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Social Corruption and the Subversion of the American Success Story in Arthur Mervyn
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
Extract
Because both parts of Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 (1799–1800) were clearly not composed under the same creative impetus as his other novels were (critics conjecture that the novel was written in three segments within a two-year span), the novel as a whole evinces the author's propensity to improvise more than any of his other works do (Ringe, 49). Early critics, notably R. W. B. Lewis (The American Adam) and David Lee Clark (Pioneer Voice in America), choose to ignore and/or gloss over the troublesome second part. Later criticism, however, deals with both part 1 and part 2. Kenneth Bernard, for one, concisely identifies one of the novel's themes as the correlation between innocence and experience, the first part dealing with Mervyn's innocence and inexperience, and the second dealing with his experience and his cognizance because of that experience (441).
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References
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