10/10/07 - English Literature - Charles Brockden Brown: Wieland

Brown was born in 1771 and died in 1810. We had in an incredibly productive period of four years in which he wrote five novels. Wieland was completed in 1798. Brown can be considered the first professional American author, for he started writing at the beginning of an emergent identity in literature and culture that was specifically American.

What kind of literature is Wieland, and how is it different?
Wieland is a Gothic novel. It is problematical, though, as it has no stable or consistent meaning. Earlier Gothic texts such as Anne Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho have evidence of the supernatural and macabre and insane experiences, and they are filled with narrative suspense and horror. They are typically set in wild, secluded areas, far away from normal social environments. More precisely, the earlier Gothic texts associated their subject with hauntings, and what exactly haunting signifies. They are characterised by scrutiny and investigation. The Gothic haunting explores history and the unconscious mind, or a conflation of the two. Hauntings are the legacy of specific historical events or characters are haunted by their own imaginations, something irrepressible by the conscious mind.

Wieland obviously is a heady cocktail of Gothic components: spontaneous combustion, ventriloquy, mass murder and suicide, an evil stalker and religious mania. It is set in Pennsylvania. Brown transposes the Gothic elements into this banal situation. Brown shows how the legacies of Europe affect the American experience. The American Gothic is different from the European Gothic:

"The American gothic is 'a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation'."
[Fiedler, L. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Stein and Day, 1982. 29. (originally published in 1960)]

"[T]he gothic tells of the historical horrors that make national identity possible yet must be repressed in order to sustain it."
[Goddu, T. A. Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. 10]

Fiedler takes Franklin's ideology of America and the American Gothic takes the "dark side" of America. From the second quote, we may guess that repressed historical experiences rupture.

How do you do something creative in an already-rooted genre?
Brown asked himself this question. He wanted to make a Gothic novel that was not stereotypical. Wieland is about contemporary understanding of the human mind, i.e. psychology. Brown asks questions about how the mind works and how it can go wrong. The relationship between sensory impressions and the perception of these is explored. Brown asks: what do dreams signify?

"What I have related will, no doubt, appear to you a fable. You will believe that calamity has subverted my reason, and that I am amusing you with the chimeras of my brain instead of facts that have really happened. I shall not be surprised or offended if these be your suspicions. I know not, indeed, how you can deny them admission. For, if to me, the immediate witness, they were fertile of perplexity and doubt, how must they affect another to whom they are recommended only by my testimony?"
[Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland, Chapter 7, 1798]

Here Brown expresses anxiety about how things can be known, when there is no degree of clarity. Each of Wieland's characters are vehicles for a certain type of belief. They each have ideas on how to live and in the novel, and these ideas are tested for their efficacy. It is therefore an intellectual novel, for the characters take a different outlook on life. The question that the novel implicitly asks is which authoritative belief system should people live by? The novel is about knowledge and authority. We see through a series of events what each character is able to know, and how they can trust their perceptions with all confidence. The novel dramatises the limits of how sure each character is in relation to the other. It dramatises the different levels of certainty and indeterminacy. It is a classic case of epistemology, or, a theory of knowledge, specifically in the form of an American Gothic novel.

There is the suggestion of the legacy of Europe in Wieland, since Clara's father is from Germany. The legacy of this inheritance never goes away.

"No opportunities of recreation were allowed him. He spent all his time pent up in a gloomy apartment, or traversing narrow and crowded streets. His food was coarse, and his lodging humble. His heart gradually contracted a habit of morose and gloomy reflection … His morals, which had never been loose were now modeled by a stricter standard. The empire of religious duty extended itself to his looks, gestures and phrases … His air was mournful and contemplative. He laboured to keep alive a sentiment of fear, and a belief of the awe-creating presence of the Deity."
[Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland, Chapter 1, 1798]

This passage is full of Gothic language. Wieland's mind is susceptible to religious tract because of his severe work conditions. His religious ethic mirrors his work ethic: "laboured"; "fear". He takes a Puritanical attitude to religion, developed specifically from his ethic of work. Thus he leaves for America. His failure to convert the natives leads him to think that he has displeased God. He has paranoid delusions that God will punish him. He has a temple built, which strengthens his fear, and he eventually spontaneously combusts. Clara is never sure whether he was punished by God or whether there is a scientific and logical explanation.

After the spontaneous combustion episode, there is a dramatic shift. Wieland's children were brought up under different circumstances. Their American upbringing was an enlightenment one.

"Our education had been modelled by no religious standard. We were left to the guidance of our own understanding and the casual impressions which society might make upon us. My friends’ temper, as well as my own, exempted us from much anxiety on this account. It must not be supposed that we were without religion; but with us it was the product of lively feelings, excited by reflection on our own happiness, and by the grandeur of external nature."
[Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland, Chapter 3, 1798]

This statement of Clara's is a conscious move away from the gloom of her father's death. His temple was converted to a place of social activity. Its dark history, however, is never far away. Theodore is the arch rationalist, he is led by Enlightenment philosophy.

"Pleyel was the champion of intellectual liberty, and rejected all guidance but that of his reason."

He still retains some output of his father's mind, a predilection for brooding. Brown tests out the limits of what father and son can believe, considering their respective backgrounds. Brown is therefore formulaic in his writing.

Then the character of Carwin enters to set things awry. He is a wanderer, ruthless and potentially dangerous because he is solitary and has a shady European past. His appearance is at odds with how he sounds. Clara is confounded by her senses. This is an unsettling reaction, considering her Enlightenment upbringing. But Carwin has a unique skill: ventriloquism, and this disturbs the peace. It is a skill contrary to scientific law. It has the ability to refute the characters' senses in inexplicable ways. Carwin's motivation was at first as an expedient to get out of the temple unseen, and later simply his fascination with his own supernatural power.

What are the consequences?
The characters begin to hear voices. It defies their collective ability to interpret what this means rationally. It is an event at odds with they way they have been brought up. We see how easily undermined rational scepticism is. We see how quickly rational characters believe in something implausible when their senses make them aware of how irrational the voice is. Wieland itself is a work of contrivance, of imagination. The events almost bring Clara to insanity, and she has prophetic dreams that will not allow her to dismiss them as meaningless. The novel is not merely about history but about the workings of Clara's mind. It is also a novel of secluded places, symbolic of the compartments of the human mind. The novel conflates what happens in Clara's mind on an unconscious historical level. The American dream becomes a nightmare!

However: Beware! Wieland is too subtle and sophisticated to be whittled down to the singular meaning of the American dream.