Haunted Wilderness and the Gothic Frontier

In Voices in the Darkness, we explored the uncanny kinship between Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 novel Wieland and Robert Eggers’ 2015 film The Witch, tracing how each uses isolation, religious fervor, and psychological disintegration to probe the fragility of reason in the face of the unknown. In this companion study, we turn to Brown once again—this time to his 1799 novel Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker—and draw it into conversation with The Revenant, the 2002 novel by Michael Punke and its widely acclaimed 2015 film adaptation directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. At first glance, the pairing may seem less obvious. Brown’s tangled 18th-century prose, obsessed with sleepwalking and moral ambiguity, stands in contrast to The Revenant’s sparse, corporeal violence and stark, frozen visuals. Yet beneath their aesthetic and historical differences lies a deep thematic resonance.

Both works inhabit what we might call the Gothic frontier—a space at once geographical and psychological, where wilderness becomes a crucible for the white subject confronting Otherness, both within and without. In these narratives, the American landscape is not passive or sublime in the Romantic sense but active, uncanny, and perilous. The mountains and forests of Pennsylvania in Edgar Huntly, and the frozen river valleys of the upper Missouri in The Revenant, are not neutral backdrops. They are sites of encounter with the irrational: environments that dissolve Enlightenment order and force a reckoning with fear, trauma, and the violence of self-preservation.

In both texts, the protagonists are lone white men navigating a world defined by betrayal, disorientation, and Indigenous presence—a presence that is alternately spectral, threatening, redemptive, and erased. These narratives are shaped by the anxieties of their times but share a common cultural logic: the belief that the frontier is a place of moral and existential testing, where civilization is stripped away and the individual is laid bare. In Brown’s case, this often manifests as a descent into madness disguised as rational inquiry; in Iñárritu’s, it is rendered in bodily suffering, silence, and elemental confrontation.

Yet if both works reflect a white subjectivity haunted by the wilderness, they also participate—whether intentionally or not—in the ongoing distortion of frontier history. The Indigenous peoples who inhabit these landscapes are rarely centered in their own right. Instead, they often serve as catalysts, ghosts, or narrative abstractions—symbols rather than subjects. This essay seeks not only to compare Edgar Huntly and The Revenant in literary and cinematic terms but to unpack the cultural inheritance they share: a lineage of American storytelling that confuses the horrors of the frontier with the horrors brought to it.

As we will argue, the wilderness of the American Gothic is not a blank space to be mapped or conquered, but a mirror held up to the settler mind, reflecting the disorientation, guilt, and contradictions of a colonial psyche. Edgar Huntly and The Revenant, separated by over two centuries, are linked by this mirror—each distorting and illuminating, each echoing the same haunted cry in the wilderness.

The Frontier as Gothic Space

To understand the kinship between Edgar Huntly and The Revenant, we must first recognize that both belong to a distinct mode of storytelling in American literature: the Gothic frontier narrative. This mode, unlike its European predecessor, does not rely on decaying castles or medieval lineages for its sense of dread. Instead, it relocates the Gothic to a New World environment—vast, unmapped, and filled with what Enlightenment rationality could not comprehend or control. Here, the haunted house becomes the haunted landscape; the supernatural gives way to psychological rupture; and the oppressive family is replaced by the burden of history, guilt, and the self.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the American frontier was already a contested and symbolically overloaded space. For white settlers and early American authors, it represented both possibility and peril: a blank slate for utopian reinvention and a hostile void populated by native inhabitants who defied simple categorization. Charles Brockden Brown was among the first to use this space not as an exotic backdrop, but as a psychological territory—an unstable zone where Enlightenment values of reason, order, and self-control were repeatedly overwhelmed by dream logic, primal fear, and the inexplicable.

In Edgar Huntly, Brown strips away the creaking floorboards and gloomy abbeys of traditional Gothic and instead plunges the reader into caves, forests, cliffs, and darkness—spaces that disorient the senses and defy coherent mapping. Huntly, our narrator, loses not only his bearings but his moral compass. As he descends—literally and figuratively—into the earth, the novel mirrors this descent into the irrational mind. His actions, particularly his violence against Indigenous people, emerge not from deliberate malice but from a collapse of categories: sleep and wake, reason and instinct, guilt and justification. The Gothic terror here is not some spectral foe but the frightening elasticity of the self, when untethered from law, society, or light.

