in his works fall victim to internal and external assaults, and people avoid or fall into disaster seemingly by chance. In Radcliffe’s fictional world, Providence actively promotes poetic justice; if the hero or heroine persists in rational Christian virtue and holds to his or her faith that the world is ultimately orderly, then weaknesses and error, villains and accidents will be overcome, and justice will prevail. In Brown’s novels, there are no such guarantees. At the end ofWieland, Clara, the narrator, reflects, “If Wieland had framed juster notions of moral duty, and of the divine attributes; or if I had been gifted with ordinary equanimity or foresight, the double-tongued deceiver would have been baffled and repelled.” Clara’s moralizing is, in fact, useless, even to herself. She was not so “gifted”; therefore, she could never have escaped the catastrophes that befell her. Furthermore, she persists in seeing Carwin, the “double-tongued deceiver,” as a devil who ruined her brother, even though Carwin is no more than a peculiarly gifted and not very moral human being. Clara is able to moralize in this way only because, for the time being, disasters do not threaten her. Placed once again in the situation in which she completed the first portion of her narrative, she would again reject all human comfort and wish for death. Brown’s fictional worlds defy human comprehension and make ethical actions excessively problematic.

This apparent irony in Wieland illustrates a final significant development in Brown’s adaptation of the gothic romance. Although it is difficult, given his sometimes clumsy work, to be certain of what he intends, Brown seems to have experimented with point of view in ways that foreshadow later works. Arthur Mervyn, written in two parts, seems a deliberate experiment in multiple points of view. As Donald Ringe has noted, while the first part, told primarily from Mervyn’s point of view, emphasizes Mervyn’s naïve victimization by a sophisticated villain, the second part, told from a more objective point of view, suggests that Mervyn may unconsciously be a moral chameleon and confidence man. This shifting of point of view to capture complexity or create irony reappears in the works of many major American novelists, notably Herman Melville (for example, in “Benito Cereno”) and William Faulkner.

By focusing on the mind dealing with crises in an ambiguous world, making his stories more immediate, and manipulating point of view for ironic effect, Brown helped to transform popular gothic conventions into tools for the more deeply psychological American gothic fiction that would follow.

Wieland

Clara Wieland, the heroine of Wieland, is a bridge between the gothic heroine of Radcliffe and a line of American gothic victims stretching from Edgar Allan Poe’s narrators in his tales of terror through Henry James’s governess in The Turn of the Screw (1898) to Faulkner’s Temple Drake and beyond. Her life is idyllic until she reaches her early twenties, when she encounters a series of catastrophes that, it appears, will greatly alter her benign view of life. When her disasters are three years behind her and she has married the man she loves, Clara returns to her view that the world is reasonably orderly and that careful virtue will pull one through all difficulties.

The novel opens with an account of the Wieland family curse on the father’s side. Clara’s father, an orphaned child of a German nobleman cast off by his family because of a rebellious marriage, grows up apprenticed to an English merchant. Deprived of family love and feeling an emptiness in his spiritual isolation, he finds meaning when he chances upon a book of a radical Protestant sect. In consequence, he develops an asocial and paranoid personal faith that converts his emptiness into an obligation. He takes upon himself certain duties that will make him worthy of the god he has created. These attitudes dominate his life and lead eventually to his “spontaneous combustion” in his private temple on the estate he has developed in America. The spiritual and psychological causes of this disaster arise in part from his guilt at failing to carry out some command of his personal deity, perhaps the successful conversion of American Indians to Christianity, the project that brought him to America. Clara’s uncle presents this “scientific” explanation of her father’s death and, much later in the novel, tells a story indicating that such religious madness has also occurred on her mother’s side of the family. Religious madness is the familial curse that falls upon Clara’s immediate family: Theodore Wieland, her brother; his wife, Catharine; their children and a ward; and Catharine’s brother, Pleyel, whom Clara comes to love.

The madness strikes Theodore Wieland; he believes he hears the voice of God commanding him to sacrifice his family if he is to be granted a vision of God. He succeeds in killing all except Pleyel and Clara. The first half of the novel leads up to his crimes, and the second half deals primarily with Clara’s discoveries about herself and the world as she learns more details about the murders. Clara’s ability to deal with this catastrophe is greatly complicated by events that prove to be essentially unrelated to it but coincide with it. In these events, the central agent is Carwin.

