE BLACK GHOST OF BERMONDSEY: MARIA MANNING AND THE POPULAR SUBLIME .......................................................................... 362

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Tender Is the Wild:

Subliminal Soundscapes and the Aural

Sublime in Charles Brockden Brown’s Proto-

Crime Fiction

Alessandra Calanchi

(University of Urbino)

1. The case of Charles Brockden Brown

Early crime writing and early detective stories often combine fiction and

history, imagination and logical reasoning; nonetheless, the case of

Charles Brockden Brown – the first American ‘who may fairly be called a

novelist’ according to Warren Barton Blake (1910: 434), the ‘inventor of

the American writer’ according to Leslie A. Fiedler (1960: 145), and the

‘founding father of American literature’ according to Stephen Watts

(1994: 73) – is, in several ways, extraordinary. Not only did this late

18th-century New World writer feed from the lymph of Revolution, but

he drew inspiration and energy from a multifarious context made up of

captivity narratives, immigration, gender issues, and even medical

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knowledge, thus mixing – but not stirring – Romantic subjectivity and

Enlightenment intellectualism, Quaker background and sensationalism,

violence and sentimental love, Gothic legacy and Western agency. His

novels bear witness to a fundamental period in the United States’ history

and culture when a country was being built out of the wilderness and a

matching literature had to be created anew. Also, Brown’s aim to educate

his readership responds to a project consisting of prompting them into

taking part in the ideological and cultural debates of the period and

embracing sociocultural determinism and progressive ideas.

However, the atmospheres of mystery, anxiety, and suspense

undoubtedly prevail in Charles Brockden Brown’s novels. Spontaneous

combustion, sleepwalking, allusions to lycanthropy, ventriloquism, and

other uncanny phenomena crowd his pages; and even when the author

describes the American scene, he ‘does so almost invariably in terms of

the eighteenth-century esthetics of the sublime and of the picturesque’

(Bernard 1964). Especially in Edgar Huntly, ‘a wider and wilder vista

opens before the reader: the scene remains Pennsylvania, to be sure, but a

Pennsylvania of mountains, caves, wild-cats’ (Blake 1910: 432). In other

words, although he documents his stories by ‘elaborating detail, leading

always toward verisimilitude’ (Blake 1910: 443), Brown does not actually

describe a real landscape, because he is not really interested in nature as

such but rather as a source of terror – in the Burkean sense – and

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possibly as ‘the reflection of individual consciousness and an insight into

the mind – a haunted one’ (Sowczuk 2010). Although a Quaker, he is

more interested in vision, imagination, and reverie than in representing

truth and/or reality (Kafer 2000). His ‘visionary powers’ and ‘visionary

quest’ (Kafer 2000: 564) perfectly fit the ‘haunted countryside’ (Fiedler

1960: 131) which is typical of Gothic fiction.

In Wieland we have a clear example of this:

Schuylkill was here a pure and trans-lucid current, broken into wild and

ceaseless music by rocky points; murmuring on a sandy margin, and reflecting

on its surface, banks of all varieties of height and degrees of declivity. These

banks were chequered by patches of dark verdure and shapeless masses of

white marble, and crowded by copses of cedar, or by the regular magnificence

of orchards, which, at this season, were in blossom, and were prodigal of

odours. The ground which receded from the river was scooped into valleys

and dales. (43).

In Edgar Huntly, the Norwalk wilderness is described through a musical

lexicon which at times prevails over the visual description of the place:

These spots are obscured by the melancholy umbrage of the pines, whose

eternal murmurs are in unison with vacancy and solitude, with the

reverberations of torrents and the whistling of the blasts (67).

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And later on:

At that moment, torrents of rain poured from above, and stronger blasts

thundered amidst these desolate recesses and profound chasms. Instead of

lamenting the prevalence of this tempest, I now began to regard it with

pleasure. I conferred new forms of sublimity on this scene (83).

When the narrator is trapped in a dark cave, overwhelmed by total

darkness, he exclaims: ‘Famine, and blindness, and death, and savage

enemies, never fail to be conjured up by the silence and darkness of the

night’ (106). Despite the strong insistence on obscurity and darkness in

Brown’s fiction, which is not unexpected since ‘dark, confused, uncertain

images have a greater power on the fancy to form the grander passions,

than those have which are more clear and determinate’ (Burke: 68), the

presence of silence and the repertory of sounds we encounter are

extremely relevant.

