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After spending a night chasing through "the wilds around Norwalk" after his alter ego Clithero Edny, Edgar Huntly returns to his uncle's farm to a night of fitful sleep. From within a half-waking, half-sleeping state, Edgar's murdered friend Waldegrave appears to him, like the ghost of King Hamlet evincing "inquietude and anger," Edgar believes. "Some service or duty remained to be performed by me," Edgar continues, "which I had culpably neglected: to inspirit my zeal, to awaken my remembrance, and incite me to the performance of this duty, did this glimmering messenger, this half-indignant apparition, come" (I30). Like young Hamlet before him, Edgar is reminded of his duty to avenge a murder; and like Hamlet, he has been distracted by his own self-absorption, though he several times writes, in his letter to Mary Waldegrave that comprises Edgar Huntly, that he lives only for revenge, after which he cares not whether he lives to relate the tale: "To die thus speedily, and after some atonement was made for those who had already been slain, was sweet" (I87).
Edgar Huntly's reenactment of the revenge plot extends beyond vengeance for an isolated loss to encompass political, economic, and structural contours of not only the revenge tragedy but also a revenge culture, defined by Charles Hallett and Elaine Hallett as a society undergoing change on a grand scale such that its "myth of civilization," the symbolism providing basic understanding and regulation of passions, has begun to crumble, to be replaced by a new controlling myth. The novel's revenge elements both establish the basis for Edgar's actions and enter the current dialogue about economic policy and practice, a discussion registering the shift in power, during the American I790s, from a landed to an entrepreneurial class.
The liberalizing political practices in the new United States were during the time of Edgar Huntly's production accompanied by a move from an economy of landownership to an economics of paper currency and speculation run by a decidedly entrepreneurial class, such that more than a decade after Independence, the U.S. myth of civilization was still undergoing adjustment to the new social order of civic and economic interdependence. As several historians of the past twenty years have argued, this "federalist" decade of the I790s saw more...