Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly

“Edgar Huntly” by Charles Brockden Brown as experimental novel
In the area of Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, people had moral difficulties in the war against Indians, just like the settlers in early America, who killed the “savages” with no scruples. Aspects of these problems of human violence contributed to the development of the protagonist of “Edgar Huntly”, the novel by Charles Brockden Brown. The discussion in this essay will concern experiments and violent scenes in which the protagonist‘s mind is being analized and will reveal that the individual is unable to connect responsibly with human nature: Edgar Huntly replaces Lockean’s optimistic conception of the social nature of man by quite a pessimistic idea of Hobbes. Brown aim was probably to show the human mind as being capable of dealing with murder in a rational way.
However, Brown’s protagonist has a moral shortcoming. Edgar Huntly does not act rationally and justly during the war between the settlers and the Indians. Thomas Hobbes’ view of human nature
This worker from Ireland has almost killed his love there and wants to start a new life in America. He has nightmares and cannot sleep. In America, he has the chance to build a new self, but the suspicious society around him makes this impossible: Huntly’s investigations interfere with Clithero seeking the rest. He confesses his crimes to Huntly and then hides in caves. During sleepwalking, he leads Huntly into these caves, which can be seen as the human mind. Having revealed his secrets to Huntly, Clithero stays in the hut of the old Indian women and works on a farm – he lives in peace with nature. Huntly meets him there, and he recognizes that "His fatal and gloomy thoughts seemed to have somewhat yielded into tranquility". At the end of the novel, Huntly would better have agreed to what Clithero says when he accuses him of foolish