Over two centuries later, The Revenant resurrects this vision of the frontier as a Gothic space, albeit through a new visual and physical language. The film replaces Brown’s florid prose with stark silence, breath, snow, and flesh, but the effect is similar: the viewer is immersed in a wilderness that is not sublime but overwhelming. This is not nature-as-peaceful or even neutral; it is nature as active antagonist—brutal, indifferent, and spiritually charged. Alejandro Iñárritu’s camera lingers on the wind in the trees, the steaming breath of animals, the sound of ice cracking beneath feet. These are not atmospheric flourishes. They serve the same function as Brown’s obsessive attention to stone, blood, and darkness: to dissolve the line between the real and the uncanny, and to question whether human beings can survive—let alone preserve their moral integrity—in such a place.

In both works, the frontier becomes a kind of liminal realm, neither civilized nor entirely wild, neither dream nor reality. It is a space of testing and transformation, where the protagonists emerge not enlightened but altered—damaged, isolated, and morally ambiguous. The land does not offer redemption. It offers only confrontation: with death, with the Other, and with the fractured self.

This Gothic framing of the frontier is not a neutral aesthetic choice. It reveals a deeper cultural pattern: the way settler literature often projects internal instability and cultural anxiety onto the landscape itself. The American wilderness, in these narratives, is haunted not by native ghosts but by colonial fears, repressed violence, and the inability to reconcile identity with history.

Edgar Huntly: Madness in the Rocks

Edgar Huntly begins, like many Gothic tales, with a murder—and a letter. But the horror that unfolds is not the product of a supernatural agent or villainous scheme. Instead, it emerges from the unstable terrain of the protagonist’s own mind and the unforgiving landscape that mirrors it. From the outset, Brown draws the reader into a world where certainty—of motive, memory, and morality—erodes beneath the pressure of grief, sleeplessness, and inexplicable behavior. The titular narrator, in seeking to uncover the truth about his friend Waldegrave’s death, stumbles instead into a personal abyss that Brown maps with obsessive detail across rock faces, hidden caves, and sleepless nights.

The motif of somnambulism, or sleepwalking, defines the novel’s psychological terrain. Both Huntly and Clithero, the mysterious figure he suspects of murder, exhibit episodes of unconscious wandering and violence. But Brown’s use of the motif is not simply medical or melodramatic—it is epistemological. Somnambulism in Edgar Huntly dramatizes the collapse of Enlightenment assumptions: that the self is coherent, that reason guides action, and that truth can be uncovered through investigation. Huntly, in attempting to decipher Clithero, is gradually revealed to be just as fragmented and unreliable. In the end, the novel’s horror lies not in what others do in the dark, but in the impossibility of fully knowing one’s own intentions.

This disorientation is mirrored in the novel’s physical spaces. The most harrowing passages take place not in drawing rooms or settlements, but in the caves and wilderness outside of society’s reach. Brown’s detailed, almost geological descriptions of the cliffside descent, the blackness of the caverns, and the blind groping through subterranean passageways function as an allegory for Huntly’s descent into his own unconscious. These are not merely backdrops—they are labyrinths of psyche, environments that dissolve linear time, cause, and judgment.

Violence, in this setting, becomes ambiguous. Huntly’s killing of the Lenni Lenape warriors—rendered in grim, physical detail—is positioned as necessary for survival, yet his narrative is laced with rationalization and moral hedging. He insists on his innocence, his instinctual reaction, and the lack of alternatives, yet the reader is left unsettled. Why does Huntly’s justification ring hollow? Because Brown, deliberately or not, stages a drama of colonial guilt. Huntly is not an invader, but a settler, and his violence is not gratuitous but “necessary”—precisely the framing through which Indigenous genocide was justified in American political discourse. His fragmented recollections, dreams, and sense of compulsion reflect a cracked moral subject, haunted not by ghosts but by the unresolved contradiction between American ideals and American violence.