Though it is often stated that ‘picturesque aesthetics mediated between

nature and the ego, the ‘eye’ of vision and the ‘I’ of selfhood’ (Berthold

1984: 63, and passim), I think it is high time that the links between the

‘ear’ and the ‘I’ be taken into due consideration. Also the link between

picturesque and wilderness, which in the past was based on the ‘eye’,

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needs to be reconsidered:

The picturesque … provided Americans with a congenial, respectable,

eminently civilized standpoint from which to study and enjoy the wilderness.

To the strong national ego already evident in political Independence – the

wilderness-subduing, westward-moving ‘I’ – the picturesque added a

controlling aesthetic vision – a wilderness-subduing ‘eye’ – to help organize,

shape, and even half-create a native landscape compatible with the civilization

that was encroaching on the rugged forests and mountains of the western

borders. (Berthold 1984: 69)

Any landscape is also a soundscape (‘any acoustic field of study’, Schafer

1977: 7). In Brown’s novels not only does silence match darkness in

creating terror, but the sounds we hear are absolutely necessary to enter

the mood, to establish the geography, to build up the plot, to create the

atmosphere, to give pregnancy to characters, and to make the story alive

with meaning. Be it geophonies – water, thunder, wind, etc. – , biophonies

– voices, birds singing, humans walking, etc. – , or anthrophonies –

musical instruments, mechanical sounds, noises created by men (Krause

1968, 1998), sounds and noises create a sub-text of terror, where hearing

and listening match the activities of the eye (watching, seeing,

contemplating, gazing, staring…) in setting the tone, describing the

location, and soliciting the reader to prick up their ears in order to enjoy

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the truly full-dimensional experience of reading. Brown is opening the

path to Poe’s epiphany of sound, which is clearly stated in the incipit of

‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ (‘Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard

all things in the heaven and in the earth’, Poe 1967: 277) and

disseminated throughout his work.

The fact that Brown was interested in problematising the

predominance of sight is evident in one of his secondary characters,

Stephen Dudley. He is Costantia’s father in Ormond, or the Secret

Witness, and has attracted little attention though undoubtedly deserving

more careful scrutiny (Sato). After being financially ruined and losing his

wife, he then develops a cataract and soon becomes blind – though he

will later recover from his blindness thanks to a surgical operation.

Blindness is described as a severe disability – ‘He was shut out from the

light of heaven, and debarred of every human comfort’ (Brown 2009:

15) – and yet ‘It restored him to himself’ and encouraged him to play the

instruments he had played in his youth (Brown 2009: 21). Sato focuses

his interest on the situation of surgery at the time of the Republic, but

soundscape studies would certainly consider this part of the novel a fine

ground for analysis as far as the sonic environment of the late 18th-

century New World is concerned. Not only that: Dudley’s sight

disability ominously resounds with the Evil Eye of the aforementioned

tale by Poe.

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Brown’s novels are set in a period and in a territory characterised by a

low degree of background noise, or white noise; silence is a frequent

condition and vice versa it is almost impossible to find what Truax calls

‘aural crowding’ (2001: 140). In other words, the acoustic environment

we meet in the novels may be rightly called a ‘hi-fi soundscape’, which

means a soundscape which possesses a positive signal-to-noise ratio. In

this kind of environment, it is possible to hear discrete sounds clearly

from a distance since there are no disturbances obscuring the signals

(Schafer 2004: 29–38). It is interesting to observe that in this context –

be it urban or rural, be it night or day, be it outdoor or indoor – sound

clearly creates a robust ‘relationship between the individual and the

environment’ (Truax 2001: 94) where noise – commonly defined as a

‘disorder’ (Serres 1995: 21) or ‘a nuisance, an unwanted signal’ – reveals

itself as ‘a potentially meaningful element of communication’

(Schweighauser 2006: 3, 6).

In their Introduction to Ormond, Barnard and Shapiro rightly speak –

among other things – of the ‘distribution of gossip, rumor, and hearsay;

acts of secret surveillance bordering on and including voyeurism’, and

conclude that ‘Brown’s manner of writing in this novel seems to seek an

audience of secret witnesses’ (Barnard & Shapiro 2006a: xx–xxi). The

choice of the word ‘audience’ is interesting, as well as the repetition of

‘secret’. What is a secret, if not something that cannot be told? The

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priority of sight over sound is not to be questioned in this essay;

however, my opinion is that, alongside voyeurism and eye-witnesses,

eavesdropping, ear-witnesses, and overhearing also play a fundamental role

and participate in the American shift in taste from the traditional sights

of Europe to an appreciation of both the ‘picturesque’ local landscape

(Berthold 1984: 63) and of the ‘sublime’ wilderness (Berthold 1984: 67),

since the one does not exclude the other: in the romantic New World,

‘the picturesque traveler can attain safe perspectives, however dangerous

they may appear, from which to enjoy the aesthetic pleasures of the wild’

(Berthold 1984: 76).

