The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 13 (2002)

Immersed in Palpable Darkness: Republican
Virtue and the Spatial Topography ofCharles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn

Masashi ORISHIMA

I
When Arthur Mervyn arrives in Philadelphia to “build a name anda fortune for [him]self,” he is thrilled at ﬁrst with the scenery of the metropolis. Arriving from his rural home with only seventy-ﬁve cents in
his pocket, Mervyn marvels at the largest city in post-revolutionary
America, though it is only a two-day journey distant. For the ﬁrst timein his life, Mervyn witnesses such wonders as “a triple row of lamps”
that present “a spectacle enchanting and new”; Mervyn’s “personalcares” are “lost, for a time, in the tumultuous sensations.” However, theprotagonist of Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirsof the Year 1793 is far less forthcoming in describing what he sees as hemakes his way into the heart of the city. For all that Mervyn relates his“new delight and new wonder,” he scarcely notices the buildings thatline the way to Front Street. It is as if Mervyn is walking along a narrow
street with almost nothing on either side.1
The experience of a lonely walker traversing such a dark and narrowpassage recurs throughout Brown’s works, for example, when
Constantia Dudley in Ormond repeatedly tries to reach an only vaguely
described destination in a plague-stricken Philadelphia, or when Clithero
Copyright © 2002 Masashi Orishima. All rights reserved. This work may be used,with this notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work
may be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.
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MASASHI ORISHIMA

in his framed narrative in Edgar Huntly has a fatal encounter with his
enemy in a narrow and dark alley in labyrinthine Dublin. Perhaps it isno surprise to ﬁnd lone walkers on narrow streets in Brown’s works,
since Brown is widely recognized as the ﬁrst signiﬁcant practitioner of
the Gothic novel in America, and since conﬁnement within tight,
enclosed spaces is a convention of genre.
However, the manner in which Brown’s narratives unfold conspicuously and exclusively within claustrophobic spaces such as caves, underground cellars, and closets bears close attention. Narrative viewpoints in
Brown’s major novels never reﬂect the wide perspectives afforded byhigh, open places. On the contrary, vision itself seems inhibited andspace is perceived largely through touch and other semi-direct sensations. In the darkness, a narrator suddenly stumbles into contact with adead body. “[T]he malignant vapor” from the putrefying bodies ofplague victims surrounds the narrator.2 Sound waves emanating fromunidentiﬁed sources impinge upon the narrator’s hearing. Such tactileand quasi-tactile sensations characterize the Brownian space.
Thus feeling their way through space rather than seeing it clearly,
characters in Brown’s works have difﬁculty imagining spaces they do
not directly experience. That is, they cannot grasp the whole of the spaces
they inhabit, whether the spaces are cities, houses, or woods; rather, theparticulars of the spaces directly before them dominate their perception.
Furthermore, Brown’s characters seldom imagine that these particulars
are representative of either particular or more general matters occupying a larger (for example, national) space. Nor do Brown’s novels, with
the notable exception of Wieland, evince any sense of regular, objective
time that might serve to index a larger common space.
Critical discourse on Arthur Mervyn has long focused on whether
Mervyn, as his author asserts, is an honest young man exemplifying
Republican virtue, or a self-centered materialist despite not only
Brown’s but also his own claims as narrator to the contrary. Dana
Luciano observes that although Brown did not see “himself as writing
novels that would have been termed ‘depraved’ and nihilistic in his day. . . there is something in literary eloquence that ultimately limits its usefulness. In his own novels, that something works to turn rationality
against itself and subordinate it to the body and its desires.”3 The uniquetopography of Brownian space provides strong support for this view:
because Mervyn, like many of Brown’s characters, is incapable of imagining a coherent, structured public space shared by his fellow citizens,IMMERSED IN PALPABLE DARKNESS

