by Steven Moore
“Some defect in the constitution”; Brown repeats this key word later when he states, “The seeds of an early and lingering death are sown in my constitution” (1.14), and it is tempting to consider Arthur Mervyn (and Arthur Mervyn) an allegorical figure (like Constantia in Ormond) for the young republic and its defective Constitution. (Another character blames the yellow fever on “a morbid constitution of the atmosphere” [1.17.]) Mervyn notes the unfair disparity between the rich and poor, and Dr. Stevens issues an early warning about the class of schemers that periodically brings the American economy to its knees when he describes a financier named Thetford as
one of those who employed money not as the medium of traffic, but as in itself a commodity. He had neither wines nor clothes to transmute into silver. He thought it a tedious process to exchange today one hundred dollars for a cask or bale, and tomorrow exchange the bale or cask for an hundred and ten dollars. It was better to give the hundred for a piece of paper which, carried forthwith to the moneychangers, he could procure an hundred twenty-three and three-fourths. In short, this man’s coffers were supplied by the despair of honest men and the stratagems of rogues. (2.1).
If the story he tells is true, Mervyn is basically a good person willing to make (and justify) questionable compromises to succeed—he dumps a sweet younger woman after she loses her estate and embraces the older, wealthier woman—though his good intentions often have bad results or mask other motives, as can be said of many of America’s foreign policy adventures over the years. As Christophersen cracks, “The doctrine of Manifest Destiny, for example, manifested not so much the nation’s divine calling as its greed in Sunday garments” (119).
As prescient as Arthur Mervyn may be as a diagnostic of America’s moral constitution, the novel is more interesting for its psychological complexity and as Brown’s most successful dramatization of “the delusiveness of appearances” (1.14). Pausing at one point, Mervyn says he will continue to provide “minute descriptions of the objects which I saw and of the reasonings and inferences which they suggested to my understanding” (1.23), and those “reasonings and inferences”—both Mervyn’s and those by other characters about Mervyn—predominate as he and others try to make sense of what they see and hear. He is the first to admit that many of his initial inferences turned out to be wrong—which lends credence to his account—but the difficulty, the impossibility of judging accurately what one sees, especially when blinkered by psychological complexes and social prejudices, is more convincingly demonstrated here than in Wieland, where people were being tricked into disbelieving their senses.
Arthur Mervyn is usually classified as a Gothic novel, presumably because of its epidemic scenes of delirium and for the “nameless sort of terror” that haunts Mervyn at the end, though “noir” might be a better classification, given the prevalence of sleazy double-dealings and Mervyn’s detectivelike tendency to spy on people and investigate their homes without permission. But I agree with Emory Elliott that Arthur Mervyn is more significant as “an anatomy of social and psychological survival which demands from a reader a systematic character analysis.”34 Brown demanded of his readers a more systematic analysis of his protagonist than most novelists of his time, for if read quickly and/or merely for entertainment, the novel might strike readers as “lame and incredible”—the response of some characters to an account of Mervyn’s latest actions (2.10). But if read slowly and with attention to all the clues Brown artfully drops along the way, Arthur Mervyn emerges as one of the most psychologically complex literary performances of the 18th century, comparable to Moritz’s Anton Reiser and Godwin’s Caleb Williams, and anticipating the novels of Hawthorne and Melville.
One of the psychotic expressions of Mervyn’s prewedding jitters is an episode of sleepwalking, the first in fiction, I believe. In Brown’s time, somnambulism was regarded as a sign of guilt and incipient insanity, as in Lady Macbeth’s case, and today is thought to be triggered by stress and psychological conflicts. Brown put this mysterious malady to fascinating use in his fourth major novel, Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker (1799). The novel takes the form of a long letter the title character writes to his fiancée, Mary Waldegrave, whose freethinking brother—and Huntly’s best friend—was recently murdered. The fact that this is a first-person narrative immediately puts us on guard, for Brown has taught us that none of his narrators can be trusted. It begins like a mystery novel as Huntly roams around at night looking for clues; he thinks he identifies the murderer when he comes across an emigrant named Clithero sleepwalking around the area where Waldegrave was murdered. When Huntly coaxes a confession from him, we learn that Clithero actually is guilt-ridden over killing his former patroness/employer back in Ireland. (He is mistaken, yet another sucker for “the delusiveness of appearance,” for we later learn the woman recovered from his attack, married a man named Sarsefield—who was once Huntly’s tutor: as in all of Brown’s novels, everybody is one or two degrees of separation away from everybody else—and is now living in New York.) Then Huntly receives some bad news that sends him over the edge, and he begins sleepwalking out of anxiety for his future and guilt over other matters. (Like the ghost in Hamlet, Waldegrave appears to Huntly in a dream and chastises him for not pursuing his case.) At this point, Edgar Huntly descends into Heart of Darkness.