Carwin is a ventriloquist whose background is explained in a separate short fragment, “Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist.” Because ventriloquism is an art virtually unknown in Clara’s world, Carwin seems monstrous to her. As he explains to Clara near the end of the novel, he has been lurking about the Wieland estate, and his life has touched on theirs in several ways. He has used his art to avoid being detected in his solitary night explorations of the grounds. The apparently supernatural voices he has created may have contributed to the unsettling of Theodore Wieland, but Wieland’s own account during his trial indicates other more powerful causes of his madness. Much more dangerous to Clara has been Carwin’s affair with her housekeeper, Judith, for by this means he has come to see Clara as a flower of human virtue and intellect. He is tempted to test her by creating the illusion that murderers are killing Judith in Clara’s bedroom closet. This experiment miscarries, leading Clara to think she is the proposed victim. He later uses a “supernatural” voice that accidentally coincides with one of her prophetic dreams; though his purpose is to frighten her away from the place of his meetings with Judith, Carwin confirms Clara’s fears and superstitions. He pries into her private diary and concocts an elaborate lie about his intention to rape her when he is caught. Out of envy and spite and because he is able, Carwin deceives Pleyel into thinking that Clara has surrendered her honor to him.

Throughout these deceptions, Carwin also fosters in Clara the superstition that a supernatural being is watching over and protecting her by warning her of dangers. Carwin’s acts are essentially pranks; he never intends as much harm as actually occurs when his actions become threads in a complex net of causality. The worst consequence of his pranks is that Pleyel is convinced that Clara has become depraved just at the moment when she hopes that he will propose marriage, and this consequence occurs because Carwin overestimates Pleyel’s intelligence. Pleyel’s accusation of Clara is quite serious for her because it culminates the series of dark events that Clara perceives as engulfing her happy life. Carwin’s scattered acts have convinced her that rapists and murderers lurk in every dark corner and that she is the center of some impersonal struggle between forces of good and evil. Pleyel’s accusation also immediately precedes her brother’s murders. These two crises nearly destroy Clara’s reason and deprive her of the will to live.

The attack on Clara’s mind is, in fact, the central action of the novel. All the gothic shocks come to focus on her perception of herself. They strip her of layers of identity until she is reduced to a mere consciousness of her own integrity, a consciousness that is then challenged when she comes to understand the nature of her brother’s insanity. When all the props of her identity have been shaken, she wishes for death. Tracing her progress toward the wish for death reveals the central thematic elements of the novel.

The attack on Clara’s mind is generated from poles represented by her brother and Pleyel. Wieland crumbles from within, and Pleyel is deceived by external appearances. Each falls prey to the weakness to which he is most susceptible. Clara’s more stable mind is caught in the midst of these extremes. Theodore Wieland has the family temperament, the tendency to brood in isolation over his spiritual state and over “last things.” Pleyel is the lighthearted and optimistic rationalist, skeptical of all religious ideas, especially any belief in modern supernatural agencies. While Wieland trusts his inner voice above all, Pleyel places absolute faith in his senses. Both are certain of their powers to interpret their experience accurately, and both are wrong on all counts. Wieland sees what he wants to see, and Pleyel’s senses are easily deceived, especially by the skillful Carwin. Wieland interprets his visions as divine revelations even though they command murder, and Pleyel believes Clara is polluted even though such a belief is inconsistent with his lifelong knowledge of her.

Clara’s sense of identity first suffers when her idyllic world begins to slip away. Her world becomes a place of unseen and unaccountable danger. As her anxiety increases, she finds herself unable to reason about her situation. Brown shows this disintegration in one of his more famous scenes, when Clara comes to believe there is someone in her closet, yet persists in trying to enter it even though she has heard the murderers there and even after her protecting voice has warned her away. Critics take various attitudes toward this scene, which prolongs the reader’s wait to learn who is in the closet in order to follow minutely Clara’s thoughts and reactions. Brown creates suspense that some critics have judged overwrought, but his main purpose is clearly the close analysis of a strong mind coming apart under great pressure. Even though Pleyel’s mistakes emphasize the inadequacy of individual rationality to the complexity of the world, that faculty remains the isolated person’s only means of active defense. As Clara’s rationality disintegrates, her helplessness increases.