9

he can be understood to inhabit a space quite distinct from the community of Republican virtue.
II
The quintessentially Brownian space is the closet, as exempliﬁed by
the closet in which Mervyn ﬁnds himself on his ﬁrst night in
Philadelphia. Alone in the city with neither friend nor money, Mervyn
falls victim to a youth who tricks him into a merchant’s bedroom, abandoning him there without a candle. When the merchant and his wife
return, Mervyn feels compelled to hide himself in the closet, wherein—“[i]mmersed in palpable darkness” and “lurking like a robber”4 andunable to get out because he naturally knows “not in what manner todemean himself”5 if confronted with the occupants of the room—he listens to “[m]any facts of the most secret and momentous nature.”6 Only
when the couple falls asleep does Mervyn manage to slip out of the bedchamber and leave the darkness of the closet behind.
At ﬁrst this seemingly farcical episode may bring to mind the scenes
in Wieland in which Carwin steals into the closet adjacent to Clara’s bedroom to exert his ventriloquist power on her from his position in hiding;however, the cave in which Edgar Huntly ﬁnds himself upon waking
after a somnambulistic walk bears a closer resemblance to Mervyn’s
closet. Both Arthur and Edgar are ignorant of the circumstances and reasons that have led them, respectively, to the closet and the cave; both arethus “in the dark” both literally—it is quite dark in both locations—andﬁguratively as well.
Indeed, the darkness inside the closet is so profound that when Mervyn
ﬁnally emerges, he notes that “the light admitted into three windows,
produced, to my eyes, a considerable illumination.”7 Edgar also feels his
vision to be affected by the darkness of his cave:
I turned my head to different quarters, I stretched my eye-lids, and exerted
every visual energy, but in vain. I was wrapt in the murkiest and most impenetrable gloom.
The ﬁrst effort of reﬂection was to suggest the belief that I was blind; thatdisease is known to assail us in a moment and without previous warning. Thissurely was the misfortune that had now befallen me. Some ray, however ﬂeeting and uncertain, could not fail to be discerned, if the power of vision were
not utterly extinguished. In what circumstances could I possibly be placed,from which every particle of light should, by other means, be excluded?8

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Both characters are immersed in darkness, but there is more to Edgar’s
situation than the simple absence of light. In suspecting that his “powerof vision” is “utterly extinguished,” Mervyn inverts the logic of his reality, that because there is no light there is no vision, imagining insteadthat because there is no vision there is no light.
The sense of darkness resulting not from the absence of light but rather
from the inhibition of the visual sense is basic to the works of Brown,
and it is through vision thus compromised that space is perceived. Thus
Mervyn panics in Welbeck’s basement—where he is reluctantly helping
to bury Watson’s body—when Welbeck departs with their only candle,
leaving Mervyn alone with the body and without his primary means ofgrasping the space around him. In his panic, Mervyn resorts to other,more direct means of spatial perception:
I extended my hands and went forward. . . . Notwithstanding the danger ofencountering obstructions, I rushed towards the entrance with precipitation.
My temerity was quickly punished. In a moment, I was repelled by a jutting
angle of the wall, with such force that I staggered backward and fell. . . . I
now proceeded with greater wariness and caution. I had lost all distinct
notions of my way. My motions were at random. All my labour was to shunobstruction and to advance whenever the vacuity would permit.9

Notably, information about the surrounding space comes to Mervyn,
who is at the focus of perception, through physical contact with obstacles.
This mode of spatial perception predominates in Brown’s major
works, wherein the sense of vision is generally inhibited and at times
totally lost. To take another example, when Edgar pursues Clithero intoa cave in the wilderness after his confession in Edgar Huntly, Edgar ﬁnds
himself “immersed in the dunnest obscurity.”10 Edgar then makes his
way in exactly the manner of Mervyn in Welbeck’s basement:
In a short time, my progress was stopped by an abrupt descent. I set down
the advancing foot with caution, being aware that I might at the next step
encounter a bottomless pit. To the brink of such an one I seemed now to havearrived. I stooped, and stretched my hand forward and downward, but all was
vacuity.
Here it was needful to pose. I had reached the brink of a cavity whose depth
it was impossible to ascertain. It might be a few inches beyond my reach, or
hundreds of feet.11

In a fundamental sense, objects and the spaces they occupy exist only
when physically touched in Brown’s works; if not touched, their

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11

existence is less deﬁnite. Direct physical contact in total darkness thus
comprises a primary condition of Brownian reality, and the visual spaces
perceived by Brown’s characters are invariably informed by this condition, though to varying degrees.
Thus even after emerging from the cave, Edgar becomes aware of signiﬁcant objects in the surrounding space by direct physical contact.
During a bloody encounter with Indians, Edgar loses consciousness.
When he comes to his senses, he rapidly takes visual note of “the cottage and the neighbouring thicket, illuminated by a declining moon.” Yet
Edgar notices the most signiﬁcant aspect of his surroundings not throughvision but through physical contact: “My head rested upon something,which, on turning to examine, I found to be one of the slain Indians.”12
In a similar encounter as he makes his way back to Solebury, Edgar stumbles as he is crossing a meadow, saying, “I lighted on something which
lay across the path, and which, on being closely inspected, appeared to
be an human body. It was the corse [sic] of a girl, mangled by anhatchet.”13
Not only human bodies and the walls of caves and basements serve as
objects of direct, non-visual contact in Brownian space; one also encounters islands of “a vapour, noisome and contagious,”14 a vapor believed
to be issuing from the bodies of yellow fever victims. Such victims are
an important focus in novels purporting to promote—at least in theirauthor’s mind—civic virtue, insofar as such virtue plays a critical role intheir rescue.15 In Arthur Mervyn and Ormond, Brown’s heroes and heroines cannot in good conscience abandon yellow fever victims to theirfates, though attempting to rescue them entails physical contact withextremely unpleasant matter. For example, Mervyn, who is in general
exemplary in attempting to fulfill his civic duty to help others, visitsa room formerly occupied by an acquaintance and inadvertently witnesses the unfortunate end of the foreigner who is its current occupant.
But before reaching the room he must experience something noxious:
I mounted the stair. As I approached the door of which I was in search, avapour, infectious and deadly, assailed my senses. It resembled nothing of
which I had ever before been sensible. Many odours had been met with, evensince my arrival in the city, less insupportable than this. I seemed not so muchto smell as to taste the element that now encompassed me. I felt as if I had
inhaled a poisonous and subtle ﬂuid, whose power instantly bereft my stomach of all vigour. Some fatal inﬂuence appeared to seize upon my vitals; andthe work of corrosion and decomposition to be busily begun.16