In one of the most extraordinary scenes in premodern fiction, Huntly wakes in complete darkness in what he later learns is the bottom of a cavern, just outside the civilized limits of his Delaware town. He gradually orients himself, confronts and kills a panther with a tomahawk and eats it raw, climbs out of the cavern and sees a group of sleeping Indians and a bound-and-gagged white girl, rescues the girl and kills the first Indian who comes after him, and gradually makes his way through the dangerous wilderness back to civilization, killing four more Indians along the way and shooting at his former tutor Sarsefield, a member of his rescue party that Huntly mistakes for more Indians. After this incredible journey, Sarsefield greets his exhausted young friend with Christian resurrection imagery—“You were dead. . . . Now, in a blissful hour, you had risen. . . .”35 However, the ending avoids resolution, as Huntly warned in his first paragraph (“At length the drama is brought to an imperfect close”): Waldegrave’s murder is blamed on an Indian, though it’s possible Huntly himself is the murderer, and in any case his future is still uncertain, especially when Huntly learns that the uncle he has been living with has just died and he’s likely to be turned out of his home penniless. To make matters worse, his misguided attempt at benevolence almost results in the murder of Sarsefield’s wife. We’re left with the impression that Huntly’s noctambulatory outings are far from over.
In a calculated use of his chosen form, Brown keeps the reader in the dark much of the time: because Huntly is writing to his fiancée, he doesn’t have to spell out many things that the reader must consequently struggle to grasp, forcing us to play detective just as he does. We don’t even learn that all this taking place in Delaware and that Huntly is the one telling the story until nearly halfway through, and although he is narrating this retrospectively, he doesn’t explains things as he goes along, leading us first through the same kind of wrongheaded “reasonings and inferences” that Arthur Mervyn made, and only partially clearing things up at the end. The “reasonings and inferences” other characters make are just as wrongheaded as his: in a sense, everyone is sleepwalking in this novel, except perhaps for the Indians. Huntly hides certain things from his correspondent—specifically the irreligious content of the letters Waldegrave sent him—and he also seems to be hiding things from himself. “Sleepwalking is Brown’s crowning metaphor for the trance of unawareness in which we exist and act,” Christophersen observes, “a trance made possible by our proficiency at hiding from and rationalizing motives” (138).
The wilderness scenes in Edgar Huntly read now like a pulp-fiction adventure story, but they were a startling innovation in Brown’s time, and he indulges in some metafictionl back-patting:
“The following incidents are of a kind to which the most ardent invention has never conceived a parallel” Huntly brags at the commencement of the cavern episode (16), and near the end of his wilderness adventure, he boasts, “The miracles of poetry, the transitions of enchantment, are beggarly and mean compared with those which I had experienced” (23). These scenes were his contribution to a distinctly American kind of fiction, as he explains in his brief but historically important preface:
America has opened new views to the naturalist and politician, but has seldom furnished themes to the moral painter. That new springs of action and new motives to curiosity should operate, that the field of investigation opened to us by our own country should differ essentially from those which exist in Europe, may be readily conceived. The sources of amusement to the fancy and instruction to the heart that are particular to ourselves are equally numerous and inexhaustible. It is the purpose of this work to profit by some of these sources, to exhibit a series of adventures growing out of the condition of our country. . . .
One merit the writer may at least claim: that of calling forth the passions and engaging the sympathy of the reader by means hitherto unemployed by preceding authors. Puerile superstition and exploded manners, Gothic castles and chimeras, are the materials usually employed for this end. The incidents of Indian hostility and the perils of the western wilderness are far more suitable, and for a native of America to overlook these would admit of no apology.
