찰스 브록덴 브라운의 최종 선택: 아서 멀빈을 중심으로

Abstract

Brown worked on Arthur Mervyn longer than any other novels of his. After publishing the first part of Arthur Mervyn, Brown wrote Edgar Huntly and then he finished the second part of Arthur Mervyn, which is actually the final novel of his. Therefore, the novel presented the changes of Brown’s ideas on writing, career, and society better than any other works. The protagonist of Arthur Mervyn is an object of intense, often suspicious scrutiny. His ambiguity stems from the uncertainty of his fluctuating goals and values. The “diseased” atmosphere of Philadelphia so overwhelmed the novel that the work took on dark shadow. For Brown, the unrelenting yellow fever came to symbolize a pervasive social as well as biological sickness. Though perhaps not his best novel, Arthur Mervyn is the one most revealing about himself as a writer in America. Brown’s unsettling portrayal of social disarray, institutional failure, and personal incoherence in late eighteenth-century America ends on a note of cultural capitulation. Faced with a moral spectacle of rampant fraud, venality, and confusion, Arthur offers a complex vision of the new American type of character; alternately well-meaning and self-interested, a mass of insecurities covered by a thin veneer of excessive confidence, drifting wildly between greed and benevolence with no firm moral bearings. The treachery of urban market-place society was replicated in interaction between the sexes, and Brown punctuated Arthur Mervyn with incidents of destructive gender tensions. Arthur’s involvement with Asha Fielding culminates the novel’s troubled portrayal of gender relations. The retreat to the bosom of his “good mamma” provides Arthur with an escape, both from his family problems and from the social pressures. The novel comes to a close with the protagonist reconstituting family and renouncing self, then joyfully retiring to Europe, Arthur’s marriage to Asha Fielding is as much as expression of his withdrawal from the social and economic struggle of modernizing American society. It also is the indirect expression of Brown’s deep frustration as well as his profound criticism on American society where it is almost impossible to pursue one’s dream.