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MASASHI ORISHIMA

It is as if the disgusting efﬂuvium of disease has solid substance. Mervyn
has the impression of tasting rather than smelling this efﬂuvium because
he feels it to be a kind of “poisonous and subtle ﬂuid” with the power tophysically affect his stomach, beginning its “work of corrosion anddecomposition.” Olfactory sensation, which thus bears an uncanny
resemblance to tactile impressions, is indispensable in deﬁning thespaces in which Brown’s characters wander.
The plague-stricken city of brotherly love does not only produce
smells in relation to rescue missions; it is more generally a city thatsmells of fear. In Philadelphia, people’s senses are constantly alert for
the intrusion of invisible yet almost tangibly evil-smelling “vapours”
into their immediate spaces, though their alertness does not necessarily
help them. When one of Constantia’s neighbors in Ormond, for example, discovers that his sister is infected with the disease, the neighborabandons her, ﬂeeing to the barn of a farmhouse in the country. However,this man himself falls victim to the disease, and since the inhabitants ofthe farm have as great a fear of the plague and as little care for humanity as he does, the man dies alone. Yet the episode does not end there:
When dead, no one would cover his body with earth, but he was suffered todecay by piecemeal.
The dwelling, being at no great distance from the barn, could not be wholly screened from the malignant vapour, which a corpse thus neglected could
not fail to produce. The inhabitants were preparing, on this account, to change
their abode, but, on the eve of their departure, the master of the family becamesick. He was, in a short time, followed to the grave by his mother, his wife,and four children.17

In sharp contrast to a public sphere where “humanity” is constantly
invoked, a private sphere is jealously guarded against “the sphere of thecontagion.”18 This private sphere is both structured and maintained bydirect contact through tactile and olfactory sensation, that is, by smellsthat one encounters semi-directly as physical substances.
III
Although Mervyn is always looking into the private spaces of otherpeople’s lives, he fails to locate these within the larger space surrounding these private spheres; Mervyn’s rude invasion of the house of Mrs.
Villars is demonstrative. When he enters the house to look for Clemenza

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13

Lodi, a victim of Welbeck’s selﬁshness, Mervyn justiﬁes his actions in
the name of “the rescue of an human creature from distress and dishonor.”19 Thus feeling entitled to seek the satisfaction of his curiosity, whichis “only to be gained by searching the house,”20 Mervyn judges that hehas “only to mount the stair, and go from one room to another.” Mervyn
succeeds in ﬁnding Clemenza hidden in one of the many rooms,21 but
the reader never gains a clear view either of the house as a whole or its
mistress, Mrs. Villars, who understandably becomes enraged with
Mervyn and drives him off with a pistol.
Mervyn’s experience is essentially repeated in his exploration of
Welbeck’s house, which remains a mystery to Mervyn even after he has
stayed there for some time. One night, Welbeck is late in returning home.
Mervyn waits for his master in a cool bath on the ﬁrst ﬂoor, but discovers that the candle he has left in the parlor has disappeared. Mervyn
leaves the bath to procure a new candle, and ascends the stairs with theintention of going to the library on the third ﬂoor. However, he changes
his mind regarding his destination, deciding en route to enter Clemenza’s
room and examine it:
The chamber was now desolate: perhaps it was accessible: if so no injury wasdone by entering it. My curiosity was strong, but it pictured to itself no precise object. Three steps would bear me to the door. The trial, whether it was
fastened, might be made in a moment; and I readily imagined that somethingmight be found within to reward the trouble of examination. The door yielded to my hand and I entered.22

Here, in contrast to Mrs. Villars’s house, Mervyn’s only rationale for
injudiciously entering the room is his “curiosity,” that is, his ignorance
and his desire to rid himself of it. Because he cannot see, he wants to see.
Yet although Mervyn always manages to discover some new aspectof whatever he investigates, he never sees it in its entirety. As late as theconclusion of the First Part—in the aftermath of his ﬁnal confrontation
with the villain Welbeck—Mervyn still ﬁnds occasion to search “an asylum in the remotest corner of the house” through “a trap door opened in
the ceiling of the third story,” where he hides himself in “a narrow anddarksome nook, formed by the angle of the roof.” Before descending,
Mervyn casts “a curious eye over this recess” and sees “a sea of new
wonders.”23 What exactly this “sea” contains, however, is neverrevealed, and remains to this day one of the most prominent loose ends
in this narrative of unresolved enigmas. It is as if the house is itself capable of generating new recesses.

