THOUGH SIMPLE in conception, Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn (I799; Part II, i8oo) is wonderfully complicated in execution. Brown adopted the straightforward, familiar tale of a young man's initiation and made of it a text extraordinary in its elaborateness, even in comparison to the intricacies of his other long fictions. There is nothing like it in serious American fiction until Faulkner's novels, excepting perhaps Melville's Pierre, the nineteenth-century American work it most resembles. R. W. B. Lewis no doubt spoke for most readers when he said that the plot is often unintelligible and that the indirect narrative method confuses us intolerably.' At a lower level of generality than that provided by terms like initiation fable and Bildungsroman, the contrast between theoretical simplicity and actual complication is evident in the difference between the clarity of the story material and the frequent obscurity of Brown's plotting, between the ease with which the story can be summarized and the reader's sense of confusion as he experiences the text itself. When his widowed father's marriage to a conniving servant seems sure to disinherit him, young Arthur leaves the family farm to try his luck in Philadelphia where he becomes secretary to the villainous Welbeck. Within a few days he learns that his employer is a seducer, a thief, and a killer, and then an apparent suicide. Having had enough of wicked city ways, Arthur returns to the country where he works on the Hadwins' farm and falls in love with Eliza Hadwin. Soon a yellow fever epidemic strikes Philadelphia, and Arthur returns to the city to look for the fiance of another of the Hadwins' daughters. Becoming ill, he is himself rescued by Dr. Stevens, who defends him against suspicion stem-