Sixth Senses and Vocal Glens: Autistic Nation-Building in Charles Brockden Brown’s Echolocational Fiction

This essay de-gothicizes Charles Brockden Brown’s sonic portrayals of cognitive disability. Led by “idiot” and “monster” Nick Handyside, Brown’s neurodivergent characters navigate an unlit American wilderness guided by echoes. This practice, later named “echolocation,” was discovered during the 1790s in scientific experiments that Brown and his circles chronicled as a quest for a “sixth sense.” In his fiction, Brown relates echolocators’ “sixth sense” to sensory-processing, communicational, and sociality traits today associated with autism. The result is not a horror show but a model of individual and national growth that prioritizes acoustics over semantics, relationality over persuasion, neuroplasticity over rationalism.