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MASASHI ORISHIMAIn Arthur Mervyn and Brown’s other novels, narrow and dimly lit passages, alleys, corridors, and stairways with small cell-like spaces branching off one after another comprise a conspicuously recurring spatial
structure. Whether these cells are plague-stricken houses, rooms with
mysterious occupants, basement recesses littered with dead bodies, or
nooks with obscure “wonders,” they are invariably structurally disconnected from one another, and consequently a comprehensive three
dimensional spatial impression has difﬁculty emerging. The signiﬁcanceof this spatial pattern is best considered in view of recent criticism of
Arthur Mervyn, criticism that interrogates the novel and its protagonist
in its historical and cultural context.
IV
Arthur Mervyn has a long history as a subject of serious critical attention, one that is, as Cathy Davidson observes, “a history of how the novel
has been interpreted.” Although in Davidson’s view this history is “aslabyrinthine and contradictory as anything in a Gothic novel . . . [m]ostof the debate centers on the character of Arthur Mervyn. . . . [R]eadersof the novel have. . . insistently asked, ‘Who is Mervyn?’ This is indeed
the central question of the novel.”24 In approaching this question, critics
must consider whether Mervyn is innocent or guilty of complicity in
Welbeck’s crime; whether or not he is sincere in replacing Eliza Hadwin,
who is young and poor, with Achsa Fielding, who is much older and very
rich, as the object of his love; and whether Brown does or does not
approve of Mervyn’s shift from a moral position based on simple
Republican virtues to a more cosmopolitan outlook. Brown’s attitude
towards Mervyn’s ostensible virtue is perhaps the most important ofthese considerations, particularly in view of Brown’s considering
Mervyn capable of membership in a national community composed ofenlightened, well-intentioned, virtuous individuals.
A number of critics have addressed this issue. Emory Elliott, in his
Revolutionary Writers, states that although “on ﬁrst examination thestory appears to present the struggle of a virtuous country boy against
the corruption of the city,”25 closer examination—particularly of theSecond Part, wherein Mervyn jilts Eliza for Achsa—reveals that
“Mervyn’s various assertions that he has dreams of living as a
Jeffersonian gentleman-farmer, [and] that he has a warm-hearted affection for humanity . . . fail to be supported by his actions. . . .”26 In Elliott’s

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15

view, Mervyn becomes a rather materialistic and “calculating opportunist”27 over the course of the novel, and thus Brown distances himself
from “Mervyn, a near anagram of Everyman,” who must be read as “asymbol of the amoral, unschooled but intelligent individual struggling
to survive in the social turmoil of the post-Revolutionary age.”28 For
Elliott, Brown’s attitude toward Mervyn is, in a word, ironical. Although
Mervyn himself does not believe strongly in the Republican ideal of
human virtue, a similar lack of strong belief cannot be ascribed to Brown.
Jane Tompkins presents a sharply contrasting view in her Sensational
Designs. For Tompkins, the structural and paradigmatic kernel of Arthur
Mervyn is “benevolence,” conveyed in the form of Mervyn’s multiple
rescue missions, as considered above. A rescue is not simply an act of
benevolence beneﬁting an individual, but is also “for the good of thecommunity,” and Mervyn—especially in the First Part—engages himself busily in this form of benevolence, in keeping with the “ideal of
republican virtue which based the prosperity of the state on the character of its individual citizens.” According to Tompkins, however, Brown’sconcept of virtue differed from “Jefferson’s ideal of virtue” that comprised “honesty, industry, and frugality ﬂourishing uncorrupted on thefarm.” In contrast, Tompkins contends, “Brown’s ideal reﬂects theFederalist . . . concept of America as a nation for which commerce within and without its borders is the lifeblood,” and thus Mervyn’s transformation in the Second Part does not incur a loss of the author’s sanction;on the contrary, “Arthur Mervyn exempliﬁes benevolence” by “obeying
the rules of exchange.”29 In Tompkins’s understanding, Mervyn nolonger believes in Republican virtue by the close of the novel, and neither does Brown.
In contrast to both Elliott and Tompkins, Cathy Davidson maintains
that it is impossible to determine whether or not Mervyn is virtuous
according to some Republican or similar standard. It is certain that, asDavidson contends, “Mervyn tries to make his tale . . . true by making
it . . . mythic,” that is, a mythic tale in which “[a] poor boy from the country” overcoming “the dangers of the city” by virtue of his “shield of perfect innocence,” and thence traveling “the road to riches.” Stevens, theostensible narrator of the story until Mervyn “takes up the pen” and completely supersedes him in the last half of the Second Part, apparently
believes in these myths, which were “already part and parcel of American
popular culture and the larger ideology of individualism.”30 Stevens atleast is completely persuaded of Mervyn’s virtue, and as such can be