Moreover, Brown destabilizes the very narrative form that would give such acts coherence. Huntly is our narrator, but his grasp on chronology and causality weakens as the novel progresses. He recalls things vaguely, inserts editorial justifications, and moves between philosophical reflection and visceral description in a way that renders his account suspect. Like the terrain he traverses, Huntly’s psyche is unmapped and possibly unmappable—a wilderness of contradictions and buried motives.

In this way, Edgar Huntly anticipates the psychological Gothic of Poe, the unreliable narrators of Hawthorne, and the dark frontier morality of later American literature. Brown shows that beneath the rhetoric of civilization lies a sleepwalker, capable of atrocity, haunted by the void, and unable to reconcile his actions with his identity. The frontier is not merely where the savage dwells—it is where the settler becomes savage and can no longer tell the difference.

The Revenant: Flesh, Ice, and Fire

Where Edgar Huntly offers a descent into the psychological wilderness of a fractured narrator, The Revenant immerses us in a bodily wilderness where survival itself becomes a form of horror. Michael Punke’s novel and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s film adaptation both fictionalize the real-life ordeal of frontiersman Hugh Glass, who was mauled by a grizzly bear in 1823, left for dead by his companions, and crawled hundreds of miles through hostile terrain to seek revenge—or justice. But like Brown before them, both Punke and Iñárritu are ultimately less interested in historical accuracy than in mythic confrontation: between man and nature, man and death, man and himself.

In Punke’s novel, the narrative is taut, deliberate, and reflective of a literary tradition that balances heroic endurance with moral ambiguity. Glass’s journey is not only an external one across the American plains and river valleys, but an internal one—through pain, obsession, memory, and grief. Punke frames the story as a clash of codes: honor, loyalty, betrayal. Glass’s survival is heroic, but the narrative complicates this heroism by showing how revenge deforms the soul, even as it animates the body. The language is often stark and unadorned, in contrast to Brown’s florid prose, but the result is a similar focus on the thresholds of experience—what a human being can endure, and what must be left behind to endure it.

Iñárritu’s film intensifies and transforms these themes through its immersive visual grammar. The camera does not simply record Glass’s suffering—it enters it, lingering on breath, blood, and light refracting through ice. The director’s obsession with natural light and long takes creates a cinematic equivalent of Brown’s claustrophobic wilderness: not a symbolic backdrop but a visceral, inescapable reality that dominates the protagonist’s body and mind. DiCaprio’s Glass groans, crawls, gags, and screams his way through the film not as a noble avenger, but as a man reduced to pure instinct.

The film’s mystical overtones—dream sequences of his murdered son, visions of a ruined church, the weight of silence—echo Brown’s somnambulism and symbolic dislocation. Iñárritu, like Brown, turns the natural world into a space where linear time breaks down. Memories intrude on the present. The dead remain present. Pain replaces plot. And revenge, initially so clear, becomes strangely emptied of satisfaction. When Glass finally encounters Fitzgerald, the man who abandoned him, he ultimately chooses not to kill him—delivering him instead to the Arikara warriors, whose looming presence has haunted the film from the start. Whether this is mercy, fatigue, or spiritual reckoning is left open. But the gesture reframes the entire arc: Glass’s journey was never about justice in the Enlightenment sense. It was about enduring, and what is lost in the act of doing so.

The Arikara themselves are more fully realized than Indigenous figures in Brown’s work, yet they remain largely voiceless and mythic. Their presence is spectral, their motives unclear, their violence both justified and terrifying. Iñárritu gestures toward a postcolonial critique, hinting at the horrors of land theft and settler cruelty, but the narrative still orbits a white protagonist, whose suffering the audience is meant to inhabit and redeem. The Native woman who shelters Glass, the Arikara warriors who close the film, and the Pawnee guide who dies helping him all serve as moments of grace or justice—but they remain satellites around Glass’s agony, not agents of their own narrative.

What The Revenant achieves—perhaps unintentionally—is a cinematic re-inscription of the Gothic frontier: a place where man is unmade, where nature overwhelms, and where the body itself becomes a symbol of history’s brutal erasures. Glass, like Huntly, walks through a landscape that mirrors his own psychic disintegration. But in this telling, the disintegration is not veiled in metaphor—it is flesh, ice, fire, and silence. His resurrection is incomplete. He survives, but he is no longer entirely human.