Sounds, noises, and voices solicit, on the part of the reader and of the

scholar, the transposition into the literary text of what is called an

‘auditory scene analysis’, an expression coined by psychologist Albert

Bregman with reference to ‘a collection of questions that have to do with

hearing in the presence of multiple sound sources’ (Schnupp et al 2011:

223). If we take Wieland, for example, we can easily appreciate the sonic

quality of the text, which is well evident from the very beginning of the

story, and apply auditory scene analysis to such scenes as the following:

… the clock tolled. The sound appeared to communicate a shock to every part

of my father’s frame. … his joints trembled, and his teeth chattered with

dismay. … my mother … heard his steps …. An hour passed away in this

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state of suspense. … instantly a loud report, like the explosion of a mine,

followed. She uttered an involuntary shriek, but the new sounds that greeted

her ear, quickly conquered her surprise. They were piercing shrieks, and

uttered without intermission (16–17).

As we read on, we can go deeper into the texture and delve into the

origin of sounds, their personal or social meaning, the emotions aroused

by hearing them, their being in the foreground or in the background, the

presence (or absence) of soundmarks (particular sonic events which can

defined as the auditory counterparts of landmarks, see Truax 2001) – in

Wieland, for example, the tolls of the clock in chapter II and the sound

of war in chapter IV are recognizable soundmarks of a specific culture

and/or community.

Though the ‘sound of war’ may be interpreted as an example of

‘aesthetic distance’, i.e. as a reduction of war via the cognitive (sublime)

distance of aestheticization (Galluzzo 2009: 255), the fact that the author

chooses sound to evoke war is particularly meaningful from the point of

view of the soundscape. Of course, if war can be heard at a distance it

means that battles are not very far off, but they are not so near as to be

seen either. Moreover, you can close your eyes or shut a window, while

the aural sense cannot be closed at will: as Schafer simply states, ‘There

are no earlids’ (Schafer 1977: 11). As a consequence, we perceive sound

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with no interruption and with no filters – ‘The eye points outward; the

ear draws inward. It soaks up information’ (Schafer 1977: 11).

The sound of time belongs to a category which Schafer calls ‘sounds

that matter’. The clock of the novel not only measures time, but it does

so audibly, like church bells, thus creating a channel to the inner mind:

Its chimes are acoustic signals, but even at a subliminal level the incessant

rhythm of its ticking forms a keynote of unavoidable significance in the life of

Western Man. Clocks reach into the recesses of night to remind man of his

mortality. (Schafer 1977: 56)

Also, clocks belong to both the private and the public space, since they

‘unify and regulate the community’ (Schafer 1977: 56). And of course

the perception of their sound changes from day to night (Schafer 1977:

60–62). As for warfare and battlefields, they cannot but evoke

frightening, unpleasant, and ugly sensations.

In order to understand fully the dynamic character of soundscape and

become familiar with some concepts that can help us understand the

pages under examination in a somewhat unexplored fashion, we need to

grow familiar with some notions. Among these, aural architecture, based

on the fact that sounds from multiple sources interact with the various

spatial elements, and which, ‘with its own beauty, aesthetics, and

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symbolism, parallels visual architecture’ (Bless and Salter 2007: 2, 3);

auditory space awareness, which includes ‘the emotional and behavioural

experience of space’ and refers to ‘all parts of aural experience’: sensation,

perception, and affect (Bless and Salter 2007: 11, 14); and simultaneous

segregation, which is ‘the ability to “hear out” multiple sounds that occur

at the same time’ (Schnupp et al 2011: 224), also called the ‘party effect’.

2. A dealer in probabilities

Let us take Edgar Huntly. Although it may duly be considered the first

American detective novel (Landrum 1999), there is no real detective, not

at least in the professional sense that we have been used to after Edgar

Allan Poe’s Auguste Dupin or even Tim Burton’s Ichabod Crane12. And

yet, the protagonist acts like a detective and deals with crime. Since

criminal inquiry regards both the personal level of the characters and

American history, in particular the relationships between natives and

immigrants, we can possibly argue that the proto-American detective acts

as a romantic hero in a land torn between sublime wilderness and

compelling modernity where – to quote Sherlock Holmes’s well known

motto – ‘the game is afoot’.

True, Edgar returns to the scene of the crime in response to moral

12 Ichabod Crane, a schoolmaster in ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’, a ghost story by Washington Irving (1820) set in 1790, is reinterpreted as a 24-year-old New York City police officer in 1799 by film director Tim Burton in Sleepy Hollow (1999).