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understood to act as the trusting reader. Yet in this novel of multiple andcontradictory ﬁrst person narratives, Stevens “accept[s] Arthur’s story
mostly on faith,” a faith that ultimately derives from “faith in the land
whose story Arthur’s story at its best sets forth—the land of opportunity, the country of the free.”31 It follows that belief in Mervyn’s virtuousness depends on belief in the future of the young Republic. Since thereader may or may not hold this belief, the novel admits of several interpretations. Totalizing readings are thus neither desirable nor possible.
Michael Warner offers yet another approach. Locating early American
ﬁction within the wider context of eighteenth-century print culture,
Warner emphasizes how even novels, though difﬁcult to subsume
completely under the Republican paradigm, were basically subservientto that paradigm: “if we read Arthur Mervyn’s behavior in the context
of the rhetoric of republican literature, we can see the novel as figuring . . . culturally dominant assumptions and desires about the value of
printed goods. Doing so would clarify the standards of value implicit inrepublican publication; all the more because their extension to the novel
was uneasy.”32 Warner maintains that Brown can be interpreted to claim“that by showing how ignorance may be overcome and benevolence actualized, the novel itself helps to effect” virtuous goals. On this basis, Warnerreasons that “if Arthur Mervyn is the kind of object that Brown describes,
then its value is that of an exemplary public instrument.”33 In this interpretation, even Mervyn’s obnoxious habit of entering other people’s
rooms without permission emerges as fundamentally virtuous conduct:
If there is a door, Mervyn will walk through it. If there is a book, Mervyn
will open it. Because of this trait he avoids the traps of ignorance and attains
a secure liberty. . . . The result may resemble headlong idiocy, but since
Mervyn’s adventurous behavior is the unmediated result of his need forknowledge, Brown is able to regard that direct translation of knowledge into
virtue as evidence that learning . . . is inherently virtuous.34

In contrast to Elliott, among others who argue that Brown cannot but
disapprove of this kind of behavior and hence regard his character withirony, Warner sees a tension that displaces any “disparity between
Brown’s judgment and Mervyn’s.”35 Speciﬁcally, this tension arises
between “a possibility of full, surveying enlightenment at the end” of thework, which comprises the novel’s beneﬁcent instrumentality, andMervyn’s “dark, adventurous path”36 —that is, between the author’s ﬁnal
goal and the transitional and temporary state that is the duration of thenarrative.

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Warner’s reading is persuasive, especially in arguing for Brown’s
benevolent intentions. Apart from a possible difference in outlook
between Brown and Mervyn, there is certainly an unmistakable tension
between the novel’s overall intentions and its constituent narrative meanderings. Yet Warner ultimately places too much stress on the “momentof enlightenment interpreted as transcending or escaping the narrative
condition” at the end of the novel.37 The tension is thus ﬁnally resolved,
and Warner attributes Mervyn’s ignorance to the “narrative condition”
in general, regarding it as an accidental, if unavoidable, eventuality.
V
From a spatial and sensory, as opposed to a narrative and temporal,
point of view, ignorance is a constitutional characteristic of Mervyn andmany other Brown characters. Not only does Mervyn fail to attain the“moment of enlightenment” until the end of his narrative, if ever, he also
fails to grasp his spatial environment beyond the understanding permitted by means of direct and semi-direct sensation, as discussed above.
The narratives that constitute Arthur Mervyn, which is comprised ofindependent tales and tales-within-tales, are typically ﬁrst person narratives, and as such are necessarily limited in the information they can convey. Furthermore, these narratives are unusually nearsighted, so to
speak, in the dearth of visual information they provide. As if to compensate, they are extraordinarily rich in tactile and olfactory sensation.
In more abstract, sociological terms, the narratives lack the capacity to
evoke the space of community.
Probing “the obscure genesis of nationalism,” the anthropologist
Benedict Anderson proposes in his much-celebrated Imagined
Communities a triangular relationship between the modern concept ofsimultaneity, the space of a national community, and the novel.
According to Anderson, the mediaeval conception of simultaneity was“wholly alien to our own,” entailing a connection “established between
two events which are linked neither temporally nor causally,” but rather“are vertically linked to Divine Providence.” As Anderson explains, “Ifan occurrence like the sacriﬁce of Issac is interpreted as preﬁguring thesacriﬁce of Christ, the here and now . . . is simultaneously somethingwhich has always been, and will be fulﬁlled in the future.” The concept
is akin to “what Benjamin calls Messianic time, a simultaneity of pastand future in an instantaneous present.”38 Anderson contrasts this18

