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"The Highest Province of Benevolence": Charles Brockden Brown's Fictional Theory JAMES DILLON His novels abound in superfluous characters and their plots lack cohesion . His intellectual career was strangely bifurcated: he was a Godwinian romantic in the 1790s but a jingoistic federalist in the 1800s. These and similar charges of inconsistency (variously attributed to haste, sloppiness, or psychic dysfunction) characterize critical appraisals of Charles Brockden Brown. Even Norman Grabo, in his friendly reading of Brown's novels, bases his advocacy for them on an acceptance of their fragmentation, which he calls "repetition." Steven Watts incorporates fragmentation (which he also calls "splintering" and "disintegration") as the major organizing principle of his recent literary biography of Brown. To Watts, Brown's novels are "meandering" and "inconsistent"; his career is dualistic, divided into periods of Godwinian romanticism and "bourgeois moralism"; and even Brown's consciousness is "schizoid" or "divided."1 In this essay I do not seek to prove that Brown's novels are all unified works, neatly-constructed fictions that late-twentieth-century readers should find irresistibly fascinating; nor that Watts and others who see Brown as a figure whose opinions and focus changed over the course of his career are wrong. Rather, I hope to describe a continuity in Brown's work, a continuity that perhaps will suggest how the gothic romancer of the 1790s became the pamphleteering champion of American expansion in the 1800s. However 237 238 / DILLON inconsistent a group of texts Brown's novels might seem (especially if one includes the seldom-discussed Clara Howard and Stephen Calvert), the theory of literature and its uses that Brown expresses in his criticism is remarkably consistent throughout his career. Moreover, Brown's criticism suggests fruitful approaches for readers of his fiction. In this essay, I describe Brown's literary theory as revealed in his magazine writings, and show how this theory informs his fiction, especially Arthur Mervyn (1799-1800) and Clara Howard (1801). Specifically, these novels model for the reader the peculiar version of republican virtue Brown advocates in his criticism. Further, Arthur Mervyn in particular evidences concerns about the role of the author analogous to those discussed in Brown's magazine essays. I To date, slightly over two hundred and thirty magazine items by Brown have been identified.2 Many of these items are book reviews or general literary criticism. While Brown's conception of literature is to some extent revealed or implied in most of these essays, several of them are particularly notable for their extended discussion of literary theory. Among these are "Walstein's School of History. From the German of Krants of Gotha" ( 1799), "The Difference between History and Romance" (1800), and "Historical Characters Are False Representations of Nature" (1806). These three essays distill the literary theory revealed in the body of his criticism, which challenges important late eighteenth-century ideas concerning the nature and role of literature. In these essays, Brown claims for the novel several generic features (including both subject matter and intended effect) usually identified by mainstream criticism as features of history and biography. Simultaneously , he denies biography and history the characteristics for which they were most valued during the eighteenth century: positive moral influence and fidelity to historical reality (with, it was believed, a resultant disassociation from the ambiguous realm of the imaginary). "The Difference between History and Romance" argues that all intellectual endeavors can be described as exercises in either history or romance. Brown begins by asserting that "history and romance are terms that have never been very clearly distinguished from each other," and notes further that in general usage the two terms seem to be opposites, a relationship that forms the basis of the argument of his essay.3 Brown parlays his observation on connotative associations of the two terms into a bipolar opposition: the historian, in Brown's scheme, "carefully watches, and faithfully enumerates the appearances which occur," while the romancer "adorns these appearances with cause and effect, and traces resemblances between the past. . . and future, with the present." Brown reinforces this dichotomization by re- " The Highest Province of Benevolence" / 239 ferring to various pursuits of natural history, including geology, chemistry, astronomy, and "electrical history," as examples of the...

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