Brown’s American Gothic substitutes natural caverns for castle dungeons, Indians for bandits, and subjective dangers for objective ones. One difference, underscored by the novel’s unresolved ending, is that Americans created their villains when they drove the Indians off their land and dehumanized them as savages, little different from the wild animals that Huntly encounters. He feels some guilt at killing them—less so as he proceeds, however—though he rationalizes this by noting Indians slaughtered his parents and his best friend. But the return to normalcy that concludes most British and European Gothic novels is impossible in an American setting because of the abnormal way the invaders took over the land: it’s as though a gang Gothic heroines squatted in a villainous baron’s castle, forcing him to retaliate. “The incidents of Indian hostility and the perils of the western wilderness” would be explored in greater depth by later American novelists from James Fenimore Cooper onward, but Brown deserves credit for being the first to move beyond the artistically simple captivity narratives to a more complex treatment of the historical and psychological implications of the relationship between the aborigines and the invaders, unresolved to this day.36
Edgar Huntly’s dark night of the soul represents Brown’s bleakest view of human nature (and of the future of America). His earlier novels established that we can’t trust others or even our own senses, and here he goes further to suggest that even when we are asleep we are capable of doing mischief, and of descending to savagery in extreme circumstances. The geographic wilderness Huntly wanders is the wilderness of the mind, and a hundred years before Freud, Brown explored its darkest recesses and brought back frightening reports about the id and superego. Brown’s novels complete the arc toward interiority the novel as a genre had been tracing throughout this early-modern period, moving away from exterior events to focus more and more on internal “reasonings and inferences,” away from certainty and order toward ambiguity and disorder, the approach more and more literary novelists would take going forward (while commercial novelists would continue to privilege actions over thoughts, closure over open-endedness). Brown’s unreliable narrators, daring conceptual metaphors, and expressive forms set him apart from other novelists of the time—American and European—and though these early dispatches from the Twilight Zone were written too quickly to result in polished works of art, they chart a new direction for American fiction, one that would be followed not only by the aforementioned Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville, but also by Poe, Lovecraft, and any number of 20th-century neo-Gothicists and noir writers.
But like most innovators, Brown wasn’t sufficiently appreciated or remunerated for these unusual novels. He took a stab at a different market with two domestic-sentimental novels—Clara Howard and Jane Talbot (both 1801)—then, after writing about 2,000 pages of fiction in five years, gave it up for political pamphleteering and editorial work. He died less than a decade later at the relatively young age of 39.
One of Brown’s unfinished novels, Memoirs of Stephen Calvert (serialized 1799–1800), is narrated by a romantic recluse living on the shore of Lake Michigan who admits he was something of a Don Quixote when younger, falling for a woman sight-unseen like the heroes of chivalric romances whom “Cervantes had taught me to ridicule or to disbelieve” (112). Two other American novelists at century’s end evoked Cervantes’ crazed idealist to address challenges facing the young republic, one written for teenage girls, the other for adults.