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mediaeval conception of simultaneity to the modern understanding thatsucceeded it:
What has come to take the place of the mediaeval conception of simultaneity-along-time is, to borrow again from Benjamin, an idea of “homogeneous,
empty time,” in which simultaneity is . . . marked not by preﬁguring and fulﬁllment, but by temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and calendar.39

Along with the appearance of “homogeneous, empty time,” there also
emerged the capacity to imagine that even as one particular thing is happening in one place, another thing is happening elsewhere. Even if one
does not witness both occurrences—even if one does not know theirdetails or even that they occurred—the modern subject is always convinced of the ongoing, “simultaneous” occurrences of a body of suchparticular things. As an example, Anderson notes that “an American will
never meet, or even know the names of more than a handful of his . . .
fellow-Americans. . . . But he has complete conﬁdence in their steady,anonymous, simultaneous activity.”40 Thus, the word “meanwhile” takes
on key importance when the modern conception of simultaneity supplants the mediaeval. Space ﬁlls with comparable things, becoming a“world of plurals: shops, ofﬁces, carriages . . . and gas lamps.”41
Anderson further maintains that the novel and the newspaper, “whichﬁrst ﬂowered in Europe in the eighteenth century,” provided an analogue
to the space of this emergent world, serving to situate it geographicallyand thereby constructing the “national.” Much as citizens in a national
space have faith in the ongoing, simultaneous existence of unknown people and events, readers of these printed forms have faith in the ongoing
existence of the represented world.
Jonathan Culler succinctly reformulates Anderson’s argument, suggesting that “it might be more pertinent to speak of novels that present‘the space of a community’ than to emphasize ‘homogeneous, empty
time.’” Culler maintains that “in Anderson’s account what is crucial to
the role of ﬁction in the imagining of nations is . . . that the world evokedby the novel include events happening simultaneously, extend[ing]beyond the experience of particular individuals. . . .”42 That is, to present
the space of community, the novel must evoke a world extending“beyond the experience of particular individuals.” For Culler, what “isnecessary is that the narrative provide a point of view exterior to andsuperior to that of any particular character.” Given that not every novel
fulﬁlls this criterion, Culler argues that what Anderson has in mind isIMMERSED IN PALPABLE DARKNESS

19“the old-fashioned novel,” and that what is “excluded is the limited pointof view that developed in the novel during the course of the nineteenth
century.” Brown’s novels, though obviously not products of nineteenthcentury developments, are nonetheless narrated in the ﬁrst person andthus restricted in their point of view. Yet in itself, this fact does not automatically disqualify Brown’s novels from membership in the club ofnovels that evoke Anderson’s imagined communities.
Indeed, every one of Brown’s six novels, by virtue of their epistolary
or semi-epistolary forms,43 has the appearance of seeking to communicate with others; with the exception of Jane Talbot and Clara Howard,
each of Brown’s novels offers prefatory materials which speak of
Brown’s intention that it be of service to the community. In Wieland,
Brown’s “Advertisement” asserts that the work aims to contribute to thedevelopment of human knowledge by “the illustration of some important branches of the moral constitution of man.”44 In Edgar Huntly,
Brown’s introductory notice, “To the Public,” states that “America has
opened [a] new view to the naturalist and politician, but has seldom furnished themes to the moral painter,”45 thus indicating Brown’s intentionof depicting morality in a uniquely American way. In the introductory
letter in Ormond, “To I. E. Rosenberg,” the narrator gives a conventional
and pro forma guarantee that it is “an authentic, and not a ﬁctitious tale,”46
yet one that promises to provide an illustrative and instructive case.
Finally, in the “Preface” to Arthur Mervyn, Brown writes of the responsibility of the author “to weave into an humble narrative, such incidents
as appeared to him most instructive and remarkable” from among thoseincidents accompanying “the evils of pestilence” which had recently
afﬂicted Philadelphia; Brown viewed it as “every one’s duty to proﬁt by
all opportunities of inculcating on mankind the lessons of justice andhumanity.”47 As these passages amply demonstrate, Brown embraced the
civic ideal of overcoming ignorance and acting on benevolent intentions.
In Tompkins words, “there can be no question how he himself conceived[his novel]: he wrote in order to beneﬁt the mass of men . . . and he saw
himself as a servant of ‘benevolence’ rather than of the Muse.”48
VI
Thus, on one hand, Brown explicitly states his aspiration of conveying a point of view greater than that of any particular individual, that is,a perspective of service to the community. On the other hand, Brown’s20