Seeing her world divide into a war between good and evil in which her reason fails to help her, Clara’s anxiety develops into paranoia. After Carwin tells how he intended to rape her, she begins to see him as a supernatural agent of Satan. When Pleyel accuses her of self-transforming wickedness with Carwin, Clara loses her social identity. Unable to change Pleyel’s mind, she can see recent events only as a devilish plot against her happiness. Just when she thinks she is about to complete her identity in marriage, she is denied the opportunity. When she loses the rest of her family as a result of Wieland’s insanity, she loses the last supporting prop of her identity, leaving only her faith in herself, her consciousness of her own innocence, and her belief that the satanic Carwin has caused all of her catastrophes.

Two more events deprive Clara of these remaining certainties. She learns that Wieland, rather than Carwin, whom she has suspected, is the murderer, and when she understands Wieland’s motives, she loses confidence in her perceptions of herself, for should she be similarly transformed, she would be unable to resist. In fact, she sees herself, prostrate and wishing for death, as already transformed: “Was I not likewise transformed from rational and human into a creature of nameless and fearful attributes?” In this state, she understands her brother’s certainty of his own rectitude. She cannot know herself. When she finally meets Carwin and hears how trivial and without malice his acts have been, she is unable to believe him, unable to give up her belief that she is the victim of a supernatural agency. Like Wieland, whom she meets for the last time on the same evening she talks with Carwin, she insists that divinity stands behind her disasters; the paranoid Wielands stand at the head of the line of American monomaniacs of whom Melville’s Ahab is the greatest example. Deprived of her ordered world, Clara asserts against it an order that gives her reason, at least, to die. Wieland himself commits suicide when Carwin convinces him he has listened to the wrong voice.

Criticism has been rightly skeptical of the apparent clumsiness of the last chapter, Clara’s continuation of the narration three years after Wieland’s suicide. That chapter tidies up what had appeared earlier to be a subplot involving the Wielands’ ward, Louisa Conway, and it also puts together a conventional happy ending. The recovered Clara marries Pleyel after he resolves several complications, including learning the truth about Clara and losing his first wife. Although it remains difficult to determine what Brown intended, it is unlikely that a writer of Brown’s intelligence, deeply interested in the twistings of human thought, could be unaware that Clara’s final statement is a manifest tissue of illusion. No attainable human virtue could have saved her or Wieland from the web of events in which they became enmeshed. That she persists in magnifying Carwin’s responsibility shows that she fails to appreciate the complexity of human events even as Carwin himself has failed. That the Conway/Stuart family disasters of the last chapter recapitulate her own emphasizes Clara’s failure to appreciate fully the incomprehensibility of her world.

Brown apparently intended in the final chapter to underline the illusory quality of social normality. When life moves as it usually does, it appears to be orderly, and one’s ideas of order, because they are not seriously challenged, seem to prevail and become a source of comfort and security. That these ideas of order all break down when seriously challenged leads Clara to the wisdom of despair: “The most perfect being must owe his exemption from vice to the absence of temptation. No human virtue is secure from degeneracy.” Such wisdom is not, however, of much use under normal conditions and is of no use at all in a crisis. Perhaps more useful is Clara’s reflection as she looks back from the perspective of three years, her idea that one’s perceptions and interpretations, because of their imperfection, must be tested over time and compared with those of other observers. The Wieland family curse and Pleyel’s errors might be moderated if each character relied less on his or her unaided perceptions and interpretations. In the midst of chaos, however, this maxim may be no more helpful than any other; Clara, for example, violently resists the sympathy of friends who might help to restore the order of her mind.

Although not a great novel, Wieland is both intrinsically interesting and worthy of study for the degree to which it foreshadows developments of considerable importance in the American novel. By subjecting Clara to a completely disordered world and by taking her through a loss of identity, Brown prepares the way for greater American gothic protagonists from Captain Ahab to Thomas Sutpen.

