Who Killed Waldegrave?

Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury: The question for consideration here constitutes literary double jeopardy. Our defendant, Edgar Huntly, has been tried for the crime of murder in the past-see Bernard v. Huntly (1967)-and was found guilty. But, Huntly escaped the hangman’s noose, for post-1967 criticism of Charles Brockden Brown’s 1799 novel Edgar Huntly has only casually flirted with the idea that Edgar himself might be implicated in some fashion in Waldegrave’s murder. A slayer of Indians, of course, but the murderer of his friend, the brother of his beloved Mary Waldegrave? Surely not. Fortunately, the US. Constitution does not extend Fifth Amendment privileges to literary somnambulists, so despite Huntly’s peremptory plea of autrefis convict, let us drag him back before the bar. Edgar Huntly has generated a sizeable body of probing criticism in the past couple of decades and has been a favorite among postcolonial critics, cultural critics, and others who find the text fertile territory for mapping out some of the complexities of early republican literature in America. And even though I may risk appearing sophomoric in the midst of this wave of delicately nuanced, culturally rich criticism of the novel, in this essay I simplywish to address a matter of plot. Whatever else Edgar Hunt@ may be, and whatever else it may have to say about life in the earliest years of the republic, Brown’s novel is, at its core, a murder mystery, and although its title character is no Sam Spade or Continental Op, he is, nevertheless, a self-styled detective seeking his friend’s killer. Or, in Huntly’s own words: “Once more I asked, who was his assassin? By what motives could he be impelled to a deed like this?”’ Huntly provides answers to these two questions in the novel: Waldegrave was killed in a chance meeting with a lone Native American on a quest to wreak vengeance for accumulated wrongs on the first settler he should meet. That settler was Waldegrave. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It could have been anyone. It is easy to take Huntly at his word, as most critics do, but to do so is certainly risky business, for Huntly is a notoriously unreliable narrator, and, simply put, his explanation-revealed as an afterthought at the end of the narrative in a brief passage-is unsatisfjmg enough to warrant an inquisitive second glance. If we momentarily set aside Huntly’s own explanation regarding Waldegrave’s murder and reexamine Edgar Huntly in a fresh effort to answer the question Huntly himself poses at the beginning of the narrative, the evidence-perhaps overwhelmingly so-points to none other than Huntly himself.