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narratives prove incapable of evoking any space larger than that which
a lone individual can directly sense. The tension between Brown’s aspiration, which demands the imagination of a community space inhabitedby unseen but simultaneously existent community members, and the limited perspective of his narratives can be translated into spatial terms.
In Arthur Mervyn in particular, but elsewhere in Brown’s works aswell, this tension is manifested in the contrast between a public space of
virtuous individuals whom Mervyn wishes to help, and the dark, limited sphere of direct sensation within which he is conﬁned as narrator. In
spite of Brown’s explicit and laudable intention that his novel beneﬁtmankind, the author cannot maintain a convincing sense of a larger spaceof community. Once characters exit Mervyn’s sphere of direct sensation,
they effectively cease to exist.
Eliza Hadwin is exemplary in this respect. Almost every reader of thenovel feels uneasy when Mervyn deserts Eliza Hadwin to pursue Achsa
Fielding. Elliott observes that “from Percy Shelley and William Dunlap
to the most recent critics, even Brown’s sympathetic readers are bothered by his decision to have Arthur marry Achsa Fielding.”49 Donald
Ringe locates the problem in Mervyn’s character, deeming “his ability
to attach himself to an older person who can provide him with the means
for material success. . . [as] nothing short of uncanny.”50 The real scandal, though, is not that Mervyn chooses Achsa instead of Eliza, but that
Mervyn completely forgets about Eliza after he leaves her. Davidson
considers the disappearance of Eliza to be a typical Brownian “gap” ofthe sort that both bafﬂes and exhilarates modern critics:. . . we might notice how regularly seemingly signiﬁcant characters simply
vanish from the narrative. There is Wallace, who gets Volume 2 going andthen is himself gone . . . Miss Carlton . . . Miss Fanny Maurice. . . . But themost signiﬁcant disappearing act . . . is Eliza’s. She drops from the novel justbefore what should be the climax of the subsidiary love story in which she
supposedly stars. . . . Arthur proclaims that “there is nothing upon earth moredear to me than my Bess,” and then never even notices dear Bess’s responsewhen Achsa proves dearer.51

It is as if these “seemingly signiﬁcant characters,” in staging theircurious disappearing acts, are dispatched into some non-spatial, nonexistent nowhere.
For example, Mervyn is intent on rescuing Clemenza Lodi, but after
the death of her baby and several failed attempts by Mervyn to secure
her protection, she is never mentioned again. In the last of theseIMMERSED IN PALPABLE DARKNESS

21

attempts—at the end of Chapter XVI of the Second Part—Mervyn asks
Achsa Fielding to look after Clemenza, then leaves for Baltimore on a
mission to return a sum of money to its rightful owners. When Mervyn
returns to Philadelphia four chapters later, he seems not even to remember Clemenza; her name is never again mentioned.
In addition to such “seemingly signiﬁcant characters” as Clemenza, anumber of minor characters also emerge from and disappear into the
nowhere beyond Brownian space. These include such characters as
Maravegli and Lodi, as well as the Walpoles, who arrive in America fromabroad but immediately fall victim to the plague and die. Two hundred
pages into the novel, Stevens casually introduces another such character as “[o]ne of my friends, by name of Carlton”52 ; Carlton plays the perplexing and superﬂuous role of drawing Stevens and Mervyn to thedebtors’ prison where Welbeck is preparing to die, then simply drops outof the picture.
Small wonder, then, that Brown’s readers ﬁnd it a challenge to makesense of these and other inconsistencies. Those who resist ﬁnding fault
with Brown’s technique have often searched instead for some consistency within these inconsistencies. Norman S. Grabo is typical of thosetaking this approach, addressing Brown’s ﬂaws as follows:
Among the very ﬁrst things readers note about Charles Brockden Brown’s
ﬁctions is their curious and sometimes painful dependence upon coincidence.
When Edgar Huntly needs a weapon, his hand just happens to fall upon atomahawk in the darkness. Threatened women vigorously defend life andhonor with penknives that pop out of nowhere just when most needed. Surely
these are the classic signals of a naïve, clumsy, even childish, storyteller.