Edgar Huntly

Edgar Huntly appears at first to be a clumsily episodic adventure novel, but the more closely one looks at it, the more interesting and troubling it becomes. The protagonist-narrator, Edgar Huntly, writes a long letter to his betrothed, Mary Waldegrave, recounting a series of adventures in which he has participated. This letter is followed by two short ones from Huntly to his benefactor, Sarsefield, and one final short letter from Sarsefield to Huntly. The last letter suggests some of the ways in which the apparent clumsiness becomes troubling. Midway through the novel, Edgar learns that he will probably be unable to marry his fiancé, for her inheritance from her recently murdered brother seems not really to belong to her. Later, it appears that the return of Edgar’s recently well-married friend, Sarsefield, once again puts him in a position to marry, but Sarsefield’s last letter raises doubts about this event that remain unresolved. The reader never learns whether Edgar and Mary are united. The purpose of Sarsefield’s letter is to chastise Edgar.

Edgar’s main project in the novel becomes to cure the mad Clithero, who mistakenly believes he has been responsible for the death of Sarsefield’s wife, formerly Mrs. Lorimer. By the end of his adventures, Edgar understands the degree to which Clithero is mistaken about events and believes that when Clithero learns the truth, he will be cured. To Edgar’s surprise, when Clithero learns the truth, he apparently sets out to really kill his benefactor, Mrs. Sarsefield. Edgar writes his two letters to Sarsefield to warn of Clithero’s impending appearance and sends them directly to Sarsefield, knowing that his wife may well see them first. She does see the second letter, and collapses and miscarries as a result. Sarsefield chastises Edgar for misdirecting the letters, even though Sarsefield knew full well from the first letter that the second was on its way to the same address. While, on one hand, Edgar’s error seems comically trivial, especially in comparison with the misguided benevolence that drives him to meddle with Clithero, on the other hand, the consequences are quite serious, serious enough to make one question why Edgar and Sarsefield are so stupid about their handling of the letters. The reader is left wondering what to make of Edgar and Sarsefield; does either of them know what he is doing?

The novel seems intended in part as a demonstration that one is rarely if ever aware of what one is doing. Paul Witherington has noted that the novel takes the form of a quest that never quite succeeds, a story of initiation in which repeated initiations fail to take place. Edgar returns to his home shortly after the murder of his closest friend, Waldegrave, in order to solve the crime and bring the murderer to justice. When he sees Clithero, the mysterious servant of a neighbor, sleepwalking at the murder scene, he suspects Clithero of the murder. When he confronts Clithero, Edgar learns the story of his past. In Ireland, Clithero rose out of obscurity to become the favorite servant of Mrs. Lorimer. His virtue eventually led to Mrs. Lorimer’s allowing an engagement between Clithero and her beloved niece. This story of virtue rewarded turned sour when, in self-defense, Clithero killed Mrs. Lorimer’s blackguard twin brother. Mrs. Lorimer believed her life to be mysteriously entwined with her brother’s and was convinced that she would die when he did. Clithero believed her and was convinced that by killing the father of his bride-to-be he had also killed his benefactor. In a mad refinement of benevolence, he determined to stab her in order to spare her the pain of dying from the news of her brother’s death. Failing with the sword, he resorted to the word, telling her what had happened. Upon her collapse, he took flight, ignorant of the actual consequences of his act. Mrs. Lorimer did not die; she married Sarsefield and they went to America. Although Clithero’s guilt seems unconnected with the murder of Waldegrave, except that the event has renewed Clithero’s anguish over what he believes to be his crime, Edgar still suspects him. Furthermore, Clithero’s story has stimulated Edgar’s benevolence.

Edgar becomes determined to help Clithero, for even if he is Waldegrave’s murderer, he has suffered enough. Clithero retires to the wilderness of Norwalk to die after telling his story to Edgar, but Edgar pursues him there to save him. After three trips filled with wilderness adventures, Edgar receives a series of shocks. He meets the man who is probably the real owner of Mary’s inheritance and loses his hope for a speedy marriage. Fatigued from his adventures in the wilderness and frustrated in his efforts to benefit Clithero, perhaps guilty about prying into Clithero’s life and certainly guilty about his handling of Waldegrave’s letters, he begins to sleepwalk. His sleepwalking mirrors Clithero’s in several ways, most notably in that he also hides a treasure, Waldegrave’s letters, without being aware of what he is doing. After a second episode of sleepwalking, he finds himself at the bottom of a pit in a cave with no memory of how he arrived there; this is the second apparent diversion from his quest for Waldegrave’s murderer.