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demands, and his investigation is perpetually deferred – see the long

ellipsis when he sleep-walks into the wilderness (Downes 1996: 214,

417); yet he embodies the typical figure of the detective when he

commits himself to reason: ‘Reason was no less an antidote to the

illusions of insanity like his, than to the illusions of error’ (Brown 2006a:

66).

Quite interestingly, Brown himself, in his essay entitled ‘The

Difference Between History and Romance’ (1800), gives us an

extraordinary clue which enables us to detect the detective – please

forgive the pun – in his novels:

… Curiosity is not satisfied with viewing facts in their disconnected state and

natural order, but is prone to arrange them anew, and to deviate from present

and sensible objects, into speculations on the past or future; it is eager to infer

from the present state of things, their former or future condition.

The observer or experimentalist, therefore, who carefully watches, and

faithfully enumerates the appearances which occur, may claim the appellation

of historian. He who adorns these appearances with cause and effect, and

traces resemblances between the past, distant, and future, with the present,

performs a different part. He is a dealer, not in certainties, but probabilities,

and is therefore a romancer. (Brown 2006 B: 233).

Apart from the rather expected prevalence of visual imagery to define

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both the historian and the fictional writer (viewing, speculations, observer,

watches), we find many elements in both categories which perfectly fit

the definition of a detective: namely, a person who connects facts, who is

capable of inference (a synonym for deduction), who knows the nature

and bonds of cause and effect (principle of causality), who traces

resemblances (criminal profiling), and – most astonishingly of all – who

deals in probabilities, which literally prefigures Sherlock Holmes’ famous

motto from A Study in Scarlet (1887): ‘when you have eliminated the

impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth’

(Doyle 1981: 111).

Brown’s detectives are therefore not necessarily professional

investigators. On the contrary, they act within a familiar, domestic

milieu. Nonetheless, they could, in some ways, be thought of as ante

litteram ‘private eyes’– or better, ‘private ears’ as we shall see – and the

eager interpreters of a hybridisation between history and romance, which

accounts for their double layered performativity: both as American

citizens of the New World and as individuals caught in their intimacy

which includes their romantic quest (or proto-detection) into the wild.

As Brown writes in his foreword note ‘To the Public’ in Edgar Huntly,

America offers a new ‘field of investigation’ which differs greatly from

Europe, urging the writer to operate a ‘suitable’ change of scenery from

the Gothic castle to ‘Indian hostility, and the perils of the western

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wilderness’ (Brown 2006a: 4).

Since the writer/narrator is like an amateur investigator, and his

narrator/character an amateur detective (both can do without a Watson-

like service for the time being), all idealised landscape descriptions and

romanticised weather reports – sublime as they may be – are intertwined

with plots made up of wondering, questioning, suspense, murderous

thinking, and crime (un)solving which betray an inner anxiety towards

the construction of identity in the New World (from citizenship to

Americanness). Prolix letter-writers, biloquist characters, and

sleepwalkers cannot really be said to belong to the sublime, nor to fit in

the picturesque; rather, they apparently represent a sort of connection

between the sublime and the subliminal, providing the missing link with

modernity.

From this perspective, ventriloquism can be considered a manifest

signal of the delusion of the double, or – in other words – the foreteller

of that crisis of identity which in Europe will only explode one century

later in Dr Jekyll’s laboratory. One might think that the unique

experience of the late 18th-century distinctively American territories

(inhabited by threatening Indians as well as by the signatories of the

Constitution and also African slaves) not only fostered a sort of alchemy

between history and romance, but accelerated that very rite of passage

which coincided with the process of deconstruction of the so called

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individual (from the Latin: something, or someone, that is impossible to

divide). Just as the century was approaching its end, while the earliest

futuristic utopias appeared in many European countries during the last

decades of the 18th century (Clarke 1979: 37), and prophecies of

universal desolation came in the first two decades of the next century (for

example, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, 1826, or Lord Byron’s

‘Darkness’, 1816), the New World experienced an ‘anxiety about the

constitution of American society itself’ and its early fiction showed a

‘darkness suggestive of individual pathology’ (Botting 1996: 117).

In this context, the Gothic represents a fitting register for the

American hero/ine, who is torn between the vision of a sublimely almost

empty landscape (no ruined castles are to be found in America) and the

terror from within – be it the Devil, the super-ego, or a voice from the

closet as happens in Wieland, where ‘the concept of voice, so recently

emblematic of rational autonomy, became a provocative figure of

unreason’ (Judson 2010: 23). Voice has a long history: it has been

considered a sign of divine presence, of moral agency, and now – in the

new American republic – it has become ‘a potent symbol of the citizen’s

right to participate’ (Judson 2010: 23). In Wieland, however, voice

represents the hard core of that very ‘crisis of the uncanny’ (Judson 2010:

29) which demands rational investigation.