Yet Grabo goes on to defend Brown’s use of coincidence as “part of apattern of signiﬁcance,” a pattern reﬂecting “both a complex mind anda sophisticated art.”53
Tompkins argues along similar lines. Contending that “[i]f plot in theaccepted deﬁnition has no place in Arthur Mervyn, so character, in thesense of individual identity, is nonexistent,” Tompkins maintains that
“Arthur Mervyn is a novel that must be read structurally—that is, as aseries of abstract propositions” presented in various “permutations andcombinations.” For Tompkins, the relationship of an episode to the plot
as a whole, or the position of one character relative to another, signiﬁes
less than abstract structural repetitions within the narrative. In assertingthat such “permutations and combinations spell out a message to thereader, a message whose intent is to change the social reality which the

22

MASASHI ORISHIMA

narrative purports to represent,” this interpretation attempts to reconcile
textual fact with the author’s intention of beneﬁting society.54
Tompkins’s argument for the necessity of a structural reading is compelling, but two signiﬁcant structural properties of the novel make her
attempt at reconciling Brown’s text and social intentions problematic.
First, characters regularly emerge from and disappear into the non-spatial, non-existent nowhere beyond Brownian space, as if their ongoing
existence outside of the narrator’s sphere of direct sensation cannot be
imagined. Second, the experience of the limited, personal space of direct
sensation is remarkably intense. As a result of these two structural properties, the imaginative power of the novel to evoke a space of community extending beyond the individual—a prerequisite to realizing
beneﬁcent communal purposes—is quite weak, and spatial perception
dependent upon an individual’s point of view, or perhaps point of touch,is disproportionately strong. Within Arthur Mervyn, itself a kind of dark,narrow closet accessible primarily through tactile and olfactory sensation, space remains walled off from the space of public discourse in thewider world.
NOTESCharles Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 in Charles
Brockden Brown: Three Gothic Novels, ed., Sydney J. Krause (1799–1800; New York:
Library of America, 1998), 251–54.
2
Charles Brockden Brown, Ormond; or, The Secret Witness, ed., Mary Chapman(1799; Petersborough, Canada: Broadview Pr, 1999), 74.
3Dana Luciano, “ ‘Perverse Nature’: Edgar Huntly and the Novel’s Reproductive
Disorders,” American Literature 70.1 (1998): 23.
4
Brown, Arthur Mervyn 263.
5
Ibid., 264.
6
Ibid., 265.
7
Ibid., 267.
8Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker, eds.,
Sydney J. Krause and S. W. Reid (1799; Kent: Kent State UP, 1987), 160.
9
Brown, Arthur Mervyn 329–30.
10Brown, Edgar Huntly 99.
11
Ibid., 99–100.
12
Ibid., 197.
13
Ibid., 230.
14
Brown, Arthur Mervyn 363.
15
In her structural reading of Arthur Mervyn, discussed below in Section VI, Jane
Tompkins contends that “all of the episodes [in the novel] are transformations of a few
paradigmatic situations,” and that these situations exemplify “benevolence, ﬁgured as
the rescue of one man by another.” See Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural
Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford UP, 1985), 66–67.
1

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23

Brown, Arthur Mervyn 360.
Brown, Ormond 74–75.
18
Ibid., 78.
19
Brown, Arthur Mervyn 522.
20
Ibid., 521.
21
Ibid., 516.
22
Ibid., 302–3.
23
Ibid., 423–24.
24
Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (NewYork: Oxford UP, 1986), 240.
25
Emory Elliott, Revolutionary Writers: Literature and Authority in the New Republic,
1725–1810 (New York: Oxford UP, 1986), 235.
26
Ibid., 244.
27
Ibid., 238.
28
Ibid., 240.
29
Tompkins 69.
30
Davidson 244.
31
Ibid., 250.
32
Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in
Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1990), 155.
33
Ibid., 154
34
Ibid., 161.
35
Ibid., 162.
36
Ibid., 163
37
Ibid.
38
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reﬂections on the Origins and Spreadof Nationalism (1983; 2nd rev. ed. London: Verso, 1991), 24.
39
Ibid.
40
Ibid., 26.
41
Ibid., 32.
42
Jonathan Culler, “Anderson and the Novel,” Diacritics 29.4 (1999): 23.
43
Speciﬁcally,Wieland is written in the form of Clara’s letters, Ormond in the form ofletters to its narrator’s German friend, Edgar Huntly in the form of Edgar’s letters, andClara Howard and Jane Talbot in the conventional epistolary form of a series of lettersexchanged between characters. Only Arthur Mervyn is not explicitly epistolary, but its
ﬁnal chapters comprise letters from Mervyn to Stevens.
44Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland; or, The Transformation in Charles Brockden
Brown: Three Gothic Novels, ed., Sydney J. Krause (1798; New York: Library ofAmerica, 1998), 3.
45
Brown, Edgar Huntly 3.
46
Brown, Ormond 37.
47
Brown, Arthur Mervyn 231.
48
Tompkins 64.
49
Elliott 239.
50
Donald A. Ringe, Charles Brockden Brown (New York: Twayne, 1966), 77. Donald
A. Ringe, Charles Brockden Brown (New York: Twayne, 1966), 77.
51
Davidson 248.
52
Brown, Arthur Mervyn 458.
53
Norman S. Grabo, Coincidental Art of Charles Brockden Brown (Chapel Hill: U of
North Carolina P, 1981), ix–x.
54
Tompkins 67.
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