Edgar takes three days to return to civilization, moving through a fairly clear pattern of death and rebirth that parallels the movement from savagery to civilization. His adventures—drinking panther blood, rescuing a maiden, fighting Native Americans, losing and finding himself in rough terrain, nearly killing his friends, and successfully evading his own rescue while narrowly escaping death several times—are filled with weird mistakes and rather abstract humor. For example, he is amazed at his physical endurance. When he finds himself within a half-day’s walk of home, he determines, despite his three days of privation, to make the walk in six hours. Six hours later, he has not yet even gained the necessary road, and, though he knows where he is, he is effectively no closer to home than when he started out. Although he has endured the physical trials, he has not progressed.

Of his earlier explorations of the wilderness, Edgar says, “My rambles were productive of incessant novelty, though they always terminated in the prospects of limits that could not be overleaped.” This physical nature of the wilderness is indicative of the moral nature of human life, which proves so complex that while people believe they can see to the next step of their actions, they find continually that they have seen incorrectly. Edgar repeatedly finds himself doing what he never thought he could do and failing at what he believes he can easily accomplish. The complexities of his wilderness experience are beyond the reach of this brief essay, but they seem to lead toward the deeper consideration of questions Edgar raises after hearing Clithero’s story: If consequences arise that cannot be foreseen, shall we find no refuge in the persuasion of our rectitude and of human frailty? Shall we deem ourselves criminal because we do not enjoy the attributes of Deity? Because our power and our knowledge are confined by impassable boundaries?

In order for Edgar to be initiated and to achieve his quest, he needs to come to a just appreciation of his own limits. Although he can see Clithero’s limitations quite clearly, Edgar fails to see his own, even after he learns that he has been sleepwalking, that he has been largely mistaken about the events surrounding the Indian raid, that he has mistaken his friends for enemies, and that he has made many other errors that might have caused his own death. Even after he learns that an American Indian killed Waldegrave and that his efforts with Clithero have been largely irrelevant, he persists in his ignorant attempt to cure the madman, only to precipitate new disasters. Edgar does not know himself and cannot measure the consequences of his simplest actions, yet he persists in meddling with another equally complex soul that he understands even less. Before Clithero tells Edgar his story, he says: “You boast of the beneficence of your intentions. You set yourself to do me benefit. What are the effects of your misguided zeal and random efforts? They have brought my life to a miserable close.” This statement proves prophetic, for prior to each confrontation with Edgar, Clithero has determined to try to live out his life as best he can; each of Edgar’s attempts to help drives Clithero toward the suicide that he finally commits.

Insofar as Edgar’s quest is to avenge his friend’s murder, he succeeds quite by accident. Insofar as his quest is for ethical maturity, he fails miserably, but no one else in the novel succeeds either. If a measure of moral maturity is the ability to moderate one’s passions for the benefit of others, no one is mature. The virtuous Mrs. Lorimer cannot behave rationally toward her villainous brother, and her suffering derives ultimately from that failure. Clithero will murder out of misguided benevolence. Sarsefield, a physician, will let Clithero die of wounds received from American Indians because he believes that to Clithero, “consciousness itself is the malady, the pest, of which he only is cured who ceases to think.” Even though Edgar must assent to this statement—concluding, “Disastrous and humiliating is the state of man! By his own hands is constructed the mass of misery and error in which his steps are forever involved”—he still wishes to correct some of Clithero’s mistakes. In doing so, he provokes Clithero’s suicide. No character understands him- or herself, his or her limitations, or his or her actions thoroughly; in the case of each of these characters, benevolence issues in murder, direct or indirect. One of the novel’s many ironies is that among Edgar, Sarsefield, and Clithero, only Clithero is never morally responsible for a death other than his own.

In Edgar Huntly, as in Wieland, the stage of human action is beyond human comprehension. In Wieland, although there is no sanctuary for the virtuous, virtue remains valuable at least as a source of illusions of order, but in Edgar Huntly positive virtue becomes criminal because of inevitable human error. The phenomenon of sleepwalking and the motif of ignorance of self encourage the reader to consider those darker motives that may be hidden from the consciousness of the characters. Edgar must indeed affirm that people are criminal because they do not have “the attributes of Deity.”

Wieland and Edgar Huntly are good examples of Brown’s interests and the complexity of his fiction. The wedding of serious philosophical issues with forms of the popular gothic novel accounts for Brown’s distinctive role in the development of the American novel and his continuing interest for students of American culture.