Misperception, Projection, and the White Subject in the Frontier Myth

The white subject on the American frontier, whether Huntly in Brown’s novel or Glass in The Revenant, is never merely an explorer or survivor. He is a self-mythologizing figure, a product of his own projections as much as of the land he traverses. In both texts, the frontier is portrayed not just as a place of hardship, but as a mirror—one that reflects the internal fractures of settler identity back upon itself. Yet this mirror is fogged, warped by layers of cultural delusion, historical denial, and the profound misapprehension of the land and peoples encountered there.

Brown’s Edgar Huntly offers a strikingly early example of this pattern. Huntly begins his narrative convinced of his own clarity and moral purpose. He seeks truth, justice, perhaps even redemption for a murdered friend. But his journey becomes one of gradual epistemological collapse, as the rational tools he wields—deduction, memory, narrative—fail him in the face of dreams, darkness, and desperation. As he sleepwalks through caves and slaughters Native Americans with rocks and guns, he does so not in a frenzy of hatred, but under the guise of necessity. He cannot imagine another possibility. And neither, Brown suggests, can the culture that produced him.

This blindness is not incidental—it is foundational. Huntly sees the Indigenous figures he encounters not as people but as threats, puzzles, obstacles, or phantoms. Their language is unreadable, their motivations irrelevant. They are written out of personhood by the very structure of his narration. In doing so, Brown exposes the delusional solipsism of settler consciousness, in which the moral universe is centered entirely on the white self. The horror, then, is not that Huntly kills. It is that he can do so while continuing to believe himself innocent.

In The Revenant, we see a more ambivalent rendering of this same psychological architecture. Glass, unlike Huntly, has known personal intimacy with Native peoples—his wife was Pawnee, his son is mixed-race, and his Pawnee companion on the trail dies protecting him. The film allows occasional glimpses of Indigenous subjectivity, and it portrays settler violence, particularly in the characters of Fitzgerald and the French trappers, as cruel and exploitative. But Glass remains the narrative’s gravitational center. His suffering becomes the suffering of history itself, as if his ordeal can stand in for the brutality experienced on all sides.

This is the trap of the white frontier narrative: its capacity to absorb critique into myth, to show colonizer and colonized alike as victims of some greater, abstract force—Nature, Fate, Time—without ever confronting the structures of domination that made the violence possible. Glass is not a villain, but he is still a hero within a framework built on erasure. The Arikara, whose vengeance frames the film’s beginning and end, are never truly known. Their justice, while satisfying, is aesthetic—an image, a resolution, a gesture toward redress that cannot speak.

In both cases, then, the white subject’s confrontation with the wilderness is not only external but deeply hallucinatory. Huntly kills in his sleep. Glass survives in a trance of pain and grief. The Indigenous presence becomes symbolic, even mystical—reduced to haunting or salvation, never autonomy. These works reflect a settler imagination unable to fully see what it has done, and therefore doomed to wander in circles of guilt, fantasy, and disavowal.

It is important to understand this not as a flaw in the stories themselves, but as a symptom of the historical consciousness they express. The Gothic mode—especially as employed in American frontier fiction—does not emerge from a desire to demonize the other, but from a deeper and more corrosive uncertainty: the fear that the self, once stripped of civilization, is no different from the savage it condemns. The frontier, in these works, is not so much a battleground of cultures as a psychic wound, reopened each time the settler turns inward and finds only confusion, fear, and projection.

Thus, the horror is not the wilderness. It is the way the white subject brings that wilderness with him—within his own assumptions, his own guilt, his own refusal to reckon with the full humanity of the people already there.

Persistence and Evolution of the Gothic Frontier

The Gothic frontier did not vanish with the 19th century. It mutated. As the physical frontier was closed, surveyed, and absorbed into the mythos of American exceptionalism, the psychological and symbolic frontier expanded, migrating into fiction, cinema, and cultural memory. What began in Brown’s Edgar Huntly as a nightmare of disorientation and moral uncertainty survives into The Revenant—not just as echo, but as continuity. These works, separated by centuries, illustrate how deeply entrenched the frontier remains as a liminal space in the American imagination, where identity, morality, and history are blurred and tested.