In other words, by representing an attempt to redeem ‘the improbable

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and marvelous’ (Fiedler 1979: 135), Brown’s Gothic fiction calls for the

skills of a true investigator (the detective story, though considered ‘horror

pornography’, is the ‘heir of the Gothic’ according to Fiedler) and for a

process of self-analysis – as happens in Edgar Huntly, ‘the account of a

young man who begins by looking for guilt in others and ends finding it

in himself’ (Fiedler 1979: 156–157).

3. Hearing spaces

Brown’s (self)detective is also – as anticipated – a listener. Analogously to

Chandler’s and Hammett’s hard-boiled PIs – who, almost one century

and a half later, will roam in the nocturnal 20th century metropolis

looking and watching for clues, and whose bodies will be fragmented by

the sado-voyeuristic surgical knife of the camera in the film noir –

Brown’s detective (I am borrowing the following expression by Blesser

and Salter: 12) ‘hears space’.

In Wieland, it is Clara – a woman, and the narrator – who takes the

burden of the quest upon herself. In a story packed with sounds, noises,

voices, whispers, footsteps, door-knocking, overhearing, etc., Clara’s

‘listening attitude’ (51) or auditory space awareness is the engine of the

plot. Such attitude encourages her to make ‘inquiries’ and ‘conjectures’

(54) and even though she admits she could have ‘mistaken’ the sounds

and been misled by her own ‘imagination’ (51), she is a champion of

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simultaneous segregation and always keeps questioning and doubting till

the end of the novel, like a real detective – ‘Yet if a human being had

been there, could be fail to have been visible? Which of my senses was

the prey of a fatal illusion?’ (71). Even when she is terrified on hearing

the voice coming from the interior of the closet, she does not lose control

but acknowledges the necessity of analysing aural architecture. True, her

rationality wavers at times – ‘By what means could he hide himself in

this closet? Surely he is gifted with supernatural power’ (77) – and she

sometimes hesitates – ‘Should I confide in the testimony of my ears?’

(83). Nonetheless, she never refuses to hear, not even when she is

unjustly accused by Pleyel. On the contrary, she accuses him of not

hearing her: ‘He has judged me without hearing’ (85).

Clara soon perceives that she has fallen victim to a wicked scheme, but

she also knows that to prove her innocence is a hard job; therefore, she

trains herself in reasoning like a real detective:

… how was this error to be unveiled? What but my own assertion had I to

throw in the balance against it? Would be this permitted to outweigh the

testimony of his senses? I had no witnesses … (89)

His opinion was not destitute of evidence: yet what proofs could reasonably

avail to establish an opinion like this? If the sentiments corresponded not with

the voice that was heard, the evidence was deficient; but this want of

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correspondence would have been supposed by me if I had been the auditor

and Pleyel the criminal. But mimicry might still more plausibly have been

employed to explain the scene. (91)

‘O!’ I exclaimed, in a voice broken by sobs, ‘what a task is mine! Compelled to

hearken to charges which I feel to be false, but which I know to be believed by

him that utters them; believed too not without evidence, which, though

fallacious, is not implausible.’ (94)

Even though mimicry is later explained as biloquism, and Carwin’s

experiments in echo and ventriloquism may be read either as clear

symptoms of his own social frustration (Barnard & Shapiro 2009 B: xli)

or as a sublimation of real (pre-revolutionary) terrors (Galluzzo 2009:

256), the outcast’s double voice can be also interpreted as an

extraordinary epiphany of the soundscape of inner consciousness, which

is the true ground for Clara’s investigation. The strange voice is a clear

element of disturbance – a noise more than a sound – the more so

because it comes from the closet, which ought to suggest domestic space,

intimacy, and belonging. The complex chain of negations – not without

evidence, not implausible – reinforces the impalpable, invisible, and

vanishing quality of sound, which demands not only to be listened to,

but to be believed as true. The suggestion that the voice could have been

‘counterfeited’ (94) acquires force, and the lexicon of detection lurks

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between the lines:

The scenes that I had witnessed were revived, became the theme of

deliberation and deduction … (122)

‘Madness, say you? Are you sure? Were not these sights, and these sounds,

really seen and heard?’ (135)

‘I believe the agency to be external and real, but not supernatural’ (135)

‘All is wildering conjecture’ (135)

Where is the proof, said I, that daemons may not be subjected to the control

of men? This truth may be distorted and debased in the minds of the

ignorant. (137)

In the end, all that Carwin the biloquist asks for is just ‘a patient

audience’ (149): he is eager to render his confession, even though he is

not the murderer we should expect him to be. But a few pages before the

end of the long narrative, Clara writes: ‘I did not listen’ (174).