Tabitha Tenney (1762–1837) published a conduct book for young ladies in 1799, and the following year moved with her congressman husband to Washington, DC, where she wrote a farcical conduct book in novel form entitled Female Quixotism, Exhibited in the Romantic Opinions and Extravagant Adventures of Dorcasina Sheldon (1801). As the title suggests, it resembles Lennox’s Female Quixote, though there’s no evidence Tenney read that superior novel (or Don Quixote, for that matter). Losing her mother at an early age and having access to her father’s library, Dorca falls under the spell of the romance novels he owns, which he reads merely “for amusement,” not as realistic depictions of life—the fatal mistake his daughter makes. Expanding her name to the more romantic-sounding Dorcasina, the teenager dismisses one sensible suitor because he doesn’t talk and write like Sir Charles Grandison, and after that she falls prey to a string of scoundrels who want to marry the homely, novel-addled woman for her money. Though unoriginal, Female Quixotism is very funny at times and includes classic bits like disguises, mistaken identities, conniving servants, and more crossdressing than backstage at a drag show.37
This antiromance differs from The Female Quixote (but resembles Don Quixote) first in the age of its protagonist: Dorcasina is 34 when she is courted for the first time by a gigolo, and in her forties for succeeding misadventures, which makes her girlish infatuation with romantic ideals even more ludicrous. As the narrator says, it’s difficult to decide “whether Dorcasina was most an object of ridicule or compassion” (2.8), especially since reading novels “has been the delight of my life” (2.8), she gushes, and the only times she comes alive in the novel is when she is treated like the heroine of a romance. (The saddest/funniest scene in the novel is when she talks her maid Betty—her Sancho Panza—into dressing up in her ex-suitor’s clothes to imitate his love-talk.) Second, though Dork finally realizes (at age 49) that novels have lied to her, she’s not rewarded with marriage to a sensible suitor as in The Female Quixote and others of that ilk, novels that, as Sarah Wood notes, repeat “the happily-ever-after formula of the romantic fiction they appear to deride” (168). Though the dangers of novel-reading was a shopworn theme by 1801, Tenney dramatizes the point more forcefully—though not as forcefully as those novelists who killed off their novel-addicts. Addressing in her dedication the same “Columbian young ladies” that Brown did in The Power of Sympathy, Tenney regards novels as a gateway drug to seduction, and treats her “sister novel writers” like drug-dealers (and Samuel Richardson as their overlord). “Would to heaven people could find some better employment than thus turning the heads of inexperienced females,” Dorcasina’s father rages, and is tempted to commit “to the flames every novel within his daughter’s reach” (1.17, 13). At the end, Dorcasina realizes that a neighbor did well to forbid her daughter to read them, and now that the daughter is married (after dressing up as a young soldier a few years earlier to try to lure Dork away from a fortune-hunter, and getting so carried away in her breeches role that she “threw her arms round Dorcasina’s neck and almost stopped her breath with kisses, and concluded by biting her cheek so hard as
to make her scream aloud” [2.15]), Dork advices her to do likewise and forbid novels to her future daughters: “Withhold from their eye the pernicious volumes which, while they convey false ideas of life and inspire illusory expectations, will tend to keep them ignorant of everything really worth knowing” (2.17). At issue again is the use of romance novels: they are to be treated as escapist fantasies, not imitated: they offer an alternative or virtual reality, not an accurate description of life. Tenney doesn’t say anything about realist novels—she mentions Roderick Random at one point, but only to borrow a romantic subplot from it—perhaps because she assumed her female YA audience were as uninterested in novels like Smollett’s as Dorcasina was when younger.
Though Tenney based her novel on older British and European models, she does provide some local color to this novel set in Pennsylvania. One reason Dork turns down her first suitor is because she doesn’t want to move down to Virginia to “be served by slaves, and be supported by the sweat, toil and blood of that unfortunate and miserable part of mankind” (1.1). Her family has a black steward, who is apparently free, though not free from racial stereotyping: he has spent all his life up north but speaks in a crude dialect like a southern slave just off the boat from Africa. Skulking in the background are a few Indians, whom the servants regard as savages. Tenney also comments on America’s gene pool, criticizing a sea captain for giving passage to an Irishman and “never considering what mischiefs have been occasioned to this country by its being an asylum to European convicts, fugitives from justice, and other worthless characters” (1.4). Nor does she approve of the importation of French ideas, railing against “Jacobinism, atheism, and illuminatism”: “Those pernicious sentiments, the growth of other climes, have found their way to this once happy country, so justly celebrated for the domestic felicity of its inhabitants” (2.18). That, like her earlier remark on slavery, sounds less like Dorcasina than Tenney, the wife of a conservative senator. I’d like to think Tenney is being ironic here, allowing her naïve novel-maniac to evoke an earlier America that is as unrealistic and unhistorical as the golden age of chivalry Don Quixote believes in, but I suspect she’s as serious as today’s conservatives who evoke a pre-1960s America that never actually existed.38 Nevertheless, Female Quixotism is a fun book to read, and though it had no effect – novelists continued to romance female readers, who continued to succumb to their sweet-talk – if it inspired some American girls to leave Rowson’s Way for the more realistic novels along Corncob’s Way, so much the better. There, taking up four lanes, they would have encountered the first Great American Novel.