Attachment, Place, and Otherness in Nineteenth-Century American Literature by Jillmarie Murphy

Author:Jillmarie Murphy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2018-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

With Quaker City, Lippard chose to fictionalize a society he regarded as lurid and terrifying, and thus, as Reynolds contends, he succeeded in creating a “nightmare world” that was always “threatening to destroy ordinary perceptions of objective surroundings.”30 Likewise, by setting Arthur Mervyn during the height of the worst yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia history, Brown successfully fashions a similarly nightmarish world in which disease is emblematic of societal corruption. While Lippard candidly exploits the sensational in Quaker City, where the major players—Mary Arlington, Long-haired Bess, Gus Lorrimer, Byrnewood Arlington, Devil-Bug, and Mother Nancy—are surreal and/or grotesque caricatures of real people, in Arthur Mervyn, Brown compels the main character to confront grotesquery as a way to find his own truth in a diseased society, where surreal events repeatedly challenge his perceptions of reality. Although Lippard was “pilloried” by many of his contemporaries, who were horrified by his uncensored attacks on “every type of ‘respectable’ Philadelphian,” he increasingly rose in favor among those who saw him as a “champion of the poor and a foe of the hypocritical elite.”31 Lippard’s candor and unrestrained passion in Quaker City are, like Brown’s in Arthur Mervyn, palpable illustrations of his defense of the oppressed.

The essay “The Heart-Broken,” which is Lippard’s tribute to Charles Brockden Brown, suggests Lippard felt more than professional admiration for Brown. Writing of Brown’s final resting place in a “Quaker graveyard,”32 whose “green mounds extend from the door of the meeting-house to the walls,” Lippard declares that Brown’s grave holds a “sad and peculiar interest” for him. Beneath that “clump of sod,” he writes, lies a “strong Heart, throbbing with impulses that were breathed into it by Almighty God… and a skull that once flashed with divine fire from the eyes, and worked immortal thoughts within its brain.” For Lippard, Brown was a “Great Soul, worthy to stand in solemn dignity among the mightiest names of earth.” Describing Brown in a way that could just as readily be a description of himself, Lippard writes of Brown having a “supernatural analysis of motive and character, a superhuman POWER in Genius.”33

Throughout their lives, both Brown and Lippard tethered their humanitarian impulses to their social and intellectual pursuits. In the late 1790s, Brown joined The Friendly Club, a group comprised of young professionals who sought intellectual companionship with likeminded others. Members of The Friendly Club included women, many who were friends or relatives of male members. The group’s focus on rational ideals and egalitarian models of companionship undoubtedly influenced Brown’s surge of writing during the late 1790s, which included not only Arthur Mervyn, a novel Lippard described as containing a “touching pathos or thrilling power” that “immeasurably excels the works of De Foe or Boccaccio,” but also the novel Wieland; or The Transformation (1798), which Lippard thought of as “a tremendous book, awful in its delineations of a stern and unrelenting Fanaticism,” in which the female narrator’s rational intellect is juxtaposed with her brother’s progressive insanity; and Ormond; or The Secret Witness (1799), a novel in which Brown explores cross-dressing, same-sex companionship, and the trauma of rape.

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