The fractures between seeing and listening, listening and not listening,

the voice of God and the voice of the devil, all reflect the fractured

identity which is at the core of the novel. Similarly to what we find in

The Memoirs of Stephen Calvert, where interrogation, cross-examination,

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testimony, and silences pervade the dialogues, as in court proceedings, in

both works the arguments, counter-arguments, accusations:

… lack order and do not end in conclusive results, for the specter of the

double and the theme of mistaken identity haunts the text. Instead of order,

we find an uncanny vision of the dark mysteries of the self in which the

boundaries separating self and other are not clearly defined. (Edwards 2009:

217)

4. The Man of the Wild, or, The Silence of the Sleepwalkers

As Kojima has observed, differently from other novels by Brown there is

almost no voice of women in Edgar Huntly’s Memoir. Elizabeth Hind

states that the women in Edgar’s tale have no more voice than the

Indians (Hind 1997: 154): Edgar reports the words of the old Delaware

Indian matriarch as well as those of the captive girl he rescues, but the

reader does not ‘hear’ the sound of their voice. Language is mediated by

the narrator and among the nonspeaking characters we have, as we shall

see, both the Native warriors and the somnambulists.

Most critics have seen Clithero as Edgar’s double or alter ego, but the

challenge is to investigate the reason for this identification and the

motive for his becoming a somnambulist (Christophersen 1993). Maybe

one reason could be the one proposed by Kojima, who puts it in relation

to male sentimentalism and defines him ‘the man of feeling in American

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wilderness’ (Kojima: 8), or Burgett, who speaks of ‘melodrama of

sentimental manhood’ (Burgett 1998: 116). The fact that Edgar first

meets Clithero as a sleepwalker is obviously crucial and accounts for his

following speculation on the strange ‘disease’ – also called ‘malady’ and

‘misery’ – which is perceived as mental disorder. But it soon becomes

apparent that this condition, being strictly linked with consciousness and

brain activity, cannot be cured. More so: it is contagious (otherwise

Edgar would not become a sleepwalker himself).

It is not impossible that homoerotism might be involved: Giuliano has

observed Edgar’s ‘adolescent lack of submission to the “patriarchal

scheme” of hetero-sexuality’ and has suggested that the racial panic

which he shows might be about heterosexuality as well (Giuliano 1998:

16). Even without taking into consideration what Sedgwick calls ‘the

Unspeakable’ (Sedgwick 1985), we can see that behind the rational

construction of the story there is a strong secondary drive to repress or

forget. The result is ‘a narrative that continually strives to alter or defer

its own traumatic content’ (Bellis 1987: 44). The more the narrator tries

to control his tale, the more new dangerous tales threaten his own

authority and reliability. A rather convincing psychoanalytic

interpretation in this sense has been given by Leonard Cassuto, who has

argued that Indians – as seen through Edgar’s eyes – are ‘the lens through

which to discern the effect of his childhood trauma’ (Cassuto 1993:

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118). We shall here try to understand the aural counterpart of Edgar’s

‘bizarre quest’ (Cassuto 1993: 118), which begins at the very moment

when he listens to Clithero’s long tale: as a matter of fact, ‘it is after

hearing Clithero’s story that Edgar begins to behave like him (Luciano

1998: 6, my italics).

Huntly first encounters Clithero when he, wanting to revisit the site of

Waldegrave’s murder, wanders from his homeward path into a ‘trackless

and intricate’ wilderness (8). Here he sees and decides to follow a

sleepwalker, Clithero Edny, through a ‘rugged, picturesque, and wild’

region, to a hidden cave (15). As Giuliano writes, ‘contrary to what

traditional readings of the novel would lead one to expect, Edgar’s most

painful “fall” is not the fall into pure sensation but into rational thought’

(Giuliano 1998: 22).