In Brown’s time, the Gothic mode was a means of interrogating the instability of Enlightenment ideals under frontier conditions. Reason fails; the body becomes unreliable; the mind becomes a traitor to itself. Nature is not a source of clarity or harmony but a force that shatters coherence, revealing the fragility of the civilized self. These themes find new expression in The Revenant, where the landscape, now starkly visual and physical, continues to overwhelm the subject. Glass’s body becomes a battleground—between nature and will, grief and revenge, life and death. The film’s near-silent aesthetic recalls Brown’s claustrophobic darkness: both narrators grope through a world that cannot be made sense of.

What has changed, however, is the mode of delivery. Brown’s prose is dense, filled with rationalizations, classical allusions, and epistemological anxiety. Punke’s novel is lean and focused; Iñárritu’s film is immersive and elemental, full of breath and blood and frost. Yet the underlying structure—the Gothic collapse of certainty, the ambiguity of violence, the projection of fear onto the wilderness—remains intact. Both stories hinge on the unmaking of the protagonist, and both place that unmaking in a space haunted by histories the protagonist does not fully understand.

This persistence speaks to the unfinished business of American history. The Gothic frontier continues to recur because the questions it raises—about race, land, identity, and guilt—have not been resolved. Indeed, they have only deepened. As new generations of storytellers revisit these tropes, they may offer more complex or sympathetic renderings of Indigenous characters, more critique of settler logic, or more attention to the structural roots of violence. But the form itself—the white subject alone in a hostile wilderness, confronting madness, loss, and ambiguous morality—remains a central myth of the American narrative canon.

This is not merely a literary pattern. It reflects a deeper cultural psychology: the sense that America was born not from clarity but from rupture, not from consensus but from conflict and displacement. The Gothic mode, with its fascination with haunting, guilt, and the return of the repressed, offers a way to dramatize these truths without resolving them. In Brown’s era, this took the form of fragmented rationalism. In Iñárritu’s, it takes the form of cinematic immersion in suffering. In both cases, the past returns—not to be reconciled, but to be endured.

The question, then, is not whether these stories can "transcend" their roots in settler ideology. The question is whether they can help expose the emotional, moral, and symbolic costs of that ideology—and perhaps point, however obliquely, toward a different kind of reckoning.

Echoes in the Wilderness

In pairing Edgar Huntly with The Revenant, we are not merely tracing aesthetic parallels or thematic curiosities across time—we are uncovering a persistent structure of American self-understanding. Both works, though separated by more than two centuries, inhabit the same symbolic terrain: the wilderness as mirror, the frontier as trauma site, the settler as haunted subject. Brown’s somnambulist and Iñárritu’s wounded revenant are brothers in dislocation—sleepwalkers across a landscape that resists mastery and returns violence for intrusion.

These stories remind us that the American frontier was never just a place—it was, and remains, a psychological construct, a cultural projection, a zone of moral ambiguity where self and other dissolve under pressure. The Gothic mode offers these narratives a framework through which to explore contradiction, guilt, and the unconscious forces that shape violence. But it also allows something more: a way to register the cracks in the mythologies America tells about itself.

Neither Huntly nor Glass emerges whole. Huntly concludes his tale with unresolved moral ambiguity and suppressed horror. Glass, in the film, stares into the camera—into us—at the edge of exhaustion and meaning. Neither character reaches clarity or peace. They survive, but their survival does not redeem them. Instead, their journeys expose the internal distortions that shaped their descent: the hallucinated righteousness of the settler, the spectral rendering of the Indigenous Other, and the confusion of personal trauma with historical consequence.

In this way, both Edgar Huntly and The Revenant offer unintentional critiques of the narratives they seem to uphold. Brown may not have sought to indict settler violence, and Iñárritu may not dismantle the white male revenge arc as fully as he could—but both works, through their visceral depictions of disorientation, suffering, and the frontier’s refusal to yield to logic or justice, give us something rare: a glimpse of the American myth unraveling itself.

We return, then, to the haunted wilderness—not to escape history, but to witness its phantoms. To hear, in Brown’s caves and Iñárritu’s forests, the echoes of an unfinished reckoning. And perhaps to ask, finally: what new stories might emerge when the frontier is no longer defined by fear, projection, or conquest, but by presence, listening, and the long-overdue centering of voices long silenced?