Arthur Mervyn's Revolutions

ARTHUR MERVYN'S REVOLUTIONS Robert S. Levine* In the Second Part of C. B. Brown's Arthur Mervyn (1799-1800), the eponymous hero journeys into the country from Philadelphia to bring the dismal news to the Hadwins, his Quaker benefactors, that Wallace, the fiancé of Susan Hadwin, has probably succumbed to the yellow fever. Earlier Mervyn had secretly ventured into fever-stricken Philadelphia in search of Wallace, and because he had cloaked his intentions from the Hadwins, Mr. Hadwin undertook a similar mission and needlessly exposed himself to the fever. Now returning to this family who, prior to meeting him, had been living in repose, Mervyn finds that his intervention has affected a complete upheaval. Hadwin, Mervyn learns, has died as a result of his unnecessary visit to Philadelphia. The languishing Susan, overjoyed by the news that a young man has just arrived, rushes downstairs to find that it is only Mervyn, and immediately perishes. Mervyn comments on her amazing demise: "This fatal disappointment of hopes that had nearly been extinct, and which were now so powerfully revived, could not be endured by a frame verging to dissolution."1 Stepping outside to the site of Hadwin's grave, Mervyn reflects on the havoc wrought by the passage of time: "A few months had passed since I had last visited this spot. What revolutions had since occurred, and how gloomily contrasted was my present purpose with what had formerly led me hither!" (p. 281). Arthur Mervyn comprises a series of such "revolutions," turns of the wheel that are unforeseen, disorienting, and never-ending. Susan's death represents the numbing toll exacted by an unstable world that eventually wears down its revolving individuals. To be sure, this world is a post-revolutionary one but not the progressive and democratic society supposedly fostered by the American Revolution and not even its nightmare antithesis as dramatized in such later works as Cooper's Lionel Lincoln and Hawthorne's "My Kinsman, Major Molineux." Arthur Mervyn is about a particular post-revolutionary moment in which revolution is a blow to the imagination, an unexpected disorienting shock, an unforeseen upheaval that makes a mockery of stabilizing controls and simple cause-effect schematizations: it is about, and even partly shaped by, the post-French Revolutionary world and its attendant literary images, tropes, and structures.2 *Robert S. Levine is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maryland. He has published articles on Charles Brockden Brown, Herman Melville, and Kate Chopin, and he is currently working on a book entitled "Conspiracy Fears and the American Romance." 146Robert S. Levine Ronald Paulson has argued brilliantly that French Revolutionary impulses and anxieties inform a number of late-eighteenth-century European literary texts that on the surface do not appear to be about the Revolution. In William Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794), for example, the country boy Williams expresses a revolutionary envy by spying on the wealthy Falkland and writing about his experiences. Fearful that Williams might expose his secret crimes, Falkland initiates a persecutory campaign that soon wears down both the persecutor and persecuted and even challenges the possibility of distinguishing be'tween the two. As Paulson puts it, Godwin's "work reflects that constant potential for simple inversion of the persecutor-persecuted relationship which events in Paris had so terribly exemplified. "' By the end of the novel, Williams can only helplessly exclaim on man's vulnerability: "Great God! What is man? Is he thus blind to the future, thus totally unsuspecting of what is to occur in the next moment of his existence?"4 In a sense, he enunciates the accrued wisdom of the French Revolution. It has been fashionable of late for American literary chauvinists to downplay and even dismiss the influence of Godwin on Brown, as if influence suggests sycophancy and not intelligence. But Brown's friends and admirers noted the influence, and Brown was the first to acknowledge his indebtedness.5 In a journal entry of 1797 on a recently completed and unpublished novel, Brown wrote: When a mental comparison is made between this and the mass of novels, I am inclined to be pleased with my own production. But when the objects of comparison...