The protagonist’s ‘rational investigation of the irrational’ (Bellis 1987:

45) transforms him into a sui generis detective, who is extraordinarily

similar to the nameless narrator following a man through a crowded

London in Edgar Allan Poe’s walk narrative ‘The Man of the Crowd’

(1840). Here we are in a different context – in the middle of the

American wilderness, half a century before – but the compulsion to

follow the man in the darkness, the desire to investigate the ‘recesses of

[his] soul’, and the allure exerted by the ‘inscrutable’ enigma of a murder

are of the same sort. What is different is the sublime fractal geometry of

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the location:

The track into which he now led me … was a maze, oblique, circuitous,

upward and downward, in a degree which only could take place in a region so

remarkably irregular in surface, so abounding in hillocks and steeps, and pits

and brooks as Solebury. It seemed to be the sole end of his labours to bewilder

or fatigue his pursuer, to pierce into the deepest thickets, to plunge into the

darkest cavities, to ascend the most difficult heights, and approach the slippery

and tremulous verge of the dizziest precipices. (17)

The perception of the environment, which is rendered through the

double filter of Edgar’s past altered state of consciousness and his present

rationalizing narrative, is also different from the Man of the Crowd’s

since it is more focused on the pursuer than on the pursued:

I plunged into obscurities, and clambered over obstacles, from which, in a

different state of mind, and with a different object to pursuit, I should have

recoiled with invincible timidity. (18, my italics).

As he himself much later admits,

One image runs into another, sensations succeed in so rapid a train, that I

fear, I shall be unable to distribute and express them with sufficient

perspicuity … I am conscious to a kind of complex sentiment of distress and

95

forlornness that cannot be perfectly portrayed by words; but I must do as well

as I can. In the utmost vigour of my faculties, no eloquence that I possess

would do justice to the tale. (106)

Such ‘compression and condensation’ (Bellis 1987: 49) is obviously

characteristic of dreams: ‘The external world itself becomes an

internalised mental landscape, as Huntly’s thoughts turn “wildering and

mazy” (107). Outer and inner “wildering” mazes form a single

dreamscape.’ (Bellis 1987: 49).

It is quite easy for us to recognise these oneiric qualities after Freud

and after the dynamics of sleep and wakeful dream have been long

explored. But Brown lived at the end of the 18th century, when

somnambulism had just started to be studied in a scientific way. It would

be interesting to compare Edgar’s sleepwalking with Rip Van Winkle’s

sound sleep in Washington Irving’s homonymous tale (1819). There, the

protagonist sleeps undisturbed for the whole period of the American

revolution, having drunk the liquor offered to him by some mysterious

men while wandering with his dog in the wilderness; here, on the

contrary, Edgar undergoes a devastating psychological process of self-

alienation which allows Brown to problematise not only the

physiological/psychological quality of sleep and its relations with the

mind’s activities, but also ‘the patterns of imperialism, expansionism, and

96

racialism that he depicts in Edgar Huntly.’ (Barnard & Shapiro 2006:

xix)

Third, the soundscape is totally different. London is full of noises,

while the forest is silent. The return of the irrational forces Edgar has

tried to repress (Bellis 1987: 52) eventually becomes manifest in the

episodes of the echo. In chapter X, after a few pages without sounds,

surrounded as Edgar is by perfect silence, he unexpectedly sees Clithero

and calls out. But his voice reverberates across the rocks and Clithero,

though hearing it, cannot make out its source:

All that I could do was to speak. 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! … He was conscious of the voice, but not of the quarter whence it

came (72).

In chapter XVI, when Edgar awakens in the cave (another good example

of aural architecture), he cannot remember his own past, he has no idea

about time or space, and is overwhelmed by silence. The only way in

which he can locate himself in this wilderness and in the utter darkness

‘is to cry out – it is the echo of his own voice, its belated simulacrum,

that he recognizes as resembling an echo heard at a point in his earlier

rambles’ (Bellis 1987: 50). In so doing, he shows deep auditory space

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awareness:

I now exerted my voice, and cried as loud as my wasted strength would

admit. Its echoes were sent back to me in broken and confused sounds from

above. … To acquaint me as far as was possible, with the dimensions of the

place, I had hallooed with all my force, knowing that sound is reflected

according to the distance and relative positions of the substances from which

it is repelled.

The effects produced by my voice on this occasion resembled, with

remarkable exactness, the effect which was then produced. Was I then shut up

in the same cavern? Had I reached the brink of the same precipice and had

been thrown headlong into that vacuity? Whence else could arise the bruises

which I had received, but from my fall? … it was only possible to conclude

that I had come hither on my intended expedition and had been thrown by

another, or had, by some ill chance, fallen into the pit. (109).

In a suggestive anticipation of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Pit and the

Pendulum’ (1842), Heisenberg’s Principle of Indeterminacy (1927) and

Schrödinger’s Cat experiment (1935), Edgar’s position – is he on the

brink of the precipice or at the bottom of the pit? – cannot be stated with

certainty. Not only that: voice itself – an instrument of communication

and control – becomes ‘a sign of the dissolution of identity, the division

of the self into mutually unrecognizable elements’ (Bellis 1987: 50). It

follows that Edgar’s alienated self may be seen almost as being, as it were,

98

culturally vampirised by his own repressed twin-ego – which explains

why, after this experience, he starts killing animals and then Indians out

of an involuntary as much as uncontrollable impulse.

My interpretation is not in total conflict with Cassuto’s; according to

him, ‘his powerful response to the Indians results from unconscious guilt

over his parents’ deaths, a guilt that motivates Edgar from childhood,

without his own knowledge’ (Cassuto 1993: 120). I also agree that ‘he

learns a thing or two about the transplanted Gothic horrors of the

American wilderness’ (Cassuto 1993: 120), yet I think childhood trauma

alone cannot account for his rage. It would be the same as saying that

Jekyll’s transformation into Hyde originates in a childhood trauma. Nor

do I fully agree with Barbara Judson, who – though recognising that

‘these voices deliver eerie impressions of the inner self, the secret

thoughts and feelings hidden from conscious scrutiny’, attributes them to

the Puritan influence of sin, rather than to secret forces at work within

the psyche (Judson 2010: 21). I rather see Edgar’s dissolution of identity

and self-alienation as a crisis congenital to the post-European man on the

verge of entering the crucible of Crèvecoeur’s Alma Mater. An early

example of Manifest Destiny, as it has been often considered (Barnard &

Shapiro 2006: xix), this novel certainly deals with political issues while

remaining anchored to the extremely private level of the protagonist’s fall

into mental turbulence.

99

It is worthwhile to note that, despite the prevalence of sight in the first

part of the story (observation, exploration, etc.) in comparison with

sound (‘His evenings were spent in incommunicative silence’: 19; ‘My

companion preserved a mournful and inviolable silence’: 21; ‘He was

irresolute and silent’: 22; etc.), the natural soundscape with its geophonies

and biophonies (Krause 1968) participates actively both in the

construction of the plot and in the very process of (outward and inward)

detection: ‘My attention has often been excited by the hollow sound

which was produced by my casual footsteps … A mountain-cave and the

rumbling of an unseen torrent, are appendages of this scene’: 17).

Human sounds or anthrophonies (Krause 1968) however, often reveal

their fallacy. If Clithero exclaims, in the course of his long confession,

‘How propitious, how incredible was this event! I could scarcely confide

in the testimony of my senses’ (41), Edgar cross-questions himself as a

real investigator, relying upon logical reasoning (the ‘sufficient grounds’)

rather than on sensory information – ‘Was this error to be imputed to

credulity? Would not any one, from similar appearances, have drawn

similar conclusions? Or is there a criterion by which truth can always be

distinguished?’ (63) – and also showing he appreciates the value of

evidence: ‘My apprehensions were surely built upon sufficient grounds’

(65).

The narrator chooses writing as the privileged means of report and

100

communication. True, he is a story-teller, but we (the reader) know that

he is writing a memoir. As already said, women are given no voice, and

the muteness of the Indians has attracted the attention of many scholars.

However, as Cassuto observes, ‘the Indians aren’t the only mutes in the

story: there are also the sleepwalkers. Edgar and Clithero are silent while

sleepwalking, a similarity which forges an unacknowledged tie between

Edgar and his Indian foes. The utter savagery of their voiceless

transactions further draws them together.’ (Cassuto 1993: 123). And the

fact that Edgar is mostly characterised by acts of non-speech (or ‘wilful

silence’) and ‘writes everything in letters’ allows silence to ‘make it easier

to hear the competing and conflicting voices of Edgar’ (Cassuto 1993:

126).

Sounds, noises, voices, and silences, as we have seen, provide a rich

repertory of meanings in Charles Brockden’s Brown works. Moreover, all

activities connected with hearing and listening – eavesdropping, ear-

witnesses, overhearing, etc. – interface with the environment as well as

with the domestic milieu, thus encouraging, on the part of both the

characters and the readers, an intense activity of detection in the

soundscape. The notions of auditory spaces, aural architecture, and

simultaneous segregation, prove also very valuable to interpretive aims

and to full appreciate the historical and cultural context. Together with

picturesque and sublime landscapes, they help the reader and the scholar

101

to have a more complete image of the chronotope under examination

and, in our specific case, to better understand the process of formation of

the figure of the detective as a researcher into sound as well as into visual

evidence. To both ends, soundscape studies do offer precious

instruments of research and analysis.

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